The Christmas Spirit

I used to love Christmas, honestly I did.  I would make the most of the whole month of December.  I would be invited to every party, every section lunch, every after work drinkie session, I was the archetypal “life and soul.”

Regrettably the month did have it’s down side and for all the merry making there were a few mornings when I wasn't really on full form and the rarer occasions when I didn't come in at all.  My colleagues were not always best pleased but they would put up with it because they knew at some point we would be crawling in hungover together.  For the rest of the year I was as reliable and hard working as the next man – or woman.

And so it was that I spent seven years in the office, being carried by my work-mates through the last month of the year before the status quo was restored in January and I pulled my weight for the next 11 months.  I loved Christmas, me…or at least until last year I did.

It was around mid autumn that Cassie came to work with us and I have to admit that we never really hit it off.  She made it abundantly clear that she thought me tedious and after initial stabs at friendliness I came to the conclusion that she was far too precious so I gave up and left her to it.  She was self-obsessed and miserable; I flatter myself perhaps but almost the complete opposite of my fun loving, up for a laugh self.  We acted with barely polite professionalism towards each other for a while and then came the Yuletide season.

I first realised that she was probably not the biggest fan of the festive period when I caught her tutting at my advent calendar.  I am a bit of a traditionalist in these matters, no chocolate filled “Pop Idol” advent for me. I had a countryside, snowbound scene replete with glitter and cute animals all celebrating Christmas in their own way (which seemed to involve little more than eating a lot and pushing gaily wrapped parcels around in little animal sized hand carts).  Cassie stomped in to the room, aggrieved at some form of merriment that she had not approved of.  Glaring at my calendar, she huffed “oh not you as well” and then barked some work based order at me before I could reply.  Considering her now obvious dislike of the season it was unfortunate that she received my Christmas card later the same day.  I was in the habit of sending one to everyone in the office and prior to that morning I had seen no reason not to include Cassie.  Indeed, as the Muslims and Sikhs in the office had received their cards with the sentiment of goodwill that was intended I did not foresee such umbrage being caused to her!  Umbrage was caused, and Cassie was not shy about demonstrating that fact to me.  This she did by returning the card to me, in pieces, in an envelope, which bore the legend “off, you” (missing out the swear words).

That would have been the end of the story, and thus not really a tale worth recounting, if I had not by chance wandered in to one of the more countrified hostelries on the edge of town some three weeks later.  I had been to dinner with one of the departments from work and had been liberally plied with Merlot by colleagues grateful to be in the presence of my wit and repartee.   After leaving the restaurant, a few of us went to the Lamb; I only lived a ten-minute walk away and the other two lads closer still.  We were already nursing pints when we noticed Cassie sitting in the corner, talking with a tall, dread-locked man in an earnest manner.  Neither of them, I noted, appeared to be enjoying themselves.  From the conversation of my two colleagues it was apparent that she had ingratiated herself in their affections no more than she had in mine:  “moody cow” and “miserable bitch” being two of the more mentionable epithets applied to her.

The two chaps left after a pint and as I was not quite satiated for the evening I remained, sipping at a double rum and coke.  The young man who was with Cassie left abruptly, exchanging pleasantries with her as he went (this is of course sardonicism, they were in fact saying some very rude words and seemed quite cross with each other).  Still I sat alone for a while before my blood-alcohol level reached such heights as common sense and me were abject strangers. At this point I decided it would be a good idea to talk to Cassie, who had spent the intervening period with an expression somewhere between angry defiance and pathetic grief plastered across her pale, drawn countenance.

“Cheer up, it may never happen!”

As an opening gambit this would have been very poor even had I been twice as drunk and been talking to somebody five times as good-humoured as Cassie.  She glared at me with the sort of contempt usually reserved for child murderers or tabloid journalists.  Clearly “it” had already happened and she hadn’t yet come to terms with “it”.  She was not forthcoming about the circumstances of her current misery but I would guess that a likely congruence of the respective private parts of Cassie and the earnest young man was now a less likely proposition than it had been relatively recently.  Realising that the gravity of the matter probably required a little more in the way of seriousness, I countered my opening statement with astounding depth.

“Are you ok?”

All right, not that deep at all but certainly an improvement.

“Yeah…” she returned, not completely convincing me with her tone, “He was a twat anyway.”

