“Here,” I said defensively. I didn’t know he knew.
“And stay off the bypass. Stop contrabanding old wardrobes till I clear this up. Okay?”
Which is why I spent an anxious hour in the library with a gazetteer, and the next hour divvying for Francie to earn some money to feed Jo to get Shona’s address to leave the district. A process of elimination was going on, and I wanted out.
Francie’s rarely around, but always is, if you follow. She travels with her husband and sixty-seven others. They’re a fairground, the sort with roundabouts, Roll-a-Pennies, sideshows, and a Giant Caterpillar that whirls round and covers you over for a quick snog. They’ve even a Galactic Wheel and a Ghost Train. It’s marvelous, lights and action and people. I like fairgrounds, always have. Francie collects antiques on the side, eroding the whole enterprise’s meager profits year after year. I used to make smiles with Francie before she went a-gypsy roving.
The place they land is Castle Heath, a greensward where centuries ago some baddies shot some heroes to death, or the other way round. They come like night-thieving arabs, suddenly there in full swing. It’s one of the most exciting scenes to see an early morning fairground with wagons and tents and fanciful structures. I love their colors, for the same reason I love them on canal boats; they are the brilliance of an earlier century showing through modern grot.
Francie welcomed me as always as I shouted at the steps and climbed into her caravan, which is to say with hardly a glance. In her tribe it’s an insult to dawdle at the door.
She immediately put the kettle on.
“How do, love.” I bussed her and quickly sat down uninvited, another must. “How’s it among the oppressed nomads?”
“How is it among the static fascists, darling?”
“Bloody grim. Better for seeing thee, though.”
“So you got off.” That always makes me blink. The fair only arrived a day ago, but here she was knowing everything.
An infant came in, looking vaguely familiar, fetched a toffee out of the fridge.
“Is this good for your teeth?” I demanded, obediently unwrapping it for her.
“Ta.” The kiddie left to join six others milling about outside. Fairground children are always so businesslike.
“Yours, Francie?”
She didn’t look up. “Mmmmh. And you got off today from Tipper Noone’s accident, Lovejoy. Two out of two.”
That explained the familiar feeling I’d got from looking at the little girl. Family likeness.
“Eh? Oh, aye. I’m a master of escapology.” She came and sat on the bunk seat, facing me so our eyeballs practically touched. Odd that I’d never seen her kiddie Betty before, though I’d been to her caravan a few times. Shy, I suppose.
“Still trying to fit two days into one, Lovejoy? Still hopeless with women, with money?”
“Don’t talk daft.” The kettle was whistling. She rose to see to it. Women are always narked when they find somebody who understands them better than they know themselves. And as for being useless, they should bloody well talk. “You got much to divvy?”
“Maybe.”
These caravans are modern trailers, windows and bunks in tiers, a kitchen at one end.
Francie’s is small, but mirrors cunningly exaggerate the space she has. Tables fold out of walls, all that. She saw me looking.
“Fancy the life yet, Lovejoy?”
“Among the raggle-taggle gypsies o? When the Mounties are after me, happen I will.”
She was bringing out the stuff while we spoke.
“Over there,” I told her, nodding at the table across from where I sat. A reasonable light falling semi-obliquely across my field of view. Francie knows the drill.
“Yes, love,” she said. “I’ll be quiet.”
Eyes closed, I relaxed and waited until she told me, “Right, Lovejoy.” I faced the heap of items and began reaching, touching, stroking, listening, feeling.
It seems daft to say things actually speak, doesn’t it, but they do, they do. Correction: Antiques speak, and do it with a resonance that tremors through your very being.
Gunge—and I do mean everything modern—is inert, lifeless. It deserves to remain so.
The explanation is that you can’t trick Nature. Humanity gets back exactly what it puts in. Passionate learning plus artistic creativity are what made little Tintoretto a bobby-dazzler instead of simply a paint-mixer for his dad. Look at a great oil painting, and then at the front cover of a magazine. Just as many colors, maybe the same size and even the same subject. But there’s a difference.
The caravan’s interior was hot. I lifted objects, peered, sniffed, fondled, laid them aside and went on to the next.
Feeling—I mean touch—is the great modern omission. People dance apart. Even old lovers merely wave hello. It was different when I was little. You got a thick ear for not remembering to kiss even your most wrinkled auntie. Folk embraced, patted, impinged.
Human contact was in. Nowadays everybody intones catchphrases proving we’re hooked on togetherness, yet
