Uchenna had no choice but to do just that, since all the rest of the people on her team, especially Joyce Donnelly who she really liked and enjoyed playing hockey with, were getting increasingly annoyed with her. All right, let’s get serious, she had to keep saying to herself: they depend on me, I’m the biggest girl on the team, and if I don’t get straight tonight about what plays I’m supposed to be part of, we’re going to tank tomorrow. All the same, between plays, while Mrs. Leenane was screaming at the others—she was an equal-opportunity screamer, and did not discriminate on grounds of race, religion or academic ability—Uchenna found her attention drawn again and again through the slowly falling dusk toward the northwestern side of the park and the view beyond it. The view was blocked by the trees that separated the park from the street, and by the houses between here and the fields—Emer’s house, among many others. But past there was the field they had been in last night, and Uchenna kept thinking, Whoever took those horses away has to have left some kind of trace. Tracks or something. The ground was pretty soft. If there was a car, a trailer, they’d have to have left some sign…
“O’Connor!” screamed Mrs. Leenane as Uchenna was lining up on a particularly juicy shot into the red side’s goal. “Less of the million-mile stare, please, more of the hundred-yard one, toward the goal?!”
Oh come on, I wasn’t even looking that way! Uchenna thought furiously, spotting the hole in the other side’s defense and whacking the ball straight through it. The ball streaked into the net, only very narrowly missing poor Deirdre Mallon, who stood there looking shocked as it shot past her.
“Nice, but sheer luck!” Mrs. Leenane screamed. “Lucky shot!” The rest of the team broke out in sardonic applause, though the irony was pointed at Mrs. Leenane: she never really believed that any of her team members could actually think their way to a goal instead of just slapping the ball around, which was all she was capable of herself. Uchenna, grinning at her teammates, simply bowed, acknowledging the clapping, and then straightened up again, holding the hockey stick up like a bishop holding up his crozier in benediction toward the team. “Bless you, my children, thank you…”
Over at the edge of the hockey field, Uchenna could see various people hanging over the chain link fence, watching the practice. One of them, standing by herself, was slight and had long blond hair. Emer had been home and changed into jeans and a rusty-black windbreaker and—Uchenna had to snort with laughter—a pair of green rubber “wellie” boots. “All right,” Leenane was shouting, “all right, that’s it for tonight, we’re in okay shape. Everybody, the bus leaves for Naas tomorrow morning at nine thirty, that’s nine thirty, Walsh, Merrion, McConnor, not ten-thirty, just get up a little early for a change…”
The team got together to bang fists and congratulate each other on a good practice. “Sorry about that, Deirdre,” Uchenna said as their turn to fist-pound came around. “Wasn’t trying to hit you…”
Little dark Deirdre grinned one of those quick crooked grins of hers. “I know that,” she said. “But you can do it to the Naas goalie if you want. Better to have them a little off balance…”
“Yeah,” Uchenna said as the team started breaking up. Along with the others, she made her way over to the pile of shoulderbags and bookbags and kit bags, and pushed various of them aside until she found the one that had her school clothes and her books in it. She picked it up and slung it over her shoulder, making her way across the field to the fence where Emer was standing.
Emer saw Uchenna’s amused glance at her wellies. “Not a bad idea,” she said. “I should have brought some of those.”
“You’re okay,” Emer said, looking critically at Uchenna’s field shoes: “got enough mud there already. And look at those socks!”
“Yeah, and I see you’ve got a fair chunk of mud on you too,” Uchenna said, as she swung her bags over the fence and climbed over it, rather than walk all the way down to the gate. “Find anything?”
Emer shook her head, looking depressed. “I went back to the field,” she said. “No tracks.”
Uchenna had to blink at that. “Nothing at all?”
“Nope.”
“I want to see,” Uchenna said.
“Don’t bother,” Emer said. “I took pictures with my phone…you can see those. There’s nothing but a lot of hoofprints inside the field.”
“They go anywhere?”
