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[Here’s part three of the four part Christmas story. If you haven’t read the story so far then you may want to check out, Part one: You may have seen a cakewalk, but have you seen plenty of this (9) and Part two: Love Handle (3, 4)]

Tom was eating his cereal while Jenny dithered in the kitchen. It was Christmas eve and the goose was… Well it wasn’t getting fat, Jenny thought, because by now it would probably be dead. And anyway they were having turkey again this year. This had caused a bit of an argument in the flat over the last few days. Jenny had wanted to try goose for a change but Tom had put his foot down. He didn’t usually mind about things like this so she knew it was important to him. But she also knew that she’d pushed him to defend himself a lot further than she’d really needed to be convinced. It was just so refreshing to see him passionate about something like that. Tom wasn’t brain dead or anything far from it. He was just very good at having come to the correct conclusion first. So he would normally be able to diffuse any argument with the answer. Or the smart compromise. What Jenny’s boss, whom she hated, would call, “the win win”.

But she had pushed him further than she probably should have because it was great to see the passion. To see him really care about something. And she knew that it was probably destructive to play the bad guy just to see that reaction. But she wasn’t able to help herself.

She hadn’t been able to help herself at the work Christmas party last night. She had known it was wrong but she had done it anyway. It was, a moment of weakness, and she was already trying to tell herself that it didn’t mean anything. She had slept with a guy. It had never happened before. And she knew it would never happen again. But while she would easily be able to get away with what she’d done she also knew that she didn’t want to. It wasn’t that she wanted to go out with this guy. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to not go out with Tom anymore… No actually that was it exactly it. She didn’t want to go out with Tom anymore.

She looked back at him sitting at the table. He was just pushing his cereal bowl away form him, and pulling the paper closer to him.

And then he said quite quietly to Jenny, “here’s the one I can’t do, ‘Break one’s word, nine letters'”.

[This is part two of the four part Gamboling Christmas story. If you haven’t already you may want to see part one (You may have seen a cakewalk, but have you seen plenty of this (9)).]

In all towns there is one bar which is the coolest bar to hang out. This is true everywhere even in the big cities – especially in the big cities. You might think there are several or that it all depends on your individual taste, but in that case you’ve sadly – tragically almost – missed the point. Cool isn’t about what you think it’s about, it’s about what other people are doing all the time when you’re having a rest. But in a small town it’s easy. It’s clear. And in a small university town it’s so easy that even deeply uncool people can figure out where it is. And this was what Tom was thinking as he watched Jenny walk in to the bar.

Jenny was wearing thick rimmed glasses and had her jet black hair tied back in such a way that Tom was sure that later in her particular story she would take off her glasses, and let her hair fall to her shoulders in a moment designed to make the viewer say, “oh she’s actually beautiful”. But actually Tom could see perfectly well that she was beautiful now. But he could also see, as she dropped a small bag of tangerines on to the table and they all started rolling off in different directions, that she was an embarrassed klutz.

The two of them had been kind of avoiding each other since the beginning of the year. They had ended up at the same uni by accident. And really the only tension between the two of them was that they had once, when too young to know what it really meant, said that they would get married. They had just come off stage from being Mary and Joseph in the school nativity and they had been asked one of those fake adult questions that no child has ever really thought about. The adult asked if they had ever thought he they could be married and that is when it happened.

They had said that they would definitely get married and that they would be best friends forever. And that had been all that it took. The adult mentioned how cute this news was to all of the other adults and from then on they could never really escape from this thing that they didn’t ever understand.

Jenny, who had thought about this lots, had decided that it was this reason that they hadn’t been able to stay friends when they hit puberty. This, she reasoned, was not something that would have happened if they had simply been friends. In that case it would have been easier. But being betrothed to somebody who is changing that fast is tricky. Especially when you’re changing just as much. Tom just thought they’d drifted apart.

They’d been going to the same university for a year and a half now and still they hadn’t really acknowledged each other’s existence more than a quick nod or hurried “hi”. And Tom had noticed and logged in the back of his mind with a sense of embarrassment that he had had another different girl with him every time they met. And Jenny had logged in the back of her mind that she had been alone every time that they met. She was alone again now she noticed.

