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J. Winterson

O’Brien’s First Christmas

Anyone who looked up could see it. TWENTY-SEVEN SHOPPING DAYS TILL CHRISTMAS, in red letters, followed by a stream of dancing Santas, then a whirlwind of angels, trumpets rampant.

The department store was very large. If you were to lay its merchandise from end to end, starting with a silk stocking and ending with a plastic baby Jesus, you would encompass the world. The opulence of the store defeated all shoppers. Even in the hectic twenty-seven days before Christmas, no mass exodus of goods could have made the slightest impression on the well-stocked shelves.

O’Brien worked in the pet shop. She had watched women stacking their baskets with hand and body lotion in attractive rein-deer wrap. Customers, who looked normal, had fallen in delight upon pyramids of fondant creams packed in “Bethlehem by night” boxes. It made no difference; whatever they demolished returned. This phenomenon, as far as O’Brien could calculate, meant that two-thirds of the known world would be eating sticky stuff or spreading it over themselves from December 25^th onwards.

O’Brien didn’t like Christmas. Every year she prayed for an ordinary miracle to take her away from the swelling round of ageing aunts who gave her knitted socks and asked about her young man. She didn’t have a young man. She lived alone and worked in the pet shop for company. At thirty-five per cent staff discount, it made sense for her to have a pet of her own, but her landlady, a Christian Scientist, didn’t like what she called “stray molecules”.

“Hair,” she said, “carries germs, and what is hairier than an animal?” So O’Brien faced another Christmas alone.

In the department store, shoppers enjoyed the kind of solidarity we read about in the war years. There was none of the vulgar pushing and shoving so usually associated with peak-time buying. People made way for one another in the queues and chatted about the weather and the impending snowfall.

“Snow for Christmas,” said one, “that’s how it should be.”

It was right and nice; enough money, enough presents, clean log fires courtesy of the Gas Board, and snow for the children.

O’Brien leafed through the Lonely Hearts. There were always extra pages of them at Christmas, just as there was extra everything else. How could it be that column after column of sane, loving, slim men and women without obvious perversions were spending Christmas alone? Were the people in the department store a beguiling minority?

She had once answered a Lonely Hearts advertisement and had dinner with a small young man who mended organ pipes. He had suggested they get married by special licence. O’Brien had declined on the grounds that a whirlwind romance would tire her out after so little practice. It seemed rather like going to advanced aerobics when you couldn’t manage five minutes on an exercise bicycle. She had asked him why he was in such a hurry.

“I have a heart condition,” he said.

So it was like aerobics after all.

After that, she had joined a camera club where a number of men had been keen to help her in the darkroom, but all of them had square hairy hands that reminded her of joke-shop gorilla paws.

“Don’t set your sights too high,” her aunts warned.

But she did. She set them in the constellations, in the roaring lion and the flanks of the bull. In December, when the stars were bright, she saw herself in another life, and happy.

“You’ve got to have a dream,” she told the Newfoundland pup, destined to become a Christmas present, “I don’t know what I want, I’m just drifting.”

She’d heard that men knew what they wanted, so she asked Clive, the floor manager. “I’d like to run my own branch of McDonald’s,” he said. “A really big one where they do breakfasts.”

O’Brien tried but she couldn’t get excited.

When she returned to her lodgings that evening her landlady was solemnly nailing a holly wreath to the front door. “This is not for myself, you understand, it is for my tenants. Next, I will put up some paper-chains in the hall.”

O’Brien’s landlady always spoke very slowly because she had once been a Hungarian countess. A countess does not rush her words.

O’Brien, still in her red duffel coat, found herself holding on to one end of a paper-chain while her landlady creaked up the aluminium steps, six tacks between her teeth.

“Soon be Christmas,” said O’Brien, “and I’m making a New Year’s resolution to change my life, otherwise what’s the point?”

“Life has no point,” said her landlady. “You would do better to get married or start an evening class. For the last seven years I have busied myself with brass rubbings.”

The hall was cold, the paper-chain was too short, and O’Brien didn’t want advice. She made her excuses and mounted the stairs. Her landlady, perhaps stung by a pang of sympathy, offered her a can of sardines for supper. “They are not in tomato sauce but olive oil.”

O’Brien, though, had other plans.

Inside her room she started to make a list of the things people thought of as their future. Marriage, children, a career, travel, a home, enough money, lots of money. Christmas time brought these things sharply into focus. If you had them, any of them, you could feel especially pleased with life over the twelve days of feasting and family. If you didn’t have them, you felt your lack more keenly. You felt like an outsider. Odd that a festival intended to celebrate the most austere of births should become the season of conspicuous consumption. O’Brien didn’t know much about theology but she knew there had been a muck-up somewhere.

As she looked at the list, she began to realize that an off-the-peg future, however nicely designed, wouldn’t be the life she sensed when she looked at the stars. Immediately she felt guilty. Who was she to imagine she could find something better than most people’s best?

“What’s wrong with settling down and getting married?” she said out loud.

“Nothing,” said her landlady, appearing round the door without knocking. “It’s normal. We should all try to be normal,” and she put the sardines down in O’Brien’s kitchenette and left.

“Nothing wrong,” said O’Brien, “but what’s right for me?”

