‘Of course you are,’ Midnight grinned. ‘What have you been drinking, you’re steaming.’
‘No I’m not.’
‘If you say so…’ Midnight looked up at the house – a warm glow from every window, lanterns and fairy lights twinkling amongst the trees of the garden, the band playing while people danced, the warm smell of the barbeque on the air and laughter coming from all quarters. ‘It’s a pretty amazing party,’ she said in a softer voice, and she smiled at Phoebe. ‘We wouldn’t have missed this; not for the world.’
Phoebe felt a lump rise in her throat. Perhaps it was the drink that was making her sentimental, but was that Midnight actually telling her how much she cared? ‘I love you so much!’ she squeaked as she threw her arms around her again.
‘Steady on… you’ll be making my man jealous,’ Midnight laughed.
Geraint, who had been silent and grinning throughout the exchange, merely grinned a little more broadly.
‘We might as well tell you something else, before we get into trouble for keeping secrets,’ Midnight added.
‘What?’ Phoebe asked breathlessly. ‘Are you getting married?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Midnight replied, more like her old self. ‘But we are moving in together.’
‘You are? That’s brilliant!’ Phoebe beamed.
‘Yeah… and you are coming back to the office soon to help Dixon, aren’t you?’
‘Yes… next week.’
‘Good, because I won’t be able to.’
‘You don’t have to go back to the shop floor; I’m sure Dixon will have a word with Adam about it…’
‘I won’t be able to because we’ve managed to get me up the duff.’
Phoebe stared at her, and then at Geraint, who simply blushed, though he looked rather pleased with himself all the same. ‘You’re going to have a baby?’ Phoebe said in a small voice.
‘Looks like it.’
‘And you’re okay with it?’
‘You did it. How hard can it be?’
‘But…’
‘Don’t worry,’ Midnight smiled. ‘It was an accident but we’re happy about it.’
‘You are?’
‘Yes. Which is more than can be said for Geraint’s mother.’
‘You’ve met her?’
‘Earlier tonight. That’s why we were late.’
‘Mummy Midnight… it has a ring, don’t you think?’
‘Don’t you dare!’ Midnight growled.
‘You can have my breast pump. And I probably have some stretch mark oil left over somewhere, and support tights… and –’
‘Oi!’ Midnight cried. ‘Stop it!’
Phoebe giggled. ‘If you’re happy then I think it’s amazing. And you’ll make fantastic parents.’
‘You think?’ Midnight asked, for the first time looking less than supremely confident about the whole thing.
‘I know so.’
Jack joined them. ‘Sorry… got held up by Archie… Or rather, I had to hold him up while I sat him in a chair to sober up. What have I missed?’
Phoebe giggled, while Midnight and Geraint just grinned.
‘Have I missed some massive joke?’ Jack asked.
Phoebe twirled around into his arms and pulled him close. ‘You know what?’
‘What?’ Jack asked, smiling down at her.
‘Life is perfect.’
*
READ ON FOR AN ADDITIONAL BONUS PREQUEL TO PHOEBE’S STORY
Mishaps and Mistletoe
Phoebe stood under the glare of the toilet lights, adjusting her red-and-green-striped tights in front of the full-length mirror. She let out a huge sigh. The little bells on the point of her cloth hat tinkled, not with Christmas cheer, but in mournful agreement with her utterly defeated mood. The rest of her outfit – a bright green velour waistcoat and matching pantaloons – was meant to make people (especially little kids) feel festive and jolly. Not quite the effect it was having on her at that moment. A toy store Christmas elf? Had she really sunk this low?
