The Christmas Burn-Up - Part 2
The snow had stopped. At last something
positive.
She turned away from the bus stop and
walked the short distance to their house. Correction: her house. If she was going to properly move on she needed to at
the very least stop thinking about things in a joint way. Maybe the woman on
the bus had a point now that she thought about it. Her single life was still heavily
laced with Daniel. Her phone memory was still chock full of his grovelling
messages, asking her to give things another try, protesting that they were both
at fault in their own ways. The bloody cheek of it. Only one of them had
declared he felt like he was wearing a ball and chain. The house was still stuffed
with belongings he’d neglected to collect and reminders of their time together.
Maybe it was time for a clear out. That
part of what the crazy old bus lady had said actually made a certain kind of
sense. How the hell was she supposed
to move forward when she was surrounded by reminders of him everywhere she
looked? And it wasn’t as if she had anything more pressing in her social diary
for the evening.
The little house was easily identifiable.
It was the only one in the terraced row that wasn’t sporting some kind of
flashy Christmas illumination. The Thorp family, three doors down and slaves to
vulgar, had a sleigh and reindeer in flashing neon lights on their roof. Next
door had attempted tasteful, with a minimalist row of mock candles in the
window. End of the row had an inflatable snowman bobbing about in their front
garden and brandishing a ‘Santa Please Stop Here’ sign. Charlotte’s tiny house
stood in darkness.
She opened the front door and was
immediately tripped up by Cinnamon the cat, launching his assault from the side
table in the hall where he’d been staking out the doorway for her arrival,
winding his way hungrily between her feet. This time last year, exactly to the
day she realised with a pang of nostalgia, she’d found him. A tiny ball of
oily, grubby, spiky fur with a high-pitched pitiful mew that tugged at her
heart. No collar. Skin and bone. Found sheltering from the snow near the bins
at the back of the terrace.
She’d mocked up a leaflet and dropped it
through every letterbox on the street and had put up posters for good measure.
No one had come forward to claim him, much to her delight and Daniel’s grouching.
She’d talked Daniel into letting her keep him. Of course she had. Didn’t the
perfect couple in their perfect home need a pet? It was practically a requirement. It went with the image.
She swallowed. When it came right down to
it, image had really been all they were about. Playing house. Fitting what each
of them thought a steady cohabiting relationship should be and clashing like
crazy because their expectations were at opposite ends of a very big scale.
The wistful smile faded from her lips. She
was not about to be diverted from her task by a stupid nostalgia trip about a
cat. Dodging out of Cinnamon’s way, she whisked through the house like a
dervish on a wave of new momentum, picking up anything along the way that
reminded her of Daniel, some of it his stuff that he’d failed to pick up, some
things they’d bought together. Daniel’s football programmes, a photograph of
the two of them on a day trip to London, a cheap painting they’d bought
together, a spare jacket of his that he’d left behind. Since the house was a tiny two-up two-down, it
really didn’t take long. At last she held a teetering pile in her arms that she
dropped by the back door while Cinnamon watched disapprovingly.
‘What?’ she asked him. ‘Where’s your sense
of loyalty? He wanted to call you Crimbo. And do you really think you would
have been allowed to stay here if I hadn’t been around? Two words: Animal
Shelter.’
She opened the back door. A rush of
freezing air swept in and Cinnamon bolted up the stairs.
****
The
garden was as tiny as the house. A square of lawn, a miniscule patio that had
just enough room for a small table and chairs and a titchy shed at the bottom
corner. Next door had carried the theme of Christmas-meets-Vegas into their
back garden too, with a zingy string of coloured fairy lights along the
dividing hedge and Rudolph’s reindeer face depicted in lights on the back of
their house with a red nose that flashed rhythmically on and off.
She
carried the pile of belongings to the bottom of the postage stamp lawn and
carefully built up a base stack of rubbish for a bonfire, adding in some old
planks of wood that lay next to the tiny shed and some garden tat she found
inside it. She lobbed a few firelighters in the middle, leftovers from a summer
barbecue when they’d sat out here with friends and Daniel had wielded the
barbecue implements – stereotypical. She pressed her lips together. That’s
exactly what their life had been. She’d seen to it, she realised now. That was
what you did in summer when you lived together: you had a civilised barbecue
with your man turning the burgers while you rustled up a jug of Pimms. Daniel’s
mates had turned up, each brandishing a girlfriend and a six-pack, and it had
turned into more of a raving party than the sedate grown-up thing she’d had in
mind. Instead of having a laugh, she’d felt somehow disappointed, as if she’d
failed at the point of the afternoon. It all seemed a bit ridiculous now. Prior
to moving in with Daniel, she would have been partying along with the rest of
them. Sharing bricks and mortar had somehow made her lose sight of herself in
some mad quest to become Mary Berry.
