by Jay Stringer
She got up and squeezed my shoulder instead of kissing me on the cheek. “I’m going to take a shower then head. Got to get ready for court.”
I needed to leave, but I didn’t want to. There was something here between us that needed exploring. I sat in silence until I heard the shower start. I piled the plates and cups into the sink and looked around the flat. Some of Laura’s clothes were still scattered across the floor, and Claire’s bottle of wine was still on the table.
Could things get any more complicated?
My phone rang, and I answered it without screening the caller.
“Eoin.” The voice on the other end was Terry Becker. Once my best friend, he was now added to the list of people who hated me. “Thought you should know, I had to arrest your old man last night. He’s getting released this morning if you want to come get him.”
My father?
Great.
Becker was working out of Telford police station, a thirty-minute drive northwest of Wolverhampton. Telford was known locally as a “new town,” since much of its central area had been built in the sixties and seventies. The area had once been made up of several small towns and villages that had sat in the peaceful surrounding countryside for hundreds of years. They’d been merged when developers moved in and built a new town center, creating one large urban area. Many of the original villages hated the idea of merging, and fiercely hung on to their own identities.
Telford was covered by West Mercia Police, an entirely different force than the one Becker and Laura worked for in Wolverhampton. Becker was there on loan with a handful of senior officers from other forces around the country, and he was in the area for the same reason as my father.
Hobs Ford.
The settlement had started a couple generations ago, when a liberal-minded farmer had allowed a couple of Romani families to settle on a part of his land he didn’t use. Most locals objected to the idea, as they always did, but it was the farmer’s land and he could do what he wanted. It didn’t help that the land was only a few miles downstream from Ironbridge, a tourist attraction and world heritage site; a loose settlement of Romani living out of caravans wasn’t good for the area’s image. I’d been there a few times as a child when my father took me to visit one of the families we knew who’d settled there, but my memories were sketchy.
The settlement had swelled in size over the past decade. Other camps around the country had been evicted by local councils, and without an alternative site, many of the residents had traveled to Hobs Ford to settle down. The place was now the size of a large village, and had even ended up on a local road map which had been a source of major controversy. Locals assumed they’d finally get rid of the settlement when the farmer died a couple years before. His children had decided they wanted to sell the land, and that meant kicking out the people who lived on it. They ordered the settlers to leave, and a two-year legal process had ended with eviction notices from both the court and the council.
The media ran with the story when pro-settlement campaigners began to turn up and barricade the entrances to stop the eviction. The Commissioner for the West Mercia force was using the eviction as the centerpiece of his re-election campaign, and the rise in profile had meant a much larger police presence was needed. The government was dealing with an election of their own, and wanted to appear strong and forceful to their base. They’d given West Mercia a large budget increase to borrow uniforms and senior officers from other forces, and other commissioners had been able to get people off their own wage bills at a time when financial management could mean extra votes.
The whole establishment had gone to war with the people of Hobs Ford.
I’d known for two years that my father was living at the camp. I’d been doing my best to ignore the news stories, because that meant I could still ignore my father. I drove out there listening to a song by The Replacements about hating your father, relying on the old kick of great music to prepare for the meeting. There was a self-awareness in Westerberg’s words that I’d been waiting for my whole life.
I was still waiting.
When I’d joined the police force, which everybody except me had seen was a mistake, my father had cut almost all ties with me. He’d only attended my wedding under threat of violence from my mother, who’d driven out to wherever he was staying and dragged him to the ceremony. And now he’d chosen this moment to barrel back into my life when I really had no time to deal with his bullshit.
Veronica Gaines had less than two days left to live unless I figured things out, and now I had to deal with the very asshole responsible for me being tied to the Gaines family in the first place. Common sense told me not to go. Everything told me not to go.
It was my father. I had to go.
At the main police station I was told I’d come to the wrong place, and given directions to a site just over a mile away, deeper in the countryside. The buildings I arrived at looked more like a school than a police station. A uniformed cop at the gate directed me over to a freestanding square building at the far end of the car park.
I walked in through large double doors and showed my ID at the reception desk. Then I settled into a cheap plastic seat in the waiting area. I looked up to see Becker pushing through the double swing doors beside the reception desk and realized we had no idea how to greet the other. We settled for not bothering with it. He kept his hands in his pockets and looked down at me; I stayed in my seat and leaned back, trying to look comfortable.
The last two years had changed him. I’d heard that his marriage had ended a year before, five years after it should have, but it looked like the single life was good for him. He’d been carrying too much weight last time I’d seen him, but now he was fit and lean, like he spent his evenings in a gym. He wore a pressed suit that would look great on the news. To anyone else he looked like a fit and healthy man in his thirties, but I could see the other telltale signs: the sadness in his eyes, the hurt etched into the lines at the top of his nose. I wondered how far beneath the surface I would need to scratch to find a bitter and lonely man just shy of forty.
