The Ghosts of Christmas Page 3

  She hits the wall and bounces off it. She falls, grabbing her nose. She looks so capable and organised I know she could hit me hard, I know she could defend herself, but she just drops to the ground and puts her hands to her face. I will not make her fight. She can control herself and I can’t.

  Ben rushes in and grabs me. I don’t want him to touch me. I struggle.

  ‘What are you doing?!’ He’s shouting at me.

  I can feel this mind burning up. If I stay much longer, I’ll start damaging it. I half want to.

  I ripped the crown from my head and threw it onto the ground. I burst into tears. I put my hands on my belly to comfort myself. But I found no comfort there.

  But my pain wasn’t important. It wasn’t! The mistakes I’d made were what was important. What happened to Alice, that was what was important.

  I got up and walked around the room. If I stopped now, I was thinking, the rest of my life would be a tragedy, I would be forever anticipating what was written, or trying…hopelessly, yes, there was nothing in the research then that said I had any hope…to change it. I would be living without hope. I could do that. But the important thing was what that burden would do to Alice… If I was going to be allowed to keep Alice, after what I’d seen.

  I could go to the airport now. I could leave Ben asleep, while he was still my Ben, and have the baby in France, and break history… No I couldn’t. Something would get me back to what I’d seen. Maybe something cosmic and violent that wouldn’t respect the human mind’s need for narrative. That was what the maths said. Alice shouldn’t have that in her life. Alice shouldn’t have me in her life.

  But the me who wrote the first note wanted me not to try to visit the future again. When she knew I had. Did she think that was possible? Did I learn something in the next year that hinted that it might be? Why didn’t I address that in future notes?

  Because of anger? Because of fatalism? Because of a desire to hurt myself?

  But…if there was even a chance it might be possible…

  I slowly squatted and picked up the crown.

  I’ve moved. I’m in a different house. Smaller. I walk quickly through the rooms, searching. I have to support myself against the wall in relief when I see Alice. There she is, in her own room, making a wall out of cardboard wrapping-paper rolls. Still the love in me. I don’t think that’s ever going to go. It feels like…a condition. A good disease this mind lives with. But what’s she doing alone in here? Did I make her flee here, exile her here?

  She looks up at me and smiles. No. No, I didn’t.

  I find the note this time on the kitchen table. It’s quite long, it’s apologetic. It tells me straight away that Ben and… Jessica, the young woman’s name is Jessica…understood quite quickly after I left her mind and she started apologising. She apologises too for not doing anything to stop what happened. But she says she really wasn’t setting me up for it. She says she’s still working at the Project. She says she’s still looking for a way to change time, but hasn’t much hope of finding one.

  I put down the letter feeling…hatred. For her. For her weakness. For her acceptance. That whole letter feels like…acting. Like she’s saying something because she thinks she should.

  From the other room comes the sound of Alice starting to cry. She’s hurt herself somehow. I feel the urge from this mind to go immediately to her. But I… I actually hesitate. For the first time there is a distance. I’m a stranger from years ago. This isn’t really my child. This is her child.

  The next few visits were like an exhibition of time-lapse photography about the disintegration of a mother and child’s relationship. Except calling it that suggests a distance, and I was amongst it, complicit in it.

  ‘You get so weird!’ she’s shouting at me. ‘It’s like you get frightened every Christmas that I’ll go away with Dad and Jessica and never come back! I want to! I want to go away!’

  But the next Christmas she’s still there.

  ‘Will you just listen to me? You look at me sometimes like I’m not real, like I’m not human!’ The mind of the future learned that from her memory of my experiences, I guess, learned that from her own experience of being a teenager with added context. Alice has had to fight for her mother to see her as an actual human being. I did that. I mean, I did that to her. I try now to reach out, but she sees how artificial it looks and shies away.

  ‘Do I…neglect you?’ I ask her.

  She swears at me, and says yes. But then she would, wouldn’t she?

  And then the next year she’s not there.

  A note says the bitch arranged for her to stay with Ben and Jessica, and it all got too much in terms of anticipation, and she’s sure she’ll be back next time. She’s certain of that. She’s sorry, and she…hopes I am too?!

  I go to the wall in the hall. I’ve always used bloody walls to do my fighting. I stand close to it. And as hard as I can I butt my head against it. I love the roaring of the mind I’m in as the pain hits us both. Feel that, you bitch, do something about that! I do it again. And then my head starts to swim and I don’t think I can do it again, and I get out just as the darkness hits.

  That was why she ‘hoped I was sorry too’, because she knew that was coming.

  I wonder how much I injured myself? She couldn’t have known when she wrote the note. She was so bloody weak she didn’t even try to ask me not to do it.

  I am such a bully.

  But I’m only doing it to myself.

  There’s no sign of Alice for the next two Christmases. When the bitch was certain she’d be back next time. The liar. There are just some very needy letters. Which show no sign of brain damage, thank God.

  Then there’s Alice, sitting opposite me. She wears fashions designed to shock. ‘Christmas Day,’ she says, ‘time for you to go insane and hurt yourself, only today I’m trapped with you. What joy.’

