‘You started it,’ Robbie was saying.
‘That’s hardly fair.’ Sandy managed to sound scoffing. Robbie shrugged his shoulders. He gazed at his companion, his eyes milky but keen.
‘Not long now,’ he said, to keep the conversation turning. In his life, Robbie talked to very few people, and fewer listened. He enjoyed Sandy’s company more than he could say, and regarded him as a friend. He could not quite understand the change that had taken place in Sandy recently, but he knew that it had something to do with Rian. He knew that as well as he knew himself. Sandy seemed determined not to talk about it for the moment, but something in the boy’s attitude told Robbie that he would talk about it soon enough, and that the conversation then would not be happy.
They walked quickly, but were held back by the steepness of The Brae. They were walking to Craigie Hill, just beyond Cardell, behind which a quarry was in operation. Craigie Hill was sheer at one side and sloping at the other. The tinkers’ encampment was at the base of the sheer side. Sandy expected that one day a bulldozer would push the whole hillside down on top of the gypsies and their small modern caravans.
He had met Robbie near the school; a chance meeting. Previously, he had been wary of being seen with him, but the long summer had instilled a sense of carelessness in him, or rather recklessness, and so he walked with Robbie along the town’s outskirts. Robbie was going to visit his Aunt Kitty. From her, Sandy hoped he would learn some truth.
Robbie coughed into his cupped hands, than spat noisily into the road.
‘Do you feel it getting cooler these days?’ he asked Sandy. The boy shook his head.
‘Well,’ said Sandy, ‘the summer’s not over yet. It’s a long time since there was any rain. I can’t say that I’ve noticed it cold. Are you feeling all right?’
‘Fine, fine. Just a wee summer chill, that’s all.’ Sandy examined Robbie while he coughed again.
‘Are you eating enough, Robbie?’ he asked, embarrassed by the sympathy which was evident in his question.
‘Oh aye, we eat well enough. We can’t really eat hot food though, unless it’s from the chip shop. My Aunt Kitty gives me a square meal whenever I visit. Rian’s a decent enough cook, but there isn’t the — what-do-you-call-thems? the facilities — in the mansion.’
‘Aye.’ Sandy nodded his head. He had never known hunger or malnutrition. Hunger to him was the half-hour before lunch, soon appeased. Malnutrition was when his mother forgot the bacon for Sunday breakfast. He was like a fattened chick in a warm nest. Robbie, though, was a scavenger-hunter. He had to make kills if he was to eat, and had to make double the kills in order to feed his young sister. Was that the truth? Sandy could not see truth anywhere. He could see nothing but appearances. Things might or might not be what they seemed. He had written a poem about this problem, based upon a record by a rock group. He hoped to buy the group’s new album with the money he would be given on his birthday. His sixteenth birthday was only two weeks away, a week after school restarted. Sixteen. Some things became legal. He could marry. That seemed absurd. He still could not go into pubs. He had promised himself that on his birthday he would go to Edinburgh by himself on the train. He would spend his money there. It would be an adventure. He had been there with his mother on childhood sightseeing trips, but this would be quite different. He would be sixteen. It seemed the perfect age. He did not think that he would like to be any older than sixteen, so long as he were still served in pubs.
Finally, at the top of the hill, they came to the encampment — four caravans and a couple of cars set on a patch of derelict ground in the shadow of the sheer rock face. Sandy knew the spot well. He could see it from the playing fields of his school. He knew that the locals had been trying to evict the gypsies ever since they had arrived there some ten months before. He did not know why they had not succeeded, but he knew that the bad feeling towards these people had shifted the balance of intolerance away from his mother, who might well be a witch in the eyes of the town but was still local born and bred and of decent parents. Sandy felt a pang of sadness. His mother’s life had been one of peripheral contact, of balancing on a slender edge between acceptance and outright rejection, never knowing when the scales might perilously tip. It was horrible. She had no real friends. It was worse than having enemies. He felt his own resentment towards Andy Wallace lifting. It flew into the fine wind that curled around the field. It was scooped up over Craigie Hill itself and deposited in the growling quarry. The odds, Sandy knew, were against Andy Wallace as surely as they were against his mother. He prayed silently, to a God he was slowly recognising, that they might endure.
‘That’s my Aunt Kitty,’ Robbie said. He was pointing a long arm towards a small, solid woman who emerged from one of the caravans and went behind it. Robbie shouted towards her, into the wind.
Her head appeared round the caravan. She waved, then the head disappeared again. She looked a bit like a rag-doll to Sandy. Her arm seemed a bag of stockings. When she came from behind the caravan, tugging at her patterned dress, Sandy saw that one sleeve of the dress was folded back and, presumably, tied behind her. The arm she had raised in welcome was her only arm. She chuckled now, displaying some black and crooked teeth. Her hair was tight with curlers and pins.
‘You beast, Robbie, why haven’t you been to see your old auntie before this? I was of a mind to come and see you meself.’ There was no kissing, no handshakes. They stood a foot or two apart and smiled. Then she ushered them both towards the caravan. Sandy was having second thoughts. He recalled fairy stories his grandmother had told him. Her fairy stories could not be found in books. They came from her head, as if it were some great repository of knowledge. Sandy had the feeling that, because she told her stories with her eyes closed and without the aid of books, his grandmother’s tales had been real. This had shocked him into full attentiveness as a listener, and he had forgotten few of them. He remembered one now. It concerned a young girl who was taken to a gypsy camp and made to dance until she died, but when she died her spirit had been strong and she was able to cure her little sister who had been crippled. Sandy knew that in essence the story was concerned with not fearing death, but there was something more to it. Who could say that he was not walking into a sacrifice? Rian had told him never to trust Robbie. Now he was in the hands of both Robbie and the aunt who, according to Rian, had wanted to use her cruelly. He had been stupid to come to this place.
A large mongrel dog, as if confirming his growing fears, barked at him viciously. It was tethered to one of the caravans, but only by a rope. He backed away from it, and in so doing edged closer to the old, cackling woman and her caravan. Robbie approached the animal and stroked it. It ignored him and went on barking and baring its teeth at Sandy.
‘Come on and make friends,’ Robbie called to him, patting the snarling beast.
‘Come inside, dear,’ coaxed the old woman with her dark mouth.
Sandy tore himself in two. Part of him ran to safety, but that was his spirit self; his body climbed the two iron steps slowly and was inside the caravan.
The woman stooped low over her cooker and ignited the gas. She pushed a blackened kettle on to the ring. Sandy inspected the cramped interior. There was nothing romantic or sensational about it. A small television sat on the only table, wired to a car battery on the floor. There were two bench-seats facing into this table, the whole contrivance becoming a small double bed when adjusted. Sandy liked caravans. He liked their clever compactness, not an inch of space wasted. He realised that life in the town was a little like that. He looked at the paintings on the walls, crude, cheap reproductions in plastic frames. There was no toilet. He remembered the woman emerging from behind the caravan. He could taste mothballs at the back of his throat.