A Christmas Holiday
by
Brendan Gerad O’Brien
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Brendan Gerad O’Brien on Smashwords
A Christmas Holiday
Copyright © 2010 by Brendan Gerad O’Brien
Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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A story from the collection Dreamin’ Dreams by Brendan Gerad O’Brien, also published on Smashwords
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/21881
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A Christmas Holiday
“Well? Did you get that stupid car fixed?”
I stopped dead in my tracks. Well, I certainly hadn’t expected such an ugly reception when I got home from work, that cold December evening last year.
I’d come sauntering up the garden path, flicked the key in the lock and pushed open the front door with my usual jolly salutation.
“Honey, I’m home,” I chirped.
Now what usually happens is this; Jayne pops her head around the kitchen door and gives me a warm and welcoming smile, followed immediately by a quick run-down of what’s for tea.
This time, though, she didn’t just pop her head around the door. She leapt all the way out of the kitchen and into the hallway in one astonishingly wild flourish, and she had a look on her face like a ferocious bulldog chewing a wasp.
The glare she threw came at me like an assassin’s bullet, and it pinned me back against the stairs.
“But I’m only just after finishing work,” was all I managed to croak, and that was a feeble yelp. “When did I have the time to get the car fixed?”
“I don’t care!” she shrieked, scooping the baby off the floor and strutting angrily into the living room where she flopped down onto the sofa. “Have you any idea what it’s like having to catch a bus into town with the baby under one arm and the pushchair under the other and ten bags of shopping and no seat for you to sit on?”
She wagged a bottle of milk at me before popping it into the baby’s mouth.
“You have to go rummaging in your purse for the exact money while the people behind you are tutting in your ear,” she continued without drawing breath. “Then the stupid bus takes off before you’re ready, so you end up galloping down the full length of the aisle and landing in a heap at the other end. I’m fed up with it! Do you hear me? I’m fed up with it! So you’d better get that bloody car fixed right now, or you can do your own bloody shopping from now on!”
I sagged into the armchair in the far corner of the room, deflated and speechless. Deflated because, when I got here I was actually bursting with excitement, having rushed all the way home from work with an amazing surprise for her.
Of course she couldn’t possibly have known, but in my shirt pocket I had a couple of tickets for the holiday of a lifetime! I was only going to take her to San Francisco for Christmas! It was supposed to take her breath away. Instead she goes and pops my bubble.
All right! I’d forgotten all about the stupid car. Considering it was going to cost me a week’s wages for a new clutch, it was hard to believe I let it slip my mind like that. But in my defence I could say that I got caught up in the sheer madness of the moment.
And what a moment! Talk about being in the right place at the right time! And I really thought Jayne would be well up for it too, especially when you realize how lucky I was to get those tickets in the first place.
The problem was that it all happened so quickly. I’d spotted Mickey Dunn coming out of the factory gates at the end of our shift, shuffling along with his hands deep in his pockets.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked, catching up with him. “You’ve got a face on you like a robber’s dog!”
He gave a snort and shook his head slowly from side to side, and the bunch of curls on his forehead swayed with the movement. But he didn’t answer.
“Well?” I asked again, after an awkward silence.
“Ah, tis nothing,” he said gloomily. “Nothing at all.”
“But aren’t you going away on holiday in two weeks time?” I laughed. “To San Francisco, no less. And with the beautiful Eileen Grey as well. You should be on top of the world, a man in your position.” I gave him a poke with my elbow. “Imagine getting away from this gloomy auld place for two whole weeks, eh? I’d nearly give my right arm for a holiday like that.”
Mickey nodded slowly. “I’m not going, though,” he muttered.
“You’re not going?” I queried cautiously. “But why not?”
“Well, tis Eileen.” More gloom. “She’s after dumping me.”
I studied him very carefully for a moment. Mickey Dunn was the kind of guy who, if he told you what the date was, you’d still check with a calendar. You never knew if he was winding you up or not. He also had more neck than the average giraffe. He’d steal the eye out of your head and come back later for the eyelash.
But, somehow, you could never take offence at him. A loveable rogue, that’s how everyone described him.
