She could understand that.
Three more Krampus escapees burst through the pub door to boisterous congratulations and whistles. One of them was dressed like a turkey. Their cheeks were crimson apples from the cold, and Fred shivered at the idea of walking back to the Forest Inn in the frigid night air. She looked at her watch. It was almost eleven o’ clock. Krampus had one more hour of mayhem before being relegated to myth and legend for another year.
“How long did it take you before you felt normal again? Relatively speaking,” she added, pointedly looking at his costume.
He looked thoughtful as he turned a cardboard beer coaster over and over on the table.
“Once I’d opened up about what I was going through, and let the people who love me help, things got better quickly. Eventually, I found a new path that suits me better. My folks were great.”
“Yeah, but you haveyourfamily. I’m about to move back in with a woman who, when not making Christmas Crackers, is making out with every loser in town, and two octogenarians who think that custard and advocaat are legitimately interchangeable.”
He laughed. “When we were kids, everyone wanted to live with your family. You never knew how good you had it.”
She was about to reply when a man with a thick handlebar mustache and a beard big enough for crows to nest in banged his tankard on the tabletop and shouted, “Little Freddie Hallow-Hart, as I live and breathe! I heard tell you’d be back, but I didn’t expect to see you out on Krampus Night.”
Oh, for god’s sake.
Ryan looked at her and nodded. “Don’t worry, I’ve got this.” Then he turned to the man and said, “I regret to inform you, Mr. Bishop, that she is not back, she’s merely perching, like a swallow.”
Fred scowled at Ryan, and he grinned back at her.
“What in the bollocky-billy-goats does that mean?” Mr. Bishop roared.
Fred sighed. “It means I won’t be stopping for long, Mr. Bishop. Anyway, how are you?” She forced a smile.And so, it begins.
“Not too bad.” He scratched his chin, and his entire hand disappeared inside his beard. “Not too bad at all. I hope you two aren’t going to be up to any of your old tricks now the band is back together, as it were.” His eyes twinkled beneath two foxtail eyebrows.
“Not back together,” said Fred. “Never actually together.” There were some humiliations a girl never got over—and being rebuffed by Ryan Frost in a rowing boat when they were sixteen was one of them.
Ryan smirked.
“Young Ryan here’s a reformed character, these days. I don’t want you being a bad influence on him, Freddie Hallow-Hart.”
She smiled sweetly up at Mr. Bishop. “I will be on my best behavior.”
“You’d better be. You don’t want to wind up on the Naughty List. Again!”
“Dad repainted the chalkboard yesterday in readiness for her arrival,” said Ryan, grinning.
The Naughty List was a six-foot chalkboard fixed to a wall outside Frost Hardware. In a tradition almost as old as Krampus Night, people would chalk the names of the naughty on the board in the run-up to Christmas. No one under twelve was allowed to be named; it was mostly done in fun, and definitely not for terrifying kids into behaving. As a counterbalance to the Naughty List there was also a green post box into which people would post written details of all the kind deeds people had done that year. At the Krampus versus Father Christmas Face-Off, Mrs. Christmas would read out all the kindnesses and decide whether there was enough goodwill to banish Krampus for another year.
“Well, I have no intention of being on the Naughty List. I have evolved,” Fred assured Mr. Bishop.
Mr. Bishop looked skeptical. “Do you remember the time you dared one of my farmhands to sprint naked through the summer fair?” he asked. “Now what was his name?”
“Devlin McGee,” Ryan offered, helpfully.
Fred squinted her eyes at him. “That was a long time ago,” she said.
“Devlin, that was it.” Mr. Bishop slapped his thigh. “You fair bewitched that boy. Was that the same summer you freed McCalister’s pigs, right before they were due for slaughter? He never did find them all. And what about when the pair of you climbed down the cliff and got trapped by the tide, and we had to call out the coastguard? Silly arses. Or—”
“Yep,” she interjected loudly, in an effort to curtail his trip down memory lane. “I remember. But you can rest assured I am not the same person I was back then.”
“Who is?” added Ryan, and she smiled at him gratefully.
“Pity,” said Mr. Bishop. “I always secretly admired your spirit.”
She and Ryan had been thick as thieves when they were kids, always getting into some scrape or another. But something had shifted between them the year they turned sixteen, and after that they’d drifted apart. Ryan fell in with a group of lads she didn’t like, and she’d focused her efforts on getting into a university far, far away.
