The Invisible Ones (21 page)

“It’s not your fault. We can’t help it.”

“I should never have—”

“There’s nothing you could do. It’s not your fault!”

This is terrible. I want to put my hand out and touch him—on the sleeve or something. I’ve never seen him so upset. But this is Ivo we’re talking about, so I don’t.

“So . . .”

He looks down and sniffs loudly.

“So, this is . . . It might sound crazy, but it’s no crazier than expecting a miracle, right? We’re Gypsies. This is our curse. So maybe we should give him a Gypsy cure. Have you ever heard Kath or Tene talk about the
chovihano
?”

“No.”

“The
chovihano
is a medicine man. A healer. Like a shaman—do you know what that is?”

I say, “Shamans live in the Arctic. They can turn into bears and stuff. And fly.”

“Yeah . . . kind of. A
chovihano
is a Gypsy shaman. Someone who can cast out illness.”

Visions of boiling herbs dance before my eyes. Dissected toads, and plants with names like mugwort and asphodel. I stare at the table, where a bowl of dark liquid throws back a reflection of the moving candle flames. This is worse than I’d imagined. I hardly know where to look—certainly not at Ivo.

“Because in the old ways . . . illness is never just illness. It’s
prikaza
. Like . . . like a punishment.”

“But why would Christo get punished? He’s never done anything!”

“The whole family is punished, in the blood.”

“For what?”

Ivo shakes his head. “I don’t know. We’ve had this curse for generations.”

“Come on, Ivo . . .”

“Is it any crazier than going to Lourdes?”

“It worked for you, didn’t it?”

There is a silence for a long moment.

“What happened to me isn’t going to happen to him.”

His voice is small and strange. When I dare to look at Ivo, there are tears running down his cheeks.

Christo coughs.

“So that’s what I’m doing. Trying to cast out the illness.”

“You’re a . . .
chovihano
?”

Ivo sort of smiles, as if he is at least a bit aware of the weirdness of the whole thing.

“My mum was—did you know that? She knew all about herbs. Healing. She taught me a bit. There are recipes and things. Written down. There’s nothing dangerous in there.”

He gestures toward the bowl of dark liquid. There is also a container of salt on the table, and, I realize, there’s salt everywhere, like he’s been pouring it all over the place.

“What’s in there?”

“Plants. Stewed up.”

“Oh.”

“I reckon if anyone qualifies to be one, I do.”

I don’t know what Ivo means by this, and I really don’t want to ask.

I suddenly feel terribly sorry for Ivo. He must feel so helpless. We all do—but it must be so much worse for him, as Christo’s dad.

“Mr. Lovell said he knows a children’s doctor. Up in London. A specialist.”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe we should talk to him about that. If everybody chipped in, I expect we could afford it.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“It’s worth a try, isn’t it? For Chris?”

“Okay. Yeah.”

“Okay, then . . . Well . . .”

I smile, wanting to cheer him up. Wanting him to be normal and put the electric light on. It’s strange—I feel like I’m older than him. “See you later.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you coming over for tea?”

“Yeah. We’ll be over in a bit.”

I look at Christo. He looks at me calmly. He doesn’t seem distressed.

“All right, Christo?”

He grunts at me, which means hi. Just like normal.

I go out with relief, wondering if he’s going to start groaning and throwing salt again. I suppose it doesn’t matter much. Maybe it is okay. It’s just hocuspocus. Candles and funny smells and a bit of moaning.

I mean, what harm can it do?

25.

Ray

We take an afternoon to drive up to Cambridge. It’s the hospital where Tene was treated, and Hen knows one of the pediatricians there—they were at school together. Gavin is Irish, not as posh as Hen, a scholarship boy. He always looks exhausted. I like him.

“So it’s feasible that a woman who’d had a baby two or three months previously, say, could just run off and leave everything.”

We’re sitting in the hospital canteen, discussing postnatal depression. Gavin can’t even take enough time off to leave the building. He shovels congealed pasta bake into his mouth as we talk.

“You don’t have to be psychotic to do that. There could be all sorts of reasons.”

“Her husband said that before she left, she pretended—maybe really believed—that the baby didn’t exist.”

