AT ANY other time of year they would not have looked remarkable: an old woman and a young boy travelling together. But it was Christmas Eve, their arms were full of packages, and Ninna was insisting on sitting where she shouldn’t.
“I’m afraid this is a first-class carriage.” The ticket inspector may well have been afraid, had he known what was coming.
“First class…?” Ninna made a point of looking at the stains on the plastic table. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“The tickets, ma’am. Are the wrong ones for this part of the train.”
“Not at all,” Ninna said with the air of someone graciously accepting an apology. “I know what I paid for.”
By now the inspector had processed the fact of Ninna’s extremely tweedy coat and stout shoes and, moreover, her manner, which was stolidly self-assured. Her tickets might say otherwise but she was clearly built for first-class travel. His gaze flickered to her young companion. Kim kept his hands in his lap, sitting upright, his expression solemn.
“I’m afraid I am going to have to ask you to move down the train.”
“Nonsense.” Ninna settled herself more emphatically in the seat. “I paid for first-class tickets. If the imbecilic machine at the station saw fit to furnish me with second-class stubs that is hardly my concern. A human being wouldn’t have made that mistake. But it’s all machines now, isn’t it? Kim, open the lunchbox. This is my grandson,” she lied, before adding in the tone of a bomb disposal expert clearing a crowd, “and we’re about to eat egg sandwiches.”
The inspector, admitting defeat, moved on.
Kim shared out the sandwiches. He was wearing his best clothes – a blue jumper with an itchy neck and brown corduroy trousers that rasped when he walked – a gift from Ninna, like everything he possessed. He’d only lived with her for eight weeks but was already up to his neck in debt to her. This did not occur to him at the time, of course; he was only eight years old. Had it occurred to him, he’d have rationalised it like this: she was the one who’d asked for him, he’d certainly never asked for her. Two months ago, he’d been taken to an unfamiliar part of London that looked like the set from a 1950s film about the future. It was 2024. The future, as dreamt of by those bold imagineers, had failed to materialise. Cable cars swooped across the Thames, it was true, and a train ran on elevated tracks. But, overridingly, there was pollution, never-ending building works, rats and tourists (Ninna made no distinction between the last two). From the windows of her large house in this unfamiliar part of London, she surveyed this world as an iceberg might the maiden voyage of an egotistical ocean liner.
Kim picked a stray crumb from his jumper. “What will Salisbury be like?”
“Deadly.” Ninna wiped her chin with a handkerchief. “We’ll be lucky if we survive it.”
Kim digested this as he’d learnt to digest much of what she said, as if it were a tricky bit of bacon, stringy all the way down. “And what will Douglas and Lionel and the others be like?”
She tucked the handkerchief up her sleeve. “Even luckier.”
To survive it, she meant, this deadly family get-together called Christmas. As far as Kim could tell, spending Christmas in Salisbury with her son and grandchildren was the last thing Veronica Marley wanted to do. It surprised him, therefore, that she was doing it. Ninna, who never did anything she didn’t want to, who didn’t return library books on time or pay bills until they changed colour from black to red, or buy the right train tickets for those rare occasions when she had to travel from the comfort of her own home.
“Christmas is for families,” she said ominously, taking a large hardback from her overnight bag. Kim recognised it as one of the overdue library books: a Western with an angry man on the cover, trying to ride a horse that didn’t want to be ridden.
Kim took out a book of his own: The RSPB British Handbook of Birds. The book had been waiting for him in the attic bedroom of the big house with views across the Thames to cable cars and cranes strung with Christmas lights “for some godforsaken reason,” Ninna had said. The attic, like the rest of the house, was cold and spartan. Ninna didn’t believe in home comforts, she said. The social worker who’d brought Kim looked shocked at this but after referring to the paperwork seemed happy to leave him in her care. The RSPB British Handbook of Birds was a very good book. As soon as he’d seen it on the bedside table, he’d been happy to stay. There were no books in the children’s home, let alone ones about birds. It must have been the children’s home that told Ninna how much Kim loved birds. He wished the train would move more slowly so he could watch from its windows for whichever species were living in the trees planted alongside the tracks. Crows, of course, and jackdaws. Magpies. When they passed a flooded field, he saw seagulls sitting on the water, looking confused. The floods confused everyone. Kim would’ve thought they’d be used to rivers bursting their banks by now; they’d been doing it every winter since he could remember.
