by Alex Coleman
“And you hadn’t heard from him since? Until just now?”
“Nope. Well, he used to write, at first, but he stopped after a while. Actually, I think I probably stopped before he did. What was the point? And he’s been back and forth, of course, plenty of times. He just never looked me up.”
“All right, so he’s standing outside the house and you suddenly recognise him . . . ”
“Yes. And it’s all hugs and I-can’t-believe-its and you-look-greats. I asked him in for a cup of tea, of course, and we did all the catching up, all thirty-odd years worth of it. He was here for hours.”
“What’s he doing home?”
“He’s back for good. He’s retired – from a very successful business, by all accounts. Catering equipment. Restaurants, hotels, all that. He’s been back for months, has a house here and everything. Out in Dundrum somewhere. Supposed to be massive.”
“How the hell did he find you?”
“He looked up an old pal of his, Bernie Maguire. I haven’t laid eyes on Bernie in twenty years but he knew I’d married a man called Christmas. And there aren’t too many Christmases in the phone book, so . . . ”
Holly tried to phrase her next question carefully. “Is Charlie’s wife with him?” she asked.
“Nope. There is no Charlie’s wife. He never married.”
“Right. Annnd . . . ”
Holly’s mother stared across the table at her. Now that the moment was here, she seemed incapable of taking the final step. She swallowed a few times and shifted her position in her chair a few more, but she couldn’t summon any words.
“Mum,” Holly said. “I’m just going to come out and ask you. Are you and Charlie an item now? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
She shook her head, paused, and then shook it again.
“Oh,” Holly said. “What was all the ‘partner’ business about then? I thought –”
“He wants . . . that. Charlie does.”
This, apparently, had taken a lot of effort to say. Mrs Christmas slumped slightly in her seat and rubbed the back of her neck as if she’d just finished a long session stooped over a difficult maths problem.
“And what do you want?” Holly asked.
This time, the reply came immediately. “I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s affecting my health, I’m a mess here.”
“So you’ve seen him again since that first day?”
“Yes. I have. Five or six times.”
At this point, Holly’s mind was flooded with so many questions that she experienced a brief drowning sensation. “What have you been doing?” was the first one that found its way out.
“Eating out, mostly. Charlie’s a serious, what’s the word, foodie these days. We went to a Thai place one night. Have you ever had Thai food?”
“Yeah. I have.”
“It’s nice, isn’t it?”
“Eh . . . yes. It is.”
“We went to see a film too. I hadn’t been to the cinema in years. A French thing with subtitles. It was . . . good. I wasn’t sure what everyone else was laughing at half the time, but I still enjoyed it.”
“So you’ve been out together a few times. Quite a few times.”
“Yes.”
“But just as . . . what? Friends?”
“I don’t know what we are. But there have been no shenanigans.”
“No what?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Okay.”
They looked at each other. Holly was waiting to see what her mother was going to say next. Several seconds went by before she realised that her mother was waiting to see what she would say next.
“Am I supposed to be talking now?” Holly asked. “Because if I am, I honestly don’t know what I’m supposed to be saying. Are you asking me if I think it’s all right for you to have a partner? I think I’ve already answered that one. Yes. Yes, it is all right. I mean, it’ll take me a while to get used to the idea, but if you really –”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“Oh? What then?”
“Well, that’s part of it – should I? Have . . . one.”
“And what’s the other part?”
Mrs Christmas took a moment. The subtle movement of her lips told Holly that words were being carefully chosen. “The other part is should I have this particular one?”
Holly stared at her. “Sorry? You’re asking me if I think you should go out with this Charlie guy specifically?”
“Basically, yes.”
“But I’ve never met him!”
“I know. I want you to. I can set it up.”
Holly leaned on the table and rubbed her temples. “You want me to meet him and tell you if I think you should let him be your boyfriend?”
Her mother smiled and nodded vigorously in a way that, somewhere at the back of her brain, reminded Holly of Harpo Marx.
“This is starting to feel like a really weird dream,” Holly said. “What am I supposed to do, hold up cards with scores on them? Do you want to give him a questionnaire to fill in? Should I ask him where he sees himself in five years time?”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” Mrs Christmas said.
