That’ll do me, he decided.
‘Hold on,’ he said to Zac.
He pulled the swamp rat over to the side of the unsealed road and crawled along, searching for an opening through the trees. With the car rolling out of gear, it was now no longer as loud as a Mack truck. He spotted a stand of scrubby bushes he figured he could drive his way through.
‘We’re going in,’ he said. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, keep your hands in the vehicle at all times.’
He steered the swamp rat into the bush.
A camp on the outskirts of Pantelimon, Bucharest, Romania
June 30, 7.38 p.m.
Right now, Samantha was positive that any punishment she and Mirela copped for sneaking out would be worth it.
Because she was squished into the back of Besnik’s Toyota HiAce van, and her knee was jammed up against Tamas’s thigh. Right now, she felt that lunch with the gypsy king had been a mere diversion, being chased by the ninjas had been but a game, and the gossiping at the moonlight ceremony had never even happened.
Tamas’s older brother, Luca, was their driver, nineteen now, and old enough to satisfy any Gaje policeman that he was legal to drive. Samantha remembered plenty of trips when they’d had to use fake IDs, fast talking and/or running when pulled over by the cops. Hanzi, Luca’s cousin and Mirela’s big brother, had the prized front passenger seat. Sam, Mirela and Tamas’s little sister, Shofranka, were in the back. Of course. Samantha didn’t think she’d ever had a ride up the front. She was cool with that.
Tamas was not.
He sat glowering, cross-legged on the van’s hard floor, one leg jammed up against two bald tyres and a spare sliding door, and the other pressed against Samantha’s knee. She felt his indignation sparking in periodic bursts through the clothing over their skin. She also sensed something else from him. It made her cheeks burn and her palms itch.
For as long as forever, Samantha had watched Tamas fight his big brother and cousin for a spot in the front seat of the HiAce. Given over to storage, a bedroom for up to six little kids during winter, and daytrips into town for the teenagers, anyone under thirty thought the HiAce was the coolest vehicle in camp, maybe even the coolest car in Romania. Diarrhoea-yellow, handpainted with an old house-paintbrush – back window and all – the HiAce was nevertheless always there when you needed it. Although you had to make room for the junk. It was a kind of mobile wrecker’s yard: always full of spare parts found on the side of the road. Lala told Samantha that this was because the van was cursed. It broke down more than any trailer, bike, car, wagon or horse the camp had ever owned. Still, Sam had watched knock-down brawls in the dust as the boys fought to ride up front of the golden chariot.
At this very moment, she’d have paid money for her spot in the back.
‘Why are you so cranky?’ she said quietly to Tamas, pretending that Mirela and Shofranka were not listening to every word.
‘Stop being witchy,’ said Tamas. ‘I’m not cranky.’
Tonight he wore jeans just like her, and a soft, dusky-brown T-shirt the same colour as his skin. It was almost as good as his usual uniform: jeans-and-that-was-it. Although the T-shirt was loose at his midriff, it gripped tightly around his upper arms. He wore his silver amulet out over the top of the shirt and a red bandana to hold his hair back from his eyes.
Samantha watched him blink those outrageously long lashes a few times. She outright stared. She couldn’t help it. Her mouth felt dry. She licked her lips.
And then she felt Tamas lean – maybe it was only two millimetres – a little closer into her.
She had to blink a couple of times. And then she coughed. Why did her mouth get so dry when she was around him? I swear to Goddess Gaia that I would kiss the gypsy king for a glass of water right now, she silently declared.
Music pumped from the front of the van. She didn’t think she’d ever heard the song before.
‘What’s that song?’ she said, suddenly in love with it.
‘It’s olden-day music,’ said Shofranka.
Tiny Shofranka, a year younger than her thirteen-year-old cousin, Mirela, didn’t say much, but whatever she said, it could always be relied upon.
‘It’s Huey Lewis and the News,’ Shofranka continued.
‘What?’ said Samantha.
‘That’s the name of the band,’ said Shofranka. ‘Huey Lewis and the News. The song is called “The Power of Love”.’
