Across the way, a small man in a bobble hat and striped scarf starts selling the evening paper from a makeshift stand.
‘City Final!’ he roars, over the sound of our singing.
‘Hark the Herald!’ Brendan Coyle roars back.
Eventually, even Miss Devlin admits that it’s too cold to go on. The snow is falling fast now, and shoppers are hurrying for their buses and cars, anxious to get home. They don’t want to hear carols, or cats being strangled.
‘Happy Christmas, children,’ Miss Devlin calls out, her antlers bobbing. ‘Take care getting home. See you in the New Year!’
We break up into little groups and slither through the slush down towards the bus stops. Nuala O’Sullivan flags down a number 73 and I am left alone, at the tail end of the longest queue I have ever seen for the number 32A. Every bus that comes past is stuffed with shoppers. One after another sweeps past, splattering me with grey slush. I am so cold I could curl up in a corner and die.
‘We could always walk,’ says a voice in my ear.
Kevin Carter is at my side, a black beanie hat pulled low over straw-coloured hair, coat collar turned up against the snow.
‘Sure. Nice weather for a stroll,’ I snap.
‘Seriously,’ Carter says. ‘The buses are full – you’ll be stuck here till all hours. We could start walking, warm up a bit. If we stick to the bus route, we’ll be able to get on eventually, once people start getting off.’
‘Carter, it’s miles,’ I protest.
‘You can call me Kevin,’ he grins.
‘I know. C’mon, Carter, it’s a crazy idea.’
‘Got a better one?’
I haven’t. We walk down through the precinct, almost deserted now, and out along the main road towards Tile Hill. The snow is settling, hiding grey pavements beneath a shimmering crust of white.
‘You don’t even catch the same bus as me,’ I accuse him.
‘No,’ he admits.
‘Were you following me?’
Carter pulls a big red envelope, slightly soggy, from his pocket. ‘Wanted to give you this,’ he says. ‘I forgot, in school. Just a card, y’know.’
I open the card, which shows two penguins standing together on a heart-shaped chunk of ice. There is a foil-wrapped chocolate tree decoration inside the envelope, also heart-shaped.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I haven’t got anything for you.’
‘S’OK.’ Carter shrugs. ‘I didn’t expect anything. What are you doing at Christmas?’
‘The usual. Falling asleep in midnight Mass, eating too much turkey, watching too much corny TV. You?’
‘Pretty much the same. How about New Year?’
I roll my eyes. ‘Party,’ I tell him. ‘My dad just got engaged to his girlfriend, and they’re having a get-together. Fancy dress.’ It’s an Elvis party, actually, but I leave out that little detail.
‘Your dad?’ Carter frowns.
‘He’s not with my mum any more,’ I explain. ‘Not for years.’
‘That’s why you live with your grandparents?’
‘That’s why.’
‘Can anyone come?’ Carter asks. ‘To the party?’
‘Strictly invite only.’
‘Pity.’
We’ve turned off the main road now, heading down the hill towards my old school, Our Lady of Sorrows.
‘Kristina Kowalski lives around here somewhere,’ Carter says.
‘Does she?’ I reply. ‘What a thrill! I’ve never seen her around.’
‘Nobody knows much about her,’ Carter muses. ‘Even Brendan doesn’t know where she lives exactly.’
‘In a crumbling castle full of dungeons, bats and vampires?’ I suggest.
‘You don’t like her, do you?’
‘Well spotted!’
‘She’s OK.’ Carter shrugs, and even though I don’t like Kevin Carter, not really, I feel a sharp needle of jealousy. Kristina Kowalski can have any boy she wants – I just don’t want her to have Carter.
‘Wow. Our Lady of Sorrows?’ Carter reads from the snowcapped sign as we trudge past the grey building-block classrooms. ‘Some name for a primary school! Bet that was a bundle of laughs.’
‘It was OK,’ I tell him. ‘We called it “Our Lady’s” for short.’
‘Wish I’d known you when you were six years old, with gaps in your teeth and pigtails.’ Carter grins. ‘What’s this bit – the church?’ We stop, looking up at the stained-glass windows, the fancy zigzaggy roof that some architect must have thought would look really cool back in the 1960s.
‘Yeah. Mass every Sunday, class service on Tuesdays, Benediction on Fridays,’ I tell him. ‘We never go any more.’
