Coming Home for Christmas (21 page)

As adrenalin surged through him he raised his face to the blue immensity of sky, reaching higher, higher, every muscle, ligament and fibre protesting as he strained to reach his target. His
hands curved around the hard leather of the ball and Jeff felt a rush of emotions, triumph, joy, and deep satisfaction that nothing else in life could equal. Every aching bone, every second of
weary exhaustion from the punishing training regime he followed was worth it for this moment.

The roar of the crowd lifted him higher. The shiny red faces of the men he soared over, a blur in the bright sunlight. If only Valerie were here to see this, he thought with a brief pang of
regret as his hands tightened around his prize and he plotted the optimum trajectory towards the goalmouth. But Valerie didn’t like football. She resented the time he spent training. He
should be spending it with her and their young daughter, she’d say. He hated how she made him feel guilty about his passion. It took the good out of moments like this. He twisted on the
downward descent, elbowing his marker in the shoulder as he tried to grab the ball from him, clearing his way to prepare his onslaught on the box.

The pain hit, gripping him like a vice, forcing the breath out of his lungs, and bringing him to his knees. The roar of the crowd faded. Surprise and shock staggered him. He crumpled to the
ground and saw the blue of the sky briefly before the darkness enveloped him.

And then it seemed that only a moment had passed and brightness bathed him in a soft light as he opened his eyes and felt a wondrous sense of wellbeing. Thank God for that, Jeff thought,
relieved. He felt so well, so fit, so . . . so . . .
perfect
. Perhaps he’d imagined that brief, shocking jolt of pain. Or maybe he was in hospital and they had injected him. That must
be it. He had no memory of getting there, no memory of being in an ambulance. He must have been out like a light.

Had they won the match? He’d liked to have scored that goal; it would have been a beauty, one of his best, he mused, feeling utterly relaxed. Whatever they’d given him was working a
treat. The light drew closer and his eyes widened . . .

Everything was going to be absolutely fine, Jeff knew as he recognized his beloved grandmother coming towards him, smiling at him as he took her outstretched hand.

Briony McAllister felt the glorious heat of the Mediterranean sun on her upturned face as she contemplated the cobalt sky above her and felt the tension ease out of her body,
dissipating into the soft green tartan rug she was lying on. Little cotton puffs of clouds drifted over the sharp-ridged peaks of the sierras to the north, and the breeze whispered through the pine
trees.

Beside her, her 4-year-old daughter, Katie, was engrossed in plaiting her Moxie Girl’s hair. It was a Sunday afternoon in September and a somnolent, peaceful air pervaded the Parque
Princessa Diana, a pretty park on the Costa del Sol. Katie had wanted to go there instead of the beach, the swings and modest playground being a big attraction. Thankfully, she was now happy to
play with her dolls after twenty minutes of blissful soaring back and forth on the swings, and Briony was content to lie drowsily in the late afternoon sun, her novel unopened beside her.

Riviera, a small town on Spain’s southern coast, was empty of tourists, who had long gone back to their jobs and mundane lives, their Costa holiday a faded summer’s dream. Where once
older couples and retired ex-pats would have filled the many restaurants and coffee shops, the recession had ensured that the Costa del Sol was decimated after many years of lavish boom. Briony
knew full well the effects of economic collapse. She, too, should have been back behind her desk, dealing with the thousand and one queries that came with being an administrator in a busy private
hospital. But life as she knew it had changed completely the day, two months previously, when the owners of the Olympus Sports clinic had called staff together and told them that due to the current
economic climate and falling patient numbers, redundancies would have to be made.

Briony knew, even before it was her turn to meet with HR, that she would be one of the staff to be ‘let go’. She had been last into the department, having left a similar position in
a big teaching hospital the previous year to work nearer home and closer to her daughter’s crèche.

Briony sighed and brushed away a mosquito that had taken a fancy to her lightly tanned flesh. The truth was that with all the cuts in her salary in the last couple of years, the prohibitive
crèche fees had taken most of what was left, and now that she was redundant she and her husband, Finn, were almost no worse off with her dole money, especially without having to pay for
child-minding. They had decided after much discussion that for the next year, before Katie started school, Briony would be a stay-at-home mother.