‘How do you know that?’ said Samantha.
‘Why do you know that?’ said Mirela.
‘Are we there yet?’ said Tamas.
Shofranka said nothing. She leaned back against a greasy carburettor and mouthed words along with the song.
‘Don’t you wish you were up front with the big boys?’ Mirela said suddenly to Tamas.
Samantha could have killed her.
Tamas reeled right back until there was nothing but air between her jeans and his. ‘Why don’t you shut up, Mimi,’ he said. ‘Unless you want me to tell Aunt Esmeralda exactly what you’ve been doing from five minutes ago until the second we get back to camp.’
‘Well, she would bust you boys just as bad as she gets me,’ said Mirela. ‘On account of you taking us when she told you not to.’
‘Yeah? Well, what’s she gonna do to me?’ he said. ‘I’m not scared of Esmeralda. It’s you who asks how high when she tells you to jump.’
‘Oh really?’ said Mirela. ‘I guess that’s why I’m in the back of the van on the way to the Carnivale, hmm? And if you’re not scared of my mamma, you sure put on a pretty good act the other day, dancing around like Beyoncé to the tune of that wooden spoon.’
Samantha tried to zone out to their bickering, but they were on a roll, and although she knew they were just arguing to pass the time, the verbal arrows they shot at one another ricocheted around the small space in the van, glancing off walls when they missed their target and piercing her skin instead. They stung slightly, minor irritations, but because she was already so on-edge they dragged her mood down further.
She closed her eyes and concentrated on emitting calmness. Within a minute or so, Tamas and Mirela laughed more as they hurled their insults. Their emotional darts disintegrated to dust as soon as they touched her.
She’d always been able to do this and never really thought about it properly until now. She’d just put it down to the power of positive thinking. She’d read about it online: if you think good thoughts and wish people well, you can send out positive energy.
Suddenly, she snapped open her eyes and hugged her knees up to her chest. What if I can make it stronger, she thought. Much, much stronger? What if that’s all the honeyed light is? She thought about the two occasions that she’d felt the light: with Milosh and with Scarface. Both times I’ve been overwhelmed by two emotions: terror and love. Do I have to feel both for it to work? Can’t it be just one or the other?
She decided to try to find out. And love, she figured, was much nicer than terror.
She closed her eyes again to focus and thought about what she loved about Tamas. Her lips parted. A slow, delicious smile lit up her face. She leaned back against the wall of the van, breathing deeply. The music and voices around her faded and she wished she could lie there forever, dreaming about him. She flicked open her eyes to find Shofranka staring at her.
Sam smiled tightly and turned away, determined to press on. She forced herself to turn her thoughts to Mirela; to find the reasons that she loved her crazy friend. She pictured some of the mad things they’d done together and soon giggles bubbled up from her stomach; she pressed her lips together to stop them bursting from her mouth.
So now I have these feelings, she thought, what do I do with them? She tried to imagine gathering the happy sensations together, squishing them all into one big lump. And in her mind they became a slowly spinning sphere, made up of billions of dots of brilliant energy, fizzing, spitting and spinning about one another.
And now what? she wondered. In her mind, she kind of nudged the ba
ll, prodding it carefully. Immediately, she felt its edges blur, particles breaking away, dispersing into a soft light that radiated from her skin as it scattered, like glowing dust motes. She buzzed and tingled all over.
Wow.
She fell back against the wall of the van. How great is that?!
Suddenly, feverishly excited by the feeling, she gave the ball a great push.
The ball of light exploded, spraying outward from every part of her body.
And then everything happened at once.
First thing she thought was that they’d been in a car accident: Shofranka, Mirela and Tamas were piled on top of her and the van had screeched to a stop.
And then Tamas began kissing her neck.
Mirela, pushing her hands past him, groped at the tangles in her hair. Shofranka was at her feet, stroking her hands, her eyes glazed.
‘Hey! What are you lunatics doing?’ Sam yelled. ‘Get the hell off me!’
And then the sliding van door slammed open. Luca and Hanzi pushed through the doorway, wrestling one another to be first to climb into the back of the cabin.
