What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch (e book reader free TXT) 📗

thinking that this is like a video game when you get to the limits of the level. I’ve never liked those kind of games – I’ve always wanted to see what was on the other side of the wall.

I stride back into the living room and grab the hookah. It’s got some heft. It also gets the attention of the kids pretending to use it.

‘Hey!’ says Guns N’ Roses. ‘That’s an antique.’

‘Don’t mind me,’ I say, and swing it at the front window.

I swear it smashes. I feel the impact run up my arms, hear the deep bell sound of breaking glass, see the shards glittering red in the light from the lamp, falling out into the night.

And then it’s gone, and the hookah is back where it was. All I have is a tingling numbness in my palms and a fading memory of a breaking window. The kids have gone back to ignoring me.

‘That’s cool, man,’ says Guns N’ Roses, and takes a hit from the hookah.

It was totally cold and empty when I picked it up, but now it’s like I’ve got two videos superimposed over each other. One with an empty hookah, and one where it’s full and bubbling.

As I back away, the bubbling hookah fades.

I back all the way into the dining room/kitchenette, where Indigo is hiding under a table. I sit down on a chair where I can keep an eye on the kids in the front room. Indigo jumps into my lap and presses her muzzle against my chest – she’s trembling. I stroke her behind her ears to calm her down.

I pull my phone from my rucksack, but however hard I mash the power button it won’t turn on. When I shake the phone by my ear it makes a rattling sound – I won’t be calling for help. Assuming I could get bars in the first place.

‘We can’t get outside the house,’ I say.

‘There is nothing outside,’ says Indigo.

I look out the kitchen window. Past my reflection I can see a stretch of lawn lit by the lights from the windows above and the silhouette of the wooden stairs that lead down from the ground floor. It looks like it’s really real.

‘It looks real,’ I say.

‘Not to me,’ says Indigo. ‘And I can’t hear anything outside – only silence. What if it’s Uncle Oboe?’

‘Who’s Uncle Oboe?’

Indigo trembles harder, so I put my other arm around her.

‘We don’t know what it is,’ she says. ‘It’s unknown, that’s why it’s Uncle.’

Uncle for Unknown, more old-style phonetic alphabet.21

‘Oboe stands for what?’

‘Opposition,’ says Indigo. She’s stopped trembling but is still pressing into me.

‘What does Uncle Oboe do?’ I ask.

‘Plots, kills foxes, twists things, insinuates and corrupts,’ says Indigo.

Which is bare unhelpful and we are definitely going to have a talk about this later, but first we have to get out of here. I get up, carefully put Indigo down, and just to be certain I swing the chair at the kitchen window.

This time, not even the memory of a smash.

Obviously I can’t get out of the granny flat. But Natali, Not Jan and Guns N’ Roses walked in, so perhaps I can walk out with them. We’ve done rushing in, and we’ve done breaking windows, so maybe it’s time we finesse this a bit.

‘I’m going to see if I can join their group,’ I tell Indigo. ‘But whatever this is, I think it sucks you into the game, right? I need to get close enough to follow them, but not get sucked all the way in. Right?’

There is a pause.

‘Right?’

‘Roger,’ says Indigo. ‘So what do you want me to do?’

‘You follow me up, and if I don’t say the safe word you bite me again.’

I sidle up to the kids, and this time I can actually feel it, a sort of drag, like when the wind is behind you. As I get closer, the room gets darker and starts to smell like the inside of a lift after the local ganja growers have been using it.

‘Wagwan, fam,’ I say. ‘What you saying?’22

*

Helena’s mum’s lodger is just the coolest. He’s got like this Turkish pipe with water in it, and lets us smoke pot providing we suck on some Polos before we go upstairs. My mum smelt it on me once but I told her that it was patchouli oil. Which was half true since Helena’s mum’s lodger drenches himself in the stuff. And, anyway, never mind the pot. If my mum knew about Helena and me, then she’d really lose her rag. She definitely wouldn’t like the idea of me having a something . . . a somebody . . . a girl as a very close friend. Especially now we’re sharing digs in Cambridge. Which part of me doesn’t understand. But the me that is still Abigail Kamara knows a certified gay couple when I’m play-acting as part of one. Even if whoever is organising this game doesn’t seem to know what lesbians are – or straights, either. That’s something to think about. But first I’ve got to get us upstairs.

‘I’ve got the munchies,’ I say. ‘Can we get some snacks?’

20 When I questioned her as to how she came to know what a hookah looked like, Abigail informed me, somewhat tartly, that one appears in the Disney cartoon Alice in Wonderland. That, as they say, is me told.

21 I remember this version of the phonetic alphabet very well. It was still in use when I did my National Service. No doubt Thomas used it as well, during the war, and I can only assume that Abigail gained her knowledge of it from him. Where on earth the foxes learnt it, or why they adopted it for their own use, I dare not even speculate.

22 Hello, friends, what are you doing?

25

Refugees

I was running for the front door when suddenly some total wasteman attached a bowling ball to my belly button.

*

Julias says that obviously babies are like buses, you wait years in vain for one and then two come