THE LAST NOEL
He walks the streets to find a tree; it’s no use, no, the day is nothing
without a tree. And it must be the right kind of tree. The word on his mind is fulsome. The
word on his mind is plump. The word on his mind is proportioned. A spruce or
grand fir, potted with damp earth, decked with paperchains and popcorn, a fresh
blast of pine from the sharp of its needles. Once he had stood atop a kind of crow’s
nest, over the square, looking down on the crowds and started the countdown. At
its end, he hit a red button to light up the Norwegian Spruce, the coos and ahs
reaching him in waves of childlike delight. What a sight, that tree. What a sight.
No use, no; the day is nothing without a tree.
He crosses the river, the trench where once it flowed, and
looks in every car he passes, though he knows them well and not one has a tree lain across its backseats. Once, inside a
Jaguar, he found a cigar and lit it just for the smell, the memory of
leather-backed chairs and cognac; of men talking, gently drunk and half-eyed at
the end of dinner. He would like to find a cigar today, but there isn’t even a
cigarette or a book of matches in the fourteen abandoned vehicles. He knows this,
but he looks anyway.
Mother used to bring him, the first week of December, into
the city on the train. They would disembark and walk the teeming streets: the
hats and umbrellas, the smell of chestnuts and damp cloth. She held his hand
tightly and took him to department stores and boutiques, allowed him to carry
the bags, the cardboard ones with tissue paper inside his favourite, the strong
smell of sprayed perfume lingering on his skin as, at the end of the day, they
rode the rails out east, the two of them strap-hanging, the bags clenched
between his legs.
He walks up the Charing Cross Road, its slight incline and
remembers strip joints and peepshows, cars which took him from one bar to
another, then out to Surrey. He has long since found the last surviving sex
shops and looted all the magazines that interest him. By Any Amount of Books, he
remembers a woman he once knew, a woman who had once— Stop
now. He says this out loud. Stop now. No
past, no remembrance. A tree. He
shouts. A tree, that’s all. I have
come for a tree and I will not leave without a tree. I will not be denied.
Inside one of the bookstores, somewhere, there could be a
tree. But these shops are a last resort; their trees, if they have any at all,
will be puny little things, small and dusty and without the trimmings. Threaded
tinsel, at best. To his left, Chinatown. No trees to be seen there. Lanterns, perhaps.
One day he might need lanterns. Once there was a lantern bobbing from a string,
inside a restaurant; a wife, his wife, telling of an affair. How these things
come to one, just from the saying of a word.
Tree, tree, come out,
come out, wherever you are!
He jumps over the bonnet of a black cab. A tic now. A
superstition. If he sees one on his side of the road, he feels he must vault
it. It slows his progress, but at least he does not think of lanterns or strip
joints. Charing Cross Road meets Oxford Street and Noel now realizes where he is heading. He has decided on the place that surely will have a tree. Even after
everything that has happened, perhaps because of it, Noel believes he has agency.
Noel believes he can manipulate the world, can bend it
to his will. He has said many times that there is no such thing as death. And in
this, at least in his case, he has proved himself correct. He is therefore
certain that John Lewis will have, somewhere in its rooms and halls, a tree.
There is no need to look elsewhere, duck into what was once HMV, or Tower
Records. Energy in the body, unlike the mind, is limited. One must focus
instead. Energy burns but lightly when focused.
He takes some jerky from his
pocket and chews as he walks. He passes a McDonald’s outside of which he was
once mobbed. That’s what they said in the papers, but it was only five people,
and at least one of them had called him a bearded twat. He cannot recall the
year it happened. A million lifetimes before at least.
He has seen this street more often from a helicopter than at
pavement-level. To his knowledge he has never taken a bus along the road. He can
not recall the last time he rode a bus. He jumps aboard an open-doored 73.
There were clippies when he was young, uniformed and ready with a smack round the
ear for cheek. The buses smelled of metal and ash, grime in the upholstered seats.
This 73 smells of plastic and rot, the floor sticky with what once was drink.
He gets off the bus. He vaults a lone taxi and slows his pace until he stops
outside the grand façade of John Lewis. Its doors are open, wedged. It welcomes
him. You have come for the trees, Noel,
it says. The trees are here and waiting
for you.
