Alice thought again of the way Miss King had lifted her gaze suddenly, her eyes unblinking, as if she had given the important cue and was now waiting for Alice to speak her line.
The clock chimed eleven. She should go back downstairs. At the door, she turned. Suddenly she had an odd feeling, no more than a hunch, that Will was watching. That he’d been watching all evening. She closed the door quickly, brushing her hand against the felt stocking on the handle, and heard something rustle.
Dear Santa. For Christmas I would like …
Alice read with her mouth open.
‘Alan?’ She stood at the doorway of the conservatory, Will’s letter in her hand. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’
Alan had fitted most of the pieces together now. The kit was taking shape – sections were almost a foot in length. Carefully he lifted the largest piece and balanced it upright. As he removed his hands, she held her breath, transfixed, but it only gave a small unsteady wobble like a child taking to its feet for the first time, and remained standing.
‘Will doesn’t want a racing bike for Christmas,’ she said.
‘That’s maybe just as well,’ said Alan.
Meanwhile the crack in the wall had become almost an opening; you could have stuffed a tight roll of newspaper inside it. A pool of powdered grey cement lay on the floor. And Alice was certain, now she looked, that the pitched roof was not so much pitched any more as buckling. ‘Are you absolutely sure this conservatory is safe?’ she asked.
‘Would I be sitting here if I didn’t think it was safe?’
Nevertheless there was something disjointed about Alan too, surrounded by all those tiny pieces. There was something disjointed about everything.
Alice held out Will’s Christmas letter. ‘He says he wants a dress. A green one. With a sweetheart neckline and a ribbon belt. Also a pack of Top Trump cards and a memory stick. I’ve got both of those. Just not the dress. I didn’t … you know. I didn’t think of that.’ Alice stooped for a screw, only instead of pairing it with a nut, she cradled it in her palm.
Alan slammed one stretch of tubing into another, but somehow he missed and they both leapt out of his hands and shot towards the Christmas tree. The crack in the wall gave a low murmur and spat out a shower of freezing dust.
Alice dropped the screw and clung to the doorframe. Oh, here came that cold, screaming feeling again.
‘Do you think,’ she said fiercely, ‘do you really think you’re any good at DIY? The number of times, the number of times, I’ve had to call out a proper builder once you were at a safe distance from the house! And what about the time you fitted showtime mirror lights in the bathroom and practically fried me? You should be locked up for the damage you’ve done!’
Alan leapt to his feet, brandishing a wrench and one of Alice’s make-up brushes. ‘You think you’re a slave to the home? The house is filthy. It’s a tip! I have to take my clothes to the cleaners after you’ve washed them! You – Essex girl!’
‘You – financial adviser!’
A green lightning ball seemed to shoot through the crack in the wall and skipped across the floor, striking the Christmas tree and felling it with a bang as if it had been shot execution-style through the heart. The metal supports of the conservatory twisted and buckled. Alan charged towards Alice and lifted her into the safety of the hallway just as the polycarbonate roof panels gave a ripping noise and split. There was a sound of cracking and snapping as the outer supports lifted and then, one by one, the sides of the conservatory popped open and peeled outwards like a pack of cards. Plink, plank, plonk. It took barely seconds to fall, but in doing so, it must have cut short the power supply because the green-lit shrubbery was suddenly not green any more but night-coloured. There was nothing but the bitter smell of burnt electrical wires.
‘Alan?’ said Alice.
‘Alice?’ said Alan.
Alan and Alice stepped through the gap in the wall. The side of the house was a wound letting in the night and where there had been a conservatory there were only empty frames and layer upon layer of rubble and plastic roofing. Strands of silicone hung in streamers.
‘What have we said?’ Alice wrapped her arms around her body like a belt. ‘What have we done?’ She stared into the dark.
