Tales from the Folly

by Ben Aaronovitch

  She doesn’t say where the money’s coming from, because she knows I’m going to blag it off Molly—she thrifty that way, is my mum. She once told me that some people get to be precious about their dignity, but not families like us—we’ve got to take any opportunity we can get. Mum and Dad see the Folly as my big chance, even though they have no fricking idea what that chance is.

  I’d let it worry me, but dinner is dinner, and Molly does like to cook.

  * * *

  I’m walking into Great Ormond Street Hospital, where everybody knows my name—I’ve been coming here since before I can remember. I used to love coming here when I was a little kid and didn’t know any better. It never scared me, everyone was nice to me and it was full of interesting stuff. I remember how big and solid the oxygen cylinders seemed and my dad telling me about the do’s and don’ts of high pressure gas storage. There were machines and tubes and devices to look at and, when it was sunny and I was older, they let me go over the road to Corum Fields.

  I’m here to visit my mum because when Paul comes to hospital it’s because there’s a problem and he’s either asleep or away being scanned or something. I walk past a couple of white girls sitting in adjacent beds, one with no hair and a tube up her nose. They’re both smiling.

  There are balloons and tinsel and Father Christmas. The first of this year’s surprise celebrity Santas have already passed through leaving presents and photo-opportunities behind them.

  A junior oncologist from Brazil once told me that the reason cancer is lethal in children is because young bodies are so full of life. That’s how he said it, that their cancers are full of life too. But, he said, because they are full of life children often defy your expectations and make miraculous recoveries.

  ‘There’s always hope,’ he said.

  Except when there isn’t—I’ve learnt to be practical about this stuff.

  Both Paul and Mum are asleep so I settle into the other chair with my sample GSCE Latin exam questions and wait for one of them to wake up.

  * * *

  I don’t take chances with Christmas, and I generally start negotiating for what I want around Easter so I can wear my dad down over the course of the year. It has to be my dad because my mum is wheedle-proof—years of dealing with Paul, I guess. Still, I think she’s the one who makes sure the presents are wrapped and stuffed into a pillowcase hanging off the end of my bed.

  I wake Christmas morning from a dream in which me and Molly are presenting the Great British Bake Off, only Molly keeps missing her cues and the producer, who looks and sounds just like Nightingale, is just on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

  I know from the quiet that Mum had already left for the hospital and Dad is on shift. He nearly always works Christmas Eve into Christmas Day. For the railways the holidays are mainly a golden opportunity to get some work done without all those annoying passengers getting in the way.

  They didn’t used to leave me on my own like this, but I’m big now and they trust me not to burn the house down.

  I unpack the pillowcase they’ve left at the end of my bed and sit cross-legged on my bed with the presents arranged around me. I recognised the big soft badly-wrapped parcel as being from Aunty Rose and it will be clothes—it’s always clothes. Brand new and not stuff I would ever wear, and not going to fetch much on eBay. I usually keep them in my wardrobe for a couple of years and then hand them back to Aunty Rose to send to Sierra Leone—I wonder if she notices?

  There are various presents from Mum’s family, which can be pretty hit and miss. Last year they clubbed together to get me a Purple Diamond vanity case which arrived full of makeup that was, shocking I know, all the wrong shades. Still I traded the make up at school and keep the case to house my specimen collection kit.

  And some of the Mac cosmetics that Bev gave me later.

  This time it’s a single Christmas card, depicting a robin on a Christmas tree, containing an Argos Gift Card—no mention of how much is on the card, just Merry Xmas and a list of familiar names. They all signed their names separately so the card is going in the permanent collection.

  I save the best for second from last. It’s a heavy rectangle containing the main present—the one I’ve been pushing for since June. And yes it’s a reconditioned Chrome Book with all the trimmings.

  There’s the usual bits and pieces at the bottom of the pillowcase, sweets, chocolates and shiny things from the market and the Pound Shop. I sort them into edible, swappable and recyclable.

  I open the last present—the one from Paul. It’s a small box shape and wrapped in silver paper.

