Always, in December(5)
Josie screwed up her face against the stinging in her nose and gulped in more air, coughing on the car fumes that she accidentally swallowed at the same time. She turned right at the bottom of the hill and pedaled faster, past the train station, past the first post box she saw. She wasn’t ready to post her letter and turn back yet, was desperate to forget about the terrible day she’d just had.
She was forced to come to a stop at the next set of traffic lights, panting harder than she should be, given how short a time she’d been on the bike. She waited while the man changed from red to green and a surge of people crossed the road in time to the beeping, heads down, keen to get home into the warm. But there were three people who didn’t rush like the others, who strolled across smiling, oblivious to the commuter chaos around them. A family—mum, dad, and little boy of about five or six, Josie would guess. The boy was laughing, a reindeer headband on top of his sandy hair, the horns flopping with the movement of his head. Both of his parents gripped one of his hands, and he swung back and forward, using their arms as levers to propel himself in whatever game he was lost in.
It reminded her so much of her and her parents, on evenings like this one, only quieter, without the buzz of traffic, the annoyed car horns, the people tsking when someone got in their way. The streets of her village may have been easier and safer to walk down, but she used to do that too, hold both her parents’ hands, demand to be swung up on the count of three until she’d gotten too tall for them to manage it. That’s how they’d walked down to the post box on the week before Christmas every year since she could remember, and all the years she couldn’t, according to her grandmother. Hand in hand, her in the middle with a letter to Santa tucked into her coat pocket, ready to send to the North Pole.
It was her ninth year that stuck out in her memory. It had snowed that year and she’d been delighted, running around leaving fresh footprints in that way you can only do in the countryside, demanding to pick up a carrot from the shop for the all-important nose of a snowman. None of the carrots they had at home were right—it had to be perfect, she’d insisted. So they’d posted her letter on the way to the shop, and she’d only stopped swinging on her parents’ arms when her mum nearly lost her balance on the icy side of the pavement. For some reason that particular moment was imprinted on Josie’s mind—the way her mother’s fluffy brown boot had slipped, how she’d grabbed Josie’s hand to right herself, nearly pulling her over as she did so. How her mother had laughed at herself for being so silly, how she and Josie’s dad had grinned at each other over the top of Josie’s head. A premonition of what was to come a week later, Josie often thought now.
What had she written in her letter to Santa that day? She remembered the way the snow had felt crunching underfoot, the way her fingers had started to feel numb as they neared the post box, even through her red gloves. She remembered her mum’s silver bobble hat, pulled over her long mousy-brown hair, making her look like a princess, Josie had thought at the time. And she could hear her dad’s voice, listing silly things she could have put on the list—a left sock, an onion, a new dishwasher. But she hadn’t the faintest clue what she’d actually wanted for Christmas that year, what her nine-year-old heart had craved.
She’d still believed in Santa then, though. It wasn’t until the year after, when he didn’t bring her the one and only thing she wrote on her list, delivered to the post box as usual, with her grandmother holding her hand where her mum should have been, that she stopped believing.
That didn’t stop the tradition, though. After that year, she carried on writing a letter every Christmas, still took it to the post box. It was something she’d never been able to let go of. Only now the letter was very different, and it said the same thing every year.
Dear Mum and Dad, Missing you always. Merry Christmas and lots of love, Josie.
A loud beep of a car horn jolted Josie back to reality. She realized she was in the way—the lights had changed, but she was holding up traffic behind her because she was waiting close to the middle of the road, rather than off to the left as she should have been. She grimaced and fumbled to get her sneakers on the pedals, pushing off and getting quickly to the side of the road, deliberately not looking at the car behind her for fear of seeing the glare of the driver. She brushed away a tear that had escaped without her notice, took a breath to stem the flow, and started pedaling again. She passed another post box, but she wasn’t ready to go back to her flat, wasn’t ready to smile and drink and talk about what a wonderful time Bia would have on her adventure. She needed to get her head on straight first. Think about something else, she told herself firmly. Automatically, her mind turned to work, which wasn’t overly helpful right now. Because all that did was conjure up an image of her boss, flicking back her dead-straight black hair, having pulled her into one of the little glass cubicles, which everyone could see straight into, for a “chat.”
Josie, I’m afraid there’s something we need to talk about.
Josie gritted her teeth and pedaled faster, overtaking the cyclist in front of her. She was on Streatham High Road now, underneath the Christmas lights that, while nowhere near as impressive as those on Oxford Street, still put to shame the little display that her village had been so proud of. She wondered if they still did that there now, and how much the Christmas tradition had changed. Everyone used to gather together to watch the lights switched on, with people handing out homemade mulled wine and mince pies, using it as an excuse to catch up on the latest gossip. She’d gone with her parents every year, disappearing with her best friend from school the moment they got there, hunting out the chocolates that were always inevitably left somewhere unattended. Her grandparents had tried to take her along that first year after it happened, but she hadn’t stopped crying the whole time, and they’d stopped going after that. She wondered if they’d started going again after she’d left for university, staying away for the Christmas holidays without fail, or if it was too painful for them, too. She’d never been able to bring herself to ask.