Page 35 of I’ll Be Home for Christmas

On Saturday evening, Bella went out with Liam again and Fred felt pleased that he had company. She hated the thought of him being lonely.

It was not lost on her that her mum was out painting the town red on a Saturday night, while she was pottering around the house with her eighty-something aunts, but she was discovering that she enjoyed their company even more now than she had when she was younger.

Teenage Fred had been so riddled with self-conscious angst that her aunts’ eccentricities and shenanigans were often a source of cringing embarrassment.

Now she was beginning to view them as inspiration for her life goals.

When the aunts retired to the cottage, she settled down to finesse her marketing strategy for the business.

She’d posted the first Hallow-Hart Crackers reel and post to Instagram late in the afternoon—a kind of “meet the family” introduction—and the likes had been growing slowly but steadily.

She replied to a handful of comments, and checked to see which hashtags were working and which she ought to change, then she added a couple of stories to get the engagement going.

But left alone with her thoughts, by midnight she was restless and it was clear that sleep was a long way off.

She’d heard her mum come home about a quarter of an hour ago and tiptoe upstairs to bed.

Fred punched her pillows into submission and threw herself back onto them, sighing loudly.

Ryan was, for some reason, on her mind. She didn’t know how to be around him anymore, not as grown-ups.

It was a weird situation; in some ways they knew each other best of all, and yet in others not in the least. Could they really pick up a friendship they’d left behind seventeen years ago?

Maybe she could do that with a woman. But with a man?

A man who, whether she wanted to admit it or not, was undeniably attractive.

Or in the words of Harry Burns: would the sex part always get in the way?

Not that that was likely to be a problem for Ryan, he’d made his feelings crystal clear all those years ago.

She picked her phone up off the bedside table and began to scroll through social media to move her mind waaaay away from anything that put Ryan and sex in the same place in her mind.

A skittering against the window made her jump and she got out of bed and pulled back the curtains.

As if summoned by her thoughts, Ryan himself grinned up at her from the cabbage patch, and she sucked in a breath as her stomach did a backflip.

The scene was so familiar and so ridiculous that she had to slap her hand over her mouth to stifle her laugh.

As quietly as she could, she pulled up the sash window, recoiling as the cold wind whipped in between the buttons on her pjs. She grabbed her dressing gown and pulled it tightly around her, before calling down in a shouty-whisper, “What are you doing?”

“Hey, Fred!” He smiled lopsidedly.

“Are you drunk?”

“Small bit.” He shrugged. “I’ve been out with Benj and Rab. And then I had the best idea ever. I think we should dig up the time capsule!”

The wind was whisking his voice away down the garden.

“Are you insane? It’s the middle of the night!”

“Exactly. There won’t be any golfers there to stop us. I’ll meet you down by the front gates.”

She took exactly five seconds to consider the situation, before saying to herself, “Fuck it!” and then leaning further out of the window and whisper-shouting, “Give me three minutes!”

—

After a quick wee and a change of clothes—agreeing to dig up a golf course in the dark was quite wild enough, she didn’t need to do it in her avocado-print pajamas—she tiptoed downstairs, almost giddy with the sense of nostalgia evoked by sneaking out with Ryan.

The grandfather clock—bedecked in a holly and red berry garland—ticked on steadily in the entrance hall as she wiggled her bed-socked feet into her winter hiking boots and unhooked her Puffa jacket from the coat rack.

She spied her mum’s red beanie hat poking out of a coat pocket and grabbed that too, pulling it low over her ears.

“Don’t forget gloves, it’s going to snow again tonight.”

“Holy shit!” Fred literally leaped into the air with fright, spinning a full 360 degrees as she whirled to see where the voice had come from.

The silhouette of Aunt Aggie stood in the kitchen doorway. She leaned back and nudged open the fridge with her elbow, bathing the hall in its cool blue light.

“Bloody hell, Aunty, you scared the crap out of me!”

Aunt Aggie shrugged and said, “Sorry,” in an unapologetic voice.

“What are you doing here?” Fred asked, taking in her aunt’s long velvet dressing gown and Wellington boots. The white splint bandages on her wrists poked out of the ends of her sleeves.

“I could ask you the same.” She winked.

“Is that cheese and crackers?” Fred asked, noticing the plate on the table.

