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  And then he put his arms around the girls and joined the queue for the BigO.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  One or more of the women had bad dreams most nights. Even if the conscious mind could deal with the horrific abuse most of these women had suffered at the hands of their partners or families, the unconscious mind wasn’t having it. Farzana could make out Bijul’s groans of agony as her brother beat her again in her dreams. And then there was a new voice, probably the tall woman whose family had tried to make her kill herself when her husband had died. Even if past horrors could be suppressed during the day, night-time brought them back, often with a terrifying intensity. Five years of working in the refuge had taught Farzana many things, one of which was that the past may be another country, but it was very close by. Like France. One could easily just slip across the English Channel or hop onto a Eurostar.

  Usually when women came to the refuge they were in distress, they were afraid and they knocked on the front door so hard some of them made their knuckles bleed. So when Farzana first heard what wasn’t much more than a light tapping on the front door, she ignored it. Sometimes local kids would knock on their door and run away. Sometimes, more worryingly, the caller was a furious husband, intent upon removing his wife from the premises. That was why they had an intercom. Farzana went back to looking at the dire state of the refuge’s accounts. They were currently spending what was turning out to be an unsustainable amount of money on food. She shook her head. So much of the food they bought came from pound shops already, it was almost impossible to economise. Basically, there were just too many residents.

  The tapping started again and this time Farzana picked up the intercom and said, ‘Yes? Who is it?’

  Only when no one answered did she look at the intercom screen. But when she did look, she put her hand over her mouth to stop herself screaming.

  She was following him. He’d become convinced of this when he’d strolled back into the fairground and then out again. Why hadn’t he let Mumtaz come with him? After all, he’d had no meaningful memory or moment of enlightenment on his solo walk. He’d just picked up this Gypsy woman who was making him nervous. Maybe she meant to mug him at some point? But then if she did, she was going about it in a very strange way. He’d already got a good view of her face – which was none too pleasant.

  That was unfair, but then wasn’t she being unfair by following him about? Irving left the fairground and began to thread his way through the jungle of caravans where the workers and show people lived. Many of them appeared to be empty, but there were a lot of vans where people were cooking, watching TV and strolling around. Of course, the fairground people were just ordinary folk, most of them, probably not Gypsies at all.

  It had been his father who had told him they were all Gypsies and vagabonds. And why wouldn’t he, after what had happened to his daughter? To be fair, his mother never had. She’d just never spoken on the subject at all.

  Irving looked behind him and saw that the woman had gone. He breathed a sigh of relief. Then he kept on walking until he came to the place where he’d first seen the woman. But this time he could hear a voice speaking English. He walked behind the lone caravan in front of him and saw a strange and familiar figure, throwing a rope over a horizontal metal bar suspended between two, what looked like, castle towers.

  Shazia looked at her friend’s face and stated the obvious.

  ‘Doesn’t go very fast, does it?’

  Grace said, ‘Gonna take us half an hour to do one circuit!’

  It hadn’t looked this slow when they’d been on the ground. But Lee had known it would be. He smiled.

  ‘I think this is for the old people,’ Grace said.

  ‘Doesn’t make it shit,’ Lee said. ‘Look, you can see Ford’s factory, if you squint hard and have a good imagination.’

  Grace raised her eyes.

  Shazia took his arm and squeezed. ‘I heard what you said to Amma,’ she said.

  ‘Shazia …’

  ‘I know it’s not my business,’ she said. ‘But if you can’t see she loves you too, you must be blind.’

  Lee said nothing. He knew the girl was right, but that didn’t make his life any easier.

  Farzana ran to the front door and unlocked it. Not only could she now see what was staining the woman’s clothes, she could smell it too. A sort of iron-scented, meaty aroma. She gagged.

  ‘Shirin!’ she said.

  Her whole body rebelled at the thought of touching her, but somehow Farzana managed to pull Shirin Shah inside and close the door behind her.

  ‘Shirin, how did you …’

  How had she got there? She couldn’t have come by public transport and Farzana knew she didn’t drive.

  A scream made her look away, as one of the other women, coming down the stairs, saw what she saw. Farzana said, ‘Sssh! Sssh!’

  The woman, a tiny middle-aged Indian, put a hand over her mouth.

  God, what a state! And still Shirin’s face didn’t so much as flicker. It was almost as if she was sleepwalking. Dressed entirely in what had once been a full-length white nightdress, she was entirely soaked in blood from the waist down.

  And her hands were covered too.

  Farzana just managed to catch her before the woman collapsed. Holding her up underneath her arms, she said, ‘Oh Shirin, what has been done to you?’

  Some old man who looked as if he was going to a funeral was looking at her. Staring. Amber did get a lot of male attention these days and so she ignored it. The only man who meant anything to her, Nagyapa, would be so pleased she was practising and that was all she cared about. The Twins had taught her how to drop down from the trapeze, catching the ropes with her feet at the last possible moment. It was a common technique, but if she could master it, she could move on to going higher and, maybe, trying somersaults.

