A Typical Family Christmas

by Liz Davies

  The squelching noise was bad enough, but when the stench of half-eaten dog food and bile wafted up her nose, Kate almost gagged. Dear God, but the stuff was all over her shoe...

  She took a step. The bag clung to her foot.

  She tried to shake it off, but it hung on in there, forcing her to bend down and remove it with her fingers.

  Trying not to breathe and thankful it was dark, so she couldn’t see the mess too clearly, Kate gingerly placed the broken, soggy bag in the nearest flower bed. She’d deal with it later.

  Walking on her heel, with her toes not touching the paving stones because she didn’t want risk spreading the disgusting mess all over the drive, Kate hobbled towards the house, leaving the cases where they were. First of all, she needed a bucket of hot, soapy water and some disinfectant to wash the remains of Pepe’s little present away, before she moved the luggage.

  Her mother met her at the door, just as Kate was attempting to ease her shoe off.

  ‘There’s someone in my room,’ Beverley announced. ‘It’s Helen.’ From the tone of Beverley’s voice, anyone would think Satan himself was staying the night.

  ‘Helen?’ Oh, God, Kate had forgotten Helen was here.

  ‘I thought she doesn’t usually turn up until Christmas Eve?’ her mother said.

  ‘She’s here early. Just like you are.’ Kate used the edge of the doorstep to lever her heel out of the shoe, then turned to go inside. She vowed to speak to Brett later; he could bloody well have warned her!

  Her mother was blocking the way. ‘Where am I supposed to sleep, that’s what I want to know?’

  ‘Look, Mum, go inside. Let me clean this mess up and bring your cases in, then we’ll sort something out.’

  She wondered if she should take advantage of the fact that the girls were out, to install her mother in Portia’s room and put the inflatable mattress in Ellis’s. Faced with a fait accompli, neither of them would be able to do anything about it.

  Or would they?

  Kate had a horrid feeling they’d make a scene, and the last thing she wanted was to make her mother feel unwelcome. She might be miserable and moany, but she didn’t deserve to feel as though she wasn’t wanted.

  Anyway, Brett still hadn’t fetched the blasted mattress from the garage yet, and he hadn’t brought the decorations in, either. Damn him. And they still didn’t have a tree.

  Kate tried to move her mother away from the door so she could get past, when she became aware of Pepe wriggling frantically in her mother’s arms.

  ‘He needs to go pee-pee,’ Beverley said, placing the poodle on the ground and scrabbling around to get a hold on the thin, red leather lead, which went with his thin, red leather, diamante-encrusted collar.

  Unfortunately, it slipped through her fingers, and Pepe, probably sensing unexpected and very welcome freedom, took the opportunity to make a dash for it, darting between Kate’s legs and down the drive.

  ‘Stop him!’ Beverley shrieked. ‘Oh, my baby!’

  Kate, on the edge of the stone step and with one shoe on and the other off, made a pathetic lunge for the trailing lead, and lost her balance.

  She tottered precariously for a long, long second, wind-milling her arms, before losing the fight to remain upright, and falling face first onto the drive.

  ‘Argh!’ she grunted as she hit the ground with a thud.

  ‘My baby, oh my baby. He’s getting away.’ Her mother shuffled toward her, then stepped over Kate’s prone body and tottered down the drive after the poodle.

  She wished she could sodding well get away, she thought, as she levered herself on to her knees and assessed the damage. Anywhere but here would do.

  ‘Pepe, Pepe, darling, come to Mama,’ Beverley called. ‘Ooh, he’s heading for the road. Stop him, Kate.’

  She shook her head in disbelief. How the hell was she supposed to stop a determined poodle who was in full flight, when she was barely able to stand up?

  Carefully, she got to her feet; nothing appeared broken (except her spirit, but that was an old injury), although her knees were sore where she’d landed on them, and her wrist ached from her attempt to prevent herself face-planting the concrete paving stones. It was a wonder she hadn’t broken her collarbone or fractured a kneecap.

  Taking a shaky breath to steady herself, she peered down the drive. Pepe was nowhere to be seen, but it wasn’t surprising – spotting a small black dog in the darkness of a December evening was never going to be easy, despite the streetlights.

