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Ghost wondered, for the fifth time that morning, where it had all gone wrong.
A storm had blown in the day before, battering the hills and valleys of Herefordshire as if the land had done something to personally offend it. As darkness fell, its rage intensified and he’d spent the night staring at the ceiling, listening to the creaks and groans as the wind buffeted the house, fretting about the condition of the roof, whilst MacTavish, long deafened by his special interest in all things explosive, had slept on obliviously beside him, snoring softly. By the time dawn broke, grey and sullen over the sodden landscape, it had blown itself out, having ripped the remaining leaves from the trees in its fury and coating the garden in a treacherous layer of soggy brown mush that turned the simple walk down the path into a fraught expedition laden with ankle-twisting danger.
But despite the best efforts of the universe to stack the odds against them, they made it to the shops relatively unscathed by mid-morning, crawling their way through the flooded roads, swerving past fallen trees and suicidal cyclists, creeping through the interminable roadworks until finally, they’d turned into the supermarket car park.
By this point, Ghost had been merely mildly irritated, but by the time they’d finished their pitched battle to cross items off the shopping list, forcing their trolley through the crowds of doddering pensioners and whinging toddlers as the relentless crooning of Chris de Burgh assaulted them from the speakers, he was grinding his teeth with constrained rage. By the time they’d crept through the gridlocked streets, and reached the main road out of the town, the drizzling rain had turned into a relentless downpour, pattering the car with syncopated bursts of wet noise, every squealing pass of the wiper blades sawing Ghost frayed nerves closer to breaking point.
“How do you feel about getting a real tree?”
He started. “You what?”
There was an answering rustle from the seat beside him and he twisted just in time to see MacTavish tear open a packet of crisps he’d snuck from a shopping bag. The noxious stench of cheese and onion erupted into the space between them. Disgusted, Ghost stabbed at the controls to open the window, and was immediately slapped in the face by a wet blast of icy wind. Quietly seething, he wound it back up.
“We always had an artificial one,” MacTavish went on, apparently indifferent to Ghost’s constrained fury, spraying flakes of crisps as he spoke, “But I’m thinking it might be nice, you know, do something different?”
He jerked his chin in the direction of the road and Ghost turned to see that the car in front of them had started to move. He shook himself, snarled in irritation and shoved the car into gear. “What are you on about?” he demanded.
“Getting a tree.” MacTavish explained, in a tone of voice that suggested Ghost was both deaf and stupid. They crawled forward another two yards, and stopped again. He gestured with the crisp packet “You know, for Christmas?”
Ghost sighed as the lights changed against them again. For a long moment, he fought a pitched battle against the urge to slam his face repeatedly into the steering wheel just to make it all stop. Christmas. He hated Christmas. He took a long, deep breath, ignoring the crinkling and crunching from the passenger seat, the ever increasing oniony fug filling the car, and counted slowly to ten in his head until the murderous rage subsided enough for him to ask exasperatedly “Haven’t you got a tree already?”
“Eh?”
“In the attic.”
“Whit?” MacTavish’s face distorted into a puzzled frown, then he snorted in amusement “That’s far too wee! I only got that because all the weights were taking up half the living room in the old flat. We can’t have that!”
Ghost ground his teeth “And why not?”
“Because it’s only about this big!” MacTavish held up his hands as if presenting an imaginary fish. “We’ve plenty space now. We need a proper tree!”
Ghost shifted the car back into gear as the traffic began to move again. “Whatever.” he growled, and shrugged, hoping that this would be enough for MacTavish to drop the subject.
Christmas. Fucking Christmas!
If either of his parents had even been sober or present enough to notice it was happening, Christmas had not been a joyful experience for the young Simon Riley, and the long years riding a repeating cycle of hope and disappointment every December had left him resentful of the whole business. If he was feeling generous, he would say that Christmas was something that happened to other people whilst he tucked up with beer and pizza to wait for it all to blow over, but today, as he ground his way through the bad weather and the terrible traffic, short of sleep and temper, the mere mention of it felt like a particularly cruel joke.
