Make a Christmas Wish

by Julia Williams

  ‘Why?’ I say suspiciously.

  ‘Because it’s my job,’ says the cat wearily. ‘Though, quite frankly, I’ve had easier material to work with.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ I say, furious again.

  ‘Well, let’s start with untangling the mess you’ve made of your life.’

  ‘I haven’t made a mess of my life,’ I protest. ‘I liked my life. I’d really like it back please.’

  ‘Too late for that,’ says Malachi. ‘But we can put a few things right if you like. We can start with your past.’

  ‘Suppose I don’t want to,’ I object. I make a point of never looking back and wondering if I could have done things differently. That way madness lies, if you ask me.

  ‘Fair enough,’ says the cat. ‘But I can’t help you till you want to be helped. If you’re not prepared to listen to me, you’ll be stuck here until you’re ready to move on.’

  ‘I refuse to listen to this,’ I say. ‘Any minute now I’m going to wake up and this will have been a horrible nightmare.’

  ‘Your choice,’ he purrs. ‘You stay here guarding the bins then. Let me know when you’re ready. I’ve got better things to do with my time.’

  With a flick of his tail he is gone. And I am left here alone, floating around Lidl’s car park, trapped on the very spot where I died.

  Emily

  Emily Harris hadn’t been sure whether to go to Livvy Carmichael’s funeral or not. She knew Adam wouldn’t be able to talk to her, but she wanted to support him anyway. She’d tentatively texted him to let him know she’d be there, but he hadn’t texted back. She had no idea what that meant. They’d barely spoken since the awful night when he’d rung her to tell her what had happened. She had no place in this. Adam had to be there for Joe, and Emily knew in her heart that might mean whatever they’d had together could be finished forever. She felt desperately sad that Livvy was dead – no one deserved such an end, not even her rival who had caused Adam untold pain for years. But now Livvy was gone she didn’t know where it left her and Adam. Maybe he was only with her because everything had been so hard for him. Their love might fade away in the fallout from this terrible tragedy. It was shitty and miserable but there was nothing she could do.

  Emily crept into the back of the packed church. The mood was sombre, and she felt blacker than she’d ever felt in her life. Poor Livvy. What a godawful thing to have happened. Poor Joe. Poor Adam. Poor bloody everybody.

  The organ started to play ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’, and everyone rose. In a blur, Emily watched Adam, his fair head bowed, looking blankly ahead escorting Joe, his skinny frame hunched and miserable, and a small fair-haired woman, who must be Livvy’s mum, Felicity, as they followed the coffin down the aisle. The three of them clung to each other, for support, and Emily felt more than ever that she had no right to be here. She nearly turned and fled, but Adam glanced up at her as he walked past and gave her a quick and grateful smile. He looked so sombre and sad. Emily wished beyond anything she could be by his side.

  The funeral passed in a blur. Felicity got up and read something about Death not being the end in such a dignified manner, Emily felt a lump rise in her throat. She had a sudden terrible memory of her own mother’s funeral, and marvelled at Felicity’s courage. Emily couldn’t do anything but sob that day; to be able to read for your own daughter and not break down took some doing.

  Adam also read a passage about love. He didn’t look at the congregation, focusing his attention on getting every word out. Emily could see what it cost him, and longed to be with him to comfort him. And then Joe got up, and said simply. ‘My mum was the best. She looked after me, and now she’s gone. And I miss her.’

  There wasn’t a dry eye in the church after that, and the rest of the service was punctuated with people sobbing. After it was over, Emily escaped as quickly as she could. The family were going on to a private burial, and she had no intention of attending the wake.

  A crowd of people clustered around Joe, Adam and Felicity, so Emily walked down the path to the road where her car was parked. She’d done what she came to do. Although Emily had thought what she and Adam had was special, Livvy being dead altered things. Her rival was gone, but not in a way anyone would have wanted. Was Adam’s love for her enough to withstand his grief? All Emily could do was wait and see if Adam would come back to her.

  As she was unlocking the car door, she heard a shout, ‘Emily, wait.’

