by Stef Penney
“Will you take him for a bit? You go with JJ, okay?”
I settle Christo on my hip.
“Why have we stopped here?”
Ivo gives me a look that makes me wander off without asking anything else.
“Shall we go and sit on the grass over there? Come on.”
Ivo goes back into the trailer where his dad is and shuts the door. Maybe they’re having another row—they’ve been doing that a lot recently. Gran comes over as we’re strolling along the verge. It’s been raining, and it’s wet and there’s nowhere nice to sit.
“What’re they doing now?” she asks me.
“Dunno.”
“Bloody hell. I just want to get home, don’t you? See your mum?”
“Yeah.”
I do miss Mum, but in other ways I wish we weren’t going home, which means going back to ordinary boring life, and school, and being hassled about next year’s exams.
“I think it would be great to live in France.”
I didn’t really mean to say it, but it comes out in a rush.
Gran takes the fag out of her mouth and stares at me like I’ve just said wouldn’t it be great to have two heads.
“Live here? And do what?”
“People do. Come and live here. You have to learn French, that’s all.” “Oh, yeah?”
She smirks and looks at me in that annoying way that grown-ups have—like there are so many things you don’t know, they can’t even be bothered to start.
“What’s wrong with that?”
Gran shrugs, still smirking.
“I could. I know what you’re thinking. And you’re wrong.”
“Oh, you know what I’m thinking? Do you?”
I’m on thin ice here, but something makes me keep going.
“Yeah.”
She pokes her finger in front of my face.
“You have no idea what I’m thinking, young man.”
“You’re thinking that people like us don’t move to France. You’re thinking, There’s stupid JJ off again with his head in the clouds. He’ll learn. When he goes totting with his granddad he’ll get all that gorjio nonsense knocked out of him.”
My cheeks are hot with daring as I say this. Gran’s face goes hard. “Don’t you dare disrespect your granddad. Who do you think pays for your precious education? Granddad and his lorry—that’s who.”
“School’s free, actually.”
“Free? You should be working at your age, not sitting around on your arse. You should be helping your mother. Be a man. But no—you’re like your father . . . a useless gorjio!”
I really think Gran’s going to hit me for a moment. I’ve actually forgotten that I’m still holding Christo in my arms and we’re arguing over his head, ridiculous as that sounds.
Gran must be furious—she hardly ever uses curse words, although whenever she’s cross with me she brings up my useless gorjio dad. This is really unfair, as a) I can’t help who my dad was, and b) I don’t even know his name—I don’t know anything about him, so what can I say in response?
Just then Christo holds up his finger and pokes me in the chin. It’s his way of saying, “Stop shouting, you two.”
“I’m sorry, Christo. We’re being silly. Aren’t we?”
Gran says, “Yeah, Christo. I’m sorry. All this driving’s making me tired. I want to go home.”
Glaring at me, still: “I think we all need to go home.”
Ivo gets out of the trailer and lights a fag. He walks over to us.
Gran says to him, “Let’s get going, for God’s sake. My grandson’s driving me up the frigging wall.”
“Sorry, Auntie Kath. Dad and I wanted to have a chat. You see, the reason why we stopped here is because . . .”
He looks back along the road.
“This is where Christina died. On this road.”
“Oh,” I say.
“God, Ivo,” says Gran, crossing herself. “You should’ve said.”
Ivo shrugs.
“We could go and visit her grave, if you like,” Gran says.
Ivo looks at my right ear.
“No,” he says. “She was . . . cremated. You know.”
“Oh,” I say again.
I look up and down the road, thinking we should pick some flowers and leave them here. But there don’t seem to be any—just a lot of grass. You can’t leave a bunch of grass for someone who’s died.
Ivo reaches out to take Christo, who leans his head on Ivo’s shoulder. Gran and Ivo walk up and down the roadside, talking in low voices, ignoring me. Of course Gran remembers Christina. I don’t—I was only two when she died, and I hadn’t even met her, as that was when Mum was still in disgrace in Basingstoke.
