The Invisible Ones (6 page)

We don’t have a lot to go on. First we run the obvious searches: DVLC, electoral rolls, utilities, land registry. The name Rose Wood or Rose Janko
doesn’t appear anywhere. I would have been surprised if it had. Even now, few Gypsies have passports or appear on electoral rolls. And if Rose has changed her name, we’re not going to find a thing there, anyway. With a missing person, there is a set of procedures to follow. You check the official records—dull, time-consuming work. You run “hookers” in the papers— small ads asking for the missing person to get in touch to find out something to their advantage, or to collect an inheritance. When you don’t know what area someone lives in, that’s a very big net to catch a small fish— and not everyone reads the small ads—but still, you never know. And, of course, you talk to the people who knew them, starting with immediate family and widening out in ever-increasing circles—school friends, work colleagues, acquaintances, hairdressers, doctors, dentists, local shopkeepers, paper boy . . . Only with Rose, there doesn’t seem to be a set of increasing circles; there is just one. No school friends, because she barely went to school; no colleagues, because she never worked. There is only family, and that so long ago: a small, tight, closed world from which a good girl does not stray.

At 7:30 the next evening I trudge up the drive to Hen’s house. Thanks to Madeleine’s money, they live in a vast detached house in a leafy neighborhood. Even though it’s much closer to central London than I am, I feel like I’ve come to the country. When I ring the doorbell, Madeleine answers and pecks me on the cheek. I’ve always had the feeling that Hen’s aristocratic wife doesn’t really like me. One look from those pale blue eyes, and I feel like I should be coming in through the tradesmen’s entrance.

“Ray . . . How lovely to see you. It’s been too long.”

I hold a bottle of wine up in front of me. It’s probably the wrong kind, but this is one thing, over the years, I have stopped worrying about.

“Oh, lovely. Thank you. We promised Charlie you’d read him a story. Would you mind?”

I don’t mind. Charlie is their youngest child and my godson. I can’t imagine how Hen managed to talk Madeleine into that one; perhaps he has a file of incriminating photographs stashed in a vault.

Charlie is in the kitchen, hanging on to Hen’s leg and dragging his security blanket, which he sucks, wrapped around one thumb. He has his father’s floppy pale hair and diffident approach to life. I put the bottle of wine in the fridge. Blu-tacked to the fridge door is a typed list of the skills that Charlie needs to work on to bring him up to scratch. I read it with interest: “Speech—do not give him anything until he has named it properly. He must eat only without his blanket—do not give in! Hand-eye coordination—throwing and catching soft apple or blue ball. Numbers— get him to repeat them every day . . .” The list is laminated. Charlie peers at me with watery green eyes, a tinge of resentment in them: he knows I get to walk away from the list at the end of the evening, but he’s in it for life. He drags me upstairs to read a story—about a big wolf who scares people without meaning to. But Charlie is more interested in telling me that there was a big storm, and it made him wet his bed.

“When was that, Charlie?”

“When I was young.”

Charlie is four years old. I think his development is frighteningly advanced.

The evening is tolerable, for dinner at their house. There is a nasty moment when Madeleine springs on me that she’s invited a friend of hers along—allegedly at the last minute. Vanessa is recently divorced—purely a coincidence, of course. Hen raises his eyebrows to signal that it’s none of his doing, but would I please go along with it? Actually, Vanessa is surprisingly okay: not too many expectations, not overly bitter. A handsome streaked blonde, solid but shapely, a legal secretary. We eat lasagna and drink red wine (mine was the wrong color), followed by a lonely salad, and a bitter coffee-flavored trifle with a foreign name—all made by Madeleine, who needs to prove she can do everything. The two older girls— both in their teens—are “studying with friends,” apparently, although I half hope they are doing something much more reprehensible.

Actually, the conversation is reasonable, the atmosphere surprisingly unstrained. Vanessa laughs at my jokes and appears genuinely interested in our work. I suspect Madeleine of exaggerating the exciting nature of
our setup—to make Hen look good, of course, but I am her husband’s boss. Of course, she will have added—as a spice—that I am half Gypsy. A little bit of rough.