  Her mother, however, was clearly visible, prodding at the bushes which divided Kate’s drive from the one next door, and calling, ‘Darling, come to Mummy.’

  Kate sighed and groped around with her foot. Finding the shoe she’d just taken off, she slipped it back on again, and went to help her mother search for the dog.

  ‘Pepe! Pepe!’ she called, pausing in between as though she expected the dog to answer her.

  Nothing.

  Her mother’s voice was becoming increasingly high pitched, which might be a good thing, Kate decided – if it went high enough, only Pepe would hear it, and everyone knew dogs responded to those high-frequency whistles that humans couldn’t hear.

  ‘What on earth are you doing out there?’ Helen called.

  Kate looked over her shoulder to see her mother-in-law standing in the window of the spare bedroom, or “her” room, as she liked to refer to it, silhouetted against the light.

  ‘Looking for Pepe,’ Kate replied loudly, following it with, ‘Damned dog,’ under her breath. As if she didn’t have enough to do this evening. If she didn’t get the casserole in the oven soon, they’d be eating it at midnight, and now she had her mother-in-law to contend with, too.

  Oh, there was Pepe, in the Edmunds’s garden, which was on the opposite side of the road and three doors down.

  ‘Mum, I can see him. Pepe! Pepe! Here, boy.’ Kate made kissy noises in the hope it would entice him to come within lead-grabbing distance.

  Pepe ignored her. He continued to sniff and rootle in the rose bushes, before lifting his leg and giving the plants a quick watering.

  Kate took the opportunity to hobble painfully across the road while he was stationary, and hoped his widdle would last long enough for one or the other of them to catch him. Her mother was hurrying along the pavement on the opposite side of the road, with the clear intention of trying to intercept her pet.

  The poodle saw them coming long before either of them got close enough to attempt a rugby tackle, and certainly not close enough for a foot to stamp on his trailing lead.

  Pepe was off, tail in the air, scampering into the middle of the road and dodging his would-be captors with ease.

  Headlights, the growl of an engine, the squeal of brakes, followed by her mother’s strangled scream, brought Kate skidding to a stop.

  ‘Pepe! My darling! Oh God, they’ve killed him,’ her mother shrieked, scurrying to the front of the vehicle to inspect the damage.

  ‘Mum, don’t look,’ Kate called, but it was too late.

  Beverley came to an abrupt halt, her eyes on the ground just in front of the car.

  Kate knew her mother’s horrified expression would stay with her forever.

  ‘Mum,’ she whispered, her heart going out to her.

  ‘Nanny?’

  ‘Portia?’ Kate said, seeing a young girl emerge from the car.

  ‘What’s going on?’ her daughter wanted to know.

  ‘Get back in the car!’ Kate yelled. ‘Portia, for once in your life, do as you’re told and get back in the car.’ Portia didn’t need to see poor Pepe’s remains smeared across the road.

  Her daughter ignored her, walking around the bonnet to join her maternal grandmother in their examination of Pepe’s corpse.

  Kate finally limped over to the car, steeling herself for the unpleasantness.

  Pepe wasn’t there.

  ‘Is it all right?’ a female voice asked, through the car’s window. ‘I didn’t see it in time. It should hav
e been on a lead.’

  ‘We know,’ Kate muttered, raising her voice to say, ‘I think he might be underneath your car.’

  ‘Oh. Yuck. I’ll reverse a bit, shall I? You can’t leave him there.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Kate whispered to Portia out of the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Alice’s mum. She gave me a lift home because you didn’t come to pick me up,’ Portia hissed back. ‘Is Nanny’s dog under there?’

  Kate nodded. ‘Poor thing. You don’t need to see this and neither does Nanny. Why don’t you take her back to the house?’

  ‘Nah, it’s OK.’

  ‘It’s not going to be pretty,’ Kate warned.

  ‘I’ll be fine. We dissected a frog in school last term. It was a bit gross, but I wasn’t sick or anything.’

  You mightn’t be, Kate thought, but I’ll probably barf, and what about my mother? Not only that, who was going to move it? Pepe couldn’t be left in the middle of the road. Oh, God, would she be expected to do it? She bet she’d have to bury him, too.

  The car slowly moved backwards.

