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

gather on the Tollerton Bridge to watch the Flying Scotsman whizz by.

18

Isochrone

Mum and Dad are asleep on the sofa in the living room with the TV on. Even from Paul’s room I can hear Ian Beale pleading with Denise to give him one more chance. I wouldn’t. But then I wouldn’t have stuck myself with someone that pathetic in first place.

Paul makes a noise – it’s all he’s got left, but I’ve taught myself to understand him and he wants me to keep reading. I tune out EastEnders and concentrate on Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett. It’s his favourite and I could do most of it off by heart, except it makes me cry at the end because now I know what magic can really do and what it can’t.

I was going to spend this evening making an isochrone map of the area around the Heath. It’s from the Greek isos meaning equal and khronos meaning time, and basically you work out the area you can reach travelling by a certain mode for a certain length of time from a single point. In this case, fifteen minutes by foot from the edge of the Heath. Fifteen minutes, because I reckon that any longer than that and the Feds would have spotted one of their mispers17 on CCTV, and Mr and Mrs Fed wouldn’t have had to randomly harass law-abiding young ladies like myself. But Mum wanted to watch the six o’clock news and she looked so peaceful with her head on Dad’s shoulder, like they were teenagers, that I reckoned Paul could wait a bit for his bath.

Paul makes a sudden ugh sound and bangs his shoulder on the padded bars that stop him rolling off the bed.

‘Do you want me to read this or not?’ I ask, and he quietens down.

I discovered isochrones on the internet when I was still in primary school and spent hours mapping out my own independent isochrone – how far I could escape from my house on foot in one hour, two hours, a morning . . .

Then I discovered the TfL site and realised I could go anywhere in the whole of London for free as long as I took a bus.18 I spent a whole week and a half going everywhere – I’d pick a bus that went out into the zones and ride it all the way to the end and then all the way back. Finally, my school informed my parents that I’d been bunking off and I was grounded into the ground. I pointed out that I’d gone missing over the weekend as well, and they hadn’t noticed. But that just meant my mum starting crying as well as shouting. I was so happy in year 7 when the school put me in special measures because then I was going to be special too. You’re stupid when you’re a kid, aren’t you?

I’ve still got my independent isochrone map hanging on my bedroom wall in an old frame I found in a skip.

Paul’s independent isochrone map has been shrinking since he was five years old. All the way down to a single point centred on his bed.

So I kept reading to my brother all the way through Holby City, until my mum woke up to help get him ready for sleep. Afterwards she hugged me and said she loved me, and then spoilt it by saying she didn’t know what she’d do without me.

Which just goes to show that elders can be just as stupid as you are.

*

It is the middle of the night and I am awake because I had a dream but can’t remember what it was about. I lie in my bed and imagine I have slit pupils like a fox and can see in the dark.

Close by I can hear a big diesel locomotive revving up. Probably a Class 67 dieselelectric powering up after being held at signal outside Kentish Town Station. The Class 67 is nicknamed the Cyclops because of its single-pane windscreen. Two years ago I could have told you what the train was carrying and I would have imagined myself carried away to Tonbridge or Derby or Angerstein.

Now I know about magic.

Now I imagine seeing in the dark and running with foxes.

And maybe, somewhere out there, something that can save my brother.

It’s magic, after all – anything could be possible.

17 In some ways I fear the police are as bad as contemporary youth when it comes to playing fast and loose with the English language. In this particular case, ‘mispers’ is a portmanteau word derived from ‘missing persons’.

18 TfL – Transport for London is the body that runs or regulates public transport within the Greater London Area. Children under the age of eleven may travel for free, which has livened up many a bus ride, I can tell you.

19

Camp Simon’s House

‘

It can’t be easy at home, helping look after your brother,’ says Simon’s mum.

Which means she and the foxes have one thing in common – they’re both up in people’s business when they shouldn’t be. I know this because I never mentioned my brother to her or Simon. I don’t, as a rule, tell people unless I have to. I don’t like the way they look at me afterwards – like I’m a background character in somebody else’s soap opera.

To be fair, I looked her up on the internet myself. But all I found was pictures of her on other people’s Facebook pages – most of them antique, and the only recent mention was of her as a senior manager at the Home Office.19 I ignore her and pretend I am distracted by Simon trying to carry his camping gear out the kitchen’s back door. He’s got such a pile in his arms that he has to do a shimmy to finesse the doorway, and there’s something about his shoulders that’s making me feel bare queasy. But that ain’t going to run with me, because we done puberty in year 6 and I’m starting