The king took another sip of whisky. ‘Thank you, no,’ he said. ‘The girl will be fine.’
Samantha was having a hard time sensing the mood of the king. From the driver she felt disdain, mild revulsion. She found it difficult to even look at him. But the king seemed to have no very strong emotions at all – his urbane speech did not seem to mask anything sinister. Perhaps he was just curious about her. Well, she didn’t have a problem with giving him a blessing or a good-luck charm. She just couldn’t understand why the rest of her family seemed so uptight about it.
Wait till I tell Birthday Jones about this, thought Sam. He’ll never believe me, of course, but when he hears it from everyone he’ll have to.
She went back for seconds of the chicken rice.
***
It was immediately obvious that the king was too huge to sit opposite Sam in the client’s chair. For a few tense moments, she’d been worried about him being able to make it into the caravan at all. The front step had been the first problem, but when he’d heaved his way up that with his driver pushing him from behind, there’d been the issue of the narrow front door. While she and Lala pretended not to look, the king turned sideways and scraped his way in. When the driver followed, the king turned towards him, his head stooped a little under the low ceiling.
‘We’ll be fine, thank you, Boldo,’ he said.
Boldo scowled, but turned around to leave. Tamas stood in the doorway.
‘What do you want?’ said Boldo.
‘I’m coming in,’ said Tamas.
‘The hell you are,’ said Boldo, hand on his holster.
Blazing emotions suddenly ricocheted around the small space, absorbing all the air. The room grew darker. Sam gasped.
‘Tamas, my child,’ said Lala from somewhere behind the king’s vast body. ‘Would you please be a good boy and bring cold juice for all of us? Or would you prefer something else to drink, your Grace?’
‘Coca-Cola,’ said the king.
‘Three cans of Coke, Tamas, please. In the fridge by the truck. It is very warm in here, so hurry along.’
Tamas stood still, eyes locked on the bodyguard’s.
Go, please, Tamas, thought Samantha. Don’t start something with a man with a gun!
She felt the heat in the van fall when Tamas spoke. He continued to stare at the driver as he answered Lala. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring the drinks, and then I’ll be right outside.’
Able to think again, Samantha considered how strange this situation was. If the king had wanted a consultation so badly, surely he could have summoned them to his palace. Just last week, she, Mirela and Birthday Jones had walked past the huge, ornate gates in Pantelimon, trying to get a glimpse of the place everybody talked about, but the curved drive and the hostile guard had prevented them from seeing much. Man, imagine if she’d been invited right into the palace by the king himself!
This, though, was looking like it was going to make for an even better story. The king sat on Lala’s day bed, a tattered brown velvet double-seater lounge that she usually reserved for dream analysis. He fitted into it as though it were a single-seat armchair. Lala had taken the reader’s chair and Samantha sat in the client’s. They angled themselves to face the king.
She and Lala waited awkwardly for him to speak, but he sat silently, watching them. Still Sam could not read his mood. His aura felt guarded, as though he was deliberately hiding the way he was feeling. Why would somebody do that? She lowered her eyes a little so as not to stare, but she had a mental image of him sitting there, sprawled like a gigantic toad on a log. She felt like a fly.
Tension from the front of the van suddenly climbed again and Tamas appeared in the doorway. He made his way in with the drinks and she gave him a reassuring smile, felt him relax just a little.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked her.
‘Why wouldn’t she be all right?’ said the king. ‘What kind of question is that?’
‘Please forgive him, your Grace,’ said Lala. Samantha could sense her heart racing. ‘He is just a child, my son’s nephew. You can see he is too young to go with the men to the horse fair. His mother has passed, your Grace, and since then he has been a little touched in the head.’
Tamas drew a breath. Lala snapped her head in his direction. Whatever he was going to say went unsaid.
‘Well, he’s a very rude boy,’ said the king. ‘And now he can go.’
Tamas looked down at Samantha. ‘I’ll be outside,’ he said.
