Page 5 of I’ll Be Home for Christmas

The Naughty List was a six-foot chalkboard fixed to a wall outside Frost Hardware.

In a tradition almost as old as Krampus Night, people would chalk the names of the naughty on the board in the run-up to Christmas.

No one under twelve was allowed to be named; it was mostly done in fun, and definitely not for terrifying kids into behaving.

As a counterbalance to the Naughty List there was also a green post box into which people would post written details of all the kind deeds people had done that year.

At the Krampus versus Father Christmas Face-Off, Mrs. Christmas would read out all the kindnesses and decide whether there was enough goodwill to banish Krampus for another year.

“Well, I have no intention of being on the Naughty List. I have evolved,” Fred assured Mr. Bishop.

Mr. Bishop looked skeptical. “Do you remember the time you dared one of my farmhands to sprint naked through the summer fair?” he asked. “Now what was his name?”

“Devlin McGee,” Ryan offered, helpfully.

Fred squinted her eyes at him. “That was a long time ago,” she said.

“Devlin, that was it.” Mr. Bishop slapped his thigh.

“You fair bewitched that boy. Was that the same summer you freed McCalister’s pigs, right before they were due for slaughter?

He never did find them all. And what about when the pair of you climbed down the cliff and got trapped by the tide, and we had to call out the coastguard? Silly arses. Or—”

“Yep,” she interjected loudly, in an effort to curtail his trip down memory lane. “I remember. But you can rest assured I am not the same person I was back then.”

“Who is?” added Ryan, and she smiled at him gratefully.

“Pity,” said Mr. Bishop. “I always secretly admired your spirit.”

She and Ryan had been thick as thieves when they were kids, always getting into some scrape or another.

But something had shifted between them the year they turned sixteen, and after that they’d drifted apart.

Ryan fell in with a group of lads she didn’t like, and she’d focused her efforts on getting into a university far, far away.

“I suppose it was just your Hallow-Hart blood made you contrary,” Mr. Bishop concluded.

She didn’t call out the inequality of focusing on her rebellion, which had been relatively short in comparison with Ryan’s; his was still going strong when she’d left for university.

“That must be it,” agreed Fred, taking a deep swig of her mulled wine.

She had never enjoyed being likened to her mother or her great-aunts.

Growing up, her family’s eccentricities had been a source of mortifying embarrassment, and she’d tried desperately hard to be ordinary.

Living in a household fueled by unchecked personal freedoms had made her yearn for ground rules, curfews and consequences; when your normal is extraordinary, you crave banality.

Her home life had been the envy of her peers, and her obvious disdain for it only served to make her look like a brat.

The pub owner produced a large bottle of whisky—“the good stuff”—which he thumped down onto the bar, inducing a surge toward it that thankfully included Mr. Bishop.

“Thank god!” she sighed as the burly farmer muscled his way between a man dressed like the Nutcracker Prince and a woman in a Sexy Santa dress. “It’s like he kept a diary of all my misdemeanors.”

“I think it’s all done with affection. I’ve had my fair share of ribbing.”

She rubbed her eyes. Lord, she was tired. “Anyway, that was years ago. I have been very sensible for a very long time.”

“I see.” He nodded. “So, I guess you’re too sensible to wonder whether our time capsule is still buried in the sandpit at the golf course?”

She’d forgotten about their time capsule. What did we put in that thing?

The edges of his mouth pulled up into a mischievous smile that was so familiar to her it was like being yanked back through time at top speed.

Her stomach lurched, and for one fleeting moment she entertained the idea of grabbing his hand and heading for the golf course right now.

But that wasn’t who she was anymore. She was not like her mother.

Being an adult meant not acting on your every impulse.

“I think my days of searching for buried treasure are over,” she said. Sadness knocked inside her chest as the words left her.

She watched the sparkle in his eyes dim when he replied, “Pity.” And she felt a pang for the kids they’d been. But she had grown up; it wasn’t her fault if Ryan was chasing a Peter Pan reality. She had put away her childish things a long time ago.

—

It was half past twelve when Fred let herself unsteadily back into her room at the Forest Inn.

Though she hadn’t drunk that much, the combination of alcohol and tiredness after her drive had left her very tipsy.

At midnight, bugles had sounded throughout the town, signaling the end of Krampus Night, and after one for the road—and some dancing?

Dear god, had she been dancing?—Ryan had chivalrously walked her back to the inn.

It had felt so familiar to be back beside him, zigzagging down the road after a night of high jinks, and she’d linked her arm through his as they walked.

She’d always felt safe with Ryan. He’d been a good-looking teenager—the secret crush of lots of the girls at school, including Fred—but maturity had chiseled those boyish good looks into something more characterful; his soft edges had become sharper, and the fine lines at the corners of his eyes told of a man who smiled often.

Downstairs, the pub was still heaving. All the participants of Krampus Night had now been freed and were distributed around the pubs of Pine Bluff, enjoying a well-earned pint.

