A Mistletoe Miracle

by Emma Jackson

  The alleyway was narrow and cobbled. It headed steeply uphill towards the green and the primary school, but I kept up my swift pace, knowing that even if they saw me and were moving in the same direction, there was no way eight-months-pregnant Rachel would be able to catch up. I double-checked with a glance behind me just as I stepped out of the alleyway: all clear. I was home and—

  CRASH.

  Chapter Two

  As I stepped out onto the street I body-slammed straight into a man walking across the mouth of the alleyway. We bounced apart, ricocheting backwards from the force. His arms began to flail as the massive rucksack on his back threatened to topple him over. I grabbed the strap across his chest in an effort to stop him from landing on the ground like a tortoise, hauling him close.

  I took a big gulp of air and a strong, pleasant scent wafted over me, like the rain had released special chemicals from his skin, the same way it did from the earth: leather, eucalyptus and man. He was tall, so I was still just staring at his chin as I got my bearings again when he spoke, short and sharp.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good. D’you think you could let go of me then?’

  I flushed and unwound my fingers from the canvas strap of his backpack, taking a few hurried steps back. He pushed his Buddy-Holly-style glasses back up his nose with his knuckle and frowned at me like I was some kind of idiot.

  I think I might’ve gone into shock because this was the closest I’d come to a man’s body in two months. Longer actually, what with all those nights Peter had been away on ‘business trips’. And when he had been home there’d been enough acreage of bed sheets between us each night to sell off as a smallholding. My body was probably starved for any kind of physical contact: I mean, this guy I’d crashed into looked like he’d been spun around in a washing machine a few times and taken out again too soon; soaked through, dishevelled and cross.

  Cross. At me.

  ‘That’s a strange way of saying thank you.’ I folded my arms over my chest and fixed him with a glare.

  ‘Why would I say thank you?’ He threw a quick raised eyebrow in my direction and then began scouring the pavement in our immediate vicinity.

  ‘Because I just saved you from toppling over like a ninepin.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have lost my balance if you’d been looking where you were going.’ He found what he was searching for – his phone – and scooped it up.

  ‘Ditto. You obviously had your head buried in your phone.’ I injected the necessary amount of derision into my tone to cover up the fact that I was constantly walking around looking at my phone too. Everyone was these days. But he didn’t even bother to defend himself on that charge; he was too busy examining his screen to see if it was cracked.

  I gave an annoyed little harrumph and jammed my hands in my pockets, ready to start walking home again. Our drama was obviously over. Then I realised I shouldn’t have been able to get my hand in my left pocket. The angel. Where was she?

  A range of colourful swear words erupted from my lips as I spun around on the spot and tried to find her. She must’ve fallen out of my pocket when we knocked into each other.

  There. Her little white hand signalled to me in distress, the rest of her submerged in a great dirty puddle that had formed in a crack between the pavement and the cobbles of the alleyway.

  ‘Nooo, no, no, no.’ Poor misfit angel, winding up with only me to look after her. I’d been her guardian for all of ten minutes and she was drowning in a muddy puddle.

  I crouched down to pull her out by the arm, streams of filthy water cascading out of her now grey and overstretched woollen dress.

  ‘What is that?’ he asked, vaguely disgusted, and even though I knew the angel was nothing much to look at before she took a dip, it still irritated me. She might be a misfit, but she was my misfit. An evil thought occurred to me.

  ‘What she is, is irreplaceable. She’s been in our family for generations. My great-great-great-grandmother made her, and we bring her out every Christmas. It’s a family tradition.’

  He blinked at me and cocked his head to the side slightly, then his expression cleared.

  ‘Ohhh, it’s a fairy for the Christmas tree,’ he said, like he’d finally figured out a major puzzle.

  ‘It was. Now I’ll have to take her home and show my mother – she’ll be heartbroken.’

  His face fell and his cheeks, which were pink with cold, paled beneath. I almost felt bad.

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ He unzipped the top of his jacket so he could reach inside and pull his wallet out but when he checked the contents, he bit his bottom lip and winced at me. ‘I’ve only got a couple of pounds left in English money. I doubt that would cover it?’

