Chapter 1

1

ELEVEN DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS

‘Can we go home now? Please ?’

Shelley stops in the busy shopping mall and glares at Joel. Fairy lights sparkle overhead and ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ is being piped out from somewhere – the bowels of hell possibly – accelerating Shelley’s heart rate like a double caffeine shot. ‘Just need to get a few bits,’ she says. ‘Honestly, it won’t take too long.’

‘I hate this,’ he whines. ‘We’ve been here for hours!’

‘Joel, we only arrived forty minutes ago?—’

‘I’m hungry and I need a drink?—’

‘We won’t be much longer?—’

‘I really need something to drink,’ Joel insists, gasping now, as if they were traversing the Kalahari Desert and not an east London shopping mall long overdue a refit. ‘Why do we have to do this? On a Saturday as well. All these people! I hate it!’

‘For God’s sake.’ Shelley rounds on him. ‘You think I love it?’

‘I’m tired and I want to go home.’ Joel looks at her imploringly. Then he makes his body go floppy, as if his spine has suddenly melted and he is on the verge of collapse.

Trying to blot him from her vision, Shelley marches on determinedly, rattling through the kind of mental lists that have cluttered her brain throughout every December since she first gave birth. Travel mug for Fin (can his preferred type really cost forty quid?) and that special razor Martha wants, plus roll-on perfume, sheet masks, pillow spray containing some crucial ingredient that Shelley has now forgotten, and something called a ‘pore blurrer’.

At seventeen years old, Martha’s pores are invisible to the naked eye. It’s Shelley’s pores that need blurring, she decides crossly. She’s been tempted by something her friend Pearl, a former beauty editor and product aficionado, has been raving about. ‘The Miracle Filler’, it’s called. But are things really so bad that, at fifty-two, Shelley’s face needs to be filled, like cracked mortar?

As she drags the whining Joel past a desolate branch of Claire’s Accessories, her brain flips back to her Christmas list. A sweater for Fin, or will he despise it on principle? Socks! Non-moulting scarf for her mother-in-law, because last year’s choice shed turquoise fluff all over her good jacket and apparently she’s still picking bits off…

Shelley glares at her shopping companion as he lopes along at her side. Now her list swerves down an alternative route. Strong booze, cigarettes, divorce lawyer…

Unfortunately, she can’t placate Joel with a Chupa Chups lolly or even a visit to Santa’s grotto, set up in a saggy velour tent outside Dr Noodles. Because Joel isn’t a small child, being dragged around the shops by his mum. Joel is Shelley’s husband, aged fifty-two and a highly successful freelance graphic designer and father to their teenage daughter and son.

For the seventeen years they’ve been parents, Joel has cunningly avoided any involvement with Christmas at all. Or indeed parenting, pretty much. However, it’s the festive season that always threatens to tip Shelley over the edge. In the early years, when Shelley was at home full time with the kids, it sort of made sense, as Joel would be working flat out to meet Christmas deadlines (he never works at a normal rate; it’s always ‘flat out’). By the time Martha and Fin were at school, and Shelley had returned to work, Christmas had well and truly become her department.

Really, everything is Shelley’s department. If their lives together were one of those vast, old fashioned department stores, Shelley would be in charge of ladies’ fashions, bedding and electricals, plus the restaurant, staff, cleaning and building maintenance. What Joel does, as he points out regularly, is earn money to keep them all. The real money, that is. Shelley’s contribution, from working as a receptionist at a local care home, is barely acknowledged.

‘Can’t you do it all online?’ Joel asked this morning, meaning the Christmas shopping.

‘No, I can’t,’ Shelley insisted. ‘I need one day – just one day, Joel, with you helping me – looking around the real shops.’

And now, as they head home on the Tube, laden with bags, Shelley senses Joel’s spirits rising. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ he announces loudly, for the benefit of the whole carriage. ‘ Please promise you’ll do it all online next year. Don’t make me go through that again.’ Rather than deigning to reply – which would only encourage him – she watches her husband catch the eye of the young man in a mustard beanie hat sitting opposite. And she reads the silent exchange between them.

Joel: Women, eh! Christmas!

Beanie man: You poor bastard, mate.

Joel: But I did it ’cause I’m a good guy!

Beanie man smirks in a way that Joel interprets as male-to-male camaraderie, when in fact he is probably thinking, Stop grinning and staring at me, weird old man!

Back home, Shelley and Joel dump the numerous bags in the hallway. Before she has even pulled off her jacket, he’s zoomed to the kitchen and snatched a beer from the fridge as if it’s essential to life. Then he marches past her, cantering upstairs with his beer, leaving her standing with the shopping bags clustered around her feet.