But right now he did look seriously dejected. It was very rare to see Mickey Dunn with a face so long that his chin was dragging on the ground.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “When did this happen?”
“Ah, sure, it’s been on the cards for a long time now,” he sighed. “I’ve had my suspicions for a while now, you know, but they were actually confirmed the other morning when I phoned her from work. Just to ask her if she’d sorted out the passports, you understand. Well, before I could get a word in, she’s purring down the phone and calling me Wayne in a weird sort of voice, all husky and soft. Really slushy stuff! I should have shut up and let her carry on, but instead I tell her tis me! Well, didn’t she nearly bite my head off! She called me all sorts of names and told me never to call her out of the blue like that again, especially when I’m supposed to be in work. She made out I was spying on her, that I didn’t trust her and all that kind of rubbish.’
He gulped and the Adam’s apple rippled up and down on his neck like a yo-yo behind a rough dishcloth.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he spluttered. “I should have sorted it out right there and then. But, being the big eejit that I am, and madly in love with her at the same time, I supposed I just swallowed my little bit of pride and hoped it would all go away.”
Our bus came along and rattled to a stop, swamping us in a cloud of evil smelling smoke, and something clattered noisily underneath. We shuffled on board and sat at the back.
“As luck would have it, though,” Mickey sniggered gleefully, “I still have the tickets for the holiday right here in my pocket. But it was a close thing, I have to tell you. Very close indeed! I was actually taking them over to her house. Well, you know what she’s like,” he nodded seriously. “She likes to be in charge. She has to be in total control of everything, otherwise she’s not enjoying herself. She gets it from her mother, of course. Well, you’ve seen her mother yourself, that day she was sitting in the garden polishing her jackboots for her Gestapo reunion. And what about that big bullwhip that’s hanging above the mantelpiece, eh?”
He gave a feeble cough and wiped his eyes. Good grief, I thought, don’t start crying on me now. Not on a bus full of hairy factory workers. The bus hit a bump and we all wobbled.
“Anyway,” he continued, “just as I got to her front gate, I caught sight of the clothes on the washing line at the back of the house, and a dreadful sense of foreboding swept over me. You should have seen the size of her mother’s things!”
His eyes were like saucers now.
“That bra would have excited any red blooded camel, I can tell you, with the two enormous humps on it. And as for the - you know? - the unmentionables, well! Billy Smart’s Circus could have moved in there, and that’s a fact. Anyway, just at that moment, Eileen herself comes out of the front door and catches me staring at them and she immediately assumes that the look of horror on my face is some kind of uncontrollable lust, and she really lets rip at me.”
I chuckled at that. Micky didn’t.
“Suddenly I’m a pervert in need of locking up!” he yelped, his voice almost overwhelmed with distress. “Unbelievable as it seems, she makes out that I have the hots for her mother. ‘Well, if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for,’ says she, ‘there’s no way on God’s earth that I’m going to America with you. I’d never know what you’d be up to when my back’s turned.’ So she left me with no choice but to walk away.”
We reflected on this for a few minutes.
“But that’s not the worst bit,” he sighed. “As I’m scattering off down the road, running for my life, I see this shiny red sports car cruising casually up to the house. It stops outside the gate and there’s Eileen, as bold as brass with a silly grin on her face, fawning all over the driver. If I had been closer I’d have, well ... I’d have pulled off his wing mirrors.”
Another bump and another wobble.
“One thousand pounds I’m after paying for that holiday,” Mickey sighed again. “One thousand pounds! I must have been mad.”
“So what are you going to do with the tickets now?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “It hadn’t crossed my mind to take out insurance. Well, I thought wild horses wouldn’t stop Eileen from going to San Francisco. But there you are! I didn’t want to go there myself in the first place. I can’t stand the thought of flying all that way, but at the time I was blinded by a strange passion for the woman.”
“No insurance?” I said, surprised. “So you can’t even take them back to the travel agent?”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now, anyway,” he growled. “I just haven’t got the heart left in me to worry about it all. On the one hand, I miss her badly, but on the other hand I wake up at night in a terrible sweat, and I feel so relieved that I’ve managed to escape her clutches. Imagine ten years down the road when she’s turned into a clone of her mother and you can’t take her out in daylight in case she frightens the neighbour’s cat? What a nightmare that would be!”
