What Abigail Did Tha Summer, Ben Aaronovitch [if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud txt] 📗

‘I thought chocolate was poisonous to foxes,’ I say, holding the KitKat out of reach.

‘Is it?’ asks Indigo, who has climbed into my lap trying to reach it.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I looked it up – you can have some tangerine.’

‘It smells so good,’ whines Indigo, but settles down with her head on my chest. ‘Scratchy,’ she pleads.

I scratch the soft fur of her neck and chest with my right hand while eating the KitKat with the left.

A swan is passing close to the shore and Indigo’s head turns to track it.

‘Vicious buggers,’ she says.

‘Billiards,’ I say.

‘Who’s Billy Yards?’ Indigo asks, perking up. ‘Who does he work for?’

‘Billiards,’ I say. ‘It’s a game. A bit like snooker.’

‘What’s snooker?’

‘Not important,’ I say.

What is important is that it’s played on a big expensive fabric-covered table – it’s not generally known as an outdoor sport. It’s also well posh and not often played by teenagers, not even posh ones like Natali. A happening with billiards, she’d said. And, thinking back, that should have been a clue right there.

‘If they’re playing billiards,’ I say, ‘then they got to be indoors.’

Possibly somewhere with billiard tables.

Indigo stiffens and makes a hissing sound like a snake coughing up a furball.

‘What is it?’

‘Something’s coming,’ she whispers.

I can feel it too. A weird singing in the head, like when you walk into a room full of strangers and could swear they’re all staring at you and there’s nothing you can do but keep your head up and dare them to make some beef about it.

Quick as a flash, Indigo snakes off my lap and burrows into the gap between the small of my back and the fence. I can feel her trembling.

‘In front of you,’ she hisses.

There is a dog lying in the grass three metres to my front and left. It’s a black and white collie with one blue eye and one brown eye. I recognise it as the one that approached me and Indigo that first night on Kite Hill. It is lying on its belly in the way sheepdogs do when they’re waiting for instructions.

I look around to see if I can spot its owners and don’t see any wizened farmers in flat caps, or anybody else taking an interest for that matter.

‘Sugar Dog H-1 Alpha,’ says Indigo, still trembling.

‘Meaning what?’ I ask.

The sheepdog’s gaze is fixed on me.

‘Dog captain, dog officer,’ says Indigo. ‘Alpha male – top dog.’

‘Meaning what!’

‘Meaning you wished to meet the local goddess,’ says Indigo. ‘Wish granted.’

10 Apparently ‘bad’, although Abigail assures me that the use of ‘peak’ gives a greater sense of alarm than the plain English.

15

An Island in the Aegean

As soon as there were ponds on the Heath then people started swimming in them. This being the old days, they didn’t worry about Health and Safety, and if four people were dying a month during the summer that was a price worth paying. What did disturb the Victorians was that people were doing it without their clothes on.

Obviously something had to be done, otherwise people might get overexcited at the sight of some random bather’s package. So, by the end of the nineteenth century, the London County Council added some proper facilities to the Mixed Bathing Pond on the Hampstead side. This became the famous ‘Cockney child’s seaside’, where thousands of poor kids came to splash about in the summer, meaning that the posh olds needed somewhere else to swim. In 1893 the Highgate Men’s Pond on the other side of the Heath was opened, and there fine strapping Edwardian men could show off their legs to their fellow men without having any females around to harsh their squee. It wasn’t until 1926 that the Highgate Ladies’ Pond opened further up the hill.

On the first day there was a host of donnies standing on the slope overlooking the pond, eager to catch a glimpse of the other half of the population getting wet in their scandalously skimpy swimming costumes. Never mind that they was as revealing as a burkini – it’s the thought that counts, isn’t that right, fam? This is probably why the pond is now screened on all sides by trees so tall you’d need a drone to see over.

And why there is a sign that says WOMEN ONLY on the front gate.

As soon as I’d got to my feet the collie had sprung up, turned smartly and headed north. I followed but Indigo stayed behind, making little whimpering noises. The collie led me past the men’s pond, the Model Boating Pond and then left up the hill to Millfield Lane, which runs along the east side of the Heath. Ponds and trees on one side, the back fences of the uber-boujee11 on the other. I find out later that this is also called Poet’s Lane, because Keats and Coleridge used to jam down here looking for nightingales. If I’d kept going I’d have ended up in Kenwood, where me and Simon practised falling out of trees. Halfway along there is a gate in the iron fence that marks the entrance to the women’s pond.

Beyond the gate is a cool shady path through the trees.

The Border collie pauses to let me catch up, watching me over his shoulder with cool mismatched eyes.

I’m not prang12, not even a little bit. What’s there to be scared of, anyway? I follow the Border collie down the path, past the changing rooms and out into the sunlight again. I’m standing at the edge of the meadow that runs from the trees down to the pond. Dozens of white women are stretched out on their towels and sizzling like bacon in the hot sun. Most are pale but a couple are tanned. One old lady near me is nut-brown and wrinkly in nothing but a polka-dot bikini and a sun hat. She has an open hardback book lying across her face as a sun shield – I can’t see the title.

The collie nudges my leg and pads