by Paul Magrs
But no one at the hotel had caught her eye. More to the point, she hadn’t caught theirs.
Robert and his Aunty Jane sat at the high stools of the off-licence bar for a couple of hours, drinking the pale, murky wine served to them by a bloke who looked like Harvey Keitel. They talked about love like they never really had before. The conversation was an eye-opener for both of them.
They drifted out, bought peaches off a fruit stall gondola and sat on the steps of a white stone bridge. The evening mist and dark came down and they talked about their ideal men, and how sick they had become of turkey, tinsel, and the blazing blue Christmas puddings.
“Look at him,” Robert suddenly said, laughing and pointing at an old man strolling by the closed up front of a church.
“He’s ancient,” his aunt said, wiping peach juice off her chin.
He had a huge white beard and a scarlet face. He was a skinny old thing in a checked sleeveless shirt and Bermuda shorts.
“It’s Santa Claus!” Robert laughed, choking. “On holiday!”
They both laughed until the old bloke was out of sight. “He must wear padding at Christmas time,” Aunty Jane said, and then shuddered. “Oh, don’t talk about Christmas to me.”
WATCH THE BIRDIE
“But who could afford all this? And how would you carry it back in your luggage?”
They were looking at the coloured glass objects in the shop windows.
Twisted, sculpted glass with crimson and aquamarine seeping clouded and frozen in spirals and whorls like ink dropped rough water. The two of them gazed for an hour or more at jewellery and vases and bottles and, finally, a whole tree of blown glass that teemed with life-sized and haughty-looking parrots.
It was as they were studying the glass birds that Robert glimpsed a familiar figure inside the shop.
“Don’t look now,” Robert hissed. “But there’s Santa again.”
Santa was having something carefully wrapped in green tissue paper. His Bermuda shorts showed off his pale, hairless legs and sandals. He looked affluent and pleased with himself, scratching at his magnificent beard.
“Oh, no,” said Jane. “Let’s ignore him. God, I hope he didn’t hear us laughing at him last night...”
She was blushing as the old man came out of the glass shop, struggling with his precious parcel and the awkward door. Aunty Jane looked away, but Robert was watching.
Santa fixed them with a genial frown, his feathery eyebrows pulled together. He waited until Aunty Jane met his glance.
Then he said, “Ho, ho, ho!” and she gasped.
The old man moved off into the narrow, bustling arcade and soon he was lost to them amongst the brolleys, damp fleeces and shopping bags.
Regret tastes of coffee
They had tiny cups of bitter, gritty coffee at a table by their hotel.
“The canals smell of damp wool,” Robert said, staring at the milky green water. He looked at his despondent Aunty Jane and sighed. A litre of wine at lunchtime in the Peggy Guggenheim museum hadn’t been such a good idea. The sour wine had tasted like rainwater, like tears, and as they’d trooped around, dutifully taking in the surrealist pieces (nightmare interiors by Ernst and Magritte, driftwood assemblages knocked up by Picasso), Robert had watched his slender, nervy Aunty Jane sink into a deep depression.
She bolted back the rest of her espresso like medicine, pursed her lips and told him: “Don’t you ever turn out like me, Robert.”
“How do you mean?” He’d found he was watching the gondoliers again, as they rested on the opposite side of the canal. Larking about in a foreign language, shoving each other, lazing in the afternoon sun as the cobbles gave off wreaths of warm mist.
“I was your age in the Seventies and I thought I had it all in front of me. I was like one of Pan’s People off Top of the Pops. That’s what I looked like. And I called it sexist at the time, the way all the blokes looked at me and tried to chat me up. I just breezed through and then it was a decade later and I was a housewife for a bit. Poodle perm, batwing mohair sweaters, negative equity, the lot. And by the time I’d got myself out of all that, I found I’d turned into a little old lady, like this...”
