by Matt Haig
‘No,’ said Father Christmas, looking worried but trying his best to smile through it. ‘I have heard the rumours too, but he assured me he was doing nothing of the sort.’
Humdrum sighed. ‘Well, there is a new newspaper being sold right now on the Main Path, as of today. It’s called the D-D-D-Daily Truth. Noosh is convinced it’s the work of Father Vodol.’
And I remembered what Father Vodol had said to me on the day of the wedding: Oh, you don’t understand the mind of elves. You see, they are very changeable. You take one wrong step and they’ll turn against you. You’ll see. I’ll make sure of it.
I thought of all my wrong steps. Like crashing the sleigh.
‘Well, I doubt he’d start a paper called the Daily Truth.’ Father Christmas laughed. ‘The last thing Father Vodol is interested in is the truth.’ But then he scratched his beard, confused. ‘How can a newspaper just appear? Where are its offices?’ He tried to shake away the thought. ‘Anyway, the trouble is, Humdrum, that Amelia goes to school five days a week.’
‘I could work on weekends, just like here,’ I said, and suddenly the thought shone inside me like a sun. Suddenly I felt at home again. ‘That would be amazing! I could be a real-life journalist!’
Father Christmas laughed a little. ‘Okay, Amelia. Why not? Let’s find Noosh.’
The Daily Snow
sat on the top floor of the Daily Snow office building in a chair made of gingerbread with giant bright red fluffy cushions. Almost everything in the room – apart from the cushions – was made of gingerbread. Even the walls. Although it wasn’t ordinary gingerbread. No. This was reinforced extra-strong gingerbread, and it shone a deep dark brownish orange. The office had only a single window, a giant round one at the end of the room, complete with a view of all the curving streets and small multicoloured houses of Elfhelm. On the walls were lots of old front pages of the Daily Snow hanging in large golden picture frames.
Noosh herself sat behind a huge desk and stared at me for a long time with wide open eyes from beneath her wild black hair.
She looked tired. Even the bags under her eyes had bags. But, despite that, she was quite animated, and moved her hands around a lot, and smiled, even as she frowned.
‘I have to get up Very Early Indeed every morning. Sometimes even earlier. I have to wake up, have breakfast, make a snow elf with Little Mim – he insists I make one every morning – before taking him to kindergarten. Well, sometimes Humdrum takes him. It depends on his shift, really.’ She picked up the cup in front of her and took a sip. ‘Triple-strength hot chocolate with extra chocolate sprinkles. It’s the only thing that gets me through the day. You’re sure you don’t want one?’
‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘I’m sure. Thank you, though. Too much chocolate gives me a headache.’
‘Wow. Must be hard to fit in to Elfhelm then?’
‘A little,’ I said, when really I meant, Yes! A lot! I feel like a freak!
‘So. You are good at writing, I hear?’
‘Well, I know that I enjoy it.’
‘The thing is that writing for a newspaper is very different to writing stories that you make up from your head.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I understand.’
She saw me looking at one of the old Daily Snow front pages. The headline was ‘CHRISTMAS FOR HUMANS – A VERY BAD IDEA!’
‘Ah,’ Noosh explained, ‘that was back in the old days. Back when Father Vodol was in charge. He believed the way to sell a newspaper was to make elves hate humans. To try and keep elves thinking just of themselves and fearing strangers. He once started a campaign to try to build a wall stretching from sea to sea, and rising right over the mountain, in order to keep humans out.’
I spotted another framed front page headline: ‘BUILD THAT WALL!’ And another: ‘NEW RESEARCH: HUMANS ARE POINTLESSLY TALL!’ And another, so long it hardly fitted on the page: ‘HUMANS ONCE KIDNAPPED LITTLE KIP AND SO THEY ARE ALL PROBABLY KIDNAPPERS (DON’T TRUST THEM, WHATEVER FATHER CHRISTMAS TELLS YOU!’ And: ‘ELVES FOR ELVES: VOTE VODOL!’ And: ‘TROLL TERROR STOPS CHRISTMAS!’
Noosh pointed at the pile of newspapers on her desk. ‘This is today’s paper,’ she explained. ‘Look at the headline.’
