to our own festive devices. We woke late as we’d been working the previous night and after a late breakfast of tea and fags we phoned our respective friends and families to wish them ‘all the best’. This brought on a lump in the throat and a melancholia in both of us that required a quick nip of our respective tipples to help banish the blues and restore a sense of festive good cheer, no matter how forced and artificial.
Hush, determined to have a traditional Christmas lunch, pulled out all the stops and produced a meal that could’ve sustained the entire village during a ten-day siege, should one have occurred. Following this indigestion-inducing blowout we exchanged gifts, a Ben Sherman shirt for me and a red and black lumberjack jacket I’d bought in Huddersfield Market for Hush. Wearing paper hats from the crackers we’d pulled, we sat, bored out of our minds, watching Morecambe and Wise on the black and white telly.
After a while we decided to go for a walk to try and stir ourselves. The village was deserted and covered in a thin layer of frost and ice, Christmas trees twinkled in front-roomwindows and from somewhere I heard a child imploring her mother to ‘Tell him, Mam, I haven’t had a turn yet.’ A real sense of displacement slowly crept over the pair of us. Everyone in this village belonged here apart from us, they had reasons to be gathered in their front rooms on this Christmas night; Slaithwaite was their home as it had been for generations of families, whereas it certainly wasn’t ours. For us it was only transient, before we packed up and moved on to somewhere else.
But to where, I wondered silently, and when?
I was seriously beginning to question this rootless existence with very few responsibilities and if, for once, I was truly honest with myself I knew that we couldn’t go on living like this indefinitely. The piper, to quote my ma, would very soon have to be paid.
We wandered over to the canal path. It was eerily silent now by the water and the pang of loneliness in the pit of the stomach we’d experienced earlier in the day started to gnaw again.
‘What the hell are we doing here?’ Hush suddenly said, breaking the silence, his icy breath mingling with the smoke of his cigarette in the cold night air.
‘We were going for a walk,’ I said numbly, staring absently into the canal at a shopping trolley that was not fully submerged and had a length of emerald-green tinsel wrapped around the handle.
‘No, I mean in bloody Slaithwaite. I miss London, oooh how I miss it so,’ Hush literally mooed, the sad and lonely low of a homesick cow who’d suddenly realized it was in the wrong field.
‘Well, I don’t,’ I lied. ‘There’s a lot more work up here and it’s better paid and besides we’ve got nowhere to live inLondon. Best hold out here till we’ve saved a few bob and can afford to go back.’
‘I can’t stop panicking about the future,’ he suddenly blurted out, panicking me in the process. We normally didn’t disclose our more personal feelings to each other so I was quite surprised at this unexpected admission, having arrogantly assumed that he had come to accept this strange lifestyle of ours, adapting to it extremely well. On the surface he was quietly confident, even-tempered and sensible, dealing with the pitfalls of life with a philosophical shrug of the shoulder. Hush was Old Reliable, always there to create magic by turning a cheap nylon wig into a towering con fection of curls and waves that defied all laws of gravity. He was someone who thought nothing of whipping out his machine and running you up a magnificent creation out of two and a half yards of lurex in under an hour. He was also someone who in all probability was taken for granted.
Still waters run deep, unplumbed, unfathomable depths in Hush’s case, so deep there were fish with massive teeth and luminous antennae hanging off their heads swimming about down there.
‘I’ve had enough,’ Hush
Hush, determined to have a traditional Christmas lunch, pulled out all the stops and produced a meal that could’ve sustained the entire village during a ten-day siege, should one have occurred. Following this indigestion-inducing blowout we exchanged gifts, a Ben Sherman shirt for me and a red and black lumberjack jacket I’d bought in Huddersfield Market for Hush. Wearing paper hats from the crackers we’d pulled, we sat, bored out of our minds, watching Morecambe and Wise on the black and white telly.
After a while we decided to go for a walk to try and stir ourselves. The village was deserted and covered in a thin layer of frost and ice, Christmas trees twinkled in front-roomwindows and from somewhere I heard a child imploring her mother to ‘Tell him, Mam, I haven’t had a turn yet.’ A real sense of displacement slowly crept over the pair of us. Everyone in this village belonged here apart from us, they had reasons to be gathered in their front rooms on this Christmas night; Slaithwaite was their home as it had been for generations of families, whereas it certainly wasn’t ours. For us it was only transient, before we packed up and moved on to somewhere else.
But to where, I wondered silently, and when?
I was seriously beginning to question this rootless existence with very few responsibilities and if, for once, I was truly honest with myself I knew that we couldn’t go on living like this indefinitely. The piper, to quote my ma, would very soon have to be paid.
We wandered over to the canal path. It was eerily silent now by the water and the pang of loneliness in the pit of the stomach we’d experienced earlier in the day started to gnaw again.
‘What the hell are we doing here?’ Hush suddenly said, breaking the silence, his icy breath mingling with the smoke of his cigarette in the cold night air.
‘We were going for a walk,’ I said numbly, staring absently into the canal at a shopping trolley that was not fully submerged and had a length of emerald-green tinsel wrapped around the handle.
‘No, I mean in bloody Slaithwaite. I miss London, oooh how I miss it so,’ Hush literally mooed, the sad and lonely low of a homesick cow who’d suddenly realized it was in the wrong field.
‘Well, I don’t,’ I lied. ‘There’s a lot more work up here and it’s better paid and besides we’ve got nowhere to live inLondon. Best hold out here till we’ve saved a few bob and can afford to go back.’
‘I can’t stop panicking about the future,’ he suddenly blurted out, panicking me in the process. We normally didn’t disclose our more personal feelings to each other so I was quite surprised at this unexpected admission, having arrogantly assumed that he had come to accept this strange lifestyle of ours, adapting to it extremely well. On the surface he was quietly confident, even-tempered and sensible, dealing with the pitfalls of life with a philosophical shrug of the shoulder. Hush was Old Reliable, always there to create magic by turning a cheap nylon wig into a towering con fection of curls and waves that defied all laws of gravity. He was someone who thought nothing of whipping out his machine and running you up a magnificent creation out of two and a half yards of lurex in under an hour. He was also someone who in all probability was taken for granted.
Still waters run deep, unplumbed, unfathomable depths in Hush’s case, so deep there were fish with massive teeth and luminous antennae hanging off their heads swimming about down there.
‘I’ve had enough,’ Hush
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