Digging to Australia (15 page)

17

For the first time I noticed the female smell of the stocking Mama gave me to put on the end of my bed. It was a cast-off of her own. It lay across my bedspread like a sloughed snake skin. I kept my face turned to the wall when Bob crept in. My mouth was dry and my head pounded. Mama had allowed me a tiny glass of sherry after we'd decorated the tree, when I was not yet thoroughly over the whisky. I heard the rustling creak of the packed stocking as Bob replaced the empty one, and I breathed as smoothly and easily as a sleeping person. He stood still for a moment, watching me, and I even stirred slightly as if in a dream.

When he'd gone and closed my door, I turned and looked at the luminous face of my alarm clock. It was half-past twelve. I reached for the stocking, and in the tiny amount of light that seeped round the edges of my door from the landing, I pulled everything out. There was a chocolate snowman just like the one Susan had won for her poem; a new toothbrush; a flannel and a bar of soap; three pairs of knickers; some chocolate money and a tangerine. They were all, but for the chocolates, things they would have bought me anyway. I prised open a few chocolate coins and ate them, feeling obscurely cheated. And then I pushed everything to the end of my bed, lay down and slept soundly until morning.

After breakfast, Bob, fully clothed and looking uncomfortably festive in a new red tie, went out to telephone for a taxi, in order to collect Auntie May. I helped Mama wash the breakfast things, and then, while she peeled the potatoes and put the turkey in the oven, I went and stood by the Christmas tree. I switched on the lights. Bob had tinkered with them late into the night and now they twinkled obediently, reflecting themselves in the glass baubles and the shimmering Lametta. I put my face close to a large green bauble and saw my tiny contorted face receding from a huge blunt snout. It opened its mouth to me, like some monstrosity rising through water. I stood quickly back.

The tree looked perfect, like a picture on a Christmas card. It was dark green and healthy, bristling with life. Bob had planted it in a red bucket, and then we'd draped it in its finery so that every branch dripped with sparkles. The fairy was tied to the pointed branch at the top. Bob had arranged the lights so that a red one was behind her and made her wings glow a rosy pink. She gazed serenely across the room like a person in her element. I sent a thought to Jacqueline then, wherever she was, celebrating Christmas somewhere in the world with her own finely stitched fairy on the top of her own tree.

Under the tree were the presents that we'd open when Auntie May arrived. They were all wrapped in the same garish paper. The rest of the room was crammed with paper angels and stars. They crowded the windowsills, jostled with Christmas cards on the mantelpiece and dangled from the ceiling on bits of black cotton. On a low table was Mama's nativity scene, crumpled donkey and all. It was absurd. It was sweet. It was beautiful in its own way. My own feelings jostled inside me. I could not bear the frailty of all that paper folded with such maddening care, or the fragility of the whole festivity. I wanted to stamp on it and smash it and scorn it – and I wanted to believe in and be a part of it. I wanted to swallow it all in one great gullible gulp.

Bob carried Auntie May into the sitting room and settled her down in his own armchair. Just as I had grown bigger during the year, she had grown smaller, and her feet dangled in the air. She regarded me brightly with her sunken hooded eyes. The dry little nut of her skull was visible through her sparse puff of colourless hair. Her eyebrows were reduced to three or four hairs each, but these were long and stuck out like twisted wires. Round her mouth were whiskers. She had no teeth left in her mouth, which had shrunk to nothing but a little moist bud.

‘Hello, Auntie May. Happy Christmas,' I said, bending to kiss her cheek. Bob was pulling a face and screwing his finger into the side of his head to Mama, who ignored him.

‘Auntie May …' Mama sat on the arm of the chair and hugged her with quite genuine love.

Auntie May stared at me. ‘The girl's changed.' She squeezed the words out in her rustling distant voice.

‘Thirteen now. A teenager,' Mama said. She turned her face to May as she spoke so that May could read her lips, for she had grown very deaf.

‘Now. Let the festivities commence,' Bob said, rubbing his hands. ‘Sherry, Lilian? May? A glass of pop, Jenny?'

When I had been younger, the way we used to open presents used to drive me to distraction. It was my job to distribute them and then we opened them slowly, in turn, everyone watching and admiring each present and passing it round for general inspection. It was a lengthy process, and ridiculous, at least from Mama's point of view, since she had chosen and wrapped almost everything. The procedure took even longer this year because Auntie May kept drifting off, not to sleep, but to some place beyond us, and it was with great difficulty that we kept her engaged with the task.

