Michael’s Fasting
for Christmas
It was the third most traumatic experience in your life. That’s what Amy read in a magazine. Coming in, in third place after death and divorce—bronze medal, not a winner but not a loser either—was moving house. Such an ordinary, everyday experience, but there it was, in the top three. Amy wondered if they had asked the Africans. Did this survey include the Africans too? She thought a lot about them these days. Not as much as when she was a kid and her mother used them as an example for why she should eat all her dinner, and also for why she couldn’t have ice cream for afternoon tea, but quite a lot all the same. Do the African children have ice cream? Amy’s mother used to say to her, knowing full well that she knew the answer. Maybe all the guilt had got into her head like some poor soggy Catholic.
Anyway, being starving but still alive was probably more traumatic than moving house. If Amy could find out who had conducted the survey, she would send that to them in a letter. She could get it printed on a teeshirt. She could start a campaign. She thought about it all afternoon, and then she realised something. She couldn’t do any of these things; she couldn’t because she was just as bad as the rest; she couldn’t because at the moment when she read the statistic, standing in the checkout queue in the supermarket, she had thought to herself, No. No, she had thought, Christmas should be there in third place. Just like the true middle-class girl she was, she had thought instantly of trauma and Christmas.
She had remembered the Africans later.
That was the year that Michael fasted. That’s probably why it was on Amy’s mind, Christmas that is, because it was the 22nd of December; the countdown was well underway. The next day her mother called her at work, on the direct line that was reserved for emergencies. That’s what Amy told her, anyway.
‘Well, he’s fasting,’ she said. No hello, how are you. No explanation, just straight in there, as if she was picking up on a conversation that had been left off mid-thread.
Amy was sorting the papers on her desk into piles, most important to least. She bit at her fingernail.
‘Michael,’ her mother said definitively. ‘He’s fasting. For Christmas.’
There was a pregnant pause, and Amy heard a little puff of breath coming down the phone line. She felt as if it could hit her in the ear, like spit.
‘What do you mean he’s fasting?’
‘He’s fasting,’ her mother said again. ‘Some health kick. It’s a ten-day one, and he says he won’t stop, not even for Christmas dinner. Meredith called me in tears.’
Meredith was Amy’s oldest sister. She got weepy a lot. It was her allergies, apparently.
Amy let out a cynical snort and leaned back in her chair.
‘Well, I think that’s hilarious,’ she said.
‘Hilarious?’ her mother said. ‘The Stroms are coming this year, and Grandma and Grandpop. Hilarious? Amy, you really do have a warped sense of humour.’ Her voice quavered a little as she said it, but not in an irritable way; she sounded almost admiring.
‘Maybe he’s trying to be Christ,’ Amy said, chewing on her fingernails, staring absent-mindedly out the window.
‘Trying to be nice?’ her mother said. ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’
‘No—Christ.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ her mother said wistfully, suddenly calm, disinterested, the excitement of the gossip seeming to have drained her. ‘Yes, maybe.’
*
Meredith had met Michael six months after her divorce from Jeff (life trauma no. 2, according to the New Woman magazine).
She had started seeing him almost immediately.
He took such good care of himself, she told Amy once, and when she said it Amy imagined a man who wore beige pants and boat shoes and washed his hands with a fragrant moisturising soap. That wasn’t what Michael was at all; that wasn’t quite the care Meredith had been talking about. It was more an inner sort of cleanliness that he was into, polishing organs instead of shoes, that sort of thing.
He owned a Water Alkaliser that had cost a thousand dollars, and a juicer that swallowed lemons whole, transforming them into a milky liquid that was as good as doing a six-week liver cleanse, according to Michael. Meredith, who was only thirty-two, but who had somehow started to lose her lustre, took on a certain pre-pubescent glow once he started feeding her his concoctions. Amy’s mother noticed it too, but put it down to new love, or something. After Jeff, she said, any man with hairs on his chest would do the trick, no matter who he was or what he was into. Amy was inclined to agree, about Jeff anyway, but she didn’t know if love had ever improved her skin that much. She even got Meredith to send her a pamphlet on Colloidal Silver, which was the latest advance in health technology, apparently.
The peculiar thing was that despite all the inner vacuuming Michael did, he didn’t look that much the better for it. He was a good ten years older than Meredith, and maybe compared to other forty-somethings he was doing okay, but there was something about him that wasn’t quite right. His skin had a yellowish tinge, like he was always standing under fluorescent lights, and it seemed to be pulled tight across his shaved head: tight as a drum, almost parched, like the skin of a mummy.
