Bah! Humbug!

by Michael Rosen

  GENTLEMAN: They are. Still, I wish I could say they were not.

  SCROOGE: The Treadmill and the Poor Law are still in fine shape, then?

  GENTLEMAN: Both very busy, sir.

  SCROOGE: Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course. I’m very glad to hear it.

  GENTLEMAN: A few of us are trying to raise a fund to buy the poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when want is keenly felt, and abundance is shared. What shall I put you down for?

  SCROOGE: Nothing!

  GENTLEMAN: You wish to be anonymous?

  SCROOGE: I wish to be left alone. Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough and those who are badly off must go there.

  GENTLEMAN: Many can’t go there, and many would rather die.

  SCROOGE: If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Good afternoon, gentlemen!

  DICKENS: And the gentlemen saw themselves out.

  Harry had always liked it that Scrooge’s bitter words had the power to send the gentlemen away. No booing or hissing this time, he thought as his eyes wandered over the audience again. Then, just as he felt a tremor of pleasure pass down his back, his eyes reached Dad. He could see him pull himself away from Mom’s arm and Eva’s glare and leave. Deep in Harry’s stomach, something started grinding. It was a slow, dull heaviness.

  DICKENS: At length the hour of shutting up the countinghouse arrived. With an ill will, Scrooge dismounted from his stool. Bob Cratchit instantly snuffed his candle out and put on his hat.

  SCROOGE: You’ll want all day tomorrow off, I suppose?

  BOB: If that’d be convenient, sir.

  SCROOGE: It’s not convenient, and it’s not fair. If I was to dock you half a crown for it, you’d think yourself hard done by, I’ll be bound? And yet, you don’t think me hard done by when I pay you a day’s wages for doing no work.

  BOB: It is only once a year, sir.

  SCROOGE: A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December! But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning!

  BOB: Yes, sir!

  DICKENS: Scrooge walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white scarf dangling below his waist — he had no coat — ran home to his family in Camden Town as fast as he could. Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and whiled away the rest of the evening with his banker’s book, went home.

  Ray sprinted to the car. Mumbai! If they could clinch this one tonight, it would change everything. GruberMeister.com would be global. Global Gruber!

  He slammed the car door shut. What Lisa doesn’t get is that global doesn’t just mean global. It means time. Global time. Twenty-four-hour days. It’s not just that Mumbai is here. Mumbai is now.

  He whirled the steering wheel around with a little flourish, and the car purred toward the school gates. He tapped the wheel as he waited for them to open automatically and glanced to his right at the booth where Malik the security guy usually sat on nights like this.

  Hmph, no one here tonight . . . that’s odd.

  Ray’s eyes switched back to watch the gates creak open and then whipped back to the booth.

  Sitting still and smiling in the booth was Kwame. Kwame?! His best friend from school. They had even gone to the same college! The hours they spent, their heads full of dreams of how they could change the world: desalinate the sea and get fresh water to places that hadn’t seen rain for years, use recycled trucks and containers to house the homeless . . . and then . . . Oh, hell and hell and hell again, why was it that dear Kwame had parked on the shoulder of the highway, opened the hood of his old car, and, as a jet of screaming hot steam hit his face, staggered out into traffic and been killed instantly?

  Ray stared at Kwame.

  Kwame smiled back.

  Ray heard himself gasp. He looked at the gates still creeping open as if Kwame were controlling them. Yet again, Ray looked back at Kwame, but he was gone. No one was there. Nothing. Just the empty booth, with a picture of the school team stuck slightly crookedly on the back wall. Ray heard a step next to the car. A face loomed up into the window. It was Malik.

  “Merry Christmas, Mr. Gruber,” he said.

  “Yes, yes,” Ray muttered back, and pulled out of the parking lot as fast as he could. Better not to assume that was actually Malik, he thought.

  Grubermeister operated from an office unit in an industrial park on a long, winding, unlit exit off the highway. As Ray drove the car along this road, he switched the headlights to high beams, but the dark crowded in on the shaft of light. He slowed down. There was something strange about the darkness tonight, something heavy, almost as if it had gathered around the car like a cloth, and it was the cloth that was slowing the car down and not him. He couldn’t stop himself from staring out into it. Into his mind came the picture of poor dear Kwame staggering out into the road — not something he had seen but had only imagined as the news had filtered through about how he had died.

  SCROOGE: Now, it is a fact that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on my door, except that it was very large. It is also a fact, that I had seen it, night and morning, during the whole time I lived in that place. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that I, having my key in the lock of the door, saw not a knocker, but Marley’s face!