  His accent was definitely from somewhere in the south east of England, so he must’ve just got back from his holidays. Everyone was either on holiday, coming home from holiday or planning one, it seemed. What I wouldn’t have given to be on a desert island at that moment. Just me, a good book and a bottle of rum. Perhaps I should give Granny Caroline a call in Jamaica, see if she fancied putting up her granddaughter for a couple of weeks…or months?

  Instead, I started wringing out the angel’s smock dress as best as I was able. ‘Of course it won’t. I told you. She’s irreplaceable.’

  ‘Well. Here. At least let me give you something to take her home in, so she doesn’t get any more water damage.’ He swung his backpack free and let it fall to the pavement in between us with a thump.

  As he undid the toggles and rummaged around inside, a lock of his saturated hair fell free from the rest. It hung there, twisted in a perfect little curl, begging me to pull it down just to see if it would spring back. I have issues with compulsions like that, so I tightened my grip on the angel. When he straightened back up, it settled on his forehead and he unfolded a white T-shirt and extended it towards me.

  I wasn’t sure how it would help at all, but it seemed like I’d made him feel sufficiently guilty; he clearly needed to do something to make it up to me, and if ruining one of his T-shirts would ease his conscience then so be it.

  I gave the angel a last gentle shake and moved closer again to put her in the centre of the T-shirt so he could wrap her up. There was a strange intimacy to the moment as his long fingers showed an excess of care when folding over the left side of the shirt. He paused before covering her with the right.

  ‘Are they plastic wings?’

  Oh. Whoops. Guess I’d added too many ‘greats’ to my list of fictional grandparents.

  ‘She’s over a hundred years old – she’s needed some modernisations over the years.’ I tugged the rest of the T-shirt over her and hugged her to my chest. ‘Guess she’ll need even more now.’

  ‘Look, if you give me your number or address, I can drop some money in to help with her repairs, once I’ve had a chance to get some more sterling.’

  ‘Please don’t trouble yourself any further.’

  He rifled in his wallet again and produced a business card. ‘In case you change you mind.’

  I jammed it in my back pocket and turned on my heel, throwing a sarcastic ‘Merry Christmas,’ at him, over my shoulder. I needed to get this angel home and figure out a way of avoiding giving her to my mum until she was fixed. I couldn’t even be trusted to buy a Christmas decoration and deliver it in one piece.

  When I got back to the hotel, I bypassed the front door in favour of the side entrance that led straight into the kitchen. That way I had a good chance of dodging my mum who should be setting up the bar round about now.

  The kitchen was warm, full of the creamy aroma of tomato soup, bread and coffee. I put my soggy parcel of T-shirt and angel on the island in the middle of the kitchen and shrugged out of my wet jacket.

  Henry, one of our chefs, stepped out of the walk-in fridge, his arms laden with cheese and milk.

  ‘That soup smells amazing,’ I said, hanging my jacket on the back of a stool at the island. ‘Any chance there’s some
left over?’

  Henry grunted and took his dairy products to the other side of the island.

  ‘Didn’t you just come back from your lunch break?’ He slammed a slab of mature cheddar onto the chopping block.

  ‘I did, but I didn’t have time to grab anything. I’ll sort it out if there is some – I wasn’t expecting you to warm it up or anything.’

  ‘My goodness, how generous of you,’ he muttered, snatching up a knife and slicing the packaging of the cheese in one swift slash. ‘There isn’t any. You’ll have to lower yourself to making a sandwich, if you think you can manage that, Princess?’

  I frowned at his bent head. Well. The kitchen had been warm when I first walked in. It was decidedly chilly now.

  Henry had always called me Princess. Back when he first joined the staff, it had been a teasing sort of endearment but since I’d moved home again, there was an edge to it. I didn’t know what I’d done to provoke the change, other than the thought that I’d gone down in his estimation by returning home with my tail between my legs. He wasn’t alone if that was the case.