Emer shook her head again. “Not as far as I can tell. All the grass in that little field was eaten down. And every bit of the apples was gone. The gate was shut—”
As they came out of the park and crossed the street to the sidewalk of the street that led back toward Uchenna’s house, Uchenna saw Emer do something unusual. She actually shuddered. “Chen,” Emer said, “you remember how the gate was tied on with that old rope?”
“Yeah—”
“It was still tied the same way. There was moss on that rope, and the moss wasn’t even touched. Like the knots had never been untied. And if they weren’t, how’d they get the horses out?”
“‘They?’”
“I don’t know… whoever took them out.” Emer gave Uchenna a troubled look. “Anyway, they’re gone, all right…”
“You sound even more freaked now than when you thought the field behind your house was full of cars you couldn’t hear,” Uchenna said as they came around the curve that led toward Uchenna’s circle.
“Well, cars I could have coped with, sort of,” Emer said. “But now there’s no sign of anything, and I don’t know what to think…”
Uchenna sighed as they headed down into the circle and toward her house. “I need a shower,” she said. “It won’t take long. Then let’s go take some pizza out in the Back Office and chill for a while.”
4: Visitors and Secrets
Inside Uchenna’s house, her mam had been home from the hospital for some hours: and to Uchenna’s astonishment, her dad was home too, and had even brought dinner with him from one of the Indian takeaways in Naas. But Uchenna wasn’t yet up to feeling hungry—she was too sweaty and achy from the exertion of the game to care much about food just yet. “How did it go, sweet?” her mam said, looking up from the computer desk in the corner of the living room, while Emer paused in the utility room to pull the wellies off.
“Pretty good,” Uchenna said. “I’ll be down in a while, mam. Gotta sluice myself off…”
She and Emer went upstairs, and Emer went to Uchenna’s desk, woke up the computer, and while Uchenna went through her dresser drawers to get out some jeans and socks and a sweatshirt, Emer brought up her Facebook page and scanned idly down it to see who’d written anything new on her wall. Outside, the streetlight had come on: evening was setting in. Glancing through the window, Uchenna sighed. “I hate that,” she said.
“What?” Emer glanced at the window. “Oh, you mean it’s getting dark faster now…”
“I just seem to get stuck in the summer,” Uchenna said, shutting the sock drawer, “when the sun doesn’t set till like ten thirty, and it stays light so late… Somehow I expect it to keep doing that forever.”
“It drives me crazy,” Emer said. “It takes me forever to get to sleep in June and July.”
“You’re still stuck on California time. You’ll get used to it eventually,” Uchenna said. “And meanwhile, pretty soon you’re gonna start wanting to go to sleep at three thirty, when the sun goes down around Christmas time…”
“Please. I don’t want to think about it.”
“So don’t.”
“I can’t help it. I’m stuck in the Land Of Eternal Night Which Starts Gradually Next Month.”
Uchenna rolled her eyes at Emer’s moaning. “Going to shower now,” Uchenna said, and went.
Twenty minutes or so later she was out, dried, dressed, and found Emer staring hard at somebody else’s web page, on Tumblr. “These people,” Emer said, not looking up, “not only have no souls, they have no design sense. Look at all that dumb pink glitter. How can anyone read this?”
&nb
sp; Uchenna looked over Emer’s shoulder at the page. It had a noisy magenta-and-blue tiled background that (since all the print was dark pink) turned it into a torment to the eyes; the whole rest of the page was a mile-long scrolldown of reblogged music-album art and movie promo pictures. “Whose is that?” Uchenna said.
“Big Aisling’s.”
Uchenna shook her head and went tsk-tsk. There were two Aislings in their class, one little and fair, the other broad and dark, and their entire relationship was based on how much each of them hated the other one for having the same name. The attitude seemed to have carried over into the Tumblr, which—when Uchenna squinted at it—she could see featured many crudely Photoshopped phonecam images of “EVIL AISLING”.
