Around me was a giant’s breathing and the warp and weft of a loom gigantic enough to weave the stars themselves. I could no more have stopped myself from grasping that bundle than I could have stopped myself breathing.
The bundle was warm and squirming in my arms. I unwrapped a layer of gauzy chiffon, gazed down on my fate and was lost.
‘Oi,’ said a voice from behind me.
I turned to find myself confronting the sartorial disaster that were the Deplorables en masse. I won’t describe their appearance on the off chance that children may one day read this account.
‘Can I help you, gentlemen?’ I asked, because politeness is always stylish.
‘Yeah,’ said Cutter. ‘You can give us the ten grand you owe us.’
‘Plus interest,’ said Lead Pipe.
‘Plus interest,’ said Cutter.
‘I’m rather afraid I haven’t got it,’ I said.
‘That’s a shame,’ said Cutter, and he turned to Lead Pipe. ‘Isn’t that a shame?’
‘It’s definitely a shame,’ said Lead Pipe.
The bundle in my arms squirmed a bit and made happy gurgling noises.
‘Since the money is not forthcoming, I’m afraid we’ll be forced to take measures,’ said Cutter. He looked once more to Lead Pipe. ‘Is your sledgehammer ready?’
By way of reply, Lead Pipe held up his sledgehammer and I couldn’t help but notice that there were brown stains on the long wooden handle.
‘And Gnasher,’ said Cutter. ‘Do you have a marlinspike about your person?’
Gnasher grunted and held up a pointed lump of metal that I can only presume, in my ignorance of all things nautical, was a marlinspike.
Cutter turned back to me and smiled nastily.
‘I’d say that you should take this like a man,’ said Cutter. ‘But that would be a waste of time.’
Never mind his rudeness, I had more pressing concerns.
‘Shush,’ I said. ‘You’ll wake the baby.’
Cutter’s face suffused to a fine shade of puce and he opened his mouth to continue his ranting, so I twitched aside the fine damask sheet to reveal my daughter nestled in her bundle of silk and high thread Egyptian cotton.
Her beautiful brown face broke into a charming smile and, opening her chubby arms in a benediction, she laughed—a sound like water tumbling over stones.
Cutter gave me an astonished look and whispered.
‘Is this your …?’
‘Yes,’ I whispered back. ‘Her name is Wanda.’
‘But,’ said Cutter, ‘you can’t keep her here.’
‘She likes it here,’ I said indignantly.
‘It’s a dump,’ said Lead Pipe in a low rumble. ‘It’s not fit for human habitation.’
‘He’s right,’ said Cutter. ‘There’s damp and mould and the kitchen is a disgrace.’
‘And there’s no nursery,’ rumbled Lead Pipe.
‘And the garden is a jungle,’ said Gnasher. ‘Totally unsuitable.’
‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I can’t attend to any of these details if you break my legs.’
‘Obviously, we have to deal with the immediate shortcomings of this house before we return to the matter of breaking your legs,’ said Cutter. ‘Don’t we, boys?’
‘I know a couple of builders,’ said Gnasher. ‘And Lead Pipe has green fingers. Ain’t that right?’
Lead Pipe cracked knuckles the size of walnuts.
‘That’s true,’ he said.
‘Really?’ I said.
‘You should see his allotment,’ said Cutter. ‘He has compost heaps you wouldn’t believe.’
I thought of the rumours of what exactly happened to people who crossed the Deplorables, and I decided that I actually did believe in those heaps.
‘About my legs,’ I said, but Cutter wasn’t listening.
‘And there’s the roof,’ he said, and the others nodded.
‘About my legs,’ I said louder and then wished I hadn’t, because the trio were jerked out of their dreams of home improvement and focused on yours truly in a somewhat disconcerting manner.
‘What about them?’ asked Cutter, taking a step towards me.
‘I thought we might reach a more mutually beneficial arrangement,’ I said.
‘What kind of beneficial arrangement did you have in mind?’ he said.
