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.
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.
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 who 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 end?’
‘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.