There were once three sisters arguing on Zoom about who was going to house their father for Christmas that year. All three had valid sounding reasons for unwillingness. The eldest one believed he’d become too cantankerous. The middle one believed he was now too inappropriate. The youngest one believed he just wasn’t anything like the person she’d imagined him to be when she was a child any more.
They all also knew now that he was likely to make a pass at any woman present who wasn’t literally one of his daughters. But they hadn’t dared say this out loud even to themselves, though they’d suggested a shared knowledge of it with a bit of eyebrow raising and pursing of lips. Saying it out loud would’ve felt the ultimate in family disloyalty. So they all shrugged at each other on the screen.
It’s how rude he is. I know it’s sometimes funny and everything, but more often now it turns into a kind of acute aggressiveness, the eldest said.
And he’s very ... off, the middle one said. These days he’s given to saying things that range from embarrassing to hurtful – and to whoever! Anyone! He’s perfectly capable of shouting something inappropriate right across a room at someone random!
The thing is. I just don’t want to, the youngest said.
You’ve got more space, the eldest said.
Neither of the other two sisters knew which one of them she was specifically talking to because on Zoom you can’t tell for sure who the person speaking is looking at.
And this year I’ve had to invite a lot of people, the eldest said, for late Christmas morning/early afternoon drinks before lunch. Friends and their kids, and people from work and their kids, and from Jonathan’s work too, his boss is coming. It’s full-on for me this year.
I did it last year, the middle one said.
I did it the year before, the youngest one said.
It’s your turn, they said in unison.
OK. OK. But only if you both come for dinner on Christmas Day too, the eldest said.
And stay where? the middle one said.
I can’t afford it, the youngest said. Plus you always leave me to deal with him. It’s so not fair. You never pull your weight.
I do not!
I do so!
Digitally blunted shouting on a screen.
But when they were children he’d stood so tall, their father, to the youngest at least, the kind of tall that’s the mast of a ship from the past. Handsome, she knew even when she was very small, because of the way women looked at him and then glanced at their mother (God rest her) with side eyes all unconcealed envy. The kind of wise that knew without measuring exactly how much milk to add to a tin of tomato soup to make the tin go as far as all of them without spoiling the tomato, and there he is, standing at the back of the hall at the school concert even though it’s afternoon and he’s supposed to be at work, and people in the neighbourhood, someone always at the door or calling through the window can you give me a hand moving these breeze blocks Kenny? and my man’s lopped the top off his finger what do I do? and Mr Gerard, Mr Gerard can I ask your advice / letter from lawyers / final demand / have a look and tell me what this means?
Blink of an eye later. Now it was Christmas, a late bright sunny morning and warm in that sun as if December were September, and they were all in a room full of the bonhomie of overdressed and mildly intoxicated people, strangers mostly even to the sister whose house it was, and though in the old days he’d have been working his charms hard in a room like this, now it was him who literally meant that phrase old days, sitting morose tonguing his teeth, shielding his eyes against sun through the window in an armchair too small for him, looking away when anyone, family or not, made an effort to include him in conversation or bent to offer him a drink, a heated-up canape, whatever.
At least he was being quiet, the youngest thought. To be preferred to him being pushy or demanding or taking sudden hold of the shoulder of some woman who didn’t know him. She took another sip of the cloying stuff someone had poured into a tiny glass for her but it was so unpleasant she couldn’t pretend, so she put the glass down on the nearest sideboard. Someone, some friend of her eldest sister she hadn’t been introduced to, crossed the room and removed it immediately, checking the bottom of the glass then the surface of the sideboard.
She tamped down a guffaw and looked back over at their father to see if he’d seen that happen; in the old days they’d at least have exchanged a look.
What she saw then was their father start to fade in front of her eyes.
Trick of the sunlight? like when you’re driving and the sun hits at an angle that means everything becomes a blinding nothing?
She closed her eyes. The room went dark. She opened them.
It was true. He was vanishing. He was turning transparent, becoming something more like a block of glass or ice than a man.
She shook her head.
It kept happening.
Now it was like she could see right through him. No, it wasn’t just like. She could. She could see the chair he was sitting in appear through him, the stupidly fashionable back of it shimmered through the clarity he made, then the back of that armchair faded to a kind of clearness too and through the new lens of her father in the chair she could see the mess of the rest of the room with all its people and tinsel and torn screwed-up wrapping paper and movement and noise, then all this became thin too, turned actually translucent, the noise continuing but everything that made it dissolving into air till there was nothing substantial left but the massive pine tree at the other end of the lounge, way too big for this room and layered with swags of baubles and lights, and even these things hanging on it were thinning to nothing now, each little light winking, then gone, one after the other and the other and the other like so many snuffed stars, until there was nothing real in that room but the tower of it stretching wide its spiky green, the held spread of the haughtiness of the branches of a tree ritually uprooted in the cold and the dark and the quiet of a forest to be placed in an overheated room, and for what? All she could hear all around her was cacophony, nonsense, like the non-language coming from the new toy someone’s kid was playing with behind her that was repeating the word Yeehah! like someone on TV was slapping the back of a horse to get it to go faster or the rumps of cattle to get them to move.
She heard something fall behind her. The child, quite small, maybe seven years old, she couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, had dropped the puppetronic creature on to the parquet; it lay there silent, its mouth open, its teeth bared with its real-looking tongue between them.
But the child who’d dropped it was standing as still and as shocked as a caricature of a child in a state of wonder and staring straight through her gone father too at the tree.
How is he doing that? the child said. Where did he go? Where did all the little lights and stuff go? How did he make it go so green? Is he magic?
I don’t know, she said.
She stared like a child alongside the child.
Then a single tiny Christmas light bulb relit itself on one side of the tree. Another on its far side, then another, the lights began to wink back on at a leisurely pace all over it. The baubles one by one resumed their little brittlenesses on the branches, and the child, losing interest, picked up the dropped toy and sat down on the floor with it, put a hand into somewhere at the back of its head to press a button. The puppet blinked its big eyes, opened and closed its mouth.
The youngest of the sisters looked again and saw their father, a man who’s grown elderly and been stuck in a chair somewhere he doesn’t want to be. She glanced across the room. The eldest sister threw her a glance back. All OK? All OK. She nodded. The middle sister checked in too from the other side of the room, OK? rolled her eyes then went back to flirting with a man in a comedy jumper.
OK.
The youngest went over and perched on the arm of the chair next to their father.
Need anything, Dad? she said.
For Christ’s sake stop asking me that, he said in the warmth of his icy way.
I know, she said. I know. Well. Not long now. And listen. We’ll do Christmas at mine next year, eh, will we?
You’ll be bloody lucky, he said.
Illustration by Yann Kebbi