A Ghost Story for Christmas

19th December.

In her room, Holly thinks.

For a little while she watches from her window as, one by one, the lights go out in the houses across the little estate outside. Her phone is in her pocket. She thinks she might be thinking about her phone, then reconsiders. If she was thinking about her phone, why wouldn’t she just take it out and look? She can’t be thinking about her phone, because she doesn’t want to think about her phone. And so instead, alone in her room, she stands and stares and thinks.

Recently, she has been anxious about how – not just this year, but this year especially – it feels like people, even people she knows, behave as if they can just believe their own realities into being. Like witches and warlocks. As if simply thinking a thing can in fact manifest it. She wonders if the world has always been this way and it is only now, as sixteen dissolves to seventeen, that she is realising it. It would be more comforting that way, not least because if it has always been like this then it’s simply something she can chalk up to getting older. S’alright. Nobody minds. No, what really worries her is if it is something new, emerging only now, at this time in human history. That would mean that no matter what her plans and ambitions are, it is her responsibility to do something about it – possibly to the detriment of all else. What if, for the first time in the history of the planet, a new kind of villain is emerging? One who says one thing because it sounds good, but in fact believes another? This, she thinks, she cannot stand. Life – all of life – her life – is too fragile for such monsters to go unchecked.

Holly thinks, while downstairs her father drinks.

It isn’t late (just after ten maybe?), except to know that for sure, she’d have to check her phone, and right now she doesn’t want to check her phone. Her phone is in her pocket. She doesn’t need to look at her phone. And even if she did, it wouldn’t mean that he’d have messaged. Sure, there’d be some messages (there’s never no messages), they’d just be the usual messages. She wonders how many WhatsApp groups she might actually be in if only she could be bothered to scroll so low. I could archive them, she thinks, just in case, then brushes off the thought as quickly as it came.

In the corner of the room, a little Christmas tree crouches and twinkles. The Christmas tree was a good idea. It is only little. Though, really, it’s more about the fairylights, which wash the room in such a romantic light that already she feels depressed at the thought of losing them in January. Or, just keep them up? Are the lights beautiful because they’re not usually there, or would they spell magic all year round? She thinks about how many trees have been cut down this year, and feels bad. Still, it’s only little. Maybe that’s worse. Is a baby tree more murderous than a parent one? Holly doesn’t know. She wonders if she’ll ever properly know.

Holly thinks about how five or six days a week, the house below her is pristine, the cupboards arranged neatly into little rows of forward-facing tins, the sideboards clear, everything in its right place, and then – suddenly – bottles and cans, strewn like shells, appear across the kitchen or the living room, as if from somewhere else. Holly thinks about how proud a man her father is, as the last of those upstairs lights is turned out across the street.

In her room, Holly thinks about how many things she thinks about in this room.

Once, not far from this window - where the motorcycle bollards give way to the ginnel, and where the neighbourhood kids gather to smoke cigs under dark skies - she wondered, when bracing a swift corner, what it might feel like to be caught between the wheels of a car she didn’t see. That night, she heard the crunch of bone, and felt the speed of how quickly the rubber took her under. She wonders what kind of person wouldn’t think of such things, then laughs. Because she does know. She knows because she works for those people, every Friday and Saturday, at the ASDA in Longsight which seems, against everyone’s will, to be clinging to the image of what an ASDA looked like in the early 1990s. Those people are forty and wear ill-fitting suit jackets and tell you one thing whilst believing another. If those people had the same thoughts sometimes, then being late because you set your phone alarm to PM instead of AM wouldn’t be the root of such a public telling-off when you arrived, flustered and blushed, twenty-three minutes late for a morning shift. They would know, just like Holly knows, that life is short and strange and tragic. Besides, time isn’t linear – she understands this – and so retail middle management can go fuck themselves, six ways and again, for all she cares. Except, she has to care. It’s a job. And jobs are scarce. This she also knows, because she has been told it many times, for a very long time.

Sometimes the house is not pristine. But mostly, it is.

Holly checks her phone. Nothing. For once, there is no messages, but at last that digital typeface tells her the time: 11.10pm. She has been here awhile, and still – nothing.

