One

Aurélie

 

Do you remember all of your dreams?

I do.

I collect them like the library books I steal.

I dream every night and then afterwards I shelve them away ready to be recalled like memories. And when I relive them they’re always in startling present tense. You’ll see. They play and replay for me like movies, not that I’ve seen many to compare. 

I was stuck that moment right between sleeping and waking where the dreams start to disappear and I forget where I am, who I am. 

That moment when I don’t remember falling, sleeping, or the difference between real and make-believe.

When it’s just-

Quiet. 

And then life crept in, 

inch 

by 

inch. 

Starting with the mocking sway of our old, wooden gypsy wagon as it rocked in the grip of a whipping wind.

On that one particular day the motion made an unusual nausea swell in my stomach as tiny dancing bells rang from the ceiling, waking me up. But I hadn’t been asleep. I was upright. Staring, wide eyed, not blinking, lost in some memory of a dream of a boy in a wood. Yes, I remember all of my dreams but recently they’ve been haunting me a little more vividly �" they’ve been biting at my heels.

The paper birds above me swung in a breeze from nowhere, tapping my head as they danced and I tried to remember what I’d been thinking about before I lost focus.

Today was another moving day. 

That was it.

We had outstayed our welcome in yet another village. Even while minding our own business it was easy to annoy the locals by just being a little bit different. So we travelled every week or two to a new spot much further from faces, from towns, from a normal life. Always onwards. Always hidden. Don’t ask me why.  My Aunt would come home in a panic, spooked by something, tell me she was fine and hurry about moving piles of clothes, putting away anything that might break as we moved and then she would announce it:

Time to go.

It was another one of thosedays and yet, different. It was my sixteenth birthday. 

My Aunt had promised that things would change for me after today and as I sat on my narrow bed I repeated her words. Things will change. Things willchange. I was convinced that now it was time for friends and a taste of a normal life - the kind I read about in the books I never took back to the libraries we passed along the way. I wanted nothing else. So tired of reading everything I could about the world outside of wooden wagons and a wanderer’s life. Even the few films I’d seen weren’t enough. I’d seen normality in different forms printed on discoloured, dog-eared pages and on screens of all sizes but I hadn’t lived any of it. 

My normality was whole shades different to anyone else’s.

I rubbed my face as the wooden doors swung open letting out the tepid air.

“Are you awake, Aurélie? Some of us are ready to go.” Vivien smiled at me, impossibly awake despite the early hour. Maybe she hadn’t even slept at all. Her eyes were dewy with distraction. 

 “Why so early?” I still had that morning croak in my voice. 

“Sweetheart, you know why.” She tucked her battery-operated radio into a drawer and folded clothes nervously.

“Who’s going to see us leave? There’s no one around.” My sigh was purposefully loud. “And the sun isn’t even up yet.” I looked toward the window with narrow eyes.

“Then we can watch it while we go, you always love that.” She smiled again as she stood at my bed. I groaned.

“I used to…when it was new.” I felt like I was waiting for a newnew.

“And now you’re all grown up and sunrises just aren’t as interesting, yes I know, I know.” Vivien interrupted my thought. “I try to remember what things were like before I started taking care of you and I think I probably felt the same. Life has its distractions. Now I can’t believe what I was missing tucked away behind walls and stage curtains. And here youare, so eager to be on the other side of them.” She paused, thinking. “Wandering around with you has changed me in many ways.” She reached down under the bed and pulled out a flat package loosely wrapped in creased tissue paper. “Don’t wish it away too soon, after it’s gone you’ll realise it wasn’t enough.” She winked. 

Things will change after your sixteenth birthday.

I repeated it in my head as Vivien stared at me, stroking her hand along my thick, messy hair until she reached the ends that rested on the bed sheet. I’ve been told it’s like my mothers hair. Long, boldly dark. Not like Vivien’s with its flecks of something paler threaded within wiry, untameable strands, just one of our many differences. The only thing that linked me to her and my father were our silver eyes and even they were a little different.

She stared at me as I stroked a hand over the tissue paper. How had she never tired of seeing the same face everyday? I asked her once, she said something ridiculous like:

You’re my destinyor this is how it’s supposed to be.

But is there really such a thing?

I was definitely a little bored of herface.

I pulled the folded lace from the paper �" a sleeve, another sleeve, a sweetheart neckline and a long skirt.

“It was your mother’s wedding dress. It might not seem like much but she spent months making it.” 

It was soft, elegant and a little darker with age. More grown up than I was used to and made with the same thin lace that hung at the windows and across the beds in our caravan. She’d made it out of tiny pieces of her history and I felt closer to her just by holding it. 

“She was married?”