Finally, they made it through the lights, and he began to work his way through the countryside, trying his best to remember the way through the labyrinth of diversions that had waylaid them on their journey already. MacTavish, to Ghost’s relief, poked at his crisps in silence, but then, just as they joined the end of a crawling snake of traffic trying to ford a badly waterlogged dip in the road, he piped up again.
“And there’s another thing.” he said, crumpling up the crisp packet and, to Ghost’s disgust, tossing it into the footwell by his feet. He wiped his greasy hands on his jeans. “My Mum was on the phone, asking what we’re doing for Christmas.”
Ghost rolled his eyes, and sighed, wishing that MacTavish would take the hint. “What for?” he demanded.
“Well, Eildh’s man’s wanting to go to his Mum and Dad’s this year, and Kellyanne’s due on the fifth, so she’d can’t be having people round hers. And Davey...”
Ghost listened half-heartedly as MacTavish droned on. There were four sisters, he remembered, and a roster of cousins, aunts, uncles and general hangers-on that accumulated in an expanding and contracting cloud around MacTavish’s mother. The more of them he met, the harder it had become to keep them all straight in his head.
He realised that MacTavish had stopped talking, and was looking at him expectantly. He shook himself and shrugged.
“You can go if you want.”
There was a sharp, indrawn hiss of breath from the passenger seat “What do you mean, ‘I can go if I want?’ What about you?”
Ghost pushed his foot down on the accelerator as the car in front cleared the flood and pressed forward “I went up with you in the summer, didn’t I?” he snapped.
The experience, trapped in a bleak, post-industrial town struggling under the press of austerity, hemmed in by the never ending rain, sleeping in MacTavish’s old room in his mother’s house, suffocating under the pressing judgement of his family, wasn’t an experience he was in a hurry to repeat. The thought of doing it whilst being force-fed turkey, stuffing and Mariah Carey made him want to scream.
“It’s Christmas!” exclaimed MacTavish, aghast “It’s a time for family!”
Ghost ground his teeth. “And I’m not stopping you seeing yours.”
MacTavish glared at him, face puckering in anger as if he’d bitten something sour, then he turned away, muttering darkly “I thought we were family.”
“Well it’s fine for you, innit?” Ghost spat, “Your Dad bringing in good money, Mum at home, all your brothers and sisters! I bet you all had a great time pissing mulled wine and shitting mince pies and all the rest! Some of us were just trying to get through it!”
“Aye. But-”
“Christmas!” he snarled, his constrained rage finally bursting at the seams. “Fucking Christmas!” He glared at MacTavish as he rammed the car violently into a higher gear “It’s just more made up nonsense to get people to spend money they don’t have on stuff no one wants!” He shoved his foot to the floor in fury, flogging the engine as if everything was its fault “It’s just another fucking day and I’m fucking sick of it already. If you want to piss off up to Scotland and wax fat on stuffing balls and gravy then you be my guest!”
It took an hour, but after a long walk and the inevitable passage of time, Ghost had started to feel stupid.
He’d seethed in silence, festering resentment growing with every bend in the road, for the remainder of the journey whilst beside him, MacTavish sulked in silence: arms folded, shoulders drawn up like defensive walls, a tight glowering ball of hostility that grew denser with every passing mile.
When they’d pulled up at the house, the poisonous silence had thickened to a palpable, suffocating cloud. Without waiting for MacTavish, Ghost had yanked open the boot and gathered up all the shopping bags without a word to his husband, before stalking off up the garden path and into the house in a fit of rage, leaving MacTavish standing awkward and empty-handed beside the car.
It wasn’t until he’d slammed the fridge door shut on the last of it that Ghost realised that he hadn’t been followed, and MacTavish had, instead, chosen to make a tactical retreat to the shed rather than come into the house.
