As a little Christmas present for my readers, here is an extract from my book ‘Sisters’.  To set the scene, main character, 20-year-old Hazel, has brought her girlfriend Annie to spend Christmas with her mums, Deb and Martine, her big sister Róisin and her much younger sisters Danielle (almost 2) and Sofie (called ‘Monster’ in the family, not quite 4).  Gaia is the Mums’ Spanish au-pair.  Annie is recovering from a serious illness. Buh, is Sofie’s beloved teddy bear.

The ‘Cottage’, Chippenden Road, Wyeburn.  4:40 p.m. Saturday, 24th December, 2005.

            “This is the way the gentleman rides,” crooned Annie, “a gallop, a gallop, a gallop!”

            Little Dannie almost shrieked with delight as Annie’s knee jolted up and down beneath her in a fair imitation of the ride of a galloping horse.  Dannie was besotted.

            “This is the way the lady rides,” Annie giggled, with Dannie’s fascinated eyes locked on hers, “a trot, a trot, a trot!”

            Dannie had found a new game and she loved it.  She held Annie’s hands firmly, as if they really were the reins of a horse, while beneath her Annie’s knee became the mounts of a bewildering variety of people from the Parson and farmer, to the merchant, whose horse went ‘a clink, a clink, a clink!’ because of all the money bags.  But there was one character the little one couldn’t get enough of.

            “Do dunk,” she demanded.  “Gen, gen, do dunk!”

            “You want the drunkard again?” Annie giggled.  “We only just had him once.”

            “Gen, gen, gen, do dunk!”

            Gaia looked nervous once more.  She was on the edge of her seat ready to intervene if things went wrong and she needed to rescue her charge.  She really wasn’t sure that a woman capable of forgetting who she was for two years should be allowed to play rough with her baby, even if Debbie-mum persisted in thinking that Dannie was her baby really and seemed perfectly at ease with the situation.

            “OK then, you asked for it,” grinned Annie, quietly shifting her grip from Dannie’s hands to her waist.  “Hold on tight, now.  This is the way the drunkard rides: wuperty-aye, wuperty-aye,” the knee began a distinctly drunken side to side motion, “and ….. into the ditch!” whereupon Annie’s leg straightened into a steep slide, so that Dannie shot backwards towards the floor until deftly caught and restored to her mount.

            Gaia relaxed again while Dannie clapped her hands, giggling hysterically.  Sofie looked up indulgently from drawing on a pad lying on the floor, prepared to tolerate such childishness in a sister who, after all, was still less than two years old.  Annie and Danielle had bonded big-time, but Monster remained firmly loyal to the woman she now called simply ‘My girlfriend’.

            It was Christmas Eve and the ‘Cottage’ living room was like Santa’s grotto.  Debbie-mum had always gone overboard with the decorations: a reaction to austere childhood Christmases with parents who thought Scrooge was a bit of a spendthrift even before he met the three ghosts.  But this time, much to her delight, she’d been aided and abetted by a near fanatic.  Because three-year-old Monster had now properly got the hang of Christmas and had egged her Mum-mum on to even greater excess.  In return she’d been positively encouraged to join in.  Marty-mum, in a rash moment, had shown her how to make paper chains out of strips of gummed paper.  I remember Roshie and me making the odd one when we were little.  But Sofie had begun production on an almost industrial scale and woe-betide any Mum who didn’t use every last link.  So the room was positively festooned.  The prime example of what you might call the Monster effect though, was the tree.  As ever, Deb had bought the tallest that would fit.  In fact, she’d had to trim it a bit to stop it hitting the ceiling.  Once it was properly up she and Sofie had really gone to town on its decoration, with six-foot Marty helping with the very top, as she was the only one who could reach.  And now a rather startled looking angel was having to come to terms with the fact that once again, for at least the twentieth year running, she had the top of a prickly pine tree shoved up her dress!  The result was a peculiar multi-layered effect.

