In Too Deep by Billy O'Callaghan

Author:Billy O'Callaghan [O'Callaghan, Billy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, Ireland, History, Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Short Stories, Marginality; Social, Fantasy
ISBN: 9781856356336
Publisher: Mercier Press
Published: 2009-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

An Immigrant’s Christmas Eve

Stefania watches Michael as he sleeps. Three years old now, he looks more and more like her father with every passing day. Already, he has the same strong chin and the same way of wrinkling up his nose to laugh. There are times when she struggles to bring her mother’s face to mind, but one glance at Michael and her father, Jozef, might just as well be standing there before her, large as life.

Tonight is Christmas Eve. Back in Tarnów this is the most precious night of the year, a night for family and all that family means, all the laughter, tears, tales and longings; but Ireland isn’t Poland and tonight, sitting here in a bed-sit and watching her son as he sleeps, home has never seemed further away.

She sighs, a long tired breath that spins gossamer curls from her thin mouth. The cold has crept in only this week, turning everything ideally seasonal. For the past few days now, there has been a rawness to the air that makes smiling easier than usual. At the beginning she gave herself willingly to the spirit of things, braving the hectic streets, spending money she didn’t really have on things that neither she nor Michael really needed. But that’s Christmas.

Once the night-time has fully settled, she gives in and switches on one bar of the electric fire. An hour of that heat will make all the difference; if she is still feeling the cold after that then at least it will be late enough to go to bed. The apartment feels more bearable in the darkness. She draws her chair in close to the fire and sits forward all the way to the edge so that she is perched to savour the fullest throw of heat.

She has lived in this city for almost six years now, and Cork isn’t so bad. Like a lot of her friends, she had listened to the stories of money to be made, of life to be lived and great adventure to be had. What she has isn’t squalor, though it’s a long way from the lavish world she’d been led to believe. But that’s the way of the world. As it turned out, hers was the old story, that of tumbling headlong into love with a man who knew exactly the right way to flatter and coerce. For the better part of two years, his word was gospel and she feasted on the very sight of him, adoring everything from the premature salt-and-pepper sprinkle of his crew-cut all the way down to the caked mud of his steel-toed work boots. And when that bubble burst, her life had been changed forever. Well, she wasn’t the first …

At home, they’d have the table laid for the Wigilia, the Christmas Eve dinner. Days would have been spent in decorating the house and preparing the many traditional meatless courses. Her father would lead the family in prayer, a place would be set in memory of their wayward daughter, and after the meal had been eaten, carols would be sung.

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