What Abigail Did Tha Summer

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Or you could climb down, walk over to the right tree, and climb up that.

  But the mother phoenix could return at any moment.

  About that – phoenixes have got to be endangered species, right? You can’t just tax their eggs like they were chickens. I’m not having this any more – none of these things are real.

  I roll out of the bed while, behind me, Charles cries in frustration.

  ‘Stay here. You can be anything!’

  But I already am.

  37

  The Clinic

  I am standing in the ghost of a Victorian nursery on the top floor of an old house in Hampstead. Or it might be the memory of a Victorian nursery, or the embodiment of a story about a nursery, or something there isn’t a word for – or at least one I haven’t found yet. If there is a word, then chances are it’s in Latin or Greek, and I think that since I’m probably the first one to encounter this phenomenon this side of the invention of the internet I’m going to be the one that gets to name it. And it’s going to be a good name, too.

  If I can just get out of here alive.

  The nursery has shelves of books and chests full of wooden and pewter toys, but is dominated by a brass bed. The bed is big, but it looked even bigger a few moments ago. It shrank as I left it. But other things haven’t changed. Indigo still looks like a dachshund wearing a fur coat and Simon is sitting propped up against the pillows and is staring into space like he’s watching TV.

  The windows are closed but there’s no smell – not even clean linen.

  This might work, I think.

  Charles is standing at the end of the bed, and this time I get to see him with all of my brain engaged. White, very pale, nine or ten, with the junior vampire look. His wrists are thin and I bet if I had his pink nightgown off I’d be able to count every rib. He’s really not well and I’ve spent enough time in the Children’s Ward to know death when it’s sitting patiently in the corner.

  He smiles at me and it’s bright and radiant and so like Simon’s that I’m sure he’s stolen it.

  ‘Stay with me,’ he says, and walks towards me. ‘In the bed where it’s nice and warm.’

  We’re face to face – almost close enough to kiss – which gives me an idea.

  ‘If you like me so much,’ I say, ‘why don’t we have sex?’

  Charles takes an actual step backwards, a look of horror on his face.

  ‘Sex?’ he says. ‘That’s dirty. Why?’

  ‘It makes people happy,’ I say – and it certainly makes Mum happy, which I know despite her trying to muffle it with a pillow. ‘How about a kiss?’

  I pucker up and lean forward.

  Charles jumps backwards, a disgusted look on his face. That was me when I was nine. All right, truth be told, that was me when I was twelve, too. But since then I’m coming round to the idea – in theory. There may be some experimentation in the future with an appropriate range of test subjects. Once I’ve worked out what the range is, of course.

  ‘Abigail and Charlie sitting in a tree,’ I say, ‘K-I-S-S-I-N-G.’

  ‘No,’ he says in a voice that is too deep and too old to be that of a poor sod of a boy who’s spent most of his short life trapped in the attic. I squint at him and there’s a booky kind of solidness about him – a fleeting cement pattern on his nightshirt, flashes of yellow-red brick in his eyes.

  ‘You’re not him,’ I say. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Darling Abigail, always thinking, always looking for answers,’ says Charles. ‘I’m not poor Charles who was trapped up here in his unreliable body – although certainly I can relate. His memories are part of me, a foundational part, as are those of many of the ones that sheltered under my roof.’

  He’s been talking but I’ve been moving slowly. A millimetre at a time towards the stairs, looking to put the bed between me and Charles, who maybe I should be calling House now, and get close enough to make a grab for Simon.

  ‘Although, let’s be honest,’ says Charles, his voice grown older – less Dickens, more downstairs Downton, ‘by the standards of the time, young Charles’s life was not too awful – now was it?’

  ‘Everyone’s life could be better,’ I say, but I’m not really concentrating because I’m feeling for the plugs I have stashed in the pocket of my jeans.

  ‘What about your brother?’ asks Charles. ‘What about his happiness?’

  I open my mouth to speak but nothing comes out.

