“Do you think if we’re horrible to her, she’ll leave? Before Dad gets back? Ooh, we can have the whole house to ourselves! Maybe we could give her some lactive too…”
“I thought the laxative jam wasn’t a good idea! And anyway, you used it all, remember? Hi, Dad.”
Dad placed a tray holding mugs of steaming tea, a jug of cold milk, and brown sugar crystals on the coffee table. “You sure did.”
“Did what, Dad?” Honey smiled sweetly.
“Used it all. That darn cranberry sauce. It cleaned me inside out. I even pooped the ice cream I had when I was five. He laughed. “But don’t get your hopes up. I feel fine now. Better than I’ve felt in years. I seem to have gotten over the, erm…constipation problem. Maybe what I needed was an overdose. So I’m not buying any more of those jams. And no, they don’t sell them to children.” He grinned. “Maybe that’s what you need, too. An overdose. An overdose of Grandma might cure your dislike of her.”
“Dad!” cried Honey.
“Oh, Dad, but…” Teddy’s mouth clamped shut as Grandma came into the room, rubbing her gloved hands together. Her left hand looked a little stiff. It always had done, Honey thought. As is she didn’t have a real hand in there, made of flesh and bone, but something rigid, like a hook. A hook! Grandma was a hook murderer. She strung people up with her hook while she chuckled and twittered in French.
“Oh, hi, Flo. I made you a cuppa.”
“Non, mon cher, I’m okay…in fact, I don’t feel very well.”
“Arthritis again?”
Grandma rubbed her left hand, wincing.
“Yes, son. I’m not getting any younger…”
“Well, why don’t you take your gloves off, Grandma? It’s eighty degrees in here. At least.”
But Grandma was so quick up on her feet that she toppled over the coffee table. Tea spilled on the white rug and the sugar crystals flew over to where Kitty lay curled up on a chair. Her head jolted from the cushion and she sniffed at them.
“I’m off, mon chers. Need a nap, you see. Long journey. I’ll see you at dinner. I’ll have my dinner at eight, as usual, Gregory. And make sure there is meat, and that it is soft and falling off the bone. I can’t chew very well. My teeth hurt.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Who does she think she is?” Honey exploded the moment she was out of earshot. “Who does she think we are? Servants? And those gloves. And that smell. And…”
“What was that?” Teddy pointed to the ceiling, where a crackling sound was coming from above the fireplace. Soot and bits of wood rained down into the grate.
“What…?”
There was a bang and a clash. Then something heavy fell to the floor.
They waited for the cloud of soot to clear and there, in the midst of all the rubble…
“Blimey, it’s a squirrel! We need to get it out of here!” Dad yelled, his hands already on the poker.
“It’s a baby squirrel, Dad,” said Teddy.
“Why’s it squealing like that?” Honey stuck her fingers in her ears.
The baby squirrel made a terrible noise, crying so loud you could see the pink of its mouth.
“It wants its mummy,” Teddy said. “Dad, can we keep it?”
“I think it’s broken its leg,” said Dad, hopping up and down with the poker in his hand.
“Drop that poker, Dad. For goodness’ sake, it’s not gonna bite you. It’s just a cub…Dad! Pick it up! Can’t you see it’s…it’s distressed?”
“It might be venomous!” Dad yelled. “It might have poison glands! Stay away from it, children. I’ll phone the fire department.”
“Dad, don’t be ridiculous,” Teddy laughed. “Squirrels are mammals. Not snakes.”
“Even Teddy knows that. And he doesn’t read any books.”
“Dad!”
“Honey, this is not a good time to make fun of your brother… aaaarghhhhh!”
The children shouted with Dad. He waved his poker up in the air, screaming as the furry squirrel shot between his legs and out of the room. He stepped back right on the sugar bowl which cracked under his weight. The framed photos on the mantelpiece, along with the candle holders, clattered down on the floor. Finally, Dad landed flat on his face.
“We need to find that…pest…” he murmured.
Honey and Teddy breathed with relief.
