Uchenna's Apples (5 page)

“I didn’t have to,” Uchenna said. “She talked herself into it.”

Emer smiled. “Parents,” she said. “Once you get them trained, they’re not so much trouble.”

Uchenna wasn’t so sure. Though her mam could be very easygoing, there were times—mostly when Uchenna’s dad got her thinking that way—that she could be really stern and tough to deal with. But Uchenna’s mind wasn’t on that right now. It was once more on the Mammy Horse, as they went past the tied-on tubular gate and past the little field again. As the path they were on went through another hedgerow and out the other side, Uchenna paused and looked back at the Mammy Horse, standing there with her head down, looking tired.

“It’s January, by the way,” Uchenna said.

“What?”

“Mam’s due date.”

“Oh!”

“January fourteenth.”

“Cool,” Emer said. But her glance followed Uchenna’s, back toward the field. “You’re gonna start worrying about
her
now,” Emer said, sounding resigned.

“I have other things to worry about,” Uchenna said. She started digging around in her pockets for her coin purse. “We have to get minerals at the Spar. And bread. Don’t know if I’ve got enough, and I don’t want to go all the way home again—”

But by the time they’d come out of the fields and back into the world of pavements and shops and concrete walls, and were walking up to the first apartment building, the one with the glass-fronted Spar convenience store in it, they had gone through all available pockets and come up with six Euro and forty-three cent, which would be just about enough for what they had to buy. Uchenna and Emer pushed through the usual small front-of-store crowd of tweens and teens idling away the time before they had to go home, went in, and got the big bottles of lemon soda and Coke, and a loaf of the perfectly square plastic-wrapped bread that Uchenna’s mam loved and her dad condemned as “sliced white bathroom sponge” while at the same time eating vast amounts of it toasted and smothered with butter. Uchenna’s taste ran more to the crunchy French baguettes that the shop sold as sandwiches, but she didn’t have enough for one right now, and anyway there would be pizza soon. “Is there enough for gum?” Emer said, poking through the change as they walked away from the counter with their bag of bottles and bread.

“You and your gum,” Uchenna said. “You should get off that stuff. It makes you look like a camel.”

Emer punched Uchenna in the arm, though not terribly hard. Uchenna snickered at her as they went out the automatic doors. There would have been more of this, but as they walked out of the store Emer’s phone went off, peeping shrilly—it was one of those chirping ringtones that only kids and some freak adults could hear—and she pulled it out. “Yeah— Hi, Mom, oh I’m glad you called, I was going to call you, can I have supper at Uchenna’s?— Yeah— Yeah, it’s okay with her mam. Pizza. Yeah. Seven
thirty?
Oh, come on, mom, we’ll hardly even have time to finish eating— Well,
nine!”
There was a long pause, during which Emer rolled her eyes expressively. “Okay, okay,” she said at last. “Eight thirty. Yeah. Okay, bye.”

Emer put her phone away with a sigh. “Blah blah blah school night, blah blah blah homework…” she said. “You know how she is.”

“I thought you had her trained,” Uchenna said.

Emer punched her again, harder this time. “Do I need this from you?”

Uchenna just laughed at her friend. The shadows were getting long and the sun had dipped down behind the hills to the west as they made their way back to Uchenna’s circle and up the driveway. The circle was getting full of cars now as people got home from work or school at one of the colleges between here and Dublin. It wasn’t long before Uchenna’s dad came along in the family’s other car, an Audi estate wagon. Uchenna and Emer ran out to help him bring the pizza in: as usual her dad had brought four of them, more than they could all possibly eat. “Old hacker’s bad habits,” he said as he came in after the girls and dropped his briefcase on the washing machine before going into the kitchen and hugging and kissing Uchenna’s mam. “Always buy twice as much pizza as you need, you might want it in the middle of the night…”

Uchenna turned away to hide a grin, because sometimes they were so cute together even if they were old—the tall skinny redheaded guy with his freckles and buzzcut, and the tall handsome broad-shouldered black woman, out of her doctor-coat now and changed into jeans and a floppy T-shirt.

