Santa Claws

by Gabriela Harding

  ‘I took a deep breath, and slid open the doors. Nothing fell over me, though. A blue woollen jumper had slipped from its hanger, and I picked it up and hung it back again.”

  Honey noticed Mum’s eyes were shiny. “Then… something soft, lukewarm – touched my cheek. On my fingers, it was the colour of autumn leaves – the best leaves – brilliant red. I looked up. And there…there they were. The boys.”

  Grandma Florence shivered.

  “I cut them down and laid them side by side on the bed. For the first time in my life, I prayed. Really prayed. But it was too late. They’d been dead for hours. Around their throats, the blood was like a strange necklace. Mother had butchered them like lambs. For a long while I sat there and howled. Then I went downstairs to heat up water for their baths, determined that everything should go on as normal. I would wash them. I would put them to bed. I would sing to them. Mother was still alive. She begged me to end her suffering, but I let her lie there instead. She bled to death. It didn’t take nearly as long as I’d hoped. Later I found out Mother suffered from a severe form of seasonal affective depression. Winter depression, as they call it. At first I thought nothing of Mother sleeping late into the day and eating every scrap of food there was. It wasn’t until later, when Greg introduced me to Dr Karmel, that I knew what Mother had, and that by the time of her death on that gloomy December day it had turned into a very nasty form of bipolar disorder.”

  “What is bi…order?” asked Teddy.

  “I know,” said Honey. “It’s when you’re either very happy or very sad, and there’s really no way in between. When you’re happy, you’re really, really happy, and when you’re sad, the sadness takes over your life. It makes you do bad things.”

  Honey had barely finished speaking when she realised she was describing Mum.

  “Yes, I inherited those genes. It’s not my fault. After all, I’m a victim. I lost my boys.”

  Inherited genes. Did that mean that Honey might end up killing Teddy, too, in a moment of madness?

  “Your brothers,” Honey corrected.

  “No, they weren’t,” barked Grandma Florence. She seemed totally unimpressed with the story, unlike many of the dwarves, who were sobbing and blowing their noses loudly. “They were her sons.”

  The wind howled and a chill penetrated the room through the damp-eaten walls. Steamy breaths rose in ominous clouds. A shadow appeared for a moment in the dark window, through the swirling snow.

  “What?” said Honey.

  “We have brothers?” said Teddy.

  “Had,” said Fridrik. “My beloved Alfrid suffered from a terrible condition called a teenage pregnancy.”

  “It didn’t even show.” Tears sprang from Mum’s eyes.

  “She had no idea – nobody had – until she was taken to the nearest surgery with cramps, and the village doctor suspected a tumour. As it turned out, the tumour was double, alive and kicking.”

  Everyone was silent.

  “Thass not even the worss of it. Wait until you hear what she did with the bodiez. All three of them.”

  Mum jerked her head sideways. “I just couldn’t…couldn’t…”

  “You couldn’t, what?” Honey whispered. Horror trickled down her spine.

  More silence.

  “Mum?”

  It was Grandma Florence who answered.

  “Bury them,” she said. “She didn’t bury the bodiez. Tell me, dear, how could you store your own dead mother in the pantry? Like she wazz some overwinter provision? What did you make her into? Sausageez?”

  Mum buried her face in her hands. Fridrik and Hinrik laughed.

  “A year later, when Social Services and the police broke down the door that Alfrid never opened, telling everyone her mother waz ill and the twinz were safe inside, they found meat she claimed to be reindeer hung in the barn. However, it later tested positive for human DNA. The twins were fossilized in their cots.”

  Tears poured down Honey’s cheeks. Teddy still looked like he didn’t understand.

  “How do you know all this?” he asked.

  “Hasn’t she told you?” Mum flopped into a chair, her head in her hands, sobbing. “Your step grandmother is an international spy.”

  “And your mother, children, was a juvenile delinquent – this is une fancy name for child criminal.”

  “And that, for the sake of the story, is how she met me.” Fridrik grinned.