Once, long ago, she had said that she was going to give up telling her daughter not to be sarcastic because she was wasting her breath. It was the first time Holly had heard the words in quite a while. She was surprised to find that they had an effect.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, feeling very small. “But still. Tell me how you see this going. I’m all ears.”
“Well, now that you’re asking me, I’m not sure how to put words on it. I suppose I just want a second opinion really.” She paused, then her face lit up. “It’s like if you were buying a car and you didn’t know anything about cars, you might bring along someone who knew more than you did. Right? Someone who knew what questions to ask so you didn’t get ripped off.” The smile that had blossomed on her face slowly died. “Okay, so it’s not exactly like buying a car.”
“Not ‘exactly’? Mum! It’s nothing like buying a car.”
“All right, all right, let me try again. I’m fifty-four years of age, Holly. I’ve been on my own since I was twenty-six. If I ever did know anything about men, and that’s debatable, I’ve long since forgotten it.”
“I’m not exactly an expert myself.”
“I know. But you’re all I’ve got.”
“Jesus. Cheers.”
“Sorry. That came out wrong too. But, come on, you know what I mean.”
Now it was Holly’s turn to choose her words carefully. “Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t this just as simple as . . . do you like him?”
“Maybe. But I don’t know for sure that I like him. I mean, I like him, but I don’t know if I like him like him. It’d be such a huge step.”
“Yeah, but if –”
“Holly. Please. I’m asking you for a favour. Will you meet Charlie and tell me what you think? That’s all I’m asking. Meet the chap and tell me what you think.”
Put that way, it seemed like a sensible request. Holly was sure there was a good reason why she shouldn’t, but she was damned if she could think of what it was.
“All right. If that’s what you want. I’ll meet the guy.”
Her mother nodded solemnly. Holly nodded back, fully expecting to wake up any minute.
Chapter 7
The rest of the first week back at school slipped by relatively quietly. Classroom crises were few and far between and, among the teaching staff, the only real drama occurred on Wednesday when Julie Sullivan and Barry Dwyer, the school’s resident couple, had a falling-out. Nuala Fanning overheard them arguing in what they had mistakenly presumed to be an out-of-the-way corner and lost no time in expressing her concerns to her colleagues. Although she didn’t know what the problem was, she was firm in her conviction that they’d been going at it “like a couple of cats”. Holly wasn’t surprised to find that Eleanor Duffy was sent into a tailspin by this intelligence, bu
t she was really taken aback by the reaction of her other colleagues, who were almost universally horrified. Was this a mere tiff or something more serious? Would it blow over or get completely out of hand? Surely the relationship wasn’t in any real jeopardy? All day long, they stopped each other in corridors to report in hushed tones on the latest sightings of the unhappy couple (Barry looked “drained”; Julie sounded “tense”; Barry sounded “angry”; Julie looked “emotional”). The drama – or rather the speculation – continued all day long but ended abruptly at four o’clock when Mike Hennessy strode into the staff room and announced that he’s just seen Julie and Barry giggling and cooing at each other in the car park “like a couple of cats”. Holly was intrigued. He’d used exactly the same words that Nuala had employed to describe the opposite scenario, but no one else seemed to notice. They waved her away when she mentioned it and flatly ignored her when she pointed out that “like a couple of cats” wasn’t even an idiom. Her repeated attempts to get someone, anyone, to agree that this was at very least a strange linguistic phenomenon eventually resulted in Greg Tynan telling her to stop complaining and just be happy that everything had turned out all right. Holly protested that she hadn’t been “complaining” but no one wanted to listen.
