Just like? It was

"It started to snow

And you said it was like Christmas.

But you were wrong,

It wasn't like Christmas at all"

Just Like Christmas, Low

Content Warning:

Menace

Transcript

Just Like? It was 

Driving to an uncertain location to collect the turkey, the thing which feels the furthest away is snow. A white christmas feels like such an impossibility that you wonder where the idea even came from, how it took hold. There has never been a white christmas; it has only ever been a dream- that’s what you tell yourself as you are driven down uncertain roads to this uncertain location, this undisclosed location where turkeys have been slaughtered, plucked, gutted and frozen, where they await purchase, where one of their bald number awaits being placed in the boot of your car, driven home, and stored in the fridge (a sizeable space has already been cleared for it). In the fridge, this turkey shall await christmas day, (so called), come which time it shall be roasted in the oven and eaten by the family, and by a few invited members of the extended family.

The roads wind on and on, quieter and quieter, more and more untravelled by foot or tyre. The world becomes more unspoiled but somehow bleaker. Beneath the severe skies, bare and lifeless fields range wide. Hedgerows lining both sides of the road conceal them for a while. Then the hedgerows shrink into the ground, revealing the sparseness, the expanses they lately hid. Sometimes there is a house, an isolated homestead, no washing hanging from the line in the garden. You see bales of hay, tightly bagged. You see the tentacled, cuttlefish carcass of a combine harvester. 

At this remove, none of the houses, (the few houses), have christmas lights. Good. You dislike christmas lights, intensely. Far-off, standing where the fields rise like sea waves, you catch sight of the occasional scarecrow. But you can’t make out its features. You see only a hoisted, man-shaped shape which clearly isn’t a man. 

Mother is driving the old car. She is the only one who can drive. (After many years, your dad is learning but of the three available descriptors the instructor uses to describe the progress of each of his pupils, (fast, medium, slow), your dad has been given an unambiguous slow). 

She is so small and old, mother. Sitting behind her, you are becoming more and more aware of just how gaunt and timid she is, how small and narrow her shoulders- even in her puffy, blue coat. Especially in her puffy, blue coat. How tense and inelegant she is at the steering wheel. The car rumbles along. The ground shudders, loudly, up through the tyres. 

Many people speak of christmas with a kind of breathless reverence. They call it their favourite time of the year. In town, green and red and white and gold all burst out in celebration, like clockwork, a few days before the end of every November. You wonder at the secular sacredness of things associated with christmas. To play a christmas song in the summer, to watch a christmas film carries, for most people, such a jarring disquiet. You suppose that sex and darkness can be smeared onto it with impunity in a way they can’t onto the genuinely sacred. Serial killer Santa, a slutty elf. Whatever floats their boat, you suppose. 

People even talk of christmas, sometimes, as being the only time of the year they enjoy, the only time during which much of what they cherish about life seems present to them, at all. 

For you, it is a different story altogether. This time of year is the only time of the year when you feel truly alienated. 

In your mind, the word “christmas” is lowercase. It is too far away from its namesake to be capitalised. The significant first syllable is powerless to capitalise it. It is a word for a time of year, late December. That’s all it describes. Whatever else it describes, or once described, has never happened. In your mind.     

It is the heart of the winter; the winds are very bitter. Somehow you know this, even from inside the car.

Mother and father are not speaking to one another. Between them is that frosty silence you recognise so immediately as the silence they inflict upon one another when they’ve just had a row. It’s an involuntary and yet unconquerable silence. Words are possible but they must be laconic, must be just a little stiff and over-courteous. The character of that silence is loud in the little car. Today, the silence is even barer, even more naked, the utterances even fewer.

They did, in fact, have an argument that morning. It was about Christmas lights. Mother bought some new Christmas lights and put them up. Father feels that he should have been consulted, that the red they glow is too alarming, too angry. He should have been consulted, he still thinks. That he thinks this mystifies and angers mother.