Gavin shrugs.

“I can believe that. There can be all sorts of manifestations. Mental illness is a slippery bugger. Literally anything you can think of is possible.”

“Suicide?”

“Anything is possible. Glad I could help you!” He grins at us. “I’ll send you my bill.”

He’s joking. And that’s not the real reason we came. I’ve described Christo’s symptoms as best I can. Gavin listened intently, total concentration on his face. When I’ve gone as far as I can, he looks up.

“What do you think, Gavin?”

“I’ve no buggering idea.”

When I meet people like Gavin, I wish I were an expert in something. Even when you don’t know the answer, you inspire respect.

“I’d love to have a crack at him, though. You say the father recovered?”

He scrapes his plate clean.

“Can’t believe I eat this stuff. Do you think you could get them both up to London—come to the clinic?” Gavin does his consulting on Harley Street. He’s very eminent, by all accounts.

“I was hoping you’d say that. Ray will do his best.”

“Thanks, Gavin. While we’re here, could you do us another favor?”

Despite his reluctance—something to do with the Hippocratic oath, I believe; I stopped listening at that point—we get to see some office bod who looks up the records. I sense that if I was here on my own, I wouldn’t get anywhere, but Hen’s public-school accent and charm is a skeleton key in many instances—this is one of them.

We stress that we don’t want to know any private medical details, just when he was there, and, Gavin having vouched for us, we get the information that a fifty-five-year-old man called Tene Janko (it seems unlikely that there are many others) was admitted to the spinal injuries depart-ment six and a half years ago, on December 18, 1979, having suffered a broken back in a car accident. He was in the hospital for eighteen weeks, and then discharged himself, against advice. There are no records of out-patient treatment.

Hen says, later, “Maybe she did commit suicide.”

We’ve ended up in an old-fashioned tea shop in the town center.

“So where’s the body?”

“Maybe she jumped down a disused mineshaft. Or a well. She could have walked into the sea.”

All of these things are possible, and yet . . .

“Ivo’s aunt, Lulu Janko, said that Rose had already gone when Tene had his accident, and they didn’t know about Christo’s illness then. ‘Long gone’ was the phrase she used. But Ivo and Tene both say Rose left after she found out the child was ill—that his illness was the reason for her going.”

Hen shrugs.

“They’re blaming her for leaving—less embarrassing than . . . admitting that you beat your wife, for example.”

“So you agree that they’re lying? You agree with me?”

Hen smiles. “Looks like it.”

26.

JJ

I’ve been thinking a lot, ever since seeing Mum and Uncle Ivo together in our trailer. It makes me feel sick. Not that that was a wrong thing for either of them to be doing—I don’t even know what that was, for sure. But it’s as though someone has pulled the carpet out from under my feet; I’m trying to keep my balance but don’t know if I can. And since that night with Ivo doing his witch-doctor stuff, I’m even more off balance. It hasn’t had any effect that I can see, other than weirding me out: Christo seems just the same as before.

One thing that’s happened, which I think is a good thing, is that Mr. Lovell came back to see us and suggested that Ivo take Christo up to London to see a specialist in children’s diseases. I didn’t even have to bring it up. Apparently, he knows a doctor who will do it for nothing. There was a big family meeting about that—or rather, there was a family meeting for everyone except me, because, although I have to clean up and do my own washing and generally be responsible—“Now that you’re fourteen, you’re not a kid anymore”—when it comes to decisions like this, it seems that I’m not an adult, either.

I pointed this out to Mum, and she said, “Well you aren’t an adult yet, are you? You can’t drive, and you still go to school. Anyway, you should
be glad you’re not an adult; there are things you don’t know, and you should be glad you don’t know them.” And I said, “What are you talking about? Maybe I do already know them,” and she said, “No, you don’t know about this, I know you don’t.” And I said, “You don’t know what I know,” and she said, “Yes, I do.”

After that, I got even more worried, trying to think of what could be so awful that I’ve never heard of it (but she has). I mean, I already know about lots of awful things, like the Holocaust and war and rape and torture—how can it be worse than those?