This had made Ghost furious. He had felt the pressure of rage inside him, straining to break loose again, yearning for a fight. The lack of sleep, the difficult journey, the stress of shopping and, of all things, Christmas, was just too much to bear and in a fit of petulant fury, he had stalked out of the house.
The walk into the village took him half an hour. With the freezing wind whistling past his ears, sweating with the effort of his furious march, his anger had slowly petered out by the time he reached the cafe. When they’d brought him his coffee fifteen minutes later he was feeling stupid, and by the time he’d finished his bacon roll, guilty.
Of course you like Christmas, Johnny, he thought glumly But why the hell did you think I would?
Because you never told me you didn’t, and I’m not fucking psychic!
Ghost scowled into his coffee, uncomfortable at the thought that MacTavish, imaginary though he was at that moment, was right. MacTavish knew, of course, why the Rileys had been conspicuously absent from the wedding service, but Ghost didn’t exactly want to talk about it, and MacTavish knew well enough to leave alone. He would have had no reason to suspect how Ghost felt about something that most of the population considered to be an entirely normal event.
By the time he’d drained his mug, he had come to the uncomfortable realisation that he was going to have to apologise, and had just worked up the fortitude to settle his bill and head back up the road to the house when a voice intruded.
“Hello, Mr Riley!”
He froze. Deep in his chest he felt a sudden rising of heavy dread. He knew that voice, everyone in the village knew that voice, and with it, the knowledge no matter what faith, orientation or belief system they subscribed to, they were about to be roped into Doing Good, whether they liked it or not.
Steeling himself for the inevitable, he looked up and found himself face to bosom with the vicar.
Without waiting for an invitation, and before he could muster up an objection she yanked out the empty chair that faced him and dropped heavily into the seat.
“Survived the storm, I take it?” she asked brusquely, and began to unwind the long coil of brightly coloured, mismatched knitting that surrounded her neck.
“Well-”
She continued as if he hadn’t started to speak. “And how's that husband of yours? Busy putting the gym bunnies through their paces?”
“Um…”
“Excellent! She shrugged off the huge mass of wool, and beamed at him. “Well! I’m glad to have caught you at a loose end…”
“I, er-”
“There’s quite a few folk still short of power just outside the village, you know, and not quite as many watertight roofs as there were yesterday! I’ve been doing the rounds, but-” she gestured down to where her plump body was swathed in a threadbare wax jacket. Her shoulders jerked in an offhand shrug and she pulled her face into a strange, smiling grimace that Ghost found quite alarming, “Not really built for ladders!”
He noticed, with a rising sense of trepidation, that the cafe appeared to have emptied out whilst he hadn’t been looking, and that the moment the vicar appeared, every other able-bodied person in the place seemed to have had urgent business elsewhere.
“So, I thought, well God helps those who help themselves! Maybe…” she winked at him as if she was letting him in on some dark secret “...I could help myself of some extra muscle, and here you are!”
Ghost tried to lean backwards as she poked at his upper arm, but found himself pinned into the corner between the wall and the cafe’s window. He was trapped, listening to her plummy, cheerful voice going on about the woes and worries of her flock, feeling his brain fighting against the long years of army conditioning to put up with well-meaning, bustling padres, and inexorably, losing the battle.
He looked around helplessly and met the stares of the few remaining customers, feeling the press of their judgement, waiting for their moment to inhale with a pearl-clutching hiss if he dared to say no, and damn both him and MacTavish to pariahhood for the rest of their lives.
He sighed, and surrendered.
“What is it you need me to do?”
As darkness fell, MacTavish really started to worry.
When his husband had stormed into the house and left him standing beside the car, he’d decided that he’d had enough, and stalked off into the shed rather than follow Ghost into the inside. There was no reasoning with him when he got himself into one of his moods, MacTavish knew, and long, bitter experience had taught him to just let him lick his wounds in solitude, get it out of his system, and deal with whatever the problem was, later.
So he’d stayed outside, and let Ghost crash about the kitchen slamming cupboard doors until he’d marched off down the road, leaving MacTavish to rake up the sodden leaves until his hands hurt, all the while getting colder and grumpier.
