Christmas, Merry Christmas!’ Dad comes bounding into the hall, which as usual is strung with horrible paper decorations we probably made in infant school. He’s dressed in his usual Santa Claus outfit; he insists on wearing it every year, even though it gets more and more threadbare. I can hear Christmas carols playing in the background, and begin to relax a bit. As usual, Mum will be chopping vegetables in the kitchen, warbling away to them. I take a deep breath. It is Christmas after all; I need to let go of my lack of sleep induced grumpiness.
Dad is waving a bottle of Prosecco around and looks rather red in the face. It’s unlike him to start drinking before we arrive, but never mind.
‘Still not got rid of that ghastly costume, Dad?’ I laugh. It’s a running joke every year.
‘Never!’ he says. ‘Bubbly anyone?’
I accept a glass, but Daniel says no as he’s being generous and driving this year. Sam looks like he might throw up at the thought, but I let Megan have a small one.
‘Where’s Mum?’
Is it my imagination, or does Dad suddenly look shifty?
‘Kitchen,’ he says.
Dad is in full mein host mode and ushers Daniel and the kids through to the lounge. Honestly, it makes me laugh how well he and Daniel get along now. To think of the grief I got when I first brought him home to meet them. It’s not that my parents are racist exactly, but I guess when imagining a much longed-for son-in-law, a black one hadn’t really featured, and Dad was quite sniffy at first. I can remember an excruciating occasion when he’d quizzed Daniel endlessly about his prospects. I wouldn’t have blamed Daniel for not giving my parents a second chance, especially as his own mum, in the short time I knew her, proved to be much less intolerant. But after she died, Mum forgot all about any prejudices she had and said, ‘That poor boy needs a mother.’ After that she really took him under her wing, and Dad quickly followed suit. Now they’re the best of friends, and you’d never know there had been a problem. Daniel is a forgiving sort, so he saw the best in them, and I have always loved him for it.
I wander into the kitchen to see if Mum needs any help. I always offer, even though I know her response will be to shoo me away, but to my surprise she’s barely made a start on the vegetables. She looks a bit pale and wan, and I feel guilty. I’ve barely seen her in the last month as I’ve been so wrapped up in my book. I have a sudden stab of worry that she might be ill.
‘Is everything OK, Mum?’ I ask.
‘Of course it is, why shouldn’t it be?’ she says, picking up a carrot ready to chop. ‘If you’re going to stand around in here, you may as well be useful.’ She hands me a knife.
Something’s a bit off here, but I can’t quite work out what, and there’s no point asking again. It’s not that I don’t get on with my mum. I do, and I love her very much, but we don’t have that cosy mother–daughter relationship that so many of my girlfriends enjoy. My mum doesn’t do cosy, and wouldn’t understand at all if I suddenly launched into a litany of my woes. She’s very good at practical advice, but go to her for help in emotional matters and you may as well howl at the moon.
We chop vegetables companionably, with carols playing in the background while Mum starts her annual moan about why Ged and Lou can’t ever get here on time, which is the main reason Daniel and I always come early, just to keep her from feeling totally unloved. Although it pisses me off too. Why is it always up to me to be the sensible one?
‘You know they have further to come,’ I say, trying to be diplomatic. ‘And Ged only just flew in from Oz yesterday, so he’s probably really jet-lagged.’
Ged has been taking a year off to ‘discover himself’. If I were to do such a thing, Mum and Dad would both think it’s ridiculous, but Golden Boy Ged, as the baby of the family, always does what he wants and gets away with it too. I love my younger brother dearly, but it’s sometimes very hard not to get fed up with the way he gets treated so differently just because he’s a boy.
‘He’s bringing Rachel,’ says Mum. ‘Did I say?’
‘Only about a hundred times,’ I laugh. Rachel is Ged’s new girlfriend. It will be interesting to see if she lasts longer that the rest. ‘Do stop trying to marry them off. Ged will run a mile if he thinks you’ve already bought your hat. You’ve already been on enough at Lou about Joe. You need to give them both some space.’
The doorbell rings.
‘That’ll be them now,’ says Mum, her face brightening.
Dad has got to the door first and we all troop out to say hello.
It’s Ged, with a very beautiful blonde girl in tow.
‘Oh,’ says Mum, her jaw dropping.
Oh indeed. Ged’s beautiful blonde appears to be pregnant.
Lou
I’m running late. As usual. Christmas has started with a very unpleasant bang. I had been so looking forward to it: my first Christmas as part of a proper couple. Jo and I had agreed to spend the day apart with our families, as I still hadn’t got round to breaking the news about our relationship to mine, but we’d planned to have breakfast together at the flat I share in Kentish Town, and make Boxing Day our Christmas. I had prepared stockings for her, and gone to town on the decorations. My Christmas tree was as sparkly as I could make it, much to the amusement of my flatmate, Kate, who had left three days earlier to spend the festive season with her family. I had spent hours making mince pies, mulled wine and eggnog. I’d even hung mistletoe over the door. I had everything planned down to a T. I so wanted it all to be perfect. I might have known it wouldn’t work out like that: Lou Holroyd and her spectacularly pathetic love life triumphs once again. Instead of a lovely evening in with a bottle of bubbly cuddled up on the sofa, Jo has dropped a bombshell, standing in the doorway of the lounge, underneath the sodding mistletoe, barely noticing the efforts I’d gone to.
‘It’s not you, it’s me, babe.’ She actually said that, and I know it’s not true, because her initial, ‘I’m a free spirit and I can’t give you what you want,’ quickly descended into, ‘You’re so clingy and need to sort your shit out.’ Which, given that I was wailing pathetically in a corner, probably wasn’t too far off the mark.
I suppose I should have seen it coming. We’d both been so busy in the run-up to Christmas, and I’d had to blow her out a couple of times because I was working late – is it my fault that after a while where I looked safe jobwise, things are looking decidedly dodgy again? – and I suppose she’d been more distant recently, but I’d just put that down to the hectic nature of both our lives. She’s a nurse in a busy medical practice, and I’m obviously working hard to try and reduce my chances of being made redundant. We both take our work seriously; it was one of the things that attracted me to her. That and the fact that she’s bloody gorgeous and I feel so lucky that someone as fabulous as Jo could have chosen me. But now …
‘It’s definitely over,’ was her parting shot to my pathetic plea for us to take a break and have a rethink in the New Year. And with that she was off, swanning out to join her friends, her other life, the one she barely let me get involved in, leaving me cold and lonely by the Christmas tree, which now looked gaudy and overdone in her absence. I guess now I look at it in the cold light of day, she was always a little bit ashamed of me. There were the