As this was the first time she had ever used that word without implying that I was one I felt we had reached a new level of understanding and offered her a drink.  She opted for a double rum and coke and for a brief moment we were as close as we were ever to be, drinking the same drink and neither of us abusing the other.  It wasn't to last, and it is all the fault of bloody Roy Wood and Wizard.

As I returned from the bar loaded with Woods’ (how ironic) and Coke and a packet of Salt and Vinegar Discos “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” started to blare from the juke-box and I, like an idiot overwhelmed with goodwill, decided to sing it to Cassie.  Not the best decision I've ever made in retrospect.

In the following tirade that spewed from her like toxic waste from a ruptured freighter I discovered many things, the details are now etched on my psyche in the same way that one would remember losing a limb.  The earnest young man was called Jake and he had been Cassie’s lover.  They had been followers of a pagan religion that seemed loosely based on the Wicca but with a darker, supernatural element thrown in for good measure.  Sadly – at least from her point of view – Jake had fallen in with a bad crowd, some Christians, and had renounced his former faith and had left her to devote his life to Jesus Christ.  Cassie was not really very pleased about his decision and had decided to take it out on me due to her being in love with Jake and regarding me as below pond life.

“You wish it could be Christmas every day do you, you (expletive deleted)? Well, I’ll (expletive deleted) fix it for you!” she snarled at me with a fury I had seldom seen in a human but occasionally in an angry Doberman.  At this point my bladder kindly advised me to go empty it before it emptied itself so I nonchalantly dismissed myself and swaggered to the men’s room – or possibly I jumped from my chair and sprinted there in terror – I forget which.  By the time I returned, timidly and not before some consideration, she had gone.  I poured the remains of her drink in to mine and downed it in one, it did taste a little odd but I assumed this was due to the involuntary evacuation of my digestive system that had occurred orally in the gents so I thought little of it.

The next day I was fine, not even a hangover, so I went to work.  I was a little nervous about running in to Cassie but it turned out that she had called in sick so it was fine.  She didn't return before Christmas and there was a really good atmosphere in the office for those last few days before we broke up on Christmas Eve.  Then I enjoyed Christmas like I never had before, it just felt so special, like the ones I remember from my school days.  It is just as well that I enjoyed it so much as to all intents and purposes it was my last.

It wasn't until about January 4^th that I realised something was wrong.  It had been a particularly mental New Years Eve so it didn't surprise me when it took a few days to get over that feeling of excitement.  Then the whole world started to feel decidedly odd.

At first it was just the atmosphere.  I don’t mean the oxygen/nitrogen balance in the air but the feeling one gets in one’s bones at special times.  I had a feeling in me and at first I couldn't quite put a finger on it but it soon came to me.  It was like the feeling I used to get at school when the headmaster did his reading of A Christmas Carol instead of doing prayers in assembly.  It was the feeling I get when the local council put the enormous tree up in the town square at the beginning of December or when old Auntie Rose visits with her brightly wrapped gifts of socks and handkerchiefs.  This was fantastic, I loved that feeling!

But how quickly things spoil when they are left out in the wrong weather.  By March the daffodils were peeking out and the sun had taken off his hat and the rebel songs in the pub on the 17^th just felt so, so wrong.  I started to feel how I imagined I would if I had spent Christmas day on Bondi Beach and it was around this time that I realised that Christmas every day was becoming a horribly real prospect.  I was being haunted by the spirit of Christmas.

It went on.  Every flesh I tasted was of Turkey, and that went beyond just eating.  Every drink was like punch or wine or those horrible liqueurs that only get drunk on Boxing Day but never the things I was actually drinking, which tended less and less to be alcoholic as I seemed to be hung over every morning without fail.  Television became a chore.  You know that feeling when you watch a Christmas special of some comedy show and it isn't based at Christmas time and it isn't very funny and the whole thing seems massively disappointing?  Well, imagine if every show you watched felt like the 2001 special of Only Fools and Horses.  Films are worse, even when I am at the Cinema I am convinced that I have seen the film before and I didn't like it and I am only watching it because somebody else wants to and there is something better on the other side.

And that’s not all of it by any means.  I wake up every morning hungover and drift every night in to a drunken sleep that never refreshes, whether I drink whisky or water, it matters not.  Every chocolate I taste is the coffee one from the Quality Street that nobody likes except Auntie Rose.  Auntie Rose seems to be around constantly, drunk on Bailey’s but not eating the coffee sweeties, just to annoy me.  The sofa seems constantly full of nutshells to stick in me when I sit down and the aroma of satsuma peel invades me with every breath I take.

