by Stef Penney
Katie picks up her Jane Austen and slides closer to me on the little settee. She had said when we came in, very airily, “That’s where I do my thinking.” Like thinking is a specialized activity that you have to do in a special place, like a swimming pool. She wriggles around a lot and tosses her hair every few seconds. Gradually she seems to get closer, until her thigh is touching my thigh, but she doesn’t even seem to notice. Yet how can she not notice? I try to slide away from her, but very casually, so it looks accidental. But she only wriggles some more and ends up touching me again. Maybe she’s one of those people who is very casual about touching other people—and it is a small settee. She’s opened the book and is pointing at some passage or other. We’re sort of sharing the book, so maybe it’s normal to be sitting so close together.
“This is the bit we’re supposed to start with, isn’t it?”
“Um . . .”
I can’t remember what we’re talking about, or anything about the book at all, at the moment. She bends forward so that her hair falls out from behind her ear and hangs like a shiny curtain between us, and then she flicks it back. It must be deliberate; the hair flicks right in my face, but she doesn’t apologize. She has pretty hair—honey-colored, flat, and quite long. A piece of it brushes my lips, and all of a sudden, I have a tremendous erection. Panicking, I lean forward so she won’t notice, and pretend to be studying Sense and Sensibility, but of course I don’t read a single word.
I’m not even sure what happens for the next minute or so; I’m just clutching the book while trying to think about horrible, disgusting things, like the pencils-and-feet smell of the boys’ cloakroom, but then (how? why?) the book isn’t in my hands anymore. From being beside me, Katie is sort of kneeling and pushing her mouth against mine. Her lips are hot and soft and lightly sticky, and then her tongue is in my mouth, wrestling with my tongue, tasting of tea and fruitcake. I don’t know if I respond, because every molecule of sensation is in my mouth, tasting her hot, wet tongue. I don’t know what my hands are doing, or any other part of me.
Eventually (after a second, ten minutes?) Katie pulls back. It turns out that her hands were on my shoulders, and mine were lying moronically by my sides. She looks at me through half-closed eyes, panting slightly. A strand of hair crosses her face at a diagonal, glued to her lip with our spit. Her lips look redder than they did before. It’s all I can do not to lunge at her again.
“Did you ever do that with Stella?”
“No.”
Surely she knows that—or maybe Stella didn’t tell her everything. Maybe she’s seeing if I’d lie and say we’d gone all the way, although the most we ever did was talk.
I try to kiss her again, but she leans back, her hand pressing lightly on my chest.
“You won’t tell anyone about this?”
“No. Will you?”
“No.”
“Not even Stella?”
“Why, do you want me to?”
“No. But you’re best friends, aren’t you?”
She shrugs in a very off hand way. If I was Stella, I’d be really insulted. However, I’m not.
“I don’t tell her everything. What I do is no one else’s business.” “Right.”
Just as I think she’s going to remove her hand from my chest and we can get back to snogging, that strange half smile appears on her face again.
“Do you want to see my horse?”
For a moment I think she’s joking—or that “horse” actually means something else—but it turns out it doesn’t. She really does have a horse— her own horse, for God’s sake, out in a stable behind the house. The stable has electric lights, running water, and a heater. It’s got narrow yellow bricks on the wall, and bluish bricks on the floor. It’s a palace. I don’t know much about horses, although Katie seems to think I should. But I can see it’s a beautiful animal—apparently, it’s a purebred something or other called Subadar (“which means ‘captain’ in Hindustani,” she says) and “He has the champagne gene,” whatever that means. He has a really intelligent expression in his big dark eyes. Katie led me outside by the hand, although once in the stable she let go. I wonder if she’s going to kiss me again—I don’t think of trying to kiss her again, because she’s posh and I’m not, and what if she screamed? But anyway, instead, she flings her arms around the horse’s neck and kisses and caresses it in such an abandoned way that I feel instantly jealous. She croons endearments, rubbing her lips against the silky golden-brown neck—“Feel his nose, how soft it is”—and I obediently pat the horse while looking at Katie and feeling myself getting hard again, which is ridiculous as well as embarrassing.
