Innocence (2 page)

It’s 7:45 a.m. when we pull up alongside the Riverside Tavern, deserted except for a plump girl sitting on the wall outside the pub, reading. She has a school uniform on, but it’s too early yet for school.

“You!” Dad shouts.

I cringe, wishing I were downstairs in the cabin with Jay. Dad is always so bloody impolite when he addresses people, especially girls, whom he seems to regard with a greater dislike than anyone.

The poor girl looks up. Her blue eyes lock on mine and not Dad’s. Mutely I shake my head, mortified that she thinks it’s me who shouted, and I glare at him.

“Here, catch the rope and wind it round the mooring.”

He throws the dirty gray mooring rope onto the walkway, huffing when the unprepared girl drops it and the rope nearly snakes its way into the water.

Securing the boat is usually my job, but we’re sat a little too low in the water for me to just hop out. Dad, as usual, has not looked for the ladders set at regular intervals into the canal wall.

“Sorry,” I mutter apologetically as I scrabble up onto the towpath to take the rope from her. “He’s rude to everyone.” I check the knot, then hold out my hand. “I’m Christopher.”

Without quite shaking it, she touches her hand against mine, light as the brush of a leaf, and pulls away. Her cheeks flush, probably from the cool morning air.

“Lorne,” she says, so quietly I have to strain my ears and repeat the word to myself.

“Do you go to school nearby?” She looks about Jay’s age. “We’re trying to find a school for my brother,” I carry on when she doesn’t reply. She continues to stare at me as though I’m speaking a different language, so I stop talking.

“Christopher!” Dad shouts from the boat.

Awkwardly I shrug to Lorne. “I have to go.”

She holds up her hand in a tiny wave, and I smile.

I jump back down onto the boat and peer into the wheelhouse. Jay is lying on the seats in the galley, eating out of a packet of dry cereal and watching some inane cartoon on TV.

“I haven’t got time for you to be messing around.” Impatiently Dad shoves a folded note in my hand. “I need you to go find a shop and get some milk and a pack of cigarettes for me. But don’t take too long, we’re meeting Liam at nine,” he says, virtually pushing me back up the steps towards the ladder.

Dad only smokes when he’s nervous.

There’s a main road behind the pub, but it’s all housing estate either side. Shoving my hands deep in my pockets, I pick a direction and start walking. I don’t get far before I hear an out-of-breath gasp behind me. I smile, slowing up some by kicking at the dandelions growing through the cracks in the pavement, but I don’t turn round.

“Wait up!” Jay calls, shouting out in shock as I tackle him when he’s near enough. His skinny body tries to wriggle out of my grasp, but I’m so much stronger than he is. I know just how much I would hate this if I were the younger brother, but that doesn’t stop me. I am possessed of some evil sprite, some backwards grace. We wrestle for a moment. I grin evilly as I pin him down on the pavement, my knee in his chest, my hair falling into his eyes.

“Ow, you’re hurting me!” he yelps.

I roll my eyes. I doubt it. But I let him up anyway, holding out my hand to swing him to his feet as though he is lighter than air.

“Why are you wearing my T-shirt?” I query as he dusts himself off.

It’s the T-shirt I wore yesterday, and it can’t smell too good, which is why I didn’t pull it on this morning. Plus it’s too big for him.

He shrugs. “It was on the floor, first thing I saw. I wanted to come with you.”

We find a corner shop easily enough, and I buy the milk and cigarettes. Then we wander around for a bit to see if we can find the school Jay will probably be enrolled in. We figure, on a housing estate this size, there must be a secondary school somewhere. It’s going to be a long walk for him if there’s not—busing it will be out of the question.

His shoulders slump the farther we walk. He doesn’t want to go to school. I don’t blame him. From bitter experience I know he’ll be behind in the work, he won’t make friends, and he’ll be labeled “gypsy scum” and harassed until we leave. Not that I’d let anyone harass him if I was around.

“It’s nine,” Jay says suddenly, swiveling the old watch I gave him around his thin wrist.

“I know,” I say heavily, not wanting to think about what sort of crap job I’m going to be roped into doing today.

So we head back without finding the school. Lorne is gone, and the Tavern is open, regulars already leaning like slantwise statues at the bar.