  I always get a present from Paul. My mum swears blind that Paul helps her choose them, though we both know that hasn’t been possible for years. Still, last year it was a hand-carved statue of a cat—not something my mum would choose on her own.

  I carefully remove the paper to reveal a watch box. Inside is a Hamilton Officer’s watch with a black face and a really kruters khaki strap. But I don’t care because it’s a mechanical movement—it’s for a practitioner who doesn’t want her own magic messing with her timepiece. It’s a wizard’s watch.

  I wind it up, set the time and slip it onto my wrist.

  Then I cry for a bit because it’s the best present I’ve ever got.

  * * *

  I am standing outside Bab’s house on Dalmeny Road just off Tufnell Park Road. It’s one of those big old semis with a side passage to the back garden and a staircase that goes up to the front door. There is a holly wreath carefully fastened around the brass door knocker. There’s also an old fashioned round doorbell which I press. It goes ding dong and through the door I hear voices asking whether anyone is expecting anyone.

  Me and Dad visited Paul and Mum at the hospital and had Christmas dinner there. My dad says that Great Ormond Street has the best food of any hospital in the country. He’s been awake for twenty four hours by the time we leave, but it doesn’t show until he gets home. I leave him snoring on the sofa while I head up Tufnell Park to finish the case.

  I am nervous because there are lots of voices and I only know Babs. Peter knocks on strange doors all the time and says the trick is to remind yourself you are there for a good reason.

  ‘But what if you can’t tell them, because it’s a secret?’ I asked him.

  ‘That’s alright,’ he said. ‘They don’t need to know the reason—only you need to know.’

  A tall white woman in a mauve jumper and tan slacks opens the door and looks down on me. She has blue eyes and brown curly hair —Peter’s taught me to notice things like that—with a silver paper crown crammed on top. Her face is flushed and she looks both happy and surprised to see me.

  ‘Good god,’ she says. ‘Is that you, Abigail? Come in, come in. You’re so grown.’

  She pulls me into the house. I can smell turkey and roast potatoes and sprouts and coal smoke. So maybe not just smell because later I check and find they have a fake real fire in the living room—the kind with concrete logs and a gas flame. I’ve missed Christmas dinner, she says but they’re playing games and the more the merrier.

  They’ve got one of those houses with the front room knocked through to the back room to make one large space. The front half has the sofas and the TV and the dog, a particularly stupid looking Labrador called Pom Pom. The walls are light brown and between the fire, the candles ranged along the mantelpiece and the artfully positioned strip lighting, it is bright and cosy and glittering. It’s also stuffed with Babs’s family… well, all those over the age of thirteen. The younger kids are upstairs in Babs’s brother’s bedroom playing on her PS3.

  There’s her dad’s brother Stephen, who is going through a messy divorce and is expected to lose his house, his beloved Mercedes and access to his kids. He stands in the centre of the room wearing a paper hat and a grin and opening his hands to indicate that it’s a book.

  ‘It’s a book,’ yells Babs’s mum’s sister Beatrice, who works as a dinner lady at a works canteen in Barnsley and wh
o has a son that came within one sentencing guideline of youth detention for twocking a Prius in Halifax town centre last April. He is sitting at his mother’s feet, a smile on his face and also, I notice, a can of Special Brew in his hand.

  They’re all there, the sisters and the brothers and the spouses and children. Pink cheeked and jolly in the light of the fake fire, and I can feel something occult coming off them in waves like the smell of plum brandy and mince pies.

  And a quiet space behind me—a still spot.

  I turn and look back towards the dining room end of the room, where shadows collect around a seated figure.

  I look over at Babs, who is perched on the arm of a sofa. I try to catch her eye but she is far too busy with second syllable. Sounds like… banana? Monkey? Ape? Sounds like ape!

  I wonder if I’m in danger, but I think not.

  I wander over.

  ‘Come in, come in, young lady,’ says Uncle Stan, ‘and know me better.’

