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

and red canvas shorts, and the others look like they hit Topshop with a limited budget.

Indigo confirms she’s seeing the kids now.

Another step and I can hear them talking – it’s like watching a school play where everybody is pretending to be elders by making their voice deep, except for one girl who is squeaking.

One more step and I can hear the actual words – or at least some of them. Nerd Boy is still playing Julias with a joke Czech accent, but when the kids playing the Hungarians talk to each other it sounds like made-up noises. Like people trying to sound like they’re speaking a foreign language.

‘I don’t like this,’ calls Indigo from the top of the stairs.

I’m six steps from the bottom, so I take the next one in slow motion. As my foot touches the next step, there’s a ripple like heat haze and when it passes I can see the clunky wooden coat rack hung with thick woollen coats, scarves and umbrellas. Now Nerd Boy looks like an elder, and way more buff than he is in real life – Julias is bare peng and I can see what I saw in him when I was somebody else earlier.

Confusing, isn’t it?

Cautiously I rock more of my weight onto my descending foot . . .

*

The refugees arrive in the middle of a downpour. A man and a woman with a girl in tow. Julias embraces each in turn as if they were long lost family rather than people he knew from the war. I’m so far gone now that I have to feel my way slowly down the stairs – only the child has spotted me. There’s something desperately queer about her appearance. She seems oddly deformed, as if she has been squashed down into her present height . . .

23 A loan word from Caribbean English. Probably a combination of ‘man’ and ‘them’ and used to indicate a group of men or people. ‘Galdem’ is the equivalent used to describe a group of women or girls.

26

Girls Can Do Anything

And I rock back onto my back foot – out of the illusion. I go back up slow and steady, watching the refugees become play-acting kids, then shadows and then nothing. I sit down at the top of the stairs and Indigo climbs into my lap.

‘What did you see?’ I ask her.

‘Everyone changed appearance.’

‘What about me?’

‘You too.’

‘Who did I change into?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Indigo. ‘You got all fat and your bottom got really wide.’

If I had a bit of string and Indigo was wearing a collar I’d send her down the stairs next to see if she triggers a scene, or whether it’s only me. I should probably have crept downstairs myself again to see whether the scene happens the same way twice, but I was too prang to risk it.

‘What’s the plan?’ asks Indigo.

This is an old house and, like I said, these memories are true, because I doubt Natali had a humanities stroke history teacher like Miss Redmayne who loved to teach you one subject by talking about another. In this case, refugees, by looking at case studies from throughout history – including Hungary 1956.

‘There are three doors to three rooms,’ I say.

‘Four doors,’ says Indigo.

‘Where’s number four?’

‘Over our heads,’ she says, and I stand to check. Real thing – there’s a pair of small doors at shoulder height hidden behind a layer of old wallpaper. When they stripped the house, someone pulled enough away to confirm their existence and then left them – a patch of dark wood peeking out of a hole and a rectangular depression outlining their shape. They can’t be serving hatches because they’re set into an outside wall. I knock on them and get a hollow sound.

‘It’s a dumb waiter,’ I say, and lift Indigo to have a look.

‘What’s it for?’ she asks.

‘It’s a small lift so people in the kitchen can send food upstairs quickly,’ I say.

‘I could climb down,’ says Indigo. ‘So could you – possibly.’

I put Indigo down and try to get my fingers into the seam between the hatches. There’s some give, but not enough. I wish I could carry a crowbar in my rucksack, but they’re too heavy – and hard to explain in a stop-and-search scenario.

‘A trowel,’ I tell Indigo. ‘Or a screwdriver. And if I get stuck in the shaft we’ll be well fucked.’

I have a sudden image of myself being dug out the wall in twenty years’ time as an inexplicable cold case. Obviously she was trapped in the dumb waiter, the investigator would say, but where did the fox come from?

Or would Indigo eat me?

‘Leaving out this hatch,’ I say, ‘there are three doors to three rooms – and rooms are where most good events take place.’

‘Why good events?’ asks Indigo, which is a good question – why did I say that?

‘Never mind that,’ I say. ‘Events is what the House uses to control us.’

‘Controls you,’ says Indigo, ‘not me.’

‘Not you so far, fam,’ I say. ‘Maybe it just hasn’t noticed you yet.’

‘That’s because I possess excellent tradecraft skills,’ says Indigo. But she’s scared, too. ‘If we avoid the rooms, that leaves the stairs. Up or down?’

‘Neither,’ I say. ‘We go out the far window – bypass the rooms and their memories.’

‘Can you make the jump down?’

‘You forget,’ I say. ‘In real life there’s scaffolding all the way around – what do you think is keeping up the plastic sheeting?’

‘Oh, clever,’ says Indigo. ‘When do we do it?’

‘Now,’ I say.

*

Papa has brought me the most marvellous present back from America, a model aeroplane all made out of balsa wood. It came in pieces in a box and we spent the morning in the study assembling it piece by piece on Papa’s desk. I know it sounds strange, and I do miss him when he is away on business, but missing him just makes me more happy when he returns. It took us all morning to assemble the aeroplane, but when we finish it’s