Pictures of my sister (2)

 The tea was strange.  I didn’t like the way it dried my tongue when I swallowed and it had a powerful taste that I didn’t recognise.  My uncle watched my face, and then poured a little milk in, clouding it.  He stirred it and I tasted again, and we repeated this until I nodded.  The taste of the tea was hard to identify now and I definitely preferred the taste of the milk, which was dominant, but there was something about this that was getting better as I sipped.

“What is she drinking?”  My aunt’s voice carried well; when she wanted attention in a shop or a crowded hall, she got it.  It was a pleasant voice, usually, but when she was annoyed it went up in pitch slightly and seemed to cut through other sounds a little more easily.  This morning she didn’t sound annoyed, but there was definitely a note of disapproval.

“Milky tea,” said my uncle.  He shrugged.  “More milk than tea, I’d say, but she has to start sometime.”

My aunt pursed her lips but her eyes didn’t harden and I knew she wasn’t really annoyed.  “I’m not sure anyone needs to start drinking tea,” she said, but her voice had lost its edge.  “But I suppose if it means we can make a pot of tea without adding other drinks as well it saves time.”

My aunt liked to save time, along with lots of other things.  That thought made me wonder: were the missing pictures saved somewhere else too?

“We shall go to the department store today,” said my aunt, waving a hand at the teapot.  My uncle nodded and poured her a cup of tea, listening as she detailed the things she wanted to buy.  I sipped my tea as well, listening carefully.  While my aunt would never have dreamed of asking me to remember anything for her — ordering my uncle to was fine, but admitting she couldn’t do it herself would have been like announcing she was a horse — she did occasionally ask me if I’d been listening.  If I couldn’t answer her questions, I got a lecture on listening to adults which, oddly enough, was so rehearsed that I could practically repeat it myself.

“When we come back, we shall attend to the garden,” she finished.  Then she looked at me.  “You must have homework.”

I nodded, though it was less a question than an insistence.  “Good.  You shall do that then, and I shall look over it afterwards.”  I nodded again, but inwardly I cringed.  My aunt found more faults with my homework than my teachers did.

The department store trip was both tiring and boring.  Though the shop housed many things, often new and exciting, my aunt only had time and thoughts for the things she was buying and disliked ‘window shopping’ as she phrased it.  So my uncle and I trudged after her, occasionally pausing when we thought we weren’t observed to look at other things and then hurrying after my aunt to try and avoid being told not to dawdle, lollygaggle, or be accused of browsing.  I wasn’t sure why browsing was such a sin, but the stern look on my aunt’s face convinced me that it was problematic at least.  The car journey back was warm and the radio was turned on and I was allowed to listen to music.  My aunt occasionally humphed at things, but my uncle seemed to have more say in matters in the car and the radio was left alone.  I was happy; music was fun and made me feel cheerful and I didn’t see why my aunt might not like some of it.

Back at home, when the purchases had been carefully unwrapped and put away and tea had been poured and drunk (and I had slightly less milk in mine this time, with a quiet wink from my uncle and I thought I might be starting to like it more), my aunt led the way into the garden and my uncle strolled behind her whistling and I made my way upstairs to my bedroom and my schoolbooks.

I stopped on the first landing.  My room was on the second floor with a tiny, chilly bathroom next to it that I only used for going to the toilet.  The first floor had my uncle and aunt’s bedroom, the main bathroom that was bigger and warmer and had the fluffy, tassled bathmats that I loved standing on and wiggling my toes in, and the room that my uncle called his study.  The door was usually slightly ajar, by a couple of centimetres, but rarely closed unless my uncle was in there.  I’d peeked inside of a few occasions but the room was boring: there was a bookcase in one corner, a desk and two chairs, some pictures on the walls and a window and that was pretty much it.  But now I hesitated, remembering my thought from earlier: had my aunt saved the pictures from the photo album somewhere in the study?

