“Out behind my house!” Emer said. “Well, almost. You know where the second field back is, on the right side of my circle? In there. We should go see.”
Uchenna looked at her friend a little oddly as they headed down the steps together. “Didn’t think you were all that much of a horse person,” Uchenna said.
“I’m not! But I’ve never seen any of these up close. Can’t wait.”
“You’re never going to go in the field with them?” Uchenna said, mystified by the sudden interest.
“I am! I’ve always wanted to see some of these shaggy ones up close. Now they’re right behind my house, almost. It’s like they’re mine.” Emer was actually grinning, and those pale blue eyes of hers were alight with excitement as the breeze whipped her hair around. “Nobody can say anything to me if I go look at them. And anyway, if we don’t do it now, they might be gone in the morning!”
“Yeah, they might,” Uchenna said. “And don’t you think you should be careful? Because whatever tinkers put them there might get pissed off at you if they see you messing with them.” And there might be trouble, Uchenna thought. Traveling people had a reputation for being violent sometimes, especially when settled people meddled in their doings.
“Well, I’m not gonna mess with them. But anyway, there’s no sign of any tinkers around right now,” Emer said. “Which is really weird.”
“Yeah, you’d be right there,” Uchenna said, pausing for a moment in the school gateway. From off to their left, in the distance, came the clear, carrying honk of a northbound train slowing down to come into the Adamstown station: up on the platform she could see some of the kids from school, waiting to catch the train into Dublin or up toward the shopping centre at Tallaght and the Luas tram line there.
“You think anybody else is over there right now?” Uchenna said, considering.
“I don’t know,” Emer said. “But if they are, they won’t stay forever. It’ll start getting dark in a while, and when it does, we can just slip over there. I have a way back into that field, a few houses down from mine. They don’t have a wall: it’s a chainlink fence, and it’s loose on one side. We can just walk through. Or there are about five other ways to get back there.”
Uchenna turned and paused to look both ways down the street in front of the school, making sure no late school-run SUVs were bearing down on them: then the two of them went across. “Well, I guess I was going to see how these horses’ knees go,” Uchenna said. “I can do that looking through the fence.”
“Oh, come on, you know you want to go in the field with them!”
They turned down the street and headed westward down the sidewalk, past the plateglass-windowed stores and the multistory apartments in the town-center part of Adamstown, toward the housing-development side. “In the mud? Girl, you are insane.”
“There’s no mud!”
“It’s a field,” Uchenna said, quoting her dad. “There’s always mud.” But at the same time, she was thinking, If I don’t go in there with her, she’s gonna get herself trampled or something. Two of us will be safer than one. Especially if somebody comes along. And if you’re going to be in a field with horses, maybe you should bring them something—
That was when the idea hit her. “Okay,” Uchenna said. “I’ll go with you. But we have to go to my house first.”
“Why?”
“I have a plan.”
“What? Tell me!”
“No,” Uchenna said.
“Yes!”
“No!”
And they kept saying Yes! and No! to each other—with occasional breaks for laughter and argument, and some discussion of the day at school—for something like ten of the fifteen minutes it took them to walk the mile past the town center to the place where the biggest housing developments started. They were both lucky to live in two of the largest and oldest ones, but then both their sets of parents were pretty well off, like a lot of other people in Adamstown—that being mostly how you were able to afford to live there. There was, of course, some so-called “socially affordable” housing off to one side, closer to the town: poky-looking little pebble-dashed two bedroom houses squashed together side by side in long terraces, very flimsy and cheap-looking next to the big handsome four- and five-bedroom houses scattered around the outside of the Adamstown development and the big apartments concentrated by the train station. Uchenna had heard her dad saying quietly to her mam that he thought the socially-affordable houses had been built badly on purpose, so that the developer—forced to build them by the government, and now apparently unable to sell them—would eventually have an excuse to pull them down and build something more expensive on the same site.