            Sofie had clearly gone for the idea of ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it’.  We’d acquired quite a few tree decorations over the years which lived in a couple of large cardboard boxes that spent most of the year asleep in a wardrobe upstairs.  Normally, Deb would bring them down and we’d assemble a tasteful selection before putting the rest back to bed.  But that was not the Monster way.  The result was that any greenery had been totally obscured up to the height a small girl could reach on tiptoes.  Instead, we got a dense mass of tinsel, baubles and other random ornaments, topped off with flashing lights.  Above that, the rest of the tree was a sparser, more restrained affair although as high up as Debbie-mum could reach, there were numerous extra intrusions for which Sofie had pestered and Mum had included for a quiet life, delighted to see her darling joining in with such gusto.  The boxes, meanwhile, had been taken back up virtually empty.  Dannie had tried to take things off again at first, but she eventually got the idea that nice things went on the tree and you weren’t supposed to help yourself.  So whenever Mum wasn’t looking she’d waddle off and reappear with suggestions of her own, including CDs, her socks and on one occasion, much to Monster’s alarm, Buh!

            Sofie had also got her head round something else: on Christmas morning, Santa would come bringing presents.  She definitely liked that idea.  Presents were good: the more the merrier, as far as she was concerned.  Marty-mum had tried to explain to her that there was a catch: only good little girls got presents.  Little girls who were naughty, or who didn’t go to bed when they were told, who annoyed Gaia or, well, insert the sin of your choice!  Those girls got cinders.  Sofie remained unimpressed, partly because against all the evidence she was firmly convinced that she was a good girl and partly, I suspect, because she didn’t actually know what cinders were.  We did have an open fire in the living room, but it hadn’t been lit for some years while we had inquisitive little ones around again, who might not be too cautious or steady on their feet.  Oddly, Monster didn’t seem much interested in what might be in the presents.  She looked blank if you asked her what she’d like for Christmas, or just answered, “Pwesents!”

            “No-one, but absolutely no-one is to buy her a damn drum!” Marty-mum had grumphed at Charlie Hides, the drummer in both of Debbie’s bands.  He’d been my drum teacher and bought me my first drum kit, but Mum had never quite been sure she approved.

            “Noted, Marty,” he grinned.  “Wouldn’t dream …..”

            “Dwum, Dum!” parroted Dannie, with Mum mouthing something to the effect of ‘Oh, Hell!”, but less polite.

            Just at the moment though, Monster was being unusually quiet and while Dannie continued to shriek with excitement with Annie, Sofie lay out on the floor on her tummy with her knees bent so the soles of her feet pointed straight up, and with a pad of paper in front of her.  She had a box of crayons and Buh tucked under her right arm as artistic consultant.

            “What’s that, sweetie?” asked Gaia, staring in puzzlement at the apparently random scribble.

            “Picture,” said Sofie with a look that said very plainly: ‘Are you stupid or what?’  “Iz for Wachel,” she added.

            I looked at my three-year-old sister and wondered, not for the first time, just how old her spirit was.  I remembered when Mr. Granby had explained in Art that pictures didn’t have to be representational.  I’d found it a difficult concept to grasp at first.  But Mr. Granby smiled indulgently and said:

            “It’s simple, girls: pictures and sculptures don’t have to be of anything.  They can just be themselves.  After all, you don’t listen to a piece of music and think ‘What’s that supposed to be?’

            Had Sofie worked that out for herself, or was she just winding up Gaia?

            I was starting to worry about Rosh, though.  The afternoon was wearing on and I caught Marty-mum too repeatedly glancing towards the front door.  She was spending more and more time out walking alone, with company, even me, apparently unwelcome.  She also spent hours closeted in the music room with Debbie-mum.  She always had of course, but now she regularly emerged red of eye as if she’d been crying and Deb had hinted that just at the moment, Annie and I might want to wait to be invited before coming in to jam.

All Saints Church, Wyeburn.  5 p.m. Saturday, 24th December, 2005.