“Well. She should have been.” She swallowed back the sadness in her voice. I wanted to ask �" I always wanted to ask. Vivien was my only teacher. We had built this moveable one on one school together. But she had never taught me anything about my family or my history and she never would. She taught me facts about the world but not about myworld. 

I held it to my nose, it smelt of lavender and lilac �" of the caravan but not as I knew it. The caravan when it still belonged to my mother and when it was filled with her story, whatever that was. 

“It’s beautiful.”

“And every one needs accessories.” She handed me a velvet box and I almost snatched it from her. I knew what was inside. I smiled at the gold trinket, its lustre was long gone but my love for it wasn’t. Vivien had hidden it one last time after she found it buried in my bed one night. She knew how much I wanted it but it wasn’t for me. Never for me. Until now. 

The carved vines and roses swirled over the dirty gold heart just as I remembered and the little bell still hung from the tip of it, tapping and tinkering with every movement. I slipped it over my head, feeling nothing but the pull of the chain at first and the weight of the metal against me. As a child it was so fascinating to me - I was always drawn to it and desperate to have it. I stole it at every opportunity. It was like a game. My Aunt had never blamed me or punished me for stealing it but taking it away from me was a punishment in itself. Its absence left a void in me, and it had a weight all of its own. 

I never knew where she’d hidden it, there were only so many places in the wagon and I had tried them all, I could always find it. I liked to imagine it whispered to me. 

“My beautiful girl.” Vivien placed a hand to my cheek. “You make me so proud.” She forced a smile, I thought she might cry and I creased my brow without meaning to.

Vivien was strange. 

“Wear that dress today, please.” She turned away from my bed and walked away. But she could sense my hesitation without even looking. “It is your birthday after all, and you never know who you might meet.” 

The words repeated as I slipped my nightdress over my head. I recognised the warmth from the gold trinket around my neck as it started to cling to my bare skin, spreading across my chest, tracing my shoulders and flushing my face. It spread over me until it reached the tips of my nails and the edges of my eyelids and I stayed there a moment, letting everything else turn quiet, closing my eyes until the world demanded to be heard again as it always did. A sound from outside: a plane in the sky; a car racing along a narrow road.

The sounds brought me back. 

And as my eyes opened I realised the air in our little caravan felt different - still and colourless. And with it came a creeping feeling that had haunted my dreams every night that week. An idea, a simple thought that these were the last days. 

Sometimes my thoughts are strange. I’d say that it’s a normal thing �" but honestly, I wouldn’t know.

 

I stopped at the small mirror. The dress skimmed over my curves perfectly and stopped just above my ankles. I felt like I’d grown, changed somehow. But my sixteen-year-old face wasn’t any different. I didn’t look sixteen. Whatever sixteen looks like. Without the dress I didn’t feel sixteen. I rubbed at my eyes and smudged yesterday’s badly drawn eyeliner even more. It made my eyes seem darker but for the glowing silver that reflected the dim light. 

“Are you ready?” She called from outside the porch, pulling me away from my reflection.

***

The trees in the clearing were covered in late summer leaves against an amber dawn sky.  

So familiar. 

I narrowed my eyes. “Have we been here before?”

“Exquisite,” she answered. “What do you think, old man?” Vivien spoke as if she half expected our Gypsy Cob to answer but he was more concerned with eating his meagre breakfast. 

I smiled at him as I stroked strands of his forelock between two fingers and pressed a kiss into his grey dappled cheek. 

“So have we? Been here before?”

She looked around, humouring me for a second. “No. Well maybe. I lose track Aurélie, you know what my memory is like.”

Her memory was fine.

She was lying, I was sure of it. But I’ve seen so many forests that they may as well have all been the same one.

“Have you been digging?” I stared at her muddied hand before she quickly hid it from me.

“Yes Aurélie, I’ve recently discovered the joys of digging in the morning. It’s like yoga but earthier.”

I pretended to find her funny. But there were wrinkles at the corner of her mouth from years of fake smiling at questions she didn’t want to answer and I could see them all the more clearly in this morning light. Hemingway snorted. Done with his breakfast. He was an impatient sort of horse.

“Time to go.” Vivien mounted the wooden perch at the front of the wagon. She was an impatient sort of person.

I looked back at the clearing, listening to the rustle of leaves. I thought I could make out moving shapes in the way you can when you turn out the light for the first time. A figure draped in something and hardly hidden behind the trunk of an old tree. I blinked, expecting the shape to change and the darkness to have thinned revealing an old tree stump or a strangely shaped bush. When I opened my eyes, there was neither. There was nothing.

“Coming?”

“Maybe there’s someone else camping around here?” My voice was quiet as the wagon began to creak with movement.

“I doubt it, sweetheart.” I caught her glimpsing into the trees, a flash of worry on her face as she urged Hemingway to move a little faster.

Always such a liar.