For a while, I’m grateful to be sitting at a table, having a meal and talking—like people do when they don’t go to pubs anymore. It’s normal. I suppose it’s nice. Vanessa’s nice. She deserves someone better than me. I ponder this—for Madeleine to line her up with me, she must be a rather low-status friend. I stop pondering when Vanessa comes home with me afterward. She’s fun, a good sport, but half my mind is occupied with wondering if she’s going to tell Madeleine, and then feeling sorry in anticipation for Hen. Madeleine will complain to Hen about my rascally behavior, and he’ll be the one—not me—to get it in the neck. The other half of my mind is somewhere else, too. Not that Vanessa seems to notice my distraction.

She leaves in the morning with a smile and a wave, and there is none of that tremulous, brittle fishing around about calling or phone numbers or seeing each other again. Sensible woman. Low expectations: the key to happiness.

7.

JJ

We’re only ninety-eight miles from Lourdes! So hurray. Hurray even though it’s my job to cook tonight. I’m doing Joe Gray, which is stew made with a tin of soup—any soup—potatoes, onions, carrots, and bacon. It’s traditional, and one of my favorites. I discovered that bacon’s called
lardon
in French, which makes me laugh. I make a joke about it putting the lard on; I think it’s rather good, personally, but only Christo laughs—and that’s because I’m clowning around, not because he gets it— and Gran just smiles a bit. No one else laughs. Uncle Ivo and Great-uncle have had some sort of major falling-out, but I don’t know what it’s about. Ivo took Great-uncle off for a walk earlier, and they came back not speaking. In fact, Ivo came back without Great-uncle at all, and I had to go and find him. It was just starting to rain. Luckily, he wasn’t very far away.

Now they’re both sulking for England. Ivo smokes and stares out the window. This despite Gran’s having asked him four times to put it out or go outside. Great-uncle is staring into space and smoking his pipe. He’s allowed to smoke indoors, since he’s in a wheelchair and there has to be some compensation. But it smells horrible. I can hardly breathe. He breaks the tense silence with a sigh like a gust of wind.

“You break my heart, you do, kid.”

This to Ivo, who ignores him, other than by sucking his teeth in an insulting way.

“Ivo, for Pete’s sake . . . We’re about to eat.”

That’s five. See, I can keep count, assess everyone’s bad moods, and cook at the same time.

“Open the window.”

“You could think of your son!”

This is absolutely guaranteed to wind Ivo up. He pretty much does think about Christo all the time.

“Jesus Christ, Kath—”

And this is guaranteed to wind Gran up.

“So help me . . . we’re going to bloody Lourdes! Sometimes I really wonder about you.”

She says this in a really low voice, although we’re all crammed around the table, so it would be hard for anyone to miss it. Ivo looks daggers at her. Great-uncle taps out his pipe.

“Come on, now. JJ is about to dish up. Smells delicious, kid.”

“Here it comes, here it comes. Bacon bacon bacon bacon. Come on get your lard on. Come on get your lard on! Get your lard on while it’s hot . . .”

I can keep this sort of thing up for hours. Just switch my brain off and let my tongue go on automatic. It’s a good way of annoying everyone so much that they stop having a go at one another. Gran, who appreciates this, even if no one else does, smiles in encouragement.

“Thank you, my darling. Doesn’t that smell good. It smells different from at home, doesn’t it?”

Ivo finally puts his fag out.

I slosh the Joe Gray onto everyone’s plate, and they’re off, eating like starving dingoes. Ivo, though, eats only a few mouthfuls, then pushes his plate away and gets up. He goes out of the trailer even though it’s still raining. He leaves a sort of hollow vacuum behind him—it sucks your good mood into it. Sometimes, I swear, I don’t know what gets into him. I know everyone gets depressed from time to time, but with him it’s different.

. . .

