Sick of the same old Santa myth? Michel Faber conjures a seasonal tale with bells on, in the best Scots tradition. Readers who consider parody a crass and parasitical form of writing are advised to read no further.
Irvine's Christmas
Christmas, thought Irvine as he eased his crowbar into the narrow slit, is for cunts.
Two thousand years ago, some little Jewish bastard gets born in the back of a Bethlehem pub and forever after, it's an excuse to play fuckin Slade and Cliff Richard on the radio and deck the windows of shopping centres with boughs of plastic holly. Fuckin Paul McFuckin Cartney's "Wonderful Fuckin Christmastime" playing day and night when all a man wants is to score some smack and crawl under a soft blanket of oblivion. Irvine knew what that felt like. He was aching for a hit right now, and not Paul McFuckin Cartney's kind of hit. A hit of heroin, paid for with the money he'd get from selling the goods he would soon have in his sweating grasp.
As soon as he had broken into this house.
Irvine wiggled the crowbar, and the window slid open far enough for him to open it the rest of the way with his fingers. He inserted his whole body into the room, one leg still dangling in the bitter cold of the late-December night, the other already reacting to the warmth of central heating. The whole fuckin house warm as toast at two in the morning - that's the pampered middle-class for you. Being robbed was the least they deserved.
Normally when breaking into a dark and unfamiliar house, Irvine had to be careful not to knock over some fuckin lamp or rotating CD tower or some such fuckin poncy thing, but tonight, he needn't blunder. His way was lit by the Christmas tree. A real branch of pine, this one, garlanded with a hundred tiny red, white, yellow and blue lights, smoothing his way to the goodies that would, in turn, lead to a warm injection of skag into his favourite vein.
It was the night before Christmas. Under the tree, a pile of gifts had been arranged with artful randomness, wrapped in seasonal paper - all greens, reds and Yuletide designs - tied with silver ribbon. Little white cards to remind the family who was who. Not a creature was stirring in this outer-suburban house, just as you'd expect from the sort of brain-dead middle-class cunts who would live in such a place. Irvine could just picture them. They would look like Richard and Judy. They would buy each other Jamie Oliver and Nigella cookbooks and check the labels on their coffee jars to make sure there was no exploitation of the underprivileged involved. They would buy Time Out and draw red circles around the names of trendy bands they thought they might go see, but never would go see because the kids would need a babysitter and besides they only liked shite music anyway.
Irvine's red-rimmed eyes found a shelf of CDs: Moby, Macy Gray, a Van Morrison greatest hits, the new Coldplay. He would give these cunts a rush of blood to the head, that's for sure, when they woke up in the morning.
With practised efficiency, Irvine started loading the CDs into his back-pack. These would be easy enough to sell, but at a low price, because there were so many other bastards like himself stealing exactly the same fuckin CDs to fund exactly the same habit. To really cash in, he'd have to find something more substantial.
Irvine considered the VCR. VCRs were buggers to offload nowadays, unless they were state-of-the-art. This one was bog-standard. There didn't seem to be a DVD player. Trust his luck to break into the house of people who were not just middle-class, but behind the times.
He squinted around the rest of the room, which was looking less dim now that his eyes had adjusted fully to the Christmas tree lights. The TV was top of the range but too big to carry without an accomplice. The clocks and knick-knacks were garage sale stuff. Videos were only saleable if they were porn. Books were no use to man nor beast.
Suddenly Irvine heard - or thought he heard - a noise. A rustling from above his head. Christ, it better not be some fuckin eight year old wean sleepwalking downstairs, lured by dreams of the presents under the tree.
He stood still as a surveillance camera, while he listened and tried to pinpoint the source of the noise. It was coming, he decided, from the chimney. Small fragments of something-or-other were falling down the flue. Bits of old bird nest, maybe. Accumulated crap dislodged by wind and snow.
Getting that vision of the kid sneaking down to open his presents was a good thing, though. It occurred to Irvine that the most valuable takings might in fact be inside those naff little parcels. Hand-held computer games. Portable CD players. Mobile phones. Maybe even jewellery. The only problem was, he didn't want to carry away a satchel full of gifts without knowing if they were worth the bother.