Father’s clawed hand reaches for something. It crawls forth from its sleeve and feels about for something in the area between the seats, your side of the handbrake. You cannot see your father’s face, and you cannot see your mother’s face. You glance to your right where a brother or a sister might be. But there is nobody sitting there. Only an empty space, the window unblocked. The hand before you clutches at something, blindly. It returns to the front of the car, holding something.

The CD player makes a noise of ejection. The radio interjects briefly. A vicar-voiced man is preaching in an echoey space. From his tone it is clear, though only fleetingly, that he is speaking to many people, to many listening ears. Even from that small, platitudinous snippet, which you catch imperfectly and which you forget almost instantly, you derive irritation. It is the irritation of hearing people say things which you know they don’t believe. The world is parched with a stubborn frost, the earth as dry and starved as if it had been scorched by fire. Looking at it, it is hard to believe that it has any kind of past, that anything ever happened there. When they leave so little trace, it is impossible to verify- let alone grant any credence- many of the things that some people say happened, once. At least the religious say grand things, at least the things they claim to believe in have a little stature about them, a far-fetched impressiveness. The things the politicians claim to believe in are so invariably paltry. 

The CD your father’s hand has fetched up from the floor begins playing in the CD player. There is a rhythmic jingling of bells, then a bar of syncopated percussion, then a strange thud. You recognise all of this, immediately. Then, without realising it has begun, you hear a sound you can’t identify. It sounds a little like a piano but only a little. It is lower, it booms with a different resonance to the piano, it is more metallic, it produces these honkey-tonk-like vibrations. Then the voice comes through, feminine but not high, crystal clear. Kindly. The voice has something to say and you are glad that it is saying it to you. This is only an illusion of course but you are able to believe it, for a while. 

On our way from Stockholm

It started to snow

You have heard this song many times. You have listened to it, obsessively. Not because it especially interests or dazzles you but because, for a time, it nourished something in you. It was like a teat and you clung to it, an addict. Through dizzying, blurring repetitions the song’s wellspring has dried up, and it is no longer capable of providing what it once provided. But the memory is still there. It is still able to remind you of a time when it was capable of fortifying you, of feeding you. 

And you said it was like Christmas.

But you were wrong.

It wasn’t like Christmas at all.

Maybe there’s still something there, something quickening. You have occasionally observed this, that a song that no longer satisfies you when you listen to it alone is capable of new life when you listen to it among other people. You are a vampiric listener. You suck the sweets of other people’s unfamiliarity, you feast on people’s being a little surprised or touched by a song you have heard too many times. You have even, sometimes, listened to this song in March, in August!

By the time we got to Oslo

The snow had gone

And we got lost.

The beds were small,

But we felt so young:

It was just like Christmas

And from there, on the track, the story is finished and a feeling takes over from the miniature narrative. Voice and music link arms, they iterate it over and over again, this refrain, its former vacuity replaced with a meaning which seems to mount and then recede and then swell again.   

It was just like Christmas

It was just like Christmas

Your mother and father are still sitting there. They sit very still. They seem unmoved by the song. They are not unmoved. But you see only their stillness silhouetted against the grey world, the backs of their woolly-hatted heads.

You are moved, saddened, and ultimately embittered by the song. Its words describe a scene unknown to you. You believe in it so fervently; you are so convinced by its gentle sense of epiphany. At first. But then you start to encounter it as something foreign, something alien, something which happened to somebody else, once, but may not happen again. It certainly shall not happen to you.      

You are still driving come nightfall. You are not driving, you are being driven. The journey has not yet ended. You wonder if you shall ever reach the farm, the dark forbidding farm where the turkeys are, the shed where the birds are stacked, where feathered others hang upside down by their sharp, thin feet. The lifeless stables. Maybe a dog: a vicious, snarling dog, trying to leap free of its chain. The drive continues. 

