Christmas Day was a swear word in my father’s vocabulary, said any time of year with stamping foot, making us scatter and laugh. Sometimes he’d take his lunch to the garage, eat it staring at the shelf lined with cobwebs and redcurrant jelly, his chair shoved up against the freezer. But actual Christmas Day was one of exacting repetition, everything, always the same. Stockings, our parent’s bed crowded, we could make a tinsel mess. Church, running up the lane, ringing the bell, the pull of that scratch rope, the tiny chapel filling with coats and scarves and icy breath, becoming hysterical singing Hark the herald Angels, I still can’t stand between my brother and sister in a pew without losing it. The silver platter being handed along for coins, my father taking it to the altar, his bow that we knew meant precisely nothing; as parish warden he loved to say how he never went to church. Except today. Drinks at our neighbour’s house followed, a chore escaped if, and this was more special than presents or lunch, you were chosen by him to go quietly along the stony lane to collect those shiny wrapped parcels from his studio, the secret locked place above a stable block that held treasures, mostly him. The stamp and chill of an outside staircase closed as an afterthought, but thinly. A half glazed green door, the warmth of his small and orderly room, rugs and round table, a little kitchen, kettle and sink, a cupboard of oat cakes and figs, cups with blue and white stripe. When he died and the studio was dismantled, I took the Morris curtains and tea set. There was a perfectly neat, perfectly small bathroom, bath and sink. Next to it, the same size, a bedroom with single bed where after lunch he’d take forty winks. His desk was fitted in a corner, his typewriter and swivel chair, a drawing of his Uncle Ivar, handsome in the library at Inveraray with pipe in his mouth, now sits on my desk with the calendar in its silver frame. There were tiny brass animals on the windowsill, there were pine steps up into the gallery that felt like a tall ship’s galley, it’s pitched walls cleverly lined with paintings of women in rustling dresses, velvet ribbons at their throats, faces like mine. There, our Christmas presents were stored, and I passed them along into his arms and we took them, pile by stacked precarious pile down the outside stairs to the waiting Subaru. The cosy studio, the sudden rush and chill of winter stairs, my boots leaving mud, and when we were finished, we stood at the top, the half-glazed door locked by him. The banister had a ridge and valley to the wall, it made for a slide for a small and well-placed set of keys, teeth up, stretched out, keyring in the middle. At the bottom by the final door was a green Hunter wellington, an old one of his, exactly placed if you were lucky or skilled, and let’s see, as he smiles and says off you go then, and I let go. Away the bunch of keys, sliding inexorably faster, twenty steps or more, flying downward, will they do it, and the micro perfect second’s silence as we watch and they leap from end into air, choose success or failure, disappear with damp black thud into the boot, our cheers already echoing the thin false walls, the windows frosted. He was a man of little games punctuating moments of a life lived carefully, this moment now as we drive like royalty along narrow lanes, hedgerows bare, bracken bent and brown, our Christmas presents piled in the back, the low-beamed cottage coming into view, waiting hands.
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