The truth was, there were no instructions when you got married. There was no manual in the birthing suite that explained how to bring up a happy child. No one said, you do this, and then you do this, and after that this will happen. You made it up as you went along. And the people who had brought you up were no use either. They seemed to have completely forgotten what they’d done to make things work. How a couple stayed together or brought up a child was anyone’s guess. But just because it was not the thing you’d expected did not necessarily mean it had not worked.
Alan and Alice stood silent and side by side.
The hall clock chimed midnight. Once more, Will took up his watching post at the bedroom window. He had seen everything. He always did; he was always watching. But now something was different. What was it?
There was no conservatory.
Two stooped figures stepped into the black nothingness below. One was his mother, her hair all curly, and the other his father, covered in dust. Will saw his father’s hand grope its passage around his mother’s waist. He saw her head lower like a drawbridge to rest on his father’s shoulder.
Will took a good look at the present his parents had made. It had a leaning spire and two small wheels like hands and a set of flappers that kept it upright. Its body was a tower of ill-matched nuts and screws. Caught over one shoulder was his father’s jacket and at its feet were thrown his mother’s mules. It seemed to grow out of the wreckage like a wild flower on a bombsite. He was glad it wasn’t a bicycle. Will liked it. He liked it very much.
And in that moment Will knew something. It was so big and strange, this thing, he barely had the words for it. It was only a thought really, a shape. Long after his father had gone, and his mother too, there would be this. This whatever it was. This fact. His parents had put him together with the chaos of their loving. They had done their best and they had made mistakes, yes, and most of the time it was no more than a botch-job, and now those mistakes were a part of who he was. But he had been loved, he was loved, and he too could love. Take courage, Will.
Overhead an aeroplane passed, its lights blinking in the dark. Will watched for a while, and as he looked he noticed another and another and another, like stars. He imagined all those people inside the planes, some sleeping, some awake, some staring down at the ground below, seeing house lights and street lamps and maybe even the houses on the avenue. All those people flying to wherever they were going for Christmas. Each of them so different, but travelling above him, all the same.
Will looked up, and at the same moment he saw himself looking down, as if he had just passed himself and said hello.
Then a soft wind picked up and wiped the sky clean.
Christmas Day at the Airport
It is early Christmas morning at the airport. All flights have been suspended until further notice. Nothing is landing and nothing is taking off.
Travellers gather beneath the departures board and gaze upwards. It’s like waiting for a sign, only in this case nothing happens. All these people, some dressed for skiing holidays, some for a break in the sun, others in casual clothing for a long-haul flight. There is no seating left. People sleep at tables with heads in their hands and sprawl on the floor, using coats and rucksacks as makeshift blankets and pillows. Suitcases stand like garden walls between one group and another. It is not yet fully light outside. The airport eateries are already running low on food.
Magda stands in stillness. She wears jogging pants and a loose hoodie that sits over her belly. Her hair is pinched into a ponytail and it hangs like the scrappiest bit of rag. Magda, too, is waiting for a sign, only hers is a different kind, and she has no idea how it will come, whether it will be a feeling or a smell or maybe something she hasn’t e
ven known before. Something she doesn’t yet have a word for. Once when she was a child she saw a deer in the middle of the road and she thinks of it now, with its nose to the air, its haunches frozen, in the grip of fear. She has never seen a deer since.
The thickset woman at her side wears a denim boiler suit and nickel bracelets that hang with the weight of chains. Her arms and neck are blue with tattoos: painted birds and mermaids and dragons. You wouldn’t know but on her back she has a painted warrior with hair to her waist; Magda loves that. It’s like looking at a painting in a museum. The woman is almost twice her age, old enough to be her mother, and her hair is dyed punk-pink and shaved to fuzz. Passers-by give the two women a wide berth. Trailer trash, someone mutters. Well, so what? They’ve heard worse.
