by Alex Coleman
Holly gasped. “It doesn’t actually say that . . . ”
“Say what?”
“Yours Christmasly?’”
“No, it does.”
“Jesus.”
“So. What do you think?”
“I think he sounds certifiable.”
“Holly.”
“Really. Maybe he’s been locked up already. Is the letter typed or did he do it on toilet roll with a crayon?”
“My funny, funny daughter . . . I wonder if Aidan and Alice got one?”
Aidan and Alice were Holly’s uncle and aunt. They’d been living in the middle of nowhere in Kerry since the sixties and were rarely heard from. Holly had only met them a handful of times and had come to share her mother’s opinion that they were several different kinds of weird.
“Who knows? I doubt they’d be interested. I doubt anybody with a functioning brain would be.”
“Am I to take all this sarcasm as a no, then?”
Holly pulled a face. And then she realised that when her mother said “What do you think?” she wasn’t asking her to judge the letter writer’s sanity or lack thereof. She was asking her what she thought of his idea.
“Holy crap,” she wheezed. “You’re not really giving it serious thought, are you? You are!”
“Well . . .”
“No! I thought you were just telling me for a laugh! You were mocking his exclama–”
“So? That’s beside –”
“Mum!”
“What? It might be nice to meet new people. Some of them are bound to turn out to be related, even if it’s only distantly.”
“Mum. Listen to me. I would rather die than go to a Christmas gathering of Christmases. Okay?”
“Holly. Don’t ever say you would rather die than do something. You’re tempting fa–”
“Fine. I would rather scoop my eyes out with a spoon. I would rather chew glass. I would rather be locked in a dark room with ten thousand Daddy Long-Legses.”
She hoped this last one would carry some sway. Her mother was well aware of how she felt about those particular insects. Mrs Christmas exhaled with some force, sending a wintry crackle down the phone line. “Fine. Have it your way. I just thought it might be . . . I don’t know . . .”
A few choice phrases suggested themselves to Holly. They seemed to queue up behind her lips, each jostling to be the first one out. Excruciatingly boring? Life-threateningly irritating? Heart-squeezingly stupid? She waited for them to be still.
“Okay then,” Mrs Christmas said after an edgy pause. “Things to do, better get going. I’m sorry to have bothered you with the dopey letter.”
“You didn’t bother me with it,” Holly said weakly. “I just don’t –”
“Okay, then. Bye bye.”
The line went dead. It was such a surprising development that Holly sat with the phone pressed to her ear for a few seconds, listening to the hum. Her mother had never even come close to hanging up like that before. Normally, she had just the opposite problem when it came to terminating phone calls. She was the sort of person, Holly had once told her, who would respond to “I have to go now, there’s a burglar coming through the window” with a long review of an article she’d recently seen in which the writer gave tips on securing your house against burglars.
Holly scratched the back of her head and sighed. She had been a little harsh, possibly. But the Christmas Convention of Christmases was the sort of idea that had to be nipped in the bud, trampled underfoot and then thrown off a cliff. Better to be harsh now and get it over with rather than to fake interest for weeks only to arrive at the same result in the end. And, of course, she had said yes to meeting Charlie Fallon, so she was still a net contributor to her mother’s happiness. It probably wasn’t healthy, she realised, to be so calculating about these matters. But such was life.
On Friday morning, Holly woke up feeling hot and dizzy. Her head ached and there was a maddening itch deep in her throat. She contemplated taking the day off but decided, after a lengthy bout of gland-feeling and tongue-examining, that there was no need. Her primary motivation was to avoid something that she thought of as Greg Tynan Syndrome. It was a condition that to the inexperienced eye could easily be confused for common-or-garden hypochondria, but the two were not quite synonymous. Regular hypochondriacs were convinced that multiple illnesses existed were there was none. GTS sufferers, on the other hand, suffered from a single, highly specific delusion: they were forever coming down with “the flu”. In Greg’s particular case, Holly had lost count of the number of times he had shown up coughing and spluttering after a single day’s absence and attributed it to those three little letters. Each and every time, Holly told him that, no, he hadn’t been suffering from “the flu”. He’d had a cold. They were different. A person with a cold felt a bit bunged up and out of sorts. A person with the flu was bedridden for a fortnight and contemplated suicide for every miserable minute of that time. There was simply no mistaking the two. Greg invariably cast his eyes to heaven and moved away, muttering under his breath. Some time later, he would show up sucking a Locket and ask if he’d missed any scandal the previous day, when he was out with the flu. Over the years, Greg and his fellow sufferers had driven Holly to such rage and despair that she had become their polar opposite, refusing not just to confuse a cold with the flu but to countenance the idea of illness in general. In all of her time at St Brendan’s, she had taken only three sick days, all of which had involved gastrointestinal problems that required unencumbered access to toilet facilities. On this occasion, she concluded that while she had felt better, she was certainly fit for duty.
