hristmas Eve at the Cracker Factory.
Boxes labelled ‘Trumpets’, ‘Drums’, ‘Stars’, ‘Robins’ and ‘Snowmen’ were stacked on either side of the long tables where the crackers were assembled. Sheets of gold cardboard were piled against the cutting machines. Waterfalls of red streamers ran down the walls.
The spitting, snapping, banging, firing, pistol-shot strips that made the crackers crack were safely in tubes on the shelves. Three giant vats, of the Ali Baba kind, marked ‘Hats’, ‘Jokes’ and ‘Balloons’ sat under the funnels that automatically topped them up as more and more crackers were filled, packed and dispatched.
The cracker factory operated all year round but at Christmas-time everybody worked harder to fulfil the orders: Cheap crackers. Economy crackers. Family packs. De-luxe boxes. Sets for children, sets for grown-ups, and some boxes marked ‘Adult’, because they contained very tiny briefs. Most of the crackers had long since been dispatched to stores and from stores to tables as everyone made ready for Christmas Day.
But there was one cracker left to be made. The very last, the very special, the giant charity Christmas cracker, long as a crocodile, fat as a pudding, an enormous golden tube lying on its side, waiting to be stuffed tight as a sausage.
But for now the factory is empty, because it’s early morning, the bus is just arriving at the gates, and Bill and Fred and Amy and Belle are coming in, special shift, cheerful because it’s Christmas now, and they’ll have a drink when they’re done.
The factory is empty. Or is it?
The dog is still asleep in a dream of warm tissue paper, where he crept last night, cold and wet, because somebody left open a small window, and he is only a small dog.
In he crept, under the red safety light that shone on the gold card beneath the paper angels. He rolled on his back to get dry and ate a marzipan donkey – bad for his teeth, but what can you do? – and fell asleep.
In they come, neon lights, radio on, and before the dog can say ‘woof’ a golden tunnel opens right before his brown eyes and a pair of firm, spade-like hands shoves all the tissue paper and all the dog right inside one end of the cracker and seals it with a plastic lid.
He can still see out the other end. He buries his nose deeper, the hair in his ears twitching, as an avalanche of chocolates crashes round his head, followed by an army of teddy bears, an arsenal of pop-guns, a barrage of balloons, beads like hailstones, a string of yo-yos, a peal of whistles, a masked ball of false noses and beards, a plague of clockwork mice and a huddle of evil-looking finger-puppets dressed in black.
Somebody says, ‘Make it good with the explosives, then – this one has to go with a bang!’
A fuse-rod of gun-powdery stuff is poked past the dog’s nose (sneeze) and past his tail (twitch), and out through a hole in the lid. The dog thinks of all those circus animals fired out of cannons, or the ones dropped by parachute behind enemy lines. He thinks of Laika, the Soviet dog shot into space, never to come down, and he thinks of the star-dogs, Canis Major and Minor, tracking the dark fields above, glittering guardians of their rougher kind below.
Perhaps he’s going to join them, sky-set, a new-burned star, Canis Fugit, the flying dog.
But he doesn’t want to be a flying dog!
He wants all four paws on the ground.
Too late!
They are tying the ribbon at both ends round the giant charity Christmas cracker. He feels himself lifted up and carried out like a canine Cleopatra in a roll of carpet, and there he is on a gilded barge – no, it’s the back of a battered truck – driving towards a large hotel with a green-coated doorman at the door, and a white Christmas tree behind the door in the chandeliered lobby.
The dog and his cracker are carried in by specially chosen elves on the minimum wage, to the wonderment and applause of all.
This is the children’s charity party – rich parents have paid a lot so that their children can help children in need without having to meet any of them.
The dog can hear announcements being made – special prizes, and the best prize of all is for the one who wins the cracker.
