“Oh Dad I could weep. Honestly! ” said his daughter, angry beyond exasperation.

“Kirsty, I felt like weeping too. Whenever I took it out the washing machine there it was, about the size it would fit wee Freddie’s teddy bear.”

“How could you be so bloody stupid? What temperature did you wash it at?”

Colin shrugged. He looked down miserably at his favourite winter sweater, its jewel colours and fair-isle pattern now a tiny felted and shrunken square.

“Looks like you stuck it in at 95 or something. And when I think of all the time and effort Mum spent... She was ages just picking the colours alone. Look, I set the dial for you. Just don’t touch it. I told you. Wash everything at 30, handwash, even sheets and towels. God, you’re absolutely useless! Hopeless.”

This was his own Kirsty talking to her Dad like this. As if he was some annoying old befuddled dodderer. OK, these days he did sometimes feel like a befuddled old dodderer, but Kirsty, his best music-loving pal, his lifelong companion at concerts from classical to vintage rock – his Kirsty, who, according to Ann, had simply always been a real daddy’s girl ever since she was the tiniest scrap of a thing...

The leaflet on grief that Kirsty’s husband Ed’s mother, Judith, a humanist celebrant, had pressed into his hands at the funeral – and which, days later, bewildered, he’d dutifully read cover-to-cover – had been all about the Five Stages. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Something, Something – there was an acronym, D.A.B. Something... you were supposed to remember. Anyway he hadn’t found it helpful.

Sad, that was how he felt.

And, if there were these stages, and you were meant to progress through them, Kirsty seemed to be permanently stuck at anger.

*****

Ann hadn’t even had a full year of retirement. It wasn’t fair. What with that newly appointed young head at her school causing havoc with all that extra admin and meaningless management-speak he, it seemed, actually believed in, she’d decided she’d had enough and to go at sixty so she could get on with some of those creative things she wanted to do – she was so creative, Ann – and she had been enjoying it a lot, freedom from teaching after all these years, getting on with so much. Colin, in with the bricks at his inner-city Comprehensive, was due to retire in the summer at sixty-five. And then they would travel together. They were both so fit. This Christmas Eve should have found them together, after exploring in both India and Japan, briefly domestic in Sydney with their son Iain and family, planning their trip to Ayers Rock. Both he and Ann had always had a thing about Ayers Rock, and, for once in their lives, a Christmas in hot weather.

Instead – he would go over and over it like it was a film he could see himself in, though he tried not to – out of the blue that day in March the woman from the office, urgent, pale-faced and solemn, interrupting the singing lesson with his best Advanced Higher pupil – his phone was off, obviously, on silent and in his briefcase – then Ann’s friend Vanessa (they’d been out shopping for a new sofa for Vanessa) downstairs in School Reception, in shock, weeping, then Vanessa’s husband Bill arriving to take over, drive them to the hospital.

Since then, in a kind of blur, Colin had, near the end of April, gone with Kirsty and Ed and wee Freddie on the Easter Sunday Picnic they always did together and rolled down a hill till the shells cracked, several hard-boiled eggs coloured and dyed by Kirsty in exactly the way her mother had always done them. Were there any strains visible between Ed and Kirsty then, he’d wondered since? Not to him. Not in the state he’d been in.

He’d somehow got through Ann’s sixty-first birthday in May, his (muted) retirement do at the end of June and his own sixty-fifth birthday in August. Even eaten a bit of cake and somehow swallowed a mouthful from a glass of fizz at Bill and Vanessa’s.

Bill and Vanessa had done their best. Other friends too. People had been careful to have him round. Vanessa had spent the best part of two or three weeks after he went back to work sorting through Ann’s clothes. Ann had a lot of clothes. Some – many – of them with the labels still on. He’d come back and find Vanessa, red-eyed but stoical, and piles of bags sorted and labelled in the spare room, ready to go, the doors on the wardrobes in what would now be his not their bedroom swinging open revealing them three-quarters empty. Vanessa would call Bill and tell him to order takeaway food, take Colin home with her and they would eat then all three watch gloomy Scandinavian crime dramas together. He was very glad of the subtitles, his mind didn’t seem to be working properly, and the effort of reading as well as watching somehow re-inforced the plot for him. Helped him follow the story.

