‘I’m not. I was just in a good mood, and as usual you’ve ruined it just by walking through the door. Me and Lily were having a lovely time –’ He gestured in her direction, and she drew back further, pushing her shoulder-blades into the wall.
‘I’m not trying to stop you having fun, for God’s sake. Maybe if just once you’d let me join in instead of feeling like an outsider –’
Their voices rose, until all illusion of communication was gone: they were merely shouting their own grievances over the top of each other’s words. Lily waited until she was absolutely sure they weren’t paying her any attention, and then slipped into the hallway and up the stairs to her room.
She closed the door behind her, and then went to the window, throwing it open and trying not to wince as the cold air slapped against her bare face and hands. She stuck her head as far out as she could, gulping freezing air, feeling it rush down her windpipe and constrict her insides with cold. If she leaned out far enough then their voices were just a distant murmur against the noise of the birds in the trees, and she couldn’t hear the words they said.
Two houses down, a family were out in their back garden: a father and son dragged wood into a pile while the mother watched, unwilling to join in, but smiling nonetheless. She pointed to bits of wood with hands gloved in orange wool, directing them on the best methods of construction. The son, not much older than seven or eight, kept trying to pick up logs that were too big for him, determination etched on his young face.
Lily smiled as she watched them, enjoying the simplicity of the scene, the cordiality with which all members of the family treated each other. When the boy dropped a piece of wood on his foot, and neither parent had been watching closely enough to prevent it, they didn’t scold each other, they just made sure their son wasn’t injured and then carried on as normal.
From her position half-inside and half-outside the house, Lily heard the front door slam. She waited, her breathing as shallow and quiet as she could make it without it hurting her lungs, for sounds from which she could deduce what had happened. Ten seconds passed, and then the car beeped: the door opened, shut. A further ten seconds, and the engine roared to life. The car itself sounded angry as it sped away, far more quickly than it usually would have done.
There was no sound from within the house. It was impossible to guess which one of them had left. She realised she was almost impressed, that they could upset each other so much in such a short space of time. It had been less than five minutes, all told.
She pulled the window closed quietly, not wanting to draw attention to herself, and then tiptoed across her room and opened the door as carefully as she could. She could hear no sound from downstairs: whoever remained had shut off the radio, and they weren’t moving. That was if either of them remained, of course. What if they had left at the same time, disappeared in different directions? Would she be expected to sit here quietly, have dinner ready for when they got home?
The stairs creaked as she walked down them, despite her attempts to place her weight evenly and not disturb the looser floorboards. She was well practised at creeping around the house; she half-believed that it was the prevention of this that kept her mother from investing in carpets, but she and Connie had often snuck around in the middle of the night when they were young, while their parents slept on, oblivious.
She thought of the last time they had crept out together, and shivered, involuntarily. Over four years, and it still felt as if the legacy of that day perched on her shoulder and watched her.
Her mother was in the kitchen. She sat on the floor, legs curled to her chest, head resting on her knees, shaking silently. Lily waited for a moment, watching her. She looked exhausted. Emptied. When Lily came to stand in front of her, she stirred but didn’t look up. Lily felt her strain to even out her breathing, her body racked by deep, shuddering inhalations as she tried to steady herself.
‘I’m sorry I ruined Christmas,’ she said, sounding as forlorn as a child. Lily knew she should feel angry, or at least irritated. But all she felt was sorry, that this was what her family had come to: that, out of all them, she was the one who seemed to have the best grip on reality.
She sat down next to her mother. The floor was cold, and she could feel the numbness seeping through her jeans. ‘Where did Dad go?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘He took the car.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ Anna paused for a beat. ‘He was really angry with me, Lily. He told me he wanted to leave me.’
Lily nodded, but didn’t reply.
‘Do you think he’ll ever forgive me?’
Lily shrugged. Noticed a piece of thread that was coming loose from the bottom of her trousers, and tugged it, sharply. ‘He was drinking earlier. He shouldn’t be driving.’