  It was Adam. The temptation to hug him was immense, but Emily hung back.

  ‘I just wanted to say thanks,’ he said. ‘It meant a lot that you came.’

  ‘Of course I came,’ said Emily. ‘How are you bearing up?’

  ‘Not well,’ said Adam. He looked tired and strained.

  ‘You’d better get back,’ said Emily uneasily. ‘People might talk.’

  ‘I’m not sure that matters any more.’

  ‘You have Joe to think of,’ she pointed out.

  ‘I know,’ said Adam. ‘Emily, you do understand, don’t you? Joe has to be my priority right now. And – well – the next few months, I might not be able to see you, and I wanted to say it won’t be because I don’t want to.’

  ‘Oh Adam,’ said Emily. ‘Of course I understand.’

  They were both a bit weepy now.

  She could see the funeral party breaking up.

  ‘You have to go, Adam,’ she said. ‘But if you ever need me, you know where I am.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said.

  ‘When you’re ready,’ said Emily. Who knew how easy that would be?

  ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘I know this is a big ask, but please – can you wait for me?’

  With that he was gone, and Emily got in her car and drove home, wondering if she’d ever see him again, but hoping more than she’d ever hoped before that she would.

  Livvy

  I spend a long time in a foggy blur, not entirely sure where the days, nights and months go to, but unable to reach out to anyone I love, to at least see if they’re doing OK. I get the odd vague impulse – round the time of my funeral, I can feel Joe’s distress, and occasionally I sense that Adam is trying to talk to me from somewhere, but it’s like a broken radio wave, it comes to me from such a distance, I am not even sure it is him. In the midst of the fog I feel a terrible pain and sense of loss. There’s something I should be doing, but I don’t know what it is.

  And then …

  On a winter’s night when a storm is raging in my car park, suddenly I can hear Joe in my head. I can feel his confusion clamouring in my brain.

  ‘So is Emily my new mum, Dad?’ he asks.

  Who the hell is Emily? And why is Adam looking for a new mum for Joe?

  ‘Over my dead body,’ I snarl, and suddenly it’s as if a whirlwind has torn me from the car park.

  What the—? I’m standing in my front room, with no clue how I got there. I am stunned but delighted. Finally I’m out of that damned car park. Then I look around me and see Adam, Joe, and a pretty dark-haired woman I don’t know, but vaguely recognize, decorating the Christmas tree.

  A strange woman in my house. With Adam. And Joe. What on earth is going on?

  Christmas Past

  Livid doesn’t cover it. I hurl myself at the dark-haired woman in MY front room in a fury.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ I yell. ‘What are you doing here? In my house, in my life?’

  I want her to be terrified. I want her to react. But all that happens is the woman shivers, and says, ‘That’s odd. I just felt someone walking over my grave.’

  Crap, I can’t even haunt people properly. All I want is for Adam and Joe to see me, to know I’m there, to want me back, the way I want them back.

  ‘Oh quit feeling sorry for yourself.’ Malachi hasn’t gone away. Oh good. ‘If you’d not turned your back on me a year ago all this would be sorted by now. They do need you and you need them, but possibly not in the way you think.’

  ‘What do you mean?’
Why does Malachi have to talk in riddles?

  ‘You have things to sort out, things to put right.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I’d blush with fury if I could.

  ‘You really don’t know?’ says Malachi. ‘Here, let me show you …’

  With a jolt, I’m awake. With a living breathing human body. I’d forgotten how good it is, to feel and see and taste and smell. Wait. I remember this. I look around me. I’m sitting in a hospital bed, watching my newborn baby asleep in his cot. A sudden rush of love – hormones? – flows through me. Here is my baby at last, after all the false starts. My miracle baby.

  But where is Adam? We’ve waited so long for this baby, been through so much, and he’s not here.

