* * *
Perfectly on time, Bridge stole downstairs and over to the fire. She would like to have stayed down here for a while and sat by the dying embers, but she needed to be quick so the next person could come. She didn’t have a real fire in her house but she soon would. She decided that when she got home, she’d have the arty gas fire ripped out and an inglenook fireplace built in its stead. It might be more faff having to clear out ash, but the pleasure would far outweigh the trouble.
As she stuffed her present into the sock, she knew she had the perfect gift for the owner of it. Maybe not the most conventional, but one that she hoped would convince him that the battle lines were trodden into the dust, finally and forever.
* * *
Charlie hurried downstairs as fast as he could, despite having promised Robin he would take it easy. He hadn’t felt this able for weeks; there must be magic in the brandies or the toasted marshmallows, possibly the cherries… or maybe he was just enlivened by the wonderful company he was keeping.
He had made his present himself and he hoped that it would work, because if ever anyone needed some guidance it was him. He was Charlie years ago, barricades up, letting no one in and nothing of himself out. If Robin hadn’t been so damned persistent, Charlie would have ended up a lonely, sad old man. Instead he’d had a lifetime of love and joy and he wanted the same for this person.
He hoped he’d read the words of a contented old Yorkshireman and learn from his hard years of experience. It would be a shame for it all to go to waste.
* * *
Robin was next. His hand was trembling as he put his present inside the sock. He didn’t want to go through with it, wished he had thought of something else now, but he knew that the recipient wanted this more than anything and he had to think of him before self. It would make him as happy as it would make Robin sad, as if they were on opposite sides of an emotional see-saw. But he owed him this. For all the wonderful years they’d shared, for all the love, the fun, the laughter. But he was dreading the giving of it.
* * *
Luke tiptoed downstairs. This time next year his Christmas would be very different. A new era awaited, one he never imagined would be his.
He had to stretch the sock to fit his present in it. Stupid but full of meaning. It represented a time in his life when he didn’t think his lot could be any better. Okay, so he hadn’t exactly been aiming high at the time where luxury was concerned, but he had everything his unambitious heart wanted. Life was so much better now, but in a different way. It was comfortable and calm and easy. Before, it was raw and exciting and edgy and that had been a fit for the Luke he was then. He had needed to be him first, the blank sheet of paper to be written on, the rough copy. It was just a shame that the grateful thrill of the simplest pleasures had become collateral damage of his evolution.
He hoped his gift would mean something to her, that she’d take from it what she’d meant to him once. The page may have turned and they may have skipped forward chapters, but it was still there, an integral part of their book. Of them.
* * *
Jack was the last one to go downstairs; all the other socks were filled except the long red one. Present-choosing was never his forte, which was why he tended to delegate the duty to those who would pick something more suitable than he could, because he didn’t want to get it wrong. He felt ridiculously apprehensive about putting his gift into the sock. Maybe it was too subtle, maybe it was overstepping a mark, crossing a line. Maybe it wasn’t crossing it enough.
He had the luxury of time, being the final stocking stuffer and sat in the armchair for a moment, enjoying the peace. Something cracked, as if it was the inn settling down to sleep, resting its old bones. How good it would have been to sit somewhere like this with a lovely woman in the armchair next to him, enjoying a nightcap after a mad half hour putting their children’s toys under the tree. He did want what his friends had, that shift of focus from the material to the personal. They all still worked damned hard, but now what they did had more purpose, because they were building for a family. It made them both tougher and softer at the same time. They’d changed and he wanted to change with them. He did want children, wanted them to have the things he didn’t have, things his dad had missed in pursuit of giving him what he thought was the most important. Because he’d loved him.
