I'll Be Home for Christmas Page 5

  For a second I’m sure she’s going to say no, but then she arranges a smile on her face and says, “Just for a second.”

  “This looks very festive,” she says when she steps into the room. To her credit, she sounds like she actually means it.

  Priya and Sarah are already up out of their seats and there’s a lot of shaking of hands and nice to meet yous. I can’t tell if Mum’s realized that Sarah and Priya are together, but then Priya kisses Sarah on the cheek when she passes on her way to the kitchen, so she must realize now.

  “Jan, would you like a coffee? Or tea? Builder’s? Herbal? We have pretty much every type you can think of.”

  “A small coffee would be lovely, thanks. But then we really must be going.” I wait for the pointed glance in my direction, but it never comes. She sits down next to Marjorie and asks how she knows Priya and Sarah, and Marjorie tells her that she’s lived three doors down from them since before AJ was born.

  I shouldn’t be surprised – Mum’s always been good at social stuff and small talk. The chatter starts up again, with Sarah joining in and offering Mum some cake. Mum says she really shouldn’t, but then she relents and says she’ll have a tiny slice with her coffee. Meanwhile I hover awkwardly and wait for her to say something offensive.

  Tea and coffee are served in mismatched mugs and Mum says nice things about the cake. She doesn’t ask Lionel if he’s got laryngitis and when Serge emerges from the bedroom, sleep-rumpled and looking only slightly less worse for wear than earlier, she takes it in her stride. At least he’s sobered up a little. He turns on the charm with Mum and it’s the strangest thing to see this musician I’ve been borderline obsessed with talking about fair-trade coffee with my mother.

  I sit on the floor next to the fireplace, sipping peppermint tea from a Darth Vader mug. Priya and Sarah are chatting away with Mum and Marjorie. Lionel’s on the sofa with Rocky’s head lolling on his lap. AJ’s clearing the table so they can play a board game. I’d like to stay and play, although it’s probably for the best that I can’t. I’ve been known to get a little over-competitive in the past; like mother, like daughter.

  After a few minutes I clamber to my feet. “Come on, Mum. We’d better get going.” If Mum can come here and smile and be polite and not act like a douchebag, I think I can manage to do the same back at home.

  She looks up, surprised. Pleased, I think. I’m sure she’ll still give me a piece of her mind in the car, but I’ll take it. She may not understand me and I may not understand her, but perhaps we can find some common ground, somewhere. Maybe we can meet on that common ground every once in a while and have a cup of tea and a biscuit together. I think that would be more than OK.

  We say our goodbyes and Serge gives me a hug.

  “Welcome to the Club of Lost Souls.” So it seems AJ isn’t the only one with a nickname for Sarah and Priya’s misfit dinner guests. “Sorry about earlier… Listen, AJ tells me you’re kind of into my music.”

  I shoot daggers at AJ, who’s looking far too pleased with himself for my liking. I nod, trying to play it cool.

  “I could get you on the guest list for my next gig, if you like? You and a friend?”

  “That would be… I would love that. Thank you.”

  I think I know just the friend. If she’ll take me back.

  I get a hug from everyone except Lionel. He doesn’t like hugs.

  Mum takes Marjorie’s number. It seems they’ve discovered a mutual love of theatre.

  I thank Sarah and Priya for the meal and say that I hope I’ll see them again soon. Sarah gives me a Tupperware box and Priya squeezes my arm and says, “Feel free to drop by whenever. Our home is your home.” I smile shyly and then she says, “I mean it, Effie.”

  I know she does.

  The Associates

  –

  Kevin Brooks

  “I’m like a bird.”

  Manny and Hugh are perched on the second-from-top step outside the library, their knees drawn up and their shoulders hunched against the cold. A never-ending stream of mid-morning traffic coils back and forth along the narrow high street in front of them, filling the wintry air with a constant rumble and a blue-grey choke of exhaust fumes.

  Hugh cups a grimy hand around his cigarette lighter, trying to light the dead stub of a roll-up hanging from his lip.

  “What?” he says to Manny.

  “I’m like a bird,” Manny repeats.

  “What kind of bird?”

