The Ghosts of Christmas Read online

  I quickly put the crown back on my head. I had a fix now, I could see where particular patterns took me, I could get to—

  Oh. Much clearer now. I must be about two years old. I’m walking around an empty room, marching, raising my knees and then lowering them, as if that’s important.

  Oh, I can think that. There’s room for that thought in my head. I’m able to internally comment on my own condition. As an adult. As a toddler.

  Can I control…? I lower my foot. I stand there, inhabiting my toddler body, aware of it, the smallness of everything. But my fingers feel huge. And awkward. It’s like wearing oven gloves. I don’t want to touch anything. I know I’d break it.

  And that would be terrible.

  I turn my head. I put my foot forward. It’s not like learning to drive, I already know how all this is done, it’s just slightly different, like driving in America. I can hear…

  Words I understand. ‘Merry Christmas!’ From through the door. Oh, the door. The vase with a crack in it. The picture of a Spanish lady that Dad cut off the side of a crate of oranges and put in a frame. The smell of the carpet, close up. Oh, reactions to the smell, lots of memories, associations, piling in.

  No! No! I can’t take that! I can’t understand that! I haven’t built those memories yet!

  Is this why I’ve always felt such enormous meaningless meaning about those objects and smells? I put it all out of my mind, and try to just be. And it’s okay. It’s okay.

  The Christmas tree is enormous. With opened presents at the bottom, and I’m not too interested in those presents, which is weird, they’ve been left there, amongst the wrapping. The wrapping is better. This mind doesn’t have signifiers for wrapping and tree yet, this is just a lot of weird stuff that happens, like all the other weird stuff that happens.

  I head through the doorway. Step, step, step.

  Into the hall. All sorts of differences from now, all sorts of objects with associations, but no, never mind the fondness and horror around you.

  I step carefully into the kitchen.

  And I’m looking up at the enormous figure of my mother, who is talking to…who is that? A woman in a headscarf. Auntie someone…oh, she died. I know she died! And I forgot her completely! Because she died!

  I can’t stop this little body from starting to shake. I’m going to cry. But I mustn’t!

  ‘Oh, there she goes again,’ says Mum, a sigh in her voice. ‘It’s Christmas, you mustn’t cry at Christmas.’

  ‘She wants to know where her daddy is,’ says the dead auntie. ‘He’s down the pub.’

  ‘Don’t tell her that!’ That sudden fear in her voice. And the wryness that always went along with that fear. As if she was mocking herself for her weakness.

  ‘She can’t understand yet. Oh, look at that. Is she meant to be walking like that?’ And oh no, Mum’s looking scared at me too. Am I walking like I don’t know how, or like an adult?

  Mummy grabs me up into her arms and looks and looks at me, and I try to be a child in response to the fear in her face…but I have a terrible feeling that I look right into those eyes as me. I’m scaring her, like a child possessed!

  I took the crown off more slowly that time. And then immediately put it on again. And now I knew I was picking at a scab. Now I knew and I didn’t care. I wanted to know what everything in my mother’s face at that moment meant.

  I’m seven and I’m staring at nothing under the tree. I’m up early and I’m waiting. Something must soon appear under the tree. There was nothing in the stocking at the end of my bed, but they/Father Christmas/they/Father Christmas/they might not have known I’d put out a stocking.

  I hear the door to my parents’ bedroom opening. I tense up. So much that it hurts. My dad enters the room and sighs to see me there. I bounce on my heels expectantly. I do a little dance that the connections between my muscles and my memory tell me now was programmed into me by a children’s TV show.

  He looks at me like I’m some terrible demand. ‘You’re too old for this now,’ he says. And I remember. I remember this from my own memory. I’d forgotten this. I hadn’t forgotten. ‘I’m off down the shops to get you some presents. If I can find any shops that are open. If you’d stayed asleep until you were supposed to, they’d have been waiting for you. Don’t look at me like that. You knew there wasn’t any such thing as Father Christmas.’

  He takes his car keys from the table and goes outside in his dressing gown, and drives off in the car, in his dressing gown.

