The kid sat up and looked furiously at her. “The Yank,” he said under his breath. “What’re you doing here? You don’t live here.”
“She was visiting me,” Uchenna said, stepping over to Emer’s side, “and you’d better start explaining why you are.” In the poor light under the thick leaves of the apple tree, Uchenna continued to peer at the skinny kid sitting on the ground—and then suddenly realized why he looked familiar. It was Jimmy Garrity, the Traveller kid from that morning.
“Garrity!” Emer said at the same moment.
“Yeah,” he said, still sounding angry: but now there was something else in his voice, too—fear. “Go on, call the feckin’ Guards and get it over with.”
“No,” Uchenna said, surprising herself somewhat. “Not till you tell me what you’re doing here.”
He scowled and turned his face away as if Uchenna was too stupid to be believed. Then he got up, reaching down to pick up a pale thing that had been lying on the ground next to him. It was a beat-up white plastic carrier bag from the Tesco supermarket chain, and as he picked it up, a couple of apples fell out of it.
Emer stared at them. “What do you want those for?”
He didn’t answer. But Uchenna looked at them, having a strange thought. After a moment she said, “They’re for the horses, aren’t they.”
Jimmy started swearing. At the point where he started using expressions that Uchenna couldn’t even understand any more, she said, “Just shut up! What’s your problem?”
“It’s the first thing you bloody buffers’d think of, isn’t it?” Uchenna’s eyes were now used enough to the dark under the tree that she could see Jimmy roll his eyes in complete angry scorn. “Travellers and horses.”
“Well, yeah, and here you are bringing them apples!” Emer said.
“Stealing them apples,” Uchenna added.
For a moment, even in this darkness, Uchenna saw the fury on Jimmy’s face and was horrified by it. “What am I supposed to do!” he said, loud and angry. “They’re out there with nothing to eat, they don’t even have water, they—”
“Sssh!” Uchenna said. “Would you hold it down? My parents’ll hear you.”
“Out there where?” Emer said.
“Over behind the south side of town,” Jimmy said. “One of those little fields past the Condom Ditch. Donnelan’s old place, my dad says it’s called. The field belongs to one of the cottages down on the Laoise Road, but they’re not doing anything with it because the drainage is so bad, there’s nothing there but weeds—”
Uchenna thought for a moment. The Condom Ditch she knew: it was near a small lane that passed between two fields behind the furthest southern side of Adamstown. The lane had unusually high hedgerows that blocked the view from both the nearest road and the train line, and kids with access to cars liked to go down there to have sex. They tended to throw the used condoms over the hedgerow into the ditch on its far side, and over time the ditch had become disgustingly full of them. But as to which field Jimmy was talking about—
“You know the one,” Emer said. “Right by the train, on the south side of the station, where that little road turns sideways before it goes under the tracks. That field’s always full of water when it’s been raining: sometimes you even get ducks in there.”
Uchenna shook her head. “Jeez, even I know it’s way too wet for horses in there!”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Jimmy said as he got up off the ground and dusted himself off. “I don’t know about the fecking things.”
Uchenna raised her eyebrows. “Everybody says you do.”
“Yeah, well everybody says you’re a druggy thuggy wagon whose mam’s a leprosy doctor and whose dad got his job by kissing Bill Gates’ ass,” Jimmy growled, “but maybe that’s not true either, is it?”
Uchenna’s eyes went wide. Emer’s mouth fell right open. “You scummy little—”
“No,” Uchenna said, “don’t.” Now that she was getting over the initial shock of finding somebody sneaking over the wall into her back yard, she was starting to think more normally again—and the first thought that had occurred after the initial flush of anger was that she’d been called a lot worse things since she first came to Adamstown. Most of the kids here, in fact, were a lot less toxic than the ones back in Stillorgan. Or maybe I’m just getting older and more used to it… And anyway, there was something funny about the way he’d put it. He actually called me a wagon! He sounds like Belle…
“Okay,” Uchenna said to Jimmy after a moment. “Sorry. Maybe I had that coming.”