Shelley blinks down at them and then glares upstairs. It wouldn’t have killed him to help her carry them up to their bedroom, where Christmas presents are being stored. Presents, incidentally, that include carefully chosen items for Joel’s mum and dad – to which the non-moulting scarf will be added – plus his brother, his brother’s wife, their three children and a couple of elderly aunties. They, too, come under the banner of ‘Shelley’s department’. Joel is too busy being God, installed up in his studio in the converted loft space of their somewhat scuffed and shabby terraced home.

‘Martha? Fin?’ Shelley calls out. No response. The kids must be out, so at least their presents can be squirrelled away without any interference. ‘Joel?’ She stares upstairs. ‘ Joel! ’

After a few moments he appears on the landing, looking distracted and clutching his phone. Joel is obsessed with his phone and checks it repeatedly during mealtimes and sometimes, on occasion, during sex. In those rare moments when he isn’t holding it, his hand still forms a phone-holding shape. Shelley worries that he might need an operation to correct it.

‘What is it?’ He frowns.

‘Could you help me upstairs with this lot?’

‘Can we do in a bit? Just sending some emails?—’

‘It’s just, if the kids come back they’re going to see?—’

‘Can I do it when I’ve finished?’ He disappears back up the wooden staircase to the loft. Simmering with irritation now, Shelley lugs the shopping upstairs in two loads, and then heads to the kitchen to prepare dinner.

The sink is piled high with dirty dishes. Shelley’s family seem to be under the illusion that this is a magical sink that cleanses its contents without any human involvement, like those freaky public loos that sluice everything down when you’ve gone out.

She re-fixes her blonde ponytail and tears into the washing up. And now she remembers that Joel has invited ‘the boys’ around tomorrow for mince pies, mulled wine and their annual festive table football tournament. Shelley likes Joel’s friends, gathered from his various magazine jobs and a football team he belonged to, briefly. She’s happy for him to invite them all round, as it’s usually a jolly occasion. But they’re not ready this year. Not a single decoration has been put up yet, and there isn’t a tree. There aren’t even any mince pies, for crying out loud. They’re Joel’s friends! Couldn’t he have sorted this?

She scampers upstairs and bursts into Joel’s studio. He springs back in his chair as if she’s pulled a gun on him. ‘We need to get a tree,’ she announces.

‘What? What kind of tree?’

What kind does he think? An apple tree? A weeping willow? ‘A Christmas tree! You’ve got the boys coming over tomorrow?—’

‘We can get it tomorrow morning,’ he says with a shrug.

‘Can’t we just do it now? So we can decorate it in the morning and do the room? Make it look festive for everyone coming? The man’s there till around seven…’ The Christmas tree man, she means. He’s been selling real pine trees all week from a pop-up shop in the old launderette.

‘We don’t need it all decorated for tomorrow. It’s ages till Christmas.’

‘It’s not ages, Joel. It’s eleven days?—’

‘Fucking hell, are you counting?’ he splutters.

‘It’s just, I’m working four days next week?—’

‘So am I! I’m working all the days!’

‘Yes, so if we don’t do it this weekend that’s another week gone?—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Joel places his phone face down on his desk, a vast expanse of vintage teak the size of Kent. He won’t admit how much it cost. ‘It’s a business expense,’ he’d insisted. Whenever he looks cross when Shelley buys anything other than the cheapest white wine, she is tempted to tell him it’s necessary for the smooth running of their family home. So that too is a business expense. ‘All this fuss,’ he grumbles now. ‘Every year it’s the same?—’

‘Joel, I didn’t invent Christmas. I’m not the Virgin Mary.’ What is she saying? Is she going mad? Inexplicably, Shelley’s eyes prickle with sudden tears as she looks around Joel’s immaculate workspace.

There are several computers and tablets; state of the art technology that no one is allowed to touch. A new laptop is Joel’s prized possession. He also lied about the cost of this; Shelley knows because she checked. Not because Joel isn’t entitled to buy whatever he likes. He earns the money, after all. And it’s not just a laptop, it’s a vital tool , he says. No, she only checked the price to confirm to herself that it really hadn’t been ￡200, and that therefore, he must think her an idiot.

Her gaze sweeps across the rest of the room. There’s his beloved football table, which Fin and Martha used to nag to play until Joel’s rabid competitiveness drained all the fun out of it. In the corner, a fantastically expensive guitar, virtually unplayed, gleams from its stand, and the walls are hung with huge framed prints showcasing Joel’s typography. ‘FREE YOUR SOUL’, one of them reads. Okay, Shelley thinks, but could you also get the ladder out and climb up through the hatch, like I keep asking you to, to free the Christmas decorations from the loft? She’s about to ask again, but the way he is looking at her now – Please go , his look says – sends Shelley stomping back downstairs, calculating that in three days’ time she’ll be getting together with Pearl and Lena and then her equilibrium will be fully restored.

And then, she is sure of it, everything will be all right.