In A Dark Wood - Shaun Whiteside

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jacket, the inevitable bag lying crookedly across his chest, the dull, bald head with nothing above the ears but fluffy grey tufts. Filthy Frans is staring at a mechanical octopus, its arms an orgy of different coloured lights flickering on and off and at the end of the arms little cars with people sitting in them. They shriek, their pale faces shoot by in a blur. The man standing there is completely lost in what is happening. Then, as if he feels that someone is spying on him, he suddenly jerks around. His head twitches back and forth, as if he is systematically reading the surroundings, and almost without transition he shrugs his shoulders, pulls the bag tighter to his chest and moves in an agitated step, hopping so as not to run, into the dense throng.

      ‘Maaaarcoooo …’

      Four hands drag him in, slip under his jacket, twist fingers through his hair and lead him down a bloodstream-red illuminated fabric tunnel. And Marcus, a child of the Freudian age, thinks what he must think.

      ‘Fifteen guilders for a palm-reading and twenty-five for a complete forecast.’ Madame Zara’s tone is at its weariest. She switches on the lamp that stands in the middle of the table and clearly stands in for the crystal ball. An absent expression and the red curls escaping from under her headscarf suggest that this evening she got herself ready in a hurry.

      ‘Five …’

      ‘Ten?’

      Call Anneberte.

      ‘Don’t pester, ladies,’ says Marcus. ‘The future can’t be bought for nothing.’ He looks severely at the black-haired one, Anne, and points to the table. ‘You go first.’ Her intuitive protest turns into a melting smile when he doesn’t avert his eyes and she quickly sits down at the flowery tablecloth, lays her hand next to the lamp and inhales so deeply that it looks as if she’s about to undergo a deep medical examination.

      It’s a tent, but that’s not how it seems. The space they occupy doesn’t look like a … space. It’s a time. It’s a red time, a time that consists of rags and cloths and has no entrance or exit. As he looks around, Marcus tries to discover how he got in, the whereabouts of the glowing red tunnel that made him think of the birth canal, but he doesn’t see a thing.

      Anne gets to her feet and strides solemnly towards him and Berte sits down at the table and stares so intensely at the lamp standing in for the crystal ball that Marcus fears for a moment that it’s going to explode.

      What he would like, here in this little red tent at the funfair, is a fortune-teller who wouldn’t predict his future, but would instead explain his past. He would like to come in here, sit down and see in the milk-white mist of the glass bowl how he got here and what happened to get him here, the whole journey undertaken up to this moment, further back, to before his birth, when there wasn’t yet a town here, just a dry patch among the bogs, and long before that, when the megalithic farmers hunted and built their big stone tombs, yes, to the creation of the world.

      ‘You too, sir?’

      Anneberte look at him. The fortune-teller looks at him.

      ‘You too?’

      ‘Me too,’ he says, and as he sits down at the table he is overcome by a feeling of exhaustion that doesn’t suit the time of day, which he knows only from long ago, when he had Pfeiffer’s disease and spent a month, longer even, in bed and thought he would never be able to summon the courage to get up and take the first step, and the second … He sighs a sigh that makes his whole body groan.

      ‘Is there something special you would like to know?’

      Marcus raises his head, looks across the lamp into her absent brown eyes and smiles a crooked smile.

      ‘The past, madam,’ he says, ‘can you do anything with it?’

      It’s a question which, he can tell from the fortune-teller’s perplexed expression, he would have been better off not asking.

      ‘A joke,’ he says. ‘The red light suggests that humour is in the air.’

      Behind him the girls shuffle.

      He smiles again and fixes an inviting look upon the oracle.

      Only later on, when they are standing outside once more and the fury of the world of the funfair washes around them, only then will it occur to him how the fortune-teller looked up at him when she took his hand in hers. Not that she saw anything in the lines that cross the glowing landscape of his palm. Nothing but the nicotine stain on the inside of his middle finger, at any rate, the vague scar on the tip of his thumb, perhaps, the calm structure of shallow folds as it appears in the palm of a reasonably healthy man in the prime of life. Nothing but that, no. But she sat up, slowly raised her head, and looked at him meditatively. As if she wanted to say, in the good old fortune-telling tradition: What brings you here, stranger, what long road have you travelled? And for a moment, as they stand there outside the tent, he and the girls and all that noise and light and the movement around him, for a moment he remembers that he had given her unasked question a thoughtful answer: I have returned, madam, I have travelled the world and now I am in Ithaca. But he had said nothing. He had sat down as limply as a neglected house plant at the table with the flower-patterned cloth and the round lamp, his clammy hand on the dry, slightly wrinkled palm of the fortune-teller, his thoughts like falling drops of water in his head, her oracular words evaporating in his ears.

      I see a dark manwomanstranger. A rich and healthy life. And long. Many children. Prosperity.

      He had felt the nail of her index finger running lightly over the lines in his palm. Manicured. Severely varnished. Filed, polished, undercoat, and then the glistening blood drop to finish it off.

      Like Chaja used to do.

      A performance he had never been able to take his eyes off: When She Does Her Nails. With Mathematical Precision.

      The haughtily waving hand letting the varnish dry. A claw. After clawing. Blooddripping.

      The vague tingle of dark excitement that ran through his belly.

      Blood.

      Claw.

      If this Madam Thing really did read his hand.

      ‘You will marry twice. Or rather: you will have a family twice. Twice two children, I see.’

      Old bullshit.

      ‘The life line heralds a fine old age. Eighty-three.’

      As if he’s going to ask for his money back if he dies of lung cancer at fifty-two.

      ‘You’re a wandering soul. You move house a lot. Very …’

      A vague feeling of unease now.

      ‘… alone.’

      Oh, Christ.

      ‘In the light of eternity we are all alone, madam,’ he had said.

      She had glanced up and looked at him for the first time with eyes that were bright and alert.

      ‘I meant alone in the sense of lonely,’ she said gently.

      He had returned her gaze by staring at her expressionlessly. Then he got up, nodded, smiled, laid the money on the table and said airily, as light as candyfloss: ‘Thank you. Now I’m going to celebrate my long life and enjoy the brief hour of freedom granted me on the eve of my two marriages.’

      Towards the edge of the funfair grounds lies the big dodgems tent. It’s there that the youth of the village hang out. A throng of young people swarms around the tent, each waiting for a free car in which he can steer with his left hand as he puts his right arm around her shoulder. Marcus suddenly wonders if this is all a conspiracy, if the little cars are intended for rebellious adolescents to get them used to life as daddy and mummy, and the glass boxes of the crane machines, filled with plastic watches and cheap metal rings, to make them familiar with the idea that eternal fidelity is fixed by the giving of presents. Father bird brings a twig, mother tidies the nest. The haunted house: where she is supposed to

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