Santa Claws

by Gabriela Harding

  “Not the memory of the puppy, mind, because the Hawaiian therapist would have charged double, and we weren’t yet rich in those days.”

  Florence pushed up from her seat. “I remember him. He did the job so well that for days Gregory couldn’t remember who you were!” She giggled as she stumbled down the aisle to the loo.

  “It’s not funny!” Flaubert yelled after her. “And besides, many children don’t remember a thing from before the age of five, anyway!”

  He sat back in the comfortable leather chair, slightly nauseous from being flown in circles by José.

  “I can’t bear any more lies.” Florence sat down quietly. “None of this would have happened if I could have told him who she was from the beginning.”

  “Now, there’s no point crying over spilt milk.”

  “He still thinks my hand was badly burned in a fire, bless him. Only the other night, the children walked into my room. I found them rummaging in my valise. Of course, I pretended to sleepwalk to make them go away. All my passports were in there – all thirty nine of them.”

  Flaubert guffawed. “I still don’t know how you managed to get a passport for Burkina Faso. What did you put on your face, black shoe polish?” He giggled.

  “I wore a gold turban, and used the darkest shade of face powder.” Florence heaved a deep sigh. “I’m tired of pretending that the house and the yacht and everything we own come from an unexpected inheritance. I just wish I knew what and how to tell him.”

  “The truth,” Flaubert unbuckled his seat belt and leaned closer to his wife. “You tell him the truth. After all, he’s our son. He’ll understand. Don’t you think he already knows, anyway? I mean, doesn’t he always ask us for money and is never curious as to where we get it from? Last year you gave him £30,000 in cash to buy a ring.”

  Florence groaned.

  “How about the million pounds we gave him to pay for Chess Cottage up front? Where does he think we get the money from? We’re not royalty, so we must be doing something dodgy.”

  “Something to do with politics.”

  “Same thing. About time you got a proper prosthesis, too.” He inspected her doll-like limb. “That thing is way out of date. It doesn’t do anything. These days, people do everything with prosthetic hands, even knead dough…”

  “You just want me to knead the dough for your doughnuts better,” Florence teased, a small smile flowering on her lips despite herself. Flaubert could be the most childish man ever. No wonder he made such a good spy. No one would suspect him of intelligence.

  She slipped the glove back over her hand and snuggled into the blanket. If she survived this last mission, she would start fresh. It was a promise. She would tell Greg the truth. She’d get a proper prosthetic hand. She’d retire. She’d put a stop to I Spy using her garden for hazardous plant experiments, like that carnivorous pumpkin plant bred as a human trap. That bleedin’ pumpkin nearly killed her. One night when Florence took the washing out, it curled around her legs, tripping her over and wrapping itself tightly around her. By the time Flaubert got home the following morning, with a black eye and stinking of explosive, the vegetable was totally out of control, binding her so tightly she could hardly breathe. It had even gagged her with a small orange pumpkin that dislocated her jaw. Flaubert had had to shoot at the roots with his 9 mm silencer, a gun he used only in utmost emergencies.

  No, this lifestyle had to end, they had enough money buried in a crypt in the garden to last them ten lifetimes. It was in situations like this, when what you love most slips out of your hands, that you realise money is not everything.

  Sliding the window shutter open, Flaubert peered at the starlit sky, the white clouds floating through it like ghosts. He peeled the doughnut off and ate it thoughtfully. Something pricked at his heart, a disturbing sensation, which he tried to chase away, not before realising that it was fear. This could be the most dangerous thing he had ever had to do.

  33. The Box

  “Sorry I stormed out like that.” Anaconda was manoeuvring the car along the narrow, icy road. The ground was so slippery her knuckles nearly burst through her skin with the effort of keeping the tiny Fiat from going off track.

  Greg kept a straight face behind the tight seat belt, but he couldn’t help feeling like a cadaver in a straightjacket. Immobilized – that’s how he felt. How on earth was he going to eat? Cold sweat poured down his face as he thought of all the other things he couldn’t do. He made a mental note to check those talking, walking, self-wiping toilets from Japan. He had a bit of money to burn, after all. Why didn’t they give him an information leaflet? God, he hated this godforsaken place.