  DICKENS: Marley’s face. It had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid color, made it horrible.

  SCROOGE: But then, suddenly, it was a knocker again. To say that I was not startled would be untrue. But I put my hand upon the key I had let go of, turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted my candle.

  DICKENS: He did pause, before he shut the door, and he did look cautiously behind the door first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley’s hair tied into a pigtail sticking out into the hall.

  SCROOGE: Nothing on the back of the door, except the screws and nuts that hold the knocker on.

  DICKENS: Up the stairs Scrooge went, trimming his candle and not caring a button for the darkness; darkness is cheap. But before he shut his heavy door, Scrooge walked through his rooms to see that all was right.

  SCROOGE: Sitting room, bedroom, lumber room. All as they should be. Nobody under the table; nobody under the sofa; nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in my dressing gown, hanging up in that suspicious way against the wall.

  DICKENS: Quite satisfied, he closed his door and locked himself in; double-locked himself in. Thus secured against surprise, Scrooge took off his cravat, put on his dressing gown and slippers, and his nightcap, and sat down before the fire to take his gruel.

  SCROOGE: Humbug!

  DICKENS: Scrooge threw his head back in the chair, and his glance happened to rest upon a disused bell that hung in the room. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange dread, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.

  “How are you going to make the bell swing all on its own?” Eva had asked Harry one time when he was rehearsing. Harry wasn’t going to give anything away. He just tapped the side of his nose. Well, not his nose, actually. The mask’s nose.

  When the bell moved in the show itself, Eva remembered this chat. And still she couldn’t see what made the bell move. She pointed at it, as if Mom might not have seen it. She mimed it moving
with her hands. Lisa smiled and shrugged as if to say, How do I know?

  But Eva knew that Mom would know exactly how and smiled. Anyone who sticks tape on the floor to tell actors where to stand would know how to make a bell move all on its own. Maybe, one day, I could do that too, she thought. No. Maybe I could be like that Shona, who Harry seems to like so much, and it would be me making sure I was in the right place where the tape was stuck down . . .

  The units in the industrial park crouched in the darkness. Even Unit 9B, Grubermeister, was dark, as the windows were in the roof and on the other side. The team liked the futuristic anonymity of the plain gray front wall of the unit. It could almost be a UFO and they were anywhere, nowhere and everywhere.

  Ray passed the electronic fob over the pad, and the door slid open. He stepped in, and the door closed automatically. At the end of the hall, he could see a line of light at the base of the door. He walked toward it, and for a moment wondered if, when he opened it, Kwame would be sitting waiting for him.

  DICKENS: The bells were followed by a clanking noise, deep down below, as if some person were dragging a heavy chain in the cellar.

  SCROOGE: Ghosts! Don’t they say ghosts in haunted houses can be heard dragging chains?

  DICKENS: There was a booming sound, of the cellar door flying open, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below, then coming up the stairs; then coming straight toward his door.

  SCROOGE: It’s humbug still! I won’t believe it.

  DICKENS: His color changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes.

  SCROOGE: The same face: the very same. Marley!

  Ray passed the fob over the pad, and the door opened inward. It wasn’t Kwame; it was François. He had two monitors up and a laptop in front of them and was glancing between all three screens. The low purr of the keys crept out of his fingertips.

  Without looking up, François calmly greeted Ray in his half-American, half-French accent: “This is unnecessary.”

  “What is?”

  “You.”

  Ray laughed.

  “I’m serious,” François said, his eyes never leaving the screens.

  “Vraiment?” Ray prodded back. “Really?”

  François swung around on his chair and looked up at Ray. “You know how we do that thing on Monday mornings?”

  “Hmm?” Ray didn’t know where this was going. He had a sense that tonight was turning into a night of not knowing where things were going.

  “Prioritize Time. PT! What are your priorities tonight, Ray?”

  “Oh, shut up, will you!” Ray snapped back. “You texted me. I didn’t text you.”

  “I was passing the informations on to you, Ray. You say that’s what makes us strong. We share always the informations. Your job now is with the Grubers, not with Grubermeister.”

  “No, it’s you who’s got this wrong, François.” Ray poked his finger at him. “Grubermeister is what keeps the Grubers floating on the river and —”

  François interrupted: “Is Harry doing the show tonight?”

  Ray nodded.

  François said nothing. He just nodded back in a heavy, significant way.

  Ray got the point. “There’ll be other shows. And yet more shows. How many nativity plays do I have to see?”

  “Christmas Carol is a nativity play?”

  “No, no, no. You know what I mean . . .” Ray’s eyes moved to the screens. He took it all in with a glance.

