Christmas

It had snowed again in Parma in the night.

16, said Tyler’s message, at seven, under a photograph of the same driveway and the same white hump and the same small figure in the pink hat with the yardstick, a little further up the yardstick than before. merry xmas fred. did u keep the fire

He was already at Tyler’s desk in the coat. On the two screens the snow was falling on the forest and the figure in furs was coming back from the edge of the camp with its arms full, and the fire went up, and the thirty-one stood straighter.

Yes, he wrote. Every day.

legend, wrote Tyler.

Then, a minute later: grandma says the plate was empty but it was still yours. she says thats allowed.

---

Sam went to church at nine.

He went with his mother’s list, and chose, by the distance in minutes on foot, the brick church of 1889 on the rise south of the butte, and came back at half past ten with the order of service folded into four in his top pocket, and stood in the kitchen doorway, where Rhys was watching the pudding.

“They prayed for you,” said Sam.

Frederick, at the table, looked up.

“Everybody does. It’s in the book.”

“I know it’s in the book. I’d never heard it in a room.” Sam took the order of service out of his pocket and unfolded it and looked at it, as though checking. “The King, and the Governor-General, and the Lord Marcher, and the Diet. In that order.” He folded it again. “And then the vicar said and for all who are far from home this Christmas, and I thought, that’s us. That’s all three of us.” He put it back in his pocket. “So I said amen louder than the others. A woman in front turned round.”

“Two churches,” said Frederick.

“Three,” said Sam. “Today.”

---

The pudding had come out of Rhys’s mother’s parcel in a white cloth tied at the top with string, round and dark and heavy as a cannonball, with a card tucked under the string in her handwriting, which was large and leaned forward as though it were hurrying to catch something.

Steam 2 hrs. Water halfway up the bowl, NOT OVER. Keep it topped up. Turn out onto a plate. Warm the brandy in a spoon, pour over, light it. STAND BACK, RHYS. Love Mum xxx

There had been a very small bottle of brandy in the parcel, the kind they give you on aeroplanes, tucked into the toe of one of the reindeer socks.

It had been on the left ring since half past ten, in a saucepan with the water halfway up the bowl and not over, and Sam had checked the water every fifteen minutes and written it down. The kitchen was full of steam and smelled of fruit and spice and something dark under them like the inside of a cupboard in an old house, and the window onto the arcade had steamed up, and Rhys had written on it with one finger, backwards, so that it could be read from outside, HAPPY CHRISTMAS SARGE.

“She can’t see it from across the road,” said Frederick.

“She’ll know it’s there,” said Rhys.

At half past twelve they turned it out. Rhys did it, in oven gloves that said PROPERTY OF RESIDENCE LIFE on the backs: the bowl upside down over a plate, a shake, a long moment, a soft heavy sound; and he lifted the bowl away, and there it was, dark and round and steaming and perfect, and none of them said anything, because it was beautiful.

“My mum,” said Rhys, quite quietly, and did not finish.

Sam warmed the brandy in a tablespoon over the left ring, because Sam was the only one of them the card had not specifically warned, and poured it over the top, and it ran down the sides in shining lines; and Rhys struck a match from his kit, which was for something else, and held it to the edge of the pudding, and stood back.

It went up blue.

It went up all at once, in a soft rush, a blue flame all over it, almost invisible, standing up off the dark surface like the ghost of a fire, and the three of them stood round the table in the steam and looked at it, and Frederick thought that he had seen the Crown jewels of four countries and the sun come up over Berlin from the top of a monument, and that he had never seen anything as pretty in his life.

Then the alarm went.

---

It went in the kitchen first, a small white disc on the ceiling above the hob that none of them had looked at once in eight days, with a shriek like a kettle being murdered. Then it went everywhere: the lounge, the lobby, every landing and every corridor of all five floors, the whole of the empty building screaming at the top of its voice for a Christmas pudding, and every door on the ground floor unlocking itself with a heavy clack, one after another, like a row of people sitting up in bed.

Rhys and Sam moved.

They did not discuss it. Before he had properly understood that the noise was a fire alarm he was in the corridor behind the lounge with Rhys’s hand flat between his shoulder blades and Sam a yard ahead, going not towards the front doors, where anybody would go, but left, to the fire door at the end of the ground floor, the one nobody used, which Sam pushed open with his shoulder, and looked through, and nodded.