I decided to go on the offensive by doing the last thing he expected—
I was nice.
“You look well.”
He nodded and shuffled for a second, caught off guard, before saying, “Thanks. How’s Laura?”
“Still too good for either of us.”
My voice was a bit too defensive and he heard it—he was too good a cop not to—but he also let me see him leave it alone.
I nodded at the walls around us. “School?”
“It was. Got shut down a few years ago when they merged a few local districts to save money. This place was due to be sold to property developers but it suits our needs so we’ve borrowed it.”
“Out of sight, out of mind?”
He sat down beside me. “Pretty much. Everyone knows we’re here, but the activists prefer to hold their protests at the official police station and outside the council buildings, where they’ll be seen. We get left to our own devices, and this place is perfect. The classrooms make great offices, and there’s an old lecture hall that we’ve converted into a press briefing room.”
“Sounds like you’re getting ready to invade a country, not arrest a few Gypsies.”
“Listen.” Whatever was eating at Becker was now bubbling to the surface. “About this whole thing, the camp. I just wanted—fuck it. I didn’t take this job to get at you. I wouldn’t do that.”
I didn’t believe him, but I nodded and said it was fine.
Then I decided it wasn’t fine after all. “Beck, what harm are they doing?”
“That’s not the job, and you know it. It’s not about harm. It’s about law and money. They’re on the wrong side of both.”
“And you’re happy with that?”
“It’s not personal. Nobody here is racist, you know that. But cops are an endang
ered species at the moment, with the layoffs and budget cuts. This is the only guaranteed overtime in the midlands right now, and you know how much some of us need that.”
“I think there was a fair amount of overtime being handed out before the invasion of Poland, too. Didn’t make it honest work.”
He rolled his eyes at that. “All I’m doing here is upholding the law. They don’t own the land, and they don’t have planning permission. The owner wants them evicted, so they have to leave. And get off your high horse, comparing us to Nazis. The eviction’s been building for years. You’re only here now because I arrested your old man.”
“Why was he arrested?”
“He was drunk and stupid. Somehow got the addresses of the council leaders and started trying to serve eviction notices at their houses. The first couple saw the funny side, but the third called us in.”
Okay, that was funny. Points for my old man.
“How did he get the addresses?”
Becker stood up and straightened the lines on his suit. “I’m choosing not to ask. If I did, I may not have been able to release him.”
“Do me a favor, then, and ask him.”
He laughed and walked back through the swing doors, leaving me to wait until the doors swung again. This time two uniformed officers emerged, flanked by an old man.
I blinked.
The old man was my father. I hadn’t laid eyes on Aaron Miller since my wedding. When he was younger Mum had nicknamed him Rumblefish after Mickey Rourke, but somewhere along the way he’d turned into Oliver Reed in Gladiator. His hair was silver and white, and his beard needed a comb and a trim. His eyes were dark and shadowed, and his strong shoulders—one of the things I remembered most about him—looked slumped, as if they’d taken too much weight over the years.
None of this took away from the other thing I remembered about him: his attitude. For all that he looked old and tired, he still looked unflappable, still had those eyes that could stare down a charging bull. I stood to shake his hand but he pulled me into a tight embrace before pushing me to arm’s length to get a look at me.
“You look like a junkie,” he said.
I’m not one for small talk and I get that from my father, so putting the two of us together in a car should have been a recipe for silence. He hadn’t read the script, though.
“Thanks for fetching me.”
“Why did you ask for me?”
He had two kinds of smiles from what I remembered. One when he was telling the truth, and one when he was telling a lie. His face cracked into a third, one that I couldn’t read. “I asked for someone else. Becker chose you.”
I clenched my jaw and drove in silence until he laughed, a rattling laugh, like an empty spray-paint can. “I’m joking, Eoin. I asked him to call you.”
“Why?”
“Because it seems I have to get arrested to see my boy.”
“You’ve made it pretty clear over the years that you don’t want to see me.”
He gave me that third smile again. It had a weary edge to it. “Have I?”
“And we both know you didn’t get arrested for my attention. What was that stunt all about, serving the councillors?”
“Pisassin.”
Having fun.
I had to give him points on that one. We both laughed.
“You know you can’t stay there, Dai.” I took my eyes off the road long enough to meet his, trying to cut through our self-defense mechanisms of humor. “The camp, I mean.”
“Don’t use that word. We’re not cub scouts in a field, pitching tents and sitting round campfires, singing Ging Gang Goolie. This is our home. Bricks and mortar. There are people older than you who were born on that land, and they have a mind to die there, too.”
“Why?”
He shook his head and stayed silent. I could see him clenching his jaw and realized that was yet another of his gifts to me. I thought about pushing the point, but decided to leave it.
I didn’t need directions to Hobs Ford.