So, he knelt down to unwrap the nearest present.
All at once there was a flash of crimson in his peripheral vision, and the sound of something immense falling into the room, like a giant sack of coal dumped down a chute.
'Dün't eeffen sink abüt it, yü nøtty bøy!' boomed a voice. 'I püt døse presents dere ten minutes agø, keep yür hends øff dem!'
Irvine goggled at the apparition in front of him. A filthy, sooty, obese old man, dressed in what had once been a berry-red tunic, now as grimy as the anorak of the long-term homeless. Dark wrinkled skin, Asiatic eyes, matted black hair, a sparse beard sprouting from under a largely toothless mouth. Filthy red trousers tucked into black leather boots.
'Yø Hø Hø!' bellowed the Eskimo.
Irvine clenched his fists, thought better of it. Santa Claus's fists were bigger than his, and the bastard looked like a hard cunt.
'Aren't you supposed tae be white,' challenged Irvine, 'with a white beard?'
'Racial dis... discømmunication!' protested the Eskimo, taking a step forward. 'I liff in Nørd Pøll. What yü sink liffs in Nørd Pøll, idjøt - Hollywüd müüfie stars?'
Irvine had a policy of not arguing with mad cunts, especially not if they'd caught him in the act of housebreaking.
'Ah'm ootae here,' he muttered, lurching towards the window.
'Nøt sø fast, boy!' bellowed Santa, seizing hold of Irvine's shoulder. 'What yü gøt in yür bekpek?'
'Don't boather yersel aboot that, granddad. Jist a few CDs. Call it redistribution ae wealth. Or the fuckin garbage being taken oot.'
The Eskimo narrowed his eyes. 'Dat not yür garbage, Irvine. Yü püt it bek, OK?'
Sweat sprang out of Irvine's forehead like leakage from a defective shower nozzle. 'How d'ye ken mah name's Irvine?'
The old man did his fuckin annoying Yo Ho Ho routine. 'I Farter Chrissmas,' he declared. 'I know de name of everybody. I know if yü bin güd bøy or bad bøy!' Out of one baggy pocket he pulled a small gadget, like a video remote control. His massive, coal-blackened fingertips tapped a surprisingly agile pattern on the keys. His eyes widened slightly at the electronic readout. 'Last time yü bin a güd bøy was... uh... 1993. Jesus, bøy, wot yü dü since den? Yü dün't want giftlets, or what?'
Without fear or hesitation, he grabbed the backpack and ripped it off Irvine's shoulders. A couple of CDs clattered onto the carpet.
'Gie us them back! Ah've goat tae huv smack,'
'Smeck? Smeck?' echoed the old man. 'Hø! I not yür mütter! If yü been nøtty bøy, I püt nø giftlets ünder yür tree - but smeck yür bøttøm I dün't dü. What is wit yü British and smecking, eh?
'Heroin, ya foreign cunt,' snarled Irvine. 'Drugs.'
'Ah!' roared the Eskimo. 'Mörfine, yes? Hø! Døn't yü knøw, bøy? Mörfine is før when yü gøt cancer! Mörfine is før when yü legs is røtty and dey müst be chøppened off! Mörfine is før send öld sick huskies to sleep! Nøt før püt in de arms, idjøt! Yü gøt mörfine, yü keep it før de öld huskies, hahn?' And he bent forward and gave Irvine a cautionary tap on the nose.
Irvine had had quite enough by now. The sickness of heroin deprivation was starting to kick in; he had better things to do than stand here arguing with some Inuit radge. He made a break for the window, but the old bastard was quick for a fat cunt. The two of them tussled in front of the Christmas tree, like World Championship Wrestling by fairylight, their four feet - Nike trainers, black Wellingtons - stamping dangerously close to the piles of gaudy, fragile presents.
'Take care, idjøt!' growled Santa. 'If dese töys break tomorrow ønder foots of childrens, is OK. If dey break now, I hit yü face.'
Irvine tore himself out of the old man's grip. A small gift-box exploded underfoot, squirting pink fluid and shards of red plastic all over the carpet. A shampoo lid in the shape of a comic superhero's head skittered against the far wall. Father Christmas swung one big horny fist through the air and clocked Irvine on the forehead, knocking him flat.
