Page 20 of It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas
I needed to chew over this some more. I decided that physical chewing would help.
I plonked myself on the sofa with a big bowl of Weetos – delighted it was the end of the pack, which meant I got the bonus addition of the extra-sweet cereal dust – and stuckSaturday Kitchenon. I rolled my eyes as an antler-wearing TV chef served up a plate of raw scrambled eggs under the pretence of having cooked a speedy omelette in order to have their face slapped onto a meaningless leaderboard.
I aimlessly flicked through the channels until I landed midway through a Christmas movie on Channel 5, as I’d known I would. My whole body relaxed as I stretched out on the sofa, balanced the bowl of cereal on a cushion and settled in for forty-five minutes or so of safe storytelling. According to the TV guide, this one was calledChristmas Wonderlandand it was about a budding artist who’d put her creative dreams on hold for the sake of a glittering career in the city. I watched with renewed interest as the protagonist told repeated lies to her horrible boss so she could return to her hometown for some emergency babysitting, only to bump into her high-school ex.
I had no high-school ex, but as the rest of the film played out exactly in line with my bingo sheets, it made me think more about the possibility of returning to Scarnbrook.
Scarnbrook. Even the silent utterance of the word in my mind seemed slightly foreign and unreal, as if it had faded from my vocabulary over the last two decades and I had to teach myself how to get my mouth around it again.
My parents had cut all ties with the village since Livvie’s death, and neither Josh nor I had had any obvious reason to return since her funeral. But I’d always missed the place I’d once called home, despite everything that had happened.
From the outset, Livvie had been the anomalous sibling. While never explicitly confirmed by our parents, her appearance three years after me was widely accepted to have been… unexpected. It was always as if she subconsciously knew this and applied it to every way she lived her life. She was absolutely determined to exist.
She’d been the total opposite to each and every one of us other Allisters. Even her colouring – her copper hair, bright blue eyes and dusting of freckles over her pale skin – had seemingly come out of nowhere. Mum eventually tracked it back to some ginger-bearded great-uncle on her side.
Whatever kind of ease each of us had established before her arrival, she totally disrupted. Where my mum was conflict-averse and fastidiously tidy, my sister was contrary and seemed to thrive among mess and chaos. Where my dad was numbers- and details-oriented, my sister lived for big ideas and zany projects. Where my brother was athletic and unshakably serious, she was unabashedly clumsy and an emotional open book. And where I was dry-humoured yet ultimately rule-abiding, she was completely fearless, actively seeking out extravagant ways to draw attention to her musical talent and whimsical nature.
Despite her endless schemes, everybody – and I meaneverybody– loved her. From the moment she was born, she slowly but surely pulled each of us out of ourselves. I could talk to her about anything; with full faith I could trust her with all my secrets big (like my huge, out-of-character crush on the most popular boy in school that even Elle had never known about) and weird (like my irrational fear of theThomas the Tank Enginetheme tune). Me, Livvie and Josh had always looked out for each other. Mum and Dad were thrilled at the wholesome dynamic of their offspring, as they could trust us to stay at home by ourselves once Josh was a fully-fledged teenager without having to find babysitters to keep up with their active roles in the community.
Livvie had truly been the glue that bonded each of our relationships with each other together. Especially the one between me and Josh, which had always been a bit strained. That’s why the two years after Josh left home for university, even though he was only twenty-five minutes up the road at the University of the West of England, were practically the happiest years of my life. Just me and Livvie, loafing about at home after school every day, while Mum and Dad were busy with their own jobs and social lives.
Livvie was the beating heart of our family. It was impossible not to be tugged towards her spirit and love of life. There was no doubt in my mind that she’d do something significant with her talents, most likely through the cello that she loved playing so much, and that – regardless of whatever she did with her life and wherever she ended up – Scarnbrook wouldn’t forget Livvie Allister in a hurry.
And, well, it never did – for all the wrong reasons. Because Livvie’s departure was as unexpected as her arrival.
But thinking about that stuff – let alone talking about it – was instinctively out of bounds. I blinked away my tears and opened up my coffee-table drawer to retrieve my Christmas movie notebook. I added the details of the film that had just ended, along with the one I’d watched with Elle last night. I’d watched twenty-nine of them last December, and it was my intention to beat that figure this year.
After I’d tallied up my latest viewing total, I decided I might as well put up my Christmas tree. These days, ‘putting up the tree’ was a pretty depressing affair. It involved retrieving my miniature fibre-optic spruce from its tatty box, bending the bristly wires into vaguely branch-like positions and shoving it on top of the space-saving dining table in the corner of my living room, which was permanently folded away into its smallest position these days. As my outstretched hand scrabbled about under my bed for the box in question, it landed on another box, instead – the one that had housed my PE effort award for all those years.
It was the kind of box that had moved around with me ever since I’d left Scarnbrook, shoved into the corners of understairs cupboards alongside the never-used steam cleaner that had been bought on a wine-induced whim after watching soothing late-night infomercials. I wrapped myself in my dressing gown, sat on the floor and dragged it over to have another rifle of its contents. It was a hodgepodge collection of late-nineties tweenage memorabilia that my parents had hastily scooped up from my bedroom when they’d moved out of our Scarnbrook home not long after Livvie’s funeral.