Finding this out from Mary, and that his dad had been proud of him, had meant everything and, if what she’d said was true – and he had no reason to doubt it – he could have discovered it a lot sooner had he not rebuffed her in a corridor. It sounded crazy but it was as if he had just met her, this kind, thoughtful, accomplished… woman – yes, woman – who had always been as far from a ‘silly young thing’ as it was possible to be. Why hadn’t he realised that Mary existed outside the frame of a PA before? Luke, Bridge, Charlie, Robin had made him view her through their eyes, because they had seen more of her true worth in the day and a half they had known her than he had in six and a half years. He felt confused by the absurdity of it and something else he couldn’t quite pin down that defied definition, like someone blowing a hint of warm breath on his nerve endings, setting them to shiver with a frisson of delight and trepidation when she was nearby.
All he did know for certain was that he wanted Mary to comprehend what his present was meant to say, what he was getting at: that she was class, a woman of quality. He hoped that the subtlety of that message would come through loud and clear to her.
Chapter 21
‘Mary. You awake?’ Bridge whispered tentatively, not wanting to disturb her if she wasn’t.
‘Yep. Can’t sleep.’
‘Me neither. No idea why. I usually have no problems and I can’t blame the bed. I slept like a baby last night.’
‘Me too,’ said Mary. ‘I could never sleep on Christmas Eve when I was young. I used to be terrified I’d be awake when Santa came and he wouldn’t leave me any presents. One time, I awoke and saw him, this red suit in the corner of my bedroom and I turned over and squeezed my eyes shut. I reckoned if I couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see me. I must have scared myself into a coma because my mum woke me up the next morning as I’d slept in.’
‘Ha! You must have been the only child in the country not to be up before five o’clock.’
‘It was Dad, of course. When he died and we were clearing some of his things out of his wardrobe, I found his Santa costume. He’d kept it all those years.’
‘How sweet,’ said Bridge. She’d never get her childhood back, but on their first Christmas Luke dressed up in a red jumper, fur-trimmed hat and a beard he’d made out of cotton wool and cardboard and put her presents in a pillowcase at the bottom of the bed. She’d woken up, asked him what the hell he was doing, and he’d pretended to be Santa, told her in a deep voice to get back to sleep. He’d bought her a Polly Pocket Fashion Star, a Fuzzy Felt, the Mouse Trap game and other stuff she told him she’d put on her Christmas lists when she was a kid but never got. He’d hunted them down on eBay. Another memory resurfaced that she’d buried with all the other Luke detritus.
‘He sounds like a nice man, your dad,’ Bridge went on.
‘He really was, Bridge.’
‘Were you very close?’
‘Very. I was a proper daddy’s girl.’
‘I never knew my dad,’ said Bridge. ‘I had a stepdad. More than one actually, but I stayed as far away from them as possible.’
‘That’s sad.’
‘No point in complaining about it. The past made me resilient. Luke was the first person who gave me any real affection. I think I repaid my debt though because I gave him the idea for Plant Boy.’
Mary levered herself up onto her elbow. ‘No way.’
‘Yes way,’ said Bridge, with puffed-out-chest pride.
* * *
Next door, Luke asked Jack if he was awake, even though it was obvious with all the tossing and turning and disgruntled blowing out of air that he was.
‘Sorry, can’t sleep. Didn’t mean to dis
turb you,’ Jack answered.
‘It’s fine. I can’t get to sleep either.’
‘It’s too quiet, isn’t it?’ said Jack. ‘I’m not used to this countryside muffled snow silence.’
‘I know what you mean. I moved from the city into a hamlet recently and it took me ages to get used to it.’
They both listened to the nothingness for a few beats before Jack spoke again.
‘Interesting name, Plant Boy. Where did it come from?’
Luke grinned. ‘Bridge. It was an insult she levelled at me, accompanied by a large head of broccoli, which gave me a discoloured, if not quite black and blue eye for a couple of days. Her words, paraphrased, ran on the lines of, “Here you go, plant boy, make a million out of this then.” ’
Jack gave an impressed whistle. ‘Wow, that’s… remarkable. Not a strong enough word I know, but suffice to say you grew a hell of a plant from that small verbal seed, pun intended.’