  ‘How long does he have left?’

  ‘What the fuck do you know about anything?’ I yell – control gone – fist clenched – why am I so easy to mess with?

  Charles speaks again, only now his voice is high-pitched, a girl, familiar. Someone I know.

  ‘It’s so sad,’ he says. ‘She’s got like this brother with one of them diseases, you know, like you’re born with it. You start off okay but like you get worse and worse and then you die, like, before you’re twenty. Like I said, sad, innit?’

  Charles has made a mistake. He had to prove himself and that little pause let me pattern myself and get myself under control. I take a big breath and let it out slowly. He thinks he’s got a deal. I’m thinking I should find out what it is – because you never know.

  It might be a good deal.

  ‘What about Paul?’

  ‘He could live here,’ says Charles. ‘With me – forever.’

  ‘What, as a ghost? No thank you.’

  The wizards never really settled whether ghosts were people or not, but I’ve met enough ghosts and played enough video games with crappy AI to know that, at best, ghosts are bad imitations of people and, at worst – sad memories. The Shadow Lady certainly felt the same. And she should know.

  ‘You misunderstand me, Abigail,’ says Charles. ‘Here with me outside time – outside death.’

  Outside time, outside time, outside time?

  Sooner or later there will be a cure, everybody knows that – a retrovirus, a gene replacement or a drug therapy or all of those – but not soon enough, not for my brother, not for Paul.

  But outside time?

  Then why not open a clinic – stick all the doomed kids in a happy stasis until cures are found.

  ‘How would that work?’ I ask, because it would be so good.

  ‘You would bring him here,’ says Charles. ‘And we would be playmates forever.’

  ‘And Simon?’

  The pause gives it away and I know the answer before Charles speaks.

  ‘Simon stays with me too,’ he says. ‘I need him and, besides, be honest, he’s going to be happier here.’

  I shut my eyes – it would have been a good clinic.

  ‘Why are you blubbing?’ says Charles.

  ‘They’re tears of joy,’ I say – amazed by how quiet my voice is.

  38

  The Solo

  Sometimes, when you’ve decided something, it’s like the part of your mind that’s made the decision is setting things in motion before the rest of your brain has caught up. So when Charles asked what I was sticking up my nose, the slow bit of my brain had to think about the answer.

  ‘They’re nose plugs,’ I say, pulling a capsule from my other pocket. ‘Real talk – genuine SAS issue.’

  And then I drop the capsule and stamp on it.

  I was expecting more delay, but almost immediately Indigo coughs once, twice and throws up all over the bed. She rears back, vomits again – stretches out and grows a beautiful bushy tail.

  ‘Indigo,’ I say. ‘To me.’ And she jumps into my arms.

  Simon’s mouth twists into a funny shape.

  ‘Yuck,’ he says.

  ‘I did a stink bomb,’ I say.

  He says something, but with his hands clamped over his face it’s too muffled to make out. I lean over and grab him by the arm and drag him out into the hal
l. I want the stairs, but there’s another door and I can’t risk leaving someone up here. I push Simon towards the stairs and bang open the door.

  Inside is another room with two narrow bedsteads and mean-looking furniture – servants’ rooms. Nobody at home, but I crush another capsule – just to be sure.

  Simon is waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Get down the stairs!’ I yell as Charles the House lurches into the hallway behind me.

  Simon thumps down the staircase ahead of me, and I drop a third capsule halfway down and stamp on it. But even as I do, I realise it was a mistake. Indigo yaks messily down my side and even with the nose clip I’m feeling bare sick and not in a good way.

  Indigo is coughing and spluttering and jumps out of my arms – skipping the last third of the stairs. Behind me there is a wail that starts like a child’s but goes all weirdly loud and deep, like something that lives under water and eats whales. I jump the last of the steps.

  ‘You two!’ I shout at Simon and Indigo. ‘Out the front door!’

  Amazingly, they don’t argue.

