by Beth Moran
“So what did you do last year?”
“I think you’d better get on, Grace. You don’t want to miss your flight.” I reached out and hugged her. “Scarlett has packed your present from me. Now go, and have a really wonderful time!”
Last Christmas, I woke late to find my mother huddled in front of our coal fire, a bottle of Guinness in her hand. I made myself toast, and sat across from her on what she still called “Henry’s chair”.
“Are you going to open your present, Ma?”
“Are you still planning on abandoning your own mother on Christmas Day? If so, I’ll save it for later. It’ll give me something to do when I’m on my own. Perhaps it’ll stop me feeling so lonely.”
“Ma.” I closed my eyes, ground my teeth a few times. As had happened every single year my mother had been out of hospital for Christmas, Auntie Jean would pick her up straight after mass and take her to their brother Liam’s house. They’d have dozens of relatives coming and going all day, a four-course dinner, games, music and enough booze to keep even my mother happy. For the first time I had been courageous enough to speak up and tell the rest of the family I would not be joining them. This ruffled a few feathers, and provided Ma with buckets of sympathy to wring out from anyone unfortunate enough to blunder into her sphere of bitterness.
The postman must have been sick of hearing about her selfish, stuck-up daughter who would rather leave her widowed mother all alone on Christmas Day and traipse off to that doctor’s house. Might as well grovel on her knees and beg that boy to marry her, she’s that brazen. Always considered herself too high and mighty for her own family. Too grand for the likes of us. And who’ll she come snivelling back to when he decides he doesn’t want a weak, freaky sheep for a wife? Who’ll be expected to pick up the pieces then?
I spent the morning sitting with Ma while she pointedly looked at the wall behind my head and worked her way through two more bottles. She informed me, several times, that seeing I was ditching her for such a grand family, they could buy me a present while they were at it. This had limited impact since I hadn’t received a gift from my mother in eighteen years. There was always something under Liam’s tree with a tag stating “To Marion, with all my love, Ma”, but even at eight years old I’d known the writing, and the love, was not my mother’s.
Once Auntie Jean had been, I walked across town to Eamonn’s house, where I spent the afternoon playing Monopoly and eating chocolate. We ate a late dinner, opening our presents in the early evening. Eamonn walked me home, and we kissed goodnight. As I climbed into my freezing bed, hoping to be asleep before my mother returned, Harriet phoned.
“So, how was Christmas without the screaming cousins and your mother’s jolly wit?”
“It was fine, thanks. Peaceful.”
“Boring, you mean.”
“No. I missed the weans, but I had a nice time.”
“And? What did you get? Anything sparkly in a wee velvet box? Is your hand a little heavier this evening than it was when you woke up?”
“No.”
“Disappointed? Or relieved?”
“Neither! I wasn’t expecting a ring, Harriet. We’re fine as we are.”
“No, Marion. You are not fine. You’re hanging all your hopes on this man rescuing you, yet again, from the clutches of the dragon witch.”
“Harriet!”
“Sorry. From her clutches. You’re drifting about like an empty crisp packet, doing the bare minimum to classify yourself as animal not vegetable. You have a job and a nice boyfriend. Big deal. Your life is not going to change once you marry Eamonn Brown. You’ll still be round at your mother’s every day, cooking her dinner and absorbing her evil spillage. You’ll go nowhere you really want to go, do nothing you actually want to do and carry on pouring your life away like dirty dishwater. There is nothing wrong with living in the same town your whole life, sticking with a good job and marrying your childhood sweetheart. But Marion, you have no peace, no satisfaction and you certainly aren’t happy. You walk around this town with your head bowed and your eyes on the ground like that’s all you’re worth, all you’re aiming for. You had a lousy childhood. A really lousy one. So have millions of other people. When are you going to stop letting that be an excuse to waste the rest of your life? Get over it. Move on. It’s claws that hold you here, not love. Eamonn is not the answer. He’s part of the problem because he gives you an excuse to keep wallowing in your swamp of a life.”
