‘Please, call me Kate, not Catherine’ suggested that I start writing this. It might help, she offered with another of her well-meaning smiles. She also suggested that I take Ella and Theo away for a bit. How long’s ‘a bit’? Kate doesn’t deal in absolutes. Her sentences start with words like ‘maybe’ and ‘perhaps’. They end with questions that, somehow, I’m meant to know the answers to. Take Ella and Theo away where? Dad passed seven years ago. Mum’s in a care home. We visited her last year. Decided to make a day of it. Have dinner there – turkey and all the trimmings. Ella and Theo had stuffed their faces with sweets for breakfast. By the time we arrived at Mum’s, the e-numbers were working their magic. These noisy children, Mum asked me, who do they belong to, my dear boy? I held back tears. You were always better at keeping it together at those times.
No, I tell Kate, there’s no one to visit for ‘a bit’. To help with the kids. To take us in like a charity case. Then, perhaps, she says, shifting tactics, a holiday? I say that I would love to know where the money’s coming from. Okay, she takes a breath, before giving me some spiel about stress and coping and management. Her words sound like my boss’s when he granted me leave. Long as you like, he said, but you know how it is. Times were hard. He couldn’t keep dishing out money to people who weren’t there. I told him I understood.
I tell Kate I will, as she wishes, stock-take my ‘thoughts and feelings’ in a journal. See how it goes. I tell her I will not take the kids away this year. But as I rise to leave, Kate tells me again to think of a holiday. Says she’ll see me in two weeks’ time. This time slot still okay? Fine, I say, and scamper before she can start showing me brochures for weekend mini-breaks. We’re staying home, me, Ella and Theo for Christmas. The kids need normality, not a ‘change in the environment’.
The day after my meeting with Kate, I am halfway through the weekly shop when Ella tugs on my coat-sleeve. She points to my left. Carrots, I ask her, why do you want carrots? She hasn’t touched them since she, age two, threw a plate of orange soup on the lounge carpet. It was white back then. It’s white no more. Light colours and toddlers, what were we thinking?
Ella tugs again at my sleeve. For Rudolf, Dad, for the reindeers to eat. For the snowman’s nose. Theo repeats her pleas before bursting into tears. The realisation that reindeer eat snowmen’s noses has dawned upon him. I let him sit in the trolley. It earnt me disapproving looks from the other shoppers. Several tuts when he ripped the foil off a chocolate Santa. Shoved the whole thing in his mouth. But I didn’t tell him off. When I spotted what was going on, Santa had only his waist left anyway. I tell the children off a lot less nowadays. I don’t see the point. Let them indulge. Have some fun. Run riot. They deserve it. I chuck a packet of carrots into the front of the trolley, pause, drop two more in. Ella’s face lights up.
We fetch the tree the same day. Ella huffs that she doesn’t want a new tree. Decides to play martyr in the shopping centre car park and refuses to get in the car. She likes the old tree, she says. I coax her into the car by telling her that the old one is fake, and well, old. This one will be new and real and she can pick it. I try not to look at the price on the receipt too hard afterwards. Ella listened as the man selling the trees listed the different types and heights and prices. She didn’t interrupt. Her brow furrowed like yours when you made business calls as she weighed up her decision, before pointing at the tallest tree she could see.
I shove it tree-top first into our car. The end branches poke out of the back. I push the tree forward, once, twice, countless times. After the sixth attempt I get the boot door to click. I drive home at risk of impalement via a thousand tiny bristles if I snap my head to the right at a turning.
Of course, though, we can’t buy everything new. That afternoon I’m up in the loft, grappling in the dark. I try to ignore the smell of damp. Limit myself to only minor bouts of choking. I drag the boxes of decorations out of the small hatch, displacing dust cloud after dust cloud. Theo begged me not to go up. I told him I’d be ten minutes, tops. He counted everyone. I told him that, since Ella chose the tree, he could choose where to put the decorations.
9 minutes and 12 seconds later Theo dives into a cardboard box labelled ‘Baubles’. The letters are tightly looped. You were always a neater writer than me. My fingertips go to trace the word. Stop when I hear Ella’s whining. The baubles are all gold. Ella asks me where the red ones are, the sparkly ones she always loved. I tell her I don’t know. Neither of the kids want me to go into the loft again. Neither of them complain when we only manage to unearth two streams of tinsel. One is nothing more than a ropey sliver. Ella fashions it into a bracelet for Theo. I wrap the longer bit of tinsel around the staircase bannister. I coil it tight between the wooden slats like you we do every year. I sello-tape the end of the tinsel down, but it keeps springing free. On the third time, I sigh and fetch a stapler.
Come on, I announce to Theo and Ella when I return to the lounge, let’s make mince pies. They bound into the kitchen and for an hour we forget the Christmas tree. We forget how it’s too tall. How it hunches, like a giant from one of Ella’s fairy-tale stories, in the corner of the room. How it’s top branches crush against the ceiling and its middle sags back into the wall. How it’s dotted here and there with baubles, all gold. We forget the great, empty patches of green. I gave up, after several expletives-rapidly-muttered-underneath-the-breath-ridden attempts, trying to untangle the Christmas tree lights. Their ever-multiplying knots.
We make mince pies from scratch. My culinary skills still leave a lot to be desired, but they are improving. Practice makes perfect, after all. I’ve had two months. Fixed breakfasts, made school lunches, prepared snacks for after-school clubs, cooked dinners. At first, the dinners stretched to beans on toast. Chicken nuggets and chips and canned vegetables is now my forte. I’ve never made anything from scratch before. Never made mince pies. My secret recipe, you always told me, top secret. For your knowledge only.
Later that night Ella nibbles at the burnt crust of a mince pie. Scrunches up her face at the taste. I didn’t know she didn’t like cinnamon. I’ve no idea why I put it in. I can’t stand the mince pies either, it turns out. Too much sugar. But Theo munches away. I’m up with him all night when he throws it back up. I feed him sips of water and rub his stomach. I try to hide my fear that I’ve poisoned our child. The next day he says he feels better, and the day after, but I almost don’t bring him and Ella to see you.
The weather’s freezing. I don’t want the kids catching colds on Christmas day, of all days. But I bundle them up in their coats and gloves and scarves and hats. We crunch our way over the frozen planes of grass. The clear, white sky curves over us like a glass dome. The kids run ahead but wait for me before going through the gates. Snow, Ella squeaks, as we walk through. On the corner of your stone, glistening in the winter sunlight. But it’s not snow. I clear it away with a wipe before she can realise. I trim the grass around your stone. Remove the wilted flowers, the crumpled, dirty cards. The wind has strewn them everywhere. I pick up the teddy bear Ella left, now a faded pink and nested with beetles. Slip it in a carrier bag to throw away. A few minutes later, she asks me where it’s gone. I say an angel took it up to heaven to Mummy. Like the angel on top of the tree, she asks. Yes, I say. Okay, she replies. Continues her cartwheels across the graves from the early nineteen hundreds’, before crying out. I find out that she’s cut her hand on a rock and we go back home early.
Laura Stanley
Featured image courtesy of Shelly Havens via Flickr. Image use licence here.
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