‘There’s the matter of the way you dress,’ I said.
Cutter pushed his face towards mine.
‘What’s wrong with the way we dress?’ he said. ‘It’s practical.’
‘Stain resistant,’ said Lead Pipe
‘Yes, but,’ I said, ‘it could be so much more.’
And Wanda laughed again and this time behind the chuckling stream was the crisp snap of fabric shears and the whistling hum of the shuttle as it plays back and forth across the thread.
‘But first,’ said Cutter, waving a blunt finger in my face, ‘we have to sort out the playroom.’
* * *
And that was that. I gave up the pharmaceutical trade and opened a boutique instead. Cutter and his boys were my first customers, and while they never stopped being an unsavoury gang of foul-mouthed thugs, at least when they broke legs they were well dressed while doing it.
Merton, it turned out, had fled the squat the day we pumped out the water and, being in need of some security, assaulted a police officer so that he could spend a couple of nice peaceful years at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Lilith visited him regularly, and after he got out they ran an animal sanctuary just outside Abergavenny until their deaths, within three months of each other, in 2009. Nigel is still alive and taught cybernetics at Imperial College until his retirement a couple of years ago.
My daughter and I never got around to giving the boutique a name. It was always just ‘the shop’ and given that we never advertised, it’s a wonder we stay in business. We’re always at the cutting edge of fashion. We were out of flares while the Bay City Rollers were still number one and stocking bondage trousers before John Lydon had dyed his hair. We’ve moved the shop a couple of times and, while we’re hard to find, we’re always close to the river.
So if you want to know what the herd are going to be wearing next spring, and if you can find us and are prepared to pay the price, you too can join the ranks of the stylish, the à la mode, and truly become a dedicated follower of fashion.
Introduction: Favourite Uncle
(Set between The Hanging Tree and Lies Sleeping)
Abigail is one of those characters whose first appearance was supposed to be limited to a paragraph or three but who, once created, refused to leave the narrative. Since making her debut as annoying local teenager in Moon Over Soho, she then graduated to plucky teenaged sidekick by Broken Homes and is now on track to have her own novella, What Abigail Did That Summer, coming soon.
Favourite Uncle
We used to be friends—a long time ago.
We went to the same primary but she went to Parli and I went to Burghley and that’s like a whole quantum level of separation. And for your information I know what the word quantum actually means—actually. So given the difference in our energy states it was going to take a bit more than some fuzzy feeling to bridge that gap. That’s why it was a bit of a shock when I walked out of school after Latin club and found her waiting for me in front of the school gate. Her in her Parliament Hill School uniform and everything.
‘Hey Abi,’ she says.
‘Hi Babs,’ I say. Her real name was Barbara Wilson but I’ve called her Babs since infants and I’m not about to stop just because she’s a head taller than me.
‘I need your help,’ she says.
‘My help?’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Natalia said that you were the one to go to for things.’
‘Natalia?’
‘She said you got her out of the house in Hampstead,’ said Babs. ‘Whatever that was about.’
One of the kids from that… incident. They were supposed to be sworn to secrecy. I told
Peter he was wasting his time, but it’s not like we have a convenient obliviate spell to do the job for us.
Babs looks down at me hopefully.
‘She said you could help,’ she says.
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘I don’t think my Uncle Stan is really related to me,’ she says.
‘Okay,’ I says.
Babs shifts from foot to foot.
‘And I think he’s over a hundred years old,’ she says as if that explains everything.
‘Step into my office,’ I say.
* * *
‘What you’ve got to understand about Uncle Stan is that we only ever see him at Christmas,’ says Babs over a hot chocolate in the Café de la Paix.
I use this café because it’s halfway up Fortess Road and so is convenient for school without being so close that I have to put up with year eights getting in my business.
‘Every year he arrives like the day before Christmas, stays with us until two days later and leaves,’ says Babs. ‘He sleeps in my room, which means I have to share with my brothers, which is bare dry.’ She blinks and looks at me. ‘How’s your brother?’
