Anaconda took a deep drag on her cigarette, and her bony chest swelled as she gave a small gasp of pleasure.
“Of course it’s OK. Though, honestly, you seem to be going to the toilet a lot during meals,” she commented, gesturing to the lavish display of food on the coffee table: a platter of pale pink prawns, a bowl of caviar, a half-finished lobster and a few slices of cold turkey. In an ice bucket, a new bottle of champagne had already been opened. Greg watched the white gas rising from its narrow neck like the breath of a trapped genie.
“Nonsense,” he replied, his eyes scanning the label of the bottle with dread. She had evidently ordered it while he was in the bathroom, fighting his panic attack. These attacks, they were getting more frequent, and they worried him. What if he went mad and blurted everything out in a moment of hysteria? “I thought I explained what happened last time. The children thought it would be a good joke, that’s all.” He blushed, the embarrassment of that night coming back to him. The first time he’d brought his new girlfriend home was a disaster: she found out about his inability to change light bulbs, and she’d heard him farting. As if that wasn’t enough, he had to punish those two in front of a guest. As much as he had always cherished the company of his children, he was glad they weren’t here now. Hard work, those brats were, always demanding things. How did Al cope?
“The children,” Anaconda sighed. “It’s just us here, honey, and you’re still talking as if I didn’t know the truth. Well, at least now we don’t have to worry about them anymore, so you can’t blame your peculiar toilet habits on them.”
“I suppose not.” Greg stared out of the window at the white rooftops. The snow, this simple phenomenon that had always left him indifferent, seemed somehow vile and depressing. He was the exact opposite of Al, who had a morbid fascination with winter. He’d lived with her in a house where winter decorations stayed in the windows up until March, so much a part of the landscape that no one took much notice of them. Thank goodness, the house was now free of all the cheap clutter she picked up in pound shops, car boot sales, charity shops: brilliant pink tinsel, fake holly, Santa-shaped fairy lights. Al was gone, but there was the snow, to remind him of her. The way it was falling from the black clouds and growing on the distant pavements, it was surely burying him alive. Sweat drops popped on to his skin.
Snowflakes clung to the other side of the glass like candy floss, sealing him in. He struggled to breathe through the knot in his chest. His heart galloped, like a racing horse. And he jerked at the touch of a hand on his shoulder. Before he knew what he was doing, his clenched knuckles crashed into something soft.
“Oh, God!” Anaconda yelled. She was down on her knees, her hand to her face. The cigarette was on the rug, gnawing at the white, soft fabric.
“I’m so sorry! Oh, God, I don’t know what I was doing! Are you OK? Please, let me see…”
Anaconda yelled again, as her boyfriend fussed around her like a dog chasing his tail. She’d cupped her hands over her eye, as if she was keeping her eyeball from falling out. Greg rushed to the ice bucket and wrapped a few cubes in a towel.
“Here, put this on…”
Whimpering, she removed her manicured fingers from her eye. The skin around the socket was turning blue.
“I can’t SEE,” she sobbed, and gave another strangled scream.
The rug was on fire.
“Oh, Lord!”
Dropping the bundle of ice, Greg hurried to the bedroom, where he tugged desperately at the heavy cord, hoping it was really ringing in the servants’ quarters, and cursed aloud this hotel that would be old-fashioned even for his ancestors. Only Anaconda, with her love for the old and the bizarre, could have found it cool.
Hours later, they were sitting together on the sofa talking about Ghost Hunters.
“I just luurve this program,” purred Anaconda, flicking lazily through the pages of the restaurant menu. Her nails were long enough to be used instead of fingers, and their curved tips made a sinister rattle on the cardboard cover.
Greg nodded. He hated ghost programs, and in fact ghosts and ghost hunters or anything related to the paranormal.
“I just remembered, I booked a new haunting weekend. This time it’s in a castle in Scotland. Cheap as chips, too. £50 per night. Oh, and I used your credit card to pay for it. I’ll pay you back later. Hope that’s all right?”