It is now December again but I am at odds with the latest festive season, as for me the last one hasn't ended yet.  It is going on and on and on and it is constantly the end of Christmas, the bit where even my old self was starting to get a bit fed up with it.  If normal life being Christmas was hard, then Christmas being Christmas is set to be harder.

Cassie never did return to work.  I have been searching for her but she has moved on.  I don’t know what she did to me but I know it was her, I'm sure she wanted me to know.  At the last attempt I made to find her I discovered that Jake had “saved” her and they had gone to do missionary work in Africa together.  I can’t help feeling even if I found her she wouldn't be able to help me now, maybe her pagan powers were lost to Christianity.  I always said that it was the religious aspects of Christmas that ruined it.  Without Christianity and Paganism, Christmas would be fine.

Part 1

He was sitting on our bed eating chips, the fucker.  By “our”, mine and Terri’s bed, I never shared a bed with Phil.  But there he was, sitting there as I fumbled drunkenly through the door in to the dismal studio flat Terri and I had called home for the past two months.  Eating chips.  I kind of knew what was going on but suppressed this inwardly and carried on blithely in hope that I was wrong.  Terri had just asked him back for a coffee after seeing this god-awful band.  Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts?  Jesus! What sort of a fucking name was that, sounded too much like a novelty band? Anyway, having him back like this was an action extremely inappropriate; what with her boyfriend out and all but probably by design; knowing Terri.  She was winding me up, teaching me a lesson.

“Alright?” I nodded to Phil.

“Alright”. Phil nodded back.  He certainly did not hint towards what was going on in the kitchen.

Terri was packing some things.  She was going.  Still this did not really register though I knew it to be true.  She already had a bag packed but was filling another with kitchen items; knife, fork, spoon, mug, plate and so on.  Was she going camping?

“What’s going on?” I slurred.

“I’m going, I’ve had enough.  I’m going with Phil.”

Two helmets.  There were TWO motorbike helmets on the bed with loathsome Phil and his chips and his biker jacket and denim cut off and Saxon and Status Quo patches.  She was leaving me for a man who openly admitted to liking Status Quo.  Oh, the shame.

I stomped back in to the bedroom/lounge/dining area and stared at him.  He was so fucking ugly, how could she?  I know she’d got off with him last week but surely that was just to teach me a lesson: an easy snog to taunt me with.

“Enjoy your fuck, did you?” I snarled.  A slight tremor in my voice, the pitch a little too high.  I’m a lover, not a fighter and by all the evidence before me, not much of a lover. Phil seemed bigger than me, perhaps more by the way he carried himself, confident in a way only the slightly stupid can achieve.

“I’ll let you know”, he responded, dead pan.  Brilliant! If only I could have been that calm.  Was he used to absconding in to the night with other bloke’s girlfriends or was I just so little of a threat to him that he could not generate the adrenaline to rise to my baiting of him?  I slumped back in to one of the two chairs in the room, the one that had been left out from the dining table when I had stormed in to the kitchen four hours earlier, enraged at Terri’s refusal to wash up.  Is this it, she’s finally leaving me because of an argument about washing the plates?  The four or five pints of Newcastle Brown in my gut began to agitate. I felt a little sick… the thought that I could puke in front of Phil bolstered me a little, I concentrated on keeping the contents of my guts where they were… at least until they’d gone.

The evening behind me now seemed so long ago, even the parts that had happened barely fifteen minutes ago.  Terri had decided not to go out with Phil, Julian and Wayne; she would stay in, spend quality time with me, a conciliatory night in, put all this recent bother behind us.  I was glad, didn’t trust Julian at all, he clearly had the hots for Terri. Then she’d left the washing up, said she’d do it later. I cook, she washes, I dry.  But she wouldn’t.  I’d sworn, started doing it myself.  She’d stormed out; she will go out after all if I’m going to be like that.  I’d followed her through the door two minutes later, drawn out my last ten pounds from the cash point, gone to the pub, spent the evening in the Claremont getting a bit drunk and flirting with a girl called Louise I knew from college. From a romantic night in to splitting up in five minutes, though I didn’t know it then of course.  I bloody knew it now!

