It's Beginning To Feel A Lot Like Christmas
11 September 2011
The air changed this week. It got colder, there was cold moisture in the air. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I felt Christmassy for the first time. There’s a certain magic in the air when the warm seasons diminish, magic that promises romantic walks through damp autumnal parks, the smell of bonfires on dark November nights, the prospect of Christmas. The sensation reminded me of a time when I was a kid, in the year of 1987, or maybe ’88. At the time I was into He-Man and Thunder Cats. I had outgrown simple ideas of space and dinosaurs and needed to flesh out my imagination with characters. I was hoping to get either the open-top flying device that He-Man used to fly around in or the big tank in which the Thunder Cats figures could sit and enjoy some downtime. For me, I enjoyed the times when my figures were between adventures, just hanging out, being themselves.
I was so excited this particular year that I remember attempting to stay up on Christmas Eve to get a glimpse of Father Christmas. Christmas Eve was cold that year, so cold that a latticework of ice molecules had crystallised in the air. You could feel them on your face as you walked. I spent the afternoon kicking a football nervously against a wall, a solitary game of soccer tally. Dusk gathered itself about the afternoon and a mist came in off the river. I remember quite clearly thinking that if ever I was going to see my great hero then tonight would be the night.
I retired to bed at my usual hour of eight o’clock , with a mug of warm Ribena and some light reading material. I read for a while and then made loud stomping noises to the light switch so that my parents below would assume that I was preparing for sleep. Oh how wrong they were! For when I climbed back into bed I had on my person my Formula 1 car which was actually a radio, a torch, and a portable digital clock. I tuned into a comedy show and though I wasn’t old enough to understand the jokes I was thrilled at hearing adult voices talking about things I was not ordinarily privy to. Every now and again I would check the portable digital clock, watching the digits creep ever so slowly by. It seemed odd that episodes of He-Man were twenty minutes long and they flashed by when here in my bed twenty minutes seemed more like an episode of Songs of Praise.
But I am nothing if not immensely stubborn. It got to eleven thirty and I heard a rustling sound not from downstairs, where the fireplace lay in wait, but in my parents’ bedroom. I knew that our chimney was not closed – hail stones landed on the hearth when there were storms – and so I knew that old Santa would not enter the house through a window. I stayed put. Bide your time, Rhys, I told myself. Bide your time.
I was getting tired. I closed my eyes for a while and must have drifted off because soon after I found myself waking up. After recovering from a mild panic attack due to the fact that I had fallen asleep with my face under the blanket, hence leaving myself susceptible to death by asphyxiation, I checked the digital clock. 4:15am ! I remember the time vividly because I had never been awake anywhere close to that time. I had once crept downstairs at 1am after my parents had hosted a house party and accidentally mistook whiskey for delicious Coca Cola, a mistake I never repeated until, some years later in Harry Ramsdens, my brothers substituted my Coca Cola for vinegar whilst I was in the toilet. But 4:15am was completely new territory. I was nervous. Officially it was Christmas Day – was it too late for Father Christmas? How exactly did he conduct his night’s work?
I was already heading down the stairs, freezing in my Gremlins pyjamas that I had outgrown some years previous. When I reached the door that led to the living room I paused. There was someone in there. This is a true story. I pressed my ear to the door and quickly sucked in a shock of breath. The baubles on the Christmas tree were jangling. I got scared for a second and thought about waking my mum and dad but then I thought, no, I have to go through with this. I’ll never get another chance to meet the great man. Slowly, I opened the door.
The curtains were not drawn; moonlight lit the room. This was only a side thought that slipped in through my open mouth. There was something in the living room, or lounge as we used to call it. And it had heard me. Its back was to the room, and it had paused. The thing wore a thick coat that might have been red, it was hard to tell in the light. The collar was shrouded in some ethereal cloud of white. It wore a hat made of an unidentified animal’s fur. Two pointed ears stood upright either side of the hat. Long, pointed ears. As I waited, my hand on the freezing door handle, it sniffed the air. And then it started to turn.
This was enough for me. I slammed the door shut and bolted up to my parents’ room, shaking them awake. I was screaming by this point. I eventually managed to get them out of bed and downstairs. My dad switched on the main light of the lounge, which was now completely empty. There was no sign of anything having been there. I blinked and took in the landscape. There were stacks of presents everywhere.
‘See? He’s been,’ my mum said. ‘But you can’t have seen him because he was here hours ago. You must have had a bad dream.’
