25 Days 'Til Christmas

by Poppy Alexander

Daniel wasn’t a big drinker either, but he felt he needed a stiffener before he braved Cara and Paul’s blatant matchmaking attempts. Fond as he was of them both, he wished they wouldn’t. What he wouldn’t do to be volunteering at Crisisline instead. Barbara had refused him permission to give up another Saturday night, though, insisting he must have better things to do.

  He really didn’t.

  He sat at the bar, cradling a double Scotch on the rocks, and idly gazed into the smoked mirror wall behind the shelves in the bar. It allowed him a glimpse of the door and he could watch the crowds of people slowly filling the bar, idly checking out the women with their unlikely winter tans, bare legs under short skirts, and elaborate eye makeup. False lashes were mandatory, it seemed. The thick, heavy spiders glued to their real lashes weighed down the eyelids so much the girls had sultry, come-to-bed expressions simply because they could not open their eyes very far. Several seemed to have actual feathers coming out a couple of inches from where the eyelashes would normally end. A couple had tiny sequins attached too. There was an outbreak of Christmas deely bopper headbands with Santa heads and reindeer antlers, even though there were still nearly three weeks to go.

  A gaggle of four noisy women bundled in through the door, laughing. A beautiful dark-skinned woman was clearly the leader and she quickly got them organized on a table near Daniel’s barstool, ordering Negronis all around from an appreciative barman. The blond woman, last through the door and more reserved than the others, caught his eye.

  Christmas Tree Girl. She hadn’t seen him. Discovering he was sitting there several minutes in would have been weird, but just as he was about to turn around, catch her eye, and acknowledge the acquaintance, a very drunk man with a tight gray suit and greased back hair lurched over to them.

  “Laydeez,” he said, loudly, “looking for some fun?”

  The Indian woman was still at the bar. The two other women looked at each other and burst out laughing but Christmas Tree Girl just looked uncomfortable, staring at the table and flinching away from him.

  “So what are you lovely milfs doing without a man to service your every need tonight,” he went on, and before any of them had time to answer he made a grab for Christmas Tree Girl. “You especially,” he said, “sad-faced girl, you look like you especially need to be shown a good time.” He did a hip thrust in her general direction that nearly unbalanced him completely, making him put all his weight on the hand he had on her arm. She winced under the weight.

  Daniel had seen enough.

  “You’ve failed to make a favorable impression, mate,” he said, laying his hand heavily on the man’s shoulder and pulling him backward so he would release his grip.

  “And who the hell are you?” he reeled around angrily.

  “I’m your guardian angel, mate,” said Daniel, “here to stop you getting yourself into a situation you can’t get out of. Now bugger off and bother someone else.”

  For a moment, the whole room held its breath. The only sound, within twenty feet of them, was the thudding background music, as everyone waited for the fight to erupt. The man gave Daniel a furious look, curling his lip and looking him up and down. Daniel waited patiently for the appraisal to be complete and then gave the man a shove.

  Shrugging off Daniel’s hand, the man turned and slunk away, cursing as he went.

  “What’s a milf ?” Kate asked Amy and Karen.

  “Us,” giggled Karen, partly in relief at the positive end to the encounter. “Mothers they’d like to—you know . . . and I wouldn’t mind a bit if he thought so,” she said, gesturing at Daniel who was watching the man depart, making damned sure he left completely. The barman was of the same mind, gesturing to the bouncer on the door to extract him and evict him from the premises.

  “Are you all right?” asked Daniel. It was Kate he was looking at.

  “Thank you, yes, I’m fine,” said Kate. “He wasn’t exactly my type,” she added.

  “I should hope not. Big night planned?”

  “Probably,” she said, smiling at Seema who was just coming back from the bar with a tray of drinks, oblivious to what had just happened. “Unfortunately,” she added.

  “Be safe,” said Daniel, draining his drink and shrugging on his coat.

  “I will,” said Kate quietly to his departing figure.

  “So, you nearly pulled then,” Seema said, when she had been filled in on the excitement by Karen and Amy.

  “The greasy-haired bloke? Yeah, the one that got away,” joked Kate.