“He loves me! Eamonn loves me even though I’m a complete mess. How can that be a problem?” My voice echoed down the phone. I felt shocked. Harriet had encouraged and cajoled me pretty much non-stop over the years, but she had never spoken to me like this before.
“He might love you for who you are. He doesn’t love you for who you can become. Only you can save yourself, Marion. Only you can find a way to look at yourself in the mirror and feel proud of the person gazing back at you. I don’t know exactly what’s happened to you, or how Eamonn’s helped you out, but I do know this: you are never going to be free until you get out of here.”
I didn’t want to be free. I wanted to be safe.
Harriet called me back ten minutes later.
“I’m sorry. I’ve spent the day listening to my parents wondering why I’m not married yet. Ma told me over Christmas pudding that if I was a lesbian that would be grand, as long as I was the girl one.”
“Happy Christmas, Harriet.”
“Happy Christmas, Marion.”
Sunday morning I got up, made myself a flask of coffee, wrapped up a cinnamon bagel and trudged over to the grotto site. The ground was crunchy with frost. Droplets of freezing dew clung to the decorations and glimmered off every wooden surface. The sun shone but the wind slapped at my skin. I ate breakfast inside the grotto hut, perched on the large rocking chair Archie hadn’t got round to collecting yet.
“So then, Marion, have you been a good girl?”
I poured myself a cup of coffee, offering a sip to imaginary Santa.
“Oh yes, Santa, ever so good. Well, except for running away from home without telling anyone where I was going, leaving my fiancé in the lurch, and stealing a programme from a mad man’s cellar. And having pleasant thoughts about someone else’s boyfriend, and unpleasant thoughts about, oh, loads of different people, and – ”
“Steady on, Marion, this isn’t confession.”
“Sorry, Santa. I suppose you want to hear my Christmas list.”
“Yes please. I am pretty busy at the moment.”
“Well, let me think. I’d like a new coat to show off my haircut, and some more books. I want to be able to run all the way around the estate without getting a stitch. But – honestly? What I really want is to find out who my da was. To feel… oh, like I know him again. What he cared about. If he was like me. And it would be great if you could give me enough courage to face the mess I’ve left back home. And to stop thinking about men who don’t belong to me. Oh yes, and a cookbook. Does that sound a bit much, Santa? I could do without the coat.”
I was about to reply to myself, when I heard a bark from the other side of the shed wall. Jumping up, I managed to avoid spilling my coffee, and looked up to see Lucy poking her head around the shed door, Reuben right behind her.
His eyes glinted. “Is it just you in here, Marion? I thought I heard the sound of voices.”
I straightened my spine and pointed my chin up toward the roof. “Yes. That would have been me. I was reciting poetry. It’s good for one’s soul.”
“Of course.” He nodded his head gravely. “Good idea. What’s your poem of choice for, um, soul improving?”
I stared at him for a moment. “That would depend. But today it was, of course, a Christmas poem. By Christina Rossetti, actually: ‘Love Came Down at Christmas’.” Thank you, Ballydown library Christmas recital evening.
“Love all lovely, love divine?” He furrowed his brow. “Funny. I don’t remember any lines about Santa.”
“Did you want somethi
ng or are you just here to eavesdrop?”
Reuben grinned. A full-on beam of crisp December sunshine.
“Archie thought you might need some help. It was that or make stuffing with Sunny while his elves swung from my belt loops and bounced pigs in blankets off my head.”
“Are you ready then, for Christmas? Got all your presents?”
“Nearly. Erica usually writes me a list, but she refused to this year, and it’s a nightmare trying to guess what she’d like. She thinks I should know her well enough to figure it out. I’m a bloke. I’ll never figure it out. If ever I get it right, it will be a lucky fluke.”
“You really don’t know?”
He leaned forwards slightly. “Why? Do you? Has she said something?”