“You’re not a little old lady…” he murmured. One of the gondoliers was climbing back aboard his boat and Robert was watching him: the curious, wiry strength of him, the overdeveloped calf muscles.
“I may as well be,” she said. “And who has looked at me during this holiday, eh? Who has looked my way?”
Robert’s heart went out to her, because his Aunty took such a pride in her appearance, and it was a shame if no one paid her any attention. But he had seen men looking, in the Departures lounge at Standsted, in that shop in Pisa.
“Them?” she gasped. “They were perverts. I don’t want perverts looking at me.”
SLIPPING AWAY
It was a strange city, and not for the reasons they expected.
Not because of the weird, overlapping sounds of the canals at night, or the fog that slipped down and swapped all the streets around so that nothing was in the same place as before. And not because of the thought of ancient ballrooms, casinos and bordellos sunk underwater, preserved somewhere beneath their feet, with monstrous fish drifting about through gilded rooms, under chandeliers bearded with lichen and weed.
It was strange because it seemed empty to Robert and Jane. They were here together, but they were both looking for other people. There was a sense of something here for both of them, but neither knew how to find it.
“We may as well be invisible,” Aunty Jane said. “We’re like ghosts in a city that’s sinking...”
Robert didn’t like it much when her thoughts went morbid and lurid like this and she told him all about it. Each night, when he knew she was sleeping, he slipped out of their shared hotel room and went hunting around the Academia bridge. There were men hanging around, sure enough, smoking fags and following him when he attempted to lead them a merry dance.
But they didn’t play the rest of the game like they were meant to. They had some other cryptic purpose, knocking about the woolly-smelling canals in the dark. Robert couldn’t figure it out.
Their holiday was taking a bleak, sour turn and reluctantly Robert had to put it all down to sex. We’re on what could be a romantic trip, he thought: that’s why. All this romance is just like rubbing our faces in it.
WAITING ON
They ate in a trattoria with a courtyard out back. Their waitress kept pinching Robert’s cheek and his ciggies and came over to gabble at them in Italian, as if they understood every word.
“She’s very insinuating,” Aunty Jane said, flicking her menu. She had come up in terrible bumps from insect bites and was itchy, dizzy and cross. “She’s much too familiar. I don’t like her.”
Aunty Jane considered herself to be a very fine waitress and took great interest in how others behaved on the job.
“I think they’re all ex-prostitutes, who run this place.” Robert was studying the plastic lobsters on the walls and the mirrors with disturbing clowns painted on. Everything was garlanded with fairy lights. “They’re all retired and they’ve set up a co-op and now they’re raking it in.”
“Their bread buns aren’t very fresh,” Jane sighed.
The waitress was back. She wasn’t that helpful with explaining the menu. “Oh, lasagna, tagliatelle, spaghetti...is all the same.” Then she was nudging Robert with her bony elbow. She was wrinkled from the sun, but very pale and her dyed black hair had gone thin on top. “She your mama, yes? Your lover, no?”
“Oh no,” said Aunty Jane.
“No, no,” said Robert. “My aunt. Just my aunt. My friend.”
The waitress didn’t understand and passed him a rose. “Che bello,” she told him, and ruffled his hair.
Aunty Jane was looking aghast, but not at him.
“What’s the matter?” At a table in the ramshackle courtyard of the trattoria, Santa Claus was wearing a pink linen suit and sitting hunched over by gutte
ring candlelight. He was polishing off a dressed crab and beaming to himself.
“He’s following us about,” Aunty Jane said, transfixed by that formidable beard.
“Never,” Robert laughed. “It’s a small town, really. Like Whitby. You’re bound to bump into people again and again...it’s like maze with everyone going round…”
She shook her head, looking grim. She fiddled fearfully with her long dark hair. “No. He’s a pervert. He’s a Santa Claus pervert and he’s coming after me.”
Robert had to laugh.
