‘Sweetheart,’ she says, softening a bit now. ‘I know. Believe me no one knows more than I do how God-awful it is for you. But staying here all alone, yet again? It’s just not good for you, it’s not healthy. I’d be worried about you.’
I shrug lightly and act like I’m tossing the whole thing aside, though I strongly doubt that she really does understand. No one possibly could. And with no offence to Joy who only means well, particularly no one like her could ever understand, with two hale and hearty parents, three sisters and two brothers to eat with and drink with and row with and love. Just like family are supposed to at Christmas.
Family.
‘I’m just saying,’ Joy goes on, eyes not leaving me, not even for a second. ‘You know you’re more than welcome to spend the holidays with my family, that goes without saying. My folks would be thrilled to have you, as would all the gang. And I know it’s always a bit boisterous and rowdy, but at least it’s better than being by yourself, isn’t it?’
But that’s the thing though. And Joy knows it by now as well as I do myself.
‘Like it or not,’ I sigh, ‘I am all alone.’
There’s just the tiniest beat, like she’s weighing up whether or not she should say what’s really on her mind.
‘Not necessarily,’ she offers quietly.
‘Joy, please. Not this. Not again. And certainly not right now.’
‘I’m just saying, you can’t know that for definite.’
‘But I do know.’
‘You know I’d help you, if you ever decided to—’
‘Christmas,’ I interrupt her firmly, ‘is a time for family. If you’re lucky enough to be blessed with one, then good for you.’
‘But you could have … I mean you might still be able to find out exactly …’
‘Look. Whatever happened in the past, the fact is that now I’m alone.’
And the surest and safest way to get through C-Day, I’ve long learned, is to suffer it out, try and not inflict my company on anyone else and take comfort from the fact that in twenty-four short hours, 26th December will roll around and it’ll be all over for yet another year.
At least, that’s the plan.
*
Maybe it was the conversation with Joy and with Dermot earlier, but in bed that night it was like the Ghost of Christmases Past came back to haunt me.
25th December, 1990.
Thank God we lived in a flat-roof bungalow, that’s all I can remember thinking when Mum got up to her annual festive ritual again. She did this, year in, year out, and the seven-year-old me absolutely loved it, despite the whispers floating round the school playground.
‘… Everyone knows there’s no such thing as Santa Claus …’
‘But that’s not true! I’m telling you, I saw him last year! I waited up for him and about midnight, there he was, giant sack and all. He even took away the carrot stick I’d left out especially for Rudolf …’
‘Just listen to you, Holly Johnson. You’re off your head, that’s what’s wrong with you. Because there isn’t any Santa. It’s just your mam and dad doing it to try and get you to be good over Christmas. You should see what my parents do every year to keep us believing. Sure last Christmas, my dad …’.
‘Shhh!’ I remember Sandy Curran, who we all used to nickname Sandy Currant Bun, hissing. Then an embarrassed silence while the penny dropped; that the words ‘dad’ or ‘parents’ were something not to be mentioned in front of me, as they all instantly remembered my own particular family situation. In fact, barring Jayne Byrne – a quiet-spoken girl in my class whose father had died the previous year – I was the only other girl who came from a single-parent family.
‘Sorry Holly,’ one girl grumbled reluctantly.
‘Yeah, me and all. I forgot.’
‘I didn’t mean to …’
‘It’s OK,’ I shrugged, realizing in the way that little girls of seven can, that my little family had been earmarked as different right from the get-go. Realizing it, though not having the first clue why.
‘Ho, ho, HO!!!’ was all I could hear from the roof of our little bungalow, in a woman’s impression of what a deep man’s baritone should be. Which was followed by footsteps, but God bless Mum, because she was so svelte and petite, by absolutely no stretch of the imagination could anyone – even a seven-year-old – possibly confuse those footsteps, with a rotund, fifteen-stone Santa Claus.
The trouble she went to just to keep Christmas magical for me, her only child. And I loved her for it, even though I hadn’t the heart to tell her all the disturbing rumours that had been circulating the playground ever since Halloween. Or about Beth, another girl in my class who was openly laughed at and ridiculed for ‘still believing’.
Then there were the snow prints on the living room carpet, leading a trail all the way from the chimney over to our Christmas tree and back again. To this day, I still don’t know how Mum even managed it. Papier mâché? Cotton wool? Back then, I was too young and thick to dig a bit deeper. And yet every Christmas morning without fail, there they’d be: real, live snow prints dotted all over our living room carpet.
Money was tight for Mum and yet still Santa never failed to deliver in style. A doll’s house that particular year, I remember. A little girl’s fantasy version of just what a proper Victorian doll’s house should be, right down to window boxes and plastic figurines in bonnets and corsets that you could move around inside.
‘You see?’ she said, beaming that wise, calm smile that’s imprinted on my mind to this very day. ‘Santa never forgets good children.’
It’s only looking back now that I realize how tough Mum must have had it really. She’d adopted me at forty-two, quite lateish in her life, certainly for the nineteen eighties, a time when women in their forties rarely had kids and certainly didn’t go adopting on their own. It was an extraordinarily brave thing to take on, then as now, and until I arrived I think she never really thought it would actually happen. I was, as she used to joke, ‘her little surprise’.
Right from when I started preschool, she was by far the oldest of all the mums waiting for us at the school gates. Not only that, but she was one of the few who worked full-time too; all the others seemed to have husbands who were the main breadwinners. Back then, right bang in the middle of The Decade that Taste Forgot, I can still see all the younger mothers, in shoulder pads with big hair and waaaay too much blusher, nattering excitedly about Talking Heads / Duran Duran / who was going to see Fatal Attraction that weekend.
And right there at the back, always at the back, Mum would be waiting quietly for me. More often than not, still in her nurse’s uniform of long blue trousers with a white top over them, navy woolly cardigan, flat, sensible shoes with her hair pulled back into a tiny bun. Neat as a pin, like always.
‘Is that your mammy or your granny?’ I remember one girl in my class innocently asking me. I never said a word to Mum about it, but I think she knew anyway. She knew by the way I hugged her tight that night and said, ‘I think you’re lovely … and not that old at all!’ She just knew, same way she always knew everything, mind reader that she was.
The subject of my birth parents was one she and I never went into, at least not until I was old enough to properly understand. Even though as a nosey kid I practically had the poor woman persecuted.