‘Has something happened?’ I ask, once she’s settled.
She sips at her water, her eyes big. ‘I couldn’t stay there,’ she says, her voice catching. She reaches for a biscuit, and I wonder what I’m going to feed her if she ends up staying here all day.
‘My sister’s boyfriend was over. They’ve got a baby together and they were joking about if he turned out to be gay, and my mum was so horrified. I just couldn’t be there.’
I shake my head. How can they not see, these people, what they’re doing to her? How can they be so blind?
‘Did you say anything? Do they know why you left?’
‘I just said I was going out for some fresh air, but I’m not going back.’
I must look a bit panicked, because she speaks again.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll find somewhere to go, I just, I didn’t know who I could call on Christmas Day and I was wandering around, and then I spotted your house and I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind.’
‘I don’t,’ I say. ‘I don’t mind.’
I don’t tell her that she’s brightened up my day no end, that I was wondering how I was going to get through it without any company. Because my saving grace is her disaster. She’s hurt and she needs comfort.
‘You can stay here,’ I say. ‘There’s a spare room. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s somewhere you can come, anytime you can’t be at home.’
She looks up at me through thick, wet lashes. ‘Thank you.’
‘The only thing is, I don’t know what I can feed you. Today, I mean, while the shops are closed. Julie bought me one of those roast dinners for one. I don’t have much else in.’
She waves a hand. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
When she goes to the bathroom to wash her face, I think about what I can do to take her mind off her hurt. I consult with Arthur, silently. What would he have said, or done, if a teenager had turned up on the doorstep on Christmas Day? I almost laugh. There’s just no way it would have happened. In strange and mysterious ways, my life has opened up since his death. I never could have expected it.
We can’t sit in front of the television all day. And that’s when I think of it. A game. Arthur and I went through phases. We’d go months playing Scrabble every day, then we’d get fed up with it and put it away. And a couple of weeks later, Arthur would suggest a game of cribbage or bridge, and we’d be onto that for a while. I open the sideboard and look inside. Backgammon, Scrabble, a couple of packs of cards, and three or four thousand-piece jigsaws.
‘What are you doing?’ Erin asks.
I hadn’t heard her on the stairs and she makes me jump.
‘I thought maybe we could play a game. Take your mind off things.’
I’m bending over to look, but she crouches down, like it’s nothing. I remember when my body moved easily like that. When nothing was too difficult, physically. When my heart was open and uncracked.
‘Scrabble?’ she suggests. ‘I haven’t played for years.’
We set it up on the dining table, and Erin roots through the kitchen cupboards and manages to find some hot chocolate. Lord knows how long it’s been there, but I don’t think things like that really go off, so she makes us both one, and it feels cosy. Less like two people thrown together on the one day of the year you’re really supposed to be with family, and more like something planned.
‘What are we like?’ I ask. ‘I don’t have any family and you, well…’
‘I can’t spend a full day with mine.’
‘Yes.’
It’s a sorry state of affairs, my family all in the graveyard and me missing them terribly, and hers alive and well and causing her great pain.
I watch her looking at her tiles, rearranging them. A little hesitantly, she reaches out, plays the word ‘brother’. A seven-letter word, on her first go. I’ll never recover from it. But it doesn’t matter, because there’s a smile playing at the corners of her lips, and it’s the first one I’ve seen today.
‘What are your plans?’ I ask her, laying out my own letters. I use the ‘r’ of ‘brother’ to make ‘reads’. ‘Longer-term, I mean, after your A levels.’
‘University,’ she says.
What might my life have been like, if going to university had been as normal when I was her age as it is now? What would I have studied, and what would I have done with the qualification? At school, I was always good at history. Could remember dates and facts, and enjoyed seeing how different parts of the past slotted together, what impacted what, like a line of dominos. I try to imagine myself in a classroom, or a library or museum, or leading tourists around a place of interest. I might have been good at one or other of those things, but I’ll never know. Erin has everything open to her, doors flung wide. I’m a little envious, but I try to push that to one side.
‘Art is the only thing I’ve ever been good at.’
‘Seems to me that you’re pretty good at Scrabble,’ I say, as she lays down the word ‘ankle’ with the ‘k’ on a triple letter tile.
She giggles. ‘I want to work at a gallery, curating. I mean, eventually.’
‘Not making your own art?’
‘It just seems like too big a dream. It’s so hard to make it.’
I sit back, take a sip of my hot chocolate, watching her all the while. She’s looking at her letters, concentrating, a little hunched. I wish she could see what I can see. A young woman who could take on anything, and win. Who could do whatever she chooses. She’s right at the start, and nothing is closed off.
‘I’d advise against limiting your dreams at this early stage,’ I say. ‘There’ll be plenty of time for that later on. Now, you should be aiming for the biggest thing you can think of.’
She looks up at me and for a minute neither of us says anything.
‘Love,’ she says, a hairline crack in her voice. ‘That’s the biggest dream. Then art.’
I nod, because I understand. I do. All those career paths I didn’t and couldn’t have taken, none of them would have led me anywhere as wonderful as love.
‘Go for both,’ I say. ‘Always both. Then later, if you have to, you can start making compromises or choosing between them. But right now, reach for everything.’
She’s really looking at me, and I don’t know but I hope it’s a conversation that will stay with her, that she’ll think of long after I’ve gone, when she’s built herself a life and it’s more or less what she wanted. I hope she won’t settle for less than she deserves.
28
We’ve finished Scrabble, with Erin having beaten me by over one hundred points, and I’m starting to feel a little hungry when I see Kirsty walking down the street with Olly. I knock on the window and wave, and she waves back. A few seconds later, there’s a knock on the door.
‘I’ll get it,’ Erin offers.
I hear them making their introductions in the hallway.
‘I had to get out of the house,’ Kirsty says, coming into the front room. ‘Hello Mabel, happy Christmas, I hope you got my gift?’