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“Can we spend Christmas with Mabel next year?” Elsie had Crumpet on her lap and either her mother hadn’t noticed or she’d decided to let the presence of the cat at the meal table pass without comment on this occasion. “I like it. I want to do this every time.”
“We’re not thinking about next Christmas right now,” Brooke said. “We’re thinking about this Christmas.”
“This is going to be the best Christmas ever,” Poppy said happily, and right at that moment the power went out and they were plunged into darkness.
17
Izzy
There was a moment of shocked silence and then shrill screams from the two girls.
Her head pierced by the wails, Izzy winced and sprang into action.
She fumbled in her pocket for her phone and then remembered she’d left it in the car. Had Jason found it when he was unloading? “Oh, this is fun! What an adventure. Let me find my flashlight and we can play this amazing game making shadows.”
The girls were wailing too loudly to hear her.
“That’s enough, girls.” Brooke’s voice came from the darkness, firm but patient. “We need to think, and we can’t think when you’re making that noise. We’ll fix it. Sit still for a moment while one of us finds a phone. I think I left mine in the bedroom, Matt. Girls! You’re safe.”
Wails turned to whimpers.
“Mummy?” Elsie spoke first. A disembodied voice in the enveloping blackness. “I don’t like it. I don’t like the dark.”
Izzy had felt the same way at the same age. Her mother had bought a night-light for her but after she’d died, her father had removed it and told her that she was too old to sleep with a light on. The first thing she’d done when she’d left home was buy herself a night-light.
“Elsie, the room is the same as it was a moment ago. Nothing has changed except the lighting. Stay where you are and don’t move. I don’t want you bumping into things.” Matt answered her. “Everything is going to be fine. I have my phone here. Let me switch the torch on.”
“But why are there no lights?”
“The storm must have knocked them out.”
“Is it going to be dark for the whole of Christmas?” Elsie’s voice rose. “Are we going to live in the dark? How will Santa see where he’s going?”
Izzy smiled into the darkness.
Had she believed in Santa at that age? No. By the age of eight her life had been nothing but reality. If Santa had ever turned up at her door, she would have said no to the present and jumped on his sleigh instead. Take me away from here.
It occurred to her that maybe Elsie didn’t really believe. Maybe she was doing it for her sister.
And she could play that game, too.
“He has lights on his sleigh,” she said firmly. “And the reindeer know where they’re going. They’re like … wild salmon.”
“Like salmon?” Jason’s voice shook in the darkness. “Reindeer are nothing like salmon.”
“I only meant they naturally know where they’re going.
They have an internal compass.”
“It all sounds a bit fishy to me. Rudolph the red-nosed salmon.”
Someone laughed. Brooke? Mabel?
A few seconds passed and then a light flickered.
Izzy almost felt Brooke’s relief.
“There we go,” she said in a singsong voice. “This is fun! What an adventure.”