CHRISTMAS STALKING
The old man finished his dinner and paid up just as they were going. He didn’t make it obvious and neither of them noticed him casting sidelong glances their way, but somehow he timed it so he was leaving the noisy, shabby trattoria just as they were.
Their waitress was hugging Robert goodbye and Aunty Jane was hissing, “told you!” as Santa squashed by, grinning.
They took the dark back alleys to their hotel. Aunty Jane had them scooting along, shooting backwards glances all the way, until Robert lost patience with her.
It was true, though. The bearded man in the pink linen suit was ambling after them, all the way to their hotel.
They’d been lucky with their hotel, managing to get a room with an arched window at water level, right on the Grand Canal. They had a pedestal table and wickerwork chairs, where they could sit to watch vaporetti chugging past.
“He must be staying in the same hotel,” Robert told her.
His aunt was getting far too jumpy. She had two high spots of pink on her cheeks.
“It’s the way he went ‘Ho, ho, ho,’” she said, coming out of the en suite, brushing her teeth. “It sent a chill right through me...”
SEASON’S GREETING
The next morning they were sitting at their window and waving at the vaporetti, trying to get the passengers to wave back.
“Well! The cheeky devil!” Aunt Jane burst out suddenly. Robert looked and saw why. It was Santa, up on the top deck of the passing bus. He was waving both arms at her energetically, grinning his head off through his beard.
It was Jane’s idea that the two of them split up for that morning and do some exploring alone. She felt Robert may be tiring of her nerviness and want to get away. lie shrugged, nonplussed.
Jane found herself drifting about not too far from the hotel, since she’d come without her map. It was a cautious exploration, with her clothes sticking to her.
She sat right out on the front of the bay, where the choppy Adriatic came up to the front of the newsagents and bistros. She sat a table and ordered a coffee and then she saw the two waitresses from last night’s trattoria ambling along the prom, carrying between them what looked like a big bag of leftovers, a huge doggy bag, one handle each. It was as if they had been working in that tatty restaurant all night and were only now setting off home on aching feet, looking even more ancient in the lemony-grey morning light.
Jane had a kind of future-shock then. One of her sudden, horrible glimpses of what might be in store for her. She often tortured herself like this. In these queer flash-forwards, she never saw things going well for herself. She saw herself as a real old lady (really, she knew she wasn’t one yet) and she was still grafting away at the Christmas Hotel. And Robert was still with her, twenty years and they were still finishing their backbreakingly festive shifts and struggling home together at the end of them, just like these two gamey old birds — who had noticed her by now, and were waving at her as she sat under her awning, blowing On her coffee.
They were jeering at her really; two wizened old death’s head crones, knowing that her life might as well be over already and it was always going to be the same.
She gulped her coffee and refused to wave back. They moved on, out of sight. And then Santa was pulling up one of the aluminium chairs, scraping it on the cobbles and seating himself heavily at her table.
Jane narrowed her eyes, deciding to treat him, if not with contempt, then at least as an hallucination. Sunspots. Fever. Malaria from her insect bites.
“Ho, ho!” he said.
WINTER BREAKS
“Go away,” she hissed, mustering the nerve to swear at him.
He looked hurt in an exaggerated way, an operatic way. “You treat me like exactly the kind of man who you don’t want to meet. But look at me! I’m perfect! I’m doing everything to catch your eye.” He laid a bunch of bedraggled, wilting anemones on the table. Their petals were like wet rags. “Is it my age?”
“No, no,” she sighed. “I’m just not used to being pursued across a strange city by...”
He chuckled. “Pursued...”I
“It’s very disconcerting.”
“You act as if I appal you. Am I so grotesque?”
She relented for a second. “I don’t even know you.”
He twinkled at her. “Are you sure?”
She pulled a face savagely. “You’re so bloody jolly and good. Every time we’ve seen you on this horrible holiday, you’ve looked so, well, happy...”
“Is it really a horrible holiday you’re having?”
She realised her mistake. “No, not really. It’s fine, actually.”
