‘What exactly?’
‘Magical,’ he said, but with a rising inflection so that instead of sounding certain he only sounded sort of desperate.
‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’ his sister asked. ‘You can’t afford to blow it, Henry.’
She was right. As always. There was so much to fix before the boys arrived. Henry checked every day but she was right about the weather too; there was no snow forecast. There was no forecast for anything much except low-level grey cloud. Sometimes the day had barely got going before it turned dark again.
Meanwhile Henry’s head was feverish, flurrying with all the details he had to get sorted. First off, the flat needed a lick of paint. Henry had bought the place ten months ago just after the divorce came through and so far he had taken no interest in it whatsoever. The flat – not even his flat, but the flat, as if it was a neutral space he’d drifted into and might leave at any moment, the middle of the night maybe, whenever the urge took him – the flat was somewhere Henry ate a takeaway after work and drank a glass of milk whilst watching television until his eyes burnt so hard they had no choice but to close. When he washed a mug or a plate he replaced it not in a cupboard but in its storage box. Sometimes he even re-wrapped it in newspaper; he found his belongings seemed super-imposed on his life and had nothing to do with him. Even his sons didn’t quite seem to fit. At the weekends Henry went to the park or he drove to his sister for a proper Sunday roast. Bea was five years younger than Henry but behaved like his mother. Well, someone had to, she often joked.
‘I wish I wasn’t going away,’ she said.
‘I’ll manage. It’s OK.’
‘I don’t even like skiing.’ They laughed. And then she asked, ‘So what will you do with the boys? Six days is a long time.’
‘Oh, I have lots planned.’
‘You do?’ He could hear the surprise in her voice and also relief. She was trying not to show it and this made him sad, for some reason.
‘Well, bye now. I must get on with things,’ he said.
Normally when Henry had an arrangement to see the boys it was only for the afternoon. He never met them at the old family house because he still couldn’t face going back; it made him feel too guilty and uncomfortable. He’d allow a few hours for the drive down the motorway, stopping at a service station for coffee, and there he’d plan all the things he might do with the boys, though when it came to it he always did the same thing and took them to the pictures. It was easier to watch a film than sit around a table, just the three of them, not knowing what to say. It was certainly easier than something like a museum. (‘And who even goes to museums?’ asked Conor. His older son had become so ashen and elongated it looked as if his height was robbing him of both colour and ballast. Feathery hints of a beard shadowed his jawline and upper lip; his face had a hard, unforgiving look. ‘I might like to go to a museum,’ said Owen. Unlike his fifteen-year-old brother, Owen had not grown at all.) After the film, there was always just enough time to eat. Sometimes Henry suggested Chinese food, but to his relief they always chose stuffed-crust pizzas, which they ate from the boxes in Henry’s car. There was something about the packaging and the car that kept everything small and temporary and eyes-down, where it was easiest. If Henry braved a question about school or home or Debbie, the boys said, ‘Fine.’ Everything was ‘fine’. No more, no less. It was like meeting an unfamiliar wall where there had once been plain, open spaces. Henry still couldn’t get the hang of it.
But there had been a shift. ‘An advancement,’ his sister called it. Now that Henry had landed a new job and settled into the flat, the boys were going to stay with him from 27 December to 1 January. It would be the longest period Henry had spent with his sons since his breakdown and the divorce. ‘Your looney tune,’ as his ex-wife Debbie referred to it, saying ‘toon’ to rhyme with ‘loon’.
Henry bought a tin of blue paint for the bedroom. He chose a cheap pine bunk bed in the sales with a matching set of drawers. He bought a set of matching plates and glasses with stems and a full set of cutlery. He tried to find a picture so that the flat would appear more lived-in and chose a reduced-price winter scene in a plastic clip-on frame because it looked seasonal, the trees piled with white, the deep troughs of snow, the young woman in her red coat and all those cartoon animals. The snow picture made Henry feel calm, as if a hand was resting on his shoulders and a soft voice was telling him to sleep. It was a long time since he’d felt like that. Often he sat looking at the picture, not thinking anything really, only looking. The young woman seemed happy but a part of him still felt sorry for her. He wondered what happened next in her story, because there must be a next part. Someone must have imagined it.