Parts of the route were lodged in my memory, landmarks from the journey when I was a child, flashes of landmarks and buildings, a farm that still had the same sign up for strawberries in season. The rest I could piece together from what I’d seen on the news, the maps that flashed up on television whenever the anchor covered the story. There were also clear giveaways, like the gradual buildup of a police presence the closer we got, the occasional outside broadcast news van stopped at the side of the road while its driver sipped a coffee.
Mostly, though, it was because I have a nose for trouble, and Hobs Ford was nothing if not trouble.
Soon we passed hand-painted directions to Hobs Ford tied onto the much more official signposts that directed drivers to the nearby historic sites of Ironbridge and Coalport. The homemade signs seemed both heartwarming and ominous: they showed people taking pride in having a place they called home, but seeing flimsy cardboard directions tied to expensive metal road signs also highlighted the fleeting and temporary nature of the site.
My father told me to ignore the hand-painted sign that said to take the next left, and advised me to take the next turn instead. As we drove past the marked entrance I turned to look and saw more news trucks and police vans, and a burned-out caravan blocking the road.
“That’s for the tourists, the people who come to see us with cameras and paperwork,” my father said. “It’s all a show to them. They want burning caravans, we’ll give it to them.”
I followed his directions up a narrow country lane that gave way to a wider and well-traveled dirt track. We passed police vans lining the road, and then a couple television news trucks, before driving through a coppice of trees and coming to a stop at a sheet-metal gate. My father leaned out the passenger window and waved to someone I couldn’t see, and the gate was opened for us to drive through.
From the apocalyptic imagery on TV I was half expecting to arrive onto a scene like a Mad Max film set, with burned-out vehicles and overturned caravans, maybe a few sexy warrior women with bows and arrows. What I found instead was a clean and tidy caravan park. It looked like any one of the sites where pensioners go to live out retirement, in bungalows and oversized caravans, waiting for a ride in the long black car.
There were three dozen large caravans, the types that have to be towed on the back of massive trucks, arranged in rigid lines down the sloping field. Each was set on a foundation of steel, concrete, and rock, and they encircled a central flat communal playing field, where a few rusted old tractors were arranged around a climbing frame. Nearby I could see the river, sweeping past with a violent-looking current. On its opposite bank I could see a village, and the remnants of a few houses that had been built too close to the river and had doubtless been victim to one of the floods that so often affected the area. The field of Hobs Ford was elevated high enough above the bank, and the caravans built far enough up the slope, that it didn’t look like the water would ever be a danger.
Only at the edges of the settlement could I see signs of problems, where protestors had set up tents and smaller mobile homes, the laundry hung on lines between the tents like a mini music festival. Surrounding the settlement were large metal fences to keep unwanted visitors out.
People came to gather round us as we climbed out of the car. Most of them were a shade or two darker than me, but a few had my complexion, suggesting they had the same confused upbringing I did. Others looked darker still, and I guessed the camp wasn’t just home to Romanichal, the Gypsies that had been in England for hundreds of years, but also the more recent arrivals from places like Romania and Bulgaria. There was chatter in a mix of languages; some I recognized as variations on the dialect my father had taught me, but others I couldn’t place.
My father said my name to them a number of times and then placed his arm around my shoulder and led me through the crowd to one of the larger caravans w
hich had a central spot near the flattest part of the settlement. The caravan was one of the biggest I’d ever seen, and had wooden extensions built on to the side, making it look more like a small house. Around it was a low fence that hemmed in a garden, with vegetables and flowers growing in well-kept patches. He led me along a short path between the plants, and up in through the front door onto a porch made of wood and glass, where we slipped off our shoes before stepping into the living room.
There was no mistaking whose home this was. The walls of the living room were lined with bookcases, and in most cases the books were stacked two and three deep. My father’s love of reading was legend, and went against every stereotype people had thrown at me over the years about Gypsies being uneducated. I fought back the urge to tell him I was now a reader too. I didn’t want to give him anything.
I followed him through into the small kitchen, dominated by a spice rack the size of a television, and he picked two clean tumblers off the draining board. The sink smelled faintly of bleach and I smiled, remembering the arguments my parents used to have. Dad liked doing the dishes with bleach, Mum with washing-up liquid. Mum would say bleach was poisonous, but Dad would argue, it kills ninety-nine percent of all known germs, how can it be harmful?
He pointed for me to turn around and head back into the living room, and he followed me. He picked a large bottle of clear liquid from a cabinet by the door, and sat down in one of the large armchairs, waving for me to do the same. He poured two large measures of the liquid and handed one to me.
“Do I drink this or wash my dishes with it?”
He raised his glass and said, “Mishto.”
He knocked it straight back and poured a second measure; I paused to stare at my glass expectantly. I took a tentative sip, feeling the fumes tingle my nose. He frowned so I knocked the whole thing back. My mouth burned, but the fire turned to mellow warmth as it slid into my gut. My taste buds were left with an aftertaste of smoke, peat, and citrus.
“What you think, eh? Still need a name for it.”