Chapter 21
After lunch, Roo went on a hunt, to gather up the components for her Christingle craft session.
She’d managed to find a reel of red ribbon in the stock cupboard where all the decorations had been kept.
There were plenty of clementines in the pantry and some long tapered candles that she snapped into smaller pieces; there were cocktail sticks in the bar and a jar of maraschino cherries.
She had the sudden urge to open it, stick her finger in and hook one out.
She burst it between her teeth and a shot of sticky, rich liquid hit her tastebuds.
They reminded her of Christmases past and one of her dad’s barmaid girlfriends, who’d sneak her a slug from her bottle of snowball when they were in the pub, top it up with lemonade and then drop a cherry in it for her.
Vincent had found some slippers for John, but they were sizes too big.
Alas John’s feet were about half the size of his boots.
All the prison-issue footwear was on the large side, he’d explained, they just had to wear extra socks to pad them out.
John’s thin, worn socks, however, wouldn’t have helped him fill those big boots.
Vincent gave him a pair of his own thick woolly ones to tide him over.
The socks John took off were fit only for the bin.
One more wash and they’d have disintegrated.
Mind you, his feet looked as if they would as well.
Those boots must have rubbed him raw. John stuffed them hurriedly into the fresh new socks but Vince had spotted they were a mess.
‘What was that song you were singing when you walked into the carriage where I was holed up?’ John asked Roo when they were both sitting around the fire drawing warmth from it.
‘ “Hark! Hark”, that one?’ she replied. ‘It’s my favourite carol.’
‘You’ve got a lovely voice. I haven’t heard that one before.’
‘It’s an old folk song. Carols once were meant to be sung in pubs and houses, you know, not churches. Not quite sure I sang it properly though, I was a bit thrown by your leg moving.’
‘Ah yes, my leg,’ said John, flexing it. ‘I was trying to keep still and not alert you but my knee hurts. Old age.’
‘You don’t look that old, John. I mean, you’ll probably look younger when you’ve had a wash.’
That made John hoot.
‘I feel a bit grubby. I could do with a bath. Is there one on here?’
‘Not that we’ve found, but there are great showers.’
Roo didn’t want to say that he could indeed do with one.
His clothes were whiffy and half his hair was matted.
He’d looked much bigger when she first set eyes on him with that heavy coat and boots and she suspected he was much younger than the forty-something she’d guess he was.
He was just a little shorter than Frank, five nine, maybe, but string-lean.
Jane could have probably overpowered him if he’d lied to them about being a prison guard and was actually a psycho.
He wasn’t though, she could tell. He had nice eyes, kind, friendly, even if the rest of him looked a bit ‘weathered’.
‘I expect you’ll be bunking up with Tim now. He’s already warned everyone he snores, so good luck there.’
‘We’ll see, Roo,’ replied John. ‘He might not want to share with a stranger.’
‘We’re all strangers. We only met yesterday. The train broke down taking us to Eskford and the driver and guard got off to fetch an engineer and haven’t been back. If that hadn’t happened, we would have all gone on our merry way and not given each other a second thought.’
‘Ah, interesting. I presumed you were a party travelling somewhere together for Christmas.’
It was amazing how quickly you did get to know people though, when thrown together, thought Roo then, seeing them all through John’s eyes. Maybe he presumed as much because of her goading of Tim, something you might not do unless you knew someone a little better than one did.
She’d felt bad about Tim since, annoyed with herself for pushing him to reveal far more of himself than he probably wanted to. She looked at the clock on the wall and saw she had fifteen minutes before Brian came back on the radio to make his Christingle.
‘If you’ll excuse me, John, I’ll be back.’
Just outside the car, Roo took her coin out of her pocket, closed her eyes and asked the question.
‘Should I do this?’ She tossed it up, slammed it on the back of her hand to find the YES facing upwards. She was glad about that because she felt it was the right thing.
Roo made her way down the carriages looking for Tim.
She popped her head in the galley, but there was only Frank in there, mixing something in a bowl and singing – if you could call it that – ‘Jingle Bells’.
She reminded him about the sprouts in the hash, but he said he hadn’t forgotten.
She had an idea Tim would be in ‘Maria Gloriosa’ reading again and he was.
Alone – good. She walked in, he looked up, gave her a slight nod of acknowledgement and returned to his book, presuming probably that she wasn’t in there for him.
She surprised him though by sitting down near him on the sofa.
‘Can I have a word?’ she said.
‘If you must.’