When Amy said that to her mother, she’d taken it quite the wrong way.
‘Well motherhood is very hard,’ she’d said, ‘but considering that I’ve probably lost my looks for you, I don’t think you should go around shouting the fact from the rooftops.’
‘No,’ Amy said. ‘A mummy. A dead one.’
‘Oh,’ her mother said, ‘those.’
*
The drive from Amy’s house to her parents’ took an hour and a half. They had wanted her to go up on Christmas Eve so they could do stockings on the end of the bed, just like when she was small, but she said no, using the traffic as a suitably safety-conscious excuse.
Ben had flown out at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve. His family liked to celebrate Christmas at different geographical sites each year. For the last one they’d gone to some mountain on the Volcanic Plateau, and worn Santa hats on the tramp up there. There was a photo of them all garbed up, eating turkey sandwiches, sitting cross-legged around a gingham cloth spread across the dust. This year they were going to a lake, were going to have smoked trout and pavlova out of a chilly bin, sitting right out in the middle of the water in a family friend’s boat.
Ben tried to pretend it wasn’t fun, for her sake.
‘Have a Merry Christmas,’ he’d said to her, standing in the wind outside the airport, holding her hand in a non-committal way.
‘Yeah,’ Amy said brightly. ‘You too.’
He tried to smile as if he wouldn’t. Whatever.
Amy had a piece of toast for breakfast, and packed her bags, and set off just after nine. She listened to talkback radio to avoid the hymns.
‘Mer-ry Christmas!’ the host kept hollering every time a new caller came through. One woman, her words slurring slightly, said she was going to be celebrating with her dear friend Gypsy, which sounded fine until she let slip that Gypsy was her cat. At that point Amy turned the radio off and sang ‘O Tannenbaum’—which they’d learned in German at school—just to see if she could remember the words. She was okay on the chorus, but the verses, she discovered, required a certain amount of concentration.
She pulled into her parents’ drive just after eleven. Her mother’s wide white face appeared in the kitchen window. She came hoppity-hopping out the back door.
‘You made it here in one piece!’ she said tremulously, as if it was one of the great miracles of modern-day life.
Which it was, really, if you thought about it.
Meredith and Michael, and Howard and Ann Strom, and their friend Bill, and Amy’s father were all sitting in the living room.
‘Here she is!’ Amy’s father said. He had a paper crown on his head, and little tufts of hair poked out the top and sides, seeming quite out of place and odd, like the hair on a hippopotamus. The couch seemed to be in the process of swallowing him whole, sucking his small soft body down, down into its stuffing.
He looked remarkably cheery for a man about to disappear.
‘This is our Amy,’ he said to the room, even though everyone there had met her before.
They nodded and shuffled, Meredith launching herself out of her armchair and duck-footing it over to Amy to give her a wet kiss on the cheek; Michael getting in the queue behind her; Amy’s father and the Stroms heaving themselves off the couch. They all lined up, like children waiting to have their photo with Father Christmas.
‘Merry Christmas!’ Amy said to each one of them.
Really, all she needed was a beard.
At 11.30 her grandparents arrived, which was always a miracle—they were in their nineties and still believed they could drive—and the line-up re-formed, with Amy a part of it this time, standing at the back next to Howard Halitosis Strom, who asked her for the second time what it was she was doing with her life these days. For the second time that day she tried to use diversion tactics to avoid admitting that she spent eight hours a day sitting at a desk doing next to nothing. Howard smiled. He wasn’t the least bit interested in the answer anyway.
‘And your father tells me,’ he said, aiming the words moistly at her left cheek, ‘that Zoë is doing extremely well.’
This was the conversation he really wanted to have. He just had to get past the preliminaries first.
‘Yes,’ said Amy, smiling cheerily back, ‘she is.’
‘How splendid,’ said Howard. And then he was washed away on the hellos.
This is how it would go, this Christmas like any other: Amy fielding questions about Zoë who probably wouldn’t have managed to field them all on her own, even if she’d been there. Zoë was the middle sister, and because she was closer in age and looks to Amy, it was Amy, not Meredith, whom everyone went to for information.
She was trying her luck in London, after spending four years on a soap in Australia. There had been an article on her in Woman’s Day. There were whole websites dedicated to the death of her character, Lydia Ford, killed off in a car accident. Zoë had recently got her first role in the UK, playing a young sassy mother in a VW Beetle advertisement. There was a certain irony in this, Amy thought, considering what a car had done to poor Lydia Ford.