  “It’s just that sometimes, I wonder where this is going. We’ve been together for two years…”

  “We’ve been friends for two years,” retorted Greg, wishing he had a finger to point with. “Together for one.”

  “Still…”

  “I was with Alfrid for seven years,” Greg reminded her, “and I never married her.”

  “And we both know why.” Anaconda slowed down to let an elderly woman pass. The lady waved a loaf of bread. Her old-fashioned shawl caught the wind, and was nearly blown onto the windscreen.

  “Not now,” Greg pleaded. “Will you help me find the box? Pretty please? Then all your questions will be answered, I promise.”

  “Oh, that box, again!” Anaconda’s hand slapped the horn in frustration. A cat bristled up on a fence. In the house, a head in curlers appeared from behind a curtain. “You’re hallucinating from all the morphine they gave you when they fixed your arms.”

  She reversed the car, wheels screeching in the pebbled alley. Greg gazed desperately at the trees, hoping to see the black leather case shining through the snow.

  “I can’t believe you broke your arms, you know. This is a disaster. What were you doing, anyway?” Anaconda unbuckled Greg’s seatbelt, clucking her tongue.

  “I was trying to propose to you,” Greg snarled. “Thanks for trusting me, by the way. We both know why I didn’t marry Al. I’m not that kind of a guy, and yet you labelled me as if I was a…a…a… jar of pickles!” He paused to catch his breath. “When I ask you something really important, you tell me I’m high on drugs. Really, I don’t know what sort of couple we’re going to make.”

  Mouth agape, Anaconda looked at him. Then her gaze shifted to the trees. It was cold and she could feel the tiredness of a sleepless night creeping up on her.

  “Propose?” she squeaked. “You were going to…propose?”

  The silence seemed to stretch on forever. Greg didn’t know what happened first, the loud BOOM exploding in his ears, or the thick purple liquid dripping on them from the roof of the car like a sticky rain. The windscreen looked like it had smashed into a giant beetroot. He stuck his tongue out and tasted the drop tickling his upper lip. It was sweet, it was off, it was, without a doubt, Ribena.

  Anaconda screamed. The shredded plastic bottle was in her claws, hissing and spluttering. Greg bit his lip. She looked like a Dalmatian in her now spotty fur coat.

  “What on earth…” Understanding dawned on her and she inhaled deeply. “This bottle of Ribena fermented in my car for ages. One of your kids put it here, I don’t drink Ribena, it’s full of sugar!”

  Greg squeezed himself out of the car. Anaconda followed him.

  “Don’t get your hopes up. I’ve changed my mind,” he muttered. He walked away in a huff, but after a few steps he lost his balance.

  “I suppose I could help you look for that box,” she suggested, stumbling over to him and gripping his arm.

  “What box? The one in my dreams? The one that doesn’t exist?”

  Anaconda blushed. “Come now. I was only joking. Where did you drop it? Around here somewhere?” She began to dig in a snow mound by a cluster of trees.

  “No. It was over that w
ay.”

  They followed the trail of trees. It smelled of snow, a fresh smell of winter. From afar, the sea roared, filling the air with the threat of a storm. All of a sudden, something gleamed in the snow, almost at the same time that a dark silhouette materialised in the distance from the direction of The Mighty Mermaid. The box was slightly open, covered with a thin layer of ice, half buried near the trunk of a tree.

  “There it is,” Anaconda shrieked. Her fingers trembled as she snapped the box open. From the pearly cushion, the pink diamond, mounted on the most stupendous ring, sparkled.

  “Anaconda White, will you…”

  “Mr Raymond!” In the distance, the stumpy figure of the receptionist was advancing towards them. He was waving a piece of paper above his head. “Mr Raymond, we’ve been looking for you all night, sir!”

  “What does that idiot want?” Greg grumbled through his teeth.