I sighed. “Everybody in the whole entire forest knows what Erica wants you to get her for Christmas! It’s the same thing she wanted last year. And for her birthday. And for Valentine’s Day. And your anniversary. I can’t believe you haven’t cracked under the pressure. There was a sweepstake on whether you were going to do it at the festival.”
Reuben tightened his jaw. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Turning briskly, he stalked out of the doorway.
I took a few moments to make sure my bag was definitely fastened properly, checked it again for good measure, and having judged that to be long enough for him to have calmed down, I followed Reuben outside.
“What were you going to do first?” Reuben tugged at a star dangling from an oak branch. The rotten string snapped and it came off in his hand.
“I was going to undress the tree.” Even as I said it, a hideous flashback of my last cookery lesson slapped me across the face. I squinted at Reuben from the corner of my eyes, praying he hadn’t noticed.
“Well…” his voice was breezy – “as long as it’s only the tree getting undressed.”
Dumping a crate near the Christmas tree, I began tucking Grace’s woven decorations into the nest of shredded paper. “Archie said you’d managed to explain what happened. That you’re forgiven.”
“Erica trusts me.” He stretched up to unhook some of the ornaments that I couldn’t reach. “And she trusts herself.”
“What does that mean?”
“She knows she’s a great girlfriend and I have no reason to cheat on her.”
I thought about that for a few minutes, and wondered why, if Erica was such a great girlfriend, Reuben hadn’t given in to expectations and asked her to marry him. Or move in, at least.
“Are you really staying here by yourself all week?”
“Yes. It’ll be a blissful change. I might manage to get through Christmas Day without a relative-induced migraine.”
“So you wouldn’t want to spend Boxing Day with us up at the Hall? There will be relatives, both immediate and extended.”
“Ah, but they won’t be my relatives.”
I drove to Nottingham on Christmas Eve and spent a couple of hours wandering around the Winter Wonderland in the old market square, until the scrum of desperate last-minute shoppers drove me into a café. There was a pay phone in the corner. I sipped my hot chocolate and stared at it. The warmth of my drink couldn’t melt the lump of ice in the bottom of my stomach. I made a decision. This would be my Christmas present to myself: doing the right thing. In the midst of all my mistakes, I could tick this one thing off my list. I picked up the phone and dialled.
“Aye?”
“Eamonn, it’s me.”
There was a hard silence.
“What do you want?”
“I’m sorry. Really, truly sorry. It wasn’t about you – ”
“Is that it?”
“No, Eamonn, I…”
“Bye, Marion. Have a nice Christmas.”
I drove home, nauseous and wretched.
Sitting in the caravan on my bed, I opened the little box with the ring Eamonn had given me. I knew now that he did not love me – only the idea of loving me. I knew he thought of me only in terms of how I fitted into his life. He considered me too fragile, too small, to have hopes or dreams of my own. But he had genuinely believed it would make me happy to be the doctor’s wife, to spend my life looking after him and being protected by him. He had believed I needed a safe harbour, a calm sea, after all the storms I’d endured before. He had never realized that the peace I needed would come, not from my surroundings, but through making peace with myself.
By eleven-thirty I still felt restless with remorse. Old habits die hard in guilty Catholic girls. I grabbed my bag, picked my way through the deserted campsite with a torch and went to church.
I parked on the street outside Hatherstone village chapel. If the full car park hadn’t confirmed my guess about there being a midnight mass, the warm glow of lights shining through the lead-paned windows would still have enticed me in.
From the outside, the chapel looked a typical English country church. Within, it had been surprisingly modernized. Rows of padded chairs greeted me instead of the pews I expected. The floor had warm carpet instead of old stone, and I could see no ancient relics or statues at all. Bright banners hung on the walls, and dozens of paper lanterns filled with coloured lights dangled from the rafters. None of the familiar landmarks I associated with church were visible – no altar or stations of the cross, no pictures of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. If it hadn’t been for the box of white candles stacked behind the last row of chairs, and the wooden nativity scene on a table beside the door, I wouldn’t have known where I was.
