A Very Lucky Christmas

by A Very Lucky Christmas (retail) (epub)

  Daisy scrabbled around some more, until she found the coin her great-gran wanted. It was small, like a five pence piece, and was remarkably similar. ‘I can’t take this,’ she protested. ‘It’s yours. You should keep it.’

  ‘It’ll bring you luck,’ her great-gran said. ‘But only if you find it in your pudding.’

  ‘Huh?’ Daisy raised her eyebrows at her mother and mouthed, ‘What’s she talking about?’

  ‘Christmas puddings,’ Nan said. ‘When I was a girl, she used to make her own Christmas pudding every year, and she used to hide a sixpence in the mixture. Whoever got the sixpence was supposed to have good luck all year. It never bloody worked.’

  ‘That’s because you hated Christmas pudding and never ate any,’ Gwenda said.

  ‘I remember – you were still making them right up until Great-Grandad died,’ Daisy’s mother declared. She turned to David. ‘You never knew your great-grandad, did you? He died when you were a baby, but Daisy might remember him.’

  Zoe giggled, one hand held delicately over her mouth. For a dentist’s wife, she was really reluctant to show her teeth, Daisy thought. She’d actually forgotten Zoe was in the room, the woman had been so quiet.

  ‘Have you got any brandy, Sandra?’ Gee-Gee asked.

  ‘Mum, you can’t drink, not with the tablets you’re on,’ Elsie protested.

  Gwenda replied frostily, ‘I haven’t had a drink since 1992.’

  ‘What happened in 1992?’ David asked.

  Daisy watched him slip a choice slice of roast beef onto Zoe’s plate and smile at her drippily, and she felt slightly nauseous. And rather envious, if she was being truthful. No one had ever picked out a nice slice of beef for her. Not that she wanted them to, but the offer would have been nice.

  ‘I stopped drinking alcohol, that’s what happened in 1992,’ Gwenda said, and her mouth became an inverted smile. She clearly wasn’t going to say anything more on the matter.

  But Elsie was. ‘She got drunk and demolished your great-granddad’s garden shed,’ she said.

  Gwenda glowered at her daughter.

  What was it with the women in my family, Daisy wondered. They were always bickering and trying to score points off each other.

  David smiled. ‘You go, Gee-Gee.’

  ‘Go where?’ their great-gran wanted to know.

  ‘It’s a saying, Gee-Gee,’ David tried to explain.

  ‘What is?’ Gwenda asked.

  Zoe giggled again. She’d hardly said a word all through lunch. In fact, Daisy wondered if her sister-in-law was actually able to speak at all. She also wondered what a supposedly intelligent man like her brother, saw in the air-head; apart from her prettiness, Zoe didn’t have much else going for her, Daisy surmised, meanly. Then immediately felt guilty for thinking such sour thoughts. After all, she’d never really taken the time to get to know the other girl.

  ‘Where’s the brandy?’ Gwenda demanded.

  ‘I told you, you can’t have any,’ her daughter said.

  ‘It’s for the pudding,’ Gwenda argued.

  ‘What pudding? I’ve not bought any pudding. You can have a biscuit or a French Fancy.’ This was from Sandra.

  ‘I don’t want any pudding,’ Gwenda said.

  ‘You just said you did! Make your mind up.’ Sandra stood up, huffing, and clattered plates together.

  ‘For the Christmas pudding,’ Gwenda enunciated, slowly and clearly, despite her lack of teeth. She’d taken them out yet again, and Daisy guessed she’d shoved them down her bra for safe-keeping.

  Daisy watched the exchange in amusement. Conversations could be quite surreal in her house. Oh dear – she was already back to thinking of this house as hers, as if she was going to be living here forever. It had been her house once, she supposed, as in, she’d lived there since she was born, but technically it was her mother’s house, and Daisy so didn’t want to be that thirty-year-old woman who still lived at home with her mother.

  ‘We haven’t got a Christmas pudding,’ Sandra pointed out.

  ‘You will have, if Miss Miseryguts there gets up off her backside and makes one,’ Gwenda came back.

  ‘Stop a minute – Miss who?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Miseryguts.’ Gwenda stared at her defiantly.

  ‘You mean me?’ Daisy queried.

  ‘If the cap fits.’ This time Gwenda smirked at her.

