The Little Match Boy

Every year I write a little story  for Christmas and the New Year holidays. Nothing groundbreaking and epic or wonderful, just a little story. This one is a few days late, something that couldn't be helped due to the unforeseen set of somewhat bothersome circumstances.  
All the errors and typos and the assorted crimes against good grammar and spelling here were not my fault - it's all the evil doing of the mischievous bevy of Mexican beauties, all called Margarita Heaven and hell combined can't help  a dyslexic,  writing in a foreign tongue,  while inebriated.  This version here  is a very condensed and abridged one, to keep the trouble reading it to a minimum. Anyway, enough rambling about - here it is, The Christmas story for the year 2012. (Almost forgot, a note about the title - familiar with Andersen? If you are, it may add a little something to the mix.)  

~~~
  "It says here to be paid on Christmas Day - on  bloody Christmas, for godssake.  Don't you, guys, have a day off like everyone else?" Aaron hissed though his gritted teeth. He shot a glare at the council official across the desk. The man wore a drab navy-blue serge suit, with the bright pink tie that cast the pale bubble-gum rosy glow onto his shiny forehead.
"I'm just doing my job, Mr Engelmann. The council must protect its interests - it's nothing personal." The man in the suit picked up a pile of forms from the in-tray to his left, and gently tapped the papers on the desk. The motion gave them a nice, neat edge, and the man nodded in approval. Very satisfactory, that neat paperwork thing - very satisfactory indeed.
"I don't have three grand. Where do you suppose I get the money I don't have?"
"I seem to recall a  lovely two-seater convertible  parked on your driveway, Mr Engelmann, and it looks like you haven't had a use of it for some time." The man in the suit leaned back ito his  chair and steepled his fingers.
"Because every penny I needed to fix it has been going to pay for the council's 'little oversight'...three bloody grand worth of it. You have personally told me - you..." Aaron clenched his jaw, fighting the urge to punch the blue-serge-suited-shiny-foreheaded official square in the face.
"It would be your word against mine. I am the council, Mr Engelmann, so -  it's your word against the council." The man across the desk bared his teeth in what it must have been the standard government issue smile reserved for the occasions just like this one. "You may appeal. The court summons will be sent to you on the third."
Aaron stood up.
"And I will. " He leaned across the desk and looked straight into the man's face. "You're not getting my house. I'll tear it down myself, brick by brick if I have to, but you're not getting your hands... on my... house."
"I'm afraid that the statistics are against you, Mr Engelmann. Government always gets its money, one way or the other. I'm just doing my job."
"Hope they pay you extra for working holiday hours," Aaron picked up  his coat from the chair and headed toward the door. "Such dedication needs to be rewarded...no wonder this country is in shit, when its' run by the pricks like you..." he said in a cold, calm voice, and closed the door behind.


Aaron locked  his front door and headed straight for the kitchen, leaving  muddy bootprints on the scattered mail on the floor underneath the letterbox. He opened the fridge and grabbed the large glass jug two-thirds full of the thick, faintly fragrant, pale pink liquid. Aaron poured some into a clean coffee mug and took a long thirsty sip, while taking the drinks to the living-room.
He slumped onto the sofa , threw his head back and closed his eyes.


It was the third time his phone rang before he decided to fish it out of his back pocket.
"Aaron, is that you?" the bubbly tenor with the Northern lilt chirped its breathless greeting.
"No, it's Elvis. I was just passing by. Jason, who do you think picks up my mobile at this time of day?"
"Hello, gorgeous! Just the man I was after!" the voice giggled. "You free at the moment? I might have a little job for you."
"Who do I have to bump off?"
"My ex!" the voice on the other end of the telephone lined burst into laughter. "One of my clients would like to commission a little project. Interested?"
"Step into my office. I think I might squeeze  a few minutes out of my busy diary."
Aaron shifted in his seat. His gaze stopped at the bottle at the foot of the sofa. He slid it across the smooth, glass-topped table, until it settled by the glass pitcher and the empty coffee mug.
"Wonderful! She is a lovely lady, Aaron, I've been doing her hair for over a year now and," he added in a mischievous whisper, "she is loaded. Works for a Swiss investment fund, happily single, has class, style-"
"-sold. I''m hers for the price of the plane ticket - just let me get my toothbrush-"
"Aaron, stop it. I'm serious."
