what comes after Christmas 2

Carl grew so weary sitting beside her bed his shoulders were mudflats.

It seemed so long ago. He couldn’t remember how it came to this. The world seemed neither good nor bad. It was predictable in its unpredictabless. Of course they got Dr Fleming’s house and its contents, fixture and fittings, sauna and newly installed gymnasium in the same way they’d got his camper van. The gas and electricity were paid a year in advance. A well-stocked bar and the fridges in the basement held enough to feed a marauding army of well-wishers. A generator, candles and torches lay untouched in the cupboards in case of blackouts. All that wealth and unearned privilege sucked the oxygen out of every room.

The girls were doing so well at school they needed private tutors. For Carl that was a contradiction. He’d grown smaller in their judgement especially since he’d lost his job and was unable to get another.   

A family joke about buttered softness and family favourites. Naama’s fists and arms remain dimpled as her healthy pink cheeks.

She was a child not yet old enough to be confused by the truth. ‘Am I dying?’

He crammed his finger in his mouth and clenched them into a fist. He had to leave the room so she couldn’t hear him howl. His love had to be silent as a blackout. All shallow clouds. Curtains pulled tight. No chink of light. That’s how he knew her utterly and openly with so much love the bedroom and everything in it was squeezed out.

He kept his voice upbeat and level. His daughter’s eyes were as clear as a Loch Lomond shore and blue appeared as if she’d been staring at him the whole time.

‘You are the prettiest stars passing through the vast nothingness of a cold universe and I picked you. You are simultaneously here. Now with me, with us but you will always exist. Long after I die. Lighting up someone else’s dark sky.’

Pain passed through her body and left a moon’s glow on her face.

Choma’s eyes glittered and her plum cheeks were a bit more flushed than usual when he suggested they leave it all behind. Move back into the council house they’d came from. ‘It’s already gone.’

Whether she meant the council house or that life, he wasn’t sure. She hadn’t been standing still. She leveraged the house and van to rent out other houses and vans. Self-sufficiency she called it. Suggested he moved into one of the smaller vans.

 They’d argued about it. More than that. But it had been over two years. He thought he knew his wife better than any man.  

Carl sensed Dr Fleming’s presence. Cigarette or was it cigar smoke? Thought he’d seen him once or twice the back gate slamming behind him as he sneaked out. It was just stupid. Then there was the photograph in the bookcase. Dr Fleming in shooting clothes grinning, holding a child by the ankles like some plucked game. He’d never been able to explain what happened to the picture or to himself. He was still listed and his private practice had made him immensely wealthy. Carl dithered about contacting him directly.  

  But he’d called Choma out about her greed. Her smooth cheeks grew more cherubic. Dressed it up in stuff he’d read from ten philosophy primers, but then he thought he was being smart. ‘My problem isn’t my nothingness. My problem is how you now think you are something. And you want me to disappear as if we hadn’t existed. It seems now it was always about you, and you only. I’ll ask you one question, where did our children come from?

‘You’re just being ridiculous.’

‘Answer my ridiculousness.’

‘I’ll answer you when you’ve got something sensible to say.’

‘Exactly, the more I change the more you stay the same. You worshipped the god of money and power. You coveted it with your heart and soul. And now you have these trappings which contain you like a pretty picture on someone else’s wall. Remember this, we all fall. You think because you have money and power you’re protected but our wee lassie is ill.’

‘Keep talking. That’s all your good for. Talk, talk, talk, that’s never changed anything either. I’ll get the best doctors money can buy.’  

‘You may be right in your high-and-mightyness. But I like to think of what we are is how we speak of others. That’s the basis of most philosophies and religions. I can’t say I know all about each and every one of them. But there’s that story of the philosopher’s stone. It lies in a stream of crystal clear water running over it with millions of other stones that look much the same. To know ourself, we must love ourself.’

‘See,’ she cried and slapped him hard. ‘Useless.’

‘There are over 7000 languages. And in each and every one I’d declare I love you, but I love our daughter more.’ 

‘Get o’er yourself.’

‘I wish I could, but I cannot. With unendurable sadness, our wrongs—not our rights—gallop ahead and escort us to the judgement table. We make up sad stories, easy to see through, about how it must have been something we must have done or something we should have done. Worse if it’s fated. But despite ourself, we look for a word of comfort, an act of kindness. That’s what compassion is acting like people matter more than ideas. More than words like “I love you” with nothing to back them up.’ 

With a hand over her mouth she shrunk from the room to cry alone. ‘So it’s my fault?’

‘Unendurable sorrow.’ His words offered no comfort. ‘That was were us man got the idea of limbo. A place where all wrong will be righted.’

 Naama had the beginnings of her angel wings. He saw them poke out of her shoulders blades and the halo on her head. He’d always thought that was some kind of scam. Artists with bits of gold leaf left over dotted it around someone’s head. That way they got top buck for little work. The medieval equivalent of taking twenty or thirty pounds off in a selfie holiday snap and giving yourself longer legs. Her future had become an unopened present.

He wrapped her in the quilt and lifted her from her bed. He took the back stairs, cooing  to her as he went. She snuggled up against his neck. Each jolt of the step went through his body twice. Once for himself hurrying and once for her.  

‘Daddy, you’re so funny,’ she yawned.