Кэрри Фишер – The Love Island: The laugh out loud romantic comedy you have to read this summer (страница 9)
I drew my knees up to my chest. I could still feel the stickiness and grime of that police cell no matter how many times I showered. ‘Nothing.’
‘It’s Christmas. Let’s enjoy ourselves. For Alicia’s sake.’
I wavered, unsure whether Scott was just trying to weasel his way out of trouble or was genuinely regretful. I did want Alicia to have a lovely day.
In case lovely days were suddenly in short supply.
Maybe, over time, I could forgive him.
He swung round to face me, his index finger under the silk shoulder strap of my nightie.
But definitely not yet.
‘No. Just no. Get off.’
He stood up, backing away, hands raised in surrender. ‘OK, OK. No need to turn nasty.’
Pot. Kettle.
I got out of bed. ‘Come on, we need to get downstairs. Alicia still gets excited about presents.’
Scott drained his glass, shaking his head as though I was completely irrational. He paused at the door. ‘I hope you’re not going to spoil today by sulking.’
I waited until he’d disappeared downstairs to hurl a pillow at the wall.
I heard Alicia shouting down the landing. ‘Mum? Mum? When are we doing presents?’
I called down to her. ‘I’m up here. Shower’s not working properly in our bedroom. Be down in a mo. Can you see if Granny Adele wants a cup of coffee?’
As soon as I arrived in the kitchen, Adele was right there, getting in the way of the fridge, standing in front of every cupboard I wanted to open, like a dog I’d forgotten to feed.
‘Where’s Scotty?’ she said. ‘He used to love Christmas, first one up. When my Jack was alive, we’d all get up at six to make the most of the day. I used to buy kilos of potatoes, parboil them, fluff them up in the colander. And Jack, he was in charge of the turkey. We used to get it from Mr Saunders. His is the house on the corner of our road, you know, the one with the blue gates and the boat-shaped bird table on the front lawn …’
Endless detail rained down in the strong Scottish accent Adele had retained despite emigrating to Australia in her late teens, fifty years earlier. I put the coffee machine in motion and nipped into the loo to text Octavia. She’d sounded wrung-out when she’d filled me in on Jonathan’s redundancy the day before. With three kids who all came with a bewildering array of after-school activities, I knew they struggled to keep their heads above water even when Jonathan was earning. I wondered how I could persuade Octavia to let me lend her some money.
We’d always gone out for a walk on our own on Christmas Day. As teenagers, we’d examined each other’s new eye shadows and compared appalling knitwear. In our twenties, I’d tried to play down Scott’s extravagant presents. Even when we were broke, he’d still decorated the tree with little love messages, souvenirs from places we’d been, postcards of paintings I loved. Once Charlie was born just after Octavia’s twenty-third birthday, Jonathan appeared to skip romance and went straight to the practical. Octavia laughed it off. ‘Anyone can buy fancy knickers. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a husband who can build a cupboard to keep them in.’
Since we’d had children, our walk on Christmas Day was simply a pressure cooker valve – a breather to let off steam about our families so that we could return with smiles on our faces. Today, more than ever, I’d be glad of the escape.
A beep on my mobile signalled Octavia’s reply.
Poor Octavia. I didn’t know how she stood Jonathan and his penny-pinching. I’d pointed it out early on and we’d had one of our few proper rows about it, descending into a slanging match about me being born with a silver spoon in my mouth. All credit due to her though, she’d been the first to cheer me on when Scott and I shunned my dad’s money and made a living doing up tatty old houses.
Was it really all for nothing?
Jonathan usually loved choosing the Christmas tree. He would spend hours in the local garden centre, debating with the children until they found the perfect specimen, the one and only Norwegian spruce that could grace our lounge. Then he’d haul it into the right place, the exact spot between the fireplace and the dresser. Immi and Polly would decorate it according to Jonathan’s rigid spacing and ornament eking-out rules, with Charlie chucking the baubles on willy-nilly.
