This Winter

by Alice Oseman

  This Winter – a Solitaire novella

  Alice Oseman

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

  HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Copyright © Alice Oseman 2015

  Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015

  All rights reserved

  Alice Oseman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780008147884

  Version: 2015-10-21

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Victoria Annabel Spring, 16

  Charles Francis Spring, 15

  Oliver Jonathan Spring, 7

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  “Caroline decidedly says that none of the party will return into Hertfordshire this winter. I will read it to you:

  ‘When my brother left us yesterday, he imagined that the business which took him to London might be concluded in three or four days; but as we are certain it cannot be so, and at the same time convinced that when Charles gets to town he will be in no hurry to leave it again, we have determined on following him thither, that he may not be obliged to spend his vacant hours in a comfortless hotel. Many of my acquaintances are already there for the winter; I wish that I could hear that you, my dearest friend, had any intention of making one of the crowd – but of that I despair. I sincerely hope your Christmas in Hertfordshire may abound in the gaieties which that season generally brings, and that your beaux will be so numerous as to prevent your feeling the loss of the three of whom we shall deprive you.’

  “It is evident by this,” added Jane, “that he comes back no more this winter.”

  Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

  VICTORIA ANNABEL SPRING, 16

  I wake up two hours after I fall asleep. The amount of sleep I get on Christmas Eve seems to be steadily decreasing each year, probably because each year my average falling-asleep time gets steadily later, probably because I’m an Internet-addicted idiot. Maybe, eventually, I’ll just stop sleeping altogether and become a vampire. I’d be good at that.

  Not gonna bother complaining about my sleeping pattern right now though, because it’s Christmas and this is the one day of the year when I should at least try not to complain about anything. This is hard when your seven-year-old brother is hitting you in the face with a pillow at six o’clock in the morning.

  I say something along the lines of “nooooo” and retreat under my duvet, but this doesn’t stop Oliver from following, tearing back the covers and crawling on to my bed.

  “Tori,” he whispers. “It’s Christmas.”

  “Mm.”

  “Are you awake?”

  “No.”

  “You are!”

  “No.”

  “Tori.”

  “Oliver … go wake Charlie up.”

  “Mum said I wasn’t allowed because he’s ill.” He starts ruffling my hair. “Toriiiiiiii—”

  “Ugh.” I roll over and open my eyes. Oliver is completely under the covers, looking at me, wriggling with excitement, his hair sticking up on end, like a dandelion. Charlie and I have discussed at length how it is possible that Oliver can be at all related to us, since he’s the literal embodiment of joy and we’re both miserable fucks. We concluded that he must have got all of the happy genes.

  Oliver has a Christmas card in his hands.

  “Why do you have a—”

  He opens the card and a disgustingly cheerful version of We Wish You A Merry Christmas begins to play right into my ear.

  I groan and shove Oliver off the bed with one hand. He rolls on to the floor and bursts into giggles.

  “So annoying,” I mutter, before sitting up and turning on my bedside lamp, resulting in a shriek of “YAY!” from Oliver. He begins to wander around my room, opening and closing the card, repeating the first two notes over and over again, and my eyes are opening and closing like they do in my early morning English lessons. The realisation that it’s Christmas Day is creeping over me and I guess I feel kind of … I don’t know. It’s not exactly a normal Christmas Day this year.

  Christmas is okay at our house. It’s chilled. Quiet. Dad calls it a Spring Christmas, which he thinks is hilarious, for some reason. We open presents when we wake up, then family come over for Christmas dinner and stay until late, and that’s it. I play multiple video games with my brothers and cousins, Dad always gets drunk, my Spanish grandfather (Dad’s dad) has an argument with my English grandfather (Mum’s dad) – truly wonderful stuff.

  It’s not a normal Christmas this year though.

  My fifteen-year-old brother Charlie had to go to a psychiatric hospital back in October because he has anorexia and some really shitty stuff happened. Don’t really want to think too much about it on Christmas Day.

