by Annie O'Neil
‘Mouldering, eh?’ Mr Winters said.
Jess pulled an apologetic face. ‘Sorry.’
‘Quit with your sorries. I know what you’re saying. I just …’ He held up both of his big, capable, Clint Eastwood hands. ‘Leave it with me, lass.’
Jess wiped her tears and scrunched her forehead. ‘No. I feel bad now. I don’t want you to feel pressured into doing something if you genuinely don’t want to. I can make cookies or something. Buy some. Whatever.’
‘I think you know well enough that I won’t be cornered into doing anything I don’t want to do.’
Jess smiled. Yeah. She was pretty sure Arnold Winters was his own man, bossy neighbours notwithstanding.
‘So … can I tell everyone you’ll do something?’
He hesitated before answering. ‘Tell everyone to make their plans and live their lives, but that at six o’clock tomorrow evening, this mouldering old man will try and find enough life in him to pull something out of the bag. It won’t be hours of entertainment, I can tell you that now—’
Jess couldn’t help herself. She threw her arms around him and give him a huge hug. He awkwardly patted her shoulders then extracted himself, saying she’d best leave her gratitude until tomorrow. He wasn’t making a promise. Nor was it a cast-in-stone commitment to dazzle the residents of Christmas Street from now until the end of time, but … it wasn’t a no.
As Jess made her way down the street towards her house, she barely registered how miserable the weather was because life had taken a turn for the better. Not only would Mr Winters hold a wonderfully magical Christmas Eve, he’d win everyone over. Forever. Including Drea’s son, who would be so thrilled by his initial impression of life here on Christmas Street, he’d chuck in his job and move here and then … Jess actually did a little happy dance. Will. Yes. Will would arrive in his little green van at precisely the moment the entire neighbourhood put their hands together to applaud and cheer their shared delight in the best Christmas Eve any of them had ever had. It would, in short, be perfectly perfect. Just as Christmas was meant to be.
24 December
Jess woke up half anxious, half excited. She was feeling jittery about tonight, so probably didn’t need her morning cup of coffee, but there was something about spooning the hot chocolate into a mug while the kettle boiled and turning it into a thick, richly scented paste that felt therapeutic. There were other things that were good, too. It had stopped raining. A sign, hopefully, that the day would turn out well. No word from Mr Winters yet, but it was early.
There were three loud pounds on her front door. ‘Jess! It’s me.’
No coooeee! No long-lashed peepers peering through the letter box. This was very un-Drea like.
Jess opened the door and saw her friend clutching her large puffy ankle-length jacket round her. She looked frail and tear-streaked and utterly bereft of the confidence that normally glowed round her with supernatural wattage.
It was absolutely freezing. Where the rain had stopped, Jack Frost had clearly stepped in. Or his evil older brother Ichabod Icicle. Puddles had turned to miniature ice rinks. The wind felt as if it literally cut through you. Clouds hung in leaden, weighted clumps, like portents of doom waiting to unleash untold horrors upon the poor unsuspecting citizens of Whoville. Or, in this case, Boughton.
It didn’t bode well.
After Jess had ushered her in, deposited her on the sofa, run upstairs to get her duvet to wrap round her, made a hot chocolate (minus the coffee), and located a box of tissues, Drea numbly began to explain why she wasn’t in her house whipping up a massive pile of blueberry pancakes for her son.
‘He wasn’t on the plane,’ Drea said, not sounding at all like Drea.
‘And you couldn’t have mistaken the flight?’
Drea shook her head. ‘Right airline, right airport, right time, no son. Looks like he was pranking me.’
Jess frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound like Spencer.’
Jess clapped her hand over her mouth.
‘What?’ Drea flared angrily.
‘I – umm … I might have sent him an email.’
‘You what?’ Her expression twisted into something derisive and cruel. ‘You can’t help yourself, can you? Sticking your little fingers in everyone else’s pies.’
‘No, that wasn’t what I—’
She forced herself to stop. It had been exactly what she’d done.
