by Cj Flood
‘Your brother’s older,’ he said. ‘Fifteen?’
I nodded. He was good at this.
‘Older than me, then,’ he said, as if it had been puzzling him for a while.
I asked about his sisters, and he said they were just babies, not worth bothering with, and he pronounced baby to rhyme with tabby, but I noticed that his words didn’t match his voice, and I remembered seeing him on the caravan steps, leaning over to show them something cupped in his hands.
‘I’d love to have a little sister,’ I said, instantly embarrassed by the feeling in my voice.
‘I always wanted a younger brother,’ he said. ‘People’d call us the Delaney boys. All the girls’d want to double-date us.’
He spoke so fast I was sure I’d miss what he said, but if I waited a second the words caught up with me.
Trick turned to lean on one elbow, facing me, and I copied him. Our bodies made a V.
I asked what it was like living in a caravan, and he said pretty much like living in a house except that you moved all the time, and there’s no privacy, and I laughed and said, so not much like a house at all then.
‘Me mammy’s desperate for one,’ he said. ‘She loves the idea of it, unpacked forever!’
I remembered my mum, packing her things in boxes and taking them to Oxfam. I’d heard her talking to Tess. She didn’t want to sit in the house drinking a bottle of wine by herself every night, she said. When you want things to change, you have to do something different. This is certainly different, Tess had said.
Trick was telling me how his da said he would settle when he was in his grave, and how he felt just the same. As soon as he was old enough he was going to get his own trailer and go all around the world.
‘Just me and me wife,’ he said. ‘No kids or dogs or nothing like that.’
He pronounced that like dat.
‘It’s all right now my uncle’s here, I’m in with him, but before that . . . The noise!’
He breathed out through his mouth to emphasise his point, and I remembered him lying under the caravan those first nights I’d watched him.
He talked so much I could hardly keep up. He told me about the old camp, where they’d pulled in next to his uncle, a different one, and had a great time until the land was sold for redevelopment.
‘We ended up on the A52,’ he said. ‘Imagine putting that on a letter!’
I examined the tiny blue forget-me-nots which grew in bunches between the rows of corn. I couldn’t imagine it at all.
I thought about Sam saying gypsies couldn’t read, and I wanted to ask Trick about it. I wanted to ask how he got to school if he was living on the A52, but maybe it was a well-known fact that gypsies didn’t go. But then, what about Grace Fitzpatrick?
As the sun climbed higher we grew slow and lazy like wasps trapped in a jar. He seemed to have talked himself out, for a while at least, and I was too hot to worry about thinking of things to say. Sweat trickled down the backs of my knees. I changed position occasionally, uncomfortable in the heat, but Trick lay still as a reptile. He basked. His skin seemed to glow in the sun, like it would never get burned.
I looked at the way his eyes moved underneath his eyelids and wished I was brave enough to ask him more questions.
A cabbage white flew into our hideout, and I watched it flutter on the breeze. I remembered how his mum had looked this morning.
‘Your mum’s really pretty,’ I said. ‘I was listening to her sing before you jumped on my back.’
He laughed. ‘She’s tone deaf. Drives me da mad.’
I thought of Mum practising her guitar, and how Sam would sing along with her. She tried to teach us harmonies, but I could never get it right in time. I got left behind.
The butterfly settled on a leaf. It blinked its wings, showing us the black eyes there, then took off.
‘Haven’t seen your mum yet,’ he said.
‘She doesn’t go out much.’
I smoothed my hands across the thick, battered stems on the ground between us. He did the same.
‘Actually. She’s out all the time. As in, she doesn’t live with us any more.’
I waited, but he didn’t put on a fake voice, or gasp, or give me his opinion, and so I told him how she’d left for Beni Khiar with hardly anything packed into a blue Ford Transit van that she’d spent weeks fitting with a bed and storage space and a tiny gas stove.
‘It’s in Tunisia,’ I said. ‘She always wanted to go there for some reason.’