The departure lounge is so polished and shiny it could be made of glass. It is reflected in the windows, even more brilliant and doubled in size, spread across the early-morning light as if it were made of water. Everywhere there are flashing signs and reduced-price duty-free gift ideas. The air smells of coffee and a thousand perfumes. From a giant screen, the same short film keeps playing on a loop, something to do with a young woman walking through snow and some little animals, only they are not real, not like the young woman in her red coat, they are cartoon animals, with exaggerated ears and fluffy tails like pom-poms and buck teeth that give them a cute look. It must an advert for something, because everything here is an advert for something, but the girl can’t imagine what. It’s like a no man’s land, this place. You could lose yourself.
The girl scans the lists of destinations – places she has never visited: Palma, Reus, Enfidha – and they are each coupled with the words ‘DELAYED. Awaiting Information’.
‘There’s freak weather coming,’ a middle-aged man says to his wife. They both wear linen suits, white with a crease in them, and straw hats, and they speak very loudly, the way Magda has noticed that some English people do, as if no one else is present. ‘Nothing taking off. Nothing landing. We could be here for hours. Merry bloody Christmas.’
Someone says there’s been a terrorist attack and someone else says there hasn’t, it’s just a problem with the computers at air-traffic control.
‘Whatever it is, we’re not going anywhere,’ repeats the man in his linen suit. He tears his straw hat off his head as if to show that is the end of his holiday.
‘You sure you’re OK, Mags?’ asks the older woman.
‘I think so,’ says Magda.
‘You don’t look it.’
‘I am OK.’
Later, Magda overhears some people talking about snow and others about flash floods, but they are still there, all of them waiting in the departure lounge. If anything, there are more people now; this is not a huge airport.
‘You want anything?’ asks the older woman. They use simple English words because the older woman knows no Latvian and Magda knows no Romanian.
Magda shakes her head. ‘Something’s happening.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know.’
She thinks again of that deer and the way every muscle of it was waiting.
Not all the passengers at the airport are people. The animal reception centre is a white building situated a stone’s throw from the departure lounge where pets are held until they can be collected by their owners. The staff take care of animal welfare during shipment, help to stop smuggling, and X-ray animals to check for drugs and bombs.
This morning there is a lively smell of farmyard mixed with the more familiar one of detergent. You get it as soon as you pass Security. Manure and bleach, thinks Mrs Pike, deputy manager, arriving for the first shift of Christmas Day. She says to one of the girls (she can never tell them apart, and when she does, the girls only go and dye their hair blue or purple or pink, and Mrs Pike is confused all over again), she says, ‘I am certain I can smell manure.’ Hester. That is her name. Or at least that is what it says on the plastic identity badge hanging from a ribbon around her neck.
‘Oh, that will be the donkey,’ says Hester. She seems to have green hair.
‘What donkey?’ says Mrs Pike.
‘The donkey that came in the night,’ says Hester. ‘It has no paperwork.’
‘A donkey?’
Hester makes an infuriating ‘Uh-huh’ noise at her mobile phone. She doesn’t even glance up.
‘Why did no one mention a donkey before?’
‘I guess they thought you’d notice. There’s a goat and four cheetahs as well.’
Mrs Pike gropes for the edge of the desk. ‘A goat? Cheetahs? We’re only supposed to have cats and dogs.’
‘And fish,’ points out Hester. Her hair hangs like grass.
‘And fish,’ concedes Mrs Pike, reaching for her handbag and tugging out her Nicorettes.
‘The cheetahs don’t have their microchips. We are holding them until a convenient alternative can be found. Nobody has a clue about the goat. It’s a total nightmare.’
Christmas Morning. A strange weather front is apparently heading in the direction of the airport. The computers have gone down in air-traffic control. Cars are at a standstill on the two-mile stretch from the motorway. Nobody can move; Mrs Pike had to abandon her Polo and walk. At home she still has the turkey to stuff, along with a vegan alternative, because at six p.m. her three daughters will arrive, along with her two sons-in-law and her six Pikelet grandchildren. The last thing Mrs Pike needs or wants is a grassy-haired girl telling her about four cheetahs without microchips, an unexplained goat and a donkey.
