The Invisible Ones Read Free Page B

Kent as his parents picked hops during the Great War. His parents stayed on the road; traveling and working around the southeast with his brothers. My one remaining uncle is now on a permanent site near the south coast, but only because his health deteriorated and made life on the road too arduous. But after the second war—during which my father met a gorjio girl named Dorothy, and when he drove ambulances in Italy, where he was interned and learned to read—after that he deliberately drew back from his family, and we didn’t see that much of them. My brother and I grew up in a house; we went to school. We weren’t Travelers. Dorothy—our mother—was a brisk Land Girl from Tonbridge who was never going to be seduced by the romance of the road. She was a fanatical believer in universal education—and my father was quite an autodidact, in his dour, humorless way. He even went so far—much too far, for most of our relatives—as to become a postman.
    But despite them, we knew things. I (especially me, as the dark one) knew what it meant to be called a dirty gyppo; I know, too, about the long, petty battles over caravan sites, and the evictions and petitions and squabbles over education. I know about the mutual distrust that stopped Leon from going to the police about his daughter—or to any other private investigator. I have some inkling of what made him come to me, and I realize that he must be desperate to do so.

3.
    JJ
    I suppose my family isn’t like most people’s. For a start, we’re Gypsies or Romanies or whatever. Our name is Janko. Our ancestors came from Eastern Europe, although they’ve been here for a long time, but my gran married my granddad, who’s an English Gypsy, so my mum is half Roma and half Gypsy, and then she went offwith my dad, who she says was a gorjio . I’ve never met him, so I don’t know. They didn’t get married, so my name is Smith, like hers and Gran and Granddad’s. JJ Smith. Mum called me after her dad, Jimmy, but I don’t like being called Jimmy, and now she calls me JJ. To be honest I’d rather not be called after my granddad, I’d rather be called after someone else—like James Hunt. Or James Brown. But that’s not the truth.
    We have five trailers on our site. First of all, there’s our trailer— that’s where Mum and I live. Mum’s name is Sandra Smith. She’s quite young—she was seventeen when she got into trouble and had me. Her parents were furious and chucked her out, and she had to go and live in Basingstoke, but after a couple of years they relented and let her travel with them again. They had to, really, as she is their only child, which is quite unusual. And I’m their only grandchild. Our trailer is a Lunedale— it’s not that big, or that new, but it has oak-veneer walls and has a niceold-fashioned look. It’s not flash, but I like it. Because it’s just the two of us, I suppose, we’re quite good friends. I think she’s a pretty good mum, on the whole. Sometimes she drives me mad, of course, and, well, sometimes I drive her mad, too, but generally we get on pretty well.
    Mum works as a delivery woman when we stop anywhere for a while. She’s good at picking up work wherever we are. She works really hard, and apart from that sort of work, she helps look after my great-uncle, who’s in a wheelchair. We all do that—Mum and me, Gran and Granddad, and my uncle. They are the other people we travel with. Gran and Granddad have two trailers between them—both Vickers, and both really flash with chrome trim and cut-glass windows. They live and sleep in the biggest and newest one, and then Gran cooks and does washing up and so on in the other one. And it’s their spare room, if they need it. Great-uncle has a Westmorland Star that has been specially adapted for him, although it’s the same one that he lived in when Great-aunt Marta was alive. It’s got a ramp so that he can wheel himself in and out, and it’s also got something that most