The Present

by Charlotte Phillips

  ‘Does it have Santa?’

  ‘Not within miles of it.’

  ‘In that case I’ll pass. I like my Christmases festive.’ She frowned. ‘When exactly are you off?’

  ‘Tonight. I just thought I’d drop over early though, there’s no crazy rush.’

  He saw her shake her head despairingly as he followed her into the kitchen and switched the kettle on.

  ‘My mother’s gone out somewhere, so I thought I’d bring the tree in ready for later. She’s probably thinking about breaking her fingernails, the lazy cow.’ She smiled at him. ‘We need to bring a bed downstairs, and she’s meant to be helping me shift it, so she’s made herself scarce. You want coffee?’

  She didn’t wait for an answer, just grabbed a couple of mugs from the cupboard.

  ‘What is it with you and moving heavy stuff around?’

  She laughed.

  ‘It’s not heavy, just awkward. The single bed from the spare room. We can do it between us when she gets back, it’s not a problem.’

  ‘So what’s happening about your place, then?’ he said, taking the mug of coffee she held out. ‘Why the change of plan?’ He asked the question as if he were asking about the weather, when, in actual fact, he couldn’t remember wanting an answer to anything so badly.

  ‘Long story.’ She held her mug of coffee in both hands. ‘If we have this first, then we can do the bed and go and get Gran. Then later on I can do shopping and stuff.’

  ‘Still stuff on the to-do list, then.’

  ‘To-do list is done with,’ she said shortly.

  Before he could question what that meant, she was across the room putting the milk back in the fridge.

  ‘How come you’re doing Christmas here?’

  ‘I’ve moved back in with Gran.’ A pause. ‘And my mother. It’s going to be interesting.’

  His heart rate zipped into overdrive.

  ‘Your mother’s staying too?’

  She pulled a sceptical face and leaned against the counter.

  ‘She says she is. Maybe I should just take that and be happy with it instead of expecting too much, expecting her to be someone that’s she’s never going to be.’ The box of decorations lay open on the counter next to her. She looked down at it and ran a hand distractedly through her hair. ‘In my head, as a kid, I had this idea of what a perfect mother should be. I used to feed it when I was at school. My friends’ mothers waiting at the school gate, while mine was in Morocco, or Tenerife, or Benidorm, or just insert any holiday destination with sunshine. Maybe that benchmark was just unfair. Once I moved in with Gran and Grandad, she’d rock back up and think it all ran like clockwork without her.’ She nodded around her, taking in the house with its disarray. ‘It’s so far from clockwork right now that she fits right in. So maybe she will stay this time.’ She looked at him and smiled. ‘I’m glad you came over early,’ she said.

  ‘Because I helped you shift the ambitious Christmas tree?’

  ‘No, because I wanted to say thanks again. For coming with me to find Elizabeth and Joseph. For not letting me give up and chuck the whole thing in a skip.’

  ‘You would have gone anyway,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure I would have. You’ve been such a good mate these last few weeks.’

  He crossed the kitchen and stood next to her against the counter, leaned back like she was. Her head just about reached his shoulder. He put his arm around her, and she smiled sideways at him in a way that had him clenching his hands to stop himself from pulling her in tight against him and kissing her until she couldn’t breathe. Somewhere along the way, he had side-slipped into the role of supportive friend. The thing was, that really didn’t feel like it was enough any longer, not for him, not now he knew she might be free. It took a monumental effort. but instead of sliding his hands into her hair and drawing her lower lip, which looked to him like the softest thing in the universe, into his mouth, he pulled her against him and kissed her forehead. The closeness of her, the warm sweet scent of her hair. Every instinct told him to pick her up and take her to the nearest lockable room, and all that stopped him was the thought of what would happen afterwards. She was indispensable now, and that made things a whole lot harder. He’d spent so much time making sure he never dated anyone that he couldn’t do without, and now this had crept up on him in the guise of spoken-for friend, who was now no longer spoken for.

  ‘I hope you have a fantastic Christmas,’ he said, against the smooth milky skin of her forehead.

