Home. Rose pondered the meaning of the word as she stretched out on the deep, soft mattress of her temporary bed. Its sumptuous quilt was kicked unceremoniously to the floor. It was too hot in the room! How do people sleep in such heat? Mrs Luca had set the temperature before wishing Rose goodnight, kissing her on the forehead and disappearing into her own room next door. Rose grimaced at the thought of the kiss and the waft of sickly perfume that accompanied it. She listened to the low rumble of someone snoring next door that the walls of the prestigious hotel failed to stifle. Sometime earlier, she had heard raised voices, though she couldn’t decipher what was being said, nor even what language it was being said in. Silence had fallen briefly, before the rumble had commenced and settled into a rhythm.
Home. Nicu snored. Nicu’s snore was elephantine, especially when he had been drinking his home-brewed ale. In the confines of their wagon, it often woke them up. Esme would dig him hard in the ribs with her elbow or her fist. He would snuffle and snort, then turn over, and for a while peace would follow, until he cranked it up again. Rani thought it was hilarious and mimicked him, though mostly he slept through his father’s nocturnal ruckus. Rani could sleep through anything, even thunderstorms. Rose didn’t like thunderstorms. No matter how many times Esme told her that she was perfectly safe and that nothing bad was going to happen to her, Rose couldn’t help jumping out of her skin at every loud clap of thunder. She was convinced one of the claps would make the wagon explode and that they would all die.
The wagon did explode, but not because of a thunderstorm. It had been their home. The only home she knew. Not a house in the country, with its own piece of land. Not a flat in a town, with windows so thick that they cut out all sounds of life outside. Why, Rose wondered, would anyone want to live in a house or a flat? Why would anyone want to live in a place where you woke up, opened the curtains, and everything around you was the same, day in, day out? Rose was sure she would die of boredom. She grew impatient when they rented a trailer and stayed put in the same place for a few weeks over the winter. Yet there were children she spoke to in villages where they stopped who were shocked that she was happy to leave her friends behind, that she didn’t go to school, that her only permanent home was the wagon.
‘But it’s tiny!’ they said. ‘How do you all fit in?’
‘It’s cosy,’ Rose replied. ‘And we spend a lot of time outdoors.’
‘What about when it’s cold?’ they asked.
‘Who wants to be in a big place when it’s cold?’ she replied. ‘In a small place you can snuggle up together. And we’ve got a stove. Anyway, we’re used to the cold.’
Some of them envied the fact that Rose didn’t go to school. Others told her she would never get a good job.
‘Why do I need to go to a school to study things like geography and nature and science when it’s all around me?’ she used to say, quoting Nicu, who was adamant they would learn far more from travelling than sitting in a stuffy classroom.
‘I can show you the stars and constellations while we sit by the fire at night,’ her father was fond of saying. ‘I can show you the tracks made by animals when we forage through the woods for food. I can teach you to recognise birds and their songs when we wake early in the morning to set off for new pastures. I can take you to see mountains and valleys, rivers and seas, forests and grasslands.’
Rose loved it when Nicu spoke like that, his voice strong and musical, his eyes glinting.
‘Your father is a man of poetry and passion,’ Esme always said. ‘And that’s why I married him.’
Home. Home is where you feel safe and loved and secure, Rose concluded. It’s where you are surrounded by people who mean more to you than anything else in the world and by things that you cherish because they are part of your history and part of your story. Papa would have been proud of me for coming up with such a description, Rose thought to herself. She knew that he might have said something similar once upon a time in his strong, musical voice.
Alone now in the darkness of a hotel room, she cried for the home she had lost. For Nicu, for Esme and for Rani. For her history and for her story. Next door the rumble continued, persistent and heedless.