“The paragraph,” said Sam, over the noise.

“What?”

“The paragraph about the fire door,” said Sam, and they went through it, into the sun.

The assembly point was a sign on a post at the far end of the car park, and they stood under it in the sun, Frederick in his Swedish coat and Sam in the grey quarter-zip and Rhys still in the oven gloves, holding at chest height the plate with the pudding on it, from which the last of the blue flame was just going out.

Behind them the building shrieked.

“You brought it,” said Frederick.

Rhys looked down at the pudding.

“I didn’t think,” said Rhys. “I just picked it up.” He looked at it a little longer. “My mum made it.”

Across the road, over the dentist’s, the blind went down an inch.

---

The fire engine came in four minutes and forty seconds, which Sam recorded.

It came round the corner with its lights going and no siren, a big red engine of the Tempe Fire Department, and four people got down from it without hurrying, as people do who have been to a great many shrieking buildings and found almost all of them shrieking about nothing; and three went in through the front doors, and the fourth came across the car park to the sign.

She was about fifty, with grey hair cut short under the helmet and a face the sun had been at for a long time, and she looked at the three of them, and at the plate in Rhys’s oven gloves, and at the last thin wisp of smoke going up off the top of it into the clear blue air.

“That it?” she said.

“Yes,” said Rhys.

“Kitchen?”

“Ground floor. Behind the lounge.”

She spoke into the radio on her shoulder, briefly, and listened, and the shriek inside the building stopped, quite suddenly, in the middle, and left behind it a silence so complete that they could hear a bird somewhere in the palo verdes by the arcade, and the engine ticking.

“Smoke head over the hob,” said the captain. “You didn’t burn anything. You just put a flame under a detector. They don’t like it.” She looked at the pudding. “Christmas pudding.”

“Yes.”

“My grandmother made those. In Bisbee. Every year she set it on fire at the table and set off the alarm, and every year my grandfather took the battery out on Christmas Eve, and every year she put it back on Christmas morning because she said it wasn’t safe.” She considered the pudding. “Eighty-eight, she did that. Last one was the year I made captain.”

Then she looked at Frederick.

She looked at him for perhaps a second, under the sign at the end of the car park, in his coat, and he saw her know. It went across her face and away again like the shadow of a bird. And then she decided, quite visibly, as the woman from Duluth had decided at the till, that it was Christmas, and that it was not the most interesting thing about the morning.

“Merry Christmas, sir,” said the captain.

“Merry Christmas.”

She looked back at the pudding.

“We’ve got about twenty minutes,” she said, “before somebody in Mesa does something stupid with a turkey fryer. They always do. Every year, about two.” She looked at Rhys. “That going?”

---

They ate it in the car park, the seven of them, round the back step of the fire engine, with plastic forks from the kitchen that Sam went back in for, now that the building had been declared to be a building again.

It was very good, dark and rich and still hot in the middle, and a young firefighter with a moustache he was evidently proud of ate three pieces and said that it was better than his mother’s, and that if that ever got back to his mother he would deny it under oath. Another found a coin in hers, a small old silver one, and held it up, and Rhys went very pink and said that his mother put one in every year and that it meant luck.

“Luck for what?” said the firefighter.

“Just luck,” said Rhys. “In general.”

“I’ll take it,” said the firefighter, and put it in the top pocket of her coat, and buttoned the pocket.

At five past one Rhys’s phone went. He looked at it, and showed it to Frederick without saying anything.

Pudding?

Sam carried a slice across the road on a paper plate at ten past, with a plastic fork, under a napkin, and went up the outside stair beside the dentist’s and knocked, and the door opened about a foot, and the plate went into the gap, and the door shut; and he came back down and across the road with exactly the face he had gone with.

“She said thank you,” said Sam.

“Anything else?”

Sam considered.

“She said it was a little dry,” he said, “and that we were to tell Rhys’s mother it was perfect.”

At a quarter past one, somewhere to the east, a long way off, a siren started; and the captain looked at her watch, and said “Mesa,” without any surprise at all, and they went.