  I discover that Ben and Jessica are on holiday abroad with their own…children…this year. And that the bitch has done…some sort of harm to herself on each of these days Alice wasn’t here, obviously after I left. Is that just self-harm, am I actually capable of…? Well, I suppose I know I am. Or is she trying to offer some explanation for that one time, or to use it to try to hurt Alice emotionally?

  ‘No insanity this year,’ I say, trying to make my voice sound calm. And it sounds weird. It sounds old. It sounds like I’ve put inverted commas around ‘insanity’. Like I’m trying to put distance between my own actions, being wry about my own weakness…like Mum always is.

  I try to have fun with Alice in the ten minutes I’ve got. She shuts herself in her room when I get too cloying. I try to enter. She slams herself against the door. I get angry, though the weak woman I’m in really doesn’t want to, and try to muscle in. But she grabs me, she’s stronger than me.

  She slams me against the wall. And I burst into tears. And she steps back, shaking her head in mocking disbelief at…all I’ve done to her.

  I slipped the crown from my head.

  I was staring into space. And then my phone rang. The display said it was Mum. And I thought now of all the times, and then I thought no, I have a cover to maintain here, I don’t want her calling Ben… I didn’t want to go home to Ben…

  I took a deep breath, and answered.

  ‘Is there…news?’ she asked. I heard that wry, anxious tone in her voice again. Did I ever think of that sound as anxious before? ‘You are due today, aren’t you?’

  I told her that I was, but it didn’t feel like it was going to be today, and that I’d call her immediately when anything started to happen. I stopped then, realising that actually, I did know it was going to be today; Ben said ‘Happy Christmas birthday’’ to Alice. But I couldn’t tell her that I knew that and I didn’t want to tell her I felt something I didn’t feel. ‘Merry Christmas,’ I said, remembering the pleasantries, which she hadn’t.

  She repeated that, an edge in her voice again. ‘I was hoping that I might see you today, but I suppose that�
��s impossible, even though the baby isn’t coming. You’ve got much more important things to do.’ And the words hurt as much as they always did, but they weren’t a dull ache now, but a bright pain. Because I heard them not as barbs to make me guilty, but as being exactly like the tone of the letters the bitch had left for me. Pained, pleading…weak. That was why I’d slammed her against the wall, all those years ago, because she was weak, because I could.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Oh. I’m always sorry to hear you say that,’ she said.

  I said I’d call her as soon as anything happened.

  Once as she was off the phone, I picked up the crown and held it in my hands like I was in a Shakespeare play. I was so poetically contemplating it. I felt like laughing at my own presumption at having opened up my womb and taken a good look at where Jacob Marley had come from.

  I had hurt my own mother. I had never made that up to her. I never could. But I hadn’t tried. I had hated her for what I had done. And I could not stop. And in the future, the reflection was as bad as the shadow. I had become my mother. And I had created a daughter who felt exactly the same way about me. And I had created a yearly hell for my future self, making sure she never forgot the lesson I had learned on this day.

  I would release myself from it. That’s what I decided.

  I put the crown on for the last time.

  I’m standing there with my daughter. She looks to be in her late twenties. Tidy now. A worried look on her face. She’s back for a family Christmas, but she knows there’ll be trouble as always. She’s been waiting for it. She looks kinder. She looks guilty. The room is bare of decoration. Like the bitch…like my victim…has decided not to make the effort anymore.

  ‘Get away from me,’ I tell Alice, immediately, ‘get out of this house.’ Because I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to stay inside this mind. I’m going to break it. I’m going to give myself the release of knowing I’m going to go mad, at the age of… I look around and find a conveniently placed calendar. Which was unbelievably accommodating of her, to know what I’m about to do and still do that. I will go mad at the age of fifty-six. I have a finish line. It’s a relief. Perhaps she wants this too.

  ‘Mum,’ says Alice, ‘Mum, please—!’ And she sounds desperate and worried for herself as well as for me, and still not understanding what all this is about.

  But then her expression…changes. It suddenly becomes determined and calm. ‘Mum, please don’t do this. I know we only have minutes—’

  ‘What? Did I tell you about—?’

  ‘No, this is an older Alice. I’m working on the same technology now. I’ve come back to talk to you.’

  It takes me a moment to take that in. ‘You mean, you’ve found a way to change time?’

  ‘No. What’s written is written. Immediately after we have this conversation, and we’ve both left these bodies, you tell me everything about what you’ve been doing.’

  ‘Why…do I do that?’ I can feel the sound of my mother’s weakness in my voice.

  ‘Because after you leave here, you go forward five years and see me again.’ She takes my hands in hers and looks into my eyes. I can’t see the hurt there. The hurt I put there. And I can see a reflection too.

  Can I believe her?

  She sees me hesitate. And she grows determined. ‘I’ll stay as long as you will,’ she says. ‘You might do this to yourself, but I know you’d never let your child suffer.’