Tom wasn’t, however, with a girl but neither was he alone. He was with some guys. They had just come from a lecture and had folders, books, scarves and beer bottles littered around them. He looked over to Jenny who had every thing neatly packed away and on her table in front of her was a glass of white wine, a coaster, a pen and a newspaper.

Tom got up and walked towards her. As he made his way over he realised that she was deep in thought and probably wouldn’t notice his arrival. She was looking down at the paper and a lock of her hair fell off of her forehead and down in front of her eyes. She pushed it back up and then ran her fingers along to tips of the section and then tucked it behind her ear.

Tom arrived at the table and pulled out the seat opposite her. She suddenly looked up with a panicked look in her eye and almost started to say something before she realised who it was and changed her mind. So instead of the probable complaint she simply said, “Tom”.

“Hi Jenny,” he responded, “how are you?”
“I’m okay. You?”
“Yeah I’m fine.”
“What made you come over?”
“Well I just saw you there and I thought I’d say Hi.”
“Bullshit!”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well we’ve seen each other a million times and you’ve never come over before.”
“You weren’t alone before.”
“I actually was.” Actually, this was the moment that Jenny softened to him because although she’d been obsessing about this information clearly it hadn’t been important to him. But then she also thought badly of him again because he hadn’t been properly paying attention to her.
“Oh,” he said, “well I wasn’t alone probably. And so… Yeah…”

He took this moment to actually sit down on the chair he’d been gripping on to during the conversation so far.

“Okay,” he said, “it was the newspaper. That’s what made me come over.”
“Oh charming!”
“No! No. I meant something better than that. I meant that well it reminded me of when we first met. And I suddenly thought that it would be so much better if we could just first meet again. And pretend that there wasn’t any of that history there. That I could just kind of come over and as friends we could work on the crossword together.”
“I see.”
“Yeah, that’s all I was thinking. I mean it’s not as if we ever did the crossword together again after that very first day, so it wouldn’t be something from the past or anything. So what do you think Jenny? Couldn’t it work.”
“Well I’ve actually only got one clue left. But maybe. Maybe that could work. But…”
“What?”
“You can’t call me Jenny anymore because that’s from the past too. Everyone calls me Jen now.”
“But… Couldn’t I just have that as my pet name for you?”
“Well maybe… Oh damn you!”
“What?”
“That’s it! You just got it. The clue was Love Handle (3, 4) and it’s Pet Name! That’s what you just said.”
“Well in that case you’ll have to let me call you it!”
“We shall see.”

And at that moment, as a waitress walked past and Tom ordered a bottle of whichever white Jenny had a glass of her, she felt that feeling again. And it was delicious.

[Note: This is part one of a four part Christmas story which I usually write in the week running up to Christmas. But as I’m now only doing fiction on Fridays I figured we’d just have to start now. Yes Christmas does really seem to be getting earlier. Anyway happy Spidermass everybody.]

Jenny was looking out of the window and it was definitely snowing. Jenny had told her mother that the news report had said to not make any unnecessary journeys and that it was definitely snowing but Jenny’s mum didn’t think it was true.

“But that’s what they always say when it gets the slightest bit cold. ‘Avoid unnecessary journeys’ like your life should revolve around something as random as the weather. And anyway,” she said clearing things up, “it’s not even snowing”.

But it definitely was snowing, and Jenny wasn’t sure how well her mother would take it. Jenny knew that her mother had to go to work and that they all thought like her that a bit of weather shouldn’t stop her from getting in to work. But what about school. Somebody at school had been saying that if it snowed then they would close the school. Jenny thought about this for a while because mentioning it now if the school was open might just make it seem like she wasn’t cooperating. She had been the one to bring up the snow in the first place. And it wasn’t as if she didn’t want to go to school either, she liked school – it just seemed that none of the people at school liked her. She was just worried about what her mother would say to her after they’d driven their in the snow and found that it was closed. Especially if she somehow found out then that she’d known all along that it was a possibility.

But before she could think anymore about this Jenny heard the light scrape of keys against the post at the bottom of the stairs that meant that her mum was leaving. Jenny hopped off of her seat, picked up her satchel and headed for the door. She knew better than to dawdle, the alarm would be on within seconds, it was definitely time to go.

