His Christmas Present
Read His Christmas Present Online
Authors: Serenity Woods
His Christmas Present
by Serenity Woods
His Christmas Present
Text copyright 2012 Serenity Woods
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and
incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events,
locales or organizations is coincidental.
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“
Yesterday is
history.
Tomorrow is a mystery.
But today is a gift.
That’s why it
’
s called the
present.”
Origin unknown
Alternatively attributed to
Eleanor Roosevelt
, Joan Rivers
and Oogway from
Kung Fu Panda
.
To Charles Dickens.
Because A Christmas Carol is the best Christmas story ever.
Table of Contents
Christmas Present
It was the nineteenth of December and
eighty degrees in the shade.
After years of living through cold northern
hemisphere Christmases, Dion’s brain struggled to compute the bizarreness of
his new surroundings. The tarmac on the road shimmered in the hot sunshine, and
Sean had switched on the car’s air con to combat the high humidity. In
December! It just didn’t make sense.
Also, while flying from one side of the
world to the other, Dion had crossed the International Date Line and somehow
lost an entire day. How the hell had that happened? Had he actually travelled
back in time?
Sean signalled and took the road to the
town centre before glancing across at him. “My mother would say ‘if the wind
changes, your face will stay like that.’”
Dion continued to frown as he stared out of
the side window at the lush, sub-tropical landscape of the Northland of New
Zealand. “It looks so alien,” he murmured, studying the arching palms and
large, vibrant flowers. How odd that it appeared so unfamiliar considering he’d
lived there from the ages of eight to eighteen. He remembered collapsing in bed
late on Christmas Eve as a teenager, listening to the sound of cicadas outside
his window, his skin hot and crisp from a day spent in the sun and surf. “I
thought it would feel like coming home. But it doesn’t. It feels weird.”
“You’ve been gone nearly a decade,” Sean
observed. “It’s not surprising it seems strange. And you’re not a Kiwi anymore.
You’ve lost your accent and sound all flash now.”
Dion smiled wryly. His father had taken
great pains to teach him how to speak ‘properly’ before he went to Cambridge. He’d
thought his Kiwi lilt still replaced the upper class twang when he left the
office, but obviously not as much as he’d assumed.
He fixed his gaze on the shops lining the
new one-way road system. The streets were wide and the cafés spilled tables and
chairs onto the pavements. People lazed under big umbrellas that shaded them from
the hot sun, drinking coffee while a busker entertained them with folksy jazz
on a guitar.
It could have been the Mediterranean—the
south of France or Greece. Everyone looked as if they were on holiday, tanned
and wearing shorts and T-shirts, Sean included. Dion felt overdressed in his
shirt and chinos, hot in the thick material, his shirt damp against his back.
Perhaps he should have worn something more casual. Did he have anything more
casual in his suitcase? He’d forgotten how laid back the Kiwis were.
“What’s Christmas like in England?” Sean
asked. “Is it all deep and crisp and even?”
“More mild and damp,” Dion said. “I’ve only
seen snow on Christmas Day once. It usually rains. And it’s more commercialised
than here. Adverts on the TV start in August. And the shop windows are full of
fake snow with cheesy songs piped on a loop.”
“Sounds great.”
“You get used to it.” Even though he’d
criticised it, he couldn’t stop the defensiveness creeping into his voice. He didn’t
particularly love the festive season in the UK, but he’d made a life for
himself there, and he wasn’t going to let Sean insinuate that his move to
England had been a mistake.
He glanced across at his old friend. They’d
kept in touch occasionally over the nine years since he moved away, on Facebook
and via the odd email, but they’d mainly talked bloke talk, about rugby and
politics and movies. He hadn’t been able to get any real sense of how Sean had
changed since their teenage years.
He’d been relieved to still recognise his
once-best mate. He’d spotted him immediately across the tarmac at the small
Kerikeri airport. Sean had been leaning on the gate, waiting, and Dion had spotted
his stocky frame, albeit layered with a few more pounds. His short blond hair had
thinned on top, but it still stuck up in the same familiar way at the front.
