Read by Lucy Mabbitt
“Who’ll be Mother?” Jess wonders as we flip through her extensive wardrobe.
It’s more of a relief than anything that none of us are seeing our folks again this year – nobody’s exactly family-orientated, and enduring the usual round of resentments, tensions, arguments and passive-aggressive regiftings doesn’t appeal. So Jess, TJ and me are having Friends are Family Christmas in our flat, where nobody can critically examine our lives, question our choices or, crucially, tell us we’re drinking too much.
“Is that a wig?” asks TJ. He extracts a blonde mop, frisking it about on his spread fingers like a permed Muppet.
“Hey,” cries Jess, “my Halloween costume!”
“Sexy Killer Clown wasn’t it?” I remember.
A red-and-white striped jumper dress calls to me from the rack. It’s disturbingly like one my mum used to wear. “Seasonal but not too Christmassy,” she’d said when she found it on the sale rail at Debenhams. “And ooh, pockets!”
“I’ll be Mother,” I announce, snatching it. “And I’ll need that wig too.”
“I’ll be Dad,” says TJ, “Pass me that tweed waistcoat?”
Jess obliges.
“And the Che Guevara top?”
“What kind of dad is this?” I ask. “I thought we were going traditional? You know, John-Lewis-ad cosy-Christmas vibes. Box of Milk Tray, game of Scrabble, the whole deal?”
“Squabbling kids, burnt turkey, tipsy Tory grandad,” Jess always brings the realism. She nods at me. “Uptight perfectionist matriarch.”
“Exactly!” I bow. “Jess gets it.”
“This is my Dad,” says TJ gloomily. “He had a moral crisis after the divorce and now he’s a committed Communist.”
TJ doesn’t talk to his dad much, but they argue on Facebook occasionally. Usually about politics.
“Isn’t he a Lib Dem Councillor in Basingstoke?” I ask.
TJ shakes his head. “He resigned. They’re the lickspittle poodles of a crypto-Fascist twatocracy, apparently.”
“Imagine that on a t-shirt.” Jess muses.
“My mum reckons it’s this new woman he’s met on Tinder.” TJ explains. “He’s bought a bike too.”
“Communist cyclist with a mid-life crisis!” I say. “Sounds perfect. Jess, can you work with that?”
Jess, it’s clear from the layers of assorted clothes in her arms, will be playing all other roles: Tory Grandad, Divorced Auntie, Sulky Teen, Hyperactive Child, Over-Friendly Neighbour, Hungry Dog etc. “I can work with anything,” she shrugs. What a pro.
“So Mum …” says TJ interestedly. “Are we talking Nigella or Cruella here?”
“Well, she’s based on my mum,” I say, “so a bit of both.”
*
Part One of Stay-At-Home Christmas is the tree decoration. A prior survey of family customs has established that the tree is:
- a) pre-lit silver tinsel
- b) real with roots and
- c) recycled ocean plastic.
The correct time to put up the tree is:
- a) early November
- b) “when they’re knocked down to half-price” and
- c) the first Sunday of Advent, whenever that is.
As a compromise, ours has been lurking in the corner of the living-room for the past fortnight like a timid green ghost, waiting for its tinsel-and-baubles Cinderella moment. Jess, as her ten-year-old twin stepbrothers (playing both parts), insists on decorating, while TJ, inhabiting his role, makes tight-lipped observations about consumer capitalist orgies.
“What happened to Buy Nothing Christmas this year?” he complains as I hand him a mug of freshly-whisked hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows. (This is the Nigella side of my mum, and honestly the one I sometimes actually miss).
“It’s OK, we found it all in the loft!” Jess bounces towards us in a Christmasaurus Rex t-shirt, festooned in tinsel. “Can I have a marshmallow pleasepleaseplease?”
“They’re on the counter. One each, no fighting.” I say in my mum’s stern voice. As Jess races herself to the kitchen I clink mugs with TJ.
“Come on – wait, what’s your Dad’s name?”
