The Christmas Wish, page 7
‘Aunt Bronwyn, where did Uncle Steve get these fireworks?’ Manny asked with concern.
She shrugged, rubbing her hands together before poking around in her pockets for a pair of mismatched gloves. ‘I don’t know, he told me he got some fireworks, I assumed he bought them from the supermarket after Bonfire Night.’
‘I didn’t know Tesco was a demilitarized zone,’ I replied, pulling on Manny’s arm. ‘Come on, we’ve got to help him before he blows himself up. It can’t be safe to have so many explosives this close to Dorothy’s punch. Everyone here has to be at least ninety per cent proof.’
‘What did I miss?’ Oliver asked as he elbowed his way to the front of the crowd, knocking over two toddlers and a planter full of pansies on the way.
‘Dad’s set up enough fireworks to expose the earth’s core,’ I replied as Cerys and the kids joined him. ‘I was simply suggesting we stop him before he blows himself up and takes the entire village with him.’
‘I’m sure he knows what he’s doing,’ Cerys argued before pushing Arthur and Artemis slightly behind her. ‘He used to do firework displays in the garden every year when we were kids.’
I turned around to see Dad shine his torch on one enormous rocket labelled ‘Apocalypse Now’.
‘I don’t want to fight with you, Care, but I’m thinking maybe we don’t want Grandad to blow himself to smithereens in front of the kids. That feels like one of those memories that might stick.’
She gave me another of her trademark condescending smiles and it took every ounce of my remaining self-respect not to whack it right off her face. ‘Calm down and leave Dad to it, will you? Contrary to popular belief, you don’t know everything. Also, you stink of booze.’
I knew I shouldn’t rise to it, I knew I’d promised my mum and I knew I was thirty-two years old. But I simply could not help myself.
‘What is wrong with you?’ I snapped. ‘If I said the sky was blue, you’d argue that it wasn’t.’
‘Well, technically it isn’t,’ she replied. ‘The colour of the sky is determined by the scattering of electromagnetic radiation which we perceive as blue light for the majority of the day but at different times of the day, the sunlight comes through at different angles which is why we see red and orange light at sunrise or sunset.’
‘Is it not exhausting being such a self-righteous cow all the time?’
‘It’s not all the time, just whenever you’re near,’ she answered, her voice hot. ‘Why do you always think you know better than everyone else?’
‘Nobody panic!’ Dad shouted from the bottom of the garden as Cerys and I faced off. ‘There’s a loose wire, that’s all. I’ll have it all sorted in a minute.’
‘I do not,’ I blustered, heat burning out of my cheeks as our neighbours turned their attention away from my dad and towards the two of us. ‘You’re the one who thinks you’re better than the rest of us because you went to Oxford and married a complete tit.’
‘I don’t think I’m better than you because I went to Oxford!’ Cerys retorted.
‘And I’m not a tit,’ Oliver added.
‘Shut up, Oliver,’ we both said at the same time.
‘Confirmed tit.’ Manny put a mittened hand on my shoulder and squeezed. ‘Come on, Gwen, leave it. Let’s go home and I’ll make you a hot toddy.’
‘Yes, Gwen, leave it,’ Mum said, an awkward smile on her face as she rolled her eyes theatrically at Mrs Ahmed from two doors down.
But there was no stopping me now, I was on a roll. Everything I’d been holding down rushed up to the surface: losing Michael, the nonsense at work, living in a shit flat, the time Cerys drew a moustache on my favourite My Little Pony.
‘No!’ I knocked Manny’s hand away, all at once consumed by the rightful vindication of every wronged sibling ever to walk the earth. ‘It’s about time we had it out; what’s the problem, Cerys? Is this because I got a job at Abbott & Howe and you’re wasting your degree suing roadside cafes for making their coffee too hot?’
‘Almost there!’ Dad yelled, his face buried in a pile of gaudily decorated TNT. ‘Let’s have a countdown. Five!’
My sister’s dark eyes burned black.
‘That’s it, Gwen, I don’t care anymore. I’ve had it up to here with you.’
‘Have you now?’ I replied as half the village counted down with my dad and the other half hung on our every word. ‘Well, that makes two of us.’