  He felt her hand tighten momentarily on his shirt at his shoulder blade, and then she stood up straight and walked away, out of his reach, to put her coffee mug in the sink.

  The bed was the metal-framed single from the spare room. She had already removed the screws, and it leaned against the wall in pieces to be carried down.

  ‘Don’t go dropping it or throwing yourself down the stairs now,’ he called up to her. ‘You know what you can be like. I’ve never met anyone so accident prone.’

  ‘Any Laurel and Hardy jokes, and I’ll set my mother on you,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I’m obviously the organiser in this partnership,’ he said. ‘Lift that a bit higher over the banister … that’s it.’ He made sure he took the weight of it.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she called from the landing. ‘But without me this would just fall on your head, and then you’d be the one trapped under something heavy, right?’

  He bolted the bed back together in the sitting room, while she organised bedding.

  ‘This is perfect,’ she said, adding plenty of squashy pillows. ‘She’ll be right in the middle of everything while she rests up, and she can watch all the trash TV she likes. Plus, she’ll be much warmer in here with the fire. Thanks so much for helping me.’

  ‘No problem. Now let’s go and cause a security alert at the hospital, shall we?’

  Lunch had just been served at the hospital when they arrived. It didn’t seem to matter what was on the menu, it always smelled of meat and unidentifiable vegetables. At the nurses’ station outside the ward, Lucy glanced sideways at Jack.

  ‘Let’s try and do it by the book first, shall we?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘These people are the gatekeepers,’ he said. ‘Worth a try I guess.’

  She leaned over the high counter and spoke to the nurse on duty.

  ‘Olive Jackson. What are my chances of getting her discharged today?’

  The nurse tapped her pen against her teeth thoughtfully.

  ‘Well, to use a seasonal analogy,’ she said. ‘Imagine a snowball in hell. Then divide that by ten.’

  Oh terrific.

  ‘There is nothing that she’s getting here that I can’t provide,’ Lucy protested. ‘She’s not on a drip, she’s not hooked up to any monitors, it’s just a matter of a few tablets and bedrest, and I am a responsible adult.’

  She saw Jack pull an amused face in her peripheral vision and deliberately ignored him. The nurse wasn’t moved.

  ‘Even if she’s up to it, which is a coin-toss at best, she needs to be checked over by a doctor before discharge, and they’re like hens’ teeth. It’s Christmas, in case you hadn’t noticed, and there’s some kind of emergency in A & E that’s hoovered up anyone with a stethoscope. I wouldn’t pin my hopes on today.’

  ‘No leeway at all?’ Lucy pressed.

  ‘Nope. Just giving it to you straight.’

  ‘Well, that went well. Not,’ she said to Jack as they headed down the corridor. They turned into the ward to find Gran propped up in the bed reading Hello. She looked up at them in such delight that Lucy’s heart sank. How could they possibly leave her on her own in this place?

  ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ Lucy said to her, pulling up a chair. Jack sat down on the other side of the bed.

  ‘The good. Obviously.’

  ‘I’ve got the house ready for you to come home for Christmas. Your house, not mine. Bit of a change of plan, I know, but it’s all good.’
<
br />   Gran’s eyes lit up.

  ‘And the bad news is …?’

  ‘The way it’s looking, you’ll be hanging on for days waiting to see a doctor to be discharged. They’re short-staffed.’

  ‘Sod the discharge then,’ Gran said. ‘Just tell them we’re going, and get me out of here. It’s not a bloody prison.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that. What about a care plan when you get out? What about painkillers?’

  Gran flapped a hand.

  ‘We’ll call up Doctor Dudley when we get home. He’s been my GP for thirty years, he’ll see me right if I need anything. I’ve been perfectly fine for ninety-two years, and I’ve got tights older than half the doctors in this place. I’m not about to run a marathon, I just want a decent cup of tea.’