“Leon.”
“Oh like Trotsky! Nice. Come on Leon, let’s not bring politics into Christmas eh? For the children’s sake.” I hook my arm through his tightly.
“It’s for the children’s sake that I have to,” says ‘Leon’, with the kind of earnestness usually only found in TV appeals for abused donkeys.
“But TJ’s fine! He’s got a great job, lovely …” I look around, “well, decent place to live, hilarious, intelligent, highly attractive flatmates – what are you worried about?”
“What about his kids – wait, what’s your Mum’s name?”
All the years we’ve been living together they’ve never met her, and that’s no accident.
“Sophie.”
“What about his kids, Soph?”
“Soph-ie,” I repeat, icicle-sharp. TJ looks scared. I really am channeling my mum.
“Yeah, what about our grandkids? Look at the economy, the environment, the pan–“
“Don’t say it!” I hiss. “Only cheerful chat at Christmas!” One of my mum’s festive catchphrases, usually directed at me, worn thin as a Quality Street wrapper by the time I last saw her.
“To engage with the endemic problems of the twenty-first century,” Leon says pompously, “it’s necessary to be a pessimist.”
“Yes love,” I say. Marshmallow-based bickering drifts from the kitchen, and it smells like the parsnips are done. I peck him on the cheek. “But you don’t have to be so miserable about it.”
*
A Spotify playlist of Festive Jazz Standards (Sophie’s choice) croons as I carry the crisp golden bird to its resting place on the living-room table, extended for the occasion. I look up and nearly drop the bloody thing.
“Good God.”
Jess and TJ have continued decorating while I cooked. The fairy-light situation is out of control. Twinkling, glimmering, gently pulsing, gem-coloured and star-bright. Weak winter daylight stands no chance against this lot, so I draw the curtains and all of a sudden we’re in it, the John Lewis advert.
We’re on Quality Street, tiny snow-dusted figures in the glittery advent calendar; we’re the picture on a Christmas card strung over a fireplace with a real fucking fire giving off that cosy orange-gold glow that feels as distant as childhood, as unreal as Santa Claus. The tree bursts with baubles. The crackers gleam. The tinsel sparkles like silent fireworks. O Holy Night on a sultry sax oozes from my phone, and the others grin at me anxiously.
“Too much?” asks TJ.
“It’s Christmas. Too much is just enough.” This is a very my-Mum sentiment. Their little faces beam. “Champagne time!” I cry. This is also very Sophie.
In the kitchen, I take a moment. I never thought I’d get sentimental about family Christmases but these guys are killing me. I grab the bottle and steel myself. The sooner we get drunk and argumentative, are disappointed by our gifts and start snarking over Trivial Pursuit, the better. That’s the true meaning of Christmas, after all. Especially a family one.
When I re-enter, Jess has transformed. Fed up of being her stepbrothers, probably after she lost to herself repeatedly on Playstation, she’s changed into a low-cut sparkly jumper and flashing holly-leaf earrings.
“Nice Divorced Auntie costume,” I tell her.
Jess and TJ swap glances and snigger.
“I’m you, you idiot! These are your clothes!” says Jess.
I squint through the turkey steam. “Are they?”
God, maybe Mum was right about my dress sense all along.
*
First Nigella, then Cruella. That’s always how it went. Mum would rustle up an amazing feast, graciously accept praise and then start to pick away at everything – especially me – over the course of the meal. She’d tell me I was looking too skinny (or I’d put on weight). That I was working too hard (or ask when I was going to get a proper job). Did I have to wear those clothes (or why couldn’t I make a bit of an effort?) If I happened to be single … well, no surprises there, and if, God forbid, I’d brought a boyfriend, she’d either bitch about him to me (in the kitchen while washing up) or bitch about me to him, to my face, usually around the Christmas pudding/third glass of champagne stage.
Jess plays me well, though. She passes the cranberry sauce calmly, while deflecting my mum’s barbed sallies. She stands her ground and keeps the conversation civil without getting shitfaced or storming out, both techniques I’ve employed in the past.
