When she strode back along the corridor toward the front door, Bia was standing at the top of the step in the living room, watching her over the rim of her wine glass. “If this is you bolting because you smell smoke and I don’t or something, then I’m definitely going to come back to haunt you after I burn alive.”
Josie rolled her eyes as she slipped on her coat, put on her sneakers, and tucked the last letter inside her pocket. “Lovely, graphic image there.”
“All right, but hur-ry,” Bia said, drawing out the syllables on the last word. “If you’re not back soon, I’m finishing the rest of your wine. I’ll drink it out of your glass, no shame.” Josie waved a hand over her shoulder at Bia as she let herself out of the flat.
As soon as she was on the other side of the door, she allowed her face to crumple and screwed up her eyes. In the last twenty years, there had never been one where she’d looked forward to Christmas Day. She’d long since forgotten what it had been like to be a child, desperate and excited for Santa to come, listening out for the creak of a parent’s footstep. And though she liked the break from work every year and enjoyed the extra time to spend with friends, who were inevitably in better moods and looking for excuses for fun as the day grew nearer, she dreaded the countdown to Christmas itself, to the reminders it brought. The last few years, she’d gotten through it in London by keeping busy and distracted, which had been made easy by good friends, especially Bia and Laura, a demanding job, and, more recently, Oliver. And now, at least two of those things had been taken away from her. Josie slid a hand into her coat pocket and ran two fingers over the smooth envelope. Christmas, it seemed, was looking very bleak indeed this year.
The cold, damp air whipped past Josie’s face as she let her bike whizz down the side of Streatham Common, past the runners trudging their way up the other side of the road, her gloved fingers resting lightly on the brakes. Her breath misted out in front of her, the puffs soon disappearing into the little bubble of darkness around her—darkness that never extended too far here with all the lights and people, not like the little village she grew up in, where she’d learned to take a flashlight every time she stepped outside at night. Her cheeks were already freezing, and it felt like little misty water droplets were clinging to her skin, though it wasn’t raining. There had been a lot of talk of snow recently, in the office and on the news, the whole country getting excited about the prospect of a white Christmas, as it seemed to do every year. Josie would much rather take the rain, though she knew that was a controversial opinion and one often best kept to herself. But for her, the snow only brought on painful memories of Christmas Day twenty years ago, of watching through the window as fluffy snowflakes fell onto an empty driveway outside her grandparents’ house, a full but unopened stocking lying next to her, listening to her grandmother stifling sobs from where she made Josie a hot chocolate in the next room.
Josie screwed up her face against the stinging in her nose and gulped in more air, coughing on the car fumes that she accidentally swallowed at the same time. She turned right at the bottom of the hill and pedaled faster, past the train station, past the first post box she saw. She wasn’t ready to post her letter and turn back yet, was desperate to forget about the terrible day she’d just had.
She was forced to come to a stop at the next set of traffic lights, panting harder than she should be, given how short a time she’d been on the bike. She waited while the man changed from red to green and a surge of people crossed the road in time to the beeping, heads down, keen to get home into the warm. But there were three people who didn’t rush like the others, who strolled across smiling, oblivious to the commuter chaos around them. A family—mum, dad, and little boy of about five or six, Josie would guess. The boy was laughing, a reindeer headband on top of his sandy hair, the horns flopping with the movement of his head. Both of his parents gripped one of his hands, and he swung back and forward, using their arms as levers to propel himself in whatever game he was lost in.
It reminded her so much of her and her parents, on evenings like this one, only quieter, without the buzz of traffic, the annoyed car horns, the people tsking when someone got in their way. The streets of her village may have been easier and safer to walk down, but she used to do that too, hold both her parents’ hands, demand to be swung up on the count of three until she’d gotten too tall for them to manage it. That’s how they’d walked down to the post box on the week before Christmas every year since she could remember, and all the years she couldn’t, according to her grandmother. Hand in hand, her in the middle with a letter to Santa tucked into her coat pocket, ready to send to the North Pole.