‘Which you already told us,’ said the king.
‘Get out, Tamas,’ said Lala.
The king cracked his Coke and guzzled. When he put the can down on the lamp table next to him, Samantha thought that it sounded near empty. He belched loudly.
Delightful.
‘Now, your Grace,’ said Lala. ‘How can we help you? Would you like a charm for your business dealings? A spell for your luck?’
The king raised a pudgy hand to his many chins and stroked. He faced Samantha. She met his eyes and finally felt something from him. Ravenousness.
‘I want a reading,’ he said.
Lala hissed. ‘A what!? My Grace, you know that we don’t read the cards for other Rom. Card reading is only for the Gaje! It is terrible, terrible luck, your Grace, to have your cards read by another gypsy. It is never done. We are happy to write a curse for your enemies or create great blessings for your wealth or health, but we can’t read your cards, my King.’
‘I am speaking to the child,’ the gypsy king said, staring at Samantha. ‘And I want a reading.’
Huh. Well, she hadn’t expected that. Samantha had never even considered performing a reading for another Rom. Lala had drummed the bad-luck thing into her for a year before she’d even allowed her to hold a tarot deck. Before today, Samantha would no more have read cards for a gypsy than strip naked and streak through the camp carrying Bo’s flag.
And yet, here she was, about to read for the king of the gypsies. She shrugged, and as the king watched her, she felt his greed swell further. Oh well, though she didn’t like to admit it, even to herself, she wasn’t sure that she believed a lot of the stuff Lala had taught her about the cards. I mean, what Lala told her they meant, and what she saw for the clients when she read, were usually two very different things.
She reached for the shiny, jet-black lacquered box containing her deck and Lala hissed again, quietly. Samantha sent calm towards the chair beside her. The king’s eyes widened as she did so, and for the first time she faltered.
How had he sensed that?
He smiled and licked his lips.
She loosened the gold cord wrapped around the box and opened it. As always, the sounds faded around her. The drone of the old electric fan on the lamp table became a mosquito in the distance. The heavy breathing of the king and Lala’s rapid gasps fell silent. Sam smiled, closed her eyes, and fondled the red silk wrapped around the deck, slipping into the fabric as though into a blood-warm river. The cards welcomed her, had missed her, swam with her, darting over and under, each clamouring to whisper their secrets. They tickled; she giggled. Then she opened her eyes.
The king regarded her hungrily.
She decided then and there to make this as brief a reading as possible – just three cards: his past, present and future. It was not Lala’s discomfort; it was the gypsy king’s eyes that warned her to get this over with quickly.
I wonder if he didn’t eat at lunch because his favourite food is teenager, she thought.
She slipped the silk from the cards and they hummed feverishly in her hands. She began to sweat.
‘Um, okay,’ she said, wiping a hand across her brow, ‘you need to think of a question.’
She decided to forget about the witchy-poo theatrics to set the mood. Nothing she could say would make this scene any weirder than it already was.
‘I have my question,’ he said, his eyes oil slicks.
‘Good. Do not speak it aloud,’ she said.
; She shuffled the deck, eyes again closed, some cards battling to find her hands, others shirking from her touch. She listened as their whispers tumbled over and under one another as she shuffled: snatches of thought; cobwebs of consciousness; what will be, what is now, what will come nevermore. She stilled her hands, put the deck on the table, opened her eyes.
‘Cut the cards,’ she said. ‘Three piles, any size. Face down.’
She wrinkled her nose in distaste as he grabbed greedily at the deck, his fat fingers fracturing its symmetry as he spread the cards in his haste. He slapped down three piles on the table and lifted his eyes.
‘Put them back together again,’ she said. ‘Any order. Face down.’
She could feel Lala bristling at her lack of etiquette, but she sensed that her mentor also wanted this over with quickly.
When her deck was whole again on the table before her, Samantha rubbed her palms together twice and reached for it.
‘Hold your question in your mind.’
