Clowns At Midnight (11 page)

Before I could say anything, Angelina called something amusing in Italian, Isabella added a comment, then Angelina did, and the women laughed. Pat Kesby, Gemma and I couldn’t follow what was said, though we smiled at their forgetfulness in using Italian in front of us. Gemma turned a smile at me and lifted her eyebrows as if to say: we have to go along with this, yes? Which delighted me even more, made me feel we truly were in something together.

‘Katerina has bees,’ Raina said, bringing me back. ‘She and Paolo are experts at apiculture.’

‘Happy culture,’ Isabella added, deliberately slurring her words, either pretending to be drunk or definitely getting that way.

‘Behave, eh?’ Raina told her. ‘We all enjoy their honey. We try to make mead in the old way. Please, David, you must have more.’

‘Just a little,’ I said, but Raina filled my tumbler to the top. When I met her gaze, she gave the most wonderful look, part apology, part playful defiance, part conspiratorial:
You know
.
Just go with it
.

I did so gladly.

Soon we drowsed. There was no breeze, just the dead still air, the heat and glare everywhere, all-encompassing. But there was shade too and the blankets, and the mead had done its job well. Nothing was said. First Angelina and Katerina settled for a nap, then Raina and Gemma, finally Lucia, Isabella and Pat Kesby. It was so easy to lie back, so easy to look up through the branches at the hot empty sky, to give in to the exquisite sensation of being in your body, with your body, surrounded by others who accepted you and were at ease.

I drowsed and smiled, thinking of Gemma so close, so near. So different—or, rather, more like when we’d first met. I watched the leaves curling, separate and together, just as we were, just as we all were. I followed the lines of branches into folds and knots of green light, went out into all that and down into myself, and both knew and never knew what it was I did. I pulled the light into me, let it flow up through me. Without knowing, I slept.

CHAPTER 7

And woke in a different world. It was late afternoon, well after five o’clock, and I was alone. The trees were in much deeper shadow. The women had gone. Gemma was gone, and the blankets and baskets. There was just the blanket on which I lay, but at least that to prove it had happened, that and a terrible thirst from the alcohol.

I felt dismay, a quick stab of betrayal, then smiled. No, it was right; it was how it had to be. If there hadn’t been the blanket, it would have been a cruel trick, a ‘you dreamt it all’ set-up. With the blanket still there, it was as if they had tiptoed off not to wake me, to let me have this precious sleep, this golden honey time.

It made for a charming completion too. It had resolved as elegantly as it had begun, without more unnecessary apologies from me about interrupting and intruding, without their polite reassurances, without the awkwardness of farewelling Gemma, collecting befuddled thoughts about whatever it was I felt, clumsy from sleep and drink.

This was best: as wonderfully dreamlike as it had begun. But thank God for the blanket.

I stood and folded it, carried it with me back through the forest, back across the clearing. The wildflower garland hung dry and wilting on the cross; the sprig of gumnuts sagged in its strands. I would have plucked it out and taken it with me, but I had the blanket. I had my proof.

For good measure, I tried the tower door, seized the ring and pushed back on it, turned it this way and that. Still locked. I rapped on the metal plate six times, heard the echoes die away within. Then I moved round the tower, one hand on the stones, and headed back through the forest to the car.

I was restless all that evening. Having had so much, it was hard to pull back to mundane things like preparing pasta and salad. I distracted myself with television until 9:30, then, after checking the spare room—something I had to do—I answered emails, then did a net search on Sardinia. I’d given Carlo the rough opening to my article, a glimpse into my world. Now it was time to discover his.

For me, Sardinia had always been part of Italy, like Sicily was, the southernmost of the two large islands to the west of the high-heeled boot. Now I started to see it as itself, as a place very much in the blind spot of the modern world but constantly caught up in the dynamics of the ancient Mediterranean. Just as the early Romans had first plundered and then absorbed the Etruscans, virtually removing them from history by obscuring so much of their civilisation, so Sardinia existed in the shadow.

Over the next hour I visited a half-dozen online tourist sites with English text, and drew the island out of that darkness.

There were ambushes along the way, of course, images of masks and statues, links to festivals and celebrations that triggered quarter-clown and worse. Some sites I judiciously avoided, but the picnic had helped, had provided much-needed balance and resolve, and in fits and starts I found what I needed.

I learned that its first known inhabitants arrived around 6000 BC, mostly from Italy, mainly Etruria, the future home of the Etruscans, while the central region was settled by Neolithic peoples from the Iberian Peninsula, arriving via the Balearic Islands. Other newcomers came across the Mediterranean from Africa to occupy the southern part of the island, adding to the racial mix. Sardinia was that kind of melting pot. It stood at that sort of crossroads.

