Lost Christmas (3 page)

Suddenly, he heard a
Phhrruppp!
sound and the bulb above him went out. He looked up at it and belched loudly.

Did I do that?
he wondered. Then the neighbouring lamp, some ten metres away, went out too.

‘Hmm,' said Frank, out loud.

A lamp across the road died. And then in quick succession, one by one, all the lamps in the street went dark. Within just a few seconds, the only light was coming from the moon.

Frank buttoned up his fly and was about to hurry on home when a cloud drifted across the face of the moon. He was plunged into complete darkness. He thought this was particularly spooky. Then he realized that there were absolutely no sounds around him. That made the spooky much worse and goose bumps prickled Frank's arms and the back of his neck. He was unnerved. So much so that he actually acknowledged to himself that he was unnerved.

I'm unnerved
, he thought. It was too dark. Unnaturally dark for the city, where there was always light coming from somewhere, but Frank couldn't see any. No cars around,
not even any lit windows in the surrounding houses. It was as if Frank was completely alone. The only person in the whole of Manchester.

Then he spotted a small blinking red light on the dashboard of the parked car next to him. It was a security light, blinking to inform would-be thieves that the car was alarmed. That little red light made Frank feel a bit better and a little less alone. Someone somewhere owned this car and cared enough about it to fit it with an alarm system. Or at the very least a little blinking red light. He relaxed.

Then he looked up at the lamp post again and was now sober enough to think it odd that all the lights had gone out like they had. As he was contemplating this oddity, all the bulbs in the street came back on, all at once and much brighter than before. Ten, twenty times brighter. Frank was blinded. He cried out and covered his eyes, but it was just a little too late. As he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, he could see shapes and specks drifting past his pupils, varying shades of dark and light coruscating behind his eyelids.

The lamps dimmed, returning to their usual benign luminance, but it took the best part of a minute before Frank was able to open his eyes again. Even then, he couldn't see very much. Gradually the streaks and blobs of blurred detritus swimming in his field of vision began to dissolve and his retinas ceased to sting. Frank blinked
twenty-three times in quick succession and his eyes started to feel normal again.

He tilted his head to one side, frowned and squinted. There was a mound in the middle of the road that, he was pretty sure, hadn't been there a few moments before, prior to all the street lamps going supernova. The more he concentrated on it, the more he realized it was a human-shaped mound. Cautiously he moved towards it.

As he got closer he saw that the human-shaped mound was indeed a human. It was a man. Broad, with big features. A large jaw, a wide forehead. The man's hair was a dirty blond colour, and while he didn't have a full-blown beard, he clearly hadn't shaved for more than a week or maybe two. His beard was mostly the same colour as his hair but with wisps of red mixed in. He was dressed oddly: baggy cargo pants, frayed at the hems; heavy work boots, extremely worn; fingerless gloves on his hands and three dog collars around his right wrist. However, the reason Frank thought he was dressed oddly was mostly because of his jacket. It was a strange-looking jacket in itself, but it was the contrast between the jacket and the rest of his clothing that made it stand out. It was maroon with yellow horizontal stripes and matching yellow trim. On the left breast pocket was a badge. The badge read: ‘My name is Anthony. How can I help?'

Frank edged closer, peering down at the prostrate man,
wondering if he was alive or not. He could see his chest rising and falling so he decided he was alive. Frank nudged him with his toe. ‘Hey … mate …'

No response.

Frank's eyes flicked down to the name badge: ‘Anthony … you awright?' He prodded him again, a bit harder this time. More a kick than a prod really. Still nothing. Frank crouched down, wobbling a bit, looking over him closely, his face just a few centimetres from Anthony's.

‘You alive?'

Suddenly Anthony's eyes pinged open, taking Frank by surprise. He lost his already shaky balance and toppled over backwards with a cry.

Anthony sat up, blinking, and looked around. It was clear from his furrowed brow that he had no recollection of how he had got there.