Some massively overweight guy with long greasy hair tied up in a ponytail is talking to Dad as he locks up the boat. Presumably this is Liam Bosco.

Dad glances at us as we wander over. I know by the tight set of his shoulders that he’s pissed off we’re late—pissed off
I’m
late.

I hold out the cigarettes. He takes them without a word.

“My sons, Christopher and James.”

Liam looks us over, his small eyes narrowing, and then cracks an illuminating smile that changes his features so much, it’s unnerving.

“Pleased to meet you,” he grins at us, and I catch the flash of gold in his mouth, the silver ring in his ear. “You both up for a day’s grafting?”

“No,” Dad says sharply. “Just the older one. We’re looking for a school for James. He’s got brains in that head of his somewhere.”

Dad reaches out to cuff Jay in passing, a movement Jay doesn’t quite manage to shy away from.

They go off to the pub to talk business. I walk in the opposite direction towards the boat, pretending I don’t hear when Dad calls me, expecting me to go with them. I know he won’t make a scene in front of Liam.

Jay turns the TV on in the galley again, and we sit watching a stupid cartoon about a boy who flies around and gets lost in space for the next half hour or so, until the boat rocks as Dad climbs back aboard.

I’m to leave with Liam in his rusty white van, while Jay goes with Dad to enroll in school. I’ve still little idea what I’m to be doing all day.

“Got a site needs clearing,” Liam informs me somewhat cryptically after I get in his van.

I try to click my seat belt into place. The road is visible through the gaps in the floor beneath Liam’s feet. In fact the whole van seems to be crumbling to pieces, so I dare not push the seat belt too hard into its socket lest I break something.

Turns out the passenger-side seat belt is broken anyway, and Liam is a crazy driver. It’s true I don’t have much experience of traveling by car, but Christ, we almost rear-end the car in front of us every time we stop.

Thankfully it’s not a long journey.

He pulls up outside a building site on a dead-end street. Past the thick fog of dust and the piles of lath and plaster sits a huge derelict Victorian house.

“Shane!” Liam hollers, sticking his head out the van window.

“He’s clearing the garden,” a voice calls back from somewhere inside.

Liam turns to me, pointing his hand in the direction of the open front door. “Find your way through there. Tell Shane I sent you. The boys will give you a lift back later.”

Reluctantly I exit the vehicle and, wishing the ground would miraculously open up and engulf me instead, walk towards the house.

The dust cloud swallows the bright sunlight as I step across the threshold.

“Watch it, sunshine!”

A heavy roll-top bath plummets down the stairs, snapping the banister as it hits it with a sickening crack, and skids across the hallway, barely missing me. I press my hands against the wall behind me, feeling sick, my stomach shriveled into a small complicated knot.

“You stupid fuck, Rowan, you almost killed the kid!”

A tall form appears out of the dark. My eyes are still adjusting to the gloom, and I can’t really see his face, but it’s his voice that has my attention anyway—Irish, lilting.

“You all right, kid?”

Even though I can’t see him well, I know he’s staring at me.

“Come on. I expect you’re here to see Shane, right?” he asks, and I nod.

Trying to slow my heart to a regular pace, I follow behind as he navigates the maze of gloomy, dust-filled corridors, which eventually lead outside. The garden out the back is even more of a mess than the front—a graveyard of broken sinks, fireplaces, and doors to cupboards and secret places, the once cared-for lawn churned up by all the activity.

The man I take to be Shane is muscular in a way I’ve not seen up close before. He is built like the men on the side of those cartons of protein shake—bare arms nearly as big as my thighs even though he’s no taller than I am. I step back, weirdly aware of my personal space and not wanting anyone else in it.

“Who are you?” he inquires, looking up as he twists a dulled antique tap off one of the sinks. His voice is surprisingly high-pitched, incongruous with his appearance.

“Liam sent me,” I answer, looking at his huge hands. “Christopher.” I shift uncomfortably, my shirt stuck to my back before I’ve even done any work.

“Okay.” He thinks for a minute, frowning. “We gotta clear this house before Friday, when the wreckers get here. I’ll give you a choice—you can start taking the fireplaces out to the front and line ’em up near the road, or you can go up and help Rowan rip out the bathrooms.”

“Fireplaces,” I say immediately.

The tall guy laughs as he lopes back inside. “Wise choice,” he calls out.

