CHAPTER 1
All of this begins on a hot afternoon when a dusty white Transit van winds down a green-hedged lane and drives into a rather tatty gypsies’ site known as Elm Hill Caravan Park. In this park there’s a mixture of several static homes and an assortment of travelling caravans. Of these perhaps only two would make the cut onto Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. There’s a rake of vehicles – a couple of trucks, a very shiny motorhome, a lorry with a tarmac roller in the back – that are parked outside their respective homesteads. In the middle of this acre site there’s a shower block and toilets and two mountains of mixed metals; bits of cars, fridges, washing machines, tumble dryers, copper pipes, drums of cables from BT and several solar panels. Around the perimeter of this atchen-tan there’s a crumbling chain-linked fence supported by concrete posts, where a tethered pony – Harry Potter emblazoned and named – is flicking its tail at the nuisance of flies, and casting envy towards two free-running Exmoors. There’s a couple of other things to notice about Elm Hill Caravan Park. One is that it’s not on a hill, and the other is that Dutch elm disease annihilated the trees a generation ago.
But for now it’s three o’clock on an over-warm summer’s day and a couple of stringy dogs are scavenging around the rubbish bins, and a couple of stringy boys, kitted out in red Man U shirts, are kicking a football to each other. The Transit van, driven on site a little too fast, scuffs up a wave of dust as it skids to a halt. This intrusion brings football play to a halt and draws the boys’ attention as they watch the van’s side door slide open, the cab doors swing open and half-a-dozen men climb out and stretch their legs and pass around the fags. All of them look a little unkempt, on the edge of scruffiness; it’s obvious that they’re bona fide paid-up members of the travelling community.
After a couple of minutes of waiting, the driver, a bit on the impatient side and looking at his watch, gives a beep on his horn. This brings to life the sauntering approach of two more men and upsets a few more dogs who enter into a mad barking competition.
Of the two approaching we’ll start with Danny Delaney. He’s of middling height but compact with long arms, a bald head and a fighter’s face. Which is what he is. He’s a warrior of the ring with the flattened features to match and he’s fighting at the venue that these men of the road are subscribing to. His companion and cousin is Silas Penfold and he’s the opposite of Danny. Tall and lanky with spiky dark hair and a voice like a rasping of iron and he’s using it to call loudly, ‘Hurry up, Jimmy, we’re running late.’
This Jimmy he’s calling to is his brother, the last of the pick-ups, and if anyone’s going to have a leading role in events you can see it would be this Jimmy. He’s your typical Jack-the-lad, a lovable rogue; all the clichés that fit a six-foot-plus, dark-haired David Essex lookalike. He’s in the doorway of his static home saying goodbye to his missus. It’s a long goodbye, a bit more than a kiss and cuddle. Mind he can’t be blamed for this because Jimmy’s woman, Zilla, is a hell of a looker. She’s got a good figure, dyed-blonde hair, tight-fitting jeans. (It’s almost impossible to believe that she’s mother to a fifteen-year-old; a boy who’s taller than herself, and just under half her age, and who is, at this moment with his cousin Carter, hiding on the edge of a cornfield, sighting a gun barrel onto a descending pigeon.) But anyway, it’s still a goodbye but she’s loath to let him go.
‘There’s always drama, Jimmy. You know there’s always trouble.’
Jimmy promises, ‘Not this time Zilla.’
Then he slowly detaches himself from his woman as Silas delivers a more impatient, more grating, ‘For God’s sake get yer arse in gear, my pralla.’
His voice may sound a little on the harsh side but Silas can be excused because he’s been chasing up Jimmy for more years than he cares to remember. A decade of age gives him a rank he never asked for and a responsibility he didn’t want. But it’s all done with the thick blood of brotherly love.
And now Jimmy, getting that arse in gear, joins the bus of men on their journey to an illegal dust-up where Danny’s fighting third man on in a six-rounder.
Jimmy says to Danny, ‘I hope you’re good for it, ’cos I’ve put my social on you.’
There’s nods all around because there’s assorted lots of Jobseeker’s Allowance, Housing Benefits and even a successful – although much rarer – Universal Credit beneficiary included in the punters. That’s a fair amount of social security monies resting on Danny’s battered nose, and Danny Delaney, thinking himself the local hero and thumping his chest like Tarzan does in those old black-and-white films, roars: ‘Yer vonga’s safe on me, boys.’