"So am I, " Aaron muttered under his chin.
"She wants to commission a book - a limited  edition, just for her and a few friends, a few short stories with some nice artwork. She wants something a bit naughty, you know, that kind of stuff that's very in these days, if you know what I mean, but nothing too icky."
"I don't do smut, Jason - not my bag."
"That's what sells, gorgeous - read the news lately? It appears a little bit of spanking  goes a long way."
"Jack says no."
"Who the hell is Jack?" Aaron felt the bubbly effervescence in his friend's voice go flat like a stale champagne, in an instant. "I thought you were on your own."
"Not entirely." Aaron smiled. "With three lovely senoritas form Mexico. All named Margarita, would you believe it. With strawberries." Aaron reached for the glass jug, but it was empty. He stretched across the table and poured the  contents of the bottle into his coffee mug. "I'm moving north of the border  now. Tennessee."
Aaron swirled the golden liquid a few times before downing it in one long, reluctant gulp.
"Ar, Paula's been leaving messages for over a week now. She's been worried sick. You're not picking up the phone, she hasn't seen you in a month.  Your  website has disappeared, everything has been pulled out. And don't give me that 'I suck' spiel, it doesn't work on me. I  can suck you under the table any time of the day," the voice chuckled.
"Thanks but no thanks, Jason, I'd rather stick to something with more boob and less balls if I may," Aaron smiled.
"I know, gorgeous. I just couldn't resist it," the voice on the other side of the phone line giggled. "I do worry about you, Aaron." The voice softened. "You need to go out, my boy, shake that money maker, get out there, get some work that pays for a change.  It's been five years since you sold that script.  Nobody cares if it is a Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet Mark Two if it doesn't bring the pennies to the bank, you know. You're not getting any younger - you're thirty-eight, my boy, that's it,  from now on shit only rolls downhill. One needs to make the best of what one has."
"Jason, don't Jewish mother me. If I wanted a Jewish mother, I'd still live with my own."
"I'm your friend, Ar, and I care about you. Paula does too, poor girl, she deserves better than this, bless her."
Aaron got up and walked to the window. The rain streaked across the glass pane, pooling at the wooden ledge. His two-up-two-down Queens Park Victorian cottage cried with the sky.
"Jason, do you ever wake up  with that feeling, like that Talking Heads song, as if you were living someone else's life? " Aaron run his fingers through his hair. "As if... the address is right, all the details match, but everything feels wrong -  it's not really you?"
"Is that 'Jack' talking, or your middle-aged crisis?" the voice on the other side teased. "So what about that book commission we talked about?"
Aaron smiled.
"Merry Christmas, Jas. Have a good one."
The voice on the other side of phone line sighed.
"Merry Christmas, gorgeous."


Aaron felt a hand tugging at his pony tail, at first gingerly, like a thief, then getting braver and more forceful with each pull. He quickly turned around to catch the culprit red-handed, and found himself looking down at  a little boy of about three or four, with a toussled dark hair, hazel-grey eyes and a beaming smile on his face.
The boy was standing in the queue next to Aaron's, holding firm onto the hand of a woman berating a hapless shop assistant laden with every kind of a plush toy tiger in the shop, and judging by the way the conversation was going, clearly the wrong kind, too.
"You have a long pony-tail like a girl - but you're a boy," the child giggled.
"And who says only girls are allowed to look nice?" Aaron smiled.
The boy climbed on his tiptoes and pointed at silver streaks showing under the thick dark locks pulled over Aaron's temples. "Is it because you're old?"
Aaron tapped the boy's nose with his index finger. It was almost as looking at himself, only some three and a half decades ago. He felt the sharp pain in his chest and it took him by surprise.
"I'm not old, " he whispered and winked. "I just pretend I am."
"Nathan! I'll never take you anywhere again! Wait till I tell your Dad about this!" The woman stopped her tirade at the red-faced shop-assistant struggling with the dozen of soft toys in his arms.
"I hope he didn't bother you, sir, he is always such a pest," the woman rushed her apology. Aaron wanted to say how there was no bother and how this was the most sensible conversation he had in weeks, but the woman moved away, pulling the boy along. The child turned around, holding a toy tiger in his hand. He smiled and stuck his tongue at the strange-old-but-not-old, slim, long-haired pony-tailed man in the black overcoat and jeans.