  Manny flicks his head back, rearranging a loose twist of long black hair. “No kind. Just a bird.”

  The two men lapse into a comfortable silence – Manny browsing idly through his library book (The A–Z of Serial Killers), while Hugh just sits there watching the world go by. He watches an old lady scuttling along the pavement, dragging a wheeled shopping trolley behind her. He watches (and listens) as a whistling van driver slams his rear doors shut, then whistles his way round to the front of the van, gets in and starts the engine. And he watches a young woman with drug-haunted eyes buying cheap cuts of meat in the butcher’s shop across the road.

  “See him?” he says to Manny after a while.

  Manny looks up from his book and sees a teenage boy with a rock-hard slab of heavily gelled hair slouching past the library steps.

  “Hey, kid!” Hugh calls out. “Where d’you get the hat?”

  The boy glances anxiously at the two grubby men on the steps, his hand rising instinctively towards his head. He doesn’t know what Hugh means – what hat? – or if the two men mean him any harm or not. Hugh and Manny don’t help him out, they just sit there staring blankly at him. The boy lowers his hand, looks away, and self-consciously walks on by.

  Hugh pulls hard on the half-inch stub of his cigarette, hoping for a final hit, but there’s nothing left of it now. He takes it from his mouth, gives it a disapproving look, then flicks it away. He sticks his hands into the warmth of his coat pockets, automatically feeling (and recognizing) their contents – fluff, bits of a lolly stick, tobacco dust … penknife, string, an unknown key … a partly sucked boiled sweet (coated with fluff and tobacco dust), a pencil stub, tobacco tin…

  Across the road, next to the butcher’s, a young couple are looking at the houses for sale in an estate agent’s window. The man is tall and blond, and dressed in a pristine white rugby shirt. His partner – wife? girlfriend? – has perfectly groomed light brown hair and is wearing an unseasonably short dress that leaves little to the imagination.

  Hugh stares at her backside, imagining a parallel universe in which he’s the one looking at houses in an estate agent’s window, dressed in a pristine white rugby shirt, with his pretty young wife standing beside him in an unseasonably short dress that draws the attention of two grubby men sitting on the steps outside the library across the road…

  The man turns round then, and when he sees Hugh staring at his wife’s/girlfriend’s backside, he narrows his eyes and gives him a tough-guy glare.

  Hugh sets the mark of the devil into his face and stares right back, and a moment later the man takes his wife/girlfriend by the arm and moves on.

  “Hair, stare, glare, scare,” says Hugh.

  “She was there,” adds Manny, “showing off her underwear.”

  A lorry shudders to a halt outside the pet shop on the corner. As the airbrakes let out a weary sigh, the driver takes a sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolds it and reads. He frowns for a second or two, scratching his head, then he drops the paper on the seat beside him, puts the lorry into gear, and rumbles off again.

  In the pet shop, a woman in glasses is sitting on a stool next to the till, filling mesh bags with peanuts.

  The two men sit for a while longer – reading, smoking, sniffing, coughing … watching the December day unravel.

  Sometime later, the town hall clock strikes twelve.

  “Ready?” says Hugh.

  “Yep,” says Manny.

  They stand up, slap the dust from their trousers, and set off up the high street. T
hey walk side by side, with unconcerned ease, like two indomitable cowboys, Dusty and Slim, moseying on up to the bunkhouse after a hard morning’s work.

  *

  This town is known for its swans. They gather at the side of a long straight road that runs alongside the estuary. Visitors from out of town stop their cars, buy ice creams from ice-cream vans and feed the swans. They feed them on bread, crisps, buns, ice cream, nuts and chocolate bars, but the swans remain as white as the morning snow. Manny and Hugh neither like nor dislike them. They’re just there, like everything else.

  The two companions dine at Gino’s. Or, to be more accurate, they buy their fish and chips from Gino’s and dine on them across the road on a bench beneath the War Memorial.

  Hugh leans his head back, gazing up at the list of names inscribed on the marble monolith above him. Still leaning back, he drops a vinegar-soaked chip into his mouth and chews it slowly.

