The Mother of All Christmases Read online

  She watched Effin and Jacques now playing out a regular scenario: Effin screaming that his workload was too much and he was going to walk out and Jacques telling him that he’d help him pack up all his tools. It had happened at least once a week this year, but she’d started to worry that Effin might actually carry out his threat because of her ridiculous expectations. There was a new film out in June called, coincidentally, Winterworld, starring a drop-dead gorgeous A-list actor by the name of Franco Mezzaluna. Eve had joked to Jacques about the possibility of inviting him to open their new attraction and just when they’d decided their chances lay between none and sod all, Franco’s PR office had rung up and volunteered his services without having to be asked. Aunt Evelyn had engineered that from above, they were all convinced of it. And if Aunt Evelyn had a hand in it, then everything was going to work out fine.

  Eve saw Effin’s murderous expression cave in to laughter at something Jacques had said. Her husband could charm the robins out of the Christmas trees. There wasn’t anyone that Jacques couldn’t get on with: he could talk sensibly with banks, he could bargain with suppliers, he was patience itself with the elderly, eloquent and friendly with the press and a second Doctor Dolittle with the animals they had in the park. But he was really on his level with kids. Eve’s goddaughter Phoebe adored him, probably because he was such a big kid himself. He had a Basil Brush alarm clock, a Superman dressing gown and the ringtone on his phone was the Scooby Doo theme tune. Bonkers – wonderfully bonkers. Children thought he was Santa with a modern-day makeover. Even little babies stared at him from their prams as if he were a creature not of this world.

  With that in her mind, Eve went over to pour herself a cup of coffee from the percolator at the back of the office, an area guarded by a huge stuffed elk called Gabriel that had once belonged to Aunt Evelyn.

  ‘What’s he like, my husband, Gabriel?’ Eve asked the bauble-wearing elk. She often talked to him when they were alone. He didn’t answer back but his expression was always one that suggested he was contemplating. ‘What’s he like with kids?’

  He should have his own, said a voice rushing at her from left field with such force that she felt it knock her sideways. It was a sentiment she agreed with because Jacques would make a wonderful father. But when? They were too busy for children, the park took up all their energies. Still, she wasn’t yet forty and people were having their families later and later these days; so not now, but one day. When they had some time.

  Wait for some time and it might never come said that same voice, and she couldn’t be sure because it was so fleeting, but it didn’t half sound like it belonged to an old lady.

  Chapter 3

  Palma Collins paused before alerting the inhabitants of number 15, Ladybower Gardens to her presence, because she could hear the argument going on within the walls from the bottom of the path. She loitered outside for a few moments, allowing time for the heat to leave the words; which she hoped would happen quickly, so she could do what she had to do and then get on her way.

  Tabitha Stephenson had just called her husband a ‘first-class prick’. Christian batted back with a ‘condescending cow’. At least neither of them could be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act.

  The button for the doorbell was directly under the aspirations-of-grandeur ‘Stephen’s Hall’ nameplate. Okay, so it might be one of the larger detached houses on the estate but it was hardly Downton Abbey. Tabitha had given her a guided tour on their first meeting in the early part of the new year to show her the grade of house the child would grow up in. Like a proud estate agent she had introduced Palma to her two reception rooms, study, country house-style dining room with egg-and-dart Lincrusta border, not to mention the eighteen-foot-long pergola and the stunning Arctic cabin in the garden. Now, that really had made Palma’s jaw drop to the floor. You could keep the octagonal conservatory, the hot tub and the his and hers en-suites, each with a bidet, but the Arctic cabin – oh my. One day she hoped she would be rich enough to afford one of those, though it was highly unlikely. What she soon would be – with any luck – was getting paid a lump sum that would change everything, even though it wouldn’t be anything like the amount needed to give her the indulgent lifestyle the Stephensons enjoyed. It would, however, get her away from the gutter, and that would do for now.

  Stephen’s Hall was magazine perfect and full of shine: shiny chrome kitchen units, shiny cupboard fronts, shiny glass tables and shiny wooden floors. Palma wondered how Tabitha would cope with sticky baby fingerprints dulling all the surfaces. Not very well, she concluded, but that was hardly her problem. Once the baby was born, Palma wouldn’t think of it or the Stephensons again. Duty done, wish them all her best, and forget.

