Once more, silence descended over the room, and the banner proclaiming The National Celebration of Santaville suddenly looked oddly out of place. Honey glanced at her brother and, in a flash everything made sense. It should have been obvious. This had been their last meal.
39. Secrets
Mum took the glass offered to her by a dwarf and downed it in one gulp. Then she smiled dumbly at Fridrik.
“I met Fridrik during one of my nightshifts at the restaurant, when I was training to be a chef,” she began.
“But thass not when you really met him, waz it?”
Honey jumped. Someone had appeared in the doorway. The wind whistled, cutting through Honey’s skin like slices of ice.
The silhouette pushed further into the shadows. And then, all of a sudden, the comforting smell came to her. It would’ve made her clip a peg on her nose only a week back, but now it was the best smell in the world.
The glorious smell of mothballs.
The masked visitor strode across the glass floor, ignoring the narwhal and the monstrous floating bodies.
The twin ex-Santas glanced at each other. Mum’s eyes narrowed.
And then the mask and goggles were removed.
“Grandma!” Teddy gasped.
Honey took a sharp breath. It was Grandma. And she gave no signs that she even noticed them. She stared fiercely at only one person in the room. Mum flinched, and edged closer to Fridrik.
“When you disappeared last year,” Grandma spat the words out with a waft of brandy, “I had you followed. Your pitiful story of the mobile phone and severed toe didn’t fool me. Why, even a child could do a better job. I mean, really, anyone can cut off a toe with a steak knife, scissors, a meat cleaver…”
“Though you mustn’t try this at home.” Fridrik’s grin widened. “She is funny,” he croaked at Mum.
“What?” Teddy cried. “Mum cut off her toe?”
It was then that the thought came to Honey – Mum was limping. Of course, this was what had been different about her.
Mum gave Grandma Florence a hateful glance. “I fooled the police, didn’t I? I sacrificed my body part, or not?” She turned to Honey. “I always wanted to be a writer, didn’t I, pumpkin?” Honey half returned her smile. “Only my sharpest Shogun knife was sharp enough to cut through the bone,” Mum continued matter-of-factly, taking out a knife the children recognised from the arsenal in the supermarket, the knife that left a dusty mark on their kitchen wall. “It wasn’t the cleverest of Fridrik’s ideas, I must say. I still can’t get my balance right.” She sighed. “I feel like a damn cripple.”
“You’re a martyr, sweetheart,” Fridrik reminded her.
“Such an important clue, though. Don’t you agree, Madame Poirot?”
Grandma gulped and stood up very straight.
“She’s the spy you were talking about, then? Muppet’s mother?”
“Spy? Are you a spy, Grandma? Is that why you have all those passports?”
Mum’s laugh was like the shriek of a bird. “Of course that’s why she has them, Teddy. She’s a fraud, this old hag. I’ve spent the last ten years doing detective work, too. I removed microphones from door handles, floorboards and keyholes. Tiny ears, all over the house like a rash.”
Grandma didn’t blink.
“Just before Christmas last year, I found a hidden camera behind Dad’s Sensation painting, you know, the one with the dots. She made a hole in one of the dark blue dots. Ruined, the whole thing ruined! A genuine Bridget Riley!”
“Why do you care?” Fridrik snarled. “Only stupid people spend fortunes on paintings. I always say a bear skin tanned to perfection makes the best wall decoration. Keeps the room warm, too.”
“Well, in England they have somesing called radiators. Wonderful inventions, they are.”
“Shut your face, Granny,” came Oskar’s voice from the shadows.
Grandma ignored this. “Ah, ma cherie. How about the one I’ve hidden in the bathroom? You didn’t mention that. Mind, the black period hat was the best camouflage, I’d say.”
Mum stood up. “You didn’t, did you? You didn’t ruin my Monet!”
“Why do you care? You don’t live there anymore.” Fridrik pushed her back on the chair roughly. Underfoot, the fish scattered away. The dead body they had been eating floated upside down, staining the water rusty red, and Teddy saw that it was Georgie, the kitchen help.