He laid the book down at the side of him; it was a large one with yellowing pages and a brown cover, a gilt outline of a bell on the front. Then he waited to see what word she wanted with him.
‘What you were saying… earlier… about your daughter…’
He shuffled uneasily. ‘I don’t really want to discuss—’
She spoke over him.
‘I’m not asking you to, I would like you to listen to me. To my story. Please.’
‘All right.’
‘You’ll have to bear with me, I’m not very good at précising things,’ she began.
‘Okay.’ His face said he hadn’t a clue what she was going to come out with. Roo smiled and began.
‘My mum left us when I was really young. So my dad was lumbered with me. We didn’t have a lot of money, Dad didn’t have a job.
He said it was because of his back, but there wasn’t much wrong with it when he was doing a bit of work on the side, not that he did much.
Occasionally he’d have a girlfriend, dunno how; most of them were quite nice, rough but kind, not that they lasted long.
One of them taught me how to use our old twin tub so I took over the washing duties because Dad used to just dip stuff in the sink and it was never properly clean and I’d get made fun of at school: Ruby Pooper, they’d call me, or Poopy Cooper.
But I found out early that making people laugh, poking fun at myself a lot, got them off my back.
A defence mechanism. That’s why I thought I’d quite like to make people laugh and get paid for it, when I grew up.
‘I had free school dinners which didn’t help the name calling, and there was never anything in the cupboards which is probably why I’m the height I am and why my body doesn’t store fat, because it doesn’t know what to do with it.
Alien substance.’ She gave a small laugh, one devoid of any real humour.
‘He loved me… I think, in his own way, and I loved him. I was pretty upset when he died, because he was my dad.’
She could have told him so much more, and she would if she needed to, but these bare bones would probably suffice.
‘I’m aware that this might sound as if I’m talking about Dickensian London and not sixteen years ago in South Yorkshire, but some kids still live like this today, survive under the radar.’
She took a deep breath before continuing. It never got any less raw remembering how it was.
‘On the run-up to Christmas, Dad would find a bit of work so he had some money in his pocket. Not for presents, for boozing. I remember racing downstairs to see if Santa had been and finding some of my old toys wrapped up, and a scruffy old book that some kids had already scribbled on, a KitKat. I remember feeling absolutely heartbroken. Of course then I didn’t know it was my dad’s attempt at presents, I thought it was Santa and he hated me.
And then going back to school and everyone talking about what they’d had.
I was on tenterhooks for a whole year, hoping Santa would make up for it the next Christmas, but he didn’t.
There was nothing. Not a thing under the tree.
My dad had got wrecked and couldn’t remember where he’d put stuff.
He gave me a tenner and told me that Santa had sent it for me so I could get myself what I wanted. ’
She coughed. She could still recall how devastated she’d been, she could still tune in to the hurt of knowing she’d pissed Santa off somehow and hadn’t a clue how to put it right.
‘Mad, I know, but even when I found out there was no Santa, I carried on hating him as if he was real, I still had all those feelings. Maybe because I didn’t want to hate my dad, so I transferred them. My dad, who was always around, I saw him every day. Every. Single. Day.’
Tim shifted, obviously uncomfortable. This was not what he wanted to hear.
‘Yep, he was always around, Tim. Well, nearly, because he was in the pub a fair bit. But if he wasn’t there, he’d be watching the telly or pissed asleep on the sofa and I’d throw a blanket over him before I went to bed.
He didn’t have money for presents, for healthy food, but he always had money for beer, cigs, spliffs, betting, his mobile phone and we had a massive telly. Huge thing.
‘And though he was never rotten to me, never hit me or anything, he wasn’t that great to me either because there was only ever one person on his planet, unless you count the barmaids and the bookies.
My point being, that I would have killed for a dad who wanted to provide his best for me, who sacrificed his time with me for the greater good, who put me first, who worked so I’d be comfortable and warm and filled my belly with nice food.
That’s real love, that is. Don’t think that your girl can’t see that, whatever your ex-missus said.
So if she wants you to go over and be with her for the birth of her baby, that’s telling you she loves you right back, Tim. ’
Tim wasn’t looking at her any more, he had dropped his head but she could see his eyes blinking, processing the words she had fed into his brain.
Roo stood up, ready to leave.
‘We’re making Christingles with Radio Brian in five minutes on the table in ‘Old Tom’. Plenty of oranges to go round.’
She’d said all she needed to and she hoped it might help, because she bet that Tim had never thought of it all from the other side. Her miserable younger life had come in handy twice, then: for today, as well as for developing her comedy muscle. If only she had the guts to flex it.