Little Black Everything

by Alex Coleman

  And then she caught something out of the corner of her eye. She snapped her head to the right. The shop window was festooned with flyers advertising this and that – yoga classes, English lessons, decorating services. Right in the middle was one labelled MISSING CAT. The pictured animal was the Cat of Many Colours. She was wearing a collar in the photo, granted, and she looked a good deal sturdier, but it was her all right. There was no doubt about it. Holly stepped closer and foraged for details. She was “a much-loved pet”, apparently, who hadn’t been seen for several weeks. Her real name was Combo. Someone called Sam was offering a reward for her return. There was a phone number and an address. Combo . . . Holly liked that. She wished she’d thought of it herself. Sam hadn’t gone far to post the flyer; he or she lived in the street that ran down the side of the shop. Holly gave it some thought. On the one hand, this Sam person was probably frantic. On the other hand, they’d already been frantic for several weeks. One more night wasn’t going to kill them. Then there were the chip butties to consider. She paused, biting her lip. Chip butties didn’t seem like a good enough reason to go straight home. She was drunk, of course. No one liked having a drunk showing up on their doorstep on a Saturday night, even if they did bring good news. And besides, it might be nice to have Combo’s company for a night knowing that it wouldn’t be permanent. She could sit on the sofa and give her a little tickle, safe in the knowledge that she was no longer a harbinger of doom. Yeah. Tomorrow would do fine. She headed for home.

  Epilogue

  Riverston Lodge, Southampton

  29th November 2008

  Simon Christmas tapped the microphone and then bellowed into it. “ONE-TWO, oops, sorry. One-two? Hello? Yes? Hello? You can all hear me all right, can you?”

  The crowd, as they had frequently been reminded, was forty-four strong. Forty-three of them yelled back that they could hear him loud and clear.

  “Good then!” Simon declared. He adjusted his paper hat with his free hand and somehow managed to make it look even more ridiculous. “Well. Where do I begin? I have to hold my hand up and say that in all honesty, no word of a lie, may God strike me down, hand on heart, this has been one of the best days of my life.”

  His voice had cracked towards the end of this statement. There was a small smattering of applause.

  “Oh God,” Holly said. “He’s going to cry. Sweet Jesus, no.” She tried to pull her paper hat down over her eyes but stopped when it started to split. There was no point in destroying the thing. Earlier in the evening, she had “accidentally” ruined three others. Replacements had been found and planted on her head within seconds. Apparently there was an inexhaustible supply. Resistance was futile. Her mother was sitting on her right.

  “Shhh,” she said. “I want to hear this.”

  “It’s hard to know which bit I enjoyed the best,” Simon continued. “Meeting you all for the first time was a great joy, of course, and one that I know I will never forget. But even better than that – and I know, I know, it’s only been a few hours – even better than that was getting to know you. I already feel like I’ve made some friends for life.”

  “Huh,” Holly said. “He spent most of his time on me.” She was exaggerating but not by much. Simon’s delight at meeting someone with what he called a “doubly festive” name had been something to behold. There had been moments when she had feared for his health.

  “Quiet, please,” her mother begged.

  “To meet Christmases from all over the world has been every bit as special as I always hoped it would be,” Simon said. He adjusted his hat again. It was bright yellow. Holly’s was pink. “Canada, Australia, America, Wales. We have representatives, as the old proverb goes, from every corner of the world.”

  “That’s not a proverb,” Holly hissed through her teeth.

  “We even have a last-minute South African!”

  A small cheer went up from those who were seated with the man in question. He got to his feet and raised his glass. “Thenks!” he cried. “Thenk you for the welcome!”

  “South Africa!” Simon marvelled. “Imagine! The jewel of the . . . the jewel of the . . . South Africa!”

  Holly tried to position her hands so that they would cover both her eyes and her ears. Mrs Christmas slapped them down again.

  “And, of course, how could I forget, I hope you’ve all met my new best friend among you. Where are you, dear? There she is! Stand up, would you, please? Ladies and gentlemen – how special is this? Holly! Christmas! That’s right, you heard me – Holly! Holly!”

  There was more applause, this time accompanied by cheers and a few whistles.

  Holly’s mum elbowed her in the ribs. “Get up. Please. Don’t just sit there. It won’t kill you. Please. Give them a wave.”

  “Fuck me,” Holly said and got to her feet. She waved to both sides of the room and dropped into her seat again.

  “If I ever have a daughter . . .” Simon said. He was becoming emotional again.

  Holly dared to hope that he would be unable to continue, but no, he soon recovered. “All right then. I don’t want to go on for too long because I don’t know about you, but I smell turkey and the sooner I sit down, the sooner we can all get tucked in. Am I right? And besides, this isn’t my proper speech – that comes at the end of the night. This is just a warm-up.”

  Holly experienced a brief strangling sensation. “Gaggghhh,” she said.

