by Rachel Joyce
Henry stood close to the woman in her red coat, watching and laughing as his boys threw down their sledges and fell on them, sliding themselves forwards with their hands. There was no need to say anything else. Briefly he turned and looked back at the park, and even the ordinariness of it was beautiful. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he was so tired. He honestly believed he could stretch right out on the bleached winter grass and sleep for hours.
Henry felt a warm small hand in his, touching his fingertips, and then taking hold of his fingers and squeezing tight. But the voice that came with it was not the high singing voice of Owen, but one that was altogether more cracked and unsure.
‘We just want to spend time with you, Dad.’
‘Guess what, Mum?’ said Owen that night. ‘We’re going for Chinese food on New Year’s Eve. Also, it snowed here.’ Owen stopped suddenly and handed his phone to Henry. ‘She wants a word,’ he said quietly. He bit his lip. Conor shuffled forwards, pulling a face at Owen. Henry pressed Owen’s phone to his ear.
‘Hello, Debbie,’ he said.
‘It snowed?’ It was less a question, more an accusation.
‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’
There was a pause, during which he imagined her taking a deep breath. Grinding her teeth. Instead she laughed. ‘You jammy bastard. How come you fixed that?’
Somewhere there must be an explanation – there was always an explanation, just as there was always a word for something if you searched hard enough. You could call it luck, intuition, the gods, magic, or you could be very practical if you wished and call it mashed-up paper – but this time Henry had no inclination to give it a name and understand. There was something sublime about what had happened, something small and beyond words.
It had snowed at Christmas, just as Henry promised. That was enough.
I’ll Be Home for Christmas
‘Now remember, everybody!’ calls Sylvia, raising her voice and hitting a thin note, ‘X doesn’t want any fuss! Just a normal family Christmas! Can you all hear me?’
She looks out over the sea of paper party hats and her heart swoops. Sylvia doesn’t even recognize half the people in her sitting room. Last time she checked, there were cars parked the length of the street. All three bedrooms have been commandeered for the guests’ coats. She has no idea where X will put his suitcases when he arrives.
The pale, stick-thin girls in red fleeces with a large silver embroidered X on the back are from the record company. They gape at their phones because apparently they’re all tweeting. Earlier Sylvia offered them coffee, and to her dismay they said yes, please, to caffeine-free drinks only, so she had to send her daughter Mary rushing out for herbal tea bags and now Mary is in such a fury she is the only person in the room who refuses to wear her party hat.
As for the others, it’s anyone’s guess why most of them are here. Some haven’t seen X since he was a little boy; others have never even met him. A few are something to do with Sylvia’s sisters. (Diane, Sylvia’s eldest sister, is dressed in a new blue trouser-suit, matched with a silk blouse that shows off her figure perfectly. Linda, the middle sister, has come straight from her hairdresser; she has chosen a chic style with one side of her hair cut two inches lower than the other. Whenever she speaks to her, Sylvia has to stop herself from tilting to the left.) Every chair in the room is occupied by at least two distant relatives. There are ageing great-aunts and uncles squashed against the walls; there are cousins and second cousins packed into the bay window, and brothers-in-law, nieces, nephews and their extended families jammed around the dining table. Sylvia’s mother is wedged on the sofa, sandwiched between two staff members from the nursing home, and several children are already tucking into the buffet. Meanwhile a dog – who on earth brought a dog? – is chewing something in the corner.
Sylvia claps her hands. She chirrups again, ‘X just wants us all to be normal! All right, everyone?’ She can barely breathe for excitement.
Across the room, Malcolm averts his eyes and gives a long sigh that seems to be aimed at his Hush Puppies. Mary crushes a brand-new cushion to her stomach. She is dressed from head to toe in black. She hasn’t even brushed her hair.
‘I’m tired, Mum,’ X had said a few days ago on the phone. ‘I miss you guys. I think I’ll come home for Christmas.’
But they’d already had Christmas, she’d laughed. She didn’t mention that she’d waited all day for a call.
‘Oh,’ he said, as if he should have spotted that. ‘Yeah.’ The signal had gone before she could say anything else. When she re-dialled, his phone went straight to voicemail. She tried again and again and every time it was the same. If only she hadn’t pointed out that he’d missed Christmas. How could she have been so ordinary?