Her opening class of the day was science, with first-year students. It featured a long discussion on the characteristics of living organisms. This wasn’t a bad thing in itself but unfortunately, it necessitated her use of the word “reproduction”. As a result, the experience turned out to be something of a trial. She went out of her way to use the unsexiest examples she could think of, namely amoebae and chestnut trees, but that made little difference. As she saw the ripple go through the room like a shock wave from a nuclear blast, she realised that she might as well have mentioned Angelina Jolie and Jessica Alba. It wasn’t as if everybody started openly giggling, although one or two of the stupider boys were unable to help themselves. It was more like a change in atmosphere, a sudden thickening of the air itself. Nods were nodded and winks were winked. There was a woman in the room and she was talking about reproduction. If that could happen, they seemed to think, then who knew what else was around the corner? One of the things that was around the corner, of course, was a series of classes on honest-to-God human sex. At this point, it was still a long way off, but that was of little comfort to Holly. The best she could hope for was that by the time she was obliged to say “vagina” with a straight face, they would be ready for it. Over the years, Holly had learned that reproduction should be the last characteristic of living organisms to get an airing because once the word was out there, the class was effectively over – or at least she thought she had learned that. In this case, for some unfathomable reason, she had mentioned it first. The thirty minutes between her dropping the R-bomb and the bell for the end of the lesson dragged by with glacial slowness. She might as well not have been there, she felt, for all the attention that was paid.
If anything, her second class of the day was worse. This time, she was teaching physics to third years – or at least she was trying to. She knew that something was up from the moment they trooped in and she soon found out what that something was. In the first class of the day, Larry Martin had called one of their number “a little bollocks”; now, revolution was in the air. Holly couldn’t quite tell if the anger on show was genuine or had been manufactured in the interests of wasting time, but it hardly mattered. No one wanted to hear about Newton’s Laws of Motion. They wanted to talk politics. It wasn’t right, they yelped – in fact, it was a form of abuse. This sort of thing could be psychologically damaging. There c
ould be a law suit here. The Department of Education should be informed. Holly allowed them to vent for a little while, hoping that the subject could then be put behind them. This proved to be a mistake. They took it as a sign that she sympathised with their cause and moved from issuing their own complaints to trying to get her to admit that Larry had stepped out of line. It was a tricky scenario. She certainly didn’t want to condone what the old goat had done. But she didn’t want to align herself with the mini-Spartacuses either. The water was further muddied by the fact that the boy at the centre of the drama was Owen Quigley; “little bollocks” wasn’t far off the mark. The end result was that almost half of the class was taken up with diplomatic wrangling. By the time she finally lost her temper and told them that she didn’t want to hear another word on the subject, she had lost the will to teach. She did her best but was glad that there were no inspectors around for the second half of the lesson. It was not her best work.
The third period of the morning was a maths class with fifth years. Holly gave such a lacklustre performance and was in such patently bad form that she thought she saw genuine concern on some of the boys’ faces. She couldn’t wait for the bell to ring and more or less ran to the staff room when it did. There, she made herself a cup of strong coffee and found a quiet corner in which to sip it. She sincerely hoped that no one would bother her for the duration of the break but in this she was disappointed. Peter Fogarty joined her almost as soon as she was in position and spotted immediately that she was not in stellar form.
“Not in the mood for talking, eh?” he observed.
Holly shook her head. “No.”
“Why? What’s the problem?”
“I’ve had a brutal morning, Peter. I don’t feel well. And I had three shitty classes in a row.”
“Why? What was so shitty?”
She gazed up at him. “The words ‘not in the mood for talking’ have literally no meaning for you, do they?”
“Oh dear. You are grumpy, aren’t you?”
Just then, James Bond appeared at Peter’s shoulder. Holly hadn’t even noticed him approaching.
“Morning,” he said. “Gorgeous day, isn’t it?”
Peter put his finger to his lips. “Shhh. Holly’s in a bad mood. Even by her standards.”
“You know what?” she snapped. “I’m getting pretty sick of this Holly-and-her-moods rubbish.”
“She’s not feeling well,” Peter whispered.
James nodded. “Is that right? What’s the problem? Flu?”
She put her coffee cup to her mouth and bit down on its rim for a moment to stop herself saying something unpleasant. In truth, she felt pretty awful. She would have given a finger – one of the useful ones – for a lie-down in a nice quiet room.
“It’s nothing,” she said then. “Just a bit of a headache. That and the fact that I’m a crap teacher.”
“Well, I know that’s not true,” James said. “I’ve heard just the opposite.”
“Really? Someone said that? Who?” As soon as the words were out, she wanted nothing more from life than to have them back. Could she possibly have sounded any more needy and pathetic? It didn’t seem likely.
“That would be telling,” James said. “Everyone has the odd bad class now and again, don’t they? I know I sure as hell do.”