  “I just want to remind you all that you don’t have to go easy on the crackers, you can pull away. More will be put out after every course. Oh yes, I’ve thought of everything. I also want to let you know that we’re going to go round the tables after dessert to give everybody a chance to relate their favourite Christmas anecdote, so get thinking. It can be anything – the time you received that one special gift as a child, a lovely story about a Christmas reunion, anything at all. So long as it features our favourite time of the year, that’s good enough. All right then. Without further ado, let’s bring on the soup! I don’t want to ruin the surprise but if you’re a fan of vegetable, your luck’s in!”

  He switched off the microphone and dropped it to the table. Then he raised his arms above his head in a V as if he’d just scored in the cup final. There was yet more applause.

  “An anecdote?” Holly gasped. “A fucking anecdote? Someone kill me now. Please. Make it quick.”

  “You’ll be fine,” said the man to her left.

  Holly dabbed at her brow. “I knew it would be bad. I mean, I knew it would be bad. But this . . . this is . . .” Words failed her.

  “Well, I’m having fun anyway. And I can’t wait to hear your anecdote. I’m sure it’ll be . . . jolly. I might record it on my phone. You know, so I can enjoy it again and again and again and again.” He dissolved into laughter.

  “Arsehole.” She turned to face him.

  He laughed all the harder.

  Despite herself, she smiled. “Thanks for coming,” she said. “I mean it.”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. This is epic entertainment. Epic.”

  “I’d be even worse if you weren’t here.”

  “I can only imagine.”

  She leaned across and kissed him. “I’m being serious. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Sam.

  The End

  If you enjoyed Little Black Everything

  try The Bright Side also published by Poolbeg

  Here’s a sneak preview of Chapter One

  “Fetch me that flower, the herb

  Chapter One The Bright Side

  It was a Friday the 13th, the day I caught Gerry having sex with our next-door neighbour. Not that I ever thought the two things were connected. I’d always hated all that superstitious malarkey. A broken mirror didn’t mean seven years bad luck in my book – it meant a trip to the mirror shop. Still, there was no denying that I’d been having a really brutal 13th, even before I caught the pair of them puffing and panting over the back of my good sofa like a couple of kna
ckered greyhounds. I slept in, for a start, and that always got on my nerves (no matter how often it happened). Skipping breakfast didn’t bother me so much, but I really resented having to rush my shower. A rushed shower, in my opinion, was worse than none at all. You got all the hassle of getting wet but none of the benefits. It wasn’t much different to getting caught in the rain. And this was a real in-and-out job: the first drops of water had barely hit the floor before I was back in the bedroom, swearing under my breath and rooting through my underwear drawer. Gerry was gently snuffling in his sleep, as usual (he was very rarely out of bed before me, even when I wasn’t up on time). When we first got married, I found his snuffling seriously cute. He used to say that I’d soon change my tune about that one. But he was wrong. It always stayed cute to me, even after twenty-one years.

  My day didn’t improve a whole pile when I finally made it across to First Premier in Santry. When I’d started working there, about three years previously, I’d foolishly pointed out to my manager, Jenny, that “first” and “premier” meant the same thing. She’d fixed me with one of her non-smile smiles and said, “Do you really think we don’t know that here at First Premier?” I discovered later that Jenny elbowed the phrase “here at First Premier” into approximately fifty per cent of her conversations. My job title was “Data Entry Operative”. I liked the “Operative” part. It made me sound like a glamorous spy. It was the “Data Entry” bit I had trouble with, both as a title and, sadly, as an everyday activity. That morning, as I came through the door of our humongous open-plan office, afraid to look at my watch but knowing it was getting on for ten, I just knew that Jenny was lying in wait for me like a badly permed leopard. Sure enough, I wasn’t even halfway to my desk – my workstation, rather – before she pounced.

  Good afternoon, I thought.

  “Good afternoon,” said Jenny. This was her standard greeting for latecomers. It was so obvious and childish and unfunny that it always made me want to cry, even when it wasn’t being directed at me.

  “Hello, Jenny,” I said, trying my best to smile. “I’m a bit late.”

  She gazed back at me with the cold, unblinking eyes of a doll. “I hope everything’s all right at home,” she cooed then, doing a sympathetic head-tilt.

  I resumed walking. Jenny followed half a pace behind, like one of those small, annoying dogs that goes Yip instead of Woof.

  “Everything’s fine at home,” I said. “Alarm clock let me down, that’s all. Dead battery or something.”

  “Hmmm,” Jenny said.

  There was something about the way she said it, some vague hint of menace, that made me stop and turn to face her.

  “It won’t happen again,” I lied.

  Jenny frowned. “The thing is, Jackie, you’ve said that before.”

  She had a point there. I’d said it many, many times before, some of them, if memory served, in the past couple of days. There didn’t seem to be any point in adding that being late annoyed me as much as it did her and that I dearly wished it wouldn’t happen so often. I decided instead to try the light-hearted approach. Nothing in my experience of Jenny told me she would appreciate the effort, but I gave it a whirl anyway.

  “I know I’ve said that before,” I told her with what I hoped was a loveable grin, “but this time, I really, really mean it.” I held up my right hand with fingers crossed and when Jenny failed to respond, I held the left up too.

