Father Christmas and Me

by Matt Haig

  She must have been to the Wooded Hills, collecting fruit for the Christmas cake she was planning to make.

  She hadn’t seen me.

  I didn’t want her to see me.

  I didn’t want to see anyone. Or talk to anyone.

  I didn’t want to cry in front of Mary and make her sad. But in seconds she would open the door and be inside the house.

  So I then did the thing I was best at in the whole world. I crawled up the chimney.

  Unlike elf houses, Father Christmas’s home had been made to a human scale, and that included the chimney. So it was easy for me to fit inside. Halfway up I pressed my feet and back against the opposite sides of the sooty chimney wall and waited there, with my knees quite close to my chest, and cried some more.

  I wanted to stay there for ever.

  Unseen, in the darkness, not bothering or offending anyone.

  As I cried it dawned on me – I wasn’t made for anywhere. I would never fit in, no matter where I was. In London, at the workhouse, I was the one that Mr Jeremiah Creeper hated the most. I had never fitted in. Even before that, being a girl chimney sweep had made me a kind of freak among other children. And now, here, it was happening again. Here of all places, where I thought life would be wonderful and magical. Where I thought I would be happy for ever.

  But I wasn’t crying for me.

  Well, not just for me.

  I was crying because I had now made things harder for Father Christmas. The whole of Elfhelm was probably going to turn on him now.

  As I tried hard to stop sobbing, I heard something below.

  A voice.

  ‘Amelia?’

  I looked down and in the darkness saw Mary’s face staring up at me. She was leaning into the fireplace and looked understandably surprised to see me there.

  ‘What are you doing up there, sweetheart?’

  ‘I just wanted to be on my own.’

  ‘Well, we all want to be on our own sometimes. I certainly do. But I tend to just go to my room and shut the door. I don’t climb up a chimney.’

  ‘I like chimneys,’ I told her. ‘I know what to do in a chimney. Unlike everywhere else.’

  ‘Come and have some berries and tell me what’s the matter.’

  I did as she said. I came down.

  ‘Look at your face,’ she said. ‘All that soot. All those tears.’

  I looked in the mirror. The tears had made little tracks through the soot.

  ‘What’s happened, Amelia? What’s wrong?’

  I thought of the front page of the Daily Truth. I thought of the sleigh. I thought of school. I thought of the workshop. I thought of nearly being eaten by a tree. I thought of Father Vodol, who had been against me from the start. I thought of the faces staring at me on the Main Path, near the newspaper stand. ‘Everything.’

  And I told her. I told her it all. Then – when Father Christmas came home – Mary told him too.

  But Father Christmas knew.

  ‘I saw the newspaper,’ he said, as he sat on his rocking chair with Captain Soot purring on his lap. ‘Father Vodol is up to his old tricks again.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I should never have stayed here. I should go back to London. You should fly me there tonight.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Amelia,’ said Mary.

  ‘But I don’t belong here.’

  ‘Nonsense! Of course you belong here.’

  But just as he said that a short elf with a green-and-white hat walked by the window and saw me and shouted in, ‘You don’t belong here!’

  Father Christmas stormed to the door, flung it open, and roared, ‘Get away from here with your stinking words, Dewdrop. It’s Father Vodol’s poisonous lies that don’t belong here!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Father Christmas,’ said Dewdrop. ‘But the human girl is here to destroy Elfhelm and all we stand for. It was in the Daily Truth. And it wouldn’t be called the Daily Truth if it wasn’t the truth, would it?’

  I could see through the doorway there were other elves gathering. This day really was the worst.

  The Elves on the Doorstep

  ne thing about elves that I had noticed is that they like being in a crowd. Elf crowds gathered very easily. If there were two elves standing still on a street, within a minute it would be thirty elves, and in ten minutes it would be three hundred. The crowd was getting bigger by the second.

  ‘The real story,’ said Father Topo, who was now on the doorstep, ‘is that Father Vodol is clearly trying to poison our minds again. We should have been tougher with him.’

  Father Christmas sighed. ‘We took away his offices and made him live on Very Quiet Street.’