Just before Christmas, Henry bought a fir tree in a pot. Strictly speaking it was a reduced-price reject at the back of the grocery shop and it had grown crooked, drooping towards the left as if it was very tired and straining to lie down. (It made him think of Conor. And once it had made him think of Conor, Henry couldn’t just leave it there.) Both Henry and the grocer peered at the tree with their heads tilted to correct the angle. ‘I guess you could put a wedge under one side of the pot,’ said the grocer. Afterwards Henry hauled it up the communal stairs, shedding needles all the way, getting scratched and nicked, past the boxes and bikes and junk mail and bottles and takeaway packaging and all the other communal things people dumped outside their flats. He drove to a hardware shop on the edge of town and spent an hour trying to find the right Christmas lights and tinsel and baubles.
‘These are nice,’ the assistant said. She had soft brown eyes and a big ring through her nose as if she were searching for something to be attached to.
‘Are they?’ he asked.
She laughed. ‘Yes. The lights come with a remote control and six different settings. Your sons will like these.’ She smiled as she was bagging up his items and asked if he would like to go for a drink, but then she blushed so hard he wondered if he’d misheard. ‘See you around,’ she said.
Presents were more difficult. There wasn’t much money left once the month’s maintenance had gone into Debbie’s account and he had bought the beds and things for the flat. Henry asked the boys on the phone what they would like, but Conor grunted something that Henry didn’t like to ask him to repeat. Owen said he didn’t mind what he had for Christmas. He liked everything. When Henry texted Debbie the same question she replied, ‘Work it out.’
Henry bought computer games for the boys to play on their laptops. At least it would give them something to do. Passing a sports shop, he noticed a sign advertising cut-price sledges in the shapes of polar bears and penguins. ‘They’re a bargain, those,’ said the manager as he paid. She was a solid-looking, older woman with red hair and a smoker’s deep laugh. ‘They are made of foam. You can almost lift them with one finger. See?’ Henry explained his oldest son was fifteen and too old for sledges, but the woman gave another of her manly laughs. ‘No one’s too old for snow,’ she said. When Henry told his sister on the phone about the animal-shaped sledges, she sighed. ‘Why do you think they were cut-price, sweetheart?’ she asked. ‘It’s never going to snow.’
Henry waited for Debbie at the motorway service station. ‘They didn’t want to come,’ she said, squeezing past a Krispy Kreme Doughnut display case. The place was heaving with Christmas travellers. Conor and Owen trailed after Debbie like two shadows, one long and slow, one jumpy and small. Debbie extended her cheek mid-air. ‘I’m just warning you.’ To Henry’s surprise, she accepted his offer to buy refreshments and they crammed, all four of them, around a laminated table, with paper cups the size of vases and drinks that were an angry shade of orange.
‘Well,’ he said, because no one else was saying anything, they were just staring at their phones and scratching their heads. ‘Just like old times.’
‘Are you for real?’ said Debbie. She wore a dark lipstick, a colour he had never seen her use before, so that her mouth looked as though she’d eaten too many black
berries.
Was he for real? Henry had no idea any more. What was real? In this particular instance, he was being nice, he was saying words for the sake of saying them, and maybe that was not real. Two years ago, when things were at their worst, he had seen motorbikes thundering up and down the hall stairs. He had seen them and heard them, he had smelt the acrid heat of exhaust fumes and petrol, and even though no one else had experienced motorbikes on the hall stairs, it had not made them any less real at the time. It had been terrifying.
‘You think I look funny,’ Debbie said.
‘I don’t,’ he said.
‘Then stop staring at my mouth.’
She had a new fluffy pink Christmas jumper that clung to her. It seemed to have a picture of a knitted squirrel on the front eating some sort of sequinny nut, but he didn’t like to peer too closely after what she’d said about her mouth.
‘Are you going straight from here to the airport?’ he asked.
