Page 3

"And then one time he was watching a TV programme where Santa was coming down the chimney – you know, one of those kid’s flicks – and he began hyperventilating and screaming something about the chimney. I had to shut off the TV. Most of the time he’s pretty good about the TV though. He’s much more scared of real-life Santas."

"You have a chimney?"

"All the old houses in this town have chimneys. Not that they are used, most of them. Mine isn’t."

"Is your son scared of the chimney?"

"He hasn’t mentioned it since. But I don’t know what he thinks inside his head."

"And before this his mother had been killed, last December? What happened there?"

"I don’t know the details. Some psycho entered the house at night and slaughtered her, a couple of days before Christmas. Left her just about turned inside out. The neighbour found her the next morning. He, Davey, was still sleeping."

"Um. It must have been traumatic. Maybe he associated Santa with his mother’s death. It happens sometimes."

"So what’s the way forward?"

"You can’t possibly take him to a country where there is no Santa till Christmas is over? Saudi Arabia or somewhere like that?" The psychiatrist answered himself. "I guess not. Look, Sean, I’d like you to bring him to me tomorrow. Come early and you can stay the night. I’ll observe him."

"All right." He could adjust his time. He still had no regular job and the pension was still paying the bills. "I’ll be coming." In the car, taken out after so long, driving carefully not only because of the snow but because his right foot was fake and could so easily slip off the accelerator – or press down hard. He’d see. Christmas traffic. Snow and ice. A metal foot. A kid who was a shivering neurotic and who more probably than not looked on him – his dad – as his jailer. What a mess.

He looked in on the boy in his room. He was sleeping, the night light on, his thumb in his mouth. He looked at the boy and then he went to bed.

He woke in the middle of a dream, one of those dreams that were so real that they were not distinguishable from reality, only this had not been a dream once. He had been riding shotgun at the head of the convoy, scanning the brown dusty hills on either side for the enemy, the driver in the right hand seat hunched forward over the wheel, studying the road for signs of a buried mine, and still going as fast as he could. It had been a very quiet day apart from the noise of engines. They had not even seen the occasional farmer in turban or Afghan pakol. And that was strange, but he had shrugged off the strangeness, because he was going on leave at the end of this trip. He could almost taste the beer.

Then it was that the Taliban had sprung their ambush and the first RPG had slammed into the door on the driver’s side, smashed through and exploded, reducing the driver to chunks of bloody flesh and apart from a brief confused moment of blood and pain he had known nothing more until he had woken up in the hospital.

It was the same in the dream, only he had been in the shotgun seat, knowing the ambush was coming, anticipating it, but unable to do anything about it, waiting for the tongue of flame and the explosion, the thread of tension stretching until it had to break – but it did not. He snapped awake.

Dimly, he realised that the darkness was much greater than it should have been, and it was colder. The lights from the street were still entering through the top of the high window, but the little glow from the thermostat was off. He reached out for the table lamp. As he expected, the lights were out.

Damn. If there was a blown fuse in the mains, he’d better do something about it before they all froze. And if the boy woke and found himself in the dark, he’d start screaming the house down. If there was any way he could get the lights working, he’d better get on with it.

He took the torch from the bedside drawer by touch and turned it on. The light was fitful and dim – worn out batteries. But there was enough to see by. He moved quietly to the door, shuffling in house slippers, and moved downstairs to the living room. On the way he paused outside his son’s door. The door was slightly ajar so he closed it. There was no sound from inside. The boy hadn’t woken yet.

[ Continue to page 4 ]