The Christmas Bookshop
Jenny Colgan
To vaccine scientists, because, man, you saved us,
you brilliant, brilliant people. And the vaccinators too.
Thank you.
‘And oh, how sweet and pleasant it is to the truly spiritual eye to see several sorts of believers … ’
Quaker saying
‘But it’s August!’ said Carmen into the phone, putting down her book. ‘August! It’s almost sunny outside! I have sandals on! Ice cream vans patrol the land! I put sunblock on last week and almost needed it! How can I possibly get my head round what you’re asking me?’
‘I’m just saying,’ her mother’s soft voice came again, and Carmen sighed. They had the same tussle every year. ‘It’s just useful to know early, that’s all. And of course Sofia … ’
Carmen screwed up her face.
‘Yes, she’s popping out yet another sprog and overpopulating the world, blah blah blah, I know.’
‘Carmen June Hogan. Be nice.’
‘Come on, Mum. She’s already got three. She’s just being greedy. Anyway, I don’t know what I might be doing at Christmas. I might be going away.’
‘Who with?’ Her mother sounded sceptical.
‘I could meet someone between now and Christmas! And they could whisk me off to Barbados! Or LA!’
She could almost feel her mother smiling down the phone.
‘So you’re not coming home for Christmas because you’ll be in LA.’
‘I could be in LA.’
Carmen couldn’t, she thought to herself, be the only person in the world who was both nearly thirty and who still turned into a stroppy teenager when confronted by her mother.
But it was only August. She just didn’t want to think about the summer being over, or about another Christmas – sleeping in her old bedroom, which was full of ridiculous junk now that didn’t belong to her: sewing machines and what-not. Reading all her old paperbacks on the shelf: the Follyfoot series, C. S. Lewis and The Dark Is Rising, seeing as it was Christmas.
Then it would be everyone making the hugest fuss of Sofia’s noisy, bratty children and giving them so much stuff （which always had to be wooden and expensive） that they could barely tear the wrapping from one gift before they dived to the next.
With every passing year too, Sofia’s gifts to the rest of the family got more and more lavish and expensive, making it more and more apparent who in the family was doing well – and who was still sleeping under her Spice Girls duvet and handing out discounted gifts from the shop she worked in.
Her mother ploughed on regardless.
‘I mean, Sofia wants to show off the new house and won’t want to travel … I thought we’d all go to hers and I’d cook … ?’
Sofia worked as a lawyer in Edinburgh, a hundred miles away from their dying industrial west-coast Scottish town, and was doing very nicely, thank you, with her handsome international lawyer husband and babies and Range Rovers, blah blah blah. Carmen still worked in the department store she’d had a Saturday job in when she’d been at school. The store was shabby, and getting worse all the time. Literally nobody in the family ever brought this up, which made it worse.
As if sensing her thoughts, her mother’s voice lowered. ‘And how is Dounston’s doing?’
Carmen understood, although she hated the tone.
‘Well … we’ll be doing better by Christmas,’ she said, and both of them desperately tried to believe it.
Carmen hung up without satisfactorily settling the question of Christmas – or rather, by refusing to commit, knowing full well her mother would go ahead and count her in anyway. And of course nothing else would come up and she would indeed be back there again, either at Sofia’s new place – whatever it was like; for sure she would have the worst bed in the place – or under her old Spice Girls duvet on the twenty-fourth which made her feel lower than ever. She looked around the staff room.