Love Begins in Winter

by Simon Van Booy

  Then the father broke down. Two men stepped forward and propped him up.

  Then the sister of the saved child ran over to Walter’s father and took his dark hand.

  “We don’t care that you’re Gypsies,” she said.

  Walter’s mother stood by her husband.

  “You can bring your whole family here if you like,” the girl continued. “We can all be together—it’ll be like heaven.”

  And so the orange tent was never taken down. Instead, the camp was built around it, and they became known as the “Gypsies on the Hill.”

  And when the father of the saved girl decided to move his family to the safety of Dublin a year later, he made a sign in his metal shop and erected it on the cliff one windy afternoon.

  It read:

  On this spot in 1963,

  An Irish Gypsy jumped off the cliff

  To save my daughter.

  About the time the sign went up, Walter was conceived.

  The Canadian Orphan

  WALTER LOOKED AT HIS motorcycle on its side in the puddle. He imagined firing up the engine and riding at full pelt toward her house. In the distance waves crashed against the point: the foam, the black rocks—two equally determined forces. Walter felt such forces alive within himself. He thought of his father’s daring rescue before he was born.

  Walter was headed for the very same farmhouse his mother had been taken to after her husband tossed his body off the cliff into the sea.

  After the saved child’s family moved to Dublin, a middle-aged man moved in and began to farm the area around his cottage. Now, strangely, it was the home of Walter’s beloved. The orphan from Canada.

  Walter lifted his bike off its side and continued toward her house. Only a mile or so to go.

  He wondered if he might even find out her name—that would be a brilliant start, he thought. He imagined riding his bike off a cliff and screaming her name in midair.

  Walter was riding his motorbike the first time he saw her in the village. He veered off the road and almost hit an old woman.

  “Dear God in heaven,” he muttered to himself as his eyes followed her from shop to shop. “What a beauty, mother of Jesus.” The old woman glared at him and waved her stick.

  Walter assumed the girl was an American tourist, one of the many who would appear (usually in late summer) with their children and announce themselves in the pub as descendants of so-and-so.

  Walter watched her stroll through the village quietly, lingering at shop windows. Then he smoked and pretended not to watch her wait for the N36 bus, which deposited its passengers about the northern part of the countryside every time it pulled to the side of the road.

  Walter considered following the bus into the country, but his bike was so noisy it might irritate her, and there was the fear that the bus might end up going faster than he could.

  Walter resolved to discover who she was and where she lived from the people in the shops, who between them knew everything that was happening within a twenty-mile radius.

  At the newsagent, Walter asked for a pack of twenty Players cigarettes and casually mentioned that he’d seen a stranger in the village—a girl walking alone like a single cloud in the sky—but then his breath shallowed suddenly and he was unable to continue talking.

  “You should really think about cutting down,” the newsagent said, holding up the cigarettes. “You’re only a lad to be smoking so much; look at you, Walter—you can barely breathe.”

  Before Walter left the shop, the newsagent suddenly remembered what Walter had said and called out.

  “Ay, the girl you’re talking about, Walter. She’s been in, nice girl she is, and very tall, and a bit too old for you, me boy, if you know what I mean—a little too experienced.” Then he laughed to himself. Walter shrugged and felt his blood turn cold with embarrassment.

  “I’m actually getting on in years,” Walter exclaimed.

  Just as he was about to step outside, he heard the newsagent add, “And very sad what happened to her and her sister.”

  Walter poked his head back around the door.

  “What’s that you say?”

  “Very sad, Walter—what happened to her ma and dad.”

  Walter stepped inside the shop again. It was brighter this time. He reached for a pint of milk and took it up to the counter.

  “I bet you didn’t know she’s Canadian.”

  “Canadian? That’s nice,” Walter said, pretending not to care.

  “And she arrived in Ireland with her sister sometime last month. Popsy met them at the airport—”

  “How does Popsy know them?” Walter asked.

