doesn’t hear it, because of the music and the dancing and the laughing, but she knows there will have been a door slam. Even at eight, Becca is really good at door-slamming.
By the time the song finishes and all three of them collapse onto the sofa, a bit sweaty and a lot happy, Becca storms back into the room.
‘I didn’t want this!’ she yells, lobbing her Girls’ World head onto the carpet. It rolls around for a bit, like a decapitated blonde, until it comes to rest beneath the Christmas tree, where it totters, red lips facing the ceiling. Laura sees that most of the shiny synthetic hair has been brutally hacked off, leaving bits sticking out in tufts, and that there are now just gaping holes where the eyes should be.
Becca stands in the doorway, hands on her hips, hair wild and tangled, brown eyes full of angry tears. She probably expected more of a reaction, but in reality, Mum and Dad are a bit too ‘merry’ to blow their top at her, even if she is behaving like a brat. A brat who likes killing blondes.
‘Crikey,’ says Dad, his chest puffing up and down after all the dancing. ‘That’ll be a good story to tell at your wedding.’
‘I’m never getting married! And Santa doesn’t exist, because if he did, he’d have brought me turtle stuff! And I HATE Christmas!’
December 25, 2000
There has been a lot of dancing in the Fletcher home this Christmas. The kids are older, and the fridge is well stocked with giant pork pies and Black Forest gateaux and multiple packs of lager, nestled next to Mum’s Baileys.
Nobody gets out of bed at 5am to check for presents any more, and Dad doesn’t have to spend the first half of the day with a screwdriver in his hand, searching for yet another pack of Triple A batteries.
The girls have their own rooms, so there is less fighting, and Laura has her own fiancé, which is a whole different story. David – the fiancé in question – has been at the house all day, with his Labrador, Jambo the Second. Even Jambo got in on the party, jumping up and down and woofing along to ‘Who Let The Dogs Out?’
David and Laura did lots of joke-dancing to S Club 7 songs, and a smoochy to ‘Never Had A Dream Come True’, and Mum and Dad did mock line-dancing to ‘Man I Feel Like A Woman’, and everyone leapt around to Robbie Williams being a Rock DJ.
Everyone apart from Becca, that is. Becca had had a tough time recently. She’d split up with her boyfriend Shaun, and taken it hard. Nobody else in the family could quite figure out why she’d taken it so hard, as they’d only been together for a few months and always seemed to be arguing anyway. Even Laura couldn’t get anything out of her, apart from a mouthful of bad language and a bedroom door slammed in her face.
But since the split, Becca had been sulky and sullen and had apparently forgotten how to operate a shower or use shampoo. Her skin was blotchy and sore-looking, her hair glued to her head with grease, and she spent as much time as she possibly could either asleep, pretending to be asleep, or, Laura suspected, indulging in substances – some legal, some not – that would help her sleep.
She’d been dragged out of bed by their mum for Christmas lunch, and had sat at the table in her stained Eminem T-shirt, pushing her food around the plate and not actually eating any of it. She managed to drink, though – quite a lot.
By the time the dancing started, she was halfway to hammered, and she’d had enough. Of everything. Looking at Mum and Dad and Laura and David and even the bloody adorably cute dog was all just too much for her. They were like a scene from a film about happy families at Christmas, and she was the only one who didn’t fit in. She was the evil Gremlin.
Becca didn’t feel merry or jolly or thankful or festive. She barely even felt alive, and often wished she wasn’t. It was like she was trapped in a bubble, on her own, completely isolated, even though she was in a room full of people who she knew loved her. In fact, watching them, seeing their happiness and their silliness, yet being unable to feel it herself, made everything so much worse.
She snuck out of the house mid-afternoon – seeing her dad gear up to do his rendition of Tom Jones’ ‘Sex Bomb’ pushed her over the edge. She’d told Laura she was going round to her friend Lucy’s house and she’d be back in a few hours.
She never made it to Lucy’s house. She never intended to. She stopped off in the kitchen to raid the lager stash and headed on out without even getting her coat. That, she realised as soon as she made it outside, was bloody stupid – there was snow everywhere. Laura and David had been so delighted with it, Mr and Mrs Perfect, yammering on about how pretty it was and laughing at Jambo snuffling in it and building snowmen together and having snowball fights like characters in some lame rom com.
They were just disgustingly good together, and it made Becca feel even more dysfunctional. Even more lonely. The coat, she decided, wasn’t worth going back for. Not if it meant another dose of that kind of medicine.
Back inside the house, the party meandered its way through the rest of the day. There was more singing. More dancing. More eating. More drinking.
Laura texted her sister on her little Nokia mobile phone, and got a reply saying she was fine and would be back later. She wasn’t completely happy with her being gone, but what could she do? Becca was seventeen. If she said she was fine, she had to believe her.
It wasn’t until just after six in the evening that the bell rang.
Mum – a little the worse for wear after all her Baileys – answers the door, a glass in one hand and a slice of pork pie in the other. She’s wearing a bright-green paper crown from a cracker, draped over her head at a wonky angle, drooping down to cover one eye.
The other eye can see perfectly, though. And what it sees isn’t pretty.
There is a police car parked by the pavement at the end of the drive, its tracks perfectly clear on the snow-covered road. The flakes are still falling and the evening air is so chilly that Mum’s breath makes a big, steaming cloud as she gasps out her shock.
One police officer is standing on the step, blowing into her hands in an attempt to warm them up, and another is walking towards them along the icy path. She has an arm around Becca’s shoulders, and is half-walking, half-carrying her.
Mum rushes outside, lucky not to slip, and tries to help. There is a kind of tussle, where there are too many arms and legs flying around, and Becca is eventually safely deposited into the hallway, where she leans back against the wall and slides right down it until she is sitting on her bottom, legs splayed out in front of her.
‘She’s fine,’ says the dark-haired policewoman, smiling through chattering lips. ‘Just had a few too many, as well as being too cold. We found her in the park, sitting at the top of the slide. We put her in the back of the car to warm up and gave her a check-over in case she needed to go to A&E, but… well, who wants to go there at Christmas, right? We thought you’d probably prefer it if we brought her home instead.’
Mum nods her thanks, and Dad – who has made his way through to see what all the fuss is about, along with Laura and David and the dog – manages actual words. Mum mainly looks worried and Dad looks a bit angry.
‘Don’t be too hard on her,’ says the police lady as she turns to leave. ‘We were all young and stupid once, weren’t we?’
Mum closes the door behind her and turns to look at her younger daughter. Her big, stompy black boots are soggy and there is a distinct cigarette