Debbie didn’t reply. She just sucked expansively on her straw and waved her hand as if she were shooing him along.
He said, ‘Have you checked your flight? Only there were problems on Christmas Day. A baby was born at the airport.’ Conor grunted. Owen gave a smile. Debbie rolled her eyes.
‘The computers went down,’ she said. ‘There was a technical glitch.’
At another table a young woman greeted a man holding a child. He kissed her quickly and passed the child over like a package he’d been finding way too heavy. In the corner, four children wearing Santa hats ate burgers, whilst their parents stood on either side of the table, facing outwards. How many of these people were travelling together and how many were divorced, like himself and Debbie, exchanging children – the only thing left of their marriages – for Christmas?
‘I’ve got a turkey, boys,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow morning I thought we could do the full works. Presents under the tree. Christmas lunch …’ The boys glanced up briefly and then returned to their phones.
‘They only eat sausages,’ interrupted Debbie. ‘And pizza.’
‘I didn’t know they only ate sausages. When did that happen?’
‘When you ran off to find yourself. How’s that going?’
‘Well. You know …’
‘I haven’t a clue,’ she said.
Debbie smacked the lid down on her drink and pushed the cup to one side, and Henry couldn’t help feeling he was somewhere inside that cup, all set to be cleared away. ‘Are you ready?’ She slotted a piece of gum in her mouth and stood.
He walked at a short distance behind Debbie and the boys to her new car. Overhead the clouds shifted forward like huge flat plates, tipping one by one over the edge of the horizon. Cars were stuffed with suitcases and bedding and presents. When Debbie passed over the boys’ hold-all bags from the boot, she dropped them mid-air as if she couldn’t see Henry but expected him to be there nonetheless. He couldn’t help noticing her suitcase. ‘Sun and yoga,’ she’d said. Along with, ‘Be a father for once.’ He wondered if she was going alone or with friends, or maybe someone in particular.
‘Boys,’ she said. ‘I want a quick word with Henry. Go and wait by his car.’
Conor and Owen trundled to one side, reluctant to be out of hearing. Debbie stepped so close to Henry that he could smell the spearmint of her chewing gum. He looked at her hands in order to avoid staring at her sequinny jumper or her blackberry mouth. She seemed to be ripping a serviette into shreds. Her voice said very clearly into his left ear, ‘I am warning you. If you do one weird thing while I am away, I will come down on you like a ton of bricks. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ he said. And then he said it again in case the first one didn’t sound big enough. ‘Yes. I understand.’
‘The boys say you keep promising snow.’
‘That’s only a joke, Debbie.’
She stopped chewing. She clenched her molars very tight. ‘Is it?’
‘Of course it is.’
‘You promise me you’re OK? You’re not seeing any weird shit?’
Owen must have heard her swear because he crumpled his mouth to suggest he hadn’t.
‘I promise you I am not seeing anything weird or shitty. That was a long time ago, Debbie. My life these days is numbingly average.’
The boys were silent in the car. Henry could see Conor in the rear-view mirror, scratching his black mop of hair as he hunched over his phone. Owen sat with his anorak zipped all the way to the tip of his chin, and his small hands on his lap, gazing out of the window. It was only once they turned off the motorway that he said solemnly, ‘Hm. I don’t see any snow yet, Henry.’
Henry’s stomach gave a turn; and it still came as a shock that the boys no longer called him Dad, that since his breakdown they’d chosen to call him by his name, as if he were someone they’d met recently and needed to be polite to. ‘Well, you know,’ he said. ‘It might not … you know … it probably won’t …’
A sudden movement in the rear-view mirror caused him to stop speaking. It was Conor. The boy swiped his fringe from his eyes. His jaw was as firm and pale as a clenched fist. ‘Of course it won’t snow,’ he shouted and his voice splintered. ‘Every time we asked, you promised. Do you think we’re kids?’ It was the most comprehensive sentence he’d said in a year and he sounded like a man. A man-version of Debbie.
