Anyone who looked up could see it: TWENTY-SEVEN SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS, in red letters, followed by a storm of dancing Santas, then a whirlwind of angels, trumpets rampant.
The department store was very large. If you were to lay its merchandise end to end, starting with a silk stocking and closing on a plastic baby Jesus, you would have belted the world. The opulence of the store defeated all shoppers. Even in the hectic twenty-seven days to Christmas, even including the extended opening hours, there was no exodus of goods that could make the slightest impression on the well stocked shelves.
O’Brien, who worked in the Pet Department, had watched women stacking their baskets with hand and body lotion in an attractive reindeer wrap. Customers who looked quite normal were falling in delight upon pyramids of fondant creams packed in Bethlehem-by-Night boxes. It made no difference. Whatever they demolished returned. This phenomenon, as far as O’Brien could calculate, meant that two-thirds of the spending world would be eating sticky stuff or spreading it over themselves on December 25th.
She poured out a measure of hand and body lotion and broke open a fondant cream. The filling was the same in both. Somewhere, in a town no one visited, stood a factory dedicated to the manufacture of pale yellow sticky stuff waiting to be despatched in labelless vats to profiteers who traded exclusively in Christmas.
O’Brien didn’t like Christmas. Every year she prayed for an ordinary miracle to take her away from the swelling round of ageing aunts who knitted her socks and asked about her young man. She didn’t have a young man. She lived alone and worked in the Pet Department for company. At a staff discount of 35 percent it made sense for her to have a pet of her own, but her landlady, a Christian Scientist, did not approve of what she called ‘Stray Molecules.’
‘Hair,’ she said, ‘carries germs, and what is hairier than an animal?’
So O’Brien faced another Christmas alone.
In the store shoppers enjoyed the kind of solidarity we read about in the war years. There was none of the vulgar pushing and shoving usually associated with peak time buying. People made way for one another in the queues and chatted about the weather and the impending snowfall.
‘Snow for Christmas,’ said one. ‘That’s how it should be.’ It was right and nice. Enough presents, enough money, clean flame-effect log fires courtesy of the Gas Board. Snow for the children.
O’Brien flicked through the Lonely Hearts. There were extra pages of them at Christmas, just as there was extra everything else. How could it be that column after column of sane, loving, slim men and women, without obvious perversions, were spending Christmas alone? Were the happy families in the department store a beguiling minority?
She had once answered a Lonely Hearts advertisement and eaten dinner with a small young man who mended organ pipes. He had suggested they get married that night by special licence. O’Brien had declined on the grounds that a whirlwind romance would tire her out after so little practice. It seemed rather like going to advanced aerobics when you couldn’t manage five minutes on the exercise bicycle. She had asked him why he was in such a hurry.
‘I have a heart condition.’
So it was like aerobics after all.
After that she had joined a camera club, where a number of men had been keen to help her in the darkroom, but all of them had square hairy hands that reminded her of joke shop gorilla paws.
‘Don’t set your sights too high,’ her aunts warned.
But she did. She set them in the constellations, in the roaring lion, and the flanks of the bull. In December, when the stars were bright, she saw herself in another life, happy.
‘You’ve got to have a dream,’ she told the Newfoundland pup destined to become a Christmas present. ‘I don’t know what I want. I’m just drifting.’
She’d heard that men knew what they wanted, so she asked Clive, the Floor Manager.
‘I’d like to run my own branch of McDonald’s. A really big one with full breakfasts and party seating.’
O’Brien tried, but she couldn’t get excited. It was the same with vacuum cleaners; she could use the power but where was the glamour?
When she returned to her lodgings that evening her landlady was solemnly nailing a holly wreath to the front door.
‘This is not for myself, you understand, it is for my tenants. Next I will hang paper chains in the hall.’ O’Brien’s landlady always spoke very slowly because she had been a Hungarian Countess. A Countess does not rush her words.
O’Brien, still in her red duffle coat, found herself holding on to one end of a paper chain, while her landlady creaked up the aluminium steps, six tacks between her teeth.
‘Soon be Christmas,’ said O’Brien. ‘I’m making a New Year’s resolution to change my life, otherwise, what’s the point?’
‘Life has no point,’ said her landlady. ‘You would be better to get married or start an evening class. For the last seven years I have busied myself with brass rubbings.’
The hall was cold. The paper chain was too short. O’Brien didn’t want advice. She made her excuses and mounted the stairs. Her landlady, perhaps stung by a pang of sympathy, offered her a can of sardines for supper.
‘They are not in tomato sauce but olive oil.’
O’Brien though, had other plans.
Inside her room she began to make a list of the things people thought of as their future: Marriage, children, a career, travel, a home, enough money, lots of money. Christmas time brought these things sharply into focus. If you had them, any of them, you could feel especially pleased with life over the twelve days of feasting and family. If you didn’t have them, you felt the lack more keenly. You felt like an outsider. Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should become the season of conspicuous consumption. O’Brien didn’t know much about theology but she knew there had been a muck-up somewhere.
As she looked at the list, she began to realise that an off the peg future, however nicely designed, wouldn’t be the life she sensed when she looked up at the stars. Immediately she felt guilty. Who was she to imagine she could find something better than other people’s best?
‘What’s wrong with settling down and getting married?’ she said out loud.
