After breakfast we swapped presents. I’d gone shopping with Edie and bought Mum a beautiful silver clip to wear in her hair. It was the kind of thing Dad would have bought her and I’d used practically all my savings on it – money I’d earned from spotting good things at the auctions – but as soon as she opened it I knew it was exactly right.
She gave me a new old book, The Coral Island, which I hadn’t read, but she also gave me a little stack of new books – different books, she said, to broaden my literary horizons. Some of them had girly covers, like the covers Fergus didn’t like, but they weren’t too girly and they didn’t have handbags on them. She also gave me a floppy straw hat to go with my embroidered top, a pair of marcasite earrings to go with Miriam’s angel wings and, of course, the bike. It had a proper basket on it, at the front, as though it was a bike in an old movie. I planned to name it, the way you name a ship – but I had to think of the right name first.
Edie gave me a bright red fountain pen because she’d heard that I was writing things down and wanted to encourage any kind of creativity.
‘It saves you from bad-boy heartbreak,’ she said. ‘Ask me how I know.’
She gave Mum a cookbook called Cookies (‘Not that I don’t love the lemon tart!’) and, most specially, another rosebush.
‘It’s a Blue Moon,’ Edie said, ‘because once in a blue moon you meet good friends like you and Mimi. It’s a climber. I thought we could put a trellis up on a bit of the shed.’
‘Edie! It’s beautiful. Thank you.’
Edie loved her cockatoo as well and said she thought that with it, the angelfish and visiting Pippi, she was pretty well off in the pet department. Mum and I also gave her a pair of amber earrings – Miriam had verified they were the real thing. They were like little drops of honey on the end of slender silver stems. They suited Edie perfectly.
‘This,’ Edie said, waving her cup of coffee at the morning, ‘has been a lovely way to wake up on Christmas Day.’
I looked at Mum and we smiled at each other, even though I knew we were both missing Dad. This time last year, he would have been just getting up, squeezing oranges for his traditional champagne-and-orange-juice Christmas breakfast. He would have been belting out ‘Good King Wenceslas’ because it was his favourite carol.
We weren’t playing Christmas carols this year. We had some old hippy band on that Mum used to listen to – it was carol-y music, though, even if they were hippies. We weren’t having turkey or Dad’s roast potatoes. We weren’t having Christmas pudding with an extra splash of brandy. We weren’t going to the aunts carrying our half-cooked potatoes and the pudding and the bottle of brandy to give it the extra oomph.
Everyone was coming to us and we were all going to sit down at our table, which was covered with a red satin tablecloth over which Mum had put a white lace one so it looked particularly swish. We had little snowman candles on little glass saucers and at everyone’s place there was a different kind of wine glass – because we’d had to raid the shop, of course, to find enough. Everyone had different plates, too, but we all had the same cutlery because we borrowed that from the shop. We had a special Christmas cake plate with a special cake server.
Mum had made prawn salad with mango and avocado salsa. Edie had bought free-range ham. Guy was bringing a Russian salad. Crane was bringing the elixir of youth – no one knew what that meant, but Mum guessed it was wine. The aunts were bringing salads and Aunty Marita’s beau was providing a Christmas icecream cake, which was sort of like pudding but not as heavy. Pippi and Audrey had organic dog biscuits and a special butcher’s chicken loaf for pampered puppies.
I wondered what we looked like, from the other side, from the outside of the shop. I knew what we all looked like inside – it was all glowing and golden from the Christmas tree lights and the candles flickered from the gentle whirring of the fan and made even the older people, like Guy and Crane and Aunty Ann and Aunty Marita’s beau, look smoothed out and joyful.
People who walked past stopped and looked into the shop. Some of them called out, ‘Merry Christmas!’ and then we’d all call back, ‘Merry, merry!’ in a chorus of voices that almost sounded like a carol, even though another hippy band was on the CD player.
When lunch was over, Aunty Ann and Aunty Marita washed up and Edie and I dried up and I showed Edie the cabinets where the glasses and plates went. I put all the knives, forks and spoons back in the cutlery canteen, because I liked putting them in their places and slipping the little catches that held the forks on top of the blue velvet lid.
Then they went back to the table to eat more chocolates or have another half-glass of Crane’s elixir of youth, which turned out to be pink champagne and very pretty. I walked out to the backyard and listened hard. There was nothing to hear but the occasional burst of laughter from down the alley or from inside our shop, or a waft of Christmas music or a magpie, suddenly adding its voice to the day. Ableth was gone.
He would never see me in my new hat and top. He’d never admire the little bow earrings or the piratically striped socks that Guy had found me from the market. He’d never blow my hair away from my neck when it was hot. He’d never hold my hand when we crossed a street together. He’d never call me queen of the blue, queen of my heart. He was gone. Without even saying goodbye. Which didn’t mean he couldn’t hear me.
‘Ableth,’ I said aloud, ‘you never did what you were told. You were never reliable and you always drank too much, and not just at Christmas. You read up in the crow’s nest when you should have been scrubbing the deck. But none of it mattered because I loved you. I love you.’
I didn’t know if I heard an echo of my own voice or whether Ableth replied, I love you, faintly, the way you can sometimes hear the sea from our backyard even though the beach is way down past blocks of flats and little dwarfed houses. I stood there while my tears dried, with Pippi patiently sitting on my feet. Then I wiped my face with the back of my hand and hoped the mascara that Edie had put on for me this morning was waterproof.
When I walked back into the shop everyone was still sitting around the table. Aunty Ann had her Christmas cracker hat on at a jaunty angle and Mum was turned away from me listening to something Aunty Marita’s beau was telling her. The silver clasp in her hair gleamed brightly against the darkness of her curls. Edie’s head was bobbing slightly to the music and without even looking at me, she gestured me over to sit next to her. Crane patted my head as though I was his dog, Audrey, who came over and sniffed Pippi all over, all over again. Guy poured me a lemon squash in a champagne glass and stood up holding his own glass.
‘A toast,’ he said. ‘A toast to Lou and Mimi and many Christmases filled with that peculiar life elixir of sadness and joy which it is the lot of us poor humans to imbibe.’
‘Goodness,’ Aunty Ann said. ‘Can’t you just say “Merry Christmas” like anyone else?’ Then she reached over and chinked his glass loudly so he knew she didn’t really mean it.
‘The elixir!’ Crane said. ‘Dear, dear people, absent and present.’
We chinked across the table, arms overlapping each other and when no one was watching, I raised my glass a tiny bit in the air.
And to you, dear, dear absent blue slave of my heart. With my love, Mimi.
I didn’t hear Ableth’s reply, if there was one, because Guy started singing, his voice deep and true.
‘Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the feast of Stephen...’
Just like that, we all stood up, held hands and started to sing Dad’s Christmas song together. Mum was crying a little but she was smiling too. The candles danced and the words were so beautiful even though there was no rude wind’s lament outside at all, but the end of another summer’s day, blue with a sea breeze bringing with it the smell of salt and boats right up to our shop door, just as it did every Christmas.
nd the Blue Slave
Mimi and the Blue Slave Page 15