12 Days 'til Christmas ✓

chapter seven

s e v e n

*

Outside is completely white. The sky is piercingly bright, reflecting the clear, unmarked snow that fell all night and hasn't stopped falling. There must be at least a few inches out there, deep enough to make my uneven garden look flat; the world is white as far as the eye can see, and the sight fills me with a soft glow that starts in my stomach and spreads throughout my body.

This is what Christmas should be like. It's a cliché, I know, but it's one I wholeheartedly adore: the whiteout December, gardens filled with awkwardly-rolled snowmen. To me, nothing says Christmas more than waking up to a sea of snow and joining my family around a log fire, the flames reflected in bulbous glass baubles. Last year, we all gathered at my parents' house, including India and her husband; this year, while they're have renovations, the responsibility falls on me.

My house is about half the size, but right before the previous owners put it on the market, they added a conservatory that doubles the living space: the back door in the kitchen doesn't lead out into the garden, but into a warm, glass-roofed sunroom that will serve as the main room on Christmas Day. It even has its own tree, a fake one I found in a charity shop for less than a tenner, and a discordant array of sofas and armchairs to make the space as cosy as possible.

It's only after several long minutes of staring outside in awe that I remember, again, that Casper's here. The moment I fall asleep each night, it's as though my memories are packed away tight and it takes a while for them to crawl back in the morning. And then I realise the date. Today's the fifteenth. My chest squeezes tight, so tightly I have to rub my sternum and screw my eyes shut, counting to ten. Twenty. Thirty. I reach forty-two before I feel okay again, enough to stuff my feet into my slippers and pull on a dressing gown over my pyjamas, and shuffle out of my room to the sound of Casper's snoring as I head downstairs.

I'm out of milk. Damn it. I'm usually pretty good at keeping on top of stuff like that but it's been an odd couple of days, with twice as much coffee and tea as usual, and the empty carton sitting in the recycling bin is proof of that. I don't even have powdered milk, or one of those pre-mixed lattes in a sachet, and I need my morning pick-me-up. I'm sure it's psychosomatic, but it's only a bad day that starts without a hot drink, and every hot drink I enjoy requires milk. For a splinter of a moment, it seems like the end of the world, until I mentally slap myself and stand up straight. I can go and get milk. Today will not start badly. It can't.

My pyjama bottoms look close enough to joggers that I don't bother to change to go to the shop. I just replace my dressing gown with a coat and kick off my slippers in exchange for boots, and spend long enough debating whether or not to write a note for Casper that I could've written seven in the time it takes me to decide not to. The shop is only a couple of minutes away – double that in this weather, perhaps, never mind the time it'll take to defrost the windscreen.

Once the snow starts to fall, so do the standards of everyone who uses this tiny village store. I'm not the only one to have thrown a coat over pyjamas. There are a handful of other people here doing the same thing as me, cursing forgetfulness and stocking up on the essentials. I add bread and butter just in case, even though it costs twice as much here as it does at the supermarket in Saint Wendelin, and suffer through polite conversation for as long as it takes to scan three items.

I love where I live, but I don't love this aspect of small-town life. Everyone knows everyone; everyone knows who I am. Everyone makes the same small talk every time I see them and it's like nails screeching down a chalkboard, the grating repetition of polite disinterest. I'm reminded of one of my S6 sociology classes, one of few things I've retained from school: Goffman's idea of civil inattention, something I think more people need to employ. The art of acknowledging the people in your vicinity without imposing on them, whereby a quick glance or a nod of the head is plenty.