  Twenty-six years old, single, and living with my mother with no fiscally robust career plan. Quite a different story to the twenty-two-year-old musical protégé intent on sharing her deep love for music by becoming a tutor, who ran off to London after a whirlwind romance to live with her new boyfriend. I’d taken for granted the people enabling my aspirations and Peter’s initial enthusiasm for supporting me had only cocooned me further. It was no wonder Henry called me Princess. I’d been royally spoiled.

  ‘Okay, Henry, don’t get your panties in a pickle,’ I said lightly. ‘I’ll get out of your hair. Y’know, what you have left of it.’ I threw the joke out in the hope I could resurrect our friendly banter.

  ‘Very funny.’ He blew out an impatient breath. ‘Go on then, some of us have work to do. And don’t forget to take whatever that is, making a mess in my kitchen.’ He waved the knife in the direction of the angel.

  I scooped up my stuff and went through to the utility room. There were two industrial-sized washer-dryers; one was busy churning the pale green tablecloths from lunchtime but the other was empty. I stripped the angel of her puddle-soaked dress and threw it into the empty drum, along with a pile of sheets from the dirty linen sacks on the cleaner’s trolley and the T-shirt that man had given me. I supposed when it was clean, I should really post it back to him.

  Outside of the utility room was the service lift and the narrow ‘servants’ staircase, hidden at the rear of the hotel. When I was a kid and I brought school friends over for the first time they usually reacted with “wows” and gaping mouths about how grand the hotel was. And it was grand. Twelve guest suites and beautiful gardens, all surrounding a house that looked like something out of a Jane Austen novel.

  The reality of living here, however, was this: fifty-two steps up a narrow stairwell with no natural light, to get to the flat my mother and I lived in at the very top of the building. I was not Elizabeth Bennet in this scenario – I was one of the unnamed servants. At least now, in comparison to my teen years, I got paid for the work I did here. When I thought of it that way, perhaps I wasn’t such a princess after all.

  I unlocked the door at the top of the stairs with the usual starbursts of exertion playing at the edges of my vision and went inside. Our flat was even warmer than the kitchen. The heating was kept pumping twenty-four/seven in winter and since we were in what used to be the attic, massive water tanks and boilers flanked the living space.

  My parents bought the hotel when I was eleven and it took me over a year to manage to sleep properly with all the pipes groaning around me; I kept imagining it was the ghosts of former occupants trying to get us to leave. A child psychologist might’ve said the nightmares were more to do with my dad rapidly succumbing to cancer shortly after we moved in but either way crawling into bed with my mum was the only way I could get off to sleep for a long time.

  Mum had done her best to make the flat feel as different to the rest of the hotel as possible. Whereas downstairs everything was decorated in a muted and classic way, keeping to neutral tones, varnished wood and delicate floral-patterned soft furnishings, the flat was bright and modern. There was one large squashy teal sofa, the bright colour picked out in the designer print wallpaper on one wall.

  But facing the TV was a cracked, saggy leather armchair, which didn’t really go with either decor scheme. Mum had always grumbled about how ugly that chair was when Dad was alive, but she was never going to get rid of it now. I kissed my fingers and touched them to the headrest as I went past.

  Somehow, even after being back for nearly two months, everything still looked smaller than how I remembered it. The jumble of paraphernalia from my youth – posters, stickers, photos, stuffed toys and knick-knacks – betrayed how hard I’d been trying to assert my individuality back then and yet I couldn’t really remember who that person was. She’d been very sure of herself, that much I knew.

  There was a notably empty space on the wall beneath the hook opposite my bed where my guitar should have been. In my hurry to leave when Peter and I broke up, I’d left my guitar at the flat. I’d just grabbed my clothes and bolted for the train. Its absence gnawed at me every time I noticed it. My dad had given that guitar to me when I was barely big enough to hold it, and he’d taught me how to play on it; hours of laughter and talking and listening to him. He’d been so patient. Too patient really – I could see that from my tutoring perspective now. I learnt much quicker when I started getting lessons at school too, since they were stricter about practising regularly. He just wanted me to enjoy the music with him.

  I’d used it to the point where the lacquer on its fretwork had worn away in places, and even if I’d already given up tutoring, I needed my guitar.