            As the light faded from the December sky, Rosh got home to Marty-mum’s visible relief.  Deb too emerged from the music room and helped Gaia to get out the little ones’ thick winter coats.

            “I’ve got something to show you,” she announced to them happily.  “Shall we walk, or go in the car?”

            Marty-mum and Gaia had obviously been warned about this, but we hadn’t.

            “Would your exercise be up to walking to the church and back?” Deb asked Annie.  “It’s almost exactly half a mile each way.”

            “If I can have a rest when we get there,” she smiled, as Dannie, frustrated of further horse riding fell asleep in a matter of seconds with her head on Annie’s chest.

            “I walk,” insisted Monster as the Mums got out the pushchairs and tried to shoo her off for a precautionary trip to the loo.

            “It’s a bit far, darling,” said Marty-mum, “but I’ll tell you what, you can walk, but we’ll take the chair just in case.”

            Dannie was woken, dressed and buckled in.  Monster got her usual lecture about holding Mummy’s hand when we were by the road, and off we set, all except Gaia who Deb told me later had a special dispensation to use this bit of privacy to ring Jenny.  It was a crisp, dry winter’s afternoon: distinctly cold unless you kept moving.  Annie and I brought up the rear, hand in hand, each giving the other companionable little squeezes as we went.  Monster did rather well.  She got most of the way to the village before she started to flag and eventually allowed herself to be persuaded that maybe riding in style like her little sister might be only fitting.

            What we’d come to see was the church nativity scene and I have to admit it was magical, with half of Bethlehem modelled, not just the usual stable scene, and with the church’s stained-glass windows lit up by the floodlights outside.  Sofie was enthralled, especially when Rosh picked her up for a better view, and Dannie bounced up and down in Marty-mum’s arms, clearly impressed even though she’d no real idea what she was looking at.

            “It’s like a train set with no trains,” grinned Marty.  “Someone’s been to a lot of trouble.  It’s even better than last year.”

            “Der’s a baby,” squeaked Monster excitedly.

            “Babum!” agreed Dannie.

            Annie had a long look with an arm round my waist, but then sat down on a pew for a rest.

            “D’you want me to fetch the car?” I whispered, but she smiled and shook her head.

            “And der’s sheeps,” Sofie continued.

            “Oink!” chimed in Dannie.

            “Nooooo!” exclaimed Sofie, managing to make a two letter word last several seconds.  “Sheepsies don’t go oink, dey go baa, silly.  It’s piggys dat go oink.”

            “Oink!” muttered Dannie with a pout.  “Babum!” she added for good measure.

            It was totally dark when we got back outside, with a good display of stars twinkling overhead and the beginnings of frost on the grass.  We let the others go on, with Monster still chattering happily about the crib.  Annie and I nipped across the village green to the shop and bought, of all things, two choc ices.  Then we sat in the bus shelter, the place where we’d first met, to eat them and for me to smoke a nostalgic cigarette.  I snuggled up with my head on her shoulder.  We both felt it: it was a little bit like the old days when she’d been the confident, older sophisticate and I’d been her little friend, half-honoured just to be in her company.  The tables had turned a bit lately, but somehow this felt so right.

            “I sure wish Mum would ring or email or something,” Annie said after a while.  “I know she’d really had it with me, and I guess I don’t blame her.  But I so hope she and Dad patch things up.”

            There was another long, intimate silence and she pulled me closer when I shivered.

            “Babe,” she said at last.  “Mum was so right when she ripped into me about you.  I can’t even imagine what it was like.  I did that to you, then sulked like a child because you’d tried to recover.  And don’t think I don’t understand what losing Rachel cost you.”

            “Thank you,” I breathed.  “I just hope she finds someone who deserves her, because I sure as hell didn’t.  But just maybe, I deserve you.”

            She grinned that grin of hers, the one I fell for the very first time I saw her, right here on this spot, four long years ago.

            “I so love you Babe,” she whispered, and pulled me into a kiss.