Greg ground his teeth. “All right,” he said.
She beamed at him. A lump the size and colour of a small baked apple had appeared on her cheekbone. She looked like a boxer after a particularly tough fight.
“What exactly do you…do at these huntings?”
“Hauntings, not huntings, darling,” she corrected him. “It’s stupendous. You should try it. It’s for people who think outside the box. You know what I mean. Intelligent people. Not everyone can sit in a dark room for a whole night, listening to spirits roaming around.” She sighed. “It’s so beautiful.”
“Is that what you have to do?” Greg was examining the new brown rug in the room, while the bill for the burned one was in his wallet. He took a sip of champagne. Krug, the most expensive wine on the menu, but other things apart from the cost of this sumptuous drink were on his mind. He resisted the urge to look at the children’s photographs tucked in his card holder. “And what happens? Do the spirits talk to you, or…”
“They do… in their own way. Once I had a can of Coke thrown at me. And another time a pen was shot right between my eyes, which is why I have this red dot on my forehead that looks like a bindi.” She brushed her fringe aside to reveal the small bright mark. Greg knew that a bindi was a forehead decoration usually drawn right between the eyebrows with a coloured paste. He knew about bindi-stickers, which you can glue and unglue every day. Anaconda’s dot, however, was tattooed on her skin, and Greg thought she looked like a boxer with a bindi.
“Someone threw things at you? And you liked it? Well, darling, if you give me £50 I promise to organise a totally horrific ghost night. I can throw anything you want at you, and I promise not to leave a scar.”
He laughed, taking another sip of his drink, and then another. As the effervescent, flavoured liquid travelled through his body, he began to feel hot, and giggly, and not so bad about having spent a small fortune on the bottle of Krug. It was worth every penny.
Anaconda laughed, too. “You’re so silly. It wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t be the ghosts doing it,” she said, spearing a grape with a fingernail and sucking it into her mouth.
“Darling, the ghosts are not doing it, anyway.” Greg wondered if now was the right moment to pull out his pièce de résistance in the shape of a round, leather-bound case. Make-belief was the curse of his life: his son still believed in Santa Claus and tooth fairies, Anaconda worshipped ghosts, and Al had lived under the dark spell of winter. It was Honey who believed in nothing, just like him. She was too clever for make-beliefs, though she did have, unfortunately, an unhealthy obsession for her mother.
He made a move to remove the little case from his trouser pocket, when there was a knock on the door. Room service, bringing another bottle of champagne.
Oh God. If this carried on, he would soon be too inebriated to make a decent marriage proposal. He giggled, which wasn’t a good sign, and as he opened his wallet to give the servant a tip, he stumbled upon a folded piece of glossy paper. He unfolded it and his heart skipped a beat. It was a leaflet – the leaflet someone had squeezed through his letterbox a long time ago. He remembered opening the door sharply, prepared to give whoever was there a lecture about junk mail with its unnecessary waste of paper, when he was taken aback by the unexpected presence in the doorway.
That was the first time he had taken his children to a circus. The evening was, now he thought of it, their last outing as a family. Circus of Ice, it was called, and he remembered thinking, yes, Al will like this.
“Oh, and Greg, I booked you for a Fear of the Paranormal course. You can take the test in a year – we’ll have to drive up to Scotland, you know, the ceremony is held in a castle cellar, previously a torture chamber in the Middle Ages…”
Greg was barely listening. The night of the circus unravelled in his mind.
It was already dark when they got to the address on the leaflet. It was cold. And even if you couldn’t see any snow, the smell of it was in the air. People were so wrapped up they looked like they were in disguise. Cars streamed past, their lights switched on. Teddy said they looked like fireflies.
Tents and caravans rose out of the dark ground like giant gravestones. Then a strange thing happened. Al stopped dead in her tracks. Her face was whiter than her white coat, and her lips seemed drained of life.