‘It was snowing,' said Anthony, articulating the first curious thing that occurred to him. Half a dozen other curious realizations also flitted through his mind at the same time, but the lack of snow seemed to be the one at the forefront.

Frank turned himself around and with some difficulty managed to sit up. Any talent he once possessed for balance had deserted him.

‘Snow! Not in Manchester, mate,' he said. ‘In Manchester it rains.'

Anthony turned to look at Frank. He wondered who he was but decided not to ask because there was the more pressing matter of that absent snow. Anthony looked up at the mostly cloudless sky. Frank looked up too.

The one cloud that had recently obscured the moon was on the move. It settled above them, and as Frank squinted up at it he caught sight of something small and white drifting down towards him. With marvellous precision, a snowflake floated down in a tight spiral and landed on the tip of Frank's nose. He crossed his eyes to try to look at it. He plucked it off and it dissolved between his fingers. He couldn't be sure what it had been.

However, before he could generate enough brain activity to formulate a question about what had landed on him, another snowflake entered his field of vision. Then another and another and then a million more. It was snowing. In Manchester. Where usually it only rained.

‘What the … ?' Frank couldn't believe it. It was really snowing. Fast now. Collecting on the surfaces around him and on him.

Somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, memories of Christmases past whirled and elided, moments from his childhood flashed past his mind's eye like images on the old slide projector his father had cherished. Frank remembered waking up on Christmas morning at his grandmother's little house in Kent and looking out of the
window of his bedroom to see a blanket of snow stretching out over the fields surrounding the house. He remembered the smell of her kitchen as a turkey roasted in the oven and his grandmother arranged mince pies on a plate, sneaking sips of port and thinking no one knew. She would be drunk by lunch.

The fire crackled in the living-room hearth and his big sister sprawled on the sofa watching
The Wizard of Oz
. He remembered being scared of the flying monkeys and he remembered the sing-song tinkle of the little silver bells that hung on the Christmas tree. And then suddenly he was back in Manchester, a short time after midnight on Christmas Eve. Frank shivered, but not from the cold.

‘How did you … ?' Frank turned to look at Anthony, but he wasn't beside him any more. He turned his head in time to see Anthony striding away, vanishing into a swirling, whirling wall of snow. Slowly Anthony faded from view, and Frank wasn't sure if he had ever really been there.

The wall was high but someone had dumped an old suitcase in the alleyway and Goose was able to position it in such a way that he could stand on it, though it smelled like a family of stray cats had been squatting in it until recently and Goose didn't want to find out what was inside. If he reached up as high as he could, there was still a gap of the best part of half a metre, but he was an athletic kid. He jumped and was able to snag his fingertips on the lip of the wall. Fortunately, no glass or other defences were embedded in the top and he was able to pull himself up, his feet scraping against the brickwork, the edges of his Converse finding a little purchase here and there where the dusty mortar had worn away over time.

His dog, now no longer a puppy, sat obediently below, watching his master scaling the wall. He was called Mutt. He was sleek, white and brown, and had big, expressive eyes that missed nothing. He glanced quickly left and right as if he was keeping lookout.

Goose peered over the top into the dark garden beyond. The light of the moon reflected off the snow that was lying all around and still falling. The garden was small, like all the backyards in this part of Manchester, but unlike most of them this one was lovingly maintained, with narrow pathways that traversed bushes and rockeries from which unusual statues looked out. The statues were of Hindu gods but Goose didn't know that. There were areas of lawn and gravel separated by small evergreen border hedges. He could see strings of dormant fairy lights were strung around the whole garden.

His breath clouded as he exhaled, sitting on top of the wall. He looked different. Older than the year that had passed since the crash. His wild, all-over-the-place hair was long gone. In its place was a military-style buzz cut. He had lost weight from his face and he looked sullen. He still had huge green eyes, but there was no joy behind them any more. He had nothing to be joyful about. A near-permanent frown pushed his thick eyebrows closer together.