‘Well, you listen to me and you listen real good. You’d be better putting your energy into dealing with your own problems before you try and fix everyone else’s, yeah? Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve got a mess of growing up to do, Jessica Green. This isn’t playschool. This is real life and you went too far this time. Well out of bounds.’
A slap on the face would’ve hurt less.
‘No, that wasn’t what I—’ Jess stumbled over her words trying to explain, but Drea didn’t want to hear it. She wanted to punish Jess for meddling in something that wasn’t her business.
‘Did you talk about the women’s refuges as well? Promise him I’d put my name on them? Talk about my failings, did you? Weak Drea. Pathetic Drea. Snivelling, bloody, broken Drea not strong enough to look after her son or stand up to a man, or brave enough to admit her life is a bloody shambles.’
‘Your life isn’t a shambles,’ Jess bridled.
‘Aww, Jess,’ Drea shook her head, tears skidding down her cheeks so rapidly, she didn’t bother to wipe them away. ‘You poor, pathetic, naive girl.’
‘I’m not pathetic!’
‘Right.’ Drea was riding her mean streak to its apex. ‘That’s why your house is perfect. The For Sale sign is gone and you’ve got cards on the mantel from all of the little kiddies you’re going to be teaching next term. I bet you’ve not even put that bed of yours together yet. What are you waiting for? A big strong man to come and do it for you? Someone, anyone to swoop in and fix life for you because it’s too hard to do it yourself like the rest of us have to?’
Jess bit down on the inside of her cheek. She was glad she and Drea weren’t having an actual, physical fight. Drea would crush her.
‘I think maybe we should drink our hot chocolate and regroup,’ Jess began. ‘You were up early. Maybe you should have a little rest or something.’
‘Why? So you can run off to call your mummy and daddy and tell them the mean lady from up the street’s been a right royal bitch because her heart’s just been ripped from her chest?’ And then Drea really began to cry.
Strong, indefatigable, resilient Drea wept with such a depth of sorrow, Jess could hardly bear it. She did want to run away. She did want to call her mum and dad. But it wasn’t an option and it shouldn’t be. Not for this. So she put her hurt feelings to the side and crawled onto the sofa with Drea, put her arms around her and held her until she was all cried out.
Eventually, she fell asleep. With her make-up long since washed away by tears, Jess had a glimpse of what Drea must’ve looked like years back before she’d built the strong, impenetrable mask of strength she wore every day like armour. It was a vulnerable beauty. Open. Honest. Drea’s public aesthetic, Jess realised, was what she used to hold people at arm’s length. A power she wielded to control men who might think they stood a chance. Here’s what you’re not getting, it said. Or, if you do, it’ll be on my terms.
Jess wished Spencer could see her. Bear witness to how heartbroken his mother was. It had been cruel to get her hopes up like this, then crush them by not appearing at the airport. Her stomach churned at the thought that this could just as easily be her fault. This was no Love Actually full of happy, ridiculous, legs-around-the-waist hugs at the airport. It was more … Life Actually. Real life. Full of ups and downs and moments you thought you’d never survive but somehow had to find the strength to soldier through. So … a bit like Love Actually.
Jess resolved to put a smile b
ack on Drea’s face. No matter what it took. She’d plumb the very depths of her resilience, determined to prove to her friend she’d only ever meant to bring her joy.
Jess pulled the zip of her coat straight up to her chin. Though it was only just past lunchtime, the street had a darkness hanging about it despite most of the houses having some form of Christmas lights twinkling away in or outside. There were a handful of people, like the hippies and the Nishios, who only lit real candles, but for the most part, it was a street that had hit the garden centres hard for holiday decor. Today, however, the flashing icicle lights struck a discordant note, giving the street an end-of-a-long-dreary-day sort of feeling that made taking each carefully placed footstep along the icy pavement that much more difficult. As if to confirm the strange feeling of foreboding that had dug under Jess’s coat, the street lamps flickered on, then off, then on again, unable to decide if they felt up to spilling their warm pools of light on the street below.