  Lucy met Jack’s eyes across the bed. He smiled at her.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

  If the bed hadn’t been in the way, she would have hugged him right then and there. How was it that the partner-in-crime vibe he had was so appealing? The way he took her wants and made them feel doable. Literally anything felt possible with him in her corner, she could never tell where they would end up. And, instead of struggling with the unpredictability of this fact, she found herself liking it. Gran would be home for Christmas: the thought filled her with happiness, and she wasn’t sure she would have pushed hard enough to make it happen without him.

  Trundling an AWOL pensioner in a wheelchair past the nurses’ station without drawing attention to yourselves was definitely made easier by the fact it was Christmas.

  ‘They can’t actually stop us, it is a free country,’ Lucy said, tucking a blanket over Gran’s knees. ‘Maybe I should just try and talk them round.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Gran said. ‘We’ll be stuck here for hours while they argue the point and make you feel guilty. Get me home and break out the sherry.’

  ‘Just wait until the nurse is distracted,’ Jack said, draping tinsel around the wheelchair. ‘Put this on.’ He handed Gran a sparkly green party hat. ‘Anyone asks, we’re going to watch the carol singing.’

  ‘Carol singing?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘It’s Christmas week, there are bound to be carol singers somewhere in this place.’

  At the nurses’ station, she put both elbows on the counter and waved her hands, enthusing about the hospital Christmas lunch menu while Gran sped past behind her like Jensen Button, with Jack at the steering wheel.

  ‘I’ve left a note with my phone number and address, and told them I’ll make sure she sees the family doctor,’ Lucy said, running to catch up. ‘They’ll be glad of the free bed.’

  In the car, with Gran settled comfortably in the back seat and the heater on full, Jack returned the wheelchair to the building and walked back to the car. As he crossed the frosty car park he could see Lucy In the car, kneeling on the front seat and talking excitedly to Gran in the back. Lucy’s hair gleamed gold in the light, and she was smiling. His heart upped speed. The last hour had been a laugh. There was no other word for it. He’d had so much fun with the pair of them. The thought of it coming to an end brought in an instant downer. After Christmas with Olive on the mend, he would go back to doing occasional work for her in the garden and the house, Lucy would go back to work. After Christmas, it would be as-you-were. And while he really wasn’t sure that was what he wanted, how could he make it into anything else?

  Napping in bed in the sitting room, propped comfortably up with a small sherry, the TV remote and the Christmas Radio Times, Gran looked a million times better already. Jack was shifting the furniture around to give more space and there was just the tree left to decorate. Lucy headed to the kitchen, feeling warm and happy, to get James’s box of decorations. This year she and Gran could look at them and remember. She walked out of the sitting room and fell straight over a bulging suitcase that had appeared in the hallway. She frowned down at it. Not just any suitcase. Her mother’s flashy fake Louis Vuitton suitcase.

  What the actual fuck?

  Her mother appeared at the top of the stairs as if on cue, weighed down with the rest of the Vuitton collection and wearing a floppy sunhat like it wasn’t minus one degree outside. As if to press the point even more, the honk of a car horn sounded outside the house. A thousand childhood flashbacks gathered themselves into one giant cannonball-sized dose of déjà vu and dumped themselves into Lucy’s brain.

  Her mother, true to form, was leaving. After everything she’d said, it was back to the same old same old. And Lucy had fallen for the same old bollocks yet again.

  ‘You’re leaving,’ she said, watching as her mother manoeuvred herself down the stairs carefully in her flowy jumpsuit and heels. ‘In fact, you’re not even just leaving, you couldn’t actually be arsed to tell me that you are. And what about Gran? You’ve talked to her for five minutes since we brought her home.’

  It was that more than anything else. Bad enough that she was heading off, true to form after all the times she’d done exactly this when Lucy was growing up. But after everything that had been said this last couple of days, not to actually discuss the situation first was the thing that really hurt.

  ‘I’ve talked to Mother. She understands. And the taxi’s turned up early. I was absolutely not going to leave without saying goodbye.’