Not since the time Gran shouted out in the middle of an especially heated sermon, telling Father Lynch to mind his manners or she’d have a word with his mum.
‘Me neither,’ Carter says.
‘It was different back then,’ I tell him. ‘I believed it all. I saw a miracle here once, when I was seven.’
‘What kind of a miracle?’
I steer him off the road, across the car park and round to the back of the church. ‘What am I looking for?’ he asks, puzzled.
A little lantern is built into the wall, spilling yellow light into the darkness. There is a shrine built into the rocks against the back wall of the church, a statue of Our Lady of Sorrows in a blue dress, arms outstretched. Today, of course, she is shrouded in white.
‘Wow!’ Carter says. ‘There’s nothing like that at our local church.’
‘It was out of bounds when we were at school, but we used to sneak through the fence.’ Back then, I used to kneel at the handrail in front of the statue, praying that I’d get a Barbie for Christmas, that my hamster wouldn’t die. Other stuff, too. It didn’t work.
‘So – what was the miracle?’
‘When I was seven, some kids started a rumour that if you could make the statue smile, all your prayers would be answered,’ I explain. ‘I believed it. One Saturday, Nuala and I brought biscuits and Fanta and sat on the bench for hours, telling her jokes and funny stories, pulling faces, till we were so bored our eyes ached. Then – finally – she smiled!’
Carter grins. ‘Not really,’ he says.
‘Well, maybe not really. Maybe we were just tired and fed up and over-imaginative. But we thought it happened, both of us.’
I guess I needed something to believe in, back then. It was at a time when Mum was drinking heavily, rowing lots with her old boyfriend Tom. I tried to believe I’d seen the statue smile, tried to believe my prayers would be answered. They weren’t – well, not for long, anyhow.
Carter frowns up at the statue, considering. ‘What d’you call a reindeer in a blindfold?’ he asks, then provides his own answer. ‘No-eye deer!’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Getting her to smile, of course!’ Carter says. ‘Think she could get me into the street hockey team?’
‘Hmm. That might take more than a miracle.’
We trudge through the car park and back to the pavement. Carter’s hat is caked with snow, his coat flecked with white. He sticks his tongue out in the dark, catching snowflakes.
I scuff up a wad of snow on the toe of my boot, then flick it off into the road. ‘Carter, why are you walking me home?’ I ask.
‘Felt like it,’ he says, looking at me with shiny hazel eyes. He reaches out a soggy gloved hand to touch my face. ‘You’ve got a snowflake on your nose.’ He shows me the snowflake, clinging to the damp black wool of his glove like a tiny, fallen star.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Carter says. I glance up and notice the snowflakes glinting around the edge of his beanie hat, the little white flecks that cling to the tips of his long brown lashes.
Just for a moment, I think he’s going to kiss me. He leans forward, his lips parted slightly, smiling, and my heart thumps, because I’m just not ready for this and I don’t know how to tell him without hurting his feelings.
‘Don’t,’ I sa
y. ‘Please.’
‘I can’t help it.’
Then he stuffs a snowball down the back of my neck, and runs away through the snowstorm. Typical.
My Christmas stocking holds a tangerine, chocolate coins, gel pens, nail varnish and tinsel-trimmed hairslides. Under the tree, there is a Concise Encyclopaedia for Students (Grandad), neon-pink curling tongs that look like an instrument of torture (Mum) and a polka-dot skipping rope (Gran).
We’ve all slept in, because we stayed up late at midnight Mass. We eat cornflakes, tangerines and selection box sweeties for breakfast, and it’s past eleven before anyone remembers the turkey. Grandad lifts it out of the fridge, pale and goose-pimpled and reproachful.
‘We have to make stuffing,’ I say, looking for instructions on the side of the packet. ‘Boiling water and a lump of butter, and mix it up with a fork.’ I put the kettle on.
‘You’re only supposed to have turkey at Christmas,’ Gran says, helpfully. ‘It’s such a lot of bother.’
‘You can say that again, Molly, love. Rose!’ Grandad calls through to Mum. ‘Can you remember how long the turkey needs?’
‘Hours, I think,’ she says vaguely. ‘If we put it in now, it should be ready for three.’ She wanders through, cradling a black coffee and massaging her forehead. She didn’t show up for midnight Mass – she was on a girls’ night out with Sue from the hairdresser’s.