  ‘That wasn’t enough. He has always been trouble. We should have locked him up, Father Christmas, when we found out he’d set the trolls against us.’

  ‘Now, now, Father Topo. We shouldn’t lock anyone up. That isn’t the Elfhelm way. That hasn’t been the Elfhelm way since . . . since . . . well, since Father Vodol locked me up when I was a little boy. And Father Vodol isn’t in charge any more.’

  ‘He might as well be,’ said Father Topo sadly. Even his white moustache seemed to wilt with sadness. ‘Almost everyone is reading the Daily Truth right now. It’s only been going for a few hours and it’s already the most popular paper. And it doesn’t help that the Daily Snow’s circulation is down to only seventeen readers. Poor Noosh.’

  ‘The Daily Snow is boring!’ said an elf at the back of the crowd.

  ‘It never tells the truth!’ said another.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dewdrop. ‘It never tells the truth. That’s why it’s so boring.’

  ‘It always tells the truth, now Noosh is in charge,’ corrected Father Topo.

  Father Christmas, from the doorway, looked around at the growing mass of elves. ‘Now, now, everyone, let’s all calm down. We mustn’t believe Father Vodol’s lies about humans. He’s been telling them for years. Humanophobia has no place in Elfhelm.’

  ‘What’s humanophobia?’ asked Little Mim, who was – I could now see – holding on to her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Father Topo’s hand.

  ‘Humanophobia is an irrational fear of humans,’ explained Father Topo, rather quietly, but still loud enough for some of the elves to hear. One of them stepped forwards. Thin and tall with a bit of a stoop, I recognised him instantly. My heart began to beat like a drum. It was Kip.

  ‘Maybe it’s not an irrational fear,’ he said.

  The elves all turned to stare at him. Kip was an elf whom other elves were a little intimidated by. And although he spoke to elf children when he was teaching them to fly sleighs, he rarely spoke to elf grown-ups.

  ‘In fact, there is every reason to be scared of humans.’

  Several elves muttered and nodded in agreement.

  Father Christmas had a pained expression, as if he had just trodden on something sharp. ‘But, Kip,’ he said. ‘Look at me. I am a human.’

  ‘And so was your father,’ said Kip. Some of the crowd gasped. ‘Everyone knows the story about your father kidnapping me.’

  I gulped. So that was why Kip had gone white as snow when he met me.

  I went over to stand beside Father Christmas, to try to give him some support. As I looked up I saw his eyes bulge and glisten with tears that didn’t quite fall, before he managed to blink them away. ‘Kip, you know how sorry I am about what happened to you. My father was a complicated man.’

  Kip shook his head. ‘A complicated kidnapper.’

  Father Christmas turned around to check that Mary couldn’t hear. But she was busy heating up the berries in the kitchen, singing loudly to herself. He turned back to the crowd – to Kip – and spoke softly.

  ‘Listen, Kip, I am not my father. There are good humans and there are bad humans, and sometimes there are humans with bits of good and bits of bad.’ He was speaking louder now, for everyone to hear. ‘Humans aren’t really different to elves, you know. It’s just that when lives are deprive
d of magic, things can be quite miserable. And miserable lives can make people do miserable things. That’s why we decided to help them, wasn’t it? That’s why we decided to give the humans some magic in their lives, even if it was for one day? That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right!’ said Father Topo.

  ‘That’s right!’ said Father Bottom.

  ‘That’s right!’ said Little Mim.

  ‘That’s right!’ said Mother Breer, who was carrying a shiny new black belt over her arm for Father Christmas.

  ‘That’s right!’ said Mother Miro, who had already set up her easel and canvas, and was beginning to paint the whole scene.

  ‘That’s r-i-i-i-i-g-h-t!’ sang Juniper and the other Sleigh Belles.

  And a few other elves whose names I didn’t know also said, ‘That’s right’, and I was starting to feel a little bit better about things, but just at that point another elf pushed through the crowd. This one had a long black beard and a dark tunic and big black bushy eyebrows that looked like caterpillars whispering secrets.