Holly thinks about Malavi.

Maybe he is asleep.

She hopes so. More than anything, she hopes so. Because if he is asleep then possibly, in the fraught confusion of the day, in the remnants of his subconscious (and if the stars conspire right) she’ll appear, like a fragment or a message, in his thoughts.

Holly slinks down on her bed, throws her phone away, and thinks.

* * * *

20th December.

Holly fixes her hair while the FaceTime screen rings out. She does it quickly, like she should have made a bigger effort before hitting ‘Call.’ Malavi answers, more promptly than usual.

“Yo. What’s happening?”

In the half-light of the screen, his face is radiant. His skin is dark and soft. She wonders what it might be like to walk around in that skin, to shower in it, to live in it.

“How are your hands?” she says, less well than when she rehearsed it.

Malavi frowns.

“My hands?”

“I feel like I’m over-sanitising again,” she says. “Because of work.”

“Lemme see?”

Holly holds up her hands.

“No, lemme see your hands.”

“That is my hands.”

“No, no. That’s some Nightmare on Corona Street type shit is what that is. When did Freddie Krueger start lettin’ you wear his murder gloves?”

Holly blushes and laughs and lowers her hands out of frame.

“Why are you wearing a tie?” he asks.

Holly tries not to blush more. “Ugh. Job interview. Zoom. Thought it’d look more professional, no?”

Malavi, suppressing laughter: “No. No, it does.”

“Don’t laugh and say it does, because that it means it’s bad and it doesn’t.”

“You’re right. It does not.”

“Yeah, well, it didn’t go well anyway.” Then, stumbling across an idea: “Oh wait! I’ve just thought of one.”

For a moment, she disappears out of frame, then returns wearing a black hat, an American accent and affecting a performative social awkwardness.

“Oh, God. What a—what a dumb thing to say, right? Oh well. La-di-da. La-di-da. La-di--”

“Annie Hall,” Malavi says, interrupting her, laughing.

Holly stops acting, and resumes her usual self-consciousness. She is suddenly aware that she feels sad. The kind of sadness that starts in your belly and stretches to your temples. The kind of sadness where the sight of fresh leeks and celery in the fridge is enough to make you cry because they speak of such promise. She wonders if her father will eat anything on Christmas Day. Then, as if that fleeting thought can be seen:

“How’s your old man?”

She thinks, and decides on: “He’s drinking through it.”

A sad little laugh.

“You got money?” he asks.

“Nope. You?”

“Nope,” he says. “Why change the habit of a lifetime?”

Holly smiles, and it hurts her heart. Outside, a wintry fog descends.

“I should get off,” he says.

“Yeah. Me too.” Which isn’t true. Truth is, she has very little to get off to – or for.

“Speak tomorrow?” Malavi says, and she nods. Tomorrow, if it ever comes, it is.

Malavi ends the call. And whilst she doesn’t know it yet, later Holly will steal a cig from her sleeping father’s pack and walk twice around the block, where, under a smoky crescent moon, she will smoke and think and eventually cry, just for a few seconds.

Just because it’s overdue.

Just because.

* * * *

21st December.

Holly is thinking about how she should write some of the things she is thinking down. If she doesn’t, how will anybody ever know? How will they know that she once went to Barcelona? Or saw two planets align? Or felt, in one moment, the purest love she’s ever felt, when her mother placed her familiar hand over hers (the silver wedding ring was slipping by then, she remembers that now) and said, in a voice as old as the world itself, “Love, the world is waiting for you.”

In her room, Holly thinks about her mother. Just two Christmases ago, she’d woken to the sound of Christmas records, turning over on the LP player as she cut crosses into sprouts and brewed once-a-year coffee in a dusty old cafetière that only saw light in December. She misses that now, in a way she didn’t think she could ever miss anything.

She thinks about who she is at work and how different that person is from who she really is. She thinks about how her fingers clasp the scanner, or work the buttons on the til, and how repetitive a life is. Sometimes she dreams of those buttons, and sometimes she wakes from half-sleep to realise that she isn’t still there. There is a freedom in that. A kind of letting go. When she walks home, she wonders if the people behind those windows, illuminated as they are, wouldn’t prefer the real her, the her with all the thoughts.

