In Search of the Griffon Vulture

The reason she noticed them in the first place was that their vans weren’t lined up with the others, in neat spaces marked out by oleander hedges.They were corralled in an unkempt field behind the toilet block. Wild West, Margaret thought. Circling the wagons. In the centre of the corral, a makeshift kitchen had been created from a shiny new barbecue, a picnic table, and a haphazard ring of plastic chairs. A washing line strung up between wing mirrors was hung with football shirts and sleeveless vests. A beach towel said that Elvis Lives.

She heard the accents only as she clocked the number plates. Irish. Letting the side down, no doubt. She watched a group of children kick a ball around. It ricocheted off the side of a van. She thought there was something forlorn about the sound it made. The ball hit a cereal box, and its contents scattered.

Her first thought was Travellers, gypsies, itinerants. But these were concrete-and-tarmac kids. The sort she’d taught in Dublin, years ago. Pale and feral. Well enough off, if you’re talking money. But high on sugar and screens and doomed to repeat the sins of their parents. What attracted her attention was not the kids themselves, but the fact that they were out of place. At the end of September, these kids should have been at school, not on some campsite north of Marseille. She wondered what their teachers back home had been told, whether anyone had had the guts to confront the parents. She scanned the OK Corral to see if she could spot an adult. No women, at least none that she could see. Just men who didn’t look remotely sporty wearing sports gear and jabbing at their mobile phones. One wore a Dublin GAA shirt. The other was in red—Man U, Liverpool, whatever.

Margaret continued on her way to the row of stainless-steel sinks, her miniature plastic bowl containing a handful of cutlery, a mug, a couple of non-shatter glasses from yesterday, and the Fairy liquid she’d decanted into a mini conditioner bottle from the hotel she’d treated herself to in Aix.

She’d come across the campsite by chance. It was late in the day, and she’d strayed off her route, and there it was. It wasn’t listed on any of the usual websites and yet it seemed to attract the usual crowd: the ancients watching Netflix inside their monster vans, the balding, pot-bellied men wheeling their poo cans to the Chemical Disposal Point, the young couples travelling out of season. She had them clocked and boxed the moment she clapped eyes on them. She wondered what they made of her, if they even noticed her at all.

She was travelling solo just as the weather was closing in. Dodging the rain back home, and the awful choir, and the neighbour who kept on at her to join the Residents Association. She had a van full of Henning Mankell books that she should really jettison for the damage they’d already done to her head, filled now with bizarre countryside fates. Margaret had met just one other widow, a Dutchwoman, two campsites ago.

The Dutchwoman got up frighteningly early. She seemed to enjoy punishing herself on the high hills with her hiking poles and her eye-wounding Day-Glo jacket. Having turned down an invitation to join her delivered over the washing-up, Margaret had watched the woman’s departing figure through the mesh window of her pop-up roof. She worried suddenly that something terrible would happen to that woman, something Technicolour in its cruelty. Margaret wished she’d gone with her, and there was a lump in her stomach until she saw that scream of a jacket reappear. Since then, she had resolved to engage with people more, to meet the eye, initiate conversation, or at least to bat it back and forth until the other side gave up.

People seemed to think that travel required a purpose, so Margaret laid claim to birdwatching. Top of her list, she told them, was the Griffon Vulture. That shut them up. But Margaret’s only real purpose was to keep one step ahead of herself. Since Joe died, she had become a hard scone, the bitterness baked into her. She was better on the move. As for the Dubliners in that field, instinct told her they were trouble. She had half a mind to cover her own number plate before they spotted her.

As she placed her plastic basin in the sink, she spotted some detritus in the plughole, a tangle of pasta and shredded vegetable. Attempting to pick it out with a fork, she tried to picture some of the children she’d actually liked over the years. She’d always preferred the ones who’d shown promise. No doubt her sisters, Eileen and Grace, would put that down to a monumental flaw in Margaret’s character. An elitist streak.