He could see into the neighbouring yards on both sides. A large, circular trampoline dominated the one on
his left. The safety net around the trampoline was tatty and torn. The ground was littered with junk. The yard on the right was decked and there was a two-storey playhouse in one corner. Clearly children lived in both of these houses. Goose looked up at the house to his right: three windows on the first floor. He imagined one of the children waking from a bad dream and crying out, the father jumping out of bed and hurrying across the hallway, kneeling down and stroking his son's brow, pushing the hair out of his eyes and telling him to go back to sleep because everything was all right.

Goose felt weight in the pit of his stomach, as if a jagged ball of stone was expanding within him, pulling him down. He knew, for the rest of his life, there would never be anyone to comfort him like that. He tried to convince himself that he didn't need it, but the lie didn't fool him for a second. All he could do was choose not to dwell on it. Mutt yapped once, breaking Goose's train of thought and pulling him out of his brooding. The stone ball contracted once again, but it would be back sooner or later.

‘Sorry, Mutt,' whispered Goose.

He looked down and could see a bench in the garden beneath him. He pushed himself off the wall and landed in an empty flower bed. The snow crunched under his feet. Crouching down, Goose observed the house. There was no movement or sign of life. He moved swiftly across the
yard to a pair of French windows and retrieved a small torch from his jacket pocket. He switched it on and shone it through the glass.

He was looking into a living room. The beam from the torch landed on a chunky, antiquated television set and a stereo. Neither was worth very much, if anything, and Goose rarely stole bulky items like that. Too heavy to carry, too hard to conceal if stopped by the coppers.

Goose was close to deciding to call it a night when the beam from his torch hit something that glinted. He stopped and moved back slowly. As the beam crossed the arm of an old worn leather chair, there was another glint of light. Goose squinted and saw a gold bangle sitting there.

Goose heard Mutt bark softly once again from the other side of the wall. He pulled an old Swiss Army knife that had once belonged to his dad out of his pocket and forced the blade into a gap by the lock. One quick, much-practised flick of his wrist and the door opened. It always shocked Goose just how easy it was to break into most houses. He opened the door and stepped inside.

The house smelled a little musty. Someone elderly lived here. For a split second Goose thought about his nan at home alone right now. He quickly pushed those thoughts out of his head and concentrated on the job at hand.

He crossed to the armchair and directed the beam of his torch on to the bangle. He picked it up and examined it
in the light. It was beautiful. It was gold. Old gold. Goose could tell the difference. There was weight to it. The bangle was in the shape of two cobras in a circle, each biting the other's tail. The detail was exquisite. Every scale on the snakes' skin had been individually outlined and the torchlight surged through the minute fissures like flowing lava.

He heard floorboards creaking upstairs. He froze and listened. He couldn't hear anyone moving. Maybe it was just someone turning over in bed.

Goose looked around. There was nothing else of value so he left, closing the door behind him.

He made his way back across the small garden. The falling snow had already filled in his footprints from earlier and he knew that soon there would be no trace of him. He climbed up on to the back of the bench and jumped towards the high back wall, got his hands on the top and pulled himself up and over.

He dropped down into the alleyway, where Mutt was waiting for him. The dog yapped. Just then they heard the sound of a car approaching and they froze. Goose stared at the mouth of the alleyway. He felt the drumming of his heart: partly from the exertion of climbing the wall and partly from the fear of being caught. The car was drawing ever closer. It was moving slowly. Goose imagined a police car, moving slowly because its occupants were looking for
someone. Maybe he had been spotted sitting on top of the wall earlier. Goose looked behind him to the other end of the alleyway. It was a long way and the alleyway was wide enough for a car to drive down. If the police chased him, he'd have no chance of escaping. The car was close now. Goose held his breath. A taxi drove past. Its tyres were slipping and sliding on the snowy tarmac, which was why it was moving slowly. Goose breathed a sigh of relief as it disappeared from view.