Little Black Everything

by Alex Coleman

  Her class was due to start at ten thirty, which she took to mean eleven. It was something of a surprise then, when she heard activity in the corridor outside at ten thirty-five. She answered the knock at the door and found Greg standing at the head of what seemed like an endless line of boys.

  “Miss Christmas,” he said in a voice that bore no relation to the one he used every day. “I have a special delivery for you.”

  Holly made a concerted effort to make her own voice sound bright and friendly. “Great, where do I sign?”

  She stepped aside, as did Greg. The boys trooped in and took seats. She kept up a steady stream of “Hello”s and “Nice to see you”s as they filed past. It was amazing, she thought, as she did every year, how much you could tell about them just by the way they entered the classroom. A few sauntered in as if they owned the place. Most came in sheepishly, staring at their feet. One or two almost had to be pushed in by the boy coming along behind them. None of them looked directly at her unless she spoke to them. Even then, they took only the briefest of glances.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” Greg said when everyone was inside.

  “Thanks,” Holly said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  When the door closed, she turned to her new class. The majority were settled in but a few were still squabbling over the seating arrangements.

  “The chairs are all the same,” she said. “There’s nothing special about any of them, so you might as well just sit down in the nearest one. We did have some magic chairs that were worth fighting over, but we got rid of them a couple of years back.”

  She immediately regretted this small joke. No one laughed or even smiled and, judging by his dropped jaw, one little boy in the front row seemed to take her seriously (she made a mental note to keep an eye on his academic progress).

  “Okay then,” she said when at last everyone was seated. “My name is Miss Christmas” – cue giggles – “and I’ll be your science teacher –”

  A hand shot up. It belonged to a mono-browed lump of a lad who looked at least sixteen.

  “Yes?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. I know an awful lot about science. Go on – ask me anything.”

  He frowned. “No, I mean, seriously, is your name really Christmas?”

  “It’s really Miss Christmas, yes.”

  “And is it true that your first name is Holly?”

  For a moment, she considered denying it. “Yeah. It is.”

  “No way.”

  “Do you think I’m making it up?”

  “No. Suppose not. Do you like Christmas or is just a name?”

  There was no real logic to that, but she decided to answer as if there was. “Of course I like Christmas,” she lied.

  Another hand went up. This one belonged to a red-haired, freckle-faced boy who looked, she couldn’t help but think, slightly coked-up. His eyes were wild and his fingers didn’t seem to be under his conscious control.

  “Do people make jokes about it all the time?”

  “Well, not all the time, no, they –”

  “Are we allowed to make jokes about it?”

  There was something about the way he said it that immediately endeared him to her. Where his predecessor had sneered, this one twinkled.

  “No,” she said. “You’re not allowed to make jokes about it. But thank you for asking. Now, that’s enough about my name, we’re not going to get very far if I don’t know what you lot are called. Here’s what we’re going to do. I want you all –”

  “My name’s Mickey Hallowe’en.”

  This was Mono-brow again. He got a big laugh.

  “Okay,” Holly sighed. “Thing one: when you want to say something, raise your hand first. If I’m interested in hearing what it is, I’ll let you know. Thing two: your joke doesn’t really work. My name is absolutely hilarious because ‘Holly’ and ‘Christmas’ go together. ‘Mickey’ and ‘Hallowe’en’ don’t go together. Or am I missing something? Maybe you could you tell us what the connection is?”

  Mono-brow glared at her.

  “No? Okay then. So we’re agreed: your joke didn’t work and you should never, ever try to be funny again. Now, as I was saying – I want you all to split up into pairs. I’m going to give you a few minutes to have a chat and then you’re going to tell us all about each other.”

  This was something she did with every new class and it never ceased to amaze her how unpopular it was.

  “I hear a lot of moaning,” she said, raising her voice. “But it’s either this or you stand up and tell us all about yourself – in the form of a poem.” The moaning doubled in volume. “I thought so. Okay, then, off you go.”

  The room descended into chaos immediately.

  “You don’t have to shout your entire life story!” she called out. “You can just whisper the important bits. All we’re looking for here is your neighbour’s name, what school he was at before now, what his hobbies are, is he married or single, that sort of thing.”