“Why don’t you just sell them, so?” I suggested.
“Ah, I can’t be bothered with all that stuff right now.” He gave a casual shrug.
“They cost you a thousand pounds and you can’t be bothered?” I laughed out loud.
“Well, there’s only two weeks left to go.” His nose twitched. “Where am I going to find someone who’ll want to buy them at this short notice, even if I tried to give them away at half the price? Or even a third of the price.”
“A third of the price?” I gasped. “You’d sell them for three hundred pounds?”
“Four hundred.” he said. I thought for a second that I caught a twinkle in his eye, but he looked out of the window.
I scratched my head. “Three into one thousand ...”
“Ah, tis too late now, anyway,” he said again. “No one could get the two weeks off for the Christmas at this short notice, like I said.”
“Well, our factory is shut for the Christmas,” I said quickly. “We have the two weeks off ourselves.”
Well, you’d be mad not to grab a golden opportunity like that with both hands?
Wouldn’t you?
Anyway, with a sudden rush of blood to the head and without as much as a nod towards the consequences, I bought the tickets from Micky Dunn.
Of course I had to borrow the money from Jayne’s Christmas fund, the one that she’d been saving with since last January. My mother kept it in an old cocoa tin under the kitchen sink. She wouldn’t even notice that I’d crept in and borrowed it.
And that was that!
Of course I was going to tell Jayne! As soon as everything was sorted and we were on our way, that is. We’d leave the baby with Jayne’s mother and then we’d disappear for two glorious weeks in the sun. Then I’d mention it. She would be so proud. Probably.
But right at this moment, as I wilted under the unblinking stare of my beloved Jayne, the magic had somehow evaporated. After the reception I just encountered, I didn’t feel this was a good time to mention it, either. She was bound to start asking awkward questions, demand to know how I could afford to take her anywhere when I didn’t have enough money to get the car sorted!
“So, what’s for tea?” I asked, flashing my most penitent smile.
“We’ve had ours,” she sneered back. “Yours is in the dog.”
My heart sank. I hated these sulks. Sometimes Jayne could sulk for Ireland.
I needed to steel myself, and seriously consider my options at the same time, so I grabbed my coat and retreated to Maguire’s pub to brood over my predicament.
The words of the famous song clattered into my mind: I’m reviewing the situation.
*****
So what on earth was I going to do now? If I didn’t get the car fixed, Jayne was going to give me intolerable and persistent grief, and then, when she found out that I’d spent her Christmas savings on an impulse, she was bound to crank up the ferocity of the grief a notch or two! And she might not even come to San Francisco with me after all that, just to add a heap of salt to the weeping wound.
What possessed me to act so impulsively in the first place? I must have had a fleeting explosion of mad cow disease. My stomach turned when I thought about it.
I threw a handful of coins onto the counter, having just managed to collect enough to buy a pint of stout, and a packet of crisps to go with it.
“Will you be buying a ticket for Saturday’s raffle, Michael?” Mrs Maguire’s peroxide blond hair glowed like a halo around her head in the subdued light of the solitary bulb. “They’re only a pound each.”
“What’s the prize, Mrs Maguire?”
“A stereo cassette player,” she beamed. “Tis one of them compact ones.”
“I’ve got one of them already, thanks.”
“Now, don’t be so mean,” she pouted. “Tis for charity, you know.”
“Don’t talk to me about charity, Mrs Maguire,” I protested. “I’m a very poor man myself, as you well know. I’m so poor I could nearly qualify for charity status myself.”
“Ah, will you go away, you big eejit.” She gave me a thump on the arm. “Sure isn’t it just a bit of fun on a Saturday night? Tis just a bit of a laugh, helps to get us into the Christmas spirit. The money we raise will go to the St. John’s Gregorian Boys Choir, to encourage them to continue with the Christmas Nativity.”
She rattled the tin under my nose.
“You won’t be making enough out of this raffle to encourage a budgie to sing, let alone a whole choir,” I mocked.
She gave an almighty laugh that blew the froth off the top of my pint, and the slap on the back nearly cracked a rib.