He takes a mighty pull on his cigarette, suppresses a cough in his throat and finishes with a husky, ‘Best condition I ever been in. Best condition ever.’
The driver does a quick poll count, fires up the engine, whacks his toe down and the van leaves like it came in – a squealing of tyres and a cloud of dust. (This journey’s started, a journey that leads to a long farm track in the middle of nowhere, to a huge old barn where there’s a canvas square, roped into a ring for the dubious practising of the Noble Art of Self Defence.) The second the vehicle has left the site, the would-be football stars resume their interrupted practise of precision passing and their dreamings of Old Trafford.
Zilla has watched the van leave and she’s praying to God there’ll be no trouble but she also knows that this mob is not exactly a UN peacekeeping corps. She’s still making her wishes when an older woman – old, really – joins Zilla in company and says:
‘Don’t worry, my Zilla.’
Now this woman is Meg and she uses the ‘my’ because one way or another she seems to be related to everyone on the site. It’s like she’s the elder of these people. The authority. The one they come to for advice or more. But if you thought Silas had a rasp for a voice, this woman’s speech is a couple more notes down the scale. And it fits the way she looks. And her name fits as well because she’s the gypsy crone of the storybook.
She’s dark, she’s thin, she’s of an indeterminate age. She wears a pale-red shawl around her shoulders and a scarf around her head. She’s of the type that could stop you in the street, bony fingers clutching your arm and fixing you with a glittering eye. Like she really knows something about you. Like she could really offer some insight into your life if you crossed her palm with silver. So when Meg says, ‘Don’t worry, my Zilla’, it should offer Zilla some crumbs of comfort, but Zilla says, ‘You know what they’re like, Meg.’ Meg nods because it’s true and she’s thinking that perhaps there are some worries in the offing.
From across the site there’s growls and barks and curses and the rattle of a dustbin as two dogs have a bit of a set-to. One of these scrappers belongs to Meg, and her voice cracks like a whip as she shouts ‘Wilma’ three times before her dog comes slinking to her in resentful obedience, with its tail between its legs. This black-and-white dog’s a cross between a Jack Russell – always up for some aggro – and a collie, and she’s inherited the best, or worst, of both breeds. She’s not exactly small but she’s clean and pretty and long-legged, with a turn of speed that would rival a lurchers. Also this jukal is so close to Meg that in the days of witch-finding someone would have called her out as a familiar.
There’s not much else goes on at Elm Hill Park, except that this hot day slides into warm evening as the site settles down for the night. Windows light up, televisions go on, mothers holler for their chavees to come in. Mikey clumps in the door with three pigeons and the shotgun. Meg calls home the errant Wilma who’s been causing drama at the bins again. There’s also a few shouts and a fair bit of screeching from a caravan where a newly married couple are living. It’s one of those volatile relationships where the honeymoon period is short-lived. The marriage hasn’t even made the change of the moon before they’re either fighting or loving. Tonight it’s fighting and it ends when there’s a mighty slamming of the caravan door and hubby streaks to his van like a long dog. He’s bent over the steering wheel and tearing away as the wife, adjusting her lower dress and following him out, screams at his getaway:
‘You bastard.’
Then to everyone within hearing distance she laments very loudly. ‘Waited till I was on the loo. The bastard.’
But he’s gone and she won’t see him until after the pubs have shut and that’s when they’ll probably continue their battle, this unlikely Romeo and Juliet.
From Silas’s homestead there’s a flash of a torch as Carter – dead spit of his father, and Mikey’s pigeon partner – walks his whippet out. And there’s also the flare of a match as Carter takes his chance for a few crafty drags as he’s on the rounds for an absent Silas. He checks the sheds are locked, checks out the building on their patch. One of which is Danny’s gym, a rough and ready room, concrete floor, rubber mats, couple of benches, several pairs of boxing gloves and a heavy bag suspended from a roof beam.
Carter can’t resist this temptation. He pinches out his cigarette and does a whirlwind round on the bag. Then catching his breath, he relights his dog-end and locks the door. Now the securities are done he thinks he might have an hour on Fortnite in his bedroom. Or at least until his mother calls for lights out.
