I Heart Christmas Read online

  ‘Well, it’s just you’ve been married more than a year now and he’s having a baby …’ Aah, so that was it. ‘They’re not even married yet, you know.’

  ‘It’s not a race,’ I pointed out. ‘Mark isn’t winning because he’s having a baby first.’

  Mum made an unconvinced humphing sound.

  ‘And anyway, I’m married and he isn’t.’ I was fairly certain that meant I’d won. If it was a race, which it wasn’t. But if it was …

  ‘I know you’re busy with your career,’ she said, taking special care to pronounce the word career with all the disdain she felt that it deserved. ‘And you know we’re very proud of you—’

  ‘Tell her I’m proud of her as well,’ I heard my dad shout down the line.

  ‘I said “we”. Be quiet, David,’ she scolded. I smiled. ‘As I said, we’re very proud of you, me and your dad, but you’re not getting any younger, Angela.’

  A fact I was completely aware of and did not wish to be reminded of again.

  ‘We don’t need to have this conversation,’ I said, putting a verbal black line through the topic. ‘We’re not ready, that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘No one’s ever ready for a baby,’ she replied. ‘If me and your dad had waited until we were ready for you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But never mind me, the last thing I want to do is be accused of interfering.’

  ‘The last thing,’ I sighed. ‘Listen, Mum, I’ve got to go. I’ve got loads to do and—’

  ‘Well, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about as well,’ she said before I could hang up. ‘Just very quickly … Me and your dad are coming over to you for Christmas.’

  ‘What?’

  My grip tightened around the handset and I sat straight up in my chair, begging her to start laughing.

  ‘We were talking about it last night, how we haven’t seen you in ages and how you’re so busy with your career.’ Pause for a distasteful swallow. ‘And how if you do decide to start trying for a baby, you shouldn’t really be travelling anyway and so we just did it! We booked the flights. Your dad did them on the internet.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Surprise!’ Dad bellowed from across the room. ‘Merry Christmas!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dad’ll send you an email message with the details so you can meet us at the airport,’ she said, sounding considerably more cheerful than she had at the beginning of the phone call. ‘Love to Alex.’

  And with that, she hung up.

  Love to Alex? Love to bloody Alex? It wasn’t too long ago that my mother would only refer to the love of my life as ‘that musician’ and now he was getting sent love? It was just all too much. I had my Christmas plan. I could work the move in, I could deal with Jenny and I could manage Cici, but my parents? In my house for all of Christmas with no warning? I couldn’t cope with any more surprises.

  Without even replacing the receiver I reset the line and dialled Alex as fast as I could.

  ‘Alex,’ I wailed when he answered. ‘Mum just called to say they were coming for Christmas and I’m freaking out and I don’t know what to do and they can’t come, they can’t, please tell me they don’t have to come.’

  ‘Um, OK?’ he replied. ‘I’m in the furniture store. If I send you a picture of a sofa, can you let me know whether or not you like it?’

  ‘ALEX!’

  ‘Right, your mom, sure,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll fix it. And don’t freak out if I’m not home when you get in tonight. I have an appointment with a builder at the new place.’

  ‘The new place,’ I said, trying to find a way out from underneath this horrible cloud of shittiness that I had just created for myself. I was a horrible daughter. ‘OK.’

  ‘And it’s forecast to snow,’ Alex’s voice crackled. For some reason, American phone lines were always a bit rubbish. ‘So don’t stay late if you don’t have to.’

  ‘I never stay late if I don’t have to,’ I muttered. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  He really hadn’t grasped the enormity of the situation. Probably because his parents lived upstate and he saw them about once every five years or at family weddings and/or funerals, whichever came first. My family were not his family. They were selfish and wonderful and passive aggressive and there was a reason I was perfectly happy to have them on the other side of the ocean.

  ‘Love you,’ he replied before hanging up.

