The Night Before the Christmas Before I Was Married & Other Festive Tales by Adam Maxwell

The Night Before The Christmas Before I Was Married
    I t’s difficult to explain, I suppose, how I ended up here in the middle of a crowded shopping centre covered in blood and punching Santa Claus repeatedly in the face with security guards running towards me. Quite surprisingly, it’s a much shorter story than you would imagine.

    Home for the holidays. You meet people. People you know, people you once knew, people you have tried hard to no longer know.

    I was on High Street cutting through the crowds like a drunken elf through a bottle of brandy when it stared;

    Prod. Prod. Prod.

    I kept weaving and walking through the masses, trying to work out what it was I was supposed to be buying for Aunty Betty but it kept at me.

    Prod. Prod. Proooooooooooood.

    I stopped in front of a window displaying a cacophony of confectionary and absently brushed at my shoulder. The prodding stopped and was almost instantly replaced by a tongue in my ear.

    “I can’t believe you did that in front of all those people,” I said, dumping two steaming cinnamon latte’s on the table of the coffee house we found ourselves in a few minutes later.

    Christine laughed in that way I remembered and we started talking about when we used to be together. She wasn’t anything like I remembered her being, not the girl I had built up in my mind. Not the girl I had made the decision to dump because… I couldn’t remember exactly. She linked arms with me when we finally left the coffee house and it felt good. Natural. Christmassy.

    I smiled and it started to snow. Really snow, flurries of the stuff billowing like bastard duvets from the sky. We took shelter in a doorway and Christine leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, her perfume was intoxicating and I should never have let her but it’s always retrospect that gives you clarity isn’t it?

    So that’s us - freezing, huddled in a doorway, snow trying it damnedest to bury us where we stood, my lips brush her forehead, my hands so cold that my thumb-ring drops to the ground. I stooped to pick it up and then the next thing I know I’m relating the story to my brother.

    “Only you could manage to get engaged to Crazy Christine?” he howls with derisive laughter.

    “I don’t think I said anything,” I said, and scratched at my earlobe. “She did all the talking.”

    “It takes a special talent to pull off something as mindblowingly stupid as this having only been in the city for,” he looked at his watch. “Five hours is it?”

    “Four and a half,” I said, reaching for the mulled wine. I had a feeling I was going to need it.

    In all honesty it’s unlikely that the mulled wine fuelled our actions. It’s more likely it was the Stella Artois or perhaps the Cabernet Sauvignon. Either way the alcohol hit me nearly as hard as I knew my actual fiancée would hit me when she arrived the next day and found out I had handed the ring she bought me for my birthday to an ex-girlfriend.

    I had a feeling it was going to get awkward.

    And I was right.

    The doorbell rang and it was Christine. My brother shoved me forward to deal with the situation and, fuelled by alcohol and a resulting lack of self-consciousness I knew I could deal with the situation.

    “I don’t love you,” I blurted. “I didn’t even propose you crazy bitch, why would I?”

    Never, ever call a woman a crazy bitch when she really is a crazy bitch.

    And never, ever, ever call a crazy bitch a crazy bitch when you are standing with your legs slightly parted and partially arseholed. She raised her knee with a practiced precision rendering me speechless and gasping for air on the carpet.

    “Don’t think you can get away with this,” she leant down, hissing the words close into my ear so specks of her saliva caught in the tiny hair inside. “When Daddy hears about this… ”

    “Gnnnnng?” I tried to say.

    “Do you know what a shotgun wedding is?” She grabbed the ring she had taken from me and shoved it into my