The Invisible Ones

by Stef Penney

  No body turned up in the Georgia case, and weeks after the police wound down the search, her parents—or rather her mother and stepfather—called me in. And after a few weeks, I found her. I found her and brought her back, fuming, uncooperative, and silent. Why was she silent? I still can’t work it out. If she had told me about it all, could I have kept my mouth shut and let her disappear? Or did she realize that I was too pleased with myself to listen, having succeeded where the police had failed. It was true, I was pleased with myself: I hadn’t been running my own business long; I thought it could be the beginning of bigger and better things—I’d do a few interviews: The Man Who Found Georgia . . . You let your imagination run away with you sometimes, don’t you? And then . . . well, you recall what happened next—or at least what happened seven months later. There was a hue and cry then. That was news. I didn’t see her again, but I pictured her in my mind. There was nothing pretty or unspoiled or optimistic about that picture.

  Since then, I haven’t taken on another missing girl. Debt absconders I can deal with. Long-lost relatives, that sort of thing. Maritals—all manner of sordidness, but not young girls.

  In fits and starts, then, Leon Wood tells me what happened. In October of 1978 his daughter, Rose, married a boy from another Gypsy family, Ivo Janko. An arranged marriage, although he doesn’t put it in so many words. Leon and his family went to the wedding, which took place in West Sussex, then Rose went off with her new family—effectively becoming part of their clan. Leon has not seen her since. This is not quite as unusual as it might sound. I gather that Leon lives on his own private land, but the Jankos are old-style Travelers in the real sense of the word— not house Gypsies, not living semi-settled on a permanent site, but continually moving on, from lay-by to farmer’s field to verge, trying to stay one jump ahead of the next police visit and the next eviction.

  “Were you happy she married Ivo Janko?”

  Leon shrugs.

  “They wanted it. Ivo’s father, Tene Janko, he wanted it, seeing as we’re purebloods.”

  I get a shock when he says this, a cold, queasy thrill that travels down my spine.

  “Purebloods?”

  “Come on, Mr. Lovell, you know—pure Romany. That was Tene’s big thing, see? You and I know that it’s rubbish; there’s no such thing anymore, is there? But he had a bee in his bonnet about the pure blood, ‘the pure black blood.’ You know?”

  My father never talked much about his days on the road when he was a boy. There was always the feeling he was . . . not ashamed, but it was over and that was that. A Gypsy was not what he chose to be. When the world looked at him, he wanted it to see a respectable postman, an example of the new world of enlightenment and progress, and that was what he was. When he was asked about his childhood—and when my brother and I were little we were wildly curious—he gave us bare facts but didn’t go into detail. He certainly didn’t romanticize it, ramble on about freedom and the wind in your hair and the joys of the open road, any of that stuff. He tried to make it sound boring—even the not-going-to-school-all-the-time part, which of course we thought was great. Dad had the autodidact’s earnestness about education. After learning to read in the POW camp, he seized every opportunity that came his way, subscribed to Reader’s Digest, and would look things up in a vast serial encyclopaedia called The Book of Knowledge, which had been published in the 1920s. Mum said that when he was younger, he used to read an entry a night, committing it to memory. Later, he became a devotee of television documentaries, although he increasingly disagreed with them, suspicious of any findings that departed from the Book.

  As a result he had some pretty funny ideas about things, but he wasn’t interested in any pure black blood. I remember Tata—my grandfather— referring to it. He was angry and, I belatedly realized, hurt, when Dad married out. He refused to speak to him and Mum for years—until my brother and I were both walking. Then, as children often do, we softened him. I knew I was his favorite because, as was made abundantly clear to me, I took after Dad and, by extension, him.

  “You’re a real Romany chavi,” he would say to me—a real Gypsy boy. Unlike, by implication, my little brother, who took after Mum— tall, rosy-cheeked, with far-seeing gray eyes, Mum and Tom were built to stride over a grouse moor, although, born into the struggling lower-middle classes, that was never going to happen. Tom, aware of the favoritism, hated going to Tata’s. I loved it.