It was disconcerting adjusting to her new circumstances. Strange not having to get up at the crack of dawn and wake her daughter from sleep to feed and dress her before dropping her off at the
crèche, greeting the other equally stressed, bleary-eyed parents she had got to know. And then making the bumper-to-bumper commute to work, hoping that she would get a parking place and not
be last in, keeping her head down like a naughty schoolgirl and not a thirty-something, self-confident, career woman and working mother. She was still a ‘working’ mother, she thought
defensively, realizing in these last few weeks how irritating the term was to mothers who could choose to stay at home and rear their children themselves.

Why
did
she feel guilty every morning, though, when she and Katie shared cuddles in bed when Finn had left for work? It was such a treat having a leisurely breakfast and fascinating
conversations with her 4-year-old. She had already missed so much of her child’s development. When she’d worked in the clinic, the time they’d had together after Briony collected
her from the crèche in the evenings was often ruined by teary tantrums and squabbles over bath-time and bedtime, both of them exhausted after their early start. It was all so different now,
so much
fun
! But no doubt this, too, would change. It was still very new and different. She felt like she was playing truant from real life.

She was going to make the most of this unexpected blessing. It would be her gap year, Briony decided. This unemployment that had been foisted upon her would not diminish her. She would not allow
herself to feel guilty that she wasn’t contributing to the family income, or that she was taking money from the state. She had paid her hard-earned money week after week, in social insurance,
for just this eventuality.

How she and her colleagues had complained bitterly about the previous government’s atrocious handling of the economy and the ‘brown envelope’ mentality that pervaded every
level of society from the top down, the avarice of bankers, politicians, developers and the so-called ‘golden circle’. The negligence and incompetence of the so-called regulatory
authorities, too, had led to the country being bankrupted and Briony and Katie’s generation, and generations to come, would carry a huge burden of debt. For all the good their complaining
did. Ordinary folk like them were being hammered while the people responsible were still living in their big houses, holidaying in the sun and paying outrageous sums for lavish weddings, at the
expense of tax payers. Every tea-break there would be heated discussion of some new revelation of chicanery, or some new pay cut proposed, that would leave Briony and her friends despairing of how
they were going to manage in the future and worry about what lay ahead for their children.

She hadn’t wanted to be made redundant from her job. She had been perfectly willing to work, albeit, she conceded with hindsight, at the expense of her relationship with her daughter. But
the old saying ‘When one door closes another one opens’ was true. Everything depended on the way you looked at things.

This time had been given to her and Katie to strengthen their bond and that was how she would view it. She no longer had money for life’s luxuries; eating out was a thing of the past for
them, where once they had dined out three or four times a week and not given it a second thought. Even buying books, glossy mags and make-up now required a ‘Do I really need this?’
debate, whereas before they would have been tossed willy-nilly into her supermarket trolley. She’d sold her Ford Focus reluctantly, trying not to cry when she’d seen it disappear down
her street, and with it, the privileged life she’d taken for granted.

The upside now, thought Briony, was that she was no longer time poor. The speed on her life’s treadmill had decelerated and she felt she was slowly exhaling years of stress and tension
that juggling her life as a wife and mother, combined with holding down a job, had entailed.

Briony felt the knot that had been in her stomach since she had walked out of her office for the last time loosen another little bit as she lay in the sunshine, and the feelings of failure,
guilt, helplessness and fear wafted away on the balmy breeze blowing across the sea from Africa, as the scent of jasmine and the chorus of birdsong sent her drifting off into drowsy slumber.

‘Mom . . . Mom . . . I is hungry.’ An indignant poke brought Briony back to wakefulness and she squinted up to see her daughter’s indignant face hovering over hers. ‘Can
we have our picnic now?’

‘Can we have our picnic now,
please
?’

