A Christmas Wringer
                           Simon Kellow-Bingham


I was feeling strung out after my third soya cappuccino. Bad idea I know but I’d been
sitting watching the Departure Board flip over cancelled for four hours. What else was I going
to do? I had had the tearful face to face with the children via the Internet. Face time. It’s a
great new wonder invention. The kids can see my regret is real, I can see their
disappointment and Mary, my wife, just gives me that look. I think I preferred it when all I got
was the difficult silences on the telephone, now I get both.

It didn’t matter how hard I had worked to get to the Airport, how I helped dig the taxi out of
the snow that one time, how I had left the taxi in traffic and jogged the last mile to the
terminal building. I had arrived on time, checked in on-line, been ready to go, then this, this
awful catalogue of Christmas cancellations.

I made it all the way to the boarding gate too.

But it was entirely my fault. I couldn’t say no to the trip. I had to go and close the deal myself.
Business kudos was evidently more important than family. If this, if that, if whatever, I could’
ve had it both ways and been home in time on Christmas Eve and been a double hero. All my
colleagues were home toasting my success, but, I admit, the deal would have probably gone
through anyway.

I stabbed at the mess that was the remains of the cappuccino with the thin stick I always used
to stir.

“What is my problem?” Who was I kidding? The froth in the bottom of my coffee bowl wasn’t
going to tell me anything.

“You think you got problems?” I looked up and met the gaze of some old guy on the next
table. He was nursing a tall glass of water, “We all got tickets to fly outta this place. It’s a
privilege to be able to leave God’s earth in that way.”

“Okay,” I said. I dropped my eyes and poked the froth around some more, ‘Oops!’ I thought. ‘I’
d better try and keep it to myself!’

“I remember you.” If the old guy was going to be persistent I was going to have to get outta
there. “You weren’t always this much of a pain in the ass!”

“I beg your pardon?” I looked up. He was smirking. No, not quite a smirk, but he had given me
my cue. “Excuse me. I’m not comfortable here.”

I stood up to leave, slipped my tablet into my shoulder bag and dropped some coins onto the
table for the staff.

“Coupla nickels oughtta keep the menials happy!” he chuckled and then winked at me. I
walked away grinding my teeth. Like I said already, I’d had way too much coffee than was
sensible. I heard the squeak of his chair as he pushed it back. “Just a minute my friend,”
I quickened my pace, walked around the sports car raffle-get a thirty dollar ticket and win a
car you couldn’t get insured to park outside your house-and slipped past a closed electronics
shop to a viewing area. The seats here were taken by sleeping travellers, the stranded who
had abandoned hope of a late flight out. Through the window the snow was still coming
down. I could just make out the steady flash of a yellow light on the cab of a snowplow.
There was nowhere left to sit so I took the stairs up to the next level. Here there was another
eatery but this one had its shutters down on the bar and the dining area was dark. There was
no one about so I stole in and made myself comfortable near the window where I could
watch the snowplow on its hopeless task. It tracked back and forth across the taxi-way, from
one end of the window to the other, leaving a trace of black tarmac in its wake.

“Hey Buddy,” the old guy had followed me, “listen, I’m sorry about that. I was a little harsh
back there.”

I didn’t want to engage. I was busy trying to think of the speech I was going to give when I got
home tomorrow afternoon, to my kids, to Mary, to her folks and mine. I wasn’t looking
forward to it.

“Can I show you something?” He pulled up a chair next to me, sat and then watched the plow’
s patient progress with me. I waited. He didn’t make to leave. I figured I could pretty much
stonewall him till dawn. After several long minutes he pulled a tablet out of his coat. It lit up as
he held it out in front of us.

“I looked you up,” he said, “Like I said before, you weren’t always like this. When I saw you
talking with your family I thought I’d take a little trouble and look you up on the net.”
He turned to look directly at me. “I think you need to take a look at what I found.”

He touched the screen with his right index finger and it flashed up a picture of me some five
years younger. I had a party hat on my head and a silly grin on my face.

“What’s that?” he suddenly had my attention, “Where did you get that from?”

“Just something cached on the web. Nothing’s safe out there you know. Everything is
accessible,”

I opened my mouth, and then shut it again.