Trick looked impressed, so I told him more, about how she was living in the van and camping, stopping at places with names like Qalibiyah and Qurbus.
I looked at our hands stroking the dead crop.
‘D’you think it’s weird?’
‘Not for country people,’ he said, and seeing my blank face, he explained. ‘You know, you lot. The settled community, brick-lovers. Stationary folk. Country people always leave each other . . .
‘Sorry,’ he added, and I wondered if I’d flinched.
‘And you lot don’t?’
He shook his head. ‘Think some of them wish they would,’ he said. He dug his nail into the ground leaving a little crescent there.
‘Know what we call you?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Gorgios.’
He looked at me, delighted.
‘Am I supposed to be offended?’
He shrugged as if that were up to me, then started telling me about the gorgios that lived behind him for a bit when he was growing up. They all had the same clothes, he said.
‘White trainers and tracky bottoms. And they were shit-scared of us!’
I wrinkled my nose. ‘Doubt it.’
He started talking about how things used to be different, and how travellers used to be welcome. When he was older he wanted to live in the old way, he said: cooking over a fire and living off the land and sleeping under the stars. He talked more about travelling the world, and the places he would go, and I listened happily, imagining myself out there too, driving around in a sky blue van.
‘So, why’d she go, then? Your mammy?’
I looked at him, surprised, but his face was so friendly and open. I breathed in slowly, and thought about it.
‘She used to get really angry,’ I said, after a while. ‘She said she didn’t want us growing up with her like that. That we’re better off . . . She said she didn’t want to blame us.’
‘Blame you?’ he said, and I shrugged.
He asked why I hadn’t gone with her.
‘I would have,’ he said, and I thought of Sam and how much he’d wanted to go.
I said it was because of school, because that seemed easiest, but really I wouldn’t have gone because of Dad. I didn’t tell him that she hadn’t wanted us.
‘Our ma gets pretty angry,’ he said. ‘But we just ignore her.’
‘There was no way you could ignore mine.’
‘My da’s like that,’ he said. ‘Happiest man in the world most of the time, but when he goes . . .’
He looked like he was going to say something else, so I stayed quiet and waited, but he only plucked a dandelion, leaves and all, and rolled it into a scrappy ball.
Lying next to him like that, I thought of an old picture of Mum and Dad. They are leaning on each other, laughing, in front of a caravan. He’s in flares and she’s in a flowery minidress. She only looks a few years older than me. They were a boy and a girl, like us right now. I didn’t understand. How was it possible to stop loving someone?
I stood up, brushing the dirt off my shorts, and asked Trick if he wanted to see something cool, which, of course, he did.
If you followed the brook deep into the Ashbourne Estate, right to the furthest edge of the cornfield, past where the Shetland ponies feed in the meadow and the barbed wire is snagged with sheep’s wool, you eventually came to Drum Hill, which the brook flowed through inside a concrete tunnel.
I let Trick go in front so he could see the view from the top
first.
He whistled in appreciation.
Ashbourne Lake spread out below us, big as a football pitch and glittering in the sun. A pair of swans came in to land as we reached the water’s edge, scattering moorhens with their floppy orange feet. Trick kicked water at them, making them hiss, and I told him to leave them alone. I laughed a minute later when one waddled onto the bank and went snapping and hissing after him.
The right-hand verge was striped with an orchard, and I collapsed under a gnarled-looking apple tree, desperate for shade. In the background, Ashbourne Hall stood grey and square, and Trick asked if we were allowed to be here. I told him that we’d have to run if anyone came, and he didn’t say anything, but I could see from his profile that he was pleased.
At the lake’s centre, a stone woman poured water over her bare shoulders, and I found myself falling into thinking about Mum again, the way she used to wet a sponge in the bath and squeeze it so water ran over her head, wetting her long hair. Before I fell any further, I kicked off my shoes and ran into the freezing water.