  He is a skinny old white man whose neck seems too small for his shirt collar and his ears and nose too big for his face. Still has a thick head of hair, gone grey and brushed back from his forehead. I swear his eyes were the darkest brown I’ve ever seen on a white guy in my life.

  He waves at a chair opposite him.

  ‘Come, come, lass and know me better,’ he says and I sit down.

  The dining table is a No Man’s Land of pillaged chocolate boxes, unexploded crackers, empty bottles and forlorn buttresses of spun sugar icing.

  As I get closer, I smell holly and pine needles and wood smoke and decide that my estimate of Uncle Stan’s age was out by hundreds of years. Maybe thousands. Peter would have had a fit if he knew I was sitting down with somebody this magical. Mind you, Peter is shagging a river goddess so he’s one to talk.

  ‘So, you’re Uncle Stan,’ I say, because a positive identification solves problems later.

  He smiles. A warm smile, where the good humour goes all the ways to his eyes, but in those eyes I think I can see something else—but I don’t know what.

  ‘That’s what they call me,’ he says.

  ‘Good,’ I said and poke him with the poker I’d borrowed from the set beside the fireplace. It’s not hot or nothing, and I don’t poke him hard—just enough to make sure he’s physically there.

  A sort of light flares in his eyes—not a real light, I guess, with real photons, but something that my brain is interpreting as a flash. His smile grows broader and I fight down an urge to lean away.

  ‘Good for you,’ he says. ‘Have a crème egg.’ He pushes over a bowl filled with Cadbury Creme Eggs. ‘The mother buys them just after Easter when they’re going cheap and brings them out at Christmas.’

  ‘That’s stupid,’ I say before I can stop myself.

  ‘Is it?’ said Uncle Stan. ‘Why’s that? Chocolate is chocolate, after all.’

  Sometimes a stupid thought comes out your mouth even when you know it’s a stupid thought. ‘Because it’s for Easter, innit?’ I say.

  He offers me an egg again and I say no again.

  He said there was no obligation, but I said I don’t like the squidgy stuff inside.

  ‘It started when they were a young family—a way to save money,’ said Uncle Stan.

  There was a high pitched giggle from the centre of the room as Babs makes a weird face to sell the mime. The rest of the family laughed, too loudly. The mother actually kind of hoots like a monkey.

  I ask Uncle Stan if all this jollity was his doing.

  He waves his hand in a disparaging gesture.

  ‘I encourage a feeling of safety,’ he says. ‘People are less inhibited when they feel safe.’

  ‘How long have you been visiting?’

  ‘I’ve been coming down to London for Christmas since Barbara was old enough to unwrap her own presents,’ he says.

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘With her mother’s mother family.’

  ‘In Harrogate.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So you move about?’

  ‘I’m peripatetic,’ he says and smiles with enormous good humour.

  ‘What’s so funny?

  ‘They talk about you,’ he says.

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘The Parliament of Foxes gossip about nothing else,’ he says. ‘And on the edges of the horse fairs and carnivals from Appleby to Goldsithney they pass your name from hand to hand in the hope of guessing the future.’

  He’s trying to distract me. Peter has warned me that when you push people in an interview they instinctively look for ways to deflect you. If Uncle Stan is looking to make the conversation about me then I must be pushing his buttons.

  ‘So you’ve been to all these places?’ I ask.

  ‘As I said—peripatetic.’

  Which makes me smile although I don’t tell him why.

  ‘Do you visit other families?’ I ask.

  ‘Occasionally.’

  ‘For Christmas?’ I ask, in case he’s some kind of weird multiple manifestation—don’t laugh. It’s totally possible.

  ‘There are other celebrations than Christmas, other religions and beliefs, other moments of joy where people gather,’ he says, and I smile.

  ‘Joy?’ I ask. ‘Is that what you feed on?’

  His eyes narrow but the smile doesn’t fade.

  ‘You’re a clever little one,’ he says. ‘The foxes obviously don’t know the half of it.’

  I look back to where Babs’s family are doing their Marks and Spencer Christmas advert impression.