  “I heard it was the first time Popsy had been to an airport, and he asked the Aer Lingus girl where exactly on the runway did the people come out.”

  The newsagent cackled.

  “What a daft bugger he is, eh?” the newsagent said.

  Walter rolled his eyes.

  “So what happened to her family?” Walter said, taking his change and tucking the milk into his jacket.

  “Well, me boy—they all perished in a fiery car crash outside Toronto.”

  “In Canada?”

  “Ay. Now all that’s left of the family is the tall girl that you saw, her young sister—who’s the spitting image of her—and daft old Popsy.”

  The newsagent sniggered.

  “That man’s lived alone his entire life—and now he’s got two girls to take care of. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—what next?”

  “Ay, it’s strange, it is,” Walter said.

  “But something tells me he’ll do all right,” the newsagent admitted in a gesture that was particularly Irish—to cajole, mock, embarrass as a prelude to love.

  “How’s your da?”

  “He’s fine,” Walter said.

  “Still in the wheelchair?”

  “Ay—but it’s grand how he gets around.”

  “Ay—they don’t make ’em like your da anymore. Give him my regards.”

  “Ay, I will,” Walter promised.

  Walter slipped from the bright shop and stepped out into the dusk. His motorcycle headlamp was on and cast a web of yellow light across the black concrete.

  Walter had never talked directly with Popsy but knew who he was. The man had never married. He lived alone in an isolated farmhouse on the cliffs. He was occasionally seen in the pub—generally in the summer—talking amiably in his soft voice and telling his dog to lie down. Walter didn’t know his real name but knew he was a master carpenter. Walter’s father had once said that what Popsy did with wood made it stronger than steel.

  Walter continued in the rain along the wet farm road with his basket of eggs in the back. A bird dipped alongside him and glided forward, landing on the road ahead to gulp down a worm.

  When Walter was seven, he learned to swim on the incoming tide, watched vigilantly by his uncle, who’d come to live at their camp when Walter was a baby. His uncle had wanted to marry a non-Romany girl from Sethlow, but she eventually left him for an Englishman who worked on an oil rig. However, Uncle Ivan didn’t seem particularly upset when the girl one day turned up with her new boyfriend at the camp in a brown Rover. In fact, Uncle Ivan had laughed and shaken the new boyfriend’s hand vigorously.

  Walter (now that he was older) believed the real reason that Uncle Ivan came to live with them was because of Walter’s father’s accident, which left him partially paralyzed. Walter’s father could feel his legs and stand on them (with great pain), but he was unable to walk—or to work. Uncle Ivan had the sort of energy that enabled him to do two men’s work in half the time. And he was also a celebrity. Uncle Ivan was the only Gypsy (and Irishman) in history to win a gold medal at the Olympics.

  The Trampolining Gypsy

  UNCLE IVAN HAD ONCE lived in the caravan that now belonged to Walter. Upon the walls, newspaper clippings the color of salt and pepper displayed the impossible: a white figure flying through the air.

  As a child, Walter liked to stand very still
in front of each clip and study the expressions on his uncle’s face. In the grainy prints, Uncle Ivan always wore a white under-shirt with a number on it, white shorts tied at the front, thin black socks, and black Brogues.

  Walter remembered his own bony white body stretching out in the cold water as he learned to swim. His uncle would call out strokes from the beach. Sometimes waxy slabs of seaweed hung in the water. Walter didn’t like it. He imagined other things lurking at the bottom. One autumn day while swimming, Walter was bitten on the thigh by a conger eel. At first it felt like something was scratching him—maybe a dumb jellyfish washed in from deep water—then Walter looked down and saw a black head and an impossibly thick body writhing about his legs. Walter remembers his uncle’s shirt tied around the wound. Watery blood running down his thigh, dripping off his big toe.

  His uncle carried him a mile up the hill at a jog, and then the local doctor came. The doctor was from the north of Ireland and drove a Mercedes Estate. He looked at everyone from under his glasses. He balanced a mint imperial on his tongue during the examination. Several days in bed with the black-and-white television brought in from the living room, and anything he wants to eat, was the doctor’s advice.