Thursday morning was strange. It started out well – Julie and Barry’s reunion had raised the collective spirits – but went rapidly downhill when Larry Martin raised the subject of pyjamas. He had called in to his corner shop on the way home the previous day and had been appalled to see not one but two women shopping in their night-wear, fluffy slippers and all. This, according to Larry, was a slap in the face of all that was good and decent. It was slovenly. It was disgusting. It was disgraceful. The end of the world was surely at hand. When he’d finished his broadside – it was a couple of minutes long – the room fell silent. Holly assumed that this was because no one wanted to be seen to agree with the old fart. She was genuinely astonished when Ursula McCarthy spoke up and said she didn’t see what the big deal was. So what if they weren’t dressed by five in the afternoon? It was nobody’s business but theirs. And pyjamas were clothes of a sort. It wasn’t like they were going to the shops in the nip. These statements were greeted with a small chorus of agreement, at which point Holly almost had a stroke. Before she knew what she was doing, she had embarked on a scalding rant that made Larry sound undecided on the subject. It built to a storming climax in which she heard herself howling that women who went to the shops in their pyjamas had no right to complain about muggers and burglars and junkies because they themselves were playing an important part in society’s gradual breakdown. It was about standards; either you had them or you didn’t. When she’d finished howling, she tried not to mind that everyone was staring at her, open-mouthed.
Then Enda Clerkin nudged James Bond and said something that sounded a lot like “I told you”.
Holly suddenly saw herself not as a righteous crusader for decency and common-sense – the image she’d been working with up to that point – but as a sour little curmudgeon who took her lead on social issues from Larry bloody Martin, a man who was widely known to be in favour of homosexuals getting an island of their own. She was too shocked and panicked to have a go at Enda. Instead, she tried to make herself as small as possible and waited for someone to change the subject (Larry obliged; he changed it to National Service – Worth a Go?).
At lunchtime that day, Holly arrived in the staff room to find a small crowd gathered around James Bond. This was not unusual in itself. Holly had yet to see him sitting or standing alone. And it wasn’t just the teachers who seemed drawn to him; she had even heard a couple of the kids using the word “cool” in the same sentence as his name without the traditional accompaniment of “thinks he’s so . . .” . It soon emerged that James’s car – everyone except Holly called it the Aston Martin; it was a pale blue Mazda 3 – had been vandalised. Someone had drawn a large rectangle on its roof and inside that rectangle, just for clarity, had scrawled the words Ejector Seat. At first, Holly was sympathetic. Over the years, she’d suffered a variety of vehicular embellishments – the addition of blow-up Santas, fake snow, and so on – but they’d all been easily removed. The vandal in this case had used permanent marker and it was proving difficult to shift. Her sympathy wavered, however, when she realised that James was not just sanguine about his misfortune, but positively tickled. It was a new one on him, he said, and he was impressed by the inventiveness behind it. He even praised the vandal’s draughtsmanship – the rectangle had been carefully measured and drawn in perfectly straight lines with gently rounded corners. The other teachers seemed to find his response delightful – Eleanor Duffy used the word “inspirational” – but Holly felt dizzy and confused. When she offered her take on the situation, namely that there was nothing funny about vandalism and that the little hood responsible should be found and suspended from school if not from a tree, she was treated to several groans and a couple of expletives. Then Mike Hennessy said that she and Larry Martin should form a posse. When they found the vandal, they could give him the birch and then send him off to national service. That got a big laugh.
When Holly arrived home on Thursday evening, she found Lizzie scrubbing the outside of her front-room window. She was completely absorbed in the task and performing it with such vigour that her right arm was just a blur. Holly sneaked up behind her and whispered in her ear.
“Hello.”
Lizzie leaped a clear inch off the ground before spinning around. “Hmph. And to think I was looking forward to you coming home.”
“Yeah? Why’s that then?”
“Some little toe-rags threw an egg at the window. I was in there, I saw them legging it down the street. Couldn’t have been more than ten.”
“Tossers. What’s it got to do with me?”
“I want someone to bitch with. Someone who’s really good at it.”
“Oh. Okay. Kids, eh?”
Lizzie frowned. “That’s it? ‘Kids, eh?’ Jesus, Holly, I could have come up with that myself. Where’s the bile? Where’s the scorn?”
“Sorry?”
“Are you all right? You look a bit . . . I dunno . . . peaky.”
“I’m fine.”
“First-week blues?”
