Christmas Every Day Read online

  ‘I thought it might be some bizarre countryside custom.’

  ‘Running about the woods scaring the pants off women?’ He handed me his phone. ‘Call the police. It’ll make their day, something more interesting than a missing cat to investigate.’

  ‘But it’s not really a crime, is it? I wasn’t hurt. I didn’t even see them.’

  ‘No, but they can keep an eye out.’

  I hesitated.

  ‘You might prevent something awful happening.’

  I called the nearest police station, and a straight-to-the-point policewoman who instructed me to call her Brenda promised to visit later that day. Mack’s gaze was steady. ‘You should have knocked on my door last night.’

  ‘I was too busy panicking to think.’ I tried to smile. ‘I did bang on the wall a few times.’

  ‘That was you?’ He looked apologetic. ‘I thought it was the boiler playing up.’

  ‘Maybe I should have your phone number?’

  Not the circumstances in which I’d imagined uttering that sentence.

  We swapped numbers, and I stood up. ‘Right. I’d best get back, then. Don’t want to miss PC Brenda.’ I put my phone in my jeans pocket, took it out again and looked at the screen for no reason, slid it back in. Nodded my head a few times. ‘Thanks for listening. And for your phone number. Good to know you can call me if you need rescuing.’

  I shuffled over to the door, opened it, turned back to face Mack but couldn’t think of a single other excuse to delay going back to the empty, lonely, rustly side of the building.

  He’d gone. Without even saying goodbye.

  ‘Sorry.’ He hurried back into the kitchen. ‘I was getting my laptop. Oh, and I need my shoes. Hold on.’ He vanished into the hall again, popping back in a few seconds later. ‘Right. Ready. Let’s go.’

  ‘Um. Go where?’

  ‘To your house. To wait for the police.’

  ‘You’re coming with me?’ I asked, momentarily confused.

  ‘Would you rather I didn’t?’ Mack said. ‘Because from the way you were dithering by the door I assumed you were nervous about being home alone.’

  ‘I wasn’t dithering. Sheesh, Mack. Every time you do something kind you have to open your mouth and ruin it.’

  ‘Yeah. So I’ve been told.’ His face darkened, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the telling had probably been done by the invisible was-she-real-or-invented-to-keep-me-away wife.

  ‘I don’t need you to babysit me. I’ll lock my door and keep my phone close by. I’ll be fine,’ New Jenny said.

  Please delete that comment, Old Jenny shouted in my head.

  ‘I’ll only be sat here worrying about you,’ he grunted.

  ‘You think I should be worrying?’ A shiver scampered up my back at the thought that Mack considered it a possibility that whoever it was might come to my house. Followed by a traitorous thrill right on its heels at the thought he’d be worrying about me. The shiver slunk back down with the realisation he would probably only be worrying about getting dragged into facing a madman. Or that after a few days my mutilated corpse would start to smell. Or that the house would get burnt to the ground, taking Mack’s side with it…

  ‘I think there’s zero chance of that moron making an appearance.’ He shifted his laptop from one arm to the other. ‘But it’d be abnormal not to be freaking out a bit. It’s only neighbourly to provide you with some company.’

  I smiled at him. ‘I think you’re scared to be alone in your cottage. And, in that case, you may come and reassure yourself with my presence while I sort through the filing cabinet I managed to pry open yesterday.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He nodded, sombrely. ‘I owe you one.’

  ‘Ooh, I think we’ve stopped counting who owes who what, haven’t we, neighbour?’

  ‘Get out of here,’ he growled. ‘I’ve work to do.’

  ‘Wipe that look off your face!’ I hissed at Mannequin Diana as I caught her smirking at me through the open master-bedroom door. There was no way she could tell whether I’d been spinning an elaborate, detailed daydream about me pottering about upstairs while my lovely husband worked at the kitchen table, him calling up to offer me a cup of tea, leaning in for a kiss as he handed it to me, then getting caught up in the moment, putting the tea on the dressing table before he lowered me manfully yet tenderly to the bed…

  ‘Jenny, do you want tea?’ Mack called up the stairs. My face: virtually bubbling with molten embarrassment. Diana’s face: smug and suggestive at the same time. I spent about two minutes sticking my head out of the window to cool down before he appeared.

