The Haunting of Abney Heights by Cat Thomas

Author:Cat Thomas [Thomas, Cat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781916025141
Publisher: Gwillion Press
Published: 2022-10-02T23:00:00+00:00

18

OFFBRAND

‘You promise I won’t end up buying this, Terry?’ I look up from the app and catch Rowan and Uzi exchanging an indulgent ‘ahh, old people don’t trust the tech’, glance. They don’t know Terry like I do.

He’s enticed us all down to Ridley Road market with the promise of meeting his stallholder friend, Birdie, who might have information about our mystery. It’s early morning and the stallholders are still setting up in the chilly autumn mist. Whilst we’re waiting, munching bagels at tables outside the bakery, Terry’s got us beta testing his app. Buying pretend phones, laptops and tablets, plus various accessories, such as the famous circuit breakers that he hasn’t managed to flog to Monarch wholesale. Yet.

‘Seems to be working okay, Pop.’ Antoine doesn’t sound convinced. ‘I’ve had the right texts and email confirmation for all the things I’m supposed to have bought.’

‘It is good.’ Generous praise from Uzi. ‘The photos could be made better.’

She and Terry have a surprisingly technical conversation about optimising the photo quality, while I surreptitiously check my bank account to make sure I haven’t actually bought anything.

‘Good prices,’ says Rowan.

‘It’s not bad gear,’ Antoine says. ‘All my family use it. I would if I didn’t have work kit.’

‘You? Use an offbrand phone?’ I chortle. ‘That’ll be the day. You’re as snobby about tech as Ella is about social class.’

‘Ooooh, glass houses, Morgan.’

‘I am so not a snob. How can you even say that?’

‘Aunt Breda, Eileen and the rest? You’re not that enthusiastic about your working-class roots nowadays. You haven’t even seen them yet.’

‘It’s all very well for you, your family like who you’ve become. They’re more…’ I glance at Terry, ‘flexible. Mine think I’m weird; everything about me offends them.’

‘They’re always asking after you at church, according to Mom.’

‘I’m a divorced, over-educated atheist with no kids. I’m incomprehensible to them, so they pity and resent me.’

He points out that, being a dinner-party destroyer, I could end up cutting myself off from both worlds if I’m not careful. I tell him that’s what education does to people like us. It leaves you marooned between the place you came from and the one where you’ll never really fit in.

‘Because rich people think you are offbrand,’ Uzi says, and I laugh.

‘Exactly. That look they give you when you use the wrong knife?’ I say.

‘It’s different for me,’ Antoine says. ‘No one expects me to get the cutlery right,’

‘Ironic, eh?’ I say. Antoine could set a banqueting table like a pro by the time he was ten. With a mum like Claudette, you don’t have much choice. He had a supporting role in her work for years.

‘Child labour is underrated as a pathway to social mobility,’ Terry says. ‘Lad next door who built this app, he’s only fourteen. He’ll be a millionaire by the time he can vote.’

‘Were Ella’s family millionaires?’ Ever-practical Rowan brings us back to our project.

‘Her father’s family were just upper-middle-class professionals,’ I say. ‘Claire’s folks were more upmarket. I expect that’s the source of her patrician attitudes.

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