Honey’s mouth hung open. “You’re a spy? That’s so…cool. Why didn’t you tell us before?”
Grandma looked taken aback. “Well, I..I wanted you to give me a chance. I play the role of the good old nanny, boring and with no sense of…”
“Fashion?” Mum offered.
“We don’t like boring nannies. You should have just been yourself.”
“Yes. Gangsta Nanny.”
Grandma sighed. “You’re right, you know. Maybe I waz a coward. It’s time I admitted that I lack something in my life, something I lacked all along, and that’s why I’m here.”
“Sense? A proper husband? A proper son? Health? Good looks? Cooking skills? Driving skills? The list could go on.”
Grandma winced. “Honesty,” she said quietly. Then she sighed. “It’s a long story.”
“Everything is always a long story with adults.” Honey clenched her fists. “Why don’t you just tell us the truth?”
“Yeah, why don’t you tell them, Flo? Why do you think Dad was in boarding school in England?”
“Alfrid, she is ruining our show. We’ve been waiting for this for so long.” While Fridrik talked, his twin lurched at Grandma just as she pulled out a pistol.
“Stay away from me, clown!” she growled.
“Alfrid?” Honey whispered. “Her name is Al. Short for Alison…”
“Al-Frid.” Grandma spat the last syllable out as if it was a bone that had stuck in her throat. “Short for Alfrid. A Scandinavian name. ALFRID. Or, simply, Frida.”
Teddy gasped. “You were in the bathroom…you had a mask on and…and…Santa called you, Frida…I mean, Fridrik called you, or Oskar, ah, this is confusing…”
“Bingo,” clapped Fridrik. “I tried to save you from certain death at the bottom of the toboggan – you see, the dead seals weren’t meant to be there, but the table was.”
“The murder table.” Teddy shivered. “So the bucket was for draining the blood.”
“Indeed. Vlad Dracul, the Romanian king, killed his enemies by throwing them from his tower room into spikes planted strategically around his castle. He was my inspiration,” Fridrik explained.
“At first, the toboggan was a chute for the dirty washing to go down to the pantry,” Mum said. “The pantry was my washroom.”
“You can’t imagine how grubby real men can get, my dears, and by dirt I don’t just mean paint and snot from nursery tots.”
“Alors, cherie, finalement, tell the children your real last name!”
Mum looked at Fridrik. He squeezed her shoulder and she let her head fall on his hand. She nodded softly.
Fridrik stepped forward. “The reason why your mother never married Gregory is because she is already married.”
The children clapped their hands over their mouths in unison. The dwarves followed in mocking imitation.
Fridrik cleared his throat. “That’s right. Already married. To me.”
“He got you a ring,” Honey murmured. “He was going to propose, at last…”
Mum cackled. “Is that what he told you? That he couldn’t make up his mind to marry me? Anyone who saw us together would know that I was the one who couldn’t –wouldn’t – marry him.”
“So you found the ring. I stole the matryoshka doll from the tree at the lass minute, before you woke up. Luckily I had my x-ray glassez on that morning by mistake.”
“X-ray glasses! Do you hear her, Fred? Does the word ‘privacy’ mean nothing to you, Florence?”
“Not in my profession. It’s important to see through walls to make sure suspects aren’t doing anything dodgy.”
“You’re a nutcase!”
From the corner of her eye, Honey saw Fridrik move. He was now standing next to her, his hand on her shoulder. Goosebumps erupted on her skin. “Don’t you remember?” he said gently. “You were born on Ellesmere Island.”
“No,” Honey murmured.
She was Honey Raymond.
She was born in London.
She went to Cuckoo School.
Before that, she went to Cuckoo Nursery.
And before that, she was toddling around Chess Cottage.
Or was she?
Out of nowhere… a memory spilled into her mind.
They were gutting the seal. They were eating the insides, their faces grubby with blood. A bloodstained hand reached out to her. Honey blinked. She felt herself plunging into this memory: it felt like she was sinking in a dark well.
“Don’t you remember?”