“Feckin right you did.” Jimmy spat on the ground, but Uchenna particularly noticed that he had to work for a moment to get enough spit to do it. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with the tough-kid act.
“Meanwhile, what you have coming is that you came in here and started stealing my stuff,” Uchenna said. “And if you wanted to do something that wouldn’t make you look like a knacker, boy did you blow it! So you owe me one. “ Jimmy scowled. “And you can stop putting on these hard-man faces, okay? They just make you look like you’ve got wind.”
Emer strangled a laugh, though not particularly hard. “What was I supposed to do?” Jimmy growled. “I couldn’t get them anything to eat, my mam’s got eyes like feckin’ telescopes and I couldn’t mich anything out of my house—”
“So you came to mich something out of mine,” Uchenna said.
“I had to! I couldn’t figure out what to do! I didn’t have any money! And I was walking by and here’s this big tree and I thought, sure those ones in there’d never eat anything that didn’t come out of a supermarket, and I thought if I just—”
“What you didn’t think was that you could just ask me for some and I’d give them to you!” Uchenna said.
Jimmy laughed at her outright. “Ask you? I don’t even know you!”
“You do now,” Uchenna said. “And now we’re standing here arguing while the horses are off in that field starving away to nothing, which is just stupid! So come on. We’ve got to get you out of here before my mam or dad come out. So you’re going back over the wall, and we’ll be over after you in a minute, and you’re going to show us where the horses are.” She picked up his bag and handed it back to him. “Come on, fill it up, there’s some more of them lying around on the ground here.”
Jimmy looked at her unbelievingly for a moment, then started to stoop down and pick up apples. Uchenna looked toward the house, but no one inside seemed to have noticed anything. “We can get over there and back before they notice, I bet,” she said. “Wait a minute.”
She crept back to the house, peered in one of the back windows. Her Dad was already pulling cushions off the couch, and the laptop was open on the coffee table and was showing one of the programs that he used to keep in touch with his team at work. Her Mam was in one of the easy chairs, her feet up on the coffee table and the remote control pointed at the TV as she channel-surfed.
Uchenna smiled a little and went back to Emer and Jimmy. “They’re settled in already,” she said. “So predictable. Come on, let’s go.” She glanced over at Jimmy. “Is it real muddy over there?”
“A bit mucky,” he said. “If you’re careful you can stay out of it.”
“Great. Let’s go. Eames, go sneak in and get your wellies.”
Emer looked uncomfortably. “What if your folks see me?”
Uchenna rolled her eyes. “Tell them you wanted to leave them in the Office so they wouldn’t be in the way. Mam always likes it when anybody but her ever cleans anything up…”
Emer snickered at that. Then she faded off into the darkness nearer the house. Uchenna glanced up into the tree, not saying aloud any of the words she was thinking. If the three of them left the front way, past the house, it would take forever to get to the spot Jimmy was describing. Going over the wall was going to be the only way.
“It’s not hard to climb in,” Jimmy said in a low voice, following her glance.
“It’s not the climbing that?
??s going to bother me,” Uchenna said. “It’s the falling.”
“You won’t have as far to fall,” Jimmy said, and grinned.
Uchenna looked at him, confused.
“‘Cause you’re so tall,” Jimmy said cheerfully. Then he got a better look at Uchenna’s face. “Uh, sorry…”
“Yeah, I know, you thought it was funny,” Uchenna said under her breath. “So does the rest of the planet, why should you be any different…”
Emer reappeared with her wellies on. “They see you?” Uchenna said.
Emer shook her head. “They’re in the living room, watching TV.” She rolled her eyes. “And snogging.”
“Good.” Uchenna looked at Jimmy. “Okay,” she said, “let’s go.”
Getting up the tree was something of a challenge. Jimmy, to Uchenna’s annoyance, went up it as if he spent his days doing nothing but climbing. Emer went up after him, taking a little more time: but then she was wearing rubber boots. Fortunately the lower branches weren’t too hard to get onto, once you made up your mind that you were going to do it quickly enough not to look hopeless to the two who were already up there on the wall, waiting. Still, that last step from a thinnish branch out onto the wall made the sweat break out all over Uchenna. She was really glad when Emer casually put out a hand for her to grab, bracing Uchenna just enough so that she could take the last step without it looking like it was costing her a week’s worth of decision in about a second.