  “Actually, I meant him,” said Seema, nodding her head at Daniel. “He’s lush. Do you know each other?”

  “Not really.”

  “Shame.”

  “Hang on,” protested Kate. “That’s not on the list. I do not need a man to achieve my Christmas miracle.” She meant it. It felt critically important to her that she and Jack had to find their own way, find their feet. If, after that, another relationship presented itself then she wasn’t entirely uninterested.

  “Fair enough,” said Seema. She knew when she was beaten. “Seriously nice arse though.”

  As he opened the gate to the garden of Paul and Cara’s little terraced house he dearly wished he was manning the phone lines instead.

  The woman Cara had lined up for him was already there. Introducing herself as Hayley and planting a kiss on his cheek in greeting, she was plump, blond, and loud. Cara had clearly given her a briefing and Daniel could see she was bursting to mention “the thing.” Idly, he watched the clock and made bets with himself how long she would take to bring it up.

  “So, Daniel,” she breathed, after the briefest of conversations about the weather. She pushed her breasts forward as she leaned in toward him, a large glass of Prosecco in her hand. “I’m so sorry to hear about your sister. She was a Down’s wasn’t she?”

  He looked at the clock. One and a half minutes, he reckoned. That was better than he’d thought, if he was honest. She must have tied herself up in knots managing to go that long without drawing attention to the thing that marked him out and made him different from the other young men. It was almost like a smell, an aura, that women could discern in him. Some of them seemed to like it on the whole. Unfortunately, those women tended to be the wrong ones.

  “She was a young woman,” said Daniel, “not ‘a Down’s.’” But then, as her face fell, he smiled at her. “It’s fine, it’s just that—well—if you’d met her, it would have taken five minutes and the last thing you would have been thinking about was how she was born with Down’s syndrome.”

  “Yeah, but it must have been awful . . .” she pressed. “And to die so young from it. I can’t imagine . . . Such a tragedy.”

  “Down’s syndrome isn’t a disease.”

  “But she died of it,” said Hayley, perplexed. “At least . . .” she looked uncertainly at Cara, who was busy bossing Paul around in the kitchen end of the room.

  “She died of a congenital heart defect,” he explained as they sat at the long dining table crammed into the other end of the room, where he and Hayley had been banished. “She was born with it. They,” he hesitated, even though he had trotted this out a thousand times, “they didn’t fix it when she was a baby, so it became unfixable. As she grew it got worse and, well, eventually she just couldn’t survive it.” He bowed his head, and Hayley pressed her hand onto his arm sympathetically.

  He couldn’t dislike this ignorant woman. She was kind, but simple, and Cara had done her best. With a supreme effort, he raised his head and smiled.

  “She was twenty-two,” he said, “which was actually amazing. When she was born we were told she had no chance of becoming an adult.”

  “Sooo sad,” said Hayley, seeming grateful for the smile. “And you’re how old?”

  “Thirty-two,” said Daniel, making a rueful face. “Really old.”

  “And you’re . . . single?”

  She clearly already knew he was.

  “I’ve been looking after Zoe,” he explained. “Our parents di
ed so, obviously . . .”

  “And now you’re free.”

  Daniel wasn’t at all sure he would look at it that way. “I’m alone,” he offered instead.

  “You don’t have to be,” she said, her perfume and her winey breath surrounding him like a fog.

  “How’s it going, mate,” murmured Paul when Daniel escaped to the fridge to get the Prosecco bottle out. As far as he could see, it was only Hayley drinking it, but the level was going down pretty fast.

  “She’s, erm . . . very sweet.”

  “Not the sharpest tool in the box?”

  “Yeah, but nice, erm . . .” Daniel searched for something positive to say.

  “Nice tits?”

  “I was going to say, ‘nice smile.’”

  “Yeah.” Paul thought for a moment. “Nice tits too though.”

  “Shut up, you prat. She’s fine, but don’t expect me to take her home.”