But this year Jonathan had come up with ‘I haven’t got time/the girls don’t want to go today/the trees will be cheaper nearer the day’ until the one ritual I could delegate without guilt had plopped back onto my plate. The result was spindly and lacklustre. Instead of the usual good-natured banter over whether to have the fairy or the star on top, the kids had argued over who was going to hang up the bloody glass reindeers and who got stuck with the crappy old snowflakes. Resentment had sliced into my fantasies of a cheery household floating about singing angelic bursts of
Mum had arrived at eight o’clock that morning as though we would need five hours to prepare a roast lunch for six people. She stood in the kitchen hovering but not actually ‘doing’ until the hairs on my neck were quivering with irritation.
I managed to shoo her out to play Scrabble with Immi, which meant I could slosh industrial quantities of Chablis into my glass without copping the fourteen units a week speech. This year’s project of knocking our lounge and dining room together to make one big living space was beginning to look like a mistake. Instead of being tucked away with the XBox, Polly and Charlie were right under Mum’s nose. As Mum thought anything more hi-tech than a landline was the path to all evil, it was only a matter of time before she decided to deliver the ‘Give a child a cardboard box and they’ll be just as happy’ speech.
Normally, Charlie would laugh and say, ‘Oh Nanna, get real,’ but this year, a huge bellow of ‘Jesus Christ, we’re not in the 1950s’ came echoing through to the kitchen. A door slam followed.
I poked my head through the hatch and saw my mother rear up like a meerkat on its look-out mound, turning from Jonathan faffing about with the precise angle of the serviettes, to me, waiting to see how we were going to deal with – shock, horror – God’s name being taken in vain on Christmas Day.
Jonathan rolled his eyes and went back to straightening the knives and forks that Polly had thrown down in a slapdash manner. I tried Roberta’s New Age bollocks of visualising lying in a hammock in Barbados, but discovered that only a hiss at the husband would do.
‘Jonathan, do you think you could go and deal with Charlie, please, while I finish off lunch?’ I probably sounded calm to the casual listener but sixteen years of marriage had taught him to recognise the meaningful ‘—CCCHHH’ on the end of that sentence. With one last tweak of the table mats, he made his way upstairs.
I shouted through to Polly. ‘Come and take through the cranberry sauce for me, love.’
No answer. I shouted again.
‘In a minute.’
‘No, now, we’re nearly ready to sit down.’
‘I’m just finishing this game.’
I bit back a bellow of ‘Come now!’ Never mind a flipping virgin birth, my kids doing what they were told the first time I asked them would be the true miracle of Christmas.
Instead of Polly appearing, Immi came into the kitchen instead. ‘My tummy hurts. I don’t want any lunch.’
Honestly, next year I’d just do beans on toast.
‘It’ll make you feel better if you have something to eat. I’ve made your favourite, cauliflower cheese.’ I stroked her strawberry-blonde curls.
‘I’m not hungry. I already ate all my selection box. Do you want to know what I had? I had a Curly Wurly, a Mars bar, a Milky Way, a Twix – I’ve got one stick of that left – and a packet of jelly babies.’
At this rate, we’d need an appointment with the emergency dentist. ‘I thought Dad said you could only have one thing.’
‘He did, but then when I asked him if I could eat the rest, he just went “hmm” and carried on reading his book, so I thought it was OK.’
I could feel a bit of a Jesus Christ incident coming on myself.
‘I gave the Maltesers and Revels to Stan, though. I wasn’t that greedy.’
‘You shouldn’t give chocolate to dogs. It’s bad for them. Anyway, never mind.’ I turned back to stirring the gravy, which had now gone all lumpy.
I took a deep breath and called through to the front room. ‘Mum, it’s ready. Can I pass you these things through the hatch?’
Mum scurried over and busied herself with the food, just as Jonathan reappeared.
‘Charlie won’t come down.’ There was something pathetic in his tone, a waiting for me to get it sorted.
The food was getting cold, which made me want to have my own tantrum. It was definitely early-onset middle age – more bothered about chilly carrots than my son having a Yuletide meltdown. Not for the first time, I mourned the era of spending every holiday backpacking on a diet of beer and crisps. I trudged up the stairs, shouting ‘Start serving’ in the general direction of Mum and Jonathan in the hope that between them they might summon up the initiative required to get a few Brussels on plates without me.