‘He’ll be okay. He’s just trying to get my attention.’
Maybe you should pay attention, then. But Lily didn’t say it aloud.
‘Dinner will be ready soon,’ Anna said after a while.
Together, they stood up, and carried on making dinner, as if they had been the ones who had started it.
The knock on the door came hours later. Anna had dished up the food, and they had eaten, quietly, Lily eyeing the space at the table that was the source of their silence. Anna looked resolutely ahead throughout the entire meal, staring at a spot on the wall that Lily couldn’t see. Afterwards, Lily went through to the living room while Anna washed up. She turned the main light off, draping the room in early winter darkness. Then she got on her hands and knees and groped behind the sofa, searching for the switch, and, finding it, sat back to admire her work. The darkness was gone, swept away in a twinkling of Christmas lights. The lights winked on and off, playing hide and seek behind the green plastic branches. Lily was so involved in watching them that she didn’t notice someone walking up the path, just outside the window.
But she heard the knock at the door.
There was only one policeman, and she remembered, later, being surprised at that: on TV there were always two of them. He was about the same age as her dad, but he was balding, and his face was etched with deep creases that she longed to poke a finger into.
‘Is your mother in?’
Lily sized him up, and decided he was probably not a danger to either of them. She’d seen enough policemen when Connie had left to be able to recognise their general type, regardless of whether or not they were in uniform. ‘Sure. Come in.’
She led him through to the kitchen, where they found Anna elbow-deep in soap bubbles. Her expression changed from exhaustion to surprise when she saw who it was, and then, almost instantly, to trepidation. ‘Hello,’ she said, guarded.
‘Good evening. Sorry to barge in on you like this. Mrs Emmett?’
‘Yes.’ She pulled her arms out of the sink, and dried them hurriedly on a nearby tea-towel. She started to hold out a hand to shake, then seemed to think better of it.
‘Jack Latham. Police constable.’
Anna nodded, uncertain. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘No, thank you. Could we sit down?’
‘Sure.’
Anna led him into the living room. Hesitated. And then closed the door, leaving Lily in the hallway by herself.
now
Lily awoke early on Christmas Day. She could see through the gap in the curtains that the sky was still shrouded in darkness; the day had not officially begun. She rolled over, and realised Richard was awake, watching her in silence. ‘Morning,’ she whispered.
‘Morning,’ he whispered back. His eyes were glimmers of light in the darkness as they darted around her face, taking her in. He ran a hand up her back, slowly, and his fingers were warm and dry, and gentle, as they explored the network of muscles beneath her skin. She pushed her face into his chest so she could no longer see him, but she could feel his heart beating in her forehead. My fiancé, she thought, and allowed herself a moment of shivering pleasure, before remembering what day it was.
&nb
sp; Richard kissed the top of her head, teasing strands of hair away from her scalp with his nose, burrowing into her. They lay quietly for a while, his arms clasped around her back, her palms pressed against his chest.
‘In the beginning was the word,’ he said, after a while, his voice still hushed in the darkness. ‘And the word was…?’
‘Marcus,’ she replied, her voice barely a whisper.
‘Ah, well. The name Marcus is said to originate from the Roman god Mars. So I suppose our story must start in Rome, with a nameless young orphan who had worked all his life and received nothing more than bread and water for his trouble.
‘This orphan had always belonged, in a sense, to a middle-aged couple with too many children of their own. They had allowed him to sleep in their barn and to share the scraps of food that the whole family had to live on, but they could not afford more generosity than this, for they were starving themselves. No one knew how he had come to be with this couple: he had simply been brought to them one day, as a baby. At the time the couple had been preoccupied with other babies and other worries, and so they had not had time to spare him a name. Because of this, he had spent his life being known as Puer, or “boy”.