“Wait,” he said, “Watch this,”

He pressed the screen again and the image of me sprung into life. I was laughing like a drain.
The view panned over my shoulder to a plastic Christmas tree covered in red and gold tinsel.
There was the cat, ‘Old Moggs’, he’s dead now, but he used to hide in the tree and steal the
chocolate decorations. Those were good times. We still use the tree, such great value for
money.

“You were happy once weren’t you? Look there’s Mary. She looks happy, and your daughters
seem cheerful too.”

He was right. It all looked very nice, very much like the movies, but I caught a look of concern
in Mary’s eyes. The view on the screen followed me as I walked into the kitchen. There was
mom. It must have been before the operation, before she got her new hip. I walked past her
into the utility. I was going for ice. ‘A drink’s too quiet without ice’ is what my father used to
say, bless him, right before his liver failed.

Deep inside the freezer, beneath the bags of ice, nestled a bottle of vodka. It had been given to
me by a client and I had opened it at seven am that Christmas morning. I fancied myself as a
‘high-functioning alcoholic’ at the time, not like some loser drunk.

“Great little gizmo this search thing,” the old guy was watching me watch myself slugging the
vodka straight from the bottle, “but that’s not a pretty sight now is it?”

I shook my head and he slid his finger across the screen. The scene changed. It was later in
the day. The family all sat around the dining table. It was well decorated. Some of the stuff we
still had, like the napkin rings and the candelabra. Other stuff, well I guess we lost my dad and
Mary’s sister doesn’t figure so much in our lives anymore, not since that boxing night when I
went to bed and found myself in the wrong room. It was a simple mistake.

“Oh dear,” the old guy pointed to the image of me on the screen. I was red faced and looked
very tired. I had been working hard. I was single minded about developing my career and
getting up the property ladder pronto. There was nothing wrong with that. Mary’s sister, Julia,
that’s her name, is looking at me with a funny expression I don’t remember noticing before,
but my dad’s noticed, I can see it in his eyes. Is this why this home movie is on the net?

“Who posted this on-line? Where did you get it?”

“Oh no-one you know, not really, and I just did a couple of searches and found this site. It had
your name on it,” he waved his finger across the screen again and the scene blurred and
changed, “How well do you remember this Christmas?”

“I got quite merry, like usual. The house was full of free-loaders, wasters and other members
of our extended family. My brother used to think it was necessary to eat all of the nuts. He
would sit for hours cracking open walnuts and hazelnuts, chewing joylessly between slugs of
my best whisky. Mary’s cousins would consider it their duty to clear the wine cooler in the
kitchen. This Christmas was, I seem to remember, the final time we were plagued by all these
locusts. I put my foot down. I fell out with all of them. Been nice and quiet and cost effective
ever since.”

“Do you remember Julia in the utility room when Mary was putting the girls to bed?”

“What?” I suddenly felt strangely vulnerable. The images on the screen suddenly popped back
into life. I could see my face reflected in the glass pane in the top half of the utility room door.
My face was next to Julia’s. I was gazing out into the half dark twilight of the garden, and there
she was, standing between me and the door. She was smiling, she leaned back into me. My
gaze dropped over her shoulder and suddenly I was there, a little unsteady on my feet after
such a long and sustained period of eating and drinking, holding on to my sister in law with
my arm around her waist.

I remember the feel of her hand on my belly, her ‘who ate all the Christmas pies’ remark, the
way her little finger slipped behind my belt buckle. I could smell her fashionable scent; feel
the sleek satin of her party top as I crushed it in my hand. She turned her face toward mine
and I tasted warm brandy on her breath.

“A little Christmas kiss?” I offered.

“Just a little...” her voice trailed off as we started kissing.

The image on the screen returned to the view of the glazed door. In the reflection on the glass
was my mother in law in the half opened door to the kitchen. The view zoomed past her in a
direct line of sight through the kitchen, out into the hall and halfway up the stairs to Mary.
There was Mary, sitting on the stairs, gazing through the banisters, past her mother’s head at
her husband and little sister. The door to the utility room closed and my wife gripped the
banister rails with white knuckles.

I was two stairs down from her and the old guy was two stairs up.

“Good times,” the old guy was tickled pink,

“Mary?”

“Don’t waste your time. This is the past. You’re in the utility room across the kitchen, not
here.”

“Then how...?”

“Messes with your head, huh?” He didn’t wait for an answer, “So good for the memory this
sort of trip. See Mary here had no idea until now that you had been big-time flirting with Julia.
She assumed there was someone at work, your PA or some-such. She dealt with it through
her mother. You never knew a thing.”