Most of the hundred or so chairs were occupied. The glass door from the porch creaked as I slipped inside, and about ninety of the hundred people there twisted round in their seats to see who had come in late. I recognized some of the faces, including Jo from the café. She pointed to the empty chair next to her and, grateful to squeeze in near the back, I scurried over. A teenage girl at the front was about to begin a reading, struggling with the clip on her microphone. I used the empty moment to send up a silent prayer: Forgive me, God. It’s been a long time. But then I guess you know that already. And what I did to Eamonn. I’m not sorry for leaving, but I am ashamed of how I did it. I won’t make excuses for hurting him; I just wanted to say I’m sorry. If you can, help him to forgive me so he can move on without anger. Bless Ma, and the rest of them. Oh, and I hope you don’t mind me being in this weird church. I don’t even know what one it is. It was the best I could do at short notice. Amen.
I settled back and listened as the girl began. It had been years since I’d heard the Bible read. Father Francis had moved to a new parish when I was twenty and I had rarely attended mass since, only making an exception for cousins’ weddings, their children’s baptisms, and maybe a first communion if it was someone I especially liked. The words washing over me felt familiar, stirring memories and feelings long forgotten, but at the same time, it was as if I’d never really listened to them before, never connected the syllables together to understand what they actually said.
Don’t be afraid! I bring you good news of great joy which is for all people.
Glory to God in the highest! And on earth peace, good will to all men.
I thought about that: no longer being afraid. Having great joy. Finding peace. It all sounded so simple. I didn’t know much about anything, but life was never simple – this I did know.
The girl sat down, and a bunch of musicians took her place. A woman sang a carol I hadn’t heard before, about light in the darkness. Her voice was clear and strong, and she sang as if she had heard this good news, and her heart would break with the great joy of it. Then an older man read some more verses, about Jesus being the light of the world.
Somebody turned the lanterns off. The room went black. A hundred people held their breath. There was no sound except for the brief rustling of clothes, a child coughing. The room smelt of pine trees and polished wood. The man spoke again. His voice, though cracked with age, sounded resonant and vibrant in the darkness.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never
put it out.
There came the faint rasp and hiss of a match igniting, and a tiny flickering candle flame lit up the man’s face in front of us. A child, maybe nine or ten years old, went to stand in front of the man, and he dipped his candle to one held in the boy’s hands. Two flames now glimmering, the boy turned to light the candle of the young woman behind him, and so it went on, until every single person in the church held a glowing flame, the brightness shining all around us. The darkness fled.
At gone one o’clock I still lay awake in bed, thinking about churches where people smile instead of tutting when you walk in late, and the person in charge (a priestess? A vicaress? I had no frame of reference for women who ran churches) has skinny jeans, high-heeled pointy boots and a laugh that bounces off the rafters.
Then my thoughts skittered to a dead halt as I heard a crunch. Then another one. The soft tread of footsteps in the frost outside my window. Slow steps, hesitant, secretive.
I held my breath through the familiar wobble of the caravan as somebody climbed the steps outside. I waited for a knock. Or a crash. Neither came. I heard the door rattle, then a bump. The van wobbled again as whoever it was scrunched away.
Great.
I lay in bed a while longer, letting the adrenaline subside, wondering where my phone was.
“Was that you, Santa?” If it was, he wouldn’t have been fooled by my bluster. And besides, my mother had made it very clear that Santa was a big, fat, jolly sack of reindeer droppings. What are you crying for, you pathetic brat? Santa wouldn’t visit a girl like you anyway.
I flipped the covers off, forcing myself to get up. This worked, caravans in December being deathly cold. I dug out a thick cardigan, and carefully laced up my trainers, just in case I had to make a run for it, of course – nothing to do with putting off opening my front door. Peeking through a chink in the corner of my living room curtain revealed nothing; too dark to see. I carefully turned the key in the door, trying to be as quiet as possible even though I had heard the footsteps walk away, and gingerly opened the door a tiny crack.