At the end of September Kirsty announced that she and Ed were separating. Colin realised now that he shouldn’t have said that whatever-he’d-said about “your mother would have been so upset to hear that”. Anyhow it had provoked a tirade about how both Ann and he had always thought a lot more of Ed than they had of their own daughter, as far as they were concerned the sun had always shone out of Ed’s arse and how little either of them really knew.

Colin had tried his best to counter whatever had so offended her. The usual about how no-one ever knew what was going on behind the closed doors of anyone else’s marriage. Kirsty’d calmed down eventually. But of course he was worried. How could he not be? And how desperately he missed Ann to talk it over with, while simultaneously he did sometimes feel glad she hadn’t been there to see this.

*****

And now it was Christmas Eve and he would somehow have to get through his first Christmas in thirty-nine years without Ann.

Ann had loved Christmas. Really made a meal of the whole thing from start to finish. He’d always teased her that he was a true Scotsman and preferred Hogmanay and Neerdy and a good steak pie and that it was her being English that made her stick to all those daft wee ceremonies like “stirring the pudding from East to West in honour of the wise men” – this would be weeks before, as would be making her own mince-meat for the mince-pies and it hurt to think that this year the whole December had gone by without the night of the whole kitchen filling up with that distinct sweet, fruity, spicy scent.

The knitting machine in the spare room under these jewel-coloured cones of wool had been silent all Autumn – Vanessa was still trying to find the right person who would make good use of it, Kirsty didn’t want it. Every year Ann would make wonderful presents.

Like this sweater he had ruined.

On his forays – as seldom as possible – into the supermarket since November he had kept his eyes averted from the piles of stollen and chocolate and booze, from those obscene piles of pallid big bare naked turkeys. He’d noticed those sullen looking men pushing great loaded trolleys as their wives, with glazed-eyes, darted back and forward to the stacks and shelves throwing more and more items into the trolleys, and he’d envied them their misery – he often found himself with pangs of this ridiculous, he knew it was foolish, envy, of other couples that looked his age or older. Just doing ordinary boring things together. Why should they be walking around and Ann and him not? As if it was necessary for him to honour his dead wife by shopping as she had, he would stock up with the modest fish and chicken portions and fresh vegetables in a rainbow of colours – you’d to eat a rainbow, he remembered that, and five-a-day... He did his best. He cooked supper. By a great effort of will he ate it at the kitchen table and not in front of the television. Most nights. But he sometimes had to throw stuff away. Ann wouldn’t have approved of that.

When the increased volume of mail at ever more irregular hours and those envelopes of all different sizes announced that the Christmas cards had begun to come in, his heart sank. He would let them mount up for days then open them, straggle them out across the mantlepiece after hardly a glance when he knew Kirsty and wee Freddie would be over. Or when Vanessa or Bill might come round. The two or three, more, that had arrived addressed to both Ann and him he left unopened in a wee pile behind the television. He would sit down after Boxing Day, definitely before Hogmanay, and write those letters. Once he’d done one of them it might not be so hard.

At least no one, not even Kirsty, expected him to have a Christmas tree. When he’d arrived this afternoon at Kirsty’s and been dragged by an excited Freddie to the front room to see the tree ablaze with lights and trinkets and tinsel, Kirsty had touched his hand and murmured, “Oh I know, Dad, I know, I didn’t have the heart for this either, not this year, but for wee Freddie’s sake...” And he actually found it easy enough to grab Freddie, shrieking and giggling, up in a cuddle and a tickle, swing him up as high as the fairy on the top, tell him it was the best Christmas tree he’d ever seen.

