I’m a little overwhelmed, sitting there with the torn wrapping around me. I felt like these women were slipping away, but perhaps it’s just a period of adjustment. These gifts show that they still care.
I’ve bought myself a selection of tiny Danish pastries for breakfast, because I’ve been hankering after another croissant since Erin brought me one, so I set up a plate and get myself an orange juice, and I sit at the dining table and savour every bite. But after they’ve all gone, I feel a bit desperate. It feels like there are too many hours stretching ahead and nothing to fill them. I’ve got so used to having Julie here for a couple of hours each day – she often calls in at the weekend, too, so I rarely have a full day on my own, and if I do I make sure I get out and go to the shops and at least see some people. But nothing’s open, of course. I feel a panic start to rise in me and give myself a stern talking to. I put the television on, something I never usually do this early, and try to lose myself in a kids’ film.
Next thing I know, there’s a knock at the door. I check my watch. Quarter past eleven. I must have dozed off. Who would be here, now, on Christmas Day? I get up, rub my back and make my way to the front door, all the time wondering who could possibly be standing on the other side of it. If it’s Julie, breaking up her cosy Christmas with Martin to check on me, I’ll be cross with her. But it’s not. It’s Erin. And she looks small, and her face is streaked with tears.
‘I’m so sorry to turn up on Christmas Day,’ she says.
‘It’s all right, it doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘Do you want to come in?’
She nods and steps inside, slips her shoes off. Looks even smaller, then. I lead her into the front room. She’s never been here before, and for a second I can’t work out how she knew where I lived, but then I remember the evening we went to Patricia’s dancing class, Julie dropping me off first and Erin waving from the car.
‘Can I get you something?’ I ask, remembering my manners. ‘A tea or coffee?’
‘Just water, please,’ she says. ‘I can get it, if you point me in the right direction.’
‘I’ll do it,’ I say. ‘You sit down.’
I bring her water and find some biscuits in a cupboard. It doesn’t feel very festive, but I haven’t got anything else, really.
‘Has something happened?’ I ask, once she’s settled.
She sips at her water, her eyes big. ‘I couldn’t stay there,’ she says, her voice catching. She reaches for a biscuit, and I wonder what I’m going to feed her if she ends up staying here all day.
‘My sister’s boyfriend was over. They’ve got a baby together and they were joking about if he turned out to be gay, and my mum was so horrified. I just couldn’t be there.’
I shake my head. How can they not see, these people, what they’re doing to her? How can they be so blind?
‘Did you say anything? Do they know why you left?’
‘I just said I was going out for some fresh air, but I’m not going back.’
I must look a bit panicked, because she speaks again.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll find somewhere to go, I just, I didn’t know who I could call on Christmas Day and I was wandering around, and then I spotted your house and I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind.’
‘I don’t,’ I say. ‘I don’t mind.’
I don’t tell her that she’s brightened up my day no end, that I was wondering how I was going to get through it without any company. Because my saving grace is her disaster. She’s hurt and she needs comfort.
‘You can stay here,’ I say. ‘There’s a spare room. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s somewhere you can come, anytime you can’t be at home.’
She looks up at me through thick, wet lashes. ‘Thank you.’
‘The only thing is, I don’t know what I can feed you. Today, I mean, while the shops are closed. Julie bought me one of those roast dinners for one. I don’t have much else in.’
She waves a hand. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
When she goes to the bathroom to wash her face, I think about what I can do to take her mind off her hurt. I consult with Arthur, silently. What would he have said, or done, if a teenager had turned up on the doorstep on Christmas Day? I almost laugh. There’s just no way it would have happened. In strange and mysterious ways, my life has opened up since his death. I never could have expected it.
We can’t sit in front of the television all day. And that’s when I think of it. A game. Arthur and I went through phases. We’d go months playing Scrabble every day, then we’d get fed up with it and put it away. And a couple of weeks later, Arthur would suggest a game of cribbage or bridge, and we’d be onto that for a while. I open the sideboard and look inside. Backgammon, Scrabble, a couple of packs of cards, and three or four thousand-piece jigsaws.
‘What are you doing?’ Erin asks.
I hadn’t heard her on the stairs and she makes me jump.
‘I thought maybe we could play a game. Take your mind off things.’
I’m bending over to look, but she crouches down, like it’s nothing. I remember when my body moved easily like that. When nothing was too difficult, physically. When my heart was open and uncracked.
‘Scrabble?’ she suggests. ‘I haven’t played for years.’
We set it up on the dining table, and Erin roots through the kitchen cupboards and manages to find some hot chocolate. Lord knows how long it’s been there, but I don’t think things like that really go off, so she makes us both one, and it feels cosy. Less like two people thrown together on the one day of the year you’re really supposed to be with family, and more like something planned.
‘What are we like?’ I ask. ‘I don’t have any family and you, well…’
‘I can’t spend a full day with mine.’
‘Yes.’
It’s a sorry state of affairs, my family all in the graveyard and me missing them terribly, and hers alive and well and causing her great pain.
I watch her looking at her tiles, rearranging them. A little hesitantly, she reaches out, plays the word ‘brother’。 A seven-letter word, on her first go. I’ll never recover from it. But it doesn’t matter, because there’s a smile playing at the corners of her lips, and it’s the first one I’ve seen today.
‘What are your plans?’ I ask her, laying out my own letters. I use the ‘r’ of ‘brother’ to make ‘reads’。 ‘Longer-term, I mean, after your A levels.’
‘University,’ she says.
What might my life have been like, if going to university had been as normal when I was her age as it is now? What would I have studied, and what would I have done with the qualification? At school, I was always good at history. Could remember dates and facts, and enjoyed seeing how different parts of the past slotted together, what impacted what, like a line of dominos. I try to imagine myself in a classroom, or a library or museum, or leading tourists around a place of interest. I might have been good at one or other of those things, but I’ll never know. Erin has everything open to her, doors flung wide. I’m a little envious, but I try to push that to one side.