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“I have bought new lights,” Jonathan points out testily. “We do not need to use the old lights.”
Nanny Barb shakes her head. She’s holding a pinecone on which somebody, long ago, glued a very small amount of glitter. “The old lights is traditional.”
“As is Johnny failing to make them work,” adds Auntie Jack.
“Here, Sam, hold this ladder.” I’m beginning to get a bit overwhelmed with all the voices coming at me—at least I tell myself that’s what’s overwhelming me—but I turn to see Del already halfway up an unsecured stepladder with a red-and-gold foil star in one hand and the faded paper chain that Les was fixing earlier in the other.
Not wanting to be even indirectly responsible for an old man breaking his neck, I dash over to help. “Are you sure you’re all right up there?”
“Fine.” He’s not even looking at me. “Why wouldn’t I be? Now pass me them drawing pins.”
I glance over to Jonathan to make sure he’s okay with holes getting poked in his ceiling, and it seem like he is, so I lean around and grab them for Del while also trying to keep the ladder steady.
Between the eight of us, the festive wonderland of Jonathan’s house begins to take shape. It’s not exactly what you’d call tasteful—it has sort of a time capsule feel, with some of the decorations being so old they must go back to when Del and Barb were first setting up home together and the family as a whole having a definite more-is-better philosophy when it comes to, well, to everything really. But there’s a heart to it I find throws me more than I thought it would. Like when you don’t realise your foot’s gone to sleep until you try to stand up.
So I try to keep myself busy making tea while everybody else hangs things on other things and sometimes hangs third things on top of the second things. I’m making the fifth round of the day when the rest of the family shows up—and Auntie Jack does the introductions since she’s the only one not neck deep in stuff that sparkles.
“So this…” She points me at a woman a bit older than Jonathan with the same dark eyes I’ve seen on him and Barbara Jane, “is Kayla, Johnny’s daughter from his incredibly failed marriage.”
“Oy,” shout Johnny and Kayla simultaneously.
“Would you prefer preposterously failed?”
“I was very young,” protests Johnny, like this is an old argument. “I’ve changed.”
Auntie Jack sneers at him. “You have fucking not.”
“Language,” Wendy calls from the other room. “There’s children present.”
“I’m sixteen,” says the person who, by a process of elimination, is little Anthea, though she’s not especially little. Being, as she points out, sixteen and having picked up height from her mother’s side. “People say fuck in front of me all the time.”
“Not in my house, they don’t.” This is probably her dad—a thin, slightly greying man in round glasses and crisp blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
Anthea folds her arms. She’s not sullen exactly, but she’s inthat kind of teenagery nonspace where you’re never sure which way she’ll jump, and maybe she isn’t either. “We’re not in your house, though. We’re in Jonathan’s house. And Jonathan says fuck more than anybody.”
“Not around children, I don’t.” Jonathan barges past and grabs an armful of slightly scraggy tinsel from the box.
“I’m sixteen,” Anthea repeats. “I’m not children.”
Introductions having been thoroughly derailed, it falls to Kayla—who’s got an air of sensibleness that must have skipped a generation—to get things back on track. “If it helps,” she says to her daughter, “Barb called me children ‘til you were three.” Then she holds out her hand to me. “Sorry love, don’t think I caught your name.”
“That”—Auntie Jack is mixing herself a very large amount of G with a very small amount of T—“is because I was rudely interrupted. Sam, this is Anthea, Kayla, and Theo. Everybody, this is Sam. We’re politely pretending he isn’t dating Jonathan.”
That joke got about six hundred percent less funny overnight. “Hi,” I say.
Johnny, who’s still not located the break in the lights, comes over to embrace his daughter and granddaughter, and have a manly handshake with his son-in-law.
“Anthea,” Wendy yells through from the other room, “get in here and check out the tree. It’s massive.”
Anthea leans in the doorway. She’s wearing fountain pen tips for earrings, and they swing slightly when she tilts her head. “Saw it from the garden. Just…how?”
“I know a bloke.” It’s the only answer Del seems to think matters, and he delivers it from the top of a stepladder that once again nobody’s holding, so I very quietly move to steady it.
“Jonathan.” Theo raises a large Tupperware box. “I brought melomakarona. Where do you want me to stick them?”
“Plenty of room in the kitchen,” Jonathan calls back.
“Because he never uses it,” I add.