I pushed the door gently.  I had seen my aunt and uncle both go outside and still I couldn’t quite get away from the feeling that one of them had someone sneaked back inside and was waiting in the study for me to catch me.  The door swung silently back and revealed the empty room.  I looked out of the window, but the study was at the front of the house and the garden at the back, so there was nothing much to see but the narrow strip of grass that made up the front lawn, the hedge that shielded it from the road, and the road beyond.  The room was much as I’d remembered it; the bookcase was there and the desk; the chairs had been pushed against the wall and there were papers on the desk.  I looked at them quickly, my heart pounding in my chest as I worried that my aunt or uncle might come up the stairs at any time for something they’d forgotten and they would find me there, but they weren’t pictures.  They had words and numbers and were probably bills, but to me they meant nothing.

I looked at the bookcase, wondering what my aunt might have saved the pictures in.  There were no photo-albums that I could see, and the books were all serious-looking: they were big, heavy and often had gold lettering on the spines.  The top two shelves were mostly full, but the bottom two held no books at all.  One was empty, and the bottom shelf had a couple of white cardboard boxes sitting on it.  One was open and I could see a scattering of paperclips, some string, a short metal ruler and other office-stationery type things and the other had a cardboard lid that closed it.

I was so nervous that I had to tiptoe to the stairs and peer over the bannister, listening as hard as I could.  The house was quiet and I thought that my aunt and uncle were still out in the garden.  I tiptoed back, holding my breath, and gently tugged on the lid of the box.  It slipped upwards easily — it was a little too large — and inside was a stack of paper.  I picked it out and looked at it, shuffling it in my hands.  Much of it seemed to be letters in envelopes addressed to my aunt, but between two of them was something glossier and firmer: the missing pictures.

I stared at them, and then put everything back in the box and the lid back on, tiptoed out of the room and closed the door almost all the way, then ran upstairs to my room.  I got my books out and sat down in front of them and stared blindly at the page of English comprehension questions.  All I could see was the pictures of my parents holding two children: one that was me as a baby and an older girl I didn’t recognise at all.

Home for Christmas

The car took the corner far too fast for the ice-spotted road and the brake-lights glowed cherry-red in the deepening twilight as the driver stamped on the brakes and hauled on the steering wheel.  The wheels skidded sideways across the slick tarmac and the car's nose spun round until it was pointing back the way it was facing.  At the edge of the road the tarmac became frozen earth and crispy, frosted grass and the tyres grabbed a little traction at last.  The driver felt the change and switched pedals from the brake to the accelerator.  There was a screech of rubber, the car fish-tailed back and forth a little as it regained the road, and then it was off once more.  It carried on still too fast for the wintery conditions and nearly missed the turning half-way along the road, the brake-lights flaring again and the car riding up on the pavement and bouncing back down on to the road.  The turning led onto a long, wide road with large houses, and cars parked on both sides of the road.  The car barrelled down the white line in the middle of the road and executed a bootlegger's turn to pass between a black Bentley and a silver BMW and hurtle onto the gravel driveway that led to one of the houses.  The car decelerated smoothly, so much so that its gentle collision with the sea-green Ford Fiesta parked on one side of the drive was suspicious.  The Fiesta's alarm went off and the new car backed up a few centimetres: enough that the cars weren't touching, but not far enough for anyone driving the Fiesta to be able to extricate their car.  The driver killed the engine, and for a moment there was the crisp winter air, the start of a snowfall, and the insistent, repetitive blare of the Fiesta's alarm.  Then curtains twitched, lights went on, and people came out of the house.  Inspector Playfair sighed and opened his car door.  He was home for Christmas.

