Читать книгу Father Christmas and Me - Matt Haig - Страница 9

7 Reindeer Road

ather Christmas lived at 7 Reindeer Road, right next to Reindeer Field, on the edge of Elfhelm.

His house, like many of the houses in Elfhelm, was made of reinforced ginger-bread, and – unlike almost all other houses in Elfhelm – it had a front door so large you didn’t have to bend forwards to walk through it.

It was full of fun things. There was a slide down from the first floor to the ground floor. The doorbell played a version of ‘Jingle Bells’. There were toys everywhere. The kitchen had shelves full of the tastiest sweet things in jars – chocolate, gingerbread, cloudberry jam. There was a reindeer clock in the living room, which was like a cuckoo clock but instead of a cuckoo popping out it was a reindeer. Oh, and it didn’t tell ordinary human time with boring things like ‘six o’clock’ and ‘twenty past nine’. It told elf time, and elf hours were called things like Very Early Indeed and Way Past Bedtime.

Father Christmas had been living on his own but he quickly got Slumber, the elf bedmaker, to build two extra beds and ‘the world’s comfiest cat basket’ for Captain Soot.

‘Though tonight,’ he said that first day, ‘I’ll sleep downstairs on the trampoline.’ Father Christmas insisted that it was a very comfy trampoline.

The reason Father Christmas needed two extra beds was because of Mary Ethel Winters and myself.

Mary was the woman Father Christmas was in love with. He blushed every time he looked at her. And she loved him too.

Mary was the kindest and loveliest woman I had ever met. Her cheeks were as rosy as apples and her smile could warm a room. I had first known her when I was in London, when the very worst thing of all happened. My mother caught a horrible illness from cleaning chimneys. I did all I could to look after her, but in the end the illness was too powerful. I couldn’t stop her dying. My father had left us when I was very little, so after that I was sent to Mr Jeremiah Creeper’s workhouse. I was utterly miserable, but Mary – who worked in the kitchens there – was always nice to me. She would secretly add a spoonful of honey to the watery gruel we had to eat. I’ll never forget that.

She’d had a tough life. Before she had gone to the workhouse she had been homeless and slept on a bench next to Tower Bridge, surrounded by pigeons.

Anyway, when Captain Soot and I eventually escaped the workhouse, thanks to Father Christmas, Mary came with us. And, like me, she was very pleased to be here.

We arrived in Elfhelm on Christmas Day, when every human child in the world was opening their presents, and we ate the biggest Christmas dinner I had ever seen and listened to the most brilliant and happy music played by an elf band called the Sleigh Belles. We laughed and sang and spickle danced. Spickle dancing is a very complicated type of elf dancing which involves a lot of energetic leg work, a lot of twisting, and some floating magically in the air.

‘I think you are going to like it here,’ Father Christmas told me later, as we went ice skating on a frozen lake.

‘Yes, I think I will,’ I said.

And I did. I did like it there. Well for a while. Before I managed to smash my own happiness into a million pieces.