by Martin Bryce
Santa’s Gifte Shoppe at the beginning of each day. It meant lumping bloody great packing cases from the sub-basement to the top floor for however long it takes. Manual labour is not me. I was told to clock in by eight-thirty; a minute late and I would lose half an hour’s pay. I calculated that I would have about half an hour for tea break and make-up before my performance began at ten on the dot, or else.
Rowena had accepted my lunch invitation. She ate something light and exotic while I had pie and chips followed by rice pudding. We talked and talked. It turned out that her father was an antiques’ dealer and her mother a sculptress; they had a small estate in Buckinghamshire. She told me that her father, like mine, amazingly, was a Navy man and expressed surprise that our families had never met before, particularly as both men had once served on the same ship together; gone down together, in fact. Something for which her father had always, probably rightly, blamed my father.
‘You know,’ I began gently, ‘the Navy’s got certain traditions.’ Where to go? She was gazing at me with that heavenly smile, chin cupped in her hands, her come-on eyes flashing. She opened her lips, licked them and pouted wide. Under the napkin on my lap I was becoming embarrassingly uncomfortable. ‘Stokers and Admirals… well, they rarely, if ever met, socially I mean. It just wasn’t…’ Shit! My feet began to itch again and she noticed something was up. ‘The adrenaline, you know,’ I offered wildly, hoping she wasn’t a mind reader. Her coy smile and lingering sideways glance told me she was.
The air of gloom as I walked up Mafeking Avenue that evening was palpable. It was as if 47 was a brick-built black hole sucking every last glimmer of hope and cheer from the planet. It took joie de vivre and by some strange alchemy transmuted it, in a flash of deepest darkness, into mauvais quart d’heure. All of a sudden I felt imprisoned, pinioned between my role as bringer of joy and light to a winter world and that of exorcist of unfathomable misery. Perhaps they were one and the same, but it was beginning to feel like hard work.
The plumber had repaired the pipes, but she’d also started a small fire in the kitchen with her blowlamp. La cuisine had dried out nicely, but it had only been installed a month earlier, paid for out of the money from Mrs H’s father’s will and now there was nothing left. She was sitting in the front room sobbing. Elsewhere, in an effort to dry it out, the house was full of electric heaters and dehumidifiers. The electricity meter was going round like a bloody Dervish, but it was the first time the sodding place had been warm that winter.
Back in my room after a light meal of Cup-a-Soup and a wholemeal crust that had seen better days, I sat down and tried to make my costume a bit more presentable. I brushed down the suit and darned some of the holes; I didn’t have quite the right shade of red thread, but no matter, pink was close enough. I planned to take it to the dry cleaning machine at the laundrette the following Sunday and claim the expenses from Harridges on Monday. I polished the boots as best I could; one of the heels came away, but I managed to repair it with Evo-Stik. Lighter fluid removed the worst of the glue I accidentally spilled in the beard. On washing the beard later, I discovered that the blobs of food in it were a kind of porridge and they’d been there for some years. I hung the thing over the back of a chair in front of the antiquated gas fire to dry while I sorted out my thinnest socks to wear with the undersized boots. Then, with a second Cup-a-Soup, I settled down on my bed to block the second act of the gruesome Scent. Strangely, there was no sign of Cloudesley.
I must have fallen asleep. I woke up shivering; the gas fire had gone out and I had no coins for the meter. The beard was still dripping. I went downstairs to ask the Hs if they had change of a fiver and met Mr H who was struggling manfully, well… no, just struggling with a six-foot tall Christmas tree in a heavy pot. Naturally I offered to help and was told to take the heavy end.
The first casualty was a standard lamp as we manoeuvred the bush into the front room. H the Morose blamed me, of course, but it was his end that had performed the whiplash through the door that not only knocked the thing over, but also caught H smartly in the face breaking his glasses. Second casualty. Cnut was the third, needing four stiches in its paw, lacerated on the broken light bulb.
Despite his broken glasses, H noticed a damp patch on the ceiling which I quickly calculated lay directly below a chair in the room above, hanging from which was a dripping beard. I guess if all you look for is fault, then that’s what you’ll find. H flew into a splenetic northern rage about the plumber who he was already planning to sue over the kitchen. Acting on the principle that discretion is the better part of valour, I crept away to deal with the dripping beard. I also didn’t get my change.
Returning to my room I turned on the single bar electric fire in an effort to find warmth and blew all the fuses. It’s amazing how quickly an already damp and chilly room becomes positively Siberian; I mean, whatever happened to global warming?
Out on the landing Mrs H opened the linen cupboard where, unaccountably, the H’s kept their candles. Cloudesley, with a blood-curdling yowl, leapt out and anchored himself firmly to her face. He’d been accidentally shut in there by the plumber who’d now definitely had her three strikes.
‘Bet that’s the first time you’ve had a mouthful of pussy,’ I remarked as I prised Cloudesley’s claws out of her hair. She looked at me uncomprehendingly before breaking into a wail which rapidly subsided into another sobbing episode. She went next door to recover with the neighbours while her significant other played electrician at the fuse box.