‘Nothing,’ said her landlady, appearing around the door without knocking. ‘It’s normal. We should all try to be normal,’ and she put down the sardines on O’Brien’s kitchenette, and left.
‘Nothing wrong,’ thought O’Brien, ‘but what is right for me?’
She lay awake through the night, listening to the radio beaming out songs and bonhomie for Christmas. She wanted to stay under the blankets forever, being warm and watching the bar of the electric fire. She remembered a story she had read as a child about a princess invited to a ball. Her father offered her more than two hundred gowns to choose from but none of them fitted and they were too difficult to alter. At last she went in her silk shift with her hair down, and still she was more beautiful than anyone.
‘Be yourself,’ said O’Brien, not altogether sure what she meant.
At the still point of the night O’Brien awoke with a sense that she was no longer alone in the room. She was right. At the bottom of her bed sat a young woman wearing an organza tutu.
O’Brien didn’t bother to panic. She was used to her neighbour’s friends blundering into the wrong room.
‘Vicky is next door,’ she said. ‘Do you want the light on?’
‘I’m the Christmas fairy,’ said the woman. ‘Do you want to make a wish?’
‘Come on,’ said O’Brien, realising her visitor must be drunk. ‘I’ll show you the way.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said the woman. ‘This is the address I was given. Do you want love or adventure or what? We don’t do money.’
O’Brien thought for a moment. Perhaps this was a new kind of singing telegram. She decided to play along, hoping to discover the sender.
‘What can you offer?’
The stranger pulled out a photograph album. ‘In here are all the eligible men in London. It’s indexed, so if you want one with a moustache, look under “M,” where you will also find “moles.” ’
O’Brien had a look. She could think of nothing but those booklets of Sunny Smiles she used to buy to help the orphans. Seeing her lack of enthusiasm, the stranger offered her a second album.
‘Here’s one with all the eligible women. It’s all the same to me.’
‘Shouldn’t you be singing all this?’ asked O’Brien, thinking it was time to change the subject.
‘Why?’ said the fairy. ‘Does conversation bother you?’
‘No, but you are a Singing Telegram.’
‘I am not a Singing Telegram. I am a fairy. Now what is your wish?’
‘OK,’ said O’Brien, wanting to go back to sleep. ‘I wish I was blonde.’
Then she must have gone back to sleep straightaway, because the next thing she heard was the alarm ringing in her ears. She dozed, she was late, no time for anything, just into her red duffle coat and out into a street full of shoppers, mindful of their too few days to go.
At work, on her way up to the Pet Department, she met Janice from Lingerie, who said, ‘Your hair’s fantastic. I didn’t recognise you at first.’
O’Brien was confused. She hadn’t had time to brush her hair. Was it standing on end? She went into the Ladies and peered into the mirror. She was blonde.
‘It really suits you,’ said Kathleen, from Fabrics and Furnishings. ‘You should do more with your make-up now.’
‘Do more?’ thought O’Brien, who did nothing. She decided to go back home, but in the lift on the way out, she met the actor who had come to play Santa …
‘It’s awful in the Grotto. It’s made of polystyrene and everyone knows that’s bad for the lungs.’ O’Brien sympathised.
‘Listen,’ said Santa, ‘there’s two dozen inflatable gnomes in the basement. I’ve got to blow them up. If you’ll help me, I’ll buy you lunch.’
For the first time in her life O’Brien abandoned herself to chaos and decided it didn’t matter. What surprises could remain for a woman who had been visited in the night by a Non-Singing Telegram and subsequently turned blonde? Blowing up gnomes was a breath of fresh air.
‘I like your hair,’ said the actor Santa.
‘Thanks,’ said O’Brien, ‘I’ve only just had it done.’
At the vegetarian cafe where every lentil bake came with its own sprig of holly, Santa asked O’Brien if she would like to come for Christmas dinner.
‘There won’t be any roast corpse though.’
‘That’s all right,’ said O’Brien, ‘I’m not a vegetarian but I don’t eat meat.’
‘Then you are a vegetarian.’
‘Aren’t you supposed to join something?’
‘No,’ said Santa. ‘Just be yourself.’
In the mirror on the wall O’Brien smiled. She was starting to like being herself. She didn’t go back to work that afternoon. She went shopping like everybody else. She bought new clothes, lots of food, and a set of fairy lights. When the man at the stall offered her a cut price Christmas tree, she shouldered it home. Her landlady saw her arriving.
‘You are early today,’ she said very slowly. ‘I see you are going to get pine needles on my carpet.’
‘Thanks for the sardines,’ said O’Brien. ‘Have a bag of satsumas.’
‘Your hair is not what it was last night. Did something happen to you?’
‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘but it’s a secret.’
‘I hope it was not a man.’
‘No it was a woman.’
Her landlady paused, and said, ‘I am going now to listen to the Gospel according to St Luke on my wireless.’
O’Brien put the potatoes in the oven and strung her window with fairy lights. Outside the sky was strung with stars.
At eight o’clock, when Santa arrived, wet and cold and still in uniform, O’Brien lit the candles beneath the tree. She said,
‘If you could make a wish what would it be?’
‘I’d wish to be here with you.’
‘Even if I wasn’t blonde?’
‘Even if you were bald.’
‘Merry Christmas,’ said O’Brien.