Why can’t people look things up on Wikipedia and know what a stupid question that is? They’ve always got to ask and what am I supposed to say? He’s worse, he’s going to keep on getting worse, and then he’s going to die.
Before I’m old enough to do anything about it.
‘About the same,’ I say.
‘Yeah, sorry about that,’ Babs says. ‘Anyway, like I was saying, he stays in my room.’
‘Does he bring presents?’ I ask.
‘What?’
‘It’s Christmas,’ I say. ‘Does he bring presents?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Babs. ‘Is that important?’
I say it might be, and Babs says that all the presents from everyone go under the tree and she doesn’t always check the labels when she opens them. I’ll bet she doesn’t. I’ll bet she rips off the wrapping too, as if you couldn’t do it neatly and save the paper for something else.
‘Does he touch you?’ I ask—because sometimes you’ve got to ask, don’t you? Saves time.
Babs makes a disgusted face.
‘Nothing like that,’ she says. ‘That’s not what the problem is at all.’
The problem being that they had done a project at school about tracing your family tree. Babs, being Babs, dutifully persuaded her dad to invest in one of those genealogical apps that does most of the work for you and sets about finding out who her great grandparents were and all that.
Mine, in case you’re wondering, are half from Sierra Leone and the other half are a lot of genuine cor-blimey cockneys and Irish—Catholic and Protestant, it’s not as uncommon as people think.
My dad being African, it wasn’t as if randomly attaching non-biological aunts and uncles was without precedent.
‘I asked my mum whose uncle he was. She said she didn’t know, but she remembered him coming to Christmas when she was a girl,’ says Babs.
‘So he’s on your mum’s side of the family,’ I say, and she’s really got my interest now.
‘I suppose so,’ says Babs. Her mum had been born in Harrogate and had come down to London for university where she’d met Babs’s dad who’d originally come from Newcastle. They stayed in London, got married and bought a house in Tufnell Park back when houses were cheap. There they had Babs’s two older brothers and then Babs—I remember that house. She had a big bedroom all to herself and the most toys—I was bare jealous.
‘The thing is,’ says Babs. ‘I can’t find a single photograph of him.’ Not even when she’d opened up the albums from the Dark Ages and the faded Instamatics had become actual black and white pictures.
I tell her that I charge ten quid a day plus expenses and thirty up front, and she doesn’t even quibble—told you she was loaded. Plus she has to give me her log-in details for the genealogical app.
She hesitates, which is sensible, I wouldn’t want other people to know my family history either.
‘Save time, won’t it?’ I say.
* * *
I am sitting in the mundane library at the Folly with a pile of books, my A4 research notebook and a one of Molly’s experimental cakes. The notebook is from Paperchase and has an orange cover with a skinny white woman drawn on it—I only bought it because it has squared paper, which I prefer. The books are all those in the library whose index cards list immortality and calendar related events. There are fifteen books in total, ranging from Kingsley’s ‘On Fairies and Their Abodes’ to Heston Chalmers’s ‘Index of Faerie Volume I’. The Chalmers is well frustrating because Volume 1 only goes from A to D and he never finished any of the other volumes. I know there’s got to be notes somewhere and one day I’m going to make Professor Postmartin go find them.
The cake is a pecan and apple sandwich—it smells really good—but I’m leaving it because I’m being strong. If you want to do magic you’ve got to rise above the body—you’ve got to keep a clear head.
I’m reading Hiddlestone’s Miscellanea which, while not what you’d call useful, is at least good for a laugh. He says that there are reports that some men, ‘Have extended their existence by accident rather than design. These unfortunates, for such I judge them to be, show little understanding of their plight and when questioned seem strangely insensate of the peculiarity of their circumstances. How these wretches came about their unfortunate state is still a mystery to the frustration of those amongst us who seek a magical cure for ageing.’