  I’m eight, and I’m staring at a huge pile of presents under the tree, things I wanted but have been carefully not saying anything about, things that are far too expensive. Mum and Dad are standing there, and as I walk into the room, eight-year-old walk, trying, no idea how, looking at my mum’s face, which is again scared, just turned scared in the second she saw me…but Dad starts clapping, actually applauding, and then Mum does too.

  ‘I told you I’d make it up to you,’ says Dad. I don’t remember him telling me. ‘I told you.’ This is too much. This is too much. I don’t know how I’m supposed to react. I don’t know how in this mind or outside of it.

  I sit down beside the presents. I lower my head to the ground. And I stay there, to the point where I’m urging this body to get up, to show some bloody gratitude! But it stays there. I’m just a doll, and I stay there. And I can’t make younger me move and look. I don’t want to.

  I’m nine, and I’m sitting at the dinner table, with Christmas dinner in front of me. Mum is saying grace, which is scary, because she only does it at Christmas, and it’s a whole weird thing, and oh, I’m thinking, I’m feeling weird again, I’m feeling weird like I always feel on Christmas Day. Is this because of her doing that?

  I don’t think I’m going to be able to leave any knowledge about what’s actually going on in the mind I’m visiting. The transmission of information is only one way. I’m a voice that can suggest muscle movement, but I’m a very quiet one.

  I’m fifteen. Oh. This is the Christmas after Dad died. And I’m…drunk. No, I wasn’t. I’m not. It just feels like I am. What’s inside my head is…huge. I hate having it in here with me. Right now. I feel like I’m…possessed. And I think it was like that in here before I arrived to join in. The shape of what I’m in is different. It feels…wounded. Oh God, did I hurt it already? No. I’m still me here and now. I wouldn’t be if I’d hurt my young brain back then. No, I, I sort of remember. This is just what it was like being fifteen. My mind feels…like it’s shaped awkwardly, not like it’s wounded. All this…fury. I can feel the weight of the world limiting me. I can feel a terrible force towards action. Do something, now! Why aren’t all these idiots around me doing something, when I know so well what they should do?! And God, God, I am horny even during this, which is, which is…terrible.

  I’m bellowing at Mum, who’s trying to raise her voice to shout over me at the door of my room. ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ I’m shouting. ‘We never have a good Christmas because of you! Dad would always try to make it a good Christmas, but he had to deal with you! Stop being afraid!’

  I know as I yell this that it isn’t true. I know now and I know then.

  She slams the door of my room against the wall and marches in, raising a shaking finger—

  I grab her. I grab her and I feel the frailness of her as I grab her, and I use all my strength, and it’s lots, and I shove her reeling out of the door, and she crashes into the far wall and I run at her and I slam her into it again, so the back of her head hits the wall and I meant to do it and I don’t, I so terribly don’t. I’m beating up an old woman!

  I manage to stop myself from doing that. Just. My new self and old self manage at the same time. I let go.

  She bursts out crying. So do I.

  ‘Stop doing that to me!’ I yell.

  ‘I worry about you,’ she manages to sob. ‘It’s because I worry about you.’

  Is it just at Christmas she worries? I think hard about saying it, and this body
says it. My voice sounds odd saying it. ‘Is it just at Christmas?’

  She’s silent, looking scared at how I sounded. Or, oh God, is she afraid of me now?

  This is what did it, I realise. I make this mind go weird at Christmas, and they always noticed. It’s great they noticed. What I grew up with, how I was brought up, is them reacting to that, expecting that, for the rest of the year. This makes sense, I’ve solved it! I’ve solved who I am! Who I am is my own fault! I’m a self-fulfilling prophecy!

  Well, that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Should have known that. Everybody should realise that about themselves. Simple!

  I find that I’m smiling suddenly and Mum bursts into tears again. To her, it must seem like she’s looking at a complete psycho.

