Angelica's Grotto

35 Deck The Halls

Being a Jewish atheist, Klein always half-expected a brick through his window in the Christmas season. No one chalked CHRISTKILLER on his door but child carollers menaced him with ‘We wish you a Merry Christmas’ and public-school boys politely intimidated him with holly wreaths which he bought several of. Christmas trees bloomed in windows all around him, and some houses sported external twinkling lights.

He withdrew into his video collection, surfacing intermittently to watch Yuletide films in which Germans spoke broken English before being blown up by Lee Marvin and Telly Savalas. Even when the TV was turned off, Christmas carols, seasonal piety, and adverts for computer games leaked out of it and spread in a greasy puddle on the floor. Walt Disney manifested his undead self in various ways, sometimes sliding under the door as a mist, sometimes like a bat at the window or a wolf howling in Fulham Broadway. On Christmas Day a grey sky squeezed out a thin snowfall on which fresh dog turds stood out sharply.

Klein phoned Melissa several times and got her answering machine; he left messages but she never phoned him back. Sometimes he imagined her writhing naked in steamy orgies; sometimes he imagined her in the bosom of her family somewhere in the provinces, eating and drinking and sleeping with whoever was handy without a thought for him.

When the partridges had left the pear trees and the lords had ceased to leap, Klein emerged blinking and unshaven into the Christmas-New Year interval. The ghost of New Year’s Past now came to visit with clanking chains of memory and action replays of champagne, soft words, and kisses. Sometimes it hunkered down beside his bed and improvised sad songs of happy times departed; sometimes it rocked back and forth and moaned.