Uchenna's Apples (8 page)

Uchenna looked over Emer’s shoulder at the page. It had a noisy magenta-and-blue tiled background that (since all the print was dark pink) turned it into a torment to the eyes; the whole rest of the page was a mile-long scrolldown of reblogged music-album art and movie promo pictures. “Whose is that?” Uchenna said.

“Big Aisling’s.”

Uchenna shook her head and went tsk-tsk. There were two Aislings in their class, one little and fair, the other broad and dark, and their entire relationship was based on how much each of them hated the other one for having the same name. The attitude seemed to have carried over into the Tumblr, which—when Uchenna squinted at it—she could see featured many crudely Photoshopped phonecam images of “EVIL AISLING”. 

“School’s gonna call her parents in when they see those,” Uchenna said.

“Maybe they won’t see it…”

“They will,” Uchenna said. “The IT teacher has it fixed so the school system archives every student page automatically whenever it’s changed.”

Emer pushed away from the desk, making a face. “Oh well,” she said, “everybody gets to be stupid once.”

“Our classmates? Sometimes more than once. Let’s go down to the Office. Podge and Rodge are on.”

In the kitchen, Uchenna’s mam and dad were dishing out takeaway. Uchenna sniffed as she and Emer passed through, and didn’t immediately catch the scent of anything she couldn’t live without for an hour or so. “Chenna?” her dad said. “You two going to sit down?”

“In a while, Daddy,” Uchenna said, and she and Emer kept going.

“They’re gonna eat it all,” Emer said as they came out into the dark and cool of the back yard.

“Not a chance,” Uchenna said, unlocking the door of the Back Office. “There’s another whole bag of stuff on the counter that they haven’t even unpacked yet. My dad doesn’t know how to feed anything smaller than a software intervention team…”

The went in and shut the Office door, and Uchenna turned on the little battery-powered table lamp so they could find her cache of junk food, crisps mostly, and break out a one-quart bottle of red lemonade, which having been out here was cool enough to drink without ice. Uchenna turned on the TV, fiddled with its little antenna for a few moments until RTÉ 2 came in as well as it ever did out here, and the two of them settled down among the piles of cushions and stuffed animals and started stuffing their faces.

The screen lit up with the images of a couple of puppets who looked like round-faced and slightly sinister country guys, sitting in an candlelit cottage and having a funny and somewhat rude talk with some young black-leather-clad celebrity who was passing through Ireland and didn’t believe that appearing with Podge and Rodge would permanently damage his career. “Who is that?” Emer said.

“No idea. Some kind of rock star?” Uchenna said. “The guys in U2 keep inviting them over. Kill that light, would you Eames? We don’t need it.”

Emer shut the table light off, and the two of them leaned back and ate crisps and laughed at Podge and Rodge, and the rock-star-or-whoever, who didn’t seem to understand that the puppets, the human host, and the studio crew were all making fun of him. “I feel sorry for the guy,” Uchenna said after a while.

“Who? The rock guy?”

“No, the one under the table, making the puppets go.”

“It has to be two guys,” Emer said. “Those are real hands working all of theirs. Look, four of them.”

Uchenna looked at the wooden table on the set and shook her head. “Must be really tight in there,” she said. “Boy, you think we smell bad after PE, imagine how
they
—”

Something went BANG! on the roof right over their heads.

The two girls froze, staring at each other.

On the TV, Podge said something rude, and Rodge and the rock star and the audience all laughed. But it all suddenly seemed a long way away. The hair was standing up all over Uchenna in shock, and Emer’s face was a study in fear.

BANG! And this time the sound happened directly above them, on the roof right over the spot where they were sitting.

“What
is
that?!” Emer whispered.

Uchenna shook her head. “Did you hear anything else?” she whispered back. “An engine? A car?”

Emer shook her head, her eyes wide. “I told you—”

“Don’t freak,” Uchenna whispered. “Let’s just take a look.”

“I don’t know—”

Uchenna patted her pocket. “Come on. We see anything we don’t like, we call the house and my dad right comes out.”

Emer hesitated. Then she said, very softly, “Okay. Can you open that door and not have it make any noise?”

“You better believe it,” Uchenna said, “because sometimes I sneak out here at night.” She grinned.

