by Stef Penney
And then something really bad happened. She said, “Um . . . where’s the bathroom?”
“Um, it’s outside.”
“Outside?”
Stella looked horrified. Like I’d said it was on Mars. Or there wasn’t one. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me before—that having an outside bathroom is bad. I mean, why would you want your toilet in with you— you want it as far away as possible, don’t you? I mean, yuck.
“Yeah, it’s just . . . We’ve got a key. It’s our own bathroom . . .”
We went outside, and I took her to the bathroom. Which was a cubicle in the toilet block. It would have been nicer if it had been ours, but we were only subletting, so we couldn’t do much about it. Unfortunately, when we got there, Great-uncle was already in there. We had to wait, then he came out, in his wheelchair, and looked a bit fed up that we were waiting, and this strange gorjio girl was seeing him come out of a lavatory. She looked a bit startled when I introduced them, but she said hello. It was all really awful.
Stella went in there, and then she came out and was rather quiet. We went back inside and talked some more, but I wanted to die. I don’t think it was Stella’s fault. It wasn’t as if she turned her nose up at our old Lunedale, or treated it like it wasn’t good enough or anything. I just remember thinking, I can never, ever, do this again. I must not let anyone I like see where I live.
And I did like her. I really liked her. She was the best friend I’ve ever had at school, or anywhere.
After what felt like about a year, Mum drove her home, and we dropped her off at her house. It was in the residential area north of the town center, where nice, detached houses sit between front and back gardens, with extra space at the sides for garages and bikes and things. I’d never seen her house before, and it made me realize what a shock our trailer must have been to her—who was used to having her own room, probably with matching furniture, and a little sister and a dog and a tor-toise, and a father who was a physics teacher and a mother who worked part-time in a clothes shop. It was all so gorjio and nice, and so unlike the Jankos, with their dead boys and their sublet toilet and their wheelchairs and their terrible, fatal luck.
I waved good-bye as Mum turned the car around, and she waved back from her doorstep. I felt as though she was going back to another country and I would never see her again—not in the same way as before. Mum said, “She seems like a nice girl,” and I said, “Mmm.”
And that was all we ever said about it.
In the school library, I read this book called Down the Lane: A Threatened Way of Life. I wondered what other people thought about us. This book was written by a gorjio for other gorjios, and even though it was aimed at schoolkids, it seemed stupid and simple. It talked about bender tents and wagons, and wooden flowers and horses and mending knives. It said that Gypsies have dark skin and hair, and “particularly bright eyes.” What does that mean? How can some eyes be brighter than other eyes? By being wetter?
I suppose some of the things it said were true. Some Gypsy men used to make wooden flowers, but it all seems long ago and not much to do with me or my family, or anyone I know. The book said that we’re in touch with nature and know how to make old herbal remedies and stuff like that. Well, I don’t know. Great-uncle’s wife knew all about herbs and plants, apparently, but she’s dead now. You get the impression that Gypsies are supposed to be wild and free. But there was nothing about O levels in there, for example. Apparently, Gypsies don’t do exams. They don’t become doctors.
When I saw Stella again at school it was different. Nothing big, initially— we still talked and sat beside each other for a couple of lessons, but there was something missing—that secret thing that made it seem like we were two of a kind, however different we might be on the surface. Gradually, we talked less and less, and then she became best friends with supersnob Katie Williams, whose father is on the council, and moved to sit beside her, usually, and now we hardly speak, except to say hi, sometimes.
Gorjio. I know more what Great-uncle means now, when he says that we’re different. Not better or worse, just different. Like me and Stella—we might both have dark hair and speak English, and both like The Smiths, and both hate geography lessons. But we’re like trains on tracks that run more or less parallel but will never meet. I can’t go on her tracks, and she can’t go on mine.
17.
Ray
The next day the heavens open. Gutters fill and overflow. The ground, saturated from spring, can’t soak it up. It has nowhere to go. Headlines obsess about the weather. Everyone talks about it. How the rain might be radioactive, might kill us.