A car pulled onto the street and slowly made its way down. It stopped beside her, dark windows lowered to reveal Kai and Rex. ‘Hey, Jess. You ready for the big day?’
They both looked tired. Not remotely as excited as they tried to sound.
She half shrugged. She’d saved going to the shop to buy her seasonal ready meal for today to see if she could pick up some festive buzz before going home to celebrate her first Christmas on her own. Maybe, now that Drea was tucked up on the sofa watching A Bad Moms Christmas, she would have to buy two.
‘Are you two coming along tonight?’ she asked.
They both looked a bit blank for a minute, then Rex threw a glance at number 24. ‘You think he’s going to do something?’
‘We were kind of thinking we might have a quiet one,’ Kai said semi-apologetically. The look on his face explained it all. They were missing their dog. Just like Drea, they were finding it difficult to celebrate when their loved one wouldn’t be there. Mr Winters had endured that level of grief for thirty-five long years.
‘Arnold told me he was going to do something,’ she said a bit more confidently than she felt. ‘I doubt it would last long. Please say you’ll come.’
A weird rumbling pulled their attention to the end of the street. The gritting truck. It stopped at the end of the street. Jess waved at him. The driver tilted his head to the side then slowly pulled off.
‘Did you see that?’ Jess asked.
‘We’ve been onto the council for yonks,’ Rex rolled his eyes. ‘It’s a bloody ice rink out here.’
Kai tsked. ‘What do they think? That we love skidding around on this ice? It’s dangerous is what it is.’
Mr Winters and his advent-calendar offering forgotten, Kai and Rex blew her a couple of non-committal kisses, Rex making a show of finding the button to roll up the windows for Kai who was, quite clearly, shivering from the cold.
Jess tried not to take Rex and Kai’s wavering as a sign that other people might follow suit, presume Arnold wouldn’t do anything and not bother coming. A blanket set of no-shows would be the worst possible result, particularly considering how high Drea’s expectations had been that doing the advent calendar would draw the neighbours closer together. It had. It really had. Not just for her, the newbie on the street, but for the long-term residents as well. The nightly gatherings had clearly strengthened friendships that already existed, and had also created new ones. As eclectic as they were, the residents of Christmas Street formed a sort of second family. If one person didn’t have a spare cup of milk or sugar, surely another would. A desperation seized her to make this night a truly fabulous cherry atop a wondrously festive cake.
Jess opened up the picket fence, nearly losing her balance not once, but twice as she climbed Mr Winters’ steps.
When she went out, she’d hunt down an industrial-sized bag of salt to pour on them. They wouldn’t be adding a law suit to Mr Winters’ woes. Not tonight.
Just as she was about to knock there was a distant sound of car tyres squealing, a couple of horns honking, a huge bang and then an unnatural, eerie silence.
The street lights went off.
The light that had been on in Mr Winters’ front window went off.
When she turned round, there wasn’t a single blinking icicle in sight.
Oh, crumbs.
‘Honey?’ she heard Rex call to Kai. ‘The alarm thingy isn’t working.’
As if she’d entered one of those slow-motion movie moments, Jess’s eyes inched along the street. All of the lights that had been glittering and blinking away were now dark, their absence absorbing even more of the scant light filtering through the grey cloudscape.
Kev came out of his front door in a pair of coveralls, clocked Jess and shouted. ‘Power’s out.’
As if everyone had heard his call, a few more doors opened. Dads shuffling out in slippers, looking up at their eaves or out to their reindeer lit with fairy lights to confirm that, yes, the power had gone out outside as well as inside and no, they were pretty sure it wasn’t just a fuse.
Jess left Mr Winters’ to gather more information. She’d go back in a minute to make sure he was all right, but she needed to know everything she could before she spoke with him. Mr Winters would not and could not give up on Christmas. Not at this juncture.
Kai held up his phone. ‘Apparently there’s been a “major incident”.’