Holly shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. Yeah . . . So, wait a minute, you think I’m good at bitching, is that what you’re saying?”
“Not just good, Holly, world-class. You know that.”
“But is that how you think of me . . . all the time? I mean, when you hear my name, is that what comes to mind? Really good at bitching?”
Lizzie stepped closer. “Are you sure you’re okay? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Holly said, regaining the composure that had been rapidly deserting her. “I’m grand. First-week blues, like you said. I’ll leave you to it. If I think of any good lines about today’s youth, I’ll let you know.”
With that, she turned and made the journey of a few feet across to her own front door. It seemed to take her several minutes to find her keys in her bag. Although she didn’t look back, she was acutely aware as she fumbled through the tissues and mints that Lizzie had yet to return to her scrubbing and was staring at her intently.
Holly had been home for half an hour or so when the phone rang. It was her mother. She ran through some preliminary pleasantries before announcing that she had some news. Holly almost bit clean through her tongue. This was going to be about Charlie Fallon. She had yet to assimilate the fact that he a) existed and b) required her personal evaluation, but here it was, news of their first meeting.
“Go on,” she said, her voice a tremulous little warble.
“I’ve had a letter,” her mother said. “From England. Did you get one?”
“A letter? No. Who from?”
“It’s from a man named Simon. Simon Christmas.”
Holly did a quick memory-scan. She had no relatives of that name, as far she knew. “Who’s he then?”
“We don’t know hi
m. He must have got my address on the Internet.”
As ever, there was fear and caution in her voice as she said the word “Internet”.
“And, what, does he think we’re related?”
“Why don’t I just read it out to you?”
“Go on then.”
“Right. It starts out with Greetings in huge letters with one, two, three, four, five, six exclamation marks.”
“Nice,” Holly said. “If you’re going to use multiple exclamation marks, six is a good number. Five’s not enough, but seven would just look silly.”
“It goes on ‘I am writing to you today to bring you news of of’ – two ‘ofs’ there, that’s a mistake – ‘an exciting event that is upcoming’. That’s a stupid way to put it, isn’t it? An event that is upcoming? Would you not just say ‘an upcoming event’ and have done with it?”
“Yup.”
“Anyway: ‘My name is Simon Christmas and I am the founder and I am also the president of the Christmas Society, which is a society for people like yourself who have the best surname in the world, which is, of course, Christmas, as you know.’ It’s really badly written, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Holly sighed. “It is. Go on.”
She didn’t need her to go on, of course; she’d already guessed that this was some sort of clan-gathering. The very idea made her intestines shiver.
“‘As you may know or may not know, we Christmases have found a home in every corner of the glob.’ I presume he means globe.”
“One would imagine.”
“‘I have done my best to compile a list of international Christmases, to “coin a phrase”.’ He has ‘coin a phrase’ in quote marks, for some reason. ‘These letters are going out to England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia and Canada, to “name but a few”.’ That last bit’s in quote marks too. And he said Canada twice.”
“Mum, you don’t have to correct the whole thing as you go. Just read it out.”
“All right, all right. ‘It has been a great pleasure to me to compile the list and I hope you are happy to receive the letter. To cut a long story short, my first act as the founder and also the president of the Christmas Society is to formally invite you all to a family gathering of sorts which will take place on a date yet to be decided in a location that is also yet to be decided. Although they have yet to be decided, I have decided that the best location would be some hotel in Southampton, which is where I currently lay my head, and the best time would definitely be what else can you guess but Christmas or shortly before it, rather.’ I know that doesn’t sound right, but that’s what it says here. ‘The actual venue will depend on how many of you decide to come. I hope all of you’ – three exclamation marks. ‘Such a gathering will be an opportunity for us to get to know each other and do a bit of research about our histories and of course share some of our experiences of having such a brilliant name. I don’t know about you but I thank God every day for having such a brilliant name. It is always an ice-breaker at parties’ – three exclamation marks. ‘I conclude now by hoping that this letter finds you well and also by hoping that you will respond with a big yes’ – four exclamation marks. ‘Thank you. Yours Christmasly, Simon Christmas.’”