The students who’d been watching the fight now gathered together again, as the teachers left, and an immediate postgame analysis began. But Uchenna wasn’t particularly interested. She was watching the skinny kid as Mallon marched him off around the side of the school and out of sight. “Who was that?”
“A skanger,” said somebody behind Uchenna, and snickered.
Uchenna frowned. “Jimmy Garrity,” said somebody else off to one side, a tall brown-haired girl Uchenna didn’t know. “That Traveller kid that transferred in from Tallaght last month.”
Uchenna nodded at the brown-haired girl, then turned to scowl at the owner of the oh-so-smackworthy voice that had spoken first. Eamonn was standing there and peering past them, trying to get a last glimpse of Mallon and Jimmy Garrity as they vanished around the building, and of Brian Mayfield, who was being led off in the same direction by one of the other teachers. “Not a very nice word to use on somebody, Eamonn,” she said.
“Yeah, well he is,” Eamonn said, unrepentant. “Or a knacker, anyway.” It was another rude name for a Traveller, one that implied that he not only traded in old worn-out horses, but probably also chopped them up and boiled them down for glue.
Uchenna flushed hot with the stupid rudeness of it. “And you would know, of course,” Uchenna said, “being such a specialist in all the kinds of crimes the rest of us are supposed to commit.”
“Huh?”
Eamonn was trying to look innocent and unconcerned: a losing battle. Emer leaned toward Eamonn and got in his face. “Four, one, nine,” she said, distinct and scornful, as if trying to teach a three-year-old how to count. “Remember that? Or have you finally copped on that not everybody whose mam comes from Nigeria is an internet scammer? You plank.”
Some of the kids standing around them stared, for Emer wasn’t normally the kind to come out with lines like that. Eamonn tried to look casual. He didn’t make a very good job of it, however. From behind him, one of his friends, a guy named Mihaul, said, “Anyway, yer man there is a knacker. Everybody knows it.”
“He lives over in the bog,” said another boy, behind Mihaul: a tall dark-haired kid that Uchenna didn’t know. “The bog” in this case didn’t mean the toilet, but was the school name for the two rows of affordable housing over on the south side of Adamstown. “There’s like twelve of them in the house.”
“You sure?” Emer said. “It helps to be able to count.” The others around them brayed with surprised laughter— Emer wasn’t usually so caustic— and the kid she’d been talking about blushed and turned away.
Inside the school, the bell rang for the first class, and people started heading toward the door. Shortly Uchenna and Emer were left by themselves. “What started that, I wonder?” Uchenna said.
“Don’t know,” Emer said as they headed for the steps, “but I bet we’ll know everything about it by lunchtime.”
They went through the door, joining the streams of other students heading for their classrooms. “And what got into you?” Uchenna said. “You’re bitchy this morning.”
Emer shook her head. “They get on my nerves,” she said. “Anyway, I’m freaked out about the horses.”
“Why? You were the one who said they might be gone in the morning.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t really think it would happen! And Chen, I should have heard it happening. Where those horses were, it’s practically just outside my window! I don’t like thinking somebody got so close to my house with a trailer or whatever and neither me or my mom heard a thing. It creeps me out.”
Emer really did look worried. “But you just had the new alarm system put in,” Uchenna said. “Nobody’s going to get into your house without you knowing when that’s turned on.”
“Well…” Emer said. “I guess.” But she didn’t sound convinced.
The pace of movement in the corridor was picking up as people hurried faster to get to their classrooms. “Don’t worry about it right now,” Uchenna said, as they went into classroom 4-A. “We’ll ask around at lunch and see what we can find out.”
*
Three hours later, half the population of the school was in the ground-floor lunchroom—something like a hundred and fifty kids, all scattered among fifteen long tables and a group of round tables at the back of the room, near the big windows, where the sixth-formers sat. Those tables were off limits to the younger students, but they were allowed to mix freely among the long tables at the front end of the room, near the low, curtained stage area that was used for school assemblies too small to need the big assembly room.