“Me too,” Peter agreed. “Definitely.”
Holly didn’t doubt for a moment that Peter had made some howlers in the past but somehow she got the impression that James was merely being polite. Nevertheless, she found that she appreciated the effort.
“I have one more class before lunchtime,” she said. “If I can get through that in one piece, I’m sure I’ll be fine for the afternoon.”
“You know what you need?” James said. “You need soup.”
She thought she’d misheard him. “Sorry, did you say ‘soup’?”
He nodded. “Never underestimate the power of a good soup. Nothing like it. Comforting, delicious, satisfying. Have you ever been to Souperior?”
This was a new café in Rathgar. Some of the teachers raved about it but Holly had never been.
“No. Never.”
“Right. We’ll go at lunchtime, the three of us. We’ll have to hurry, but it’s doable.”
“I’ve got a sandwich with me,” Peter said sorrowfully.
“So? Have it tomorrow. It’ll keep.”
Holly had been about to raise the same objection but now realised that it sounded deeply silly.
“All right then,” Peter said. “I’m in.”
They both looked at Holly. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go wild. Soup it is.”
Souperior turned out to be one of those places that had a couple of tables at the back for show but was really more of a corridor than a café. The queue for take-out ran all the way out the front door and on to the pavement. Holly despaired when she saw it but James insisted that it would move quickly. Irritatingly, he was correct. As they approached the checkout, he further opined that he had a feeling they would even get a table (he felt it in his bones, apparently). Sure enough, just as Peter paid for his Tomato and Basil, a couple of suits got up to leave. They pounced. It was the Outer Mongolian booth all over again. Holly hoped this excursion would have a more upbeat ending.
She had plumped for Mexican Bean and found that it was everything James had said it would be. It not only tasted divine but seemed to have genuine medicinal qualities; before she was even halfway done her headache began to lift. The combination of improving health and a sense of having actually taught something – her pre-lunch class had gone quite well – was having a considerable effect on her mental state.
And then James said something that put a genuine smile on her face. On the way over in Peter’s car, they’d been listening to a phone-in on the radio. The subject under discussion was shyness. They’d passed a few comments but hadn’t really paid much attention. Now that lunch was behind them, however, they’d fallen into the topic again. Peter said he knew for a fact that shyness wasn’t necessarily a permanent condition. Growing up, his little sister Cathy had lacked confidence to such an extent that she would physically squirm if someone outside of her immediately family so much as spoke to her. Somewhere along the way, however, she’d simply grown out of it. These days, she was the life and soul of every event she attended and seemed to have a couple of dozen “very best friends”. James shook his head sadly. His pal John Lennon had shyness issues too, but he very much doubted that the guy would ever leave them behind him. Peter probed for details. It wasn’t as if John was a recluse or anything, James explained. He just had trouble talking to women. It was starting to get him down. This was the moment when Holly broke into a smile.
“Wow,” James said. “You look pretty chuffed to hear that. I didn’t know you were a sadist.”
“I’m not pleased to hear that he’s unhappy,” Holly said. “But I have a friend in the same sort of boat. Trouble meeting men, I mean. I’m just wondering if maybe . . . you know.”
“What? Get ‘em together?”
“Yeah. Why not?”
“I don’t know, Holly. What’s your friend like?”
“You go first. What’s John Lennon like?”
James hesitated. She noticed.
“Ah, shite,” she said.
“What?”
“You paused. There’s something wrong with him. What is it?”
James looked offended. It was a look that Holly hadn’t seen on his face before. “There’s nothing wrong with him,” he said. “I wouldn’t be friends with him, would I, if there was something wrong with him?”
“Except . . . ?”
James looked briefly to Peter as if asking for fraternal support. “Well. He’s a bit sensitive about his, uh . . . weight.”
“I see,” Holly said. “What are we talking about here? Bit on the plump side or carrying a bottle of oxygen?”
“Oh, plump,” James assured her. “At worst. It’s all in his head, really.”
“
And around his waist, presumably.”
“He could stand to lose a few pounds,” James said with an air of finality. “It’s no big deal. Honestly. What about yours?”
“Orla,” Holly said. “Her name’s Orla. I’ve known her since primary school. She’s lovely. Very kind. Soft-hearted. And she’s got one of those voices, those husky ones that men seem to love.”
“Oooh, Kathleen Turner,” Peter said. He looked very pleased to have been able to make a contribution.
“Yeah,” Holly said. “Exactly. That’s what everyone says . . .”
“That sounds good,” James said. “So, what are you not telling me?”
“Nothing. Orla’s great.”
“And yet she has trouble meeting men. Come on, I told you about John’s . . . extra . . . I told you about John.”
Holly chewed it over for a moment. There was no need for details. “It’s just my opinion,” she said slowly, “but if I was her . . . I’d give my wardrobe a rethink.”