“Oh, won’t we now?” she bellowed. “Well, I’ll have you know, we made over nine hundred pounds for the nuns last week.” She gave me a wicked wink. “The old man says tis just a dirty habit with them nuns, but I says we’ll have ‘nun’ of that kind of talk in here!”
“Nine hundred pounds?”
“Oh, yes. Easy. And we made more than that the week before. It all depends on what the prize is.”
My head suddenly buzzed. “So who arranges these raffles, then?” I asked casually.
“Well, you know my son Derek, don’t you?” she answered, nodding towards the bar.
My blood ran cold. “Oh, they’ve let Derek out - er - come home, have they?”
“They have!” Mrs Maguire had a very proud look on her face. “So just go over there and ask him all about it. He’ll be glad to give you all the details.”
I glanced over at Derek Maguire, a six-foot tall, ex-boxer and all round barbarian, who was thrown out of the French Foreign Legion for being too aggressive.
“Well, I ...”
“So what were you thinking about anyway, Michael? Was it a charity or something like that?”
“Ah, well, I was just thinking about a friend of mine,” I stuttered. “Well, he’s a cousin actually, you know, a distant cousin, on my mother’s side. You wouldn’t know him yourself. Anyway, he’s been very sick recently. They said he should get away for a while, to help him recover, you know what I mean?”
“Oh, that’s very thoughtful of you, Michael Galvin. I didn’t know you were so kind hearted, you being you and all that?”
“What do you mean?” I put on my most indignant expression.
She chuckled and patted me on the arm. “A chancer, that’s how I’d put it. A chancer.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say, Mrs Maguire. And you after knowing me for most of my life.”
She nodded gravely. “A chancer! But never mind about that right now. What were you proposing to put up as the prize? That’s if you were serious about a raffle at all.”
“I am!” I answered loudly. “And I would like to put up a holiday for two in San Francisco, so there!”
Her eyes popped. Then they narrowed.
“A holiday for two in San Francisco?” she purred. “What’s the catch?”
“Well, it has to be taken in two weeks time, that’s the only snag,” I said. “But it will be for two whole weeks in the sun, away from all this. Just imagine, Christmas in San Francisco!”
Her eyes narrowed even more, so I took out the black envelope with the gold letters on it that said ‘Lucy’s Luxury Holidays’.
“Now feast your eyes on that, Mrs Maguire,” I said warmly.
She held the envelope like it was red hot and she examined every word on the tickets, scrutinising every sentence. She was frowning when she handed it back.
“Lucy’s Luxury Holidays? Where on earth is that?”
“It’s in Killarney,” I told her, slipping the tickets back into my pocket. “On the main street. I asked my mother. She thinks it’s over a Chinese Chip Shop.”
“It sounds very posh indeed,” Mrs Maguire conceded. “But isn’t San Francisco a nice warm place? So why doesn’t that cousin of yours just go there himself?”
I didn’t know Mrs Maguire was a police interrogator. I had to think fast.
“He’s terrified. That’s it,” I said quickly. “The poor sod is terrified of flying, so he is, absolutely terrified. Well, not of the actual flying itself, you understand, tis the crashing that worries him, if you see what I mean? Even the thought of getting onto a plane gives him palpitations, and hasn’t he got enough of them already? But, of course, I had no idea that he felt like that when I decided to buy him a holiday in the sun. I mean, how was I to know? A kind heart, that’s me all over. Impetuous, with no thought about the consequences.”
“Take them back to where you got them, so!” Now she had a smug look about her.
“Ah, now I can’t do that. You see I forgot to take out any insurance. Well, I didn’t think I was going to need it, did I? I mean, why on earth should I take out insurance? Didn’t I think he would be delighted to go to America? Who in heaven’s name would turn down a chance to go to San Francisco, especially if it’s free? Well, I ask you!”
“What about yourself, then? Take Jayne and go.”
“I wish I could,” I said sadly. “But tis way too late for all that. We wouldn’t have enough money to take with us, anyway, and it would be a nightmare trying to arrange for someone to have the baby and all that. You know how it is!”
Mrs Maguire nodded again. “A chancer!” she muttered.