They got in the car and drove. Jenny wanted to listen to a special cd that she’d selected. Her mum did not, she wanted to listen to the news. They sat like normal not talking. The thing that Jenny liked when there was music on was that you were kind of allowed to talk. But if there were people talking on the news then you weren’t really allowed to talk.

As they drove the snow was falling thicker and more thickly. And they were driving more and more slowly until finally they simply stopped. It was not for want of trying but something had happened in the engine and it wasn’t going to go anymore.

“What are we going to do? Nobody ever drives along here.” Jenny’s mum said rather presumptuously. Jenny wanted to say that it couldn’t possibly be that they kept the whole road open only for them but she had to admit that she had never seen any other car drive down this road.

They sat for a while until the battery stopped working and the radio died. It was suddenly colder the moment the fans stopped blowing hot air in their faces. Jenny already had her coat on which was lucky because when she wasn’t wearing it, it lived in the boot. And she would have been very cold if she’d had to go out to get it. Her mother calmly picked up her coat from the back seat. And then rather uncalmly tried to put it on without standing up. But when her mother had picked up her coat something had caught Jenny’s eye. Underneath it was nestling today’s paper.

“Maybe we could do today’s crossword”.
“I’ve done it already”.
“Oh,” Jenny was disappointed, she always liked doing the crossword with her mum.
“Well there’s one clue that I haven’t got.”
“Oh,” Jenny suddenly perked up, “what is it?”
“It’s, ‘You may have seen a cakewalk, but have you seen plenty of this’, it’s nine letters.”
“Hmm,” I don’t know.
“Mmmm,” me either.

Jenny and her mother waited for an hour, and nobody came. After a while Jenny started shivering. And a little bit later her mother started doing the same.

“What will we do if nobody comes?”
“Somebody will come.”
“But…”
“Well…”

Suddenly a light reflected on the front window from behind. Another car was arriving. It slowed and a guy jumped out.

“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just, our battery’s out.”
“Okay I’ll give you a jump.”

The man walked round to the front of the car, and opened the bonnet. But before he’d looked for too long he came walking back to the window.

“I don’t think it can be your battery. What happened?”
“We were driving and the car suddenly slowed, and stopped. The after a while later the fan stopped running.”
“Well that makes sense. You’ve got a hole in your radiator. The battery must have run down trying to keep the two of you warm.”
“So will we be able to get it going again.”
“Not without a tow-truck. I’m sorry can I take you somewhere where we can call someone?”
“That would be great. Actually the only reason I’m here is that I’m trying to take Jenny to school.”
“Actually me too, my son’s in the back in there,” he pointed to his car, “Tom keeps telling me that school is cancelled for today. But I’m not sure exactly how that helps me. If he can’t go to school then I can’t go to work.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Look, should we try and drop them both off and then see if we can call somebody from there?”

It was a plan. Jenny and her mother abandoned the car and got into the jeep that belonged to their knight in metallic silver. As she got in the back Jenny was sitting next to a boy that she didn’t know. The boy spoke.

“Are you Jenny?” he said.
“Yeah, how did you know my name?”
“You’re in the year bellow me.”
“Oh I…”
“You’re new aren’t you.”
“That’s right but I…”
“People have been talking about you.” He clearly realised that it sounded bad, so he said, “nothing bad, they’re just interested because you’re new.”
“Oh.”
“Do you do crosswords?”
“Um. Sort of. My dad taught me I think.”
“Yeah my mum taught me.”
“Oh. Why are you asking?”
“Just because my mum has a clue that we can’t work out in today’s crossword. You haven’t done one today already have you.”
“No.”
“Not at all.”
“No, we usually do the Saturday one.”
“Oh. Well this clue, this one we can’t get.”
“Yes.”
“Well it’s, ‘You may have seen a cakewalk, but have you seen plenty of this’, it’s nine letters.” Jenny realised right after she’d said it that she’d almost been doing an impression of her mother when she was saying the clue.
“Well, I think I know the answer.”
“Well…? What is it?”
“Well, I think it must be ‘Abundance’. Yes that must be it.”