I spend the rest of the morning shifting fireplaces and pieces of broken wrought ironwork into separate piles out the front. My arms burn with fiery pain, the heat of the sun beating down makes me feel light-headed.

Everything is dust. Some of the men wear handkerchiefs knotted over their mouths and noses as they chuck broken lath out of the upper-story windows, all of them pale with dust from head to foot.

Lunchtime comes and goes. At around 2:00 p.m. a girl with flame-red hair arrives with sandwiches and a kettle, which she plugs into a socket in the porch.

“You’re Dru’s son, aren’t you?” she says to me in a squeaky voice as I step over the kettle wire, my arms full of thin pieces of pipe. “I’m Pixie.”

I nod. “Christopher,” I say, trying to juggle the pipes to hold out my hand.

She laughs. “Go put them down and come have a break.”

Beckoning me over, she holds out a cup of strong sweet tea. Gratefully I take it and sit down on the porch step next to her, the sun-soaked bricks warm at my back.

I close my eyes, enjoying the rest.

“Have a sandwich before the rest of them come out.” She passes me a carrier bag full of bacon rolls.

A few minutes later, she steps into the house and calls out loudly that lunch has arrived. Laughter and voices wash over me as the porch fills up with men covered in dust and sweat, joking and pushing one another. I press myself farther against the wall, accepting Pixie’s offer of a second cup of sweet tea.

After they’ve eaten, their attention wanders and eventually focuses on me—who I am, what I’m doing here, where I’ve come from, the fact Dad is Romani. They’re all travelers, Irish mostly, like my mother. Most people, especially kids at school, don’t see the differences between Romani Gypsies and Irish Travelers—we’re all outsiders to them—but they are completely different cultures from completely different parts of the world. The only thing we have in common is a tendency to move around, but even that is not always true anymore. The word gypsy comes from “gypcian,” since people in the Middle Ages thought Romani were Egyptians because of their dark hair and skin, but their roots were in India. So Irish Travelers are not gypsies at all.

My origins are the only part of school that interested me, but still I say little now, unsure what is expected. I feel the tall guy’s eyes on me again, relieved when he tactfully changes the subject.

The others call him Finn.

Around four thirty the work stops. A couple of flatbed trucks arrive from a local salvage yard, and we load them with first the lath and other wood and then the iron. Money is exchanged and shared out, though I receive none. Finn offers to drive me home in a small rusted Renault. I don’t think it’s his. All the cars seem to be communal and various arguments break out over who takes which. We drive away before anyone notices.

Traffic is slow through the center of town. I stare out the window, my body curled and hurting, unused to such brutal work.

“You’re a quiet one, aren’t you?” he says.

I shrug, the movement making me feel as though my muscles are melting from my bones. “Not got anything much to say.”

Finn puts the radio on low, and I relax a little more.

Stopping in front of the Riverside Tavern, he tells me he’ll pick me up at eight in the morning. As an afterthought, he hands me a can of cider from under the passenger seat.

“You worked hard today, kid,” he says.

I take it, nodding my thanks, before getting out of the car and walking away.

Jay sits on deck waiting for me.

“Whoa,” he says, raising his eyebrows at the sight of me. “Hard day?”

“Harder than yours.” I push him onto his back with a dust-covered palm to his chest as I pass, before disappearing down into the galley.

“I’m going swimming,” I announce loudly, knowing he’ll come. “Where’s Dad?”

“Pub. ‘Negotiating,’ he called it.”

Standing in the doorway of our room, Jay gives me a wry smile.

I throw him a towel. “Come on.”

“Where? The river’s kinda grim around here.”

I shrug. “Upstream from the factories. We’ll find somewhere.”

Following the towpath, we walk as far as we can along it. The air is still and hazy, full of thunderbugs and impossible-to-catch mosquitoes, which rise up in swarms as I run my hand through the waist-high river grasses. Eventually the warehouses cut us off, and we have to make our way along the road. It’s a wasteland this time of day, every car park empty of cars, every building black-eyed and silent. Though maybe it really is a wasteland, or maybe no one works here anymore. As the industrial estate begins to peter out, I notice a cut-through between buildings. The river glints beyond it in the late-afternoon sun. Tired of walking, I decide this is where we’re swimming.