Along with everybody else, Uchenna and Emer filed through the food service area on the inside wall of the room, picking up trays to push along the tubular steel ledge between them and the white-jacketed, paper-hatted “dinner ladies” who served the food. As usual, the food looked less than inspiring. It seemed that even having a brand new school didn’t ensure brand new cooking, and no matter what fresh and interesting things might be happening in food life elsewhere in the country, almost everything sitting in the big stainless-steel trays over the hissing steam tables looked and smelled traditionally Irish—that is, like it had been cooked way too long. There were floppy and suspicious-looking beef burgers in some mysterious brown sauce, and broccoli boiled until it had gone browny-green, as well as grilled chicken that looked either too burnt or too raw, and a salad accompanied by dribbly squirt bottles of some salad dressing that looked and (more scarily) smelled beige.
Uchenna looked over the options and thought wistfully of the pizza at home in the freezer, even if it’d be both day-old and defrosted by the time she got at it. Down at the end of the line, near the drinks dispensers and the milk cartons, there were (as usual) some film-wrapped sandwiches stacked up on a shelf: tuna salad, cheese and ham, and egg salad. Uchenna stood in front of them for several moments, trying to work out which ones looked least awful. She was having trouble understanding why sandwiches that had been made that morning somehow managed to look as if they’d been there for days: the edges of the sandwiches were already starting to curl, even inside the plastic wrap.
Behind her, Emer caught up, sliding a tray along that held a plate containing the floppy burger and some of the mystery sauce, along with some chips, which were somehow both flabby-looking and too brown. She glanced at the sandwiches, then at Uchenna. “Avoid the tuna,” Emer said. “They keep putting pickles in it.”
Uchenna made a face and shook her head in disbelief. Finally she sighed and pulled down a couple of the egg salad sandwiches. Surely there’s not much you can do to screw up egg salad…. She picked up a plastic bottle of mineral water and a napkin, and gave the lady at the “cash register” her student account card to swipe.
When the sandwiches had been paid for, Uchenna stood there for a moment looking around the room while she waited for Emer. There weren’t assigned lunch places, as Uchenna’s previous school had had: you sat pretty much where you pleased. She glanced around and saw spiky-haired Belle O Dalaigh and a couple of her friends sitting down at the bottom of the third long table along: there were a couple of spaces down at the end of the group before the next bunch of students, a gaggle of third-formers.
“Eames?”
“Yeah?” Emer was getting her card swiped.
“Over by Belle?”
“Yeah, sure.”
They went over when Emer was ready. Belle looked up at Uchenna and Emer and grinned at them. “Hey,” she said to the others, “it’s the Tank and the Yank.”
The greeting sounded crude, but Belle and her little crew were okay: they were in Uchenna’s and Emer’s class, and had been some of the first to get friendly with Uchenna when she came to the school. She and Emer sat down opposite each other at the end of the group and started to eat.
“Emer you poor wee child,” Belle said, “what’s that roadkill you’re eatin’?” She had a very strong midlands accent to start with, and she liked to turn it up even stronger when she was feeling goofy. Combined with her rather rude
mouth, this made her sound like somebody’s trashy country granny after a long night in the pub.
“Might have been part of a cow once,” Emer said, sounding rather resigned as she cut up the burger and started eating it. “Looked better than the chicken.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Belle said.
“Belle,” Uchenna said, “that fight this morning—”
Belle started laughing. “Yeah, wasn’t it great? Did you see the look on Brian’s face when Garrity knocked him down? Thought I’d lose the run of myself entirely. Truly severe!”
Uchenna had to smile a little, for Belle’s language veered so wildly between granny-Irish and newer slang that sometimes it was hard to understand her…not that Uchenna would ever have admitted that. “What started it?” Uchenna said.
Belle swore, though she did it under her breath, since there were teachers wandering around the lunchroom as usual. “Like anything needed to start it. Brian’s been bragging about how tough he is and how he could stomp on anybody no matter where they came from, even Tallaght.”
“Yeah,” said dark-haired Mary Morse, who was Belle’s best friend and was sitting next to her. “Where the schools’re so tough, even the arms on the desks have tattoos.”