‘Gas mark four, do you think?’ Grandad puzzles. He shovels in a few spoonfuls of stuffing and lifts the turkey into the roasting tin. It’s disgusting, all white and clammy, like a vastly overweight chicken. You can see where its feet have been chopped off, and its head. Suddenly, I am thinking of turning vegetarian.
The last time we had roast chicken, it came golden brown and crispy, from the chippy on the corner. The time before, it was cold cuts from Tesco. It is a long time since we’ve tried to cook meat from scratch. How do people manage it?
Grandad peels some spuds and sticks them in the roasting tin around the turkey, then slams the whole thing into the oven. I tip a packet of frozen sprouts into a saucepan for later, and sit the Christmas pud on top of the microwave.
‘Dad, Mum, Jude, you’re missing the film!’ Mum shouts.
It’s not like missing the film would be a problem – we’ve seen it a million times already. It’s Mum’s favourite, The Wizard of Oz, and it used to be on TV every Christmas when she was a kid. Now it’s still on every Christmas, and quite a few other days too, because Mum’s boyfriend Giovanni (he’s Italian) bought her the DVD.
The adults squash up on the sofa and I stretch out on the floor with Toto. He is named after the dog in the film, which is unsettling because the original Toto is a small, dishevelled terrier and our Toto is long-faced and mournful with flowing hair, a kind of canine supermodel.
For a while, there is no sound except the quiet clickety-click of Gran’s knitting needles and Judy Garland in the film singing ‘Over the Rainbow’. It’s a musical, the kind of film that’s magical when you’re six years old and seriously hard work when you’re twelve. It’s about a girl called Dorothy and her dog Toto, who get whisked away from their dull black-and-white world by a hurricane, and dumped in the land of Oz where everything is rainbow bright.
‘Why can’t my life switch into glorious Technicolor?’ Mum asks with a sigh. ‘Why is everything always so … dull?’
Meanwhile, Dorothy puts on her ruby slippers and sets off along a yellow-brick road to find the Emerald City and a wizard who can help her get back home. Along the way, she meets a scarecrow with straw for brains, a tin man with no heart and a lion with no courage.
‘Story of my life,’ Mum says, like she always does. ‘Your dad was the scarecrow, Jude – shocking dress sense, and no more sense than he was born with. And Tom …’
Tom was a handsome waster in a leather jacket I remember vaguely from childhood. ‘Tom’s the tin man,’ Mum declares. ‘No heart. As for Giovanni – he’s the lion. No backbone.’
‘Giovanni is a good boy,’ Grandad says. ‘He has his own business!’
‘An ice-cream van,’ Mum says scathingly. ‘I’m looking for something more. Pity all the men I meet are such no-hopers.’
We watch in silence as Dorothy finally finds her way back home, where life turns black and white once more, but Dorothy doesn’t care, because it’s where she wants to be.
Mum is misty-eyed. She slopes over to the piano, sits down and spreads her fingers over the keys. Then she launches into ‘Over the Rainbow’, singing raggedly, gazing up at the framed film poster of Judy Garland from The Wizard of Oz that hangs above the piano.
‘How about you, Jude?’ Grandad asks, hopefully. ‘Want to give us some Christmas carols? One of your Grade Four exam pieces?’
But Mum is on a roll, running through ‘Over the Rainbow’ again and again before subsiding into endless slit-your-wrist Irish songs. Grandad shakes his head and goes to check on the turkey, but it’s not ready yet, so we open a bottle of ginger beer and pour it into mugs. Alcohol is banned in our house, even at Christmas, on account of Mum’s problem.
We have mince pies, warm from the microwave, and cream, sitting back to pull crackers and watch the Queen’s speech. Grandad huffs and grumbles and swears under his breath all the way through. It’s his favourite part of Christmas.
We play Cluedo and Pontoon and Charades, and Mum styles my hair into corkscrew ringlets with the neon-pink curling tongs and twines tinsel into Toto’s hair. It’s past seven by the time we’re ready to eat. The turkey sits in the middle of the table, dark and dry and blistered. Around it, the roast potatoes are black and shrivelled, and the dish of sprouts looks like sludge-green soup.
‘Everything done to perfection,’ Grandad says proudly, but he has to saw at the turkey just to get through the leathery skin. He wrenches off a clump of meat and offers it to Mum.