  ‘It’s a bit stuffy in here.’ Mack offered the tea. I backed away so far he had to lean forwards and stretch his arm out. ‘You must be boiling – your cheeks are pink.’

  ‘Yes,’ I mumbled. ‘My cheeks are pink because it’s stuffy.’

  He turned around, leaning on the sill. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Tediously. How about you?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘So-so.’

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve distracted you.’

  ‘No.’ He sighed. ‘It’s not you.’ He opened his mouth as if to say more, but was interrupted by a knock at the door.

  ‘That must be her,’ I said, while the tone of my voice said, Eek!

  Mack led the way, swiping a golfing umbrella from the hallway as he did.

  Brenda was way better than I expected. I decided then and there I flippin’ loved the police. She listened, carefully, wrote everything down, asked questions, nodded sympathetically and promised to keep me informed.

  ‘We’ll have a look for evidence of anyone hanging about in the forest. I’ll make some calls, see if any of the usual suspects aren’t where they’re supposed to be, and follow it up if I smell anything suspicious. We’ll have a patrol officer make themselves known the next few nights. That’s usually enough to deter any more funny business. My gut instinct? Kids messing about. I really don’t think you need to worry.’ She nodded. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  I expected Mack to make a move once she’d left, but instead I found him rummaging in the fridge.

  ‘Do help yourself.’

  He pulled back out, a pot of soup in his hand. ‘Do you mind? I didn’t have breakfast. Or lunch.’

  ‘Crap! Neither did I. Why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘I figured you didn’t have much of an appetite.’

  My stomach, suddenly realising that, yes, today of all days it deserved a darn good lunch, made itself known. ‘I’ll heat the whole pot.’

  A few minutes later, as we sat eating together, not at all like a married couple, and I wasn’t thinking at all about Mack’s wife, he put his spoon down and took a deep breath.

  ‘Do you think you’d be better off using an alternative form of transport, just for now?’

  ‘Like what?’ I took a moment for my brain to catch up with my ears. ‘The Mini?’

  I sighed. ‘I’ve not heard back from the DVLA yet. And even if it is mine, I still need to get the battery and whatever else might be wrong with it sorted. Never mind insurance and tax.’

  ‘It’s taxed and insured as of this morning. The battery can be swapped over in a day. Borrow it for as long as you need.’

  I stopped eating before I dribbled soup on my chest. ‘It’s your car?’

  He scratched his chin. ‘It’s, well, complicated. I bought it as a gift for, um, someone. But it’s not practical for them to use it right now. I didn’t think it would do any harm to keep it in Charlotte Meadows’ shed temporarily.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’

  ‘I did offer.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s okay if I drive it? Just until this gets sorted? The owner won’t mind?’ The owner – or for the purposes of this conversation shall we refer to her as Mrs Mack?

  He nodded. ‘It’ll do it good to get a run out. And you can use it in exchange for storing it in your shed. I’ll pick up a new battery and give it a on
ce-over. The last thing you need is to break down in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘I’ll pay for the battery.’

  Mack frowned, about to say no. Then he paused. Looked at me. Looked down at his bowl. ‘Thanks. I’ll let you know how much it is.’

  He glanced at his watch during the awkward silence that followed. ‘Don’t you have to leave soon?’

  I checked the clock. ‘Damn. Yes. And I don’t have time to cycle the long way now.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ He got up. ‘Give me two minutes to get changed.’

  ‘You have a bike?’ I called after him, already out of the back door.

  ‘I don’t need one,’ he retorted. ‘I’ve got legs.’

  ‘Really?’ I huffed. ‘And you think your legs can keep up with my wheels? We’ll see about that.’

  Which was probably the whole point, I realised, pumping my way along the path, Mack a blur alongside me. Even bearing in mind the bumps slowing me down, he could at least have had the decency to be gasping for breath by the time we reached the Common.

  I hopped off and wheeled the bike towards the village exit, waving at Sarah through the café window. She wiggled her eyebrows and smirked when she spotted Mack, mouthing ‘call me later’ while holding an imaginary phone to her ear.

