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

*

Now we are sitting at the dining-room table, which is really too small for the number of guests, so that we jostle one another’s elbows. Charles has pride of place at one end, Julias at the other, as we eat prawn cocktails and steak diane and drink more tepid German white and talk about the miners and Vietnam and the three-day week, and I still can’t remember the name of the man on my left or the woman on my right, even as she predicts the fall of Saigon. I am sitting opposite Grace, but thank God she’s too busy fussing around the table while wearing an orange and green swirling summer dress to talk to me. All her attention is on the tall saturnine man in the blue silk shirt who says his name is Jerry or maybe Jarahk – it’s hard to tell over the gurgling and crunching as the guests tuck into rum babas and Black Forest gateau – and through it all Charles beams and smiles and nods his head and Julias is trying to catch my eye.

*

Julias is leading me downstairs into the newly converted granny flat, which he plans to rent to a granny or, more likely, to a foreign student. Cash under the table, he tells me, so that the taxman doesn’t get a whiff. Julias takes my hand as we descend and I think that he’s much too old, but I don’t know what for. We reach the new bedroom, still smelling of paint and clean linen. He takes me in his arms and draws me towards him until I am close enough to see the individual hairs on his nose and smell the wine on his breath. We stop. He looks puzzled. I feel we should be doing something else, but obviously neither of us knows what. Underneath the high cheekbones, crow’s feet and grey eyes I can see a second younger face. He frowns and asks me my name.

Abigail!

I’m shouting ’cause there’s a sharp pain in my ankle and Indigo is yelling at me to wake up. I get a confused look at someone running away, and back up the stairs – I think it might have been Nerd Boy.

24

The Granny Flat

I came off my bike once when I was a kid, misjudged a kerb outside my block and went head first over the handlebars. Banged my head bad and when I stood up I thought I was going to pass out. It all went grey and fuzzy and unreal. Like I was in an old TV programme set somewhere far away, like Kazakhstan or something.

That’s what I feel like now, but not for long because Indigo bites me on my leg again.

Downstairs . . . We were downstairs in what Julias had called the granny flat.

‘Stop that,’ I tell Indigo, before she has a chance to bite me again.

Except Julias was Nerd Boy, playing make-believe historical dinner party just a moment ago.

And I was part of it. I was Samantha and I lived in Kilburn and was betraying my best friend Grace by riding her husband. Although I think Julias/Nerd Boy didn’t know what riding was – lucky escape, right?

‘You saw that, right?’ I ask Indigo.

‘Saw what?’

‘The dinner party,’ I say. ‘Everyone around a table stuffing their faces.’

‘The canteen?’ says Indigo. ‘Heard it – didn’t dare come in. I waited until you came out with that male, the one that was on heat.’

Which is a peak thought I ain’t going near.

Except maybe later I’ll ask Indigo how she knows – might be handy later, right?

First things first – do we go out the front, the back or up the stairs? Looking around, it’s obvious I’m not in the house I first walked into – the one that’s been stripped and made ready for the million-quid makeover. This version of the granny flat has orange wallpaper, a yellow modular sofa, a TV the size of a small microwave and posters of white musicians I’ve never heard of – except the Stones, because my mum likes them. The front end is obviously the living room/bedroom, with a door that leads straight out into the outside area. Through the window I can see a cast-iron spiral staircase leading up to street level. Bright summer sunshine catches the railings at the top.

Through a wide square-edged arch is the dining room and kitchenette, with pale yellow walls and grey and pink cabinets. There’s probably a bathroom tucked behind a white door with frosted panes.

Simon is upstairs – we have to grab him on our way out. So I charge up the narrow staircase with Indigo at my heels, but before I can reach the door at the top it opens and three kids start down in my direction.

One is Natali, who obviously couldn’t stay away from the house, and the other is a boy who was play-acting as Jan at the dinner party. The third is older, maybe fifteen, with long hair and a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. The stairway is enclosed and less than a metre wide so I scramble back, slip and bump down the steps on my bum. At the bottom I reckon it’s fifty–fifty which way they’re going to go so I pick left, towards the front of the house, which of course turns out to be where they’re heading and I end up with my back against the front door.

But it’s cool because the three of them don’t even see me. Natali and Not Jan sit down on the sofa while Guns N’ Roses reaches down into the gap between it and the wall and extracts a genuine brass-bound glass hookah.20

It’s suddenly much darker in the flat, and the sunshine outside the window has been replaced with the dull orange of street lights.

I decide that since the kids are busy fussing over their ganja, I’ll have a go at the front door behind me.

It’s unopenable. Not locked, but totally fixed. And I’m