There follows a long boring paragraph where Marcus Hiddlestone goes off on one about the quest for immortality. He’s pretty certain that God allots a set time for every man—he never seems to mention women—and that it’s futile to strive for more than what God gives you. Mr Hiddlestone and I are just going to have to disagree on that point.
I am staring into space and thinking of the jazz vampires that Peter doesn’t know I know about. Three women who became sort of immortal when they got bombed in a nightclub during World War Two. They were supposed to feed on jazz, or sex, or both, and didn’t seem to know what they were either.
So if you can have white women who feed off jazz, why not an old man who feeds off… what? Christmas? Happiness? Mince pies?
I remember that the jazz vampires had victims. The musicians they fed on suffered physical damage. So I add ‘Chk Fam Med Hist’ to my action list. And then I add ‘sauce FthXmas?’
I wonder whether I should ask Peter about the jazz vampires but decide not to. I don’t want him taking an interest and stopping my investigation. The boy thinks I’m made of glass.
Assuming that it’s just the one guy, does he only appear at Christmas? Just because Babs’s family only see him once a year doesn’t mean he doesn’t visit other families for other holidays. He could be a peripatetic avatar of good cheer.
‘Peripatetic’ makes me laugh as I say it out loud. I taught it to my dad the other week and now he uses it all the time. He says working the railways is peripatetic because they’re always moving around.
I spend another three hours making notes until I’m sure I’ve at least skimmed everything relevant. The only other useful thing I find is a note in the margin of the Charles Kingsley, on the passage about certain fae ‘adopting’ families at Easter and Christmas. Dickens’ Christmas Carol?
Then I eat the cake while I think about what I’ve discovered.
The cake is special—crisp and tart, and other words they use on the Great British Bake Off—which Molly would totally win if she entered. You can get spoilt eating at the Folly. No wonder Bev keeps Peter well exercised.
The books can only take you so far, says Peter, because the Folly’s always been big on theories and short on corroboration. But it’s good to get that stuff sorted in case you start to see patterns in the evidence. But for evidence I’m going to need Wi-Fi so I pack up my things and head for the tech cave.
It’s about five metres and
a two hundred years from the back door of the Folly proper to the first floor of the coach house where Peter stashes all his tech. He’s out on a shout today, so I reckon I’ve got a couple of hours to myself.
Peter’s tower is better than my current laptop so I boot it up and, after disabling his keylogger, log into Babs’s genealogy account. The immediate family is as I remember it. Mum, Dad, Babs, older brothers. Her parents are both the eldest of their siblings, so there are two aunts and three uncles—all but two of which live in London. Or, more precisely, in various dodgy postcodes beyond the North Circular.
I call Babs, saving my minutes by using one of Peter’s backup disposables, and ask her whether any of her uncles and aunts routinely comes over for Christmas.
‘You’re joking,’ says Babs. ‘All of them.’
‘What, every year?’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘And all their kids too. It’s like a total zoo.’
‘Even the ones that live up north?’
‘Them too.’
I hang up and check the chart.
Every living member of the family attends Christmas.
I think that’s pretty special, and not just because none of them have killed one of the others yet. It’s like totally unnatural. I mean, there’s happy families… but this is totally ridiculous.
I’m feeling jealous. Proper envy—this is not helpful.
I do some routine clean-up on the genealogy chart to calm myself down.
Uncle Stan had a box all to himself. No surname, no date of birth, and no connections to any other member of the family. I believe I have, as Nightingale would say, exhausted all the possibilities of that particular technology.
Although there were some details of Babs parentage that would be good for a laugh if I wasn’t bound by a strict code of client confidentiality.
My phone rings and it’s Mum. She tells me that Paul’s condition has deteriorated and that he’s going into hospital again. She wants me to pick up a takeaway supper for Dad so he’s fed when he gets back from work that evening. He’s working on the Overground which is closed for the weekend for engineering work.
Tales from the Folly Page 10