‘Actually, Henry,’ said Owen, ‘we like turkey as well as sausages.’ He tugged a small Tupperware box from his anorak pocket and snapped off the lid. ‘Also dried apricots,’ he said, beginning to suck on one. He scratched his head amply. ‘Did Mum say we have nits?’
‘She didn’t.’
‘We do.’
They fell silent again.
That night seemed to go on and on; from one thirty, when Henry put the turkey in the oven to slow-cook (he’d found a recipe online: twelve hours on a low heat, it said) and crept into his sleeping bag on the sofa, until five, when he at last allowed himself to get up and make coffee, he slept fitfully, stirring awake to open his eyes and look into the darkness, terrified of making a mistake with the boys, asking himself over and over how he would entertain them for five more days. Everything about the flat seemed different now that the boys were inside it. Even the air around him felt taut and fragile. The only thing that remained composed was the snow picture. The young woman waiting in her red coat.
Henry checked the bedroom, easing the door open just an inch or two, but the boys were still fast asleep – the sprawling mass of Conor in the lower bunk, the small sepulchre tidiness of Owen on top. When his sister had rung the night before to ask how things were going, he’d said, ‘Fine.’ He didn’t mention that Conor had been on his phone the whole evening or that Owen had expressed polite surprise that there was no bath in the flat, only a shower, or that when Henry hovered at the bedroom door to call goodnight neither of the boys seemed inclined to call it back. He closed the door gently, as if even that was in danger of fragmenting.
In the sitting room, Henry wriggled on his stomach beneath the tree and switched on the Christmas lights. He arranged the presents to make it look as if there were more of them, resting the two big ones, the sledges, at the back and the smaller computer games in front, and making sure the labels were clearly visible. He began a backward manoeuvre by shifting his weight from one elbow to the other, only somehow he must have knocked the wedge that was holding the tree erect because it gave a sudden sideways lurch as if it had been felled. Henry reached out to rescue it but it was like grabbing hold of a shrub of pins. The only way to steady it was to remain on all fours with it digging into his shoulders, as if he was giving it a piggyback, while he tried to work out what to do next.
‘What are you up to, Henry?’ From beneath the tree, Henry spied two small feet at the doorway. Pale and perfect as two blue stones.
‘Ah. I am fixing the tree, Owen.’
‘Mm, it does look wonky.’
‘Could you possibly pass me the wedge?’
‘I don’t see a wedge, Henry
. I only see a piece of newspaper folded over and over and over.’
‘Yes, that is my wedge.’
‘I see.’ The feet pattered forward several paces, stopped and then advanced towards the tree. There was a pause during which Henry felt the tree grind its prickled weight from his left shoulder towards his right; it was like being embraced by a giant porcupine. A small hand emerged holding the newspaper, carefully refolded into its wedge shape, only somehow even neater, even more efficient.
‘Did it snow in the night?’ asked Owen, as Henry stood and brushed down his shoulders.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Maybe tomorrow?’
‘Well, now …’
‘I’ll take a look out of your window.’
Henry watched his son pull back the corner of the curtain. Street lamps were on all over the city like a blanket of orange buttons and the sky glowed a dull neon. Owen didn’t believe in Father Christmas – Debbie had wanted the boys to know the truth when they were as young as five; the whole Christmas thing was a rip-off, she said – but it seemed Owen still believed in the magic of an overnight snowfall. The transformation, while he slept, of the world from ordinary to a perfect coating of ice. And so do I, thought Henry. I still want that too. I want the world to be bigger and more mysterious than it is.
Owen turned from the window. ‘No snow. Not today.’ A solid knot caught in Henry’s throat. Owen said, ‘I think something is burning in your kitchen, Henry.’
So the online recipe was wrong. The Christmas lunch was cooked and ready – actually it was more than cooked, it was incinerated – and it was not yet seven thirty in the morning. Henry carved off the blackened skin and wrapped what was left of the bird in foil. He could feel his back breaking into a sweat. He needed air.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Owen. He scanned Henry with a careful look, as if he were afraid bits of his father might fall off. It broke Henry’s heart.
He said, ‘We should wake Conor and go for a walk. There’s a nice park near here. It might be fun.’