  At last, she raised a laugh. She gave them five minutes and then called on the first student, who seemed to get to his feet in slow motion.

  “Don’t be nervous,” she said. “We’re all friends here.”

  He was a slight boy with a bad haircut and a hangdog look. Holly would have put money on him having bullying problems somewhere down the line. She mentally crossed her fingers, hoping he wouldn’t have a lisp or a stutter. He didn’t.

  “This is Dylan Lawlor,” he said, pointing a thumb at his neighbour, who looked absolutely delighted with his fifteen seconds of fame. “His last school was St Mary’s. He’s from Rathmines. He’s into football and swimming . . . uh . . . What was the other thing?”

  “Cars,” said Dylan.

  “Yeah. Cars.”

  “Well done,” Holly said as the boy collapsed gratefully onto his chair again. “Now, Dylan. Your turn.”

  Dylan got to his feet. As he did so, Holly couldn’t help but glance at her watch. Ten minutes gone. Nine months to go.

  The staff room was always hectic at lunchtimes, but on the first day of a new term it was almost unbearable. Everyone talked at once, each firmly convinced that he or she had the killer anecdote of the morning. The physical and aural chaos was amplified by the endless toing and froing that went on between the tiny kitchen area and the table where lunches were consumed. This combination of excited chatter and frantic face-stuffing always put Holly in mind of a student house on the morning after a party. If there had been a few sleeping bags on the floor and a home-made bong lying discarded in the corner, the illusion would have been complete.

  By all accounts, it had been a perfectly run-of-the-mill start to the term. Greg Tynan had a puker. Eleanor Duffy had a crier. Mike Hennessy had an uncontrollable giggler. Almost everyone had identified an obvious troublemaker (or two, or three). Some had picked out favourites too, kids for whom they had already developed soft spots, based on almost nothing but the look in their eyes or the way they said their name. Nuala Fanning, in particular, seemed to be besotted with a lad in her class simply because he’d just had braces put on his teeth and seemed to be constantly on the verge of choking to death (“It was just so cute!” she marvelled).

  James Bond hadn’t shown up at the eleven o’clock break, but that was not unusual; the time allotted was so short that lots of teachers used it as an opportunity to grab some fresh air or, conversely, a cigarette, rather than race to the staff room to throw back a cup of bad coffee. Holly had cut short her own visit when Larry Martin started to tell her all about his summer trip to Medugorje. James also failed to show up at lunchtime, however, and that did not go unnoticed. Around the table, a number of theories were put forward to explain his absence. He’d been captured by SPECTRE. He was in bed with a Russian agent. He was getting a briefing from M. As soon as the first of these feeble jokes had been cracked, the situation had been wrung dry of potential humour, Holly thought. She wasn’t surprised to find that no one else shared her opin
ion. The gags just kept on coming, each delivered with a little more desperation than its predecessor. He was flirting with Moneypenny. He was getting a new gadget from Q. He was fighting with Jaws. He was scraping gold paint off his girlfriend. He was strapped to a table with a laser pointing at his goolies. There was only so much of it that Holly could listen to. She was on the point of leaving when the door opened and in he walked.

  Enda Clerkin spotted him first and, being the social H-bomb that he was, quieted the table with a “Shush!” that was considerably louder than any of their speaking voices. The subsequent silence seemed to go on forever.

  “Hello, everyone,” James said as he got his lunch from the fridge. They responded with wildly over-enthusiastic greetings. He approached the table slowly, as if awaiting permission to sit down.

  “Sit, sit,” Eleanor Duffy said, pushing her own chair aside to make room. “Did you have a good morning?”

  “Not bad. They started cracking jokes as soon as they heard ‘Bond’. You can imagine the reaction when I told them about the ‘James’ bit.”

  “You told them your first name?” Eleanor asked. “Is that not asking for trouble?”

  “They always find out eventually anyway,” James said. “Might as well get it over with. And some of their jokes weren’t bad, I must say.”

  Holly was sitting almost directly opposite him. She took a good, long look across the table at him as he sat down, all the while pretending, of course, to be thoroughly absorbed in her sandwich. He was still wearing that same expression, the is-it-or-isn’t-it-a-smile. What was he so pleased about?

