Page 51 of Christmas at the Movies

‘My big brother showed me an old movie called The Exorcist. It was about a girl who gets possessed by a demon. Her head spins around!’ Ollie rolled his eyes and moved his head around comically, making the others giggle. ‘I wasn’t even scared a bit,’ he boasted.

‘I might not stay for the movie,’ said Nick. He hoped his friends wouldn’t think he was a wimp.

‘That’s OK,’ said Grace. ‘I bet you’ll have the best Halloween costume.’

Nick loved making things. The Viking ship he’d made last year was still on display in his teacher’s classroom. When his Year Six class had dressed up for World War Two day, Nick had painstakingly created a gas-mask box for his evacuee costume.

‘What are you going to be?’ asked Ollie.

‘I haven’t decided yet.’ Nick had lots of ideas – he just wasn’t sure which one to go for.

Last year for Halloween, he and Dad had dressed up as Ghostbusters for a special screening at the cinema.

Dad had helped him make a costume, using an old vacuum cleaner as a proton pack.

Even though Ghostbusters was quite scary (there were some parts Nick had to close his eyes for, and cover his ears), it was also very funny.

‘I’m going to be a vampire cheerleader,’ said Abby.

‘I’m being a zombie,’ said Ollie. He stuck his arms out in front of him and moaned like a zombie.

Everyone at the table giggled.

‘Is there something you’d like to share with the class, Ollie?’ asked their teacher, Miss Pearce.

‘No, Miss,’ said Ollie. He bent his head and resumed colouring.

The break-time bell rang. Raindrops pattered against the window of the classroom and puddles had formed on the playing field. Rivulets of water streamed down the slide in the playground.

‘We’re not going out today, children,’ said Miss Pearce.

‘Aww!’ chorused Nick’s classmates in disappointment.

Yes! thought Nick.

‘I wanted to go outside and play football’ grumbled Ollie.

‘Me too,’ said Grace.

Nick liked wet play because everyone had to talk in indoor voices, so it wasn’t as noisy as being out in the playground. Best of all, this year he was a wet-play monitor.

‘See you after break.’ Nick waved goodbye to his friends and hurried down the corridor to the infants’ wing.

Only the most responsible and well-behaved Year Sixes were chosen to be wet-play monitors.

Whenever the weather was too bad to go outside, they helped supervise the younger kids.

Nick was assigned to Miss Varma’s reception class.

The bright and cheerful classroom hadn’t changed much since he was in Reception.

Colourful finger paintings hung from a string that stretched across the classroom.

An alphabet decorated with animals and a behaviour ladder with gold stars hung on the wall.

Plastic trays held reading books and there was a strong, but not unpleasant, smell of glue.

‘Ah, here’s Nick,’ said Miss Varma, smiling at him as he entered the room. ‘You know the rules for wet play – no running and use your indoor voices.’

It had been a rainy autumn so he’d helped out a few times already. The kids were happy to see him again.

‘Nick! Nick!’ called some children, waving him over to the home corner. ‘Come to our café.’

The home corner had a pretend kitchen, with an oven and a sink, and baskets of wooden food. Nick sat down at the little table, feeling like a giant on the tiny chair.

‘Hold my baby,’ said a little girl, thrusting a doll in his arms.

‘What’s for dinner?’ Nick asked.

A boy wearing an apron and a chef’s hat was pretending to fry something in a pan. A girl with her hair in bunches set down a plate with a plastic banana on it in front of Nick.

‘Oh, this looks good.’ Nick pretended to nibble the banana. Then he offered some to the baby doll.

The little girl giggled.

Nearby, there was a sand table. Two boys were enthusiastically digging a tunnel for their toy truck, sending sand flying everywhere.

Nick jumped up to intervene before the classroom was engulfed by a sandstorm. ‘Try to keep the sand inside the table.’ He swept up the sand that had fallen on the floor and went to put it in the bin by Miss Varma’s desk.

As he did, Nick noticed a little boy playing by himself with a wooden train set. He had brown hair and wore headphones over his ears. He’d noticed the kid before – always playing with the trains. Always by himself …

‘Elliot is autistic,’ Miss Varma told him quietly. ‘He’s very bright but is finding school a bit overwhelming.’

‘Is he listening to music?’

‘No, the headphones block out background noise,’ explained Miss Varma. ‘It helps him stay calm.’

Nick remembered how noisy and chaotic he’d found the classroom when he’d first started school. He’d dreaded school dinners in the hall, the smells making him queasy and the clattering cutlery giving him a headache. The playground was even worse, with kids rushing about shouting.

‘Elliot hasn’t made any friends yet,’ confided Miss Varma.