Try as she might, she could only remember a handful of exceptional children, all of them girls. The trouble with girls, though, was their tendency towards biddability, with biddability too often the enemy of promise. There was a sweet spot—pliant enough to be teachable, defiant enough to be daring. But very few found that.

Two of those pale, unruly children came running behind her now. Boys. Naked to the waist and flabby-chested above their flimsy football shorts. She could hear her elder sister Eileen’s voice. Honest to God, Margaret. I don’t know when you got to be so much better than everyone else. There’s no one in this country more than a couple of generations away from the soil.

But it wasn’t the soil that created those kids. It was the tarmac and the concrete. The takeaways. The internet. The computer games. What happened to vegetables, to decent meat? And France was just as bad, all those villages serving nothing but pizzas and kebabs. One of the kids, eleven or so, stopped to watch her then, hands on hips. She guessed that he had locked horns with enough teachers to know when one of them was on to him.

“What’s your name?” he said.

She was stuck between answering and not when the boy’s friend, or more likely brother, arrived and tried to trip him up. They scuffled for a moment, then ran off, chasing each other through the oleanders.

Margaret began humming to herself as she washed each item carefully, then wiped it dry. She had just arranged the dishes into a satisfying stack when she realised an altercation was taking place beyond the line of shower cubicles. The raised voices were something else that was out of place. She thought these first and second things were likely to be connected, and so she went to have a look.

Around the corner, a desiccated woman, possibly German, was berating the boy from before in tightly enunciated English. Complaining about the state in which one of the toilets had been left, she was instructing him to go right back and flush it. The boy seemed to be squaring up to her. Dear God, Margaret thought. He glanced at Margaret then, and she spotted a fleck of vulnerability in his eye. She’d seen that look before. Sometimes it was shame, sometimes fear. But the root of it was always a kind of pain.

“Margaret,” she said, holding out her hand, “that’s my name.”

He jutted his chin at her.

“So, there you have it. And now, I have a question for you. Why don’t you just do what the lady asked?”

“I fucken won’t,” he said and glared at the little woman. “Wasn’t me.”

“Whether it was or not, maybe doing it would be the better choice. What do you think?”

He looked at her in astonishment. And then he dashed into the block and flushed the loo. He ran off without a word, the women shrugged at each other, and that was that.

As Margaret returned to her impeccably stacked washing-up bowl, she realised that the boy reminded her of someone. She couldn’t retrieve a name, not even an initial. It was way back, one of her very first classes. The boy was loud, a bit of a blowhard. But his overwhelming attribute was that he was unattractive. The extreme pallor, the constantly weeping nose, the jumper that was covered in specks of food. She had to fight hard not to judge him by all of this. And mostly she succeeded. She was astonished when one year he was the only child to turn up to parents’ evening. Back then, children didn’t. But he stood there with his overmedicated mother and asked all the questions she didn’t have. Years later, she’d heard the boy had opened a shop in the next town. A place where he fixed things like broken Hoovers, things no one else would touch. No point in romanticising—he was no boy wonder—but there was something in him that had survived his upbringing.

She was thinking a little affectionately about herself, her urge to improve people, and all she had achieved, when she looked up to find the man standing over her. The man, yes. Not the boy, but his yellow-vested father. The man smelt strongly of one of those teen deodorants, perhaps borrowed from his son.

“Was it you, putting your oar in?” he said. “Disrespecting my young fella?”

If in doubt, say nothing.

“Back off,” he said. “I’ll only say it once.”

Margaret gathered a stray spoon into the bowl.

“I saw your fucken Wexford plates. I suppose you look down your nose at people from Dublin, do you? I suppose you think you’re better than us. Well, I know people would sort the likes of you. No problem. So put that in your pipe.”

She almost sent something back at him about his oars and pipes, but then she realised the boy was there behind him, half-hidden by the open door of the laundry room. She would not mock a father in front of his son. She would not do that. When the father turned to go, the boy trotted off after him. As he turned the corner, he looked back at her. She was half-expecting a gesture, a middle finger or whatever they do these days. But all he did was look.