Rooting around in the grass, I find some tiny little flowers, and the more I look, the more I find. I get quite carried away and sort of forget why I’m picking them, even. Eventually I’ve got quite a respectable bunch, with some ferny leaves and things. It looks really nice. I wonder about this person I never met. I don’t know whether she liked flowers, but who doesn’t? I walk back to the others. They’re climbing back into the vehicles, and when I get there, there’s no one to look at my bunch.
Gran shouts from the Land Rover: “JJ! Come on. What’re you doing grubbing about?”
The engine starts up with a threatening roar.
“See you around, then!”
I lay the flowers on the verge, saying, “This is for you, Christina, from your nephew, JJ.” And then I get in.
12.
St. Luke’s Hospital
The visions return now and again, just when I think I’m free of them. They attack without warning, and leave just as suddenly. I see things that I know aren’t there. Mostly—and I don’t know what I have done to deserve this—the visions are horrific, terrifying. Not at all like the effects of acid, which were, as far as I remember, wondrous, stupid, and extremely funny. Although this time, before the dog-woman arrived, there was something wonderful about the curtains at the window. Blazing, extraordinary. That’s not a good description, but the words don’t exist to describe these things.
She’s a stranger but with something familiar about her. Bad familiarity— like when you see a middle-aged man in the street and realize that the last time you saw him you were both at school, and that your face must be as changed as his. The creature is riding me, like before, and yet I’m nagged by the fear that she doesn’t want this, that I have in some way forced her. There is an atmosphere of . . . unwillingness, I suppose. The unwillingness may even be mine, but I am powerless to stop myself. Then, in the— for want of a better word—dream, she begins to devour me. She has long teeth. She has claws and too many heads. It is no longer a woman at all but a creature of horror. But I am paralyzed and mute, helpless to save myself. The thing reaches into my chest—the pain is abominable—and tears something out of me. It is my shame, the part of me I most despise, the thing I can’t live without.
Why am I thinking, “Rose”?
It’s a relief when Dr. Zybnieska marches in with her clipboard and sits on my bedside chair. She looks unusually pleased with herself.
“Well, Ray, how are we this morning?”
The volume of her voice is always a shock. I try not to flinch.
“All right,” I murmur. My voice sounds okay this morning, to my ears. “Good. Any more nightmares last night?”
I shake my head firmly.
She leans over and picks up my left hand and examines it.
She scribbles something on her clipboard. Looks at the chart over my bed.
“And the right hand? Still nothing?”
I lift my head and glance at it. I can’t lift it, so it’s the only way of checking it’s still there.
She produces a metal instrument and presses it into the flesh of my wrist. I can’t feel a thing. She makes a note.
“Okay. We finally have some test results.”
She looks excited. Like someone about to deliver a punch line.
&nbs
p; “The toxicology results show diverse traces of tropane alkaloids in your system!”
I say nothing, as I don’t know what to say.
“We have found traces of what looks like scopolamine, hyoscya-mine . . . also ergotamine. Very interesting. That would certainly explain the hallucinations you’ve been having.”
Hallucinations. Thank God. Thank you, God. Not real. There was never anything, nor anyone, there. I try to tell myself this, but . . .
“You know what they are?”
“No.”
“Alkaloids that come from poisonous plants. More to the point, they are psychotropic in effect. Were you experimenting? Tripping? Maybe an accidental overdose?”
I shake my head as vigorously as I can manage. In my long-gone experimental days, no bad trip came close to these horrors.
“You would have to have ingested two or three different toxic plant species to show these results. Do you know how that happened? Do you grow your own vegetables? Pick mushrooms in the woods?”
I shake my head, thinking, She should see the contents of my fridge. Like Dad, who, having experienced hedgerow food as a child, embraced processed food with evangelical fervor, I know that natural is not always better.
