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Aishe’s good intentions to be pleasant evaporated the instant she opened her front door and heard Gulliver and Benedict laughing together up in his room.
She threw her keys into the bowl and strode though into the kitchen to dump the tacos on the bench. Why does it bug me so much to know they’re having fun, she wondered? Why I am such a cranky goddamn cow?
The afternoon at the animal shelter had not been one of her better ones. Aishe had made a seven-year old cry, which had led the father of said child to lay a complaint with Nico. Aishe explained that she had only been trying to impress upon him the importance of continued commitment to the puppy he was about to acquire.
‘I just told the kid that a dog wasn’t a toy you could shove under the bed and forget about when you got bored with it,’ she’d said to Nico.
‘You also told him that a force of animal-loving zombies would hunt him down if he missed even a single feed,’ Nico had replied. ‘Possibly that sent your instructional talk beyond the bounds of acceptable. His father certainly thought so.’
‘Bet his father will thank me later,’ Aishe had muttered. ‘That kid will be a more dedicated dog-owner than Queen Elizabeth.’
Aishe had looked for the twitch at the corner of Nico’s mouth that usually followed her wisecracks. But Nico had said, ‘I can’t let this go on, Aishe. Another incident and that’s it, understand? I’ll have no choice.’
Aishe had made such a huge effort for the rest of the afternoon that the other shelter staff became alarmed. Aishe touchy they were used to. Aishe pleasant was disconcerting, if not mildly terrifying. They found excuses to leave her alone, which would normally have suited her fine. But this time all it did was highlight the fact she had no allies at the shelter. If Nico fired her, she’d be the only one to feel upset. The shelter needed to see a whole new Aishe Herne.
Trouble was, it didn’t take much to revive the old, she thought. As soon as she heard those two laughing upstairs, all her good thoughts vaporised, like a vampire in sunlight.
Damn it, she decided, yanking open the refrigerator door. She’d have a beer.
Aishe barely drank at all these days, though she had done her fair share of wild drinking in her teens. She suspected she might have been less wild if her father had been around. As it was, it was mostly Anselo who’d rescued her. Picked her up from outside clubs and bars, and once, first and last time, from the local police station.
Aishe popped the top off her beer bottle and silently toasted her distant brother.
A clatter and thump of footsteps sounded on the stairs, and a grinning Gulliver slouched into the kitchen.
‘Hi there,’ said his mother and, because she couldn’t help herself, added, ‘What’s so funny?’
Gulliver made a beeline for the tacos, rummaged in the bag to find his and started to eat it straight from the wrapper, shedding grated cheese and shredded lettuce onto the floor.
‘Plate!’ ordered Aishe.
Gulliver rolled his eyes. ‘Why? You just give me shit when I leave it around.’
‘Then don’t leave it around!’
Muttering, Gulliver opened the dishwasher and retrieved a plate. Seeing Benedict in the doorway, he got out a second plate and handed it to him.
‘Here. Don’t leave it anywhere.’
Benedict took the offering. ‘Understood.’
The small interaction made Aishe furious again. He was better friends with her son than she was. But then he could be, couldn’t he? He didn’t have any of her parental responsibilities. Didn’t have any responsibilities, most likely. Most likely, he ran from them as far as he could, the shifty git.
Benedict caught her scowl and his eyebrows went up. ‘What have I done now?’
‘Nothing.’ Aishe was both irritated and embarrassed at being caught out. To cover it, she said, ‘Want a beer?’
‘Sure. Thanks.’
‘Can I have one?’ said Gulliver.
‘What do you think?’ Aishe extracted a beer from the refrigerator and handed it to Benedict.
‘Bet you drank when you were my age,’ Gulliver muttered.
‘You’ll never know, will you?’
Aishe got a plate for herself and placed a taco on it. She moved to sit down at the small kitchen table and the other two followed her.
‘What was so funny?’ she asked again.
Benedict and Gulliver exchanged a puzzled glance. ‘Funny?’
‘You were both cackling away when I came in.’
‘Oh, that.’ Gulliver paused to take a bite of taco. ‘It was just Romeo and Juliet.’
‘Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy. Tragedies are not normally funny, hence the name.’