‘Something’s wrong,’ she’d said, waking in the middle of the night and snapping on the bedside lamp.
‘Do you have indigestion, Sylv?’ Malcolm reached for his reading glasses. (How were they going to help?)
‘We need to ring X.’
‘Sex?’ he’d said, blinking. He looked all puffy with sleep and vaguely alarmed.
‘X,’ she said. ‘Your son?’
‘You mean Tim?’
‘I mean X.’
‘But he’s fine. He’s good. He’s Christmas number one all over the world. Please can we go back to sleep?’
‘Sleep?’ she’d exclaimed. ‘Sleep? You’d sleep if the house was burning down. We have to ring him right now. We have to invite him home for Christmas.’
‘We’ve had Christmas, Sylvia.’ The remark sounded even worse now that she heard Malcolm saying it. ‘Don’t you think one Christmas is enough?’
‘We’re going to have another one. These days families do it all the time. Here,’ she said, passing him the bedside phone. ‘It’s ringing.’
‘I thought you were speaking to him.’
‘He might think I’m fussing.’
‘You are fussing.’
‘Just speak, will you?’
She’d heard X’s gentle voice at the end of the phone, ‘Hey, Dad?’ and her heart fluttered. She’d never understood the phrase until X became famous, but whenever she heard him or even thought about him, her heart really did seem to have a life of its own. ‘Where are you, son?’ Malcolm had asked. Sylvia had flattened her ear against Malcolm’s bristly, warm neck and heard X say, ‘I dunno, Dad. It could be China. I’ve forgotten.’ How could your child be so far from where he’d started? It was as if a little piece of Sylvia was spinning out there, a brilliant shiny piece that she barely recognized, in somewhere that might (or might not) be China.
‘Tell him to come home for Christmas,’ she whispered violently.
Of course, if she had made the phone call herself, she would have asked practical questions – What would you like to eat? How many days will you be staying? – but Malcolm asked none of those things. Instead he established that X would be home in two days and he wanted nothing special, just a normal family Christmas. ‘Ask if he’d like turkey,’ she hissed, flapping her hands. ‘And trimmings.’
‘Bye then, son,’ yawned Malcolm.
‘What did he say? What does he want?’
Malcolm smiled so fondly it turned into a one-eyed wink. ‘You heard every word, Sylv. He said, “Nothing special.” He doesn’t want a fuss, love.’
‘But he hasn’t been home for six months. What about a finger buffet?’
‘A finger buffet is a fuss.’
‘Yes, I’m sure he’d love a finger buffet,’ she said.
Nothing special, she reminded herself as she scanned her cookery books for recipes early the next morning, and none of them seemed quite good enough for the most famous son in the world. ‘Nothing special,’ she said casually to her sisters, phoning at midday and mentioning the buffet as if she’d only just remembered. ‘Nothing special,’ she whispered as she whipped up dips and mince pies, cheesy straws, sausage rolls, gingerbread biscuits cut into snowflakes and iced, all those things he’d loved as a child; as sh
e stuffed another turkey for the cold meats platter and steamed a Christmas pudding.
‘You haven’t invited anyone else for the buffet, have you?’ asked Malcolm, discovering the glazed ham in the fridge as well as a Tupperware tub of Coronation Chicken, sixty vol-aux-vents and a poached salmon.
‘Only my sisters,’ said Sylvia. She didn’t mention that her sisters had suggested inviting all those other extended members of the family. She was given to saying things that weren’t entirely true but would be simpler if they were.
‘I don’t see what the fuss is about,’ said Mary.
Sylvia bought new cushions for the sitting room – well, they were looking tired, the old ones, it was time for a change – and a set of special Christmas mats for the dining table and matching red napkins, along with bumper boxes of paper hats and those little party poppers. ‘Nothing special,’ she hummed, vacuuming the house from top to bottom, polishing windows, scouring the sink and the bath and the two toilets. ‘Nothing special,’ she said out loud, arriving home from the garden centre with so many potted poinsettias in her arms she failed to spot Malcolm’s slippers in the hall and practically split her head open as she crashed into the door frame. ‘Nothing special,’ she reminded her sisters when they rang to discuss what they should make for the buffet table, sweet or savoury?