She remembered. Dad bent over to watch her fall, and she saw the silver handle of the knife in his back. A dark stain spread over his shirt and the bathroom door creaked open.
Fridrik’s hand drew a heart in the air, and, for the first time ever, his smile reached his eyes.
And then she knew. She was the child he talked about that day in the igloo.
The man drew a heart of blood on the baby’s cheek.
“Honey?” Teddy squeezed her arm.
“Her name is not Honey,” said Fridrik. “I didn’t get to name you, but my daughter’s name is Snædis. Snædis,the Queen of the sea. I am your father, Snædis. Don’t you remember me at all?”
“I remember…” Honey’s eyelids fluttered over a dreadful image.
The seal opened its eyes. Blood was dripping from its mouth. Why did the seal have a long beard?
“You ate a man,” she murmured.
“So did you, Snædis,” said Mum, calling her by this strange name for the first time.
Snædis, Snædis, Snædis. The name was oddly comforting, like a clue she’d been missing all along.
Mum got up from the chair, her astounding gown brushing over the open, hideous mouth of a shark whose snout was pressed against the glass. “We didn’t have a choice. We were trapped in our hut. The blizzard hadn’t stopped for a week. We were all starving. You were dying.”
Honey closed her eyes.
Hunger. Deep, raw, eating her from inside like a big-toothed worm.
“We ate Ari, my hunting partner. One shot, that’s all it took. He didn’t feel a thing.”
“He opened his eyes.”
Tears trickled down Honey’s cheeks. The people around her disappeared, as did the banners and the dinner table. She was now sitting on a high wooden chair, looking at the broken bowls and cups on a shelf. They were chained together by icicles. Right before her was a window and, through the window, the snow was falling. From the floor came a rustling, ripping sound, but she didn’t want to look down. She didn’t want to see the man lying there.
There’s the sound of something metallic hitting the floor. Something comes out of the seal’s mouth. It rolls under her feet, a beautiful silver fang.
“He spat out the bullet you shot him with.” Honey closed her eyes.
It wasn’t a dream. The seal was a man. The man was Ari – Ari, who pinched her cheeks and helped her make snow castles. Despite the sadness, she felt relieved, grateful for the memory. Ari was a friend. And they had eaten him alive.
“Well, yes, I couldn’t shoot him in the face, could I? Look him in the eyes and pull the trigger. We were close. I loved him. So I shot him in the back of the neck. That’s why the bullet was in his mouth.”
“We should have all died,” Honey said quietly. “You should have let me starve…”
“At last, before we got to finish eating the body, the storm stopped. We returned to the village. People asked questions. We said that Ari had disappeared in a storm. Then, you began to talk. You babbled: ‘Daddy…shoot…Ari…eat.’ The villagers found the remains of Ari in the snow. They saw he had been shot, and realised it must have been your father who did it. They tied him up and took him to Eureka, handed him over to the police. He was sent back to Iceland, and I had to flee. The Inuit villagers had never liked foreigners, and now I was in danger. I had nowhere to go, and I was expecting a baby. I had no family back home, except for Hinrik, Fridrik’s brother, an actor who was always travelling with his circus.”
The dwarves bowed.
“The circus,” Teddy muttered. “Honey, do you remember?”
Honey nodded. She remembered the bright tents, the dwarves and the masked man with the throwing knives and the wheel. Hinrik. So that was his real name. And he was an actor. No wonder he had performed the fake hanging so well.
“Seeing your Chinese tower in the dormitory, I say you’d make fantastic acrobats. And if you die during a show, we’ll be guaranteed the best audience for the next ten years. People love a good public death.”
Honey shuddered.
“If I returned to Iceland, I might have been involved in the trial. So I used all my savings to pay for a flight to England. I knew I had to change our names. At Heathrow, a customs officer looked at you and said: ‘Hello, cutie. What’s your name, honey?’ You were only two years old, and repeated everything you heard. ‘Honey,’ you chirped back, and that’s how it came to me. You would be called Honey. Honey Harsson. That was your grandmother’s maiden name. They’d never track it down to me. Later, I changed our names by deed poll. You were Honey Harsson, I was Alison Harsson. I would introduce myself as Al, after my favourite wrongdoer, Al Bundy.”