And somehow, with the half smile of the realisation of the joke in the answer, accompanied with the steely determination of his jaw that he would in the end be right about what he had just said, even though he was overly polite about it in the way that he described it, Jenny loved Tom in that moment. Even though she had no real idea of what love really meant or if this, as such, was it. She knew that this was something, and only years later would she realise and tell people that she’d fallen in love with Tom from this moment.

[Check back next Friday for Part 2]

Jake Turnweed was walking. What? Isn’t that enough for you people? No? Oh I’m sorry. I do apologise. I hadn’t realised that it was your story. So do go on then. Do continue. Write the next bit yourself.

Ummmm.

No? It’s not so easy is it.

But I don’t…

Oh don’t give me this “you don’t know what actually happened next” crap. He walked to school didn’t he.

“Jake Turnweed walked to school”

Oh very clever. Very smart. I’m not impressed you know. I have absolutely no reason to be impressed. For that transgression I’m not telling you the rest of the story. See if I care.

We wheeled around the corner and then came to a sudden stop. There was a man, a young man sitting in a deck chair by the side of the house. The most important thing we knew was to discover if he was a stranger. That was paramount. Because if he was a stranger then we would have to cycle away as fast as we could.
Now I must admit that our curiosity was piqued. And because of that there was a slight bias in our questions to each other. If there was even the slightest hint that this young man wasn’t a stranger then we would be free to investigate.
“Have you ever seen this man before?” I decided to cut right to the core of the situation.
“Well define seen?”
“Well the Oxford English dictionary defines seen as…”
“No no not all that again. I mean. I mean…”
“What can you mean? Either you’ve seen him or you haven’t. Simple logic there, no gray areas, nice and clear.”
“Well no it isn’t that’s the point. That’s why I started all of this.”
“So what prey is the point then”? I tended to get more fruity in my language when my dander was up.
“Well I haven’t seen him per-say but I have heard talk of him from my Aunt. She was talking about a man very much matching his particulars just yesterday and I would say that she must have been talking about him”.
“How sure are you that this is the same man?” My interest was piqued, we might have a chance.
“Well she was talking in shock about his shoes, and she was telling my cousin (your sister) in no uncertain terms not to trust him because of them”.
“Why shouldn’t you trust these shoes”? I asked, they seemed to me to be perfectly ordinary shoes.
“Well,” my cousin said, “just you look at the lining of the shoes, it’s purple. That, your mother said, was a sign of an insatiable appetite”.
“But he’s not a fat man, he’s pretty slim”.
“Well that’s just what your sister said, but apparently, your mother said it wasn’t that kind of appetite.”
“Well I’m sure I don’t know what she’s talking about”.
“Neither did I, but your sister and your mother started giggling when they said it. I felt it best to clear out”.
“Good move”.

We both just stood there looking at this insatiable thin man sitting possibly dead in the deckchair, wondering at things that had been said that we couldn’t understand. And knowing that there were so many unknown unknowns out there that we knew we’d never know. And while we were standing there looking at him, a fly flew down onto his top lip and wandered along and walked right up his filtrum and into one nostril. A second later the chap sneezed and the fly flew out again.

But the sneeze had proved one thing at least this chap was still alive. And so just in case his mysterious appetite involved eating small boys we were off, cycling away into the sunset.

A small light in the distance appears providing you with the first sensory input you’ve had in… Well you’re not sure. It feels like a long time. The floor is soft or something when you rub your hands against it you can only vaguely feel resistance. Sort of like a non damp mist. What seems like a few hours ago you rubbed it for a while just to feel something. Everything else is dark and silent. But now this light. That was something. Something to focus on. But as it starts getting bigger your only fear is that it might be Them… coming back.

