Ordinary People by Diana Evans

Author:Diana Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2018-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

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The Christmas tree was ruled by an angel. She had a fine kingdom. It seemed to float, above its glossy mound of presents, a mist came off of it, the magical mingling of tinsel with fairy lights, of dust and pale daylight from the bay window, of faded olive-green foliage with many colours and forms of decorative bauble. The tree was bought from Woolworths in 1978. The baubles were stored throughout the year in their original partitioned boxes in the attic until it was time to radiate and scintillate. They were planets with curly waves of gold glitter circling around. They were purple discs with pink combs at their edges. They were icicles and snowmen, foil-wrapped Santas made of chocolate, which over the course of the day were unwrapped and eaten by the various children and adults liming in the armchairs, corners and nooks and crannies of the old house. The angel sat on top of it all in a long white dress and halo, watching over with inanimate blindness.

The blindness of Cornelius, Melissa’s father, however, was animate. Pertaining to one eye, his left, a recent result of accelerated glaucoma. With his other eye he went about the usual events of his eight-and-a-half-decade life, which were pegged in a neat, supportive order along a mental washing line leading towards the final eclipse: wake up, watch television, smoke, shave and dress, smoke, watch television with lunch, smoke, watch television with dinner, smoke, go to bed, smoke in the middle of the night if happen to be awake. In macro terms there was Easter, birthdays, and of course Christmas. Christmas was the largest of these events, and although he lived alone now, it was done in the same way he had always done it, with copious papery and tinselly adornment. With just one eye, an albeit sharpening eye in the demise of its friend, and with the help of Adel, the oldest daughter, who lived on his side of the river, in the third week of December Cornelius gathered the boxes of decorations on the dining table and checked their contents. From ladders lengths of motley patterns went up. They criss-crossed the ceiling and frilled the cornices, obedient to their drawing pins, for Cornelius would not be able to handle the event of a failed drawing pin, a collapsed frill, living alone as he did, and no one there to fix it for him. So they used hammers. Up went the festive Chinese chandeliers in the hallway. Over the mantelpiece went the string of Christmas cards from what was left of his family in the north, and there they all stayed until no later than midnight on the fifth day of January, that is, of course, the twelfth day of Christmas, when Adel returned to help him take them back down.

Adel had two children, Warren and Lauren, nineteen and seventeen. They always came to visit Cornelius on Boxing Day, Carol came with her five-year-old son Clay, Melissa and Michael with

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