‘But I can manage,’ Sylvia told them.
‘We’ll bring both,’ her sisters said.
‘You never do this when I come home,’ said Mary, glancing up from the sofa as Sylvia added a few extra baubles to the tree. Mary was using one of the new cushions as a footrest.
‘But you’re only coming from Aberystwyth. We see you every weekend, Mary.’
‘Oh? So you’d buy party hats if I stayed away like Tim and never rang—’
‘He’s called X,’ said Sylvia. ‘He doesn’t want to be called Tim.’
‘You’re as bad as everyone else,’ said Mary to her magazine. There was a picture of X on the front cover. He was laughing, his image superimposed on the picture that was everywhere, the one of the young woman with her red coat. Sylvia hadn’t seen it before. ‘And by the way, you know he can’t sing?’
‘Can I look at that picture, love?’ asked Sylvia.
Mary held the magazine in front of her head as if to make a point. She could be devastatingly unhelpful when she put her mind to it.
Something was different about X’s face. It was smoother, more tanned, pointier. Even more refined. Sylvia couldn’t help wondering if her sisters had seen the magazine. She’d make sure it was lying somewhere in a casual way – in the kitchen where they would be bound to see it, as if it just happened to be on its way to the recycling and hadn’t quite made it. Strange and wonderful to think that only a year ago her son was plain Tim who’d left school without impressing anyone – unlike two of his cousins who were already at Oxford. He couldn’t even get a job. He’d spent his time fiddling with his guitar in his bedroom. It was Mary who was the gifted one in the family, the real musician. (Mary and Malcolm, if you counted drums as music, which Sylvia didn’t; she made him keep his drum kit in the shed.) It was Mary who was always winning singing competitions at school. The sitting room had been stuffed with her cups and rosettes. Then Tim had posted a few songs on YouTube that scored a million hits, and the next thing they knew a booker was ringing from a late-night music programme – someone had dropped out at the last minute – and Tim ended up stealing the show. ‘I’m changing my name,’ he’d admitted once he got the record deal. ‘X?’ she’d repeated. ‘X?’ ‘If I’m Tim,’ he’d said, ‘I’m me.’ ‘I see,’ she’d said, not seeing at all. She hadn’t always liked being Sylvia, she’d wanted to be her sisters, but it had never occurred to her that she might swap her name and become altogether shinier. She’d assumed change would be more complicated than that.
And now Sylvia feels her breath gallop as she looks again at the mass of paper hats, like a roomful of bright sails, the eager crowd squashed inside her sitting room. Things have changed. These days people stop her in the street, people she doesn’t even know, to tell her how much they like her son. And normally the family gathers for Christmas drinks at her sisters’ houses because they have the extra space. It’s years since they have come to Sylvia’s. ‘X will be here any moment!’ she announces. Carefully she steps between several kneeling nieces and the pale girls from the record company and picks up a bowl of Twiglets. She almost drops it, she’s so nervous. She signals to Malcolm with her free hand that it is time to hand out the drinks, but he misunderstands and sends a wave before resuming a conversation with one of the distant cousins. ‘Fetch the drinks,’ she hisses to Mary.
‘Why me?’ Mary hisses back.
Whilst Mary fetches the drinks, Sylvia tells stories about X to her mother’s nursing staff. They can’t get enough. She tells them about the time they took X to see Thomas the Tank Engine when he was three and how he waved, and the time he fell and cut his knee open and yet he didn’t cry once, he just smiled. ‘X was always special,’ she says. ‘You know he met Obama?’
‘No!’ gasp the nursing staff. They had no idea he’d met Obama.
‘Yes,’ says Sylvia. ‘Obama flew him over to the White House for a private concert. They’re huge fans. Huge.’ And then she says it again, because she is so enjoying the word. ‘Really huge.’
‘Sylvia, dear, who is X?’ pipes up her mother.
‘X is Tim, Mother. Remember?’
‘Why is Timothy called X?’
‘Because he is a very famous pop star.’ Sylvia is aware she is talking loudly and everyone is listening. She is aware her voice doesn’t sound quite like her own, but a new and brighter, more brilliant voice. ‘He is recognized all over the world. He can’t even go to the shops.’