She gave it five minutes or so, wiping down the other sinks, drying them off, playing the good citizen, the happy camper. She was surprised how knocked she felt by the encounter, but maybe that’s what came from growing old. On her way back to the van, she passed their field. No sign of father or son, but there was another fellow there now, patrolling the camp. Back, forth, he went. Back, forth. A coiled spring, it seemed. Margaret struggled to respect coiled springs. She disliked the tension they threw out. The demands they made. Back, forth. Hitching up the back of his jeans. Back, forth. Jawing at his phone. Back, forth. Speaking loudly to someone who must be very far away. She caught the odd word. Practical words, times and places, but nothing cohered. At the centre of the man’s patrol was the open door of one of the vans.

And then she saw the girl. Black, no more than five or six. She was gazing vacantly out of the gloom to where the sun was beginning to grow too hot to sit in. Margaret craned her neck but there was no sign of anyone else. Just the girl in the dark. At that moment, the fellow caught Margaret looking. He glared at her, and Margaret moved on.

Back at her own van, Margaret sat at the collapsible table and examined their location on her phone, zooming in and out of the surrounding area. The campsite felt like it was in the middle of nowhere, but Marseille was no more than forty minutes away. She rehearsed in her head that exercise she used to do with Sixth Class. The end-of-term game. What do you know about X?

Well, Margaret, what do you know about Marseille?

Port, gangsters, Algiers, that French Connection film, knives, seafood, heroin, expensive soap, more gangsters, more heroin.

Her head spun. She gripped the metal rim of her chair to steady herself.

Too much coffee, she thought. Or too much Henning Mankell.

*     *     *

There was a small pool across the way with a cantina-style bar whose multicoloured bunting gave the place a raffish air. Margaret sat at a table under one of the orange umbrellas and let the colour drench her. And then she did something she almost never did; she ordered herself a small glass of beer. She sipped at it sparingly. It was still only eleven o’clock. But she wasn’t used to being spoken to as Yellow Vest had done. She had soaked it up, too, when she should have flung it back at him. And now she was paying the price.

Suddenly she saw herself as if from a great height. So far from home, and all alone. She opened Google Maps and learned that she was not in fact that far from home at all. Just twenty hours and thirty-eight minutes, including the two ferries. Which was not so bad, really. If it came to it, she could drive through the night and be home in less than a day. She felt better for knowing that.

The Dublin kids had colonised the pool—divebombing, squealing, disturbing the peace—their skin so stubbornly white she hoped to God that that someone had considered sunscreen. She’d always loved watching children play. Their inventiveness, their commitment, the complicated rules they layered on every game. She looked for the boy she now thought of as “hers,” but he wasn’t there.

Tired out after the encounter with Yellow Vest, she swapped her chair for one of the white plastic recliners, drawing it inside the umbrella’s orange glow. Soon, she had fallen into a kind of torpor in which the splashing sounds competed with random summer fragments. Rose windows, giant fists of garlic, a blank-faced Madonna, extraordinary mushrooms, acid-yellow fields of rape. 

She must have dozed off because when she came to, the kids were gone. And then she noticed them. Over in a shady corner there was a paddling pool and that’s where the girl was, the girl from the van. And with her, the boy. ‘Her’ boy. Margaret sat up, screened her eyes with her hand to get a better look.

“Hello, hello,” she said. “It’s yourself again. I’m Margaret, remember? Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

The boy glanced back over his shoulder.

“It’s OK. I don’t bite.”

He raised his palm, as if to block Margaret’s face, while behind him the girl slipped away through a gap in the fence and out into the rough ground.

Margaret softened her voice in an attempt to cajole him. “You never told me your name.”

“Wayne,” he said.

“That’s nice. Unusual.”

He shrugged. “Rooney, like?” He mimicked heading a ball.

“Ah, I see. And your friend?”

He shook his head, and Margaret could see that all he wanted now was to get away.

“It’s always nice to make a new friend, Wayne.”

But he was already gone.