“School’s gonna call her parents in when they see those,” Uchenna said.
“Maybe they won’t see it…”
“They will,” Uchenna said. “The IT teacher has it fixed so the school system archives every student page automatically whenever it’s changed.”
Emer pushed away from the desk, making a face. “Oh well,” she said, “everybody gets to be stupid once.”
“Our classmates? Sometimes more than once. Let’s go down to the Office. Podge and Rodge are on.”
In the kitchen, Uchenna’s mam and dad were dishing out takeaway. Uchenna sniffed as she and Emer passed through, and didn’t immediately catch the scent of anything she couldn’t live without for an hour or so. “Chenna?” her dad said. “You two going to sit down?”
“In a while, Daddy,” Uchenna said, and she and Emer kept going.
“They’re gonna eat it all,” Emer said as they came out into the dark and cool of the back yard.
“Not a chance,” Uchenna said, unlocking the door of the Back Office. “There’s another whole bag of stuff on the counter that they haven’t even unpacked yet. My dad doesn’t know how to feed anything smaller than a software intervention team…”
The went in and shut the Office door, and Uchenna turned on the little battery-powered table lamp so they could find her cache of junk food, crisps mostly, and break out a one-quart bottle of red lemonade, which having been out here was cool enough to drink without ice. Uchenna turned on the TV, fiddled with its little antenna for a few moments until RTÉ 2 came in as well as it ever did out here, and the two of them settled down among the piles of cushions and stuffed animals and started stuffing their faces.
The screen lit up with the images of a couple of puppets who looked like round-faced and slightly sinister country guys, sitting in an candlelit cottage and having a funny and somewhat rude talk with some young black-leather-clad celebrity who was passing through Ireland and didn’t believe that appearing with Podge and Rodge would permanently damage his career. “Who is that?” Emer said.
“No idea. Some kind of rock star?” Uchenna said. “The guys in U2 keep inviting them over. Kill that light, would you Eames? We don’t need it.”
Emer shut the table light off, and the two of them leaned back and ate crisps and laughed at Podge and Rodge, and the rock-star-or-whoever, who didn’t seem to understand that the puppets, the human host, and the studio crew were all making fun of him. “I feel sorry for the guy,” Uchenna said after a while.
“Who? The rock guy?”
“No, the one under the table, making the puppets go.”
“It has to be two guys,” Emer said. “Those are real hands working all of theirs. Look, four of them.”
Uchenna looked at the wooden table on the set and shook her head. “Must be really tight in there,” she said. “Boy, you think we smell bad after PE, imagine how they—”
Something went BANG! on the roof right over their heads.
The two girls froze, staring at each other.
On the TV, Podge said something rude, and Rodge and the rock star and the audience all laughed. But it all suddenly seemed a long way away. The hair was standing up all over Uchenna in shock, and Emer’s face was a study in fear.
BANG! And this time the sound happened directly above them, on the roof right over the spot where they were sitting.
“What is that?!” Emer whispered.
Uchenna shook her head. “Did you hear anything else?” she whispered back. “An engine? A car?”
Emer shook her head, her eyes wide. “I told you—”
“Don’t freak,” Uchenna whispered. “Let’s just take a look.”
“I don’t know—”
Uchenna patted her pocket. “Come on. We see anything we don’t like, we call the house and my dad right comes out.”
Emer hesitated. Then she said, very softly, “Okay. Can you open that door and not have it make any noise?”
“You better believe it,” Uchenna said, “because sometimes I sneak out here at night.” She grinned.
They got up and moved very softly toward the door, leaving the TV running: though Uchenna grabbed its remote and turned it down about halfway as she got ready to open the door. “You set?” she whispered.
Emer nodded.
Uchenna eased the door open, peered out. There was no one in the yard that she could see. But the light over the back door’s not all that great, there could be anybody in one of those shadows—
She stopped herself: there was no point in thinking that way—it was just going to make her more nervous. She looked left and right, saw nothing. Somebody behind the Office, then?