On reflection, perhaps punching the landlord of the Rose and Crown hadn’t been her finest hour. But last week had been a grope too far and she had lost it. Go to self-defence classes, her mum had told her, you’re a young, attractive girl; you need to learn to repel unwanted advances. She’d done that alright, a broken nose and a front tooth flying across to the snug where it had landed in old Albert Wainwright’s bitter. Being the only barmaid on duty at the time, she couldn’t decide what to tackle first, the landlord’s battered face or the Heimlich manoeuvre to dislodge the tooth from Albert’s windpipe. In the end, Albert had coughed up the offending article unaided and flounced out of the pub in a disgruntled huff as fast as his arthritic legs could carry him with warnings he wouldn’t drink there again if that was the sort of nonsense that was going to start happening. Gordon, the landlord, mumbled a reply through his hands as he tried to stem the flow of blood from his nose, though nobody but Gordon knew what it was.
Albert had been the last customer left in the pub before closing time, sitting on his own nursing the one pint he had bought shortly before eight, as he did every night. Phoebe had shot over to lock the door after his outraged exit and ran to fetch a bar towel to put under Gordon’s nose. She was concerned about his injury, of course, but mopping up the spilt beer at the end of the night was bad enough without adding half a pint of blood, snot and nasal cartilage to the mix. She’d even offered to drive him to A&E (it hadn’t helped her to keep her job) although she hadn’t been entirely sure she had enough petrol to get that far anyway. Shortly afterwards, unemployment had meant selling the car, so petrol had become rather a moot point.
Thinking about it now, it was probably a good thing that he had refused her offer and got his wife out of bed to call an ambulance (after ordering Phoebe off the premises); being stuck on the roadside with him in that mood wouldn’t have been pleasant. Katrina, one of the other barmaids, had since phoned Phoebe to say that he had been telling people he had had to fight off an armed raider who was trying to grab the takings. Small wonder no charges had been pressed; in order to do that, he would have had to admit that a twenty-seven-year-old girl (and one that would make your average Twiglet look morbidly obese) had beaten him up. Quite how Gordon had managed to gain Albert’s silence remained a mystery, but Phoebe suspected that a large amount of free bitter had been promised, at least until Albert’s tired old memory had filed the incident safely away in the compartment marked too old to remember properly.
Three weeks before Christmas. Not the best time to be out of work and as most of the seasonal temporary vacancies had already been filled, not the best time to find a new job either. It was lucky for her that the previous elf, a girl named Katie, had drunkenly fallen from a barstool and fractured four ribs, otherwise this job wouldn’t have been available either.
All she had to do, Phoebe reminded herself as she applied a stick of rouge in a large rosy circle to each cheek, was keep this up for three weeks and earn just enough to make the rent and a dent in the ever-growing list of Christmas gifts. There was no reason for anyone she knew to come into this particular toy store, and even if they did, they certainly wouldn’t be heading for Santa’s grotto. Three weeks of smiling serenely at spoilt brats and overprotective, overcritical parents. Three weeks of listening to a socially-challenged Santa stand-in trot out the same old lines every time a kid came in to rattle off their hugely unrealistic gift demands (I’d like an iPad, a pony, world peace and a small Caribbean island, please). Three weeks and then it would all be a bad memory. What would happen after Christmas was anyone’s guess, but Phoebe wasn’t thinking that far ahead. With the year she’d had, the last thing she was going to do was take anything in the future for granted. Watching your boyfriend get killed by a bus had a tendency to do that to you.
A buxom girl with purple hair and matching nails burst into the toilets. She was dressed in an identical outfit to Phoebe’s, only her waistcoat was pulling so hard across her brea
sts that Phoebe wondered if the store had insurance against one of the buttons popping off under the strain and taking Santa’s eye out. There at least had to be some kind of panic button situated in the grotto for such an eventuality.
‘Steve sent me to come and fetch you.’ the girl said breathlessly. ‘Are you nearly ready?’
‘Yeah, I’m just putting the slap on.’
The girl grinned. ‘It looks better on you than it does on me. You look like one of those doll people from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or something, all blonde and tiny. My purple hair with bright red cheeks really doesn’t work.’
Phoebe tried to smile in what she thought was a friendly and non-judgemental way. ‘It doesn’t look so bad,’ she said, the lie coming through her teeth so fast that you could almost hear it whistle. The girl had introduced herself when Phoebe had arrived for her first shift, an hour before, as Midnight. In the trendier rock clubs she was obviously one cool cat with a name to match. Dressed as an elf, however, she was a walking, breathing heap of irony.