  The receptionist leaned against the tree, clutching his chest.“Another…telegram…you’d better read it…”

  It was then that Greg remembered, with a sinking feeling, the telegram he was given the night before, and that it was still sitting in his pocket, unopened.

  “What? What is it?” Anaconda tottered over in her high heels. She snatched the piece of paper from the man’s hand and squinted at it through a gold monocle. Her face turned white.

  “What? What is it?”

  Anaconda searched her mind for the right words, but none came. She couldn’t utter a single sound, so she held out the telegram for her fiancé to scan the dreadful words himself.

  34. Ellesmere Island

  “You have to be kidding me,” Florence swivelled around in her ski outfit, complete with helmet and goggles. “Is this what you wore on that mission in Siberia?”

  “I had to wear a reindeer skin parka so I could pass for a Nenet,” answered Flaubert. “You look gorgeous, by the way. I hope you’re as good at riding a skidoo as you are at driving, though.”

  “Skidoo, snowmobile, you name it. I can ride anything with an engine. I could probably ride you if you had an engine,” grinned Florence. “Now, do we know where we’re going?”

  Flaubert glanced at his GPS and checked the battery on his satellite phone. “Yes, we’re heading south. That’s where I located them last, a hundred miles south of Savissivik heliport. In fact, at the North Pole, every direction points south, towards the South Pole.”

  Florence smiled. “Someone’s been doing his homework. I knew I Spy were good, but didn’t realise they were quite so good…”

  “They aren’t. But I am.” Flaubert mounted his skidoo.

  “I mean, who would have imagined this place even existed?”

  “Spying is one of those things that gets better with age. Like wine or men. The older the spy, the better the outcome and the more successful the mission.” Flaubert took a last bite of his chocolate doughnut before slipping on his mask. “They say you can read an old person’s character just by looking at their face, which I say is a load of rubbish.”

  “Well, I can certainly read your passion for doughnuts in your triple chin,” teased Florence. The next moment she was buzzing away at alarming speed in a shower of snow, Flaubert following close behind.

  35. She’s dead…

  From the moment he read the telegram, everything had been a blur for Greg. He barely remembered staggering back to the hotel, his phone being handed back to him, the messages from his parents flooding in, one after another and Anaconda packing his things, while he sat in the armchair, pale and still like a statue of wax, his tears spilling over the dusty chessboard Honey had insisted she put in the car at the last minute, probably with the bottle of Ribena. Another and probably the last of her jokes.

  He wasn’t a murderer. He didn’t mean to do any harm. Things just turned out this way, almost against his will.

  Greg sat on the ferry, staring dumbly at the passengers’ faces, the grey water bubbling around him like a massive pot of broth. The sun was high in the sky, it was midday, but he seemed to have somersaulted back into the past, to the morning when he followed Al to the park, and all he could see was the faint sunrise through the pallid winter clouds. That morning, he watched the sun rising from his bedroom window, as her silhouette moved farther and farther down the lane. At that early hour, the street was deserted, with only the glow of the night lamps flickering weakly in the misty air. A flush of pastel colour stained the sky, like a reflection of the beautiful pink diamond he held in his hands.

  The sunrise had all the colours of the rainbow: lavender, rose, gold. After the rain, the rainbow always shines. Greg remembered the song and hummed it. He crept down the stairs. His parents had stayed over that night. Their bedroom door was shut. They would be fast asleep. Honey’s bedroom door though, was ajar. The small body under the covers stirred and a leg stretched out from under the duvet.

  What would he tell the children if they woke up? He needed time to think up a lie. Something that would explain their mother not being at home on Christmas morning, and him sneaking out of the house like a thief.

  To his relief, Honey only mumbled and turned in her sleep. The resemblance between mother and daughter, obvious to anyone who knew them, was somehow even more visible when they were asleep. The only thing that Honey didn’t have from Al was the hazel eyes. Honey’s eyes were an almost surreal blue, just like her brother’s. Beautiful, as if painted on her face by an artist. And yet there was something there that made him afraid. A flash of steel. A cruel streak. The moment when her pupils stood still, and a force larger than life stilled and focused. Greg’s was the worst parent nightmare: he lived in a zone where his child, not himself, ruled.