Everything was muffled and reeds tickled my belly, and then there was a fizzing noise and Trick had jumped in beside me. We trod water, and grinned at each other because it was impossible to describe how good it was to have sun hot on our scalps, and water cold on our bodies, and the surface flashing gold and silver every time we turned our heads.
A bolt of electric blue caught my eye, and I tracked it automatically, moving slowly through the water.
‘What is it?’ Trick asked, following behind me.
‘Shhh.’
The damselfly flitted from reed to reed then stopped. Its wings moved so fast they almost disappeared.
‘It is! Look. I can’t believe it! It’s an azure damselfly! I thought I’d never see one.’
The rod-like body twitched, then took off, and I flung water into the air to celebrate.
‘How can you tell?’ Trick asked, and he looked confused by how excited I was, but he wasn’t trying to make me feel stupid, so I told him the truth: because of my dad.
‘The azure’s got three stripes on its thorax. They’re really rare. My dad knows everything about plants and animals,’ I said, flicking water at a mist of gnats.
‘Cool,’ Trick said, and I ducked my head under the water so I could beam unwitnessed.
Emerging straight-faced, I hooked my toes against a stone on the bank. Trick did the same.
‘I’m glad we came here,’ he announced, and I knew from his voice that he didn’t just mean today and to the lake.
‘Me too,’ I told him, and my hair swirled around my ears in agreement.
Four
We hung around together every day after that. It was so hot there was a hosepipe ban, and I snuck a wonky stool out from Silverweed, which we used to play cards in the shade under the oak tree. Trick was an Irish traveller, which meant he was Catholic, and supposed to go to Mass a lot more than he did, and, of course, that he was Irish, though he’d only been to Dublin once since he was born there and couldn’t remember it.
Sometimes people who love talking are no good at listening, but it wasn’t that way with Trick. He paid attention, and I told him everything. I talked a lot about Mum. He was the only person I knew who was impressed by what she was doing. I told him how she loved singing, and how easily she laughed, and how easily she shouted, and what she looked like when she got all done up for a night out with Tess – how she would wear all black and no make-up except lipstick, and her hair would be piled on top of her head.
He showed me how to dig under fire embers to bake corn on the cob, and told me about past evictions. If it was a big one, with lots of families, everyone did their bit, even the little ones. They’d pull at the men’s legs, and cry. They’d end up getting pushed over or shoved aside, which would send the mums mad, though they should just have kept them safely indoors in the first place.
If Trick’s dad knew the bailiffs were coming, he’d get his brothers in. There were six of them. In the past, there had been proper stand-offs, bricks thrown and windows smashed and fires set. Trick’s eyes lit up when he told me the extent they’d go to to stand their ground against the gorgios. It made me feel weird, listening to the stories.
He told me that his Uncle Johnny, the one with the enormous chin, had his trailer burned down once, and I couldn’t believe it. Someone actually set it on fire? For no reason? Trick said country people did stuff like that all the time.
‘They don’t like us when we travel, they don’t like us when we stop,’ he said.
Dad was still waiting for the council to agree to help him with an eviction. Once they agreed, the travellers basically had to remove themselves, or face The Consequences, which as far as I could tell meant being moved by force or, if they resisted, being moved by force and being arrested and having their vehicles and trailers confiscated.
I thought it sounded cruel, but Dad said I didn’t understand. ‘You think everybody’s good,’ he said, like I was some kind of idiot because I didn’t want to make people live on the dual carriageway. ‘You watch. They’ll stay here for as long as they can, make a bleeding mess, and clear off. And who d’you think’s going to sort out their rubbish?’
Me and Trick didn’t talk about the feud. As far as I could tell, neither of us had any say in the matter, so there wasn’t much point. Instead, we swam in the lake, climbed the oak tree, built fires, ate corn, and talked about everything else, and just as it was getting to the point that I couldn’t remember what life had been like without him, a phone call to Silverweed came and reminded me.
‘Have I done something to upset you?’ Matty burst out on the ‘o’ of my ‘Hello’.