  With my face flat on my glass desk, I stared down at my black Jimmy Choo biker boots and sniffed. You knew things were bad when they couldn’t put a smile on my face. I’d had plans to drag Jenny out to dinner and then to see The Nutcracker but there was no way I’d be out of the office in time to make it. So that was day one of my Christmasgasm effectively ruined and if I couldn’t find a way to convince my parents that Christmas in New York was a terrible idea, the whole thing would be buggered. With a sob, I turned back to the beauty pages, throwing myself into the many different looks of Beyoncé. Whether I liked it or not, my big week off was starting to look about as realistic as the virgin birth.

  ‘I’m totally leaving,’ I announced to my favourite ASkars poster, stretching my arms high above my head. He gazed down at me with brooding approval. It was just as well I’d married my Alex and not Alexander. I would have got really annoyed having to find the weird Swedish characters on my phone every time I wanted to text him.

  Enough was enough. It had been a great big bastard of a day and I needed to go home. Jesse had put the final pages to bed half an hour earlier and everyone else was long gone. Attempting to get ever so slightly ahead of myself, I’d stayed to answer all the emails I’d ignored over the course of what would go down in history as the worst Monday ever, but I realised when I signed off an email to the head of finance with three kisses and a smiley face that was I done for the day. While my lovely week of vacation was now nothing but a dream, I had at least snagged Tuesday off and Alex had promised me his undivided attention for twenty-four hours. I had really struggled to decide what to do with him. Ice skating? Christmas shopping? A train trip upstate to walk around some lovely woods? To be fair, given the day I’d had, I would settle for a duvet day and the odd reassuring pat on the head. But it felt good to know I was going home to something warm and comforting following a day of stress and clinically certifiable insanity.

  On my way out, I ran my fingers over all the empty desks and boxy computer screens, feeling a rumbling of professional pride. OK, so I struggled with my personal relationships from time to time and I had just broken my mother’s heart but workwise, things were objectively on the up. The Gloss office might be the least sexy office in the entire Spencer Media building but we were still in the building and that was an epic achievement. Yes, it smelled of fish on Tuesdays but that was because the canteen served fish on Tuesdays and we were right by the canteen. Some of the team considered that a negative, although I wasn’t quite sure why. Better to be the crappy office next to the Spencer Media canteen than to have no office at all. Plus, I was greedy.

  The first time I’d visited Spencer Media three and a half years ago, to talk to Mary about writing a blog for The Look, I had thought my heart would beat right out of my chest. The thought of being right in the heart of Times Square – the theatres, the shops, bright lights, big city, the naked cowboy and suspect adults dressed as Elmo … But tonight I just wanted to get home without tripping over Spider-Man or being invited to a comedy show. Alex had been right, it was snowing by the time I left, but the fresh chill of the air felt good on my face. I fell into step with the rest of New York as we rippled down the subway stairs, everyone moving in the same direction without saying a word. The station was crowded and when I finally made it onto a train, it was even worse. I slung the strap of my satchel over my head, pulling it in closer to my body. No matter how long I lived here, I would still treat the subway with suspicion. The subway and every single human being alive.

  This close to Christmas, travelling in the city was always a ch
ore. Commuters crossed with Christmas shoppers and every train car was full of musicians or dancers trying to make some money from the out-of-towners. Usually I didn’t mind it. More often than not, I forgot my headphones in the morning and who didn’t like watching four kids performing the Thriller dance on your way home from work? And while Jenny was against mariachi in all its forms, I loved a jaunty tune on the L train. But tonight, it was too much. Between everyone’s giant winter coats, the bags and bags and bags of shopping, there really wasn’t room for two Spanish guitars and an accordion. With my face pressed against the metal bars separating the privileged few who had forced their way into a seat and the rest of us sardines, I closed my eyes and tried to block out enthusiastic strains of ‘Feliz Navidad’ but there was no point. Thank God I had my tree at home. Oh my God, we were going to have to move the tree.

  ‘Oh!’

  We were just pulling into 1st Avenue station when I felt someone grab my arse. And not in a particularly friendly way. If there was such a thing.