I look up Seviton. It’s in Sussex, on the Downs, an unremarkable village too far from a station for commuters, too nondescript for weekend-ers. But it has a pub—the White Hart—the sign a modern interpretation attached to a mock-Tudor building. Inside, the usual gaggle of fruit machines and stale reek of fags. A couple of locals stand at the bar, although they’re preretirement age and it’s not yet half past eleven. I order a tonic water and ask around for the whereabouts of the Black Patch. No one seems to know what I’m talking about. I mention it might be a place where Gypsies once stopped, and one of the men drinking alone wrinkles his forehead.
“There was a place, off Egypt Lane. There’s an old chalk pit where Gypsies used to stop, but they closed it down a couple of years ago. It was always a mess, rubbish everywhere . . .”
He gives me directions. The name is a whopping clue. You find a few names like this all over southern England—Egypt Wood, Egypt Meadow—and it means that the place was once an encampment for the people of Little Egypt. When the first band of exotic, dark-skinned Travelers arrived in England five hundred years ago, the leader called himself the King of Little Egypt. They weren’t from Egypt, but no one knew any better, so the name stuck: Egyptians . . . Gypsies. They claimed they had been ordered to wander for seven years as a penance, and were allowed to beg for alms. They carried a letter from the Pope saying so. Or perhaps it was from the Holy Roman Emperor. Anyway, they didn’t go back to wherever they’d come from when the seven years’ penance was up. We’re still here.
Egypt Lane is a narrow road leading out of the village. There are soggy fields on either side, but nowhere that you could pull off and stop. After a few minutes’ drive into a wet wood, I find a turning toward the hillside, and am stopped by a newish barbed-wire fence and a sign that says, “No Entry. No Fires. No Overnight Camping.” Code for “No Gypsies.”
I get my wellies out of the boot, climb over the fence, and struggle through a healthy growth of brambles. It’s dark, what with the overhanging trees and the bulk of the Downs looming to the south, but I can see it is an old chalk pit—a big bite out of the hillside, revealing a whitish cliff streaked with green matter. It feels likely, but I know it’s the right place when I find the rusting hulk of a pickup, stranded, wheelless and gaunt, surrounded by head-high nettles and meadowsweet.
What the owner of the land thinks he can do with this place is beyond me. But then, that probably wasn’t the point. The point would have been to get the Travelers to go somewhere else—anywhere else—even if it was just over the parish boundary. Often, land that used to be commons— places Gypsies were allowed to use like anyone else—was reclassified as parks or residential areas, specifically to prevent them from stopping there. Fields were plowed up to make them impassable to motors. Concrete fences were built. At Kizzy Wilson’s, a prefab concrete wall surrounded the whole site so that you couldn’t see in—or the inhabitants out. Despite the open entrance, it gave it the flavor of a prison.
My dad used to tell stories of the gavvers—the police—coming with tractors to drag trailers away by force. Sometimes they didn’t even give people a chance to pack up their things, so all their china and glass got broken. No point complaining. No such thing as compensation for Gypsies. And before you ask, it still happens.
I try to get a feel of what it was like as a stopping place—small, secluded—something
the Jankos seem to like. I try to picture Tene’s Westmorland Star here—and another trailer with the elusive Ivo and the even more elusive Rose. Where would she have gone to meet the gorjio boyfriend? Seviton? The White Hart? I can’t see a shy Gypsy girl going into a pub on her own. Or did that never happen? Did something happen to her here, under the concealing trees? The sheltering cliff?
Back in the White Hart, drying off in front of the electric coal fire and warming up with a single Bell’s, I get to chatting with the oldest man I can see. He remembers with some nostalgia Egypt Lane being a stopping place, but not that it was ever called the Black Patch. I ask if there are any council sites around here instead, and he just laughs. Then he stares at me.
“Why’re you so interested in Gypsies, anyway?”
“I’m looking for a girl who went missing round here. A Gypsy girl.”
I show the pub patrons the picture of Rose at the races. Heads shake. My friend shrugs, not particularly interested.