Did anyone else see the irony in this?
She didn’t like to bring it up for fear of sounding spiteful.
Which she wasn’t. Spiteful, that is. It was just that the same conversation got wheeled out over and over again, like a gelatinous stew on a hospital tray. Two years ago, at a family reunion, distant relative after distant relative had launched their quivering selves towards her, believing her to be the shining star. She had politely pointed each one of them in the right direction, over by the presents pile, or the punch bowl, and off they’d gone, unashamedly, as if they were disciples on a pilgrimage to Mecca. As the night wore on, and it certainly did just that, Amy’s patience began to wear a little thin as well.
‘So are you the actress?’ a boggly-eyed old trout asked as Amy tried to slip outside for some air.
‘No,’ said Amy, ‘I’m the stripper.’
‘Right,’ the woman said, ‘I mean wrong—wrong one.’ And she opened and shut her small round fishy mouth and swallowed twice—glug, glug—like there was something stuck there in her throat.
‘I can see that now, actually,’ she said. ‘Now that I’m up close.’ She tapped at Amy’s arm with her fingers, trying to be affectionate but actually pushing her away, and scooted back inside.
‘So are you the piranha?’ Amy called after her, once the door had swung back into place. She called it, but it was under her breath really.
Bad move, nonetheless.
Christmas dinner was scheduled for one o’clock, but first they had to put on hats to make it feel like a celebration. Amy’s father was leading the way in that regard; he’d been wearing his, apparently, since 10 a.m. He was decreasing in age, it seemed; was sweeter and odder every time Amy saw him. She expected, come Easter, for him to be wearing school socks and a blazer; nappies the Christmas after that.
‘It covers up my bald patches,’ he said to her jollily, unfolding a paper hat for her—a green one, because he knew it was her favourite colour. ‘And it pins my ears back.’
‘Do you think it can cover my face?’ Amy said.
‘What would you want to do that for?’ he said in a tone only a parent could use.
She pulled the crinkled paper down over her hair and head—hard, so that it ripped. She hadn’t meant for that to happen. It came away in her hands, a flaccid strip of tissue.
Without a word, her father trotted off to the kitchen to get her another.
Amy’s grandparents, Grandma and Grandpop, perched side by side on the couch, their hands in their laps, were already wearing theirs. They were still snipping at each other, quietly, about Grandpop’s failure to brake fast enough at the zebra crossing.
‘They hadn’t even stepped out onto the road, love,’ he hissed, aiming the words out the corner of his mouth.
‘Yes, dear,’ she replied. ‘So you keep saying. But sometimes, you know, people speed up.’ She blinked rapidly as she said the last two words, demonstrating the acceleration, it seemed, with her lids.
Howard Strom was sitting in the armchair over by the window.
‘So, your granddaughter Zoë,’ he said, ‘is making it big in London, I hear.’
‘Sorry, dear?’ Amy’s Grandma leaned forward in her chair, clasping her hands tighter in her lap. Being hard of hearing ran in the family. Like mother, like daughter, Amy thought, and then realised that if they were like that she probably would be one day too.
‘Your granddaughter!’ he shouted. ‘Mak-ing it Big! In London!’
‘Oh yes,’ Grandma said, ‘but she isn’t here today—’ and then she paused, uncertain in her certainty— ‘is she?’
In the kitchen, Meredith and Amy’s mother were making preparations for the feast. Meredith had developed a brusqueness of movement she brought out just on family occasions, just around their mother. It was an ‘everything is under control’ quality—slightly tight lipped—which was amusing considering she only wore Indian cotton, and as a result looked floaty and ethereal, at first glance. Amy’s mother was seeing to the turkey, and Meredith was vigorously chopping parsley, the knife rattling against the board. She’d whipped her dark, fuzzy hair into a ponytail on the top of her head, and each curly strand shimmied with her movement.
‘Now Michael will have a little bit of turkey, won’t he?’ said Amy’s mother, fowl fat up to her wrists.
‘I’ve already told you, Mum,’ Meredith said. ‘You know the answer.’
‘A little bit can’t hurt, surely.’
Meredith ground one toe against the lino and scratched her head.
‘He might have a couple of Dad’s sugar snap peas,’ she said.
‘Well, what’s the difference then? Peas? Turkey? They both go in your mouth.’
‘He’d only do it so he’d have something to put on his plate.’ She bit her at her lip and raised her eyes to the ceiling in an exaggerated Don’t Cry display.