I’m nowhere near stupid enough to think that suddenly Katie Williams is my girlfriend, because only complete spazzes think things like that. In fact, I would bet that tomorrow in school she’ll ignore me, the same as always. But right now, we’re here, stroking her horse’s beautiful chestnut coat, and there’s something strange but great going on, as though a magnetic current is buzzing through the horse’s body, shooting from my hand to her hand and back again, traveling right through me with a shiver of delicious excitement. It means I can’t take my hand off the horse’s neck, and neither can she. It binds us. The horse looks at us, detached but understanding. Maybe it’ll never happen again, but I want to remember it. Remember this.
I’m just thinking with wonder how her horse lives in a nicer place than I do—which seems fair enough: it’s such a prince of horses—when I remember what time it is—or must be. It’s nearly dark. Mum doesn’t know where I am. She’ll be worried. A sense of dread builds inside me. What if this isn’t great at all? How could it be? It’s wrong. It was never meant to happen. This is Katie Williams, for God’s sake . . . The police are probably on their way right now!
“I’d better go. My mum . . . I said I’d be back soon.”
I can’t meet her eyes. Even the horse turns its head and looks at me like I’ve done something wrong and stupid.
“Okay, then.”
Katie lifts her hand off Subadar’s neck, breaking the circuit. The magnetic current is switched off, and I feel exhausted all of a sudden. Her tone of voice implies that I’ve missed out on one of life’s great opportunities.
The leader of the local council grudgingly gives me a lift—in a different car: a blue saloon. At least I’m dry by this time. Katie waves briefly and disappears upstairs, leaving us to it. I don’t take my eyes off her, but there is no meaningful eye contact between us. No heavy-lidded look to savor, no promises or squeezes of the hand. I wonder if Mr. Williams is going to drive me off into the woods and kill me.
“So you live on the Eastwick Road?” he says shortly. Mrs. Williams must have told him I’m a Gypsy. My heart’s in my mouth as I wait for what’s coming next. (She started it! I didn’t move a muscle—not voluntarily, anyway . . .) But it doesn’t come. He asks me about living on a private site and a council site—I suppose he’s got a professional interest. I manage to say a few words, but I can’t tell him what it’s really like. I don’t think he actually wants to hear that.
“So what made you move out?”
“Um . . . There was no room. It was someone else’s pitch. We just sublet it for a bit.”
“Oh. People aren’t supposed to sublet, you know.”
We all know that, but why shouldn’t you go off for the summer, if you’ve got a trailer with wheels on it? Gorjios go on holiday and no one moves into their house; why shouldn’t we? But if you leave your pitch empty, the council puts someone else on it, so you have to make private arrangements or you lose it. I told a couple people at school that we’d been to France (although not that we’d been to Lourdes asking for a miracle) and they looked at me like “But you’re Gypsies—what are you doing going on holiday? You’re supposed to be poor.” So I stopped talking about it.
“Where shall I drop you?”
We’re driving along the A32 now. It’s not far to our site. But I know, more than anything else in the world, that I do
n’t want Mr. Williams to see where I live. If he sees that, I’ll never be allowed back in that house; I’ll never be allowed near Katie’s beautiful stable, or the settee where she does her thinking—or anything else of hers—ever again.
“Um, you can just drop me at the next corner. It’s really close.”
Luckily, it’s not raining anymore.
“Sure? Okay.”
He doesn’t press me. He wants to get back to his armchair in front of the telly after a hard day telling people they can’t sublet their sites. He pulls the car over to the verge, and I get out.
“Thanks very much, Mr. Williams . . . and thank Katie and er . . . for . . . the lift and everything.”
He drives off almost before I’ve finished speaking. Can’t wait to get out of there. I hang around until the car is out of sight, so he doesn’t know that I don’t walk down the side road but set off in the other direction, until I can see a light from one of our dear old trailers, winking dimly through the trees.
