Holes for Faces (14 page)

“I still don’t drive, mummy. One of the trains was held up and we missed a connection.”

“You want to get yourself another man. Never mind, you’ll always have Davy,” his grandmother panted as she waddled to embrace him.

Her clasp was even fatter than last time. It smelled of clothes he thought could be as old as she was, and of perfume that didn’t quite disguise a further staleness he was afraid was her. His embarrassment was aggravated by a car that slowed outside the house, though the driver was only admiring the Christmas display. When his grandmother abruptly released him he thought she’d noticed his reaction, but she was peering at the sleigh. “Has he got down?” she whispered.

David understood before his mother seemed to. He retreated along the path between the flower-beds full of grass to squint past the lights that flashed
MERRY CHRISTMAS
above the bedroom windows. The second Santa was still perched on the roof; a wind set the illuminated figure rocking back and forth as if with silent laughter. “He’s there,” David said.

“I expect he has to be in lots of places at once.”

Now that he was nearly eight, David knew that his father had always been Santa. Before he could say as much, his grandmother plodded to gaze at the roof. “Do you like him?”

“I like coming to see all your Christmas things.”

“I’m not so fond of him. He looks too empty for my liking.” As the figure shifted in another wind she shouted “You stay up there where you belong. Never mind thinking of jumping on us.”

David’s grandfather hurried out to her, his slippers flapping on his thin feet, his reduced face wincing. “Come inside, Dora. You’ll have the neighbours looking.”

“I don’t care about the fat old thing,” she said loud enough to be heard on the roof and tramped into the house. “You can take your mummy’s case up, can’t you, David? You’re a big strong boy now.”

He enjoyed hauling the wheeled suitcase on its leash—it was like having a dog he could talk to, sometimes not only in his head—but bumping the luggage upstairs risked snagging the already threadbare carpet, and so his mother supported the burden. “I’ll just unpack quickly,” she told him. “Go down and see if anyone needs help.”

He used the frilly toilet in the equally pink bathroom and lingered until his mother asked if he was all right. He was trying to stay clear of the argument he could just hear through the salmon carpet. As he ventured downstairs his grandmother pounced on some remark so muted it was almost silent. “You do better, then. Let’s see you cook.”

He could smell the subject of the disagreement. Once he’d finished setting the table from the tray with which his grandfather sent him out of the kitchen, he and his mother saw it too: a casserole encrusted with gravy and containing a shrivelled lump of beef. Potatoes roasted close to impenetrability came with it, and green beans from which someone had tried to scrape the worst of the charring. “It’s not as bad as it looks, is it?” David’s grandmother said through her first mouthful. “I expect it’s like having a barbecue, Davy.”

“I don’t know,” he confessed, never having had one.

“They’ve no idea, these men, have they, Jane? They don’t have to keep dinner waiting for people. I expect your hubby’s the same.”

“Was, but can we not talk about him?”

“He’s learned his lesson, then. No call to make that face at me, Tom. I’m only saying Davy’s father—Oh, you’ve split up, Jane, haven’t you. Sorry about my big fat trap. Sorry Davy too.”

“Just eat what you want,” his grandfather advised him, “and then you’d best be scampering off to bed so Santa can make his deliveries.”

“We all want to be tucked up before he’s on the move,” said his grandmother before remembering to smile.

Santa had gone away like David’s father, and David was too old to miss either of them. He managed to breach the carapace of a second potato and chewed several forkfuls of dried-up beef, but the burned remains of beans defeated him. All the same, he thanked his grandmother as he stood up. “There’s a good boy,” she said rather too loudly, as if interceding with someone on his behalf. “Do your best to go to sleep.”