*

"You hit my car!"  Denise was Playfair's sister, a broad-shouldered woman with a classical beauty.  Dark, softly curling hair framed her face and her eyes smouldered with a mediterranean passion normally, but right now the fires had been stoked and they were blazing.  "You always hit my bloody car!  Why don't you look where you're going?"
"I didn't hit your car," said Playfair looking over the small group that had come outside.  There were more people clustered at the doorway.  "You say I hit your car every year, Denise.  It's like a tradition."
"It's not a bloody tradition!"  She was quivering with rage, full lips curled back in snarl, and her hand was jerking as though she wanted to slap Playfair but was restraining herself.  "Every year there's a new ding after I come here.  Every year!"
"You should drive more carefully," said Playfair with a broad smile.  He ignored Denise as she balled her hand up and punched her other palm forcefully and looked at the man stood next to her.  He came up to shoulder-height on Denise and had the wiry build of a long-distance runner.  His face wasn't quite handsome: it was too thin for that, and the bones jutted a little too angularly.  "Who are you?"
The man stuck his hand out and Playfair looked at it until the man retracted it.  "Steve," he said.  "I married Denise in June.  You were invited to the wedding, I think?"
"And you never came," said Denise nastily.  She punched her palm again.  "I had a special place set for you, and a parking space nowhere near my car.  I did everything."
"I was busy," said Playfair.  "I sent flowers didn't I?"
"A flower.  One flower!  You sent one bloody flower to your own sister's wedding!"
"Was it a nice one?"  Playfair opened the back door of his car, and picked up a leather animal carry case from the back seat.
"Shouldn't you know?" asked Steve, stepping in before Denise could start swinging.  "You sent it, after all."
"I asked around the office for someone who knew about weddings and got them to send something," said Playfair closing the car-door.  "I think it was one of the SOCOs.  Been married six times, so I figured he'd know what was right."  He set the carry-case down on the ground and looked for the zips that allowed it to open.  "He said he'd written a card to go with it."
"Best of luck next time! That's what it said!" Denise's scream turned into a howl.  "Steve's parents spent the next three weeks asking about it.  We played scrabble one evening and all the words they played were accusations!"
"I think you were reading too much into that."  Steve laid a hand on Denise's arm and she shrugged him off viciously.  He took a step back.  On the ground Playfair opened the carry-case door and a small dog, a Chihuahua the colour of a Doberman Pinscher, stepped out and yawned.
"Oh, you have a dog!"
There were muffled screams from the doorway and the people there disappeared inside.  The door slammed, and the sounds of it locking were audible.
"That's not Calamity," said Denise, her voice suddenly calm.
"Calamity's on duty," said Playfair.  "This is Ray."
"You have a dog called Calamity?"  Steve bent down to pat Ray, who growled without looking at him.  Steve hesitated.
"Calamity Jane," said Playfair.  "She's named for my favourite Crimean nurse."
Steve looked puzzled.  "But she wasn–"
"What's Ray short for?" asked Denise.
"Razor," said Playfair.