Very quietly she beckoned Emer to follow her around the back, into the space between the Office and the wall at the back of the property. At the corner of the temporary building she stopped, peered around the corner: then glanced behind her, shook her head at Emer. Nothing—
Silently they moved together around the back of the Office. Uchenna was surprised to see that almost none of the light from the TV was making it out through the opaque plastic curtain—they had to feel their way along the back of the building. About halfway along, Emer suddenly reached out and patted Uchenna’s arm.
Uchenna looked back at her again. Emer silently pointed up a couple of times into the branches of the tree.
They both held still for a few moments. Then Uchenna heard what Emer had heard: the rustling. And after that, something went BANG! Into the roof of the Office. It rolled down the roof and fell down onto the sparse behind-building grass at Uchenna’s feet. She stooped, picked it up.
It was an apple.
Uchenna handed it back to Emer. Emer looked at the apple, looked up into the tree. From this angle, their view of the branches of the tree was blocked. Uchenna pointed at the end of the Office, gestured that they should go around the far wall and turn the next corner.
Emer nodded. Absolutely silently they made their way down to the next corner. Above them, in the tree, the rustling seemed to get louder. Uchenna looked cautiously around the next corner, saw nothing at ground level. But above them, at the twelve-foot level, she could see the top of the wall, and just above the wall, something dark: a shape that moved. It was hard to see clearly what it was: the tree was cutting off all the light that came from the house side. But Uchenna and Emer had been outside long enough now for their eyes to start getting used to the darkness. And overhead, in the sky on the far side of the wall, there was a half moon: not incredibly bright, this close to the city, but light enough to brighten the sky a little and make anything above the wall show up as a silhouette. Looking at it hard, Uchenna thought she saw —
Emer leaned in very close, so her whisper would be almost noiseless. “It’s a leg.”
Uchenna nodded. Somebody had one foot and leg on the top of the wall: the rest of the person was hidden by the upper branches as they leaned into the leaves and branches of the tree. Sizes were hard to work out in the dark, but Uchenna was getting angry. What are they doing, using the tree to get down and sneak into my yard? Why? Are they after my little cheap TV or something? Or the barbecue, Dad said somebody over Emer’s side of town had their barbecue stolen last week —
Emer patted Uchenna on the arm again. Uchenna glanced back at her.
Emer didn’t say a word: just tossed the apple she was holding, then flicked a glance toward the tree.
Uchenna grinned and stepped back to let Emer pass her.
Emer slipped by, staying close to the building, looking up into the tree. More rustling was coming from up there, and bark and some leaves came pattering down. Looking up into the dark of the branches, Emer moved very slowly and carefully forward toward the far corner of the Office. For a few moments she held still. Then she reared back with both hands together, almost over her shoulder, one foot up off the ground as she leaned. A second later she fired the apple up into the dark branches.
“Aaah!” said a voice in the tree, in what sounded like shock and pain. There followed a scrabbling noise, a ripping sound like leaves being pulled off a branch, a couple of loud bumps: then a crash of something falling through branches, and a heavy bump, with a shock that went right through the ground. Immediately after came a smaller bump, with a sound like crinkling plastic, and then several smaller bumps, one after another. Then silence…
Uchenna and Emer headed around the corner together and stared at what had fallen out of the tree. It was folded up and groaning on the ground until they came out where it could see them. Then it tried to sit up in a hurry, and groaned again.
A kid. Small, skinny, wearing a dark track suit with white stripes up the side of the pants and the sides of the jacket, and dirty white trainers. Uchenna squinted at him: it was hard to see anything in this light.
“What are you doing here?” Uchenna said. “I’m gonna call the Guards!”
“And do what?” said the kid, sounding angry. “I’ll be gone by the time they get here. You can’t stop me.”
Emer simply stepped forward, tossing another apple that she’d just picked up. “Bets?” she said. “Don’t make me go all big-league on your ass.”