  At least he would get a good supper, because Cara was a fine cook, Daniel reminded himself as Hayley told him all about her nail bar business. She showed off her own extraordinary nails—each one a different sign of the zodiac with two on each thumbnail—and explained how the future was in false nails, fake eyelashes, and also brow tattooing, in which she was going to be trained.

  “I’m ambitious, Daniel,” she explained earnestly. “I want to do stuff with my life. I don’t just want a man to support me like some girls do . . .”

  He had nodded and smiled and nodded and smiled until he thought his face was going to fall off. At the end of the night, by which time Hayley had polished off two bottles of Prosecco and a large Bailey’s, she was tearful at Daniel’s bereavement again, holding his face in both hands and weeping. “She was so young—and a disabled too . . . it’s so sad.”

  He got Cara to tell him where Hayley lived and called a taxi.

  By the time he had maneuvered her into her coat and found her bag—a gargantuan challenge as she needed holding steady at all times—Paul was standing back laughing behind his hand.

  “I think she’s a bit far gone,” Cara had added, in a whisper. “You should make sure she gets home safe but you probably wouldn’t want to . . . you know . . . best not to take advantage.”

  Daniel gave her a look of stark disbelief, and turned back to getting Hayley out of the door without falling down the steps.

  To his relief, she fell asleep in the taxi, but she got maudlin again as he helped her out of the car and got her to the front door of her flat, first making sure that the driver wasn’t going to drive off and leave him. He was simultaneously holding her upright and scrabbling in her bag for her key.

  “She was so young,” Hayley wailed, trying to hug him.

  “You’ll get over it,” counseled Daniel. “Just try to think of happy things.” He opened the door with relief and gave her a gentle shove to get her inside. “Bedtime, I think.”

  “Come with me,” she wailed. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “I think alone is best,” he said. “You’re going to prefer it when you wake up feeling crap tomorrow.”

  “I won’t. I want to be with yooooou . . .”

  “You don’t. I’m horrible, honestly,” he tried to shove her a bit further in, so he could close the door and escape. For a ghastly moment he wondered if he ought to go in and put her to bed, but then decided against it. She would be fine.

  “It’s not you, it’s me,” he went on, flailing around desperately for things to say that would persuade her to let him leave.

  This seemed to get through. “Ah,” she said, nodding owlishly. “You need more time.”

  “I do,” he said, gratefully. “I totally do, and then . . . well, who knows?”

  She smiled. “Night, night,” she said, suddenly seeming perfectly content, slamming the door in his face. He could see her through the window of the door, making her way along the corridor using the wall for support and guidance. Suddenly she disappeared. A door in the wall she was sliding along must have been open. Hopefully it was her bedroom.

  19 Days ’til Christmas

  The weather was so awful, Jack was so tired, and Kate was so monumentally hung over, she was immensely relieved the Christmas miracle task for the following day was just to stay in and make fudge to send to her parents and to Maureen.

  “I love fudge! Can we eat some?”

  “Probably.”

  “We’ve got to save lots for Nana though.”

  “’Course.”

  “Can we take it to her?”

  Kate stopped stroking his hair. “Do you want to? It’s a really long way . . .” And expensive too, she thought.

  “I want to see her,” he said, his chin wobbling. “We haven’t seen her for ages.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll see, but she might be too poorly,” said Kate. It had been a while. She called the nursing home every few weeks and the reports were consistent. Maureen was content. Or content enough. She was generally sunny and calm, amusingly dotty, and seemingly undistressed by her confusion. She had plenty to be distressed about, though; her eighteen-year-old daughter Daisy had left home after an argument, leaving behind her infant son Tom, and never returned. Maureen had dedicated herself to raising her grandson but had then seen him killed in Afghanistan just after he became a father to Jack.

  Thankfully, Maureen usually had no memory of these sadnesses. When she asked where they were, on Kate’s suggestion she was told Daisy was out shopping and Tom was at school and would be home for tea after football practice. She could then be distracted by some other activity, drifting off into a world where an entirely different logic applied.

  “Don’t touch,” squeaked Kate, seeing Jack reaching for a drip of molten fudge running down the outside of the pan.

  “I just wanted a lick.”

  “Boiling sugar!” she snapped. “What have I told you?”

