Page 41

FORTY

It’s the second Christmas since Paddy died.

Ash can barely remember the first Christmas.

The house had been full, people rolling in and rolling out, there had been three Christmas lunches, she recalls, all cooked by different people.

Visitors whispered behind doors and then looked at her with soulful compassion whenever she walked into a room.

Her mother had been gray, glassy-eyed, lost-looking, Arlo had been overcompensating, going to the very edge of gallows humor and tipping over it here and there, filling the house with his rent-a-crowd mates, who all looked the same to Ash with their floppy hair and monochromatic sportswear.

There’d been a swim, she recalls. Dry robes.

Crocs. Chubby, mottled thighs of middle-aged people.

Was that Christmas morning? Boxing Day, maybe?

It might even have been the New Year. The whole week is a blur.

The whole week was, Ash recalls, nothing but a Paddy-free void of darkness and confusion and too much wine and too many people and not enough space to breathe.

This Christmas will be different. Arlo came home this morning, and tomorrow, Christmas Eve, they will go into the village and have a pizza, just the three of them.

Then on Christmas Day, Ash’s grandmother Rosalie will drive down from London with Paddy’s kid brother, Sean, who still lives at home for various reasons, and their borzoi called Boris, and they will cook beef (Paddy was the only person in the family who could make a turkey taste like it died for a reason) and drink champagne and watch telly and it will be pleasant enough.

Nothing special. But it will be intimate and easy, and it will be, Ash is sure, ten times better than last Christmas.

It’s just gone four o’clock and the edges of the night are drawing close when Ash hears the sound of tires on gravel, coming to a slow stop outside their house.

She thinks it might be one of Arlo’s mates, come by to say hi.

Then she thinks maybe Arlo has ordered himself a Deliveroo or a Just Eat.

And then, a second later, she hears the front door bang shut and, to her horror, the sound of Nick Radcliffe’s voice in the hallway.

She closes the lid of her laptop and slides off her bed.

From the top of the landing, she sees Nick and her mother embracing.

Then Nick says, “Oh my God, it is so good to see you, Nina. It’s been too long. ”

“Yes,” Nina agrees. “It really has. But what are you doing here! I wasn’t expecting to see you until the New Year.”

“I know, but I couldn’t wait that long, so I bunked off work early, and I know it’s short notice, but I wondered if I could take you out for a coffee, or even a drink or two, so I can give you your present and just see you properly.

Just for a little while. Is that…” Ash sees Nick’s face lose its certainty, elements of self-doubt softening the angles of his bone structure.

He pulls himself back from Nina and smiles wryly.

“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking, just turning up here like this without notice.

Rude of me. Forgive me. I should have called. I should have—”

“No,” Nina interjects, her hand resting softly against Nick’s chest. “No, it’s fine. It’s wonderful. I’m genuinely so happy to see you. And, listen, Arlo is here—I’d love you to meet him. Why don’t you come in? I’ll open a bottle. What do you think?”

Nick’s face lights up and there it is, that fucking smile. Ash hates that fucking smile. It’s fake as fuck, but how is any woman of a certain age meant to resist it?

“Are you sure? I don’t want to intrude on your—”

“I’m sure, Nick. Of course I am. Come in. Come through.”

Ash quickly dashes back to her bedroom and checks her reflection in the mirror.

She’s not sure why. Her hair is dirty—it needed a wash this morning, but because she didn’t go into work today, she decided to push it to tomorrow and have clean hair for Christmas Eve.

She spritzes it with dry shampoo and ruffles it with her fingers.

She peers at her eyes, sees yesterday’s mascara still clinging to her lashes in a couple of places, pulls it off with a cotton pad and reapplies it.

Then she sniffs her armpits, decides she smells fine, changes her socks with a hole in one toe for a pair of clean ones, and then appears in the kitchen a moment later, looking nonchalant and casually surprised to see Nick.

“Oh,” she says. “Hi. Are you—?” She throws her mother a look, and then returns her gaze to Nick. “Are you here for dinner? Or…?”

“Well,” says Nick, “no. Or at least, not officially. But your mother very kindly invited me in for a drink.”

“You’re not at work today, then?”

“No, not tonight. Not for the whole of Christmas, actually.”

“I’m amazed,” says Ash, pulling out a kitchen chair and seating herself, “that they can spare you at this time of the year.”

“If anything,” Nick says, “they’re overstaffed. Everyone wants to work Christmas. Great tips, great atmos. People fighting for shifts.”

Ash doesn’t respond, just raises an eyebrow and looks at her mother, who is opening a bag of tortilla chips.