The others snickered. Uchenna raised her eyebrows, amused by the line. Tallaght was a big sprawly town a few miles to the east of Adamstown. It had a big mall with a lot of old downmarket housing estates around it, and over time it had acquired a rough reputation. Drugs busts and carjackings and small-scale gang battles were an everyday thing there; half the kids who lived there seemed to carry knives, and (when they got drunk enough) they used them on each other frequently and with abandon. “And so when this little thin weed of a guy turns up, and he’s from Tallaght,” Belle said, “naturally Brian thinks—if that’s the word for what he does with his brain—Oh, look at the size of him, I can make myself look good for half price.”
Belle then produced a rude noise suggesting what she thought of the idea, and both Mary and Laura Conlon, who was sitting on the other side of Belle, giggled softly. “So the bold Brian’s been hanging around every morning waiting for a chance to prove to some of the older guys how tough he is,” Belle said. “Never really worked out. Teachers were in the wrong places, Garrity didn’t show up, or Brian turned up late, or Garrity turned up early. Finally, this morning, Brian got the timing right. Called Garrity a fecking knacker and knocked him down. Last thing he expected was that Garrity would get right up again and call him a brainless wanker, and knock him down.”
“Sorry I missed that,” Uchenna said, and she was. “What happened to them?”
“Serious detention for both,” Belle said. “Parents called in, assuming they can find Brian’s.”
Emer blinked at that. “Brian’s? Not Jimmy’s?” She would have assumed the parents of a Traveller family would have been harder to find, since their lifestyle usually involved going door to door selling people stuff, or trying to.
Mary shook her head. “Brian’s dad’s avoiding the Guards,” she said, her voice lowered. “There was some bar fight or something that they’re questioning people about—Blaise Morris was trying to tell me about it, but it got too complicated. Looks like Brian’s dad didn’t want to get asked about it, so he skipped town last weekend. Went up North, I think.”
Uchenna sucked in breath softly. The Guards were the Gardaí, the Irish national police. “His mum’s at work in Dublin somewhere, she won’t be able to get down till the end of the day,” Laura said. “So he’s stuck here until she comes to get him. Gonna be ugly—she’s pissed enough at his dad without Brian acting up too.”
Uchenna shrugged. “Serves him right,” she said. “Sounds like he had it coming. But listen, you guys hear everything that happens around here. Especially you, Belle. So what happened to the horses?”
Belle looked at Uchenna curiously. “What horses?”
“You didn’t hear? There were horses behind Emer’s house.”
“I heard the story,” Belle said, picking up an ignored half-sandwich from her plate, “but it was just a rumor, it turns out.”
“Was not!” Emer said. “We went to see them!”
“Come on,” Belle said, “you’re pulling my leg, right? Some kids went over to the field where they supposed to be, yesterday afternoon right after school, and there was nothing there. If there was ever anything there to start with. Everybody I talked to just said they heard about them from somebody else, and the kids who say they actually saw them aren’t the kind you’d usually believe.” She took a bite out of her sandwich. “I think somebody made it all up to get at Garrity. Poor kid can’t just have a normal life; everybody wants him to have tinker ponies in the back yard and busted-up cars in the front.”
Uchenna shook her head. “No way,” she said. “We saw the horses. Got in the same field with them. And it wasn’t that long after school. Which field were they supposed to have been in first?”
“That one over by Airlie, the one with the burnt-out car in it.”
Emer shook her head. “Wrong field,” she said. “They were behind my house. One of those little patches between the back of my circle and the old houses.”
Belle finished putting away the half sandwich and then shook her head. “Doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Anyway, it’d take time to move them that far. You’d think somebody would have seen it happening.”
“That’s what I thought this morning,” Emer said. “Or at least heard. They were there last night when I went to bed. Now—” She waved a hand in the air. “Poof! Gone.”
“Ooooo,” Belle said, making a scary-movie sound, “ghost horses! Kind of early for Hallowe’en, isn’t it Eames?”
Emer scowled. “Probably somebody stole them,” Mary said.