  There are three rooms on the second floor, only one has kids in it – Nerd Boy, Long Hair and a girl I don’t know. The walls have turned all stripped and peeling – we’re back in the real ting house and the kids have two seconds to look about before the smell hits them and they run for the door.

  All I have to do is make sure they go down, not up.

  ‘Abigail!’ A voice as loud and as deep as a foundation and full of grinding bricks. ‘What have you done?’

  I want to shout something clever like ‘smell you later’, but I’m trying not to gag as I half-run, half-slide down the stairs to the first floor. The smell is obviously running ahead of me, because the hallway is full of choking kids. I have to shove one boy in the right direction – he snarls, I shove him again, and he almost falls down the stairs.

  Wood splinters above me as if something bare heavy has crashed down onto the staircase. I follow snarling boy down, trying not to think what the spirit of a house might be able to do physically – if it was vexed enough.

  On the ground floor they’re already trooping out. And, amazingly, Simon is standing by the front door waving them through like a lollipop lady.26 I check the knocked-through reception/dining room, the kitchen and toilet under the stairs. But everyone has gone.

  I look at the door to the stairs down to the basement flat. I don’t want to, but sometimes it’s not about what you want, is it?

  ‘Out out out!’ I shout at Simon and Indigo. ‘I’m right behind you.’

  Unfortunately, so is House.

  I go down the basement stairs, out into what was once the kitchen and servants’ quarters, then a bong-infested granny flat, and then no doubt rented out to – I don’t know . . . Who can afford a flat this far up the hill in Hampstead? In the real ting house it was an empty shell, one big room stripped out and with the doors and windows sealed against squatters. Almost totally dark.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  Natali is standing in the shadows.

  ‘It’s me. Abigail,’ I say, and crush the last of my capsules underfoot.

  ‘Abigail?’ she says.

  ‘The happening has been moved to a different venue,’ I say, and grab her arm. She resists, but once the smell hits her she’s keener than me to get out.

  I follow her up the stairs and out into the ground-floor hall. There is a rectangle of daylight ahead, and luckily Natali makes straight for it.

  Then it’s the 1970s again. Julias is having a dinner party. The daylight has gone. I can feel myself slipping back into the space Grace Dvorˇák left behind when she died.

  ‘It’s not going to work,’ I say, even as I remember her first solo, pulling the stick back and feeling the plane rotate under her, the sudden smoothness as the wheels leave the ground and the sudden terrifying sense that she was in sole control of her destiny. And then climbing up, high into a blue sky above the lush apple orchards of Kent.

  ‘But for this gift,’ I say, ‘I thank you.’

  And wrapping Grace’s memory around me, I walk out into the light.

  26 School crossing guard.

  39

  A Long Delayed But Inevitable Grounding

  I’m standing outside the house in the twilight with blue lights flashing all around me.

  And hordes of Feds are sorting through the posse of teenagers that I, Abigail Kamara, have led from the valley of death – not that I’m going to get any credit. Not even an Amazon voucher.

  Simon is sitting in his mum’s sensible Audi and waving at me through the window. I wave back, but Simon’s mum is standing between me and the car and making it clear that’s the way it’s going to stay.

  Nightingale is doing a one-man sweep of the house. Sensibly, he’s wearing breathing apparatus he got from the fire brigade. I don’t think I’ve got much time before he finishes and happens to me big time, so I get straight to the point.

  ‘You’ve got to let Simon go,’ I say to his mum.

  ‘I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of my business,’ she says.

  ‘I get it, right,’ I say. ‘I really do, because you love him, I get that. But he’s never going to be clever.’

  She wants to tell me to shut up and mind my own business. But she knows she owes me and, more importantly, she knows I’m right.

  ‘He has difficulties,’ she says.

  ‘That are never going to go away,’ I say, and she rears back as if I’ve slapped her –which I’m totally prepared to do if it comes to that. ‘In your head you keep hoping that if you just keep encouraging him, he’s going to be the boy you dreamed of. But he’s never going to be something he isn’t.’