Gulliver screwed up his face. ‘It was just this bit where Benvolio says “Why Romeo, art thou mad?” You know, like “You mad?”?’
‘Ben-Trollio,’ said Benedict, deadpan, and to Aishe’s extreme irritation, Gulliver gave a snort of laughter.
‘Old school,’ he said.
‘I have no idea what you’re on about,’ she told them.
The phone pealed.
Aishe glanced at her watch. ‘Telemarketers,’ she muttered. But she got up to answer it. Better that than feeling like a third wheel.
The phone was on the couch, where she had expressly forbidden it to be left, as it invariably got lost behind a cushion. She snatched it up.
‘Yes?’ she snapped. ‘Who?’
Then she said, ‘You’re kidding me.’
‘Who was that?’ Gulliver asked when she returned to the kitchen.
Aishe sat down in her chair, picked up the beer and took a long swig.
‘It was a woman whose best friend is going out with your uncle,’ she replied.
‘Well,’ said Benedict after a pause. ‘That clears that up.’
Benedict had gone and Gulliver was up in his room, where he usually went after dinner to do whatever he did up there. One evening, compelled by a curiosity that she justified as responsible parenting, Aishe had barged on in without knocking. Gulliver had been lying on his bed, reading The Outsiders. Aishe had felt oddly let down. If it had been her at that age, with access to everything they have now — social sites, texting, online shopping — she’d have been getting into all sorts of trouble, and probably debt. Actually, that wasn’t true. She wouldn’t have even been at home.
Aishe raised her head to listen. Gulliver was practising the bass. He didn’t hook it up to the amplifier in the evenings, but she could still hear the resonant thump-thump of his fingers on the strings. He had a natural talent for it; could listen to songs online and after a few attempts to play them get them sounding if not slickly professional then pretty much right. Aishe was too far away to identify the song he was currently working on.
Before Benedict had arrived on the scene, Gulliver had been playing around with the bass lines of Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac, the kind of music Aishe preferred. Now all he seemed to play were short, sharp punk-rock numbers, which annoyed her no end. The music itself wasn’t bad; she’d always liked the verve, the anger of punk. What annoyed her was the way Gulliver had happily abandoned music he’d been fond of just because some shifty pretender thought he knew better than her what was cool.
As if Benedict Hardy had ever been to a punk concert in his life, thought Aishe scornfully. Whereas she had been up front in the mosh-pit of several Norwegian death-metal concerts, usually surrounded by drunk, black-t-shirt-wearing, mullet-sporting Teutonic idiots. Who soon learned that if they crushed or fondled her without my express permission, they’d get an elbow in the balls. Though that wasn’t always the best tactic, Aishe admitted. If she hadn’t been agile enough to duck back and hide in the crowd, God knows what damage that huge, enraged Finnish guy would have done to her. Jonas used to despair, she recalled. ‘Me and the band boys might be mild-mannered sweethearts,’ he’d say, ‘but some of our fans are strung-out meth-addled psychos. How about you err on the side of caution?’
How about it, Jonas. What would have happened if she’d taken that advice?
The music from upstairs had stopped. Gulliver was probably settling down in front of the PlayStation, or with a book. In any case, she would not see him again this evening. Gulliver had their only computer, and Aishe couldn’t see the point of spending money on streaming services, so all the television was really good for was watching old DVDs. Saturday night, she and Gulliver usually watched a DVD together, although even then she couldn’t be sure that he’d join her.
She supposed it was no different to when he was little. When she had him tucked up in bed by seven . . .
To her surprise, she heard footsteps on the stairs. Gulliver mooched into the room in that way he had, elbows akimbo, thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his jeans — a stance that made his shoulder blades stick out behind him like the wing-buds of a new-born bird. Jonas, his father, was a big, strapping man, so Aishe assumed Gulliver would fill out in much the same way. She was glad that Gulliver didn’t look any more like his father. He was enough of a reminder as it was.
Gulliver went through into the kitchen, and Aishe heard the tap run. He was probably drinking straight out of it. Sure enough, he was wiping his mouth with his forearm when he came back into the living room. He plumped down onto the armchair, and Aishe waited for him to speak. She found her senses switched on to high alert. She assumed he had only come down because he had something to say — or ask. And the kind of questions Gulliver might want to ask her these days were almost certainly ones she wasn’t yet ready to answer.