I looked. It said ‘HOW TO MAKE A CANDLE OUT OF EARWAX’.
She opened a drawer and pulled out another newspaper. ‘This is yesterday’s paper. Look again at the headline. “SLEIGH BELLES’ SINGER SAYS HER SORE THROAT IS A BIT BETTER NOW”’.
‘We devoted ten pages to that. Had a full interview with Juniper and everything.’
I smiled. ‘I like the Sleigh Belles.’
Noosh nodded. ‘Of course you do. Everyone likes the Sleigh Belles. “Reindeer Over The Mountain” is the greatest song ever written, in my opinion. And everyone loves “It’s Very Nearly Christmas (I Am So Excited I Have Wet My Tunic)”. You’ve heard that one, right?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Well, it’s great. But the trouble is Juniper’s sore throat shouldn’t be on the front page of a newspaper. It’s important, yes, obviously. But is it that important? I don’t think so.’
I leant back in my chair, inhaling the scent of gingerbread, and asked the obvious question: ‘Why did you put it on the front page, then?’
Noosh nodded as if I had said something very clever. Then she stood up and kept on nodding. She beckoned me over to the large round window at the far end of the room. The one with the panoramic view of Elfhelm.
‘Come over here,’ she said. ‘I want to show you something.’
I went over and had a look. The Daily Snow office building was – after the tower of the Toy Workshop – the tallest building in the whole of Elfhelm. It was located in the centre of Elfhelm, at the end of Vodol Street.
From here, on the top floor, I could see Blitzen and the other reindeer over in Reindeer Field. I saw the village hall. I saw an elf walk into the clog shop on the Main Path. I saw another carrying a little bag of chocolate coins he’d just withdrawn from the Bank of Chocolate. I could see the Street of Seven Curves and all the little elf cottages sitting silently. I could see Quiet Street and Really Quiet Street looking quiet and really quiet, respectively. I could see the Toy Workshop and the School of Sleighcraft and the University of Advanced Toymaking.
Beyond that, to the west, I could see the Wooded Hills. And to the south the vast snow-covered crooked triangle that was Very Big Mountain. Beyond that, of course, out of view, was the rest of Lapland, and Finland. The world of humans. The world of tall round-eared people who looked like me.
‘What do you see?’ Noosh whispered, as if the question had come from the air itself.
‘A lot,’ I said. ‘Everything. The whole of Elfhelm.’
Noosh nodded again. ‘Yes. You see everything. Of course, it is everything. But do you know what you also see?’
‘No. What?’
‘Nothing.’
I was confused, and probably looked it too. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean this everything is also nothing. Nothing actually happens here. I mean, yes, sure, things happen. Elves go to school or the workshop. Members of the Elf Council go to their meetings at the village hall to discuss sleigh flight restrictions and reindeer permits. People buy clogs and weave tunics. They sing and spickle dance and say kind things to each other. They work hard and play hard, but the problem is nothing really happens. Nothing has happened since the troll stuff? And you saw the front page when we welcomed you – a human girl into Elfhelm. Look, we put that up on the wall too.’
I had seen it. ‘THE GIRL WHO SAVED CHRISTMAS’ ran the headline. And there was a colour picture of me too.
‘Do you like the picture?’
‘Yes, I suppose it’s okay.’
‘Mother Miro painted it. She’s the Daily Snow’s in-house picture painter. She’s very good. And it was a very good news item. Indeed, you have been one of the more interesting things to happen this year. The incident with the sleigh, for instance . . .’
&nbs
p; ‘Oh no. Did you write about that?’
Noosh shook her head. ‘Not yet. I wanted to speak to you first, actually, and maybe do an interview about it.’
‘Maybe I could write it?’ I suggested hopefully. ‘That was what I was thinking, you see, that maybe you’d let me write about what it is like to be a human in an elf world.’
But Noosh was already shaking her head. ‘A human in an elf world? No, no, no. That wouldn’t work. You see, the sleigh crash story is interesting because people would wonder if you died or not, but if you wrote the story they would know you didn’t die and that would be disappointing – in a journalistic sense.’
‘Well, what about the weather? It’s very windy today. I could write about the windiness.’