On this side of town, though, the houses were big and separate from one another, with large green yards and attached two-car garages, or separate ones with carports between them and the houses. There were three big circles back here with houses arranged all around them: Uchenna’s was the third one, the middlemost circle which was also furthest back on the westward side. Right out the back of the circle, between the houses and past the side walls that separated their back yards, you could just get a glimpse of the high concrete wall that separated the circle from the empty green field behind it. Away westward, past the fields and the hedgerows that separated them, a long low bumpy green-tinged line could be seen: the silhouette of the little line of hills separating this part of County Dublin from the eastward side of County Meath.
As they headed back into the circle, Uchenna could see her mam’s big Toyota Landcruiser parked in the driveway already. “Is she off today?” Emer said. “Usually she’s not here yet.”
“No, she just gets done faster sometimes on Thursdays,” Uchenna said. “Some of the people she takes care of in the hospital have dialysis today, so they come in really early in the morning and she sees them then.”
They swung up past the SUV and headed for the back door, up at the side of the house before the garage. Most of the houses in the circle looked pretty much alike: a big living room and kitchen and utility room and one bedroom and bathroom downstairs, then three more bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs, with the upstairs windows sticking out under separate dormers from the blue slate roof. Uchenna’s house was the only one in the circle that was painted white: it had been the showhouse for the development, the first one built, and it had older plantings around it than the other houses, as well as a trimmed hedge on each side instead of the concrete-block walls that the newer houses had.
She rattled the latch of the back door and found it unlocked. Uchenna pushed the door in. The utility room was humming with a wash running in the washing machine: a couple of plastic laundry baskets full of dirty clothes stood around on the tile floor, waiting their turn to be washed. “Mam?” Uchenna said.
“In here, sweet,” said her mother from the kitchen.
They went in. The kitchen was bigger than those in some of the other houses in the circle, partly because it had been an office as well when the house was still the showhouse. A round dining table stood by the rear window that looked out on the back yard: toward the front of the kitchen, the breakfast bar looked through into the living room. In there, the big widescreen TV was showing one of the local TV station’s afternoon talk shows, where a man was busily cooking while the two female hosts looked on. Relaxing against the breakfast bar, sipping a mug of tea and idly watching the TV while holding the wireless phone against her head, was Uchenna’s Mam. Flora Alele Debe-McConnor was easily six feet tall: a little broad-shouldered, but otherwise slender and high-cheekboned, with a gorgeous smooth dark complexion and beautiful eyes that were tilted up at the corners. This catlike tilt often made Uchenna’s dad call her mam Kitty or Flowerpuss, which in turn occasionally caused Uchenna’s mam to whack her dad in the head with a pillow or pretend to strangle him with her stethoscope. She was still wearing her white medical coat from work, and hadn’t gotten around to taking off the bright patterned scarf that she had put on over her cornrows for the wards.
/> “Hi Uchenna’s Mam!” Emer said.
“Hallo Emer dear,” Uchenna’s Mam said, glancing over at them and smiling. “You two are early today. No sports?”
“Not till tomorrow, Mam,” Uchenna said, dumping her schoolbag on the back table and then going to hug her mam. “Hockey practice then. You on hold?”
“Waiting for daddy,” Uchenna’s mam said. “He said maybe we would go out for dinner tonight. But I think he has to work late. His software team just got broken up again, he’s got to put some new people into the open positions…” She sighed and turned away to lean the back of her against the breakfast bar instead of the front. “What’s the homework like tonight, girls?”
“Got it mostly done already,” Uchenna said. “But we have to go to the library.” She threw Emer a cunning look that said, No we don’t, just play along with me.
“You could’ve stopped there on the way home,” Uchenna’s mam said. “Not like you to backtrack, sweet.” Then she rolled her eyes in annoyance at the phone. “The world’s biggest software company,” she said, “you’d think they could afford some hold music that didn’t sound like a broken music box.”