  Once Tata took me on his knee—I was probably seven—and said, “You have the pure black blood, Raymond, despite everything. You’re my father come back to life. Sometimes that happens. You have the pure blood in you.”

  Presumably we were alone at the time. I remember the deadly serious look on his face, and his fervent eyes; I remember my discomfort, even though I had no idea what he meant.

  “So he was wrong,” I say to Leon. “Your family aren’t pure Romany?”

  “Who is? But he seemed to think we were, and Rosie was willing enough. He was a good-looking boy, Ivo.”

  “I’ve never heard the name Janko—are they English?”

  “Yeah. Sort of. Tene claimed they’re Machwaya or something—that his father or grandfather came from Hungary or some bloody place—but I don’t know. They’re related to the Sussex Lees in some way. Cousins or some such. So maybe it’s all rubbish about Hungary.”

  “And how did you know them?”

  He shrugs.

  “You’d see them about. Knew people who knew them. You know how it is.”

  “So . . . after the wedding, you didn’t meet up with them at the fairs . . . they didn’t come to visit?”

  Leon stares down at his hands. Perhaps he is after all a little upset about the daughter he mislaid a handful of years ago.

  “The Jankos . . . kind of kept themselves to themselves. Used to go off on their own. Private like. Didn’t mix much.”

  His mouth clamps shut.

  “But still, your daughter . . . You’d want to see her, and your wife, presumably?”

  “When you travel . . . I wasn’t surprised she didn’t come back. She was a Janko after the wedding. Not a Wood anymore. But now . . . there’s certain things—I’m sure something bad happened to her. I’m sure of it.”

  “You mean you think the Jankos harmed her in some way?”

  “I suppose, yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t trust them. There was always something not quite right . . . It’s hard to say exactly.”

  “Perhaps you could try.”

  “Like . . . Tene’s wife died, and no one knew what of. She was there and then she wasn’t there. And Tene had a sister what run away and left them. I think he had a brother what died, too . . . Unlucky. But too unlucky—you know what I mean?”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “Well, maybe it wasn’t all bad luck. People used to talk . . . All that bad luck . . . Well.”

  He shakes his head and hisses through his teeth.

  “That didn’t bother you when Rose got married?”

  Leon presses his lips together, as if I am trying his patience.

  “It was what she wanted. And to be honest, she wouldn’t have had many chances, you know, what with . . .” He waves his hand at shoulder level and pushes a photo toward me. “Not many boys would’ve had that.”

  The young girl in the picture looks entirely normal, except for a port-wine birthmark on her neck. The size and darkness of it are slightly alarming, until you realize what it is.

  “Anyhow, the Jankos used to go off on their own and wouldn’t be seen nor heard for ages. So, next we heard, she’d gone. Run off—and they didn’t know where.”

  “So that could be what happened.”

  “I feel sure she’s gone. I feel it in my bones. I just know it.”

  “Right . . .”

  Leon clasps his hands and bangs them down on the desk in front of him.

  “To tell you the truth, Ray—and I say this to you as you’re one of us—I had a dream recently . . .
”

  I have a sudden thought that someone is trying to put me out of business, or at least make me look ridiculous.

  “In my dream she was dead. She came to me and told me that Ivo and Tene done her in. Now I’m not a great one for dreams or dukkering or none of that; I’m not that way inclined, but this was different. I just know it.”

  I stare down at my notepad, irritated. I can’t imagine a more hopeless case. On the other hand, it could mean a lot of boring-but-lucrative work. One can’t be too fussy in this life.

  Leon is staring at me.

  “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m a crazy old man . . . dreams and whatnot, huh? ’S been a long time, I know that. But she’s not here, my daughter. And no one knows where she is, or if she is anywhere at all. So what happened to her?”

  The phone rings. It makes me jump. Andrea must have forgotten to put the answerphone on. I pick it up and put it down again. Too bad if it’s another case. More likely to be the landlord.

  “Do you know how to get in touch with the Jankos?”

  “They won’t tell you nothing. They say she ran offseven years ago, or six it was, with some boy.”

  “We still need to start there, with where she was last seen. Then work forward.”

  “They had a bob or two, the Jankos. Tene liked to move on. He was one for the old ways, you know, determined.”