  I tore off the crown. I remembered doing that to her. Then I let myself forget it. But I never did. And that wasn’t the only time. Lots of grabbing her. On the verge of hitting her. Is that a thing, being abused by one’s child? It got lost in the layers of who she and I were, and there I was, in it, and suddenly it was the most important thing. And now it was again.

  Because of Dad dying, I thought, because of that teenage brain, and then I thought no, that’s letting myself off the hook.

  Guilty.

  But beyond that, my teenage-influenced self had been right: I’d found what I’d gone looking for. I’d messed up my own childhood by what I was doing here. That was a neat end to the story, wasn’t it? Yes, my parents had been terribly lacking on occasion. But they’d had something beyond the norm to deal with. And I’d been…terrifying, horrible, beyond that poor frail woman’s ability to deal with.

  But that only let them off the hook…up to a point.

  Hadn’t that bit with there being no presents, that bit with the car, weren’t those beyond normal? Had me being in that mind on just one day of the year really been such a big factor?

  Would I end up doing anything like that? Would I be a good parent?

  Perhaps I should have left it there.

  But there was a way to know.

  In A Christmas Carol, we hear from charity collectors visiting Scrooge’s shop that when his partner Marley was alive, they both always gave generously. And you think therefore that Scrooge was a happy, open person then. But Scrooge doesn’t confirm that memory of theirs. When we meet Marley’s ghost, he’s weighed down by chains ‘he forged in life’. He’s warning Scrooge not to be like he was. So were the charity collectors lying or being too generous with their memory of Christmas past? Or is it just that they sometimes caught Scrooge and Marley on a good day? The latter doesn’t seem the sort of thing that happens to characters in stories. I’ve been told that story isn’t a good model for what happened to me. But perhaps, because of what’s written in the margins there, it is.

  I sat there thinking, the crown in my hands. I’d been my own ghost of Christmas future. But I could be a ghost of Christmas past too.

  Was I going to be a good parent?

  I could find out.

  I set the display to track the other side of the scale. To take me into the future, as we’d only speculated that some day might be possible. And I put the crown back on before I could think twice.

  Oh. Oh there she is. My baby is a she! I’m holding her in my arms. I love her more than I thought it was possible to love anything. The same way the big comfort thing loved me. And I didn’t understand that until I put those moments side by side. This mind I’m in now has changed so much. It’s hugely focussed on the little girl who’s asleep right here. It’s a warm feeling, but it’s…it’s hard too. Where did that come from? That worries me. She’s so little. This can’t be that far in the future. But I’ve changed so much. There’s a feeling of…this mind I’m in wanting to prove something. She wants to tell me it’s all going to be okay. That I have nothing but love inside me in this one year in the future. And I do…up to a point.

  Oh, there’s a piece of paper with the year written on it sitting on the arm of the chair right in front of me. It’s just next year. That’s my handwriting.

  The baby’s name is Alice, the writing continues. You don’t need to go any further to hear that. Please make this your last trip.

  Alice. That’s what we were planning to call her. Thank God. If it was something different, I’d now be wondering where that idea came from.

  Oh, I can feel it now. This mind has made room for me. It knew I’d be coming. Of course it did. She remembers what she did with the crown last year. But what does this mean? Why does future me want me to stop doing this? I try to reach across the distance between her and me, but I can only feel what she’s feeling, not hear her thoughts. And she had a year to prepare, that note must be all she wants to tell me. She wants me to feel that it’s all going to be okay…but she’s telling me it won’t be.

  Ben comes in. He doesn’t look very different. Unshaven. He’s smiling all over his face. He sits on the arm of the chair and looks down at his daughter, proud and utterly in love with her. The room is decorated. There are tiny presents under the tree, joint birthday and Christmas presents the little one is too small to understand. So, oh, she was born very near Christmas Day. We must make such a perfect image sitting together like this. I don’t think I can have told Ben about what I know will be happening to me at this moment on Christmas Day. I wouldn’t do that. I’d want to spare him.