The jump down was another matter entirely. Uchenna didn’t mind jumping as long as she had somewhere solid to start from, and could see what she was jumping onto. In a few seconds they were all down in the long grass and weeds on the far side of the wall.
“Watch out for the nettles,” Jimmy said.
Uchenna heard Emer hiss suddenly, and saw her perform an impromptu long-jump to get herself out of the stinging weeds before they got her bare legs again. “You might have mentioned those before we came down in them—!” Uchenna said, picking her way out of the nettle patch as carefully as she could: though she had jeans on, the things could still sting you under the hems of the jeans if your socks left a gap that exposed any skin.
“Sorry,” Jimmy said, actually sounding as if he meant it. “Didn’t occur to me, I’ve got me shells on…”
“It’s okay,” Emer said, sounding annoyed but not like she was in any serious pain. “I’ll put baking soda on it when I get home, now can we please get going?”
Jimmy led them hurriedly along a path that skirted the wall behind Uchenna’s circle, then branched away toward the hedgerows and pocket-sized fields of the southern side of Adamstown. There wasn’t a lot of conversation, partly because they were all keeping an eye on their footing in the moonlight. The ground in some places got rough without warning, a legacy of the digging and dumping that had gone along with the building of the houses—and beyond those areas, under the grass, there were still more commonplace problems: rabbit holes and dumped junk like the occasional rusty trashed bike—even, in a couple of cases, stolen and abandoned supermarket trolleys all overgrown with bindweed creepers, their handles fuzzy with moss.
“I can’t believe those,” Uchenna said as they came to the fourth or fifth of several hedgerows they’d had to cross through. Near the gap they were squeezing through, yet another trolley—this one the kind that had baby seats for two kids in front of the handle—was stuffed into the hedge, with branches of hawthorn and firethorn growing through it. “The supermarket’s two miles away easy: what’s this doing here?”
“Some people’ll steal anything…” Jimmy said.
Neither Uchenna nor Emer said a word. It’s really weird, Uchenna thought. If anybody who wasn’t a Traveller said anything like that, we wouldn’t do anything but agree. But when he says it—
From a little distance away there came a sound that made Uchenna grin: a soft whinny. “The next field?” she said.
“Yeah. Look out, here’s the Condom Ditch…”
They crossed out of the field into a gravel-scattered lane, through a gap in another hedgerow, and then out onto a pair of old thin boards that somebody had put over the ditch. Uchenna glanced down as she crossed behind Jimmy: then wished she hadn’t. She knew from her history class that there’d been a time when condoms had been illegal in Ireland, and people had actually had to smuggle them in from other countries. Plainly this was no longer a problem. “Ewwwww….” Uchenna said softly. “Why can’t these eedjits just bring a garbage bag…”
“Look,” Emer said as she made her way off the boards and up on the other side of the ditch. “Chen! There’s the Mammy!”
The far side of the ditch was another hedgerow, a lower one than the one by the lane. Past it, through the tangled knotted branches of hawthorn, Uchenna could catch a glimpse of something large and palely silvery in the moonlight.
She looked up and down the uneven length of it, but couldn’t see any gates or fences. They were going to have to squeeze through, and it would be hard to get out again in a hurry if the horses didn’t like something they were doing—
“Down here,” Jimmy said, heading down along the hedgerow. Uchenna and Emer followed him cautiously, coming to a spot that was just wide enough for one of them to slip through sideways.