  He ended up staying there for two months and he only got back two weeks ago.

  I don’t really think there was a reason he got so ill. That stuff just happens, like diseases or cancer. So it’s not his fault. Actually, I think it was probably my fault he had to go to hospital. When he stopped eating meals with me in the summer, I didn’t tell my parents and I didn’t ask him why. I didn’t talk to him enough. I didn’t even ask him “How are you?” or anything like that. I didn’t think it was weird that he stayed in his room all the time. I didn’t think about it. About anything.

  So, yeah. Everything’s been pretty stressful because Charlie’s got this food regime that he has to follow and he hates it, and Mum and Charlie aren’t really getting along and Charlie doesn’t want to join in Christmas dinner and, to cut a long story short, nobody has been feeling very Christmassy at all.

  I sometimes feel Christmassy because everything is pretty and not boring for once, but at the same time, the amount of Christmas couples kissing under the mistletoe on my Tumblr dashboard really needs to calm down. And this winter I haven’t been feeling very cheerful or anything. I thought maybe it was because of the Charlie stuff, or the fact that I’ve started Sixth Form and it’s even more boring than I thought it’d be, but I think it might just be me. All I do is mope around sadly and spend extreme amounts of time alone in my room on the Internet – just being another self-pitying sixteen-year-old girl for newspapers to criticise, I suppose. I’m sure I’ll get over myself eventually.

  I pick up my phone, ignore the notifications, and text Becky, my best friend. Well, I say best friend, but what I really mean is the-only-person-who-doesn’t-find-me-completely-dull. I have told her about what Charlie did but not all the gory details and I don’t know how well she understands mental illnesses. I think she just thinks he had a sort of tantrum.

  (06:16) Tori Spring

  HAPPY CHRISTMAS. Be thankful you don’t have siblings. I am tired. Oliver threw a pillow at me. Enjoy sleep. Bye. xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  Mum and Dad said we can’t wake them up until at least 7:30. It’s 6:17 now. I get up and open my curtains to find the world still dark, tinged yellow from the street lamps. I fall back into bed and put the radio on. It’s playing a quiet hymn for once, instead of All I Want for Christmas Is You. It’s nice. Oliver is spinning around in my desk chair and a choir is singing Silent Night, my eyes are closing again and Oliver’s sitting in my bed with me, the musical card on a pile of clothes on the floor, it’s 6:29, 6:42, 6:55 … Oliver’s pulling my hair gently, he’s talking about what presents he wants and whether Father Christmas ate the biscuits we left him and I’m mumbling something, I don’t know what, I’m drifting off …

  And then my bedroom door opens again.
>
  “… Victoria?”

  I wake up for the tenth time. It’s Charlie, just visible through the dim light standing at the door in a navy Adidas sweatshirt and checked pyjama bottoms. He looks tired but he’s smiling. “You awake?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m having an out-of-body experience. I’m just my ghost.”

  Charlie snorts and enters my room, shutting the door softly behind him. I turn to Oliver, who has fallen asleep against my shoulder, and give him a little nudge with my elbow. He snaps awake and sees Charlie.

  “CHARLIE’S HERE!” he yells and charges from the bed towards him, slamming into his legs and almost causing him to fall over. Charlie laughs and picks Oliver up like he’s a baby, which he does at least once a day, causing him to giggle. “Wow, you’re very awake, aren’t you?”

  “Can we go downstairs yet?”

  Charlie carries Oliver towards my bed. “Nope, Mum said seven thirty.”

  “Arrghhhh.” Oliver wriggles in Charlie’s arms and drops down next to me, immediately snuggling under the covers, and then Charlie sits down next to him against the headboard.

  “Ugh. Younger brothers are annoying,” I say, but I’m sort of grinning too. I curl up under the duvet. “Couldn’t you stay in your own beds?”

  “Just doing our job,” Charlie smiles. “Are you listening to Radio 4? What’s with the church music?”