  “When did you last see the family?”

  Leon fidgets in his chair.

  “I haven’t really seen them since then. No.”

  “Since . . . the wedding.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Ray . . . Mr. Lovell . . . you know as well as I do that if I went to the police with this, they’d laugh in my face. They’d think, here’s some cracked old gyppo—put him in a home. Who cares about his poxy daughter, anyway? One less gyppo—good riddance, that’s what they’d think.”

  My eyes are drawn to the bulging notes peeping out of his pocket, and he notices. They, at least, look real enough.

  “You can look at all the official stuff, can’t you? All them computer things. You know about all that.”

  He looks happy, knowing that he’s snared me, despite myself. He looks confidently at the Amstrad on my desk as though it’s a crystal ball, as though I can switch it on and see anything I want. And I agree to look into it. I give him the usual qualifications about missing-persons cases— long, expensive, often thankless. And he reminds me about Georgia Millington. So he does read the papers. Or someone reads them to him. And before he leaves, he takes one of the rolls of tens out of his pocket and leaves it on my desk, where it uncurls slowly, like a creature awakening after hibernation.

  When I’m alone again, I flick through the notes—I’ve seen plenty of fakes, and these are real. Then I sit there rattling my pencil against the desk. Strange, isn’t it, how you can think of yourself as one thing for ninety-five percent of your waking life, and then an encounter with something or someone jerks you into remembering you’re something else, that other five percent that’s always been there, but slumbering, keeping its head down. I’m subtly different from the person I was before he came in. The office is subtly different, too. Leon has left a trace of himself, changing my office from the way it normally is. I really must cut down on caffeine, I think; it’s making me paranoid. Then, after a minute, I register that difference as a tangible thing: a faint, lingering aroma. Cigarettes? Cigars? Something like that, but not that. I’m relieved; for a moment there, I thought I was going crazy. Then I get it—it’s wood smoke.

  I look at my watch. It’s long after six, on a gray, drizzly May evening in the suburbs. Another plane roars overhead, on its way somewhere nicer.

  I have to get going. Not that I’m going somewhere nice. I’ve got work to do. You might say it’s a labor of love.

  5.

  JJ

  It takes ages to get to Lourdes. We have to keep stopping to make food, or to take Christo out for fresh air, or to make Great-uncle more comfortable. Gran drives the Land Rover pulling her trailer, and Ivo drives the van pulling Great-uncle’s. There was a massive row when Gran wanted to take the number-one trailer—basically to show off to any French Travelers we might meet, but Granddad put his foot down. He calls this one “the kitchen,” and as far as he’s concerned, it’s nothing to do with him. So Gran had to put up with taking number two, although it’s flash enough to impress anyone, I would think. We haven’t seen any French Travelers, anyway, not yet.

  We pull into the service stations—they’re called “airs” here in France for some reason—to use the toilets and so on, and no one gives us any hassle. French service stations are much nicer than English ones. They have free ice machines and microwaves you can just use—you don’t have to pay or anything—and proper coffee dispensers that give you really great strong black coffee. I love coffee. Mum keeps moaning at me that I’m too young to drink so much coffee, but I can’t stop, I love it so much. I reckon I’m addicted. I don’t think coffee’s so bad, though. It’s not like heroin or fags. Uncle Ivo’s smoked a pack a day since he was ten, he says, and Great-uncle never said anything about it.

  We’re in the middle of France now. There’s still a long way to go, as Lourdes is right down at the bottom. Gran pulls into an air surrounded by some skinny little trees, and I carry Christo out into the sunshine.

  “Look, Christo, a lake—un lac. Regard!”

  It’s beautiful here—there really is a lake, with ducks and geese bobbing up and down, the water shivering in the slight breeze, which makes the leaves of the trees flutter like millions of tiny pale green flags. They make a lovely, gentle noise. It’s clean, too—no rubbish anywhere. Over the past day and a half, I’ve decided that I love France; I wish we could live here forever and didn’t have to go home.