They got up and moved very softly toward the door, leaving the TV running: though Uchenna grabbed its remote and turned it down about halfway as she got ready to open the door. “You set?” she whispered.

Emer nodded.

Uchenna eased the door open, peered out. There was no one in the yard that she could see.
But the light over the back door’s not all that great, there could be anybody in one of those shadows—

She stopped herself: there was no point in thinking that way—it was just going to make her more nervous. She looked left and right, saw nothing. Somebody behind the Office, then?

Very quietly she beckoned Emer to follow her around the back, into the space between the Office and the wall at the back of the property. At the corner of the temporary building she stopped, peered around the corner: then glanced behind her, shook her head at Emer.
Nothing—

Silently they moved together around the back of the Office. Uchenna was surprised to see that almost none of the light from the TV was making it out through the opaque plastic curtain—they had to feel their way along the back of the building. About halfway along, Emer suddenly reached out and patted Uchenna’s arm.

Uchenna looked back at her again. Emer silently pointed up a couple of times into the branches of the tree.

They both held still for a few moments. Then Uchenna heard what Emer had heard: the rustling. And after that, something went BANG! Into the roof of the Office. It rolled down the roof and fell down onto the sparse behind-building grass at Uchenna’s feet. She stooped, picked it up.

It was an apple.

Uchenna handed it back to Emer. Emer looked at the apple, looked up into the tree. From this angle, their view of the branches of the tree was blocked. Uchenna pointed at the end of the Office, gestured that they should go around the far wall and turn the next corner.

Emer nodded. Absolutely silently they made their way down to the next corner. Above them, in the tree, the rustling seemed to get louder. Uchenna looked cautiously around the next corner, saw nothing at ground level. But above them, at the twelve-foot level, she could see the top of the wall, and just above the wall, something dark: a shape that moved. It was hard to see clearly what it was: the tree was cutting off all the light that came from the house side. But Uchenna and Emer had been outside long enough now for their eyes to start getting used to the darkness. And overhead, in the sky on the far side of the wall, there was a half moon: not incredibly bright, this close to the city, but light enough to brighten the sky a little and make anything above the wall show up as a silhouette. Looking at it hard, Uchenna thought she saw —

Emer leaned in very close, so her whisper would be almost noiseless. “It’s a leg.”

Uchenna nodded. Somebody had one foot and leg on the top of the wall: the rest of the person was hidden by the upper branches as they leaned into the leaves and branches of the tree. Sizes were hard to work out in the dark, but Uchenna was getting angry.
What are they doing, using the tree to get down and sneak into my yard? Why? Are they after my little cheap TV or something? Or the barbecue, Dad said somebody over Emer’s side of town had their barbecue stolen last week —

Emer patted Uchenna on the arm again. Uchenna glanced back at her. Emer didn’t say a word: just tossed the apple she was holding, then flicked a glance toward the tree.

Uchenna grinned and stepped back to let Emer pass her.

Emer slipped by, staying close to the building, looking up into the tree. More rustling was coming from up there, and bark and some leaves came pattering down. Looking up into the dark of the branches, Emer moved very slowly and carefully forward toward the far corner of the Office. For a few moments she held still. Then she reared back with both hands together, almost over her shoulder, one foot up off the ground as she leaned. A second later she fired the apple up into the dark branches.

“Aaah!”
said a voice in the tree, in what sounded like shock and pain. There followed a scrabbling noise, a ripping sound like leaves being pulled off a branch, a couple of loud bumps: then a crash of something falling through branches, and a heavy bump, with a shock that went right through the ground. Immediately after came a smaller bump, with a sound like crinkling plastic, and then several smaller bumps, one after another. Then silence…

Uchenna and Emer headed around the corner together and stared at what had fallen out of the tree. It was folded up and groaning on the ground until they came out where it could see them. Then it tried to sit up in a hurry, and groaned again.

A kid. Small, skinny, wearing a dark track suit with white stripes up the side of the pants and the sides of the jacket, and dirty white trainers. Uchenna squinted at him: it was hard to see anything in this light.

“What are you doing here?” Uchenna said. “I’m gonna call the Guards!”