Tamas was crushing her now, and Mirela’s efforts to push past him were becoming increasingly frantic. Samantha struggled to shove them off her, but one arm was pinned and the other hand was gripped by Shofranka in a death-hug. She couldn’t move; it was becoming difficult even to breathe. Over Tamas’s shoulder, she saw that Hanzi had overpowered Luca and his huge shoulders now took up the very last of the space and the air in the van.
She freaked out.
‘GET OFF ME!’ she screamed.
Her heart bashed about in her chest like a trapped bird and she felt it pumping pure panic into her bloodstream.
This time a white energy blasted out through her system and Shofranka immediately dropped her hand as though burned. Hanzi desperately wriggled his way back out through the doorway of the van. She breathed in as the night air flooded into the cramped space.
Mirela slid backwards, leaving Tamas, still on top of her, staring blankly into her eyes. She pushed him back a little and he sat up, dazed.
‘What happened?’ he said.
She glanced about the van. Shofranka and Mirela seemed just as bewildered, as though they’d been woken suddenly from a deep sleep.
‘You don’t know?’ she asked.
‘Why are we stopped?’ said Shofranka. She sounded as though she wanted to cry.
‘Did we crash?’ Mirela said, spotting Hanzi at the door, with Luca behind him, scratching his head.
Samantha thought fast. No way did she want to tell them the truth about the last few hideously embarrassing moments. ‘No, but almost,’ she said. ‘Great driving, Luca. I don’t know how you didn’t hit that horse in the middle of the road.’
‘Is the horse all right?’ said Tamas, sitting bolt upright, banging his head on the ceiling of the van.
‘Of course he’s all right,’ said Luca, sticking his head through the doorway. ‘I can drive, dummy. But you guys look like you took a bit of a tumble.’
‘Well, what do you expect – with you screeching all over the road like that?’ said Mirela.
‘Yeah, how did you get your licence anyway, bro? Did you bribe the Gaje?’ said Tamas, rubbing his head.
‘We’re all just lucky we’re safe,’ said Hanzi, blinking. ‘You should have seen Luca swerve around that horse. It came out of nowhere.’
Oh my God, they’re just filling in the gaps as they go along, thought Samantha. She figured she’d better move things along a little before the horse became a unicorn that Luca had ridden bareback into the forest after he’d saved all their lives from a fire-breathing dragon.
‘Um, well, do you think we could get going then?’ she said. ‘Because I’ve kind of set my heart on going to the Carnivale some time this year.’
***
Everybody knew that the Gaje owned the carni, but the Roma ran it. And while in a perfect world the Gaje would have preferred that the Roma stayed away, they also knew they’d have eighty per cent fewer customers if that were the case.
They’d also have ninety per cent fewer pickpockets, but that was beside the point.
The Roma ran the show, scammed the show, loved the show. The Roma were carni people, and when the carni was in town, the Rom lapped it up.
The party began in the makeshift carparks. Two sports ovals, sacrificed for the cause – oh, and for a lot of cash. After waiting ten minutes in a fuel-fogged car queue, Luca paid a dour gate attendant for a parking spot. Whether there were any spaces available was not his responsibility, Samantha heard the attendant mutter, his words running together like a song so that she’d had to replay them a few times before she figured out what he’d said.
They cruised the dustbowl that was once a soccer field. Sam crouched with Mirela behind the front seats of the HiAce, watching everything going by. Each time she’d passed this site when the carni was not in town, the grass seemed to be struggling valiantly to grow back, but during midsummer – specifically, during the two weeks of Carnivale – the seedlings were always nuclear-blasted back into the dirt. She guessed that some government official had bought himself a couple of new cars and a boat for selling the community out this way.
She’d heard that plenty of people never even left the parking lots. Parking itself was a festival, you see. It was like this: the Roma virtually never bought their food pre-made. They liked things killed and cooked a certain way, so the battered hotdogs on sticks and the fries and bowls of salty, greasy onion rings were devoured almost exclusively by the Gaje. The Rom made their way back to the carpark when they were hungry.