  Ivo gets out of the van and fires up a fag. He looks fed up, which is quite a common expression on his face. He comes over and offers me a fag, but I shake my head, as Gran will be out in a minute and then she’ll shout at me. She smokes like a chimney herself and couldn’t care less, but Mum made her promise not to let me smoke.

  “How’re you, my love?”

  Ivo strokes Christo’s hair, and Chris gives him his sweetest smile. My uncle’s often moody, but he really loves Christo—anyone can see it. I think he’s mainly unhappy about all the doctors who couldn’t help his son, and I can’t blame him.

  I pass Christo over—he’s so light it’s like handing over a bag of shopping—and Ivo wanders off along the shore of the little lake, fag still in mouth.

  I realize the lake is man-made, and quite recently: there are still scar marks in the earth at the water’s edge, and the bushes are surrounded by bare soil. But you can tell that very quickly, the plants will cover the bare earth and it will settle down and look like it’s always been here, with the ducks and the sunlight. The obvious care that these French people took makes me happy. It’s just for the people who are passing through for a few minutes; no one lives here. Maybe they’ll stop for half an hour. But still they bothered to make it beautiful.

  “JJ!”

  Gran yells from behind me.

  “Tene needs you.”

  This always happens. When I’m looking at something lovely and feeling happy, my family comes along to annoy me. They seem to get more annoying as I get older, I’ve noticed.

  “I know you heard me.”

  I turn away from the lake and go to lower Great-uncle’s chair down the trailer steps. The ramp is too heavy to get in and out all the time, so we left it behind. This is the bargain that I struck so I could come—as well as speaking French, I also help get Great-uncle to the toilet, because even though he’s got the Elsan, he won’t use it unless he absolutely has to. So Ivo and I take turns doing this. The speaking French part is fun, though a challenge; the toilet part is not a bit fun.

  “Watch out!”

  Great-uncle swears as I bang the chair on the side of the door. He’s really heavy—not fat, but he was
a big man, and though he’s a lot thinner than he used to be, he still weighs a lot in his chair.

  “Hell’s bells, kid, what are you doing?”

  I can’t answer, as I need all my breath for lowering the chair down the steps without dropping it. It feels like the veins in my face are going to burst. Also, I’m sure it was Ivo’s turn.

  “Sorry . . .”

  “Right, let’s go and visit my aunt.”

  That’s how Great-uncle asks to go to the toilet. I’ve never heard him say the word “toilet”—it isn’t nice.

  Inside the service station there is French pop music and the smell of real coffee. I must say, French pop is pretty awful compared to English pop, which is the best in the world, but then, maybe that’s just the stuff they play in service stations. When I live here I expect I’ll find out about the good stuffthat they keep to themselves.

  We head for the gents’, where Great-uncle, as usual, asks me to wait outside. It’s to preserve his modesty, and mine, I suppose, but honestly, I’d rather go in than hang around outside the men’s lavs looking like a gaylord. I’m not allowed to walk away, either, as he’s been known to shout for me when he gets into difficulties. I try to look as though I’m not remotely interested in anyone else going into the gents’, but they always stare at me. Maybe it’s because I’ve got long hair. Yesterday, a man came up and asked me for the time. I told him, in my best French, that I didn’t have a watch (“Je suis désolé, monsieur, mais je n’ai pas une montre”), but he just smiled at me and jerked his head toward the door. I stared back, confused. Then he made a filthy gesture. Suddenly I realized what he meant, and I ran like the clappers. Great-uncle was really cross—he’d managed to drop his pipe, and it rolled behind the toilet where he couldn’t reach it. He kept yelling until some man and his wife came and found us. They said my grandfather needed me. They looked scared—people often do around wheelchairs. Great-uncle wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. But how was I to know?

  I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t love Great-uncle. I do. He’s interesting to talk to and can be really funny. We like the same TV programs—old black-and-white Western serials and police shows. He knows lots of bloodthirsty Gypsy stories, and used to tell me them when I was younger. He doesn’t do it anymore, because I’m too old—and maybe because I used to ask tons of questions that annoyed him—like “But why did the king’s son get a golden feather? He didn’t use it!” and “How could the second brother be so stupid? He sees his brother die, and then he does the same thing!”