“How are you doing this?” whispers TJ, amazed.
“I’ve got two little stepbrothers,” murmurs Jess. “I always have to be the grown-up in the room.”
Sounds like a challenge. Better up my game. Fourth glass, time for the guilt-trip. Time to tot up the emotional invoice for my birth and upbringing and present myself with the bill. I know Sophie’s whole speech by heart: investment, assessment, disappointment, resentment, the four horsemen of Christmas galloping through the snow to trample me. If I say so myself, I’m giving a hell of a performance. Shame Mum can’t see it, really.
“… and you never visit! Getting you to come over for Christmas is like getting blood out of a stone! Just a nice family Christmas for God’s sake! You don’t even call, I mean sometimes, just sometimes it’s nice to hear your voice. After everything we did for you … raised you and supported you and, and loved you …”
For a second my heart lurches and I feel it: her bitterness, her loneliness, her sitting-by-the-phoneness. Her self-righteousness. Her need to cling, to nag, to hold on somehow, to be important in my life, to make some sort of mark on me even if it’s a wound.
Fuck.
This is some sort of insane trip, this is better than therapy, and the champagne’s pretty good too, even as I down it and spit out the coup de grace –
“… you’re just an ungrateful little bitch!”
The silence is stollen-thick. But I’ve got it out, and now it’s Jess’s turn. Say what I was too choked to when I walked out, the last Christmas I saw my Mum. When I got in my car nearly sober and drove away over the white-slushed roads, into the night.
Jess’ll know what to say to shut me up. To tell her off. To make her understand she can’t just push people away and away because when you want them back again, they’re too far gone.
“Mum,” she says. Her face is unreadable.
I say nothing.
“Mum,” she says again and gets up and walks round the table towards me. I shrink away instinctively. Leon’s just frozen, watching, turkey on fork, red paper hat wilting. He never does anything of course, it’s always me who has to discipline that girl, keep her on her toes, tell her what’s what.
“What?” I snap.
Jingle Bells on jazz piano plays as she bends over and puts her arms around me in a hug. I feel like the last iceberg in the Arctic; melting, calving, crashing into the freezing sea.
I’ve never seen my mum cry, and it occurs to me that maybe I never will.
*
Later, after we’ve eaten the chocolates and drunk all the wine, and the others are battle-fatigued on the sofa watching the festive film, I go out on the balcony. The smoky stars pulse like hearts as I call the number I deleted from my phone years ago.
Ring-ring.
You never forget your childhood phone number, do you?
Ring-ring.
What am I going to say when she answers?
Ring-ring.
If she answers.
Ring-ring.
I’m fine without her. In fact, I’m better off by a long shot.
Ring-ring.
But that’s not the point, is it?
Ring-r-
“Hello?” Her tone says she thinks I’m selling something. She’s probably had six calls from donkey charities already today.
I smile at the stars. They shimmer back at me. “Hi Mum.”
There’s a silence, and then a sort of cough, like a sprout’s gone down the wrong way. And then she says, in a whisper.
“Emma? Is that you?” Amazement, disbelief. Then, fearful: “What’s happened?”
Because it must be death, disaster, disease, despair. Only bad news could bring me back, on Christmas Day of all days.
“Nothing,” I shrug. “Just … sometimes it’s nice to hear your voice.”
(c) E. P. Henderson, 2021
Lucy Mabbitt is an actress from Derbyshire in the East Midlands: she graduated from Guildhall school of Drama in 2020 and has recently moved back to London. She recently appeared in ‘GAMBIT’ for Exeter Fringe and is thrilled to be reading for Liars’ League for the first time.
E. P. Henderson started writing stories years ago, stopped for ages, and has just started again. Stories have appeared in MTM and Error 404, been published by Arachne Press, and been read live by Liars' League in London, Hong Kong and New York. She’s a Londoner by adoption rather than birth, and is (still) working on a novel.
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