---

His mother rang at two, which was nine at night in London, and he took it on the third step from the landing, under the narrow window, where he took all her calls.

“Where are you?” he said.

“On my chair,” said his mother, in Swedish.

He could hear it: the hollow quiet of a stairwell with stone in it, a clock below, and somewhere further down a door and a laugh that was Ebba’s.

“Your father is on the step below me,” said his mother. “He has brought a cushion. He has brought two cushions, one for each of us, and he has been told by Brannigan that he may sit there for half an hour and no longer, and he has told Brannigan that he was King of fourteen countries for fifty-six years, and Brannigan has said yes, sir, half an hour.” A pause. “It is the best seat in the house, this chair. Everybody who goes up or down has to pass me, and I tell them what they are doing wrong.” Another pause. “We had his Christmas at one. A turkey, which is a bird I do not believe should be eaten, and crackers; and he read the joke out of every cracker aloud, one word at a time, so that they were the longest jokes in the history of England, and by the end of each one nobody could remember how it had begun, and nobody minded.”

He thought of a kitchen on the other side of Tempe, and a chair at the end of a long table, by a stove.

“The porter’s mother does that.”

“Then she is a sensible woman,” said his mother. “Tell me about your Christmas. Everything. Slowly. I have been sitting here for an hour waiting to hear it, and your father has been sitting on the step below me waiting with me, and we have been extremely patient, both of us.”

So he told her.

He told her about Tyler’s sixteen inches, and the fire, and Sam’s church. And then he told her about the pudding, slowly, as she had asked, all of it, the card and the spoon and the blue flame and the shriek and the fire door and Rhys in the oven gloves under the sign at the end of the car park with the pudding in both hands; and somewhere around the oven gloves he heard her begin to laugh, and by the fire engine she was laughing properly, the real one, low and all the way down, the laugh that the room heard, so that he had to stop and wait for her; and he heard, below her, very faintly, a sound he had known since he was fifteen, which was his father laughing without any voice at all, the breath going in and out in short pieces.

“A captain,” said his mother, when she could. “From Bisbee.”

“Her grandmother did it every year.”

“Of course she did,” said his mother, and laughed again; and then stopped, and he waited for it, and it came: the breath, long and careful, drawn up as though it had to be lifted, and a moment longer than a breath should be, and then another; and then her ordinary voice, lightly, “Your father would like the telephone. He has been holding out his hand for some time like a man at a bus stop.”

---

“Fire,” said his father, in English, at once. “Engine.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” A breath. Then, with enormous satisfaction, as though it were the best thing he had heard all year: “Pudding.”

“Rhys’s mother made it.”

“Rhys.” His father considered the name, and set it down somewhere, carefully, to keep. Then: “Marks.”

Frederick shut his eyes on the stairs.

“Three Bs,” he said. “And a C.”

There was a silence on the line from London. It went on for a little while.

“C,” said his father.

“In the Charter.”

The silence went on a little longer. And then, very faintly, he heard it begin again below the telephone, the breath going in and out in short pieces, and go on, and go on, until he could hear his mother above it saying “Ernest” in the voice of a woman trying not to start again herself.

“Folder,” said his father, when he could. “Kept it.” A breath. “Front.”

“You put it at the front?”

“Front,” said his father, with dignity, and that was the end of that.

Then, after a pause, in the voice he used for the things he had been saving:

“Paddington.”

“Did you go?”

“This morning.” A breath. “Brannigan. Drove.”

“There aren’t any trains on Christmas Day.”

“No.” His father said it with deep contentment. “Board.” A breath. “Empty.” And then the rest of it came all at once, the way his father’s sentences came when he had been carrying them about with him: “Sixty years. Never seen it. Empty.” A breath. “Nothing in. Nothing out.” Another. “Nobody. Late.”

Frederick sat on the step and laughed, quietly, at the narrow window.

“Was it beautiful?”

“Yes,” said his father.

There was a pause on the line. He heard his father shift on the step, and the cushion, and the stick laid down against the stair rods, brass, with a small sound.

“Your mother,” said his father.

Frederick waited.

