Maddigan's Fantasia

Stretched out among
the ferns on the small tangled hillside, her red curls burning among the green leaves and fronds, Garland Maddigan closed the cover of the book she had been writing in, though still holding her writing place in it with one finger. She looked at its battered blue cover admiringly. No doubt about it. A book! A thick book of actual pages … paper pages … empty pages. Closing her eyes she rippled her thumb across their edges. Once, she knew, the world had been filled with paper, but the Destruction turned most of it to ashes. These days, even though the Destruction and the Chaos that followed it were times of the past, even though the world had been slowly remaking itself for years, paper was not always easy to come by once you moved out of the cities. And inside the cities it was often expensive. Here she
was with a whole empty book of it, found in one of those ruined houses, those empty shells twisted in gardens gone wild, lasting on in the tangled forests on either side of the road. She could move her secret thoughts from inside to outside, and then, by closing that blue cover, she could trap them before they flitted away from her. After all, soon she would be thirteen and her childhood (along with all the things that had patched her childhood together) would be fading into the past. Better write the days down before they got away from her altogether. These pages – these white spaces – were hers and hers alone. She was going to tell her secret thoughts to that mysterious reader she felt taking shape on the other side of the paper.

Down at the bottom of the hill a little plain, slightly scooped like a begging hand, reached out of a small forest of old trees stretching bare branches towards the next hill. (After all, though the sun was shining so warmly it
was
winter.) And there, on the edge of scrubby bush that fringed the true forest (trees that never lost their leaves), Garland’s moving home, the Fantasia, was laid out like a strange garden set within a crescent; tents, old and sometimes patched, had the look of gallant, coloured flags. There was her home – half bus, half caravan, a crested tower pointing upward from its roof, rather as if a little castle were struggling to hatch itself out of the old van. The Fantasia dressed not only its clowns and acrobats in astonishing clothes, but turned the vehicles that carried it along the leftover tracks of the wild world into a bright and shifting village on wheels. There was the food wagon, hung with pots and pans. Bailey, the mapreader, was carefully wiping dust out of them. He turned as Maddie, Garland’s mother, walked by, and shook his duster at her. It promptly turned into a bunch of flowers which he held out to Maddie. It was a trick they were both used to, but she laughed and Bailey laughed with her. The wind crept in under the canvas of the tents so that the canvas
rose and fell, and the whole Fantasia looked as if it were laughing along with them. Below there, in that strange garden, people were working hard: checking the horses, practising their routines, packing and repacking, fixing the frills round the necks of the dogs, then clapping their hands for them to leap through their hoops, dance on their hind legs or spin like barking tops.

Vans and wagons were parked in a wide semicircle. Garland now saw her mother join her father, Ferdy the ringmaster, bright in his scarlet coat – not the one he wore for performances but an old one he put on when the wind was cold. The Fantasia was slow to throw anything away. She watched her parents, walking side by side, and holding hands as they checked coils of rope, or bent side by side over solid, impassive boxes, watched them pat the panting tents and laugh to one another. Yves, her father’s second-in-command, walked a step or two behind them, and Boomer, that irritating boy (a sort of adopted cousin-brother), zoomed around on his small motorized bike, the treasure of his life, trying to look as if he, too, was one of the people in charge. But Boomer loved machines and perhaps machines liked Boomer. They certainly seemed to do what he told them to do. But perhaps Boomer
needed
to feel he was in charge of something. He was a Fantasia orphan, half-adopted by old Goneril the Fantasia witch who complained about him, but who made sure he had plenty to eat, and who stuck up for him when anything went wrong. And there was Goneril herself, standing outside her van which was painted with magic symbols, probably grumbling (for grumbling was her hobby). Even when the weather was fine and things were going well, Goneril always found something to grumble about. Looking down on them all, it suddenly seemed to Garland that she was watching two families … her own parents, of course, but also that other wider family – the Fantasia itself, that family of
tumblers and grumblers related to her by wonders and work, travel and trickery … Maddigan’s Fantasia. There they were – all of them – Tane the chief clown and a lively acrobat, Penrod who looked after the horses and flipped on the trapeze. There were Byrna and Nye the stilt walkers, there was old Goneril of course, and dreamy Bannister with one book tucked under his arm (even though he was strapping up a bundle of something), and another in his back pocket. Books, books, always books with Bannister. And there, of course, was Ferdy – descended directly from the first Maddigan, Gabrielle – walking with her mother, Maddie, who was not only a mother but an acrobat, and a knife thrower as well (though her knives had blades like stars or new moons). There they were, all those special people, laid out like pieces in a bright game … and beyond them, all around them, the damaged land that held still while you looked at it, but which seemed to spin and shift and tangle, turning tricks of its own once you looked away.

Garland flipped her book open again and began her writing. Funny that scribbling things down like this should be making her feel so altered … so powerful. The short stub of pencil, hard to hold but carefully sharpened, left its silver track across the page.

