‘I’ll put my bag up,’ he said, and climbed the stairs.
His brother and sister were in their rooms. Jack Junior said hello when Christopher showed his face at the crack in the door but Jack was too engrossed in Christopher’s old Scalextric to bother looking up. Louise did look up and gave him a thumbs-up. She was kneeling on her pink bedroom carpet, brushing the blonde nylon hair of what looked like the disembodied life-sized head of a girl. There were lipsticks scattered on the floor, bright plastic hair clips, a vivid blue square of eyeshadow.
‘What’re you doing?’ he asked her.
She set the brush aside and divided a lock of the plastic head’s hair into three strands. ‘Girl’s World.’ She folded one strand over another, her brow knitted, her chin jutting forward in concentration. The expression was so exactly like Margaret’s when she darned socks or sewed buttons back onto his father’s shirts, it took Christopher aback.
‘I’ll leave you to it.’ He reached the pole from its neat mount on the landing wall, pulled down the trapdoor and banged his way up the metal steps. His room was as he had left it, though it smelled of polish and there were stripes in the burgundy carpet where his mother had obviously passed the Ewbank. He took off his wet coat and hung it over the back of his desk chair. He took off his shoes and socks as they too were wet and put all of them on the oil heater, which was ice cold. He turned the dial and heard the click-click as it began to warm. His own breath clouded before him.
He sat at his desk. What he was about to do felt wrong, but he had not had time until this moment and would not delay it further. It was why he had come up to his room after all. He grabbed his writing set from the drawer where it had lain undisturbed all term, placed the bold lined sheet beneath the top sheet and wrote:
Dear Phyllis,
I realised on the train that I had quite forgotten to wish you a Merry Christmas! So I will send this second letter right away in the hope that it reaches you between Christmas and New Year.
He sat back and stared at the words on the page.
Love is where the idle mind wanders, he had once heard someone say – or perhaps he had heard it on the television, or read it somewhere. If that was true, then he loved her, Phyllis, even though he had not met her. Yes, he must do, since his mind went to her whenever it was unoccupied, sometimes even when he was trying to focus it on his books.
‘Christopher.’ From the bottom of the stepladder Margaret was calling up to him. ‘Cup of tea, love.’
‘Coming now,’ he answered, scribbling frantically:
I must dash!
Merry Christmas, Phyllis, although you won’t get this until after. I hope it is all the merrier for me contacting you. I know it is for me.
Yours,
Christopher
He wrote her name and address on the envelope and sealed it. His heart raced, battered in his chest. A second letter without hearing back from the first – he had not reined himself in, not really. Too late now! He grabbed his coat, his wet socks and shoes. He put on the shoes without the socks, which he stuffed into his coat pocket, the letter in the other. He would run out to the postbox as soon as he’d drunk his tea. Perhaps leave it half an hour for form’s sake. He had no intention of hurting anyone’s feelings, after all. And I believe that, even after all that has happened, Christopher would never hurt anyone, not intentionally.
* * *
On Christmas Eve, Christopher did his gift shopping in haste. That evening, he told me, he made himself eat three extra-strong mints to disguise any whiff of No. 6, then sprayed his room with Denim deodorant before heading down his metal staircase at quarter to eleven in time to go to Midnight Mass with the people he had called his family: Margaret, Jack, Jack Junior and Louise. Margaret was waiting for him on the landing, coat on, bag clutched at her waist as if someone were threatening to snatch it. He had not yet reached the bottom step when he turned to see her pained expression.
‘Christopher, are you wearing those trousers?’
He stepped onto the landing and looked down at his dark navy flared jeans (an absolute bugger on the stepladder, not that he would have admitted it) and his new black ankle boots with the snazzy block heel. ‘I was going to, why?’
‘Do you have any that aren’t… loons?’ She looked like she might cry, and he thought of Adam, of what he would say when Christopher told him about this. Loons? he would say, in a silly shocked old-woman voice. For the house of God, Christopher? It was all Christopher could do not to laugh out loud – it was only a lack of cruelty that prevented him.
‘I’m wearing a shirt,’ he said. ‘I don’t think God will mind.’
‘Don’t blaspheme.’
Know God’s taste in fashion, do you? was what he did not say, seeing the futility of argument just in time.
‘I can change,’ was what he did say. ‘I’ve some old ones in the wardrobe.’
‘Aye,’ she said, her nose wrinkling at the bridge. ‘Happen.’
He returned to the loft, the clank of shoe on metal serving only to amuse him further. Adam again, there in his mind’s eye: Flares, Christopher? In a church, Christopher? What are you, a murdering, drinking fornicator? How ridiculous. And it did not escape him that this ridiculousness was something he would not have seen back when he lived here, but three short months ago. And yet he could not pinpoint when or where he had learnt to view the world this other way. When had this happened to him?
At least in his loft room, he thought, his mother could not see the smirk on his face.
He searched out his old grey school trousers and changed in haste. They were too short and a little tight on the waist after a term of steamed puddings and beer, but not, at least, flaring out like the very devil incarnate. Stop it, Christopher. That’s enough. He put on his old black brogues, thought about wearing his school tie as a protest but instead grabbed an old purple tie and knotted it under the wide collars of his brown shirt. Over this new outfit, his Afghan coat must, he thought, look a little odd, though there was no mirror to check, and besides, he could hardly argue it mattered – not now. He returned to the main part of the house, repeating the dreadful and comic clonk-clank-clonk on the stepladder, his old woollen trousers airy around his knees after the skin-tight wrap of his jeans and the straight leg of course a cinch on the metal steps.
‘That’s better,’ came his mother’s voice from behind him, and when he turned to look, he saw that she was holding out a woollen coat. ‘Maybe pop this on,’ she said. ‘It’s only your father’s.’
‘Of course.’ He shrugged off the Afghan and let it fall to the floor. His mother was already at his back, spreading out his father’s coat, which smelled strongly of mothballs.