  What if Peter had sold it? He was desperate for money. After that awful dinner, all the lies had come out. His business had been failing for over a year and he’d borrowed and borrowed trying to hide it from everyone. From me.

  No. No matter how big the hole he’d dug for himself, he would never sell my guitar when he knew how much it meant to me. At least, I didn’t think he would. Clearly, I hadn’t known him as well as I thought I did.

  I set the angel on my desk, while I got changed out of my soggy jeans and V-neck jumper into a pencil skirt, tights and a light blue pinstripe blouse. Next came hair. The combination of damp and heat was making my natural afro strain to escape my double-twisted ponytail. I was sitting on the bed braiding it, when my mother pushed open my bedroom door without knocking – some things never changed.

  ‘Sorry. I was on my way down to reception, I swear. I just needed to make myself presentable.’ I snapped the hairband into place at the end of my plait. ‘It was wetter out there than I thought.’ I gestured to my smart attire as though it was a ballgown.

  She gave me a small nod of acknowledgement. I hadn’t been expecting her to be too impressed: this was a woman who decorated Christmas trees in four-inch heels, but maybe at least a smile? She was frowning at me like I’d found one of my inappropriate T-shirts from when I was a teenager and put that on…except she wasn’t really looking at me, her mind was definitely off somewhere else.

  ‘Mum, is everything okay?’

  She sighed and straightened her already very straight, white blouse.

  ‘I’ve just spoken to your Auntie Cath. It’s Grandad. He’s had a fall—’

  ‘Oh no—’

  ‘They think he’s okay,’ she added quickly, holding one hand out to withhold my worry. ‘He’s at the hospital and they want to keep him in overnight, but he most likely can be discharged in the morning as long as one of us can go up and get him.’

  ‘What happened?’ I pressed my hand to my stomach.

  ‘He slipped on some black ice apparently. He was lucky. He’s just bruised, no broken bones or anything.’

  I nodded slowly and moved out into the hall to give her a hug. For a moment, we hung on to each other, the sick f
eeling in my stomach subsiding and my mum’s shoulders gradually relaxing down from around her ears. ‘That’s something.’ I rubbed her back.

  She gave a rueful smile and stepped back. ‘Put your shoes on, and we’ll talk as we walk down.’

  I glanced down at my stocking-clad toes and then hurried back to my wardrobe to grab my black court shoes. ‘So, is Auntie Cath going to get him? He was going to be staying there for Christmas anyway, right?’

  ‘He was, but her in-laws are over from Australia. She’s got enough on her plate. And it’s the least I can do.’

  I frowned, my feet slotting into place in my shoes, toe-heel, toe-heel, at the same time as her words clunked into place in my head. ‘You’re going to go up? But the hotel is fully booked.’

  ‘I know. It’s not ideal. But he’s my dad as well.’ What with Mum having the hotel to run, as well as being a widowed single mother, Auntie Cath had taken on the majority of caring for Grandad when Nanna passed away. Mum always felt guilty about it, even though Auntie Cath never resented her for it as far as I was aware.

  ‘I’ll leave after dinner,’ she continued, ‘so that I don’t get caught in traffic on the way up. That way I can get some sleep at the bungalow, then pick him up first thing in the morning and drive him down to London to stay with Cath. I’ll be back here by the evening at the latest. You’ll be able to manage the place for me, won’t you?’

  I didn’t answer straight away. I couldn’t. My body flicked into automatic pilot as we left the flat and began the epic descent down the stairwell, and I may as well have been spiralling down into my own personal neurosis. The familiar groove of the banister dug into my palm as I tried desperately to look at the situation objectively, not tinged with panic.

  Since I’d come home I’d helped out in the hotel because it was a given that was what I did when I was here, and I didn’t have another job. I’m not sure we’d even officially discussed it. After a week or two of moping, I’d got myself dressed and asked Mum what needed doing and that had been it; I’d been back on the rota. But that had just been helping out with the usual tasks I always had: some waitressing, a bit of meet and greet on reception and housekeeping. Acting as manager – even if just for twenty-four hours – was a whole other level.