The night is black, starless to the point of fantasy, of hallucination. You have never looked out of a car window and seen a night so starless. Is there anything sadder in the world than a car window? than the view it shows? Various opacities darkly huddle and rub against each other. The headlights throw light upon the road ahead, more of those little lanes that wind and go on winding. Other than the lights of the car you are in, there is no source of light that you can see. People are sleeping in their houses, the windows curtained, lightless. Mother and father are dark and silent in the front of the car. On the steering wheel, you can see one of your mother’s hands, gloved and little and childlike. The car seems to be driving on its own, the sound of the engine has diminished to the faintest purr. The car seems to journey without human input, human will. 

Mother and father’s silence is deeper, deader now. They aren’t saying anything and there is nothing they would like to say. Except for the tyres and the engine, it is silent in the car. Uninhabited. No human noise. There is no music playing. The CD player’s tiny screen shows the time, in lurid digital digits, white on blue: Hour: 22; Minutes: 26; (the seconds are ever moving with time’s constant flux; the second-column is never still).

Imprisoned by such a silence on all sides, you are afraid of the sound of your own voice, how it will sound. The silence: it is so unignorable, so highly-strung! You do not dare to speak, to ask where you are being taken. 

You cannot account for how much time has passed, for how far you have been driven. You must have fallen asleep. But for how long were you asleep? You still believe that you are being driven to collect the turkey, the turkey for christmas day, that the collection of that great big bird, packaged and boxed and reasonably priced, is the purpose of this excursion. You continue to believe that you, your mother, your father, are united in the same purpose- despite how seldom- how little it has been discussed.

At last the car stops. It doesn’t slow to a gradual halt, it stops abruptly. The car has stopped by a dark building, a small, brick building with a thatched roof. A bird you cannot identify darts under the eaves. There must be a nest there. 

Your father turns on the car radio. Sibilant interference issues noisily from the small speaker. Rolling the dial, rolling through the channels and frequencies, it becomes apparent that things are not right. Not right or…not normal, not as they usually are. Voices come through the radio, spectral, uncertain, raucous. They are shouting. What you can hear are shouts, human shouts. But they do not panic you. They are full of joyful exclamation, full of wonder and gratitude and excitement. But so muffled and far-off. They have nothing to do with you, whatever animates them shall surely never animate you. 

Your parents exit the car and you follow them. The chill in the air stings your cheeks. It nips, at first. Then it stops nipping; you adjust. The world is full, utterly full of the same sharp, taut hush. It permeates everywhere, and everything.   

Finally you speak, you call after them. But they do not hear you. You are following your parents, their two joined, darkened souls, calling after them. You hear a mutter from the eaves. You hear an owl. Two owls, their call and response knit into the haunting, nighttime peace-cry of a single animal.

And then, at last, it appears, high over your head, your heads. You do not notice it at first. What you notice, instead, is a rumbling of feet, a distant cacophony of voices like so many seagulls, or geese gaggles. They crescendo, they come closer, they arrive. With mounting intensity, like sexual excitation or rage, like an assembling, irrepressible mob of blood within the flesh, the great throng looms under the ghostly, gorgeous light of that enormous star. They are all looking up, allowing their up-cast gaze to lead them.   

At last, you notice it. Your parents don’t seem to notice it. Or perhaps they have already noticed it, perhaps they have been following it all their lives. Or at least since darkness fell.  

At last you can hear my voice.

Proceed to the dark building. You do. You overtake your parents. They let you overtake them. They follow behind. There’s something in the building. Something of interest. Something to see here. 

In the darkness, you sense strutting shapes. These uncertain forms cluck, and sometimes they gabble. 

Do not be afraid. Open the door.

You begin to. For a moment, you think you see outstretched arms, the wrists roped, the body hanging from ropes. You think you see a decapitation block, the glint of some blade made for slaughter. But you are quickly invaded and overwhelmed by an immense whiteness, a glow radiating out from something on the ground. And, instead of the silence of the dead, the building fills with the sound of a baby crying, dauntless and passionate. Across the fields they are coming. The others. They are going to join you. I await them with pleasure.   

The door creaks open, further. I look up and I see three grim, inquisitive beings, shyly entering this building. It is you, and your family: you, and your mother, and your father. There is not a dead thing in sight and your faces burn with the exquisite, flammable radiance of my light.