“Good thing we have this moonlight,” Uchenna said under her breath, glancing over her shoulder at the train line. The south end of the platform wasn’t far away, and there were people standing there, waiting for one of the evening trains. “We’d have needed a flashlight to get down here without breaking our necks…”
“Well, we may not have this moonlight long,” Emer said, looking up at the sky. Sure enough, there was weather coming in from the west: high thin clouds, with thicker, darker ones behind them. “Come on, let’s get moving…”
They all squeezed through the narrow gap in the hedge. The five horses were standing together in the field, well over to the right-hand side. Uchenna frowned as she looked around the place and realized that calling it a “field” was almost more than it deserved at the moment. It was mostly mud from where the three of them stood near the horses, right up to the furthest left-hand side of the field where the ground sloped up toward the metal security fence separating the field from the train embankment. That whole space was nothing but a sheet of newly dried mud, all poached up and pocked with hoofprints. The only grass was a irregular patch where the horses were standing with their heads down, trying to get a last few bites out of what was there. The three boy horses and the Mammy Horse’s girlfriend all had their noses stuck into the same little patch of grass, and they were snorting at each other as if annoyed that there wasn’t enough grass for each of them to graze off by themselves. Off to one side, the Mammy Horse stood a little nearer to the hedgerow, looking tired, her legs splayed out a little with the big swollen weight of belly she was bearing. She gazed wearily at the three sudden visitors, and didn’t move.
“This is awful,” Uchenna said. “Come on, get the apples out.”
Jimmy produced the bag, and they all reached in and started rolling apples over to the horses. They looked at the fruit curiously for a few moments, but this time they got the idea more quickly: one after another, the horses started biting at the apples, munching them into pieces, occasionally picking up a whole apple and wiggling their jaws and lips around until an apple broke in two. Uchenna was pleased to see them eating, but she looked around at the field in disgust. “What are we going to do about this? They can’t just be here starving!”
“They probably won’t be,” Jimmy said. “They’ve already been in two different fields on two different nights. Can’t be good for her…” He looked at the Mammy Horse and frowned in concern. “I bet somebody’s moving them around to keep somebody else from finding them.”
Which means they’re probably stolen, Uchenna thought immediately: but this was yet another subject it was going to be hard to bring up with Jimmy. “Yeah,” she said at last, “but are they getting anything that much better to eat when they’r
e being moved around? Look at them!” The apples they’d thrown were almost gone already: Uchenna reached into the bag for more. “They’re really hungry. We’ve got to get them something more!”
“Assuming they’re not gone again tomorrow morning,” Jimmy said.
Emer looked over at Uchenna. “Get them something? Like what, besides apples?”
“I don’t know,” Uchenna said. “What do horses eat?”
“Oats?”
“I don’t think it’s the kind of oats you get at the Tesco,” Uchenna said.
Emer ran a hand through her hair. “Or hay?”
Uchenna shook her head, frowning. “Where would we get hay?”
“Yeah, good luck ordering that on the Tesco website,” Emer said. “And your mam would have some questions about the order when the delivery guy came…” She leaned on the tumbledown fence, thinking. “We’re surrounded by horse farms here. They must have lots of it, and they have to buy it from somewhere. I mean, it’s not as if they grow it. It’s all just pastures around here, no tall stuff…”
They thought about that for a while, and got the last of the apples out of the bag for the horses. The trouble for Uchenna was that all her initial ideas were coming down to stealing again. Besides how uncomfortable she was mentioning the subject in front of Jimmy, she also didn’t like the idea, or the kind of trouble you could get into if you followed up on it. And how would you steal hay anyhow? It comes in those big bales, it’s so heavy…
In the silence of the evening, the crunching of the last apples sounded very loud. Jimmy wadded the plastic bag up and stuffed it into his pocket. “This is so wrong,” Jimmy said under his breath. “I don’t even like horses.”
“That must be weird for you,” Uchenna said.
He gave her another of those annoyed looks, but there was something resigned about it. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m a traitor.”
“A traitor?” Emer said, confused.
“A Traveller who doesn’t like horses,” Jimmy said. “And doesn’t like being on the road, and doesn’t want to live in a mobile home any more. Yeah, I know, ‘it’s in the blood, you’ll never get over it,’ I hear it every day. Except I am over it. Maybe it skipped a generation with me or something.” He sounded exasperated. “I like living in a house. I like holding still. God forbid me mam hears me say that, she cusses me out like a trooper. And me dad—”