The Invisible Ones (13 page)

“So, er, why don’t you see your family?”

Lulu sighs.

“You liked him, didn’t you?”

“Tene? I . . . He’s quite a charismatic figure.”

I suppose she’s right. I did like him.

“Yeah. Charismatic.”

She makes it sound like a dirty word.

“You don’t go round shouting that you’re a Gypsy, do you? Nor do I. But Tene does. Does this big act. Only it’s not even an act. When he thinks about anything, it’s Gypsy first, everything else second.”

She shakes her head, not meeting my eyes now.

“It’s not the beginning and end of everything to me. You can’t live like that anymore, can you? Going on about the old days and the ‘pure black blood.’ Like there ever was any.”

That phrase again.

“Is that something Tene cares about?”

“Yeah. Not just blood. The culture, you know—the life. Not being forced to settle in a house and just . . . disappear.”

“Like I have.”

“And me. I’m the traitor.”

“Traitor? That’s a strong word.”

She shrugs again. She isn’t going to rise to my prodding.

“There wasn’t going to be anything for me in that life. A girl’s a slave. What have you got to look forward to? Get married, get beaten up. Not again, thanks. I’ve got my little house and my job, and it hasn’t been easy with the amount of school I got.”

“Were you close to your brother, as children?”

“God, no. He’s seventeen years older, so he was more like an uncle. When I was born, he’d already moved out on his own.”

“Any other brothers and sisters? Apart from Kath.”

“Another sister.”

“Ah.”

“I expect you’ll want her number, too.”

“That would be very helpful.”

“I doubt it. Sibby lives in Ireland. You’re welcome to give it a try.”

“I wanted to find out a bit about Christo’s illness. It seems that that might have frightened Rose off. Your brother didn’t say what it was, but he said there was no cure.”

“That’s right.”

Her face tightens. If she was flirting before, she isn’t now.

“He said others in the family had suffered.”

She drinks her tea.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry, I, em . . .”

She lights another cigarette, frowning at her recalcitrant lighter. She smokes too much, I think, or maybe just smokes during difficult conversations. She speaks quickly.

“We had two other brothers. Istvan died when he was a baby, and Matty . . . He wasn’t so bad, he made it to thirty.”

“God, I’m sorry. Is that why Tene . . .”

“No. No, he was in a road accident. Tene’s fine—in that way. But he and Marta had two sons before Ivo. Stevie . . . again, was only a baby. Milo was six.”

I can’t think of anything to say to this.

“They just took Christo to Lourdes. I suppose anything’s worth a try. It worked for Ivo.”

“Ivo was ill, too?”

“Yeah, when he was young. But he got better.”

“I thought you said there isn’t a cure.”

She shrugs. I like it when she shrugs, I decide.

“I dunno. Maybe Lourdes is the cure. Maybe he had something else. Not the same.”

“Is it just . . . boys?”

She looks up at me; her eyes are pained. I wish I wasn’t making her look like that.

“Yeah. Seems to be.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She puts herself together again. As if she’s held together with poppers:
snap, snap, snap.

I wonder about her marriage. Did she have any children?

She looks down, checks her watch.

“I have to go to work.”

“Okay. What sort of work do you do?”

“Go-go dancer.”

“Oh, great.”

A brief, sarcastic smile.

“I’m a carer.”

“Oh, great.”

“I like it.”

“You work in a home?”

“Private.”

“Well . . . thanks for meeting me, and . . . talking to me.”

“Good luck.”

“Can I ring you again?”

It doesn’t come out quite how I meant it to.

“In case something else comes up.”

She shrugs. Her shoulders make me think of wings—she is unfurling them, taking off.

“Can’t stop you.”

She taps out of the bar, and I listen to the receding tick of her heels on the pavement, like time ebbing away.

It’s appalling, if what she says is true. I think it is true. It makes me think of something . . . the Russian Tsars—didn’t they have a disease that affected only the boys, and therefore the Tsar’s succession? Something to do with Queen Victoria, too, I think, but can’t remember what. My dad would have known. And if he didn’t, he would have looked it up. But my brother, Tom, got
The Book of Knowledge
. Jen said it smelled, and wouldn’t have it in the house.

16.

JJ

One of the worst things about living in a trailer is that you can’t ask people back to yours. I’ve noticed this at school, with girls, especially: they’ll be talking and stuff at the end of classes, or walking to the bus stop, and one of them might say casually, “Come back to my house. We can study/ have tea/listen to the Pet Shop Boys LP.” Easy. No big deal. Then they get on the bus and go and have a lovely time.