But after a few moments’ silence, he got up out of the chair again. Aishe breathed a small inward sigh of relief — until she noticed where he was headed. To the shelf with the family photographs.
Aishe knew this moment had always been likely, but until now, he’d made no sign of being interested, and she’d held out the faintest hope he never would. But the moment had come, and she had better deal with it.
Gulliver picked up the photo of the Herne children and came over to squeeze down next to his mother on the two-seater. Hold on tight, thought Aishe. Here we go.
Gulliver pointed to the young Anselo. ‘What did you and he fight about when he came over?’
‘You remember that?’ his mother asked, surprised.
‘I wasn’t a baby. I was, like, six or seven.’
‘Yes. So you were.’
‘So? What did you fight about?’
‘They thought it was time I came home. I disagreed.’
‘They? I thought only he came over.’
Aishe offered her son a quick, wry grin. ‘We’re all agents of The Family.’
Gulliver goggled at her. ‘The Family? You mean, like the mafia?’
Aishe laughed. ‘No! Although sometimes I do feel like Al Pacino in The Godfather: “Just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in”. Anselo, your uncle, wasn’t the first to try to get me back home.’ Her smile dimmed. ‘But I suppose I can be grateful he was the last.’
‘So who’s they? Who’s The Family?’ Gulliver tapped the photograph. ‘This lot?’
‘That lot is only a drop in the bucket,’ his mother informed him. ‘There’s hundreds of us Hernes. Not to mention those who marry in: Kings, Bowers, Bucklands — the list goes on and on.’
‘Like a Scottish clan,’ said Gulliver thoughtfully. ‘A Romani clan.’
‘I suppose . . .’
‘Is there a head? A leader?’
Aishe glanced at her son, surprised. ‘Why do you want to know that?’
Gulliver’s expression was wary but determined. ‘They’re my family, too.’
Slowly, she nodded. ‘Yes, they are. And yes, there is a head. Your Uncle Jenico. Well, he’s your great-uncle, really.’
‘Do you have a picture of him?’
Aishe frowned, thinking. ‘I’m not sure.’ She hopped up from the two-seater. ‘Let me look.’
She went upstairs and deliberately opened and shut a few drawers to disguise the fact that she knew exactly where to look. When she came down, she was holding a smallish flat box that had once contained chocolates.
‘I don’t know why I’ve kept this.’ Aishe blew out a breath as she sat back down. ‘For you, I guess. Here—’ She handed the box to her son. ‘Fill your boots.’
The first photograph that Gulliver drew out was of a young man of about eighteen wearing a zipped leather motorcycle jacket not unlike the one Benedict wore. But while on Benedict the jacket was clearly no more a fashion statement, anyone could see that on this boy it was a whole different kind of statement. The teenager was standing with arms folded across his broad chest. He had close-cropped dark hair, dark eyes and a strong-featured face that was not strictly handsome but was magnetic with confidence. Even in this slightly blurry photograph, this boy exuded charisma and, again, obvious to all, danger. He was the kind of youth you’d instinctively cross the street to avoid.
‘Wow,’ said Gulliver. ‘Who’s this?’
‘That is my first cousin — and your whatever cousin — Patrick,’ replied his mother. ‘Great photo, isn’t it? When he was in what we used to call his Wild One phase.’
‘Phase?’
Aishe noted Gulliver’s disappointment.
‘Oh, yeah. He grew out of it. Stint in jail when he was nineteen helped. Scared him witless, I gather. And then Uncle Jenico and the other men got on his case, which scared him even more. He’s a super successful London property dealer now. Legitimate, I might add,’ Aishe raised a knowing eyebrow. ‘Before you get any ideas.’
‘So he’s a Herne?’
‘No, Patrick’s a King. His mother was a Herne. She was your great-aunt. Don’t try to remember all the family connections — you’ll go insane. Patrick’s father wasn’t Roma, though. He was a Traveller.’
Gulliver smirked. ‘Like in Ghostbusters?’ He assumed the voice of what appeared to be a five-thousand-year-old female chain smoker. ‘“Gozer the Gozerian, the Destructor, the Traveller has come!”’