“Peel me an orange,” Ninna said, “there’s a good boy.”
Kim put down his book and peeled one of the oranges from the paper bag in his rucksack, trimming the pith neatly before handing it to her. “What’s in the big box?”
“A nasty surprise for a nosey parker.”
“There’s a lot of presents.”
“I have a lot of family.” Ninna fixed him with a stare above the spine of the library book. “An excess, you might say.”
This made him wonder, again, why she’d agreed to foster him when she had more than enough family already. But the children’s home was flooded like the fields, only with children not water; Kim had been encouraged to count himself lucky he had somewhere safe to stay for a while. “Call me Ninna,” she’d said, so he did, even after the social worker said “Mrs Marley” was more appropriate.
“What’re they like?” he asked. “Your family?”
“That’s what you’re going to find out.” She finished the orange and tucked her chin into her scarf, like a sandpiper settling into its ruff.
* * *
When the ticket inspector made his way back down the train, he caught Kim’s eye and smiled. The boy seemed nice enough; not his fault his grandmother was a dragon. Besides, they weren’t the only odd people on the train. At Basingstoke a hen party staggered aboard in spiked heels, shedding red feathers from their boas, followed by a troupe of actors still in costume, one smoking an elaborate pipe shaped like a trumpet. The inspector was relieved to discover the pipe was a prop. Dealing with Kim’s grandmother had used up his quota of insouciance for the day.
* * *
The house in Salisbury was small and boxy, built of pale stone and flint, its windows full of fussy little leaded panes of glass that caught what light was in the sky and shone it into Kim’s eyes. Ninna, finding the door locked, rapped on it with her fist. The afternoon smelt of dead leaves, rotten. The spire of Salisbury Cathedral poked up behind the chimneys. The garden had a lot of knotty bushes like knuckled fists. Halfway up the lawn a blackened arbour stood like a gallows.
“Never say I don’t take you anywhere nice.” Ninna thumped on the door again. Then she rubbed her gloved hand at her chest, pulling her face into a strange shape.
“Are you all right?” Kim asked.
“I’m in the arse-end of Wiltshire about to spend Christmas with my least favourite crowd of sycophants. What d’you think?”
“What are sycophants?”
“Trucklers, toadies, lickspittles…” She looked down at him. “Oxpeckers. You know what those are?”
“The red-billed oxpecker is a native of the savanna of sub-Saharan Africa.”
“The boy is a book…” Ninna moved to peer through the nearest window into the unlit house. “And what do these red-billed birds get up to?”
“They eat ticks off zebras and impalas and giraffes.”
“And what do ticks eat?”
“Blood…?” Kim followed her around the side of the house. “They suck blood from mammals.”
“So an oxpecker is a lazy bloodsucker. Speaking of…” She pitched her voice at whoever was standing behind Kim. “Where the hell’ve you been? We’re freezing half to death out here!”
“We were at choral evensong, of course. Happy Christmas, Mother!”
Four of them all together, in dark coats that made Kim think of crows; a murder of crows. The middle-aged man with a long face like a guttering candle must have been her son Douglas, the others her grandchildren: a man in his early twenties with thinning hair, another who looked like a drunk teenager, and a girl of about Kim’s age in a velvet-collared coat. Ninna batted away her son’s attempt at an embrace. “Get me inside and near a fire, with a stiff drink.”
