reluctant to function – because it doesn't seem worth the effort to grasp so much irrelevant festive detail? Mark starts playing one of the games on the mobile that Natalie's parents have given him, and I feel as if he's acting out my desire to be elsewhere. It may be his behaviour that provokes my mother to say 'I'll bet you've never had a Christmas dinner like mine.'
I haven't – not like this one. Either my childhood is blurred by nostalgia or her cooking has worsened with age. Perhaps she was ensuring that nothing's underdone. Natalie and Mark and I voice compliments that grow increasingly wordless as we saw through our portions of wizened turkey and well-nigh impenetrable potatoes and sausages as black as unexposed film. I for one feel bound to compensate for my father's silence, which seems to constrict the panelled kitchen and intensify the heat from the black iron range. 'See, it was worth coming. That's what the Christmas boy gets,' my mother cries as Mark disentangles another pound coin from a cellophane wrapping encrusted with currants. Have the adults really drunk seven bottles of wine? I take another mouthful of dessert wine to sweeten the taste of charred pudding. 'Who's for a walk to get our weight down?' says my mother.
All the plates and utensils have been piled in the stone sink under the moist grey screen of a window. 'I'll do the washing-up,' I say, 'and then I might have a nap.'
'Guess where we are, Simon.'
'Upstairs,' I mumble, because there's movement overhead.
'Of course we aren't,' Mark giggles. 'We're out.'
'I hope you haven't woken Simon,' says Natalie from further off.
It feels more as though my consciousness has omitted several events – as though a lurch in time and space has dumped me in this armchair from my childhood. I can't even recall walking to the front room. My faint reflection, which looks trapped within the dormant television screen, performs a rudimentary mime as I say 'It's all right.'
'He says it's all right.'
I'm even less convinced by the repetition, and he doesn't help by adding 'You'll have to come and find us. Your mum and dad don't know where this is.'
'I'm not lost at all. Can't speak for Sandra.'
'One of us has to be, Bob.'
'Well, it damn well isn't me. I'm still having my wander and then I'll get us home.'
They sound shrunken by remoteness, which makes me blurt 'Can you see its name, Mark?'
'I saw one a long way back. I can't now, it's dark. We're in Something Lane.'
'I don't remember any lanes round here. How long have you been walking?'
'Hours.'
Surely he's exaggerating, but when I peer at my watch in the light of the Victorian streetlamp outside the window I see that they could have left more than an hour ago. I'm about to tell him to keep talking until they reach somewhere he can name when Natalie says 'Stop bothering him now, Mark. Look, there's the end.'
Before I can speak, they're gone. Could the call and the background dialogue have been a joke? I still think someone was moving softly about upstairs. I hold onto the mobile in case Mark rings back and rest my head against the musty cushion to listen.
When I open my eyes, however, the voices are beyond the front door and singing as best they can for laughter. Are they really chanting 'Good King Senseless'? The name is past by the time I recapture some kind of awareness. Either they cut the carol short or my mind loses hold of it, because I next hear them all on the stairs. The flat slaps of my father's slippers on the hall floor are almost as loud as the flapping of my mother's looser ones. My parents couldn't have worn slippers outside the house – they must have gone upstairs to change.
'So you didn't need to call me again,' I say to Mark.
'Not when you've got up.'
'To help you find your way back, I mean.'
'Why'd we do that?'
He and the others look as confused as I won't allow myself to be. I'm sure it was a Christmas joke. There's no doubt in my mind that Mark is concealing amusement, and I don't think he's alone in it. My mother appears to have had enough of clowning, and drops on the couch. 'Put on a show,' she urges.
My father falls to his knees in front of the television, which has never had a remote control, and the floor quakes like California. 'Shout out when you see something you like,' he says.
'Is it all black and white?' says Mark.
'It's like us. It's a museum piece.'
'All your colour goes as you get older,' my mother says.
I suspect I'm not the only person who can't identify the link. My eyelids sag shut, and I'm imagining every channel filled with the same luminous gleeful face when Mark calls 'Quick, Simon, look. It's him.'
'I didn't mean shout,' my father protests. 'Spare my old head.'
He seems unable or unwilling to finish changing channels. Did I actually glimpse a familiar face peering around the edge of the screen, or was that my lingering imagination? 'What are you saying you saw, Mark?'
'It was Tubby. I'm sure it was.'
'In what?'
'I don't know,' Mark says, jigging with impatience on his creaky chair. 'Go round again.'
As my father continues his search, which looks close to automatic, Natalie says 'It was just someone big, Mark. There are people like that everywhere.'
'I saw his face. I know Tubby.'
Which of the programmes could have contained him? Hardly the footage of riots after a suspected bomber was shot, nor an advertisement for a Christmas suicide counselling service. A Berlioz oratorio about Christ is just as unlikely a context, but I suppose a clip of Tubby might have been among the films projected on a screen behind the band at a Second Coming concert. My mother adds a squeal to those emitted by the guitars, then claps her hands as the next channel proves to be broadcasting Laurel and Hardy. 'Let's have them. We want fun for Christmas.'
Their film could have included Tubby as an extra, but surely not to the extent of making Ollie's face turn into his while Stan's is swollen wider than his body by a helpless grin as he weeps at the transformation. That's only what I dream, having been the first to go upstairs. Later Natalie is pressed against me in the narrow bed. Beyond the dim mass of her sleeping face, which looks enlarged by her tousled hair, I can just distinguish that the wardrobe door is ajar. I'm reminded of one of Lane's less comprehensible notes. What portal did he fancy could lead everywhere? What was the medium 'in which all must swim or drown'? Perhaps he had the cinema in mind. This brings back his lurid grinning face, and I splash water on mine to regain awareness of my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I'll be able to stay awake once I'm at my desk, I vow as my mother says 'I'll bet you've never had a Christmas dinner like this.'
My father and Natalie must be pretending not to notice the repetition. Mark looks solemn too, but how long can he maintain the mask? I'm afraid that any second it will give way to his Tubby face – that he'll be overcome by mirth, at any rate. The possibility doesn't help my appetite for the lukewarm leftovers. Besides, I've grown fat enough; I should have joined yesterday's walk to lose some weight. The very first mouthful makes me feel I won't be able to rise from my chair. Nevertheless I retake my enthusiasm while Natalie and Mark put on an equally good show. Natalie's next line, or at least the next I'm aware of, is 'I suppose we ought to be thinking of leaving.'
'We've not had any games yet,' my mother complains. 'I thought we'd be playing some old ones with Mark. Real ones instead of on the phone.'
'Can't we?' Mark pleads.
'Maybe just one,' Natalie says, 'if it's quick.'
'I know, we'll play Simon's favourite,' says my mother. 'Hide and seek.'
They never found me in the wardrobe, and nobody's going to now. If I back into the corner I can still hold onto the half of the door that opens. If anybody should look inside they won't see me in the gloom. I thought I'd cleared everything into the suitcase, but an item is hanging up behind me. I must have overlooked it from exhaustion. It's an old coat padded fat with paper or mothballs. Perhaps I should use it for extra concealment. Keeping hold of the door, I reach for the hanger to inch the coat along the rail. There's no sign of a hanger, but my fingers touch a yielding mass within the collar. I'm able to believe it's a bag of mothballs until I feel the soft swollen chin above the flabby neck. My fingers scrabble in helpless panic at the thick lips that frame the bared teeth.
I seem to have forgotten how to work my body. One hand continues to hold the darkness shut tight while the