  Her brow creased and uncreased. “You’re aware, no doubt, of the new tardiness policy we’ve implemented here at First Premier?”

  I half-remembered seeing an e-mail with some of those words in it. It had caused a bit of a fuss about a week or two previously. I hadn’t read the thing properly and hadn’t participated in the fuss. “Of course.”

  “Well then, you’ll know all about the points system.”

  I drew a blank at that one. “Points system. Sure.”

  “Well, Jackie, I’m afraid that today’s nine-fifty-seven coupled with Wednesday’s nine-oh-eight, Tuesday’s nine-twelve and last Thursday’s nine-twenty-one puts you over the top for this month already. And it’s only –”

  “The 13th,” I sighed. “It’s Friday the 13th.”

  “Unlucky for some,” Jenny said with what looked, for a change, like a genuine smile. “So you’ll do it?”

  I hadn’t a clue what “it” was, but I knew I’d find the answer in the e-mail. “Looks like I’ll have to, doesn’t it?” I said.

  Jenny nodded. “It’s policy.”

  I turned and left her, hoping to God that I was merely imagining the bright bolts of pain that had started to flash along the right side of my head.

  I started getting “my headaches” – I always called them that as they seemed very personal – when the kids were entering their teens. We used to joke, on the days when I felt like joking about it, that it must have had something to do with all the stereos in the house suddenly getting cranked up. But really, I had no idea what the cause might be. I didn’t get them very often – four, maybe five times a year. That was plenty. Nothing seemed to provoke them – nothing that I could identify anyway. They always started the same way, with brief, shooting pains that were gone before I could even wince. Some time after that – it could be minutes, it could be hours – the party really got going; the pains returned, and this time they stayed. There were lots of suitable analogies; I usually plumped for something with white-hot six-inch nails.

  As soon as I got settled in at my desk, Veronica, who sat directly opposite me, peeped over the partition and gave me an update on her battle with the kids who gathered on her front wall every night to smoke cigarettes. There had been an escalation, by all accounts. One of the kids, a girl of no more than twelve, had called Veronica a “frigid old bitch” (it was the “old” part that really hurt, apparently). Veronica had responded with something about children who dressed like little prostitutes and feared she had gone too far.

  I tried to seem interested, but my mind kept wandering back to Jenny. It occurred to me that she’d had my tardiness details on the tip of her tongue. That meant that she’d looked them up in some sort of file, no doubt hoping that I’d be late, as opposed to absent, so she’d able to throw them at me. She’d even memorised them. I grabbed the edges of my desk and tried to think pleasant thoughts. Cute little puppies, gently babbling brooks, the last five minutes of An Officer and a Gentleman . . . I was still gripping hard and muttering darkly to myself when Eddie Hand appeared by my side.

  Eddie sat at the end of our little section, facing Veronica and me. He was a forty-something bachelor who wore the same navy-blue woollen tie quite literally every day, even though he could have showed up in an Iron Maiden T-shirt for all First Premier cared. In summer he wore his tie over a short-sleeved shirt. In winter he wore it under a V-necked jumper. Every couple of days or so, I vowed to ask him why he was devoted to that one item of clothing. I never followed through, partly because I was afraid he would tell me that it had been a present from his childhood sweetheart who had died in a tragic boating accident (or something), and partly because I didn’t want him to think that I was interested in being his friend. Eddie wasn’t exactly the type who set the room on fire when he walked in – not unless he accidentally knocked over a candle while creeping round the edge of the group, looking for a place to hide. I wasn’t proud of the attitude I had towards him. Certainly not. But I rationalised it by telling myself that most people probably had someone like that in their lives, a colleague, a neighbour, a familiar face on the bus. Someone they suspected to be a little bit sad, a little bit lonely. Someone they could possibly cheer up quite a bit, if only they’d take the time. But they didn’t, and I didn’t, for fear that the lonely person might start appearing on the doorstep, suggesting nights out or, worse, weekends away. Best to just smile politely and shimmy past them, that’s what we all told ourselves. I smiled politely at Eddie when he showed up that morning and if I hadn’t been sitting down, I would have shimmied past as well.

>   “Hello,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  I gave him a smile every bit as fake as the one Jenny had worn earlier. “I’m fine, why?”

  He shrugged and cast his eyes to the right. “I dunno. You seem a bit . . . you know . . .” He pointed with his head. “Your knuckles are all white.”

  I loosened my grip on the desk and went into my drawer for headache tablets. “I’m okay, Eddie, really. Just a bit tense, that’s all.”

  He nodded. “Is it because of your hair?”

  On the Monday of that week I’d shown up in wicked humour on account of a weekend haircut that had gone seriously awry. My usual girl had called in sick at the last minute, but rather than make a new appointment, I’d gone ahead with another stylist. I should have known better. The replacement stank of last night’s booze and seemed to be having trouble forming proper sentences (“Have you been to holiday this year, have you?” she asked me at one point). She was still drunk, I was absolutely sure of it. Long story short, I wound up with a hairstyle like Stephen Fry’s. It had annoyed me for a few days, naturally, but I had more or less forgotten about it until that moment.