  I think about it. I do myself the courtesy of that. I toy with the horror of doing that. And then I look again into her face, and I know I’m powerless in the face of love.

  I’m looking into the face of someone I don’t expect to see. It’s David. Our experimental subject. The schizophrenic. Only now he’s a lot older, and…oh, his face…he’s lost such tension about his jaw. Beside him stands Alice, five years older.

  He reaches out a hand and touches my cheek.

  I shy away from him. What?!

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have done that. We’re…a couple, okay? We’ve been together for several years now. Hello you from the past. Thank you for the last four years of excellent family Christmases.’ He gestures to decorations and cards all around.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ says Alice. She reaches down and…oh, there’s a crib there. She’s picked up a baby. ‘This is my daughter, Cyala.’

  I walk slowly over. It feels as odd and as huge as walking as a child did. I look into the face of my granddaughter.

  David, taking care not to touch me, joins me beside them. ‘It’s so interesting,’ he says, ‘seeing you from this new angle. Seeing a cross section of you. You look younger!’

  ‘Quickly,’ says Alice.

  ‘Okay, okay.’ He looks back to me. And I can’t help but examine his face, try to find the attraction I must later feel. And yes, it’s there. I just never saw him in this way before. ‘Listen, this is what you told me to say to you, and I’m glad that, from what Alice has discovered, it seems I can’t mess up my lines. It’s true that you and Alice here fought, fought physically, like you say you and your mum did. Though I once saw her deny that to your face, by the way. She sounded like you were accusing her of something, and she kept on insisting it hadn’t happened until you got angry and then finally she agreed like she was just going along with it. Oh God, this is so weird—’ He picked up some sort of thin screen where I recognised something quite like my handwriting. ‘I was sure I added to what I was supposed to say there, but now it turns out it’s written down here, and I’m not sure that it was…before. I guess your memory didn’t quite get every detail of this correct. Or perhaps there’s a certain…kindness, a mercy to time? Anyway!’ He put down the screen again, certain he wouldn’t need it. ‘But the important thing is, you only see one day. You don’t see all the good stuff. There were long stretches of good stuff. You didn’t create a monster, any more than your mum created a monster in you. You both just made people.’ He dares to actually touch me, and now I let him. ‘What you did led to a cure for people like me. And it changed how people see themselves and the world, and that’s been good and bad, it isn’t a utopia outside these walls and it isn’t a wasteland, she wanted me to emphasise that, it’s just people doing stuff as usual. And these are all your words, not mine, but I agree with them…you are not Ebenezer Scrooge, to be changed from one thing into another. Neither was your mother. Even knowing all of this is fixed, even knowing everything that happened, even if you only know the bad, you’d do it all anyway.’

  And he kisses me. Which makes me feel guilty and hopeful at the same time.

  And I let go.

  I slowly put down the crown.

  I stood up. I’d been there less than an hour. I went back to my car.

  I remember the drive home through those still empty streets. I remember how it all settled into my mind, how a different me was born in those moments. I knew what certain aspects of my life to come would be like. I had memories of the future. That weight would always be with me. I regretted having looked. I still do. Despite everything it led to, for me and science and the world. I tell people they don’t want to look into their future selves. But they usually go ahead and do it. And then they have to come to the same sort of accommodation that a lot of people have, that human life will go on, and that it’s bigger than them, and that they can only do what they can do. To some, that fatalism has proven to be a relief. But it’s driven some to suicide. It has, I think, on average, started to make the world a less extreme place. There is only so much we can do. And we don’t see the rest of the year. So we might as well be kind to one another.

  There are those who say they’ve glimpsed a pattern in it all. That the whole thing, as seen from many different angles, is indeed like writing. That, I suppose, is the revelation, that we’re not the writers, we’re what’s being written.

  I write now from the perspective of the day after my younger self stopped visiting. I’m relieved to be free of that bitch. Though
, of course, I knew everything she was going to do. The rest of my life now seems like a blessed release. I wrote every note as I remembered them, and sometimes that squared with how I was feeling at the time, and sometimes I was playing a part…for whose benefit, I don’t know.

  I remember walking back into my house and finding Ben just waking up. And he looked at me, at the doubtless strange expression on my face, and in that moment I recall thinking I saw his expression change too. By some infinitesimal amount. I have come to think that was when he started, somewhere deep inside, the chain reaction of particle trails that took him from potentially caring dad to letting himself off the hook.

  But that might equally just be the story I tell myself about that moment.

  What each of us is is but a line in a story that resonates with every other line. Who we are is distributed. In all sorts of ways. And we can’t know them all.

  And then I felt something give. There was actually a small sound in the quiet. Liquid splashed down my legs. And as I knew I was going to, I went into labour on Christmas Day.

  Ben leaped out of bed and ran to me, and we headed out to the car. Outside, the birds were singing. Of course they were.

  ‘You’re going to be fine,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be a great mother.’

  ‘Up to a point,’ I said.

  Copyright © 2012 by Paul Cornell

  Art copyright © 2012 by Scott Bakal