Something was not right; she felt that keenly. Something was out of joint.

She was hungry now, and she made her way back to the van to prepare a sandwich. The damage was obvious from several metres away. The score on the paintwork was deep, continuous, and metal-white. She did not think it could have been the boy. As she followed the score with her finger, she imagined Yellow Vest making a circuit of the van, forcing a coin to it or sinking in the tip of a knife. She felt it like a personal wound, but she was angry too. She would scream blue murder to the campsite. It was beyond the beyond, and she would not put up with it.

She went and stood at the edge of the field, noting down every reg. she could read without actually venturing in there. And then she headed for the office, only to find it shut and no hours on the door. She was almost back at the van when she heard the purr of a motor, a low-slung sportscar that swept smartly through the rustic gates. Too louche for a campsite. Too slick by half. When she saw that François from the office was driving, that gave her pause. She checked the time. Ten to. She would give him till the hour.

Margaret waited in the shade of the tamarisk trees as her righteous anger began to drain away. But then Yellow Vest turned up, rapping on the glass door of the office, making the blinds rattle. Margaret had been obliged to conduct the entire check-in procedure in laborious Google-translated French. Yet here was Yellow Vest, speaking nineteen-to-the-dozen in pure Dublinese. Good man, Yellow Vest said, delivering a double backslap. And with that, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the outsider here. It was a sentence that made no sense, an equation that didn’t balance. And then there was the girl. She had tried not to think about the girl.

When Yellow Vest left, François returned to the office to deal with some new arrivals who’d left their monster van idling by the gate, a practice that infuriated Margaret beyond all reason. It was then that she spotted a squad of kids reenter the campsite, her boy in the lead, flying along on scooters. They looked pink-cheeked, drunk on freedom. The boy rattled to a halt just in front of her, running the toe of his trainer along the dry earth. She gave him a little wave, but he didn’t return it. The others had caught up with him, and she realised now that he hadn’t stopped for her.

“Swings!” he called over his shoulder. “Race yiz!”

And then the whole rattling group progressed up over the uneven earth towards the playground. At the rear of the line of scooters, a couple of tiny off-blonde girls were riding plasticky bikes with mermaid stickers and pink tassels. There was no sign of the other girl, “her” girl.

Back at the van, the damage depressed her. Maybe she should just go home. She didn’t have to join the choir or the Residents Association. She could just settle in for winter, do something useful at the charity shop. The sun had gone now and the wind was swirling around; how she longed for the certainty of summer.

To sort her head, she left the campsite and walked into the dry and fragrant hills. She was surprised to find she longed for Irish hills, moist and grassy, full of sheep pellets and tiny flowers. She was surprised how ill-at-ease she felt, constantly glancing back over her shoulder. She was never frightened to walk in the city, for all its dark canyons. Here, though, where the sky was open and the land extended all around her, she was more frightened than she could possibly explain. She did not think she was afraid of Yellow Vest. She would spot him a mile off. It was because of the girl. She was afraid for the girl. Afraid of what the girl might mean.

When she returned to the van, the stool she’d left by the table was gone. It didn’t matter really because she had a second stool. But it was the principle of the thing. When she went up to the utilities block to wash her hands, she kept an eye open. And there it was. Sitting on its own in the middle of the field.

Take me, if you dare.

She did dare. And as she walked away, her stool in her hands, out stepped Yellow Vest in front of her.

“I’m taking what’s mine.” Bold, she knew, even as she said it.

 “You think that stool isn’t sold in every supermarket in France? You can leave that fucken stool alone.”

She ignored him, and he didn’t come after her. Though all the way across that field, she felt the same portentous presence as in those dry and fragrant hills. She glanced back at the caravan where she thought she’d seen the girl, but the door was shut. And so she gave herself permission to say that it was not her concern. She’d had enough of these people. She would leave now if she could. Only there was François to settle with, so she would have to stay till morning.

