1. The gypsies steal a beautiful child.
It's an old story, creaky and jumpy with age and so scarred by its many showings that it's as if continuous heavy rain runs over the surface of it from start to finish. There she is, the pretty child in white, holding a flower up to her mouth, out with her well-dressed family for a picnic in the countryside, and the gypsy-woman with the shawl over her head sneaks round the back of the happy family group and sweeps her up into a blanket when no one's looking, and takes her and drops her into a barrel which the gypsy-man puts the lid on, quick, looking round with his harsh eyes, and lifts on to the back of their horse-drawn caravan and off the caravan flickers, and is miles away from the picnic before anybody even notices the child is gone.
But when they do, the faces of the townspeople behind the hundred year rain are all anguish and vitriol. They slam their fists into their own hands. They resolve to get the child back.
Meanwhile the gypsy caravan is creak-creaking down the bank of a high-flowing river. The barrel is precarious at the very back of the caravan. The caravan wheel goes over an underwater bump. The barrel topples in. The gypsies don't notice. The caravan creaks across the river. The barrel is swept downstream. Cut to rapids up ahead, fast and rocky and steep. Cut back to the barrel thrown
along the old surface of the water.
None of this necessarily happens at all. It's just one of the stories the townspeople tell themselves to account for the missing child.
2. The townspeople steal a beautiful child.
It's a less obvious story with a shinier surface, wipe-clean like the surface of the units of a fitted-kitchen. The travellers have set up their caravans on the old public grazing land with the swingpark on it in the middle of the town. This is because the council has bulldozed the usual place they go, the place out on the edge, and not just bulldozed it but also placed all over it huge lumps of concrete with iron girders sticking out of them, to make it impossible to drive any caravan on to the site. A brand new park-and-ride car park has been opened just opposite and the council doesn't want travellers anywhere near the scheme.
A small group of townspeople gathers at the side in the early evening, watching the travellers erecting washing lines, cleaning cars, setting up generators, muddying up the grass of the park by letting their kids play football. Their faces as they watch are all anguish and vitriol; the houses of some of them back on to the swingpark. They call the police. They leave messages for the council. Some townswomen are crying.
In the middle of the night the windows of some of the caravans are broken by townspeople throwing bricks.
This is what happens.