The dog is worried about what will happen when they find him wrapped up inside. He isn’t anyone’s idea of a free gift; not anyone’s idea of a gift at all. He is a stray. He knows no one will want him. He lives in the park and drinks from the fountain. He came with the fair when he was a puppy, and ran round the rides in his criss-cross mongrel colours, until one day the fair packed up, and the caravans pulled away one by one, and he went to sleep for a bit because he didn’t know what was happening, and when he woke up everyone had gone.
He ran sniffing after them at first, following the scent of diesel and hot dogs, but his paws were slower than their wheels and, though he ran and ran till his pads were raw, at night-time he had to give up and, limping and frightened, through the dark and noise he found his way back to the park.
He was glad of the rustle of the trees and the soft leaves.
Sometimes people feed him sandwiches and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they try to catch him. He knows the sound of the van and he runs down the street where he can slither under a gate until they have gone. Sometimes a human sleeps in the park too, and makes a fuss of him, but the humans move on. You can’t rely on people; he knows that.
Last night was very cold. He was out scavenging for food. The kebab man had gone back to Turkey for Christmas. The dog likes kebabs. He sniffed a bit round the bins but the streets had been cleaned for Christmas.
As he trotted down the road, keeping to the wall, he saw a window ajar, and the red light inside. It looked warm. The rain had turned to sleet.
But now. . .
What will happen when they find him in the cracker?
He can hear a lot of noise. He’ll keep quiet.
The hotel ballroom is crammed with children waving raffle tickets. It’s time for the prizes to be given away – dolls, games, toy guitars, remote-control cars. There’s a man in a spangly jacket with a microphone. He’s on the stage and he wants the children to sing ‘Jingle Bells’.
Then it’s time. The Big One. The Cracker. The elves push it on stage.
What’s the winning number? Yes! It’s 999.
Two children rush forward – a fat boy in a red Elvis suit and a slim girl in a fake-fur coat. Has there been a mistake? There are two winning tickets. The children glare at each other and take up combat positions at either end of the cracker. The room fills with feral energy as the kids in the room take sides:
‘PULL! PULL! PULL!’
The fat boy wraps his fat hands round one end, and the slim girl digs her heels in and just holds on, like she’s seen her mother do in the sales.
But then a pale, quiet boy comes forward and gives the master of ceremonies his ticket. He’s got 999 too.
The master of ceremonies scratches his wig. ‘Whatever is inside this bumper, giant, gigantically exciting cracker, you’ll just have to share.’
The children in the ballroom boo.
‘Sharing is for suckers,’ says the slim girl.
‘It’s Christmas!’ says the master of ceremonies, as though repeating the obvious will make the unexpected happen.
The pale, quiet boy stands back while the boy in the red suit turns redder than his suit as he pulls and pulls at his end of the cracker. The girl throws her whole body weight on top of the cracker to stop her new enemy, the fat boy, winning the bang. The pale, quiet boy standing in the middle, holding his ticket, wonders why he can see a paw beginning to poke through the rip.
BANG! There it goes like somebody split the atom and up in the air is a mushroom cloud made of chocolate and yo-yos and false noses and finger-puppets, and for a second it hangs in perfect space, then, as the contents of the cracker scatter over the ballroom, it’s every child for itself, fighting over silver coins and plastic spiders, and nobody notices that free falling back through the smoky, acrid air is a small terrier with a paper hat round its neck.
‘Where’s the big present?’ demands the fat boy. ‘I won the cracker. I want the big present.’
The dog lands at his feet.
‘What’s that dog doing in the cracker?’ shouts the slim girl.
The dog is used to being chased and shouted at, but this time he knows he’s in trouble, so he thinks on his feet, all four, as fast as his doggy brain can, and he says, ‘ Hi! I’m a magic dog, like the genie in the bottle.’
‘What genie? What bottle?’ says the fat boy, suspicious that he’s missing something. ‘Who stole my genie?’
‘If you’re a MAGIC DOG, yeah, right, where are my three wishes?’ says the slim girl.
The pale, quiet boy says nothing. He’s looking at the dog.
