Christmas Magic

The muscle in the side of his jaw would stop tensing quite so much. He could handle this Lori, just about. She’d giggle and want to eat crisps or something else they didn’t have in the house. Eventually, she’d grow sleepy and he’d put her to bed, undressing her slowly. The sleepy times were the best. He could almost imagine it was his old wife, the one he married.

Then were nights when she came home in a rage. He’d never discovered precisely what she’d drunk. It probably didn’t matter. Wine versus tequila wasn’t the issue. Something would have set her off; some small thing in her work day: a pregnant woman, an angry customer. And then the rage would emerge, a rage that Lori could apparently only assuage with alcohol.

He got into the habit of talking to her mother every day. It was strange how Yvonne became the person he phoned. He was almost too frightened to phone Lori at work on her mobile. Except on those days when she was guilty and sorry, promising never to do it again.

‘I’m so sorry, Ben,’ she’d cry. ‘I don’t know how you still love me, I don’t know why you stay with me. I’m so horrible. I’ll never, ever do it again.’

There would follow a week of not drinking, a week of Lori coming home on time and making lovely dinners, being the perfect homemaker. Until the next time.

Yvonne, Lori’s mother, seemed to understand.

Yvonne said she’d seen her daughter drunk at too many family get-togethers recently: not falling-down drunk, but the subtle glassiness of the secret drinker who’d been filling her own glass with vodka steadily throughout the evening.

One night at such an event, Ben and Yvonne had helped Lori up the stairs to her old bedroom and the subject had been broached. Ben said he knew that a problem drinker did not need to have lost their job and be living in a cardboard box to be an alcoholic.

‘What should we do?’ asked Yvonne that night, her face drawn and her eyes wet with tears.

Ben shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

That had been nearly six months ago, not long after the move to Ardagh, the move he’d hoped would change it all.

Today, Ben made his daily phone call to his mother-in-law.

‘How is she today?’ Yvonne asked.

Ben could hear trepidation in her voice. He’d grown to hate theirs.

‘Fine today,’ Ben said.

He kept his voice low. Nobody in the marketing department knew what was going on in his life. They thought, laughably, that he had it all: stunning wife, lovely new home in a beautiful town, promotions on the way, no doubt. Life’s biggest irony, Ben thought: there could be such a vast difference between the outer picture and the inner one. If only they knew.

‘We’re going into the clinic on Friday for a consultation about the next cycle,’ he told Yvonne. ‘She never drinks before that. They do so many blood tests. I think she’s afraid of what they’ll find in hers and take us off the programme.’

‘Maybe that’s the answer,’ Yvonne said, startling him. ‘Tell them she drinks every time she’s not on an IVF cycle. Alcohol is definitely a factor in fertility.’

‘She wasn’t drinking that heavily until the last few months,’ Ben protested.

There was an ominous silence on the other end of the phone.

‘She was,’ Yvonne said, so softly Ben wondered if he’d imagined it. ‘She always drank too much, even as a teenager. Her father used to too, but he’s stopped.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said, stunned.

‘I was afraid you’d leave her,’ Yvonne whispered. ‘She needs you. I thought if we shocked her with being thrown off the IVF programme, she might stop.’

Ben left work early that day and drove home towards the rolling Wicklow hills and Ardagh. As he drove, he thought of the years he’d known Lori and how he’d never noticed her drinking more than anyone else. He liked the odd glass of wine, but that was it. True, Lori liked to have an open bottle of white in the fridge, but he didn’t see how she could have been drinking without his knowing. Surely he’d have noticed.

At home, he searched the house. There were several empty vodka bottles in her underwear and sweater drawers, a half-full one in the airing cupboard, and several bottles of wine stashed away in the kitchen. The wine was the same type as the half-full one in the fridge. Very easy to finish a bottle and replace it with another one, Ben realised, making it seem like the same innocently half-full bottle. He discovered many, many empty wine and vodka bottles shoved into the back of the cobwebby old shed. Lori had known he wouldn’t look there. They didn’t use it for anything, just promised themselves that one day, they’d clean it out. She’d known the evidence was safe enough. They’d only been in the Ardagh house for two months and she’d managed to create such a stash in such a short time.

The anger hit him then. Nobody went from being an ordinary drinker to hiding bottles of vodka that quickly. This was, as Yvonne had said, clearly a much longer-running problem than he’d thought. And the thought made him so very angry.