  Of course what she really needed was someone to act as her catcher. There she met a dead end, for the moment. Soon she’d just have to approach a circus and see whether she could train with an existing act. Nagyapa, she knew, would be so proud. Once she was flying she’d be just like he had been when he was young.

  The Twins pulled the trapeze into place and secured the ropes.

  Why her grandma had stopped yelling outside their van, Amber didn’t know or care. Once she’d gone, the Twins had retrieved a rig from a huge canvas bag. When she’d started they’d just cobbled something together with whatever they could find. Then they, or her nagyapa, had bought a proper rig. The Twins had always kept that in their van. But this rig wasn’t that one. Amber asked, ‘Where did you get this?’ not expecting an answer.

  She didn’t get one.

  She climbed up the side of what had once been part of the old Tunnel of Love and pulled the trapeze towards her.

  The old man dressed in black shouted something at her, but she couldn’t hear what it was above all the racket from the fair. And so Amber just waved. She mounted the trapeze, swung out into thin air, and waved.

  She was just a girl. Not much more than a child …

  And yet she had that look, that self-absorbed, almost haughty demeanour. Her lips pouting, eyes closed in ecstasy … His mother when she ate chocolate, when she wrapped her heart-shaped face around the filter of a cigarette.

  Irving felt sick. What was it Lee had said? Everyone has a doppelgänger.

  A boy of about sixteen was hassling her to buy one of his glow sticks.

  ‘Every colour you can think of,’ he said. ‘For your kids. They’ll love them!’

  Mumtaz said, ‘I don’t have any children.’

  The kid pulled a face and then said, ‘Nah.’

  Oh, so they were in the territory of ‘all Asians have millions of children’, were they? Mumtaz heaved a sigh.

  ‘Think what you like,’ she said. ‘But I think I’d know whether I have children rather better than you.’

  He left, but she saw him pull a face, mimicking the ‘posh’ way she spoke. But she didn’t care. She was starting t
o get a bit worried about Irving, if she was honest. Either he’d been gone a long time or she was more bored than she imagined. The BigO may be large, but it in no way shifted itself. She couldn’t see where Lee and the girls were, but she knew that Grace, at the very least, would be bored to death.

  Mumtaz looked at her watch. It had been a long ten minutes since Irving had left. What was he doing and why the hell didn’t he have a mobile phone like a normal person?

  The BigO moved and Mumtaz could now see Shazia’s feet.

  Light from the powerful lamps on the BigO illuminated the girl, but not the figures behind her. Dressed in a tatty old tracksuit, she was far from glamorous, but she was beautiful. And, as she swung ever higher on the trapeze, she was also joyful. Which was something Irving’s mother had never been.

  He heard a noise behind him, but didn’t know what it was until the girl said, ‘You see, Grandma, I’m not doing dangerous stuff. I’m just practising.’

  A harsh voice answered. ‘Get down!’

  It was the woman who had followed him. She was, it seemed, the girl’s grandmother. She looked nothing like her.

  The girl said, ‘Nagyapa has always encouraged me and I don’t know why you don’t.’

  ‘Because I don’t want you to kill yourself!’

  ‘I won’t.’

  The ropes creaked as ropes do.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Irving had almost come to believe he was invisible in this conversation between grandmother and granddaughter. So much so, he couldn’t speak.

  ‘Get down!’ the woman repeated.

  ‘I want to know who that man is,’ the girl said.

  ‘He’s no one!’

  Irving turned to the woman and said, ‘Am I indeed. Then why were you following me?’

  ‘Amma always tries to do the right thing,’ Shazia said. ‘Always! Even when she does the wrong thing, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Shazia …’

  ‘Lee, you have to make her do the right thing,’ she said. ‘I know she loves you and you do her. If you allow her to throw you away because she thinks she must do the “right” thing and marry another man she doesn’t know just because he’s from Dhaka, then you’re letting her down. She thinks her parents will be angry, but they won’t; they really like you …’

  ‘I’m not sure Mr and Mrs Huq would want me to be their daughter’s boyfriend,’ Lee said.

  ‘Oh, they’ll get used to it!’

  ‘Here, come and look at this.’

  Shazia had monopolised Lee to the extent that they’d almost forgotten about Grace. Their pod had just started to make its way down from the highest point of the BigO when she spoke, pulling their attention away from each other.

  Lee and Shazia walked to the front of the perspex orb and looked out.

  ‘What we looking at, Grace?’ he asked.

  It was a good view, but so what?

  ‘Look, there’s a girl on a trapeze over there.’

  Grace pointed.

  ‘Do you think there’s gonna be circus acts and that?’

  Lee squinted. The girl wasn’t actually that far away, in a space just beyond the sideshows. But his eyesight was getting a bit dodgy – not that he’d tell anyone until he was practically blind. Just the thought of wearing glasses made him cringe. He knew they’d make him look like a thin Ronnie Kray.

  ‘Isn’t she just on a swing?’ he said.

  Grace punched his shoulder. ‘No! Look! She’s sitting on a stick, man. Since when did a swing get to be a stick? And look how high she’s going …’

  She was going high. A pale figure with what looked like long blonde hair …

  ‘Don’t go over the top,’ Irving called out. ‘My cousin Len did that on the swing in next door’s garden and he broke his ankle.’