That sounded like an inexplicit warning, and was one of the elements that kept him awake in his bedroom, which was no larger than his room in the flat he’d moved to with his mother. Despite their heaviness, the curtains admitted a repetitive flicker from the letters
ERR
above the window, and a buzz that suggested an insect was hovering over the bed. He could just hear voices downstairs, which gave him the impression that they didn’t want him to know what they were saying. He was most troubled by a hollow creaking that reminded him of someone in a rocking chair, but overhead. The Santa figure must be swaying in the wind, not doing its best to heave itself free. David was too old for stories: while real ones didn’t always stay true, that wasn’t an excuse to make any up. Still, he was glad to hear his mother and her parents coming upstairs at last, lowering their voices to compensate. He heard doors shutting for the night, and then a nervous question from his grandmother through the wall between their rooms. “What’s he doing? Is he loose?”

“If he falls he falls,” his grandfather said barely audibly, “and good riddance to him if he’s getting on your nerves. For pity’s sake come to bed.”

David tried not to find this more disturbing than the notion that his parents had shared one. Rather than hear the mattress sag under the weight his grandmother had put on, he tugged the quilt over his head. His grasp must have slackened when he drifted off to sleep, because he was roused by a voice. It was outside the house but too close to the window.

It was his grandfather’s. David was disconcerted by the notion that the old man had clambered onto the roof until he realised his grandfather was calling out of the adjacent window. “What do you think you’re doing, Dora? Come in before you catch your death.”

“I’m seeing he’s stayed where he’s meant to be,” David’s grandmother responded from below. “Yes, you know I’m talking about you, don’t you. Never mind pretending you didn’t nod.”

“Get in for the Lord’s sake,” his grandfather urged, underlining his words with a rumble of the sash. David heard him pad across the room and as rapidly, if more stealthily, down the stairs. A bated argument grew increasingly stifled as it ascended to the bedroom. David had refrained from looking out of the window for fear of embarrassing his grandparents, but now he was nervous that his mother would be drawn to find out what was happening. He mustn’t go to her; he had to be a man, as she kept telling him, and not one like his father, who ran off to women because there was so little to him. In time the muttering beyond the wall subsided, and David was alone with the insistence of electricity and the restlessness on the roof.

When he opened his eyes the curtains had acquired a hem of daylight. It was Christmas Day. Last year he’d run downstairs to handle all the packages addressed to him under the tree and guess at their contents, but now he was wary of encountering his grandparents by himself in case he betrayed he was concealing their secret. As he lay hoping that his grandmother had slept off her condition, he heard his mother in the kitchen. “Let me make breakfast, mummy. It can be a little extra present for you.”

He didn’t venture down until she called him. “Here’s the Christmas boy,” his grandmother shouted as if he was responsible for the occasion, and dealt him such a hug that he struggled within himself. “Eat up or you won’t grow.”

Her onslaught had dislodged a taste of last night’s food. He did his best to bury it under his breakfast, then volunteered to wash up the plates and utensils and dry them as well. Before he finished she was crying “Hurry up so we can see what Santa’s brought. I’m as excited as you, Davy.”

He hoped she was only making these remarks on his behalf, not somehow growing younger than he was. In the front room his grandfather distributed the presents while the bulbs on the tree flashed patterns that made David think of secret messages. His grandparents had wrapped him up puzzle books and tales of heroic boys, his mother’s gifts to him were games for his home computer. “Thank you,” he said, sometimes dutifully.

It was the last computer game that prompted his grandmother to ask “Who are you thanking?” At once, as if she feared she’d spoiled the day for him, she added “I expect he’s listening.”

“Nobody’s listening,” his grandfather objected. “Nobody’s there.”

“Don’t say things like that, Tom, not in front of Davy.”

“That isn’t necessary, mummy. You know the truth, don’t you, David? Tell your grandmother.”

“Santa’s just a fairy tale,” David said, although it felt like robbing a younger child of an illusion. “Really people have to save up to buy presents.”

“He had to know when we’ve so much less coming in this Christmas,” said his mother. “You see how good he’s being. I believe he’s taken it better than I did.”

“I’m sorry if I upset you, Davy.”

“You didn’t,” David said, not least because his grandmother’s eyes looked dangerously moist. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”

Her face was already quivering as if there was too much of it to hold still. When she shook her head her cheeks wobbled like a whitish rubber mask that was about to fall loose. He didn’t know whether she meant to answer him or had strayed onto another subject as she peered towards the window. “There’s nothing to him at all then, is there? He’s just an empty old shell. Can’t we get him down now?”

