and pulsing machines.
‘What can we go on, Mum?’
She took one hand in each of hers and swung them round.
‘Everything.’
They plunged into the crowds and noise together. The tinny music and the barkers’ shouts, the smell of candyfloss and frying onions and the whirl of colours swallowed the three of them effortlessly. Within the circle of the fair Annie felt suddenly no older than Thomas and Ben. The fierce pleasure of childhood excitement touched her, and it was intensified by the added, subtle pleasure of her adult capacity to indulge her children, and share their indulgence.
With Tom pulling ahead they stumbled to the giant Waltzers at the centre of the fairground. The rumble of cars spinning on the wooden track drowned out even the blaring music. The riders screamed joyfully from their seats as they were swept past.
Annie clutched at responsibility for long enough to shout to Tom, ‘Benjy’s not old enough for this!’
Tom turned for a second, his hands on his hips, the sudden, living replica of his father. ‘He is. We can look after him. One on each side.’
‘I am old enough,’ said Benjy stoutly.
‘All right, then.’ They beamed at one another, colluding.
The huge machine was winding down and the riders’ faces, laughing, sprang out of the blur as the cars swung slower up and down the undulating slopes. As soon as an empty car rolled past, Thomas was off up the steps. He squirmed inside it and fended off the crowds who swarmed around it.
‘No, this is ours. Come on, Mum, Benjy.’ They ran up the steep steps after him, hand in hand, and jumped into the padded tub. Annie wedged Benjy tightly between Tom and herself and drew down the chrome hoop for them to hold on to.
‘Here we go,’ Tom yelled, leaning with the car as it began to turn to spin it faster.
Faster, and then faster again, and then to the point where centrifugal force pressed them helplessly against the chair back and tore the shouts from their throats. Annie drew her arm tighter around them, feeling their thin shoulders rigid with delighted fear. Benjy’s face was three amazed circles, and Tom’s smile was pinned right across his face. They spun faster and the world blurred into a solid wall, and the boy who took their money came balancing along the spinning edge and whirled their car faster on its axis, grinning at Annie and then pursing his lips to whistle as the wind blew her skirt up over her thighs.
‘Oh boy.’ Thomas was shouting with joy and Benjy managed a faint, tiny echo.
Hold on to them, Annie thought. Hold on. Forever.
And then they were slowing down again, gasping and laughing, thrilled with their daring as the world resolved itself again into its separate parts.
‘Wasn’t it great?’ Thomas demanded and Benjy screamed, ‘Wasn’t I brave?’
‘Oh, it was,’ Annie said weakly. ‘And you were, both of you. How could I have gone on that without you?’
They struggled off with rubber legs, the ground’s immobility strange under their feet.
‘What now?’ asked Thomas.
Seeing his face, Annie wanted to take hold of his delight and keep it, so that it could never fade. So that nothing would fade ever again. But she couldn’t do any more than put her hand on his shoulder, just for a moment, to link herself to him.
‘Something gentle,’ she pleaded.
‘I know the one you like,’ he said triumphantly. He took her hand now, and stretched out the other to Ben. ‘Come on. Don’t anyone get lost.’
He threaded them through the crowds to the huge mirrored roundabout whose steam organ ground out a pleasing, wheezy waltz. Annie looked up at it. The ornate lettering around the canopy spelled out, as it slowly revolved, The Prancers. H.W. Peacock’s Pride.
‘The hobby horses,’ she murmured. ‘I do like the hobby horses best.’
‘They’re pretty slow,’ sniffed Thomas. But he enjoyed the ride, whooping from his horse’s slippery back and hanging on to the gilded barley-sugar pole, as much as Annie and Ben did.
After the hobby horses they rode under the musty green hood of the Caterpillar, and on the Dodgems with their blue sparks and thundering crashes, and on the Octopus, and all the others even down to the toddlers’ roundabouts at the outer edges of the magic circle where Benjy swooped on the fire engine and rang the bell furiously as he trundled around, while Thomas squeezed himself into a racing car or helicopter and scowled at Annie every time he came past.
When they had ridden every roundabout they plunged into the sideshows, from the bleeping electronic games that all three of them adored, to the tattered old stalls where Annie and Tom vied with each other to throw darts at wobbly boards or shoot the pingpong balls off nodding ducks. Benjy was furiously partisan, pulling at Annie’s arm and shouting, ‘Come on, Mummy. Why don’t you win?’
Annie laughed and threw down her twisted rifle.
‘It’s no good, Ben. I’m not nearly as good as Thomas is.’
‘Here you are, baby,’ Tom snorted, thrusting the orange fur teddy bear that he had won at Benjy. ‘Is this what you wanted?’
‘I just wanted Mum to win,’ Benjy retorted. ‘I don’t want her to be sad.’
‘I won’t be sad,’ she promised him. The outside reached in, just for a moment, between the caravans and flags. ‘I won’t be sad. Let’s go and see the funny mirrors.’
They lined up in the narrow booth and paraded to and fro in front of the distorting mirrors. The images of the three of them leapt back and forth too, telescoping from spindly giants to squat barrels with grinning turnip faces.
The boys roared and gurgled with laugher, clutching at one another for support. ‘Look at Mum! Look at her legs!’
‘And her teeth. Like an old horse’s.’
Annie laughed much more at their abandoned enjoyment than at the gaping figures. Adults never laugh like this, like children do, she thought. Not giving themselves up to it.
In the end she had to pull them away from the mirrors to make room for the press of people coming in behind them. She hauled them out into the sunshine, blinking and still snorting with laughter.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘I’m so hungry.’
‘And me.’
They picnicked on hot dogs oozing with fried onions and ketchup, and Annie bought them huge puffballs of candyfloss that collapsed in sticky pink ridges over their beaming faces.
‘You’re letting us have all the bad things, Ma.’
‘Just for today,’ she said severely.
When they had finished the repellent meal they turned to her again.
‘Is
