Uchenna's Apples (2 page)

The scrum down in the schoolyard was starting to thin out somewhat now as kids flowed out of the gates, or got into cars and were driven away. Uchenna grimaced at that, for most of the kids at St. John’s lived in Adamstown, and would therefore not have to walk much more than a mile or two to get home.
Do their parents really think they’re gonna get mugged going home?
she wondered. Oh, yeah, occasionally someone got stupid about showing off a new cellphone and got it taken off them, or they got knocked off their bike: there were always little gangs and cliques in town that liked making people’s lives miserable. But that kind of thing was rare. Mostly this was a pretty good place to live—

The door to her left swung open. A short girl came through, her long pale blonde hair streaming back over her shoulders in the sucked-in wind that poured past as she came through the door.

“Emer!”

Emer Daley’s head snapped around. “Chen! There you are.”

Emer hurried over to her, slinging her bag over her shoulder. She always looked so little to Uchenna these days: maybe it was something to do with her growth spurt.
Delicate
, Uchenna thought:
that’s the word for her.
Emer was wide-eyed, fine-featured, fragile-looking, maybe even a little on the skinny side, though God knew there was nothing wrong with her appetite when you got her near a burger place or a chippie: in the presence of anything fried she turned into the human version of a Great White. “Eames, where were you? Thought you were going to meet me here as soon as we got out?”

“I’m here now,” Emer said.

“Took you long enough! What were you doing?”

“Had to stop,” Emer said. “Gossip.”

Uchenna gave Emer an odd look. Emer was shy with most people: it was one of the first things Uchenna had noticed about her when she moved here, possibly even one of the things that had drawn them together. But then Emer was half American, and Americans weren’t supposed to be shy. Either way, gossip wasn’t something Emer normally paid much attention to. “Because usually it’s about me,” she would say. “And I know the truth better than they do anyway…” But Emer’s eyes were glinting with excitement. This, too, was unusual for her: Emer put a lot of emphasis on looking cool and laid back at all times, this also apparently being part of the American thing, or the way she handled it here.

“Well, okay,” Uchenna said, “so gossip from who?”

“Donal and Ruairi,” Emer said.

Uchenna put her eyebrows up at that, for Donal and Ruairi were two fifth-form boys who were best friends and who seemed to share a gift for finding out about any interesting news as soon as it happened. “Oh, ho,” Uchenna said, dropping her voice and glancing around her. “You were eavesdropping.”

“Well, how else would I have heard it, it’s not like they’re going to hunt
me
down and tell me!”

“Fine. So what is it?”

Emer glanced around. The few other kids who had been standing on the top step had gone off. She bent her head down close by Uchenna’s. “We’ve got tinkers!” she whispered.

“What?” Uchenna looked around. “Where?”

“Not here, you think they’d come
here
so close to the school and the shops? They’d just get arrested or something.”

Uchenna shrugged. This being Ireland, there were always Travelling people around: families who lived in caravans or mobile homes as their ancestors had for sometimes hundreds of years, and didn’t want to settle down into houses. They did all kinds of casual work—fixing leaky roofs and paving driveways, recovering old slates and fireplaces from demolished houses, breaking up old cars for parts. But the “settled community” tended to look at them suspiciously a lot of the time because Travellers often made a real mess of the places where they were camped, and a lot of them were supposed to be thieves who’d steal things from people’s yards whenever they could. Some Travellers were really poor: some of them looked poor, but were really rich from the honest (or dishonest) work they did. “Well,
what?”
Uchenna said. “Oh no! Don’t tell me the playing field’s full of caravans all of a sudden! Or the park—” That was something that happened without warning in some parts of the country: a park or field would suddenly turn without warning into a gathering place for Travelers, crowded with ramshackle caravans and RVs, and it would take months for the county council to get rid of them and get everything cleaned up again.

“No, it’s okay,” Emer said as they cut across the corner into Uchenna’s street, past the big boulder set in the ground that had the words ADAMSTOWN CIRCLE WEST cut into it. “Stop looking so shocked! Your precious hockey field is safe.”