  “You, and your brother Hinrik.”

  Mum sniffled and wiped away her tears. “That’s enough, Florence. The children are minors. If you have any love for them, you can’t tell them everything.”

  “Tell us what?”

  Teddy’s voice was drowned by Florence’s screeching laugh.

  “If they are minors, why make them work in factory? Why enprizon them? Why treat them like the minor delinquent you spent five yearz with?”

  “What is it about Hinrik you don’t want us to know?”

  Hinrik was smoking. He bared his teeth in a grin, blowing out circles of smoke.

  “It’s nothing.” Mum looked nervously from Fridrik to Hinrik and back to the children.

  “She dated both of them,” Grandma said, spraying Honey’s face with her brandy scented spit.

  “I didn’t know! He tricked me. Didn’t you, love?”

  “It was a bit of a game, a pact we made between us. When we met girls, we dated them both, mind you, only until we knew which one of us liked them best. Then the one who wasn’t really interested backed up, and the girl stayed with the twin who liked her more. It wasn’t so bad, really – first, all the girls in town were dying to go out with us, and then, the resemblance between us was so great, that the girl had no idea there had been two there at all. Except, of course, most of the time we both withdrew. When it comes to women, we have the attention span of a fruit fly.”

  The dwarves laughed rudely.

  “Canailles,” muttered Grandma Florence.

  “This reminds me of the book we read about those Nepalese people,” Teddy said to his sister. “Remember? When Dad was out shopping for the dinner with Miss White. About the woman and three husbands.”

  “Polyandry in Disadvantaged Areas of the World,” Honey nodded, and immediately sighed. Sitting on the comfortable sofa in Chess Cottage waiting for Dad to return from a shopping errand seemed so far away, as if it happened in a different life and on a different planet. The grotesque reality they were trapped in felt as unreal as the past, almost as if they had been transported here against their will… Well, hadn’t they? Honey still couldn’t remember anything about the journey, but she knew it involved illegality and mischief. She wished she was back in the candlelit dining room, eating overcooked asparagus and making small talk with Miss White.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” crooned Mum. “I’ve forgiven you. You stayed, didn’t you?”

  “Only because I didn’t like you enough,” Hinrik said. “Sitting around in a correction centre for minors, doing nothing all day, you were rather plump…not my type at all.”

  “I wasn’t plump,” Mum spat out angrily. “I was pregnant.”

  “And that’s how I was born,” Honey said quietly.

  “Second teenage pregnancy,” Grandma Florence explained. “Because people like you don’t learn…”

  “I was nineteen,” Mum snapped. “Honey was born premature, at only seven months into the pregnancy.”

  “This might explain her temper. I read somewhere that premature babies suffer from lack of oxygen in the brain. They don’t develop properly. Of course being brought up by a man like Gregory Raymond doesn’t help,” commented Fridrik. “He is probably still breastfeeding himself.”

  The dwarves squealed with laughter.

  “Good one, boss.” Black Russian gave him high five.

&
nbsp; Grandma Florence narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Where is Dad?” Honey said. “What have you done to him?”

  For a moment Fridrik seemed startled. Then, he took a deep breath. “He’s dead.”

  Mum turned to look at him. Honey felt the entire world crashing down upon her.

  “Dead?”

  Dad couldn’t be dead. She had so much to tell him. So much to say sorry for. She glanced at Teddy, frozen beside her.

  “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you!”

  “You will after you see this.”

  From one of his many pockets, Fridrik produced a small remote. A side wall that had, until then, been immersed in darkness, began to glimmer eerily white. The sheet of a screen rolled itself down before them.

  Honey watched Fridrik walk over to one of the shapes covered in dust cloths.

  “Voilá!” he said, in a mocking imitation of Grandma Florence’s accent, sliding the cloth aside.

  The object revealed was not a sewing or boring machine, but a projector. Fridrik took out his iPhone and for the next few minutes worked in silence while everyone watched him. Ringlets of golden hair spilled down his back, catching the sinister blue light.

