Cecelia Ahern: Short Stories: The Every Year Collection

The same every year they think, but look closely, for it’s not.

That’s what makes people so sad and so happy at this time. That is the bittersweet magic of Christmas. It’s different and magical and wonderful and every year rich with the air of too much said and too much unsaid. They’ve realized that these are the days when edges are blurred, tongues are burned and softened and eyes are filled with the drip, drip, drip of never wanting to leave, never wanting to say goodbye to these golden moments, longing to bring back the precious days and all the people in them.

Every day of every year they long for the time when they will feel like this: together, cocooned by the warmth of Christmas Day.

Steven awoke to his alarm ringing at seven a.m. Waking up, the first disappointment of every day, was as usual followed by its faithful friend, dread. The alarm was like a siren, a warning bell: get up or else! Slowly rolling over, he stretched out his arm and punched down on the clock. Although the room was silenced, the ringing continued in his eardrums. What he would give to sleep all day, to close his lids and block out the light! Once again he had spent another night glaring unblinkingly at all-night Teletext and infomercials, sleep, as usual, not coming easy.

He looked vacantly at the growing crack on his magnolia ceiling and listened as the kids next door fought to use the bathroom. Walls like cardboard separated their two-bedroom-and-a-box-room town houses, stuffed together like shoeboxes in the dusty stockroom of a department-store basement: piled high, packed tight, squeezed in, airtight. Multicoloured toylike houses for first-time buyers, pristine and pastel with pretty thresholds to cross, blinding buyers from the realization they’d just crossed the most expensive toll they were ever likely to pay. Suburban bliss.

Steven could imagine what all the people looked like from above, lab rats running around the maze of houses, pointlessly, distracted by irrelevant and unnecessary daily routines. Did nobody think, What is the point? Did nobody else feel like suddenly stopping what they were doing, looking up to the GamesMaster in the sky and refusing to continue playing this stupid game?

He exhaled slowly, counting to three as the screaming next door turned to tears, the knocking on the door turned to kicks and the dog’s barking turned to howls. Kicking the covers off, he wearily pulled his body out of bed and began his morning routine: shower, dress—shirt, suit, tie—coffee, alarm, front door, walk to the train station. The monotony, monotonous. Night out on a Thursday, hangover on a Friday, football on a Sunday. Every week identical.

One thousand five hundred and twenty-seven steps to the train station and he would arrive at the platform at exactly 07.42, met by the same tired faces, the same bored expressions, the same coats, briefcases, hairstyles and shoes. Everyone was uniformed up and ready for battle. Nobody spoke, nobody smiled, there was just the occasional cough, beep of a mobile phone and the fuzzy sounds of personal stereos as commuters stared blankly and wearily into space, eyes glassy and sleepy, their previous night’s dreams still fresh in their minds, their beds not yet cold.

The sign over the platform declared a three-minute wait, as it always did when he arrived. The man beside him in the brown suede coat was consistently ahead of him, the woman with the black briefcase, torn at the corner and with a scratch through the middle, always behind him. Everything was done in perfect unison, their life predictable, no matter how much longer they took drinking their coffee in the morning and no matter how many extra minutes were spent closing their eyes under the soothing hot water of the shower, dreaming of somewhere and something else.

Finally, the familiar sound forced a few heads to turn and a few eyes to blink out of their trance. The wail of the horn, the vibrations on the tracks, the hiss and squeal as the train prepared to stop—everyone moved forward and took their positions. As the train slowed, dull faces on crammed bodies stared outside at them, expressionless. Nobody got off, everybody got on an already crowded train. Steven got on last. He always did.

He stepped through the door and could move no further. He turned his back on the faces staring at him and held his breath as the door slowly shut. He said goodbye to fresh air and looked out of the small dirty window at people running to the platform, seconds late, panic and frustration scrawled across their faces. How different their days would be now. A second too late and they were out of the rat race. He watched them as the train pulled away; envying them while, inside the train, hot, tired bodies huddled together in the cramped conditions, rocking back and forth with the swaying carriage. Some slept as they stood; music and chat from earphones kept others awake.

The train slowed and stopped at the next station. Doors opened, no one disembarked, more tried to squeeze in. Steven found himself being forced in further, away from the door. The toilet door opened—a distasteful odour emanating out to an already stuffy atmosphere—and three students disappeared inside for space.

The doors closed and the train moved on. The atmosphere was tinged with morning breath, coffee and BO. One person fainted, there was a scuffle to move her forward and help her off at the next stop where she was left on the bench, flushed, embarrassed and gasping for air.

Sardines in a housing estate, sardines in a train. Everywhere he went Steven was squashed, trapped, his mind cluttered with a million messy thoughts packed together so tightly he thought his head would explode. But he was keeping it together, he was waking up each morning and reminding himself to breathe. But not in this stuffy carriage, he would hold his breath here, as he had been doing over the past few years of his life, waiting for things to get better. Battling with his mind to cheer up and see the positive, losing each time and lying down even more battered and bruised.

But today was different, today he would be victorious. Today he would receive confirmation of his promotion, a promotion that would allow him to leave the stuffy, cluttered and windowless confines of his basement office, piled high with paperwork and metallic filing cabinets, so uninspiring and so small he didn’t even have space to pace. Today he would win the battle and race those steps like Rocky, dancing at the top with his fists in the air.

But he had to get there first and the train hadn’t moved for fifteen minutes. People were beginning to get agitated, feeling the strain of their personal space being invaded. Steven could move only his head: his arm and briefcase were caught behind him. When he turned his head one way he received a mouthful of frizzy hair; the other way led him to stare directly into the face of a heavy-breathing, overweight and balding man. He chose the hair.

Without any explanation as to why they hadn’t moved, the train moved on again, jerking and spluttering along the track and trying to pick up pace with its heavy load. The next stop spat out six people and sucked in ten more, and Steven breathed in the last of the fresh air before the door closed, the frizzy hair tickling his nose as he did so. The newcomers explained that the delay was due to a man jumping in front of a train further along the line. Someone tutted in annoyance and checked his watch. =He wouldn’t have felt a thing’ was the last sentence uttered before the seconds of chat ended and they were once again plunged into silence, leaving the woman who had spoken flushed in the face, as if struck by the silliness of her words.

=How could anyone do that?’ one woman had asked in confusion and horror. Steven understood how, he understood what it was like to want to get out of a situation so much you’d do anything. Standing trapped between strange bodies on the connecting joints of a train every morning, then working in a windowless office cell without any human contact, looking at so many numbers for so many hours that they all began to look the same. Everything felt as if it was moving in on him, his world was getting smaller, it was fading away and was forcing him to live only in his head. A head that was pounding, exhausted, fed up and growing tired of listening to himself. When there was nothing holding you up, nothing to show there was a point to all this, when there was no one capable of putting a smile on your face, he understood how a person could do it. He understood it very well.