Supper was a casual business as usual when they weren’t having guests or other family over. The table became a scatter of Independent Pizza boxes and plates and bottles and glasses and paper napkins, and two sets of conversations got going, crossing around and through each other many times: Uchenna and Emer talking about science projects and school lunches and the stupidity of boys, Uchenna’s mam and dad talking about commuting problems and people at work and the newest really annoying construction going on in Dublin city centre. The time went by so fast that when Emer’s phone began peeping again, Uchenna was horrified: they hadn’t had time to talk about what she really wanted to deal with, which was the horses. And then the really important thing occurred to Uchenna while Emer was on the phone, and she had to sit there moaning and clutched her head until Emer was finished telling her mom that yes, she’d be home in five minutes.

“What is it, sweet?” Uchenna’s mam said, and her father too was looking at her strangely.

“Nothing,” Uchenna said: and then hurried to make something up, because telling your parents that “nothing” was going on was always fatal. “Something I forgot for art class. No, it’s not homework! It’ll be okay.”

Her parents looked at each other dubiously as Emer was closing her phone and putting it away. “I have to go,” Emer said in a long-suffering tone. “She wants to check my homework. She’s just so
anal
sometimes…”

Uchenna’s mam spluttered with sudden laughter, and then hid her face. Uchenna took advantage of the moment to get up from the table. “I’ll walk you down the driveway…”

Emer finished getting her things together. Then the two of them went out the back door together into the driveway, which was faintly lit by the nearest streetlight in the circle. From inside Uchenna could just hear her mam giggling at something inaudible that her dad had said. “What’s the matter,” Emer said, “what is it?”

“I just realized,” Uchenna said. “The horses. I forgot to take pictures of their legs!”

Emer shrugged. “We can go tomorrow,” she said. “If they’re still there, anyway. After hockey.”

“It’ll be getting dark…”

“Oh, come on, nothing’s gonna happen.”

Uchenna thought about it for a moment. It wasn’t as if Adamstown was all that dangerous after dark. But her folks got more inquisitive about where she was then.
Still, there are ways to deal with that…
“Okay,” she said. “Come meet me after hockey practice. We’ll come back here, grab more apples, and go over.”

Emer waved and headed off across the streetlighted circle. “And don’t be up late fretting!” she called over her shoulder.

“What?”

Emer just waved again and kept on going, around the curve at the top of the circle and out of sight. Uchenna shrugged and went into the house, where her dad was now cleaning up the table and putting the dishes, and her mam was putting the leftover pizza into Zip-loc bags and sticking it into the freezer. In the living room, one of the satellite channels was showing a between-movies promo, and Uchenna saw that the cushions from both the living room sofas were piled up on the floor in front of one of them—a sure sign that her dad was going to sprawl out there with his laptop and do more work stuff while Mam stretched out on the couch and nagged him about working too much and too hard.

Uchenna grinned at that, doubled back into the kitchen to pick up her book bag, and then headed upstairs to her pink-papered bedroom. It was in one of its neat phases, since her mam had made her move the Zoo Crew out into the Back Office: you could actually see the surface of the bed, and even the desk was tidy. She had her own TV up here, her own computer hooked up to the household broadband, and another radio/CD player if she wanted music besides what she had on her iPod or could stream off the computer. Uchenna pulled her schoolbooks out of her bag, stacked up the ones she wouldn’t need in class tomorrow, and made a separate pile of the books she would need. Then she went to her closet and got her hockey stick and its case, leaning them beside the books to take with her in the morning. When everything was sorted out, she flopped down on her bed and paged through her notebook to where she’d written down the computer URL for the weekend’s assignment.
Samhain…
But she also found herself looking at the drawings of the ponies, and the way their knees went.

Uchenna got up again and went over to the computer, bringing up a browser window and loading up the URL of the assigment page. It came up as a standard page on the school website, and Uchenna started reading it. But she couldn’t concentrate.
Fretting…
 Emer had said.

Uchenna frowned, pushing the keyboard away and putting her head down on her arms. Emer loved to tease Uchenna about the way she worried about things. “Worry wart!” she called her: and Uchenna, who’d never heard the phrase until she met Emer, would say, “Why would a wart worry?”
Just another of those weird American phrases Eames keeps coming out with.
But Uchenna couldn’t argue that it was true. She did worry about things.
Well, not tonight, I’ve got stuff to do.
She turned her attention back to the computer and started reading about the Samhain feast and the ghosts and demons associated with it.