‘Jesus wept,’ said Amy’s mother.
‘Well, don’t make me weep too.’
Amy moved into the kitchen between them, suddenly aware of the knife in Meredith’s hand and her seemingly frayed nerves.
‘Maybe we could put him on the table as a centrepiece,’ she said. She was trying to be light. ‘We could put a glaze on him. He could meditate.’
She spotted Michael out the kitchen window then, down by the back fence, hovering around the vegetable garden. His lanky frame was stooped, the shoulders rolling forward slightly towards his chest, his oval head glowing in the midday light.
‘Goodness, Amy!’ said her mother. That appalled quaver again, with the undertone of delight. ‘What a sense of humour!’ And she lifted the slippery bird up out of its baking dish and dropped it heavily onto an enormous plate. It slid out of her hands, looking for a moment like a soaped-up baby, skating helplessly under the water in a bath.
Amy’s father came into the kitchen and grabbed another paper crown out of the packet.
‘I’ll take this out to Michael,’ he said to Meredith, patting her supportively on the back. ‘Just because he isn’t eating, doesn’t mean he can’t join in on the fun now, does it?’
He headed off to the vegetable patch, putting on a Christmas carols CD on his way out the door.
Amy went to get the champagne glasses from the cabinet. Grandma and Grandpop were still in the living room, trying to have a conversation with the Stroms’ friend Bill, who was trying to have a conversation with them back. Neither party was having much success. Howard was studying the family photos on the bookcase; Ann was setting the table. It seemed that everyone was waiting for something to happen. Perhaps just for the food. Amy headed back into the kitchen and finished her job, mixing the last of the cream into the trifle.
‘What about a little glass of sherry,’ Amy’s mother said to Meredith, ‘just a little one? For Michael?’
Meredith said, ‘Mum,’ which really meant no.
At 1.15—a little behind schedule—they all gathered around the dining-room table, and spread their Christmas napkins on their laps, and adjusted their party hats.
Amy’s father turned down the music, just a touch.
‘Well, Happy Christmas everyone,’ said Amy’s mother, and they all started to eat. All of them, that is, except for Michael, who took small sips of his glass of water, and every now and then looked at his plate—large, white, empty, apart from four pea pods, still with their stalks—almost wonderingly.
‘Aren’t you having any turkey, old chap?’ said Howard Strom, chewing on a crisp piece of skin as he spoke.
The rings under Michael’s eyes seemed to grow darker.
‘Oh no thanks,’ he said, as brightly as he could.
‘Some roast vegetables?’ said Howard, clearly not getting the message, behaving as if it was his house, as if he was the host.
‘No thanks,’ said Michael.
Meredith stuck a large piece of potato in her mouth, but didn’t start chewing it. She stared, instead, at her quivering fork.
‘Well, what about some more greens then?’ said Howard. Was he drunk?
Amy’s father looked at her, and looked at the table cloth, and then at the wall. Finally he looked at Howard.
‘Michael is fasting,’ he said, with more assertiveness than Amy thought she had ever heard him use in her life.
Amy’s mother cleared her throat and patted at her hair.
‘On Christmas Day?’ said Howard.
‘On Christmas Day,’ said Amy’s father, and he smiled at Michael as if to say, Never mind, boy, eat your peas.
‘Fasting on Christmas Day,’ repeated Howard. ‘Did you hear that, Ann?’
His wife nodded.
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said.
Amy felt a banging in her head, as if there was a small angry thing in there trying to get out. She looked at Howard’s thick fat neck, the jowls hanging in flaps just below his jaw line. He stuffed another enormous piece of turkey into his mouth.
‘In the West,’ she said to him, ‘we eat far more than we actually need.’
Her voice trembled a little as she said it. Had she read that somewhere, or was she simply making it up? She would carry on regardless. She thought of the African children, their limbs like sticks, their bellies round and empty as coconuts. This speech was for them. For them, and for Michael, who just happened to be the underdog today.
‘We’re greedy,’ she said, meaning, you, Howard. ‘In a village in Japan people live well into their hundreds, and they say it’s because they only eat as much as they need, not as much as they want.’
Where had that come from? Was it true?
Howard continued to chew on his flap of turkey, and then swallowed, watching Amy the whole time.
‘Well, I say if you’ve got it, flaunt it,’ he said. ‘No use in cutting down on a bit of pleasure just for the sake of it now, is there?’