“Well, it better be, we have a game with Naas on Saturday,” Uchenna said. “So where are the tinkers, then?”

“Nobody knows.”

“You are turning into Mystery Girl all of a sudden,” Uchenna said, giving Emer a weird look. “If nobody knows where the tinkers are, then how do we know they’re here in the first place?”

“It’s the horses,” Emer said.

Uchenna stopped where she was on the sidewalk and looked at Emer. “Horses
here
?” she said. “Oh, wait a minute. Is this some horses from one of the big stud farms out behind the development? What’s that big one’s name?”

“Airlie Stud,” Emer said. “Nope. These are not any of those fancy purebreds. Donal and Ruairi say they’re tinker ponies.”

Uchenna shook her head. “Okay, so where are they?”

“Out behind my house!” Emer said. “Well, almost. You know where the second field back is, on the right side of my circle? In there. We should go see.”

Uchenna looked at her friend a little oddly as they headed down the steps together. “Didn’t think you were all that much of a horse person,” Uchenna said.

“I’m not! But I’ve never seen any of these up close. Can’t wait.”

“You’re never going to go in the
field
with them?” Uchenna said, mystified by the sudden interest.

“I am! I’ve always wanted to see some of these shaggy ones up close. Now they’re right behind my house, almost. It’s like they’re mine.” Emer was actually grinning, and those pale blue eyes of hers were alight with excitement as the breeze whipped her hair around. “Nobody can say anything to me if I go look at them. And anyway, if we don’t do it now, they might be gone in the morning!”

“Yeah, they might,” Uchenna said. “And don’t you think you should be careful? Because whatever tinkers put them there might get pissed off at you if they see you messing with them.”
And there might be trouble,
Uchenna thought. Traveling people had a reputation for being violent sometimes, especially when settled people meddled in their doings.

“Well, I’m not gonna mess with them. But anyway, there’s no sign of any tinkers around right now,” Emer said. “Which is really weird.”

“Yeah, you’d be right there,” Uchenna said, pausing for a moment in the school gateway. From off to their left, in the distance, came the clear, carrying
honk
of a northbound train slowing down to come into the Adamstown station: up on the platform she could see some of the kids from school, waiting to catch the train into Dublin or up toward the shopping centre at Tallaght and the Luas tram line there.

“You think anybody else is over there right now?” Uchenna said, considering.

“I don’t know,” Emer said. “But if they are, they won’t stay forever. It’ll start getting dark in a while, and when it does, we can just slip over there. I have a way back into that field, a few houses down from mine. They don’t have a wall: it’s a chainlink fence, and it’s loose on one side. We can just walk through. Or there are about five other ways to get back there.”

Uchenna turned and paused to look both ways down the street in front of the school, making sure no late school-run SUVs were bearing down on them: then the two of them went across. “Well, I guess I was going to see how these horses’ knees go,” Uchenna said. “I can do that looking through the fence.”

“Oh, come on, you know you want to go in the field with them!”

They turned down the street and headed westward down the sidewalk, past the plateglass-windowed stores and the multistory apartments in the town-center part of Adamstown, toward the housing-development side. “In the
mud
? Girl, you are insane.”

“There’s no mud!”

“It’s a field,” Uchenna said, quoting her dad. “There’s always mud.” But at the same time, she was thinking,
If I don’t go in there with her, she’s gonna get herself trampled or something. Two of us will be safer than one. Especially if somebody comes along. And if you’re going to be in a field with horses, maybe you should bring them something—

That was when the idea hit her. “Okay,” Uchenna said. “I’ll go with you. But we have to go to my house first.”

“Why?”

“I have a plan.”

“What? Tell me!”

“No,” Uchenna said.

“Yes!”

“No!”