  She’d hoped she would have been pregnant by now because the sooner it happened, the sooner those nine months would be over and the sooner she could get on with her life, but her last two periods had come along as regular as clockwork. Third time lucky, she said to herself as she extended her hand towards the bell, but held back from contact because the argument was still raging on.

  The top part of the front window was slightly ajar, something the couple inside had obviously failed to notice. ‘She’ll be here in a minute, Christian, so shut the fuck up,’ Palma heard from within. ‘You shut the fuck up,’ Christian returned.

  Silence reigned for a count of three and Palma took that as a cue to finally announce her arrival. The doorbell released the grand tones of Big Ben’s chime whilst she arranged her facial features into her best ‘just-got-here’ expression, one that was smiling in greeting and had absolutely no prior knowledge that seconds ago the Stephensons had been ripping into each other like savage dogs.

  Tabitha opened the door looking glam as always, even in jeggings and jumper. One of those baggy tops that make thin women look fabulous and fat women look like a bombed sofa.

  ‘Ah, Palma, come, come,’ Tabitha said, shiny white teeth on full display, ushering her in. ‘Here we are again.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Palma. Here we are again.

  ‘You are still taking the folic acid aren’t you? No tea and coffee. Plenty of water and seven-a-day fruit and vegetables.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Stephenson,’ said Palma. Same question, same answer, same lie. She was taking the folic acid but though she had cut down on tea and coffee, she wasn’t cutting them out altogether. It was bad enough not having alcohol. As for seven fruit and veg per day . . . dream on, love.

  ‘Christian,’ Tabitha shouted to her husband. ‘Palma’s here.’

  As usual she pronounced it Pal-ma. ‘It’s Palma, as in the capital of Majorca,’ she’d once said, but Tabitha persisted. She was one of those women who pretended to listen to you when there was actually cling film over her ears, Palma had rapidly come to realise that.

  Christian appeared in the doorway wearing Armani jeans and a T-shirt with the Lacoste name and a super-size crocodile emblazoned across the front so one was in no doubt it was designer gear. He dressed down better than anyone she knew dressed up. ‘Hello, Palma.’ At least he pronounced it correctly.

  ‘Hello, Mr Stephenson,’ she returned. It was all very genial and normal until you knew that within five minutes Christian would be wanking into a jug, sucking it up into a meat baster and then she would be squirting it up her flue before lying back, pelvis tilted, legs up against the Graham and Brown wallpaper in their spare room, whilst sperm swam around inside her trying their best to locate an egg. All for five thousand pounds, which had sounded a small fortune when it had first been offered. She’d only get three of that, of course, the rest she’d have to hand over to Clint. He’d already got two hundred for brokering the deal. They’d get five hundred each upon confirmation of pregnancy and the rest nine months later, on handover day.

  ‘Up you go,’ said Tabitha, nodding towards the stairs. ‘You know the drill.’

  Yes, she knew the drill all right. Shoes off and up the cream carpet, thirteen steps, down the landing towards the small bedroom at the
end. Drawers off and wait patiently until Mr Stephenson had knocked one out and could hand over the tube of baby juice.

  She heard Christian enter the room next to hers. The master bedroom: it had a small plaque saying so screwed onto the door. She tried not to think about what he was doing when it all fell quiet. Palma didn’t like him for a reason she couldn’t put her finger on. He was polite and very handsome but his smile was oily, his gaze too intense and the first time she’d met him he’d hung on to her hand a beat too long when they’d been introduced. Hardly enough to damn him to hell, but, still, he put her on edge.

  It didn’t take more than a moment or two for Christian to collect the sperm. She expected him to hand it over quickly as usual and then retreat to let her get on with her side of things, but today he slipped inside the room, pushing the door softly shut behind him.

  ‘Tabitha is getting impatient,’ he said quietly, then held his finger up against his lip to shush what she had been about to say to that. ‘I know these things can’t be rushed, but we can always do it a more traditional way and lower the odds.’

  It took Palma a few seconds to understand what he meant. It was only when he added, ‘I’d see to it that you had a good time,’ that the penny dropped.