“What do you reckon?” Anaconda downed her glass and stretched it forward for a top up. “Breaded brains or deep fried chicken balls? Ah, have the brains. Such a distinctly nutty flavour.”
“I didn’t think chickens had balls,” was all Greg could say, in a choked voice. “But I guess I never thought to turn them around and look.” His hand tightened around the case in his pocket. He’d been waiting all night for the right moment to pop the question. It was as if proposing to Anaconda would relieve him of the memories that pressed on his heart like lead. Relieve him of the guilt that was the elephant in the room wherever he went, and whatever he did, and it wasn’t going to go away.
The moment never came.
In the morning, the first thing he saw was the sun. It was blazing in his face like a halogen light. The fireplace was quiet and cold. His nearly-fiancée was asleep on the sofa. Greg had had a terrible nightmare about a yellow digger demolishing Chess Cottage and a clown throwing knives at him. Now he knew why: Anaconda’s raspy snoring had probably woken the entire hotel, and her sharp stiletto heels were poking mercilessly at his ribs.
19. Snowstorm in a Globe
A memory took shape in Honey’s mind. The igloo Mum built in their back garden out of empty milk bottles. All those years ago, Honey wondered if she could build a real igloo one day. Mum had said yes. Another empty promise, although Honey never imagined she would get – by some dark twist of fate – so close to this ridiculous prophecy.
The ruins of the igloo lay in a pile under a new sheet of snow. Snow-sprinkled, the bear’s blood spilled on the frozen ground. It made Honey think of the parmesan Mum grated generously over her homemade soups, and her mouth watered. Then when she realised her tummy was rumbling over the sight of polar bear blood, she gagged.
A sparkling silver pathway cut through the barren wasteland. It had stopped snowing, but the silence was soon disturbed by footsteps. The snow creaked and popped with a sound like bursting bubble-wrap. Ice crystals danced around the guards’ night lamps. It was, Honey had to admit, kind of magical.
She walked on, flanked by the masked dwarves, wondering how many traces of murder the snow covered up. Winter was the best killer. It erased fingerprints. It got rid of bodies. Were drowned explorers and their dogs preserved intact like frozen meat in a freezer? And…the thought made her stop in her tracks.
Was Teddy’s corpse frozen somewhere close by? She gulped. If so, she hoped it would stay like that forever and ever. He’d be one of those bodies cryogenically preserved, until scientists discovered a way of reviving them in the distant future.
Since the moment she had woken with a smile on her lips, only to find that she was still in the high, spacious and particularly cold dormitory, Honey had been in a foul mood. There were no windows, for one; but, what use would windows be in a place where the sun didn’t shine? Honey squinted at her surroundings, draped in the silky veil of moonlight. As in a photographer’s darkroom, where rolls of film and dripping photographs look spooky in the safelight, the lasting twilight gave everything an eerie glimmer.
Today would be her first day working at the toy factory, and she wondered if Fridrik Helgarsson was in charge of the training. Yesterday, she managed to avoid being eaten by a bear and narrowly escaped death in a shark infested ice hole, but risking her life two days in a row would probably give the others reason to brand her insane. On the other hand, if factory work was anything like gardening, a horrendous chore Mum made her do every time she played a trick on her brother, today was going to be long and tedious.
Teddy. Honey’s heart was stung by an unbearable ache. The realisation that her brother might be dead slowly sunk in, and the pain seemed to take over her whole body. Honey wished the little nagging voice inside her would stop telling her what she already knew: that she was responsible for dragging Teddy into this. That, if Teddy was dead, it would be something she’d have to live with all her life. Because live she would, Honey decided. A strange force was simmering inside her; never had she wanted to win more than now, when she was so close to losing everything.
Her stomach grumbled, and a disgusting aftertaste of porridge wafted from her throat. Yikes. It must be the expired breakfast. She could feel the acid in her stomach working. Honey read somewhere that the acid in a human stomach could burn a hole clean through a table. Judging by the pain in her guts, Honey could well believe it.