* * *
In the years between then and now, Kim often thought of that Christmas spent with the family Ninna described as lazy bloodsuckers. There was nothing overtly lazy about Douglas or his eldest son Lionel, whose hair was thinning in his twenties. Both exerted themselves to please Ninna, dancing around her like a pair of mating albatrosses. Lionel’s younger brother Jonas wasn’t lazy so much as dormant. And eight-year-old Lena was far too watchful to be described as lazy. Her bright eyes followed Kim everywhere. Ninna had warned him about Lena: “A born actress and a bottomless pit of cunning, trustworthy as an adder,” which made Kim wonder how she’d described him to her family. None of them looked pleased to see him, a cuckoo in their nest. Ninna had told him, “Just be yourself, boy. And keep your eyes open.”
Discovering he was to sleep on a camp bed in her room, Kim braced himself for a battle similar to the one on the train with the ticket inspector, but Ninna just smiled and said, “Excellent.”
“I’m afraid at such short notice it was the best we could manage.”
“Noted. Kim, take your bag upstairs. Lena will help. I’d like a glass of port and a mince pie. Warmed, with lots of cream.”
No one, Kim was quick to notice, said no to Ninna. Douglas looked pained whenever she issued orders but he complied every time. There was something a bit squeamish about Douglas. Ninna had said he’d found his wife Kathleen dead in bed one morning two years ago: “Wouldn’t go near her, not to check her pulse or cover her face. Won’t sleep in the same room even now.”
This was the bedroom assigned to Ninna and Kim, the one where Lena’s mother had died. Standing in the room, Lena said, “You’re not my real cousin. She’s not your real grandmother. She’s only fostering you to annoy us.”
“Why would that annoy you?” Kim asked.
“Dad and Lionel are counting the days until the reading of her will.” Lena pushed the shiny toe of her shoe at the carpet. “You know what a will is, don’t you?”
“Oh yes.”
“Gran’s been teasing them about it for ages. Dad says it makes no difference since she’s getting older every year.” She dipped her head at him. “You won’t be in it, anyway.”
“Of course not.” Kim put The RSPB British Handbook of Birds onto the pillow of the camp bed. Lena watched him with the eyes of a parakeet. “It’s nice of you all to let me stay.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That won’t get you anywhere.”
Downstairs, Ninna had fallen asleep in an armchair by the fire. A plate with a demolished mince pie was in danger of slipping off her lap, but no one seemed to think it a good idea to rescue it. Douglas and Lionel looked aghast when Kim walked across the room to do exactly that, setting the plate on a low table. Lena tucked herself into the window seat with a book. Jonas was nowhere to be seen. Since there wasn’t anywhere else to sit, Kim settled on the rug at Ninna’s feet. This appeared to render him invisible to the rest of the room, who began to talk about her first in whispers, then more loudly when she didn’t wake.
“She doesn’t look well, do you think?” Douglas said.
“She hasn’t looked well in a while,” Lionel agreed.
Neither man sounded sad about this. The opposite, if anything.
“The way she shovelled that cream up… Her cholesterol must be monstrous.”
“And the port. Mind you, she always liked her booze.” Lionel used the past tense, as if Ninna might’ve died in her sleep.
Kim looked up at her. From his vantage point on the floor, he could’ve sworn her right eyelid twitched in a wink. Afterwards, he’d feel awful about this, reminded of the time he saw a magpie bowing in a tree and bowed back, only to watch as the bird toppled through the branches to land dead at his feet.
* * *
Christmas Day started early with church, then became peeling potatoes and stepping around Jonas’s outstretched feet to lay the table. Kim was worn out by the time they were all sitting down to an enormous lunch of duck, watercress and cranberries that stuck in his teeth like the pudding that followed. Ninna ate hugely, far more than she managed at home, almost as if she were making a point – although Kim couldn’t think what it might be. She was in a good mood, laughing along with her son’s attempts at humour, in contrast to which the jokes inside the crackers appeared Aristotelian.
“I’m going for a nap,” Ninna said after lunch. “Kim, give me a hand up the stairs.”