Three o’clock rolled round, and the garden was finally cleared, but there was no sign of Ghost. Resentfully, MacTavish had gathered the tools alone, and headed back into the shed to tidy up. It was then, stuffed out of sight behind a stack of crumbling flowerpots, that he found the catalogue.
At first, he had thought it was just rubbish, something the previous owner had left behind, but as he picked it up, he realised that the crumpled pages were dog-eared from recent use, and the date on the front was this year. He turned it over in his hands curiously, and a crumpled note in familiar, crabby handwriting had fluttered to the ground. He’d picked it up and stared at it, then back at the catalogue in his other hand, the toys picked out in glowing colours on the front cover. He recognised the logo: they had a shop in the town centre, a great cave of plastic wonders full of excited children and harassed looking adults. This was their Christmas catalogue, he realised. What the hell is it doing here?
Back in the house, warmer and clearer of mind, he stared out of the lounge window, anxiously spinning his phone in his hand, intermittently checking the clock and trying not to think the worst. That Ghost would stalk out of the house in a rage instead of taking it out on the people around him was something MacTavish usually considered to be one of his redeeming qualities, but as the dusk fell and the streetlights of the little hamlet began to flicker into life, he knew something was wrong.
He was just about to cave in and call Gaz for advice, when a fire engine pulled up at the gate. He felt fear grip his chest, and then he felt stupid: they didn’t send in the fire brigade to give bad news. Still he shifted anxiously from foot to foot as the big machine settled with a hiss on its suspension. As he watched nervously the door of the cab swung open and a figure jumped down. Then his jaw genuinely dropped open in shock.
A man, tall and broad shouldered, dressed in a red suit, face half-swathed in white, a jolly red bobble hat atop his head and a sack in his hand, had dropped down onto the verge. As MacTavish stared, slack-jawed and wide eyed, the figure turned his back on the fire engine and started up towards the house. It was then that he recognised the familiar gait. He raced into the hall and wrenched open the front door.
“Simon?”
Ghost stopped in the pool of light spilling from the open door. He glared back at his husband with the harrowed, thousand yard stare of a man who had just paraglided over Hell. MacTavish noticed the suit of his right leg was blackened and torn, flapping loose around his calf, and now that he was closer, that the white swathed over the lower half of his face was a slightly grubby, haphazard overlay of bandage.
“What the hell happened to you?” he demanded.
Ghost blew out a long, frustrated sigh.
“I got stuck in a chimney.”
MacTavish stared at Ghost as he pushed past into the hall, his mouth opening and closing like a drowning fish as replayed that statement back and forth, trying to make it make sense.
“How the hell did you get stuck in a chimney?”
“Got roped into the vicar’s storm relief efforts, didn’t I?” snapped Ghost. He tossed the sack onto the floor and leaning against the wall for support, folded himself down to yank at the knots of his bootlaces “I feel like I’ve gone the length and breadth of the fucking county!”
He pulled a boot off and with a snap of his arm chucked it back towards the pile of trainers at the door.
“First one, got off to a good start: nice old bint up on one of the farms needed some tarp nailed down, gave me this thing to wear, so as not to spoil my clothes.” he gestured at the red coverall he was wearing with the second boot “Then the good Reverend drove down to Mansel Lacey and had me gathering up all the blown over wheelie bins for the old folks.” He yanked the bobble hat from his head. “Some old duffer made me a cup of tea, gave me a free hat and I thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t so bad?’”.
He began to tear at the swathe of bandages that encircled the lower half of his face.
“Should you be doing that?” MacTavish asked.
“It’s nothing.” said Ghost, with an exhausted sigh. He tilted his face this way and that in the hall mirror. He poked at an iodine stained patch on his chin, where three strips of tape had been stuck over a short gash just under his jaw, and winched. “It just needs a big plaster”
“How did that happen?”