They’d clasped hands and then bear-hugged,
and for a brief moment emotion had swept over Dion. They’d been close when they
were younger, and he would be forever grateful for the fact that Sean’s parents
had taken him in for six months after his mother died, before he left for the
UK.
But then Sean pulled away to help him with
his luggage, and the moment passed. And perhaps he was imagining it, but after
his initial pleasure at seeing his friend, Sean now seemed more reserved, cool
even. Why would that be?
“So, how’s married life treating you?” Dion
hoped to warm up the atmosphere by encouraging his mate to tell tales of family
life. Married guys always seemed to want to extol the virtues of their
partners, and he’d learned that it helped to get men to talk.
He’d seen the pictures of the wedding on
Facebook four or five years ago. He didn’t know Sean’s wife, Gaby, but she’d
looked stunning in her wedding dress. They’d sent him an invite, but it had
coincided with an important meeting in Germany. Plus he wasn’t sure at the time
that he wanted to revisit his old life, so he’d politely declined. He’d thought
they’d be relieved to save some money on a place setting. Had they been upset
instead?
“Great.” Sean’s face relaxed into a smile.
He glanced across at Dion, looking a tad mischievous. “You should try it
someday.”
Dion ignored the taunt. He was adept at
steering conversation away from talk of settling down. “And two kids, eh? No
hanging around then.” They were both only twenty-seven. To Dion it seemed a
young age to already have your family done and dusted—unless…were they thinking
about having more than two kids? Jeez, some folks were a glutton for punishment.
Sean shrugged, signalled left and took a
new road Dion didn’t remember. It appeared to skirt the old Stone Store. He’d heard
that the bridge across the inlet had become choked with debris and burst its
banks during heavy rain, so they must have removed the bridge and diverted
traffic away. Shame—he’d liked the old road past the historic buildings. They’d
all had some good times in the river. He remembered the day Sean had pushed
Megan in, and how outraged she’d been. She’d stood there with her hands on her
hips and yelled at her brother, beautiful in spite of looking like a drowned
rat.
“No point in waiting,” Sean said. “It’s
good to have kids while you’ve still got the energy. I find it exhausting, even
though Gaby does most of it.”
“I guess.” Dion knew nothing about having
children. One of his half-brothers in the UK had a couple, but he’d never got
involved with them. He tended to hold babies in front of him like a rugby ball,
and when people saw how uncomfortable it made him, they stopped giving them to
him. He wasn’t one of those jolly uncles who took the kids to the zoo and
bought them sweets. The children steered clear of him now when his brother came
to visit, and he was quite happy with that. “Are the kids at home with Gaby?”
“Nah, one of Gaby’s friends has them for a
few hours,” Sean said. “They take turns to give each other a break.”
That didn’t surprise Dion. New Zealanders
had always had the ‘number eight wire’ approach to life. When the first
European immigrants arrived, thirteen thousand miles away from their homeland,
they quickly learned to invent things they couldn’t easily obtain, and the
number eight gauge of fencing wire was soon adapted for countless other uses in
New Zealand farms, factories and homes. The phrase came to represent a Kiwi who
could turn their hand to anything, and they were a people who reacted to
problems by pulling together to help each other out.
The houses thinned, and as Sean took the
road leading to Opito Bay, the countryside spread away from them, rising and
falling in a series of emerald hills until it met the glittering sea on either
side. The finger of land formed part of the sub-tropical paradise of the Bay of
Islands.
Dion blew out a breath. “That’s quite a
view.”
Sean smiled. “Yeah. I can think of worse
scenery to look at on the way to work.”
Dion thought of the narrow, dirty streets
of London, the crowded Underground, the smell and taste of the city, metallic
and dusty. Like an old but revered actress, London was beautiful in its own
way, and of course its history knocked New Zealand’s into a cocked hat, as the Cockneys
would have said. But he’d forgotten the beauty of
Aotearoa
. How vast and
high and blue the sky seemed.
“How’s the business going?” he asked. He
knew Sean had joined his father’s building trade.
Sean gave him a strange look, but said,
“Yeah, good. Things are picking up a bit after the recession. Lots of new
houses being built.”