  “I don’t think I can deal with Mariah Carey at this time of the morning.”

  Charlie laughs. “Me neither.” Like Oliver, his hair is sticking up from his forehead, though it’s not as manically curly. He’s got purple circles under his eyes and I can’t remember what he looks like without them any more. Aside from that, he looks almost his normal self, all long-limbed and gentle and healthy. Like he was early this year, before he stopped eating.

  “I only slept for like two hours,” I say.

  “Same,” he says, but I think his lack of sleep might be from different reasons to mine.

  “How many presents does Father Christmas give you when you’re seven?” asks Oliver, who’s now standing up on my bed and trampling over the duvet. Charlie and I laugh.

  “Seven,” says Charlie, decisively. “The same as the number of years you’ve been alive.”

  “So … when I’m eighty, I’ll get eighty presents?”

  Charlie prods Oliver in the chest and he falls over with a wide smile. “Only if you’ve been good!”

  “I can’t wait till I’m eighty,” says Oliver.

  “Me neither,” says Charlie.

  It’s good that we’re all back together now. It felt weird, just me and Oliver and Mum and Dad. Oliver’s still too young to talk to properly, and I don’t hate my parents or anything but I don’t feel like I’m too friendly with them either. Mum has this thing where she avoids talking about anything even slightly deep or emotional. Dad’s the same, but he makes up for it by talking about books all the time. We all get along fine, but I don’t feel like we ever talk about anything important.

  Even now that Charlie’s really ill they still don’t like talking about that stuff. I thought things might change; that we might start being more open about feelings and stuff.

  But we’re not.

  “Can you imagine being a really old man with a walking stick?” Charlie says, putting on an old man voice, and Oliver giggles, shuffling up to join us against the headboard. Charlie’s smile is contagious.

  They start playing I-spy. Today’s going to be difficult for everyone, but everyone has difficult days, I guess. I used to think that difficult was better than boring, but I know better now. There have been a lot of difficult days in the past few months. There have been too many difficult days.

  “Happy Christmas,” says Charlie, without any warning. He leans over Oliver and rests his head on mine. I lean a little too, my head on his shoulder. The radio plays. I think the sun is rising, or it might just be the streetlamps. I’m not going to think about the past few months, about Charlie and me, about all of the sad. I’m going to block it all out. Just for today.

  “Happy Christmas,” I say.

  I try not to fall asleep again but I still do, Oliver’s laugh ringing in my ears.

  It’s ten to twelve and we’re still in our pyjamas, sitting on the sofa playing Lego Harry Potter on the Xbox, which is essentially exactly the same as Lego Star Wars except the characters are less exciting. It was a present for Oliver, but he’s busy with the very large amount of toy tractors that people gave him.

  My parents got me a new laptop and Charlie a new iPod – things we both asked for. They don’t really do surprise presents. And while Charlie and I have never really tried too hard with presents before now, this year I got him a Bluetooth speaker for his bedroom and he got me a laptop case with Wednesday Addams on it. I think we both know each other better than we thought we did.

  “It doesn’t have the sense of danger,” I tell Charlie. “Where are the Stormtroopers I can slice in half?”

  Charlie, who is controlling Hagrid, casts magic at a Gringotts vault and steals all the money, which I’m pretty sure isn’t ours. “I think you may be missing the point, here.”

  I jump my character, Harry Potter, off a ledge. He explodes. “It hasn’t even got any confused droids running around.”

  “When was the last time you saw Harry Potter?”

  “Just saying.”

  “Kids?” Mum wanders into the room. She’s got her Christmas dress on – a purple thing that’s actually quite nice – and her hair curled. She always makes us dress up nice for Christmas, as if we’re supposed to do something other than stuff our faces and slob on the sofa for twelve hours. She raises her eyebrows at us. “You going to get dressed soon?”

  Charlie says nothing, so I say, “Yep, in a minute.”

  “Don’t be too long. Everyone’s arriving in half an hour.”