  “You poor thing,” Eleanor said. “You must be sick to death of it.”

  He shook his head and then, at last, broke into a genuine grin. TV teeth, Holly noticed. And TV hair, too. Factor in the nice suit and there was something of the anchorman about him.

  “Not at all. As I said earlier, you have to expect a few comments. Especially from kids. And they’re really good about it, usually. I’m sure I have ten different nicknames already but that’s fine by me, so long as they’re not nasty. And they never are. It usually settles down to ‘007’ sooner or later.”

  There was widespread nodding.

  “I have to ask,” Mike Hennessy said then. “Now, you can tell me to mind my own if you want to –”

  “What the hell were my parents thinking?”

  Mike nodded. “Well . . . yeah.”

  “I wonder that myself sometimes. But it’s pretty simple, really. My grandfather – my mother’s father – was called James. She was very close to him, my mum. He died when she was a teenager and she swore that if she ever had a son of her own, she would call him James. The way she tells it, it was one of those graveside promises, you know, in the middle of a storm. All Wuthering Heights. She didn’t know then, of course, that she would end up married to a man called Bond. Anyone with a bit of sense would have changed their mind, obviously. Not my mum. ‘Stubborn’ isn’t the word for it. I’ve got three sisters, all older than me. My dad knew about this dopey promise and I think he was kind of relieved that he was getting away with it. And then they had one of those little forty-something surprises. He tried to talk her out of it, but she wasn’t having it. They still argue about it to this day, thirty years later. Damn, now I’ve given away my age . . . ”

  “You don’t look a day over twenty-five,” Nuala Fanning said and then blushed as she realised that the line had come out with a lot more sauce on it than she’d intended.

  James gave her an aw-shucks sort of look and began work on his lunch.

  “I’d say you had an awful hard time of it at school,” Larry Martin said. “You must have had the shite kicked out of you every day of the week.”

  “Language, Larry!” Eleanor said with a sideways glance at James.

  He seemed to be on the point of reminding her that they were none of them children when James dabbed his mouth with a napkin that – Holly couldn’t help but notice – he’d apparently brought with him. He seemed to have brought his own disposable cutlery too.

  “Nope. Never once. Just the opposite. It made me kind of . . . popular. I don’t mean that as a boast, I just mean that people liked my silly name. It made them smile. I’m sure you get the same sort of thing, Holly.”

  He looked at her over the top of a plastic forkful of mixed leaves.

  “Me?” she said and felt immediately ridiculous.

  He munched and swallowed. “People must love that, surely? ‘Holly Christmas’? How could you not love that?”

  “Holly seems to manage all right,” Larry said. “She fucking hates it, in fact.”

  Eleanor rolled her eyes. She seemed to realise, as Holly did, that this particular swear-word had been inserted for purely mischievous purposes.

  “I don’t hate it,” she said somewhat weakly. There was general murmuring and snorting. Larry issued a cackle. “Well, you do a very good impression of someone who hates it.”

  “And,” Enda Clerkin said, “you’re always in filthy humour around Christmas.”

  “More than usual, even,” Mike Hennessy said. That got a laugh.

  Holly felt her cheeks begin to burn. “What is this?” she said, trying to keep her tone light. “Kick Holly Day?”

  “I’m sorry,” James said. “I didn’t mean to start anything.”

  She sighed. “To answer your question: yes. People like it. They certainly mention it, anyway.”

  “I bet. And – if you don’t mind my asking – what’s the story behind yours? Is there one? Were you born at Christmas?”

  “Nope,” Holly said. “No story. Sorry. Christmas. Holly. Holly Christmas.”

  “Cool,” James said. “Then again, I love anything to do with Christmas.”

  “Really.”

  “God, yeah. Love it. Love it. What’s not to love?”

  “How long have you got?”

  “You really don’t like it?”

  “No. I don’t. I really, really don’t.”

  “I presume that’s because you get more comments on your name at that –”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, that doesn’t help. But I think I’d still hate Christmas if I was called Mary Smith.”

  He nodded but not in agreement. “Carols? Turkey and roasties? Giving and getting presents? Seeing friends and family you haven’t seen in ages?”