Aishe gave him a look. ‘Not a lot like that, no. Travellers are Irish. Not our kind. True Roma look down on them a bit. Call them Pikeys.’
‘Until we marry them.’ Gulliver flipped through a few more photos. ‘Then they’re—’ He emphasised the capital letter. ‘Family.’
His mother gave him a smile. ‘I think you’re getting the hang of this.’
Gulliver retrieved another photo, this one of a woman in her mid-thirties. She was sitting on a garden chair, in front of a large bush with pendulous purple flowers. The photo seemed a match in date to the one of the Herne children. It had the same white border, same washed-out colours, but its composition was askew and its focus slightly blurred as if it had been taken by an amateur, or a child. The woman wasn’t looking at the camera, but smiling up with delight and affection at someone standing close by. She was slim, dark-haired and handsome. Aishe saw Gulliver’s eyes flicker from the face in the photo to her own.
‘This is your Mum,’ he concluded.
Aishe gave the photo the briefest glance. ‘Yes.’
Gulliver noticed then that the white border was on only three sides. ‘Someone’s cut this,’ he said. ‘They’ve cut out the person she’s looking at.’
‘One of us probably used it for a school project,’ said his mother. ‘Jenepher, most likely. She’s always been into the art stuff.’
‘Who got cut out?’
Aishe shrugged. ‘No idea.’
‘Could be any one of our million relations, by the sound of things.’ Gulliver shuffled through the few remaining photos. ‘You don’t seem to have any photos of your dad.’
There was a pause. ‘He didn’t like having his photo taken.’
Right at the bottom of the box, Gulliver found a piece of paper that had been folded roughly and shoved underneath. Unfolded, it proved to be a laser printout of a digital photograph, a group shot that appeared to have been taken at a wedding. There were no women in the photo, and the overriding impression was that these men had been selected because they were, in family terms, important. These were the leaders, the big men. In at least two cases, literally.
‘That’s him again, isn’t it?’ Gulliver pointed to a tall, broad man standing at the back. ‘Only older. That’s Patrick.’
‘Yes,’ his mother confirmed. ‘That was taken last year. Patrick would be about forty-four, forty-five now, I guess.’
After a short hesitation, she pointed out a second man, equally tall and broad as Patrick but older again. He had the same dark red hair as Gulliver. ‘And that’s your Uncle Jenico. It was his daughter who was getting married.’
Aishe watched Gulliver stare at the picture for what seemed to her like an eon. There was no expression on his face except a mild curiosity, but still, Aishe found the whole experience unnerving. They were his family, she told herself. She couldn’t deny it, and it had never really been her intention to hide it from him. But what now? Would he be content with a few photos? Or not?
‘That’s your brother,’ said Gulliver. ‘The one who came over, the one you fought with.’
Aishe looked down at Anselo’s face. He wasn’t smiling, but then you had to catch him unawares to have any hope of capturing his smile on film. In that respect, thought Aishe, Anselo and their father were very similar. In other respects, too; both were serious, thoughtful, careful. Unlike her bone-headed other brothers, who wouldn’t look twice at a thought even if it appeared written in a bubble over their heads. Ironic then, Aishe decided, that her older brothers were the ones who got Dad’s looks. She, Anselo and Jenepher took after their mother.
She studied the printout. Though they’d been nothing like each other growing up — Anselo so slight and Patrick so large — they were not dissimilar in looks now. Anselo was the better looking of the two, truly handsome, but despite having bulked up considerably, he still lacked Patrick’s physical presence. Primarily though, Anselo lacked the confidence that gave Patrick such magnetic appeal.
Aishe wondered about the woman who’d rung earlier. More accurately, she wondered about the woman’s best friend, who was apparently Anselo’s girlfriend. Was he happy with her? Were they getting married? They might already have children together for all she knew.
‘Was this emailed?’ Gulliver waved the laser printout.
She could lie. Put it off for just a while longer.
‘Yes. Uncle Jenico sent it. Well, one of his kids, I imagine. One of your four million cousins.’
She saw Gulliver hesitate before he asked, and braced herself. ‘Can I email them back?’
‘I don’t want to talk to them!’ She softened her voice. ‘But – as long as you know that.’
‘Cool,’ nodded her son.
Then he said, ‘What time is it in England?’