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Del, who is leaning way too far out from the stepladder for safety, looks down at me. “That’s because he’s waiting for you to roast him another chicken.”
“Try a melomakarona, Sam.” Kayla takes the box from her husband, opens it, and shoves it under my nose, the scent of honey and spices wafting up at me. “In our house it’s not Christmas ‘til you’ve had one.”
So I have one. And while I’m having it, Kayla bungs the rest in the kitchen and Del finishes putting whatever he’s putting on the ceiling on the ceiling and even though Auntie Jack is right that this is chaos and it’ll never not be chaos, people seem to find their place in it anyway. There’s Wendy in the other room on tree duty, and there’s Jonathan, gone to help Johnny with the lights that they do, eventually, get working only to find that they’re nowhere near long enough for a twenty-foot tree. Even Gollum’s in on it, sitting proudly on Auntie Jack’s lap, with that feline instinct for picking the one person the room who doesn’t like cats. Meanwhile, I’m still standing around eating a melomakarona trying not to think too hard about how I got here, or when the last time was that I could sayit’s not Christmas in our house until.
My mouth’s going a bit dry, for reasons that I’m sure have nothing to do with the cookie. And nobody’s speaking to me right now, which is fine because I’m notactuallypart of this family however nice they’re all being about it. So I sort of sidle around the edge of the kitchen and go stand in the garden for a bit.
The fresh air is welcome, though it’s nippy what with it being December. I’ve not brought my scarf out with me and I miss it in more ways than one. For a while I just…mooch. The pisser with Christmas is that it’s big. Too big. Pointlessly big. People make it into this massive thing and when you get right down to it, it’s justa day. Like any day. And it’s not fair on anybody to have all that pressure on it.
I can still see everyone through the windows, and for the first time Jonathan’s house—his absurd more-money-than-sense house—makes, well, it makes some kind of sense. Because those reception rooms were meant to receive people, not to sit empty except for him, me, a cat, and a telly. They were meant to be alive and messy and—
It really is nippy out. There’s a cold wind stinging my face and it’s making me tear up. I go shelter by the tree-line, trying to get out of the worst of the weather. Despite all the chaos of Friday, the garden survived okay. A couple of begonias got their heads chopped off but that’s about the end of the damage. And I say begonias, but I wouldn’t know a begonia if one turned into a dog and bit me. They’re probably hardy-somethings. The kind of flower that’s still daft enough to be around in winter.
“So are youactuallyJonathan’s boyfriend?” asks a voice from behind me.
I turn and see it’s little Anthea. Who I should probably stop calling that because she probably doesn’t like it. “No.”
Thenomust have sounded loaded because she looks supremely unconvinced. “Are you sure?”
“About as sure as I can be. Should you not be inside putting up tinsel?”
She glances back over her shoulder. “I’ll go back in a bit. Small doses, y’know?”
I don’t, as it happens. “You should appreciate them while you can.”
That earns me a scornful, teenage laugh. “You sound like Great Granddad. He’s been telling us he’ll be dead next year for as long as I can remember.”
“I suppose he’ll be right eventually.”
It was an unintentionally morbid comment, but she seems to be okay with that. “True.”
There’s a couple of seconds’ silence. It’s just long enough for me to reflect on how I always figured that once I was grown up like, I’d be one of them adults that’s easy for young people to talk to, and apparently I’m not.
Across the garden, the tree is beginning to take shape. Though Jonathan’s advice about putting the tinsel on first has been thoroughly ignored, and with the size of it, they’re only about a third of the way through the first floor.
“I do have to admit,” Anthea says, looking in the same direction, “the through-the-roof thing is surprisingly cool.”
“It was my idea,” I tell her, and then realise how pathetic it sounds to be bragging about your choices in Christmas decorations to somebody a decade younger than you.
“Great Granddad says it was his.”
“The big tree was him. Call it a group effort.”
Through the window, Les pulls a stepladder over to the tree and starts hanging these little vintage pompom things from the higher branches. Then Jonathan walks over to him and says something. Then Les says something back. And though I’m not an expert on body language, I think I see tension building. The atmosphere’s starting to melt, slowly but inevitable as ice cream sliding off a cone, from cosy to scratchy to outright unpleasant.
They’re not yelling—from what I’ve seen, Les never yells—but while Jonathan seems to have inherited a fair few things from his dad, calm isn’t one of them. And now Wendy’s stepping in, but it’s not making it better. The two of them are forming the heart of this little vortex of aggro.
“I should probably get in there,” I say partly to Anthea and partly to myself.
“Why? It’s not your problem.”
It’s not. Except it is. Because if Jonathan’s on edge then I’m part of that, or might be. And because it just feels—it feels a jagged tangle of sick and sharp and just straight up not okay to see things falling apart like that. For these people who, for all their bickering, clearly love each other, and were good to me when they didn’t have to be.
So I go in.
“—in my own house,” Jonathan’s saying. Nothing good ever ends with the wordsin my own house.
“This might be your house”—Les has come down from the stepladder now and he’s standing a few paces back from Jonathan, hands in his pockets, though I think he’s curled them into fists out of sight—“but you’re still my son, and I’ll not have you talking to me like I’m a fucking child.”