But the rest of the evening went by slowly: and Uchenna was almost relieved when at last her mam came and put her head in the door and said, “Lights out, sweet, you’ve got to be up in the morning…” Uchenna got undressed and threw on a long T-shirt nightgown, went off to the bathroom to brush her teeth and take care of other stuff. Then she went to bed, pulling the duvet up to her nose as usual and closing her eyes. But for a long time she lay there in the dark and thought about the Mammy Horse, running out of grass, needing more to eat for herself and her baby
. It’s not fair. Somebody’s not treating you right. Got to see what we can do about that…

The next morning when Uchenna headed out the door to walk to school, her phone beeped twice, then beeped twice again, before she was halfway down the driveway. She paused to pull it out and glanced at the phone’s screen. The text said: MEET ME HALFWAY!!!!

Uchenna didn’t need to check to see who the message was from: Emer was the only person she knew who actually spelled all her words out when texting people—Uchenna suspected she did it to prove she
could
spell, as too many of their classmates had trouble doing anything but textspeak even on exams. “Halfway” normally meant on the side street that ran up beside the Spar, so Uchenna changed her normal route a little and came up along the left-hand side of the apartment building where the Spar was. Emer was there waiting for her, leaning against one of the cast-concrete pillars of the apartment building and pointedly ignoring the glances of other school kids who were heading past her. As Uchenna came up to her, Emer pulled her back into the gap between the plate glass of the building’s lobby and the pillar just outside it.

“They’re gone,” she said.

Uchenna stared at her. “What? Who? The horses?”

Emer nodded, looking upset. “They were there last night: I could see them before I went to bed,” she said, pushing the long blond hair back out of her eyes. “They just stand there in the dark, did you know that? They don’t lie down. It’s so weird. …But I got up real early and had another look. Like around six o’clock. There was a lot of mist…”

“Yeah, they said there would be on the TV weather yesterday,” Uchenna said. “Warm days, chilly nights, late night and early morning fog…”

“Well, the weather guys got that right. And I saw the horses. I think.” Emer looked peculiarly uncertain. “There wasn’t any sun yet: it hadn’t burned through. You know how it is, like there’s this big cloud just sitting over everything—”

“Wait a minute. You
think
you saw them?” Uchenna said, mystified.

“There was something moving past the wall,” Emer said. “I was pretty sure it was them. It wasn’t moving like people, anyway. So I went back to sleep, and then my mom called me and I had to run out and shower and get dressed, and when I came back—” She shook her head. “The mist was going away. And they were gone!”

Other kids from St. John’s were going past them now, glancing at them. “We’re gonna be late,” Uchenna said. “Come on.”

They waited until the next group of kids who were coming along had passed them: then headed up toward the school. “I don’t get it,” Uchenna said. “They just turn up, and the next morning they’re gone? How come?”

“I don’t know!” Emer said as they came around the corner and went past the Spar, where a few kids were standing around on the sidewalk eating pastries and swilling energy drinks before going into the schoolyard across the road.

“Did you hear a car or anything?” Uchenna said. “If they’re gone, somebody has to have come and taken them away.” She frowned. “Unless they got out somehow. If somebody opened the gate—”

“It wasn’t open,” Emer said. “And there wasn’t a car. I would have heard that. When there’s been a joyrider or somebody like that out there before, I’ve heard them almost as soon as they turned up.”

“Okay,” Uchenna said, “so what do you—”

She stopped, staring across the street: from inside the school gates she could hear a noise that surprised her, this time of day. A lot of voices were shouting together, but in that curious repressed way that suggested people are trying not to shout too loudly, in case some adult in the area might notice. “What the feck?” Emer said, peering over that way.

Some of the kids watching whatever was going on were starting to spill out of the school gates now, which to Uchenna suggested that the event wouldn’t last long: there would be teachers out there shortly to break up whatever was going on. “Come on,” she said.