‘Four!’ roared the crowd.
Dad dashed back up the garden and threw his arm around Mum’s shoulders, blissfully unaware of the catfight of the century.
‘I wasn’t going to say anything because I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of Mum and Dad,’ Cerys snapped. ‘But I don’t know how you dare insult my job.’
‘Three!’
‘Hang on, have I missed something?’ Dad looked at me and Cerys, burning with rage, and Mum and Manny, burning with embarrassment. ‘Are you two arguing again?’
‘Two!’
‘Because it’s a shit job,’ I replied, prodding her in the chest. ‘You’re ripping people off for a living and you know you are.’
‘At least I have a job,’ she shouted at the top of her voice, before turning to our parents and bellowing with a victorious smirk. ‘Gwen got sacked for attacking a client!’
‘One!’
‘Merry bloody Christmas,’ Manny groaned as all the rockets exploded, Mum and Dad’s shocked faces awash in red, green and gold light. ‘And a Happy New Year.’
CHAPTER SIX
The ground beneath us shook as rockets whizzed up into the air, filling the snowy sky with multicoloured sparkles before the Widow Makers detonated with an ungodly roar. Gazing at the firework display, I wondered if there was still time to chuck myself on top of the Apocalypse Now rather than deal with the fallout of Cerys’s accusation.
‘Gwen?’ Dad looked at me with misty eyes, his face a picture of confusion. ‘What’s she talking about?’
‘Oliver’s friend works at Abbott & Howe and he told us everything,’ Cerys answered before I could even try to explain. ‘She attacked a client, beat him up with a staple gun, and they fired her. It happened weeks ago and she hasn’t had the guts to tell you.’
‘That’s not – not true! That’s not what happened!’ I protested, Dorothy’s punch bubbling in my stomach as the Catherine wheels whirred into life, sparks flying everywhere.
‘You mean you didn’t attack a client?’ Dad asked, heartbreakingly hopeful.
‘No,’ I replied weakly. ‘I meant it was a stapler, not a staple gun.’
Right on cue, Apocalypse Now shuddered into life, whistling its warning before lighting up the whole sky with blinding white flashes. The look on my dad’s face was not one I ever wanted to see again. The corners of his mouth drooped and his eyes were flat and grey, all the colour gone from his cheeks.
‘Oh, Gwen,’ he said sadly, reaching one hand out towards me and letting it hover an inch above my shoulder before he pulled it away. ‘Oh dear.’
‘But I can explain,’ I started, tears burning behind my eyes. ‘Let me explain.’
‘I don’t think this is the right place for this conversation,’ he said, looking around at our interested audience. Without another word, he pushed through the crowd and disappeared around the corner of the house. Mum looked at me, her own features weighed down by disappointment. She inhaled sharply then shook her head, following Dad up the path.
‘What was it you were saying about this being exactly what I needed?’ I asked, my words sticking in my throat as Manny pulled me into his chest for a hug. ‘A nice family Christmas, wasn’t it?’
As the rockets finally ran out of steam and all little plastic tubes landed in the snow with a series of soft thumps, the whispers around us turned into murmurs and the murmurs escalated into good old-fashioned gossip. I looked over to where Cerys and Oliver were having what seemed to be an equally heated conversation, the look on my sister’s face full of fury. I’d have thought she’d be more pleased with herself but what did I know?
‘Don’t stress yourself,’ Manny said, stroking my hair. ‘But if you’d told them when it happened, all this could have been avoided.’
I pulled away from Manny’s hug, stung.
‘If you don’t mind, I could do without an “I told you so”,’ I said, wiping away a tear. ‘This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell them in the first place.’
‘All I meant was—’
‘I know what you meant,’ I replied, cutting off his apology. Even in the chill of the snowy evening, I could feel the burn of every pair of eyes on me and shrank down into my jacket, pulling the hood up over my head. ‘I can’t be here, I’ve got to go.’
‘Go where?’ he called as I walked briskly away, hot tears trickling down my cold face. ‘Gwen, where are you going?’