  At last, the screen buzzed into life. Colours, faint at first, then more and more vivid, flowed into a picture.

  A horrible picture.

  Honey saw the trees, the arched bridge where the Heathrow connect train huffed and puffed, the smaller bridge over the river, and the much battered path she could walk in her sleep. The oak uprooted in the storm was lying on the meadow like some kind of sick giant, squirrels and birds hopping through the cobweb of its branches. On the small bridge, two people were hugging. A white cloak was billowing in the wind…

  The image was blurred, shaky, and cloudy, but Honey recognised, not without a sickening jolt, her mother and father.

  And they weren’t hugging. They were fighting.

  A smile spread over Mum’s face. She beamed at Fridrik.

  The recording was brief, and bad. The rustle of the wind in the leaves, the crunch of dried vegetation, and the distant gurgle of the swollen stream were all grotesquely loud. Through all these background noises, it was impossible to hear what her parents were saying as they squared up on each other on the wobbly bridge.

  And then, the bridge started crumbling. A rubbish truck was gliding downhill. A rubbish truck?! Mum’s head snapped sideways, an arc of blood squirting from her neck, Dad stumbled backwards…A black umbrella darkened the screen, before it went blank again. Honey’s blood ran cold.

  “Gregory Raymond. Dead. A sad occurrence for some, a stroke of luck for others. You may think your stepfather had gone to Isle of Wight with his girlfriend, and he would have been there now, if she hadn’t suggested they stay in a motel at the other end of the park for the night. He wanted some time away from you two, you see. He’d had enough of being a single parent.”

  Honey and Teddy glanced at each other, unspeakable horror in their eyes.

  “Girlfriend?” Mum glared at the children and their grandmother. “I wasn’t gone a year, and he’s already going away with his girlfriend? Did you know about this, Florence? Children, who is this woman? Has she been living with you? Wasn’t he supposed to be mourning me?”

  “Mourning you?” Grandma Florence cried. “While you are messing about with your real husband?”

  “Let’s not go off track. We were talking about…oh yes. Alfrid and I returned to London for our children. We camped close to the house, slept rough in the park, in a nomad tent made of animal skin, trying to find the best way to snatch you. Alfrid warned me that children aren’t allowed to leave the house without an adult, they don’t wander around parks on their own like I was hoping you would. One late afternoon – surprise, Gregoire was taking a solitary walk down the canal. Alfrid insisted on going to talk to him, to persuade him to give you two up without a fight. But, as you saw, he attacked her…”

  “She attacked him first…” Teddy’s voice trailed off.

  “Don’t interrupt,” Fridrik snarled. “He didn’t make it, I’m afraid to say. Drowned in a few inches of shallow water.” He guffawed. “Should have told me the poor devil couldn’t swim, Alfrid. Not that it was a big loss…men like him, ten to a dozen…”

  Honey’s eyes wandered aimlessly around the place that had been witness to some of the worst moments of her life – the long shifts in the factory, the tiresome preparations for the feast, and the discovery of her own identity. Overnight, Honey had learned that there was a tank of frozen water under her feet, where all sorts of illegal experiments had taken place, a place where her own parents threw people to the sharks; she learned that the man she had always argued with was not her real father but this, rather than make her happy, filled her with a new love for the clumsy, big-hearted weirdo who gave her his name; she’d discovered that her own grandmother was an international spy, but, most importantly, that her mother was not dead and her secrets were worse than she’d imagined – worse than anyone could imagine.

  And, worse than anything, the father she had always taken for granted, the one she had never even said ‘I love you’ to once, was dead.

  42. Unlucky Escape

  It was cold and dark in the factory, as quiet as a grave. In fact, it was a grave. Honey averted her eyes from the underwater dead. The fins on the sharks’ backs stuck out like knife handles. A pattern of cracks was beginning to spread on the glass.

  Dad was dead. Dad was dead. She said it again and again in her head, but just couldn’t grasp this terrible truth. Just like the other truth – Dad was not dad – it didn’t seem real.