  François lifted his hand up between them. “When my family moved to Bordeaux, you know, it was because my mother had the job in the city. My father stayed on the land.”

  Ray pretended to ignore this and tapped a few keys. The screens wiped and flashed.

  “I went to see him before I moved to California.”

  “Look at this!” Ray’s voice rose.

  “We talked about sheep and chickens,” François carried on calmly. “As I left, we embraced, you know, en famille — we kiss on both sides, four times in all! He gave me the hug and said very quiet, ‘So sorry, Frou.’ It’s what he called me. Frou is a rabbit — no, a hare — in a story we have in France.”

  Ray could hear that François’s voice had become unsteady. He knew, without looking, François’s eyes were wet.

  “Papa had missed it all. I was the four-hundred-meter youth champion in Bordeaux. Athletics.”

  Still without looking at him, Ray said quietly but fiercely, pointing his finger toward the screen, “This is what I’m doing. I’m doing it now. That’s my decision. I know what I’m doing, and I know why I’m doing it. The last thing I need is someone dumping his family issues all over me.”

  There was total silence in the office except for the low hum of the computers.

  DICKENS: The chain Marley clasped about his middle. His body was transparent; Scrooge looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes; he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.

  SCROOGE: How now! What do you want with me?

  GHOST OF MARLEY: Much!

  SCROOGE: Who are you?

  GHOST: Ask me who I was.

  SCROOGE: Who were you, then?

  GHOST: In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley. (Pause.) You don’t believe in me.

  SCROOGE: I don’t.

  GHOST: Why do you doubt your senses?

  SCROOGE: Because, any little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheat. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!

  Eva giggled. It was a high, birdlike giggle. The way Harry — (My Harry, she thought) — said “gravy” and “grave” seemed almost like a tickle. When Harry was rehearsing his words, she had to be all the other parts: Dickens, Marley — all of them. At first she had been shy and just said the lines in a very dull, flat way, but the more they rehearsed, the more she became the characters, the more she grew to love doing it.

  There were times when Harry laughed at the way she did it. He wasn’t laughing at me, Eva thought. He was laughing with me because I was good at it. And that had helped him.

  Gravy . . . grave . . . she let the words go on tickling her.

  DICKENS: Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes. The truth is that he tried to be smart as a means of keeping down his terror, for the specter’s voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones. Then the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon.

  SCROOGE (dropping to his knees): Mercy! Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?

  GHOST: Do you believe in me or not?

  SCROOGE: I do. I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?

  DICKENS: Again the specter raised a cry, and shook its chain, and wrung its shadowy hands.

  SCROOGE (trembling): You are fettered. Tell me why?

  GHOST: I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?

  DICKENS: Scrooge trembled more and more.

  GHOST: Or would you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have labored on it since. It is a ponderous chain!

  DICKENS: Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable, but he could see nothing.

  What started off as a patter turned into a drumroll. Rain was hammering on the skylights above Ray’s and François’s heads. The weather had turned. High above them, clouds had rolled in, pushing the frost out. Now they were breaking into a downpour and creating electric charges across the sky.
Lightning shot between the clouds, followed by thunder, while the rain hammered on.

  Then the lights went out and the screens died.

  SCROOGE: Jacob, old Jacob Marley, tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob.

  GHOST: I have none to give. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never walked beyond our countinghouse — mark me! — in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me! Oh, captive, bound, and double-ironed. How was I to know that there is no amount of regret that can make up for life’s opportunities misused! Yet such was I! Oh, such was I! At this time of the rolling year, I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!

  DICKENS: Scrooge began to quake exceedingly.

  GHOST: Hear me! My time is nearly gone. I am here tonight to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate, Ebenezer.

  SCROOGE: You were always a good friend to me. Thank’ee!

  GHOST: You will be haunted by Three Spirits.

  SCROOGE: Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?

  GHOST: It is.

  SCROOGE: I — I think I’d rather not.

  Eva heard Mom’s laugh next to her. Harry had made Scrooge look so certain in his own nasty way, and now, all of a sudden, he was like a little scared boy. Eva stared at the stage. It was as if it wasn’t Harry anymore. He had become Scrooge. It really was Scrooge who had said, “I think I’d rather not.”

  If Mom hadn’t been there, Eva would have called out, “Not so full of yourself now, are you, Mr. Scrooge?”

  GHOST: Without their visits, you cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls one.

  SCROOGE: Couldn’t I take ’em all at once, and have it over, Jacob?

  GHOST: Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. The third upon the next night when the last stroke of twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed between us.