Holly thinks about how many cigarettes she has stubbed out in how many different puddles, and about how her mam only ever smoked one cigarette in her life and didn’t like it. She thinks about the stars on a clear night and how some songs make her cry, even when she doesn’t want to, and how they seem to have some unwavering thing in common.

Holly thinks about all these things, one after the other, for the millionth time and the first.

Holly thinks: I wish the world wasn’t always so sad.

* * * *

22nd December.

Some nights the little estate that wraps around her house feels like a film set, the streetlights transformed into the blonde bulbs of a romcom, and all the world is suddenly a stage, and everything is sad - even the trees. This is how Holly likes the world best: when the asphalt is quiet and the night is misty, or even clear, and every footfall feels like a meaningful step in a remarkable journey. She wonders, if she did write it down, whether the words could ever truly capture the teary promise of adventure she feels when the lights in the houses are all turned out, and the only story being told is her own. She figures not. Language, by its nature, is imperfect. A prism through which the realness of life is merely glimpsed. Just, symbols of some desperately raw truth, which maybe only she knows or will ever know. She wonders if a person could exist forever in that place, or whether it would quickly overwhelm them with madness. Holly thinks that she would like to try anyway.

She thinks about this year’s masks and how they have a way of making you focus on a person’s eyes. Never in her life has she imagined half of so many people’s faces. At work, where the anxious and the belligerent collide for a weekly shop or a last-minute gift, she never ceases to wonder at how quickly she has adapted to the reshaping of heads she knew fully just nine months ago. She remembers something she read in her first year of college, about how the brain ‘invents’ the detail of that which it can only see peripherally, as if to experience everything all of the time would be too overwhelming. And there’s that word again. She thinks of all the people who have joined her there since the wheels fell off the world – those men and women who worked as translators, or flight attendants, or wedding planners – and how she has created noses and mouths and chins for all of them. She wonders how wrong she might’ve got them, how incongruent their faces might be to the muffled voices she shares polite conversation with on the shopfloor each day. She thinks about what their lives were like before this, how many careers and ambitions and loves have been lost, how many lips have quivered beneath those three-layer masks as they tell the story of how they wound up here. She wonders how many of those faces she will see in their proper aspect ratio, and how many will dissolve to some other emergency occupation when the season has ended. She thinks about the word ‘essential’ and how if the essence of a person can be glimpsed in the eyes, how we have all become essential in 2020.

Outside Malavi’s childhood home, without quite realising it, Holly stops and stands and stares at a grey sky where, instead of stars, a single white light blinks on and off towards Manchester Airport, bringing strangers to a foreign land, and families she’ll likely never know, home, to England, for the holidays.

* * * *

24th December.

The little front door rattles and Holly changes the channel again, looking for something, anything.

“Hiya love,” her father says, defeated and tired and doing his best to admit neither.

“Hi.”

“Anything decent on?” he calls.

Holly shrugs. Her dad, poised halfway between the doormat and the living room, unlaces and takes off his boots, then sweeps away the fresh mud with his hand. She loves him for it, not least because it’s become something of a familiarity this last few months.

“Usual shite,” she says, reverting back to the Beeb, where a newsreader analyses the deal. Even his tiredness is fluorescent, she thinks.

“I bashed up my fucking arm,” he says, hanging up his vest and removing the coat below. She can see the bruise. “Still, off until the 28th now, so, s’not all bad. D’you want a drink?”

“Go on then,” she says, because it’s nice to be offered and she thinks the buzz might actually be, sort of, welcome.

Her dad goes to the kitchen and returns with a couple of bottles.

“The home said we could see Nan at half past ten. Through the window, like, but it’s better than nothing.”

“I wrapped the socks and the scarf, but I didn’t know what to write in the card,” she replies.

“You’ll dream up something, love,” he says, dropping onto the settee, more heavily than before. “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” she says, and they both drink.

“Dickhead got his deal across the line, then?” he says, taking in the telly.

“Certainly seems so.”

Holly hasn’t been paying attention.

“Is it any good?” he asks.

Holly shrugs.

