life was short. Well, it was short, too short to spend with people you didn’t love at Christmas. Too short to sit around hearing endlessly about how she’d wasted her life. And how were they going to be with Skye?
A small part of her longed for home. For the big worn-down dining room table they’d all squished around. The real fire her dad would make in the living room, where everyone bundled onto sofas and cushions on the floor, marvelling at the tree, drinking tea and eating Christmas cake, exhausted and elated.
‘But what about Anna? Is she coming too?’ Skye asked.
Megan smiled gently, stroked her long brown hair, looked at her serious face. That was Skye, always worrying about who was left out and how people might feel. Maybe she’d get home and her parents would say how good a job she’d done of raising a smart, wonderful girl. And if they didn’t, they could go to hell, because they were wrong.
‘She wants to have a Christmas party with her theatre friends this year, doll.’ Megan squeezed Skye’s hand to let her know the next part was secret information, it was their code. ‘Between you and me, I think a lot of Anna’s friends are getting a little old and weary, and she wants to spend some quality time with them.’
Skye nodded slowly, then paused. ‘But you don’t want to go to grandma’s.’
‘I guess you could say I’m a little nervous.’
‘And angry,’ Skye added.
‘And angry,’ Megan confirmed, ‘but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have grandparents. It’s lovely to have them. And uncle Matty will be there, and he has a kid now. So you’d get to know your cousin too.’
She was hard-selling, she knew. She might as well promise her a pony. Skye had never particularly wanted for a family, as far as she knew. They had Anna, and Jeremy, the reams of elderly debutantes who arrived with sparkling gifts for ‘the little darling’.
‘What’s my cousin called?’
‘Jasper, I think. I’m pretty sure they went with Jasper over Reginald.’
‘Are they rich or something?’ Skye asked.
‘I have no idea,’ Megan lied, thinking of the embossed wedding invitation that came in a silk-lined box, with Swarovski diamonds around the edges. ‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Because names can be signs of socio-economic status,’ Skye said proudly.
‘So…sometimes rich people have posh names?’ Megan raised an eyebrow. ‘You just wanted to use the words socio-economic in a sentence.’
‘Yup,’ Skye grinned, swinging her hands back and forth.
‘What on earth are they teaching you in that school?’
‘Boring stuff. I learned that from Jeremy. He was talking about the boys he went to school with, and they all had strange names. So I asked.’
‘It’s good to be curious,’ Megan said, thinking perhaps Megan better not get all of her information on society from an embittered drag queen. ‘So, we’re on board for Grandma and Granddad’s?’
Skye shrugged, trying not to seem pleased. ‘If it doesn’t work out, next year we could go to Disneyland?’
Megan stopped and held out her hand to Skye. ‘Deal.’ They shook on it.
As Megan waved goodbye to Skye’s retreating back at the school gates, and watched as the other mothers eyed her, as if she’d suddenly sprout horns and do a sexy tribal dance around their husbands, she wondered whether this was the right idea. There was going to be shouting this Christmas. No doubt. Maybe they’d fight their way through it, come out the other end. But probably not. Megan had images of her mother’s mouth turning down in derision, in that way that it did, and her father shrugging sadly, never a word to defend her. She’d flounce out, drag Skye along, and then it was all done.
Was she going to have to call her mother to confirm she was coming? No, if she wanted them there, she could call. Or even better, Anna could call. Or send an invitation in the mail. Or an email. Or a carrier pigeon. Whatever, as long as she didn’t have to talk to her before Christmas day.
Anna walked up the road from St Joseph’s school, and around the corner to a little annexe building, technically still a part of the school.
She buzzed herself in, striding down the hall to her office. Well, the office she shared with Dezi, Molly and Simon. And ‘office’ was a bit of a stretch. A large dingy room with a few desks and computers, papers and files piled high in every direction, toys and charts and all manner of props chucked in the corners. Systematically, every term, they reorganised everything, but it always seemed to end up in this state of chaos around November time.
‘Morning!’ Megan announced herself, pausing to tap Molly on the shoulder, and sign out her greeting, mouthing the words. Molly was an excellent lip reader, and didn’t really need Megan’s average signing skills, but she wanted to keep practising.
‘Morning,’ Molly replied with a smile. ‘Want to do some training over lunch?’
Her hands moved so quickly that Megan always needed a second to catch up, and felt she must be making that face she made when trying to do complicated maths questions.
Megan nodded. ‘Meet you at one.’
She walked over to Dezi, who was slumped face down on her desk. ‘Heavy night?’
‘I’m going to die alone,’ a voice mumbled.
‘Because you’re too busy getting painfully drunk to actually interact with people?’ Megan offered, putting her lunch in the flickering mini fridge they had in the poor excuse for a kitchen corner, and clicking the kettle on.
‘As opposed to using your child as an emotional shield so no- one can ever get close?’ Dezi glared.
‘I’m too old to date. It probably involves some new-fangled technology and I don’t need anyone. I’m happy on my own.’ Megan had said this to Dezi so many times it was starting to sound fake. But it wasn’t her fault if her colleague couldn’t comprehend the idea.
‘Well, someone’s getting a vibrator for Christmas,’ Dezi said seriously, and even wrote it down on a post-it note.
‘Megan! Good morning!’ Simon strode over, files in hand, his blond hair flopping over as he walked. He grinned at her, handing her some papers. ‘You’re working with Amrita this morning, right? I just had a few notes.’ He gestured to a table.
‘I bet he does,’ Dezi mumbled, lifting her head up briefly enough to roll her eyes at Megan.
Simon always had notes. Great, long notes written out in his chicken-scratch handwriting, that he would make them wait around for him to decipher. It also didn’t help that he’d decided being an academic meant dressing like a granddad. His elbow patches were not ironic. Megan was pretty sure he’d painstakingly searched for an original tweed jacket, as he wore it with such pride, unaware that the youth of today could find the same thing in Primark.
‘Some notes would be great, Simon,’ Megan smiled, then gestured towards the kettle. ‘Shall I make us both a cuppa and we can have a chat about