  ‘Does it hurt them?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You people are so profligate with your gifts,’ he says and I note both the word ‘profligate’ and the use of ‘you people’. Meaning he thinks he’s a different people from me and Babs and the rest of us Homo sapiens. I wonder what are the chances of me getting a viable DNA sample from Stan and what favour I might extract from Dr Walid in exchange.

  Babs is suddenly shouting ‘Yes yes yes.’ And fist pumping—obviously this family takes their charades seriously.

  ‘Joy rolls off them like a mist,’ says Uncle Stan. ‘You cannot take what is freely given.’

  ‘You can con people out of stuff though, can’t you?’ I say.

  ‘But I don’t need to,’ he says. ‘Do I?’

  Maybe not. But nobody actually lives off joy. And while the jazz vampires thought they were eating jazz, what they were really doing was sucking the magic out of people’s bodies. As far as I could tell from my research, Babs’s family lived and died and got sick pretty much like everyone else. If Uncle Stan was shortening their lives I hadn’t seen any evidence. Not that that was going to stop me from asking Dr Walid to do an epidemiological study. Just as soon as I could think of a reasonable excuse that didn’t involve me admitting I’d been cavorting with dangerous supernatural types.

  Still, I have questions.

  ‘What about magic?’ I ask.

  ‘The same,’ says Uncle Stan. ‘Except for the likes of you.’

  ‘The likes of me?’

  ‘Them that wrap themselves in their own magic and wear it like a cloak.’

  I need to go away and have a proper think, but I want to make sure that Uncle Stan is available for round two.

  ‘Do you like this family?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘They’re my favourite.’

  ‘Would you like to keep coming here?’ I ask.

  ‘How could you stop me?’ he asks, so I give him the eye. To be fair, he lasts longer than Nightingale does when I use the eye on him. Only my mum can resist the eye, and she ain’t here.

  He sighs and raises his hands in mock surrender.

  ‘So what do you want, young lady?’ he says, sounding slightly annoyed.

  ‘Tomorrow is Boxing Day,’ I say. ‘And I want you to get up nice and early while this lot are still snoring and come down to the hospital with me.’

  ‘To what e
nd?’

  ‘Then they can get to know you better can’t they?’ I say. ‘And you can make them feel safe and joyful.’

  He didn’t frown or nothing, but he looked over at where Babs’s family were resting between bouts of compulsory charades and topping up their drinks.

  ‘Traditionally Boxing Day has been a day of rest,’ he says. ‘After all, Christmas can only come once a year.’

  ‘Some of the kids in the hospital aren’t going to make it to the next Christmas, are they?’ I say. ‘So I reckon they might as well get the next one in extra early—just to be on the safe side.’

  He looks at me for a long time—and then he smiles.

  Introduction: Vanessa Sommer’s Other Christmas List

  (Set around the same time as False Value)

  Just like Abigail, Vanessa Sommer was supposed to be a one shot character, in this case the baffled local cop to Tobias Winter’s magic savvy federal officer. It was all going well until I decided to call her Sommer… You can see the problem. Winter and Sommer—it’s a series. So when it came time to write the short story that would go with my first novella set in Germany I asked myself—how would learning magic is real affect a bright, inquisitive detective like Vanessa?

  Vanessa Sommer’s Other Christmas List

  The year that KKin Vanessa Sommer was seconded to the BKA’s Abteilung KDA she returned to her home village with two Christmas lists rather than one. The first list was the usual one, that she had started the previous January, which included reminders of what to buy her parents, her older brother, her younger brother, his wife, their toddler and all the cousins under the age of eleven. Over the course of the year that list had been embellished with other family related chores such as making sure her parents hadn’t succumbed to any email scams and had laid in enough fire wood for the winter. Despite having grown up in Eifel, her father had all the country instincts of a Berliner and her mother, who had grown up in Dresden, had actively avoided acquiring any.

  Vanessa’s second Christmas list was more recent and stemmed from her discovery, much to her surprise, that magic was real, some rivers had goddesses, and that some police officers—when properly authorised—were practising wizards.