She turned the first card. ‘A spirit card,’ she said. The whispers began. ‘This card represents your present – what is happening in your life right now.’
The ornate picture was dominated by a giant hourglass, golden sand trickling through its transparent innards. In the background stood a man, eyes down, contemplative, worried, while looping the whole card, in dizzying rings, spun a series of concentric circles. A circular maze.
The king watched her, seemed to breathe her in.
‘The Waiting Game,’ she said. ‘You have a decision to make.’
‘That is correct,’ he said.
Samantha chewed her thumbnail. She worried about what to say next. Lala would tell her that these circles meant that there were numerous possibilities open for her client to take, but the card whispered the truth.
‘There are two options,’ she said. ‘You may select only one.’
The king made a guttural sound deep in his throat. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘You have been setting your plan in motion for a long time,’ she said. ‘And the journey has been painful and dangerous. You realise that you are very close now, and you are waiting, waiting for the results to come to fruition.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said.
Samantha tuned out Lala’s worry. Nothing she had spoken had been taught by her teacher. Her words came from the cards themselves. She wanted to hurry now, learn what else they had to say.
She turned another card, placed it to the left of the first.
‘The past,’ she said. ‘This card tells where you’ve come from.’
The caravan was motionless as its occupants stared at the card. A study in blue: a beautiful woman draped in a deep-indigo dress stood, head bowed, in an inky ravine. The only other colour in the card glowed at the woman’s chest: a blood-red fabric heart formed the bodice of her dress, stitched up through the middle by the fasteners for the garment – a heart endlessly destined to be torn apart and constantly re-stitched.
An open wound.
‘Heartache and loss,’ she said. ‘Your history.’
The king’s fishy lips twisted into a sour, venomous smile. ‘Touché,’ he said.
What did that mean, she wondered. Does he think this is some kind of mental duel?
The card called her back.
‘You have suffered greatly in your past,’ she said. ‘And although you live now in a completely different world, this sorrow and disappointment still greets you every new day when you open your eyes. The love that you gave her is still inside you, available to heal you, to be given to another -’
This time the king made a hissing sound.
Samantha continued. ‘But you have kept the pain inside, fed and watered it daily. You’ve encouraged the toxins, nurtured them, sought them out and loved them. This agony is now a part of you. It is your closest friend and your most powerful, poisonous weapon.’
Suddenly, Lala heaved herself from her chair.
‘My King,’ Lala said, tottering over to stand between Samantha and her client, ‘I apologise. I tried to tell you that she is a mere baby. Sixty years I have been studying the tarot. I beg of you, please ignore this child and allow me to complete your reading. Or better yet, your Grace, let us leave this sweltering hotbox and find solace in some cold wine and fruit.’
‘Sit. Down,’ he said.
‘But, your Grace…’
‘You will sit down or I will make you,’ said the gypsy king.
The heat and the sounds of the caravan jerked Sam back into focus. She pushed her chair away, jumping to her feet. She felt violently ill with the fear emanating from Lala, but her anger overpowered it.
‘Don’t you dare speak to her like that!’ she yelled at the king.
A sizzle of filthy energy fizzed about the room. Samantha recognised it at once. Hate. It slicked her nostrils and tongue and she heaved and reached around for something to hang on to. The king laughed, a fractured, frightening sound, which opened in Samantha’s mind a sliver of a vision. Then, as suddenly as it had come, it was gone, and with it the foul energy. She could not understand what she had just glimpsed, but she sensed it slithering away – it felt like decay, dark magic, madness.
The king now smiled at her, a chalky offering of warmth.
‘Wait a moment, please, please,’ he said. He spread his fat fleshy hands before him and smiled meekly up at Samantha. ‘I’m sorry. I apologise for speaking so rudely. I will make it up to you and yours. And I promise you, good witch,’ he swivelled to face Lala, ‘no harm will befall anyone in this camp and only great goodness from me shall follow if you will peacefully allow your charge here to complete her reading. I see that you fear I am offended, but I assure you, my Romani sister, I am only charmed and delighted by her insight.’
