The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (25 page)

He’s careful to avoid the idiotic, broken, no-good F-35 software story, and to
also
avoid telling her any lies – Mum has a tax inspector’s built-in lie detector – while not overstepping the red line of his oath of office.

“You mean GCHQ, don’t you?” she asks, a sudden quiet respect creeping into her voice.

“Not them, exactly, no. Uh, I can’t tell you anything about who I work for. Just, it’s defense-related and it involves mathematics.” He pauses. “The pay’s rubbish, but the job security is high. And the rest of the security. Security is high
in general
where I work —” He realizes he’s babbling and manages to stop.

“I see, I think.” She turns away and opens the oven door, throwing out a blast of heat and an odor of cooking beef brisket that nearly makes Alex involuntarily extend his fangs. “Hmm, I think it’s done.” She bends down and lifts the roasting tray out. “Would you be a dear and carry the vegetables? We’re ready to eat, and it would be a shame to let the food go cold.”

Dinner is not obviously a total disaster at first.

While Alex is talking Mum down from the trees and Cassie tries to engage Dad in small talk, Sarah scrambles upstairs and bangs on the bathroom door. The result is that by the time Alex backs into the dining area, bearing a steaming hot dish full of boiled frozen peas and identically formed bright orange conic sections (“carrots” in Mum’s culinary vernacular), he finds a stranger seated at the table at Dad’s right hand, listening attentively as Dad apologizes stumblingly for something or other he may or may not have said earlier. By a process of logical deduction he recognizes that the stranger must be Mack. She’s glammed up for the event in a navy blue polka-dot dress and enough makeup to notice but not overwhelm. Obviously this is her way of trying to make a good impression on the partner’s parents. Her hair is longer than Sarah’s, which reminds him that the last time he saw his younger sister she sported a bushy mane. “Hello?” she says quietly.

“Hi, I’m Alex.” He deposits the serving dish and offers a hand: she shakes it firmly, surprising him with her grip. “This is Cassie —”

“I got that.” Mack smiles reassuringly. Her voice is a little husky.

Cassie looks excited. “Alex! You didn’t tell me your people have ceremonial eu—”

“No,” Alex interrupts hastily. But he’s too late.

Sarah smiles, icily. “You do not call Mack that,” she says calmly. “I don’t care whether you’re staying in-character for the evening; her gender identity is none of your business. Are we clear?”

Cassie looks away and nods. “YesYes,” she mutters sheepishly. Louder: “I’m sorry. I was just excited because I had been wondering where your kind keep your —” She stops abruptly.

Alex wishes the dining chair would swallow him up. The prickly tension between Mack, Sarah, and Cassie is mortifying. He gets that Mack is trans and that Sarah is coming out and he’s supposed to play a supporting role in kid sis’s family drama, but at least she could have
warned
him before he brought Cassie into this without notice —

Dad takes a big gulp of G&T as Mum enters, bearing the beef joint.

“Is she always like this?” Sarah asks Alex challengingly.

“Cassie is studying acting and drama at Leeds Met,” Alex says defensively. “It’s just method acting isn’t it, Cassie? Your character…”

“I’m a princess-assassin of the Unseelie Court!” Cassie agrees enthusiastically. “Not human, not even
slightly
human. So
of course
I’m weird and I make horrible social blunders when I try to pass for human! Faux pas is my middle name and I don’t understand human social mores
at all
!” Her smile is blinding and utterly sincere. “I am sorry for your discombobulation! We’re going to a fancy dress party later,” she confides.

“Huh.” Sarah smiles, not entirely nicely. Mack, for her part, is as impassive as a poker player, clearly unwilling to contribute further to what promises to be a family reunion that will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. “How did you get here, then?”

“Oh, very easily!” Cassie giggles: “Alex stole a Nazi half-track motorcycle from a mad scientist he knows through work! It was most exciting!”

Alex sighs. “I did
not
steal Ilsa,” he explains before Dad can throw a drunken hissy fit at the hint of impropriety: “Brains lent her to me for the evening.”

Sarah stares at him. “I’ll swear someone said ‘Nazi half-track motorcycle.’ And ‘mad scientist.’ I must be hallucinating, right? Tell me I’m hallucinating.”

Mack opens her mouth, then pauses thoughtfully for a moment. “Would it happen to be an NSU Kettenkrad?” she asks. “If so, was it wartime or postwar manufacture?”

Mum clears her throat diplomatically. “Alex, your father is a bit sleepy. Would you do the honors and carve the brisket?”