In the bedroom, she set her handbag aside and kicked off her shoes to lie on the bed, breathing noisily through her teeth.
“Are you all right?” Kim asked.
She snorted. “Go back downstairs, there’s a good boy. Play with your little cousin.”
* * *
Downstairs, Douglas, Lionel and Lena were setting up a game of Monopoly. Kim settled with his book in the armchair where Ninna had slept, half-listening to Douglas and Lionel debating London property prices and the wisdom or otherwise of erecting hotels in boroughs where gentrification had proved an expensive experiment. Lionel had a lot to say about the latter, beginning and ending with a history lesson that involved, for some dark reason, Jack the Ripper. Before long, the talk turned to Ninna’s house in Docklands.
“Must be worth well over three million by now,” Lionel said.
“The way she’s run it into the ground?” Douglas shook his head. “It’ll need to be torn down and rebuilt. How she affords to heat it in that condition, I’ve no idea.”
“Well, there’s money. Of course there is. We’ve always known that.”
“If Gran is rich,” Lena rolled the dice, “why doesn’t she give us better Christmas presents? That nasty old recorder didn’t even look new…”
It wasn’t a recorder but a pungi, used for charming snakes. Ninna had put a lot of thought into her gifts. An elaborate set of brushes for Lionel’s thinning hair. For Jonas, who was barely awake during lunch and who’d snored loudly in church, an alarm clock. Douglas was presented with a very large and ornate silver spoon which on closer examination proved to be silver-plated. Kim’s gift, which Ninna had insisted he unwrap in the camp bed before they went down to breakfast, was a pair of field binoculars. “Keep those to yourself, kiddo.”
The game of Monopoly ended in a bad-tempered property crash north of Mayfair. Lena was left to pick up the pieces knocked to the floor by Lionel, while their father stood blinking down at Kim in the armchair as if he couldn’t remember who he was or why he’d been let into the house.
“Having a nice Christmas, are you?” he enquired sourly.
“Yes thank you.”
“I’ll bet you are.” Lionel gave the carpet a savage kick.
Shortly after that, Kim took himself upstairs to check on Ninna. When he returned, he was pale enough to make all three of them look at him in surprise.
“She’s not breathing. I think she’s dead.”
Lionel’s mouth hung open. Douglas climbed to his feet, snapping at his son, “Call an ambulance, will you?”
Kim followed him up the stairs. From the landing he stood watching as Douglas hovered in the doorway, peering in at Ninna lying stiffly on the bed.
Kim thought of the magpie bowing in the tree and he gave a little bow of his own, in honour of the fierce old lady who’d taken him into her home.
The paramedics came very quickly in response to Lionel’s phone call. Two of them climbed the stairs to the doorway where Douglas was standing with a nauseated look on his face. A third took his arm and led him back downstairs to the kitchen, where she asked questions and offered to make a cup of tea.
“I’ll make it,” Kim said.
In due course, the paramedics came down to break the sad news that Ninna had suffered a fatal heart attack. “In her sleep, by the look of it. She won’t have suffered.”
As the house was so small and since Douglas was a funny colour, the kindest of the paramedics suggested they stepped outside while the police came to take Ninna’s body on behalf of the coroner. When Kim pulled on his coat the others did the same, even Jonas who’d been shaken awake by his father. They walked in a group to the cathedral, where Douglas told them to light candles and where they sat in prayer for a time. Back at the house, Douglas spoke to the police, answering any questions they had before leaving the family alone.
* * *
Kim climbed the stairs to look at the empty bed where Ninna had slept for the last time.
“You’ll need to change the bedding,” Lena said. “If you’re thinking of sleeping there.” She reached for Ninna’s handbag, smoothing the leather. “Is this crocodile…?” She opened the bag, stirring at the contents before snapping it shut. She must’ve caught her fingers in the clasp because she gave a strange little cry of pain and sucked at her injured hand. “I guess you’re an orphan again now. Back to the children’s home for you. What’s the number for your social worker? Dad will want to know.”
