‘What happened?’ he said.
She glanced about the van. Shofranka and Mirela seemed just as bewildered, as though they’d been woken suddenly from a deep sleep.
‘You don’t know?’ she asked.
‘Why are we stopped?’ said Shofranka. She sounded as though she wanted to cry.
‘Did we crash?’ Mirela said, spotting Hanzi at the door, with Luca behind him, scratching his head.
Samantha thought fast. No way did she want to tell them the truth about the last few hideously embarrassing moments. ‘No, but almost,’ she said. ‘Great driving, Luca. I don’t know how you didn’t hit that horse in the middle of the road.’
‘Is the horse all right?’ said Tamas, sitting bolt upright, banging his head on the ceiling of the van.
‘Of course he’s all right,’ said Luca, sticking his head through the doorway. ‘I
‘Well, what do you expect – with you screeching all over the road like that?’ said Mirela.
‘Yeah, how did you get your licence anyway, bro? Did you bribe the Gaje?’ said Tamas, rubbing his head.
‘We’re all just lucky we’re safe,’ said Hanzi, blinking. ‘You should have seen Luca swerve around that horse. It came out of nowhere.’
Oh my God, they’re just filling in the gaps as they go along, thought Samantha. She figured she’d better move things along a little before the horse became a unicorn that Luca had ridden bareback into the forest after he’d saved all their lives from a fire-breathing dragon.
‘Um, well, do you think we could get going then?’ she said. ‘Because I’ve kind of set my heart on going to the Carnivale some time
Everybody knew that the Gaje owned the carni, but the Roma ran it. And while in a perfect world the Gaje would have preferred that the Roma stayed away, they also knew they’d have eighty per cent fewer customers if that were the case.
They’d also have ninety per cent fewer pickpockets, but that was beside the point.
The Roma ran the show, scammed the show, loved the show. The Roma were carni people, and when the carni was in town, the Rom lapped it up.
The party began in the makeshift carparks. Two sports ovals, sacrificed for the cause – oh, and for a lot of cash. After waiting ten minutes in a fuel-fogged car queue, Luca paid a dour gate attendant for a parking spot. Whether there were any spaces available was not his responsibility, Samantha heard the attendant mutter, his words running together like a song so that she’d had to replay them a few times before she figured out what he’d said.
They cruised the dustbowl that was once a soccer field. Sam crouched with Mirela behind the front seats of the HiAce, watching everything going by. Each time she’d passed this site when the carni was not in town, the grass seemed to be struggling valiantly to grow back, but during midsummer – specifically, during the two weeks of Carnivale – the seedlings were always nuclear-blasted back into the dirt. She guessed that some government official had bought himself a couple of new cars and a boat for selling the community out this way.
She’d heard that plenty of people never even left the parking lots. Parking itself was a festival, you see. It was like this: the Roma virtually never bought their food pre-made. They liked things killed and cooked a certain way, so the battered hotdogs on sticks and the fries and bowls of salty, greasy onion rings were devoured almost exclusively by the Gaje. The Rom made their way back to the carpark when they were hungry.
Samantha noticed that at least every second parked car had its boot open, and inside each lay an Aladdin’s treasure-trove of food. They passed an eighties Peugeot weighed down with drinks, breads and salads in the boot and not one, but two, roasting spits fired up before it. A lamb
Gypsies, decked out in their glittering, gaudiest finest, moved from vehicle to vehicle, sat around the cars on striped deckchairs, and clustered, gossiping, right in the middle of the makeshift road. And just like the previous year, some party-person had hired a karaoke machine. A gypsy wearing sprayed-on gabardine slacks, gold front teeth and a funeral-suit jacket that Sam would swear on the Bible was covering the open fly of his unfastened pants, was belting out Frank Sinatra’s ‘I did it my way’.
The HiAce found a spot squished between a trestle table and a flatbed ute. Following a brief conversation with Luca, the ute owners gathered around the clothed table, which groaned with open bottles and food, and carefully shifted it a metre to the right. Enough for the HiAce to slide on in. But before they’d allow them to leave the parking lot, the ute owners insisted they each grab something to eat or drink.
Samantha scanned the table: everything looked and smelled amazing. She figured she’d go for a lucky dip. She’d never been frightened of food. Mirela would sniff and prod everything before she put it into her mouth, sticking to the food she knew, rejecting anything she’d never seen before. Samantha didn’t get it. Without exception, her favourite foods had begun with an experiment into the unknown.
She stabbed a plastic fork deep into a lake of grass-green olive oil, which sat viscous and dormant, obscuring something dark, moving torpidly, inside a stainless steel tray. Whatever was in there was going to taste great; she would bet her tarot deck on that. She pulled out a fat piece of marinated eggplant and had slurped down the whole thing before Mirela and Shofranka even made it out of the back of the HiAce.
Wiping her greasy lips with the back of her hand, she stumbled a little as she headed with the others towards the lights of the Carnivale. She noticed that the rest of the group were also a little unsteady on their feet. Hanzi gnawed so conscientiously on a chicken drumstick that he stumbled right into a pothole, dropping to his knees in front of a campervan full of partying gypsies. The adults toasted him uproariously, raising their glasses high, while the children cavorted around him madly, ecstatic with their remaining entertainment for the evening – another drunk adult to ridicule.
Hanzi wobbled to his feet and Sam’s family gathered around him, grinning, slapping him on the back. Sam wiped the back of her hands against her jeans, suddenly tense. They all looked out of it. Even tiny Shofranka giggled like a fifteen-year-old drunk on her parents’ schnapps for the first time ever. But none of them had been drinking.
I’ve gotta watch what I do with that new trick of mine, she thought.
And then from the fairground ahead came a crack like a gunshot, and bursting into the night sky above the rainbow lights of the Ferris wheel were fireworks. Spits, stars, blurs, bolts and bangs of colour, the firecrackers exploded in sky-slashes and pinwheels of noise and light.
Mirela squealed and ran towards the Carnivale.
Samantha was right behind her, her green eyes on fire.
Dwight Juvenile Justice Detention Centre, Sydney, Australia
When Zac took a window seat in the back row on the lower level of the train, Luke kept walking.
‘Don’t mind me,’ he said on the way past. ‘Got some reading to do.’
He pulled the folder out from the waistband of his jeans and dropped into a seat two rows ahead.
At this time of night, he figured that this would be one of the last trains out of Windsor. It was obviously an action-packed town. He’d seen only three other people, two on this level. A man wearing what looked to be a bus driver’s uniform sat right down the front of the carriage. Another man was slumped in the seat behind, leaning his head against the window, probably asleep already. And when they’d first walked onto the train, a girl, dressed totally in black, sat on a bench seat facing the doors. Walking past her, he’d thought she was either brave or stupid to be travelling alone at night. Still, with all those facial piercings and the multi-buckled platform boots, she probably scared off more people than frightened her.
He’d seen no more of sleepy Windsor during the day than a quick glimpse through the back of a paddy-wagon.