Arlo drifts into the room then, eyes glued to his phone, feet in thick, holey socks, loose sweatpants hanging low on his waist, his free hand tucked into the waistband of his underpants.

“Oh,” he says, stopping as he notices Nick sitting at the kitchen counter. “Er, hi.” He takes his hand out of his underpants and glances at his mother. “Are you…?”

“Nick,” says Nick, getting to his feet and clasping Arlo’s hand inside his, a kind of weirdly masculine bro move that doesn’t fit with Nick’s usual country gent demeanor. “You must be Arlo. I’ve heard so much about you. It’s great to meet you.”

“Yeah,” says Arlo, “likewise,” and Ash knows Arlo well enough to pick up on the uneven note of surprise in his voice. “Sorry, I didn’t realize…”

“No. My fault. I only came over to drop off your mother’s Christmas present, and she very sweetly invited me to stay.

And, oh, I have gifts for you two as well.

Here.” He goes to his large carryall and unzips the top.

He pulls out three similarly sized oblong parcels, all beautifully gift-wrapped in expensive-looking paper and finished with pink satin ribbons.

“For under the tree,” he says, resting them on the kitchen table. “Which is…?”

Nina smiles weakly. “Have to be honest. No tree. None of us could be bothered. It was always…”

“Paddy’s job?” Nick offers.

“Yes. And it’s all just such a faff, for such a short time, and I just thought… we thought—”

“Next year,” Ash cuts in. “We’ll do a tree next year.”

“Yes,” says Nina, with a note of gratitude. “Yes. Next year. But for this year,” she announces, “we are putting presents under the Christmas yucca. We put fairy lights on it. And a bit of tinsel.”

She grins and Nick laughs. “Well, that sounds like an excellent compromise.”

Nina passes the bowl of tortilla chips and tub of hummus to Arlo, and carries the opened bottle of wine and four glasses to the table.

Ash catches a sideways glance from Arlo and nods back, just a fraction, enough to acknowledge her brother’s gesture.

She knows what it means. It means, What the fuck .

Ash has tried to tell Arlo, but when Arlo is not at home, Arlo is 100 percent committed to not being at home, almost as if he enters a portal into another reality every time he goes back to Bournemouth.

Ash tries not to bring her awkwardness to the proceedings, which are already awkward enough as it is, but as she watches Nick chatting with her brother, she sees it.

She sees Arlo sit straighter, bring his body closer to the table, share jokes with Nick, look stupidly happy every time Nick laughs at something he’s said.

She watches her brother’s face—he has such a sweet face, a perfect blend of both of his parents: Paddy’s boyishness, Nina’s bone structure—and she loves her brother and she misses him and she has been wanting him to come home so badly, it has been so long, and now he is finally here, but Nick Radcliffe is stealing away their quiet night of catching up, of being just them, talking about Dad, remembering each other.

He’s sucking it all away from her and pulling Arlo toward him, and Nina’s face is also aglow, and those three oblong parcels sit there at the other end of the table looking like grisly reminders of what is happening here—the further upending of things that have already been upended and haven’t yet been put away.

And now there is this man with two names, a wife, no wife, children, no children, doggy bags but no dog, pacifier clips but no baby, a restaurant but no restaurant, and a black hole where his backstory should be—and nobody seems to care but her.

“So,” she says to her mother, hearing in her own ears how bitter she sounds, even in that one syllable. “Mum, did you want to ask Nick about those things we were talking about the other day? The, you know, the life-coach stuff.”

“Oh!” Nick turns his head, whip fast, a genial smile on his face. “Are you interested in some life coaching? You know, I used to do a bit of that.”

Nina throws Ash a pinch-eyed look, as if to say, See, I told you he’d have a benign explanation , before turning to Nick. “You did?” she asks.

“Yup,” he replies. “For a few years. I thought I was done with restaurants. I’d burned myself out.

Needed a change of direction and so I retrained in the early noughties.

It turned out it wasn’t a good fit for me, turned out I’m much better off in hospitality, even if it does feel like it’s going to kill me some days.

But it’s where my heart is. My soul. I’m good for nothing else. Truly.”

He laughs self-deprecatingly and then turns back to Ash. “I’d be happy to offer you a couple of sessions, though. Just to go through the, you know, the basics. If you’re interested?”

Ash recoils for a second, barely able to believe what she’s hearing, but within another split second she realizes that this could be a brilliant opportunity for her to dig some more, ask him questions, work on him.

And actually, Jesus Christ, if anyone she knows is in need of a life coach, it’s her.