Uchenna's Apples (17 page)

“What?
Where are they??” Uchenna whispered back.

“Donelan’s old place,” Belle said. “The other side of the north wall. But not for long! Because they’re
stolen,
and there are about five Garda cars out with them right this minute.”

Uchenna and Emer looked at each other. “Who were they stolen from?” Emer said.

Belle shook her head. “Don’t know. Don’t think the Guards do, either. They’re in the middle of an investigation… at least that’s what I heard one of the teachers saying. At least nobody knows who they belong to. But the Guards are getting ready to take them away.”

Uchenna’s eyes went wide. “Where to?”

“Back behind the Garda station,” Belle said. “They’re going to pen them up there until tomorrow, then take them over to the county animal pound in Urlingford.” Belle then started to snort with laughter. “They couldn’t take them over there today because somebody’s stolen the local Guards’ spare horse transports, would you believe it? And they couldn’t borrow one from the pound, and the horse boxes that belong to the
Gardai
in the city can’t be loaned out, or something like that… the city Guards won’t trust the country Guards with them.” Belle’s little group crowed with laughter. “They wound up borrowing some local guy’s horse box to move the horses into the parking lot behind the station.”

“Were the horses okay when they found them?” Uchenna said.

“Yeah, as far as I know,” Belle said. “What I heard was the Guards were trying to figure out how anybody had moved this big pregnant mare in there without anyone noticing. Whole thing sounds kind of shady to me.”

“Yeah,” said one of Belle’s group. “They’re trying to figure out where the horses were last. They think there might be some clues to who stole them if they can track them back…”

Uchenna flushed hot with sheer panic. She went and got some lunch just for the look of it, but she wasn’t able to do more than toy with her food for the rest of lunchtime: she was too busy cursing herself for dumping out that bag of apples.
Oh, God. What am I going to do if Mam and Dad find out about this? If a few phone calls from the neighbors make Mam crazy, what’s a Garda car in front of the house going to do?

Her state of mind after lunch got her called out a couple of times by her afternoon teachers, which just made her angrier and more nervous: so that when afternoon break came around she was beyond merely tense. She almost didn’t want to face Jimmy, but when she went out of her classroom, there he was, waiting across the hall, just where they’d agreed they should meet before they went to Mr. Mallon. A few moments later, Emer joined them.

“So what now?” Uchenna said softly, all out of sorts and not much caring who saw it. “Do we go see him and tell him what we know?”

Jimmy shook his head. “No way,” he said under his breath. “Leave me out of it now. The minute the Guards get involved, I’m out of it. Got enough trouble as it is.”

“What trouble?”

“My folks,” Jimmy said, and scowled. “They were getting grief from some people last night. ‘Your son was out getting everybody suspicious about us,’ blah blah…” He shook his head, scowled. “No more of that for me. Me da—”

Uchenna waited for him to say something else about his dad: but nothing else was forthcoming. “Listen,” Jimmy said then, fierce and upset, “you promised. Not a word about me. You
promised
!” And Jimmy walked off, head down, vanished around a corner into the corridor that headed toward the toilets.

From behind Uchenna came a snicker. A crowd of other kids who’d been milling around further down the hall now drifted up past them, paused. “Hey, You-chenna, you ready to start dating now? Didn’t think you’d start with some dumb creamer.”

Another snicker. “Yeah,” somebody else said from inside the crowd, “the creamer found himself some coffee.”

“Or some brown sugar—”

Uchenna went hot with anger. Yet another insult, a secretive reference to some rhyming slang: creamer from “cream cracker”, which rhymed with “knacker”. “It’s not like talking to somebody new’s a crime,” Uchenna said, rounding on them. “You should try it sometime, but you’re all such big fecking blouses that none of you’d dare.”

She glared at them, then turned and marched away before they would have time to do anything about the insult except suck in breath and make that “ooooooo” noise. Emer had vanished. Uchenna carefully didn’t look in the direction she suspected Emer might have gone: just took herself down to the room where her next class was.

The afternoon dragged on, and Uchenna spent it twitching. When classes were over, she was half afraid to go home. She and Emer were standing on the school steps again when Belle came out and paused, looking around for somebody. “Belle—” Uchenna said.