“I haven’t seen Julia in years.”

“She got over you pretty quick. Mary? Have you checked her on-line status lately?”

“I didn’t know she had one.”

He threw me his tablet. I caught it. On the screen was a smiling image of my wife with the
legend ‘single’. I scrolled down through a list of her ‘likes’ and pictures of her ‘friends’. She
wasn’t using her maiden name.

“She looks nice,” the old guy winked at me, “have you met her? Might give her a call myself,
direct message her, know what I mean?”

“So I cheated with Julia. It was years ago. What’s your point old man?”

“My point?” he threw his head back and roared with laughter. “It wasn’t just Julia was it? You
have been a moral bankrupt for years and you still expect to cash in that Christmas bonus
every year.”

“So what’s next?”

“Next is now.”

“What?”

“Pass me the tablet.”

I did as I was told. He waved his palm across the screen and the scene around me shifted. We
were on the stairs of our present house. It was much bigger than the last house. It was a
stretch paying for it but had everything, the catchment for the right school, the right golf
course, the travel connections nearby, the seven bedrooms, the landscaped gardens, and the
all important sibling envy. I saw my suitcase at the bottom of the stairs by the front door.

“Are we going on holiday?”

“Are you joking? It’s Boxing Day. You’re still not home, this snow is a ‘ten year weather event’
and Mary’s in the kitchen hacking into your social networking accounts.”

“My what?”

The old guy laughed as I jogged down the stairs, “She’s been reading your work e-mails for
years. She’s seen all the notifications you get from your independent networking sites. She’s a
smart one. Good catch I’d say.”

Somehow he had managed to keep up with me as I turned through the kitchen door. On the
side were piles of unfinished platters. A load of dirty crockery was waiting to go into the
dishwasher; bottles were stacked next to the recycling bin. Mary was sitting at the kitchen
table. Her laptop was open in front of her.

“Yes!” Mary clapped her hands, “I’m in! Now let’s find out who he’s been doing.”

I ran over and tried to slam the laptop shut but my hands simply passed through it. I turned
and ran back out of the kitchen, down the hall and into the sitting room. It was filled with the
sound of snoring. Mother in Law looked like she was drunk again. What was she doing here?
From the home cinema room I could hear the noise of my daughters playing on their
computer games. I had forbidden the cinema to be used for this, certain they would blow out
the surround sound.

“Dear God! What’s next?” I cried.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes,”

“Hold on,” he gripped my arm, “we only have to go forward a year,”

The lights flickered, that was all. Mother in Law was sitting in a different spot and wide awake
and enjoying talking to a man I had never seen before. There were kids running everywhere
and a huge real Christmas tree, with pine needles falling all over the floor, stood right in the
middle of the picture windows.

“Wow,” I couldn’t help smiling, “Mary always wanted the tree right there, and a real tree too. I
never let her have a real tree. Plastic makes business sense.”

“You always wanted the view didn’t you, and no pine needles?”

“That’s right.” I shrugged; it was a no-brainer.

“You know the carbon footprint of a plastic tree is equal to that of twenty real trees?”

“That’s like making an argument for organic toilet paper. Where’s Mary? And who’s the guy
talking to her mother?”

“That gentleman is Julia’s husband, Mike. Nice man. He had two kids when they met, now Julia
is expecting her first, his third. Mike’s sister is here too with her family, three boys, oh yes,
and her mother and father too.”

“So quite a party, where’s Mary? How am I paying for all this? Who talked me into it?”

“In time son, you will know all. Let’s see who else is here.”

He led me over to the Christmas tree so we could see through the picture windows. There
was my brother enjoying my expensive view with his wife and her awful parents. I did a quick
count up, my brother had four kids, Julia had co-opted two plus three, and there were my
two, so I was up to eleven already, then the adults too, we had never had this many family
together at once. Across the lawn I spotted Mary’s cousins. That made it fourteen kids at least.
Goodbye wine cellar.

“Okay, so don’t tell me I’m in some hell-hole snowbound first world refugee camp cum
airport, surely not. This is good news right?”

“Let’s go see Mary.” The old guy grabbed my arm and propelled us at speed through the hall
to the kitchen. Mary was leaning on the sink and looking through the window across the
kitchen garden. Next to her, with his right arm across her shoulders, was a man I thought I
half recognised. He was talking.