I’d almost forgotten she existed.
‘I thought you’d ring, or ask me round or something. Have we fallen out?’
‘Course we haven’t,’ I said. ‘It’s only been a week.’
‘Two!’ she said. ‘Nearly. Last year we spent the whole holiday together and we spoke on the phone every day.’
I felt bad. Matty was right. Last year we had spent all summer together. And every summer for four years before that. Benjy and Matty would come over loads and we’d sit in the garden drawing, or take sandwiches out to the paddock. Sometimes Matty would watch from her towel as we rode an inflated inner tube down the brook.
I apologised, and she exhaled, sending vibrations down the phone.
‘Why don’t you come round, then? On Saturday.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You come here. Tomorrow. They do the shopping on Fridays.’
‘Great,’ I said, but I had a feeling of dread.
I ran a bath for Fiasco, because she’d been rolling in fox shit again, and because it always made me laugh to see her desperate expression when I rubbed soap on her long brown ears. She jumped out midway and soaked the bathroom, and I could hardly lift her back in – she was so heavy when wet. I was in the middle of cleaning up the mess she’d made when there was a knock at the front door.
Nobody used the front. I shouted for whoever it was to come round the back, and I was so surprised to see Punky Beresford standing there that I didn’t even say hello. A tall, skinny girl in a baseball cap was with him. I hadn’t seen her before. She held a growling pit bull by its collar. Fiasco barked her head off, still damp from her bath, but she didn’t come out from behind my legs.
‘Is Sam in?’ Punky said.
I shook my head. I didn’t even know they knew each other. Punky Beresford had been in the year above Sam. He was expelled last year before he took his exams for throwing a chair through a window in the maths block.
He had the bluest eyes in the world. They were pink at the edges, like he’d just been crying – though you couldn’t imagine it – and he stared at you when he talked, so it felt like a challenge. His front teeth overlapped slightly, and the left tooth had a grey patch in the middle where the nerve had died, but it didn’t make him ugly. Even the story that went with it, that his dad had hit him in the face with a tel
evision, couldn’t do that.
The girl had high cheekbones dented with acne scars, and black hair cut into a bob. One side curled under her chin and the other hung straight down, so it looked uneven. I had to shout over the racket the dogs were making. I told them Sam wasn’t in, that he was off somewhere with Benjy, though I had no idea really, and when I was finished, Punky gave me this strange, slow smile. He tilted his head back when he spoke, and those pink and blue eyes stared.
He said to tell Sam he’d be at the rec later, and he spoke even slower than he smiled, so I couldn’t tell if he was stoned, or taking the piss out of me somehow.
‘I like your dog,’ the girl said, and her voice was really soft and high-pitched, like a little kid’s. She let go of the pit bull’s collar, and her and Punky walked off, holding hands. From the kitchen I could hear the dog’s claws tapping on the path.
Five
Matty answered the door in black hot pants and a silver bikini.
‘I’ve been in the garden since seven,’ she gasped, giving Dad and Austin a little wave as they drove off in the pick-up. Dad gave her a nod, but Austin only looked away.
Ever since Dad took him on last year, Austin had been in love with Matty. He was so shy around her that she called him The Mute. She wouldn’t believe me when I told her how clever he was about trees and ponds and plants. She said he was just like a Labrador with his scraggy hair and sad eyes. Nice to pat occasionally but you wouldn’t have him in the house.
‘It’s sweltering!’ she said now.
I’d never heard her say sweltering before.
‘What’ve you got on?’ she said, looking at my baggy jeans and T-shirt. ‘You’ll die like that.’
‘Nah,’ I said, my legs already sweating inside the thick denim. Death was better than comments about why it wasn’t normal to wear my mum’s dirty running shorts, and why I should be sympathetic if Dad couldn’t face doing the laundry.
‘Donna’s got loads of stuff in,’ Matty said, and I didn’t ask why she’d started using her mum’s first name.