Garland paused, then began writing again.

‘Garland!’ someone shouted urgently. She knew her father’s voice. Garland looked up sharply

‘Garland,’ came a chorus of echoing voices. Some of them were real echoes, but among them she could make out Boomer’s voice and the piping cry of Lilith, the bossy daughter of Yves, her father’s right-hand man. None of them were
voices she wanted to hear just then, for it was just great being a runaway hidden high on a hillside and looking down on the Fantasia … being a true, pure self without a couple of kids dancing around her, trying to get her attention. But her father had called her in a voice she could not ignore.

‘Garland!’ he was calling again, shouting and looking left and right, and this time she knew for sure that something had gone wrong.

‘Garland! Quickly!’ screamed yet another voice, Maddie’s voice. ‘Now! Oh lord, they’re coming!’ No way out of it! She must go. Go now!

She leapt up, sliding the book into the front of her coat and pushing the pencil stub back into her pocket. And it happened again.

The air between her and the Fantasia below rippled as if wind from another world were blowing through it … and a shape, coming out of nothing, seemed to struggle towards her … a silvery-grey shape as if an unseen pencil were drawing on the air in front of her.

Several times over the last year Garland had seen the air ripple like this in front of her, had seen that shivering mist struggling to take on some shape but always dissolving back into nothing. Garland stared at it, a little frightened, but curious too.

‘What are you?’ she cried aloud. ‘OK! What do you want to
tell
me.’ She’d asked this before but there had never been any answer.

‘Garland!’ screamed the voices down below.

‘Look! I’ve got to go!’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go!’

No time to worry about any mere ghosts! She must run right through them … run through silver mist, and the scrub and duck in under the trees

‘Garland! Now! Now!’ Maddie was shouting, and really there was nothing to do but to run.

Below her the Fantasia was seething. The horses were being drawn in among the caravans and all vans were being swung around. The Fantasia must stop being a village and become an armed fort, for it was being attacked, and it was too late for Garland to join them. Ferdy, racing from one van to another, looking desperately up at the hillside as he ran, saw her and pointed her out to Maddie.

‘Down! Down!’ yelled Maddie and Ferdy together, both swinging their arms, flattening the air in front of them, and Garland obediently flattened herself among the tussock and the broom bushes that grew on the lower slopes of the hillside, panting a little and staring between the brown-green stems, trying to work out just what was happening. She heard them before she saw them of course – the snarling of motorbikes as they were kicked into life – the roar of their attack.

Road Rats! She should have guessed. Road Rats! And by the sound of it a big gang of them.

Up from the river, out from the scrubby bush to the right of the Fantasia they came, the bikers first, gunning their machines to make a confusing sound, winding and zigzagging as they burst in on the Fantasia. After them came more men jogging ruthlessly, slung with bows, spears and occasional guns, straggling but quick and ferocious, determined to steal whatever they could get their hands on. Often Road Rats used clearer pieces of road as bait, knowing that an easy road would lure travellers, making it easy to trap and rob them. But the Fantasia was always alert, armed and ready for Road Rats. There came the peppering fire of guns. Penrod had a gun and Goneril had one too. She was a good shot. The rest of them depended on bows and arrows.

The Road Rats engaged with the front line of the Fantasia, a furious, confused struggle. Hand-to-hand combat now! Garland saw her mother’s wild red skirt flying out, saw her dealing blows
right and left. She saw Yves embracing one of the Road Rats, a man with a crown tattooed around his bald head, as if they were long lost friends. But there, on the roof of the food van, Bailey suddenly collapsed and then slid sideways. Then, peering through the broom bushes Garland saw her father Ferdy bending at the knees, taking a staggering, sideways step, and toppling forward. Even from where she was, hidden in the scrub on the slope, Garland could see he had an arrow in his chest.

‘No!’ she screamed, leaping to her feet, dancing among the broom bushes, not caring in the least if the enemy saw her red curls like a fire suddenly blazing up in the broom. Maddie straightened, spun, and threw one of the silver stars she used in her juggling act. It flew through the air – a shooting star – shining and spinning and struck a Road Rat, biting deep into his neck. But the Road Rats were already in retreat … a slow double retreat since, off to one side a group of them had successfully closed in around the food van. Some of them had managed to scramble into the van. Its motor roared. It was being driven away while other Road Rats fought a rearguard action. She heard, as if from a great distance, the rattle of the pots and pans. As the van pulled away the Road Rats were already unhooking the noisy pots and flinging them off into the tussock. There was no way that the Fantasia people could get to their van without leaving themselves open to Road-Rat attack. But that was the skill of these attackers. One group would distract travellers with battle while another group, skirmishing off to one side, would steal what they could find and run for it. Though they were thin and weedy people – though they were less well-armed they greatly outnumbered the men and women of the Fantasia.