Merry Christmas Go Round

Andy wears an expression of puzzlement, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. Shifting it seems like the best option, but it’s a stubborn stain that will take more than a light touch. Doing something tangible is the only way as far as Andy is concerned, he expresses himself with his physicality, and so he propels himself forth and walks through the open gate to the front door, knocking on it before he registers that this was what he was going to do. 

Using the knocker is complicated by the green border of a Christmas wreath. His hand brushes it and there is something of a violation there. He’s not quite certain which way that violation goes. He feels violated, but understands that he shouldn’t, so he adds a disconcerted confusion to his violation.

Stepping back from the door, he eyes the wreath and wonders why wreaths are even a part of Christmas. He has a vague recollection from his childhood of there being a meaning of life. The evergreen plants used are a part of it and the circle another. Wreaths only have one association for Andy and that is death. He shudders at that thought and finds he can no longer look into the empty eye of the wreath. Looking away, he feels nauseous and then a wave of dizziness threatens to topple him from his precarious standing position. All the muscles holding him up are threatening to mutiny, and he feels like joining them and going down in this imperfect ship of his. He imagines himself laying on the ground, making a circle of his own and he wonders why he is being like this, why he feels a growing unease. He’s lost at sea and the notion of land was been forever drowned.

Again he has a mind to act. Movement seems the only solution to the feeling of foreboding that is threatening to undo him. As he steps up to the front door he understands that there is something far worse being masked by that foreboding. He thinks it might be sadness. The sadness of regret. An overwhelming sadness that has suffocated a good many people throughout the ages.

He pushes the solid green door, and to his subdued surprise, it yields to his touch. At this point, he should stand firm and assess the situation. If he were a voyeuristic spectator he’d call out to the player at the door not to rush in like an utter fool, but then casually dipping into another’s life is easy, there are far fewer encumbrances and nowhere near as much a vested interest. 

He’s in the hall and his heart is beating a disturbing rhythm in his chest. He’s here, but he doesn’t want to be here. The problem is that he has nowhere else to be. That’s the problem with Christmas Day, it has a gravity all of its own and it draws in people who have no right being together. Christmas Day is indiscriminate and it has no quality control.. All it cares about is family and nothing else beyond that matters. Why should it? Families operate behind closed doors and behind closed doors are more secrets than could be counted in a single lifetime.

He doesn’t know how he knows it’s Christmas Day, but then, he thinks to himself, I wouldn’t come here on any other day. All the same, Christmas seems to work for a lot of people, they may moan about the imposition and hassle of it all, but people aren’t happy unless they’re moaning. Andy thinks that some of the discomfort is warranted. The ancient lizard in each and every person making itself known and spreading justified unease and discord. 

“We’re all animals,” he mutters to himself as he walks the impossibly and imposingly long and dark hallway.

Andy’s mutterings are not born of a glib theory. He’s seen the animal come out in plenty of people. His own animalistic side recognises it well. Some of the most dangerous people refuse to believe they are animals and that’s what makes them so dangerous. They supress their very nature and deny it the room to breathe. That always ends badly. For them. And usually for others. The animal in everyone is far stronger than the human. Always has been and always will be.

There is of course a higher aspect to a person and Andy is well aware of that too. It’s just that he doesn’t see enough of it and is beginning to think that the human race has lost its way. That civilisation and progress peaked back in the last century and is now in an irreversible freefall. Humanity is getting softer and weaker whilst squabbling with itself over imagined slights that bleed into reality like a river of cancer.

Andy’s thoughts of animals turn to lions. He chuckles to himself, “ideas above my station,” he whispers, but he’s not sure if hyenas are subject to the same social mores and norms as lions. He knows many animals act the same when it comes to the young males. He had two male dogs from the same litter once. Saw what happened when they got to a certain age; they turned on each other and in the end, one of them did not walk away from their fighting. 

Now Andy is walking into the old lion’s den and it feels all wrong. His cloying discomfort goes beyond that though and it’s really beginning to agitate him. He can feel his breathing becoming ragged and his fists are clenching and unclenching. When his teeth start to grind and he’s shaking his head he knows things are getting bad.

“Not good, Andy! Not good!”

He’s at the living room door now though and there’s no going back. There was never any going back. The sense of being pushed forward, come what may, hurts him. There is no free will here. He’s a marionette and the puppeteer is a cruel, sneering bastard hiding away in the shadows, making him dance onto a stage to humiliate himself in front of a bored, disinterested and antagonistic audience. 

