The doctor inspected Nell’s legs and suggested that it might be hormonal. Nell pointed out that at the age of twenty-three she was hardly likely to be menopausal. She asked the doctor about her aching and inexplicably larger feet. The doctor suggested bigger shoes.
Nell tried larger shoes and took to walking around her flat barefoot. She didn’t realize that she had also taken to walking on tiptoes until Robert pointed it out one evening when he’d come round for a spag bol dinner and a bit of a cuddle on the sofa. She tried putting her heels down on the ground but it felt sickeningly wrong, as though it would unbalance her and tip her backward.
As her feet narrowed and her toes became encased in skin and nail, she abandoned shoes altogether. She surrendered her legs to the hair not long after that. She invested in a number of floor-sweeping skirts to wear outdoors. These did not go down well with her supervisor, Josephine, who thought they looked suspiciously “folksy.”
Embarrassment at her physical state led her to break up with Robert. Nell found this hard to do, not because of any emotional attachment, but because she remained unsure as to whether he was actually her boyfriend. At work she spoke to him, about people and time and moving on and sort of said that she probably wouldn’t be inviting him over again anytime soon, and he nodded and said it was ok and went back to his cubicle, leaving her wondering if she had actually managed to break up with him or not or whether they had ever been together.
And then, on the first of December, she pulled back her duvet and looked at her crooked legs in the condensation-streaked light of day, at the tufty brown hair that covered each of them from hip to cloven toes and, like an optical illusion being revealed, saw with soft surprise that she possessed, had possessed for several weeks, a fine pair of goat legs complete with hooves. The only thing she did in the light of this knowledge was to make an experimental purchase of dog shampoo to wash her goaty fur. She was unconvinced by the results.
***
Nell prepared for a quiet Christmas. On the last Friday before the holiday, the office underlings at the Blame ‘n’ Claim call center decamped to the nearby Harvester pub and Nell found it easier to be dragged along than resist. She sipped a rum and coke and smiled whenever anyone looked at her. Robert approached her with a badly wrapped present, told her that it was just a little something for both Christmas and birthday and then almost kissed her once, bobbing his head like a chicken, and then succeeded on the second attempt, but sort of missed and kissed her on her cheekbone. Nell found herself ridiculously touched by the gesture, thanked him, downed her drink, and went home to have a cry.
By the time she got there, she couldn’t be bothered to cry and instead put her one present under the Christmas tree by the television and did the previous night’s washing up.
There was a knock at the door. She dried her hands and opened it to find on her landing a short man with thick wavy hair and a scruffy beard. He held an umbrella in one hand and a tall bottle in an off-license carrier bag in the other.
“Hey, hey, hey!” he exclaimed, spreading his arms wide.
“Yes?” said Nell. “What can I do for you?”
The little man shrank back immediately and gave her a hurt look. “Is that any way to greet your favorite uncle?”
Nell frowned. “You’re not my favorite uncle. I don’t have an uncle.”
“That you know of,” he said with a waggle of his brolly. “I am your Uncle Kantzaros. Your only uncle, ergo, your favorite uncle.”
“What do you want?”
“I come to bring an end to care and worry!” he declared, his voice raised once more, his arms open to embrace her.
“No thanks,” she said and shut the door.
As she turned, there was a loud thump, a yelp, and a whimper. She opened the door again to find the bearded man clutching his hairy knee. His lip was trembling.
“I banged it,” he said. “Very hard door.”
Nell looked at his little goat legs and hooves and at the roguish glint in his otherwise pathetic eyes.
“My uncle?” she said.
He sucked through his teeth and rubbed his knee. “Kantzaros. Kalli Kantzaros. You should have a sign. It’s a very hard door.”
“Were you trying to kick it in?”
He shrugged. “Worth a try.”
She sighed, stepped back, and ushered him inside.
“For you,” said Kantzaros, passing her the off-license bottle as he hobbled in.
“Oh, what’s this?” she said without enthusiasm as she opened the bag.
Kantzaros trotted into her kitchen, his wounded knee forgotten, and reappeared with glasses.
“Wine,” he said. “The end to care and worry.”
As she poured, he whipped off his scarf and threw it onto the table. He took a glass from her and drank deeply. She gestured to his legs.
“Are you . . . ?”
“Staying long?” he said, jiggling his empty glass at her. “No. Till the last day of Christmas, no longer.”
“No, I was asking . . . saying . . .” She refilled his glass. “You appear to have goat legs.”
“Ah. Or is it the goat that has mine? Drink up.”
The wine looked cheap and nasty, the label indicating neither grape nor country of origin, and she sipped it cautiously. However, its taste was not the poky vinegariness she expected but a warm, rounded fruitiness that spoke of golden summer days, of sunlight on leaves, of wide cloud-speckled skies.
“That’s nice,” she said.
“Nice?” he replied indignantly. “Is that what passes for acclaim these days? That Bacchus should hear such damning praise! Where are your poetic metaphors of joy? Where are your superlatives?”
“I mean it is very nice,” she said.
He humphed. “You’re obviously not drinking it right.”
