Читать книгу It’s a Wonderful Life: The Christmas bestseller is back with an unforgettable holiday romance - Julia Williams - Страница 12

I’m running late. As usual. Christmas has started with a very unpleasant bang. I had been so looking forward to it: my first Christmas as part of a proper couple. Jo and I had agreed to spend the day apart with our families, as I still hadn’t got round to breaking the news about our relationship to mine, but we’d planned to have breakfast together at the flat I share in Kentish Town, and make Boxing Day our Christmas. I had prepared stockings for her, and gone to town on the decorations. My Christmas tree was as sparkly as I could make it, much to the amusement of my flatmate, Kate, who had left three days earlier to spend the festive season with her family. I had spent hours making mince pies, mulled wine and eggnog. I’d even hung mistletoe over the door. I had everything planned down to a T. I so wanted it all to be perfect. I might have known it wouldn’t work out like that: Lou Holroyd and her spectacularly pathetic love life triumphs once again. Instead of a lovely evening in with a bottle of bubbly cuddled up on the sofa, Jo has dropped a bombshell, standing in the doorway of the lounge, underneath the sodding mistletoe, barely noticing the efforts I’d gone to.

‘It’s not you, it’s me, babe.’ She actually said that, and I know it’s not true, because her initial, ‘I’m a free spirit and I can’t give you what you want,’ quickly descended into, ‘You’re so clingy and need to sort your shit out.’ Which, given that I was wailing pathetically in a corner, probably wasn’t too far off the mark.

I suppose I should have seen it coming. We’d both been so busy in the run-up to Christmas, and I’d had to blow her out a couple of times because I was working late – is it my fault that after a while where I looked safe jobwise, things are looking decidedly dodgy again? – and I suppose she’d been more distant recently, but I’d just put that down to the hectic nature of both our lives. She’s a nurse in a busy medical practice, and I’m obviously working hard to try and reduce my chances of being made redundant. We both take our work seriously; it was one of the things that attracted me to her. That and the fact that she’s bloody gorgeous and I feel so lucky that someone as fabulous as Jo could have chosen me. But now …

‘It’s definitely over,’ was her parting shot to my pathetic plea for us to take a break and have a rethink in the New Year. And with that she was off, swanning out to join her friends, her other life, the one she barely let me get involved in, leaving me cold and lonely by the Christmas tree, which now looked gaudy and overdone in her absence. I guess now I look at it in the cold light of day, she was always a little bit ashamed of me. There were the times when she pulled away from me if I was being too affectionate in public, and the times she would put me down in front of our friends if she thought I was too loud. She’d stopped mentioning Christmas, which should have been a clue. I should have seen this coming. But then, I never bloody do.

So I spent last night in a drunken sobbing haze, barely slept at all and then missed my alarm. Now I’m driving like a maniac, feeling heartsick and hungover, to get over to Mum and Dad’s before 1 p.m. so I can prove to them that I’m not their most useless child. Poor old childless single Lou, turning up at Christmas on her own – again.

The drive from London down to Surrey is depressing beyond belief. The roads are mainly empty – everyone is clearly already with their families – and the sight of everyone’s Christmas trees and garden lights makes me feel miserable. It feels like everybody else is celebrating and having a good time, whereas my world has just collapsed.

My phone has been buzzing furiously the whole time I’ve been driving across London – so when I pull in at a traffic light, I stop to look at it. Three messages from Beth.

OMG!!! Ged’s girlfriend is pregnant, says the first.

Followed by, Mum’s crying in the kitchen and Dad’s ignoring it all.

The last one says GET YOUR BUTT HERE NOW. I CAN’T COPE.

Great. All I bloody need. A new baby in the family, and not one provided by me. I know by the time I get there, Mum will have come round to the good news and turned it into a positive. Ged can do no wrong in her eyes; Mum doesn’t half cut him some slack. And while she won’t be ecstatic about having a grandchild out of wedlock, I don’t doubt that within seconds she’ll be talking about knitting cardigans. After the grief I’ve heard over the years about her only having two grandchildren, I can’t see her being put out for long. Great. She’s given that one up of late; this will give her another excuse to pressurise me about babies.

The lights go green but my foot on the accelerator doesn’t move; I’m lost in a world of my own. I didn’t want to go today anyway. I’d much rather be curled up under the duvet in a miserable state, but if I missed Christmas I’d never have heard the end of it. But now? I’ve always wanted children. Ged never has, and Beth always says that domesticity and family life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – which seems damned ungrateful to me. She’s so lucky to have her kids. It’s not bloody fair. Why do I have to be the one on my own? I might never get to have babies.

Tears start spilling down my cheeks, and suddenly I’m sobbing on the wheel, my car engine off. This is terrible. I can’t turn up like this.

There’s a knock on my car window, and I look up to see a policeman.

‘Are you all right, madam?’ he asks as I roll my window down. ‘Only you seem to be causing a bit of an obstruction.’

I look behind me. Oh shit, somehow I’ve caused a mini traffic jam out of the only ten cars driving in London today, and got the attention of the one policeman who seems to be at work.

‘Sorry, officer,’ I say through my sniffles, and turn the engine back on.

‘Cheer up,’ he says, ‘it’s Christmas.’

I wipe the tears from my cheeks.

‘Yeah, that’s the problem,’ I say as I drive away.

Christmas. The time to be happy and jolly. The time to be with your friends and family. The time to have that special someone in your life and hold them close. I’ve never felt less like celebrating in my life.