That’s just a quick glimpse around Elm Hill and it’s more interesting, for tonight at least, to spend some time with Meg, and she’s sitting in her shiny motorhome, the one we got a glimpse of earlier. It’s still warm and the door is open to the night and Meg’s at a small table – a bottle of Bell’s whisky and a tumbler at her elbow – lit by a single lamp. She’s cupping her hands around a clouded crystal ball, set upon a square of green baize, and Meg’s tutting from her mouth and shaking her head as she stares into it. ‘Nothing,’ she says to Wilma, who’s curled up on the seat beside her. ‘There’s nothing.’
She strokes the crystal, taps the crystal and then leans back into her chair and takes a swig from her tumbler. She looks really pissed off.
She’s about to become more so because outside in the dark and shadows there’s an evil black cat on the prowl for a killing. It’s a huge slinking animal, a feral pirate with yellow eyes and teeth like a tiger’s. This cat’s afraid of nothing and no one and its curiosity draws it into the doorway. And then its great head is peering through the opening and its ears flatten and its great pink mouth gapes open to hiss at Wilma.
Wilma’s instantly onto this and even before her first shrill bark reaches Meg, the jukal has taken the shortest route. She’s scrabbled over the table, toppled whisky bottle and glass and started the crystal ball rolling. Meg’s eyes are between the dog and cat and she doesn’t see the milky, cloudy sphere rolling into free fall until it’s too late. Meg curses out a blast of indelicate language directed to an almighty bust-up of snarls and growls that’s taking place on her doorstep.
She leaves them to it as she stoops to recover her glass orb of fortune. But as she rescues it, cradling it in her skinny fingers, the crystal shivers and clears into bright pictures. It seems the thump onto the floor has knocked some life into it. A blasphemy of ‘Christ’ joins ‘Jesus’ from Meg’s mouth at what she sees is forming inside the crystal. There’s a hundred images, a thousand images. There’s images that will sneak into her mind during the day and images that will take her dreams in the night.
Meg draws her hands over the glass, wipes them away, sighs deeply and pours herself a hefty replenishment of the Bell’s. And then she sits, with a sulking Wilma now confined under the table, and concentrates on what she’s searching for. Five minutes go by. Ten minutes go by, and then a scene shimmers into her sight, settles into a view of an illegal prize-fight in a big old barn down a rough farm track. Meg watches for a while longer and then slowly shakes her head and thinks that Zilla was more than right.
CHAPTER 10
At Elm Hill the beautiful Zilla is being lifted gently, lovingly, into a bed that still holds a little of her fragrance, a residue of the warmth of her life. She’s being lifted in by Silas and Danny and to say they’re upset would be playing things down to zero. Silas can’t get past muttering, ‘The bastards. The bastards,’ over and over again under his breath. Danny just shakes his head in time with the words. Then, alone with Zilla, Meg lifts a quilt over her, covers her body and her wounded heart. Meg sits beside Zilla, strokes her face, smooths her hair. And she talks to her of Jimmy and Mikey and how Zilla’s not to worry about them and how, one day, they’ll all be together again. Then she kisses Zilla softly on her cheek and gently closes the bedroom door on beauty and the stillness of death.
Mikey, the part-orphaned chavo, is standing bewildered outside his home. There’s smears and spottings of his mother’s blood on the steps, and he’s staring at them like he can’t believe what’s happened. Carter, tall and lanky cousin that he is, has his arm around Mikey’s shoulders and he’s talking quietly to him. But it doesn’t seem as though Mikey understands or even hears the words being spoken. Of course, there’s the other Travellers here – there’s nothing like a murder to get people out of bed. Romeo and Juliet are among the scene of sad, shocked faces who whispered into silence as Zilla was carried to her bed, and when a stunned, bloodied Jimmy Penfold was stretched out in Fred and Emma Flowers’ park home, ruining their sheets and mattress. (Emma’s pretending that it doesn’t matter but secretly and guiltily, because she’s extremely house-proud, she’s wishing Jimmy was lying next door where they’re so mauzey a bit of blood and gore wouldn’t make much difference.) There always seems to be an unholy amount of bleeding from a head wound and Jimmy’s sticky mass of reddening hunnel hides the fact that the wound is a flesh one. There may be a newly constructed runway over the top of his poll, and a concussion to his brain, but there’s no deep damage. Nothing that a man skilled in treating injuries on the battlefield couldn’t put right as a matter of course. So although not badly hurt, Jimmy Penfold must receive medical attention and Meg’s slipped away to make an early morning call to Captain Surgeon (rtd) Benjamin Day.