Belle looked around at her, surprised. “Oh, hi, Chen—”

“Where’s ‘Donelan’s old place?’”

Belle smiled a little secretive smile. “Thought you might want to know,” she said. “Come on.”

She led them out the school gate and down to the right, past all the shops and apartments in the middle of Adamstown: then angled northward through an area that Uchenna didn’t know all that well, on the far side of the new leisure center and out behind it, where there were dumpsters and wheelie bins standing around in a big bare parking lot. Here there was another of the usual high concrete walls, but this one had a little gated gap in it, and the chainlink gate wasn’t locked.

They went out through it and across another field like the Field of Dead Trolleys, but one with a lot more nettles in it, some of them growing a meter tall. “Watch out for those,” Belle said, leading them on a circuitous path where most of the nettles had been trodden down.

“Jeez, how many people were out here before?” Emer said as they went along.

Belle laughed. “Lots. Anybody who thought they could sneak out to watch the Guards trying to deal with horses came out here. Everybody said it was pretty funny. The pregnant one stepped on one of them. There was screaming…” She shook her head. “Don’t think we’re gonna find a lot here now, though.”

She was right. Through a hedgerow there was an empty field, well grassed over, Uchenna was happy to see: but the horses were gone again. Their hoofprints could still be seen in the somewhat wet ground. Many tire tracks, some of them deep, led away from the hedgerowed field. That was all.

Uchenna let out a long unhappy breath.

“Something you want to tell me about this?” Belle said.

Uchenna gave her a look.

Belle held her hands up in the air in a don’t-blame-me gesture. “Okay, okay,” she said, “just asking. Never mind.” She turned and headed back toward the rear of the leisure center.

Uchenna and Emer followed her, a little ways behind. “So that’s that,” Emer said. “If the Guards have them, then the Mammy will be okay. All the horses will have plenty to eat, and the Guards’ll get the Mammy a vet if she needs one.”

“Yeah,” Uchenna said. She knew she should have felt glad: but somehow she was heartsore. She couldn’t get out of her head the image of that mild, thoughtful eye looking at her, saying… what? It was as if there’d been some attempt to communicate going on, but Uchenna hadn’t been able to work out what the message was. And now there would never be another chance.

She went home in a sad mood and did her homework more or less on autopilot: she ate dinner the same way, even though her Dad had brought home Indian from her favorite restaurant in Naas. When everything was cleaned up in the kitchen, though, and her Dad was sprawled in front of the TV tapping away on his laptop as usual, Uchenna slipped quietly downstairs again into the kitchen, rummaged around in one of the kitchen drawers, and came up with the little flashlight her Dad used when he had to go out and root around in the shed in the dark.
I hate this!
Uchenna thought as she headed silently out into the back yard and went as quickly as she could up the tree and over the wall.
It’s like being some kind of crook. But I don’t dare let anybody see me—

She made her way across the field nervously, still afraid she might be spotted. At one point, when she realized there was enough skyglow from Dublin to get by without the flashlight, she turned it off, slowing down to keep from tripping in any of the holes in the field. A while later she crossed over the Condom Ditch and into the field where the horses had been.

Uchenna turned the flashlight on, shone it around her. The hoofprints, the last remnants of the bagged grass, they were all as they had been.

But the apples were gone.

She froze.
Oh,
no.
Oh no.

Uchenna turned the flashlight off again and made her way back through the hedge and across the board over the Ditch.
They found them. The Guards found the apples.
It was the only possibility: nothing else lived in this field that was big enough to eat them all, or strong enough to take them away.
And it’s not going to take long for them to find out where they came from. They’re don’t look like the kind of apples you buy at the Tesco! They’re full of bug holes and bruised bits.

She was sweating all over as she climbed the wall again and came down in her yard by way of the tree. Very quietly Uchenna made her way back into the house, slipped the flashlight back into the kitchen drawer, and was just about to sneak back upstairs when her Dad came into the kitchen from the living room where he’d been working.

“Where were you?” he said, looking at her a little strangely. “You weren’t in the Back Office—” He reached out to her, and to Uchenna’s surprise picked a leaf off her shoulder, looked at it. “In the tree?”