Among yellowed Point Horror and Sweet Valley High books, a bottle of Exclamation perfume (‘make a statement without saying a word!’), chipped ornaments from family holidays to the Balearics and a sealed sandwich bag of shrivelled bath pearls, I discovered an old snow globe. I gave it a little shake and watched as the artificial flakes drifted downwards through the murkiness of the yellowing glass. I could just about make out Tower Bridge nestling amidst the floating glitter. Annoyingly, it played a plinky-plonky version of ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ when you twisted its crank. The mismatching of the iconic landmark with a song that related to a completely different bridge grated, but the tune did bring back memories of a December trip to London to visit Auntie Sandra back when we were kids. She’d taken the three of us to Hamleys and had let us choose anything we wanted for our Christmas presents, which had basically been the best moment of our lives up until that point.
Not wanting to take advantage, I’d selected the modest snow globe as a nice memento of a happy winter weekend. Typically, Livvie had absolutely taken advantage and – much to my parents’ dismay – had chosen one of those giant floor pianos, as popularised by the filmBig. The only room large enough for it at home had been the garage. She used to spend hours in there, running up and down the light-up keys in a surprisingly tuneful way. I had no idea what had happened to it when they decided to sell up. From what I remembered, Josh had chosen a Formula One quiz book.
I carried the dusty snow globe into the living room and put it on the mantelpiece, hoping it might add an extra element of festive magic to the place. Nope.
I returned to my room and unscrewed the lid of an ancient kiwi fruit lip balm from The Body Shop. I took a big sniff, the familiar but long-forgotten aroma immediately transporting me back to school corridors and dashing through the gauntlet of communal showers after PE. Teenage sleepovers and hours-long phone calls behind the curtain in the dining room, fingers occupied by a curly cord. Friendship dramas – usually with Elle at the heart of them – and Tom Brinton. Ah, Tom Brinton – the cool boy a quiet girl like me should never have had a crush on, but absolutely did.
It’s fair to say I’d been pretty smitten with Tom Brinton for almost the entirety of my time at Scarnbrook Community School. Even today, I still dreamt about a fictionalised adult version of him every so often, which was testament to the depth of my formative crush.
I screwed the lid back onto the ancient lip balm, amazed at the flurry of memories a simple sniff had triggered. I was surprised at how many of them were happy ones.
I placed the pot in my dressing-gown pocket and climbed up onto my bed, wrapping myself in the covers as more and more memories broke through the surface. I thought about the last normal time I’d been in Scarnbrook: I’d been in the car with my dad on a drizzly September morning, with a kettle on my lap and a boot full of clothes and crockery, on my way to Cardiff, my mum crying as she faded into the distance in the rear-view mirror. I remembered having to push down the emotional bubble in my own teenage throat. Because, the truth was, I’d never wanted to move away. I’d have been perfectly happy to stay in Scarnbrook for the rest of my life, just as my parents had intended to do themselves. But Elle had convinced me that three short years at a university just forty-five minutes up the M5 wouldn’t do any harm, so off I went. Little did I know that I was unwittingly severing my bond with Scarnbrook forever.
Because the next and most recent time I’d been in Scarnbrook, Livvie was gone and everything had changed. And instead of arriving in a place where I’d always felt nothing but ease and comfort, I returned to find nothing but a raw atmosphere of sickening shock that had pervaded the entire village.
I unscrewed the lip-balm lid once more and took another inhale from my horizontal position, trying to disperse the sad memories with the ancient fragrance. When it came to writing this article, I had no idea what to do for the best – and I was annoyed at myself for even considering the possibility of going back to Scarnbrook. All this pain was in the past. Wasn’t that where it belonged?
Chapter 5
?Baked goods
I was right: Josh’s wife, Saskia, declined Mum’s invitation to Sundaylunch, so it would be just the four of us at my parents’ place that day.It was a shame I didn’t know my sister-in-law better – or at all, truthbe told. My reluctance to wade into the world of social media – aroundwhich Saskia’s life appeared to revolve – no doubt meant thatestablishing any kind of relationship with her was a non-starter. But,from what Elle relayed to me about Saskia’s online influencing exploits,it wasn’t as if we had anything in common, anyway.
It’d taken me ages to figure out what to wear for the occasion; Josh always had something to say about fast fashion and how capitalism would be the death of us all. I mean, he probably wasn’t wrong, but he was always so bloody preachy about it. And he didn’t seem to mind that capitalism was working out pretty damn well for him and Saskia in their luxurious Chelsea apartment overlooking the River Thames.
Eventually, I settled on a pair of vintage dungarees over the top of one of Mum’s old Sweater Shop turtlenecks, which I’d been thrilled to discover languishing at the back of her wardrobe last Christmas. I pulled on my go-to Clarks ankle boots, grabbed my coat and ran for the station.