*

The family – the extended family, Playfair thought – were gathered in the drawing room.  Ray was lying in front of the fireplace, his paws extended and his belly exposed to the heat of the flames.  His eyes were half-closed; anyone coming near him or the fire started him growling, warning them that he wasn't going to tolerate being disturbed.  Playfair's mother's cat, a white-and-brown cushion-sized bundle of fluff was sitting on the window-ledge with ill-concealed hatred for the interloper.  She (her name was Suzie) licked her paws now and then but her eyes never left the chihuahua in front of the fire.
Further back in the room a tall Christmas tree, neatly decorated on one side (Playfair's mother never decorated the back of the tree, reasoning that no-one was going to see it), stood guard over brightly wrapped presents, and in front of it the adults sat at the dining table.  The children had been dispatched to the living room to watch Disney cartoons and eat tinned peaches from plastic dishes.  A scrabble board was laid out on the table, and the Dungeons and Dragons books were neatly stacked nearby, waiting for the evening adventure.
"Divorcee," said Playfair's mother, setting down all her tiles.
"Not you too!" yelled Denise.  Colour rose in her cheeks and she stood up.  Steve stood up immediately too, putting his arm around her shoulders.
"It's just a game," he said.  He leaned into her, nuzzling her shoulder as he couldn't reach her neck.  "Have... have a mince pie."
"Had to arrest a couple of bakers for poisoning mince pies this year," said Playfair.  He was sat in an armchair contemplating the crossword.  "They were putting mercury in them."
Denise looked at the plate of mince pies and paled.  She sat back down.
"Not those dear," said Playfair's mother.  "Cook makes them herself from an old recipe.  I think it was your great-grandmother's.  I'm not sure how long we'll be able to keep making them though, some of the ingredients aren't really produced any more."
"Toyboy," said Playfair's father, setting his tiles down.  "And I think that's all the Y's used up now."
"There's still a blank out there, dear," said his wife.  Denise stayed silent, though her knuckles whitened as she clenched her fists.  Steve put his arm around her shoulders and the plate of mince pies in front of her.  They were lightly dusted with icing sugar and were still warm.  The aroma of brandy, dried fruit, and shortcrust pastry tickled her nose and coerced a smile from her.
"Are you finished with the paper yet, Playfair?" said Aunt Brenda.  "I want to see how Spurs have done in the run up to Christmas."
"He hasn't touched the crossword!"  Aunt Tabitha leaned over and poked the paper with a bony finger: she was wearing her TA uniform and looked cross because she had training on the 26th.  "I thought you said you were going to solve it."
"I solved it –" Playfair checked the clock on the mantlepiece – "eight minutes ago, Tabby.  I'll write the answers in tomorrow in case any of you want to give it a go."
"Pass it over then, there's a love," said Brenda holding her hand out.  "Tabby's just jealous because learning to read is on next year's syllabus."
"Innocent," said Denise laying tiles on the scrabble board.
"Proper noun," said her father.  "Name of a Pope."
There was laughter around the table.  "Cuckold," said Steve, putting his tiles down.  "I'm so sorry, Denise, it's the letters I had."  There was the soft crumpled sound of a mince pie hitting a man squarely between the eyes and Denise stood up again and stalked out of the room.
"New record," said Playfair, checking the clock.  "Normally she only starts sulking after the first dragon eats her character."
"We've got a new dragon this year," said Brenda looking up from the paper.  "It'll be a shame if she misses it."
"You children are always squabbling," said Playfair's mother.  "I'll go and talk to her. Sit down Steve, there's a good chap.  This is a woman thing."
"Right."  Steve looked bemused.  "Do we carry on without her?"
"No," said Playfair's father.  "Game's over: Lindsey won, I came second and Denise beat you by 133 points.  You want to practice, son."
"Oh," said Steve.

*

"Why does everyone call you Playfair?" asked Steve.  "That's your surname.  Surely you have a first name?"
Ray growled like a motorbike revving before doing a wheelie.

*

"Breakfast is served at 5:30," said Playfair's mother.  "Cook will have been up all night and probably drinking heavily, so make sure you're at the table on time.  We will open presents at 6:15 and then apologise to each other at 6:30."
Steve looked around at the others; the wreckage of the Dungeons and Dragons game spilled off the table and onto the carpet and there were far more empty winebottles than he could remember drinking from.  The clock on the mantlepiece said it was 2:30 already, and he was sure he was drunk.
"Ap..apo...apologise?" he managed.
"Oh god yes," said Denise.  She slipped off her chair and giggled into the carpet.  "Oh god yes."