“I just wanted to dump my bag, mam,” Uchenna said. “And there’s some stuff in the back office I needed.”
“Okay,” her mam said. “So what about dinner, girls? If your dad wants to go after all,” she said, glancing at Uchenna.
“Ooh, I don’t know yet…” Uchenna said. “And we should ask Emer’s mom.”
“I think she’ll be okay,” Emer said. “I’ll call.”
Uchenna’s mam suddenly waved at them to be quiet a moment. “Barry? Yes, of course I am. No. No, I can’t.” She made a helpless look, waved at Uchenna again as she and Emer headed out the back door.
The two of them headed back under the carport and into the back yard. It was shaped like a third of a doughnut, with the house being where the hole would have been. Right behind the house was a decking patio with some lawn furniture and an umbrella table, everything still covered up after the recent rain. But away from the deck led a flagstone path across the rear lawn, and at the far side of the lawn, under the curved wall, was a tall, broad-crowned tree. Under the tree was a little two-roomed house with a low peaked bungalow roof just like the one on the main house.
“This is so cool,” Emer said as they made their way back under the branches of the tree, where they shaded the little house’s tiny front porch and scaled-down wooden front door. “I wish I had something like this…”
Uchenna went fishing for the little key she kept hanging on a chain around her neck. She pulled it out and unlocked the front door. There was no question that the “back office” was very cool. When this had been a show house, the little house out in the back had been the development’s main site office, a supplement to the tables that got stacked full of paperwork and brochures up in what was now the house’s living room and kitchen. When Uchenna’s folks had bought the house, her dad had looked at this little temporary building, under the tree, and said, “I wonder…” and had then wound up paying the company a little extra to keep it in place.
She remembered her mam giving him a strange look at the time. “What for, Barry?” she’d said.
“Oh, I don’t know. An office…”
When she’d heard that, her mam had laughed. Because he was a software project leader, Uchenna’s dad already spent so much time up at Microsoft that her mam sometimes teased him about needing to buy a second home up on the corporate campus by the airport. Sure enough, he never spent any time at all in the little shed out in the back, and Uchenna took it over within about a month of them moving in.
Now she and Emer slipped in and Uchenna closed the front door after them. It made a sound only a little more solid than the sound you got from closing one of the kitchen cupboards. The shed’s walls were thin, the ceiling was thin, even the floor bounced a little when you stepped on it: the little sliding windows were single-glazed and their frames were about as heavy as the upstairs shower stall in the house. The blue and green carpet tiles on the floor were peeling away at the corners in places, and the curtains hanging at the windows were made of the kind of cheap thin blue plaid plastic normally used to cover picnic tables. But Uchenna didn’t care. Against the plain white walls of the long room she had everything she needed—an old sofa from the family’s last house, a couple of chests of drawers from her mam and dad’s old bedroom, the old desk from her bedroom back in the first little house in Stillorgan. And there were a lot of things out here she didn’t strictly need, like just about every stuffed toy her folks had ever given her since she was five. She could never bear to get rid of them, and now the forty or fifty members of the Zoo Crew, as Uchenna called them, were piled up at the end of the room in a trainwreck of wildly colored plush and pile. But they just made it all seem that much more homelike to her, emphasizing that this was her space. Out here Uchenna could do her schoolwork without feeling like her folks were hanging over her shoulder watching her: and outside she could hear the quiet, or the birds singing, if she didn’t feel like running her CD player.
Right now, though, Uchenna dropped to her knees in front of one of the chests of drawers and started rummaging through the drawers, one after another. Emer stood over her and looked at what Uchenna was doing with mild bemusement. “Look at all the junk in there…” she said.
“Not junk!” said Uchenna, slamming one drawer shut and opening another. “Artifacts.”