‘Well, I’m not all that hungry …’ she blusters.
He transfers the meat to Gran’s plate, along with some charred spuds and a puddle of congealed sprouts. Gran looks distressed. We stare down at our plates, unwilling to admit defeat. I decide this isn’t the moment to discuss going veggie.
Grandad chokes down a mouthful of turkey, grinning weakly.
‘Perhaps a bit overdone,’ he says.
‘We could buy it ready-cooked from Tesco, next year,’ Mum suggests. ‘Eat it cold, with salad. That’d be easy.’
Christmas never used to be like this.
When Gran was well, it was a feast of golden turkey, onion gravy, roasted spuds and perfect vegetables. One year, Gran helped me to make mashed-potato snowmen, with strips of roasted red pepper for scarves and cloves for eyes and buttons. Everybody said they were the best thing ever. We used to do our own Christmas pud too, as well as a big iced cake and special mincemeat with grated orange rind and tons of fruit and spices.
In those days, the Christmas tree was always real – it smelt of pine needles and dark forests, and we draped it in tinsel and cotton-wool snow and bright, tiny baubles from the special box in the attic. Every year I made decorations at school – salt-dough Santas and glittery stars and snowflakes snipped from folded paper. Gran used to laugh and hug me and hang them on the tree like they were the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.
This year, we’ve got a little tinsel tree from the supermarket. It sits in the corner, looking bright and shiny and slightly lopsided, and the handmade angel and the crumpled snowflakes and stars just look kind of sad.
The doorbell goes, and Toto starts to bark. It’s Giovanni, Mum’s Italian boyfriend, the one with no backbone, bringing ice cream and red roses and a huge box of Thorntons chocolates.
‘I thought I’d bring supper,’ he says, placing a tub of creamy-yellow Italian ice cream down on the table. ‘But I see you haven’t finished dinner yet?’
‘We haven’t even started,’ Grandad exclaims. ‘Will you join us, lad?’
He picks up the plates and carries them through to the kitchen, scraping the meat
and sprouts and spuds on to Toto’s dish. Then he takes a couple of tins out of the cupboard, loads up the toaster and sets out clean plates and cutlery. He flings an old tea towel over the turkey corpse, and carries it away. I hear the front door click, and the lid of the wheelie bin as Grandad disposes of the evidence.
Gran knits serenely, her Christmas hat askew, smiling at nothing like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Can she remember the days when we made mince pies together, ate turkey and stuffing and roast spuds so crispy, so perfect? I remember, but only just, and the memories are jumbled up with flashes of Mum fighting with Tom, her ex, in the street, falling asleep on the sofa in front of The Wizard of Oz.
The past is another story, and I’m not always sure I’ve got the plot straight.
At last, we sit down to Christmas dinner, with Giovanni at the head of the table. It’s beans on toast, served with mugs of ginger beer and Christmas pudding and Italian ice cream for afters.
It’s the best I’ve ever had.
Victoria is dancing around the living room of the flat in a red minidress and a towering black nylon wig that looks like something a guard should be wearing outside Buckingham Palace.
‘This hairdo’s called a beehive,’ Victoria tells me. ‘It was all the rage in the sixties. Very elegant, very cool! Your dad bought me the wig for Christmas.’
‘It’s probably not too late to take it back to the shop,’ I say.
Victoria picks up a fluffy pink cushion from the sofa and chucks it at me. ‘Cheeky!’ she says.
Earlier on, she helped me put my hair up in big, scary rollers and now we are trying to do our make-up – pale faces, white lipstick and loads of black eyeliner all round our eyes so we look like cool 1960s chicks. Or pandas, maybe. Victoria is waving a mascara wand about as she dances.
Dad has already cracked open the wine, but Victoria isn’t drinking. She never does – I guess that makes her the exact polar opposite of Mum. I wonder if that’s why Dad chose her? Probably.
Dad comes in with a platter of warm sausage rolls and a plate of cheese butties, which he puts down on the table with a flourish. He has a red apron tied round his best Elvis catsuit, the black one with the stand-up collar and the fringy flares. His black quiff is solid with hairspray, and his sideburns are long and thick and lush. He looks grim, but I don’t care, because he’s happy, and besides, there’s nobody here from school to see him and laugh.
Sundae Girl Page 3