crapping plum pudding, sir, excuse my Klatchian.’
REALLY? HOW DO YOU KNOW ALL THIS?
‘I was young once, sir. Hung up my stocking like a good boy every year. For to get it
fil ed with toys, just like you’re doing. Mind you, in
those days basical y it was sausages and black puddings if you were lucky. But you
always got a pink sugar piglet in the toe. It wasn’t a good Hogswatch unless you’d
eaten so much you were sick as a pig, master.’
Death looked at the sacks.
It was a strange but demonstrable fact that the sacks of toys carried by the
Hogfather, no matter what they real y contained, always appeared to have sticking out
of the top a teddy bear, a toy soldier in the kind of colourful uniform that would stand out in a disco, a drum and a red-and-white candy cane. The actual contents always
turned out to be something a bit garish and costing $5.99.
Death had investigated one or two. There had been a Real Agatean Ninja, for
example, with Fearsome Death Grip, and a Captain Carrot One-Man Night Watch with
a complete wardrobe of toy weapons, each of which cost as much as the original
wooden dol in the first place.
Mind you, the stuff for the girls was just as depressing. It seemed to be nearly al
horses. Most of them were grinning. Horses, Death felt, shouldn’t grin- Any horse that
was grinning was planning something.
He sighed again.
Then there was this business of deciding who’d been naughty or nice. He’d never
had to think about that sort of thing before. Naughty or nice, it was ultimately al the
same.
Stil , it had to be done right. Otherwise it wouldn’t work.
The pigs pul ed up alongside another chimney.
‘Here we are, here we are,’ said Albert. ‘James Riddle, aged eight.’
HAH, YES. HE ACTUALLY SAYS IN HIS LETTER, ‘I BET YOU DON’T EXIST ‘COS
EVERYONE KNOWS ITS YORE PARENTS.’ OH YES, said Death, with what almost
sounded like sarcasm, I’M SURE HIS PARENTS ARE JUST IMPATIENT TO BANG
THEIR ELBOWS IN TWELVE FEET OF NARROW UNSWEPT CHIMNEY, I DON’T
THINK. I SHALL TREAD EXTRA SOOT INTO HIS CARPET.
‘Right, sir. Good thinking. Speaking of which – down you go, sir.’
HOW ABOUT IF I DON’T GIVE HIM ANYTHING AS A PUNISHMENT FOR NOT
BELIEVING?
‘Yeah, but what’s that going to prove?’
Death sighed. I SUPPOSE YOU’RE RIGHT.
‘Did you check the list?’
YES. TWICE. ARE YOU SURE THAT’S ENOUGH?
‘Definitely.’
COULDN’T REALLY MAKE HEAD OR TAIL OF IT, TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH.
HOW CAN I TELL IF HE’S BEEN NAUGHTY OR NICE, FOR EXAMPLE?
‘Oh, wel … I don’t know … Has he hung his clothes up, that sort of thing. ‘
AND IF HE HAS BEEN GOOD I MAY GIVE HIM THIS KLATCHIAN WAR CHARIOT
WITH REAL SPINNING SWORD BLADES?
‘That’s right.’
AND IF HE’S BEEN BAD?
Albert scratched his head. ‘When I was a lad, you got a bag of bones. ‘s’mazing how
kids got better behaved towards the end of the year.’
OH DEAR. AND NOW?
Albert held a package up to his ear and rustled it. ‘Sounds like socks.’
SOCKS.
‘Could be a wool y vest.’
SERVE HIM RIGHT, IF I MAY VENTURE TO EXPRESS AN OPINION…
Albert: looked across the snowy rooftops and sighed. This wasn’t right. He was
helping because, wel , Death was his master and that’s al there was to it, and if the
master had a heart it would be in the right place. But…
‘Are you sure we ought to be doing this, master?’
Death stopped, halfway out of the chimney.
CAN YOU THINK OF A BETTER ALTERNATIVE, ALBERT?
And that was it. Albert couldn’t.
Someone had to do it.
There were bears on the street again.
Susan ignored them and didn’t even make a point of not treading on the cracks.