If Amy had been ten, she would have said to herself, or her mother, or whoever was speaking, ‘Why don’t I put my dinner in an envelope and mail it to the starving children then? They can have it.’ She would have said that. She would have agreed with Howard. No use in cutting down just for the sake of it, is there? Just because they’re starving doesn’t mean we should too. She was going round in circles, like a dog chasing its tail. She was turning into her mother.
‘The saying, If you’ve got it, flaunt it, is about good looks,’ she said to Howard. ‘Not about food.’ She smiled at him then, attempting to soften the blow. She was skating off into the middle of a frozen lake, and the ice was going to crack any second.
‘Is she saying I’m not a good-looking man?’ guffawed Howard.
Meredith looked at Amy, the whites showing all the way round her eyes. Her eyes were fair anyway, a pale eggshell blue, and at that moment their blueness seemed to be fading into the white of her face. When she was young, Meredith had always lacked the effortless glamour of her high school friends—all of whom seemed unbearably glamorous to Amy and Zoë. She had lacked a certain sheen, and this bothered them, both of them—perhaps all of them?—though no one ever let on. If her two younger sisters were trying to follow in her footsteps in that regard, she had sure tried to lead them up the garden path. But sitting there, right across from her, so wild and so white, Amy felt a surge of fondness for Meredith who had always been there in her life, coveted or not. At that moment she looked a little like a reptile, her washed-out face bordered by a flush of red that was creeping in large circular patches up her neck. She was going to attempt to rescue her—to rescue the rescuer. Amy could feel it.
‘Michael has been unwell,’ Meredith said, quite loudly, and the flush on her neck seemed to fade, almost immediately. ‘He’s trying to get rid of his toxicity.’
Amy’s father nodded at her, as if to say, That’s right. A strange hush had fallen on the table. Amy realised that the Christmas CD had stopped. It was drizzling outside. Her mother was chewing sombrely on a piece of boiled carrot, her arms slack by her side. Down the end of the table Grandma and Grandpop, blissfully unaware of the discomfort around them, were simultaneously cutting at something on their plates. They were simply two halves of one thing, each side doing its job. Michael picked up one podded pea and held it between his fingertips.
‘What sort of unwell has he been?’ said Howard to Meredith, as if Michael was not in the room.
‘Honestly Howard!’ said Ann.
‘Well I’m only asking.’
Amy looked to her mother, who looked at Meredith, who looked at Michael. He nodded at her, but looked into his plate.
‘Cancer!’ said Meredith, with more force than she needed to.
Amy’s mother let out a half-muffled cry. Ann lifted her hands to the base of her throat. The skin on Meredith’s face suddenly seemed to be pulled tight back, back towards her hairline. ‘Cancer,’ she said again, ‘and he cured himself, I’ll have you know! Michael is a brave man. He needs to watch his toxicity.’
And then she burst into tears.
‘Did-You-Know-About-This?’ Amy’s mother mouthed to her across the table. Amy shook her head. She looked at Meredith who was dabbing at her face with her Christmas napkin, and at Michael who was holding her hand. She realised what it was about him that she had found odd all along. He looked defeated, like a man whose car had broken down in the middle of a desert. In this case, though, the car was his own body: engine trouble once; perhaps nothing more than a flat tyre now. He was a man surrounded by car-repairing apparatus and yet his car was causing him trouble, cleansing machines and all.
‘You never told us,’ said Amy’s mother quietly.
‘Well, you’d all worry,’ said Meredith. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ said Howard Strom again.
For a moment nobody said anything else.
Outside—somewhere over the fence—children were singing Christmas carols. Michael cleared his throat and tried to smile.
‘If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything,’ he said brightly.
‘Quite right!’ said Amy’s father, and he picked up his glass. ‘Let’s drink to that!’ He stumbled to his feet, and so did the rest of them, Michael lagging behind a bit, Amy’s grandparents also, so that it looked for a moment as if they were raising a toast to the three of them, still partially seated, partially airborne.
‘If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything!’ said Amy’s father.
‘If you don’t have your what, dear?’ said Grandma.
‘If you don’t have your hearing,’ Howard Strom said to her, ‘you don’t have anything!’ Clearly he was making a last-ditch attempt at joke of the day. He laughed at himself, but no one laughed with him.
‘Oh, indeed,’ said Amy’s Grandmother. ‘But at least we’ve got each other.’ She smiled almost smugly then, though not at Grandpop, even though the smile was certainly meant for him.