  Holly felt her cheeks flush. “Look, I don’t want to get into it. But it’s not the specifics. It’s this. It’s exactly this, now. You’re not allowed to say anything bad about Christmas. No criticism allowed. I read a quote somewhere: it’s like living in some brutal dictatorship where you have to smile on the leader’s birthday or they take you out and shoot you.”

  Larry Martin made one of his infamous nose-noises. Those who had sandwiches on the way to their mouths put thoughts of eating aside for the time being. “Scrooge,” he said when the echo had faded.

  “Also,” Holly noted, “you get called Scrooge a lot by morons.” Eyes widened. Gasps were emitted. “Just kidding. Larry knows I love him dearly.”

  “I love you too, sweetie,” Larry said.

  Holly was impressed, despite herself. He had managed to inject a level of sarcasm that made her own seem positively anaemic.

  “If you don’t like your name,” James began, “why –”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like my name,” Holly interrupted. “I said I don’t like Christmas.”

  “Yeah, but your name is Holly Christmas. It’s bound to remind you of . . . well, Christmas.”

  He didn’t add “Checkmate”, but he might as well have done. “If you don’t like it, why don’t you change it?”

  Holly looked right at him. He didn’t seem to be mocking her. His tone had been merely inquisitive.

  “I have thought about it,” she said. “But it would annoy my mother. A lot.”

  “What about your dad? Maybe he –”

  “He died before I was born.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that,” Jame
s said. For the first time, Holly thought she saw some self-doubt on his face. But it didn’t last very long. No more than a couple of seconds had gone by before he returned to his default setting, the half-smile.

  “One of my best friends is called John Lennon,” he said then. There was a chorus of “No way”s and “You’re joking”s, which he seemed to greatly enjoy. “Honestly. John Lennon.”

  “That’s some coincidence,” Mike Hennessy said.

  “To be fair,” James replied, “it wasn’t really a coincidence. He was a friend of a friend – actually, a friend of a friend of a friend – and they put a lot of effort into getting us both to the same party, just so one of them could say, ‘James Bond, I’d like you to meet John Lennon’. Which I thought was kind of admirable. The effort, I mean. They didn’t know we were going to hit it off and become proper friends. That must have seemed like a bit of a bonus.”

  “We’ll have to get the three of you together,” Nuala Fanning said. “James Bond and John Lennon and Holly Christmas.” She frowned and bit her lip. “Although that doesn’t really work. James Bond and John Lennon are famous names. Holly Christmas is just weird.”

  “God, I apologise,” Holly said. “‘Just weird’. How disappointing for you. Maybe I could change it to Marilyn Monroe, would that help?”

  “This John Lennon character,” Larry said. “Is he a fan of John Lennon? John Lennon John Lennon?”

  James chased some errant morsel with his fork. He seemed at first to be ignoring the question, but it soon became apparent by the slow shaking of his head that he was thinking something through. After he had cornered and eaten his quarry, he turned the shake into a nod and said, “What the hell. None of you are ever going to meet him. So I suppose I can tell you his deep, dark secret. He’s a Beatles nut. He lets on he can’t stand them. Says if you put a gun to his head, he’d admit that McCartney knows a melody when he hears one. Truth is, he’s obsessed with them, like, to the point of madness. And he’s into Lennon’s solo stuff too. He would absolutely kill me if he knew I was telling anybody that. No one can ever know, you know? He’s so embarrassed about it. He was only called John in the first place because his parents were shocking hippies, his dad especially, and, obviously, serious Beatles freaks. You know those old guys you see walking around with a ponytail halfway down their back and three wispy wee hairs on top? That’s John’s dad. He spent the sixties and seventies wishing he was called John and not Frank and, much like my own mother, I suppose, he did the old solemn vow business. ‘If I ever have a son . . . ’ She’s not far behind him. Valerie. Lovely people and all, just lovely, don’t get me wrong. But it’s one of those leave-your-shoes-at-the-door, don’t-hit-your-head-off-the-dream-catcher sort of houses. John pretends he only likes music that was made last week because they’d be unbearable if they knew his secret passion. They’re more or less unbearable as it is.”