Over time these disparate folk merged into small tribal states sharing the same culture, language and customs, largely due to the common external threat of pirates and raiders. All the earliest important roads led to the sanctuary of the mountainous interior. This constant threat of invasion by sea also meant that the island never became a seafaring power in its own right; nor did fishing ever feature as a major part of the coastal economies.

Around 1500 BC a new group of settlers spread across the island, bringing with them distinctly Hellenic pottery, new building techniques and a dynamic religion. Maritime villages were built around the large stone towers called
nuraghi
that gave these early inhabitants their name. These distinctive nuraghic watchtowers marked inland tribal boundaries as well. More than seven thousand of an estimated original thirty thousand towers still dotted the island.

Now I knew what my mysterious tower on the hill was meant to be. Not a silo or storehouse, not a cairn or water tower made in the curious, truncated-cone shape of a lighthouse. Though sealed, though blind, it was one of these watchtowers: a
nuraghe
.

Around 1000 BC, the Phoenicians began using the island’s many bays and inlets as harbours for their trading ships, establishing ports that soon became prosperous market towns. These settlers traded with the nuraghic Sardinians of the interior until the end of the sixth century, when the nuraghic peoples suddenly rose up against them.

It led to immediate reprisals. The Phoenicians brought in their powerful trading allies, the Carthaginians, who conquered the entire island but for the mountainous central region—the Barbagia—the ultimate destination of all those roads leading in from the sea.

This resulting cohabitation lasted nearly three centuries, most of it peaceful and mutually beneficial, until Rome defeated Carthage in the First Punic War in 238 BC and made the island a province of their own empire. Systematic military campaigns soon put an end to the last of the inland nuraghic centres, but the Romans rarely interfered in local cultural matters. Most of the native institutions and customs were left intact. A crucial sense of identity remained.

Nearly seven hundred years later, with Rome itself in decline, the Vandals invaded, only to be ousted in turn by the Byzantines, whose presence saw Christianity spread through most of the island. Only the harsh Barbagia wilderness held out, sheltered from the new ways, clinging to the old, retaining many of the ancient pagan practices.

During the Middle Ages, Sardinia suffered devastating raids by the Moors, whose armies ruled so much of Northern Africa and Spain, even parts of France, until 732 AD. To this day, the Sardinian state symbol was still Four Moors, recalling that terrible time of fear and uncertainty.

I read on, learning how Sardinia was finally rescued from the turmoil of history with the Unification of Italy in the mid-nineteenth century, but I already had what I needed: the origins of the tower and the link between Carlo’s mask and the Etruscans. I also had some idea of what he’d been trying to tell me about an important Etruscan/Greek connection, how while there were no known Greek settlements on the east coast facing Italy, there was very likely a strong Hellenic cultural influence on the nuraghic Sards through the Etruscans.

Though still not sure of Carlo’s point, I understood this much: it was an Hellenic legacy whose precise scale and force was lost in the subsequent dismantling of the Etruscan state by the Romans.

That was enough for now. There was so much information on holiday destinations and sights to see, on individual towns and cities, costume, custom and cuisine, on festivals and language tips, but the image ‘ambushes’ had taken their toll. I printed off the historical material about the
nuraghi
, added the relevant sites to my Favourites list and logged off.

Twenty minutes later I was in bed, smiling at the darkness, listening to the stillness and marvelling at what the day had been. Anything was possible now. Anything.

During the night there was wind again. It pulled me from sleep, sweeping across the distances, whistling around the eaves. I lay watching the curtains flaring in the open window, the wire fly-screen bellying in the blast.

It was hard to know what time it was. It could have been midnight, 3 am or just before dawn for all I knew. I’d switched off the digital clock on my first night at Starbreak Fell, not wanting the glow of the insistent green numbers. Checking my watch meant turning on the bedside light, and that was out of the question. So I lay in limbo, in a timelessness wholly appropriate to the moment, listening to the southerly roaring in the trees. That wind could be a bitter thing in the Australian winter, but on a summer night it like this it was so welcome.

It made for a striking visual too. My bedroom faced south, so what wasn’t the shifting intense blackness of treetops through the shuddering insect screen was that other deeper blackness, again filled with more stars than I could ever remember seeing. With it came the smells of dry grass, resins and night blossoms, gathered up, carried along, vivid cargoes in the night. Whatever moon there was came and went in that darkness, now out of sight behind the great galleons of cloud, dimly seen, now with its rich, fragile light shivering in hints and quick enamellings.

One-thirty, I decided. It couldn’t be much later. Sometimes you had the feel of the hour.