“I don’t have it here. It’s in London. In Ninna’s house.”
“Our house,” Lena said. “Don’t you mean?”
* * *
Kim had expected the evening to be sombre. He was surprised when Lionel brought out a bottle of champagne, popping the cork violently into the fireplace. “Let’s toast her…!”
Kim stayed in the background, thinking about red-billed oxpeckers. When it was time for him and Lena to go to bed, he climbed the stairs to the room where two people, Lena reminded him, had now died. “Aren’t you afraid to sleep in there?”
“Where else would I sleep?” Kim asked.
Lena didn’t have an answer to that.
He brushed his teeth, washed his face and changed into his pyjamas. Then he sat for a while cross-legged on the camp bed, learning how his new binoculars worked and reading The RSPB British Handbook of Birds.
Out of nowhere, he heard Ninna’s voice ask, “Seen any vultures lately?” and imagined he heard a hissing grunt from downstairs.
“That’s a turkey vulture,” Ninna’s voice continued. “More than one, by the sound of it. What do we call that, a group of vultures?”
“A volt,” he replied promptly, “or a committee. If they’re feeding, we call it a wake.”
The boy is a book.
“And what do they like to feed on?”
“Roadkill. White-tailed deer or carrion. They can digest toxins that would kill most scavengers. You can dissolve a shovel in their stomach acid.”
“A volt of vultures…”
“Or a kettle, if they’re in flight.”
“I should like to see that.” Ninna’s voice was sly in his head. “A kettle of vultures.”
Kim closed his book and uncurled himself from the bed. He padded to the top of the stairs in his pyjamas, standing a moment before he started to scream.
Lionel was the first to come, elbows working like wings. “What…? What’s happened?”
Douglas was behind him, wearing the red paper crown from a cracker, a glass of champagne in one hand. Kim stopped screaming to stare at him. Douglas scraped the crown from his head and hid the glass behind his back. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s Ninna.” Kim pointed towards the bedroom. “She’s in there.”
“She’s not,” Lionel said. “They took her away. She’s with the coroner.”
Kim pointed mutely in the direction of the room where two people had died. He stood back when Lionel marched past to peer inside. Douglas stayed back. From the foot of the stairs, Kim saw Jonas blinking owlishly.
“There’s no one in there.” Lionel fixed Kim with a stare. “You’re imagining things.”
“Seeing things,” Lena said. “Ghosts.”
“She spoke to me,” Kim insisted.
“What did she say?”
“She asked me if I’d seen any vultures lately.”
Douglas made a strangled sound of outrage.
Lionel thinned his lips. “What did you say?”
“Vultures. She knows I like birds.”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“What’s funny about that?” Kim asked, perplexed.
“Go to bed. We’ll be calling your social worker in the morning.”
“She won’t be working on Boxing Day, but thank you.”
Kim went into the bedroom, closing the door behind him.
He waited until midnight before stepping onto the landing to scream a second time. Lionel and Douglas were a lot more inebriated by midnight, and a great deal jollier, at least until Kim disturbed their celebrations.
“He’s seen her again,” Lena said from the other end of the landing. “Gran. He’s going to be seeing her all night.”
She was right. In the end, Kim was told to sleep on the sofa in the sitting room. Lionel had to clear two empty bottles of champagne out of the way to make room for him. Everyone, Kim thought sadly, seemed a lot happier now Ninna was gone.
* * *
The next morning, he made himself a breakfast from the leftovers in the fridge before going upstairs to wash and dress. He packed Ninna’s things into her overnight bag, and his own into the rucksack. Christmas was over. He hung the binoculars around his neck and left the house, walking until he found a park where he spotted a woodpecker, two pigeons and a murder of crows.