The family that slays together

The family that slays together

The family that slays together stays together.  When I look back over the last couple of weeks now, it's clear that that wretched little homily started it all off.  And worse than that, I still think that grandmother copied it wrong when she was stitching it on to all the cushions in the living room.
Her living room existed in a perpetual semi-twilight: the curtains were always half-drawn in front of heavy grey pre-war nets that contained the dried carcasses of incautious flies and wasps.  The carpet was heavy but hadn't been cleaned in the last fifty years, so instead of the fibers giving way beneath your feet as you walked they resisted and pushed back and it was almost like walking on concrete.  There were pictures on the walls that grandmother told us were long-dead relatives, but when I studied art-history at school I recognized most of them.  I suppose it's like those people who buy picture frames and leave the default picture of a random stranger in them, only done a hundred years earlier.  Either that or I've got relatives who were a lot more distinguished than anyone in the family has become since.  The wallpaper was probably flock once, but now I suspected that any fuzziness to the touch was just mould growing quietly in the dark.
On the couch were cushions; far too many for any one couch to hold, and really far too many for any sane person to put in a single room.  But grandmother had hand-stuffed and sewn each one, and we'd learned to identify them because they weren't all equal.  Sure, they were all embroidered with the same homily: "the family that slays together stays together" that grandmother said she'd taken from the Sunday supplements back when she still got a Sunday newspaper.  But some were stuffed with popcorn, some with cotton wool, some with actual cushion stuffing and a couple were stuffed with old newspapers.  They ranged from uncomfortable to disturbing (we think there were things living in the cushions eating the popcorn), and they weren't even the worst part about that room.
But I digress.  On Tuesday morning mum told dad that she wanted a divorce over breakfast.  Dad was eating kedgeree and he just nodded and seemed to take it quite well.  I was trying to boil tomatoes and it just wasn't working, and I was more upset than either of them seemed to be.
"Any particular reason?" asked Dad, poking at a slice of hard-boiled egg.
"It's June," said Mum and Dad just harrumphed as though that made sense, and I was left wondering if we were talking about the month or a person.
On Wednesday morning Mum told Dad that she wanted to take the dog and didn't want custody of Harvey, my little brother.  That's what started it.  As soon as she left (Mum left the house every morning and I only realised that day that I had no idea where she went or what she did or how long she was gone for) Dad muttered that wretched homily and packed us all into the car.  Dog included.
You'll have read a lot about what happened after that in the newspapers, the True Crime magazines and the Whiston Evening Post (Special Edition) so I'll summarise a little.  We ended up at the Little Dorrit Primary School where parents with enough money to not want to care about their children's social disorders sent their children and Dad took a school of about two hundred children hostage.
"I have demands!" he emailed to the police department, who'd turned up en masse outside the school only when the parents had made their views on the matter clear.  I was expecting him to demand custody of the dog, or an explanation of who June was, but no.  At the time I was mystified, but now I realise that Dad needed to make impossible demands in order to justify killing people, because... the family that slays together stays together.
"Four hundred bottles of Ukrainian dill-pickled gherkins; the bones of Thomas Bayes, numbered and labelled for articulation and assembly; the legal right to urinate in the lift of every London hotel; a random selection of books from the Bodleian library to be used as toilet paper..." is how his list began, and I was astounded that he could even think of these things, let alone ask for them as though it were the most natural thing in the world.  It carried on for another four pages though, with the second-to-last page containing things he felt were blasphemous in one regard or another.  I found myself having to google several different gods while I was reading the list to understand how they were blasphemous, and at the end of it I was impressed and educated.
"The gherkins might be a problem," came back the email from the police and Dad grinned.
"I thought so," he said.  "The rest of the list was really just insurance."
He found a collection of party bags in a cupboard in a classroom, the kind that they give out to children at the end of parties that typically contain a slice of Victoria Sponge with sickly icing and coconut sprinkles together with some cheap plastic toy, a thank-you note for attending and a handful of boiled sweets.
"Perfect," he said.  "Pick a child, and we'll begin."
All I'm willing to say about what happened next is this: people are very hard to cut up, no matter what the films make it look like; dogs do not make good assistants when attempting butchery; I don't believe it was Stockholm Syndrome that had the rest of the children helping us, I think there was something deeply wrong in that school to begin with; and a party bag isn't supposed to contain what we put in it and sent out to the police.
"We're going to burn you and the school to the ground," came back the email from the Police.  I didn't blame them.
Dad sent them another party bag, this one containing only teeth and bones.
You're all aware that the escalation continued for twenty-hours I suppose, but you won't know that when it got dark I sneaked away with the dog, crept through the cordon pretending I was a student from the school, and went home.  Mum was in having an orgy with a lot of the neighbours, so I went to bed without disturbing her and thanked my lucky stars I wasn't Harvey.
Mum got her divorce and burst into tears when the decree nici arrived.  When I asked her why she was crying, she explained that she felt that Dad's insane murder plan had been very romantic.
The dog and I left two days later to make a life of our own.