I’ve been thinking about luck as we drive south, and France gets warmer and hillier and covered with trees. I wonder if it’s true that some people are born lucky and some unlucky. I reckon it is. Apart from the obvious thing of some people being born rich and others poor—and I know you can argue about money not being necessarily a good thing—there are people who seem to suffer more than is fair. Take Great-uncle, for instance. He had two brothers who both died of the family disease. He was the only boy of his generation to survive—like Lon Chaney Jr. in
Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans
, which we used to watch together. Then he married and had two sons who died as babies—Mum says it’s because Great-aunt Marta was also his first cousin, so they probably both had the disease in some way. Then he had a daughter and a son—the son was Uncle Ivo and the daughter was my aunt Christina. At first they thought Ivo was all right, but then he began to get ill. Then Great-aunt Marta died of cancer. Ivo was only fourteen when she died—the same age as me—so that was awful, too. Then, two years later, they came to Lourdes and Ivo had his miracle and got better. But at the same time, my auntie Christina—who was only seventeen at the time—was killed in a road accident. It was almost like she had to die so that Ivo could live, or something. I think that’s an awful lot of deaths for one family—I mean, I really don’t think that’s normal. Unless you’re in Africa, maybe. And as if that wasn’t enough, after Ivo’s wife ran off and left Ivo with Christo, Great-uncle had his own car accident and lost the use of his legs. Still, despite his luck, which has got to be unusually bad, Great-uncle is pretty cheerful. Ivo, though, who has also had lots of bad luck (although he never knew his brothers, who died before he was born, so presumably he doesn’t miss them), is not cheerful. Gran says that he and his sister were very close—they were what she calls Irish twins, which means they were born less than a year apart—and he was never the same after she died. Although I imagine that having your mother die, and then a miracle cure, would also change you. Maybe he feels guilty about being the one to survive.
Whatever the reason, he’s not an easy person to live with. He’s got a terrible temper. I sometimes think of that when Great-uncle curses Rose for running off. Uncle Ivo’s said some nasty things to me, even when I was little and it wasn’t really fair. I used to get upset by him, but I don’t mind so much now. Mum once said that it must cut him up to see me—who was basically a mistake—healthy, when his own son and the only heir to the Janko name is so ill.

Later that night, I’m lying in the drop-down bed in Gran’s trailer. She sleeps at the end, on the big bed, and there’s a vinyl curtain that draws across between us. There’s only the two of us in this big trailer, while the other three are in Great-uncle’s smaller one. I suppose they’re used to being together. But I can’t sleep. After dinner, as I was taking Christo to put him to bed, Great-uncle said something to Gran about children, and the curse, and before the door shut, I heard her shush him and tell him not to be so stupid. But you do wonder, when so much bad stuff has happened. I found Ivo sitting in the other trailer, smoking and staring into space, although he pulled himself together when he saw me and Christo.

“All right, then?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“You not hungry?”

“No.”

“You looking forward to tomorrow?”

He shrugged. I can’t understand why he isn’t more excited about Lourdes. After all, he is living proof that it can work. He just smiled at Christo.

“You know, we’ve got to be careful. They bathe you in holy water.”

“Yeah . . . So?”

“We have to be careful he doesn’t catch cold. They wet your hair and everything. We’ve got to make sure he’s dry and warm immediately after. Bring some towels or something.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Ivo was kneeling on the carpet, getting bedding out of the drawer.

“Is that why you were in a mood? Because you’re worried?” I knew this was pushing it a bit. “He’s going to be fine. Look at you.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

The rain has stopped and a bright moon is shining on the window nearest me—it lights up the edge of the curtains, and a sickle of moonlight lies across my chest like a claw. And then one of Great-uncle’s gruesome stories swims into my mind—one of the saddest, most awful stories— called “The Illness Demons.” It says there are nine demons who cause all the diseases in the world—colds, stomachaches, eczema, everything. I can’t remember what all the demons are called, but I remember the one called Melalo, because he scared me the most. Melalo was the oldest child of the demon king and the fairy queen; he is a two-headed bird with sharp claws who tears out your heart and puts madness and violence in its place. Melalo is what causes people to murder and rape. I’ve broken into a sweat. I shift the curtain so that the claw shape becomes more of a blob. There’s another demon called Minceskro, who causes diseases of the blood, like the one Christo’s got. Maybe we should all be praying to her. Maybe I could pray to her, secretly.

I wonder whether—like the last time—one person has to die in order for someone else to get better. I don’t think that would be very Christian—although I know an eye for an eye is in the Old Testament. But Lourdes isn’t Old Testament, is it? It’s Mary, who’s definitely, I think, New Testament. And I don’t think Mary would demand a life for a life.

But if she did, say . . . I wonder, who would it be?

Would it be Great-uncle? Would it be me? Would I be prepared to die for Christo?