He walks into a vendetta.

“Here he is!” 

Mum is always enthusiastic at the outset of a family gathering. It doesn’t last. He’ll pay for that initial effort. He tries to smile, but experiences a flutter of treacherous panic instead. He feels weak in that moment and that perception of weakness embarrasses him.

“You alright, son?”

Dad is smiling at him. An opportunity to show his teeth and remind the young buck who’s dangerous and who’s really in charge.

“Yeah,” Andy says, “just a bit of a headache.”

“I’ll get you some paracetamol,” says his mum.

He doesn’t want any medication, but he knows there’s no point in stopping her. He’ll have those tablets whether he likes them or not. That’s the general approach here. That’s how it goes. That’s how it’s always been and no one is for changing. They never were. And so it ever was. Generation after generation. Amen.

“Take a seat and stop messing the place up,” says his dad. 

He does as he’s told. Not like a good boy. No one here has ever considered him to be a good boy. He wonders when he stopped trying to be one, if that is, he ever did aim to win at least one gold star to be stuck on the fridge next to the finger painting he drew on his first day of school. That painting was worthy. It got all the fuss on that first day of school. He watched first mum and then dad cooing over a ragged piece of paper smeared with random colours and he wondered what he’d done wrong. Why he was so wrong. He sits awkwardly on the sofa not knowing how to relax, or be. Fitting in is not possible here. He’s never had his own spot. Strange that. He has a specific seat at the table, always has, but then that’s by default. It’s the last seat available. All others taken. 

His mum hands him a glass of water and two tablets. He pops the white disks in his mouth and downs all the water. The world shifts to the left as he looks up to say thanks. His vision flickers and he has a sense of de ja vu. Only this de ja vu is a mirror held up to another mirror and he’s in one of the far away, repeated reflections and the quality of reproduction is substandard.

He's been here before, and he never wanted to be here in the first place.

Looking around at the room he sees inconsistencies and errors. There is warping at the edges of this space and nothing fits quite right. Just like him. He wants to get up but he’s not exactly sure how. Somewhere beyond that urge is the need to run, but this is shackled by the certainty that there is absolutely nowhere to run to.

He hears the front door slam shut and suddenly everything makes sense whilst all meaning is shattered into a thousand pieces.

“Here he is,” he mutters under his breath.

“What was that?” his dad asks, but Andy is looking up at his mum expectantly and sadly all at the same time.

“Here he is!”

“The man of the hour,” Andy whispers.

His dad gives him a dark look, but he hasn’t caught what Andy has said, “the man of the hour!” he enthuses as his favourite son strides into the room.

Dad gets up for this one, observes Andy. And they embrace warmly in greeting. As father and son end their moment of joyous reunion someone else enters the room.

Andy digs his fingernails into his palms and manages somehow to prevent the tears from erupting from his face. He’s trembling though. He can feel his body approaching a state where he will convulse and there’s no way he’ll hold it together. He’s breaking apart. He feels one of his back teeth crack like chalk, filling his dry mouth with the taste of copper, and he’s not even seen her yet. He knows he will, and when that happens everything will change.

Sarah Goodwin. The girl next door. His school boy crush. His. This is the girl that turned his head. The one. In some respects, she was nothing special. She wasn’t the conspicuous girl that half the lads lusted after at school. She was ordinary. Andy had liked that about her. She was special to him and that was how it was supposed to be. He chose her.

He’d taken his time. There was no rush and there was certainly no competition. Not once those in the know knew he was keen on her. They’d not dated until they’d both left school. Andy had wanted it to be done properly and so he’d done it properly. He’d started the way he had meant to go on. Do things right. Treat Sarah right. Then everything would be right.

It had been good at first. They’d been on dates and he’d enjoyed every single bloody second he’d spent with her. As far as he was concerned, it was a done deal. And so he’d busied himself with making a name for himself and building a future for the both of them. That was how it was done. And if there was any alteration to that plan then it needed to be raised and talked about. That was how a proper family behaved and he wanted a proper family more than anything in the world. He’d wanted Sarah more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life.

Sarah had dumped him six months ago. Just as he was on the ascendency. Just as everything in his life was coming together. He hadn’t seen it coming. He really hadn’t. That had made it hurt all the more. Blinded and taken for a complete mug. Like he was nothing. They fucking loved one another and that was that. How were you supposed to build a life together if the woman you loved went quiet and didn’t tell you that they had a fucking problem?