More bibliomancy

The butler had been moping ever since the stable-boy had left.  I’d been rather puzzled as to why I was paying for the employ of a stable-boy when I had no stables, so when he announced his desire to move on to a horse-farm I had congratulated him on his determination to pursue his career and offered him a month’s garden leave.  He accepted, looking suddenly happy, and that was the last I’d seen of him.  Judging by the butler’s ill-temper it was the last the butler had seen on him as well, but I was avoiding thinking about that and the implications.

It was beautiful outside, at least as far as I could tell by looking out of the window, and I had decided that a walk might be good for my health.  I was dressed to go; I had on my best walking coat and had located my grandfather’s swordstick and my father’s favourite huntsman’s hat and was pulling on a pair of boots that I didn’t recognise but appeared to be my size when I realised that I couldn’t possibly leave the house without some idea of what might befall me when I did.

I finished tying the bootlaces and then pulled a book down from the bookshelves.  I opened it without looking, jabbed a finger on to the page, and then looked to see what was written there:

She’d attended his funeral a year ago – seen his casket being lowered into the ground.

I mused for a moment that seeing a casket being lowered into the ground was no guarantee that anyone was in the casket, or that any body in there was the intended one, and then I tried to remember where the front-door was.  The house was so large, and I left my suite so infrequently, that it usually took a moment or two to remember where I was going.  Then the memory returned, I allowed myself a small chuckle of triumph, and I started off.

As I closed the front-door behind me I caught sight of the butler watching me from the upper landing window.  He still looked morose, perhaps even forlorn, and I wondered if I should buy him a pet of some kind.  I recall that my father had his butlers shot when they stopped being able to manage their day-to-day duties, but I had a feeling that times might have changed since then, and I wasn’t in the mood for entertaining the police and their enquiries.

There is a long, gravelled drive that leads out of the house and down to the main road and I was half way along that when the spire of the church hove into view.  I thought for a moment, and remembering the words from the book decided that I was probably intended to go and view a funeral today, so I clambered over the two-bar wooden fence that stopped cars randomly driving into the fields, and waded through knee-high grass in the direction of the spire.  It was tough going at first, but slowly the grass became lower and lower and the walking became easier, and then it turned into something that was neatly mowed and maintained and the churchyard was just across a low stone wall.

There was a funeral going on as I approached, with a large crowd of black-clad mourners gathered around a hole and two caskets, side-by-side on a large blue tarpaulin, presided over by the vicar who I recognised as the son of the man who had buried my father.  I managed to get over the wall, though it was harder work than the fence, and avoided falling over when I landed on some fresh flowers on a grave on the other side.  Some people in the mob… I mean, mourners, turned when they heard me swearing as I tried to keep my feet, but I ignored them.  There was a flash of pain on the vicar’s face and I wondered if he had his father’s problems of gout, vanity and avarice.

A woman broke away from the crowd and confronted me.

“This is a private funeral,” she said.  Her eyes were red and her lipstick appeared to have been put on in a moving vehicle in the dark.  She was old enough to be my sister, and she held her arm stiffly as though it had been broken and never set properly.

“This is private land,” I replied.

“It’s a church,” she said.  She still looked annoyed, but her tone had come down a notch as though she suspected I had something to say she wasn’t going to like.

“My church,” I said.  “I’m the landowner here.”

She looked like she was chewing a mouse as she tried to work out what she could say to that.

“My sons are both dead,” she said finally.  “We are burying them.  You may stay and watch if you wish.”

“Whose funeral were you at a year ago?” I asked, the bibliomantic words burning in my head now.  She’d been turning away, but now she turned back again.

“You know…?”

I nodded, though I had no idea what she was talking about.  Tears welled in her eyes.  “She said you never knew,” she said.  Her voice cracked and became a whisper.  “She said she was trying to protect you.”

“Who?” I prompted.  The vicar was staring over at us, clearly waiting for one or both of us to join the mob.

“Your mother,” she said, starting to sob.

Now that was interesting, since I was under the impression that father had shot mother as well when she stopped being able to produce children.