Under the circumstances I decided that a visit to my local, the Oliver Cromwell, was the best option and I took the beard with me so that I could dry it on one of their radiators. I downed a pint of mild and a packet of pork scratchings while the landlady heated up a pasty in the microwave for me. Noticing that the beard was getting some funny looks, I explained that I was playing Father Christmas.
‘D’you blow him, or pluck him?’ one beer-bellied wag belched.
The pasty was big and very filling, but contained mainly mashed up roots and brassicas, northern vegetables, as we used to call them at home. The second pint of beer was off, but its taste was masked by that of the pasty so I drank most of it before noticing. Feeling uncomfortably full I returned to 47 Joy Street.
He was sitting on his own in the burned out kitchen drinking a bottle of brown ale, not his first, by the light of a festive candle. He’d had to call an electrician. The master tradesman had taken one look at the wiring and declared the whole thing unsafe, saying he wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole and that the entire house needed to be rewired. It had taken him less than five minutes, but there was the standard minimum call-out charge of an hour. Also, being late in the evening and close to Christmas, he’d charged triple time for this bit of jovial news. H gave me a candle stub and bid me a sullen ‘good night’.
The candlelight and sub-zero temperature imparted an atmosphere in my room of Christmas long ago. The more superstitious might have felt a sense of foreboding, but not me; the Dickensian atmosphere actually cheered me up and I felt it was a fitting start to my brief, but glorious career as Pere Noel. But the beard was still damp and as I had no means of drying it, I laid it on the chair next to my bed. I patted Cloudesley fondly on the head, put on several extra layers of clothes, climbed into bed and blew out the candle. Tomorrow would be my big day.
SCENE 3
I was woken early again by the splenetic H berating the re-frozen plumbing. I’d not had a particularly good night myself. Nothing to do with the cold, more I suspected, to do with an overabundance of brassicas and stale beer. Cloudesley’s ongoing bowel issues did nothing to help. I briefly considered colonic irrigation in the back yard with the garden hose, for Cloudesley of course, but then put the thought far from my mind, for both our sakes.
I got up, lit the candle and considered removing some of my clothes, then thought better of it. I practised a few ho, ho, ho’s which didn’t seem to go do
wn too well with Mr H. He slammed the bathroom door very hard and I gather from the subsequent muffled cursing that this had caused his candle to go out. A few more ho, ho, hos as I wondered how long it would take to scrape the ice off the windows, melt it and boil the water over a candle for a cup of tea. I opted for the Black Cat again instead. As I finished my ho, ho practice there was further noise and confusion as H ejected the whippet from the laundry basket. It must have crept upstairs during the night, injured foot and all, in an effort to find somewhere warmer to sleep than its cardboard box in the damp hall.
Cloudesley, lying contentedly on my bed, sighed a little sigh as I anointed my toes with fungicide, something I’d again forgotten to do the previous evening. I snapped a lace putting on my shoes, but luckily I had a spare which I used to hold the wardrobe doors shut. Having run out of things to do I watched the cold grey fingers of dawn caress the grim slate roofs of the houses across the street, through the frozen waterfall that was my window. I managed to shrug off the seeds of depression just before H started hammering on my door.
‘Reet, lad,’ he began, toothlessly, ‘thy’d better make reet sure that that cat is either out of t’ouse, or securely locked in thy room before thee goes out. There’re folks coming and I don’t want that thing getting in t’way. I’d suggest you take it down t’bloody canal but the bugger’ll be froze over.’
I asked if there was anybody important among his visitors and he reeled off a list which included, among others, the electrician, the plumber, an insurance assessor, a lawyer, a man from the Council (Public Health) and a builder. What a busy day he was going to have. Ho, ho, ho.
I left the house as quietly as possible leaving Cnut standing shivering on three legs in the hall. Cloudesley leapt from under my arm and shot off down the road as I shut the front door behind me. I smiled knowing that cats are very good at looking after themselves and that dear Cloudesley almost certainly had a secret, warm hideaway somewhere.
The Black Cat was very full that morning, but I managed to find a seat by the window. I ordered the morning’s special for breakfast, kippers on toast and a pint mug of steaming hot, strong sweet tea. Sr Corsini gently opened the tin of kippers and dumped them into a pan to warm. Overhead a blob of blackened oil hovered, quivering on the cowling of the extractor fan in the air stream. I cradled the hot mug in my hands. Ah, I thought, if only every day could begin like this.
I felt a bit queasy on the tube into work and put it down to the pasty the night before. I arrived at Harridges at eight twenty-seven, but it took the time clerk several minutes to find my clocking-in card, so I lost my first half-hour’s pay. Crap.
I reported to the sub-basement warehouse where I was met by the assistant head storeman, Harry. Harry was about nineteen with a shaven head and several piercings to various parts of his body. Smartly dressed, he wore the Adidas top and white trousers with an elegant red stripe down the side and topped it all off with the required bling and the trademark Burberry cap in beige, black and red plaid. On his feet were the standard, brand new Reeboks. He seemed a nice enough sort, if a little rough at the edges; a typical cockney sparrow, as people used to say.
He showed me a pallet load of boxes that had to be taken as the initial stock to Santa’s Gifte Shoppe and told me that I could borrow his hand trolley when he wasn’t using it, which he was. Then he returned to his table in the corner to finish his mug