‘Wind is not news unless it breaks or hurts something.’
‘Or Christmas. It’s very nearly Christmas. I could write about human Christmas traditions.’
She was shaking her head. ‘The elves invented most of them.’
I felt a bit hopeless, then. A little lost. The way things were going I was beginning to think there was no way Noosh was going to offer me work.
‘The trouble is,’ she said, as we stared out of the window, ‘that apart from the sleigh crash and Juniper’s sore throat and Father Casper the Candlemaker’s discovery that you can make candles out of ear wax there is no news. Not really. Not since we made peace with the trolls again. No one dies. There is no war. Christmas isn’t under threat. It makes Elfhelm very lovely to live in, but it also means no one wants to buy newspapers.’
Just then I noticed something on the Main Path.
A long queue of elves by the newspaper stand.
‘But look,’ I said. ‘Those elves seem very keen to buy a newspaper.’
Noosh made a groaning sound and grabbed her head as if she wanted to pull her own hair out. ‘Yes, yes, they do! The trouble is the newspaper they are buying isn’t the Daily Snow.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘Nope. It’s the new paper. Have you seen it yet? Father Vodol’s. The first edition. You see, when the Elf Council voted that he had to leave his job at the Daily Snow they didn’t say that he couldn’t start another newspaper. They assumed they didn’t have to. By making him live on Very Quiet Street and by taking away his newspaper offices they thought he wouldn’t – especially after the Elf Council took all his money. But he has probably got a lot of chocolate coins hidden away somewhere. Years ago, when he was Leader of the Elf Council, he paid himself ten thousand chocolate coins a week. And that’s not to mention all the money he made from the Daily Snow. He hardly paid anyone here anything at all. When I was Chief Reindeer Correspondent I was lucky if I got thirty chocolate coins for a whole week.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said, now seeing the flag above the stand, waving in the breeze: THE DAILY TRUTH.
Noosh laughed the kind of laugh that didn’t really sound like a laugh at all. ‘The Daily Truth! Of course, it’s not really the truth. Father Vodol doesn’t care about the truth. He doesn’t care about anything except selling papers. And the way he sells papers is by lying. By making everyone scared of things that don’t exist. When he set up the Daily Snow years ago he made up things about pixies and trolls and rabbits and humans. He tried to get elves to be scared. Oh, but you know what he is saying, don’t you? What he’s been saying since I took over his job here?’
‘What is he saying?’
‘He was saying – is saying – that I am the one making things up. He calls us fake. But I have never once published a story that isn’t true. What would the point of that be? A newspaper that didn’t report the news?’
‘Not much point, I’d imagine.’
Noosh sighed a long and exasperated sigh. ‘It’s a mystery.’
‘Why?’
‘Where is it? Where is the Daily Truth’s office? Where is he printing the newspaper? It isn’t easy running a newspaper. You can’t just make it appear . . .’ She leaned her head against the glass and closed her eyes. ‘No, it really isn’t easy.’
We left the window and sat back down again.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but we are losing money. I’m afraid that without any exciting news stories – news stories that you could prove to be completely true – I simply can’t afford to take new people on.’
I tried one last time to think of an exciting news story, but my mind was as blank as a field in the snow.
I could see that she was upset about the whole situation and I didn’t want to make her feel worse, so I just said, ‘Oh, never mind. I’ll be going then.’
And I stood up.
But just as I did so something slapped against the window. It was a newspaper. A copy of the Daily Truth that must have blown out of someone’s hands and floated its way in the wind up to the window. The front page pressed against the glass, facing us.
‘Oh no,’ said Noosh. ‘Look away. Don’t read that nonsense.’
But it was too late. I’d already seen the picture beneath the headline. It was of me. But, unlike the other picture, whoever painted this one was trying to make me look as angry as possible. Beside it, smaller, was a picture of the Blizzard 360 looking even more smashed up than it did in real life.
I saw the headline and read it out: ‘ENEMY AMONG US.’
I even had time to read the first two lines: ‘The adopted human of Father Christmas, Amelia Wishart, should not be trusted. She seeks to destroy as much as Elfhelm as possible, starting with this sleigh . . .’
