Hogfather

well,” he said. “I don’t need to know what your plan is.”
    “That’s just as well, sir.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Because I don’t propose to tell you, sir. You’d be obliged to disapprove of it.”
    “I am amazed that you are so confident that it can work, Teatime.”
    “I just think logically about the problem, sir,” said the boy. He sounded reproachful.
    “Logically?” said Downey.
    “I suppose I just see things differently from other people,” said Teatime.

    It was a quiet day for Susan, although on the way to the park Gawain trod on a crack in the pavement. On purpose.
    One of the many terrors conjured up by the previous governess’s happy way with children had been the bears that waited around in the street to eat you if you stood on the cracks.
    Susan had taken to carrying the poker under her respectable coat. One wallop generally did the trick. They were amazed that anyone else saw them.
    “Gawain?” she said, eyeing a nervous bear who had suddenly spotted her and was now trying to edge away nonchalantly.
    “Yes?”
    “You meant to tread on that crack so that I’d have to thump some poor creature whose only fault is wanting to tear you limb from limb.”
    “I was just skipping—”
    “Quite. Real children don’t go hoppity-skip unless they are on drugs.”
    He grinned at her.
    “If I catch you being twee again I will knot your arms behind your head,” said Susan levelly.
    He nodded, and went to push Twyla off the swings.
    Susan relaxed, satisfied. It was her personal discovery. Ridiculous threats didn’t worry them at all, but they were obeyed. Especially the ones in graphic detail.
    The previous governess had used various monsters and bogeymen as a form of discipline. There was always something waiting to eat or carry off bad boys and girls for crimes like stuttering or defiantly and aggravatingly persisting in writing with their left hand. There was always a Scissor Man waiting for a little girl who sucked her thumb, always a bogeyman in the cellar. Of such bricks is the innocence of childhood constructed.
    Susan’s attempts at getting them to disbelieve in the things only caused the problems to get worse.
    Twyla had started to wet the bed. This may have been a crude form of defense against the terrible clawed creature that she was certain lived under it.
    Susan had found out about this one the first night, when the child had woken up crying because of a bogeyman in the closet.
    She’d sighed and gone to have a look. She’d been so angry that she’d pulled it out, hit it over the head with the nursery poker, dislocated its shoulder as a means of emphasis and kicked it out of the back door.
    The children refused to disbelieve in the monsters because, frankly, they knew damn well the things were there.
    But she’d found that they could, very firmly, also believe in the poker.
    Now she sat down on a bench and read a book. She made a point of taking the children, every day, somewhere where they could meet others of the same age. If they got the hang of the playground, she thought, adult life would hold no fears. Besides, it was nice to hear the voices of little children at play, provided you took care to be far enough away not to hear what they were actually saying.
    There were lessons later on. These were going a lot better now she’d got rid of the reading books about bouncy balls and dogs called Spot. She’d got Gawain on to the military campaigns of General Tacticus, which were suitably bloodthirsty but, more importantly, considered too difficult for a child. As a result his vocabulary was doubling every week and he could already use words like “disemboweled” in everyday conversation. After all, what was the point of teaching children to be children? They were naturally good at it.
    And she was, to her mild horror, naturally good with them. She wondered suspiciously if this was a family trait. And if, to judge by the way her hair so readily knotted itself into a prim bun, she was destined for jobs like this for the rest of her life.
    It was her parents’ fault. They hadn’t meant it to turn out like this. At least, she hoped charitably that they hadn’t.
    They’d wanted to protect her, to keep her way from the worlds outside this one, from what people thought of as the occult, from…well, from her grandfather, to put it bluntly. This had, she felt, left her a little twisted up.
    Of course, to be fair, that was a parent’s job. The world was so full of