Page 45 of Every Christmas Eve
‘So, I’ve counted forty-five side plates and there’s only twenty flute glasses, but we can get more of those from – oh, am I interrupting something?’
‘Uncle Eric!’ we both sing in unison, springing backwards.
‘Not at all,’ I say, as if I’ve been electrocuted on the spot. ‘So, yes, that’s so good to know. I’ll write that down before either of us forgets.’
My hands are shaking as I grab my pen and clipboard from a table on the other side of the hallway. Lou looks like she might explode with giddy schoolgirl laughter, while I do my best to hold it together. We are both in our early forties, yet we reacted just now like we were teenagers again.
And it felt so good.
‘I think we should get Cordelia on FaceTime now for our grand switch-on,’ Lou suggests. This is the perfect distraction for Uncle Eric, even though I’m not sure exactly how much he saw just now.
‘Great idea! I’ll fetch Ava and Tilda from the kitchen,’ he says with a wry smile. ‘You two continue what you’re doing in the meantime.’
‘We’re all done, honestly,’ says Lou.
Uncle Eric waves back as he hobbles away. ‘There’s no hurry, is there?’ he says, turning in our direction once more with a wink and a nod. ‘It’s been a long time since Ballyheaney House was lit up for Christmas like this, so we can wait another few minutes if we need to.’
‘Seriously, we’re all good,’ I call out to him.
‘We don’t need to worry about a power cut, that’s for sure,’ laughs Uncle Eric, continuing on his way. ‘There’s enough electricity in this hallway alone to light the feckin’ Eiffel Tower.’
I take a deep breath. My heart is thumping, so I excuse myself and go outside for some fresh air.
Lou doesn’t follow. Maybe that’s a good thing.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lou
THEN
Christmas Eve, 21 Years Ago
Ben wasn’t coming home for Christmas, which was probably a good thing after our conversation about creating space between us the year before. It had been hard not hearing from him as much as I used to, but we’d stuck to our plans, checking in only now and then with a quick catch-up rather than knowing each other’s every move.
I missed him terribly though, and I know he missed me too. He’d tell me in the odd drunken text message, particularly on days that had meant something to us.
His staying away for Christmas meant I hadn’t planned on being involved at Ballyheaney that year, but his sister wasn’t letting me off that lightly.
‘Oh come on, please, Lou,’ Cordelia said when she turned up on my doorstep, begging me to jump on board at the last minute. ‘Uncle Eric is like misery’s mother without you.Mum’s bloody prize peacock Cleopatra was poached, so she’s going round like a zombie, and my father is having a hissy fit because the front window got smashed by an errant tennis ball. I haven’t admitted it was me and probably never will as I couldn’t bear the incessant moaning. With Ben swanning around some Christmas market in Berlin this year with some girl, please come to Ballyheaney House and help me stay sane. I need you.’
I pictured Uncle Eric, forlorn with no one to bounce ideas off, and Tilda without her precious peacock, who she’d talked to like it was human. With Ben out of the picture, maybe Icouldhave some festive fun with a family I’d grown to love almost as much as my own?
So I got dressed, we went foraging down by the lough for some greenery and bare twigs to dress the tables with, and I immersed myself in all things Ballyheaney House, safe in the knowledge that Ben was far, far away.
He’d dropped the bombshell of his German visit at Hallowe’en in a very hurried early-evening call when he’d rung to ‘say a quick hello’ as he waited on the Metro. He was rushing to a punk gig in the Pigalle area of Paris with some German classmates. In much less glamorous surroundings, I was dressed as Marge Simpson and was on my way to a fancy-dress party in the Students’ Union, where I would drown my sorrows with a rather convincing Captain Jack Sparrow in the form of an American student called John Taylor.
‘Tell me all about him,’ Cordelia said when we took a breather from our duties on the day of the party. ‘Is he lush? I can only hope he’s as wonderful as you are.’
So I spilled the beans to her – not all of them, but enough to give her a good idea of my latest romance, which was turning into so much more.
Quiet, unassuming, charismatic John Taylor, with his long, flowing chocolate-brown hair, dimpled smile and electrifyingly smooth guitar licks, had caught my attention long ago, but I’d been doing my best to play it all very cool. Even his lecturers were bowled over by his gift of the gab and engineering expertise, both inherited from his Tipperary-born father who had raised him and his four brothers in Yonkers, New York.
We’d fallen into each other’s company back in May at a drunken student party in the infamous Holylands area, the epitome of university life in Belfast, and when he’d kissed me against a staircase with a bottle of Buckfast tonic wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other, I’d got on with my life without dwelling on it.
It was nothing more than two students sharing a drunken snog at the end of a long night.
Until it happened again, and again, and again.