When he’d asked what the fucking problem was, she’d said “don’t do this.” When he asked what she meant by this, she’d cowered away from him and told him he was frightening her.

“Fucking frightening you!?” he’d screamed in her face, flecks of spital hitting her cheeks, “you’ve torn my fucking heart out!” 

He’d beaten his chest to replace the absence of his heart and in an attempt to feel alive, but it hadn’t worked. His legs had gone from under him and it took him a while to realise that the strange wailing sound was coming from his own mouth. This seemed to shock Sarah. She didn’t know what to do. So she walked off and walked on out of Andy’s life.

Only it turned out that she hadn’t walked far. She hadn’t walked very far at all.

“And who’s this?” asks Mum.

Andy hates his mum for this alone. There’s no way that Golden Boy hasn’t told her there was one more for Christmas Dinner. At best, this is one of those conversational contrivances that should be outlawed. It’s far worse than that though, Andy knows. This is Mum rubbing his nose in it. This is a piece of shitty theatre aimed at humiliating him further. But then, why break the habit of a bloody lifetime?

“This is Sarah,” says Mark, the son who can do no wrong, “my fiancé.”

At that one word, Andy’s already broken heart almost exits via his mouth. He knew it was coming, but his response is just as visceral as he chokes on his emotions. Golden Boy has been teed up to land the sucker punch and it hits Andy like a steam train.

I should not be here, Andy thinks to himself, and there follows an echo of a thought, I should never have been here. He looks around him again, and now the walls are pulsing as though he is trapped inside his own beleaguered heart. 

Then he’s at the carefully laid out Christmas table and he doesn’t know how he got here. It’s as though he closed his eyes for a moment and a mysterious conveyor belt silently transported him from the sofa to the dining room chair. He pours himself a large red wine and glugs it down in three gulps. There is no taste and barely any sensation. The liquid really does not touch the sides. He tries again, but his dad grabs the bottle, “oh no you don’t.” he warns.

Andy grins at him, he’s a hyena after all. A ronin hyena with no respect for the natural order, because the natural order never respected him. 

He stands, rearing up and looking down upon the small gathering, and that’s when it all begins to unravel. Truth is, it unravelled well before now, and this eventuality became a certainty quite some time ago. If there is free will, it’s a joke. The punchline being; too little, too late.

All the same he pauses and a small, childish voice whispers in his ear, I don’t want to!

He ignores it, snatches up the knife laying at the side of the turkey and proclaims, “I’ll carve!”

He places his left hand on the table by his empty plate and he diligently carves away his fingers. He’s not sure why he needs to do this, it’s all a bit dramatic for his liking. But somehow it seems the right thing to do.

“See this?” he says as he raises his mangled and fingerless hand, “you did this to me.”

He’s staring at Sarah and he’s rewarded with that dumb look again. She doesn’t know what to do. 

Good thinks Andy. Then he remembers, that was why he cut his fingers off. So she would at long last understand the pain she’d inflicted upon him. 

Golden Boy has had enough, he has got to his feet and he lunges at Andy. Andy is ready for this. He’s been waiting for this all his life. He stabs the stubs of his bleeding fingers into his brother’s face. It hurts like a bastard, but it has the desired effect. Mark goes down and then Andy is kicking him for good measure.

All through this, the lion of the pride remains frozen in place and his lioness wrings her hand in a comically silent loop. It’s Sarah who stands up to intervene and that’s when Andy pushes her away. Only he’s still got that bloodied carving knife in his hand and it tears through the front of her throat like the proverbial knife through butter.

“No!” cries Golden Boy, “she’s pregnant!”

And that’s when Andy’s world ends. He looks down at the prone figure choking on her own blood and only now notices the curve of her belly. There’s something about the way she looks at him as she lays dying that tells him that that baby is his.

I’ve done it again, Andy thinks to himself. 

Now the lion rises up and defends his pride, but it’s too late. It’s too late for all of them.

Even as his dad reigns blows upon Andy, Andy walks away. He retreats from territory he should never have returned to. No going back; that’s how it should have been.

With lions, the sons are indulged up to a point, and then they are exiled. They become too powerful and aggressive, threatening the harmony and order of the pride. Banished, they head out to find their own pride, fighting for that right. Sometimes to the death.  They can never go back to their childhood pride. There is only death awaiting there. It always goes wrong when a lion goes back…

Andy wears an expression of puzzlement as he stands at the open garden gate…