Irvine struggled to sit up, troubled by a psychedelic hallucination of tiny reindeer circling his face. Santa was busy unloading the CDs from the backpack. Fuck! his hard-earned CDs, being taken away from him, as surely as a drug dealer melts away at the first glimpse of the law. Irvine's guts were giving him hell. This was hardcore unfairness going down here.
'Gies a break, granddad. Ah need smack a loat more n these cunts need thir possessions.'
'Is Chrissmas, Irvine,' the old man reminded him. 'Is when de giftlets is gived, not when dey is taken away. Jøy tø de wörld, dat's de idea.'
'Ya self-important old cunt!' exploded Irvine. 'Joy tae the world? A fuckin orgy ae consumerism! Cash registers ringin fae a bunch ae shite naebody needs! Look at it!' He kicked the remains of the novelty shampoo bottle in disgust. 'Are ye gonny tell me it's nae crap?'
Santa Claus straightened up, and for the first time he looked weary. 'Yes, is crep,' he said. 'Crep is what dey asks me før. Yü want I giff dem bøx set of Shakespir? Sagas øf Iceland? Dese smøl childrens for Chrissake, and dis Chrissmas. Crep for everybødy! Yø Hø Hø!'
Wholly recovered from his moment of doubt, Santa was in bluster mode again, his booming voice back to full volume. Irvine was struck for the first time by how peculiar it was that no one else in the house seemed to have heard all this shouting, or the sounds of their struggle. Maybe this old Eskimo cunt was a serial killer, and, upstairs, bits and pieces of middleclass family were scattered all over the bedrooms like the meat counter at Safeway.
'Are ye gonny let me go, old man?' he panted.
'Sure I let yü go,' beamed Santa, exposing three or four white yellow in the expanse of brown gum. 'But first, I giff yü a giftlet.'
'A what?'
'Yür Chrissmas present, Irvine. Is Chrissmas, yes?'
And, to Irvine's astonishment, he conjured a small, brightly-wrapped box out of nowhere, and shoved it into Irvine's hands.
'Heppy Chrissmas, idjøt!'
'What is it?' The box weighed next to nothing; but then, a hypodermic filled with heroin is almost weightless.
'Yü sink I giff yü mörfine?' bawled the old man, reading Irvine's mind. 'I Farter Chrissmas, not drøk smøkkler! Is proper present, idjøt! Is güüd for yü!' And, with a delirious flash of crimson and a loud whoosh, he was gone, sucked up the chimney like a plum into a vacuum cleaner.
Irvine was left there, in the debris-strewn living room of a stranger's house, to unwrap his present. He might as well check out what the fuck it was before getting back to the serious business of theft. Contemptuously, he tore at the prissy coloured paper. He could hardly wait to confirm that this present was shite, a cheapskate bauble shat out of the arsehole of Western capitalism, an insult. Life had always flushed him down the toilet and then asked him to be grateful for any half-rancid scraps he might salvage from the ---
Irvine's jaw dropped. The last of the wrapping paper had fallen away from his gift.
His gift.
Contrary to all his expectations, it was just what he'd always wanted, just what he'd always needed. It was the thing that would have consoled him when he was a child, the thing he had always been denied. Even in his most soothing moments, during the last ten years of hell - say, when the sweet taste of heroin first suffused his bloodstream - this was what he would rather have had. Blinking hard to stop his vision blurring with tears, Irvine cupped his present in his hands, feeling it warm his insides, right through to his heart.
'Take care!' the voice of Santa floated down to him, spooky and affectionate, through the wind and snow. 'Idjøt!'
Michel Faber has written seven other books, including the highly acclaimed The Crimson Petal and the White, The Fahrenheit Twins and the Whitbread-shortlisted novel Under the Skin. The Apple, based on characters in The Crimson Petal and the White, was published in 2006. He has also written two novellas, The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (2001) and The Courage Consort (2002), and has won several short-story awards, including the Neil Gunn, Ian St James and Macallan. Born in Holland, brought up in Australia, he now lives in the Scottish Highlands.