“’Ere, I’ve got a goodun for ya...” He takes a swig of his beer, sets himself up and then, precisely, like it could only ever be a joke: “How do you know when madness is arriving?”

Holly lets it rest a second.

“Go on...”

Her father smiles.

“When Suggs is walking up the drive,” he says.

And it is her father’s laughter which makes her laugh too, more than she would ordinarily, but genuinely enough. Because it is funny. He is funny.

“Good, innit?” he says.

“Very good.”

Her old man laughs, drains his beer in one and starts back towards the kitchen.

“Another?”

He is nearly gone before she answers.

“Nah, I’ve still got this one.”

“Well, help yerself won’t ya?” he says. “I mean, don’t go mental, but, y’know, they’re for us.”

And when she hears the fridge door open, it is all Holly can do not to think of the leeks – which, full of promise as they were, will likely never see a saucepan.

* * * *

25th December,.

Holly, glistening with nervous excitement, looks once more at the screen where, above her switched-off video, Malavi waits in sodium light.

“Okay, okay, I’m almost ready,” she says, making the last of her preparations.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. It’s illegal, remember?” His voice is tinny and glitchy and slim. Somewhere in her subconscious she remembers the bassier tones of that voice, uncompressed as they once were in the real world, like the Beatles LPs her mother insisted on playing whenever Holly tried to play them on Spotify instead.

Holly’s heart is beating fast as she makes adjustments to the tinsel on the wall behind her laptop. Her breath is a little short. She remembers her mother’s breathing, short and shallow, not even a year ago – then cigarettes outside the hospital doors. She remembers trying to ‘be strong.’

“Et voila!” she says, pushing January away, then turning on her video in a way which has a more diminished impact than the sticking tape from over the camera, which she had been considering until she couldn’t find cellotape anywhere in the house.

Malavi, who until now has been in darkness, sees the balloons, the fairylights, the tinsel, the tree. Somewhere in her room, music starts to play. Elton John. Step into Christmas.

Holly reveals herself, dressed up, all make-up and voluminous, recently conditioned hair.

“Merry Christmas!” she announces, not quite in time with the score.

“Be still my beating heart,” he says, and she flushes.

“I couldn’t come and see you, or go out and buy you anything, so I thought...” Holly gestures at the little scene she has set.

“It’s perfect. Thank you.”

“And, well, I thought I could just give you a sort of present on here...” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Now she shuffles, legs crossed, not quite herself.

“You’re nervous. Why are you nervous?”

“I don’t know,” she starts, and then: “No, that’s not right. I do know, it’s just...”

“Hol?”

“The thing is, Mal – I know everything is fucked at the moment, and we’re really far away – not that it’d matter, cause if you were here I still wouldn’t be able to see you – but that’s not the point...”

Malavi, confused, leans closer, and all the time Holly talks:

“The point is, I love you. I’m in love. A-and not rom-com love. Properly in love. With you. And I haven’t said it before because my mum was sick, and then Covid happened, and you had to go to your Mum’s... but not seeing you at college everyday, or anywhere-- and not knowing when I’ll get to see you in the same room again...” Her voice fractures, and she tries not to let it show. “You’re my best friend, but I can’t stop thinking about you being my boyfriend. It’s Christmas, and I’m on my own, and I want you to be my boyfriend.”

For a moment, the whole world goes still and Holly, in her confusion, mistakes it for causation, as if her own proclamation has brought the world itself to standstill. Then Malavi, backlit, unfreezes – and the world unfreezes with him.

Now, a voice – glitchier than before, but audible:

“I’ve lost you. I can’t--”

Take a look at these hands, she thinks, as he gestures to his ears, in the universal silent language for “I can’t hear you.”

In her room, the noise of the world returns.

“Wait, wait – I think you're back. Can you hear me now?” Half-panicked by the static, he waits for her to say something.

“Yeah, I can hear you. Can you hear me?”

“Yes!” he says, excited, relieved. “You were glitching for a second, but I think you’re back.”

“You couldn’t hear?” she asks.

Malavi shrugs, then says: “You wanna try again?”

Holly thinks. Her face is hot and her heart hurts.