‘Auntie May!' bellowed Bob. ‘A torch from Lilian to me – look – a good un.' He clicked it on and off. ‘Bright beam – normal beam – and off. Thank you, Lilian. Just the thing. Most useful.'

Mama smiled and unwrapped the present she had chosen for herself from Bob, a book about macramé and a ball of string. Auntie May was passed the string to admire and she held it in her hand and looked, puzzled, at me. ‘Anyone for tennis,' she said, or something like, and Bob laughed as if it was a joke.

I unwrapped my black jersey and ran upstairs to put it on and model it. ‘You're filling out,' Bob remarked, and Mama called it ‘chic.' I had some peach blossom bath cubes from Auntie May that I distinctly remembered giving her the year before. ‘Thank you,' I said. She looked at me through the little slits of her eyes and nodded.

Mama and Bob opened and exclaimed over their presents from me, and Bob blew his nose on the handkerchief there and then to express his approval.

‘Another little present for Jenny,' Mama said. She was on her knees before the tree. I held my breath thinking, just for a moment, that Jacqueline had remembered me. Mama burrowed beneath the tree and came out with a miniature parcel. ‘Almost got lost, it's so tiny.' The paper was the same, and I knew at once what this was: another charm for my bracelet, a little golden book. ‘Open it,' Mama said eagerly. I pressed the tiny clasp with my finger and a little concertina strip of miniature photographs fell out. Views of Paris.

‘Lovely,' I said. Disappointment lodged in my gullet, as big and fragile as an egg. There was the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe and Versailles – all pictures I recognised from the posters on the walls of the geography room at school.

‘You'll be able to jingle now,' Mama said, ‘if you fasten it on beside the wishbone.'

Auntie May chuckled for no apparent reason. We all paused to look at her. Mama helped her open her present from herself and Bob – a pair of slippers. She eased Auntie May's narrow black shoes off and replaced them with the blue fluffy slippers. They were far too big and slipped off her dangling feet at once. ‘I can change them,' Mama said sadly, looking at the bent and wizened twigs that were Auntie May's feet.

I thought I wouldn't be able to eat the lunch that Mama had worked so hard to prepare, but I found my appetite growing as I ate, and I loaded my plate with tender white breast meat and thick gravy and more and more potatoes. It was Bob who didn't eat much, which was unlike him, and Mama kept urging him to eat until he grew annoyed. Mama fed Auntie May little chopped up titbits. She opened her mouth wide to receive the forkfuls and made me think of a bright-eyed baby bird in a nest. We pulled the crackers and read the silly mottoes and wore paper crowns to eat the pudding. Auntie May's was far too big and kept falling down to sit round her neck like a collar until Mama fixed it on with sticky tape.

After lunch we sat, sated, round the fire. Bob twiddled the knobs of the radio and we listened to the crackly voice of the Queen and then Bob and Auntie May nodded off and Mama knelt on the floor and tied some lengths of string to the back of a kitchen chair and began experimenting with her macramé. ‘I think I'm going to get on famously with this,' she said. ‘Would you like a belt? Or I could make a bell pull.'

‘Whatever for?' I asked. I watched her fingers busying away until I dropped off to sleep myself. I was awoken a short time later by a paper angel falling from the ceiling onto my lap. Mama had completed several inches of her work.

‘Criss-cross diagonal cording,' she said eagerly, as soon as I opened my eyes. ‘And look at this – a flat-knot-button – I need some beads. I could make a wall-hanging. Curtains even …'

‘I'll make some tea,' I said. In the kitchen, gazing into the cavity of the half-devoured turkey, I thought about Johnny and the sort of Christmas he'd be having with Mary and her family or, perhaps, all on his own in the church with only the little branch to remind him that it was Christmas at all. It had been a surprise – a shock – to find that he had a girlfriend. I'd thought of him as a man alone. The kind of woman Mary was surprised me too, an ordinary woman who made fun of him and bossed him about. I couldn't imagine what he saw in her, but supposed it must be sex appeal. I picked a shred of meat from the carcass. I was restless. Bob had started to snore, I could hear him from the kitchen. It was too hot and stuffy in the house.