  ‘Are we talking about my son?’ she says – spitting out the words. ‘Or your brother?’

  And that hurts. I ain’t lying, that hurts – and I feel my face twisting up. But I know that pain she’s feeling. I’ve seen that pain in my mum when she’s tired and sad and wants to know, why her? Why did this shit happen to her? And she gets snappy with me and Dad and says things.

  ‘Both,’ I say. ‘But the difference is Simon has a future – if you let him have it.’

  Simon’s mum has her mask back on, which is good. Because she’s easier to deal with when she’s like this.

  ‘And how might I do that?’ she asks.

  ‘You want to send him somewhere where he can be free, where there’s no pressure. I know there’s posh schools that are like that. He likes to run, he likes games and he likes meeting people – he’s good at happy,’ I say. And for some reason I have to stop and not cry. ‘That’s rare, isn’t it? You should love him for that.’

  Now she’s not crying too. And we’re both concentrating hard because it’s a contest and whoever cracks first pays a forfeit.

  I win – obviously.

  ‘I’ll take it under advisement,’ she says.

  *

  I’m so grounded that Nightingale had to come over to my ends and debrief me in the living room. I thought Mum would want to sit in, but she decided that she’d take the opportunity to take Paul out for a walk. Nightingale helped her get Paul down the stairs and settle him into his wheelchair.

  By rights, we should have been allocated a ground-floor flat when Paul stopped being able to walk. But we’re still on the waiting list.

  Once Mum and Paul are safely gone, Nightingale makes me sit on the sofa and draws up the armchair so he can sit facing me. Nightingale is wearing his own mask. But after dealing with Simon’s mum, I’m feeling kind of invincible.

  ‘Now,’ says Nightingale. ‘Where do you think you first went wrong?’

  ‘Wrong like what?’

  His question is confusing me. I was expecting a lecture and I’m sure a lecture is coming. But Nightingale is going all humanities teacher on me. This
is not what I expect from him.

  ‘You saw a problem,’ he says. ‘You investigated, but you allowed yourself to be trapped in the house. Worse, you allowed your friend to be trapped with you. Which necessitated a second rescue mission back into the house.’

  ‘I couldn’t leave him in there,’ I say.

  ‘Quite so,’ he says, and nods. ‘But, in the first instance, what was your first mistake?’

  ‘I should have wedged the front door open,’ I say. ‘Or taken it off its hinges.’

  ‘Before that?’

  I sigh, because I know the answer – have known the answer even as I was making that first mistake back when the Feds first showed me the picture.

  ‘I should have told you,’ I say, and Nightingale’s smile broadens and for a moment he reminds me of Simon.

  ‘And why should you have told me?’ he asks.

  ‘Because you’re my teacher?’

  ‘But I’m not your teacher,’ he said. ‘At least not yet.’

  ‘Because you’re the Feds,’ I say, and I’m beginning to get vexed. I like to get my lectures over and done with so I can get on with my life.

  ‘It’s true that the case did fall within the purview of the Folly,’ he says. ‘But that is not the true reason you should have told me.’

  ‘Then why?’ I ask, because otherwise we might be at this all afternoon.

  ‘Because you should never enter a potentially dangerous environment without first establishing reliable lines of communication,’ he says. ‘Had you done that, you would have saved me a great deal of time. And your parents a great deal of anxiety.’

  Sometimes not saying something clever is the clever thing to do.

  ‘Roger that,’ I say – thinking fox.

  There’s a long pause where we both decide whether it’s worth saying any more on the subject.

  ‘Have you told Peter?’ I ask.

  ‘Would you prefer he didn’t know?’

  ‘Yeah, actually,’ I say. ‘Why? Haven’t you told him?’

  ‘Peter has quite enough on his plate at the moment,’ says Nightingale. ‘And besides, I thought I might use it as leverage to keep you on the straight and narrow.’