Aaron waved back and then the boy and his mother vanished in the Christmas Eve crowd. The flustered assistant laden with the plush tigers addressed him in a hurried, nervous voice.
"May I help, sir?"
Aaron pointed at the silver-grey soft toy perched unsteadily on the shop-assistant shoulder.
"I'd like the same one the kid had ."


The security guard carefully approached the man sitting alone on the bench in the atrium. A toy tiger was resting on the seat next to him, and the man seemed lost in thoughts, oblivious to the hollow silence of the empty shopping centre.
"Sir, Whiteley's is now closed. Will you please accompany me to the exit?"
Aaron looked up at the guard as if trying to decode a secret message, a cypher spoken in an alien language he's never heard before.
"What time is it?" he asked the guard.
"Seven o'clock." The guard continued in a quiet, concerned voice."Are you OK, sir?"
"Yeah. I'm fine. Where's the exit?"
"This way, follow the signs to your right." The guard pointed at the green arrow on the column by the bench.
Aaron took the soft toy and rose to his feet.
"Thank you. I'm sorry to hold you up. You must have a family to go to. "
"I do," the guard smiled. "Merry Christmas, sir."
"Merry Christmas."


The business was beginning to whittle down and the  taxi driver was anxious to get home.  He cursed the rain, and the muddy marks on the carpeted floor  left by the afternoon's pickups.
"...bloody monsoon, that what it is - a bloody monsoon..." He turned back to the wet, dark shape in the back of his cab.
"Where to, Guv?"
Aaron wiped the worst of the rain of his face.   He stretched  at the back seat trying to reach into his pocket, pulling out, after a moment of fumbling around, a crumpled ten-pound note and a handful of assorted change.
"How far will this take me?"
"Guv, it's the bleeding Christmas Eve, If I wanted  a comedian, I'd be watching telly with me missus now - where do you want to go?"
Aaron pulled his woolen hat low to his face and sunk deep into his seat.
"Home."
The driver threw his arms up in the air in a gesture of a patience of a saint, sorely tested and beginning to fray around the edges.
"...it's all them drugs, look at this fella - all that filthy music and them bloody drugs..." the driver muttered under his chin . He thought for a moment, then  took the best guess and started the  clock.


It was almost eleven at night when Aaron found himself at the Watford Junction station. The last bus had been long gone and the those few of the late London to Herdforshire commuters that shared his train journey were being picked up in cars by their families and friends.
The cold rain trickled down his neck and he shivered, pulling the collar of his overcoat close to his face.
He turned around to find his bearings. Though his destinations should have come as a surprise, it didn't feel so. What was extraordinary was not the fact that this was where the  random last train out of London had spat him out this evening, but that he didn't find it extraordinary at all. Frightening, in that sick-reflex-at-the-pit-of-his-stomach kind of way, but not surprising.
He walked down the empty St Albans Road, past the Library, past the ASDA and a fire station by the roundabout, his water-sodden boots taking the route all by themselves. Every mile was getting harder, almost as if he were crawling on his knees, his skin broken and shredded to the naked bone, his breath getting shorter and more laboured, fighting against the invisible  force-field pressing against his lungs. He took his inhaler and the cigarettes out of his pocket and back again every hundred yards. Tomorrow would be the day he'd stopped smoking, tomorrow would be the day he's to do whatever the hell he needed to do, but right now he needed all his strength and all his courage to walk the last two miles to the rise by the oak woods. Aaron wrapped himself tightly into his coat and started humming Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are Made for Walking.
The irony was not lost on him.


He reached the end of the quiet residential street some time after midnight. The darkened windows of the houses lining the both sides of the rise glimmered pale neon-blue from the Christmas light and a solitary television set or two still on. He pressed his nose against the bay window at the number 66, trying to catch a glimpse in the dark of the modest Christmas tree and the dining table in the living-room. He moved back, standing in the middle of the round turning  that separated the house from the forest.