When I was little and things got too much, there was only one place I could hide where no one would find me. Between the back of the garage and the garden shed was a narrow gap, too tight for my dad, too claustrophobic for Manny and altogether too dirty for my mum, but just right for me. Holding my breath, I shuffled in sideways, only breathing out when I was on the other side, in my very own secret spot, a tiny clearing behind the two buildings that was closed in by hedges on either side. A light canopy of branches kept the spot mostly dry and shielded from the wind, and a well-placed street light kept it bright enough for me to see the smears of mascara on the backs of my hands. When I first started sneaking away to my hiding place, there was nothing there but an upturned plant pot for me to sit on, but over time I’d upgraded to a pair of sturdy wooden boxes, one for me and one for the only other person who knew about my den. The same person I saw shuffling down the gap between the garage and the shed a little while later.
‘I thought I might find you here,’ Dev said, brushing cobwebs out of his thick black hair. ‘That was a pretty impressive scene between you and Cerys?’
‘Oh God, you were there,’ I covered my face with my hands as he pulled up the second box. ‘Please tell me you’ve come to put me out of my misery.’
‘Sorry. Took that pesky do no harm oath, didn’t I?’
‘You couldn’t have run away and joined the circus, could you?’ I groaned. ‘Thanks a lot, Dev.’
Once when I was fifteen and he was sixteen, Mum and Dad were reading Manny the riot act over another late night with no phone call home and, not wanting to interrupt the argument you could hear from three doors down, Dev took it upon himself to climb on top of our garage to retrieve an errant frisbee. All well and good until he fell off the garage and landed in the hedge behind me. I took his falling out of the sky and landing at my feet as a sign that we were meant to be. Dev took it as a sign to be petrified of heights from that day forward, which I thought was a far sillier a response than mine, but most importantly, he promised to keep my secret spot a secret and to the best of my knowledge he always had.
‘Want to talk about it?’ Dev fished a handful of Celebrations out of his pocket and held them out to me. I hesitated for a second before choosing the mini Bounty. No one liked the mini Bounty but it was the polite thing to do. He looked at what remained and handed me the only Malteser in the bunch. ‘I’m assuming it’s still your favourite?’
‘It is,’ I admitted as I tore into the shiny cellophane wrapper, bottom lip quivering at the epic gesture. Only a true gent would give up his only Maltesers Teaser. ‘Thank you.’
‘You never were any good at asking for what you wanted,’ he said, chomping into a miniature Mars Bar, completely unaware of how right he was. ‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but as a trained medical professional, I am an excellent listener.’
‘You always were,’ I said, managing part of a smile. ‘First of all, I didn’t get sacked, that’s not what happened.’
‘But you did smack someone with a staple gun?’
‘It was a stapler, not a staple gun, there is a massive difference,’ I dropped my head back into my hands and let my hair fall all the way in front of my face. ‘I’ve never done anything like it before, I don’t know what happened, I really don’t.’
‘Never?
‘Never ever.’
‘What about that time you kicked Jason Broadhurst in the nutbag when you caught him copying off you in the GCSE mocks?’
‘Fine. I’ve only ever done something like it once before,’ I replied through my fingers. ‘I have this insufferable client at work, Andrew Jergens. If there’s a tech company in existence and Google, Facebook or Amazon don’t already own it, you can bet it belongs to his dad. He lets his little prince run around with a couple of billion quid a year, buying up companies and pretty much running them into the ground.’
‘Sounds like a fun chap,’ Dev commented as he deftly unwrapped a Galaxy Caramel.
‘Then I’ve oversold him,’ I replied bluntly. ‘He was in to sign some paperwork, banging on about some mega exclusive party he’s planning in Italy and the next thing you know, he’s inviting me to go with him.’
‘The monster.’
I pushed my hair out of my face and looked up to meet Dev’s eyes.
‘It wasn’t just an invitation to a party.’
‘It wasn’t?’
I shook my head.
‘I’d rather not go into the details but it was made very clear that certain favours would be expected of me in return.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’ve worked with arseholes in my time, it comes with the territory, I can take a lot,’ I whispered. ‘But no one stood up for me, no one told him to shut up and we were literally in a room full of people. The next thing I knew, he had his hand on my leg and I lost it.’