  “I know, I know . . . really hot, sorry, Mummy,” said Jack, crestfallen.

  “No, I’m sorry, darling,” she said, ruffling his hair. She was tired. Dog tired. She had spent too many nights working on her jewelry, peering at it in the poor light, until her head pounded, and her eyes felt scratchy and dry. She must build up her stocks to make the most of Anastasia’s party and all the while she was looking guiltily at the bags from the charity shop. Two camel costumes coming up, she thought. Great. Perhaps going to bed at two in the morning wasn’t so bad when it was compensated for by a Sunday morning lie-in, she had told herself, but she hadn’t factored in the entirely predictable fact that six-year-old boys don’t do Sunday lie-ins. Jack was bouncing around in her bed at seven o’clock on the dot, wriggling, chatting, and wanting her attention, so that was the end of sleep.

  “How about we take this to Nana next weekend,” she said, pouring the fudge into the tin. “She would love to see how much you’ve grown.”

  “Will she think I’m Daddy?”

  “Yeah, probably. Is that okay?”

  “I don’t mind. I think it makes her feel less sad.”

  “I think it does too.”

  “I’m pleased she feels less sad,” said Jack matter-of-factly. “I wish I had something that made me less sad about not having a daddy.”

  Kate swallowed, hot tears springing to her eyes. She turned away to put the pan in the sink, swiping her eyes quickly with the back of her hand.

  “I know, darling,” she said, turning back with a watery smile. “I wish you had something too.”

  “I’ve got you, though,” he said putting his arms around her waist. “I’ve got a mummy. Some little children don’t have mummies or daddies. Like in wars and stuff.” His eyes widened as he looked up at her. “What if you go too? Like Daddy did. Then I’ll be like them. I’ll have to look after myself and I don’t think I know how to do everything on my own,” he said, staring into space, running through the complexities. “You had better show me how to use the washing machine,” he said, practically. “I will need to have clean clothes . . .”

  “I’m not goin
g anywhere,” said Kate, trying desperately to remember what the counselor had told her about when he asked these sorts of questions.

  “I’m not going to leave you,” she said, kneeling so she could hug him back. “Daddy loved you very much and so do I.”

  “But you’re not a daddy,” said Jack quietly, into her shoulder, squeezing her tight. “It would be nice to have a new daddy one day, too.”

  “Would it?”

  “One day,” he said. “Maybe. I think I’ll ask Father Christmas,” he said. “In my letter.”

  “Your letter?”

  “Yes, I’m writing, but I haven’t finished yet.”

  “Can I see?”

  “It’s to Father Christmas,” he said, firmly. “I have to post it soon or it won’t get there in time.”

  “Right,” said Kate. “Well, maybe that’s our Christmas thing for later this week. What do you reckon?”

  After Jack had gone to bed, Kate laid out the coat on the floor, along with the other bits the kind lady had given them. Now the reality of making two camel heads from it all seemed ludicrous. She should probably ask Seema for help tomorrow. It was lucky tomorrow was the one day in the week they were both collecting their boys from school. Mind you, Seema, though a woman of many talents, had no sewing skills whatsoever.

  By the time Kate had produced not one but two vaguely recognizable camel heads, both with long, fringed eyelashes made from the black felt the lady in the charity shop had miraculously found her, it was past midnight. For the second night running, she went to bed with tired eyes and an aching head. To top it all, when she finally lay there, staring into the darkness, she couldn’t sleep. Thoughts about Tom’s mother and whether it was seriously a good idea to take Jack to see her—quite apart from the expense—stopped her from relaxing enough to drop off.

  At the moment Kate finally fell asleep, Daniel was in the tiny kitchen of the Crisisline office, stirring Coffeemate into two mugs. The claggy white powder floated initially and then dispersed, turning the murky extra-strength instant coffee into an unappealing orange-brown soup with an oil slick of fat globules on its surface. He added sugar to both mugs too—that always helped—and shook the cookie tin experimentally. It was unpromisingly light and there was no rattle, just a faint swishing noise indicating the presence of cookie wrappers. Empty ones.