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Yeah, Christmas was supposed to be the happiest time of year and all, but personally, Julian couldn’t stand it. Sure, being a ghost didn’t help matters – it pretty much took out all the good bits – you know, the office parties, the Christmas Day drinks, the helpful excuse of mistletoe for sneaking a kiss on the sly etc. etc. – but even when he’d been living, it was hardly all that great. It just wasn’t his cup of tea, not his particular cocktail, and look, even as a kid he’d found it pretty shit.
Where was the fun in it, after all? First, you got roped into doing some stupid nativity play which had only been good that one year Julian got to play the innkeeper and was allowed to sneer and shout at the little idiot playing Joseph, who, as it happened, had been sat next to Julian for the last term, purposefully elbowing him as he wrote, sticking pencil shavings in his hair and copying his test answers – the same idiot who found himself with no marks on several of his final tests, after Julian had snuck back into the classroom during dinner to erase the work the he’d copied. Walter Cambridge-Hogg was his name – ended up a big party donor, owner of some luxury housing firm who got in trouble over building on protected woodland. But back to Christmas.
It sucked eggs, didn’t it. His parents would drag him off to the country house, where his mother’s sister was just round the corner and an old flame of his father’s teenaged years lived just down the road. On Christmas morning, they’d all go to church as if any of them believed and then, after being bored to death by the man in the dog collar, he’d have to endure the house being invaded by family for the rest of the day – family who got him confused with his cousin James– or worse, with his cousin Lillian – and then to be forced to choke down sprouts and parsnips and Christmas pudding and regaled with the same stories he’d heard the year before and the one before that too. And sure, he always got the latest toys and gifts more than worthy enough to show off to the other boys at school. Sure, his mother always let him have a glass of red wine and his father boasted about his accomplishments and the family gave him plenty of money. Yeah, absolutely, but it was still dreary and bloody bleak, and besides, birthdays were better.
God, it should have been better as an adult with at least all the alcohol and a nice little break as consolation, but no, as a politician it was somehow worse. There were all these events to attend, charity functions to contend with, bloody carol concerts and a focus on helping the poor and the needy. And being a local MP for anywhere on the lead up to Christmas was truly awful. Rotary club evenings, turning on the Christmas lights while listening to the complaints from local reps, being asked if he’d give up his Christmas morning to serve dinner to the homeless. Or that year where he got asked to deal with the overflowing local dog shelter and had to fight off the Dogs Trust and their supporters – or that ice-cream based uproar at the local hospital, involving smashed bowls, screaming arguments and no willingness to compromise on either side.
And the whole spirit of Christmas – yeah, sure, he’d said family, family, family, but that didn’t mean he wanted them at his table. And then the idea of giving without getting anything back, all that gift buying and the decorations and the tree that shed its pines and the pines that got stuck to your socks or jabbed into your feet when you stumbled in late and just wanted to crash into bed or on the sofa and the stupid Secret Santa and the ban on ‘inappropriate presents’ and it just went on – and on and on – until at last, New Year’s, which at least you could celebrate in style.
Christmas just wasn’t his thing, that was all. He would call it a vanilla sort of celebration, except that was hardly accurate. No, that suggested a sort of subtlety, something generally tolerable but fairly bland. Nah, Christmas was like a whole fucking ice-cream sundae, sauce, wafers, flakes, sprinkles, cherries – the lot; the sort of thing kids always wanted but never bloody finished when you got them one; the kind of thing Margot didn’t really want Rachel having but Julian, when left to his own devices, had let her have anyway, only to be left with a puddle of melting ice-cream, and Rachel munching her way through his cheeseboard, and Margot having a dig later that he hadn’t listened to her, despite the fact Rachel hadn’t eaten more than a few mouthfuls, and then him storming out to the jag and disappearing for three days, ignoring Margot’s calls and phoning in sick to some important meeting on budgeting. Yeah. That was Christmas.
Sure, it had improved a little since being dead and Mike and Alison coming along, but it was hardly that brilliant thing everyone made it out to be. It still sucked and it was supposed to suck, and it made him think too much, reflect and question with no way of escaping. Call him Scrooge or whatever, it wasn’t like he could be haunted, was it. Ha. Dickens didn’t think of that one now, did he. Perhaps Robin was right. Maybe it was a fad, a fancy, a stupid thing that he might remain around long enough to see fade out into nothing. Maybe. But then again, people these days had a terrible penchant for the tacky and the sickly-sweet sundae dream that they’d been hankering over since they were three. Maybe Robin had been right again when he argued that evolution went both ways – some things improved, some definitely things got worse.
One thing that truly was a sign of this worsening, was the fact that Christmas seemed to start earlier with every passing year. It wasn’t just a December affair anymore – nah, for some, it started at the half-way mark, in bloody June. Kitty had been drawn into that, bleating out Wizzard and putting in her Christmas list at least six months too early. Mike and Alison weren’t so bad as that, but, since the incident with the B&B, they’d seemed to really focus in on it – the promise of events, Christmas fairs, work dos and Christmas weddings. Julian couldn’t fault them on that – take money where you can get it, play into the fact you could crank the prices up by two hundred percent simply because you had tinsel round the banister and crackers on the table – but it did mean that he’d been hearing about Christmas décor since September and the Christmas tree had been up since November the first.