And at this time of the day, where else would he be found except on his smart patio at his smart house on a smart estate. It’s breakfast time al fresco and the girls are eating toast and marmalade – and Herself is already on her third cigarette of the day when the phone rings and one of the girls – Penny the eldest – beats her sister through the patio doors in the very important race to be first to answer.
Penny picks up the phone, politely recites the family’s number and then asks, ‘To whom do you wish to speak?’ in a perfect parody of her mother. Posh Penny listens and then reverts to type as she shouts very loudly, ‘It’s for you, Dad.’ And Dad, Captain B. Day, gets up from the table, takes the phone from her sticky little fingers and says,
‘Hello?’
‘Kushti duvus, drabengro.’ He answers immediately, automatically in the rokkering that nowadays he doesn’t hear or speak that often.
‘Kushti duvus, Meg.’
He says it at normal pitch but in the quiet of this morning it carries to Vanessa who freezes mid-drag on her Silk Cut. That woman again. So soon? She looks at Benjamin sharply; she may not know what he’s saying but recognises the intensity of his listening. She knows it can only mean one thing – trouble.
Inside of ten minutes, Benjamin’s in his car with his medical bag – both of them belted to their seats. Vanessa is not looking best pleased as she lights a cigarette off the stub of her last one and asks, ‘Will you be long?’ through his driver’s window.
‘Can’t say, Vanessa.’
In exasperation, she says, ‘You don’t have to go.’
‘You know how it is, they’re my family.’
She wants to scream at him, ‘And we’re your family too,’ but she doesn’t because she’s a polite well-bred lady who just happened to marry into one of those dirty, low-down, didikai families. This isn’t strictly true because she didn’t just happen to marry him. Theirs is a long story that weaves together the lives of a colonel’s daughter and a brave medical doctor. But it’s enough to know for now that he’s on call to Meg; she has a private line to her personal physician.
The connection to Meg started on a stormy afternoon over forty years ago. It’s sultry and hot and the world’s been waiting for the weather to break. Which it does with a vengeance. The heavens open and the rain bounces off the trailer roofs of this Travellers’ site in the middle of not-so-sunny Sussex by the sea. The rain also bounces off the roof of an open tin shed where there’s a pot of strong, stewed tea, along with tinned milk, sugar, crusty loaf and a melting saucer of butter, sitting atop of a forty-gallon drum. Lounging in this shelter from the storm is Eddie and Marion Day and two of their many brood, Jack and Jill (that’s not funny for the chavees). There’s also Meg, and this Meg of forty-odd years ago, is a bit of a looker. She’s got meat on her bones and her hair is raven black. At Meg’s side is Wilma’s great- great- (God knows how many greats) grandmother.
Eddie Day says, ‘But Meg, you know how difficult it is for the likes of us.’
Marion Day says, ‘I’m worried for him; if he goes he won’t know no one.’
What Marion Day is concerned about is that the future Captain Surgeon Benjamin Day, barely eleven -years old, has been offered a scholarship to a well-known school – a public school that encourages public duty. The boy’s headmaster has recognised the potential of a young Traveller boy, nurtured him to the top of the form and put him forward for this once in a lifetime chance. But what Marion and Eddie Day are also worried about is affording the expense of this strange new world. There’s too many mouths to feed, too many bodies to clothe and money is beyond scarce for them. But it’s not scarce for Meg and she quietly takes the reins for provision, adopts the cost. And so for Benjamin Day, it’s not a life of field work through the seasons, the cold wet, the hot dry, the brewing-up under the bor, the knocking on doors of the kennas. He’ll rub shoulders with a different sort of people and he’ll step in and out of his different lives. But Benjamin Day is of the type who will never forget where he comes from and that the helping works both ways.