  ‘A crowded subway is not an excuse for an inappropriate touch,’ I shouted at the squish of people pouring off the train before giving the rest of my fellow passengers an accusatory stare for good measure. I couldn’t even be slightly flattered – in this crush, whichever perv had copped a feel had hardly been driven to it by the sight of my fabulous rear. He probably just went round all the carriages with his hands out, hoping not to run into one of those blokes who left their fly open ‘by accident’. Unless … oh cockingtons. Unless he wasn’t as much a perv as someone who went around feeling people’s arse pockets for things he could steal. Things like the iPhone I vaguely remembered shoving in my back pocket when I was being rushed onto the train without enough time or room to open my bag. Brilliant. What a fabulously shitty end to a fabulously shitty day.

  Brooklyn was always colder than Manhattan and the winter wind blew in sharp off the water, pinching my face with sleet as I climbed the subway steps and ambled down the street to the apartment. This I would not miss. I rummaged around in my bag, mitten-covered fingers searching for sharp, shiny keys, muttering to myself about my lost phone and wondering who was enjoying my vast collection of pictures of other people’s pets. Bath, beer, bed. Bath, beer, bed. It wasn’t much to ask for, just five quiet minutes out of an entire twenty-four hours.

  ‘Angela?’ Right there, on my doorstep with a suitcase in one hand and a toddler in the other, was Louisa. ‘Merry Christmas!’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ten minutes of taking it in turns to use the toilet later, I was bribing the baby to be quiet with the last of my stash of Cadbury’s Buttons, while Louisa installed us on the sofa under several blankets, clutching steaming mugs of tea. Unfortunately, coming inside and warming up had given Grace a newfound burst of energy but somehow it had rendered her mother mute. Louisa hadn’t said a single word since she’d come out of the bathroom.

  ‘So …’ I was completely dazed. ‘Surprise visit?’

  Lou nodded with an enormous smile then shuffled further under the pink fluffy blanket that Alex had tried to get me to throw away several thousand times. She stared vacantly around the apartment, her light blue eyes red and tired looking.

  ‘Nice tree,’ she commented, taking a tiny sip of tea. ‘Lovely flat, Ange, really nice.’

  ‘We’re moving in a week,’ I replied. ‘Louisa, seriously, you’ve never so much as surprised me with a phone call. Is everything OK?’

  ‘Everything is fine,’ she said, stretching out the word fine for about half an hour. ‘I was just sat at home the other day and me and Gracie-pants were watching Miracle on 34th Street and I thought, I need some Angela time. So we booked a flight, we packed a bag and we came. What’s not OK about that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, reaching over to press my hand to her forehead. She was still cold from standing on my doorstep but she didn’t seem to be sickening for anything. ‘Why didn’t you call me from the airport at least?’

  ‘I’ve been calling you for the last hour,’ she replied. ‘But you weren’t answering.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ I remembered the friendly neighbourhood iPhone thief. ‘I had my phone nicked. So that’s it? You were watching TV and you just thought, hmm, flying to New York seems like a good idea?’

  ‘And what exactly went through your mind when you nicked off without a second thought as to the rest of us?’ she asked, blowing gently on her steaming hot tea.

  Aah, touché.

  ‘I didn’t have a husband at home and it wasn’t a week before Christmas,’ I said in my defence. ‘Tim doesn’t mind?’

  ‘Nope.’ She glanced over at my goddaughter, Grace, who had made herself right at home in front of the TV. She noticed her audience, rolled onto her back and showed us her knickers. Hardly a novelty for me – I’d seen her mother do that lots of times.

  ‘Is he going to come out too?’

  ‘He’s very busy.’

  This was all just so un-Louisa. Granted, she wore the trousers in her household but she hadn’t gone anywhere without Tim since he was eighteen and kissed a fifty-year-old for a dare at a Grab a Granny Night on a boys’ holiday in Magaluf. He’d called Louisa sobbing and we’d sat up all night watching Pretty Woman and weeping because that’s what TV told us we should do. They made up three days later when he came back, all sloped shoulders and sunburnt nose, bearing an apology, a coral necklace and a massive bottle of Archers. All was forgiven. And it wasn’t just her Tim-less state. Something was definitely off about her. The short sentences, the brief answers. Of course she was tired but even an exhausted Louisa was a nosy Louisa.