The fire was glowingly warm. She held her
palms out to it. A melty circle grew outward from it on the frosty lawn as the
heat thawed the ground. It was actually cosier out here with the dancing flames
than it was inside the house. You could hang up more tinsel and fairy lights
than you could shake a holly branch at, but it didn’t actually generate
Christmas cheer. You needed people for that.
Pretty soon she had a nice burn up going on.
She settled herself to one side, next to
her pile of stuff, and picked up a photo from the top of the stack of herself
and Daniel, which had been tacked to the fridge under a magnet when he’d lived
here. Since he’d packed his bags it had been stuffed into one of the kitchen
drawers so she didn’t have to look at it every time she grabbed her microwave
meal-for-one.
She looked down at the picture. A friend’s
housewarming party, the second week they’d met. She’d moved in on week three. Daniel
looking impossibly handsome. Herself looking happy. What the bloody hell was
happy? Happy had gone AWOL since this relationship had gone tits up. She tossed
the photo into the air and watched it flutter into the fire where it curled and
blackened, that moment obliterated forever.
Now didn’t that feel better?
Well no, actually. She just felt bloody
sad. She shook her head lightly. Maybe it was a question of volume. After all,
one photograph was hardly enough to cut the mustard, was it?
Turning back to the pile, she had a good
rummage and came up with the perfect you’re-better-off-without-him item: his
loathsome 2006 World Cup T-shirt, ‘England’s Barmy Army’ splashed across the
front, worn as hell but which he insisted on still dragging out as leisurewear.
She held it up. It absolutely typified him: unwilling to let go of lad culture,
still always up for the laugh. She should be chucking it on the flames without
a second thought but for some reason on impulse she held the shirt to her cold
cheek. She breathed in the smell of him: warm and laced with the woody fresh scent
of the aftershave he always wore.
Her stomach turned over softly. Didn’t the
shirt also represent the essence of what she’d liked about him when they first
met? How much fun he was, how spontaneous, always up for a joke. For some
reason living together in her world meant sensible and grown-up. Why did it
need to? Why couldn’t his sense of kiddish fun coexist with them being a proper
couple?
It was too late to let second thoughts
muddy the waters now. To prove she wasn’t wavering, in a surge of determination
she balled the T-shirt up and threw it on the fire, then for good measure she
heaved on Daniel’s skanky old dartboard that she’d loathed on sight but which
he’d insisted on hanging in the corner of the lounge.
The dartboard must have been particularly
fusty and dry because the fire really took hold now, spitting and crackling and
billowing grey smoke into the darkness. The heat baked her cheeks and she
smiled into the glow. Who knew? She clearly had a natural aptitude for
fire-building. Bear Grylls had nothing on her. Unfortunately the stab of pride at
her outdoor skills suddenly disappeared as she realised the flames were licking
up the side of the neighbour’s dust-dry hedge.
She glanced quickly around, realising that
she’d epically failed at fire safety by not having some kind of extinguishing
item to hand. She’d been so swept up in the moment that she’d forgotten to
bring out a bucket of water or sand in case things didn’t go to plan. Daniel’s
voice danced through her mind – Fire can
be unpredictable. You have to respect it.
She dashed to the house, ran into the
kitchen and shoved the washing-up bowl under the cold tap. It seemed to take
forever for the sodding thing to fill. At last she grabbed it and speed-walked
back down the hallway, trying not to slop water onto the floor, out the back
door and down the garden.
She
lobbed the bowl of water over the smouldering hedge, causing a massive sizzling
sound. Smoke billowed into the air, catching in her throat like pepper and
making her cough. Then the air cleared a little and she could see the flames
seemed to have died down. She was just congratulating herself on getting the
situation back under control when next door’s Christmas lights shorted with an
audible bang plunging her into darkness except for the orange glow of the
bonfire and an odd blue flashing that seemed to be coming from the front of the
house.
How to make a fresh start?
Burn everything that reminds you of the
past.
How not to make a fresh start?
Lose total control of the sodding fire,
prompting emergency attendance of the very person you want to forget. The fact
Daniel was a firefighter hadn’t occurred to her because she hadn’t intended to
set the bloody hedge alight, and now he was here with his firetruck and all its
flashy blue lights.
****Look out for the story in full at the end of the year! Thanks for reading and I hope you've enjoyed these snippets. Don't forget to check out the next author in the hop, the very lovely Romy Sommer!
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