To be positive, one needs strategy. Noel has strategy. On
his gameshow, he talked a lot about strategy, about how it can buy you good fortune. His strategy
is to start at the back of the top floor and work hise way to the front, then move down a floor if need be. The stores are at the top of the
building, he believes, and so this is the perfect strategy to deliver a tree. Not
just any tree: the perfect tree. Not some wire coated in silver streamers, but
a tree that looks like a tree. Branches and roots: something convincing.
He perspires after the hectic leap up the emergency stairs. The first five rooms are full of clothes. The sixth has
kitchen equipment. These are the wrong kind of stores. This is stock. He pulls out some
more jerky from a pocket and chews as he upends boxes too small to contain a
tree of any sort. He kicks a few things, they skid across the linoleum. In one
room he throws eighteen red-wine glasses against a wall, only stopping when a
shard of crystal grazes his cheek. Positive.
He says this out loud. Be positive.
Five hours and Noel is on the ground floor. He heads to the
back of the store and pushes open double doors. There are mannequins, faceless,
but with breasts, faceless but with bulges at the crotch. With one he dances, just
a quick minuet, then pushes one of them to the floor. He kicks it so hard its head comes away. He watches the head roll towards a cluster of
child models and stop like a football at the shin of a child wearing winter
clothes. And behind the boy, there is the tree. He can see it, just behind some
metal cages, just a tip of a branch, just enough to announce itself.
Noel
pushes everything aside. The tree is the same height as him, and has a fur of
fake snow on some of its needles. The frame is dark and wood covered; perfectly
believable. It stands, eventually, after some wrangling, fulsome and plump and
proportioned. He touches the tree and it even feels real. Beside it is a box.
There are paperchains and tinsel, fairy lights, and an assortment of
gingerbread men, angels and penguins. The box goes under one arm, the tree
under the other. He is hot but will not take off his layers. He pauses by the
exit of the shop. He takes in a long breath and lets it longly pass.
I’ve got the tree,
he shouts. I have the tree. Look. I have
the tree!
Back on Oxford Street he does not vault the taxis and does
not turn back down Charing Cross Road. He has a tree and at the junction of New
Oxford Street and Holborn, he knows what must do with it.
He walks the streets. He does not know them as well as he
thought. Cars and crew always bringing him; one year the helicopter. He circles
his destination for some time, but then remembers a street corner and knows he
has arrived.
The hospital is a kids’ hospital. For years, he spent
every Christmas Day there. With the kids. With the crew. Delivering presents
for the dying, the almost dead, the getting better. The emotion always got to
him. Every year the break in his voice, the slight nudging away of a tear as
the credits rolled. They cancelled the show via fax, one July afternoon. In a
rage he called the Director General of the BBC and demanded to know the reason.
They don’t believe your tears, the
Director General had said. Noel, they
think you’re faking it.
Noel walks to the wards where the sickliest of children slept: their drawings still taped to the walls, their coloured blocks and dollies
on the floor. The kids never thought he was faking. Never them.
He looks out of the window, out over the city. He dresses
the tree the same way he always has, with as much on each bough as possible. He
does not have the Santa suit, but he can remember how it felt, the scratch of
the beard on his beard. He stands in front of the tree and he remembers the moment
when he surprised the children. The way their eyes extended, stalked out, then
came back in, punctuated by squeals. The way the strength returned for a moment
as they ripped away the paper to reveal a present. Something expensive,
something to make the world feel a righter place. It made him feel alive. He
watched them and felt a tremor that connected him to every person on earth. And
they said he was faking it.
He puts the angel on the top of the tree. It is a
magnificent tree, the finest he has ever seen. He turns to ask the little boys
and girls if they would like to join him in a carol. As always, they all scream
yes. He hears their cracked, off-key voices join his in ‘Hark! The Herald Angel
Sing’ and the chorus of voices shakes the boughs of the tree. Noel cries as he sings, cries and thinks of all the boys and girls. All of teh boys and girls getting better, being well, and not being here next Christmas.