“If they weren’t stolen already,” said Laura.
“Some kind of scam,” Belle said, finishing the bottle of flourescent orange Lucasade she’d been drinking. “I’d stay away from them, assuming they’re not some kind of crazy story you two are cooking up.”
“Belle, come on!” Uchenna said. “I don’t waste my time with crazy stories.”
“No, you’re Miss Practical most of the time,” Belle said, “which is why it’d be such a great story if you were making it up. Everybody’d believe you.” She gave Uchenna a sidelong look. “Look, it’s okay, you can tell us if it’s not for real. We’ll keep it quiet.”
Uchenna was starting to get annoyed, but she did her best to keep it from showing. “It’s for real,” she said. “Why would I make something like this up? Or why would Emer? Anyway, one of those horses has me worried. She was really pregnant, and there wasn’t much to eat in that little field.”
“So if they’re gone now, somebody took them away to where there’s more food, maybe,” Laura said.
“I hope so,” Uchenna said. “It’s just that now I want to know where they are so I can find out if the mammy’s okay.”
Belle grinned. “Our own little soap opera,” she said. “You want me to ask around?”
“Sure, if you want,” Uchenna said. “Just don’t make a big deal about it.”
“Me? Never,” Belle said, glancing up at the clock. “Uh oh, getting short on time here. Gotta run.” She got up, and Laura and Mary got up with her.
Uchenna and Emer waved as the others went off to dispose of their lunch trays and left the lunchroom. “You know where they’re going, of course,” Emer said under her breath.
Uchenna nodded. There were always kids who liked to slip out of school before lunch period was over and sneak a smoke somewhere, usually across the street by the Spar. “I wish they wouldn’t,” Uchenna muttered. “The way people around here smoke after they get started, they’re gonna be dead when they’re forty.”
Emer sighed. “Yeah, well, I’m still worried about my house.”
Uchenna blew out an annoyed breath. “Eames, your house is going to be fine. You’ve got alarms all over the place. It’s the horses I’m wondering a
bout now! Listening to Belle, if I didn’t know better, I’d almost think we hallucinated them.”
Emer snorted. “Oh? And did I hallucinate the mud on my trainers?”
“Oh, so there was mud?” Uchenna said, and had to snicker.
All around them, kids were getting up as the last few minutes before the post-lunch classes passed by. “Yes there was,” Emer said, “and there’ll be plenty more on the hockey field.”
“So don’t wear your good trainers there,” Uchenna said. “Still meeting me?”
“Yeah,” Emer said. “Because afterwards we’re going to go out and look for those horses.”
“Yes we are,” Uchenna said. “And we’ll see what we can find out between now and then.”
*
But there was little to find. Three classes’ worth of note passing, very clandestine texting (because texting in class was forbidden), and good old-fashioned leaning from desk to desk and whispering, told Uchenna nothing except that nobody had actually seen any horses. Though everybody claimed to know somebody who had, or else they knew somebody who knew somebody who had… Uchenna got increasingly cranky over this as the afternoon went on, and their teacher wound up being very cutting with her when she called on Uchenna for an answer later on and Uchenna hadn’t been paying attention to what was happening in the class. This in turn made Uchenna angrier still, so that when the bell rang at last for the end of the day, her mood was actively foul.
Mrs. Leenane was annoyed with her too, later, after Uchenna got changed into her field kit—the blue jersey T-shirt and the short team hockey skirt—and headed out to meet with the rest of the team in the smaller of the two Adamstown parks, two blocks away. It was their last practice before the game with the team from Presentation College in Naas the next day, and there was some tension in the air as the team divided itself up into red and blue sides, tying the little colored pinnie vests on over their field kit. But the rest of the team was tense for different reasons than Uchenna was: the mystery of the missing horses and the bad afternoon still had her fuming. She kept missing the ball, and Mrs. Leenane screamed at her a number of times, “What’s the matter with you, O’Connor, are you too mad to see straight? Mad won’t help you tomorrow afternoon! Cool yourself down and concentrate on the goal!”