  “They didn’t exactly give their lives for their country, did they?” he says, the chip steam rising from his mouth.

  Manny picks pieces of skin from a saveloy and throws them into the gutter. He bites into the skinless meat and watches sparrows and pigeons vying for the scraps.

  It’s getting colder now.

  When Manny had said he was like a bird, he was referring specifically – if somewhat obliquely – to his total inability to recognize or understand numbers. The prices on Gino’s menu board, for example, mean absolutely nothing to him:

  Cod – squiggle.

  Saveloy – squiggle.

  Chips – squiggle.

  He gets by though, like a bird gets by. And Hugh’s always there for him. Always.

  Manny holds a steaming fat chip to his mouth and blows on it. The smell of hot vinegar waltzes drunkenly in the winter air.

  “Lil might be there tonight,” says Hugh, spitting out a sliver of fish bone.

  Tonight is the Christmas dinner at the community centre for the elderly and disadvantaged.

  “Fat Lil,” muses Manny.

  “Not so fat.”

  “Fat enough.”

  “For what?”

  Manny doesn’t reply. He screws up his chip paper into a ball and lobs it into a wire-mesh bin.

  “You’ll be shaving, then?” he says to Hugh.

  Hugh shakes his head. “Lil likes a beard.”

  “So she does.”

  Hugh rolls a cigarette and belches quietly. He steals a reverent glance at Manny, unaware of himself digging his thumbnail deep into the soft wet wood of the bench.

  Does he love him?

  No one shall ever know anything of that: only he and I and a tiny little bird, Tandaraday! who will never let fall a word.

  *

  It’s late afternoon now, the pale winter sun beginning to set, and Manny and Hugh are heading home. They move, as ever, at no great pace. Along Station Road, past the flat greyness of the industrial estate, under the railway bridge, past the high-pitched drilling of A1 Auto Services, over the roundabout by the railway station, and on up the hill, on the road out of town.

  “You know what I’d like?” says Hugh.

  “What?” says Manny, swaying away from the downhill rush of a container lorry.

  “A map of the world.”

  They stop at a gap in the hedge and lean together over a five-bar metal gate, looking out across the uphill slope of a barren field.

  “Where’s all the sheep gone?” says Manny.

  “Chopped up for dinners,” says Hugh.

  They climb the gate.

  As Manny swings a tattered trouser leg over the top bar, a woman cleaning her bedroom window in a house across the road catches a brief glimpse of off-white vagabond pants.

  “Oof!” she says.

  Manny and Hugh hike their way up the field. A woodpecker bobs across the sky and disappears into its tree, laughing as it goes. Hugh pauses, breaking into a violent fit of coughing. Doubled over, hands on knees, he hawks and hacks until eventually the coughing stops. He spits a final gob, wipes his mouth with his sleeve, then gingerly straightens up.

  “All right?” Manny says softly.

  Hugh nods.

  As they carry on up the slope, the dilapidated wire-mesh fence at the top of the hill draws closer. Beyond it lies their home – a derelict mansion house. There’s not much left of the once-grand building. Anything of value has long since been wrecked or stripped away – glass, tiles, lead, stonework – and all that’s left now is a desolate shell. The roof has gone – the few remaining broken timbers jutting out like ancient yellowed bones – and the crumbling stone walls are holed with glassless windows. A hundred years ago, the courtyard in front of the house would have hosted splendid garden parties for the privileged few, but now it’s just a cracked and weed-infested concrete square strewn with rubble and waste – empty beer cans and cider bottles, used syringes, shredded carrier bags, the desiccated remains of long-dead animals…

  It’s a place that reeks of fallen grace. From a mansion house to a tuberculosis sanatorium during the war, from a sanatorium to an industrial plastics factory in the eighties, and now, in its senility, the house has once more become a home.

  And as Manny and Hugh cross the courtyard together, the empty black eyes of the derelict building look down on them, welcoming them back at the end of their day.

  The Afterschool Club

  –

  Holly Bourne

  We were from different worlds.

  That’s how these stories always start, isn’t it?

  This isn’t that kind of story.

  We were though.