Ghost let out a snort. “Well, just as I thought we were done for the day, she asks me if I’ll take a look at her satellite dish.”
"And you said yes?”
“She’s the vicar Johnny!” Ghost snapped “You just can’t tell her to fuck off and miss Strictly! That sort of thing sticks round here.”
“So what happened?”
“One minute I’m standing on the roof, just reaching out for the bloody thing, next minute I’m balls deep in slates! Turns out the sodding chimney brickwork’s rotten. She had to call the fire brigade to get me out.”
He picked up the sack he’d dragged in and began to march up the hall, lugging it behind him.
MacTavish watched him go. Now that the shock of his husband’s reappearance had worn off, he remembered why he’d been waiting, and the disturbing presence of the toy catalogue on the dining room table. The sound of Ghost ranting about his rescue from the kitchen faded to a distant buzz as he walked into the dining room and, a rising sense of dread building in his chest, he picked it up.
Ghost had unzipped the coveralls and by the time MacTavish plucked up the fortitude to speak, he’d kicked them off and then, with a swift punt from his foot, sent them skimming across the lino to land in a crumpled heap by the bin. He pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sunk into it with a groan.
“Next time those bastards are collecting for their widows and orphans I’ll tell them they can-”
“I- I need to ask you something,”
The apprehensive tone made Ghost look up, and then he saw what MacTavish was holding in his hand.
MacTavish watched his husband’s face blanche, and it took every ounce of self control to keep himself from throwing the catalogue at Ghost’s face and storming out.
Instead, in a low, carefully controlled voice, tight with restrained rage, he demanded “What is this?”
Ghost stared back at him for a long moment: eyes wide, his face pale. Then he gathered himself, his expression hardening.
“That’s private!” he snapped. “What’re you doing going through my stuff?”
“I found it jammed behind some flowerpots in the shed.” said MacTavish “What is it?”
Ghost refused to meet his eye.
MacTavish pulled out the handful of paper receipts that had been stuffed between the pages.
“Simon, this is a grand worth of stuff you’ve bought in the last four weeks! What is this about?”
Ghost looked up at him, his face hard and angry, the muscles of his jaw bunched and tense and then something appeared to shift inside him. He closed his eyes and, shoulders slumping, he sighed. In a small voice he said “It’s for the kids.”
MacTavish’s knees were suddenly weak beneath him, as if all the blood had drained out of his body. He felt a tightness in his chest as his heart skipped through a syncopated jazz riff, and around him the world blurred. Trembling, he pulled the chair free from beneath the table and collapsed into it.
It was one thing to think about the possibility, to consider why Ghost was so keen to get rid of him at Christmas, about why he’d stuff a toy catalogue out of sight in the shed; it was another to hear him say it. For a long time, he just sat, silently staring at the catalogue on the table between them, his head in his hands, his breath coming in ragged, shaking gasps. Finally, his jaw clenched tight against the rush of emotion that threatened to overwhelm him he asked “How many are there?”
“I don’t know.” Ghost shrugged. “Fifteen? Sixteen?”
MacTavish jerked upright, and stared at him, appalled. “You’ve got fifteen kids?”
“What?” Ghost’s face twitched like he’d been stung. “They’re not my kids!”
“What do you mean they’re not your kids?” MacTavish demanded “Whose kids are they?”
“I don’t know!” replied Ghost, shifting uncomfortably under MacTavish’s glare “They’re just kids.” He gestured as if he was trying to pull words he couldn’t make from the air in front of him “Kids with nothing! Kids whose Mums are trying to do better for them.” He motioned his hand towards the catalogue on the table between them. “They just give me a list.”
“Who gives you a list?” MacTavish demanded.
“The Women’s Aid people! Them that run those shelters for the birds whose men are knocking them about. Well, they’ve got kids who come with them.
“Wait…” MacTavish held up the catalogue, his entire understanding of the situation shifting and pivoting into a new position. “You’re buying toys for charity?”
Ghost shrugged. “I suppose,” he said.