  Father Vodol.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s wrong.’ And he pointed at me. ‘That human there is a threat to us all. My newspaper tells the truth about such matters.’

  Captain Soot was beside my feet now. He hissed up at Father Vodol.

  Father Christmas stepped in front of me. ‘Leave her alone,’ he said. ‘She is a very good person. Amelia saved Christmas. Don’t you remember? She saved it from your plans to destroy it – how you got the Flying Story Pixies to trick the trolls.’

  ‘Ha!’ scoffed Father Vodol. ‘Christmas! Christmas! Well, of course a human would want to save Christmas. Of course a human would want to make sure elves spend their entire lives slaving away making toys for humans to enjoy. What human wouldn’t want that? She’s a violent, dangerous criminal and she should go back to where she came from!’

  I stepped out from behind Father Christmas to see that the crowd was split in half between elves who were nodding their heads and elves who were shaking their heads. Basically, all the Toy Workshop elves and most of the grey-haired elves were on our side, while a lot of the other elves, who had less to do with Father Christmas and the workshop, seemed to be on Father Vodol’s side.

  But Father Vodol wasn’t finished yet. He stood in front of the crowd and spoke in such a loud voice that all the reindeer in the field behind the path looked up. ‘She destroyed Kip’s sleigh – and not just any sleigh! The Blizzard 360, the highest example of elf technology. Kip worked on that sleigh for a whole year. Every single day. But this isn’t important because of the sleigh crash. It’s important because of why she crashed it. And do you know why?’

  ‘It was an accident,’ I mumbled.

  ‘I’ll tell you why,’ thundered Father Vodol. ‘I’ll tell you why.’ And then he did: ‘She was aiming at an elf!’

  ‘Who?’ The word flew around the crowd like a bird made of voices.

  ‘You’ll find out in tomorrow’s Christmas Eve edition of the Daily Truth. I have one of my top journalists, Spicer, working on the story. Isn’t that right, Spicer?’

  And the little blond-haired barrel-shaped elf next to him nodded his head. ‘Absolutely, boss. Kip saw everything. It will be the story of the week – if not the century.’

  This was just too much. I felt such anger my body seemed to vibrate from the inside. I stepped forwards and stood on the doorstep where all the elves could see me. The whole crowd fell silent. Mouths fell open. I stared over at Blitzen in the distance and I imagined he was giving me a small nod of encouragement.

  ‘That is an absolute lie. I am very, very sorry that I broke Kip’s sleigh. Extremely, absolutely, one hundred per cent sorry. But it only happened because I was trying to save my cat.’ I picked up Captain Soot at this point, for added effect. ‘I had to cut the sleigh free and then the sleigh fell to the ground in the middle of nowhere, over in the Wooded Hills. Kip was nowhere near. There was no way he saw what happened.’

  Father Vodol smiled, and walked over to me. ‘You see how humans can lie? The question is: who do you believe? An elf like Kip who has lived here all his life? Or a random lying human girl from south of Very Big Mountain who has come to live here for free in the biggest house in Elfhelm.’

  Father Christmas was getting a bit red-cheeked with crossness. ‘It seems to me, Father Vodol, that you are trying to ruin yet another Christmas. Amelia is not a random human. She is a very special person indeed.’

  Father Vodol stroked his beard. ‘Well, it’s always been clear to me, Father Christmas, that you care more about humans than elves.’

  ‘That is simply not true. Elves were miserable when you were in charge. Now they are allowed to sing and spickle dance once more. They have good jobs in the workshop. There is something to work towards. A chance to spread magic. All day today the workshop elves have been brimming with excitement and singing Christmas songs.’

  Father Vodol closed his eyes. He clenched his teeth. His forehead rippled and bubbled like water in the wind. Veins bulged below his skin. ‘Would anyone like a sneaky peek of tomorrow’s newspaper?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘No drimwickery, Father Vodol,’ said Father Topo.