Dev’s expression clouded over. ‘Hitting him with a stapler wasn’t enough.’
‘It was a stapler, a coffee cup and a reinforced three ring binder,’ I replied. ‘It’s been a rough couple of months.’
I unwrapped the Malteser and popped it in my mouth, chewing as I relived my rage.
‘He’s awful, Dev,’ I said, holding a hand over my mouth as I spoke. ‘And it’s been years of it, the inappropriate comments, the way he looks at me, at all the women I work with. But that doesn’t make decking him OK, does it? When they go low, we’re supposed to go high, not attack them with the entire contents of the stationery cupboard.’
He stifled a laugh before composing his features into a study of compassion.
‘What happens now?’ he asked.
‘I’ve got a disciplinary hearing on the fourth of January. Harry, that’s my boss, he doesn’t think I’ll get sacked since Andrew hasn’t terminated his contract with the firm, but I can say goodbye to the junior partner position for the time being. Maybe forever.’
‘He hasn’t terminated his contract?’ Dev looked surprised. ‘What is he, a masochist?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I think so. The next day he sent me two dozen roses with a card that said ‘roses are red, violets are blue, you’re a spicy filly, fancy a shag?’. It’s wasn’t an apology, he was still trying it on. I’d admire his tenacity if I didn’t hate his guts.’
‘And that’s why they say there’s no such thing as a good billionaire.’ He rifled through his pocket again and handed me the rest of the Celebrations. ‘Here, you need these more than I do. When did all this happen?’
‘Two weeks ago,’ I replied, the nightmare of it all still so fresh in my mind. Standing in Harry’s office, mortified, while he um-ed and ahh-ed, muttering about the reputation of the company and stiff upper lips in the face of adversity and something about Winston Churchill before he eventually told me to pack my things and go home. ‘I thought it would be OK as long as I didn’t lose my job. Dad wouldn’t have to find out.’ Sniffing loudly, I forced all the unpleasantness deep, deep down inside where it belonged. Out of sight, out of mind as was the Baker way.
‘That’s the annoying thing about secrets,’ Dev said kindly. ‘They have a tendency to come out at the worst possible time.’
‘He’s going to be so upset,’ I said, tearing into a tiny Snickers. ‘All he wants is for me to make partner, I’ve let him down.’
‘Your dad is a good bloke, I’m sure he’ll understand when you explain.’
As much as I wanted to agree with him, I wasn’t so sure.
‘Dad is a good person but he’s also very old school. I already know what he’s going to say, that I should have risen above it and made an official complaint through the proper channels, and he’s right, isn’t he? You can’t go round whacking people at work even if they are grade A wankers.’
Dev bunched his shoulders together and leaned forwards, resting his forearms on his knees. ‘Maybe you’re underestimating your dad here, Gwen. Remember how amazing he was when Manny came out? He’s not a neanderthal, I think he would have understood.’
‘And I think I know my family better than you do,’ I replied. My voice prickled with annoyance. ‘Just because my dad loves and supports his nephew doesn’t mean he isn’t going to be disappointed in me for the way I acted.’
‘Yes, well,’ he inhaled deeply through his nose and looked around my hiding place. It suddenly felt very claustrophobic, altogether too small for two people. ‘It’s been a long time, I don’t really know him at all. Or you for that matter.’
That was it. I felt the red rage swallow me up and a torrent of words came tumbling out of my mouth unbidden. ‘That’s hardly my fault, is it? You’re the one that went off to uni and forgot me and Manny existed,’ I said, sharpening my words for maximum damage.
‘You’re the one who stopped replying to me!’ He sat up straight, his straight black eyebrows lifted in surprise. ‘Why would I waste my time writing to you when you couldn’t be bothered to write back? I emailed you every day for months.’
I tutted and crossed my arms over my chest. ‘Honey badger videos and one-line messages about your amazing girlfriend? Hardly a correspondence for the ages, was it?’
Dev stood up, a stony look on his face. ‘Seems like you’d rather be alone. I’ll let you sulk in peace.’
