the symbols of non-christmas

The weeks around Christmas were the worst, he had found, the very sludge of life. He purchased several bottles of the cheapest Advocaat and for breakfast took to stirring it with oats and frying it in great panfuls into weird faintly alcoholic cakes which he ate by the plateload swimming in a glaze of melted margarine and uncooked drink. It had been a wet autumn which continued into the winter months, and the fallen leaves in immense flattened piles at the edges of the pavements stuck in slaps to the toes of his shoes like ham on tongues. Some months earlier he had tried his luck with a catholic girl, an attempt he knew to be futile even as it was happening but which he felt powerless to resist, as though some power even higher than his own needs was moving through him as he did so. In fairness he had not known she was a catholic at the time and only gathered this fact later, and immediately regretted - given the catholic perception of adultery - having told her he was married as part of the kind of reverse psychology he had on occasion found would lure women into his bed, and regretted all the more so because he wasn't and indeed never had been. Although they had really only spoken for less than an evening with others also he had taken the loss - if one could call it such, the failure to gain - badly, and in the weeks that followed had tried to assure her that he was in fact not married, that that was the truth, desperately, certainly so, in such a way that gave the opposite all the more credence and elevated his pointlessness to sublime heights. While he did not blame the catholics for his problems per se he also did, her in particular, and when her religious tendencies were clarified through the discreet use of social media (she belonged to several "hip catholic" groups) he was moved to disgust - as though he had been duped in some way, fucked over by Christ (again) - and to an even fiercer level of arousal than he'd originally been, as though she were a conduit with which he could fuck his way into the very heaven in which he categorically did not believe. The fact that he couldn't and indeed wouldn't would soil Christmas, both then and in the future. He yearned to ingest her guilt, her sinfulness, her penance.

The grey sky was embedded and defiant and sneered like a yob at the flat land below and he cursed it, slicing cheddar a centimetre thick from a cheap block with an unsuitable knife and sinking it quick-fast. What happened to white Christmases, snow now superseded by a slew of white goods buried in feet of polystyrene protectors and glistening under halogen like the capitalist festive fantasy. The white that counts is borne of green. He yearned to feel the spirit and crushed a bag of ice in his food processor cocktail fine, which he compressed into solid snowballs between his ungloved palms, but they were so hard they cut the little kid he threw them at in the street outside his house, trying to coax her into the abandon he thought he must have once felt, tore open her cheek and lip and left her bloodied down her face and her dress front in the 12 degree drizzle, the kid's dad swearing at him and spewing threats as he closed the front door behind him, skin of his own fingers split from his grip on the ice. You could report crimes online - it was a feature of the local constabulary website. That's what he'd do, if he was the kid's father. Report it online before you have a chance to calm down, an aggressively recalled fact the most valuable of all. The wonderful thing about the internet is that it wants us to be asocial solipsists - demands it even - and removes the barriers of politeness and etiquette or expectation or emotional subjugation that might otherwise prove problematic in a conventional, functioning, actual community. The catholic had desired him he was sure, he was that kind of person, of appeal to the seriously religious.

He visited his small group of friends, all of whom he despised but saw at least semi-regularly regardless as a break from his own company. They were arranged in a circle – their breaths above them in the darkness like a furnace – in the courtyard garden of their shared terrace property, around a few small but well decorated Christmas trees of some three feet only, the kind of stunted trees they shift at the entrance of supermarkets or from the back of people carriers in the car parks of the grimmer pubs, coins exchanged around e-cigs and house shorts. Each was urinating freely in steaming jets upon the trees and the piss dripped from the branches and the baubles in hot heavy droplets like a grotesque fondue. “Fuckin Christmas,” they were muttering, “fuck you”. He asked them what they were doing and they said they were tired of being nothing so were making symbols of themselves. They all still held their genitals in their fingers as they spoke. He asked symbols of what, exactly, and they said only of non-Christmas. He hadn’t the heart to tell them that replacing nothing with nothing was just nothing, not at this time of year. He left them to it, keen to be gone before they needed to defecate. There was a potent stench of gas in the air from the outlet pipes of combi boilers and the wheelie bins left out back of the houses in the alleyway between streets reeked of rotting foods and chicken carcasses and week old baby shit, decay intensified by the mild weather.

The catholic girl was squat but tender and through recollection alone he tried to will touching her into existence, his hands on and across the legs of her black jeans and her bare ankles, her soft giving flanks and her mainly sound breasts, her part-pocked face and square nose, her golden braid and her Christian ideology. They had embraced on departure, he had stooped to hold her and confront his many errors by way of it, but there had been no further touching. He found memory meant little but as wish fulfilment, truth twisted into hope, the fact of its happening irrelevant – so he thought it to be, so it was, alive by virtue of imagination alone. Her whole mouth looked like it had been painted on to the kiln baked face he clearly remembered holding between his hands though he hadn’t, not the lips alone but the whole ajar structure. They had discussed the flaws of his writing. He found self-deprecation among his greatest assets as a meagre seducer. Though she hadn’t read his work she was quick to offer insight into its failings, took to it impeccably; the painful part was how right she was, just two hours into a one-off conversation, dissecting his entire personality into clearly demarcated issues. You wear your tiny heart on your transparent sleeve, she said ruthlessly, in a way that suggested she liked it. He shrugged in agreement and presumed they were in love. Quite the judge of character. A catholic trait. Guilt and doubt'll do that. He’d seen the cross around her neck but assumed it a fashion accessory. She was mean for Christian and cynical and was cruising for intercourse. Or that might have been him. Was.