Outside, the sound of carols grew louder, a wordless, jolly sound, almost like birds. Were they coming closer, the carol singers? Amy’s father heard them too.
‘Listen to that!’ he said, as if he had organised the musical interlude himself. ‘Merry Christmas, everyone.’
Amy’s mother made a sound of agreement in her throat, but she looked about as merry as someone who’d been hit on the head with a frying pan.
They all sat back down again, scraping their chairs against the floor, their glasses clinking a little as they found their places. Grandma and Grandpop were the only ones left standing—still holding their glasses out in front of them, not ready to let gravity push their creaky joints back into their seats. They both looked out the window at the rain.
‘Do you think they’ve made trifle again this year?’ said Grandpop out the corner of his mouth, unaware that the whole table was his audience.
Grandma blinked chirpily, her milky blue eyes staring out the window as if she was waiting for a colourful bird, an angel perhaps, to descend from the sky.
‘Oh I hope so!’ she said, with such vigour it was as if she had more life left in her than all ten of them combined.
*
The Stroms left earlier than usual, taking their friend Bill with them. In previous years they had stayed until it was dark, to watch the Queen’s Christmas message broadcast on TV. This, it had always seemed, was Howard’s favourite part of the day, when he could make the same jokes about the corgis, and the corgis and Prince Phillip, and the corgis and Prince Phillip and the Queen. Ann and Amy’s parents, and whoever else was pretending to pay attention, would make a show of being amused and horrified, which was the required reaction. Their performance—this unwavering ability to hold up their side of the bargain—was the most impressive performance of all. But this year no one, including Howard, seemed to have the stomach for it, not even for the evening news.
‘This was the nicest Christmas I’ve ever had,’ said Bill as they were getting ready to leave. He had a limp that seemed to have been acquired recently, sometime between Christmas dinner and dessert. Was he being polite or trying to be funny? No one could tell, and so no one responded or even acknowledged his statement. He announced it to the room, and the room wouldn’t hear it. His limp was the only thing that made him seem crestfallen—and the limp, surely, was to do with a bad hip or displaced joint. He continued to smile, though, following Ann and Howard all the way down the hall, smiling all the time.
‘That really was a nice Christmas,’ he said again once they’d reached the front door.
‘Wasn’t it?’ said Amy’s mother, trying to smile back, though she narrowed her eyes as she said it—perhaps in disbelief.
‘Come along, Bill!’ Ann called to him, and just like a dog, or a badly shaped horse, he began to trot along towards the car in a lopsided canter, still favouring his left leg.
‘What a lovely day!’ they all called to each other, from a safe distance.
‘Bye bye! Thank you! Great day!’
‘Bye! Great day!’
To Amy’s ears—though perhaps delirium was simply setting in—it sounded like something else entirely. Hate day! Hate day! Everyone waving and smiling and the truth was slipping out of their mouths in disguise.
Grandma and Grandpop, standing at the back of the huddle by the front door, waved too, though seemingly at each other.
Amy’s mother closed the front door.
‘Well!’ she said. And she turned back towards the rest of the group. Nobody else moved. They all stood there. Amy’s parents, and Meredith and Michael and Grandma and Grandpop and Amy herself. The top button of Amy’s mother’s dress had come undone, possibly during the exertion of the waving and goodbyes. She looked as though she’d just been caught in a gust of wind or, even worse, some kind of appallingly passionate sexual encounter.
‘Well,’ she said again, but with less purpose this time.
They all looked at the floor, or the walls, but not at each other.
‘That might have been my last Christmas,’ said Grandma suddenly, a defiant edge in her voice. ‘At my age you start thinking things like that.’
Amy’s mother started to laugh, but then stopped herself. Perhaps she knew what was coming next.
‘Mine too,’ said Michael. ‘I think that too.’ And then he paused and smiled. ‘Shouldn’t we all think like that?’ he said.
Amy’s mother looked perplexed, and then dismissive; muttering just above her breath—about calling Zoë, and putting the trifle back in the fridge—she began to slide away from the rest of the group. Grandma and Grandad followed her, shuffling along like bags on a conveyor belt.
Michael was still smiling wanly, and when Amy looked around she saw that her father was nodding back at him, his face alight with admiration. He nodded again as he stood aside, gesturing to Michael to go before him, bowing his head a little as Michael passed.
‘We should all think like that,’ he said quietly in agreement, and he continued to nod as he followed Michael down the hallway, matching his steps, the two of them turning—a small procession—into the faded evening light of the living room.