He pressed the tip of his brolly under the base of her glass, tilting it up so that she was forced to drink it or spill it. She swallowed in desperate gulps and gasped when it was done.
“Better,” said Kantzaros. He snatched the bottle from her and charged their glasses once more (although she hadn’t seen him drink his second). “And do you?”
“Do I what?” said Nell.
“Appear to have goat legs.”
He poked at her skirts with his brolly.
“Never you mind what’s under there,” she said with a laugh. The wine seemed to have gone straight to her head. “Have you eaten?”
“More than once,” he said.
“I think I could rustle up an omelette or something.”
“You have the omelette. I’ll have the something,” said Kantzaros.
She cooked while he drank and then they ate and drank together, and although she had no wine in her flat, and he had definitely brought only one bottle, there were at least six empty wine bottles on the table when he put his knife and fork down and pushed his plate away.
Kantzaros passed wind.
“Charming,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he replied drunkenly. “Such a meal deserves thanks. It is the season of gifts, after all.” He focused slowly on the one present beneath Nell’s tree and went silent.
“You’ve got a gift for me,” Nell prompted.
“Have I?” he said in loud confusion. “Not yet. Let’s see. When I was king, I . . .”
“You were king?”
“Shush. When I was king, I offered another the gift that everything he touched would turn to gold.”
“No thanks. I know that story,” said Nell.
“It would make everything look jolly—” he paused to hold down a belch “—Christmassy.”
“No thanks.”
“Oh. Course, there’s nothing more Christmassy than an old goat. The old Yule goat. You ever been to Scandinavia?”
“No.”
“Lovely, lovely part of the world. All those . . .” He made a wobbly hand motion. “You know?”
“Fjords?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Think I need t
o throw up now.”
“Bathroom’s that way. Through the bedroom.”
As her uncle vomited noisily into the toilet, Nell made a half-hearted attempt to clear away the plates and tried to work out how she came to have a drunken satyr in her bathroom. Was he a satyr? Or a faun? Or just a goat man? Was he even her uncle? And, seeing as he wasn’t in any fit state to go anywhere else, where was she going to put him up in her one-bedroom flat?
It took her a good while to realize that everything had gone quiet in the bathroom, and she went to investigate, only to find her uncle in the gloom of her bedroom, sprawled face up across her bed. He was very still.
“Uncle?” she said softly. His eyes were closed. She leaned over him. “Kantzaros.”
He chuckled faintly and licked his lips but that was all.
“So I’ll sleep on the sofa then,” she said and then saw something on the brow of his head. His wavy hair had fallen back and beneath it she saw two stubby protrusions.
“You have horns.”
“Course I do,” he slurred. “Two on me ’ead and a horn o’ plenty just for you.” He grabbed at the fur-matted mound of his naked groin to make his bawdy point and giggled.
“Disgusting,” she said.
She was at the door when he said her name.
“Nell. Nell.”
“What?”
“You want to know the truth?” he said.
“What?”
He beckoned her over. She hesitated.
“C’mere,” he growled.
She went to the bedside.
“The best thing for a man is not to be born at all,” he said. “And, if already born, to die as soon as possible.”
She looked at him. “Get some sleep,” she said.
He was snoring before she had left the room.
***
Nell woke to the sound of banging. She sat up, cautiously tested the crick in her neck that had come from a night on the sofa, and looked round. It was afternoon. And it was Christmas Eve. There was no sign of last night’s meal on the table. Kantzaros’s scarf had gone from the back of the sofa. There was, in fact, no indication that a boozy satyr had been in her flat at all. She was quite prepared to accept that she had dreamt the whole scene, except there was the banging coming from the bathroom.
She got up, noting blithely that she had no hangover, and went into her bedroom to find Kantzaros, in his scarf, hanging from the top of the bathroom door, swinging it from side to side and seeming to do his best to pull it from the wall.
“What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you, my dear.”
“I meant what are you doing to my door?”
“Just testing it. Some of those screws are very loose, you know. Shoddy workmanship.”
“Could you stop?”
“I could do a great deal many things.”
She coughed.
He looked at her and then dropped to the floor.
“But you’re up now,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“I need to pick up a couple of presents. And a priest.”
“You need to pick up a priest?” she said.
“And a couple of presents. Chop chop. Let’s go.”
“In a minute,” she said. She went into the bathroom and closed the door firmly.
“Are you seriously going to wear that?” said Kantzaros as she came into the lounge fifteen minutes later.
“What?”
“That,” he said, pointing to her skirts with his umbrella.
“What would you rather I wore?” she said.
Kantzaros gestured to his own unclothed lower half.
“You can’t go out without anything on . . . downstairs,” she said.
“Why? Donald Duck does it all the time.”
She looked at him for a long time.
“The skirt stays,” she said, the conversation over.
***
They walked arm in arm along the snowy high street. The passersby appeared not to notice Kantzaros’s goaty legs at all, and Nell wondered if they would notice if she whipped her skirt off and exposed her own to the world.