Aaron found the low point in the fence, and jumped over it to get to the roof of a small brick building leaning against the bulk of the house. The garage roof had a grubby blue plastic tarpaulin sheet over it, and he made himself a little shelter from the rain. He curled up under, pressing his chin tightly against his knees to keep warm. The rain dripped in thick, silvery pearls off his soaked wet face.  He took the box of matches out of his coat pocket and lit the match, taking in the shy warmth in the fine orange glow if its flickering flame. It went out with a sigh, and he lit another one. All around him was the damp, blue darkness, broken by the gold and blue fireflies in the windows of the houses down the street.
The silence wrapped around him like a ghost.


Though it was around the lunchtime, there was not a living soul on the street. Nancy Sinatra  still chirped in his head about those boots made for walking and it took him all of his willpower not to buckle down.
He went around the house, trying to catch a peek though the closed curtains. The smell of the freshly baked stollen wafted from the front door. Michaela's favourite. She used to start working on it a day before. Soaking the raisins, stressing over the bloody dough "It's not rising, it's a an absolute disaster, my god, it's an absolute disaster..." Until it came out of the oven smelling like a fairytale happy ending, plump and warm, melt-in-your-mouth sweet and inviting.
He lit his last match, gazed deep into the flame until it wisped away in a faint smoke.
Aaron downed the last of his mints and drew a deep breath.  He carefully took the toy tiger out from under his coat and looked deep into its
plastic, blue eyes.
"It's just you and me now, buddy," he whispered. He drew another deep breath and then knocked at the door.
He heard the sound of slippers shuffling louder as they came closer , and then they stopped.  
The door opened, and the slim, petite woman in a pale blue jeans, a well-worn-in white and blue ski sweater stood in the doorway. Her long dark hair must have been pinned up in a hurry, because she  had one of the crystal-topped pins in her mouth and another still in her hand. She looked at the man with the plush toy in his arms, the toy tiger and a patch on his grey sweatshirt the only dry thing he had. Her face went pale.
"Do you know what year this is?!" she yelled and then turned  briskly on her heel, slamming the door behind.
He sat on the doorstep, and placed the toy by his side. There was a sound of breaking crockery, something metal being thrown in the kitchen sink, and the muffled sobbing form the upstairs bedroom window. Aaron could hear the voices in the house,  going after the sound of sobbing upstairs, then coming down, whispering amongst themselves, then more yelling, more sobbing.
He swallowed hard. His throat was dry and tender.


The door opened about six in the evening. Her face was swollen and red and she held on the doorknob as if it were a fortress, her citadel  which he no longer held the password to.
Aaron wanted to speak, but no sound came from his throat.
The woman moved aside, still holding on to the door. A slender teenage girl in a sparkly T-shirt and a pink capri pants  pressed on from behind her, straining to catch a peek of the man at the door, yet not leaving her mother's side.  
The woman's voice was hoarse and cracked.
"Tara, give your father a hug."
The girl looked at her mother, then grimaced. "Whatever..."
He hugged her tightly, unable to speak.
Tara wriggled out of the embrace and went back to her mother's, rubbing her face where Aaron's stubble chafed against her skin.  
"...you could have at least shaved before you came here..." was her only, surly comment.
"Tara, get the toy," the woman said calmly.
"But Mum!"
"He's your Dad, honey, and he came from a long way away. And a very long time.. Now give him a break.  Get the toy and lets all sit down and eat."
The girl  stomped off with the plush tiger and muttered on her way into the warmth of the house.
"... why couldn't it be an iPad, I'm not a baby anymore...typical..."
"Tara - that's enough, darling. Set the table. We'll be there in a mo."
Aaron rose to his feet and reached to kiss the cheek of the woman standing guard at the door.
She turned her face away.
"One step at the time."
"Michaela, I-"
"-don't. Whatever it is, I don't want to hear it. We'll talk tomorrow."
They stood there for as moment, looking at each other, neither one willing or able to turn their gaze away. She took his coat away, still standing stiffly at the door. Aaron bowed his head and entered the house.
She waited for him to get inside,  before easing her grip on the handle, and quietly closing the door behind.
~~~



Happy and peaceful holidays to you all. Be kind to the ones you love and care about and even kinder to the ones that love and care about you. And if you have no loved ones near,  be kind to the ones who have no-one at all.

AiRen is signing out.