Back at the house, Douglas snapped at him for going off without telling anyone, but he was hungover so Kim didn’t take much notice. He considered saying there was a train to London later that day which he wanted to be on, but decided it was probably best just to get on the train without waiting for permission. This plan was thwarted by Lionel’s decision that he and Douglas take Kim to London in their car. Kim suspected they wanted to value Ninna’s house and its contents, but he kept his peace. Whatever happened next was none of his business.
The car journey passed smoothly since the roads were clear. Lena sat beside Kim in the back while Lionel navigated from the passenger seat for Douglas, who drove. Jonas had stayed in bed in Salisbury. In Docklands, parking proved tricky but eventually a space was secured and the four of them proceeded on foot to the front door of Ninna’s big house.
“Who has a key?” Douglas eyed Kim. “Presumably you, since you packed her things.”
Kim unpocketed the key and passed it across, standing back as Ninna’s son and grandson entered the house. Lena followed Kim, her head cocked to one side.
The hallway looked the same. As did the sitting room with the sash windows Douglas said he deplored due to the draughts they let in. Back in Salisbury, he’d said he was prepared for the place to be in a terrible condition. He was not, however, prepared for the house party settled on the sofa. Or in the fireside armchair, whose occupant demanded to know what the hell Douglas thought he was playing at.
“Mother…!” Douglas crossed himself.
“Grandmother!” Lionel was an echo, aghast.
Only Lena said, “Hello, Gran, we missed you,” and walked to where Ninna was sitting to plant a dutiful kiss on her cheek.
Ninna’s gaze was on Kim. “You brought the kettle here, then. Good boy.”
“What on earth is going on?” Douglas demanded of the policeman seated on the sofa whom he’d last seen taking Ninna’s corpse away to the coroner.
The policeman took out his pipe, shaped like a trumpet, and sucked on it pensively. Of the two paramedics who’d confirmed Ninna’s death in Salisbury, one rose to her feet and offered to make tea while the other stayed on the sofa.
“But I phoned for the ambulance myself!” Lionel insisted.
“You did,” Ninna agreed. “Immediately after which my friends here, who were keeping a close eye on things, called 999 to cancel it, explaining you’d made a mistake and no ambulance was needed.”
Kim thought of the poor ticket inspector on the train who, having dealt with Ninna’s first-class fraud, was confronted by this acting troupe who’d fallen in with them on the last leg of the journey and who, it turned out, were very keen to be hired for special occasions such as the unmasking of sycophants at Christmas. Then he thought of the way in which Ninna had hired him from the children’s home to act as her eyes and ears in Salisbury. He thought of floods, and overcrowded rooms, and books on birds that were left by his bedside.
“What a foul trick to play!” Douglas paced the room.
“Disgusting,” Lionel added.
“So neither of you has a tape measure in his pocket?” Ninna popped a chocolate in her mouth. “Or the phone number for a local estate agent?”
Lionel, red-faced, put a hand over his jacket pocket defensively.
Douglas repeated, “What a foul trick! And on Christmas Day!”
“When else do we all gather together?”
“Pretending to be dead…!”
“I imagine it gave you an excuse to break open the champagne. Or were you too busy searching for my last will and testament? Which I’ll be changing, incidentally, just as soon as my solicitor’s office opens next week.” Ninna patted the arm of her chair. “Kim, dear, come and tell me exactly what these vultures had to say about my tragic demise.”
Kim, ever-obedient, did as she asked. It wasn’t until later, when it was just the two of them in the house, that he said, “The Egyptian plover bird has a very special relationship with the crocodile. He eats the bits of food that get stuck in the crocodile’s teeth.”
“Does he now?” Ninna’s expression was opaque.
“Because of this, they live together very happily.” He began to peel an orange. “Not just at Christmas.”
“Is that for me?”
“Of course.” He handed her the orange.
“Kim Marley,” she said. “Has a ring to it.”
“Like a bellbird. Or a dark-eyed junco. They sound like a telephone ringing.”
“Save it for Salisbury, child.”
“Will we be going back there?”
“I expect so,” Ninna said. “Where would the fun be in staying away?”