There are two more floors above us – the second storey and the attic conversion.
I look up the stairs and I swear it looks darker.
‘This house is empty,’ I say. ‘They’ve gone somewhere else.’
‘They might have gone through a soft spot,’ says Indigo.
‘What’s a soft spot?’ I ask, but I already think I know the answer.
‘It’s where you can fall through.’
‘Fall through to where?’
‘We don’t know,’ says Indigo. ‘We never fall through.’
‘You’re telling me this now?’
‘It was just theoretical,’ says Indigo, bobbing her head from side to side. ‘Something we covered in training. It wasn’t something I expected to run into here.’
I’m about to ask exactly where Indigo expected to run into a soft spot exactly, when I realise Simon isn’t with us any more. I call his name.
‘Up here,’ he says from the landing above. ‘I’ve been all the way to the top and it’s all empty.’
I look up, and behind Simon it’s definitely getting darker and it ain’t the sun going behind a cloud.
‘Simon!’ I shout. ‘We are leaving!’
He trots down the stairs and the darkness follows him and suddenly I’m more prang than I was that time I was dangling over the railway tracks at Acland Burghley. Simon reaches me with a look of cheerful incomprehension, and I grab his hand and drag him down the next flight of stairs to the ground floor, Indigo streaking ahead of me towards the front door.
I can feel it at my back as we run down the hall. An engulfing need piling up behind us like a pushy school crowd at dinner-time.
I reach the door and yank at the handle, but it doesn’t move.
And then everything is dark and silent.
I see nothing, but I can feel the door at my back. I stretch out my arms in all directions, but all I can feel is the rough texture of bare brick or old wallpaper.
‘Simon?’ I call. ‘Indigo?’
I’m thinking that the door to the front room must be less than a metre to my left, and to the left of the doorway will be the front windows. If I wrap my fist in my rucksack, that and its contents should save my hand when I smash the glass.
People have died trying to break windows with their hands.
Break the window, get out, get help, rescue Indigo and Simon.
Why is it so hard to move?
A light appears down the hallway, a candle flickering in a blue and white tea saucer. It’s being held by Nerd Boy. I recognise his pale face and bad hair.
‘Good God,’ he says. ‘Have you been waiting down here long?’ His voice is all wrong, proper posh and old – like he’s an elder. ‘It’s like the blackout in here, isn’t it? Still, now you’re here we can get on with it.’
23
Three-day Week
It takes more than a power cut to stop a Hampsteadite throwing a dinner party, although God knows how I’m going to get back to Kilburn. Julias has offered to run me home in his Renault, and the thought of that fills me with a strange combination of excitement and disgust, but for the life of me I don’t know why. He meets me at the door with a blue and green handmade candle guttering in a saucer and takes my coat.
*
Oh God, how did I let him talk me into coming tonight. This is going to be truly frightful and I didn’t have to say yes. But now I’m going to have to sit across the table from Grace and make pleasant conversation. Julias leads me into the recently knocked-through dining room/lounge lit by candles, where the other guests are eating canapés and drinking lukewarm German white wine. There is Grace now, sidling up with a plate of canapés and how lovely to see you, white or red, and I choose red because at least it might be the right temperature even if it is South African. Grace drifts away to fetch the wine and I’m looking around the room. I see the kids – Jan and Helena – God, they’ve grown. Jan in particular looks like his father when he was young and Helena is flushed from her first proper glass of wine. More than one glass, I think. I feel I should know the other guests, but their faces are only half familiar and they blur into a tangle of green corduroy, purple shirts and luridly coloured kipper ties.
*
Now I see Charles, splendid in a white linen shirt and a grey-green Nehru jacket, and his smile is like the moon emerging from behind a cloud. He’s holding court amongst a circle of laughing young . . . I can’t tell if they’re men or girls. Oh God, I’m getting old. Soon I’ll be knitting socks, rinsing my hair blue and attacking young men in the street.
*
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 thinking that this is like a video game when you get to the limits of the level. I’ve never liked those kind of games – I’ve always wanted to see what was on the other side of the wall.
I stride back into the living room and grab the hookah. It’s got some heft. It also gets the attention of the kids pretending to use it.
‘Hey!’ says Guns N’ Roses. ‘That’s an antique.’
‘Don’t mind me,’ I say, and swing it at the front window.
I swear it smashes. I feel the impact run up my arms, hear the deep bell sound of breaking glass, see the shards glittering red in the light from the lamp, falling out into the night.
And then it’s gone, and the hookah is back where it was. All I have is a tingling numbness in my palms and a fading memory of a breaking window. The kids have gone back to ignoring me.
‘That’s cool, man,’ says Guns N’ Roses, and takes a hit from the hookah.
It was totally cold and empty when I picked it up, but now it’s like I’ve got two videos superimposed over each other. One with an empty hookah, and one where it’s full and bubbling.
As I back away, the bubbling hookah fades.
I back all the way into the dining room/kitchenette, where Indigo is hiding under a table. I sit down on a chair where I can keep an eye on the kids in the front room. Indigo jumps into my lap and presses her muzzle against my chest – she’s trembling. I stroke her behind her ears to calm her down.
I pull my phone from my rucksack, but however hard I mash the power button it won’t turn on. When I shake the phone by my ear it makes a rattling sound – I won’t be calling for help. Assuming I could get bars in the first place.
‘We can’t get outside the house,’ I say.
‘There is nothing outside,’ says Indigo.