‘Also a terrapin,’ says Hester. ‘A guy was trying to smuggle it through in his underpants.’
‘All I need really is to lie down,’ says Magda. Her friend watches her with as much fear in her eyes as Magda has ever seen.
‘It’s not coming, is it?’
‘I don’t think so, Jo.’
Magda isn’t in pain, not as such, but she can feel the baby inside her, and for the first time she doesn’t seem big enough to hold it. There is a small person bundled like a stowaway in her belly, poking and fidgeting, growing. ‘I’m OK,’ she says, because the older woman is standing with her body stooped and her big, thick arms outstretched, as if bracing herself to catch a rugby ball.
‘I’ll ask someone to move, Mags,’ she says. ‘So you can lie down.’
‘Don’t worry, Jo.’ The girl doesn’t want to go drawing attention to herself. Besides, everyone looks so cross and miserable, there is no point asking. She just wants to be alone, just her and the baby. She doesn’t even need Johanna. Not right now.
‘I will ask, though,’ Johanna says, and then Magda doesn’t hear any more because here is that wrenching feeling and she has to breathe into it, right into the eye of it, so that it doesn’t split her open. She notices Johanna has gone and then she feels another wave of wrenching and she forgets Johanna. She forgets everything. She is just a tiny body with a huge hollowing punch inside. By the time it’s over, Jo is back.
‘You were right,’ Johanna says. ‘No one wants to give up their seat. We need to find you somewhere else.’ Fear makes her voice sound younger and smaller than the rest of her. Magda wants to hold her, like she does at home, Johanna’s head in her lap while she strokes her pink cropped hair and feels how soft it is beneath her fingertips, but people will look and so she can’t.
The baby is still, but soon it will be pushing her again. The moment of calm is even more precious because already it has an end. ‘I only need to be somewhere quiet,’ she says. She thinks she can hear choral music, but how can that be? It must be in her head.
There is nothing for it but to sing. ‘O Come All Ye Faithful.’ What else can you do if you are the Stroud Girls’ Choir and you are wearing embroidered blue sweatshirts that tell everybody you are the Stroud Girls’ Choir and you are stuck at the airport, with no room to swing a cat?
‘Come along, girls,’ interrupts Shelley. ‘Chins up.’
‘What about Winston, Miss?’
‘What about him?’
says Shelley. Winston, her sixteen-year-old son, is sitting on his travelling bag with his face in his hands and his blue sweatshirt wrapped like a turban around his scalp. He has a headache.
‘Does Winston have to put his chin up an’ all?’
‘Yes,’ says Shelley. ‘Winston?’
Winston staggers to his feet and puts up his chin. The girls are all a good year younger than him but he barely reaches their shoulders. Shelley lifts her hands for silence.
She hasn’t slept for worry. Her head is hammering. Last time she took the choir on tour, it was supposed to be lights-out at nine-thirty. Instead she spent every night trying to barricade all fifteen members of the Stroud Girls’ Choir into the fourth floor of their motel. She put Winston in charge so that she could grab a bite to eat and later found him tied to a chair whilst all fifteen choir members knocked back vodka and pineapple juice in the bar. After the tour there was an additional bill for broken toilets, a jammed sink, the dismantling of a Teasmade and the theft of fifteen waitress uniforms. She had sworn never to take the Stroud Girls’ Choir anywhere ever again, not even down to the shopping mall for a lunchtime sing-song, and then they went and won both the local and national heats for Girls’ Choir of the Year. It was hard to believe they had been invited to battle it out on the banks of Lake Geneva in the European finals just after Christmas. But they had. The competition would open with a gala performance by all finalists on Boxing Day.
Johanna asks everyone. The answer is always the same. No, they will not give up their seat. ‘But my wife,’ she says in her broken English. ‘She is pregnant.’ Well, that only makes it worse. People won’t even catch her eye when they hear that.
‘You should go home,’ someone tells her, and she doesn’t know whether he means back to the flat or Eastern Europe.