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“It’s fine. We’ll trim it down.”
“So you want to celebrate,” asks Les, “our special, first family Christmas in years with a headless Christmas tree?”
“It’ll work,” Del insists, “if we make it work. Instead of sitting around whining and making excuses.”
There’s a long, long silence. Long enough for me to realise quite how horrifying Christmas trees look in the dark, as if they’re evil giants reaching out to strangle yez. And also long enough forme to realise that there’s context to all this that I do not want to go near.
Then Jonathan says, “Come on, Dad. We can sort it out when we get home.” And he sounds tired. Disappointed almost.
It takes us about half an hour of sweating and humping to get the tree onto the roof rack and get it lashed down like James Bond inGoldfinger. And the first time we get it up there, we have it the wrong way round so the front hangs down over the windscreen, which means we have to swivel it to put the trunk up front and leave the top dangling off the back where it goes so low it practically touches the road. Honestly, with the branches spreading all over on account of how it’s too wide for the roof even with netting trying gamely to hold it in, it looks like the whole van’s been eaten by an Ent. Or, as my mam would’ve put out, by a Huorn—them being the actual trees, rather than the tree herders.
“This is so dangerous,” says Barbara Jane. “I love it.”
Del bangs the side of the van confidently. “It’s not dangerous if you know what you’re doing.”
I think he’s probably wrong about that. The only question in my mind as we get in the back, fighting our way through a forest of pine needles, is whether the whole thing is going to tip over before or after we get arrested. Fortunately, the van has a low centre of gravity and over a decade of Tory underfunding means the Metropolitan police don’t really have the manpower to stop us. So, by a frankly unwarranted Christmas miracle, do we arrive back at Jonathan’s intact and without our tree getting impounded as a public safety hazard.
I’m a bit wobbly as I climb out and quite looking forward to crashing on the sofa and trying in vain to tempt Gollum to start giving a fuck about me again. Except we’ve got a gigantic tree to deal with and I don’t want to let anybody down.
“You look like shit,” says Jonathan, winning as ever.
“Thanks,” I say back.
“No, I…” He scowls. “You look unwell. You should go inside and rest.”
“What, and send the cat out to help with the tree?”
“We’ll manage. Down’ll be easier than up.”
As usual, I have no idea if he’s being nice or really patronising. “I’ll be okay. I’ll have a sit after we’re done.”
“I’m increasingly concerned we won’t be done until next Christmas.”
Normally when Jonathan says “we”, he either means “him on his own” or “him and me going along with whatever he wants”. Tonight, though, he’s actually talking about a group of people with a shared goal, of which I am a part. Even if the goal in question is to fit a twenty-foot Christmas tree into a ten-foot room like we’re onTaskmaster.
“Come on.” Del gestures to us through the branches. “Gabbing won’t get the baby washed.”
Barbara Jane looks from the van to the house to the van again. “I don’t think the baby’s going to fit through the front door.”
“We can open the French windows at the back,” says Jonathan. “But it won’t stand up once it’s inside.”
Del is still very much occupying his own reality. “We’ll just lean it a bit.”
“Lean ithow?” asks Barbara Jane, who is at this point speaking for all of us. Except maybe Les who’s giving off strongstaying out of itvibes.
“Prop it on a wall.”
More or less as one, Les, Jonathan, and Barbara Jane decide that the only thing less possible than fitting the gargantuan tree into Jonathan’s middle reception room will be convincing Del that they shouldn’t at least try to fit the gargantuan tree into Jonathan’s middle reception room. The five of us haul it down from the roofof the van, and then at Jonathan’s insistence I leave the rest of them to try to get it in the house while I go and make a round of teas.
“He’s had a serious concussion,” Jonathan reminds his family. “So he really shouldn’t be doing this.”
I try to tell them that the concussion were a week ago now and that I’ll probably be fine but I don’t want to push it too far, partly because I’ve progressed from wobbly to woozy, and partly because I don’t want to be asked too many questions about why the amnesia’s not clearing up. Fortunately, nobody seems to want to make a thing out of it, probably because somebody said the word “tea” and they’re already throwing orders at me.
“Two sugars in mine.”
“Milk, no sugar, thanks Sam.”
“If you were going to make a coffee that’d be fab.”