  Kate made a “keep-going” motion with her hand.

  The car continued to reverse.

  Nothing. No sign of Pepe.

  Four feet, five, seven... ten.

  No dog.

  Kate’s mother let out a little cry of relief and sagged against Portia.

  Portia grimaced and pushed her away. ‘Get a grip, Nanny. Pepe’s not been squashed.’

  ‘Where is he, then?’ Beverley wanted to know.

  Kate shrugged. The rest of the family should be home soon – they could help her mother find him. She was going indoors to get changed, to make sure Helen hadn’t donned white gloves and wasn’t running her cotton-clad fingers along the skirting boards to check for dust (not that her mother-in-law had ever done such a thing, but Kate wouldn’t put it past her), and to shove that damned casserole in the blasted oven.

  She stalked off as best she could, considering her knees still ached, and made her way back to her house.

  Her mother’s cases were where Kate had left them, so she grabbed hold of the nearest and began dragging it up the drive, when something made her pause.

  What was that...?

  Oh, dear God. It was Pepe, and he was enthusiastically eating the contents of the paper bag which Kate had placed in the flower bed a few minutes earlier.

  How Kate didn’t throw up there and then was a miracle.

  Chapter 12

  Kate’s husband was seriously cheesing her off. He’d arrived home only a few minutes ago, when she was up to her armpits in drama, and what had he done? Kissed his mother on the cheek, said an off-hand hello to hers, then sloped off into the living room, slumped into his favourite armchair, and hid behind the newspaper.

  He hadn’t even remembered to take his shoes off, and Kate was certain there were faint marks of whatever Pepe had eaten for breakfast and which were now liberally smeared on the drive, daubed all over the cream carpet. In her haste to reach the downstairs cloakroom and deal with her own nausea, she’d totally forgotten that she’d intended to fetch a bucket of hot water to swill the drive down.

  His mother was sitting in the armchair, glasses perched on the end of her nose, head buried in a magazine.

  Her mother was standing in the kitchen fretting about where she was going to sleep.

  ‘I always have the spare room,’ she said, for the fifteenth time. ‘When I come to stay, you always put me in the spare room.’

  ‘Yes, Mum, we do. But you’re never here at Christmas, and Helen is. She always has the spare room when she comes to stay, too.’ Kate didn’t add that it seemed Helen had arrived early for the sole reason of claiming the spare room as her own – the wily old bat.

  ‘So where am I going to sleep?’ Beverley wailed. ‘Oh, I knew I should have stayed at home and not bothered you. I could have bought one of those microwave meals from the supermarket for Christmas dinner. It would be just as nice.’

  Thanks, Kate thought – her mother had just compared her cooking to a supermarket meal, and her carefully-planned turkey lunch hadn’t come out of it too favourably. She peeled some potatoes and threw them in a water-filled saucepan, debated whether to chop some of the wilted parsley which was currently sitting in a pot on the windowsill, to use as a garnish, and decided against it. After all, she couldn’t possibly compete with one of Asda’s finest ready meals, and her mother-in-law wasn’t too impressed with her cooking, either. She may as well have ordered a takeaway and be done with it. Crossly, she yanked the oven door open and checked the casserole.

  ‘You’re not bothering me, Mum,’ Kate said, through gritted teeth. ‘We love having you. Now stop worrying, we’ll sort something out.’

  ‘I don’t want to be an inconvenience. If you think it’s too much trouble, just say, and I’ll go back home.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You’re here now, and we’re going to have a lovely Christmas, aren’t we, Sam?’ she added to her youngest child, who had just sauntered into the kitchen. ‘Did you have a nice time? I expected you home before now. How are you so late? Say “hello” to your grandma.’

  ‘I would if you’d let me get a word in,’ Sam replied.

  He looked tired, dark circles under his eyes and his skin was pale. Kate hoped he wasn’t coming down with something, not with a brace of elderly ladies in the house, who’d be certain to catch whatever it was he might be coming down with.

  ‘Hiya, Nanny.’ He got the orange juice out of the fridge and poured himself a large glass.

  ‘You’ll rot your teeth if you drink all that,’ Beverley observed, and Sam rolled his eyes. ‘Come and give your old nan a kiss.’