“I doubt anyone in the village would see the sort that stopped there. They came and went all the time. How would you know if one had gone missing? You’ve got to have somewhere to go missing from, haven’t you? How would you know?”
He falls about, finding himself very witty.
“She had a family. She went missing from them.”
It’s true what Leon said; it feels like two different worlds, Gypsy and gorjio living side by side but not face-to-face. A lot of people don’t realize there are still Gypsies living on the road in this country, until some tabloid headline kicks up a fuss about dirty sites or con men with dodgy tarmac. They like to think that Gypsies are something from the past, like flagons of mead and horses delivering your weekly coal. Picturesque, maybe, but essentially gone.
“They weren’t real Gypsies there, anyway—more like pikeys—scroungers, you know.”
“Real Gypsies? I’m not sure I know the difference.”
“Haven’t been real Gypsies as long as I’ve been here. Proper Romanies, I mean. And I’ve been here all my life. There’s no such thing.”
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this stuff about real Gypsies. Everyone loves real Gypsies. No one agrees who they are, but they’re fairly sure there aren’t any left. The people they’re trying to get off their common land are . . . something else. Most of the time, I try to remain neutral. After all, I’m here on a job. But I don’t think I’m going to find out any more today.
“My father was a Gypsy. A real Gypsy. And he worked all his life.”
I smile and stand up, putting my glass on the counter. As I walk away, I think I hear him mutter “Gypsy cunt” in a low voice, but I couldn’t swear to it in court.
It occurs to me only as I drive out of Seviton that I have been an idiot. No one recognized the name Black Patch because Egypt Lane isn’t called the Black Patch, and never was. Names last, even when the places themselves have changed beyond recognition. Take a walk around the City of London.
In that case, why did Tene say the Black Patch was at Seviton? Inconsistencies matter. Work your fingers into a little crack and you can pull the whole thing apart. Either Tene made a mistake or he was trying to throw me off the scent. A slip of the tongue, or a lie. Either way, it’s the first interesting thing to happen with this case.
I was right. A couple days later I find the real Black Patch. I phoned Lulu Janko again. She sounded weary when I announced my name, so I just asked about the Black Patch. Surprised, she said, “Oh, that’s just outside . . . God, Watley, was it? Near Ely. Yeah, we used to stop there. I think it was sold off some time ago.”
Then she made her “I’ve got to get to work” excuse again—this time at half past three in the afternoon—and I found myself wondering about her mysterious private-care job.
Hen came up to my desk this morning, thus announcing his awkwardness; his desk is only twelve feet away, and my hearing is fine.
“So . . . the other night, at ours. It was nice, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I just wondered . . . you know. She’s nice, Vanessa, isn’t she? We thought . . .”
“Please, don’t start this. Okay?”
“Don’t look at me like that!”
“I’m not looking at you like anything.”
“So . . . what did you think?”
“You can tell your wife that I thought she was very nice, but . . . she’s not my type.”
Hen is too much of a gentleman to point out that I slept with her, but he knew. I could tell.
He nudged the wastepaper bin with his loafer.
“We worry about you.”
“I’m touched by your concern.”
“It’s been more than two years.”
“I know how long it’s been.”
I looked down at my notebook, picked up my coffee cup, and drank from it, cold though it was. He didn’t move.
“Is there something else?”
Hen nodded, determinedly not meeting my eye. “
It’s time you stopped spying on your ex-wife.”
I froze, the cup of coffee in midair.
I have been so discreet. Where did I slip up? I couldn’t be angry with him. He’s supposed to notice things.
“She’s not my ex-wife.”
“For God’s sake, Ray . . .”
I told myself to calm down. There is no sense at all in which Jen and I are still man and wife, other than on paper, and she has been asking me to sign the divorce papers for several months. Or rather, her lawyer has. I don’t know why I haven’t, really.
“You’re right. And I have . . . stopped.”
It has been more than a week since the last time. Am I finally getting bored with it? Is that how it happens?
“Well . . . good.”
“Did she see me?”
Hen looks severe.
“So you’ll tell Madeleine to leave me alone?”
