AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘You’re going to dress up in chains for Christmas?’ Greg couldn’t help smiling and she shot him a glare in return.
‘No, of course not. Gerry is.’ She finally managed to free herself from the chain, opening one of the crates and dumping it inside.
‘Gerry’s going to dress up in chains for Christmas?’ Gerard Mortimer, the senior cardiac consultant. Greg was sure that there were plenty of things more incongruous in the world, but at the moment he couldn’t bring any of them to mind. ‘Starting when?’
This time her look was ferocious enough to have cut through cold steel. ‘Some of us are dressing up as characters from Dickens’s novels. Gerry’s going to be Jacob Marley’s ghost.’
There were no words to say. Greg began to wonder whether he wasn’t dreaming after all. It wouldn’t have been the first time that Jess had featured in his dreams, but he had to admit that the chains were a new development. Maybe fatigue was lending an edge to his imagination.
‘Are you okay?’ She was staring at him intently.
‘Uh… ?’ On the off chance that he was dealing with reality and not a set of unconnected threads from his unconscious mind, he should give an answer of some sort. ‘Yeah, fine. Jet lag. So who are you dressing up as?’ It couldn’t hurt to ask, and Greg found that he was suddenly and irrationally interested.
‘I’m not dressing up. I’m organising everything.’
‘So this Christmas won’t be as chaotic as last… ’ He bit his tongue but it was too late. The cat had clawed its way out of the bag and ushered something that looked suspiciously like an elephant into the room.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
She was blushing furiously, refusing to meet his gaze. She remembered. And from the look of things she was no more indifferent to it than he was. Greg could barely suppress his grin.
‘I meant that… the weather will probably be better.’
‘Yes. I expect so. Last year was quite unusual.’ She was backing towards the door now. ‘It’s late. I’d better be getting home.’
‘See you tomorrow?’
‘Yes… Maybe.’
‘I’ll look forward to it.’ The door banged behind her, and Greg settled back into his chair. Just another ten minutes, to settle his jumbled thoughts, then he’d go home. Last Christmas…
The dream seized Greg with all the colour and immediacy of a memory, which had shadowed him for the last thirty years. The large, opulent room and the child, sitting on a thick, intricately patterned rug on the floor.
He was making something. Without having to look, Greg knew what it was. The Christmas card was for his father, the picture on the front a wishful representation of a family—father, mother and their five-year-old son—under a Christmas tree. It was almost painful to watch his younger self, so absorbed in this task, so careful with the picture and the wording inside the card, because Greg knew what was to come.
The lavishly wrapped presents from America had been no substitute for his father’s arrival, but the child had believed all the excuses that Christmas. It had taken years of broken promises to finally squash Greg’s faith and make him realise that the time his father gave so freely to the company and the people he worked with was doled out like a miser’s shilling to his family.
‘It’s not your fault.’ Greg breathed the words to his younger self, wondering if there was any way he could comfort the boy. Apparently not. His own memories still tasted of the bitterness of dreams that had never been smashed but had just dissolved under the weight of reality.
The boy was growing, though, almost before his eyes. Finding his way in the world. A first kiss on a sun-strewn hillside in Italy, where he had been holidaying with his mother’s family. The letter to his father, telling him that he was going to medical school, which had gone unanswered. The party that his mother and stepfather had thrown for him before he’d left home. The hard work, the weary nights and the smile of a woman he’d saved. She’d been the first, and from then on he’d known that this was what he was supposed to do.
Greg was reeling from the vivid clarity of the thoughts and memories flashing in front of him. Faces, dreams. The soft touch of a woman’s skin. Jess. She’d been the last, delicious taste of the life that he’d left behind. Maybe not a perfect life, there had been the usual mistakes, the usual disappointments, but it had been his and he had a singular affection for it.
Finally, the parade of images slowed. Stopped. It was last Christmas, in the dark, deserted courtyard outside the hospital, and Greg could see himself, talking to Jess. Although he couldn’t hear what they were saying, he knew
well enough. Knew what was coming, too, and he held his breath, afraid that in some way he might alter history and divert their path away from that sweet outcome.
She must have been as back-breakingly tired as he was, but she still shone. Still wore that red sparkly headband that had brought a little Christmas cheer into an A and E department that had been in a state of siege after a cold snap, accompanied by snow, had filled the waiting room, and a flu bug had thrown the holiday rota into chaos.
Greg saw himself grimace. They’d got to the goodbye. Jess had worked for him for two years, and was leaving soon, to take up a post in Cardiology. It was what she wanted to do and he was pleased for her but even now, ten months later, the sudden feeling of loss stabbed at him.
There it was… Greg watched as his former self leaned forward, a brief kiss on the cheek. Saw her flinch back in surprise as he went to kiss the other cheek, and knew that he’d whispered something about a single kiss not being enough, using his Italian heritage as an excuse for his own craving to feel her skin against his again.
More talk, their bodies seeming to grow closer by the second, and then he’d caught her hand. Pressed her fingers against his lips, smiling when she didn’t draw back. And then Greg had heedlessly trashed the first of the three rules he’d lived by up until that moment. He’d gone ahead and kissed her, despite the fact that Jess was still a member of his team for another week, and he always, whatever the circumstances, kept it strictly professional at work.
‘Think you’re in control of this, don’t you?’
He murmured the warning and his former self took no heed of it. Jess would show him differently, any minute now. Greg watched as she pulled away for a moment and then kissed him back, her hand sliding over the stubble on his jaw and coming to rest on his neck, in the exact place that had suddenly and inexplicably seemed to control the whole of his body.