She lay awake through the night, listening to the radio beaming out songs for Christmas. She wanted to stay under the blankets for ever, being warm and watching the bar of the electric fire. She remembered a story she’d read as a child about a princess invited to a ball. Her father offered her more than two hundred gowns to choose from, but none of them quite fitted and they were difficult to alter. At last she went in her silk shirt with her hair down. Still she was more beautiful than anyone.

“Be yourself,” said O’Brien, not sure what she meant.

At the still point of the night, O’Brien awoke feeling she was no longer alone in the room. She was right. At the bottom of her bed sat a young woman wearing an organza tutu. O’Brien didn’t bother to panic, she was used to her neighbour’s friends blundering into the wrong room.

“Vicky’s next door,” she said. “Do you want the light on?”

“I’m the Christmas Fairy,” said the woman. “Do you want to make a wish?”

“Come on,” said O’Brien, realizing her visitor must be drunk, “I’ll show you the way.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” said the woman. “This is the address I was given. Do you want love or adventure or what? We don’t do money.”

O’Brien thought for a moment. Perhaps this was a new kind of singing telegram. She decided to play along, hoping to discover the sender.

“What can you offer?”

The stranger pulled out a photograph album. “In here are all the eligible men in London. It’s indexed, so if you want one with a moustache you look under “M”, where you’ll also find moles.”

“Shouldn’t you be singing all this?” asked O’Brien, thinking that it was time to change the subject.

“Why,” said the fairy. “Does conversation bother you?”

“No, but you’re a singing telegram, aren’t you?”

“I am not, I am a fairy. Now what’s your wish?”

“OK,” said O’Brien, wanting to go back to sleep, “I wish I was blonde.”

Then she must have gone back to sleep straight away because the next thing she heard was the alarm ringing in her ears.

She dozed, she was late, no time for anything, just into her red duffel coat and out into a street full of shoppers, mindful of their too few days to go.

At work, on her way up to the pet department, Janice from lingerie said, “You hair’s fantastic, I didn’t recognize you at first.”

O’Brien was confused. She hadn’t had time to brush it. Was it standing on end? She went into the ladies and peered in the mirror. She was blonde.

“It really suits you,” said Kathleen from fabrics and furnishings, “but you should do more with your make-up now.”

“Do more with my make-up?” thought O’Brien, who didn’t do anything.

She decided to go back home, but in the lift on the way down, she met the actor from RADA¹ who had come to play Santa.

“Listen,” he said, “there’s two dozen inflatable gnomes in the basement. I’ve got to blow them up. If you’ll help me, I’ll buy you lunch.”

For the first time in her life, O’Brien abandoned herself to chaos and decided it didn’t matter. What surprises could remain for a woman who’d been visited in the middle of the night by a non-singing telegram and subsequently turned blonde? Blowing up gnomes was child’s play.

“I like your hair,” said the RADA Santa.

“Thanks,” said O’Brien. “I’ve only just had it done.”

At the vegetarian cafe, where every lentil bake came with its own sprig of holly, the RADA Santa asked O’Brien if she’d like to come for Christmas dinner. “There won’t be any roast corpse, though.”

“That’s OK,” said O’Brien. “I’m not a vegetarian but I don’t eat meat.”

“Then you’re a vegetarian.”

“Well, I haven’t joined anything. Aren’t you supposed to?”

“No,” said Santa. “You just get on with it, just be yourself.”

In the mirror on the wall, O’Brien smiled at her reflection and decided she was getting to like being herself. She didn’t go back to work that afternoon; instead she went shopping like everybody else. She bought new clothes, lots of food and a set of fairy lights. When the man at the veg stall offered her a cut-price Christmas tree, she shouldered it home. Her landlady saw her arriving.

“You are early today,” she said, very slowly. “I see you are going to get pine needles on my carpet.”

“Thanks for the sardines,” said O’Brien. “Have a bag of satsumas.”

“Your hair is not what it was last night. Did something happen to you?”

“Yes,” said O’Brien, “but it’s a secret.”

“I hope it was not a man.”

“No, it was a woman.”

O’Brien put potatoes in the oven and strung her window with fairy lights. Outside the sky was strung with stars.

At eight o’clock, when the RADA Santa arrived, wet and cold and still in uniform, O’Brien lit the candles beneath the tree. She said, “If you could make a wish, what would it be?”

“I’d wish to be here with you.”

“Even if I wasn’t blonde?”

“Even if you were bald.”

“Merry Christmas,” said O’Brien.

¹A local theatre society.

1. Define the genre of the short story. Give your reasoning.

2. Consider the time of the action. With what ideas and values is Christmas generally associated? How is the main character going to celebrate the holiday? What is her attitude to other people’s idea of celebrating Christmas?

3. Concentrate on the personality of the main character (her name, age, occupation, etc.). What are we allowed to know about her set of values, her likes and dislikes? How can you explain her choice of the wish? What would you choose in her place?

4. What effect did the realization of O’Brien’s wish produce on her? In what ways did the girl change?

5. Interpret the title of the short story. State its functions and try to explain why it was “the first” Christmas for the central character.

6. What do you think is necessary for changing your life if you are not happy about it?

13.

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