  The look of horror on Sam’s face when his grandmother opened her arms and puckered her lips, made Kate smile. She quickly wiped the smirk off her face and replaced her grin with a “go on then, do as you’re told” expression.

  Her son allowed himself to be hugged, although he did manage a well-executed turn of the head, so his nan’s kiss fell somewhere around his ear rather than on his cheek. As soon as she let go, he stepped away smartly and retreated towards the door and freedom.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ Kate asked him. ‘Tea won’t be for ages yet, but I can make you a sandwich to tide you over?’

  ‘Nah, I’ve eaten. Jack’s mum took us to a Harvester on the way home.’

  He tried for the door again.

  ‘Did you have a nice time?’ Kate persisted. Since he’d started in high school, he’d become recalcitrant and rather reluctant at sharing much. It wasn’t so very long ago that he used to want to share every last detail of his day with her. Now she was lucky if she got an “all right”.

  ‘It was all right,’ he said.

  ‘Just all right?’

  ‘Yeah, it was good.’

  ‘Did you do much skating.’

  Sam shrugged. ‘S’pose.’

  ‘Did you fall over?’

  He shrugged again.

  She let him go. Trying to hold a conversation with her son was worse than trying to hold one with Pepe.

  ‘I can’t believe how much he’s grown,’ her mother observed. ‘Though, I suppose when you don’t see your grandchildren much, they will have shot up.’

  ‘You saw him in October, remember? We all came down to Brighton at half term?’

  ‘That was ages ago.’

  ‘Seven weeks.’

  Beverley huffed. ‘Where am I going to sleep, that what I want to know? Will I have Portia’s room? I don’t want Sam’s – it smells of feet. Ellis’s has the nicest outlook, though, with its view over the garden. Portia’s is at the front and I don’t like sleeping at the front, it’s too noisy with all that traffic.’

  Kate ground her teeth. Too noisy, indeed? They lived on a close of only twenty or so houses. It was not noisy! Her mother, on the other hand, lived three streets back from Brighton’s busy and popular promenade.

  Kate caught Ellis’s eye as her daughter peered around the
kitchen door, and she shook her head. Don’t you dare start an argument right now, she tried to warn her.

  Ellis floated in, a beatific smile on her face. ‘Hi, Nanny,’ she said, and moved into her grandmother’s embrace without being prompted. She didn’t even pull a face.

  Kate narrowed her eyes. The girl was up to something.

  ‘We’ve sorted the sleeping arrangements out,’ Ellis said, still smiling. ‘I’ve given my room a good clean, ready for Nanny.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice of you,’ Beverley beamed. Turning to Kate, she added, ‘You could have told me I was having Ellis’s room, or do you like to see me worry?’

  ‘You’re OK with that?’ Kate asked her daughter.

  Ellis nodded, still smiling.

  Kate peered at her, trying to work out if the smile was genuine or not. It appeared genuine enough.

  Maybe Ellis was finally growing up. She was seventeen, after all. It was about time she took responsibility and stopped acting like a spoilt teenager.

  Kate felt herself welling up, and she blinked away the tears. Her little baby was turning into a lovely young woman. She was so proud of her.

  ‘Is Portia all right about it?’ Kate asked, hoping some of Ellis’s new-found maturity would rub off on her sister.

  Ellis blinked. ‘Yeah, of course, why wouldn’t she be?’

  Kate almost mentioned the arguments and tantrums over who was going to sleep where, but decided it was best not to say anything. There was no point in dredging it up again, especially when her daughters had come to terms with the situation and had sorted it out between them.

  ‘I know it’s putting you out, Ellis dear,’ Beverley said, shooting a barbed glance at Kate, ‘but you can come in whenever you want, to put your make-up on or get dressed.’

  ‘Oh, that’s OK.’ Ellis waved a hand in the air. ‘I’m taking what I need with me. Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll be back early on Christmas morning. I don’t want to miss the present opening. Ooh,’ she squealed, clapping her hands. ‘This is going to be so much fun.’ Then she twirled on her heel and darted to the door.

  ‘Wait a minute, what do you mean “you’ll be back early on Christmas morning”? Where are you going?’ Kate demanded.