  Ben was glitter, I was dust. Ben was golden, I was grey. Ben ruled the school, I ruled the scruffy patch of weeds behind the astroturf. Ben scored goals, I scored weed. Ben wore the latest football boots, I coloured in the worn patches of my biker boots with permanent marker. Ben was one of Them, I was never truly one of anything. Ben smiled, I scowled. Ben ruled, I rebelled.

  We never spoke during the day.

  But he would always meet me at 4.45 p.m., on the wall. “You all right, Mercedes?” He appeared out of the darkness, spinning a football on his finger, and sat down next to me. “How was noise practice?”

  I flicked the ball. It bounced and he caught it expertly. “Band practice was fine, thank you. How was the-pointless-kicking-of-a-ball-around-a-square?”

  He laughed, a snort of it, and spun the ball again. “It was great, thank you. We won.”

  “Won what?”

  “The game, durr.”

  “Didn’t anyone tell you it’s not the winning, but the taking part that counts?”

  Another snort of laughter and he grinned. Ben’s grin could melt most people. But I wasn’t most people. Well, I didn’t want him to think I was. That would ruin everything.

  “That’s what losers say,” Ben said.

  “You splitting the world into winners and losers, now?”

  The smile stretched wider, my insides melted further. I gulped it down.

  “Around you, Miss Angry?” he said. “I wouldn’t dare.”

  *

  We walked the back way into town, like always – taking the shortcut through the scrubby woods, getting mud on our shoes. A hanging bit of branch got stuck in my hair and pulled me back with a snap. I twisted to try and get it off, but my scalp complained as it pulled harder.

  “Ouch.” I glowed, mortified.

  Ben stopped, laughed, and turned to help me untangle it.

  “Stop struggling, you’re making it worse,” he said.

  I held still dumbly, not sure how to act with his face so close to mine. He smelled amazing – of expensive aftershave and clean after the shower. “Wow. It’s proper stuck. This tree really likes you.”

  I wiggled, my scalp twinging in pain as my hair tangled further. “Can you get it out?” I had nightmare visions of him having to leave me here to go get scissors.

  “Yes, hold still though. You’re making it worse. God, your hair is SO long.”

  I
closed my eyes for a moment to block the view of him so close, to block how it made me feel. Could he see the caking of my cheap foundation around my nose? Would he notice the beige bumps on my chin where concealer was covering the cluster of spots that took up camp there a year ago and wouldn’t leave? Was he comparing my grey, flaky face to the perfect pore-free skin of the girls he normally hangs out with? Girls like Jenny Carrington, whose pricey foundation floats flawlessly on to her glowing kale-eating skin. I heard he made out with her at Danny’s party last month… The sort of gossip that trickles down to even the social dredges like me.

  I opened my eyes and found his. They were hazel, big, as he stared at my face with intense concentration. His fingers fumbled clumsily with my hair – probably making it worse. I remembered one evening last year, before my big brother, Alfie, left us. He’d said he didn’t think plaiting hair was hard, so I’d tried to teach him. It was like a gorilla trying to figure out how to play violin or something.

  “Got it!” Ben announced triumphantly. “You’re free.”

  “Thanks.” I felt the distance between us the moment he stepped away.

  *

  We went to McDonald’s. We ordered what we always order. Ben paid like he always paid. He provides the fast food, I provide the dazzling entertainment… Ha. And the vodka. Or gin. Or whisky. Or cider. Whatever I occasionally steal without my stepdad noticing. We sat in our corner booth and ate. He had two double cheeseburgers, fries and a strawberry shake. I had a Happy Meal, still compensating for all the Happy Meals I never got as a kid.

  “You get a good toy?” He pointed to my bright cardboard box and I could see the meat in his mouth as he talked.

  I tipped the box over and a neon pink pony fell out. “Just a heavily gendered plastic horse,” I replied.

  Ben rolled his eyes. “Always a conspiracy with you, isn’t there?”

  I nodded and took a slurp of my chocolate milkshake. “Always.” But when he wasn’t looking, I tucked the pony into my coat pocket for Natalia. She would love it. I could maybe even save it for Christmas, give it to her as a present. Just in case Mum and my stepdad forgot.