  ‘I don’t know how to make a Christmas pudding,’ was all Daisy could think of to say.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ Gwenda said.

  Elsie said, ‘You can’t cut your own dinner up. How are you going to make a pudding?’

  ‘Mum, don’t be mean!’ Sandra exclaimed.

  ‘Well, it’s true,’ Elsie said, sulkily. ‘She never showed me how to make a Christmas pudding.’

  Oh God, get me out of here, Daisy pleaded silently. If she had to put up with this for the next few months, she’d be asking to swap places with Gee-Gee and go and live in the old people’s home.

  ‘I’ll tell her what to do and our Daisy can do it, can’t you, Daisy?’ Gwenda insisted.

  ‘Yes, Gee-Gee.’

  ‘And I never showed you, Elsie, because you don’t like Christmas pudding. How many times do I have to tell you?’ Gwenda scowled at her daughter.

  Elsie’s face folded in on itself as she sulked. Daisy made to leave the table and let the bickering old biddies get on with it, but Gwenda had other ideas.

  ‘Is that corner shop still open?’ she asked.

  Sandra nodded.

  ‘Right, my girl, I need brandy (unless Sandra has drunk it all and if she has, you’d better add that to the list), plain flour, that sugar that’s not dark, but not white. Oh, what’s it called?’ Gwenda wrinkled her nose up as she thought.

  ‘Muscovado?’ Zoe piped up.

  ‘That’s it! Eggs, butter, mixed dried fruit, raisins, candied peel, almonds, oh, and brandy,’ Gwenda said. ‘Did I say brandy?’

  ‘You did, Gee-Gee,’ David said, then added, to Daisy, ‘I’ll come with you to help you carry it. Will you be alright on your own Zoe-poo?’

  Zoe-poo? Ug. Daisy made gagging noises. Of course she’ll be alright – she was being left with three elderly ladies for about half an hour, what could possibly happen? Actually, maybe he had a point.

  Zoe, predictably, giggled, and this time she added a simper to it. Daisy had never seen anyone simper before. It took a certain skill.

  She stuffed her feet into her boots and shrugged on her coat, grabbing an umbrella from the stand in the porch on the way out. Christmas was less than a week away, but the weather was being predictably British – wet and gloomy, with not a festive snowflake in sight. At least the outside matched her inside – she felt like a drizzly December afternoon, all miserable and glum.

  ‘I’m sorry about Freddie,’ David said, as the pair of them stomped down the street. It was only three in the afternoon, and already the streetlights were on. Daisy debated whether to put the umbrella up and risk poking her brother in the eye, or put the umbrella up to purposely poke her brother in the eye. She did neither, pulling her hood over her head instead, to keep off the worst of the fine mist.

  ‘You really didn’t know?’ David persisted. He liked a good bit of gossip, did Saint David. Now if anyone had told her that her brother was gay, she might believe them. He was too perfect to be a typical beer-swilling, football-ogling bloke, then she mentally apologised for stereotyping gay men and straight alike. She was just being mean.

  ‘No,’ she said curtly, stuffing a lock of hair back beneath her hood. It immediately popped back out again.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked. ‘You can’t stay with Mum forever.’

  ‘Why not?’ Daisy was indignant. It wasn’t as if she was scrounging off their mother. Daisy paid rent (albeit a small token amount) and a sum towards food and bills though she might have to consider upping it, what with the amount she was eating at the moment.

  ‘Because the pair of them will drive you
mad,’ her brother said, linking his arm in hers. ‘You could always move in with me and Zoe for a time, if you need to,’ he added.

  Aw, that was so sweet of him. But they were newly-weds, and Daisy was well aware what that meant. Not only were they blissfully happy, in a shiny new house, but they were probably at it like rabbits too. Her brother meant well, (though Daisy sometimes had the feeling he was rubbing her nose in it), but all his generosity served to do, was to highlight what she didn’t have. Thanks, David, I owe you one…

  Anyway, as tempting as the offer was, she didn’t think she could put up with Zoe for more than an hour or so before she tried to bash some personality into that pretty head of hers. Daisy would take her chances with her mother and grandmother, thanks all the same.

  Chapter 7

  ‘Mary Berry, eat your heart out,’ Daisy cried, reaching for an orange from the fruit bowl on the kitchen table. She’d never mixed and grated so many ingredients in her life, and was feeling rather pleased with herself.