  His uncle sat faithfully at his bedside the whole time, smoking, feeding him sausages, and telling him what a man he was, to have been bitten by a conger and survive—it was unthinkable. Walter still had the scar; a white line, jagged but no longer raised.

  Then Uncle Ivan would fry up a dozen pieces of black pudding and they’d eat in front of the television.

  His uncle had loved cold weather and kept fit by running in singlet and shorts on mornings too cold even for school.

  Broken Eggs

  THEN THE RAIN STOPPED.

  The landscape stretched before Walter like in a painting—lines of dark green hedgerows, a cluster of bare trees, an ancient gate hung during harvest, dots of hill-sheep and then the fabric of sea.

  The morning Walter found Uncle Ivan stiff in his bed, snow had blown in through an open window and covered his body. In his will, Uncle Ivan had left his caravan, the motorbike, and his Olympic gold medal to Walter.

  Walter watched the thread of smoke rise up from his beloved’s farmhouse in the distance. The medal lay flat upon his chest, inside his shirt. He could feel the weight of it pulling on the back of his neck like an omen of hope and success.

  The cake at Uncle Ivan’s funeral was in the shape of a trampoline. The baker had made a frame of drinking straws over the cake from which dangled a marzipan figure.

  At the burial, someone read a newspaper story written about the deceased in 1972. The story was called “In Mid-Flight an Irish Gypsy Soars.”

  Walter was almost at the farmhouse. He repeated the headline over and over to himself, with the voice the priest used when he read from the Old Testament in assembly.

  “In mid-flight an Irish Gypsy soars.”

  “In mid-flight an Irish Gypsy soars.”

  Then Walter thought of his own headline.

  “In love with a Canadian girl, a Romany hero soars.”

  Walter’s leather jacket and trousers were heavy with water. He could feel the last few drops of rain bouncing off his helmet. He’d ridden twenty miles through plump green valleys. Sheep raised their curly heads to see him speed noisily by. The long lane down to the cold farmhouse was full of deep puddles, the moon in each puddle like a small white anchor, and the pale honey of windows in the distance.

  Walter imagined her walking around the house, like a beautiful thought wandering around someone’s head.

  Walter pushed his bike through the gate. He could sense her breathing beneath his, and he felt her hands reach out from the handlebars and curl around his black gloves. He imagined how she would throw aside the basket of eggs and by the time they smashed against the stone floor, she would be kissing him wetly on the lips. In the dark, he might look even more like Morrissey.

  By wheeling his motorbike instead of riding it, Walter might have a chance to sit and watch her through the window before knocking on the door and asking her uncle Popsy, quite innocently, if he might want some of the eggs left over from the morning’s collection.

  Walter had spent the early part of the day picking out the best eggs from the chicken hatch and reciting William Blake’s Songs of Innocence to the hens, which stared at him angrily, then clucked away in panic.

  After laying each egg out by his caravan, Walter found an old toothbrush and filled a bucket with warm soapy water.

  As Walter scrubbed the feathers and burnt yellow feces from the shell of each egg, he noticed that his mother, father, and baby brother were watching him through the low window of their caravan. Walter’s father was sitting in his wheelchair with the baby on his lap. His mother was standing up in her fluffy slippers. She knocked on the thin pane of glass with her knuckle.

  “Walter, you cleaning the eggs now, is it?”

  “Do you want a cup of tea?” his father shouted from his wheelchair. After reaching for something too heavy, he’d fallen the wrong way. He lay there for several hours wondering what his life would be like.

  Birds filled the sky before anyone came. Then a coworker discovered him.

  A doctor in Limerick believed that within ten years, they’d have the technology to fix him. He wasn’t paralyzed, they said—it was something to do with nerves. Everyone said it was the fall from the cliff—that his back had never been the same.