He’d believed he knew everything about Lori and he hadn’t, he hadn’t at all. He thought of all the tests and the sheer agony of waiting. And all the time, his wife was skewing the results by secretly drinking. How did he know whether she’d stopped or not during the actual cycles? He’d given up alcohol, he’d even given up cycling when Lori had read a report about how sports saddles heated the testes, which was bad for fertility.

‘No more cycling!’ she’d said firmly, and he’d agreed.

She might well have been drinking vodka on the tough days, while he stopped even cycling, for God’s sake.

He phoned her mobile and it went straight to voicemail.

‘Hi, Lori, we need to talk.’ He paused before delivering the next line. ‘I found the vodka bottles at home. Call me back now.’

He didn’t sign off with love. At that moment he felt absolutely no love.

There was no phone call in return. He drove down to the supermarket, bought some groceries and was unpacking the car when he saw one of the old ladies from the cottage next door looking at him from their front window. He waved. It was Genevieve, he thought. He wasn’t entirely sure which was which. He went indoors and made some pasta with butter and tried to watch a film on the television, but he couldn’t concentrate. Ten o’clock came, eleven, then midnight and still no sign of Lori. His phone sat silently on the low coffee table in front of him, the screen still blank.

And then he heard the noise.

It was ten to midnight, and Genevieve could hear her sister sleeping. Dolores didn’t snore exactly, but she made a low, trumpeting nasal noise, for sure. Genevieve called the dogs from Dolores’ bed and they came with a clattering of paws, delighted at this late-night game.

‘Hush,’ whispered Genevieve as Pixie began to bark. ‘Biscuits.’

She knew that the dogs would protest loudly if she went outside and they were stuck inside, so she’d collected a few of their doggie biscuits and had them hidden in the pocket of her dressing gown. She handed biscuits to Pixie and Snowy, who devoured them like dogs who hadn’t eaten in months instead of having had half of Dolores’ nighttime toast and jam just an hour before.

Then, she shut her sister’s door and shuffled down the stairs, one hand holding a small bag. The dogs jostled at her heels, keen to be involved. In the kitchen, Genevieve found the candle and the kitchen matches. It was a wild December night and any candle would blow out in an instant outside, so she got out an old hurricane lamp and carefully placed the candle inside. The book stipulated that it should be a special candle. This one was left over from Mariah’s fortieth wedding anniversary, which Genevieve felt was special enough. To add to the light, she put a few tiny tea lights around it. In the small bag, she had the paper upon which she’d written her hopes and dreams, as the book had told her, and she’d said a couple of prayers over it, which wasn’t entirely magic either, but by now Genevieve had read enough to decide that magic was rather more open to personal interpretation than Catholicism.

YOU have the power, said the book.

Genevieve Malone, who’d never felt as if she had any power in her whole life, was determined to reclaim some of it now. She was going to start by dancing skyclad under the moon over a wishlist of her dreams. Perhaps then, she’d have the courage to go to the Holy Land instead of just looking at books about it. Sybil did it. Wasn’t it time that she and Dolores did it too?

The dogs were hysterical with delight to be let out into the garden on this windy night hours after they’d been put to bed. Pixie kept chasing her tail wildly, and bumped into Genevieve.

‘Be careful, sweetie,’ whispered Genevieve, steadying the lamp.

The wind roared around the garden, rattling the holly bushes and the bare trees.

Genevieve picked her way through the dark over to the copse in the middle of the garden. It was obviously entirely accidental that her mother’s garden had hazel, rowan and elder trees in it; all magical trees. There, she put down her lamp and laid the precious paper under it.

‘God, I’m not turning my back on you,’ she said, looking up at the night sky. ‘I’m only opening my mind up to other belief systems. Asking for help wherever it is, if you like. I mean, I’ll still be at Mass on Sunday, and you know we’ve got the Advent wreath in the kitchen. And these are your trees and this is your moon, after all.’

She stripped off her dressing gown and was caught in a riptide of mid-winter air.

‘This is your body, too, God!’ she cried, shivering. ‘I don’t know why we’re supposed to be ashamed of it. Mother wouldn’t let us wear skirts shorter than our ankles, you know. Why? I mean, why?’

There was no point whispering now. Shouting was the only way to go.

She began to twirl with her arms outstretched, feet bare on the damp, cold grass. ‘I want to travel and have adventures. I’m asking the universe to help me do it! You and the universe, God. I’m asking everyone!’

It was at this moment that Pixie started at something, leapt to her feet and bounded off, knocking over the hurricane lamp on to Genevieve’s pink candlewick dressing gown, which burst into flames.