“No-one seems to be worried about it at all these days.”

“But it’s such a big gap Steve.” Mary leaned into him.

“Look at your sister, does she seem worried? There will be a ten year gap in that family.”

“I know. It’s just so unexpected; undeserved.”

“Listen to me Mary,” he turned her toward him and held her hands in his, “whatever happens,
I will always be here for you. That is an undisputed fact of life. My business is here. I will
never leave.”

She pulled away a little. Steve held on to her. I could see Mary had put on some weight
around her middle. He pulled her back close and I watched as they kissed. I felt sick.

“What about me?” I was almost pleading.

“Well you know what happens to bad dogs don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“And you had been a particularly inventive, eyebrow raising and mean dog that Mary’s
lawyers only had to ask which shirt they should leave on your back. She found out
everything. As I said before if you know where to look you can find most things. You left an e-
mail trail right around the world. She paid your call-girls to show up in court.”

“What? I don’t know any call-girls.”

“Come on. I know where you’ve been. You want me to take you there?”

“I don’t know any!”

“Whatever you say son. It doesn’t matter now anyway.”

“Of course it matters. It matters to me! This can’t be my fate! Please? I’ll do anything!”

I suddenly felt very desperate. Mary was still snogging Mr Right in my expensive kitchen,
under my high-status roof and I had a bad feeling this trip was not going to get any better.

“So where do I end up?”

“End up?” the old guy rubbed his chin, “Somewhere a lot more peaceful than here.”

“Where?”

“Come.”

He took me by the arm and led me out through the front door. The ground fell away beneath
my feet and I kicked for purchase as we soared through the cold crisp winter air. My heart
sank as we approached the village church. I could see the freshly turned earth of a new grave.

To my relief we didn’t stop but made with increasing speed for the city. The wind roared in
my ears as we rushed past the industrial sector, past the tenement buildings, straight across
the runway of City Airport and on toward the commercial sector. I looked ahead: to the right
was Napier, a smart district; to the left was Darden, a big mixed area. I didn’t care which we
were visiting, both were better than the tenements.

But we didn’t slow down, not until we were almost level with the city limits. We lost altitude
rapidly until we arrived at the gates of the Municipal Cemetery. I didn’t say a word. We
walked in. There were a few people here and there, walking dogs, paying respects with
bouquets of Christmas blooms. We marched past stone crosses, tablets and weeping angels to
an area where small rectangles lay amongst the leaves and regulation mown grass.

The old guy pointed to a moss green slab. I could just make out my name but the date was
obscured. He started reading my name out over and over. My legs gave way and I sat heavily.
The sky darkened and the scene changed. I was back in the airport. I was alone in the shut
down restaurant and my name was being called on the tannoy. My flight was due to leave.
I grabbed my bag and ran for the gate. On the plane I quickly found my seat, stowed my bag,
strapped in and began sweating about what I would find when I got home. It was probably
the least comfortable flight I had taken in my life. It was four hours of mounting horror. I
tried to sleep. It could never happen.

Then finally, as the airplane began its descent the Captain made his announcement: “Good
morning and welcome to City Airport. It’s a crisp one degree below zero outside and snow is
forecast later. We are slightly earlier than scheduled and the local time is eight am this
Christmas Eve. We thank you for...”

I missed the rest of what he said. I thought I had lost everything but instead I had gained a
day. I checked with the couple in the seat next to me. They confirmed it. It was Christmas Eve!
I had been given a chance!

I could hardly stay in my seat until the plane stopped moving. I was among the first off and I
ran along the pier to customs where I was first through. I had only hand luggage and got to
the forecourt in minutes. I gave the driver a couple of fifties and he let me stop at the garden
centre and pick up an enormous Nordic fir. He tied it to his roof for me then got me home
within half an hour. I spent that time on the telephone to my brother, my sister, Mary’s
cousins and finally Mother in Law.

Mary was fixing coffee in the kitchen when I arrived. I dragged the tree across the tiled floor.

“Mother just called me,” she said, “are you okay?”

“Never better, Merry Christmas!”

I flung my arms around her, felt her hesitation, and then she returned my grip.

“Merry Christmas husband,”

“I’m back,”

“I know,” she said,



© Simon Kellow-Bingham

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