Emer giggled at the fancy vocabulary. Uchenna ignored her, pushing the wildly assorted drawer-contents aside. “Here’s what we need…”
From under a pile of old socks and manga books and plastic jewelry and comics and pens and pencils and plastic-covered childhood diaries she pulled out a plastic shopping bag. “Here,” she said, and handed it to Emer, and went hunting for another.
Emer looked at the bag, then gave Uchenna a puzzled glance. “We could have bought these at the Spar for fifteen cent,” she said.
Uchenna shook her head. “Twenty-five,” she said. “They raised it last month.” She grinned at her friend. “You really weren’t listening in the current events unit yesterday, were you. Anyway, why pay when you’ve got them? We’re recycling. And not just these.”
Emer looked mystified as Uchenna got up off her knees and headed for the door. “What?” she said. And then, “Oh! Wait, I get it—”
Uchenna went out the door and stood peering up into the tree. Emer paused on the doorstep. “You want me to lock this now?”
“Yeah, sure—”
Emer pulled the door closed and came out onto the lawn to join Uchenna. “Anyway, it’s a brilliant idea,” Emer said.
Uchenna grinned. “Yeah, if we can just get some down…”
The tree above them was yet another leftover from past times…but this one was from a time long before the showhouse, before anyone had even thought of Adamstown. Once there had been not just pasture land here, but farmland too. Indeed there were still lots of little once-upon-a-farm fields scattered around the outer edges of the town, tiny hedged-in pieces of property the developers hadn’t been interested in buying and which weren’t big enough for the farmers to sell to anyone else. Some of them still had remnants of old farm buildings in them, broken-down pigsties or cattle sheds, now reduced to piles of gray stone and rubble with ancient trees growing through them. And some of those trees were fruit trees, survivors or escapees from some old orchard that had been located near here. This one, an apple tree, had been left inside the boundary of the development by accident, so the developers had told Uchenna’s dad. Someone had made some kind of surveying error that would have cost too much to fix, so they’d left the tree where it was and built the wall as planned right behind it. But the accident was a happy one as far as Uchenna was concerned. The tree’s droopy branches shaded the little Back Office shed, protecting it from the hottest weather in the summertime. And it looked much better than the other plantings around the development, most of which were b
rand new, spindly little rowan trees about five feet tall and about as thick as pencils.
Uchenna loved the apple tree because it was old… possibly one of the very few things in Adamstown that were. Well, maybe not incredibly old. When a branch on it had gotten cracked last year during a storm, and her dad had gone up on a ladder and sawn it down, Uchenna had seen that the branch had about sixty rings on it. But much more important than the tree’s age—though it was cool that it was older than her dad or mam—were the apples. They were starting to peep out from between the branches now: but they hadn’t yet begun to fall. They were quite big apples already, and they were green.
Standing beside Uchenna, Emer looked up into the branches. “It’s a great idea,” she said, “but someone’s gonna have to climb up there after them, and I know who that’s gonna be.”
“I can climb!” Uchenna said.
“You can fall,” Emer said, sounding resigned. “I saw you on the ropes in PE last week. Let me.” She went over around the back side of the Back Office, where the tree trunk rose up out of the space between the wall and the shed, and started to climb up the slightly slanted lower part of the trunk. “How many do you want?”
Uchenna shook her head. “Don’t know. How many do you think it’ll take to keep some horses still long enough to see how their legs go?”
Emer paused at the place where the trunk switched back on itself, choosing which of the next two big branches to climb on. “Hey, I’m no horse expert. You tell me.”
“It’d help if I knew how many there were….”
“Five,” Emer said, struggling up and out of sight. A rain of small branches and loose bark started coming down: Uchenna tried to move away from the tree enough to avoid the junk coming down without losing sight of Emer.
“Two each?” Emer said. Two came thumping down onto the grass under the tree, one of them narrowly missing Uchenna’s head.
“Better make it three,” Uchenna said, thinking about the horses’ legs again. “I’m going to have to draw them, so they’d better stay where they are for a while.”