  ‘I’m fine from here,’ I said, indicating towards the dog-walkers milling about up ahead. ‘Thanks for keeping me company.’

  ‘What time do you finish?’

  ‘Oh, I’m staying late again this evening. Ellen and Will are going out for their anniversary and won’t be back until ten. I’ll—’

  ‘I’ll be there at ten.’ Before I could reply he had sprinted off into the trees.

  ‘Traitor,’ New Jenny jeered at the smile that refused to stop curling up the side of my mouth all the way to school.

  24

  The rest of the evening was, to put it mildly, freakin’ exhausting. Hamish and Jonno were playing a new game about an invisible snake that slid up their trousers and into any holes it could find there, causing Billy to wet himself, too afraid to pull down his underwear when required.

  Maddie was trying to learn ‘Baby Shark’ on the recorder, taking seriously her teacher’s comment that practice makes perfect while simultaneously proving it to be false.

  Dawson was having a bad day. His class had been on a museum trip. Although he refused to talk about it, he spent a long time drawing Squash Harris getting trapped by the bad guys in a museum storeroom with no windows or lights, teeming with monster spiders and rats, their beady eyes glowing in the darkness.

  ‘I woke up trapped in a car with some rats not so long ago,’ I casually mentioned, when I came in to check if he had any homework.

  ‘And I care about that because…?’ he said in a monotone.

  ‘Because it’s an interesting story ending in my total humiliation in front of another person. I thought you might want to hear it.’

  He swapped his pencil for an eraser and dabbed at the corner of the page. ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘Okay. Let me know if you change your mind.’

  ‘I won’t,’ he replied in a sing-song voice as I shut the door behind me. I closed my eyes and wished very, very hard that whatever Mack was doing with the sample comic-book, he would get some good news soon.

  Then a scream broke out from the other side of the house: ‘I HATE YOU AND I HATE INVIBISLE SNAKES I’ll CHOP OFF ALL YOUR HEADS AND TAILS WITH THIS AXE!’

  I opened my eyes and hurried downstairs to avert the slaughter.

  By the time Ellen and Will arrived home, the only person who seemed remotely tired was me. The boys were pretending to be asleep, but while I was running through the events of the evening in the living room, Hamish burst in. ‘There’s a pirate in the garden and when I opened the door to ask him where his boat was he waved at me and said he’s waiting for Jenny. Jenny are you being a pirate and can I come too? I know how to hoist a mainsail and rip out guts with a cutlass and follow a treasure map and all those things like pirates do.’

  ‘You opened the front door again?’ Ellen scolded. ‘And more to the point, why aren’t you in bed?’

  I squeezed past her, having handled enough mischievous four-year-old for one day.

  ‘I’ll lock it on my way out,’ I called, slipping my boots on. ‘I promise to tell you all about my adventures on the high seas tomorrow, Hamish, if you promise to go straight back to bed and not open the door again.’

  ‘Can I be your cabin boy?’ Hamish shouted, over the top of his mother’s telling-off.

  ‘Maybe another time.’

  ‘You really didn’t have to do this,’ I said to the pirate as he handed me the bike I’d left leaning on the wall. We started walking back towards the village green.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m curious.’

  ‘Curious about what?’ I glanced at him. ‘Are we going monster-hunting?’

  ‘If there’s a monster in my woods, I’d like to know about it.’

  ‘Too scared to look alone?’

  ‘What do you think I’ve been doing since I dropped you off?’ He paused, waiting for a car to pass before we crossed the street. ‘Are you getting on that rust-bucket or not?’

  I did, pedalling slowly along the now empty road while Mack jogged beside me on the pavement.

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  We turned onto the footpath, the yellow of Sarah’s apartment lights glowing through the gaps in the trees. By the time we reached the Common, my heart was scrabbling to get out of my chest again, via my lungs.

  Mack looked across at me. ‘Maybe you should get a taxi.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I wheezed, ignoring my hands jerking about on the handlebars.

  ‘You don’t need to do this. You’ve got nothing to prove.’

  Oho! New Jenny cried. I think you’ll find I have.