“Please be in my room, please, please, please…” Teddy whispered.
“Well, well, I was just thinking of dinner ideas when who do I see coming?”
Grandma Florence stood in the doorway, wearing a fuchsia pink bath gown, her thin hair in green, red and blue curlers. She had pink gloves on, and was holding something that looked like a cross between a rabbit and a rat. It was twitching and wriggling, baring its toothless gums.
“Has any of you tried squirrel stew? It was a favourite at the royal banquets in the Middle Ages…”
Sitting down for dinner that night, Teddy gave Honey a hopeless look.
“What’s this?” he asked, lifting the flaps of his lasagne sheets with his fork.
“This,” Grandma Florence answered, “sniffing her plate, “could have been an excellente squirrel stew.”
“But it’s just lasagne,” said Dad.
“Boring,” Honey sighed, even if she liked lasagne, but she liked it with a chestnut and caramelized onion stir fry on the side, just the way Mum made it.
The faint scratch of the squirrel’s paws on the cardboard box outside broke the silence.
“Dad,” Honey blurted out, banging her fork on the table, “I’m reporting you for animal cruelty. You can’t leave the baby squirrel out there all night. Foxes will get it!”
Dad was chewing on a crispy chunk of pasta, and didn’t speak for a few seconds. Then he smiled. “You can call who you like, but in this country, we are allowed to shoot squirrels dead. You can do anything to them. They are vermin.”
“That’s unfair. Why should dogs and cats and bloody guinea pigs get better treatment?”
Grandma Florence snuffled. “I can think of at least one country in the world where guinea pigs, tu sais, are treated even worse. At least here, they are kept in cages, but in Peru…ah, what a delicieux hog roast your Grandfather Flaubert and I had in one of those…mountain bistros. Guinea pig, I mean. Makes my mouth water to think of it.”
Honey rolled her eyes. “It’s wrong to sell and buy animals in the first place, as if they were slaves.”
“What do you want to do, ma cherie, ask them how much they think they worth?” She chuckled.
“It’s basically racism. It’s like saying that white people are better than the black people, and European people are better than the Africans…and so on.”
“But they are,” answered Grandma.
“Mother, stop it. Ignore Honey, she always talks nonsense when she’s upset.” He put his knife down, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and said gently: “She doesn’t want me to go away. And Honey, I think I explained this. The reason why grey squirrels are hated is, years ago…”
“They killed the red and took over the kingdom. Survival. That’s how you would excuse your appetite for innocent animals, no? Survival instincts. Oh, I forget. You are allowed, because you’re human.”
“She is upset,” Dad mouthed to Grandma.
Grandma had a sip of wine. She chewed her food, pushing her dentures forward with her tongue until they popped out of her mouth grotesquely.
“Ma cherie, what you want your Dad to do? What happened, happened. What will be, will be. Shame I had to hand paint those Russian matryoshka dolls, seven of them, I told him, she won’t have patience to…”
“You hid the ring inside a Russian doll?” She had to give it to him, it was genius.
“What, inside the littles
t one?” Teddy’s eyes were wide.
Dad choked on a salad leaf.
“There was a velvet box, too. A tiny velvet box. Hang on a minute, how did you know that I…”
But Honey wasn’t listening. She was running up the stairs with her brother in tow. You don’t particularly want to explain to someone why you’ve read their diary. If Honey had a diary and someone read it, she would be capable of murder.
At eleven o’clock sharp on Christmas Eve morning, Dad looked anxiously at his watch. They’d spent the morning putting up the tree, with Grandma Florence tottering around the house in her Victorian nightgown.
“Now, children, I’d better start packing. Anaconda – err – Miss White is picking me up in an hour. Why don’t you ask Grandma to take you out for a ride this afternoon? She is an excellent driver, you know. She participated in forty five rallies all over Europe. Maybe she’ll tell you all about it.”
A ride?! Honey glowered at Dad over her shoulder. Was he crazy? As if anything in the world would make her get in any moving vehicle with that woman again, after the accident they had last year. Poor Kitty was sick all over the carrier. She was a rally driver all right – a mad one!