She called Phil to the kitchen, he reported to her instruction, a few mumbled words and he came back, said “See you later mate” and left.  See you later?  It could have been a threat but it didn’t sound like it, more like he just didn’t want to leave without saying something and this was all his limited imagination could come up with. 

“See ya”.  What?  Why did I say that?  I wanted this cunt dead and I’m bidding him a fond farewell. Perhaps it is this lacking in the alpha male stakes that has lead to this situation.

Terri followed when she heard the door.  She had been ready to leave but wanted to talk to me first. Alone. I don’t remember the words or even the sentiments of what she said, I just remember it started out almost as an apology but descended in to a scolding and insults.  I gave her the birthday presents I’d bought for her already, her birthday was not for another three weeks.  Did I think this would change her mind, make her stay?  She thanked me, looked almost humble for a second. 

“Please stay”.

“I can’t”

I sat back in the chair, resigned to the turn of events.  She opened the door.

“And by the way, you’re a crap kisser”.  And she was gone.  I turned off the light, laid on the bed, something crumpled beneath me.  The chips. He’d taken my love and left me with half a bag of cold chips.

**** 

Part II

She’d gone.  She really had gone.  It had almost happened several times before, usually when I had pushed things a little too far, pushed her away or actively run away myself and then been concerned that she may not some back, but she always had.  She’d always returned so I could push things a little further the next time, constantly testing her, assessing her loyalty, her love for me constantly under examination as if I just had to prove it could not be real.  But it was real and I’d stretched it, defaced it and ultimately destroyed it. This time she’d gone, with him.  There could be no turning back; I knew that, even if she wanted to she couldn’t lose face with Phil now.  It was over.

It is an obvious cliché but I was numb, really numb, physically I felt disembodied almost to the extent that I could watch myself from the corner of the room where my emotions were hiding.  I knew how I wanted to feel.  I knew I had to grieve, to scream, to cry, to be angry, to hurt like hell.  But there was nothing but a mild nagging disbelief.  I knew she’d gone.  I knew she wasn’t coming back but still my hopes and dreams had not completely died, they were still there, deep within me, refusing to leave.  They’d made themselves comfortable and had no intention of getting up and departing at this unsociable hour.  It can’t be right, it can’t be true, this can’t have happened to me because I love her so much that it is just not possible to be loved that much and ever want it to end.  No other love could ever hope to compare to that with which I adored her.

I pictured her in my fractured mind, her face angry, defiant and possibly a little ashamed as she left:  She is so beautiful.  That soft pale skin framing her moist, pink lips.  Her eyes, so deep, so sad and pretty.   Her treacle hair, like strands of all the sunshine that had ever been in my life rolled together so I could touch it.  Her breasts… oh sweet lord, her breasts.  It hit me, I’ll never see her naked again.  I’ll see her and I’ll see her face and though he may be kissing her lips I will see them but I’ll never see her breasts again.  I tried to imagine her naked, to snatch at the memory before it fled but it was too late, as if I’d let it fall from my hands in to a sea of despondency.  I’d lost her in more ways than I could bear to take in.

Every atom in the room and the flat above and the sky above that fell in on me all at once with an unbearable density.  At that moment I did not want to die, I did not want the suffering to end, I only wanted not to exist and to never have existed because this pain could never end; it was simply not possible that such a feeling of utter desolation could ever pass.  Nothing could be the same; no laughter could ever feel as if it was not mocking laughter, deriding me for being such a fool that I could not do all I could ever do to hold on to this angel, no matter how tired my arms.  No smile would ever not be a smile of pity for how much of a cretin, how much of a total, total arsehole I was.  You fucking idiot.  You cunt.  You stupid, fucking moron.  How did you do this to yourself?  How was it allowed to happen?  All you had to do was everything you possibly could.  Too much fucking bother, wasn’t it, you lazy, selfish prick?  I was overcome with unimaginable loathing for the lamentable tosser I had become.  I deserved every ounce of pain I carried and if I had the energy I’d have made it in to a physical from that I could at least acknowledge with the letting of blood.  I wanted that pain to be visible so I could carry it before me like a penance for the rest of my time.

I was shifted from thoughts of this abstract hopelessness by a knock on the door.  Surely not?  She’d changed her mind?  She’d realised how much I loved her and how nobody else could ever come close to matching my adoration and she’d let me try again.  I’d do everything I could to keep her if only it could be true, oh please, God, let it be!

It was Jason.

“You ok mate?”