And they would swear that, for a moment, the creatures and sleighs carried figures: pretty girls in their detailed fashions, fine-figured young men waving their hats, all with such joyful expressions, all with such eagerness in their bodies and gestures, that the daughters’ single impulse is to join them, to be in among the throng, so warm in colour and mood, to be swept up and a part of that strange heavy-lively crystalline music—
Which winds, with a spirited suddenness, to a triumphant flourish and stop. There is no one on the carousel. Only the creatures stand in the golden light, a hoof raised here, a head lowered there. Then the hoof strikes the wooden floor, the head lifts and the lips whiffle; an ostrich turns and blinks at the daughters down its beak. Life, minor life, entrances each girl’s eye.
‘Look, the eagle! His wings are like fire!’
‘So beautiful! So warm! I wish that music would start again.’
They stand in the snow, clutching each other.
‘Do you suppose we are meant to ride it? In this dream?’
‘Look, there are steps up to it – of course we are, sister! Come! Which mount will you choose?’
‘Oh, are you sure?’ But she climbs the stairs after her sister.
And there follows delight – the last delight of their lives. They run about, in the warmth, with no mammas or chaperones to restrain them, choosing now the lion for his sumptuous warm mane and wise eye; now the cat for its flexibility and fur and for the fish, flashing rainbows, it holds in its jaws; now the sleigh for its quilts and candles; now the eagle again for the grandeur of his red-gold wings.
Finally the elder daughter chooses the black stallion with the bejewelled harness and the saddle of warm bronze leather. The younger finds a strawberry roan nearby with an improbably frothing cream mane, all its harness a supple blood red. She climbs astride and it tosses its head, showering her with tiny white blossoms, sweetly scented, that melt like snowflakes on her skin. Delighted, she turns to her sister, in time to see her glister with tiny melting gems, shaken from the coal-black’s mane.
‘What bewitching animals!’ she cries – then, ‘Oh!’ as the beautiful machine creeps into motion around them. The music bursts out from the central fantasia of mirrors and organ pipes and glossy coloured figures and gold-painted arabesques.
All is beautiful and wonderful, warm and alive while the carousel gathers speed. Everywhere they look something catches the eye: the deft paintwork that makes that cherub look so cunning, the glitter of eagle feathers as the lights pass over, the way the giraffe runs beside them, clumsy and elegant at the same time, the lozenges of trompe-l’œil that offer whole worlds in a glance, brine-plashy seascapes, folly-bedecked parks, city squares thronged with characters and statuary, alpine vistas where one might as easily spring up into the sky as tumble to the crags below.
And their ears and their hearts are too full of the weighty rhythms of the music to allow proper thought. And the beasts below them are just alive enough to intrigue them, and to respond to the supple reins. The carousel reaches its full speed, and they gallop there awhile, calling to each other, perfectly happy.
And then it spins just a little faster.
The music accelerates, veers upward in pitch, sounds a little mad, a little wild. There is a jerk as of slipping gear-wheels, and the roan plunges.
‘Sister!’ The younger girl grasps the gold-and-white-striped pole to which the horse is fixed.
But her sister is wrestling with the reins of her own bounding stallion. Now, half-tossed from the saddle, she clings to the horse’s pole, struggles to regain her seat.
So frightened are they, so dizzied by the machine’s whirling, so busy with their desperate cries for each other’s aid, that they do not see the shiny paintwork of the poles fade to a glassy blue in their grasp, the warmer colours drain down, down out of the poles entirely. They do not discover until too late that—
‘Sister, my hands! They are frozen fast!’
The machine and the music spin on, but the horses’ movements slow and cease. Their painted coats – glossy black, pink-brown – fade to blue where the pole strikes through them, and the blueness spreads across the saddles under the folds of nightgown and dance-dress. The girls’ fine cotton drawers are no protection against the terrible coldness. It locks their thighs to the saddles; it locks their seats; it strikes up into their women’s parts, fast as flame, clear as glass, cold as ice.
‘Sister!’
‘Sister, help me!’
They gaze aghast at each other. The animals between and around them fade to blue, freeze to stillness, beaks agape, teeth points of icy light, manes and tails carven ice. The music raves, high-pitched and hurrying. The golden lights become ice-bulbs gathering only the blue snow-light below, the grey cloud-light above. The forest spins around the carousel, a mad, icy blur.
The park promenade. It is early spring and still quite cold.
Gallantine, raising his hat to every muffled personage who passes, is older now; his figure is fuller, almost imposing in the well-cut dark coat. His new wife, upon his arm, is slender, dark-haired, and has more than a touch of magic about her.
She glances over her shoulder, back along the path. ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ she says, removing her hand from his arm and placing it in her ermine muff, ‘one of those ladies once had a place in your affections.’
‘The Leblanc sisters? Well, they were beauties in their time, though you may find that hard to credit now.’
‘Did they always clutch each other so?’ she says, glancing back again. ‘Did they always carry themselves in that strange way?’
‘On the contrary, they were very fine dancers, once,’ says Gallantine mildly.
His wife is silent until he will look at her, and then for a while of looking.
She laughs a very little, through her beautiful nose. ‘How very gauche,’ she murmurs, narrowing her eyes at him. ‘How very crude of you.’ Her mouth is lovely, too. It is the only spot of colour in the whole wintry park. She hisses at him, almost inaudibly. ‘There are so many things for which to punish you.’
‘Madam.’ His voice cracks with gratification. He offers her his arm.
She reattaches herself to him, and they walk on.
Margo Lanagan is an acclaimed writer of novels and short stories. Black Juice was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and won two World Fantasy Awards and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Young Adult Fiction. Red Spikes won the CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Horn Book Fanfare title, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her novel Tender Morsels won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was an Honor Book in the Michael L. Printz award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Her novel Sea Hearts was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and won a WA Premier’s Book Award, the CBCA Book of the Year, Older Readers, the Norma K Hemming Award and the Barbara Jefferis Award, an Indie Award and an Aurealis Award among many other honours. Zeroes and its sequel Swarm, co-authored with Scott Westerfeld & Deborah Biancotti, were New York Times bestsellers.
Margo Lanagan, Singing My Sister Down and other stories
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