“Here,” said Kantzaros, stopping outside a shop Nell had never seen before, a dingy-looking thing with a low doorway and leaded windows.
“Won’t be a minute,” he said. He ducked inside and shut the door when she made to follow.
She tried peering through the windows to see what he was up to, but the glass was dirty and all she could make out was two figures shifting and gesturing by what appeared to be candlelight.
When Kantzaros emerged much later he carried two parcels, one red with green ribbon and one green with red ribbon.
“That wasn’t a minute,” she said, stamping her hooves against the cold.
“That’s what I said,” he replied, grinning. “And now a priest.”
“Where are we going to find a priest today?”
“At midnight mass.”
“It’s not midnight yet.”
“Time for a drink then.”
In the pub, Kantzaros drank and talked, and at midnight they stumbled giddily out to a nearby church from which came the sound of singing.
“We’re late,” said Nell.
“Best time to arrive.”
Kantzaros rattled the door latch noisily as they entered. The carollers turned as one to look at them.
“Excuse us!” he said in a loud voice and trotted across the flagstones to an empty pew near the front.
He picked up a service sheet and gustily joined in the song. Nell had half expected him to sing the wrong words out of tune, but he sang with the others in a rich baritone that dwarfed the rest of the congregation in tone and passion. By the end of the verse, it was as though the carol had not existed, had not been worth singing until Kantzaros lent his voice to it.
When the last note faded, Kantzaros nodded to the parishioners to soak up the praise he imagined they were silently heaping on him. They then sat down for the sermon. Kantzaros grunted approvingly at everything the vicar said, throwing out a “hear hear” every now and then. The young vicar gave them a stern gaze and tried unsuccessfully to ignore them.
They passed the vicar on the way out. Nell shook his hand politely.
“I hope you enjoyed the service,” he said stiffly.
“Bloody loved it,” said Kantzaros, pumping his hand. “Can I just say something, vicar?”
“Yes?”
Kantzaros stretched himself up to put his mouth to the vicar’s ear. Nell didn’t quite make out what was said but the tone of it was clear as was the sudden reddening of the vicar’s face. The young man backed away as though slapped, swinging his vestments and looking around wildly in embarrassment to see if any of his congregation had heard.
“See you next year,” said Kantzaros, patting him on the shoulder and running off laughing.
Left with the poor vicar, mortified and apoplectic, his mouth working silently like a fish’s, Nell decided the best thing to do was leave, so she ran too and, somehow, running made it funny and then she began to laugh.
Eventually she caught up with Kantzaros on the corner. The satyr was bent over, catching his breath.
“Hoo!”
“Was that it?” said Nell.
“Hmmm?”
“You wanted to find a priest so you could whisper vulgar comments in his ear?”
Kantzaros nodded happily. “It’s expected. We spend eleven months of the year underground, sawing away at the roots of the world tree . . .”
“There’s a world tree?”
“Of course. Do you doubt your brother’s word?”
She stopped. “Brother?”
He pulled a face. “Uncle. King. Brother. What does it matter? It’s all good.”
She made a skeptical noise and started walking. “So you saw through the roots of the world tree. Why?”
“To bring about the end of the world, of course,” said Kantzaros, falling in beside her. “An
end to care and worry.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
He shrugged. “It’s expected. Anyway, that’s for eleven months of the year, but at Christmas, just when the tree’s cut all the way through, we’re allowed up into the world above.”
“So I’ve got you all Christmas?”
“I know! Wonderful, isn’t it? All the way through to Epiphany. Twelve days, like the song. Of course, I know a better version of that. Who wants two turtledoves, when you can have two plums, two melons?”
“Ah, crudity,” she said.
“All the best things come in pairs. Well, apart from one thing,” he said lewdly and would clearly have made another crotch-waggling gesture if his hands hadn’t been full of presents. “Can’t count any higher than two, anyway. There are some numbers I can’t bear to speak.”
“What? Like three?”
He recoiled and spat. “Horrible holy number.”
She nodded. “Wondered why you didn’t go up for a sip of communion wine in the church.”
“Waste of good grapes,” he said sourly and then suddenly brightened. “Which reminds me . . .”
“What?”
He raised one of the presents.
“It’s Christmas day.”
***
At her flat, in the dim light thrown off by the Christmas tree’s fairy lights, she sat and opened the green parcel with red ribbon. Inside, nestling on a thick cushion of tissue paper, was a long-necked bottle of dark green glass with a waxy cork stopper. Nell lifted it out. It looked very old.
“Wine?” she said.
“An offensive suggestion. It’s nectar.”
“What? Like the stuff bees drink?”
“Hardly.”
He suddenly had glasses in his hand and equally suddenly the bottle was open. As the rosy-red liquid was poured, Nell caught the honeyed scent of the drink.
“This,” said Kantzaros with quiet seriousness, “that Thetis used to anoint Achilles, that Calypso offered to Odysseus. Nectar.”
He offered her a glass, clinked his gently against hers and they drank. It was a powerful and heady drink, as strong as any spirit but dressed up in the warm, rich flavors of every sweet thing she had ever loved.
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