She makes a note.
“Strange. Ergotamine . . . Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“Its more common name is ergot.”
This doesn’t mean a whole lot more to me. She seems enlivened by the whole thing. From my point of view, I don’t see that it’s that exciting.
“Ergot is a fungus that grows on cereals. Where fungicides are not used, it can still occur, especially in wet summers—like now. But there probably hasn’t been a case of ergot poisoning in this country since the Middle Ages!”
She leans back, beaming.
“So you are a very rare case.”
“Thank you.”
“LSD is a man-made derivative. Perhaps some people still use ergot to get high. Is that what you did?”
“No.”
“No idea how you could have ingested it?”
“No.”
I say no, but, of course, I have begun to form an idea.
“Will it go . . . Will I recover?”
“There is every reason to hope so. The picture is quite complex . . . The paralysis is unusual, although there are documented cases of ergot poisoning causing paralysis and hallucination. Some people think that cases of bewitchment in the Middle Ages were due to eating bread contaminated with ergot. Perhaps every case. You’re very lucky. All of these compounds can be fatal.”
“Will I remember what happened?”
“We’ll have to wait and see. But with scopolamine poisoning, memory loss is often permanent.”
“Is that a fungus, too?”
“No. It comes from plants of the datura family. Deadly nightshade and henbane. Any part of the plant is poisonous, but it has a bitter taste, so it’s not so easy to eat by accident. It’s a deliriant, but highly toxic, easy to overdose.”
She’s watching me, I suppose, to see if I start to look shamefaced. The last thing I remember is being in the trailer. Beer. Food. A peace offering. Smiling. Talking. It was all . . . normal.
I shake my head, meaning, I don’t know, perhaps. Then something does swim into my mind.
“Isn’t ergot poisoning the same thing as Saint Anthony’s fire?”
“That’s a kind of ergotism, yes. Lucky for you, you didn’t ingest enough for that. Saint Anthony’s fire is the gangrenous form of ergotism. The capillaries constrict, your extremities shrivel up and drop off—but it’s almost always fatal, anyway. You’ve got a little desquamation, but that’s all.”
I must look puzzled, because she picks up my left hand again and turns it around to show me the skin on the forearm, flaking off as though I’ve had too much sun.
“There—not enough blood getting to the skin. Not serious, in your case. You only ate enough to cause the convulsive form: muscle spasms, weakness, hallucinations . . .”
“So . . .” I don’t really know how to put this. “If you took these things deliberately, what would you hope to happen?”
“I’m not an expert on this kind of thing, but I suppose you would expect to get high, to have hallucinations. But you’d be taking a huge risk.”
“Could you use it to poison someone? To kill them?”
She looks troubled.
“I would think if you wanted to be sure of killing someone, you would give them a higher dose. You have had a very low dose. Scopolamine is used to make people forget. Where I come from, they used to give it during childbirth. It was called ‘twilight sleep.’ Women forgot the pain.”
“So I won’t remember?”
“Perhaps not.”
She looks at me with a calculating face, assessing something. Perhaps she’s about to tell me something else, but she doesn’t.
I have to think about this. Put the pieces together. There is a gap in my memory, but there are things I do remember. I know them without a doubt. And perhaps—I’m not saying more than that, just perhaps—my being here, in this state, is another piece of evidence. Because that’s the only way it makes sense.
I wonder when Hen is coming back to see me. Did he say? I’m sure I need to talk to him. Wasn’t there something I needed to tell him? Something about Rose . . . Something important but just out of sight, like a distant shore hidden by fog.
Then I remember it. And though Hen doesn’t know yet (how could I not have told him?), it doesn’t seem that important now, to tell the truth. It’s no match for the overwhelming desire to sleep.
It was all such a long time ago. After all, it’s not as though by finding her, I’ve saved her.
I’m far, far too late for that.
13.