  Then I remember. I’ve gone into early labour and Adam’s abroad. He thought we had time. We both did, but I’ve ended up giving birth alone, among strangers, in this unforgiving place. The midwives have been kind, but overworked, and Mum is away visiting friends, and can’t get here till tomorrow. I have never felt so lonely. And now I’m lying on a hospital bed, and my baby is waking up and I can’t reach him. Because of my epidural I can’t get out of bed. I’m tired and hungry and sad and overwhelmed. This is not how it was meant to be. How can I be sad on the happiest day of my life?

  When the baby starts to cry, I don’t know what to do. I ring the buzzer but no one comes. I’m here on my own with a crying baby, and I feel like crying too. And I know it’s unfair of me, but I’m very angry with Adam. But then, miraculously, Adam is here. He’s dropped everything and flown home as soon as he could, just to be by my side. He’s so happy about the baby, and so pleased to see me, I forget my anger, and bury it deep. Nothing matters now but us and our new son.

  And then I’m back in the future, where I’m dead, and talking to a mangy black cat. I can still feel the anger burning in the back of my throat. I’ve been angry with Adam so long, I’d forgotten when and where it began. Was it really then? The day that Joe was born?

  I stare disconsolately at Adam and Joe and their new friend.

  ‘So what do I do now?’ I say.

  ‘First,’ says Malachi, ‘you need to get their attention.’

  This Year

  Two Weeks before Christmas

  Adam

  A year ago? How can it be a year since my world imploded so spectacularly? As if it wasn’t fucked up enough.

  Before Livvy died, everything was going to be so different. I wasn’t proud of myself for doing it, but I had met and fallen in love with Emily. I’d been planning to tell her, but then Livvy found out anyway: You bastard. How could you? The very last words my wife said to me. In the circumstances, they were no more than I deserved, though Emily tells me I’m too hard on myself. But if … if I’d supported her more in the beginning, if I’d understood the toll of looking after Joe had exacted on her … My world is full of ifs.

  I can remember the day I first met Livvy as clearly as if it was yesterday. It was our first term at uni in Manchester, and there was this bright, vivid, red-headed girl standing in the student bar, downing shots in a competition and drinking all the boys under the table. I was too shy to talk to her that first night, but gradually I found myself more and more drawn to her, and to my surprise my interest was reciprocated. It was Livvy who took the initiative from the first, kissing me suddenly and fiercely one night when we’d sat out all evening staring at the stars together. She was so unlike anyone I’d met: a free spirit, spontaneous in a way I wasn’t. She breathed life into me, showing me there was more than the staid and rather restrictive outlook my parents had given me. It was a magical, wonderful time. Since she’s died, I often think of those days and wonder how it could have gone so badly wrong.

  But it did, and instead I’ve spent the last year picking up the pieces of my life. Even though our marriage was a sham by the end, I was devastated when Livvy died. I never got to say sorry that a love that had started out with such hope and promise had disintegrated in the way it did, and now there was no possibility of ever putting it right.

  And now here we are and it’s coming up for Christmas again, and I owe it to Joe to try and make things cheerful even though it’s the last thing I feel like doing. I’m never sure how much of what’s happened he’s taken in, and wonder what is going on inside his head. He says things like, ‘My mum is dead,’ deadpan to complete strangers, showing no emotion. Emily says we just have to support him the best we can. So today, though I’m not sure I have the stomach for Christmas decorations (last year the lights seemed to twinkle malevolently at me as if proof of my guilt), Emily and I are putting up the Christmas tree. We always put the tree up a fortnight before Christmas, and Joe with his obsessive need for order has had it written on the calendar for weeks.

  Actually, it turns out to be fun. It’s been a really blowy day, and after Joe and I put flowers on Livvy’s grave first thing, we went for a wet walk down by the canal. We get back home and make hot chocolate and sit by the fire drinking it, feeling cosy and warm, till Joe starts insisting it’s time to decorate the tree. I’d thought he might not want to do it today, on the anniversary, but he is insistent. ‘We always decorate the tree two weeks before Christmas,’ he says. ‘Mum won’t like it if we don’t.’

  It makes my heart ache to hear him speak about her in such a matter-of-fact way. He must be grieving for Livvy, but it’s hard for him to articulate it.