They just stood around, looking a bit puzzled and slightly transparent, visible only to
children and Susan. News like Susan gets around. The bears had heard about the
poker. Nuts and berries, their expressions seemed to say. That’s
what we’re here for. Big sharp teeth? What big shar— Oh, these big sharp teeth?
They’re just for, er, cracking nuts. And some of these berries can be real y vicious.
The city’s clocks were striking six when she got back to the house. She was al owed
her own key. It wasn’t as if she was a servant, exactly.
You couldn’t be a duchess and a servant. But it was al right to be a governess. It
was understood that it wasn’t exactly what you were, it was merely a way of passing
the time until you did what every girl, or gel, was supposed to do in life, i.e., marry
some man. It was understood that you were playing.
The parents were in awe of her. She was the daughter of a duke whereas Mr Gaiter
was a man to be reckoned with in the wholesale boots and shoes business. Mrs Gaiter
was bucking for a transfer into the Upper Classes, which she currently hoped to
achieve by reading books on etiquette. She treated Susan with the kind of worried
deference she thought was due to anyone who’d known the difference between a
serviette and a napkin from birth.
Susan had never before come across the idea that you could rise in Society by, as it
were, gaining marks, especial y since such noblemen as she’d met in her father’s
house had used neither serviette nor napkin but a state of mind, which was ‘Drop it on
the floor, the dogs’l eat it.’
When Mrs Gaiter had tremulously asked her how one addressed the second cousin
of a queen,
Susan had replied without thinking, ‘We cal ed him Jamie, usual y,’ and Mrs Gaiter
had had to go and have a headache in her room.
Mr Gaiter just nodded when he met her in a passage and never said very much to
her. He was pretty sure he knew where he stood in boots and shoes and that was that.
Gawain and Twyla, who’d been named by people who apparently loved them, had
been put to bed by the time Susan got in, at their own insistence. It’s a widely held
belief at a certain age that going to bed early makes tomorrow come faster.
She went to tidy up the schoolroom and get things ready for the morning, and began
to pick up the things the children had left lying around. Then something tapped at a
window pane.
She peered out at the darkness, and then opened the window. A drift of snow fel
down outside.
In the summer the window opened into the branches of a cherry tree. In the winter
dark, they were little grey fines where the snow had settled on them.
‘Who’s that?’ said Susan.
Something hopped through the frozen branches.
‘Tweet tweet tweet, would you believe?’ said the raven.
‘Not you again?’
‘You wanted maybe some dear little robin? Listen, your grand-‘
‘Go away! ‘
Susan slammed the window and pul ed the curtains across. She put her back to
them, to make sure, and tried to concentrate on the room. It helped to think about …
normal things.
There was the Hogswatch tree, a rather smal er version of the grand one in the hal .
She’d helped the children to make paper decorations for it. Yes. Think about that.
There were the paperchains. There were the bits of hol y, thrown out from the main
rooms for not having enough berries on them, and now given fake model ing clay
berries and stuck in anyhow on shelves and behind pictures.
There were two stockings hanging from the mantelpiece of the smal schoolroom
grate. There were Twyla’s paintings, al blobby blue skies and violently green grass
and red houses with four square windows. There were …
Normal things …
She straightened up and stared at them, her fingernails beating a thoughtful tattoo on
a wooden pencil case.
The door was pushed open. It revealed the tousled shape of Twyla, hanging onto the
doorknob with one hand.
‘Susan, there’s a monster under my bed again . . .’
The click of Susan’s fingernails stopped.
‘. . . I can hear it moving about . . .’
Susan sighed and turned towards the child.
‘Al right, Twyla. I’l be along directly.’
The girl nodded and went back to her room, leaping into bed from a distance as a
precaution against claws.
There was a metal ic tzing as Susan withdrew the poker from the little brass stand it
shared with the tongs and the coal shovel.
She sighed. Normality was what you made it.
She went into the children’s bedroom and leaned over as if to tuck Twyla up. Then
her hand darted down and under the bed. She grabbed a handful of hair. She pul ed.
The bogeyman came out like a cork but before it could get its balance it found itself