She changed into her pjs and climbed gratefully into bed. Surely, after the day she’d had, she would slip easily into oblivion. But alas, the moment she switched off the bedside lamp, unwanted thoughts blipped to the surface like the bubbles in a pan of boiling water.

She’d had it all worked out. Not for her, the fly-by-night men with their pie-crust promises; she wouldn’t be a slave to romance like her mother, hopelessly throwing herself at every man who paid her the slightest attention.

She was going to do it right. Tim had been the antithesis of the men who frequented her home when she was growing up, sloping sheepishly out through the back door on the mornings after, or worse, sticking around until the aunts had to practically shoehorn their feet out from under the table.

Tim was no rolling stone or freeloader. He was a university professor and lecturer in philosophy.

He was grounded, sensible, pragmatic. He was twenty years older than Fred, but she didn’t care; he was everything she’d ever wanted in a man, and she had fallen hard.

They used to attend a lot of faculty gatherings—high-minded affairs with expensive wine, fish eggs on blinis, and cheese boards.

Life with Tim was grown-up; they moved in intellectual circles and drank good wine while discussing things that mattered.

She was living the kind of life she’d always dreamed of—the kind other people wanted.

He was ruggedly handsome in that Dr. Indiana Jones kind of way, and at least once a month a besotted student would turn up on their doorstep, hoping for some “private tutoring” with him.

He would turn them away gently and then, behind the closed door, make it very plain that Fred was the only object of his desire.

Back then, her pride in him was so elevating it was like watching the room from the ceiling.

He was eloquent and charming, and she loved observing him work a room, seeing the way people stopped and listened to him, as captivated by him as she was.

He would introduce her to people as his “better half” and it felt intoxicating; when he spoke about her in front of his friends, it was with such reverence that she felt bad for anyone who hadn’t experienced that kind of love.

Being loved by Tim had felt sacred, and she would have done almost anything to continue walking in his light.

She’d been more than happy to miss her work dos and after-hours drinks with colleagues, because she and Tim were the kind of people who “prioritized their relationship.” She’d ended up spending more time with Tim’s friends—not something she was proud of now, but she’d got swept up in his world.

Tim needed her, and he wanted her with him all the time.

How many partners could say that? How could she feel anything but honored by such devotion?

He made her feel special; he made her see that she didn’t need promotions at work to validate her.

And she didn’t need her so-called friends and her family with their “angry feminist agenda” making her feel bad about her choices.

She was part of something they could never understand…

But hindsight afforded her the uncomfortable truth that a person can be trained to crave the love of another by judicious love bombing, followed by bouts of withholding affection.

Tim had painstakingly educated her in the art of being subservient.

It had happened so slowly that she hadn’t noticed she was becoming a human iceberg until she had drifted away from everyone she knew.

And having set her course quite willingly, she felt she had no one to blame but herself.

She came to realize that Tim needed her to be small.

It had been an unspoken bargain within their relationship: I will give you all my love, and in return all I ask is that you diminish yourself, become less than me, and remain happy to be so.

And she had tried. But eventually, she simply couldn’t make herself any smaller.

Any piece of paper, no matter how big, can only ever be folded a finite amount of times before it simply can’t shrink any more.

Fred had reached her maximum number of folds, and she still hadn’t been small enough.

He’d never hit her, and he’d never raised his voice while quietly dismantling her, brick by brick: her self-esteem, her self-worth, her ability to make decisions, her ability to trust her own thoughts.

Control is a shapeshifter that can look and feel like love, and by the time it reveals its true form, the person in its thrall is emotionally pinioned like a butterfly in a glass case.

It would be easy to cast Veronica—his even younger mistress—as the villainess of the piece, but in truth, it had been a relief to be usurped.

She’d lost the confidence required to leave of her own volition, and if it hadn’t been for Veronica she might be there still.

Tim had denied the affair at first, adding gaslighting to his skill set, but Veronica was smitten and only too willing to provide the unequivocal proof Fred needed.

And then it was over. Her release, when it came, was the equivalent of being discarded like a used tea bag.

She thought about Veronica sometimes. Fred hoped she was stronger than she had been.

It took two years of therapy to unpick the intricate tapestry of their relationship, the slow disentangling of Fred’s life from Tim’s, until finally she had pieced herself back together, her frayed sense of self reinforced and strengthened, her colors brighter now that she had emerged from his shade.

Though she couldn’t blame her relationship with Tim for her layoff and subsequent eviction, her reticence to put herself forward for the big campaigns (because they would have impinged on her home life) meant that she became viewed by her seniors through a lens of diffidence. She had made herself dispensable.

Don’t dwell! she chided herself now. She took a deep breath and centered herself.

Yes, being jobless and homeless was undeniably shit.

And no, she couldn’t change the past. But the ability to be unapologetically herself, imperfect as she was, was bloody brilliant.

She could do this. Her therapist had told her so.

Another muffled roar of joviality rose up through the floor of the Forest Inn.

Fred, tired of the sound of her own thoughts, tuned in to the noise below. Eventually, the hazy sounds of “The Little Drummer Boy” being sung like a football anthem in a stadium lulled her to sleep.