‘Jack, I’m under no illusions that the unwittingly donated company name has been instrumental in my success, even if I did make Bridge mad enough to clobber me with a vegetable, and boy she really was furious. Admittedly I had just told her that I was thinking of walking out of my job on a whim because I wanted to give everything I had to a new business venture making vegetarian food – me, who couldn’t boil an egg.’ He laughed at the farcical nature of it, though it hadn’t been that funny at the time because it was the most insane of impulsive gambles. Plus, he’d always been of the belief that vegetarians were akin to circus freaks, along with the four-legged lady and the man with an arse for a head.
‘The name stuck in my mind, accompanied by her shrill delivery,’ continued Luke. ‘Every time I hit a stumbling block, I replayed her screaming it at me and it drove me on. I couldn’t bear her to think I’d fail.’
Jack could easily picture the scene. Bridge, he imagined, could make Medusa look reasonable.
‘She didn’t try to claim credit for the Plant Boy name, then?’ he asked Luke.
‘Course she did; just after we split up for the final time, she told me she was coming after me for three-quarters of everything it had made, and that would have been a lot to hand over because I was making money faster than I could bank it.’
Jack’s eyebrows raised. ‘Split up for the final time? How many times did you split up in all, then?’
‘I did hear that it takes couples about five or six false attempts before they make that decisive break. I think with us the number was about thirty-two,’ Luke said with a long drawn-out sigh.
* * *
‘How did you and Luke meet?’ asked Mary, sitting up in bed now, not even thinking about nodding off.
Bridge sat up also, her action mirroring Mary’s. ‘Remember I told you that I once worked in a plumbing factory in Derby? Well, the day after I’d twatted that boss for slapping my bum, I was walking to work rehearsing what I was going to say if I was pulled in by HR to explain my actions. It was winter, the ground was covered with snow, I wasn’t looking where I was going because I was preoccupied and I tripped, and this man appeared from nowhere with a smiley face and angelic mad hair.’
‘Luke.’
‘Yep. That was the start of it.’
‘And you say you gave him the idea for Plant Boy?’ Mary’s fascination was clear.
‘We’d been together about eight years. I was working for a company selling property by then. I took Luke to a works dinner with me and the vegetarian option was lazy, some disgusting boiled cauliflower with paprika sitting in what looked like wallpaper paste, everyone was complaining about it. At the time Luke was trying to find something to sink his teeth into work-wise. He wanted his own business, so he said, but if get up and go was dynamite, Luke wouldn’t have had enough to blow his own nose with. So I was joking when I said something on the lines of that he should look at making vegetarian food more interesting because there was obviously a major gap in the market. Luke had only just learned how to pour milk on his cornflakes, so I had no idea what I’d kick off with that remark.’ Bridge shook her head in the dark, remembering the scene she had walked into the day after. Luke had spent all the rent money on food they wouldn’t eat, and not only that but he’d skived the day off work to buy it. ‘To cut a long story short I ended up throwing some broccoli at him and told him to make his first million out of it. I called him Plant Boy. I was so fucking cross.’
‘Wow,’ said Mary. ‘Just wow.’
‘Yes, and he did make his first million out of a broccoli burger. You couldn’t make it up.’
‘All that from throwing a sprig of broccoli at him?’ Mary gave an impressed whistle.
‘It wasn’t a sprig, it was a massive head of it,’ said Bridge. She thought she’d fractured his eye socket, although bloody-mindedness had prevented her from giving him the slightest hint of apology or concern. But then, it had been a time when she thought all her softness had gone forever, when she’d lived off a diet of frustration and self-loathing.
‘Crikey.’
‘I watched him change before my eyes in a matter of weeks from a feckless drifter into this manic creature with an obsessive drive. He became someone I didn’t recognise. Still, I thought he was on the road to nowhere. I had no faith in him. Not a bit. I thought he’d gone batshit insane.’
‘Did that lead to you breaking up?’ asked Mary.
Bridge gave a long outward breath. ‘Oh, Mary, there were about a million reasons why we broke up. I don’t even know where to begin answering that.’
* * *
‘Must be weird being here with Bridge,’ said Jack.