And they kept saying
Yes!
and
No!
to each other—with occasional breaks for laughter and argument, and some discussion of the day at school—for something like ten of the fifteen minutes it took them to walk the mile past the town center to the place where the biggest housing developments started. They were both lucky to live in two of the largest and oldest ones, but then both their sets of parents were pretty well off, like a lot of other people in Adamstown—that being mostly how you were able to afford to live there. There was, of course, some so-called “socially affordable” housing off to one side, closer to the town: poky-looking little pebble-dashed two bedroom houses squashed together side by side in long terraces, very flimsy and cheap-looking next to the big handsome four- and five-bedroom houses scattered around the outside of the Adamstown development and the big apartments concentrated by the train station. Uchenna had heard her dad saying quietly to her mam that he thought the socially-affordable houses had been built badly on purpose, so that the developer—forced to build them by the government, and now apparently unable to sell them—would eventually have an excuse to pull them down and build something more expensive on the same site.

On this side of town, though, the houses were big and separate from one another, with large green yards and attached two-car garages, or separate ones with carports between them and the houses. There were three big circles back here with houses arranged all around them: Uchenna’s was the third one, the middlemost circle which was also furthest back on the westward side. Right out the back of the circle, between the houses and past the side walls that separated their back yards, you could just get a glimpse of the high concrete wall that separated the circle from the empty green field behind it. Away westward, past the fields and the hedgerows that separated them, a long low bumpy green-tinged line could be seen: the silhouette of the little line of hills separating this part of County Dublin from the eastward side of County Meath.

As they headed back into the circle, Uchenna could see her mam’s big Toyota Landcruiser parked in the driveway already. “Is she off today?” Emer said. “Usually she’s not here yet.”

“No, she just gets done faster sometimes on Thursdays,” Uchenna said. “Some of the people she takes care of in the hospital have dialysis today, so they come in really early in the morning and she sees them then.”

They swung up past the SUV and headed for the back door, up at the side of the house before the garage. Most of the houses in the circle looked pretty much alike: a big living room and kitchen and utility room and one bedroom and bathroom downstairs, then three more bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs, with the upstairs windows sticking out under separate dormers from the blue slate roof. Uchenna’s house was the only one in the circle that was painted white: it had been the showhouse for the development, the first one built, and it had older plantings around it than the other houses, as well as a trimmed hedge on each side instead of the concrete-block walls that the newer houses had.

She rattled the latch of the back door and found it unlocked. Uchenna pushed the door in. The utility room was humming with a wash running in the washing machine: a couple of plastic laundry baskets full of dirty clothes stood around on the tile floor, waiting their turn to be washed. “Mam?” Uchenna said.

“In here, sweet,” said her mother from the kitchen.

They went in. The kitchen was bigger than those in some of the other houses in the circle, partly because it had been an office as well when the house was still the showhouse. A round dining table stood by the rear window that looked out on the back yard: toward the front of the kitchen, the breakfast bar looked through into the living room. In there, the big widescreen TV was showing one of the local TV station’s afternoon talk shows, where a man was busily cooking while the two female hosts looked on. Relaxing against the breakfast bar, sipping a mug of tea and idly watching the TV while holding the wireless phone against her head, was Uchenna’s Mam. Flora Alele Debe-McConnor was easily six feet tall: a little broad-shouldered, but otherwise slender and high-cheekboned, with a gorgeous smooth dark complexion and beautiful eyes that were tilted up at the corners. This catlike tilt often made Uchenna’s dad call her mam Kitty or Flowerpuss, which in turn occasionally caused Uchenna’s mam to whack her dad in the head with a pillow or pretend to strangle him with her stethoscope. She was still wearing her white medical coat from work, and hadn’t gotten around to taking off the bright patterned scarf that she had put on over her cornrows for the wards.

“Hi Uchenna’s Mam!” Emer said.

“Hallo Emer dear,” Uchenna’s Mam said, glancing over at them and smiling. “You two are early today. No sports?”

“Not till tomorrow, Mam,” Uchenna said, dumping her schoolbag on the back table and then going to hug her mam. “Hockey practice then. You on hold?”

“Waiting for daddy,” Uchenna’s mam said. “He said maybe we would go out for dinner tonight. But I think he has to work late. His software team just got broken up again, he’s got to put some new people into the open positions…” She sighed and turned away to lean the back of her against the breakfast bar instead of the front. “What’s the homework like tonight, girls?”