  Walter liked to push his father along the road. The thin black tires glistened after rolling through thin puddles. Cars would slow down at the sight of them, and each face would stare blankly out.

  The last time Walter had pushed his father to the new supermarket a couple of miles from the caravan, Walter noticed how the hair on his father’s head was very soft. On the way back from the supermarket after a lunch of doughnuts and strong, sweet tea, his father’s thinning crown made Walter want to cry; the vague idea that the seated figure before him—the king of dads, hunched in his chair—was not Walter’s father but his son or his brother; and that life was a lottery of souls.

  Walter took his business with the eggs into his small caravan and continued his work earnestly. When each egg was so shiny that it balanced a smaller version of the caravan window upon its shell, Walter sat on his Honda 450, which he kept inside next to his bed (a very un-Romany thing to do), and smoked one of his Players cigarettes. He liked the way his motorcycle looked under the single hanging bulb.

  The corners of the ceiling were softened by thick cobwebs. The caravan had once been Uncle Ivan’s. It now belonged to Walter, and Walter loved it, as he would love no other house for the rest of his life, no matter how grand or expensive or unique.

  Walter was nine when Uncle Ivan decided he wanted electric lights.

  Walter’s eggs sat in a line upon the table, touching one another so as not to roll away. The table had once supported the weight of his uncle’s elbows as he studied the lightbulb on that long-ago afternoon.

  After hours of wiring and cursing, Uncle Ivan slowly screwed the bulb into its neat socket. Walter’s mother and father were summoned from their caravan. Ivan had wanted Walter to push the switch that would bring it to life, but in the end he was not allowed. Uncle Ivan was an Olympian, not an electrician, Walter’s mother had said.

  They all cheered as the bulb suddenly glowed with the push of a button.

  “What a miracle,” said his uncle. “It’s like there’s a slither of sun in there.”

  “It’s about time you got the electric in your van, Ivan,” Walter’s mother had said.

  The four of them sat under it for some time without a word until his mother finally said:

  “Look at us sitting here like idiots.”

  Uncle Ivan stood up and turned the switch on and off several times before they all went down to the pub for an early drink from glasses the barmaid was happy to keep away from the other glasses. You must understand that the Romany rituals of cleanliness are symbolic, not pract
ical.

  Walter wondered why he had thought of the lightbulb. And then he realized that his heart was also small and bright and hot. He would deliver the eggs that very afternoon, lest the bulb mysteriously flicker and die.

  Walter turned around and saw his mother standing in the doorway.

  “So who are the eggs for?”

  “Nobody,” Walter said.

  “A girl, is it?”

  Walter nodded.

  His mother kissed him on the cheek.

  “Your dear father was the same way for me,” she said. “But he never polished me an egg a day in his life.”

  She handed Walter a cup of tea.

  “Just don’t start that thing up unless you’ve strapped your helmet on. I don’t know why you keep it in here—your Romany ancestors would turn in their graves.”

  As she shuffled back past her small garden in her slippers, she stopped to unpeg several socks hanging on the line. Walter saw his oily handprints on the back of her blouse.

  A few moments later, Walter heard laughing from their caravan.

  Then Walter imagined his mother lying down with her husband and closing her eyes, the baby in a soft sleep in the back bed. Everything warm and dark. Raining again outside. The tapping of it against the window.

  Then later, the baby quietly awake in his crib, playing with his feet and watching clouds move like gentle friends.

  Walter leaned his bike against a tree and crept up to the kitchen window. He slowly lifted his head to see inside.

  “Oh, my love, my love,” he gasped, and his gaze like a net reached over her.

  Walter pressed himself against the cold stones of the house as close to the glass pane as he dared. In her outstretched hand was a half-eaten apple. The white flesh glistened. She chewed slowly, occasionally touching her hair.

  Walter longed for something to happen—a fire, a flood, some biblical catastrophe that would afford him an opportunity to rush in and rescue her.