Page 59 of Christmas Every Day
‘I can’t tell you.’ He paused, thinking. ‘But I can tell you I’m self-employed. I work primarily for a large company with a huge marketing department, producing customer-driven solutions to generate sales and maximise brand awareness through providing significant input into innovative products designed for worldwide distribution.’
‘Stop!’ I yelled. ‘I get it. You have a completely boring job. I’ll get a photocopy done at the library. And, thanks.’
22
It was the book club’s spring bank holiday barbeque. We were sampling Jamie’s homemade sourdough when Sarah’s phone buzzed.
‘Kiko’s not coming.’ Sarah shook her head. ‘Adam’s working. If he bothered to give her a bit of notice she could sort a babysitter.’
‘That’s such a shame.’
‘Yeah. Like it was a shame she missed the Christmas party, and the book festival. And hasn’t managed a trip to visit her parents once, since they moved back to Japan.’ Sarah tapped out a reply before scooping up the plate and gliding towards the café door. ‘I’ve suggested she spend the evening booking herself that trek. He can find out what it’s like to have to drop everything because the other parent’s suddenly unavailable.’
‘Surely that can’t end well.’
‘It’ll end with her coming home to a husband ready to hear what she’s got to say. That’s better than the alternative ending, when she doesn’t come home at all.’
‘Are we ready to start?’ Frances asked, once everyone had loaded up their plates and got comfortable on the patio sofas. ‘I need an early night tonight and don’t want to miss any updates.’
‘Why don’t you kick us off?’ Ellen asked. We sat back to hear about the Big Zipper.
‘It was simply marvellous!’ Frances told us, eyes sparkling. ‘Like flying. I’d forgotten what it felt like to move without creaking and groaning. I enjoyed it so immensely, they let me have another go free of charge.’
She paused, looking down, and, for the first time, seeming every one of her eighty-four years. ‘It’s crept up on me. This old body. Sometimes I go to stand up, or bend down, and I forget how bloodyslowI am. It won’t do what I tell it to any more. Especially the cancer parts. They are the most misbehaved of all. I knew this must happen, but I somehow wasn’t expecting it. To be so tired.’
She looked round at us all, trying to discreetly hide our sniffs behind gingham napkins. It didn’t take long for the steely glint to return.
‘What’s next?’ Ellen asked, dabbing at her eyes.
‘A camel trek.’
Of course it is!
Lucille showed us a leaflet entitled ‘Tough Muck’. The picture on the front was of a man, crying, neck-deep in swampy water, blood smeared across his forehead. She tugged at the lapel of her designer jacket while we read about the ten kilometres of mud, near-impossible obstacles, pain and torture. She twiddled a Tiffany bracelet with her manicured fingers and patted her coiffed hairstyle.
‘I don’t understand,’ Ashley said, peering at the photo of a woman, T-shirt hanging off one shoulder, clinging to a rope halfway up a rock-face, a tyre on her back. With her teeth bared like a rabid wolf, beneath the filth her face looked like a purple skittle.
Lucille shrugged. ‘If Frances is wild-swimming and camel-trekking, a straightforward race didn’t seem enough. It’s not until September, I’ve got time to train.’
‘It looks awesome,’ Jamie said. ‘I quite fancy it myself.’
‘Pshaw.’ Sarah rolled her eyes. ‘You do stuff like that all the time, only with maniacs shooting at you and bombs going off in the background. That’s why your Christmas Book Club Challenge is perfecting a pie-crust.’
Jamie cleared his throat. ‘Actually… a lot of my job is just sitting around. Watching and waiting, gathering information. Meeting with clients. I’m starting to leave the running around to the younger guys.’
‘Ooh, you’re still young,’ Ashley said, looking pointedly at Sarah.
Jamie’s face was starting to resemble the purple woman on the leaflet. ‘Maybe. But you reach a point when risking your life day in, day out starts getting old. When you get, um, ready to settle down a bit.’
Everyone in the room held their breath. Except for Sarah, who leant forwards and grabbed another handful of sweet-potato crisps.
Ashley lightened the mood for us with her detective’s board, pointing out progress made in narrowing down the Hillary hunt. It was more a list of assumptions than anything approaching an accurate investigation, but at least she’d kept it legal for now. And when Lucille started to question her methods (‘Just because most of her books feature rivers, it doesn’t mean she lives near one’), Sarah said, ‘Oh, put a sock in it, Lucille.’ Normal relations were resumed.
I updated everyone on progress with the cottage, and lack of progress in finding anything out about my family.
Ellen told us about her midwifery lecturer, who couldn’t mention any female body parts without breaking out into a sweat and stuttering. ‘He gave the whole session on anatomy facing the projector screen, and the remote kept slipping out of his hands. Some of the students are merciless. They keep asking him to repeat himself, and pretending they can’t read the labels on the diagrams. One asked if the plural of vagina was vagini. It took him three minutes to get the answer out.’
By the time she’d finished her second glass of wine, Sarah was ready to tell us about her latest dud date.