  ‘Well, I’m very happy to see you,’ I said, making the conscious decision to tread lightly. ‘And I know Alex will be giddy as a kipper for some time with Grace. I think he’s a bit broody at the moment.’

  Louisa paled ever so slightly and then recovered with a laugh. ‘I’m sure Alex will be a fantastic father,’ she commented, with an edge to her voice that I wasn’t used to. OK, yeah, definitely something going on. ‘Can’t picture you at mummy and baby yoga, though.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I replied, sipping my tea. ‘So how long are you staying? Not that I’m trying to get rid of you.’

  ‘What day is it today?’ She pushed a wisp of wavy blonde hair off her face and rubbed her eyes. ‘Tuesday?’

  ‘Monday.’

  I couldn’t really call her for not knowing what day it was. I’d gone into the office on a Saturday by accident twice in the last six months, although as far as Alex knew, it had only happened once.

  ‘Um, maybe a week? Is that OK?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course it is.’ I put my scalding tea down and gave her as big a hug as I could muster. ‘I just wish you were staying for Christmas.’

  ‘Well, we could, you know.’ Louisa’s eyes lit up. ‘Wouldn’t that be lovely?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure Tim would have something to say about it,’ I joked, head on her shoulder. ‘But I’d be very happy. Things have been batshit here lately and you are a bloody sight for sore eyes.’

  Across the room, Grace started clapping at the TV. Oh, she was a True Blood fan too.

  ‘Oh shit, Grace, don’t look at that,’ I shouted, scrambling for the remote while Louisa darted across the room and scooped her child up into her arms.

  ‘Hi,’ Grace said, clambering away from her mother and settling herself against my white cotton shirt, pawing me with sticky fingers. Because what this shirt was really missing was chocolatey handprints. ‘I’m Grace.’

  ‘Gracie, this is your Auntie Angela.’ Louisa lovingly patted Grace’s blonde hair down, oblivious to the dry cleaning disaster happening in front of her. I hadn’t realised what a mini-me she had become from all the photos Lou had posted on Facebook. It was frightening how alike they were. ‘You remember Auntie Angela, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ The baby beamed her approval by sticking her hand directly in my face. ‘Anala.’

  ‘I’ve been called worse today,’ I said, kissin
g her forehead. She smelled all milky and weird. ‘Thanks, Grace.’

  ‘She’s in a real chatterbox phase,’ Louisa said, looking far too proud for someone who had just let their child watch two vampires going at it for ten or so minutes. ‘And she wants to touch everything.’

  ‘So I see.’ I looked at my blouse and said nothing. ‘I can’t believe she’s already a year old.’

  ‘Nineteen months next week,’ Lou sighed. ‘It’s mental. Doesn’t seem like two minutes since I was bringing her home from the hospital.’

  ‘I feel like I would fixate more on the part where you heaved her out of your vagina,’ I commented, relaxing into my toddler hug. It was odd but it wasn’t so bad.

  ‘Well, yes, you would,’ she replied. ‘But it really is best to just put that behind you as soon as you can.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll have any more?’ I asked, thinking of how quickly Erin had taken to churning them out. ‘Is Tim desperate to turn out his only manly man mini-me?’

  ‘You know, I am so tired,’ she said, snatching a giggly Grace out of my arms and standing up. ‘Shouldn’t we get the airbed out or something?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ I stood up as well, mostly to make the moment less awkward. ‘You can sleep in my room. Me and Alex will go on the airbed.’

  ‘You don’t actually know where the airbed is, do you?’

  ‘I know where it isn’t,’ I replied. ‘Go on, get ready for bed and I’ll see you in the morning. I’ve got the day off so we’ll do something fun.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ she leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. ‘It’s so bloody good to see you, Clark.’

  ‘Bloody good to be seen,’ I said, slapping her bum and giving Gracie a kiss all of her own. If anyone asked about the stains on the shirt, I’d just tell them it was a new Mary Katrantzou print and really, who would be any the wiser?