“Has,” said his father. A breath. The word did not come. He waited for it, the way he had learned to wait since the September he was fifteen, without filling the space, because if you filled it the word went away and did not come back. “Has. Been.” Another breath, longer. He heard his father looking for it, somewhere in the house of himself, along corridors, opening doors. “Thinking,” his father found, at last.

And above him, at once, quite quietly, his mother’s voice: “Ernest.”

“Yes.”

The line was still for a moment.

“Not,” said his father, obediently. A breath. “Today.” And then, in a different voice, the one he had used on the platform at Moreton-in-Marsh with a ticket in his hand: “Happy.” A breath. “Christmas.”

The telephone went back up a step.

---

“Your father has been talking too much,” said his mother, in Swedish. “It is catching. It is a dreadful house for it.”

“Have you finished?” he said. “Thinking.”

There was a silence. He knew its length. It was the one in which she was deciding whether to tell him something, the longer one; and it went on, on a green chair halfway up a staircase in London at a quarter past nine on Christmas night, with his father on the step below her and the clock below that, and Ebba’s laugh somewhere far down in the house, and the breath; and then it ended, and she had decided.

“Yes,” said his mother. “I finished at lunch. Somewhere in the middle of one of your father’s jokes, which was about a penguin, and took four minutes.” A pause. “I will telephone you tomorrow, Fredde. At the same time.”

“Why not now?”

“Because tomorrow is not Christmas.”

He sat on the step and looked at the narrow window, and the concrete fin, and the strip of car park beyond it, where the sun was on the tarmac and there was nobody at all.

“Is it the valve?”

“It is not the valve. The valve is the same. The man with the clean hands said so on Thursday.” She paused. “It is a thing I would like to say properly, on a day that is not for anything else. Today is for your Christmas, and Rhys’s mother’s pudding, and a captain from Bisbee.” Another pause, shorter. “And for your father, who has been to Paddington and seen nothing, and is happier than I have seen him since the summer.”

“Mamma.”

“Tomorrow,” said his mother, and it was the no there was no door in, said gently, and turned round so that it faced the other way.

---

Theo rang at eight, as he had every Sunday since the clocks went back, from the Hartigans’ flat in New Westminster, with a great deal of noise behind him and somebody, who would be Kate, shouting about a cracker.

“Merry Christmas, Freddie.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“Dad carved. He carved like he drives. Both hands, indicating.” A door shut, and the noise went down. Theo had gone into another room. “I heard about the fire engine.”

“How?”

“Rhys sent me a picture,” said Theo. “A pudding in oven gloves, in a car park, in front of a fire engine. No words.” He laughed, but not for long. “How is she?”

“She’s on the chair.”

“For how long?”

“The whole call.”

Theo did not say anything.

“She’s going to ring tomorrow,” said Frederick. “Same time. She said there’s something she wants to say properly. She said tomorrow isn’t Christmas.”

The silence on the line went on for some time. He could hear, very faintly, through a wall, the Hartigans’ Christmas going on without Theo: a television, and Kate laughing, and Peter Hartigan saying something in the voice of a man reading out the stops.

“Theo.”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Theo’s voice had gone to the one from the Hartigans’ kitchen, okay, Freddie, eat your dinner. “Ring me tomorrow. Will you? After.”

“After what?”

“After she rings,” said Theo. “Whatever time it is. I’ll have the phone on.” A pause. “I’ll have it on all day.”

---

At ten he heard Mr Luna come on, three floors down, and the radio, and the day porter going off.

He did not go down. He sat on Tyler’s bed by the window in the dark, in the coat, with the fire burning low on the two screens beside him and the thirty-one standing round it in the snow, and looked out at the butte, black against a sky full of stars, and at the A on its flank, which he could not see and knew was there.

It was five in the morning in London. She would not be asleep. She would be in the chair by the window with the lamp off, or on the green chair on the landing, halfway, with her hands in her lap, deciding how to say the thing properly, the way she decided everything, slowly, from several.

Tomorrow was not Christmas.

He sat by the window until the fire on the screens had burned right down to a red heap with no flame on it, and the figures in furs had come in close round it with their hands out; and then, although Tyler had said that morning was best, and it was not morning, he leaned across and woke the mouse, and clicked the brown square, and clicked the fire, and watched it go up.