‘Oh no,’ said Noosh. ‘Listen, Amelia . . .’
I tried to read on but the paper blew away, flapping in the wind like a desperate bird.
‘I’m not an enemy,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to destroy Elfhelm. It was an accident. I couldn’t help it.’
‘I know that, Amelia. Every elf with goodness in their hearts knows that.’
‘But you’ve just said that more people will read the Daily Truth than the Daily Snow. Hundreds of elves are going to read this . . .’ I began thinking aloud. ‘I’ll show them. I’ll make things right. I’ll pay back the sleigh . . . Then you can write about it.’
Noosh frowned, deep in thought. ‘I wish I could give you the money. But, unless you find a big story that involves something happening and that can be proven to be true, I can’t use it. If we can sell newspapers with the truth, then I can pay you.’
‘What about the story of my innocence? What if we write about what really happened? About how Captain Soot jumped into the sleigh and then onto Blitzen and that made Blitzen go crazy and then Captain Soot fell out of my arms and we dived to save him and I had to cut the sleigh free. Why don’t we write about that?’
‘Well, I’d love to. But can you prove it? Do you have any witnesses?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘It would probably just lead to Father Vodol making up more stories. And the trouble is his stories will be bigger because they’ll be lies, and the thing about lies is that they don’t have a height limit. They can be as big and tall as he wants them to be.’
‘So it’s no use then,’ I said. ‘The truth can never beat lies.’
Noosh was shaking her head. ‘Don’t believe that. We can’t believe that. We’ve just got to find a truth as big as any lie Father Vodol could come up with. An impossible truth.’ She whispered that swear word. ‘The story to end all stories. That is my dream. To make the Daily Snow the most popular newspaper in Elfhelm once again. And then we can correct all of Father Vodol’s lies.’
I tried to think where I could find a giant news story but I still couldn’t think of anything. The only thing going around my head was what Father Christmas was going to say when he read the first edition of Father Vodol’s newspaper.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Noosh. ‘I’d really better go.’
The Outsider
walked home feeling the cold bite of the wind. I passed a couple of elves fresh from the workshop who smiled at me and said, ‘Hello, Amelia!’ And I said hello back and thought m
aybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe not that many people were going to read the Daily Truth today. But when I turned off Vodol Street onto Main Path a little elf girl pointed up at me, saying, ‘Look, Mummy! That’s the human girl!’
And then her mummy – a round rosy-cheeked elf I had never seen before – grabbed her child’s arm and pulled her close. ‘Stay away from her! She’s dangerous! She doesn’t belong here!’
The little girl elf stared at me, open-mouthed, and then burst into tears, her wails scratching at me like a cat’s claws.
I hurried past them.
At the newspaper stand everyone in the queue was mumbling and whispering about me. The newspaper seller, a kind old elf with wispy grey hair, gave me a sympathetic look and said, ‘I’m sorry, love. I just sell the stuff. I don’t write it.’
‘It’s all right,’ I told him, and tried not to cry, even as I felt the sadness build and build and build inside me.
But then I felt my eyes hot with tears and I began to run.
‘YES! RUN AWAY!’ said a voice behind me. ‘WE DON’T WANT YOUR KIND HERE!’
I ran past the Bank of Chocolate and Mother Mayhem’s Music Shop and Clogs! Clogs! Clogs! and Red & Green, the clothes shop, and Magic Books, the bookshop, and then I found myself at Reindeer Field. Suddenly there were no elves, just reindeer, and reindeer didn’t read newspapers, so I felt safer, but I kept running all the way, as Blitzen looked up to see what the matter was. On and on and on. Until I was home. And I knocked on the door and kept knocking and there was no answer, but then I remembered that I didn’t need a key as it was Elfhelm and people left their doors open, so I turned the handle and went inside and I cried. I cried and cried and cried.
I went into the living room, full of decorations, and saw Captain Soot asleep in his basket beside the Christmas tree. I stared at the darkness of the fireplace. There was something comforting about the dark. I went over and crouched down, into the fireplace, and just stared at it. But then I heard footsteps on the path and saw Mary outside the window humming to herself and carrying a basket full of berries.