She looked up sharply, despite herself, wanting to know now what was the alternative.
“Or you can come inside. Into your own life.”
He really was a cheeky old thing. Now he was getting up to leave. And she found herself disappointed.
“Meet me tonight,” he said. “On the bridge by the hotel. One o’clock. Bring the glass.”
“Why?” she asked, bracing it in her fingers like a crystal ball.
He was gone.
I’ve never been given a magic object before, she thought. No one’s ever promised to take me out of my life.
I wouldn’t have to stay for long. And If I didn’t like it, I could come back.
She got up and started putting her things into her bag; purse, and then the glass bauble, which she dropped and smashed on the wet cobbles. She gave a short, anguished cry.
She picked up the pieces, careful not to cut herself. She put them all into the tissue paper, wanting to cry with shame. Th glass was so thing. It was like blue spun sugar. Well, now she’d just have to go and meet him.
To explain. To apologise. For being so clumsy and hopeless. So dangerous and out of control of her life.
FINAL FLING
After a long day spent alone Robert was full of pasta and wine. He was nodding off as he watched black water pushing against the steps up to their windowsill. He was mesmerized by the reflections of lights on the waves.
Aunty Jane’s complaints from across their room had quietened to murmurs. He managed to block out her twittering and drift off.
Then he awoke with a jerk in the dark. The hotel room lights had been dimmed right down and it was much quieter.
He looked over at Aunty Jane and made out the rigid bump of her, lying under a single white sheet. She even slept tidily.
He stood stiffly and woozily, grimacing as the wickerwork creaked beneath him.
Just once more round the block, he thought. Just a little scout around in the dark before dawn. Get some of that muggy air into his lungs on their last night in town. Might get lucky this time.
There wasn’t a peep out of Aunty Jane. He took his key and slipped out into the corridor.
Dreaming of a White Christmas
He was drawn to the steps of the Academia bridge.
For a while, no one came past. Then, one or two late stragglers came and went and left Robert to his business. He smoked and watched the sudsy clouds passing over the moon.
He stared at the bridge.
There was his Aunty Jane. Standing there like a sleepwalker, in full view of anyone who cared to look.
She tricked me, he thought. She slipped out of the hotel before even I did.
There wasn’t much space between her and Santa Claus.
They were in hushed, urgent conference.
Aunty Jane looked flustered and hot, even in her loose nightie. Santa was chuckling at her, lifting up his great beard, rippling his fingers in the humid air. Uncertainly, Jane was joining in with his echoing laughter.
When Santa snapped his fingers, Robert could hear the click.
A solid transparent sphere shimmered around both figures on the bridge. It looked brittle and faintly blue, like Murano glass.
Aunty Jane stared at the old man in wonder and he was laughing again. The glass started to mist over and it was harder for Robert to see them. He realised that it was snowing inside the bauble. A perfect, miniature snowstorm was raging just inside the sphere. Santa had taken Robert’s aunt and trapped her with him in a bubble of winter.
All around them in that hermetic space, silent clots and specks of snow were whirling, and colliding with his Aunty Jane’s overheated flesh.
He’s doing it, Robert thought suddenly, to prove that he is real.
Santa’s doing it to prove it all true.
Aunty Jane was frozen in that moment; aghast, awhirl. Her breath was crystallizing. Robert could see his aunt’s gasp of amazement hanging in front of her and it was like a large white question mark.
Santa bent forward to kiss her. He’d be melting the flakes on her face, her eyelashes.
Then he reached up and pricked the bubble from within. It burst like soap and the glass and the hectic blizzard melted in an instant. The hot wet air of the Venetian night came flooding back.
“I’ll catch my death,” Robert heard his aunty say.
Santa was peering over the side of the bridge, down to the canal, where a great dark shape had drifted up and was waiting for him.
“Time for home, Jane,” he said, in an unexpected accent.
Jane let Santa lead her down to the gondola. He nodded to the boy in the boatnecked jumper, who was bracing his slight weight on the slant of the gondola’s stern. Robert stared as the boy doffed his yellow straw hat at Jane, revealing his nascent horns, their rounded nubs poking out of close-cropped hair. Reindeer, Robert realised. The boy had cloven hooves.
He watched his aunt rubbing her arms, though she must be warmed through again by now. She was stepping aboard. She looked dainty as she sat down in the cushions, hugging her knees as Santa joined her.
The gondolier shoved their small boat away from the crumbling shore. As they went sailing off into the dark, Robert heard his aunt come out of her trance with a gasp.
It wasn’t really like her, taking off like that.
MARKED FOR LIFE
Meet: Mark Kelly – a man tattooed with glorious designs over every inch of his body. He’s married to the slightly unhinged Sam and has a young daughter who’s about to be kidnapped at Christmas by an escaped convict and old flame of our hero’s. Over one snowy festive season the whole family sets off in perilous pursuit… accompanied by Sam’s mother, who’s become a nudist lesbian and her girlfriend, who claims to be a time-transcending novelist known as Iris Wildthyme…
DOES IT SHOW?
Meet: Penny Robinson, who’s a sixteen year old with witchy powers and an impossibly glamorous and