*     *     *

That night, the wind was up. Margaret wound in the awning, stowed the picnic furniture. To get off promptly in the morning, she unhooked the electrics: the leisure battery would see her through. Most evenings, she’d light Grace’s citronella candle and sit outside. Read a bit, listen to a podcast. Or maybe just wait there for the fireflies. But she was too perturbed for that. The wind was part of it. But mainly it was the score, the wound. The force he must have used, the malice. And she’d breathed not a word of it. What was wrong with her? Eileen was a great one for the yoga breaths, and Margaret tried some of those now, but the deeper she went the greater the pain at the pit of her lungs.

Dusk had turned to dark. She was not about to chance the walk up to the utilities block, so she cleaned her teeth at the little basin and spat the paste into a plastic cup she’d have to rinse in the morning. Normally she would change into her pyjamas, but she didn’t feel like taking off her armour. Not tonight. She stepped onto the arm of the passenger seat, hoisting herself into the pop-up roof. The manoeuvre was precarious; she would invariably end up the wrong way round and have to contort her cramping legs to right herself. It was already so quiet she could hear the hum of the campsite lighting. She had her phone by her pillow, just in case, though God knows who she’d ring.

She slid into a dream in which a small child was kicking a cannonball against the side of a van. Plock, plock, plock. Each contact left a scorch mark, which was how she knew it was a cannonball. She was just wondering about the child’s foot when she realised that she was wide awake, though it was not yet morning. The birds hadn’t even started up. And, though there was a sound, it was not the one she’d encountered in the dream.

Margaret tried to ease down the zip on the mesh window, but it was impossible to do so soundlessly. Which was the better course, she wondered? Let them know you’re onto them? Or pretend you’re still asleep? She could see no benefit in the latter, so she zipped the window down as fiercely as she could. All she could see was a close-up of the oleander hedge and the sturdy white roof of the next-door van.

And then, a voice.

“Missus.”

A low whistle.

“Missus.”

What was she worried about? For God’s sake, there were people all around her.

“Miss-ussss.”

She lowered herself into the body of the van, hoiked up the window blind. And there he was. The boy, “her” boy. Though at three a.m. she was hesitant to claim him.

His attention was fixed on something just to the right of him that the light didn’t reach.

“It’s OK,” he told the dark. “You’re OK.”

As she rolled back the sliding door, Margaret felt her throat catch. Because there was the girl. Small and very still, wearing a blue dress with a white collar. When she realised the boy was trying to coax the girl into her van, Margaret was desperate to bar her way. Because once she’d let that girl inside, she would be done for. But the boy took the girl’s hand so gently that Margaret couldn’t bring herself to be the monster here. Her lips were dry, and she rolled them together to soften them up a bit. And then she beckoned the kids inside like some pantomime witch. She slid the door shut, doubtless waking half the campsite.

“Now, Wayne. You’ve five minutes to explain yourself. And you have to tell me this time, who is this?”

The boy seemed to be assessing Margaret. They’d never been at such close quarters before. “She’s called Asha,” he said.

“Aisha,” the girl corrected him, her eyes fixed on Margaret’s face.

“Aisha,” Margaret said. “Good girl.”

The girl was playing with the hem of her dress, twisting the sky-blue fabric round and round her index finger, while in the other hand she kneaded something small and red.

“And why is she here?”

“Because they’re mean to her.”

Margaret coughed, just the once.

The boy met her eye. “I think my uncle stole her,” he said, then rubbed his nose in his sleeve.

Margaret’s hand leapt to her mouth before she had the wit to stop it.

“They won’t let her play with us or nothing.”

The girl was looking from one to the other now, her expression grave, while Margaret’s head was full of police stations, consulates, ferry ports. She didn’t like authorities much. But there might have to be authorities, even so.

She remembered the pot of yoghurt she hadn’t eaten earlier, the granola that Grace had sent off with her in industrial quantities. She found a bowl, spooned it all in. The girl wolfed it down, and Margaret felt her breath come short and hard. She must not cry. She must stay calm and think.

“Mama?” she said to the girl. “Papa?”

The girl shook her head.

