Rose sat on the side of her bed, jogging her knees up and down furiously. There was no way, none at all, that she was going to be packed off on the road.
It could not happen. Not again.
Two years earlier she'd been smaller and stupider and when Johnny Dogs came to collect her for the Ederlezi fire on Easter Sunday, she'd gone with him without a second thought.
When she'd been told she'd be spending the night she'd been pleased, like a fucking ejit, because she got to share the vardo with Sharon Lee and Anna Lee and Ronja Lee, who were great fun to hang around with. She wasn't all that worried that her father hadn't showed up at the fire, even though he'd promised. He'd been held up with something, they'd told her; it wasn't hard to believe.
It wasn't until the kumpania packed up the next morning and started moving in the opposite direction of home that Rose had asked Johnny Dogs, who was setting off into the direction of home, whether she shouldn't better come with him.
"Not to worry, Rosie."
"Your da's coming to collect you at the next stop, Rosie."
"It's kushti, Rosie."
The fucking liar.
She'd ended up being on the road for close to five months.
Disposed off and forgotten and with no idea what she'd done to deserve any of it.
It hadn't been all bad. There'd been fairs and fires and a horde of children to keep her busy. They'd eaten berries and hedgehogs and rabbits, read each other fortunes which never came true and swum in freezing rivers. She forgot all she'd learned in school and learned to speak proper Romani instead. There were times when Rose nearly enjoyed herself; but as soon as she'd any time to think at all, all the parts of her body would start to hurt with longing for her family.
Of course, when she was finally delivered back to the big house, there wasn't much left in terms of family. Only her father and Charlie and Frances and, once in a blue moon, Lizzie and Johnny Dogs. Everyone else seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth.
And now, when they'd reappeared just as suddenly, he – that bastard, that fucking bastard – was going to banish her again.
Rose walked across the room and opened the window with every intention of climbing out and leaving; but as she looked along Watery Lane she realised she'd be lucky to make it three doors down. There was a Blinder in every second doorway, standing watch.
They weren't easy to see, because the rain had settled in and was blurring the world, but they were there nonetheless. She knew they weren't there because of her, they were guarding the house from the men in the wedding picture.
While it was comforting to know that no one would ever be able to get close, it also meant that it was impossible to get away.
Rose went back to her bed, pulled the blanket over her head and gripped her pillow between her teeth. She would think of a plan once the tears were out of the way.
#
When the house had fallen silent for the night, or at least the upstairs of it, Rose got out of bed and arranged her pillow under the blanket in a rough body shape. She took off her stockings and crept across the room once more and eased open the window.
"What are you doing?" Charlie was propped up on his elbows.
"Nothin'," she whispered. "Shut up and go to sleep."
"Are you running away?"
"Just bloody-"
"Please don't run away," Charlie whispered tearfully, sitting up now.
Rose was taken aback. The way she treated the poor little bastard, he should have been dancing for joy at the thought of being rid off her.
"I'm not," she said.
"I don't want you to go." Her brother was very, very close to crying now.
"I'm not," Rose repeated. "But...listen. Stop bawling. Listen. If you don't want me to go away, you need to do something for me."
Charlie nodded frantically.
"When I've gone out," Rose motioned to the window, "you've got to close the window behind me but not lock it. Don't lock it. So I can get back in. Understand?"
"But where are you going?"
"Don't lock the window, Charlie. Right?"
"Orright."
Rose sat on the window sill, the front of her nightie immediately drenched with the cold rain. She looked up at the thick dark sky and, satisfied that the horrible weather was there to stay, felt for the drainpipe. Once she was confident that she had as good a grip on it as she could hope for, she swung over and started shimmying up towards the roof.
It wasn't far, but it was slippery.
She made it nonetheless and settled down with her back against the chimney, the roof tiles freezing underneath her bare feet. Rose held her face into the sharp, biting wind and waited.
Rose lost track of time, but she guessed she'd been on the roof for about two hours when she started feeling a budding ache in her wrists and elbows and knees.
She smiled to herself with chattering teeth. There were still enough hours of night left for the bud to flower.
#
When the sky started to fade from black to grey, Rose awkwardly tilted herself forward and slid on her belly to the edge of the roof. She'd been up and down the roof enough times in her life to know what to do, even through the thick fog wafting around her head.