She walked on, feeling like Jimmy Stewart stumbling around Pottersville when everything was going horrifically, awfully wrong. Unseen. Unheard. Unable to help when sharp-tongued conversations broke out over whether or not a turkey would go off with the power out, or, more importantly, how they’d cook the damn thing given the fact that someone had failed to refill the fuel tank for the barbecue and someone else had refused an invitation to go to her parents even though it meant less work, no washing up and a decent bottle of wine. No, it was too late to accept the invitation now. The Whitmores and their children had flown in all the way from Canada because they appreciated family. Martha was outside tapping a fork against a tin of cat food calling out ‘Billie! Billie! Billie!’ Josh and the Nishios were having a quiet, serious-looking discussion about whether or not there were any moral implications involved in using their staff keys to ‘break into’ the university and use one of the residence kitchens to make their dinners.
Josh looked up to give her a quick wave and said, ‘Did you get the text?’
She shook her head no.
He held out his phone. ‘It’s from the power company. Apparently a massive lorry took out two power lines a couple of streets over. Black ice. Power’s going to be out until tomorrow, at the earliest.’
‘Ah,’ she said, in a weird, bright voice. ‘Thanks.’
One of the Gem’n’Emms was standing in the centre of her front window, tears trickling down her cheeks.
When Jess got back to her own house, fingers numb with cold, Drea was glowering at her phone. She didn’t even look up when Jess entered, just muttered something about hardly any battery power left and going back to sleep being the best option.
After checking and confirming that her own phone battery was woefully low, Jess made her way back down to Mr Winters’ house. The street had become properly murky and eerily still now. With no Christmas lights or street lamps to illuminate it, the journey was doubly trepidatious as any black ice that had managed to melt was forming again. There was the smell of smoke in the air which, intellectually, Jess knew had to be cosy fires, but after that huge bang had reverberated round the neighbourhood, she couldn’t help but imagine an enormous hole in the earth, with the smouldering remains of Santa’s sleigh and the millions of presents he had yet to deliver.
She knocked on Arnold’s door.
He quickly ushered her in saying, ‘The cold, the cold, the cold.’
He was wearing his usual ensemble of a shirt and sweater vest, but with an extra addition of a button-up cardigan. When th
ey went into the lounge she felt strangely comforted, then realised there was a big jolly fire crackling away in the wood stove keeping the room cosy and warm. He had a couple of battery-powered camping lanterns tactically placed in front of mirrors he must’ve carried in from other rooms, as they were balanced in unusual locations.
There was no tree, but on one of the side tables there was a tiny brass carousel circling the silhouettes of angels round and round the firelit room.
‘So,’ he said, opening a hand to indicate a second chair that was already drawn up to the fireplace, fringed cushion plumped, as if he had been expecting her.
‘So,’ she repeated, letting the chair accept her weight.
‘Looks like there’s a Mrs Scrooge out there, today.’
Jess quirked her head to the side.
‘My feeble attempt at a joke,’ he said. ‘I was talking about Mother Nature. The ice,’ he explained. ‘Ice on the road made the lorry skid. I heard it on the radio. Quite a nasty accident. It’s lucky there was no one hurt. It’d be a tragedy on any day, but …’ He left the sentence dangling as there was no need to fill it in. Everything felt more potent on Christmas Eve. More visceral. As if a year’s worth of expectations were heaped upon this one magical set of twenty-four hours when kindness and beauty and joy reigned.
‘Do you have food in?’ Jess asked. ‘I’m happy to go to the shops for you if you need anything.’
‘No, lass. I wouldn’t ask you to go out driving. Not in weather like this.’
‘I bet Kev has some salt hidden away in his garage.’ She didn’t have a clue if he did or didn’t, but Kev seemed practical like that. Mr Nishio hadn’t stopped singing his praises since he had serviced their car. ‘It wouldn’t be a problem. Honestly,’ she said, a bit desperate now to do something, anything helpful.
‘Please.’ Mr Winters pressed his hands down as if trying to calm the air around her then leant forward and patted her knee. ‘I’m fine as I am. I think the real question is, are you going to be all right?’