‘I think I'll go out for a walk,' I whispered to Mama, round the sitting-room door. She looked up at me over her glasses, surprised, keeping her finger on an instruction in her book. ‘All right?'

‘All right,' she said. ‘Would you like me to come?' It was a sacrifice for her to offer now that she had begun her macramé.

‘No,' I said. ‘I won't be long. Just a bit of fresh air. I'll make the tea when I get back.' She nodded, relieved, and went back to her knots.

I liked to walk around the streets in the afternoons when it was dark enough for lights to be on, but not quite time to draw the curtains. I liked the houses without net curtains best, where as I dawdled past I could most clearly glimpse the family tableaux. Many were centred round the television and, by pausing and straining my eyes and ears, I caught a snatch of circus, a spangled leap and a roar of applause. Tree lights winked. It was the very day. Pudding-heavy families slumped all along the streets, behind the lighted glass. I saw a slumbering man with his paper crown over his eyes. I saw a boy batting a shuttlecock, I saw a woman with a tray of tea. A car drew up beside me and a family spilled out with squawks of excitement and armfuls of parcels, and I bent to tie my shoelace while the door of a house opened and they were welcomed and swallowed into a hallway full of light and balloons. I didn't need to go to the playground and climb the frame to know that the family in the blue house would be having a picture-book Christmas. I forced my feet to walk away from the church and back home.

Bob had woken up and was in the kitchen pouring out the tea. ‘Got rid of the cobwebs?' he asked. I thought he looked pale and noticed that his hand shook.

‘I was going to do that,' I said. ‘Are you all right?'

‘Don't
you
start fussing,' he said.

After a cup of tea it was time for a game. Bob was the enthusiast. Mama played along loyally and I joined in because I had little choice if I wasn't to wreck Christmas altogether. I never longed for a television set more than on Christmas afternoons. I thought enviously of the families all along the road slumped in companionable quiet in front of their screens. We started harmlessly with Twenty Questions. Bob was a stickler for the rules, and invented more and more as the game progressed, ‘To keep us on our toes,' he said. He employed the bird-shaped whistle he had found inside his cracker, and gave a sharp peep on it whenever there was an infringement. There was never any suggestion that anyone else should take this umpire's role. He invented the rule that there should be no umming or erring and that each question must be answered within five seconds – four beats of his fist on the arm of the sofa and then, on the count of five, a fierce pointing of his finger at the victim to demand the answer.

Auntie May was at a complete loss, and had to be left out. She sent me a mischievous look, and I grinned back at her. You never knew with Auntie May how much she was taking in. She had been always laughing and teasing as a young woman, Mama said, and even now her old eyes glinted with fun whenever Bob raised his whistle to his lips. The first game passed successfully enough. It was always like this. We started with harmless rule-bound games where you won or lost – there was no prize for winning other than relief, for, as the level of the brandy bottle crept down, Bob became increasingly scornful of the loser. Dumb Crambo and Consequences followed, and I actually found myself enjoying the latter. Then Mama and I made the tea: turkey and stuffing sandwiches, piccalilli, and Christmas cake. After tea there was a pause for washing-up and digestion, and then, as I had feared, Bob announced ‘Village Life.'

This was a game he'd invented himself. It had so many rules that nobody except Bob could possibly remember them, or tell whether he was changing them as he went along. I was the postman this year and my sack of Christmas mail had been stolen and the point of the game was to discover who had stolen it and where it was. This was all done with dice and a laboriously drawn and much folded and smudged map, matchsticks stuck into plasticine, and scraps of paper – secret notes which had to be written in code – and each turn could take twenty minutes. Every now and then Bob would order Mama or me out of the room so that a confidential discussion could take place. Bob was, as always, the detective. He picked up one of Mama's knitting needles, a thin whippy one, and waved it as he ordered us about and waited in the panic-stricken pauses for us to take our turns. Mama and I looked at each other askance. Auntie May made an enigmatic sound in the throat. Bob drew the needle through the air and a shadow passed my eyes and I seemed to see him loom and just for a moment I cringed and screwed shut my eyes, certain that he was going to whip me. But when I looked up he was sitting in his chair with the needle in his lap, not even looking in my direction.