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

‘Hello, Abigail,’ he says, and turns the smile on the woman. ‘This is Abigail – she’s come for tea.’ Then to me. ‘This is Angelica who does.’

The words ‘Does what?’ come out of my mouth before I can stop them.

‘Housekeeper,’ says Angelica.

There is a big kitchen at the back with expensive granite counters and cupboards that aren’t made from laminated chipboard. From a huge American fridge Angelica, after asking if I have any allergies, doles out a bottle of ginger beer and a plate of sandwiches with cling film stretched across the top. From a pair of biscuit tins come one pile of custard creams and another of chocolate Bourbons. I get to carry the bottle and the glasses while Simon is entrusted with the plates. He takes them with a solemn expression and leads me up the stairs.

Simon’s room is all the way at the top of the house, and is basically the whole attic conversion with stairs that come up through the floor. I freeze when I get to the top because I can’t believe how much stuff he has. Beside the cupboard and the wardrobe, there are shelves of books and board games and piles of boxes and toys in the corners or leaning precariously against the walls. He has an elevated bed with a desk and computer tucked underneath, with a separate shelf for all his schoolbooks. He has so much stuff that if you moved it to my room you wouldn’t be able to get in the door.

Simon carefully puts his tray on the red lid of a storage box. Through the box’s translucent sides I can see it is filled to the brim with Lego. He crosses over and opens the front-facing windows. I notice that the rear-facing window is already open. I put my tray down next to his and walk over to look out.

The back garden isn’t all that, rectangular lawn and flower beds looking small from this height. It’s dominated by a big tree whose branches reach all the way to the attic. But beyond the garden is the green swell of Kite Hill – Simon has the whole of the Heath as his back garden.

We have a balcony at home but mostly we use that to store stuff.

I get a strange feeling like I want to bite something, but I don’t know what I should bite, so I shake it off and think instead about the way Simon made me wait before ringing the bell. I look down the length of the tree and see where a rope ladder leads up into the lower branches. From there you could climb up the branches until you were level with the window and . . .

I see a scuff mark on the tiles just to the right of the open window. It’s only a metre jump from the nearest branch to the roof, but there’s nothing to catch you if you fall. I look back at Simon, who is sitting cross-legged beside the Lego box and pouring himself a glass of ginger beer.

‘Did you climb in through the window?’ I ask.

Simon nods and slurps his ginger beer.

I wait for more but he just takes another slurp.

‘Why?’

‘I’m not supposed to go out on my own,’ he says.

‘But you do anyway?’

He nods again.

I look out at the gap between the roof and the branch and the ten-metre drop to multiple injuries – if you’re lucky. The only way I’d make that jump was if the house was on fire.

‘Every day?’

He shrugs and slurps.

‘I wanted to meet Jessica,’ he says.

I sit down opposite him, open my backpack and take out my notebook.

‘What’s that?’ he asks.

‘I like to write things down.’

‘Why?

‘So I don’t forget them,’ I say, and he nods as if this makes total sense to him.

I drink some ginger beer, find my place in my notes and ask if Simon sneaked out to see Jessica today. He says he did and when I ask him when he’d last seen Jessica he says yesterday, so I ask him how.

‘She rang the doorbell,’ he says, and tells me that Jessica, a girl he’d met once in the playground when he was young, said she was looking for people to come to a happening on the Heath.

6

Simon’s Mum

We are playing Risk on a board so old that it has wooden pieces and the box it comes in is held together with sellotape. It’s the fourth board game we’ve played, not counting Mouse Trap, which really isn’t a game but more an excuse to build that mousetrap and the only one Simon has come close to beating me at. He can read providing he sounds out the words and he can do maths on paper and fingers – but he does everything slowly. I’ve checked out his bookshelves where there are rows of books like Seraphina and Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn, none of which, judging by the spines, have even been opened. I guessed the books he actually reads are the ones scattered around his bed and on the windowsills. Those were Roald Dahls, How to Train Your Dragon and every single Diary of a Wimpy Kid ever written – all with cracked spines, drink stains and folded-over pages. Obviously he likes to read – he just isn’t very good at it.

On his desk are the same GCSE Latin textbooks that I use. Mine are second-hand but his are as clean and as untouched as the copy of Oliver Twist that sits next to them or the neat pad of lined A4 next to that.

He’s good at Risk, though, and he knows about the Australia gambit even if it doesn’t work that well. We need a couple of other players so we can gang up on them.

So we’re playing Risk when Simon’s mum comes home, stomps up the stairs and gives me the eye. She’s wearing an expensive black pinstripe skirt suit, the jacket undone to reveal