MacTavish stared at him, stunned. A dozen questions sprung into his mind at once. “How long has this been going on?” he demanded.
Ghost chewed on his thumbnail and thought about this “Couple of years?” he offered. He looked up at the wall above MacTavish’s head, rubbed his chin and winced. “They had a stall up Darlington Shopping Centre: people dropping off toys and clothes and stuff. This old bint caught my eye, gave me a leaflet and we got talking, and… and I thought… I thought how much better things would have been… if you know…”
MacTavish frowned, understanding dawning as Ghost trailed off, realising where it had eaten at him and why. “You’ve been doing this since you were in the Paras?” he asked “For twenty year?”
Ghost shrugged “I’ve not been keeping count.”
“A grand of stuff? Every year?”
“Not at the start, I just did a couple… but then it’s not like I had anything else to spend it on. It just sort of grew arms and legs, and…” He held up his hands in a gesture of resignation as he tailed off.
MacTavish sighed, “Why didn’t you say something?”
“It’s my money!” Ghost snapped, shifting upright in his seat “I don’t complain about you pissing away your wages on fancy trainers!”
MacTavish pursed his lips.“That’s not” he said, icily. “What I meant.” He let the words hang in the air for a long moment whilst Ghost bristled, and then, more softly, went on “I meant: did you not think I’d want to help?”
Ghost looked away, shifting uncomfortably.
“We said: no more secrets.” MacTavish stabbed his finger down on the catalogue “No more chain of command. Just the two of us, making a clean break of it: together.”
Ghost pursed his lips, and let a long, slow breath through his nose “I don’t like talking about it!” he growled.
“We said we’d always have each other’s backs.” MacTavish continued, a desperate pleading bleeding through into his words as he tried to make Ghost understand “That we’d look after each other.”
“I know! Just-”
MacTavish cut him off “If it matters to you, Simon, then it matters to me. I care about you; I’m your husband.”
Ghost looked up at him, his expression tight, the muscles of his jaw bunching with restrained emotion, and MacTavish knew he’d made his point.
He pushed away from the table, walked over to the kettle, and began to pull mugs from the cupboard. As he rooted around for the teabags, he heard Ghost’s chair scrape across the floor behind him. Seconds later, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“You want to go pick a tree tomorrow?” said Ghost.
MacTavish turned, and slid his hand around Ghost’s waist. “Aye.” he said. “I’d like that.”
“Not a real one.” said Ghost, quickly “I don’t want to get something special, and then just chuck it away.” MacTavish felt the soft exhalation of Ghost’s breath through his hair as he sighed, his voice tight. “I want something that’s going to last.”
“A big one?” MacTavish asked slyly, and shifted to pull him closer, until his face was pressed against his chest and he could hear the great bass thump of his husband’s heart.
“Big as you like.” said Ghost, and squeezed him back.
After a long moment, MacTavish leaned back and looked up into his Ghost’s face. “What is it that you’d like?”
Ghost sighed, and rested his chin against the top of MacTavish’s head “I want to stay here. For Christmas, I mean" he replied. “Just the two of us.”
“That sounds perfect.” said MacTavish, and he smiled. “You know, all that stuff: turkey, presents. It doesn’t matter. We’ve got each other. That’s all I need.”
Ghost looked down at him. “You still want a big twinkly tree though?”
MacTavish snorted “Unless you want to put on that old ghillie suit and get wrapped in lights?”
Ghost laughed “I think I’ve had quite enough dressing up for the time being,”
“Oh, I don’t know.” said MacTavish, giving him a devilish look. “I thought you looked quite fetching in that Santa outfit.” He nodded to the crumpled overalls by the bin “But your striptease routine could use a wee bit of work.”
Ghost raised a singular eyebrow “Maybe I’m not finished?”
MacTavish grinned lasciviously and slid his hands beneath Ghost’s t-shirt “Oh, but you’ve got to unwrap your own presents,” he said, and kissed him.