“Told you,” said the boy. “You need to take her with you, missus. You can leave before the office opens. I’ve got the code for the gate. They’ll just think you done a runner.”

Margaret had somehow fallen inside a film. And whatever this story was, it wasn’t hers.

“Stop,” she said. “Stop right now.”

The boy was glancing out the window, his knee hopping. And then he turned. “He said he’s going to sell her.”

Everything stopped. There was nothing in this world beyond the boy’s face and the girl, so little. If only she’d misheard.

She would ring Eileen. That’s what she’d do.

For the love of God, Margaret. You can’t just abduct a child.

Not Eileen, then. Grace.

White saviour, Margaret, really?

The boy had repositioned himself, so that his face filled her field of vision. “You already have the uncle’s reg, I saw you up there earlier. You can shop him, no bother.”

The pressure in Margaret’s head became unbearable. 

“Shut up,” she blurted out, despite herself.

But now she had made the little girl cry. Something fell from the child’s grasp and the boy bent to retrieve it. A red bottle cap with swirly white script. Coca-Cola. He pressed it into the girl’s palm, gently closed her fingers over it. And, once again, Margaret was ashamed.

“OK,” she said. “Let’s try and work out what’s what.” She tried out words for home. Casa, maison, Africa. She mimed a pitched roof, then steepled her hands by her cheek for a pillow. But the girl just shrank back into her seat.

“This is shite,” the boy said. “Her Ma died in the sea. My uncle has her now, and he’s a right fucker.”

“I’ll talk to the office.”

“You mean that shithead with the Porsche? Sure, he’d only give her back.” The boy’s face was pinched. “I’m not being funny, missus. You’ve got to catch a grip here.”

And then everything slowed. What came into Margaret’s head was a day in the West when Joe and she were courting. It was early summer, a day of high scudding clouds. The cliffs were famous, and they’d braved the barbed wire and got themselves right to the edge. They lay there, eye to the horizon-line. And it was impossible to believe that even if you fell, the sky wouldn’t take you in its arms.

“Fuck’s ssake, like, say something. Yiz need to get a move on. He does his first port run at five. And if he finds her here, he’ll brain me. And then he’ll brain you.”

Margaret didn’t say yes, and she didn’t say no. Because there was no real choice here, she could see that now.

“Back up the van there, missus, and I’ll see you clear of the tree. Asha,” he said. “Gimme five.” And then he jumped from the van.

Margaret thought the girl might cry again once Wayne was out of view, but she didn’t. She seemed intrigued by the pop-up roof. She even seemed interested in the big, old-fashioned map book Margaret had left opened on the back bench, her finger tracing the line of a long, blue river.

Margaret stowed the bedding, lowered the roof. She made Aisha a nest of pillows while the child played with the seat belt, clicking it in and out. Across the girl’s knees she laid a blanket she’d crocheted herself, half a lifetime ago. The girl drew it right up over her head, and that alone broke Margaret’s heart.

She was struck by the extent of  her own inadequacy. With no children of her own, what did she know of mothering? And even if she drove all day and reached the port. Even if she concealed the child, what then? What hope did the girl have without a passport, a history, a way of being understood? And yet, to simply drive away and leave her here. It was impossible. 

Slowly, Margaret drew down the blanket. She looked into the girl’s face, projecting all the warmth and solidity she could muster.

“Now, Aisha. You’re going to have to trust me, all right? Whatever happens, I’ll do my best for you. I can promise you that.”

Just as the boy whistled to say that he was at the gate, the girl met Margaret's eye. She nodded, as if she’d somehow understood. And Margaret had the sudden wild idea that maybe all of this would be OK. Because it would have to be. The barrier was up now, and they would soon be on their way.

ANNEMARIE NEARY

Annemarie Neary is the author of three published novels. Her prize-winning stories have appeared in many places, including Columbia Journal, The Stinging Fly, For Books’ Sake, and The Glass Shore. She was born in Ireland, lives in London, and is obsessed with Venice, the setting for a recently completed short story collection.