Пол Корнелл: The Ghosts of Christmas

I’m fifteen. Oh. This is the Christmas after Dad died. And I’m… drunk. No, I wasn’t. I’m not. It just feels like I am. What’s inside my head is… huge. I hate having it in here with me. Right now. I feel like I’m… possessed. And I think it was like that in here before I arrived to join in. The shape of what I’m in is different. It feels… wounded. Oh God, did I hurt it already? No. I’m still me here and now. I wouldn’t be if I’d hurt my young brain back then. No, I, I sort of remember. This is just what it was like being fifteen. My mind feels… like it’s shaped awkwardly, not like it’s wounded. All this… fury. I can feel the weight of the world limiting me. I can feel a terrible force towards action. Do something, now! Why aren’t all these idiots around me doing something, when I know so well what they should do?! And God, God, I am horny even during this, which is, which is… terrible.

I’m bellowing at Mum, who’s trying to raise her voice to shout over me at the door of my room. ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ I’m shouting. ‘We never have a good Christmas because of you! Dad would always try to make it a good Christmas, but he had to deal with you! Stop being afraid!’

I know as I yell this that it isn’t true. I know now and I know then.

She slams the door of my room against the wall and marches in, raising a shaking finger—

I grab her. I grab her and I feel the frailness of her as I grab her, and I use all my strength, and it’s lots, and I shove her reeling out of the door, and she crashes into the far wall and I run at her and I slam her into it again, so the back of her head hits the wall and I meant to do it and I don’t, I so terribly don’t. I’m beating up an old woman!

I manage to stop myself from doing that. Just. My new self and old self manage at the same time. I let go.

She bursts out crying. So do I.

‘Stop doing that to me!’ I yell.

‘I worry about you,’ she manages to sob. ‘It’s because I worry about you.’

Is it just at Christmas she worries? I think hard about saying it, and this body says it. My voice sounds odd saying it. ‘Is it just at Christmas?’

She’s silent, looking scared at how I sounded. Or, oh God, is she afraid of me now?

This is what did it, I realise. I make this mind go weird at Christmas, and they always noticed. It’s great they noticed. What I grew up with, how I was brought up, is them reacting to that, expecting that, for the rest of the year. This makes sense, I’ve solved it! I’ve solved who I am! Who I am is my own fault! I’m a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Well, that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Should have known that. Everybody should realise that about themselves. Simple!

I find that I’m smiling suddenly and Mum bursts into tears again. To her, it must seem like she’s looking at a complete psycho.

I tore off the crown. I remembered doing that to her. Then I let myself forget it. But I never did. And that wasn’t the only time. Lots of grabbing her. On the verge of hitting her. Is that a thing, being abused by one’s child? It got lost in the layers of who she and I were, and there I was, in it, and suddenly it was the most important thing. And now it was again.

Because of Dad dying, I thought, because of that teenage brain, and then I thought no, that’s letting myself off the hook.

Guilty.

But beyond that, my teenage-influenced self had been right: I’d found what I’d gone looking for. I’d messed up my own childhood by what I was doing here. That was a neat end to the story, wasn’t it? Yes, my parents had been terribly lacking on occasion. But they’d had something beyond the norm to deal with. And I’d been… terrifying, horrible, beyond that poor frail woman’s ability to deal with.

But that only let them off the hook… up to a point.

Hadn’t that bit with there being no presents, that bit with the car, weren’t those beyond normal? Had me being in that mind on just one day of the year really been such a big factor?

Would I end up doing anything like that? Would I be a good parent?

Perhaps I should have left it there.

But there was a way to know .

In A Christmas Carol , we hear from charity collectors visiting Scrooge’s shop that when his partner Marley was alive, they both always gave generously. And you think therefore that Scrooge was a happy, open person then. But Scrooge doesn’t confirm that memory of theirs. When we meet Marley’s ghost, he’s weighed down by chains ‘he forged in life’. He’s warning Scrooge not to be like he was. So were the charity collectors lying or being too generous with their memory of Christmas past? Or is it just that they sometimes caught Scrooge and Marley on a good day? The latter doesn’t seem the sort of thing that happens to characters in stories. I’ve been told that story isn’t a good model for what happened to me. But perhaps, because of what’s written in the margins there, it is.

I sat there thinking, the crown in my hands. I’d been my own ghost of Christmas future. But I could be a ghost of Christmas past too.

Was I going to be a good parent?

I could find out.

I set the display to track the other side of the scale. To take me into the future, as we’d only speculated that some day might be possible. And I put the crown back on before I could think twice.

Oh. Oh there she is. My baby is a she! I’m holding her in my arms. I love her more than I thought it was possible to love anything. The same way the big comfort thing loved me. And I didn’t understand that until I put those moments side by side. This mind I’m in now has changed so much. It’s hugely focussed on the little girl who’s asleep right here. It’s a warm feeling, but it’s… it’s hard too. Where did that come from? That worries me. She’s so little. This can’t be that far in the future. But I’ve changed so much. There’s a feeling of… this mind I’m in wanting to prove something. She wants to tell me it’s all going to be okay. That I have nothing but love inside me in this one year in the future. And I do… up to a point.

Oh, there’s a piece of paper with the year written on it sitting on the arm of the chair right in front of me. It’s just next year. That’s my handwriting.

The baby’s name is Alice , the writing continues. You don’t need to go any further to hear that. Please make this your last trip.

Alice. That’s what we were planning to call her. Thank God. If it was something different, I’d now be wondering where that idea came from.

Oh, I can feel it now. This mind has made room for me. It knew I’d be coming. Of course it did. She remembers what she did with the crown last year. But what does this mean? Why does future me want me to stop doing this? I try to reach across the distance between her and me, but I can only feel what she’s feeling, not hear her thoughts. And she had a year to prepare, that note must be all she wants to tell me. She wants me to feel that it’s all going to be okay… but she’s telling me it won’t be.

Ben comes in. He doesn’t look very different. Unshaven. He’s smiling all over his face. He sits on the arm of the chair and looks down at his daughter, proud and utterly in love with her. The room is decorated. There are tiny presents under the tree, joint birthday and Christmas presents the little one is too small to understand. So, oh, she was born very near Christmas Day. We must make such a perfect image sitting together like this. I don’t think I can have told Ben about what I know will be happening to me at this moment on Christmas Day. I wouldn’t do that. I’d want to spare him.

But… what’s this? I can feel my body move slightly away from him. It took me a second to realise it, because it’s so brilliant, and a little scary, to be suddenly in a body that’s not weighed down by the pregnancy, but… I’m bristling. I can feel a deep chemical anger. The teenager is in here again. But I look up at him and smile, and this mind lets me. And he’s so clearly still my Ben, absolutely the same, the Dad I knew he’d be when he asked and I said yes. It’s not like he’s started to beat me, I can’t feel that in this body, she’s not flinching, it’s like when I’m angry but I don’t feel allowed to express it.