  ‘Everyone’s got to stir it and make a wish,’ Gwenda instructed from her place next to the fridge, where she oversaw proceedings with the same attention to detail and determination as a premenstrual woman on the hunt for chocolate.

  Daisy lifted the bowl off the worktop and placed a wooden spoon in her great-gran’s clawed hand. Gwenda clutched it with difficulty and Daisy winced. The old lady’s arthritis was much worse than the last time she’d seen her, and Daisy put it down to the damp and dismal weather. Her own hands ached in sympathy, but it might have had something to do with all the grating she’d done. Daisy wasn’t used to cooking. If anything more than a simple open the box and stick it in the microwave was involved, then Freddie always used to do it. He was a good cook too, and she imagined him lovingly preparing steak with all the trimmings for Carl, and she let out a small sigh.

  Gwenda gave the mixture a stir as best she could, and Daisy took the spoon from her and passed it around so everyone could have a go.

  ‘You’ve forgotten the sixpence,’ Gwenda said. ‘It won’t work without the sixpence. You’ve got to put it in, Daisy, and make a wish.’

  The sixpence sat gleaming on the counter (Sandra had scrubbed and disinfected it to within an inch of its life), and Daisy picked the tiny coin up with trepidation. Goodness knows how many germs it might still be covered in. It had probably been sitting in Gee-Gee’s purse for years, and Daisy imagined all the grubby fingers that had handled it in the past, and she grimaced. Perhaps she should put it in boiling water for a few minutes first, to make sure any lingering nasties were dead.

  ‘Hurry up,’ David said as he and Sandra wrestled Gwenda into her coat. ‘They’re expecting her back at five-thirty.’

  ‘There’s plenty of time, and what are they going to do to her if she’s late? Lock her out? Ground her?’ Sandra chuckled. ‘I used to ground Daisy all the time.’ She gave her daughter a steely stare. ‘It didn’t work, did it?’

  ‘It did!’ Daisy protested.

  ‘I never had to ground David,’ Sandra pointed out, and Daisy heard the unspoken criticism in her mother’s voice – perfect David, with his perfect job, perfect house, and perfect wife, had never once been grounded and look at how well he’d turned out. Blah, blah!

  Maybe she could write a ditty for that too. It could start off with, “When you’re not good enough…”

  ‘Put it in,’ Gwenda urged.

  Daisy did as she was told and gave the bowl another stir.

  ‘Make a wish,’ her great-gran instructed, ‘else there’s no point in making the bloody thing.’

  Daisy, still stirring, wondered what to wish for. Were multiple wishes allowed, or just one per coin? Could she fool it by joining two wishes together? She wanted to wish for a man who’d love her the way she wanted to be loved, with his body, heart, and soul (the way she would love him), but she also wanted the assurance of marriage and children. And a home of her own. And maybe a mother-in-law who wasn’t a total dragon (a couple of her friends had mothers-in-law to rival Daenerys Stormborn’s dragons in A Game of Thrones – fearsome and able to burn you to a crisp with their dislike.

  Start with the basics Daisy, she told herself. You don’t get the marriage, the babies, or the mother-in-law (dragon or no dragon) without the man first.

  ‘I wish…’ she began, closing her eyes because it seemed the right thing to do.

  ‘Don’t say it out loud,’ Gwenda warned, ‘or it won’t come true.’

  I wish for a man to love me, Daisy said silently, and who I love back, she added, just in case the wish decided to land a stalker on her (she’d seen enough films to know how this sort of thing could seriously backfire).

  She stirred the mixture one last time and opened her eyes, images of Alexander Skarsgard lingering in her mind. ‘What now?’ she asked Gee-Gee.

  ‘You want to steam it over a pan of boiling water,’ Gwenda said.

  Daisy noticed the old lady was wearing her coat again (though that didn’t necessarily mean anything), and David was wheeling her towards the door.

  ‘Aren’t you going to stay until it’s cooked?’ Daisy asked. What if something went wrong? And how would she know when it was done?

  ‘Not on your nelly! It’ll take hours,’ Gwenda said. ‘Eight of ’em.’