“Better wait till the new year,” David’s grandfather said, and with sudden bitterness “We don’t want any more bad luck.”

Her faded sunken armchair creaked with relief as she levered herself to her feet. “Where are you going?” her husband protested and limped after her, out of the front door. He murmured at her while she stared up at the roof. At least she didn’t shout, but she began to talk not much less quietly as she returned to the house. “I don’t like him moving about with nothing inside him,” she said before she appeared to recollect David’s presence. “Maybe he’s like one of those beans with a worm inside, Davy, that used to jig about all the time.”

While David didn’t understand and was unsure he wanted to, his mother’s hasty intervention wasn’t reassuring either. “Shall we play some games? What would you like to play, mummy?”

“What do you call it, Lollopy. The one with all the little houses. Too little for any big fat things to climb on. Lollopy.”

“Monopoly.”

“Lollopy,” David’s grandmother maintained, only to continue “I don’t want to play that. Too many sums. What’s your favourite, Davy?”

Monopoly was, but he didn’t want to add to all the tensions that he sensed rather than comprehended. “Whatever yours is.”

“Ludo,” she cried and clapped her hands. “I’d play it every Sunday with your granny and grandpa when I was Davy’s age, Jane.”

He wondered if she wasn’t just remembering but behaving as she used to. She pleaded to be allowed to move her counters whenever she failed to throw a six, and kept trying to move more than she threw. David would have let her win, but his grandfather persisted in reminding her that she had to cast the precise amount to guide her counters home. After several games in which his grandmother squinted with increasingly less comical suspicion at her opponents’ moves, David’s mother said “Who’d like to go out for a walk?”

Apparently everyone did, which meant they couldn’t go fast or far. David felt out of place compared with the boys he saw riding their Christmas bicycles or brandishing their Christmas weapons. Beneath a sky frosty with cloud, all the decorations in the duplicated streets looked deadened by the pale sunlight, though they were still among the very few elements that distinguished one squat boxy house from another. “They’re not as good as ours, are they?” his grandmother kept remarking when she wasn’t frowning at the roofs. “He’s not there either,” he heard her mutter more than once, and as her house came in sight “See, he didn’t follow us. We’d have heard him.”

She was saying that nothing had moved or could move, David tried to think, but he was nervous of returning to the house. The preparation of Christmas dinner proved to be reason enough. “Too many women in this kitchen,” his mother was told when she offered to help, but his grandmother had to be reminded to turn the oven on, and she made to take the turkey out too soon more than once. Between these incidents she disagreed with her husband and her daughter about various memories of theirs while David tried to stay low in a book of mazes he had to trace with a pencil. At dinner he could tell that his mother was willing him to clean his plate so as not to distress his grandmother. He did his best, and struggled to ignore pangs of indigestion as he washed up, and then as his grandmother kept talking about if not to every television programme her husband put on. “Not very Christmassy,” she commented on all of them, and followed the remark with at least a glance towards the curtained window. Waiting for her to say worse, and his impression that his mother and grandfather were too, kept clenching David’s stomach well before his mother declared “I think it’s time someone was in bed.”

As his grandmother’s lips searched for an expression he wondered if she assumed that her daughter meant her. “I’m going,” he said and had to be called back to be hugged and kissed and wished happy Christmas thrice.

He used the toilet, having pulled the chain to cover up his noises, and huddled in bed. He had a sense of hiding behind the scenes, the way he’d waited offstage at school to perform a line about Jesus last year, when his parents had held hands at the sight of him. The flickers and the buzzing that the bedroom curtains failed to exclude could have been stage effects, while over the mumbling of the television downstairs he heard sounds of imminent drama. At least there was no creaking on the roof. He did his best to remember last Christmas as a sharp stale taste of this one continued its antics inside him, until the memories blurred into the beginnings of a dream and let him sleep.