“Wartime,” Alex says, his feet carrying him on autopilot towards the sideboard and the dish with the carving set. “How did you know?”

“I made a model of one when I was a kid. The Tamiya 1:35 scale precision one.” Mack sounds just slightly wistful. “I used to make lots of models before I grew out of it. It was something I could do by myself and I was good at it.”

“Half-track,” mutters Sarah. “So you’re driving?”

“Yup.” Alex picks up the carving fork and pokes the brisket hesitantly. As usual for Mum, it’s slightly overcooked but just the right side of burned. “So I’m not drinking.” He can feel eyeballs drilling into his back like gimlets. “I’m not making this up,” he protests defensively, “it’s parked outside!”

“I believe you,” Sarah says after a moment, as Cassie chirps: “It’s all true! Even the mad scientist!”

“He’s not mad, he just works in Technical Operations,” Alex says as he begins to carve. After the first slice: “Well, he’s not
very
mad.” After the second slice: “By Tech Ops standards.”

“What does your mad scientist friend do for your employers, dear?” his mother asks.

“He does quality assurance testing on death rays.”
Please, dear God, don’t ask me about the coffee maker.
“Also, he repairs stuff for a hobby. Like the Kettenkrad. He’s working on a hovercraft right now.”

“My hovercraft is full of eels,” Dad slurs, but nobody pays any attention to him except Cassie, and Alex is too busy trying not to slice his left hand off to look round.

Presently he has six plates stacked with what he hopes is enough burned cow’s arse to feed a dysfunctional family, so he turns and begins to deliver them around the table.

Things go all right until he gets to Mack, who looks perturbed. She turns and whispers something in Sarah’s ear. Sarah responds, audibly: “I
told
Mum…”

“Told Mum what?” Alex asks.

“Mack’s vegan,” Sarah confesses.

“I said not to make a big fuss,” Mack touches her wrist. “I’ll be okay.” But she’s leaning away from the plate in front of her as if Alex has deposited a great steaming jobbie on it.

Mum’s smile freezes in place. “Do vegans eat fish?” she asks. “Because I’ve got a couple of salmon fillets I can microwave if it’s any help —”

Mack takes a deep breath, then visibly bites her tongue. “Not really,” she says quietly.

Cassie looks confused, then her left ear twitches, telegraphing enlightenment. “Oh! I know, you need tofu!” Then her ears droop. “I didn’t bring any. No pockets, sorry.”

“Those prostheses are
amazingly
responsive,” Sarah says brightly: “Are they those Japanese toys that can sense brain-waves? Can I touch —”

It’s either kid sister’s revenge for Cassie putting her foot in it with Mack earlier, or a brilliant attempt to redirect the conversation, but before Alex can work out which (or Sarah can tug Cassie’s ears) Cassie sweeps the offending burnt offering from before Mack. “Be right back!” she trills, and makes a beeline for the kitchen.

Mum takes a deep breath, smiles tremulously, and lifts the lids off the vegetable dishes with a flourish.

British domestic cuisine spans the gamut from the sublime to the abysmal. Alex never really questioned Mum’s culinary efforts before he left home – they came off well when compared to school dinners – but exposure to a broader diet has taught him how close she sticks to her 1970s Domestic Science lessons, raiding Tesco’s and Asda’s chiller aisles for variety. Mum is not an adventurous cook, and faced with the prospect of catering to two grown-up children and their guests she has panicked slightly and retreated into the comforting certainties of meat and two (frozen) veg. One of which is still frozen.

“Um.” Alex stares at the brick of broccoli florets, ice crystals glittering under the dining room chandelier. “I’d better just take these through and heat them up…?”

Mum blinks, then with no warning whatsoever her eyes overflow and she starts to sob.

Sarah, Mack, and Alex watch in paralyzed silence. Dad is no help whatsoever, muttering inaudibly into his nearly empty tumbler: he’s out for the count. Alex looks round and realizes he must have put away a quarter of a bottle of gin. The crashing and clattering of an enterprising alien foraging for who-knows-what echoes from the kitchen. Across the table, Mack clutches her chair’s arms as if she wants the floor to swallow her. Sarah leans towards her protectively from the next seat, but her eyes are on Mum, and she’s as appalled as Alex. Mum is a tax inspector: she has nerves of steel. She doesn’t lose her shit like this, she just
doesn’t
. But there she is, at the far end of the table, quietly weeping tears of desperation and unhappiness. Alex has no idea why, or what to say.