Now, the actual festive month had arrived and Mike and Alison were hosting a crafts fair with so-called local creatives, and while that meant a stream of guests of varying degrees of interest, it also meant a continuous blasting of Christmas music. Mostly, Julian had been able to drown it out, playing chess with Robin upstairs where the board had been relegated to, watching the repeats of Dad’s Army that Alison had left on, or following round the guests that showed some level of promise but inevitably came to nothing. There was one song, however, that sounded like a re-recording of an old one, that kept catching his attention, drawing him back to the present moment.
At first, he didn’t think he’d really taken note of the lyrics. There were just there, in the background. Yet, by the third time the song came on, Julian found that somehow, the words had really stuck. It was a bit cheesy, you know, a bit, gives you the shudders kind of thing, all about not being able to fight a feeling, about a friendship turning to love, and not having the strength to let it show. There was something about a candle in the wind and crashing through a door – all the drama of a terrible Christmas movie. Not really Julian’s kind of thing, and yet, every time the bloody song came on, he felt weirdly attentive to it – attentive to the point that it distracted him from the curly blonde with excellent legs and the man on her arm who must have spent half his life in the gym. It stopped him from concentrating on the conversation he was trying to listen into about tricks to play with company expenses and he was able to pay even less attention to whatever Fanny and The Captain were wittering and whinging about besides him. In the end, he resolved to just sit down and listen to the stupid thing, see if he could figure out what it was about it.
He didn’t have to wait very long, because either the song was on Mike’s playlist twice, the shuffle was messed up, or the universe was just mocking him. Probably the latter. It was a slow sort of song, not the kind of thing you’d want to dance to, not the kind of thing carol singers would want to be bringing to people’s doors. It wasn’t sad or anything like that – nah, more sort of, hopeful, but whoever had set down the lyrics ought to have just bloody well got on with it. All that warbling about feelings flowing and candles burning, when it could have already been locking lips and fucking or if not that, then a brief dash out the door to try your luck elsewhere. Still, catching a whiff of attraction from an actual friend was never a bright idea in general; always went wrong and then you’d look around to find you’d burned not just one bridge but many, a whole flipping army of bridges. Maybe the singer was right to be a bit hesitant then. God, why was Julian analysing a Christmas song?
He glanced up as the song reached its second verse, half-suspecting to come face-to-face with someone who would definitely be able to tell that he’d been getting weird about song lyrics, but there was only milling guests and Robin. Ah. Robin. Oh yeah. That. A thing, brewing, itching, pushed away, ignored, probably one-sided, embarrassing, mushy, nope, never going to be said out loud – and here, the song, here it was. Julian would have groaned aloud but that would have attracted attention, and he couldn’t be bothered to think up an excuse to explain right now.
So – Robin. And nothing. And sitting here, across the room, like some pathetic character in a pathetic Christmas movie, not gazing, no, not him, but close enough, and just, not doing anything about it. Well, that wasn’t anything new, was it? Sure, most of the time, Julian had grabbed whatever opportunity came his way. And why not? Life was short; most people dipped in and out of it, disappeared without a trace or left a vague stain that would fade if you scrubbed it hard enough. No point hanging around. But when he actually found himself liking someone? That was a different matter.
See, if he’d known Robin in life – well, by this point, he would have run. No point ruining something half-way decent by turning it into something that would fall apart. He’d kept that rule pretty well, except, you know, with Margot, and look how that had panned out. They’d been moving in the same circles for years, finding each other at parties or galas or fancy dinners where they swapped stories, talked about the other guests, chatted about wine or cars or films or music or whatever. There had been a pull, sure, and then it had grown and at that point, Julian should have got in the Jag and driven away, but, well, you know how things go. Next, it was marriage and babies and arguments, etc. etc.
Death, however, wasn’t short. It was long and bloody indefinite. There was no way out either, no way of driving away, moving countries or lying low for a bit until someone else caused a big enough scandal. If he fucked up, well, it wasn’t like he was going to get sucked off for his own convenience. He could make it a casual thing, perhaps – he reckoned Robin would be up for that – how or why they hadn’t already done it was actually a bit of a mystery and yet. Yet. Candle in the window. Cold December night. Chest pain. Death. Severance from everyone and everything he’d known or enjoyed. No booze. No fun. No leaving. And yet chess. Pranks. Conversations. Caves. Friendship. Stronger, blah, blah, blah. And so yet.
The song had finished now and had rolled into something about Santa and guns and murder, one that Mike and Alison had debated over, but ultimately decided it was fine to play at a craft fair. Well, sure, why not. Anything was better than something that made Julian feel weird and slushy. He needed to shake himself out of it, pull himself together, get back to working out the password to the adult channel or finding a way to hack into Mike’s phone now he had that fingerprint unlocking system.
‘Oh, you!’
There was Robin, suddenly in front of him, all excited. He pointed over to one of the stalls. ‘Got little planets over there. On strings. Come and look – have something else you like too,’ Robin grinned, all salacious, and honestly, Julian was done for. Ships, shores, oars, whatever.
But he was going to be good. He was going to leave things as they were instead of taking them and smashing them up or driving them straight into a wall like he usually did. With a theatrical reluctance, he stood up. ‘Come on then, ape,’ he said, with a roll of his eyes, ‘let’s have a look.’
And so he followed Robin across the room to see a Christmas craft stall, ignoring the song that still echoed in his head and absolutely not thinking about the other stuff.