‘Not all of them are like that,’ said Samantha.
‘Yeah, right,’ said Mirela. ‘That’s your opinion, but don’t forget – you believe in fairytales.’
They strolled up the main street of Pantelimon, peering into shop windows. Samantha smiled for two red-haired, sunburned tourists falling over one another to take their photo. Right when they sing-songed, ‘Cheeeese!’ Mirela poked out her tongue.
‘What?’ she said, when Samantha frowned at her. ‘You don’t think that’s gonna make a great photo? They’ll be back home one day, maybe ten years from now, looking at that photo of the two colourful gypsy girls. Of course, they’ll be stunned by the beauty of the dark-haired one sticking out her tongue. And then off they’ll go and pay to watch me star in a movie at their local cinema, and they’ll never know that they once almost met the most famous movie star in the world.’
Samantha laughed and linked arms with her.
‘You should be a writer, not a movie star,’ she said. ‘You spin enough bull-’
‘Hey!’ laughed Mirela. ‘Do you eat with that mouth?’
They walked past McDonald’s, and Mirela gazed in wistfully. ‘You wanna go in?’ she said.
‘You got any money?’ said Samantha. ‘No, you don’t, so I don’t want to go in.’
‘We’ve got some money,’ said Mirela.
‘Oh yeah, sure. We’re gonna use the cash your mother gave us for groceries to buy McDonald’s. That sounds like a great plan. Especially if we want to be murdered. Pass.’
Just ahead, Samantha spotted the two happy photographers at a stall selling overpriced junk for tourists. She watched them examining a coffee mug bearing a blurry transfer of Count Vlad Dracul, the Impaler.
‘They can’t ever get enough of Dracula, can they?’ said Mirela.
‘Well, they are in Romania, his birthplace,’ said Samantha. ‘But they should wait until they get to Transylvania for their souvenirs. They can buy underwear with his name on it then.’
‘You talk about him like he’s real.’
‘Well, not everything that exists is visible, you know.’
‘Yeah, yeah. I know. Once upon a time…’ Mirela laughed.
‘Shut up,’ said Sam. ‘Where do you reckon they’re from, anyway?’ This was her favourite game.
‘Oh, who cares,’ said Mirela. ‘Texas? Sweden?’
‘Australia?’
‘Yeah, whatever.’
‘I’d love to go to Australia,’ said Samantha.
‘Really? Gee, you’ve never mentioned that before.’ Mirela rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t know why you want to go fantasising about riding kangaroos all day when you could be dreaming about moving to LA, baby.’
‘Meh,’ said Samantha.
‘Whatever,’ said Mirela. ‘So, where are we going, anyway?’
‘Now, where do you think?’
‘Aw, man,’ Mirela groaned. ‘Birthday Jones again? I thought you were in love with Tamas.’
‘You’re an idiot, you know that, Mimi?’
Samantha couldn’t explain why she was drawn to Birthday Jones. It would be like having to provide reasons why she loved Lala. Or Mirela, for that matter. Some people just meant the world to her.
Although Milosh’s camp travelled widely throughout Romania, they settled every year in the countryside on the outskirts of Pantelimon. And that’s where she’d met Birthday Jones. Five years ago, on the streets, where he lived.
‘But he’s not even Roma,’ said Mirela.
Samantha sighed. The fence between the Roma and the Gaje was as carefully tended by the gypsies as it was by the rest of the Romanian population. She found the whole thing completely boring. As far as she was concerned, she couldn’t have cared less about a person’s nationality or culture. It made no more difference to her than whether a person preferred Coke or Pepsi. For the past two years, every summer, she’d been using the internet at the Pantelimon library and she knew that the world was a much bigger place than Romania.
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘You got anything better to do?’
They found Birthday working his favourite restaurant strip.
‘He is gorgeous,’ said Mirela. ‘I do understand the attraction.’
‘No attraction,’ said Samantha. ‘None. Zero. Zip.’
‘You must have it bad for Tamas, then,’ said Mirela. ‘That boy there is fine.’
They watched Birthday Jones and his crew at work. They relied on the younger beggars to get the ball rolling. When they’d first met Birthday, he’d been eleven and the absolute best beggar. Samantha suspected it was racism at play. Because Birthday Jones was a Romanian street kid with a thick mop of shaggy, light-brown hair, rather than coarse, wiry black, he stood out from the crowd. He appealed to the Western mums and dads with kids at home being babysat by Nanna while they took their trip of a lifetime. The guilt would bite hard and their wallets would be out before they knew it.
Perfect. The older pickpockets would take note – that’s where they kept the cash.
But Birthday Jones had an extra secret weapon. His eyes. An amber-gold colour and yes, damn it, sparkling; he would beam those eyes into yours and all of a sudden you’d forget he was barefoot and dirt-smeared. In fact, suddenly, he looked great, and it seemed like a good idea to buy him a meal, some shoes, a bed. Sam had watched him work plenty of times, and when Birthday brought out the big guns – his dimples – the tourists started speaking seriously about adoption and the plight of Romanian street children. Sam was at once sympathetic and repulsed by that attitude. Sure, she could understand the attraction of bringing this particularly cute street kid into western suburbia. These tourists would suddenly become the Angelina Jolies of their suburb in a single post-softball weekend barbeque. But what about the smaller kids they looked right through? Andre, with the cleft palate, only eight this year, and three when Samantha first met him. He was still begging, and had three years to go before he graduated to pickpocket. And Belinda, now fourteen – Samantha hadn’t seen her once in the last two years. Word was she was in Russia now, and was owned by the mafia.
Birthday was wearing his Invisible Outfit: black cargos, blue T-shirt, runners. Today, with his sunshine curls tamed by a black trucker cap, and those eyes hooded by its curved visor, he was just another street kid. He was making certain to keep the dimples in their holster. He didn’t want to stand out.
‘Can you see their handler?’ said Mirela.
‘Fat cow,’ said Samantha. ‘She’s right there. Stay down. She hates me.’
They squatted by a row of concrete rubbish bins separating the mall from the street. Birthday Jones had had the same handler for the past three years. Cici Illiescu. When Samantha had seen the woman beating the kids because they didn’t bring in enough cash or food, she’d sworn in protest and tried to jump in to help them. But Birthday had yelled at her, told her she was making things worse.
‘It doesn’t even hurt,’ he’d said later. ‘It’s just a bit of hose. But if you get her angry, she’ll tell Drago and then we’ll really cop it. She’s nothing. We all laugh about how winded she gets just giving out five.’
‘We can’t sit here in the gutters all day, Sam,’ said Mirela. ‘This is getting boring.’
‘Chill,’ said Samantha. ‘I’ll get his attention in a second.’
A shopkeeper on the other side of the street made a show of catching their eye and spitting onto the footpath. He swept the air theatrically with his broom to shoo them away.
‘Why do they call him Birthday, anyway?’ said Mirela, smiling languidly at the shopkeeper. It’d take the Gaje police to get her to move from a public street, and even then she’d give them plenty of chat.