Grandma Florence’s face gleamed with pride.
“Ah, oui. I retire at sixty-five, une stupide rule. Quelle domage! What a pity, really!”
Teddy continued to decorate the tree, while his sister walked over to the window. The ground was covered with a brilliantly white carpet of snow crisscrossed with footprints of birds and squirrels. A spine-chilling scream broke the silence: Twoohit-twohoo, twoohit-twohoo, twoohit-twohoo!
Grandma Florence, upon hearing the owl, dropped a silver angel she was fixing on the tree top.
“Sorry, puppet,” she murmured, when the angel narrowly missed Teddy’s skull. The boy picked up the decoration and handed it to her, but she was already halfway down the ladder, muttering to herself: “Owls. Mon dieu, je n’aime pas ça, I don’t like this…Tut, tut, tut, ah non, this iz very bad zine…shoo, shoo!”
The owl, hidden in the thick foliage of the old pine tree, did not shoot out with a flurry of feathers and pinecones when Grandma Florence rapped on the window, or even when she threw open the back door and shouted at it in French while the wind tossed her nightdress about. Honey thought she saw two amber eyes gleaming in the darkness of the tree, and wondered why the owl was not asleep at this time of day. Then she heard the crackle of firewood and realised the bright flicker she’d mistaken for two owlish eyes could have been, just the same, a reflection of the leaping flames.
“I don’t think English owls speak French,” Teddy said.
A little while later, the three of them stood in the doorway to wave Dad goodbye. Miss White’s car, an old Ford, was little more than a metal box on wheels. Will it even make it there? Honey wondered, hoping the precarious vehicle might break down in the middle of nowhere. Precarious means extremely fragile, and it was one of Honey’s favourite grown up words. She smirked at the thought, picturing Miss White replacing a flat tyre and breaking her fake nails in the process. She squeezed the bottle of Ribena she’d hidden under her jumper. She had about five minutes to sneak it into the car.
Earlier that morning, while they waited on the landing for Grandma Florence to get out of the bath (where she had been singing in French for thirty-five minutes), Honey flopped to the floor and buried her head in her hands.
“I’m dreading it.”
“What?” her brother said.
“Everything. Dad leaving. Grandma here. That snake woman winning. Mum…”
She was about to say ‘Mum gone’, but she was too angry at Mum for having vanished like that to finish her sentence.
“Pardon? You talking to me, sausage?” Grandma’s croaky voice echoed from the bathroom.
Honey rolled her eyes.
“No, Grandma,” Teddy answered.
“Ooh, I thought I heard one of you say something. Did I hear you say I should hurry to give you a morning kiss? Oui?”
“The kiss of death, maybe,” Honey mouthed. “No, Grandma,” she said, louder. “I mean, no to the kiss part. We don’t like kisses. But yes to the hurry part. We’d like to shower before noon.”
“Won’t be long. Just let me sing ‘Les Hommes Qui Passent’ once more…”
She then began to sing a French song, which to Honey sounded as stupid as all the other French songs she’d ever heard her sing before.
“She sings like a donkey,” Teddy said.
“A donkey with a sore throat,” Honey agreed. She groaned. “Teddy, aren’t you worried?”
“About what?”
“Everything! I mean, what are we supposed to do? She wasn’t put off by the candles, or even the farts.”
“And the farts smelled.” Teddy pinched his nose. “She must love Dad.”
“Who cares? We love him, too. Mum loved him…didn’t she? And he wasn’t really that nice to her. But look at him now. He’s nicer to Cobra than he is to us!”
“He was probably nice to Mum, too…in the beginning.”
“I can’t remember him ever being nice to Mum. So it must have been in the very beginning. In fact…Teddy, do you ever wonder why you have millions of baby photos, and I have none? I mean, none up to the age of two, anyway.”
“Dad said they were lost in a fire, remember?”
