The Girl Below(24)

At school, Charles became a hero because he’d needed stitches (“How many?” the other kids had squealed, ferreting in his hair) and I was called a ninny or a baby for believing in made-up things. After that, I saved my zeal for home, where it blossomed into an obsession. Midyear, I started sending letters to Santa, and by November I was writing daily to butter him up. According to a book I’d read, letters to Lapland didn’t need stamps, which is how I bypassed my mother, who always tried to sneak a look at what I was writing.

“Do you know what you want for Christmas this year?” she’d say.

“You don’t need to know what I want,” I’d tell her. “Only Santa needs to know.”

But I needed my mother for something, and devised a plan in which she’d finally give me the ammunition I needed. Mum could be relied on for the truth; she didn’t believe in God and said so. She was the one who could verify Santa.

It was a rainy Sunday when I asked her, and she was tackling the weekly mountain of Dad’s business shirts, carefully steering the iron round an obstacle course of collars and cuffs. I started out warily by asking if Lapland was a real place, and if it might be possible to go there on holiday, for instance, next Christmas for two or three weeks.

“It’s a real place, all right,” she said. “In the Arctic Circle, near the North Pole. But I don’t know about going there on holiday. That would cost an arm and a leg.”

The mere thought of Santa’s reindeer skidding about in all that snow made my heart thud, and I took a deep breath to ask my next question, the big one. “So if Lapland is a real place in the Arctic Circle, then Santa must be a real person too—right?”

“You know the answer to that,” said Mum, ironing on.

“I know he’s real, but the kids at school think he isn’t, and I want to prove them wrong.”

Mum looked up from the ironing board. “He’s real if you think he’s real, dear.”

“I know, I know, but is he?”

She studied me for a moment, searching for the right words. “If you believe in him, he is.”

That sounded like a trick, and I stamped my foot in indignation. “You always say that and I don’t know what it means. All you have to tell me is that he’s real!”

“I can’t do that,” she said. “I don’t want to lie to you.”

“I’m not asking you to lie to me. Just say it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!” My excitement grew. Finally, I was going to have proof that Santa was real, and I could go to school and tell all the other kids they were dimwits.

“Well, I suppose you’re old enough to know.” She sounded sad, wistful. “We did start to wonder why you hadn’t found out.”

“Found out what?” My stomach flipped a pancake. “What do you mean found out?”

“You caught him once, barging into your room with the pillowcase—he tripped on something and woke you up—and the next day you were convinced you’d seen Santa. We couldn’t believe it.”

“But I did see Santa.”

Mum laughed. “I thought I saw a ghost once, but that doesn’t mean it was real.”

“Santa is a ghost?”

“No, weenie, Dad is Santa.”

I was inconsolable, but she hugged me as I wept, and promised to take me to the natural history museum, and to the movies, and wherever else I wanted to go to cheer me up. I told her I didn’t want to go anywhere, and probably never would. But there was worse to come. That Christmas, I woke at six out of habit and crawled to the end of my bed to marvel at the bulging pillowcase. For a moment I forgot and was filled with the old exhilaration. I sniffed the air and waited for the intoxicating fragrance to fill my lungs. But there was none. Instead I smelled wrapping paper, sticky tape, walnuts, and orange peel, stuff you could buy at Woollies or any other store. And even though I noticed that the sack was a little more bulging than usual, it was hours before I had recovered enough from the blow to open it.

Christmas vanished that year, and so too did my father, who went on a business trip and never came back.

The first sign of real absence was a box of clothes and shoes that Mum dropped off at the Westbourne Park branch of Oxfam. We often went there to look for unusual fabrics and outdated castoffs, which my mother miraculously recycled into fashionable outfits, but we never donated anything unless it was falling apart, practically in rags. So I was immediately suspicious when she placed a box on the counter and in it were a new pair of brogues, along with a selection of immaculate business shirts and ties.