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Short Stories & Other fiction

Christmas Story

Every year, as we took down the Christmas decorations, Mum would say “I’m not doing that again”. We never paid any attention to her moans about slaving over a Christmas dinner for her ungrateful children and mother and unmarried sisters, but when Dad won a couple of grand on the lottery one year he blew the lot on a holiday. Christmas in Sri Lanka . Of course, Mum protested, said she didn’t really mind the whole turkey routine, but it was a done deal. “Why Sri Lanka ?” she asked, bemused. “Because they don’t celebrate Christmas there,” replied Dad.

We had never spent Christmas just the four of us before, Mum & Dad and me and Cindy. Cindy was my kid sister. At least, that’s what they told me. But I had seen her bedroom, I knew she was an alien from Planet Pink. Pink walls, pink floor, pink bed, pink clothes, pink fairies, pink cuddly animals . . . more animals than you see in a zoo. The scientists from Planet Pink had done a good job on her, but they forgot one thing that would have made her human. They didn’t give her a sense of humour. I don’t like blowing my old trumpet, but my musical farts are legendary. They always reduce me and my schoolmates to a fit of helpless giggles, rolling about on the floor. Which is unfortunate, really, because that’s where the smell lingers. Our physics teacher told us it must be heavier than air, and that I should bottle it and sell it to the Army as a Weapon of Mass Revulsion. But even he grinned. Not Cindy the Alien. Just tilted her nose in the air and flounced off, pinkly.

Anyway, just before Christmas that year off we went to the airport, me and Dad pulling two enormous suit cases, Mum with the tickets and passports and everything, Cindy with a menagerie under her arm pulling her baby suitcase. Pink, of course. Finally, after hours of messing about, I was on my first plane. I couldn’t stop grinning, even though I hadn’t farted, until eventually I fell asleep.

It was a couple of hours drive when we landed, and it didn’t seem like a hotel, just a cluster of thatched bungalows on the edge of the beach, a sprawling dining area, a swimming pool, and palm trees everywhere. It was brilliant. Mum & Cindy spent most of the time in the pool. Me and Dad went in the sea every day, body-surfing on the big waves that came crashing in. It was like having your body pummelled all over, made you feel alive. And the water was always warm.

On Christmas Eve we left our stuff behind and drove out to Kandy , a little town in the hills where it was a bit cooler. The hired car came with a driver, Prema, who pointed out strange fruits for sale on the road side, and different trees, as we drove along. We even saw an elephant. I wanted to get out and take its photo, but Prema told me to do it from inside the car.

Next day he took us to the temple. Back in Selsey we wouldn’t even have gone to church, just watched telly and stuffed ourselves silly, but here we were ‘getting away from it all’ by going to a temple. It was quite an experience, though. Gongs and cymbals and chanting and incense, and crowds of people, but the highlight was a bit of a let-down. We shuffled in a long procession past a chamber, and inside we could see a casket, and inside the casket was a tooth belonging to Buddha. Yeah, right. If there was a tooth in it, and if it really belonged to Buddha. It wasn’t an anti-climax for the locals, though. They thought it was terrific. And somehow that made it exciting for us. Already I was thinking about boasting at school: “when I went to the Temple of the Tooth . . . .”

We spent two nights in Kandy , then set off back to the hotel by the beach. After a bit I realised that Prema had stopped pointing out things that he thought might interest us, and he kept calling people on his mobile. That didn’t stop him driving at high speed, weaving his way through all the traffic with one hand on the wheel while he talked on his phone. I should mention that the Highway Code in Sril Lanka is a bit different to West Sussex , but somehow all the kids and grannies and bikes and cows and dogs seemed to survive.

Eventually the car stopped and Prema turned round to us. “I am very sorry,” he said, “there seems to have been an accident, a disaster, they are calling it tsunami.” We didn’t know what he was talking about, not even when he stopped again, beside a sea of mud where all the palm trees had been uprooted. Prema pointed to a pile of rubble and said, “that was your hotel.” We couldn’t take it in. Our bungalow had disappeared, along with all our stuff. Even Cindy’s pink suitcase. The hotel had disappeared. So had the beach. I kept saying to myself “so this is a tsunami,” but it still didn’t mean anything. Prema took us to a small hotel a few miles away from the beach, and arranged a room for the four of us to share. We just had an overnight bag between us with dirty clothes. But what about all the other people from the hotel? They wouldn’t have anything. It didn’t occur to me that people had died.

It was another week before we came home, but that was the end of the holiday. We became volunteers, helping the survivors. We weren’t heroes or anything, we just did what we could. Even Cindy. She was really upset, but I watched out for her. And she looked after other little kids. She just sat and cuddled them, hour after hour.

At the airport, waiting for our flight back to England , we just sat there. We didn’t read, play games or anything. I bet we looked like real travellers, not holiday-makers. Cindy didn’t have any cuddly animals. She lost most of them in the tsunami, and the ones she had taken to Kandy she had given away to other kids. She was still wearing pink, of course, but you couldn’t see much of it. Like the rest of us, her clothes were faded and mud-stained. She held my hand, and even though it was in public I didn’t mind.

Dad said I had grown up. “Don’t be daft,” I said. “I’ve been shaving for almost two years.” I know the first year there was hardly anything to shave, but even so! Mum smiled, but she looked exhausted. “We should have stayed home,” I said, “stuffing a turkey would have been easier than all this.” “No we shouldn’t,” said Mum, “that was the most important week of my life. But I tell you what, next year I am going to give our family the best Christmas they have ever had.”