“Do you seriously believe that rubbish? A fire. Dad’s explanation for everything. He says that about Grandma, too. She was caught in a fire, and her hands are too scarred, and that’s why we never see them…” She sighed. “Was I adopted, Teddy? Is that why there aren’t any baby photos anywhere?”
“Maybe. That would explain why you’re always angry. Maybe your real parents were criminals.” Teddy chuckled.
“Shut up, you idiot.”
“Okay, I’ll shut up, then. But I was just about to tell you about this idea.”
“What idea?”
“You told me to shut up.”
“Teddy!”
“Okay…You know Freddie, in year 4?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, his dad, you know, left a bottle of Ribena in his car, for ages…days, I mean, a long time, and…”
“And?”
“And, it exploded. Could have given his dad a heart attack, he says, if he was in the car. But he wasn’t. He’d stopped by a shop to get something. And when he was back in the car driving, okay, the Ribena dripped on his face, all sticky and…”
“It fermented.” Honey pronounced the words as if they were a magic spell. “Say no more, bro. You are a genius. I can’t believe I haven’t thought of something like this before!”
“Err, Honey, what if it kills her?”
“Nah.” Honey shook her head. “It won’t kill her. It’ll just give her a fright. Teach her a lesson. She doesn’t have kids, right? Why not go out with someone who doesn’t have them, either? So they have kids together.”
“There aren’t many people her age who don’t have kids,” Teddy pointed out. “She’s just desperate.”
Honey squeezed the bottle of Ribena tighter. She agitated it discreetly. She knew she took a risk by sneaking the bottle in the car with Dad inside. If she was to spoil his holiday, though, she had to take a chance.
Teddy noticed there were no seats in the back of Miss White’s car and the trunk didn’t close. Their stepmother-to-be pulled the window down, her small head popping out like a jack in the box. She blew kisses at the children.
“Merry Christmas, my dears! See you soon! Be good!”
“Goodbye, children. Have a good Christmas, be good for your grandma and remember to…”
“Stay away from the bridge!” Honey and Teddy said together. Honey wondered, for the millionth time, why Dad insisted they stayed away from that side of the park. Okay, so
the good old bridge collapsed, but now the council had stepped in and built a new, sturdy one. So why did Dad still refuse to cross the park viaduct, giving pitiful excuses such as the slope is too steep, or there could be tramps in the bushes? Yes, the slope was steep, and yes, there were tramps in the bushes, but Honey knew there was more to it than that. Whatever it was, it had to do with the murder investigation that had taken place last winter. At first, she’d thought the detectives drinking tea all over the park were part of one of the many film crews that rented the church and houses in Hanwell to shoot their soaps, but when she didn’t see the vans and the cameras, she realised a real drama was unfolding.
A death.
“That’s right,” said Dad. “Now, cirio.”
“Dad, wait!”
Honey held up a present tied with a purple ribbon. Purple, Dad’s favourite colour. Purple, the colour of Ribena. Purple Ribena.
“You forgot this.” Walking to the car with the gift in her hands, she felt ridiculous, as if she was bribing Dad to be her dad.
“Oh?”
“Santa dropped this early for you.” She winked.
Dad didn’t wink back. “Pop it in,” he said, not looking too impressed. The parcel was the size of a microwave, and the tiny car was already packed with bags.
Honey threw the present in the back and quickly slipped the bottle of Ribena under the driver’s seat.
“All done, pet?” said Anaconda, her thin fingers wrapped around the steering wheel. The engine roared to life.
Honey nodded. “Have a nice holiday!” she said, swallowing her tears.
Anaconda and Dad waved goodbye and the car disappeared in a cloud of smoke at the end of the icy street. Teddy waved until his hand began to hurt.
“He didn’t,” he said.
“Didn’t what?”
“Wave.”
He was right. Dad always waved with his hand out of the car when he turned the corner. But he didn’t now. Honey heaved a sigh. She felt suddenly tired, and lonely, and the prospect of Christmas tomorrow didn’t seem very exciting. Tears pooled in her eyes and started rolling down her cheeks.
Santa Claws Page 6