  ‘We can’t do that,’ she said with a horrified gasp. ‘You’re married.’ Her instincts had been right; he was a lech.

  Christian gave her his best expression of outrage.

  ‘Palma, we wouldn’t be making love, it would merely be a more . . . direct way of doing the job. Cutting out the middle man’ – he held up the baster – ‘the way nature intended these things to happen.’

  Palma didn’t care if Mother Nature was onside with it or not, it was wrong with a big fat capital W.

  ‘No,’ she said firmly and snatched the baster from his hand. But he didn’t move.

  ‘Well, I do hope it works this time,’ he said. ‘If it doesn’t we may have to re-think the strategy. Tabitha agrees, in case you’re wondering.’

  She didn’t ask what he meant, though a picture of Tabitha kneeling on the bed whilst Palma rested her head in her lap like Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale drifted across her hippocampus.

  ‘I should warn you that Tabitha is not the most patient of people, whatever impression she’s given you. She’s desperate – and desperate people do desperate things, Palma.’

  She knew that. That’s why she was here.

  ‘I hear you,’ she said. ‘I’m doing my best.’

  Then he did leave to let her get on with what she had to do.

  If he had meant to make her feel expendable by telling her that, he’d succeeded. Christian knew she wanted this money badly. She’d made the mistake of telling them the first time they met how much she needed the cash in an effort to assure them that she would not back out of the deal, and in doing so had given a chunk of her power away.

  Clint – the broker of this deal – had told her that Tabitha yearned for the child she couldn’t carry herself, though she hadn’t cried when Palma had twice rung to tell her that her period had come. Her tone had been more one of annoyance and frustration as they booked the next insemination date in their diaries. Then again, Tabitha wasn’t the type to cry and wail. Maybe she was keeping the cork tightly in the bottle of her despair and was so at the end of her tether that it was only a matter of time before she pimped out her husband to ‘do it as Mother Nature intended’, turning a blind eye – and a deaf ear – to the spare room ceiling as it creaked with a fast-increasing rhythm.

  As Palma inserted the hard tube inside her, she wondered how much extra she would accept to have sex with Christian if it was offered. Desperate people did desperate things, as he so rightly said. And if she was desperate enough to rent out her body for nine months, it might only take a few dollars more to open up that road.

  Chapter 4

  ‘Crackers, that’s what this business is,’ said Gill, chuckling cheerfully as she stuffed a dodgy-looking pink whistle into the open end of a sparkly cracker.

  ‘What’s crackers is you leaving us for a pipe dream,’ said Iris, sitting across the table from her and scowling.

  ‘Jealously will get you nowhere, Iris.’

  ‘I’ll not be jealous when you’re home this time next year crying that you’re missing your home comforts. And you’re sick to death of the heat.’

  Gill snorted with laughter. ‘I’m going to live in Fuengirola, Iris, not in the middle of the Gobi Desert. There’s not much you can get over here that you can’t get over there.’

  Iris thought for a minute, but the best counter-argument she could come up with was:

  ‘Snow.’

  ‘I hate the stuff,’ said Gill. ‘Get me on that veranda with a Pina Colada in my hand in the middle of December and I’ll be laughing.’

  ‘You’ll soon get bored.’

  ‘Trust me, I won’t.’

  ‘You’ll miss your Viv and your Sal. You won’t be able to nip off and go shopping to Meadowhall with them like you do now having one of your fancy Prosecco lunches,’ tried Iris.

  ‘They’ll be coming over for holidays. Plus our Sal’s moving to Cornwall in August. It’d take me longer to get to her if I stayed here than if I moved to the Med.’

  ‘You’re too old, for a start,’ said Iris. ‘What if you get taken ill?’

  ‘They’ve got hospitals, Iris. And they’re good ones. Are you trying to put me off going, because if you are, you’ve no chance.’

  Iris got up from the table with a loud oof. ‘I’m going to the toilet,’ she announced in a gruff voice as if she was being forced to empty her bladder under duress. When she was safely out of earshot, Annie said, ‘She’ll miss you, Gill.’