I look out the kitchen window. Past my reflection I can see a stretch of lawn lit by the lights from the windows above and the silhouette of the wooden stairs that lead down from the ground floor. It looks like it’s really real.
‘It looks real,’ I say.
‘Not to me,’ says Indigo. ‘And I can’t hear anything outside – only silence. What if it’s Uncle Oboe?’
‘Who’s Uncle Oboe?’
Indigo trembles harder, so I put my other arm around her.
‘We don’t know what it is,’ she says. ‘It’s unknown, that’s why it’s Uncle.’
Uncle for Unknown, more old-style phonetic alphabet.21
‘Oboe stands for what?’
‘Opposition,’ says Indigo. She’s stopped trembling but is still pressing into me.
‘What does Uncle Oboe do?’ I ask.
‘Plots, kills foxes, twists things, insinuates and corrupts,’ says Indigo.
Which is bare unhelpful and we are definitely going to have a talk about this later, but first we have to get out of here. I get up, carefully put Indigo down, and just to be certain I swing the chair at the kitchen window.
This time, not even the memory of a smash.
Obviously I can’t get out of the granny flat. But Natali, Not Jan and Guns N’ Roses walked in, so perhaps I can walk out with them. We’ve done rushing in, and we’ve done breaking windows, so maybe it’s time we finesse this a bit.
‘I’m going to see if I can join their group,’ I tell Indigo. ‘But whatever this is, I think it sucks you into the game, right? I need to get close enough to follow them, but not get sucked all the way in. Right?’
There is a pause.
‘Right?’
‘Roger,’ says Indigo. ‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘You follow me up, and if I don’t say the safe word you bite me again.’
I sidle up to the kids, and this time I can actually feel it, a sort of drag, like when the wind is behind you. As I get closer, the room gets darker and starts to smell like the inside of a lift after the local ganja growers have been using it.
‘Wagwan, fam,’ I say. ‘What you saying?’22
*
Helena’s mum’s lodger is just the coolest. He’s got like this Turkish pipe with water in it, and lets us smoke pot providing we suck on some Polos before we go upstairs. My mum smelt it on me once but I told her that it was patchouli oil. Which was half true since Helena’s mum’s lodger drenches himself in the stuff. And, anyway, never mind the pot. If my mum knew about Helena and me, then she’d really lose her rag. She definitely wouldn’t like the idea of me having a something . . . a somebody . . . a girl as a very close friend. Especially now we’re sharing digs in Cambridge. Which part of me doesn’t understand. But the me that is still Abigail Kamara knows a certified gay couple when I’m play-acting as part of one. Even if whoever is organising this game doesn’t seem to know what lesbians are – or straights, either. That’s something to think about. But first I’ve got to get us upstairs.
‘I’ve got the munchies,’ I say. ‘Can we get some snacks?’
20 When I questioned her as to how she came to know what a hookah looked like, Abigail informed me, somewhat tartly, that one appears in the Disney cartoon Alice in Wonderland. That, as they say, is me told.
21 I remember this version of the phonetic alphabet very well. It was still in use when I did my National Service. No doubt Thomas used it as well, during the war, and I can only assume that Abigail gained her knowledge of it from him. Where on earth the foxes learnt it, or why they adopted it for their own use, I dare not even speculate.
22 Hello, friends, what are you doing?
25
Refugees
I was running for the front door when suddenly some total wasteman attached a bowling ball to my belly button.
*
Julias says that obviously babies are like buses, you wait years in vain for one and then two come along one after another. But at least this one is better behaved than Jan, who was trouble from
the first trimester to the last. Jan kicked and squirmed but this one seems content to ride out its gestation quietly. Too quietly, although the doctor says that the heartbeat is strong and consistent and that there is nothing to worry about. Julias isn’t worried and Charles is always a comfort.
*
The refugees arrive in the middle of a heavy downpour, in big coats and carrying a meagre collection of cheap suitcases. Julias embraces both the mother and the father in the hallway, tears of relief on his cheeks. Securing their arrival has been his project for the last three weeks, he even went as far as to contact some of his old mates from the Battle of Britain. The children stand with pale shocked faces, sheltering behind their parents. I try to catch their eyes and give them a welcoming smile, but they shrink back. Julias knows either the father or the mother from the war, I can’t remember which one. Julias’s clutch of the mother goes on notably longer than that of the father. I’m guessing she’s the comrade from the war, although Julias has warned me not to use that word around the family.
*
One of the children, the boy I think, is cautiously poking his head out from behind his mother’s legs. I squat down, feeling my knees click from the baby weight, and I swear, not for the first time, that this will be our last child. Two is a perfect sufficiency to my mind, whatever either of our mothers may think. I am not some Victorian brood mare to be popping out babies until I shrivel. We prayed for years to have a child, and now we have Jan and soon a brother or sister, and that will be quite enough, thank you very much. The refugee boy has such a round and open face and cornflower-blue eyes with long lashes. I hold out my hand and he approaches cautiously, like a nervous dog. His parents don’t seem to be paying him any heed. He sidles closer and solemnly shakes my hand. I ask him his name, and he replies in formal but accented English that his name is Charles and he’s very pleased to meet me. When he smiles it really is astonishingly radiant, and I think he must be a great comfort to his family during their time of exile. I ask him if he would like to see his new bedroom and he nods shyly. I keep hold of his hand and lead him up the stairs to where Charles is waiting on the landing. I smile, knowing that Charles will take care of the boy and show him up to the rooms in the attic.
What Abigail Did That Summer Page 9