Ray
It turns out to be off a slip road of the A32, not too far from Bishop’s Waltham in Hampshire. The road drops down behind a cutting, and there’s a half-hidden turning between overgrown hedges that leads toward a scrubby piece of woodland. A belt of evergreens planted as a windbreak ensures that passers-by will simply pass by. You have to drive through a narrow, angled opening to discover the paddock where the Jankos live. If I hadn’t been told the trailers were there, I would never have spotted them. I know this is farming land, privately rented; rather different from the council site where I met Kizzy Wilson. Here, the trailers—I count five—are arranged in a loose circle, tow bars outward. The large windows face one another, but small trees grow between them here and there—only the central space is clear, and there are signs of a fire. Other vehicles—a late-model BMW and a Land Rover—are parked behind the trailers. There must be other vehicles elsewhere, judging by large, deep wheel ruts in the mud. There’s a pile of bin bags next to where I have driven in, but otherwise it’s fairly tidy. There’s no sign of anyone. Not even dogs. But a small generator hums, and a smudge of smoke comes from the chimney pipe of one of the trailers.
I get out of the car, shut the door, and wait for something to happen.
A door opens in the largest trailer, bright with chrome and glossy paint, and a small, stout woman comes out. She is in her late fifties, with dyed black teased hair fluffed around her face and heavy tan makeup. She wears a brown-and-cream trouser suit and holds a cigarette in her hand.
“This is private land. No trespassers.”
“Hello. My name’s Ray Lovell. I’m looking for Ivo and Tene Janko. I was told they might be here.”
She looks me up and down for a moment or two.
“Yeah? Who told you that?”
“Tene’s sister, Luella.”
“Lulu? Christ! You’ve seen Lulu?”
“Er, yes.”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Ray Lovell. Are you Mrs. Smith?”
Her mouth twitches—she obviously doesn’t want to answer. “What’s this about?”
“Well, it’s about . . . I’m trying to track down Rose Wood—Ivo’s wife.”
&
nbsp; “Bloody hell. She’s not here, so you’ve wasted your time.”
“I know it was a long time ago. I’d just like to talk to them. I’m a private investigator. I’m talking to everyone who knew her.”
She seems to think about it for a minute: a minute in which she scrutinizes me carefully. She has doubtless registered my Gypsy name, but even without that, she could tell by looking at me. I think of what Leon said—how he was right: a gorjio wouldn’t stand a chance.
At last she says, “Hang on,” and goes to another of the trailers—the one farthest from the entrance. I look around at the others as I wait. The woman—who I assume is Kath Smith—came out of the most expensive trailer, and the largest. The one she has just gone into is older; a 1960s Westmorland Star about twenty feet long. The other two are smaller, and modest by comparison. I wonder if anyone else is watching me—there are usually plenty of people in a Gypsy site, lots of children and dogs— although I’ve seen no sign of either here. I’m curious, but I don’t want to poke around too obviously. It would be rude, so I wait by my car until she reappears and tells me to come in.
Inside, I feel as though I’m stepping into another era.
The trailer is dim, the windows obscured by short net curtains, and there’s a faint odor of tar. The kitchen area is bleak, but the stove is lit, making it warm and stuffy. At the back, right in the middle of the bay window, an elderly man sits behind a fold-down table. He seems large for the space, or perhaps it’s the ornaments that make it feel crowded— the top cupboards are full of china and cut glass, and almost every inch of the wood-veneered walls is hidden by photographs, plates, and pictures.
“Please . . . don’t mind if I don’t get up—not so spry as I used to be.” Tene Janko has thick dark gray hair springing off his forehead and curling over his collar. Dark brown eyes, a pleasantly weathered face, and a heavy mustache. Deep lines around his eyes give him a look of good humor. He looks like a romantic painting of a Gypsy elder; a handsome, old Romany rai on the cover of a children’s book. I didn’t think anyone looked like that anymore.
From where he sits, he extends his hand to me and shakes firmly. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Janko . . . Thank you.”