  It took no longer than minutes for him to know that, when she walked out on him, the gloom had, miraculously, lifted from his life. How incredible to realise that his life with Al had been little more than a long chain of miserable days! Chess Cottage was a comfortable cage, but a cage nonetheless. A cage he had shared with a wild beast all this time. And yet, there he stood, a ring in his hand, the glittery white wrapping paper by his feet, the string of velvet ribbon in the pocket of his bath robe. Just like an idiot.

  Following Al had been a snap decision, something he felt he had to do, for the sake of the children, for his own sake. From the stand in the hallway, he selected a black umbrella. The crude morning light, filtering through the stained glass of the front door, shone off its sharp, silver end.

  He pulled up his collar and, making sure no one was peeking from behind the drawn curtains in the neighbouring houses, he closed the door behind him and followed Al’s footsteps. He walked past the last house on the lane, the white cottage with the two cats sculpted in stone on the doorstep, past the enclosed area where the annual garden party was held, past the chestnut tree with the trunk misted by a thin film of ice. And then, there she was, a flurry of white on the winding path to the canal. The wind played with the tail of her cloak, tossing it around with the dry leaves, blowing it like a sail at sea. He counted the corners of the cubic stones on the pavement with the tip of his umbrella as he walked along, to keep his mind busy, to not let himself think of anything: one, two, three, four…

  Something was niggling at the back of his mind. He was already in the woods when he realised what it was: the bench was empty. And now, come to think of it, he hadn’t seen Woolly the tramp in what felt like weeks, or even months. Muttering to himself, he followed the flash of white through the trees, breathing deeply when he was out of the CCTV controlled zone. Those eyes watching the street of two-storey, detached homes such as his own always made him uncomfortable.

  They weren’t a good match. His own mother was careful to remind him of this when she had the chance. Al and Florence couldn’t be in the same room together without bickering. But weren’t all relationships between mother and daughter-in-law kind of…strained? With time, he had just grown to accep
t it.

  The children would never understand just how hard things were for him. They’d never know what it was like to wake up and see her looming over him. She stared at him for hours during the nights when her insomnia was at its worst, despite the strong sleeping pills prescribed by the doctor. The stash of prescriptions was ever-growing, a sinister tower at the back of his wardrobe.

  The morning air was fresh. It tasted almost as fresh as the coffee Anaconda brought him from the ferry’s cafe. No, this coffee tasted like nothing. He seemed to have lost all sense of taste. A train whistled atop the bridge. Al, in her white hooded cloak, reached the end of the path. She was now on the shabby wooden bridge. Greg heard the buckles of her studded boots click to a halt. She stopped in her tracks like a frightened deer. No, deer was not the right word to describe Al. If anything, she would be a panther – sensual, dark, deadly.

  Greg saw a man under the canopy of trees, standing among the scattered, squashed beer cans. That’s where the tramps of Hanwell passed their nights, in a lair of twigs and bracken sheltering them from the harsh winter winds. For a moment, Greg wondered if Old Woolly had spent the night there – after all, there were the charred remains of a fire at the man’s feet, and what looked like animal bones. Greg held his nose. What a place for a barbecue, and what time a of year. But he supposed tramps couldn’t be choosers.

  It was then that it struck him. The man wasn’t a tramp. His cigarette gave out a fragrant, apple-scented smoke. It didn’t smell of the cheap tobacco the homeless rolled into their fags. Greg’s heart beat faster.

  He was the man from the circus. No, he was the man who had lived between them all along. He saw him in her eyes, a moving picture, a tiny elf who spied on him from inside her head. He was the reason the diamond ring was in his pocket, and not on her finger. How stupid of him to think that, if he proposed in front of the children, by the Christmas tree, she would finally say yes.