‘Puer was not an unhappy child, despite the fact that at first glance he had much to be unhappy about. The other children in the family treated him like a slave; his work was hard, and he rarely received thanks for doing it; he was severely malnourished, and had little hope of ever receiving more food than the minimum needed to survive. Despite all this, he was happy in the animal friends with whom he shared his barn, and he took satisfaction in performing his work to a higher standard than was expected of him. And so it was that, on his eleventh birthday, the father of the family, Aulus, took him to one side, and bestowed an honour upon him.
‘“Up until now we have always asked you to tend the animals,” Aulus said, his voice grave. “But we have seen how hard you work, and we are having trouble with other aspects of our farm. We wondered if, now that you are old enough to be trusted to do it, you might help us with our crops, so that we might all be more prosperous.”
‘Puer agreed immediately: it was a great honour to be asked to work in the fields. And so the next day Aulus took him to work with him, and showed him the rest of the farm.
‘The farm was huge, and Puer, even with no farming knowledge, could see that it was being badly managed. But he said nothing; he allowed Aulus to show him around the whole farm, and then he was put to work in one field. He worked hard all day, doing exactly what Aulus had told him to do, and by the end of the day he had done far more than any of the other children who worked there.
‘The next day was the same, and the next, and the next. For a year Puer worked tirelessly, and his field produced more crops than any of the others, and at the end of the year Aulus had a celebration in his honour.
‘Naturally, Aulus’s other children were not pleased about this. They didn’t understand why someone who wasn’t part of the family was being given such honours; they felt sure that Puer must be cheating in some way. And so they started a campaign to get rid of him. Over the course of the next year they attempted to sabotage his crop, but to no avail. Everything they did seemed to backfire. They couldn’t understand how Puer seemed to be able to predict what they were going to do, or figure out things that they had done that should have been unnoticeable. They didn’t realise how closely he was watching them, how deftly he deflected their attempts, without ever saying a word to their father about their betrayal.
‘After a year, when his field was still the most successful on the farm, Puer approached Aulus about the possibility of working on more of the fields. It wasn’t hard to convince him that it was a good idea: Aulus’s sons had put so much energy into sabotaging Puer that their own fields had fallen into disrepair, and their crop harvest was noticeably poorer than the previous year.
‘So it was that Puer began the work of transforming the farm into a more successful enterprise. He shifted things around, reorganised and rebuilt, upsetting many of his fellow workers as he did so. There was an uprising, at one point: all of the workers laid down their tools and refused to work in the way that Puer was asking them to. But Puer simply carried on regardless, doing the work that he could on his own, asking Aulus for help when he couldn’t manage. Within two years they were the most successful farmers in the local area, and all of Aulus’s sons were guilty and ashamed at their behaviour, now that they could see how much more prosperous they were thanks to Puer.
‘When talking among themselves one day, Lucius, the oldest of Aulus’s sons, admitted to the others that he felt they needed to do something by way of apology. “Puer has done nothing but help us,” he said to his brothers, “and we need to give something back in return. He has put food on our table; he has made our father a legend among farmers. What can we do for him, to return the favour, and apologise for being so ungrateful before?”
‘All the sons racked their brains for a week, but they couldn’t think of anything fitting. The things that they thought of – gold, food, part-ownership of the farm – were not theirs to give, and they didn’t want to admit to their father how awfully they had behaved. And then eventually the youngest brother, only just eleven years old, stepped forward.
‘“We could give him a name,” he suggested.
‘“But he has a name. He has been Puer all his life. Why change it now?”
‘“Puer means boy,” the youngest son said, “and he is now a man. Why don’t we give him a name that reflects this?”
‘They all agreed that it was a good idea, and went away to think of a suitable name. After a week, they returned with their suggestions. A few names were tossed around, though none seemed fitting, somehow. And then Lucius said, “What about Marcus?”