  But…what’s this? I can feel my body move slightly away from him. It took me a second to realise it, because it’s so brilliant, and a little scary, to be suddenly in a body that’s not weighed down by the pregnancy, but… I’m bristling. I can feel a deep chemical anger. The teenager is in here again. But I look up at him and smile, and this mind lets me. And he’s so clearly still my Ben, absolutely the same, the Dad I knew he’d be when he asked and I said yes. It’s not like he’s started to beat me, I can’t feel that in this body, she’s not flinching, it’s like when I’m angry but I don’t feel allowed to express it.

  Is this, what, post-natal depression? Or the first sign of me doing unto others what was done to me? A pushed-down anger that might come spilling out?

  I don’t care what my one-year-older self wants me to do. She can’t know that much more than me. I need to know what this is.

  Alice is asleep in her cradle. She’s so much bigger, so quickly, two years old! Again, that bursting of love into my head. That’s reassuring. Another year on, I’m still feeling that.

  But the room…the room feels very different. Empty. There’s a tree, but it’s a little one. I make this body walk quickly through the rest of the house. The bathroom is a bit different, the bedroom is a bit different. Baby stuff everywhere, of course, but what’s missing? There’s…there’s nothing on that side of the room. I go back to the bathroom. There are no razors. No second toothbrush.

  Where’s Ben?

  I start looking in drawers, checking my email…but the password’s been changed. I can’t find anything about what’s happened. I search every inch of the house, desperate now, certain I’m going to find a funeral card or something. She knew this was going to happen to me, so wouldn’t the bitch have left one out in plain sight? Why doesn’t she want me to know? Oh please don’t be dead, Ben, please—!

  I end up meaninglessly, uselessly, looking in the last place, under the bed.

  And there’s a note, in my own handwriting.

  I hate you.

  She’s deliberately stopping me from finding out. I can’t let her.

  Alice is looking straight at me this time. ‘Presents,’ she says to me. ‘I have presents. And you have presents.’ And I can see behind her that that’s true.

  That rush of love again. That’s constant. I try to feel what’s natural and not be stiff and scary about it, and give her a big hug. ‘Does Daddy have presents?’

  She looks aside, squirms; she doesn’t know how to deal with that. Have I warned her about me? I don’t want to press her for answers. I don’t want to distress her.

  I need to keep going and find out
.

  I’m facing in the same direction, so it’s like the decor and contents of the room suddenly shift, just a little. Alice, in front of me, four now, is running in rings on the floor, obviously in the middle of, rather than anticipating something, so that’s good.

  Ben comes in. He’s alive! Oh thank God.

  I stand up at the sight of him. Has she told him about me? No, I never would. He looks so different. He’s clean shaven, smartly dressed. Did he go on a long journey somewhere? He hoists Alice into his arms and Alice laughs as he jumbles up her hair. ‘Happy Christmas birthday!’

  Alice sings it back to him, like it’s a thing they do together. So…everything’s all right? Why didn’t she want me to—?

  A young woman I don’t know comes in from the other room. She goes to Ben and puts a hand on his arm. Alice smiles at her.

  ‘We have to be gee oh aye en gee soon,’ he says to me.

  ‘Thanks for lunch,’ says the girl. ‘It was lovely.’

  The fury this time is my own. But it chimes with what’s inside this mind. She’s been holding it down. I take a step forward. And the young woman sees something in my eyes and takes a step back. And that little movement—

  No, it isn’t the movement, it isn’t what she does, this is all me—

  I march towards her. I’m taking in every feature of her. Every beautiful feature of that slightly aristocratic, kind-looking, caring face. I’m making a sound I’ve never heard before in the back of my throat. ‘Get away from him. Get your hands off him.’

  She’s trying to put up her hands and move away. She’s astonished. ‘I’m sorry—!’

  ‘What the hell?!’ Ben is staring at us. Alice has started yelling. Fearful monkey warning shouts.

  Something gives inside me. I rush at her. She runs.

  I catch her before she gets to the door. I grab her by both arms and throw her at the wall. I’m angry at her and at the mind I’m in too. Did she set me up for this?! Did she invite them here to punish me?! So she could let her anger out and not be responsible?!