‘He never went to the shops,’ says Mary, reappearing with the hostess trolley and the drinks. ‘He never left his bedroom.’
‘So why isn’t he called Timothy?’ asks Sylvia’s mother.
‘We have been through this, Mother. We’ve been through it a few times. Tim was Timothy, but now Tim is X.’ Suddenly she sounds less shiny and more like her old maths teacher. ‘So we don’t call him Tim any more. We call him X. You see?’
‘As opposed to Y,’ snarls Mary, passing bottles of beer to the aged uncles. ‘Do any of you lot want straws?’
‘Tim is called Y?’ asks her mother.
‘You’d better take a napkin with your Twiglets,’ says Sylvia.
The doorbell rings. Ding dong! Everyone freezes.
‘Oh my God,’ shrieks someone young and female. ‘It’s X!’ The dog wags its tail and cocks an ear in the direction of the front door.
‘Does everyone have a party popper?’ calls Sylvia in a rush, ‘Mary, have you got the welcome banner?’ Mary gives a twisted grimace as if someone has stamped on her foot, and Sylvia wishes she had given the welcome banner to someone less complicated, like her mother.
Oh, but her mother’s paper hat has slipped down over her head and now she is wearing it like a neck brace. She also seems to be falling through the gap between the two nursing staff.
Sylvia is aware, as she moves to the door of the sitting room, as she opens it and sees the outline of her son at the front door, as she turns back to the sea of expectant faces, as she reminds herself to be calm, keep calm, that she has never felt so significant as she does at this moment. All her life she has been overshadowed by her sisters. They were the ones who were clever at school, who had naturally good figures – Sylvia was always inclined to store weight on her hips and tummy – they were the ones who dated clever boys from the grammar school and each married a lawyer. She turns to the crowd and puts her finger to her mouth for quiet and to her amazement they fall silent like a choir waiting for the first drop of the baton. She makes her way down the hall to welcome the most famous son in the world. Her heart beats so hard it is like a thing in her hands.
X stands at the door in a pair of torn jeans and a soft grey T-shirt. He leans against th
e doorframe, as if he is about to fall asleep. There is something different about him, yes, but it is not the thing she expected and it is so familiar she can’t even put her finger on it. ‘Hiya, Mum,’ he mumbles. He gives a shy smile and so does Sylvia. When she had imagined this scene, she was going to embrace X and somehow everyone would cheer. As it is, she doesn’t quite know what to say or even what to do. She slips off her party hat.
A thickset woman wearing another of the record company red fleeces shoves out her hand and grabs hold of Sylvia’s. Behind her stands a row of suited men so huge and wide they block out the light. They have no necks to speak of, and they stand in a respectful way with their feet wide and their hands crossed over their genitalia. On Sleep mode.
‘Hiya, Mrs X,’ says the woman in her red fleece. ‘I’m Potts. How’s things?’
‘Good,’ says Sylvia. She realizes she is still holding the bowl of Twiglets.
Potts says, ‘It’s great you could have him. X really needs the rest. He’s been … you know.’
What? thinks Sylvia. He’s been what? Singing a lot? Travelling a lot? She hasn’t a clue. And where is his suitcase? He has no baggage whatsoever. He doesn’t even have a coat.
‘Kinda crazee,’ says Potts, supplying the answer. She pulls a face as if she is balancing something tricky just between her eyebrows. Before she can explain any further the sitting-room door swings open and a young woman – Sylvia hasn’t a clue who she might be – claps her eyes on X, gasps, and bursts into tears.
‘Is she OK?’ asks Potts.
The sitting-room door opens a little further. A pair of dismembered hands reaches for the sobbing girl and guides her out of sight. The door snaps shut.
‘Do please come inside,’ says Sylvia in her best voice.
Potts replies that she has a few things to sort out but she’ll be right back, then slides her mobile phone out of her back pocket and consults it – two hours to take X to the airport.
‘Why? Is he doing something at the airport?’ asks Sylvia.
Potts laughs as if this is terribly funny. ‘He has a flight to catch at nine p.m. The TV crew will be here in an hour.’