  “Yeah, we’re just gonna finish this level.”

  Mum leaves. I glance at Charlie, but he hasn’t looked away from the screen. I don’t think they’ve had an argument yet but I can feel one brewing. And I’m not going to lie, Mum is kind of pissing me off a little bit. She’s been really snappy with Charlie since he got home from the hospital, which isn’t helping anyone. And half the time she pretends that he’s not even ill, as if that’ll cure him. If she just talked about it casually, maybe Charlie wouldn’t feel so awkward about being the ‘ill child’.

  “You sure you want to have Christmas dinner with us?” I ask. “I’ll skip it with you if you want, I bet we can persuade Dad—”

  “I’m fine,” he says. I guess maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.

  I shoot some magic at a passing Gringotts goblin. “I think I’d be enjoying this more if I could be someone cool like Mrs Weasley. Or Dobby.”

  “Well, I’m not swapping you, Hagrid.”

  “Do we get to battle some Dementors soon?”

  “We’re only on the first book.”

  “Wow.”

  Charlie laughs at me. “So impatient.”

  I end up wearing the only skirt that I own, which is grey, with a collared shirt and jumper. I have this problem where I literally do not ever wear any outfits that do not involve jeans. It’s not like I ever go anywhere I need to dress up for since I am pretty much the most unsociable person ever to grace the earth. But I do manage to brush my hair, which is probably the first time I’ve done that this entire holiday. Ten points to me.

  Family members start to arrive and Charlie and I are on ‘greeting duty’, which involves more hugging than I would like. First Grandma and Grandad arrive, Grandad grumbling about something to do with his car and Grandma gives us an apologetic look. Our Spanish grandfather, who we rarely see but are instructed to call ‘Abuelo’, arrives with our nan, and Charlie has a mangled conversation in Spanish with Abuelo while Nan embarks on a long lamentation on how I cut most of my hair off in the summer.

  Dad’s brother and his family arrive – Uncle Ant and Aunt Jules, and our three cousins: Clara,
a twenty-year-old veterinary student; Esther, who’s my age; and Rosanna, a twelve-year-old who never seems to stop talking. Then we’ve got Mum’s sister Aunt Wendy, several older relatives that I’m still not sure how exactly we’re related, Dad’s sister Sofia and her husband Omar and their new baby boy Kai – the house is pretty full. Hopefully a bit later I’ll be able to sneak off to my room for a break.

  We don’t see our cousins more than a few times a year, but it has become clear to me over recent years that they are very much unlike Charlie and me. They’re a lot richer than us, and a lot posher, and they seem determined to be friendly and fun all of the time. This means that they are a complete mystery to both of us.

  “Charlie, darling …” says Clara from across the Kids Table once Christmas dinner is fully underway. Clara looks excellent in whatever she wears and has been allowed to attend Christmas Day in jeans, which annoys me quite a lot. She points a fork at Charlie, who’s on my left. “You need to tell us all about your new boyfriend.”

  Esther perks up at this, staring at Charlie through her glasses. Esther doesn’t usually say as much to us compared to Clara and Rosanna, but, from what I can tell from her Twitter, she’s a bit of a fandom addict (her username is @MerthurIsEndgame), and is therefore always interested in Charlie’s love life, what with him being the only known gay person in our entire family. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this.

  Charlie shuffles in his chair. He’s wearing black jeans, which is extremely unlike him, and still the navy Adidas sweatshirt, which I suddenly realise belongs to Nick. I think he chose his outfit purposefully to annoy Mum.

  Clara takes a decisive mouthful of potato. “What’s his name?”

  “Nick.” There’s a bit of hesitation in his voice. He probably didn’t expect an inquisition on top of his other issues with eating dinner.

  “How long have you been going out?”

  “Er … eight months.”

  “Oh! Not exactly new, then!” Clara laughs and shovels another mouthful.

  Charlie fiddles with his sweatshirt sleeves. “Haha … no …”