  But it was already too late. Drimwickery was underway. And before we knew it, something was flying through the air. Lots of things. At first I thought they were birds, flapping their wings. But they were newspapers – hundreds of newspapers. Each one landed into the hands of an elf, and it turned out there were just enough for every elf there.

  Father Vodol looked a little exhausted by his efforts, but he seemed pleased.

  Everyone began to read the front page. ‘Magic seems to be on my side. I’ve been struggling with it recently, but elves must be turning. My kind of hope is in the air.’

  A newspaper landed in Father Christmas’s hands. I saw the front cover. There was another picture of me and this time the headline said: ‘MURDERER!’

  I began to read the article as Mary joined us on the step.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ she wondered aloud.

  And then she gasped as she looked down and saw the newspaper. She began to read exactly what I was reading:

  The human girl known as Amelia Wishart did not simply destroy a sleigh. The Daily Truth can now reveal that this human, currently staying in Father Christmas’s extravagant mansion on Reindeer Road, was in fact trying to kill a little elf baby and her mother. Yes, that is right. Bonbon, the sweetmaker, and her baby Suki were the targets of this attack. But fortunately Suki’s cries alerted her mother and they ran to safety before the sleigh crashed to the ground.

  Sleigh instructor and former human kidnap victim Kip, who designed the Blizzard 360, saw it happen with his own eyes.

  ‘I saw it happen with my own eyes,’ he told the Daily Truth.

  Read more about this dangerous human on pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 15 and 17. And read our 24-page pull-out guide: ‘What to do if you see a human girl approach you! Apart from RUN and SCREAM FOR HELP – though do that too.’

  I had never felt so angry. Not even in the old days, when I had been in Creeper’s Workhouse. Nothing had ever made my heart race this fast or make my face feel so hot with rage.

  ‘Look, here’s Bonbon,’ Father Vodol said, ‘and her little baby Suki . . . Tell them, Bonbon, what happened.’

  ‘Well, I don’t really know. It was all a blur. I was in the forest looking for some new flavours – berries and such – to get some ideas for sweet recipes. One minute we were just walking along, then the next minute I saw this sleigh heading towards us.’

  I felt as if I would explode. But I wasn’t the only one who was angry. Because Mary was now storming over to Father Vodol with her pan full of hot Christmassy berries.

  ‘No, Mary, no!’ said Father Christmas.

  ‘That would be a bad idea,’ agreed Father Topo.

  ‘Uh-oh!’ said one of the Sleigh Bel
les.

  Anyway, Father Vodol had no time to do any drimwickery because Mary was too fast. Within a moment she was there, right next to Father Vodol, who – even though a tall elf – only reached Mary’s middle. He glanced up at the tilting pan, and then the hot purple fruit began to pour onto his face and hair and beard.

  The whole crowd gasped. And then gasped again.

  ‘How DARE you say that about Amelia!’ said Mary, who – once Father Vodol was entirely covered with fruit – swung the pan at his head. But Father Vodol, wiping the fruit from his eyes, saw her in time. And he hastily did a little drimwick, and although Mary tried very hard to do some magic of her own to defend herself, her drimwick lessons still weren’t going very well, and she froze like a statue.

  ‘See!’ gloated Father Vodol, wiping the hot fruit from his face. ‘Look how violent and dangerous humans are. Is that what we want in Elfhelm?’

  ‘Unfreeze her this minute!’ said Father Christmas. But of course he didn’t have to wait for Father Vodol. He was already doing drimwickery of his own. A second later Mary was moving again. The saucepan and the hand that held it kept swinging through the air. But Father Vodol had stepped back now so she didn’t hit him. She just kept on going and then twirled around and fell into the snow.

  Father Christmas and I went to help her up, taking a hand each.

  ‘It’s all right, Mary,’ said Father Christmas. ‘Don’t worry about him.’

  Father Vodol snarled. ‘Look at them! Looking after each other. We have to be careful. In the space of a year the human population of Elfhelm has TRIPLED.’

  Father Christmas laughed. ‘Yes. From one to three. And two of us have been drimwicked so we’re not technically human at all. Amelia is the only one.’

  It echoed inside me like a cry in a cave.