The silence is broken by the scrape of a chair being pushed back. Alex realizes he’s standing beside his mother’s seat. “Mum. Mum? Come on, let’s get you some tissues and clean up. Hey, it’s going to be all right —”

She stands up and leans on his shoulder. “I’m being silly,” she sniffs.

“C’mon, Mum, over here.” He guides her towards the sofa. There’s a box of Kleenex on the coffee table. He glances past her, back at the table, as Dad’s head tips slowly backwards and he begins to snore. Mack’s shoulders are shaking and as Alex turns back to focus on Mum he sees Sarah hug her.
Good for them,
he thinks, then a loud crash and a musical tinkling from the kitchen remind him that Mum is only Crisis Number One on his bucket list. “You can sit down and have a good blow and tell me all about it. What’s wrong?” Because even to Alex’s untrained male sensibilities it is obvious that something badly unhinged Mum right before he and Cassie arrived. Whatever it was, it hit her so hard that she burned the brisket and forgot to defrost the broccoli.

A possible explanation suddenly occurs to him: Could it be the V-question?
Work. Did Security interview her for my enhanced background check?
“What’s wrong?” he repeats. Quietly: “Was it me? Did you get any, uh, visitors? From my new employers?”

“Visitors?” Mum blinks bewilderedly. “No dear, it’s your sister.”

“Mum.” He holds a bunch of tissues out for her and she takes them, wipes cheeks, blows her nose. “You know that’s kind of bigoted?” He treads carefully. Mum has never been particularly religious, other than filling out the census forms with Church of England – it’s the default option – but you can never tell, and while he’s never seen her as a homophobe before —

“No, it’s not that! It’s her degree course.” Mum honks mournfully into her wad of damp tissues.

“Her course.” Alex’s brain freezes. “What about her degree?”

“She’s changed her course” – she’d been studying for a BA in Business Studies and Accounting, Alex recalls – “to study
history
.” Mum begins to tear up again. “History!
Why?
What use is
that
? How is she going to earn a living with a
history
degree?” And she’s off again.

Another crash, this time barely distinguishable from a smash, interrupts his confusion.
Oh God, Cassie,
he thinks. “Stay here?” he implores his mother; “I need to see what that was.”

He finds Cassie in the kitchen, surrounded by the shattered wreckage of dessert. A glass pudding basin lies in pieces on the floor; the tortured corpses of fruit, viciously flayed and seeds eviscerated, sprawl around the worktop. “I know it’s supposed to go together!” she protests. “I just can’t get them to fit properly.” There is a supermarket spongecake base in a plastic container, along with the makings of a liter of raspberry jelly, an unopened carton of custard, and a jar of whipping cream. Mum was evidently planning to make a sherry trifle before Sarah’s educational catastrophe dismayed her and drove Dad to drink.

“Don’t bother.” Alex takes everything in at a glance. Cream comes from cows, custard contains egg, and as for the jelly –
Isn’t gelatin some kind of kryptonite for vegans?
he thinks, then surrenders to the inevitable. “We’re done here; I’m calling in the professionals.”

He goes back to the living room and clears his throat. Sarah and Mack disengage, somewhat bashfully. “I know what this looks like,” Mack says before his sister shushes her.

“Not my problem.” Alex drags Mum’s chair round to face them. Puffy-eyed, she holds a bundle of tissues to her face and sniffs mournfully. “Listen. First, is Dad okay?” Before anyone can answer Dad supplies an answer by beginning to sing the refrain to “With a Little Help from My Friends,” in a new and creative key. “Fine, that just leaves us in need of something to eat. I’ve got a takeaway app – Mack, you’re vegan, I know what Mum and Dad will take, Cassie is easy, do we have any other restrictions?”

Sarah shakes her head. “Alex, I don’t know what Mum’s told you —”

“Food before inadvisable career choices.” He pulls out his phone, locks it into guest mode, and fires up a takeaway menu finder. “Let me guess, South Indian or Mexican are good bets?” Mack nods. “Okay, see if you can find something that appeals to you and fill in what you need. Then I’ll order for the rest of us, can you do that?”

“I’ll try.”

Mack takes his phone, just as Cassie bounds out of the kitchen on the tips of her toes, announces, “I’m done!” in a loud stage-whisper, and drapes herself over Alex’s shoulders. She stares wide-eyed at Mack. “What’s he – she – doing?”