But I hadn’t. I had seen that thing. I had.
We got up the next morning and conducted the annual Thomas ritual of gathering on the stairs outside the lounge and asking the question, ‘Has he been, has he been?’
I already knew the answer.
In the lounge the other Thomas children ran around with wild excitement, collecting up bundles of presents in their arms. I sat in my seat and cautiously peeked inside my Christmas sack. Everyone was acting like it was the greatest day ever but something had changed in me. Something was tainted.
After a few minutes my siblings calmed down and were preoccupied in their present unwrapping processes. I watched them one by one; Rhid, examining a new microscope; Chris, despondently staring at a tangerine; Anna – Anna, my sister… but not my sister.
There was a strange girl in the room, unwrapping presents, wearing the same Care Bear nightgown that my sister owned, acting as if she was meant to be here. But she wasn’t. This girl was not my sister. She was approximately the same, same hair, same size, but her face was different. A poor facsimile. The bridge of the nose went up between her eyes and her cheeks were like they had been moulded from clay. It wasn’t Anna. Why had nobody else noticed?
I looked at my mum whose face was painted with a faint smile as she regarded her children’s reactions. When she looked at Anna it was as if she was looking at her own daughter. ‘What have you got?’ she said to her.
‘My Little Pony,’ said the girl thing, holding up a pink horse with a blonde mane.
‘Who are you?’ I said to it.
When her eyes met mine they looked not like human eyes but those of a cat. The pupils were two long slits. Her irises were golden. They seemed to be absorbing me.
‘Rhys,’ scolded my mum. ‘Don’t argue.’
‘What? Mum, that’s not Anna.’ How could she not see? ‘It’s a stranger. They’ve swapped her. They’ve taken Anna away.’
My mum looked angry. ‘What’s the matter with you? Why have you got to be like this?’
‘Yeah,’ said the copy. Its voice was a croak, something coming slowly from a set of tinny speakers. ‘Why can’t you ever behave?’ A wide crack split across its face and it tilted its head to one side.
I bolted up from my seat and pointed at the thing. ‘You shut up! What have you done with her?’
‘Rhys,’ my mum shouted. ‘That’s enough.’
I turned to her. ‘Mum, it’s not-’
‘I don’t care. Get upstairs to your room.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me. Get upstairs. You’ve always got to ruin everything.’
‘Dad?’
‘Do as your mother says.’
This was scary. My parents never got angry like this. Not this quickly, anyway. All the while the distortion-girl gazed at me through those horrible eyes.
‘Now,’ my mum screamed.
I leapt up, bounded to my room, threw myself down on the bed and buried my face in the pillow. This was crazy. Something completely alien was happening. My house didn’t feel like my house, my family not my family. I thought of my sister and was scared for her. Wherever she was, she was not here in her home. She was alone on Christmas day. Almost immediately I found myself entertaining the idea that I might never see her again.
There was a knock on my door. My dad came in and sat on the end of my bed.
‘You okay, Rhys?’
I rolled over onto my back and sat up. I shook my head and started crying. My dad grabbed me up and hugged me.
‘Come on, kiddo, you’re just over-excited. It’s ok.’
And then something strange happened. A blackbird slammed into my window. Me and my dad jumped at the loud crack. The bird flapped out of sight, leaving a smear of blood on the windowpane. My heart beat fast at the shock. My dad raced over and looked down into the garden. When I joined him, the blackbird was twitching on the patio, trying to flap its wings but one was broken and it was turning in a circle. And soon it wasn’t moving at all. We watched it for a moment until my dad put his arm around me and told me it was time to go back downstairs.
In the lounge Chris and Rhid were playing with their new toys but the girl pretending to be Anna was nowhere to be seen. She’s getting changed, my mum said.
When my sister came down, though, she was still wearing her Care Bear nightgown. But this time it really was Anna. I have no way of explaining it but my sister had somehow come back. The thing that had taken her place that morning had gone back to wherever it had come from and Anna had been returned. After Christmas dinner I took her to one said and tried asking her about it but she had no memory of anything, as if whenever she thought about it her mind slipped away from whatever she had been through.
A week later I was walking through the local woods and came across some Christmas wrapping paper, all ripped up, in a holly bush. When I approached it I noticed that there was a scrap of cardboard stuck to it. I picked it up and had to double-take. The present had been a He-Man flying device, a gift I had failed to receive on Christmas day. And there was a tag that read simply: To Rhys, Merry Christmas, from Sinterklaas.
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