Phoebe gave the mirror one last check. Looking again didn’t make her reflection any less humiliating, no matter how carefully she had applied her elf make-up. She gave Midnight a half-hearted smile.
‘Okay, let’s do this!’
The lights of Santa’s grotto were so bright and so many that Phoebe wondered which third-world country had been robbed of electricity to power them. Tinny Christmas music jangled in the background, piped in through some crackly old sound system and the chemical, fake pine fragrance made Phoebe wish she’d brought her inhalers out.
‘Right,’ Steve, the store manager grabbed Phoebe by the arms and moved her to the left of Santa, who was busy adjusting his crotch. ‘You stand there,’ Steve said with an impatient frown. Midnight went to stand at the other side of Santa. ‘When the kids come in, Midnight…’ Steve placed a sarcastic emphasis on the name, ‘will show them to Santa and tell them that they can talk to him. NO parents are allowed past this point…’ He pointed to a red dividing rope at the side of the tiny grotto. ‘When they’ve given Santa their list, they can post it in the box over there…’ He nodded at a shiny post-box, ‘and then you, what’s your name…’ He clicked his fingers at Phoebe.
‘Phoebe,’ she offered, inwardly seething but doing her best to keep it in check. She had spent the previous day with this man, receiving training and a list of rules as long as the list of debts in her drawer at home, and the fact that he still couldn’t remember her name was downright rude.
‘Yeah… whatever… you hand them the toy from this pile here. Only one toy per child – girls’ toys wrapped in pink, boys’ wrapped in blue.’ He ran his gaze over the pair. ‘Got that?’
Phoebe and Midnight both nodded silently, just as Santa, otherwise known as Jeff, launched a rocket-powered fart that made both girls jump and Steve roll his eyes. Jeff looked up at them sullenly, as if daring someone to say something. Satisfied when nobody did, he returned his attention to rearranging his crotch. Whatever was going on in his pants, Phoebe couldn’t say, but she sincerely hoped it would remain firmly where it was.
Phoebe took a closer look at the man who would be making thousands of children’s Christmas dreams come true. Beneath his ill-fitting white cotton beard, his own dark stubble showed. His eyes were alarmingly bloodshot and his red nose definitely wasn’t down to seasonal make-up, but more a worrying sign of a fondness for whisky. It was lucky that the days of children sitting on Santa’s knee were long gone, because the combined power of his sweat-stained suit and booze-breath would be a stench potent enough to knock the hardiest kid off their feet.
‘Opening is in five minutes,’ Steve said. ‘Let’s get them in and out as quickly as possible – no more than three minutes per kid. If they start to ramble, cut them off. DO NOT let them touch Santa…’
Phoebe glanced at Jeff; she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to touch that. And as for getting the kids in and out, it was nice to see that the spirit of Christmas was alive and well in Hendry’s Toy Store.
Steve continued, ‘… otherwise, we’ll have beards pulled off and kids crying and God knows what else.’
Steve turned and left without giving anyone a chance to ask any questions. Phoebe looked at Midnight.
‘Is he always that cheerful?’
Midnight laughed. ‘Steve? You’ve caught him on a good day. You want to see him in a bad mood; milk goes off in the staff room when he walks past the door.’
As the sounds of chattering children and parents reached their ears, gradually moving closer, Phoebe realised that the store must have opened and families were now approaching the grotto ready to queue up outside.
‘It’s pretty quiet first thing,’ Midnight said, noticing Phoebe’s worried frown. ‘Later in the afternoon is when it goes really mental.’
Phoebe rolled her eyes. ‘That’s something to look forward to then.’
As the tinsel curtains to the grotto parted, one by one the families started to file in. Children bright-eyed with wonder, children who looked as though they had already sussed out the whole Santa deal and were just humouring their parents, and those that simply burst into tears at the first sight of the padded-out, white-bearded loon inviting them into his cave to tell him their deepest, darkest desires. At least Jeff had made some effort to try to be approachable and, despite it being inadvertent, by the chewing of a vast amount of cough sweets, was doing quite a good job of keeping his halitosis at bay.