‘Weird isn’t the word,’ said Luke with a dry chuckle.
‘When did you split up?’
‘Four years, nine months and three weeks ago. I can give you days, hours and minutes if you like because the exact moment when I walked out of the door for the very last time is tattooed on my brain.’
‘That’s a long time to be battling,’ said Jack, raising his long thick line of eyebrow in acknowledgement of the fact. ‘My parents’ divorce was done and dusted within six months and they despised each other.’
‘My solicitor explained to me that there are two types of acrimonious divorce,’ began Luke. ‘Firstly, where the couples hate each other so much, they can’t wait to be free and just want it all over and done with as soon as possible. Secondly, where the couples hate each other so much that the desire to hang on and hurt becomes more of an aim than the parting of the ways. Crazy stuff. The flipside of love can be very ugly.’
‘I see,’ said Jack, although he knew that already.
‘I used to marvel how I could hate someone with as much passion as I used to love them,’ said Luke. ‘Once upon a time, I’d have cut out my heart for her. Now, she’d let me.’
Jack shuddered at the mental image. ‘How did you meet each other in the first place?’
‘I was nineteen, walking to work in a factory early one snowy morning and a woman went arse over tit right in front of me. I helped her up. Turns out she was heading to the same place I was. We worked in the same building but didn’t know it. Then again, so did a thousand other people. And that was the start of us. After that, I seemed to bump into her all the time and I couldn’t wait to bump into her either. I fell hook, line and sinker for her, the full soulmates fairy story. We were married within the year, not a penny between us, trusted love would sort out any problems and we really thought it could solve everything. We struggled, had good times, bad times, really bad times, we fought, made up… until we ended up fighting more than loving. We tried to stay together, we had a dog that we both wanted to keep, but there was too much going on. We were both terrified that we’d try and claim each other’s hard-earned profits. Bridge got a new boyfriend and I was jealous as hell, then I got a girlfriend and she went nuts. Well, even more nuts, because nuts was her default setting.
‘Then… I met Carmen and Bridge met Ben and they were both for keeps, which accelerated the need to get this sorted,
and somewhere in the last year, I grew up. I decided that if Bridge tried to fleece me for half my business, I’d just let her have what she wanted to make it all stop. Turns out she’d grown up too, and thought the same as me. So we both waved a white flag and called a ceasefire. We started to talk to each other as we should have done at the beginning, made the decision at last to walk away from each other cleanly, make the split final and forever, not take a thing from each other.’
‘And the dog?’ asked Jack.
‘She died,’ said Luke in such a way that told Jack that subject was off limits.
‘She’s quite… formidable, Bridge,’ Jack went on, which made Luke snigger.
‘That’s conservative. Bridge is a tornado, a volcano, a tsunami. If she was born a horse, she’d have been a bucking bronco.’ Jack smiled at that. ‘But yes,’ Luke continued. ‘She’s most definitely formidable. I admire her more than I can put into words.’
‘Do you?’ Jack couldn’t work out what Luke’s true feelings for Bridge were at all.
‘Jack, I thought I had a crap upbringing but it pales into insignificance alongside how Bridge was dragged up. We both came from households with no discipline, no care, no love, permanently hungry stomachs, no Father Christmas visits. We were just kids people had, by-products of careless contraception, not wanted. Bridge ended up in the care system, which failed her really badly, made her borderline feral. I at least moved into a wonderful foster family at thirteen that unknotted some of the damage. Bridge didn’t know what it was to love or be loved until we met and she both wanted it and couldn’t handle it. She craved normality, the stuff that she’d seen other kids have; you know, the stuff people like you probably took for granted.’
Jack didn’t commit to any comment.
‘And she was so bright, but she hadn’t a GCSE to her name because she’d messed about at school, trying to get attention in all the wrong ways. She realised this and decided to make up for it in the world of work, show all those people who’d written her off just what she was capable of. She’d stand outside estate agents’ windows and look at the big houses. She’d tell me that one day we’d live in a pad like that. And we do, but not together.’
I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day Page 16