I walk up to our trailer. I’m not particularly trying to be quiet or anything, but Mum hasn’t drawn the curtains, so that’s when I see the weirdest thing of all in the whole of this pretty weird day. To be honest, I don’t even want to think about it.
21.
Ray
He’s instantly recognizable from the wedding picture. The longish dark hair, the watchful eyes, the attitude. His delicate good looks have hard-ened only slightly: the cheeks have become a little more hollow, the eyes a little more bruised. Slight and wiry, he is dressed in a rather old-fashioned way for a young man—one that proclaims his identity: a long-sleeved shirt, a heavy waistcoat buttoned up to the neck—even in June—and a handkerchief knotted around his throat.
When Kath shows me into his trailer (the Jubilee that I recognize from my first visit, as suspected), Ivo is sitting at the table with a small child on his lap, feeding him from a bowl of sodden Weetabix. He doesn’t get up but nods toward the seat at the end.
“Dad says you want to know all about Rose.”
I stare—though I try not to—at the child. I know he is six years old, but this child is tiny, a fledgling bird, smaller than my godson, Charlie. I would have guessed three, or four at the most. And I would have guessed that it was a girl, had I not known otherwise. Christo Janko looks like his father, with almost black, longish hair, and huge dark eyes in a heart-shaped face. A beautiful child but palpably odd: the head too large for the fragile body and slender neck, the limbs denim-covered sticks.
I smile at him.
“Hello, Christo.”
The boy stares at me but doesn’t respond.
I glance at Ivo.
“Does he understand?”
“Course he does, don’t you? He just don’t talk much.”
Christo grins at his father.
“Didn’t they tell you about him?”
“Yes. Well, not what the matter is, but . . . yes.”
“It’s the family curse.”
“What is it?”
“They don’t know, do they? We’ve been to the doctors and all that, but they can’t say. I had it, too, when I was young, but I got better. So we hope, don’t we?”
Ivo has a strange, compelling voice—light and rather young-sounding, yet hoarse, as though he’s getting over a cold. The sort of voice that makes you lean forward to catch every word.
“You recovered from it? That’s, er . . . great. I believe a few of your relatives died from the disease.”
Ivo looks down.
“Yeah. I was lucky.”
“You don’t know why you recovered?”
He shakes his head. He doesn’t seem to want to talk about it.
“If we did . . .”
I look at him and the boy. Wondering, if a mysterious and deadly disease can recede, can it also return? What marks has it left on Ivo? He appears normal enough, though slight, and unusually boyish. But if he used to be like Christo, that would explain it.
“Anyway, that was what frightened her off, I reckon. Rose. When we realized that he was afflicted, she couldn’t take it. Didn’t want anything more to do with us. I don’t know that I could blame her—who would want to have more kids, when you don’t know . . .”
As I ask him to recall the events of six years ago when Rose left, he avoids my eyes, talking to his son—asking him if he’s had enough to eat, if he wants a drink. He never seems to get an answer, but there must be some wordless communication between them that I cannot read, because he reacts as though Christo has spoken to him. I can’t tell if he understands what is going on; he pays no attention to the conversation, focusing on items on the table or the figurine of some action hero he holds. I suppose Ivo is used to this, but the overall impression I get is that Ivo is hiding behind him. Christo and his mystery illness is his barricade against the world. The world and the questions of impertinent private detectives.
Ivo is now wiping some invisible dribble off Christo’s chin.
“You say Rose left in the middle of the night. Didn’t that strike you as odd?”
“No.”
“Your father said that the Black Patch was quite a long way from any stations. Thetford is the nearest, isn’t it?”
Ivo looks up. Is that a sharp look? A moment later he’s shifting position, lifting Christo’s legs and resettling them.
“It was the Black Patch near Seviton.”
“Oh, right.”
“Why d’you say Thetford? We haven’t stopped up there for years and years.”
“I’m sure your father mentioned it. Just by Watley . . . near Thetford.”