‘OK! One wish each,’ says the dog, pointing at the children with his snouty nose. ‘One. Two. Three! Your wish is my command!’
‘I want a Ferrari,’ shouts the fat boy.
‘Righto,’ says the dog. ‘Give me ten minutes.’
The dog dives under a long table-cloth and races to the end of the ballroom. He is thinking only of escape. He skids across the polished floor, over the carpet, past the cloakroom, sees the zigzag sign for the emergency stairs and reckons that must be for him.
This is an emergency! Go, dog, go!
He helter-skelters down the narrow concrete stairs and lands on his head in the underground car park.
‘Move that Ferrari in Bay 16, will you?’ shouts the valet, winging the keys through the air towards his assistant.
And it must be said that for all our planning and plotting, and deliberating and deciding, the moment that changes everything comes when it will, and cannot be coaxed, or invoked, and should not be missed.
The dog didn’t miss. He stood on his hind-paws and leapt. He leapt out of his scraggy, raggy, tooth-and-nail past and caught the future as it whipped by his jaws.
There he is, back up the whirl of the concrete stairs, through the emergency exit, past the cloakroom, into the ballroom, just escaping concussion from a hundred yo-yos, but with one bound he’s on the stage by the remains of the exploded cracker, and there are the car keys at the feet of the fat boy in the Elvis suit.
‘Underground parking, Bay 16,’ says the dog.
The fat boy’s eyes gleam with greedy happiness. He doesn’t bother to thank the dog, just grabs the keys in his fat fist and waddles off, shoving the smaller children out of his way.
‘Me now,’ orders the thin girl. ‘Me, me me! I want a real fur coat.’
‘That’s unethical,’ replies the dog, who has never heard the word before, but finds it on the tip of his pink tongue.
‘I want one!’ shrieks the girl with such force that all the glass baubles on the Christmas tree shatter to powder.
‘OK!’ says the dog. ‘Your wish is my command.’ He’s about to turn tail, but the pale little boy has knelt down and given him a drink of water and a ham sandwich, from which he has carefully removed the lettuce.
The dog is grateful, and hopes that, whatever happens, he can bring the little boy his wish. But first there is the matter of the fur coat.
He’s lucky, because the parents are arriving to collect their children, just at the moment when gentle tinsel snow begins to fall in the bar next to the ballroom, and wouldn’t a drink be nice, and what’s five minutes in a lifetime, especially at Christmas? But these are the minutes some good angel has earmarked for the dog, who can’t believe his soft brown eyes as coat after coat is passed over to the girls working in the padded cloakroom, and if he just sits quietly, and just waits – yes, it’s a mink!
The girls are busy hanging up the coats in the pile and chatting about best-value turkeys, so they never notice the mink silently sliding away under the counter and across the floor, dog underneath it, twenty times his size, but he’s a terrier and born with the Holy Law of the Jaw – Don’t Let Go.
‘Darling, there’s a coat running across the floor on its own,’ says one very drunk man to his very sober wife.
She doesn’t even look round. ‘Don’t be silly, darling.’
And so the sleek mink coat, piloted by the rough-coated dog, makes its way across the carpet, into the ballroom and towards the bottom of the steps of the stage.
There’s a muffled, ‘Woof!’ The girl is on her mobile phone and doesn’t notice that her heart’s desire has arrived. The pale little boy has been waiting, really a bit anxious about the magic dog, and when he sees the coat like a rug on centipede legs slinking across the floor he knows the dog must be underneath, and runs to pull him out.
‘Are you all right?’ asks the boy.
‘Bit hot,’ says the dog. ‘Tell her the coat’s here.’
The girl covers her face in her hands, then starts clapping, the way she’s seen winners do on TV talent shows. She pulls on the coat, and sashays off the stage and falls flat on her face, just as the master of ceremonies reappears with a microphone in his hand. He looks grim. He looks serious.