  ‘If that’s true, then why didn’t you talk to me about it before you even ordered the bloody thing?’ She held up a hand to stop the excuses, all of which she would have heard before. ‘I’ll tell you why. Because you didn’t want to give me the chance to try to talk you out of it, and most of all, you didn’t want the guilt trip.’

  The silence was enough of a reply. She had done this so many times, she just had no will to argue left. Not this time. This time had felt different; she had actually thought they had the beginnings of a relationship going on that might bring more good than stress. Had thought they might even work well as a team now, supporting Gran. What an idiot she had been to get sucked back into this yet again.

  ‘Where is it this time?’

  As if it mattered. It could be any one of a hundred destinations, but that didn’t change the basic facts. She pressed her lips tightly together.

  ‘Come into the kitchen,’ her mother said.

  ‘For what reason would I possibly want to do that?’

  ‘Hang on …’

  Lucy watched her clatter down the hallway in her high heels and wrench open the door. Through the open door she saw her teeter out across the icy gravel and say something to the taxi driver. As she headed back inside the driver did a three-point turn and headed back down the drive. Scepticism that she’d delayed him for a bit fought inside her with the hope that she’d just cancelled the whole trip.

  ‘You’ve changed your mind?’ she said, as her mother ushered her into the kitchen and sat down opposite her at the table.

  ‘I asked him to come back in half an hour. I can still make my flight, I left plenty of time.’

  Scepticism had always been the right option when it came to her mother.

  ‘Tenerife,’ she said.

  As if Lucy even cared.

  ‘I’ve spent most of my time there over the last few years, I’ve made a lot of friends. I’ve got an invitation to spend Christmas and New Year. Giorgio will be there.’

  ‘What about family? I thought you were finally going to have a bit of a shot at family for the first time in sixty-odd years.’

  ‘Fifty-odd, darling. Please.’

  ‘You’re mugging off me and Gran, when we need you, to party on down in Tenerife.’

  ‘You’re—’

  ‘Don’t you dare say I’m better off without you.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to. Even though I think it’s true. It isn’t about partying.’

  She reached across the table for Lucy’s hand.

  ‘I thought I could do what we talked about. I really did. I thought I could settle down and be a part of things here, but I couldn’t do that in my twenties when you we
re little. I couldn’t do it in my thirties. I still can’t do it now. I’m just not that person, Lucy. It isn’t that I don’t want to be, it’s just that I’m not. I will be back though, I promise you. I will call you, and I will visit you. I know I’ve fallen out of touch in the past, but that won’t happen any more.’

  Lucy looked down at her mother’s hand, squeezing hers. There was no point trying to make this into something other than what it was. Their relationship was just always going to be this. It was a matter of accepting it for what it was rather than trying to make it into something else. She was never going to be one of those mums at the school gate. Maybe it was time to quit expecting her to be.

  Olive was sleeping soundly now. Jack turned the sound down a little on the TV and headed out to the kitchen. Lucy stood by the table looking down at James’s tree decorations. As he watched, she picked one up and unwrapped it. She looked up as he came in, and he frowned. She looked distant. Then she offered him a smile. Why was it so hard to take his eyes off her when she did that? He saw her gaze dip to his jacket, over his arm.

  ‘You off then?’ she said. Matter-of-fact. ‘For your non-Christmas?’

  No reason to drop back here after this. Minimal gardening work over January and February. He realised in that moment that he couldn’t leave. Not like this.

  ‘Would you like to go out?’ he said, before he could talk himself out of it.

  She looked blank.

  ‘What, now?’ She held up the pear decoration, suspended by its faded gold ribbon from one finger. ‘I need to get the tree sorted.’

  Oh, for God’s sake!

  He strode across the kitchen and took her free hand in his. She glanced down at it in surprise.

  ‘No, not right now. When I get back. Do you fancy getting dinner, or coffee sometime?’

  ‘What, like a date?’ She narrowed her eyes as if she were missing the point, when how could he even be more clear?

  Based on his experience, this was not going massively well thus far. Usually, when he rolled out one of those questions, the response involved a date and time.

  ‘Yeah, what do you reckon? When I get back from this trip.’