Armed with their dog whips, the guards strutted around. Their mean little eyes didn’t miss a thing. Every time anyone made a wrong move, they barked the only word they knew.
“Watsinak!” when Jerry stepped out of the line.
“Watsinak!” when Nico bent over to belch in Mirabelle’s ear.
“Watsinak!” when Honey stopped to study a rather pretty projection of the dwarves’ shadows on the brick walls. After all, rarely did a shadow look livelier than a person.
The lanterns were pushed so close to the children’s faces as they pronounced the foreign, mysterious and boring word, that the hot glass left round marks on their skin. Jamie, Zachary and Fern looked like they had been balancing hot drinks on their foreheads. Johann, Rong and Erasmus had already sneaked out under the pretence that they needed the toilet, and they dodged the lanterns and whips with a few skilful karate moves, blatantly ignoring the shouts of ‘Watsinak’ as they ran out of sight. They appeared several minutes later, giggling and breathless, and Honey guessed they’d had a snow fight. She shook her head. Snow fights were the last thing on her mind.
“Midget makes the porridge with human bones,” said Rong, when Honey’s stomach gave another grumble.
“He grinds them to a paste.” Erasmus patted his belly.
“That’s why it tastes so wicked,” grinned Johann, pretending to pull up his zip. This earned him a lash of the whip, which he dodged gracefully by skipping to one side.
It didn’t taste wicked to Honey. It just tasted like Grandma’s overcooked garden-snail pie.
“Who’s that?” Fern’s voice.
At first, Honey saw nothing but moving shadows in the light snowfall. Clouds shrouded the sky; darkness enveloped the land as if the night was only just beginning. A tall silhouette had appeared at the other end of the path, growing larger and clearer through the grey morning.
Fridrik Helgarsson strode across the path towards them. Behind him, deep gashes marked the snow, footprints matching his huge, hairy boots. The other set of footprints, scarring the vast expanse of land with an undulating pattern, belonged to the small person walking next to Fridrik. Honey thought it must be another dwarf, but then her heart skipped a beat.
“Teddy!” She ran and thumped into him, squealing with joy. “You’re alive!” Hot tears filled her eyes, turning almost at once into icicles. Teddy wriggled out of Honey’s arms, gasping for breath. His sister made a faint attempt at ruffling his hair, but only managed to mess up his facemask.
“Honey, I thought you were dead!” Teddy cried, fixing the eye-holes back over his eyes.
“I thought you were dead!”
“I almost was!”
�
��Me too!”
“You should see the kitchen, it’s full of yucky things. Worms! Feet soup! Seals! And the sign in the bakery! And…and Santa has a girlfriend!”
The children held each other, jumping on the spot to shake off the cold.
“Watsinak!” barked the guard closest to them, flicking her whip, but to everyone’s surprise, Fridrik took her arm and drove her away.
“What?” cried Fred.
“Where’s he taking her?” Zachary said in astonishment.
“Look!” James’ gaze followed the guards. They were running. The lamps, left behind like useless possessions that would only weigh them down, littered the pathway. Yellow light poured from them like liquid gold, as if their essence was floating away, travelling across the night in luminous capsules.
The wind whistled furiously, and the distant glaciers responded with thunderous snarls. The two siblings looked at each other, their arms linked, as the snowflakes settled on them layer by layer, until they looked less like children and more like slices from Mum’s Snow White gateau. With every second that passed, the Raymond children looked more and more like the figures trapped in the three hundred and eighty two snow globes Mum decorated Chess Cottage with every Christmas. The only difference was, there were no buttons to press and stop the snowstorm, but even so, Honey and Teddy felt trapped and watched, just the way they had watched the glass bowls perched up on the shelves in their living room, where the tiny elves, penguins and reindeers shivered in the battery powered wind.
Santa Claws Page 17