He went to the kitchen and unloaded all the wine and that bottle of malt he’d picked up in the off-licence across the road before getting in the car to come over – God knows he might need a wee dram late of an evening over the next couple of days. Judith the celebrant, Kirsty’s mother-in-law who didn’t see why she should be deprived of seeing her own grandson on Christmas Day just because of the sins of her son, she was coming with her partner Arlene and they could be hard work, yes, he might well need a drink after a day of them, although Kirsty, unjustifiably, might disapprove – he had very quickly after Ann died consciously made an effort and had practically stopped drinking altogether – and never, ever, alone, Kirsty should know that.

Not as if she was averse to a gin-and-tonic herself.

He took his overnight bag upstairs to the spare room and changed into his slippers. No presents to unload, not this year. He’d given Kirsty a lavish cheque just before that Black Friday thing, told her to get exactly what she wanted for her and Freddie too. But he took out the shrunken felted jumper that might just fit Freddie’s teddy bear and took it downstairs, waste not want not. Whatever had possessed him?

*****

Kirsty was possibly even more angry and exasperated, thought Colin, to see Freddie hooting with delight as he pushed Toddie the teddy-bear’s hard-to-bend arms through the sleeves of the ruined jumper, which fitted the toy very well indeed.

Colin had immediately stuck it back into his overnight bag, of course he had, after her initial reaction, to keep it well out of Freddie’s sight. Not well enough evidently. Screwed up again. She couldn’t really say anything though, because Colin had already agreed to look after Freddie and read him the Night Before Christmas Poem he loved and put him to bed and make sure his stocking was hanging up properly while she went out – just for an hour she said – to have a drink with a friend. All evening Kirsty had kept looking at her phone, and after a couple of incoming pings, occasionally frowning and texting back, finally leaving the room to talk when it rang. Initially the conversation had sounded a bit heated then she had come back, bringing Colin a wee whisky, just a very wee whisky he hadn’t even said he wanted, and asked him the favour. Of course. No bother.

“Will you stay with Grandpa and be a good boy?” Kirsty asked.

The child, big-eyed, nodded.

“Mum will be back long before Santa comes and I’ll mind and leave out Santa’s drink and Rudolph’s carrot for him, don’t worry.”

“Oh, we can do that together Freddie. What do you think?” said Colin.

Another solemn nod.

*****

It had already started to snow – a great smoky cold breath swirled in through the front door as Kirsty swirled out, leaving a trail of too much quickly scooshed-on scent and agitation behind her.

“I have to go with my Daddy to that other house the day after tomorrow. I can stay here tomorrow with my Mummy and you and my Other Granny will come. I don’t like that other house. I don’t want to go there, there is a big girl there and she nips me. I don’t like her.” Freddie told Colin.

“Tell your Daddy and they definitely won’t let her, I promise you.”

They opened a packet of mince pies, set one out on Freddie’s own Beatrix Potter plate for Santa. In the fridge were crammed all the delicacies Colin had avoided at the supermarket, then some. Pates, prawns, glossy avocados, too-perfect prepared sprouts, uniform orange carrot batons.

On the worktop here was only one proper nine-carat carrot – a big bent and wrinkled looking specimen, green-topped, washed but unpeeled and with hairy-looking tendrils at the pointy tip, clearly destined for Rudolph. Freddie got quite upset that now it was snowing they were going to need this carrot tomorrow for the snowman’s nose.

Ah well, Colin would write a letter and Santa would read this to Rudolph, tell him he was very welcome to eat the feathery green top but that was all. Rudolph would understand.

Together they prepared for Rudolph a plate with a cherry tomato in the middle, just as red as his own nose, he’d love that, and carrot batons and celery sticks and slices of yellow pepper, rainbow colours that would be very good for him, radiating from this centre.

*****

When Kirsty got back, not that much later, she found her Dad on his knees beside Freddie’s bed, fast asleep, his head down on the book that had been Ann’s favourite to read to them all, to Iain-in-Australia, to her, to Freddie as soon as he’d been old enough to enjoy it, and he’d been old enough to enjoy it before he could understand it. Her Dad fast asleep, hugged around the beating heart of Freddie’s complicated wee life.

© Liz Lochhead, 2016