“No, no. I’m good,” she says, eventually.

“No?”

“No,” she says. “S’all good.”

* * * *

26th December.

. . .

* * * *

28th December.

Holly thinks about how little daylight there sometimes is in a single day and how, on the morning her mother passed, it was the same slow sun which once rose over her in the hospital, when she was giving birth to a daughter. She thinks of how her mother never lived to see a world with COVID-19 in it, or heard the neighbours bang their pots together in honour of the carers, or knew who played Diana in The Crown. She thinks about the idea of death, and what it means in life. She thinks about the difference between those two things, and how on the day a person dies, the world feels lighter. She thinks about January and December, and the months that came between. She thinks about the arbitrary measures of time, and how they are simultaneously meaningless and precise. She thinks about Malavi’s body, and about her own, and about the organs inside each one, unknowingly vulnerable as they are, to the tides of life. Holly thinks about God, and about his absence.

Holly thinks about Malavi, then sleeps.

* * * *

31st December, 2020.

On FaceTime, Malavi is conducting a post-match interview in the style of a BBC sports correspondent:

“Malavi, you’ve achieved something most of us couldn’t possibly have imagined a few long months ago – a last minute winner in the first post-Coronavirus World Cup Finals, leading England to their greatest victory in nearly sixty years. Let me just ask you this: how does it feel?”

Then, changing his face completely, and becoming a breathless Scouse footballer:

"Well, y’know, we were dead focused on winning the game today – obviously me first couple of touches weren’t great, but as the manager says, you’ve gotta keep pressin’ and, what can I say, I’m just happy Raheem spotted me run and I’ve put it past the keeper from forty yards...”

Back to BBC RP:

“This, of course, in addition to having been an instrumental part in rolling out the vaccine to millions of people across the country – how will you be celebrating tonight?”

Holly laughs, and Malavi resumes his breathlessness:

“Well, I’ll probably just head to me mate Holly’s house, y’know, ‘ave a coupla drinks, order a curry and, uh, watch a film from the nineties that hasn’t aged very well at all, y’know?”

Then, the interviewer again, one last time:

“Well, on behalf of the nation – and, in many ways, the world – Malavi, thank you.”

Holly laughs and applauds.

“Yeah?” he says, seeking approval.

“Yes. A thousand times, yes.”

Malavi takes a sarcastic bow.

“You could do a Ken Loach, or a Mike Leigh...” she says.

“Yes. So long as there’s a regional accent, I’m yours.”

“Yeah?”

“Easy.”

Malavi grows quiet. And in the silence, Holly senses a change. It is something like a transition.

“Listen, Hol,” he says. Then, after a pause: “I like boys. You know that, right?”

In her room, Holly falls quietly apart.

“I do,” she says. “I mean, yes. I do know that."

Malavi smiles. A sad little smile.

“I love you, though,” he says.

Holly thinks, in the same time it takes for the first streetlamp to go on outside, that she knows this too.

“I wish you weren’t so far away,” she says.

And then:

“Well, actually, I’m staying with my Dad for a while.”

Holly, stunned: “You’re back on Green Lane?”

“I’m back on Green Lane.”

And now, with quickening heart:

“Oh my God. Wait. Just wait there.”

Holly runs to the window.

Outside, a wintry dusk descends. Same as it ever has. Beyond, a little light flickers on, and in the window--

“I can see you! That’s you!”

Across the street, Malavi raises a single silhouetted hand in salute.

“There you are!” she says, with all the delight in the country.

“That’s me,” he says, laughing. “And there you are.”

Holly doesn’t cry. Instead, across the divide:

“Get on this,” she says. “The virus has locked us in our houses, right, and we can’t go out, and even if we did there’d be physical distancing, and still we’ve wound up six feet apart."

“It’s probably more like sixty feet, but, yeah...” he says, smiling.

In the distance, the sound of sirens. For the first time this month, Holly doesn’t hear them.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he says. “S’pretty bleak out there right now.”

“I’m glad too,” she says, absent of laptop and divorced of phone, staring joyously into the grey.

“Alone together, not alone,” he says.

“Alone together,” she says.

And for a little while, she doesn’t think of anything except that.