That made Nick feel sad. It was lonely being the odd one out.

He went over to Elliot and crouched down to speak to him.

‘Hi, Elliot,’ he said softly. He wasn’t sure if the boy would be able to hear him with the headphones on.

‘Hello,’ said Elliot, never taking his eyes off the train he was playing with.

‘Is that a locomotive?’ asked Nick.

‘No,’ replied Elliot, not meeting his eye. ‘It is a shunter. It takes the engine off the train.’ He picked up a different train. ‘This is the hopper. It can carry over one hundred tonnes of freight.’

‘Wow,’ said Nick.

Elliot ran the train along the wooden tracks. He pointed to each of the train carriages in turn and told Nick what type it was and exactly what function it had. The little boy was a walking encyclopaedia of train facts.

‘This is a diesel train,’ said Elliot. ‘It only goes two hundred kilometres per hour. The fastest train in the world went 574.8 kilometres per hour on the third of April 2007.’

‘You know a lot about trains,’ said Nick. ‘Have you ever seen the movie The Polar Express?’

The animated movie was based on a children’s book that Nora and Simon had given him for Christmas when he was little.

Elliot shook his head.

‘I bet you’d really like it,’ said Nick. ‘It’s about a boy named Billy who goes on a magical train ride to the North Pole and gets to meet Santa Claus. Santa gives him a bell you can only hear if you believe in Santa.’

Some people in Nick’s class said that Santa Claus wasn’t real and that people who believed in him were babyish.

Ollie said that he’d caught his mum putting presents under the tree last Christmas Eve.

Nick had asked Dad if Santa Claus was real, unsure if he wanted to know the truth.

Dad had thought for a while before replying.

‘Well, Saint Nicholas was a real person. He lived in Turkey during the Roman Empire.’

Nick frowned, not satisfied with Dad’s answer. A lot of things about Santa just didn’t add up. Nick had seen reindeer at the Cotswold Wildlife Park, and he just couldn’t understand how they could carry a sleigh loaded with enough toys for the whole world – even if there were eight of them.

‘But how can Santa Claus possibly travel all over the world in just one night?’ He’d looked up how long it would take for a plane to fly around the globe – forty-four hours, and that was without any stops.

‘You’re right,’ Dad said. ‘Nobody can prove that.’

‘So you don’t believe in Santa?’

‘On the contrary,’ Dad replied. ‘I do believe in Santa. But I think Santa is an idea, rather than a person. Every time you do something kind for someone – and don’t expect anything back – Santa is real. You know that lovely feeling you get inside when you do something nice for someone else?’

Nick nodded.

‘That’s the real Christmas magic,’ Dad said. ‘That’s Santa Claus at work.’

That explanation was good enough for Nick.

Elliot attached a carriage to the back of the locomotive. ‘I don’t like going to the cinema. Movies are too noisy. They make my head hurt.’

‘I used to feel that way too,’ admitted Nick. He still did sometimes. Even though he was a kid himself, he despised the Saturday morning Kids’ Club screenings at the cinema.

The bell rang. Not Santa’s Christmas bell – but the end of playtime bell.

‘You’d better get back to class, Nick,’ said Miss Varma.

As he went back to his classroom, Nick thought how sad it was that Elliot didn’t like going to the cinema.

The little boy could watch The Polar Express on television, but that wasn’t the same as watching a movie on a big screen.

Dad always said that it was only in a cinema that you saw a movie the way that the director wanted it to be seen.

But, most of all, seeing a movie in a cinema was a shared experience. Nick responded to stories intensely. He liked knowing that other people sitting there in the dark were feeling the same things as him. Elliot shouldn’t miss out on that experience, just because of his sensory-processing issues.

A few days later, Nick tried on his Halloween costume in his bedroom.

He had decided to go to the party as Luffy, a character from the One Piece manga series.

He was wearing Mum’s straw hat, a red waistcoat from the back of Dad’s wardrobe and a pair of old jeans he’d cut off at the knee.

He added Holly’s yellow scarf as a sash around his waist. Perfect – he looked just like the captain of the Straw Hat Pirates.

Nick had become obsessed with manga after Pam, the local librarian, had suggested he might like it. Most of his classmates had never heard of One Piece. But Nick was OK with being different.

Luckily, Nick’s family never made him feel like he had to change or follow the herd.

Holly teased him sometimes, but Nick knew his big sister loved him and always had his back.

When he’d been in Reception, and was struggling to make friends like Elliot, Holly had made sure nobody picked on him in the playground.

‘If you mess with my little brother, I’ll mess with you,’ she’d warned the other kids fiercely.