I relished every part of it. This was what summer nights were about: flaring curtains and shuddering fly-screens after the day’s heat, rushing treetops and great gulfs of stars beyond, fragrances teasing memory, leading memory, serving up countless forgotten things as you settled into sleep once more. Perfect, I told myself. Just perfect.

But there was a sound at odds with the flow, not the clicks and rustlings of twigs and leaves on the tin roof, not the curtains stirring or the roaring of the trees, but something outside the ebbing, surging rush, one of those sounds you can’t quite place.

It was a
shink-shink, shink-shink, shink-shink
, a distinctive rhythm, there and gone, then back again, elusive and strange.

And a voice—it had to be—calling in the night, once, twice, a third time, the same mournful cry, a word, but drawn out and blown away so I couldn’t quite grasp it.

I sat up in bed and tried to listen. Nothing. Just the wind, the clashing trees, the twigs and leaves striking the roof, the whole hill alive and stirring, set among other heaving, benighted hills.

I snatched one of the curtains as it flew back, held it aside as if clearing a path to the night.

And there it was again, the
shink-shink, shink-shink, shink-shink
sound at the edge of hearing, and again the far-off cry.

‘Yakkos! Yakkos!’

There was too much wind noise, too much interference in the blustery dark, but that’s what it sounded like. Yakkos. Perhaps more than one voice too, but calling that same forlorn word over and over.

I knelt on the bed, pressed my face to the screen, conscious of the little grid pattern it would make on the tip of my nose—another childhood recollection—and tried to see if anyone was there.

It did no good. Little was visible in this layering of shadows.

I had to know what it was. I scrambled out of bed, pulled on jeans and shirt and hurried to the back door, stood there in the blowing darkness and listened for the cry and the mysterious
shink-shink
sound.

The wind gusted all about the house, rushing in the trees. The trunks creaked and strained like the masts of old ships. It was impossible to hear much over it.

I suddenly felt like a target standing there. I hadn’t turned on a light, but now I felt so visible to anyone watching.

Quickly I slipped on the yard shoes I kept inside the door and stepped onto the grassy terrace, climbed the steps to the embankment and the chicken wire fence that marked off the bonsai garden under the trees.

At least now I was in it, not just an observer looking out. It was my night as well.

And, as if that were a key, the cry came again, off to the right this time.

‘Yakkos!’

No mistaking it. A definite cry. Someone calling a child? A missing dog? Perhaps it was being carried by the wind from further off, a name brought from one of the houses way over there.

But it was answered from the hill before me, from up where the tower stood, beyond the tight little knots of the bonsai.

‘Yakkos!’

Such was the intense quality of the night, the dreamlike absurdity of people hallooing one another across the hills, that I still couldn’t accept that I was hearing it. It was like some holdover from sleep. Intruders didn’t call out; burglars didn’t rouse those they meant to rob.

It had to be a lost dog or child being called. There was that sort of plaintive, desperate quality to the cries.

But then, quite near, came the
shink-shink shink-shink
, a rippling susurration like bells on sleighs and troikas you saw in old movies, a rushing sound with a distinctive two-count:
shink-shink, shink-shink, shink-shink.

Someone was running in the night, someone with sleigh-bells, or bells on their garments like Morris dancers had.

Shink-shink, shink-shink
.

So strange, so improbable. Troikas in the night. Morris dancers loose and more.

Clown-fear was there like the clench of an iron hand, brought figures wearing bells, jesters and puppets, the closed-hook visage of Mr Punch, other Commedia faces, even—absurdly, wonderfully—Woody Allen with his drooping jester’s wand in
Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask
. What a thing! No single image, a torrent, most half-glimpsed, half-imagined, half-acknowledged in the flood.

But full-clown—snatching me away, shutting me down.

All courage, all determination vanished in an instant. I was inside my condition, raging at it, laughing through it as much as I could. I stood locked in the wind-flow, attended by trees and darkness and the grinning half-blade smile of the moon.

I was a figure of fun myself now, a clown with hair all crazy from sleep, flecked with twigs and leaves, starlight and moonlight, peering through barely seen bonsai puzzle knots at this swelling night carnival, the looming mass of the hill its big-top, the wind in the trees the unruly applause. More! More! Encore!

Then the cry: ‘Yakkos!’ came from way off, pulled me back to the cascade of troika frenzy, Morris madness, someone running in jester bells, full and unmistakable yet dwindling in the blowing dark, heading towards the call.

I had to know what it was, needed to follow. But the unreality, the misdirection brought by the wind, by the rain of twigs and leaves striking my face and shoulders, by the clown-fear and whatever early hour it was, left me standing at the fence to the bonsai garden, gripping the wire, staring into nothing.