Fridrik rolled his eyes.
“You mean serial killer,” said Honey. “And his name was Ted Bundy. Al Bundy was a man in a sitcom.”
Mum decided to ignore this. She paced from the shadows into the feeble light, and back again.
“That was a terrible year,” she whispered. Tears sprang to her eyes and rolled down her face. “I had no idea what happened to your father. I was even afraid to read the papers. Then, Teddy was born. I didn’t give him an Icelandic name – I thought…I thought it would draw attention to us. Now I know, London isn’t that kind of a place. You can cover your tracks in London, just as in a swamp where you sink to the bottom. To float you have to learn to be emotionless, even meaningless – like rubbish.” She smiled. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is…”
“Strength,” Honey finished the sentence. This was one of Mum’s favourite quotes, one she had written at the very front of her quote book.
“And, in London, kindness is indifference. People mask their indifference by being kind to you, but the truth is they don’t care. They gallop to the shops, trip over each other to catch a bus, wring their hands and tap their feet if the traffic lights take five seconds to change. No tradition, no binds, no rules that can’t be broken. Yes, you can lose your trace in London. But you can also lose yourself. That’s what happened to me. I didn’t know who I was, not until I was reunited with my husband.”
Fridrik nodded smugly, and Mum took a long gulp of her golden wine. “We lived in a cramped room on an estate in east London. Every night drunks fought in the street. The place was infested with mice, bedbugs and fleas. I thought we would die of cold and hunger. Then, when Honey turned three, she started nursery, and that’s where Greg worked. As a nursery teacher. He looked cute, you know, walking around with green paint on his hair and a cream cheese sandwich plastered to the arse of his trousers.”
“Cute?” barked Fridrik. “Men should be out hunting or making a living, not…”
“He waz making a living,” bristled
Grandma Florence. “Just because he didn’t kill seals and kidnap children doezn’t mean he wazn’t working. Besides, the world haz slightly evolved, hazn’t it, since Neanderthal times?”
“He agreed to adopt you both, and that’s how you came to be Honey and Teddy Raymond. Soon after, just after we’d all settled in Chess Cottage…”
Grandma Florence huffed loudly.
“…he proposed. I told him I was married and that my husband was in jail. I planned to divorce him, of course, but I had to wait until he got out, or he could take my children. Greg agreed to wait seven years.”
“Which is why he bought the ring last Christmas.” Tears flowed on Honey’s face. She didn’t bother to wipe them.
“He waz a fool,” Grandma snarled. “A fool!”
Mum’s eyes clouded over, and she stared blankly ahead as if the only thing she could see were her memories. “I didn’t know…I thought everything would change in seven years…though, knowing your father, I should’ve known he would do anything to track us down, to set things right. Then I fell ill…”
“Settling accounts is my speciality,” Fridrik puffed up.
“Along with trap-toys design, abduction, murder, humaine trafficking…”
Locked chambers in Honey’s mind began to click open.
It kind of all made sense. Dad didn’t sell them. The Meeting Room didn’t exist. The Midnight Meeting had never taken place. Fridrik’s secret was…Honey. She was the child he once had. The flesh and blood of the two strangers standing in front of her, in the last place in the world she would choose to be. At last, she knew where she’d seen Fridrik’s eyes before: she’d been looking at them all her life, every time she glanced in the mirror.
Honey stood in silence, listening to the story of their life. And as she listened, she discovered more and more of her own features in those of the cruel man before them. With every glint in Fridrik’s eye that mirrored Honey’s, or every twitch of the lips that reminded her of Teddy, Honey was less and less able to deny the genes that flowed between them and the murderer who was their father. DNA was a bridge – an umbilical cord through which not only blood but badness flowed into her. And as she listened, Chess Cottage with its reddish brown roof and frosted front door and high narrow windows, appeared and disappeared in her mind, fading more and more until it finally vanished in the fog of memory.
Santa Claws Page 28