‘Where are your parents?’
He hesitated. ‘Busy. Companies like ours don’t take holidays.’ There was a trace of bitterness in his words. I guessed he was mainly thinking of his sister. Blake’s face rarely looked as tender as it had when he was telling me about her. I think that must have been the moment when I finally admitted to myself that I… liked him. He couldn’t be all bad if he loved someone that much.
‘I see.’ I sat down on the bed with the magpie in my hand. ‘Aspen must be pleased to see you.’
He sighed deeply. ‘She’s made a list of about fifty Christmas movies for us to watch together.’
I grinned. ‘Sounds perfect.’
‘Are you doing anything except revising?’
The pattern of feathers felt as rough beneath my fingertips as the answer felt on my tongue: ‘We’ll have to see.’
‘Hmm.’ He didn’t push, which I was grateful for. Just because we were taking a break from the chaos, that didn’t mean it had ceased to exist. I’d promised Davie I would keep going, and I fully intended to.
Blake was quiet for a while, his footsteps slowing, his breathing becoming more laboured. I wanted to tell him to go back inside, that he must be freezing, but then I knew he’d hang up, and… I didn’t want that. ‘You should give yourself the day off,’ he said at last. ‘Do the whole clichéd Christmas thing. Eat roast chestnuts, drink mulled wine, watchLove Actually. According to Aspen, it’sthemodern classic of our times.’
‘Ah, well if Aspen says so,’ I grinned, leaping at the change of topic. ‘I might have to give the food a miss, though. The supermarkets are closed by now, and the only snacks I’ve got here are wasabi nuts.’
‘Didn’t anybody ever teach you to look under the tree?’
I paused, then bent down to lift the branches. Sure enough, there was a slim box on the cardboard base next to the pot in which the tree was planted. I fished it out and opened the lid. Several paper bags of nuts, the kind you’d buy at Christmas markets, mulled wine, mince pies and cocoa. My throat tightened, my heart trying doggedly to force itself into my throat. I tried to tell myself I was uncomfortable with the gesture because I didn’t like presents. But I realised it gave me the same feeling as Zoe’s habit of buying clothes in my size and wearing them fitfully for three weeks before acting like she didn’t want them anymore. Or Davie’s trick of persuading me to eat cake by pretending I was doing him a favour. None of it was about being pitied. It was about being liked, and I wished I handled it better. It was beautiful and awkward at the same time: it showed me what I wanted as well as what I feared.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose, opening my mouth to reply several times. I wanted to say thank you, at least, but all that came out in the end was: ‘When are you back?’
Somehow I was sure he knew what I was trying to say. ‘Not until the new year. Aspen’s going skiing with a schoolfriend and her family. It wouldn’t feel right to come back sooner.’
‘So that means I won’t see you again this year.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say that.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means there’s ways of seeing someone without literally seeing them. I explained it to you before.’ The smile that clung to the words was bathed in the dust of memory. It was red: I felt it settle on my cheeks, warm.
I let myself fall back on the mattress, turning the magpie in the light of the ceiling lamp. The way it twinkled cast patternson the walls around me. ‘So you’re suggesting we keepin touchover the holidays? In a totally straightforward, block-out-the-world-around-us kind of way?’
‘Yes,’ he said simply.
My lip was throbbing, maybe because I was biting it again to keep from smiling. Maybe because my body was thinking about something my conscious mind would never allow. Because if it had, I’d have asked Blake to come straight over. ‘Then you have to text me back this time when I message you.’
Before I’d even finished the sentence, my phone vibrated in my hand.
Heathcliff
I will.
This time I allowed myself a smile. It threaded itself so completely into my voice that I barely recognised it. ‘Great, then we’ll talk soon. And… merry Christmas, Heathcliff.’
‘Merry Christmas to you too, Pica.’
We hung up, and I stayed lying where I was. Sinking into the sheets and the smell of pine and baked goods, a glass magpie in my hand and a warm feeling in my belly. For the first time inyears, I believed this really might be it. Maybe not a merry Christmas, exactly, but at least a bearable one.
* * *
And it really was. I had been trying for years to cut Mum out of the picture of Christmas I had in my head, but in doing so I’d erased all the magic as well. This year I allowed myself to think about her, and it reminded me of all the things I loved about the season: the stillness that descended over the world, the cosiness of warm socks pulled on after a winter stroll, the taste of shortbread, the spectacle of shop-window displays at dusk. And so I immersed myself in the feeling again: I wandered through the deserted colleges, drank hot chocolate, ate all the sweet treats in the box, watched a dozen Christmas movies, and thought very little about my own life, which was so different from those unspoilt, fairy-light-decked realities that flickered across the screen.
Blake texted me a lot; he sent long messages, he always responded. What happened between us at the Christmas party floated above us like a silk scarf, one that neither of us reached for. Our messages were harmless yet meaningful. Messages while I was studying at the library, when really I should have been ignoring my phone, but was waiting instead for the screen to light up. Messages when I was cooking alone in the evenings in the shared kitchen. Messages as I lay in bed unable to sleep, and we spent hours discussing lines from various books.