“But what about the raffle, though?”
*****
It was as simple as that. Before I could change my mind, Derek decided to advertise it as the main Christmas draw. It was going to pull in the crowds the following Saturday night, you could tell by the look on his face.
And it did. You could hardly get in the door, and when you did the punters were four deep at the bar, pushing and shoving and bellowing out their orders.
The Maguires were loving it, flying up and down the length of the bar passing the pints over the customer’s heads and happily short-changing them. No one noticed because they were too anxious to get their drinks out of the way of flying elbows and back to their seats.
There was a wonderful atmosphere in the place that night, full of the festive spirit, and a lot of stout too. I couldn’t even get a place to stand properly, never mind a seat.
And by eleven o’clock all the tickets were sold. At the final count we had taken over one thousand pound. And it was mine, all mine! Well, less the 20% that went to the Maguires, of course, for their commission. That’s how it is under the Charity’s rules, they told me.
Suddenly Derek gave the brass bell a long shake and the silence dropped like a curtain. Through the thick haze of cigarette smoke and stale beer all the eyes turned towards Mrs Maguire and her paper bag full of tickets. She stuck a huge fist into it and rummaged frantically, and she held up her selection.
“Tis a pink ticket,” she shrieked. “Number seven!”
All the heads bowed together in a huge wave as everyone looked down.
Now I’m not saying that it was a fix or anything, but no one actually saw Derek buy a ticket, and when he threw his enormous body up in the air and whooped in delight, the whole bar looked up in disbelief.
“Tis mine!” he roared. “I’ve got the number seven.”
And before anyone could utter a single word, a hand the size of a small JCB plucked the black envelope from behind the bar, and Derek lurched off up the stairs at the back of the pub.
I was as amazed as everyone else, of course, but what could I do? It was imposed upon me to dutifully accept the donation on behalf of my very sick cousin, and with the well wishes ringing in my ears I made an indecently quick exit through the side door.
Then a strange thing happened. The shaft of light from the open door fell across the car that was parked on the other side of the road, and for a second the inside was lit up.
And I could have sworn that I saw Mickey Dunn and the lovely Eileen Grey enveloped in a passionate embrace on the back seat.
Naw! I shrugged it off. Would he make up a story like that?
Anyway, I danced all the way home, my mind racing with a head full of scattered plans.
I wouldn’t say anything to Jayne just yet. I would replace her Christmas fund money first thing in the morning and then I’d have the car fixed. I’d drive it home on Monday afternoon and watch the surprised look on her face.
Yes, Jayne would wonder. And I’d let her wonder, until she admitted that sometimes even I could get it right. Not very often, I admit. But when I do!
She was in the kitchen when I bounced in.
“I was just going to make some coffee,” she smiled. “Do you want some?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“By the way, your mother called in on her way home tonight.” Jayne put her head around the door. “She said you were asking her about Lucy’s Luxury Holidays?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, she said to tell you not to bother with them. They went bust last week. There’s holy war about it, apparently. Hundreds of people have lost all their holiday money!”
The End
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Thank you for taking the time to read A Christmas Holiday. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I would be delighted if you were to visit my web site at http://www.bgobrien.com/ and let me know what you thought of it by leaving your views on my guestbook page.
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Brief Bio:
Brendan Gerad O’Brien was born in Tralee, on the west coast of Ireland, and now he lives in Newport, South Wales with his wife Jennifer and daughters Shelly and Sarah.
As a child he spent his summer holidays in Listowel, Co Kerry, where his uncle Moss Scanlon had a harness maker’s shop, sadly now long gone.
The shop was a magnet for all sorts of colourful characters. It was there that his love of words was kindled by the stories of John B. Keane and Bryan MacMahon, who often wandered in for a chat and bit of jovial banter.
After serving nine years in the Royal Navy, Brendan progressed to retail management, working as a Department manager with one of the UK’s largest supermarkets.
Now retired, his hobby is writing short stories, twenty of which have already been published individually over the years, and now available in his collection Dreamin’ Dreams, which you can find at:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/21881
Also published by Smashwords is his first thriller Once On A Cold And Grey September, which you can find at: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/10114
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