‘What would you like for Christmas, young Callum?’ Santa had asked one dark-haired little angel.
Callum looked up at him in awe. ‘Well…’ he began, ‘I’d like some Lego, Star Wars figures, and a new telly.’
‘That’s a big list,’ Santa said, ‘but I think I can manage it. Have you been a good boy this year?’
Callum nodded earnestly. But then he seemed to stop and think for a minute. ‘Can you ask for presents for grown-ups too?’
Santa hesitated. ‘It depends on what they are. Perhaps your grown-up can write to me themselves?’
Callum pulled out his Christmas list and looked at it with a serious expression.
‘My mum said to my auntie that she wants a divorce for Christmas. Perhaps I should just add that to my toys?’ he decided, looking up at Santa brightly.
A woman looking on, presumably Callum’s mum, took a sharp breath and blushed furiously. Grabbing her son by the hand, she started to pull him towards the exit.
‘Awkward,’ Phoebe whispered to Midnight as she watched them go, ‘he’ll get a telling off outside.’
‘That’s nothing,’ Midnight whispered back, ‘you’d be amazed how many dirty secrets come out in here…’
By the end of the day, Phoebe was exhausted and thoroughly wound up. It was amazing how tiring handing out bits of plastic tat and smiling constantly could be. Kids were cute in their own way, but Phoebe had never been the sort of girl who melted at the sight of a cheeky little grin and certainly had no desire to produce any of her own. Besides which, a great many of their little visitors today had not been cute in the slightest. During her first day, there had been snot, tears, wind and even pee (and that had just been Santa). Phoebe had been handed the stock gift back by one child who demanded something from the store, had been pinched by another, spat at by a third, and a ten-year-old boy had even asked for her phone number. Three weeks of this and all she would want for Christmas day was to lie in a darkened room.
Phoebe let herself into the flat and threw her keys into a bowl in the hallway. The radiators had not yet kicked in and the smell of cold damp squeezed her windpipe, starting her coughing as soon as she walked in. It wasn’t the best of accommodation for her asthma, but on her budget there wasn’t likely to be anything much better. At least there was some cheap plonk waiting in the fridge – and after the day she’d had opening that was top of her list, sod cooking. Wandering through to the living room, she flicked on the light, kicked off her shoes and after three attempts to ignite it, got the gas fire going.<
br />
‘Well, that was an interesting introduction to the wonderful world of seasonal entertainment,’ she said to the photo of a grinning young man on the mantelpiece. She picked it up and gazed at it. Vik – dark skin, masses of black hair, soft brown eyes so deep you could fall into them and never find your way out. Phoebe certainly had. The photo in her hand had been taken at a party the previous Christmas; it seemed like that moment had belonged to another lifetime now, not hers. Less than a week after the picture had been taken, he was dead.
If Vik had still been here, she’d probably have kept her elf costume on to come home in. He’d have found that hilarious and almost certainly a little bit horny, so that it would soon have been littering the hallway to the bedroom before she’d had time to say jingle bells. She smiled sadly at the idea as she put the photo back on the shelf.
‘Right, as you don’t have anything to add to this conversation, you won’t mind if I go and get so drunk that I can’t remember my own name – will you?’
Vik simply grinned up at her.
Phoebe smacked the alarm clock with a groan as it screeched in her ear. Months of working evenings had tipped her body-clock upside down and now getting up before midday was like torture. The fact that she had consumed a whole bottle of white wine before bed really wasn’t helping: her head felt like it had an illegal rave going on in there. Forcing open one eye, she peered at the screwed up pile of clothes on the floor, littered with make-up stained cotton wool – she had obviously been so drunk she had forgotten that the primary function of the waste bin was to put waste in it.
The Spring of Second Chances : An absolutely perfect and uplifting romantic comedy Page 42