It seems that the winning ticket 999 has not been multiplied by three after all. It wasn’t the Christmas elves; it was two felt-tip pens. The holders of ticket numbers 9 and 99 each added the required 9s to their stock. The big present will go to the real number 999 only.
The pale little boy still has his ticket in his hand. The master of ceremonies examines it through a magnifying glass – yes, it’s the one.
The organ strikes up ‘Jingle Bells’, but not loud enough to drown out the terrific crash in the hotel lobby.
Everyone runs to the doors to see a red Ferrari, driven by a red-faced boy in a red suit, stalled in a shatter of plate-glass, with the white Christmas tree jammed through the sunroof and the green doorman sprawled over the bonnet.
‘The dog made me do it!’ screams the boy as the security guards drag him out.
The girl in the fur coat is laughing so much she can hardly hold her phone still enough to take the snap to send to all her friends. As she holds both hands above her head a pair of handcuffs slots securely round her wrists.
‘That girl has stolen my coat. She’s wearing it!’ The Russian model is unhappy. ‘I am a friend of President Putin.’
‘The dog gave it to me,’ wails the girl. ‘Arrest the dog!’
But the dog is nowhere to be seen. The dog has crept behind the blow-up reindeer in the ballroom and he’s not coming out.
As the row in the hotel lobby reaches custard-pie proportions, the master of ceremonies takes the pale, quiet boy to a gold box with a red ribbon and tells him to open it. Hesitatingly the boy pulls the ribbon, because he isn’t used to big presents. He and his mother don’t have much money. Inside the box is a mountain bike.
‘And it’s all yours,’ says the master of ceremonies. ‘You won it fair and square.’
Left alone with the bike, the boy runs his hands over the clean cogs and smooth gears, the lightweight frame and the drop/raise handlebars. It’s the best bike in the world.
‘Well, you won’t be needing a wish, then,’ says the dog invisibly, from behind the blow-up reindeers. ‘Probably for the best, under the circumstances.’
Another shriek comes from the hotel lobby as the Ferrari owner is reunited with the remains of his car. He’s shouting something about a golf course and Donald Trump.
The boy sits on the edge of the stage, swinging his thin legs and looking at the dog’s eyes looking at him. He holds out another sandwich. The dog’s brown eyes dart left, then right, then he trots out, takes the sandwich and sits next to the boy.
‘I’m not a magic dog,’ says the dog. ‘I’m a stray. I got trapped in that cracker. It was so cold last night, and I usually sleep under the wheelie bins in the park, but they had taken them away, and I was shivering, so I went for a walk to get warm and I saw a light in a window and I found a bench full of coloured paper, and fell asleep, and, well, here I am.’
‘I came on the bus,’ said the boy. ‘I live with my mum. She cleans at the hotel so they have to invite me to the party.’
‘What were you going to wish for?’ said the dog. ‘If I had been a magic dog?’
The boy thought for a bit because he was that kind of boy, then he said, ‘If I had a wish, my wish would be to take you home with me and keep you forever.’
‘What?’ barked the dog, his ears going round and round like satellite dishes picking up an alien signal. ‘What? Woof! What? Woof! What? WO-OO-OOF!’
‘I’d wish for you,’ said the boy. ‘My name’s Tommy. What’s yours?’
‘Haven’t got one.’
‘Then I’ll call you Magic,’ said Tommy.
And Tommy asked his mother if he could take Magic home, and she said yes, he could keep the dog, as long as he knew that a dog is forever and not just for Christmas.
That was all right, because Tommy was a forever sort of boy.
Then Tommy and Magic ran round and round and helped Tommy’s mum to collect the streamers and burst balloons and all the things that Christmas leaves behind. And they were happy because they weren’t leaving behind each other.
At last Tommy’s mother finished work, and off they went, all three into the frosty streets to the bus stop.
The dog trotted beside the boy, and looked into the clear sky at the star-dogs, cold and fine, and he knew that, whatever you wish, you can’t wish for better than love.
