The Cut that Wouldn't Heal by William Leith

Author:William Leith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

A Lovely Christmas

I wake up on Christmas morning. My house is quiet and peaceful. I am alone. My emotions are a mixture of guilt, shame and fear. I am not with my son. I am not with the mother of my son. I am fifty-three. I will visit my parents. I will upset my mother, I’m certain, because I mostly can’t hide the fact that I don’t like Christmas, particularly Christmas Day, that it pushes my buttons like nothing else. Apart from maybe my birthday.

But I can hide on my birthday. I can get away from people. Christmas – no. Not possible.

I wrap my presents. I know my mother will say how well wrapped they are. She will say that, in this respect, I take after my father’s father, always very precise in his physical actions, always very well dressed, and I can’t help thinking, the thought just intrudes, that his two daughters died, poor things, and his wife, my grandmother – I got to know her when my parents were abroad – she said it was a gas leak, told me that her daughters, my father’s not-quite-sisters, died in a gas leak, but actually, no, they did not.

I start to wrap my father’s present. I always give books, and an expensive card, a Vermeer or Rembrandt.

I don’t want to be too early. I turn the radio on and twiddle the dial. The Pogues: ‘Fairytale of New York’. There is a minuscule shudder in my tear ducts. I think maybe the song is set at the moment of the singer’s death, he’s crossing the line as he loses consciousness, crossing the line as his life flashes through his mind, which might and might not be a scientific possibility, but I think that’s what’s happening in the song.

The tape spool. The wrapping paper. I always use proper tape dispensers, with ‘invisible’ tape and serrated teeth so the tape tears off cleanly. There is no mess, no searching the spool for the break in the tape, no tape twisting, no tape stuck to your fingers causing mayhem. And I always use thick, glossy paper that won’t spring open when you fold it. I cut the paper to the right size, think of how I’ll fold it, fold it, tighten the paper, tape the two sides together, concealing the gift, make the ends into little triangles, fold the triangles, and tape them shut. At the end it looks like a perfect little box.

I walk to my parents’ house the quick way, along a major trunk road, something people don’t do; in fact I remember a comedy based on a guy who needed to walk along a major trunk road every day, and the fact that he was doing this, this thing that people don’t do, automatically made him a comic figure.

Cars swish past every so often, people aiming themselves at those who conceived and gave birth to them, or those they conceived and gave birth to, decades earlier, two or four people to a car, bent over instruments or gadgets, their faces blank.

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