Adorkable (39 page)

‘If I was in a really, really,
really
bad mood, Melly, it was probably because I have two really, really,
really
annoying little sisters,’ he said, and they both huffed in sheer outrage.

‘You are bad and mean and I’m going to spit on your cupcakes,’ Alice said just as Mrs Lee emerged from the fridge.

‘I know two little girls who may get sent to bed without any dinner or any cupcakes,’ she said sternly, and it was impossible to have a pity party when a five-year-old and a seven-year-old were throwing a strop. If Michael wouldn’t even look at me then that was fine. I could deal with that. I’d have my bath and some dinner and then I’d go home.

The only reason I didn’t go home was because I fell asleep halfway through
The Muppet Christmas Carol
. I was stuffed full of food and cups of tea and had Melly and Alice wedged on either side of me as we shared a big armchair, and one moment Miss Piggy and Ebenezer Scrooge were throwing down, the next I was being woken up by Mrs Lee who put me to bed in the spare room. She even tucked me in. No one had tucked me in since … well, I couldn’t remember ever being tucked in.

During
the night I was joined by Melly and Alice who’d got up because they thought they’d heard reindeer, had eaten all the chocolate coins in their stockings and thought I might like to watch cartoons, but when they realised I didn’t, they got into bed with me and I started to tell them a story about Sammy, the rock ’n’ roll squirrel, and they fell asleep, which was just as well as I had no idea where I was going with Sammy.

And so it came to pass that Mr and Mrs Lee weren’t woken up at five on Christmas morning but got to lie in until 8.30, and if Mrs Lee had been harbouring any lingering ill will to the horrible girl who’d kidnapped her son, it was all gone.

It might have been the thirteen hours of almost-uninterrupted sleep or yesterday’s crying jag or just having a chance to recharge my get-up-and-go but I was anxious to get up and be gone. I didn’t want to intrude on all their family traditions. Besides, Michael couldn’t bring himself to look at me or even talk to me much beyond passing me the sugar bowl without being asked, because he knew that I needed at least three sugars in my coffee.

‘You’re very welcome to stay,’ Shen said. And Kathy – I felt like I should call her Kathy now, instead of Mrs Lee – nodded. ‘We have so much food in the house, we’ll be eating savoury snack selection boxes until Easter.’

‘I’m going round to my friend Tabitha’s later,’ I explained. ‘I said I’d help her make sausage rolls.’

I had trouble making toast so my sausage-roll input would mostly be as an observer but it made it sound like I was all involved in someone else’s Christmas, and, as it was, Kathy already had the turkey in the oven, Shen was peeling potatoes
and Michael was doing something to a mound of Brussels sprouts so I was only going to be in the way.

‘You’re going round for Christmas lunch, then?’ Kathy asked and I snorted, I couldn’t help it, because Tabitha never got up when it was still technically morning and she’d already told me her Christmas dinner would involve whatever she and Tom could get in Lidl half an hour before it closed on Christmas Eve.

‘Well, not lunch, but an early dinner and I never ordered a cab so I’ll have to cycle to Battersea and—’

‘Then you
have
to stay for lunch,’ Kathy said firmly. ‘End of discussion.’

‘But I have—’

‘I thought we were already finished talking about this. If you want to be helpful, you can go and entertain Melly and Alice so they stop coming in here every two minutes to ask when we’re going to open presents.’

Kathy Lee was good – really good, with the steely voice and determined glint in her eye, and I couldn’t imagine why she wanted me to stick around but she already had her hand on my shoulder and was steering me towards the living room, but not before I saw the grimace on Michael’s face, like my continued presence in his life and in his actual house was causing him immense physical pain.

I didn’t want to stay. Not just because being in the same room as Michael was like having my fingernails, toenails, teeth and nose hairs pulled out slowly one by one, but because I couldn’t deal with their happy families bullshit. Except it wasn’t bullshit – they
were
a happy family.

While
they were opening presents, I took a diplomatic bath so it wouldn’t be embarrassing that I hadn’t got them anything and vice versa, but when I came downstairs again, Melly and Alice insisted that I have a pair of fairy wings and an Etch A Sketch from their combined haul, and there was also a Cadbury’s selection pack and a vanilla-scented candle because Kathy and Shen were the kind of parents who always had spare presents lying around for any last-minute guests. Michael only gave me another pained look as I helped to lay the table.

It was just your regular, run-of-the-mill, bog-standard Christmas dinner. We pulled crackers and put on our paper hats and groaned at the bad jokes in the crackers. There was an argument over who had the last pig in blanket and the home-made cranberry sauce ran out pretty quickly because the girls slathered their entire plates with the stuff.

They were all proper Christmas traditions but then, when I thought about it, I realised they were other people’s Christmas traditions. Apart from last year when Bethan
had
come home and we’d cooked a small but perfectly formed Christmas dinner and spent the day watching my MGM Musicals box set, our family Christmas traditions had sucked.

Pat and Roy would get us up really early. Not so we could open our Christmas presents but because Christmas dinner was at noon sharp. Then I’d get left with the clear-up while they took Bethan and went to put flowers on Andrew’s grave at a green burial ground in Buckinghamshire with a wild cherry tree and an environmentally friendly bench next to his plot. They never asked if I wanted to go with them, so I’d get left
behind with a mound of dirty plates and a box of Quality Street.

