The Twelve Even Stranger Days of Christmas by Syd Moore

Author:Syd Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786079800
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

JOURNEY OF THE MAGI

A Triptych

I

FIRST MAGUS: THE FRIEND

The view opened up onto a marshy creek. A sea mist had sent its fingers into the potholes and crannies that dotted the banks on either side.

It was a marked change from Southend seafront where they had been only fifteen minutes before. The dirty neon lights that blinked in amusement arcades they had driven past made Maggie feel quite dismal. Although, to be fair, it wasn’t necessarily the lights, but the handful of shady figures they illuminated: bent over slot machines and one-armed bandits.

Why would you be there, Maggie wondered? On Christmas Eve?

The thought was a conduction rod, and channelled a feeling that was not unfamiliar to her – a fusion of alienation, pity and ‘unbelonging’ which she had never found a name for.

The weather didn’t help, she supposed. Rain had been coming down in sheets, lashing the taxi as it trundled through the drab vista. She had switched her eyes to the estuary for consolation, but found it sullen and bucking under fast-approaching thunderheads.

Presently, the coastal road retreated inland, and the landscape transformed. Instead of big chunky houses that glowered at the estuary, sixties developments jostled for prime position along the bends and curves of the road.

Away from the suburbs, vast flats of countryside stretched out for miles, unbroken but for small, stumpy hillocks and molehills. There was something wild and feral in the land that was both disconcerting and strangely enlivening.

What was it, she wondered, about this little group of islands that had so caught her friends, Hattie and Luke? She had believed them to be committed Londoners, thorough urbanites, yet they showed no signs of giving up their new-found country life and moving back to the smoke. Inevitably, she was keen to see just what it was that had sucked them away from her. She hadn’t heard about the Essex archipelago, much less Sutton Island, on which they lived.

But her cabbie had.

‘Many stories about this place,’ he told Maggie as they turned left then right towards the North Sea and her island destination. ‘No way I’d live here. Too remote. Too rural. Not enough life. Wouldn’t come out for Christmas Eve. Not down this way. Not if you paid me.’

‘I am paying you,’ Maggie remarked. ‘And I’m visiting friends, so it’s them I’ve come to see. Not the place.’

The driver shrugged and shut up, taking the gear down as they passed the sign that announced they were in Iders End and should reduce their speed. Maggie expected everyone would be happy to do that: the only way onto the island was a dodgy, single-lane bridge.

It wasn’t robust and creaked worryingly under the weight of the car.

Clip clop clip clop over the rickety bridge, she thought. What was that from?

Ah yes, the Three Billy Goats Gruff.

They reached solid land and passed through clusters of pines.

‘Blimey,’ said Maggie. The village ahead was like something out of a Brothers’ Grimm tale.

Farm buildings reared out of the mist. A mauve outline of a windmill

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