Then I wondered if she was talking about Rose. Something must have happened for her to vanish so completely. Why would she not want to come back and visit Christo? Even if she and Ivo fell out and couldn’t stand each other, Christo is still her son, and she would want to see him, I should think.

Then I remember that my father didn’t want to see me.

Mum says it’s different for men. It just is. I wonder why I never put the two things together before: Rose and my father. Rose had a baby with a Janko and disappeared. My father had a baby with a Janko . . . and disappeared. For a wild moment I must admit that I thought something crazy—that Ivo was my father, and that Mum was Christo’s mother— before I remembered, with relief, that I had met Rose. She really existed. And I would have noticed if Mum had had another baby, wouldn’t I? I may have been seven, but I wasn’t a total idiot.

Even without exams to worry about, my head is exploding.

My investigations start with Gran. Mum was living with them—although in her own trailer—when she got pregnant.

“Can I ask you something?”

Gran looks at me from the kitchen of trailer number two. “You just did.”

“Did you ever meet my dad?”

Gran puts down the carrot she is peeling.

“Have you been talking to your mum again?”

“She won’t tell me anything.”

“Well, it’s up to her.”

“No, it isn’t. I have a right to know where I come from!”

“Oh, you have a right, do you? The only right you have is to do what your mum tells you.”

“It’s not fair.”

“Life’s not fair.”

“Did you meet him?”

“No, I didn’t. We never knew him, not even his name. God knows we tried to get San to tell us, but she was that scared Dad would go and break his legs, she never did. She was right, too.”

Gran snaps her mouth shut, looking grim and angry.

“He ruined your mum, that
gorjio
. Is that someone you want to talk to?” “Didn’t say I wanted to talk to him . . . I just want to know. It’s like . . .” I don’t know what to say. Like I only half exist?

I poke my finger behind a button that’s coming loose on the upholstery. When I look up again, Gran has gone back to her carrots.

I don’t feel like asking Ivo just yet—I think I should get everyone else’s version first. So next I try Great-uncle. Unsurprisingly, he’s not much help.

“You know what they say, ‘It’s a wise child that knows his own father.’”

“What?”

Great-uncle twinkles his eyes at me.

“My kid, you should count yourself lucky. You’re the son of the Gypsies, and every one of us looks out for you, you know that.”

Sometimes he drives me up the wall. This is one of those times.

“You always say family matters more than anything. ‘Family first. Family first!’ But I don’t know who half my family are. Half my DNA comes from somewhere else—and I don’t know anything about it! You don’t know what that’s like! It’s . . . horrible!”

“Be careful what you wish for, my kid; you might get it. And then you might wish you hadn’t have got it.”

He looks more serious now.

“JJ, you’ll have to ask your mother. When the time is right, she’ll tell you.”

“She won’t know when the time is right.”

He wags his finger at me now.

“Don’t you be disrespecting your mother. Your mother knows more than you will ever know.”

“’S not surprising if no one tells me anything.”

Great-uncle throws his head back and laughs, but there’s an element of “watch it” in the laugh.

“Oh, no one ever tells you anything, do they? You’re going to that fine school, getting your
gorjio
education. You’ll know it all one day.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean . . . things about us.”

“What things about us? What don’t you know?”

I shrug.

“Lots of things. Like what happened to Rose.”

“Oh, Rose, is it? You been talking to that detective fellow again?”

“No. So? I remember her. She was nice. She played with me. I was sorry she went.”

“So were we all. And you know as much as I do about that one.”

“But you were there! You must remember something about who she went off with, or why . . . or what had happened just before . . .”

Great-uncle frowns at me, drawing his great furry eyebrows together in that way that he has, so that his eyes seem to peer out from under a bush.

“People can just go. Like your dad. He just went. And maybe they don’t want to have anything to do with the people they leave behind. And maybe you’re better off when they leave—have you thought of that?”

“Was Ivo better off when Rose left? Was Christo?”

I expect him to get angry. But he doesn’t. He looks . . . sad.

“I don’t know, kid. She wasn’t . . . right in the head.”

I stare at Great-uncle, openmouthed. I’ve never heard anyone say this before.