Charlie had not locked the window and Rose half-fell into the room, frightening the life out of him.
"Go back to sleep," she croaked.
Rose took off her soaked nightie, somewhat dried herself with a jumper she found on the floor, put on the dry night dress she'd left on the foot of her bed and rolled under the covers.
By the time Frances came in to wake Charlie, Rose was burning up like a furnace.
#
"...telling you, she's not fit to go anyplace, Thomas."
Rose tried to open her eyes but found her lids were trapped under a cloth. Breathing was hard work and her ears were agony. There was a heavy hand on her head, fingers gently scratching at her skull.
"I hope you're pleased with yourself," she heard her aunt Polly say.
As she drifted back to sleep, Rose wondered whether the words were meant for her or her father.
And whether her aunt had any way of knowing that she was indeed very pleased with herself.
#
Someone was trying to make her drink something terrible. Rose had her mouth clamped shut and tried to turn her face away, but her neck was stiff and there where hands on either side of her head, keeping her in place. She no longer felt pleased with herself, she felt thoroughly terrible.
The cup was at her lips and the bitterness with it, making her cry.
"It's orright..." It was the voice her father usually reserved for spooked horses. "It tastes bad, but it's orright. It'll make it better."
Rose gagged and some of the hideous liquid got up her nose.
"I know..." Smokey smelling, scratchy fabric was wiping gently at her face. "But it'll give you dreams of the keshalyi and you'll wake up good as new, I promise. Just a little more, aye, just a little."
Rose stilled, felt the medicine scrape down the inside of her throat and waited for her dreams of the good faeries.
#
Rose was small enough to be able to fit under the chair in the front room if she curled herself up tightly. A man she'd never seen before was in the chair opposite, watching her with his huge eyes.
"Will you come out?" he asked.
She shook her head decisively.
"Why not?"
She simply rolled herself a little tighter. Her uncle Finn was lingering in the doorway, with someone else she didn't know. The house was full of strangers.
"She's pretending she's an egg," he said helpfully. "She does it all the time."
"An egg, aye?"
The strange men had come in the morning and everyone had been going spare since, singing, crying, laughing, drinking, hugging...Rose thought it best to stay an egg until things returned to normal.
The man got up and left.
Good.
Her aunt Polly had fairly thrown Rose at him when he appeared at the front door, but he'd had his hands full with her auntie Ada, so Rose had managed to get away. She listened to him walk around upstairs for a minute, heard the stairs creak and then he was back in the room with an armful of pillows and blankets from the beds. He dropped them on the rug in front of the empty fireplace and started arranging them in the roundish shape.
Rose watched silently, as the man stood and appraised his efforts, moved a pillow a little more to one side and nodded, pleased with what he saw. He carefully stepped into the circle and curled himself tightly in amongst the pillows. Rose waited. Nothing more happened.
"What're you doin'?" she asked after a while.
" Being an egg," he replied pleasantly, still perfectly rolled up.
"In a nest?"
"Yea."
Rose watched a little longer.
"D'you want to come in?" he asked. "It's nice."
Very slowly Rose crawled out from under her chair and over to the nest. It did look nice. She resumed her egg shape as far from the big egg as the nest would allow.
The eggs lay in the nest.
"Can eggs eat?" the big egg asked after a while.
"No," the little egg said solemnly. "They've no mouths."
"Of course."
The eggs were silent for a while, listening to the shouts and singing outside on the street. The whole of Watery Lane had gone daft, it seemed.
" We can hatch," the little egg said suddenly. "We'll have beaks then."
"Should we?"
"What's to eat?"
"I've some chocolate in the coat over there."
"What sort?"
" What d'you mean?" The big egg seemed confused.
"With things in it? Or normal?"
"Oh. Normal."
"Let's hatch."
They unfurled themselves awkwardly, sitting up and shaking off the eggshells.
"Are we birds now?"
Rose looked over at him. It was rare for grown-ups to ask such sensible questions.
"It'll be hard to eat chocolate with wings," he pointed out politely.
"We can be people."
"Sure now?" "
Yea."
"Good stuff. Hang on..."
He got out, went over to where he'd hung his coat earlier and dug a bar of chocolate from the pocket. Back in the nest he peeled it, carefully broke off what seemed like an unreasonably large chunk and handed it to Rose. She couldn't make up her mind whether to eat it slowly or scarf it down.