Samantha noticed that at least every second parked car had its boot open, and inside each lay an Aladdin’s treasure-trove of food. They passed an eighties Peugeot weighed down with drinks, breads and salads in the boot and not one, but two, roasting spits fired up before it. A lamb and a pig. The scent of the unbearably delicious roasting meat wallpapered the HiAce, and her mouth watered.
Gypsies, decked out in their glittering, gaudiest finest, moved from vehicle to vehicle, sat around the cars on striped deckchairs, and clustered, gossiping, right in the middle of the makeshift road. And just like the previous year, some party-person had hired a karaoke machine. A gypsy wearing sprayed-on gabardine slacks, gold front teeth and a funeral-suit jacket that Sam would swear on the Bible was covering the open fly of his unfastened pants, was belting out Frank Sinatra’s ‘I did it my way’.
The HiAce found a spot squished between a trestle table and a flatbed ute. Following a brief conversation with Luca, the ute owners gathered around the clothed table, which groaned with open bottles and food, and carefully shifted it a metre to the right. Enough for the HiAce to slide on in. But before they’d allow them to leave the parking lot, the ute owners insisted they each grab something to eat or drink.
Samantha scanned the table: everything looked and smelled amazing. She figured she’d go for a lucky dip. She’d never been frightened of food. Mirela would sniff and prod everything before she put it into her mouth, sticking to the food she knew, rejecting anything she’d never seen before. Samantha didn’t get it. Without exception, her favourite foods had begun with an experiment into the unknown.
She stabbed a plastic fork deep into a lake of grass-green olive oil, which sat viscous and dormant, obscuring something dark, moving torpidly, inside a stainless steel tray. Whatever was in there was going to taste great; she would bet her tarot deck on that. She pulled out a fat piece of marinated eggplant and had slurped down the whole thing before Mirela and Shofranka even made it out of the back of the HiAce.
Wiping her greasy lips with the back of her hand, she stumbled a little as she headed with the others towards the lights of the Carnivale. She noticed that the rest of the group were also a little unsteady on their feet. Hanzi gnawed so conscientiously on a chicken drumstick that he stumbled right into a pothole, dropping to his knees in front of a campervan full of partying gypsies. The adults toasted him uproario
usly, raising their glasses high, while the children cavorted around him madly, ecstatic with their remaining entertainment for the evening – another drunk adult to ridicule.
Hanzi wobbled to his feet and Sam’s family gathered around him, grinning, slapping him on the back. Sam wiped the back of her hands against her jeans, suddenly tense. They all looked out of it. Even tiny Shofranka giggled like a fifteen-year-old drunk on her parents’ schnapps for the first time ever. But none of them had been drinking.
I’ve gotta watch what I do with that new trick of mine, she thought.
And then from the fairground ahead came a crack like a gunshot, and bursting into the night sky above the rainbow lights of the Ferris wheel were fireworks. Spits, stars, blurs, bolts and bangs of colour, the firecrackers exploded in sky-slashes and pinwheels of noise and light.
Mirela squealed and ran towards the Carnivale.
Samantha was right behind her, her green eyes on fire.
Dwight Juvenile Justice Detention Centre, Sydney, Australia
June 30, 9.25 p.m.
When Zac took a window seat in the back row on the lower level of the train, Luke kept walking.
‘Don’t mind me,’ he said on the way past. ‘Got some reading to do.’
He pulled the folder out from the waistband of his jeans and dropped into a seat two rows ahead.
At this time of night, he figured that this would be one of the last trains out of Windsor. It was obviously an action-packed town. He’d seen only three other people, two on this level. A man wearing what looked to be a bus driver’s uniform sat right down the front of the carriage. Another man was slumped in the seat behind, leaning his head against the window, probably asleep already. And when they’d first walked onto the train, a girl, dressed totally in black, sat on a bench seat facing the doors. Walking past her, he’d thought she was either brave or stupid to be travelling alone at night. Still, with all those facial piercings and the multi-buckled platform boots, she probably scared off more people than frightened her.
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