“And do what?” said the kid, sounding angry. “I’ll be gone by the time they get here. You can’t stop me.”

Emer simply stepped forward, tossing another apple that she’d just picked up. “Bets?” she said. “Don’t make me go all big-league on your ass.”

The kid sat up and looked furiously at her. “The Yank,” he said under his breath. “What’re you doing here? You don’t live here.”

“She was visiting
me
,” Uchenna said, stepping over to Emer’s side, “and you’d better start explaining why
you
are.” In the poor light under the thick leaves of the apple tree, Uchenna continued to peer at the skinny kid sitting on the ground—and then suddenly realized why he looked familiar. It was Jimmy Garrity, the Traveller kid from that morning.

“Garrity!” Emer said at the same moment.

“Yeah,” he said, still sounding angry: but now there was something else in his voice, too—fear. “Go on, call the feckin’ Guards and get it over with.”

“No,” Uchenna said, surprising herself somewhat. “Not till you tell me what you’re doing here.”

He scowled and turned his face away as if Uchenna was too stupid to be believed. Then he got up, reaching down to pick up a pale thing that had been lying on the ground next to him. It was a beat-up white plastic carrier bag from the Tesco supermarket chain, and as he picked it up, a couple of apples fell out of it.

Emer stared at them. “What do you want
those
for?”

He didn’t answer. But Uchenna looked at them, having a strange thought. After a moment she said, “They’re for the horses, aren’t they.”

Jimmy started swearing. At the point where he started using expressions that Uchenna couldn’t even understand any more, she said, “Just shut up! What’s your problem?”

“It’s the first thing you bloody buffers’d think of, isn’t it?” Uchenna’s eyes were now used enough to the dark under the tree that she could see Jimmy roll his eyes in complete angry scorn. “Travellers and horses.”

“Well, yeah, and here you are bringing them apples!” Emer said.

“
Stealing
them apples,” Uchenna added.

For a moment, even in this darkness, Uchenna saw the fury on Jimmy’s face and was horrified by it. “What am I supposed to do!” he said, loud and angry. “They’re out there with nothing to eat, they don’t even have water, they—”

“Sssh!”
Uchenna said. “Would you hold it down? My parents’ll hear you.”

“Out there
where
?” Emer said.

“Over behind the south side of town,” Jimmy said. “One of those little fields past the Condom Ditch. Donnelan’s old place, my dad says it’s called. The field belongs to one of the cottages down on the Laoise Road, but they’re not doing anything with it because the drainage is so bad, there’s nothing there but weeds—”

Uchenna thought for a moment. The Condom Ditch she knew: it was near a small lane that passed between two fields behind the furthest southern side of Adamstown. The lane had unusually high hedgerows that blocked the view from both the nearest road and the train line, and kids with access to cars liked to go down there to have sex. They tended to throw the used condoms over the hedgerow into the ditch on its far side, and over time the ditch had become disgustingly full of them. But as to which field Jimmy was talking about—

“You know the one,” Emer said. “Right by the train, on the south side of the station, where that little road turns sideways before it goes under the tracks. That field’s always full of water when it’s been raining: sometimes you even get ducks in there.”

Uchenna shook her head. “Jeez, even I know it’s way too wet for horses in there!”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Jimmy said as he got up off the ground and dusted himself off. “I don’t know about the fecking things.”

Uchenna raised her eyebrows. “Everybody says you do.”

“Yeah, well everybody says you’re a druggy thuggy wagon whose mam’s a leprosy doctor and whose dad got his job by kissing Bill Gates’ ass,” Jimmy growled, “but maybe that’s not true either, is it?”

Uchenna’s eyes went wide. Emer’s mouth fell right open. “You scummy little—”

“No,” Uchenna said, “don’t.” Now that she was getting over the initial shock of finding somebody sneaking over the wall into her back yard, she was starting to think more normally again—and the first thought that had occurred after the initial flush of anger was that she’d been called a lot worse things since she first came to Adamstown. Most of the kids here, in fact, were a lot less toxic than the ones back in Stillorgan.
Or maybe I’m just getting older and more used to it…
And anyway, there was something funny about the way he’d put it.
He actually called me a
wagon
! He sounds like Belle…