"What's your name?" she asked, when half the chocolate was gone.
"Tommy."
"I'm Rose."
" Nice to meet you, Rose."
Rose nibbled some more, trying to turn the square of chocolate into a circle.
"Me da's called Tommy," she said. "Thomas."
"Ay?"
She looked at him for a while. He was sitting very still. Maybe he looked a little like the Tommy in the picture her aunt Polly had put upstairs by Rose's bed. It was hard to tell.
"Are you him?"
"I am." He was watching her carefully.
"Are you Finn's da, too?"
"No," he said. "I'm his big brother."
"Are you auntie Ada's big brother, too?"
"That's right."
"But you're my da?"
He cleared his throat, like the chocolate had gotten stuck.
"Yea," he said croakily. "Is that orright?"
Rose thought about this. He'd made a nest and brought chocolate. You couldn't hope for better.
"That's orright," she said. "D'you want to be eggs again?" "
I'd like that, Rosie."
The eggs lay side by side in the nest... Rose woke with a start and sat up bleary-eyed and sweaty and found the room full of breaths.
Charlie's from the bed across and someone else's from the floor next to her bed. Slowly, holding onto the side of the bed, she craned her boiling head, squinting in the dark of the room. Her father lay stretched out on the floor, his head on one of the ugly embroidered cushions from downstairs.
Rose looked at him for a long while before she lay back down and went back to sleep.
#
She woke again, less hot, but with an angry jagged rock trapped inside her chest, making her cough and sputter.
"Up you come..." Tommy appeared out of nowhere, his hands under her arms, pulling her from the pillow. "There you go, my little love, forward a bit."
Something incredibly disgusting fell from Rose's mouth onto the blanket. Her father wordlessly got rid off it with a rag from somewhere beneath the bed and helped her drink some water.
"Better?"
Rose nodded.
Tommy carefully lowered her back onto the pillow and something in the gentleness of everything and the fact that he was here in the middle of the day sent a shiver of fear down her spine.
"Am I dying?" she croaked.
"No, Rosie," he smiled. "You're not dying."
"I didn't think it'd work this well..." Rose's voice trailed off, she felt like all her inside was carpet.
"Sleep a bit more, aye?"
"I climbed on the roof," Rose whispered. "In the rain."
She waited for the silence to turn menacing, but it didn't.
"To make yourself sick?" her father asked after a very long time.
"Yea..." Rose closed her eyes to keep her tears in. "So...so...so you couldn't..."
"Oh, Rosie," Tommy sighed. "It'd only've been for a little while."
"It wasn't last time."
There were dark, stormy waves crashing across her father's eyes.
"I know." He reached out and brushed her matted hair out of her face. "But I wasn't well, things weren't good, Rosie. You were much, much better off-"
"You let Charlie stay." Rose managed to get it out before she started to cry too hard to say anymore.
"Rosie..." There was a distinct cracking in Tommy's voice now. "Listen, Rosie, listen to me. Charlie was too little. He doesn't remember any of the things, the bad things, that were going on, but you would've seen Rose and you would've remembered... I couldn't have it on my conscience."
She couldn't stop crying. Once, on the road, she'd seen a river overflow from its bed, ripping anything with it that wasn't rooted deep enough in the ground. It felt like she has one of those inside her now, bursting out.
"What...what's...that?" she sobbed.
"What's which?" her father asked.
"Conscience..."
This time the sigh seemed to come from the core of the earth rather than out of her father's body.
"It means that even though I knew you'd hate me for it and it was ripping my insides apart, I had to send you away," Tommy said softly. "Because even that was better than what might've happened otherwise."
Rose was so stunned that her tears started to subside.
"Are they that bad?" she asked after a while. "The rat catchers?"
"Yea, they are." Her father was holding her hand in both of his now, his thumb running over knuckles slowly.
"I thought..." Rose felt her cheeks burn with a new kind of heat entirely "I'll go. Orright? I'll go. I'm sorry. I thought..." fresh tears were starting now "...I thought you didn't want..."
She couldn't finish.
"Shhh...it's orright." Tommy kept hold of her hand. "When you're well we'll see, my little love. It'll get better, you'll see. It'll get better."