Then, when they did get back, Roy would disappear to his shed and Pat would go to bed with a terrible headache and Bethan would hang out with me but she’d usually end up crying. And that had been our family Christmas tradition. Then I thought about how this would be the first Christmas that no one went to visit Andrew’s grave – last year Bethan had driven up on Boxing Day – and that made me feel depressed in a way that not even each of the Lees making a wish over their first spoonful of Christmas pudding had.

Everyone said that friends were the new family, I’d even written a blog about it, but as I sat at the Lees’ dining room table with cracker debris all around me and Melly and Alice treating us all to a rousing chorus of ‘Jingle Bells’, I knew I’d been totes wrong.

Friends shouldn’t be the new family. Your family should be your family and friends got sewn into the fabric of your family life. It was only people who didn’t have a family or had a crappy family who needed friends as a substitute. And then there were people who didn’t have a family and really, when you thought about it, didn’t have friends either.

This had nothing to do with Michael Lee sitting across the table from me, not looking at or talking to me as I didn’t look at or talk to him right back, OK? I wasn’t even angry with him any more, though I was still a little bit fumy about the Twitter thing and also the thing about him not being able to deal with my success. But now I was starting to wonder if it wasn’t that Michael couldn’t deal with my success but that
he couldn’t deal with
me
, because I was a hell of a lot to deal with.

I sighed and Kathy gave me a look. Not one of her old ‘God, I wish they’d never banned corporal punishment in schools’ looks but one of her new ‘Oh, poor little Jeane’ looks.

‘Everything all right?’ she asked with a little head tilt to show that she was there for me and, oh no, now I wanted her to be there for me. I barely recognised myself.

‘Everything’s great,’ I said with huge amounts of false enthusiasm and I was saved from having to go into details about just how great everything was by my phone beeping. It was a text from Tabitha.

It was no wonder I was having a deep crisis of faith. I’d been spending far too much time with the Lees and that was why I was suddenly hankering for all this happy families nonsense. How could you hanker for what you’d never had? It was pointless. I’d feel much better when I was back with my own people.

Kathy and Shen and even Melly and Alice were very reluctant to let me go, whereas Michael grunted something and went to load the dishwasher as I said my goodbyes and promised faithfully to call and let them know when I got home that night, and if I did want to stay over for a few days that was all right too, though Kathy’s elderly aunt was coming over on Boxing Day and, according to Melly and Alice, ‘She smells of actual wee.’

They
even made noises about giving me a lift home, but I insisted frequently and a little forcefully that I was fine walking and finally, eventually, at last the front door was opened and I was free.

It
was 6.30 on Christmas Day evening and I wasn’t sure if I was going to have another mince pie, throw up or fall into a food coma.

I was lying on the living room floor, back propped against the sofa where Mum and Dad were snuggling, even though they’d been told repeatedly to stop because parental PDAs were revolting. I had a Melly and an Alice cuddled up on either side and we were watching the
Doctor Who
Christmas special. All five of us were still wearing our paper hats and I’d hidden the last three roast potatoes at the back of the fridge to eat later.

God, I love Christmas, I thought, and then my brand new iPhone beeped.

I had an email from Jeane and just like that my warm fuzzies went cold and I really thought I was going to puke. An email from Jeane felt like getting followed round a store by the security guard. It gave me a sense of foreboding and even though I
hadn’t done anything wrong (or I thought I hadn’t, but it was hard to tell with Jeane), I immediately felt guilty.

Because, yeah, she was all me, me, me all the bloody time, but now I was starting to realise that the reason she was so self-involved was because she had nobody else in her life to get involved with. She shouldn’t have to deal with broken house stuff – I didn’t even know how to put the washing machine on – and she shouldn’t have been on her own on Christmas Eve. And, yeah, I should have come clean about who I was on Twitter and, oh God, I suppose I should have admitted that I was jealous of how she was doing amazing things with her life when I didn’t even know how to put the washing machine on.

It still didn’t make it any easier to have her in my house, sucking up to my parents and my little sisters and looking all wan and fragile. I was still pissed off about how she’d behaved in New York but I didn’t want to be pissed off with her any more and so, even though I could have left the message unread and gone back to the Daleks, I decided to read it and then send her back a friendly but not
too
friendly reply.

She was right. She was impossible. Impossible to say no to, because Jeane was seventeen and she was on her own and it was Christmas and even though I don’t think I’ll ever stop being a little bit mad at her, she didn’t deserve to be on her own at Christmas.

I
turned my head and winced as I saw Mum and Dad nuzzling.

‘Can you stop that?’ I waved my phone. ‘Had an email from Jeane. Her Christmas dinner got cancelled and she wants to know if she can come and stay for a couple of days.’

It would have been all right if Dad had groaned and Mum had said, ‘But I only offered to be polite,’ but Mum was already getting up. ‘I’ll make sure she’s got clean towels. Will you go and pick her up, darling?’

I wasn’t sure which darling she was referring to but Dad was levering himself up off the sofa and Melly and Alice were asking if they could come with him because, ‘We really want to see the shower door and do you think Jeane might have different-coloured hair?’ and even if I had minded – and, well, I did a little bit – I was totally outnumbered. I emailed Jeane back.