“As long as you behave.”
“Actually, I think I might have met someone.”
“Really? Who?”
“I don’t know if there’s anything in it . . .”
“Is it Vanessa?”
“I just told you . . . No! It’s no one you know. So I’ll thank you to . . . go back to your desk and . . . do whatever it is that you do here.”
I waved my hand, mock dismissive.
Hen grinned and sat on my desk.
“So what was she like?”
“Who?”
“Oh, come on . . . You did the dirty deed!”
Public-school boys. They never grow up.
This time I’m in Fen country. All the way around the M25, then out toward Ely, Stowmarket—that strange, flat land punctured by cathedrals and air bases. They entertain themselves around these parts by thinking up bizarre names for their villages—I drive through or past Bruisingford, Shangles, Soberton. I find the village Lulu mentioned, home in on the pub—real Victorian as opposed to fake Jacobean—and ask around. This time it’s easy. I am pointed toward an elderly gentleman who’s knowledgeable about local history. He tells me the origin of the name Black Patch: the former common land on the edge of the village was the paupers’ burial ground for victims of the Black Death, although he scrupulously points out that this is, as far as he knows, unsubstantiated. When I sound him out about missing girls, though, he has nothing to add. Recent history—less than a hundred years old—seems not to interest him.
Burial ground or not, the Black Patch is now a dump. Close to a new supermarket, acres of earth have been churned into a vast, muddy moonscape—big enough to double the village population. A hoarding on the roadside announces the imminent arrival of “Alder View—An Exclusive Development of New Riverside Homes,” with an unlikely picture that bears no relation to the craterous mess in front of me. I can’t see a river, either—until I realize that the line of willows and alders beyond the site must conceal a watercourse. A couple diggers have halted with their jaws in the air, acid-yellow against the gray earth. A lone hard-hatted man s
mokes by a Portakabin. I wade through the mud toward him.
“Excuse me, this site is private.”
“Sorry. I just want to know if this is the place called the Black Patch.”
He grins.
“No, it’s Alder View now. But yeah, that’s what it used to be called. Not so appealing to the yuppies, though, is it?”
The builder, Rob, says work on Alder View is going slow because of the wetness of the ground. It’s crazy, in his opinion; they’re building houses on the floodplain. Lots of agricultural work around here: soft fruit and market gardens—and in the old days, if it flooded, the Gypsies would just move on. I ask him if the digging has turned up any evidence of plague victims, but he shrugs: not to his knowledge. Shards of pottery, and the odd fragment of bone, probably animal: most likely rubbish. I explain why I’m here: because it is, possibly, where a young woman went missing six years ago. I stress that I am not looking for a body but for a living person. Just in case he hears anything. My new friend—by now—is so excited that he promises to ask around. I give him my card.
There’s only one problem with this lead. According to Rob, the Black Patch was sold off nearly ten years ago—long before Rose went missing. Was it still used as a stopping place—illegally—while mired in a complicated, glacial planning process?
Rob thinks not.
I find myself hoping he’s wrong.
18.
JJ
Last night was the worst night of my life. We were woken up by a bang on the trailer door at about two o’clock. It was Ivo, and he sounded scared. Christo couldn’t breathe. Mum and I threw some clothes on and ran over, and though I was only hovering in the doorway behind them, I could tell it was bad. His breathing wasn’t just short and shallow, like it is sometimes, but rasping and rattling. It was horrible.
Mum said, “We’ve got to take him to hospital.”
Ivo went as white as a sheet. He hates hospitals. I mean, no one likes them, obviously, but he really hates them. Like he’s got a phobia or something. I suppose he had enough bad experiences when he was a little boy and ill—and they didn’t help. He nodded, though, as no one could really argue. We were all scared. Gran woke up at the noise we were making— no one was trying to keep that quiet—and agreed that he should go to the hospital. Everyone was being very practical and helpful, like they are in emergencies, offering scarves and blankets and Vicks rub. You have to keep your mind busy, I think, on little details, so that you don’t think about the worst that could happen—as though Vicks rub could stop that.