  And then, Honey remembered. The umbrella Dad had that day was the one missing from the stand in the hall. Either Dad kept it hidden all this time, or the recording wasn’t recent at all.

  “The date!” Grandma screamed almost at the same time as the realisation struck Honey. “That recording iz out of date! Waz filmed ages ago! And how about Python Head, wouldn’t she have alerted the police?”

  Honey didn’t see the shadow looming over her grandmother, a cord stretched tight between clenched fists. She was smiling. Of course. The recording was out of date. The storm that uprooted the oak happened before Mum’s disappearance. One blustery November evening the wind charged like a bull around the park, snapping trees in half and pulling shingles away from rooftops. Honey was awoken by a scream and the sound of shattering glass. She found Dad with the duvet gathered around him, staring at the thick branch of a tree that seemed to have grown grotesquely into the house through the window. A year later, the fallen tree had still not been moved, but the long branches were now trimmed short. As for the umbrella…she hadn’t seen that umbrella in a long time, so the video must have been taken, well, on the day Mum left.

  The storm had destroyed the bridge, too. A new bridge was built over the river, but Honey and Teddy had only seen it from afar. Dad was adamant that they didn’t get close to it. In his mind, Mum was dead and her body could be lying at the bottom of the river. He was brave to bear a burden like that for so long.

  So…Dad wasn’t dead. Mum wasn’t dead, either. But Honey didn’t have time to feel relief.

  “Grandma!” she screamed. It was too late. Hinrik had leashed her grandmother like a dog and was dragging her along the floor. She shot one bullet in the air before the other twin disarmed her.

  “I always knew you weren’t my biggest fan, Florence,” Mum said. “But coming here with a gun? I’m stunned.”

  “You were a single mother of two with no income. And a cannibal. What did you expect? The red carpet?” Grandma answered, struggling with the two brothers who were tying her to the garotte vil.

  “Aargh!!” Hinrik screamed, taking a bloody finger to his mouth. “The cow bit me!” He grunted in pain, and removed his hand to look at the dentures clasped on h
is knuckles like a sinister crab. She gave him a toothless grin. Fridrik punched the dentures back into her mouth and closed the iron ring around her throat.

  “Don’t hurt Grandma!” Teddy screamed.

  “I already did,” Fridrik grinned.

  “She’s not your grandma, Teddy. Actually, Florence, what do you want with my children? Aren’t you happy that I’m out of Greg’s life?”

  “I couldn’t be happier, but no child deserves a mother like you.”

  “So you’re playing the good missionary. You make me sick.”

  “Your death was fake,” Honey worded the unspeakable truth. Horror trickled down her spine at her mother’s silence.

  Black Russian took a step forward and bowed. Several other dwarves applauded and cheered.

  “Thank you. You see, I took a while to get into the role.” He clapped once. “Eska, come forward.” A figure detached itself from the shadows and waddled into the light.

  The dwarves wolf-whistled.

  Eska bowed.

  Fridrik clicked his fingers. “When Eska was on the death chair, I cracked my knuckles into a microphone. You heard the snap, didn’t you? You thought her neck was breaking. Really, children. Do you also think that movie stars live inside the television? After all, childhood is a form of retardation. Don’t you think?”

  “Certainly, sir.” Eska bowed again, to more applause and whistles.

  Honey gulped the cold air. Strangely, she felt as if she’d just woken from a dream.

  “See, I was careful to leave that door open,” Black Russian boasted, speaking to Teddy. “A brat like you wouldn’t miss an opportunity to stick his nose where he shouldn’t. I knew you’d be terrified of the sounds in the tunnel…” The dwarf chuckled. His beady eyes twinkled and he carried on breathlessly, spitting and spluttering. “It was just a speaker. Your own mother played a CD with forest sounds to scare you.”

  “Peekaboo.” Mum smiled strangely – like on the day when she was chopping chillies and she threw her knife over the top of Honey’s head. You could still see the faint line on the wall. Honey was grateful when Dad hung the painting of a snow-capped mountain over it.