  ‘Five thirty,’ Joe says now, pointing at his watch – time is very important to him – ‘if we don’t do it soon, it will be dinner time and too late.’

  ‘OK, Joe,’ I say, ‘let’s get on with it.’

  The wind is howling down the chimney now, and the kitchen door rattles. This is an old house, with ill-fitting doors and windows. We’ve always meant to get double glazing, but I like the old sash windows, and wooden frames. They give the place character, though on a night like tonight I’m not grateful for the draughts blowing through the house.

  Joe in his methodical way is sorting out how to decorate the tree. After the lights go up, he insists that certain decorations, like the Santa he made for us when he was five, and the reindeer Livvy once bought him at a Christmas market, take pride of place. Then he organizes the baubles according to a colour scheme: gold, red, silver hung in serried rows round the tree. This is something Livvy used to do with him, and I had no idea he had it down to such a fine art. Emily and I are there to do things the way Joe likes them, and I am finding it quite soothing.

  After the baubles, Joe makes us wrap the tree in tinsel – he won’t let us use red because ‘it doesn’t look right’ – and I mean literally wrap it. It is starting to look overloaded, but he won’t hear of us taking any off.

  We’ve just put the last bit of tinsel on the tree, when Joe suddenly looks at Emily in that disconcerting way he has and asks, ‘Are you my mother now?’

  Oh God. I’m not ready for this.

  I have tried really hard to introduce Emily into our lives slowly. Luckily Joe already knows her from the swimming club we go to on a Monday evening. Joe was always so full of energy in the evenings, I started taking him as a way to tire him out before he went to bed. Being Joe he takes it very seriously, and won’t leave the pool till he’s completed a hundred lengths.

  It was there that I first met Emily. After a messy divorce, she took up swimming, not only to get fit, but, she told me later, to do something positive for her. I swam to disperse my demons. The pool was the one place where I forgot about everything, and it relaxed me. And every week there was this pretty petite brunette in a red cap and black costume, swimming in the same lane as me. Somehow we bonded at the deep end, and though we never intended it to, one thing led to another.

  A huge gust of wind howls down the chimney, making the flames flare up, and I feel a whoosh of cold furious negative energy hit me right in the solar plexus. At the same time the lights on the Christmas tree flicker on and off. The other two don’t seem to notice, as they’re engrossed in putting the rest of the dec
s away. I go and fiddle with the plug and the lights come back on.

  Emily stands back and looks at the tree, ‘There, doesn’t that look lovely?’ she says.

  Joe smiles.

  ‘Now we can start Christmas,’ he says.

  Livvy

  ‘How do I do that?’ I say.

  ‘You’re a ghost,’ explains Malachi. ‘You have powers, try them out.’

  ‘What, like this?’ I say, and I let out a huge scream that gratifyingly causes the Christmas tree lights to flicker and go out.

  ‘What the–?’ Adam says, going to the plug and switching them back on.

  Now I’ve got their attention. I run through the house screaming at the top of my voice, causing lights to go on and off, but all that happens is that Emily jokes about power surges and Adam says, ‘Maybe there’s a problem with the wiring. I’ll call an electrician in the morning. We must get it sorted before Christmas.’

  I’ve run out of steam. Defeated, I go out into the garden, and stare disconsolately at the moon.

  ‘Well, that was a waste of time,’ I say as Malachi lopes up next to me again.

  ‘You’re not a very patient person are you?’ he says. ‘It will take time.’

  ‘Why can’t they see me?’ I say. I so want Adam and Joe to know I’m here. I’ve turned away from the moon and am staring in at the lounge, where Joe looks happy to be with Adam and his new woman. I feel shut out and cold and sorry for myself. Why am I still here, if none of them need me? Joe clearly likes the new woman otherwise he wouldn’t be decorating the tree with her. He’s particular like that. I thought maybe I’d hung around for Joe. But it turns out he is even less like other people than I thought, and doing quite well without me. It reminds me of all the times I felt so useless as a mum even though I tried so hard to get it right; now I’m dead, I’m worse than useless. I stare through the window and the memories come crowding in.