“I had the midnight munchies; and your mum bought some of that nice Lancashire cheese from the market earlier. Your Aunt Cam won’t have it in the cottage.”

“That’s because you’re lactose intolerant and you have zero willpower. She’s trying to save you from yourself!”

Aunt Aggie pulled a miffed expression. “Oh, intolerant bingbollerant.”

“Bingbollerant is not a word.”

“Says who?”

“Everyone.”

“Well, who made them the word police? I’ll tell you: no one. We are all free to make up new words whenever we want to. You should get going, poor Ryan’s out there freezing his diddlydongs off. There’re gloves in the wicker basket.” She motioned to the basket with her boot.

“Right,” said Fred, remembering her mission. “Do we need to tell anyone about me sneaking out?” she asked, pulling on a pair of fleece-lined gloves.

“Do we need to tell anyone about my little indiscretion with Lancashire’s finest dairy product?” Aunt Aggie countered, carefully lifting her plate of illegal goods with both hands and waggling her eyebrows.

“No?” said Fred.

“And it’s a no from me too.”

“Let me help you back to the cottage. That path gets icy, and you can’t exactly use your two sprained wrists to save you if you slip.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me, I’ve come prepared.” She gestured behind her to a pair of snowshoes by the back door.

“If you’re sure…”

“I’ll be fine. Now you mustn’t keep your young man waiting.”

“Not my young man.”

“Not yet.” Her aunt’s eyes twinkled. “Off you go now.”

“Thanks, Aunty.” Fred bent to kiss her cheek.

“Enjoy your wintery shennaffles!”

Fred shook her head, smiling, and slipped out into the night. She had almost reached the path when the musical Christmas tree shuddered to life, glowing ominously in the dark, branches dancing as its chipmunk voice rang out. “ With a hey and a hee and a ho-ho, with a hee and a ho and a hah-hah! ”

“Shut up!” she hissed at it, but it continued to sway as it sang. She bent down, feeling at the base for an off button, but her movement seemed only to excite the demonic tree further. “You’re going to wake the neighborhood.”

“ Oh, lucky, lucky me! ” it squealed.

In desperation, she picked it up and stuffed it into the bay hedge that ran beneath the sitting-room window. The tree continued to sing but was muffled by the foliage.

“You said three minutes,” Ryan said accusingly, when she joined him at the electric gates. He was stepping from side to side and clapping his gloved hands together against the cold.

“You can’t get me out of my nice warm bed during the witching hour in the middle of winter and then complain that I took, like, two extra minutes.”

Ryan grumbled but conceded her point. “Right, what’s the gate code?” he asked.

“Oh crap, I can’t remember, Mum changed it earlier, she wrote it on a Post-it note stuck to the fridge.” She frowned, trying to visualize the new code. It got changed every six months for security.

“Never mind,” said Ryan, unfazed. “We’ll leave the same way I came in.” He pointed to an upturned plant pot beside the railings. On the other side, a rucksack and a spade lay on the grass verge.

“I am not climbing over the fence.”

“Then how do you propose to get out?”

There was a click, and the gates began to open. Through the intercom Aunt Aggie’s voice crackled out, “I’ll text you the new code. Now bugger off, you two!”

Fred laughed and pressed the “speak” button. “Thanks, Aunty!”

As they hurried down the lane, the metallic clank of the gates closing rang out through the night.

Instead of heading to the town, they took a right and tramped down toward the beach and the golf course that ran parallel to it for almost two miles, separated only by the coast road and promenade.

A man further down the road, hidden by the darkness, sang a drunken sea shanty, probably on his way home from the pub, but otherwise the winding lanes were quiet.

“I am sorry again, about yesterday,” said Fred. She kept her voice low as they passed by high hedgerows and fields of sleeping cattle, but it still sounded loud in the blanketing night.

“Me too. I shouldn’t have pushed.”

“I shouldn’t have been so tetchy. Friends?” she asked, holding out her hand.

“Always,” he said, shaking it.

—

The moon and stars had been swallowed by streamers of clouds the color of charcoal and straw bales, with the sea a motionless black line below them.

Scant blueish light from the streetlamps dotting the coastal road illuminated grassy mounds along the golf course and threw the bunkers into pools of darkness, which offered some guidance as to how this undulating land might lie, but without Ryan’s head torch they’d be likely to twist an ankle at the very least.

“Can you remember which bunker we buried it in?” Fred asked.