I never walk to the bus stop, because our site isn’t anywhere near a bus stop, so there’s not much point. Usually Mum picks me up, often in the van that she’s driving—which might be a florist’s van, or a van for delivering bread. Once, embarrassingly, she picked me up in a refrigerator truck with “Best Sausages” on the side in huge letters. Danny Sinclair and Ben Goldman—who else?—saw, and I was called Sausages for about a year afterward. Other times she picks me up in Granddad’s car, which is cool, as it’s a BM. Very occasionally Gran or Granddad come and get me—and that will be at whatever time suits them, so I’ve spent endless hours hanging around on street corners, looking suspicious, probably. Mum usually shouts at them later, but it doesn’t make them any quicker. Whenever she has a complaint against them they remind her that she’s lucky they took her—and me—back at all. I’m used to waiting.

Only once did I try inviting anyone back to our trailers. It was Stella Barclay, shortly after I started going to this school, when she seemed to be my friend. I don’t know whether Stella is still my friend or not. She is one of the nicest people at my school, and we’ve had some really good conversations. She likes the same sort of music as I do—she introduced me to The Smiths, who I love, and not just because my name is Smith. But now she’s become friends with a girl called Katie Williams, and when they’re together she doesn’t really talk to me. It’s like she doesn’t notice me anymore. So I don’t push myself onto her.

Anyway, this was last year. I’d told her that I lived in a trailer—this is when we were on the council site—and she seemed interested in it. So I asked Mum if I could invite a friend back for tea. She looked a bit wary but said of course I could, as long as I gave her some warning, so she could make it tidy and get something nice in to eat. So I asked Stella if she would like to, and she said yes. Then I asked Mum, and she said okay, what about tomorrow, and I told Stella, but that day she had a judo class, so I went back and forth until we had set a date—it was all quite complicated, mainly because of judo and clarinet and dance lessons. I don’t have any extra lessons. Then, on that day, Mum came to pick us up—on time, after I had stressed the importance of this to her about twenty-five times. In fact, she was early. She was very nice and friendly to Stella, and she had made an effort and put on a dress—the blue-and-gray one, which looks very nice on her. She seemed to know that it was important to me that she look like a nice mum, and I was really glad she did. Stella and she seemed to get on all right, but then we got to the site, and that’s when I realized that it was all a horrible, horrible mistake and I should never, ever have suggested it.

Stella looked around at the other trailers with a mixture of fear and fascination. I know that she’d never seen a Gypsy site before, and maybe she’d heard stories about how awful and dirty Gypsies were, or something. I suppose it did seem a bit weird, with all the trailers lined up on their concrete pads, and loads of cars, and piles of bin bags in a big heap rather than in a dustbin. There were lots of dogs running about. But it
wasn’t dirty. Granddad came out of their trailer and stared at Stella in a rather unfriendly way, and even when I introduced them, and he said hello, she looked like she was scared of him.

We went into our trailer, which Mum had made look quite cheerful and nice. Everything was—as usual—clean and sparkling, and Mum made tea and bread and cheese. She’d bought some Mr. Kipling French Fancies, too.

Stella was really interested in the trailer. She looked at the kitchen, and exclaimed that there was no sink, and Mum told her how we wash things in different bowls and throw the dirty water outside. Because washing water is
mokady
, which is more than dirty. I mean, you wouldn’t wash your clothes, and then things that you put in your mouth—like forks—in the same bowl, because that’s disgusting. Isn’t it? Stella nodded and said, “Yes, I see.”

Obviously we couldn’t go into my room, because I don’t have one, so we sat on the settee at the end, with the stove lit, and Mum asked Stella boring, grown-up questions like what her favorite school subject was and how long her family had been living around here. For the first time ever, I felt really uncomfortable in our trailer: fidgety, like cheesy bugs were crawling all over me and there was nothing I could do about it. I began to feel that I could hardly breathe, and I thought I was going to explode. When Mum said she would go over to Gran’s and leave us for a bit, I thought I would die, even though all the time I had been secretly longing for her to shut up and go. There was a silence after she’d gone out. Stella kicked her heels against the bench seat.

“Do you really live here, both of you?”

Her voice was incredulous. Not mean or anything, just like she really couldn’t understand how we did it.

“Yeah.”

“Where’s your bed?”

“This is it,” I said, indicating the bench we were sitting on.

“But don’t you get any privacy?”

I thought about this.

“Not much. I can pull this curtain here . . .”

I demonstrated, but it seemed to confine us both into such a small, airless space that I panicked and pulled it back immediately.

“I don’t think I could stand it. Not being able to go into my own room and shut the door. I mean, your mum’s really nice and everything, but not to be able to listen to music on your own, you know . . . What if you get into a bad mood?”

“It’s okay, really. I don’t think about it.”

“Oh.”

She smiled.

But I knew that from then on, I would think about it. I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it.

We had more tea and French Fancies, and talked about The Smiths, who were our joint favorite band, like we often did at school, but there was something in our conversation that hadn’t been there before, something hot and sour, that made me feel as if my hands had suddenly swelled up to twice their usual size. Like I was a freak.

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?