  But the only thing my stupid, stubborn self proved was that I was too stupid and stubborn for my own good. As we reached the tree line my semi-paralysed limbs could no longer pedal fast enough to stay upright, causing me to slowly topple into a pile of nettles. Nettles I hadn’t seen because my eyes, wiser than my idiot brain, refused to remain open and watch the impending spectacle unfold.

  Mack heaved me to my feet. The front light on the bike had gone out, reminding me the rear light wasn’t working to begin with as we plunged into darkness. Guiding my huddled form back to a bench, he lowered us down and pushed my head between my knees.

  ‘Glasses?’ I rasped.

  ‘I’ve got them.’ He took his hand off the back of my neck. ‘I’ll get Sarah.’

  My arm shot out, fingers clutching his hoodie with surprising strength for someone dangerously low on oxygen. ‘No,’ I gasped. ‘I’m fine. Just need to catch. My breath.’ And you are not leaving me here alone, in the dark, while I’m unable to breathe, let alone defend myself from an evil lunatic.

  ‘Okay.’ He shifted a little closer, turning his body slightly so I almost leant on him. ‘No rush.’

  Darn it. The solid weight of Mack’s chest, entirely still save for the steady rise and fall as he breathed against my back, did not help my struggle for composure. I scrabbled for a conversation topic to lighten the atmosphere, tense for a lot of dangerous reasons now that barely included the Beast of Middlebeck.

  ‘Why did you replace my bike tyres?’

  Mack said nothing for a few moments. Which, in the darkness, felt more like several hours.

  ‘It was painful watching you hobble about on the old ones. And it would’ve wrecked the bike if you’d done it much longer.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Hey, neighbour, I noticed you needed new tyres, thought I’d make it my random act of kindness for the week.’ He’d been watching me.

  ‘Something gave me the impression you wouldn’t take kindly to my help. Oh, yeah, it might have been you hollering that you didn’t want my help.’

  ‘You were pretty rude to me when I first arrived.’<
br />
  ‘Right back at you, woman.’

  ‘Well. I was dealing with some issues.’

  ‘As I said…’

  ‘Is there someone out there?’ Sarah’s voice drifted across the Common. Mack went rigid.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he muttered against the top of my head. ‘She’s leaning out of the upstairs window. If we keep still she can’t see us.’

  There was no point in retorting that we weren’t doing anything wrong, or that minutes before Mack had been going to knock on her door with the express purpose of telling Sarah we were here. Me, huddled on a bench, in the complete dark, my glasses off, jacket skew-whiff, with a married man. It was all I could do not to spring up and gallop home.

  ‘The police have been round,’ Sarah shouted. ‘They’re patrolling all night. I can have them here in seconds. With dogs.’

  Mack’s arm began to quake where it gripped the bench next to me. He let out a tiny snort of laughter.

  ‘You are so not a spy,’ I murmured. He sucked in a deep breath, and tried to hold it, his whole body vibrating.

  ‘Jamie?’ Sarah asked, with a trace of hope. ‘Is that you? You can just come and knock on the bloody door, you know.’

  Mack and I willed each other not to release the bubbling volcano of mirth as Sarah continued to call out small talk to the non-existent Jamie. After a minute or so Edison asked, ‘Who are you talking to, Mummy? Is it Spider-Man?’

  ‘Nah, Jamie,’ she replied. ‘But come to think of it, I have never seen Jamie and Spider-Man in the same room. Have you?’

  ‘Jamie, are you Spider-Man?’ Edison yelled across the clearing. ‘Will you come in and show us your web shooters? Mummy wants to see your Spidey sense. Do you want to see his Spidey sense, Mummy?’

  ‘Please stop,’ I whispered through clenched jaws. ‘I can’t take much more of this.’

  ‘Jamie!’ Edison yelled. ‘Why won’t you say anything?’

  ‘Try thinking about the Hoard,’ Mack breathed. ‘Tax returns. Fisher. Whether or not it’s about to start raining.’

  ‘The reason we’re out here in the first place,’ I muttered. And suddenly nothing was funny any more. Not even when Edison offered Jamie/Spider-Man his teddy to cuddle.