Beguiled
by Hilary Ayshford
We wanted to be gypsies, the raggle-taggle vagabonds of folksongs and fairy tales. We wanted to meander through the countryside in brightly painted wooden caravans on wheels, pulled by thickset ponies with shaggy coats and fringed feet, to sleep under the stars and cook food on an open fire, lit by lanterns glimmering in the dusk.
“Travellers,” our father snorted, picking up the phone to report them to the Council. Through a gap in the fence, we watched them set up camp on the playing field at the end of our garden, in shiny, modern trailers with lacy curtains at the windows, through which we could see clustered china ornaments, silver-framed mirrors, and brightly coloured silk flowers in vases. When night fell, their crystal chandeliers glittered and sparkled, sending shards of light into our bedroom, patterning the ceiling.
We wanted to run wild with the brown-eyed, brown-skinned children who shouted for joy and swore and threw stones, and nobody said “Keep the noise down,” or “Mind your language,” or “Be careful, you’ll break something.” Nobody made them go to school, or wear shoes, or brush their hair.
Most of all we wanted to be gypsies because of George. George, with his limbs like burnished mahogany, his topaz eyes, his silky black hair and his white, white grin. George, who widened the gap in the fence so we could squeeze through. George, whose soft, seductive accent held us in thrall. George, who showed us where wild garlic grew and how to pick nettles for soup without getting stung.
One day George would be King of the Gypsies, he claimed, like his grandfather. We invited George to come to our house for his tea, but he frowned. “I hate houses,” he said. “They’re too small and square and solid. I’d suffocate.”
We wanted to canter bareback round the field like George on his sleek, coal-black horse, which rolled its eyes and flared its nostrils. “Who wants a ride?” he asked. We looked at the ground and shook our heads. “If you’re scared, you’d better run along home,” he mocked. So two did, but one stayed, clasping George round the waist, resting her face against his back, breathing in his musk of sun-warmed skin and sun-crisped clothes. And after he helped her down, she trembled from the thrill of the gallop and the way he held her face in his hands and kissed her on the mouth.
In the bedroom, that evening we made a tent from sheets and bedspreads, hung Mum’s red silk scarf over the bedside lamp for a campfire, and by torchlight, we gossiped and gasped and giggled and pretended to read each other’s palms to see which one of us would sit behind George tomorrow.
But the travellers disappeared in the night, leaving an empty field rutted with tyre tracks and churned up by horses’ hooves. We never heard them go, never said goodbye to George. And deep in the detritus they left behind were the discarded, bruised hearts of three Gorja girls who wanted to be gypsies.
WENSUM 