He leaned forward conspiratorially. “You know, Jane...you’ve got me all wrong.”
“I have?”
“I’m not the man you think I am.”
“You’re not.”
“I do have my darker side.”
“You do?”
He nodded happily. “If I really was the man you think I am, don’t you think I could have solved all the world’s problems? Conquered famine, and hunger and disease? Oh, but I’m too selfish for that.”
Her eyes were swimming in the dappled light from the sea. She tried to snap out of it: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“If I was the man you thought I was I’d be a very powerful, magical old man, very remiss in my duties, leaving the world so mixed up and sad. I’m too selfish to use my powers to put everything right.” He stroked his luxurious side-whiskers and beamed at her. “You were quite right about who I am. But I’m a very limited, selfish, sexy kind of Santa Claus. Nothing to do with your preconceptions. Nothing to do with Christmas.”
She snorted. “I’ve had Christmas coming out of my ears.”
She was staring at him. Could she think of Santa as an erotic object? It seemed perverted, almost.
He whispered, “I promise, you’ll only have Christmas when you want it. Only the bits you like. If you come with me.”
She flushed. “Come with you where?”
“I know you think your life is over. That it holds no more surprises for you. All I can say is, if you carry on in your regulated life, sticking with your nephew and living in a hotel where every day is necessarily the same...of course that will be true. Your life will be smooth and predictable till the end of your days.”
He produced another present for her then. It was wrapped in tissue paper. She took it like an unexploded bomb and unwrapped it in front of him. It was the glittering blue bauble he had bought in the glass shop yesterday.
“You can walk across the surface of your own life forever,” he said softly. “Round and round the same old world. Or...”
She looked up sharply, despite herself, wanting to know now what was the alternative.
“Or you can come inside. Into your own life.”
He really was a cheeky old thing. Now he was getting up to leave. And she found herself disappointed.
“Meet me tonight,” he said. “On the bridge by the hotel. One o’clock. Bring the glass.”
“Why?” she asked, bracing it in her fingers like a crystal ball.
He was gone.
I’ve never been given a magic object before, she thought. No one’s ever promised to take me out of my life.
I wouldn’t have to stay for long. And If I didn’t like it, I could come back.
She got up and started putting her things into her bag; purse, and then the g
lass bauble, which she dropped and smashed on the wet cobbles. She gave a short, anguished cry.
She picked up the pieces, careful not to cut herself. She put them all into the tissue paper, wanting to cry with shame. Th glass was so thing. It was like blue spun sugar. Well, now she’d just have to go and meet him.
To explain. To apologise. For being so clumsy and hopeless. So dangerous and out of control of her life.
FINAL FLING
After a long day spent alone Robert was full of pasta and wine. He was nodding off as he watched black water pushing against the steps up to their windowsill. He was mesmerized by the reflections of lights on the waves.
Aunty Jane’s complaints from across their room had quietened to murmurs. He managed to block out her twittering and drift off.
Then he awoke with a jerk in the dark. The hotel room lights had been dimmed right down and it was much quieter.
He looked over at Aunty Jane and made out the rigid bump of her, lying under a single white sheet. She even slept tidily.
He stood stiffly and woozily, grimacing as the wickerwork creaked beneath him.
Just once more round the block, he thought. Just a little scout around in the dark before dawn. Get some of that muggy air into his lungs on their last night in town. Might get lucky this time.
There wasn’t a peep out of Aunty Jane. He took his key and slipped out into the corridor.
Dreaming of a White Christmas
He was drawn to the steps of the Academia bridge.
For a while, no one came past. Then, one or two late stragglers came and went and left Robert to his business. He smoked and watched the sudsy clouds passing over the moon.
He stared at the bridge.
There was his Aunty Jane. Standing there like a sleepwalker, in full view of anyone who cared to look.
She tricked me, he thought. She slipped out of the hotel before even I did.
There wasn’t much space between her and Santa Claus.