On call, Captain Surgeon Benjamin Day pulls into Elm Hill Caravan Park in his shiny Volvo and takes his bag of tricks into the Flowers’ home. There, laying on the once clean sheets, his head a mess of bloody matted hair, Jimmy, with the worst headache in all the universe, is moaning softly. What follows is a cutting away of hair down the pathway of the bullet’s passage, a gentle washing and cleansing of the wound, a potent injection, and Jimmy is sleeping like a baby.
Not sleeping like a baby is Frank McFarlane – Gingerman to everyone that knows him on account of his hair colour – because he, like Zilla, is in eternal sleep, but his is for a more accidental reason.
The last day of Gingerman’s life, two weeks before, began fairly ordinarily when his alarm went off at six and his wife, short and a bit on the plump side, with a flare of red hair, mumbles,
‘Ohhh, turn it off.’
Mrs Gingerman is on the plump side because she’s pregnant. Again. There’s already, in the bedroom next door, two curly-haired, freckle-flecked boys soundly sleeping. In the room next to them, two curly-haired, freckle-flecked girls are also sleeping soundly.
Gingerman goes down to the kitchen and boils up the kettle while he’s cutting up his sandwiches for work. Then he makes two cups of coffee and carries them up to where his wife is sitting up in bed, savouring a few minutes’ quiet before the kids wake up and squabbles start. They share the five minutes of peace.
She says, ‘You won’t be late back?’
He’s a delivery driver and he has a run to Newcastle.
‘’Bout six, if I’m lucky.’
What they don’t know is that he’ll never be back and these words that he’s saying now will be the last she hears from him. And the light kiss on her lips will never happen again. (She’ll kiss him once more but it’ll be when he’s so cold to touch it makes her shiver.)
Then he’s down the stairs, the front door shuts behind him, the van starts in the drive and his last day ticks remorselessly onwards.
Mrs Gingerman comes downstairs and lays out four bowls of cornflakes. She calls her brood to breakfast and then puts her hand to her belly because she feels a kick from the unborn. She wishes Mr Gingerman could have felt it before he went to work but she’ll tell him tonight, and he’ll put his hand on her stomach and they’ll both hope to feel it together.
But they won’t.
All this is happening barely a dozen miles from Elm Hill Caravan Park. In fact they’re in the same local paper area – the Boarston Bugle – so the did and Gingerman families read and share the same news. Also television’s Spotlight falls on places they know, people they know. But they don’t know each other and probably never will.
Mr Gingerman takes the M5 and then the M6 to deliver machine parts to a suburb of Newcastle that’s not important, and also what’s not important is the rest of his day until he’s fifteen miles from home on his return journey.
It’s a cool day for May and there’s a misted rain sweeping into the afternoon; visibility on the road isn’t that great. Gingerman has the radio on loudly – Steve Wright in the Afternoon – and the heater’s set low, pushing a gentle sleepy warmth around the cab. He’s following in the slipstream of a monster lorry with Polish plates that’s throwing up dense clouds of spray. This lorry’s in the middle lane to overtake a Land Rover that’s towing a horse trailer that’s glued to sixty miles per hour in the slow lane.
Now Gingerman might have avoided his fate if an old biddy, who’s braved the fast lane for the first time on a hundred-mile journey, hadn’t found herself doing eighty mph. There’s a black Jag up her arse pushing her on and she panics, just enough to pull sharply in front of the Polish juggernaut which has to hit the brakes and . . . it’s wet and slick and the wheels lock. It draws the vehicle into a snaking skid that sideswipes the horsebox. All of this happens in a couple of blinks of the eye and Gingerman misses the first blink because he’s doing what so many do when they’re driving; he’s on his mobile. It’s not even an important call; it’s some prat trying to sell him an upgrade.
What Gingerman has to briefly worry about is trying to avoid the rapidly slowing melee in front of him. But he clips the left-hand side of the lorry trailer and takes the back of the horsebox on his front wing. That impact crushes the wing onto his tyre which blows out like a cannon shot. And this takes away what little control Gingerman has and the van, now broadside on to the road, begins the initial roll of three roof-denting, glass shattering turnovers at the end of which Gingerman will be no more of this mortal earth. Meanwhile the old biddy has sailed on, oblivious to the chaos unfolding in her rea. . .
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