‘The boys looked at him in surprise, for it was not yet a common name. But Lucius continued, “Think about it. Marcus comes from Mars, the god of war. But Mars is not just a god of war. He is a god of war that delivers peace – and that is what Puer has done. He is also a god of agriculture. He has assured peace and prosperity in this family for years to come. This is a fitting name for him.”
‘They all agreed, and so they went to their father, and explained what they wanted to do. Aulus thought it was a wonderful idea, and later that night, after the evening meal – which was much more substantial since Puer had taken charge – Lucius stood up, and asked them all to be quiet. He gave a long speech in which he confessed what he and his brothers had done, and explained that he wished to make amends. And then he formally bestowed the name Marcus on the nameless boy who had changed their family’s prospects, and they all toasted him, and drank to his good health.’
In the time that it had taken for Richard to tell his story, Lily had not moved. The sun had risen outside, and light had crept into the room through the gap in the curtains, tiptoeing its way across the sheets to fall across them both. Richard pulled back, now, so that he could see her: and she looked up at him, her face flushed, her eyes sparkling. Her palms, still against his chest, tapped out a familiar sequence.
‘I love you, too,’ he replied, encasing her tiny shoulders in his hands. They lay like that until they heard the shouts of excited children in the street outside, and then Lily wished her father a merry Christmas, and they got out of bed.
Connie woke up in the bedroom of her childhood, for the first time in over twenty years. She and Nathan were sleeping on a mattress on the floor: there was no furniture in here, nothing to remind her of the years she’d spent in this room. She had wondered yesterday, while they were making the bed, where her old single bed had gone. Had it just been thrown away, along with all the other remnants of her childhood? Or was everything stored, somewhere, waiting to be found?
She could hear the boys stirring in Lily’s old room, next door. They were talking quietly, but their voices carried through the thin walls. There was a thump, as if one of them had fallen, and then a shout, and then laughter. She smiled, trying to ima
gine what they were doing. Loving the fact, even while she was jealous of it, that they had a life that they shared away from her, a world where their parents were largely irrelevant. It reminded her of when she and Lily were young, the secrets they had shared away from their parents’ hearing.
Nathan was still fast asleep, his breathing deep and even, his body still. He was the kind of person who fell asleep where he lay and didn’t move for eight hours, who slept on his back with his arms at his sides, like a flushed corpse. Connie had always been fascinated by how tidily he slept; sometimes she fell asleep curled up into him, his arm around her shoulders, and if she moved away in the night she would wake to find his arm still outstretched, waiting for her to crawl back into the place she had left.
It was the sign of an untroubled mind, he’d told her once; you could only have truly restful sleep if you could put all your worries aside, leaving your unconscious free to roam through everything else. She wondered, now, if he truly was as calm as he seemed when he was asleep. He had always been stronger than her, less volatile, less reactive; she had found it irritating at times, thinking that he viewed himself as some kind of saint, while she was a mere hysterical woman. She was being unfair, she knew – in many ways she was stronger than he was, and he knew it, and valued that strength in her – but she couldn’t help but feel that there was something unnatural about being able to cast your anxieties aside so easily. Did he truly not worry about the future because there was little he could do to change it? Or was he just confident that Connie would never split up their family over one simple mistake? The idea of his self-assurance, his arrogance, made her want to slap him.
She heard Lily and Richard getting up, their door opening, their footsteps making their way down the stairs towards the kitchen. She remembered lying here on Christmas mornings as a child, after Lily had gone away, listening to her parents creeping down the stairs, trying to get the coffee going before she got up and demanded presents and false cheer. Not that she had ever really demanded those things: Christmas had seemed like a pointless holiday, once Lily had gone. Her parents had never been the same as they had been before; their delight in giving presents, in cooking dinner, in celebrating the existence of their family seemed to have dissipated. And Connie realised, with a stab of sadness, that it would be the same in their family, if she were to tell Nathan she couldn’t forgive him. Christmases would always be divided, as would everything else. Her children would remember, but never be able to relive, the days when their family had been a unit and there had been something to celebrate.
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