  ‘And I’ll miss her,’ Gill replied with a small sigh, ‘We’ve been friends for a long time, but Ted and I don’t want to leave it any longer. His arthritis doesn’t bother him half as much there as it does here. We’ll be able to FaceTime each other though. Our Sally bought Ted an iPad for his birthday and he’s taken to it like a duck to water. Well, I say that but he very nearly did a Facebook live of himself sat on the toilet last week when he was fiddling about trying to find a bit of Dean Martin on YouTube. The whole world almost saw the struggle he was having with his motions.’

  Joe smiled and lifted Gill’s cup up from the table. He was on drinks duty that day. In fact, he was on drinks duty every day.

  ‘And we will miss you too, Gill,’ he said. He’d come over to Leeds from Naples to study at the university when he was eighteen and fallen in love with Yorkshire and two years later with Annie. His English was fluent after all these years but his Italian accent was still very thick. Gill always thought he sounded like Rossano Brazzi, her favourite film star. It had taken her five months to fall in love with Ted when they first started courting. If he’d had an Italian accent like Joe Pandoro, he’d have had her at ‘Ciao.’

  ‘You all right today, Annie, love? You’re very pale,’ said Gill, studying her boss who was cutting up sheets of corny jokes to roll up with the hats.

  ‘See,’ said Joe, turning to his wife. ‘She noticed it too.’ Then he addressed Gill. ‘I told her she looked pale but she doesn’t listen to me.’

  ‘I’m fine, really I am. Really,’ said Annie, but there was a weariness to her voice that belied her insistence.

  ‘You’re working too hard.’ Gill declared, deciding that was the cause of her pallor. ‘Haven’t you got a replacement for me yet?’

  ‘We haven’t had anyone show any interest at the job agency,’ said Annie.

  ‘Apart from those who’ve applied to show they’re looking for work in order to keep their benefits, but don’t want the job at all,’ added Joe, waving his hand with a flourish. ‘I don’t want someone like that.’

  ‘Well you’d better look for two people because Annie looks as if she’s ready for dropping,’ said Gill.

  ‘I’m not sleeping properly,’ Annie admitted to her.

  ‘It’s your age. I was terrible when I hit
fifty,’ said Gill.

  ‘Oy, I’m forty-eight, cheeky,’ Annie threw back with a laugh.

  ‘The menopause is a bugger. Hit me like one of those big balls they knock down buildings with.’

  ‘I’m going in the kitchen,’ said Joe. ‘I don’t want to listen to all the lady talk.’

  ‘Coward,’ shouted Gill and didn’t believe him at all. Mention the word tampon to Ted and he’d cough, blush and then announce he needed something from the shed, but Joe knew as much about herself and Iris as their doctors did. She would miss the Pandoros. Though she’d only known them a few years, it felt as if it were forever; but in a good way. And this job – constructing crackers on little more than a basic wage – might not have looked much on paper, but the banter was first class, the day flew, the kettle was always on and both Joe and Annie were kindness itself.

  ‘There’s a bug going round, you know, Annie,’ she said. ‘Iris’s daughter had it. Knocked her stupid for a whole fortnight.’

  Iris appeared, waddling back to the table rubbing her hip.

  ‘I say, Iris, your Linda’s had a bug hasn’t she? I’m just telling Annie.’

  ‘A bug and a half,’ said Iris. ‘Sick as a dog and white as a sheet she was. She lost half a stone in weight in the first week alone.’ She sniffed and cast a sneer at Gill. ‘You’d better get used to that weight loss with the water over there in the Costa del Diarrhoea.’

  ‘Oh shut up, Iris, you’re talking tripe.’ Gill suddenly remembered the story she had to tell. ‘Eh, I tell you what’ll take your mind off me flitting off to paradise. Have you heard about Brenda Lee?’

  ‘The singer?’ asked Annie.

  ‘No, Brenda Lee from Canal Street,’ said Gill. ‘Brenda Lee with the funny eye. Iris’ll know who I mean.’

  Iris thought for a minute. ‘Doug Lee’s wife?’

  ‘Well, widow if you’re going to be factful. She’s marrying a Turkish barman with one of them big beards called Mehmet. Her family are trying to get her sectioned.’