Two guys are sitting at the bar one is dressed in a ninja outfit the other is wearing a bright yellow chicken outfit. Their masks are sitting on the bar next to them and they are both drinking water.
“I just didn’t expect it to be this hot”, says the ninja.
“God, you think you’re hot?”, asks the chicken. His face is bright pink. And huge drops of sweat are running down his hair line. One drops into his water but he doesn’t notice. He takes another sip and says, “this tastes salty”.
The chicken is looking around a bit while the ninja looks straight ahead. The chicken looks back, “so what? Are you a ninja or what”?
“Yeah that’s right”.
“so did you make your own costume”?
“Yeah but it’s only just a pair of old black pajamas”.
“Yeah but what about the mask”
“Yeah but I didn’t make that by myself. I just bought that”.
“Oh,” the chicken looked a bit upset.
“But there is one thing that you do have to deal with that you might not think of”
“Yeah, ” the chicken looked like he might be interested again.
“Yeah you’ve got to remember to deal with the… The… Well I’m not exactly sure what you call it. The hole at the front. For peeing through. You got to remember to tape it up.”
“But surely,” the chicken pointed out, “when you put your underwear on you’d be fine”.
“Yeah, well I thought that and then I thought that as my underwear has the same hole I might get into a pretty embarrassing situation.”
“Yeah that’s true,” said the chicken.

For the first time the Ninja looked over at the chicken and really took him in, and then he said, “so what are you supposed to be”.

Walking through the woods and we see no path. No sense of direction. We’re lost and we both know it. We kind of have an idea of which way we thought we were going – in general. But it’s difficult now to exactly remember. The things in the way: logs, shrubs and odd abandoned fences seem to have made us turn around just to walk in a straight line.

I’m confident one moment and disheartened the next. We suddenly realise that the way we’re going is starting to be pretty steeply downhill. And we start asking each other if we’re sure we’re going the right way. And of course we’re not. We stop for a second and look back. Everything behind us looks familiar and we agree that we’ve already tried all of those directions so at least this might be something. We walk down and suddenly we see a path rather than the endless miles of bracken. A real worn path where people have been. It only seems to go in one direction and I start to say how odd it is that something could be so warn by so many people for so long as to make this path but that they all just stopped walking here when I realise how odd it sounds. I leave some of the words stuck in my mouth and just let that shiver of a thought run down my back.

We get to the path and turn right onto it. And now we’re walking, we feel like there might be something ahead. A way out, a way through. We are now both sure thought that this isn’t the way. It’s at an angle to the way that we want to go. But it’s sort of in the right direction. It’s sort of worth while. But the main thing at this point is that we both just want to get out of the woods before it starts getting dark. There are already shadows in the thicker bits of the wood and there are noises which would have sounded sweet and interesting earlier which now sound a little bit too echoey in the dimming light.

We keep walking and to our relief the woods around us seem to be getting more ordered. As though there is something designed about them. That man has influenced what is going on here. Perhaps we have reached civilisation at last. As we turn a corner on the path we are suddenly presented with a set of massive redwoods lining the path. They tower above us and as we keep walking we suddenly realise that there are no noises any more. The woods have gone very quiet. In between the trees we can see one patch of sky ahead of us, and as I look up at it I see across it a strike of forked lightning and it starts to pour with rain.

The salt skittered across the kitchen counter and mingled with the rosemary and pepper that were already lying there – spoils of cooking. The chicken looked pale next to the black roasting tin, but soon would be coloured by the oil and spices that were being prepared in a small mortar. The pestle is rammed in and the herbs give up their essential oils. The mess around the preparation area builds as more boards are used and things are chopped.

Jenny stops adding to it for a second and decides to clear down her station. Even though this is her own kitchen in her own house she still thinks of it as a station in a fancy restaurant that she wishes she ran. Michael is watching the football in the living room and the sound is way up. He won’t be able to hear her. She walks over to the kitchen door and closes it a bit more.

She takes a swig of her Sauvignon Blanc and starts to commentate, just audibly. “It is always important to keep your station clear. Although don’t worry too much if you make a mess as you’re going along. After all this is supposed to be fun. But do try and not to let it get too far away from you.” She finished wiping down the counter with a paper towel and threw it in the bin.

“Now what you need to do is make sure your hands are good and clean because we’re going to rub the suffusion we’ve made onto the chicken skin.”

Just as she’s saying this the door opens, Michael walks in and starts rummaging around in the fridge for another beer. “Who were you talking to”? He wants to know.

“Nobody,” says Jenny.