  The girl ignored him. But the woman, who was now at his side said, ‘She’s on a trapeze, not a swing!’

  And yet she was getting to the point where she would loop over the bar. Cousin Len, although he’d been in intense pain when he broke his ankle, had described it being like flying. That had been the whole point.

  ‘I can do a few things,’ the girl yelled. ‘I learnt this the other day.’

  She moved her body back and forth until the trapeze was level with the bar.

  Then she let go of the ropes.

  ‘Fuck me!’

  Grace put a hand over her mouth, but she carried on looking. They all did. Not that they saw how it happened. It just did. One moment the girl was throwing herself backwards, presumably with the aim of breaking her fall using her feet against the ropes.

  And then she hit the ground, head first.

  The two girls screamed. Lee took his phone out of his pocket and called 999. Shazia, meantime, was calling Mumtaz.

  Irving knew the girl was dead. Even if her head hadn’t been at a ninety-degree angle to her body, he had heard a crack so loud and so sickening as she hit the ground, it had taken his breath away.

  The Gypsy woman had gone to her; of course she had, she was her granddaughter. Now cradling her blonde head in her thick, dark arms, she said words he didn’t understand while people ran towards her. For his part, Irving found that he couldn’t move. The two figures who had set the trapeze rig up seemed to be afflicted with the same infirmity. Still holding onto the ropes, they stood in the shadows like a pair of Chinese vases.

  Whether it was this image or whether the site was suddenly flooded with light, Irving wasn’t sure, but when he saw the figures as they really were, he knew why he’d made that comparison. Older, clearly, but still wearing the same clothes he remembered from his distant youth, there were the Siamese twins, Ping and Pong.

  ‘Irving! Are you alright?’

  He didn’t consciously fall into Mumtaz’s arms, but that was what happened. His legs gave way. She held him up until he regained his strength.

  ‘Irving, what happened?’ she said. Then, looking around her, ‘What is this?’

  He wanted to say that a girl who had looked exactly like his mother had just died. But that wasn’t what had shocked him to the core. That had been seeing them.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Gala stood in the doorway and he knew. As soon as he’d heard the sirens, he’d known.

  ‘What have you done?’ she said.

  His father had used exactly the same words to him a lifetime ago and he gave her the same reply, ‘Nothing,’ he said. And then he added, ‘I never do.’

  She turned and ran out of the caravan.

  Bela wanted to cry, but he couldn’t. He’d done all his crying a long time ago.

  Mumtaz, her coat covered in mud, wrapped her arms around Irving as he sat on the ground. He couldn’t move.

  She looked up at Lee. ‘Get the girls out of here,’ she said. ‘I don’t want them to see …’

  ‘They’ve already seen,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘The coppers have shut the site.’

  She put a hand to her head. ‘Of course. So just go and be with them.’

  She saw him gather the two girls into his arms and walk away.

  The site was a blur of green and blue as paramedics and police pushed people back from where the girl lay in the arms of a woman who screamed and screamed and screamed.

  She looked at Irving, who said, ‘She’s dead.’

  Her phone rang, but she ignored it. How could she take a call now? And yet all around people were interacting more with their phones than with each other. Talking into them, even taking photographs.

  ‘The paramedics …’

  ‘She’s dead,’ he reiterated. ‘I was here. I heard her neck break.’

  He put his head on her shoulder. The ground underneath her was soaking and she felt the wetness go through her trousers and into her underwear. But it didn’t matter.

  ‘Irving,’ she said, ‘what were you doing here?’

  ‘I was walking …’

  ‘Yes, but how …’

  ‘She looked exactly lik
e my mother when she was young,’ he said.

  He’d obviously had another psychological incident. He wasn’t well.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘You’ve had a terrible shock. Look, this is all going to take some time and I expect the police will want to talk to you …’

  And then she looked up and saw two very strange creatures standing right in front of them. They wore black silk kimonos and had what looked like curling pieces of wood sticking out of their sleeves. They didn’t speak, but Irving did.

  ‘What did you do?’ he said to them. But neither of them spoke.

  Mumtaz looked at Irving. ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘They were here when my sister disappeared,’ he said. ‘And now they’ve killed my mother.’

  When the ambulance doors closed, Eva sat down on the ground and raked her fingers down her face. Why couldn’t it have been her?

  Blood mixed with mud. She lay in the wet and buried her face. But the reflex to breathe was too strong and Eva found herself rearing up, gasping for air. Then she felt hands on her and she screamed as she tried to pull herself away. She heard someone say, ‘I’m sorry …’

  Sorry? What did that mean? Why had it even been said? And why hadn’t it been said by the man who had broken into their lives without a clue as to how much he was not wanted. Now cradled in the arms of some Muslim woman, Eva wanted to tear out his eyes.

  A police officer pulled her to her feet. But she carried on looking at the man on the ground.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ she said.

  The man began to cry. But she felt only hatred.

  ‘When you dig up dead things,’ she said, ‘you get poisoned.’