Uchenna swallowed. “Uh, yeah,” she said.

The expression her Dad turned on her was very strange. “Chenna,” he said, “tell me truthfully. You’re not—
seeing
anybody, are you?”

“What?”
She was astonished that he would ever think such a thing: though at school she pretended to be as interested in it as everybody else was, Uchenna privately found the whole concept of sex kind of icky. “No!”

“All right,” he said, sounding very relieved. “All right. Listen now, hurry up and go get yourself cleaned up, your Mam’s on the way home.” And he went back into the living room.

Uchenna went hurriedly upstairs, turning this new weirdness over in her mind. As she changed out of the tree-smudged sweatshirt and chucked it into the laundry basket in her room, she thought,
Oh, GTS, thank You for making Dad such a star! If Mam had caught me that way this time of night when she told me not to go over the wall—

Outside she could heard the engine of the SUV as it swung into the driveway. With a clean sweatshirt on, she headed downstairs and hugged her Mam as soon as she came in the door. Her Mam looked at her quizzically. “Why, sweet, what’s the matter?”

If only I could tell you!
“I hate it when you’re out late,” Uchenna said, muffled, into her Mam’s front. “I worry about you.” And while this was true, it was also a great way to distract her Mam from anything that might still be on her mind from this morning.

Her Dad was watching Uchenna from the doorway into the living room with an expression she found impossible to decipher.
Is he going to tell her on me?
Uchenna thought. But she doubted it. Her Dad sometimes went out of his way to keep her out of trouble with her Mam, who was stricter with Uchenna than he was. Probably this was because of the way he was with his Mam: Granny O’Connor was sweet with Uchenna, but when it came to her Dad, she spent a lot of time giving him the rough side of her tongue.

“It’s all right, sweet one,” her Mam said, wearily dropping her bag on one of the kitchen chairs and shrugging out of her white coat. “Did you eat? Good. I could eat a horse. Hey, handsome guy, heat me up some of that chicken tikka and let me tell you about my day…”

Uchenna went quickly and quietly up to her room, half afraid that one of the things that her Mam was going to tell her Dad about “her day” would have to do with what she and Uchenna had said to each other that morning. But if that happened, neither of them gave any sign of it. Her parents just said “Good night” to Uchenna as usual when they went up to their own bedroom.

All the same, she didn’t sleep well that night: images of that placid brown eye, of the field with no apples in it, kept coming up through her dreams to trouble her. And Uchenna got no relief the next day, either, because a lot of the kids at school were buzzing with uneasy interest about the horses. How could they just turn up in a field, and no one see them get there? How could they get moved around the way they had and not get noticed? One hallway rumor said the Guards had already found two other fields where the horses had been kept (and again Uchenna flushed hot and went quiet, but no one noticed). And conspiracy theories were starting to flower.

“It’s the IRA,” one kid said in the crowd that was forming in the front of the doors of the school’s auditorium, waiting to go in for that afternoon’s weekly assembly.

“Oh, come on,” somebody else in the crowd said, “why would the IRA want horses?”

“Well, they stole Shergar, didn’t they!”

“He was a
race horse,
you dim fecker! The Provos were going to hold him for ransom for a coupla million quid! Who’s going to do that with some dirty old tinker pony?”

“Drugs,” another kid whispered. “It’s one of the drug gangs from up in Dublin.”

“Are you kidding? What would they want horses for?”

“Didn’t you hear? Some drug dealer up in Dublin found a horse head on his doorstep the other morning. Like in
The Godfather.
He was dealing drugs without giving the gang their cut. Prob’ly the gang wants more horses to send more warnings. So they just took these cheap street horses for it—”

The very thought of the Mammy Horse having her head cut off to intimidate some stupid drug dealer made Uchenna break out in a sweat that was half fear, half fury: but she didn’t dare show any reaction.

Other theories were floated while everybody was waiting for the doors to be opened, but none of them were more worthwhile than the ones Uchenna had heard so far. Emer came up behind her as the doors opened, and they went in together and sat down in one of the lower rows, over with Belle and some of her group.