  Oh? Never mind, it sounded easy enough. She’d put the pan on to boil just before she went to bed, and it should be just about cooked by the time she got up for work in the morning.

  Then she thought again.

  Eight hours? Boiling water? There was no way she could leave the pan to bubble away unsupervised, which meant Daisy would be up half the night.

  ‘Can’t it be left until next Saturday?’ she asked, a yawn already forming in her throat at the thought of it.

  ‘No,’ her great-gran, her nan, and her mother all chorused.

  Zoe giggled.

  Gwenda left, after issuing some final instructions and Daisy settled down to pan-watch until the wee small hours.

  ‘This had better be worth it,’ she muttered crossly, as she clambered off the sofa for the twenty-forth time and trundled into the kitchen to check the level of water in the pan. The theme tune of The Antiques Roadshow followed her out. With only one TV in the whole house, Daisy was forced to watch whatever rubbish her mother and her nan had on, and she seriously thought about subscribing to Netflix, so she could watch something decent on her laptop. Even The Walking Dead would be preferable to the soaps that pair were addicted to, and Daisy hated zombies.

  She decided she might as well do some work and get a head start on tomorrow. With Christmas only a week or so away, Daisy was finding it hard to think of anything other than Christmas tunes and if Caring Cards (A Card for Every Occasion) was determined to go down the musical card route, she could use the opportunity to come up with something Christmassy ready for next year.

  She still couldn’t get the Deck the Halls tune out of her head, though, and she hummed it, whilst trying to think of words to rhyme with holly. Brolly, Molly, Polly, dolly, lolly, folly… hmm. Maybe not.

  ‘Nice to see you getting into the festive spirit,’ Sandra said, wandering into the kitchen to prepare the nightly ritual of hot cocoa and biscuits. Daisy eyed up what remained of the brandy instead.

  ‘I’m working on some Christmas stuff,’ she said. ‘The company wants to branch out into musical cards.’

  ‘What have you come up with?’ her mother asked.

  Daisy thought for a moment, then she sang:

  ‘Deck the halls with boughs of holly

  Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-laa,

  Buy some gifts, spend all your lolly

  Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-laa

  On lots of things that no one needs

  Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-laa

  Then spend the next month just eating beans

  Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-laah!’

  ‘That’s not very Christmassy, is it?’ Sandra said. ‘I don’t think it’ll be very popular.’

&nbs
p; ‘I’m not feeling very Christmassy,’ Daisy replied.

  ‘No, my love, I don’t expect you are.’ Her mother lifted a couple of mugs out of the cupboard and put a pan on the stove. ‘You can stay here as long as you like. This is your home, after all, and I mightn’t say it often enough, but I do love you and I hate to see you so unhappy.’

  ‘Oh Mum!’ Daisy began to cry, tears welling up and trickling down her cheeks.

  Her mother gathered her into her arms and patted her back. ‘There, there, it’ll be alright. In a while, you’ll realise it’s all for the best. There are plenty more fish in the sea.’

  Her mum was a great one for clichéd platitudes, but Daisy found it comforting all the same. She knew her mother was right, but it didn’t stop the ache in her chest.

  ‘He was wrong for you, Daisy-doll, but one day you’ll find someone who is right.’

  Wrong didn’t go anywhere near describing her and Freddie’s relationship, but how hadn’t she seen it? How could she have fooled herself into thinking Freddie loved her? As a woman? As a partner? She had no doubt he cared for her, but not in the way she needed, or wanted, to be cared about.

  Daisy saw their relationship for what it was – a sham, a lie, an illusion. She’d bought into the whole fairy-tale, happily-ever-after-ending in the same way a gullible buyer bought a used car from a man in a shiny suit with a good line in sales talk. She hadn’t thought she needed to look under the bonnet to check the engine, she’d just driven the thing and took it at face value.

  Well, not anymore. Never again would she accept a man for what he appeared to be. Next time (if there ever was a next time), before she gave her heart away, she’d make sure the man in question deserved it and he had no rattley bones hiding in his closet.

  Talking about closets, Daisy wondered if Freddie had told his parents yet. Now that was going to make for an interesting conversation, considering his mother had made endless hints that she expected grandchildren soon. For a second there, Daisy actually pitied Freddie. His mother could at best be described as a force of nature, and at worst, a harridan. No wonder the poor man had tried to deny his real self for all those years.