“Nah. Watley . . . It were fenced off—I dunno—ten years ago? And we wouldn’t have gone there in winter. It always flooded.”
“And the stopping place at Seviton . . . that was an old chalk pit?”
Ivo glances up again.
“Yeah. You know it?”
“I’ve been there. And that was known as the Black Patch, too?” “That’s what we called it.”
He looks like he’s genuinely thinking about it. There’s no tension there now, that I can see.
“My father gave up on the road. Doesn’t get any easier.”
Ivo just grunts in response.
“So—at Seviton—how do you think she got away?”
“She must have got someone to give her a lift. That’s what we thought. She’d been going into Seviton a bit. Used to take Dad’s car and go off for hours. Must have met someone.”
“Did you ever see her with anyone? Hear her mention a name— anything like that?”
Ivo shakes his head slowly. “I had no idea. But . . . I was thinking about Christo all the time. I didn’t maybe pay her too much attention.” He looks down at the boy again, and his face softens.
“What did she take?”
“Pretty much everything.”
“What about money?”
“I suppose she had money, yeah.”
“She didn’t take money from you?”
He shrugs.
“There weren’t much to take. She took her jewelry and stuff, just, like, bangles and earrings, you know.”
“Do you have anything of hers left, now?”
Ivo shakes his head.
“What she didn’t take, I got rid of.”
“What did she leave?”
He looks at me like I’m an idiot. Shrugs.
“Some clothes.”
“And what did you do with her things?”
“Like I said, got rid of them.”
“You didn’t think she’d come back?”
“I wouldn’t have taken her back. Not after she left. I was that angry.” He looks down at his son, who smiles up at him—a smile of eerie sweetness. Ivo smiles, too—properly, for the first time—and kisses the top of his head.
“Just you and me, kid, innit? Didn’t know what she was missing.”
There’s a sadness about his smile as he looks up and catches my eye for a brief moment.
“And this was . . .
in November?”
“Yeah. I think so. I can’t remember exactly.”
“So Christo was just a few weeks old?”
“Yeah. Or . . . might have been a bit later.”
I jot this down in my notebook. Tene had said that Rose had left when Christo was a few months old—implying that it was after Christmas. But people do forget.
“She had sisters, you know. Have you spoken to them? They’ll likely know.”
“Yes. They’ve not heard a thing.”
Ivo raises his eyebrows and shrugs again.
“I knew she wasn’t happy. After he came along. Sometimes she would say these really strange things. Like, sometimes, she would . . . Listen, let’s go outside for a bit.”
Ivo jams an old man’s cap on his head, pulling the brim down over his eyes and, still carrying his son, leads the way to the Lunedale, where a young teenage boy opens the door. Clearly another Janko. This boy takes Christo in his arms and carries him inside.
“Who’s that?” I ask in a conversational way, as we stroll off and Ivo lights a cigarette.
“JJ. My nephew.”
“Oh. You have a brother . . . or sister?”
I think back to what Lulu told me. Didn’t all the boys die, apart from Ivo? A sister, then.
“Well, he’s my cousin’s boy. Sandra. So he’s, er, what—my cousin as well. Once removed, or something. I dunno . . .”
Without Christo, he seems nervous. He sucks hard on his cigarette. Seen in broad daylight, his skin is remarkably smooth, almost waxen. I think of the illness again. Is this one of its marks?
“You have any sisters?”
A pause.
“I did. But she died.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. Was she ill, too?”
“No. Car crash.”
“Oh. Was that when your father was injured?”
“No. Long before. I was sixteen. She was seventeen.” Ivo glares at me through his cigarette smoke. There’s a truculence showing through his reserve. He’s losing patience.
“What were you going to say, indoors—about Rose—the things she said?”
He squints off into the distance, cigarette balanced lightly on his lip so that the smoke curls into his eyes. He doesn’t blink, just narrows those long eyelids. Long, sweeping eyelashes. Then he pulls the cigarette out with a jerky movement. Flicks it too hard, so that the lit end flips into some dandelions. Not so cool.