Samantha swayed.
‘Sit down, my kitten,’ murmured Lala, turning towards her and cupping her face. The aged skin of her soft palm was a feather-stroke. ‘Sit down now, child.’
Samantha dropped back into the chair; she felt as though a blowfly batted about behind her eyes.
‘Certainly we will finish for you, your Grace,’ Lala continued. ‘There is but one card left to draw – your future – and I am certain that the child will be able to complete the reading quickly.’
Lala looked down at Samantha and gave her a meaningful stare.
Samantha stared back, dazed. What is going on here, Lala? she asked with her eyes.
Please, just finish. And do it quickly, Lala’s eyes answered.
Samantha reached for the deck; the king leaned back against the day bed, and the whispers began again. This time there was heat behind the hushed voices and she thought she heard a muffled shriek from the cards. She turned the top card and placed it to the right of the hourglass.
‘Your future,’ she said coldly. ‘What will be.’
The king stared bug-eyed at the card. Sucked in air. ‘What is that?’ he said. ‘What does it mean?’
The card was almost completely black. But forming the centre, staring up at each of them, was a man in pieces. His head, shoulders, stomach, loins and legs had all been dismembered – as though he’d been wrenched from the card and, like a photo, ripped and torn before being crudely pasted back onto the blackness. His face was terrified, his arms clenched across his disembodied chest as though he scrabbled to hold at least this piece of himself together.
Samantha lifted her eyes to the king’s. His jowl quivered.
‘A major Arcana card,’ she said. ‘Your destiny – the Falling Tower.’
Samantha felt Lala willing her to deliver to the king the vanilla-version of this card: that this was a chance for him to be forewarned against a major change that would soon befall his life, and to see this disruption as merely an opportunity to transform things for the better.
Instead, she told the truth.
‘The foundations of your power are weak and rotten,’ she said. ‘Your tower will crumble.’
The lamp on the table before her flickered. She con
tinued. ‘The two choices you are now struggling with will determine whether or not you escape the fall of your empire with your life. Choose one way and you will live on. Select the other option and you will die in agony, with your last breath poisoned by regret.
‘Either way,’ Samantha said, ‘your tower will crumble.’
Dwight Juvenile Justice Detention Centre, Sydney, Australia
June 28, 2.21 p.m.
‘So that’s what makes all that noise,’ Zac shouted, on his knees in the mud next to Luke.
‘Yep, that’s the swamp rat,’ said Luke, lifting his eyes from the garden bed. ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’
‘She stinks,’ said Zac.
Luke nodded. A sheen of fuel oil shimmered in the air. He’d never been able to figure out whether the 1980 Holden Commodore had originally been red or blue. The panels that remained were a mix of both. At the moment, he couldn’t see much of either colour – the swamp rat was caked in dried dirt and splattered all over with fresh mud. It had no boot, bonnet, rear windscreen or doors, and the swamp rat’s driver, Mad Mike, was also head-to-toe in mud.
Through the hole in the passenger side of the car, Luke watched Mad Mike rip the handbrake up. The engine cut out. The sudden absence of noise was almost as disturbing as the roar of sound had been.
‘Oh my God, how loud is that car?’ said Zac, poking a finger in his ear. ‘What is that anyway? Is it even a car?’
Mad Mike swung out of the driver’s side of the vehicle and crunched over the gravel driveway leading to the Dwight Administration Building. He stopped at the folding chair near the steps leading to the entrance.
‘Mike, can you not do something about the noise from that ridiculous vehicle?’ said Matron Cole, blinking up at him from the chair in which she watched Luke and Zac weeding and the rest of Section Six raking, sweeping mud from the paths and clipping plants. ‘I mean, have you purposely modified that thing to produce that deafening racket?’
Mad Mike scratched at the grey stubble on his cheek. A wad of something brown flicked off his face with the movement. God, I hope that’s mud, thought Luke, grimacing.
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