‘Can we have our picnic now,
pleeeease
?’ Katie echoed exasperatedly and Briony managed to hide a grin as she struggled up into a sitting position and wrapped her little girl
in a joyous hug.

‘Let’s have our feast then. I’m hungry too,’ Briony smiled, nuzzling into Katie’s neck. Her daughter smelled of suntan lotion and talc, and as Briony inhaled the
scent of her she wished Finn was here to share their lazy Sunday afternoon.

They had spoken earlier. He was up to his eyes doing a last edit on a report he had written for his MD. He headed the export department of a large food producing company who were constantly
looking for new foreign markets. He was good at his job and in the last year the company’s revenue had bucked the trend as new markets in China and Brazil opened up. Ireland’s booming
export market was the one bright shining star on the gloomy economic horizon and Finn had never been busier.

Briony hated that he had to work so hard, but he was driven and enjoyed it. He had
urged
her to take the few weeks to help her mother settle into her new villa, despite Briony’s
protests that she didn’t want to be away from him for too long. Had she still been working in the clinic, they would have been like ships that pass in the night. Funny how life had balanced
out for them as a result of her redundancy, she mused, as she opened the picnic basket she’d brought with them and spread out the egg, and tuna salad sandwiches, and their absolute
favourites, the pear and custard tartlets she’d bought from the bakery in the big Super Sol supermarket across the road. She and her mother, Valerie, had done a shop on the way from the
airport the previous day and Briony still found the difference in food prices hard to believe. They had bought two huge fillets of salmon and a big bag of prawns for half the price she would have
paid at home, and a bottle of Faustino was almost a third less than what she was used to paying.

The two weeks she was going to spend with her mother, helping her settle into the small beachside villa she had recently purchased, would not cost her a fortune; in fact she’d live far
cheaper here than in Dublin. She watched as Katie busied herself putting sandwiches on two bright green plastic plates, revelling in this great new adventure. ‘One for you, one for me,’
she sang in a singsong voice, putting her juice bottle beside her Moxie Girl. Her Lalaloopsy doll, Jenny, had been left back at the villa as a punishment for some naughty deed. Katie was a very
stern mother, and the dolls lived under a much stricter regime than Katie herself did, Briony thought, grinning as her daughter admonished her doll to ‘sit up and eat properly and say thank
you’.

Mother and daughter munched companionably on their sandwiches, Katie chattering away to her doll, sometimes singing, oblivious to all around her as she immersed herself in a scenario with her
dolly that mimicked what was happening in her life right now. She had a vivid imagination and was a self-sufficient little girl who could entertain herself for hours on end. Even so, Briony longed
to get pregnant again, to give her daughter a sibling. She didn’t want there to be too big an age gap between her children should she be blessed with another baby.

Briony savoured the creamy egg sandwich, a hazy memory of picnics she’d had in her own childhood floating into her mind. Picnics on a golden beach under the cliff at the end of her
grandparents’ house. She could remember the gritty grains of sand mixing with the egg as the breeze whipped the sand around them. Sadness pricked like an unexpected wasp sting as she
remembered her grandmother, Tessa. She had loved her father’s mother with all the love her child’s heart could muster, and she had been greatly loved in return. And then the
indescribable shock of separation, of being told by Valerie that Gramma Tessa didn’t want to see them any more. The grief of that bereavement equalled the pain of the loss of her dad.
Briony’s eyes darkened at the memory and she brushed it away, annoyed that it still had the power to wound, even after all these years. It was a long, long time ago. Looking back only brought
unhappiness and pain, and what was the point of that? For all she knew, the woman could be dead. She knew nothing of her father’s family now.

And yet, she had been curious when, earlier, she’d unpacked a box of photo albums and tatty brown A4 envelopes full of old photos curling at the edges. Black-and-white ones, faded Kodak
colour prints, and memory cards of long-dead relatives she didn’t know. Now that she had a child of her own she had become more interested in her family history; the time would come when
Katie would want to know more of her family background. Valerie had always hated talking about the past and wasn’t very forthcoming when Briony quizzed her, but the photos would give her an
excuse to bring up the subject.