‘He?’ I replied, pressing the back of my hand against my forehead, confused. ‘He who?’
How had I ended up back in here? I hadn’t gone to sleep in my room last night, I conked out on Satan’s camp bed, burning my backside on the dining-room radiator every time I turned over.
Dad rolled his eyes and rattled his hands on either side of the door. ‘You’re a better lawyer than a comedian. Bacon butties will be ready in five minutes, up and out of bed or I’ll eat them all.’
I stared at him from under the covers. My father was one of the world’s greatest grudge-holders. He still drovetwenty minutes out of his way to get his shirts dry-cleaned because the man at the dry-cleaners in the village ‘looked at him funny’ when he took his trousers in after Cerys’s wedding more than fifteen years ago and tried to explain how they came to be stained after ‘an incident’ with a chocolate fountain. And yet here he was, stood in my bedroom, twelve hours after our fight and grinning from ear to ear.
‘Dad,’ I started. ‘About last night—’
He cut me off with a knowing chuckle. ‘Stay up too late, did we? I did warn you, no one wants to start Christmas day with a hangover. I’ll get Nurofen out.’
‘No, I mean about the work stuff,’ I replied, rubbing my eyes and blinking. It seemed impossible that I didn’t have at least a black eye, but my face wasn’t tender and surely Dad would have mentioned a shiner. ‘I should have talked to you before, I should have told you when it happened and I’m sorry.’
He beamed down at me with the kind of benign, paternal expression that did not belong on the face of a man who had given his daughter a vibrator for Christmas only twenty-four hours earlier, let alone everything else that had happened.
‘Work stuff? What work stuff, chicken?’
‘The stuff about my job?’ I said slowly. ‘About what happened at work?’
Now it was my dad’s turn to look clueless. ‘Gwen, what are you talking about?’
‘Look, no one wants to pretend last night didn’t happen more than me, but you might be taking it a bit far here,’ I replied, trying out a laugh. ‘There’s moving on and there’s complete denial.’
He held his hands out in front of himself to cut me off. ‘Not another word, you don’t have to explain yourself to me.’
I pinched my leg under the covers to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Your mother has forbidden me from haranguing you about work,’ he went on merrily. ‘We can talk about it tomorrow. No work chat on Christmas Day.’
With that, he tipped me a wink and took himself off down the hallway.
‘Oh my God,’ I whispered, shrinking back into the bed. He’s lost his mind. Mum always said me and Cerys would drive him mad but I didn’t think she meant literally.
Dad taking refuge in a fantasy world of denial was one thing but that didn’t explain why I was back in my bed when I’d definitely fallen asleep in the dining room. My heart began to beat a little harder than usual as I looked around, searching for clues. Nothing looked out of place, slippers by the bed, suitcase next to the chest of drawers and my red velvet dress hanging on the front of the wardrobe door.
My pristine, unworn, tags-still-attached, red velvet dress.
I climbed out of bed to inspect the fabric. Flawless. Not a single sign of a tear. It wasn’t possible. Not even Nan could have done this overnight, she was an eighty-three-year-old woman who knew her way around a sewing machine, not one of the mice inSleeping Beauty. Besides, I distinctly remembered pricking myself with the little gold safety pin when I’d pulled off the tags, the same little gold safety pin attached to the dress’s label as though it had never been removed.
This wasn’t good. This wasn’t right.
Reaching under the bed for my phone I flicked the screen into life and felt a cold trickle of icy dread run down my spine. There it was. A brand-new, unread text from Aunt Gloria.Rhiannon Liberty Conners, born at 4.47 a.m. this morning. Mummy and baby doing well, best present we could have wished for!
‘What is happening?’ I muttered, my heart beating faster and faster.
‘Morning,’ Manny appeared in my open doorway, black boxer shorts, reindeer antlers, the same as yesterday. ‘Oof, cuz, you look like shit.’
‘Manny?’ I looked up from my phone, desperate for something to start making some kind of sense. ‘What day is it today?’
‘Today, sir?’ he replied with a terrible cockney accent. ‘Why, it’s Christmas Day.’
The screen of my phone began to blur in front of me and I realized it was because my hands were shaking. ‘It can’t be,’ I breathed as the room began to swim in front of my eyes. ‘Is this some sort of hilarious joke you all cooked up last night? Because it isn’t funny at all.’
‘Yeah, no, it’s Christmas Day,’ he said, showing me the screen on his phone. ‘All day long, whether you like it or not.’
Thankfully I was right beside the bed when my legs buckled underneath me.
‘What’s going on?’ Manny tucked his phone in the waistband of his pants and pressed his hand against my forehead, the tried and tested Baker response to any kind of crisis. ‘Are you ill? You don’t feel feverish.’