The Christmas lights in town made him long to feel warm but not actually feel so and were like golden tears in the murk. The world is a cruel and repugnant place, he said, salivating over electrical goods through well lit windows and imagining using them for their intended purposes, over and over again. He passed a cluster of aged homeless fellows at the fringes of the underpass and considered the season and wanted to dig deep, to somehow appease the entire guilt of the affluent West in one extravagant gesture, but he knew he only had a tenner in his wallet, which was too deep, about two times too deep, he calculated, and besides it was mild. He stuffed his hands in his pockets until his jacket stretched and hastened promptly past. They swore to the tune of "Last Christmas" and he carried it with him for yards.

He took lunch to a bench as he did daily, corned beef, raw onion, cheap mustard, the very worst of food in which he took great relish as though atonement of some sort. As he chewed the food he saw movement at his feet which was some hundred or so live maggots writhing dreadfully upon the crooked paving slabs. Perhaps half of them were red in colour and he immediately blamed the fishermen. Dumb fucks, he thought, carefully lowering his feet onto the maggots that though half-squashed continued to writhe at least parts of their form, stuck to the sole of his shoe. He watched them and felt deep sickness. He dropped the rest of his sandwich amidst them and they turned on it immediately as though it were lush rich death and not the weird muscular composite it in fact was. Their disappointment could be matched only by his own. He could hardly tear his gaze from them. He stamped them frantically until the slab was still with carnage. Dumb fucks, he said again, very loud. He could feel the fishermen encircling him from afar: feet, metres, miles. Dumb fucks.

There was a small group of children gathered in shin-high leaves and squealing with delight in thrall to two apparent leaders, both swollen yobbish types with the faces of their fathers in immense and very expensive trainers of brilliant white that in their obscene excess were like stylised corrective footwear as bloated as the boys themselves – who reeked of Gregg’s and chips and the Rothmans they snuck solo from their mother’s knock-off Louis Vuitton – at the base of their worn school trousers. The two spat compulsively in near-constant sequential flecks that they pushed out with tongues in weird foamy spheres that caught the breeze and spiralled to nought, and smoked incompetently in gushing exhalations that belied their carefully projected experience. Closer to apes than they would ever be again they oversaw the handful of others with a shit unity of high-pitched grunts and odd slaps and with clusters of brilliantly compounded or abbreviated profanity in the accented English that would forever tarnish their futures, condemned to Norfolk and Norfolk alone from the very earliest of ages. As he approached their number they made no effort to move and he no effort to move them, and he walked instead silently into the heavy traffic and the sludgy detritus of the gutterway that he slurped through like spread hands in jelly. There was an injured robin in their midst, dragging itself in circles with one fucked wing, plaintive song it’s only entirely inappropriate protest. He’d assumed them to be playing with milk caps or similar, if children still did that, but they were taking it in turns to stamp upon the injured bird. The yobbish two would have its beak, the trophy, one half each, would wear it on a shoelace like a hallmark of psychopathy. In their accidental symbolism was Christmas destroyed.

In earlier times he had attended his parents place for or around Christmas. They did a three bird roast which he found desperately morose to eat. What I wouldn't give for just a bird, he'd said, with a paper hat drawn low down his forehead. They laughed passionately, assuming it a festive witticism of the kind he had written out as a dull child and not the wretched admission of absolute loneliness it truly was. The myriad poultry jokes of the festive season were as anathema to the isolated: breast, leg, stuffing. He'd mutter the words to himself as he jerked off in the bathroom later, enveloped in the stench of his own three bird shit. Man's gotta do something to keep warm, he'd say when he'd finished, rinsing the tap onto the gathered muck, weeping into his reflection.

At the Cathedral he stood in the cloisters and listened to the readings and the carols through the loudspeakers. There were masses of people gathered around the entrances and into the afternoon like burst blisters, too many to be contained within the cathedral itself, all anxious to experience the real meaning of Christmas and ready to fight for it. One of the antechambers had been given over to the storage of shopping bags; an elderly volunteer issued tickets for money and piled the bags high. He cherished the architecture. He watched a couple wander the labyrinth deep in meditation, grass immersed in the churned mud that coated their shoes thickly. For some moments he envied them and their tranquility but when they reached the centre and embraced and then kissed and he saw the man's hands move to the base of her loose buttocks he knew them to be as he, if happy.

He left to go home and over in the doorway of the closed lobster joint across the road he saw the catholic girl. Perfect, he thought, where else?, though the catholic cathedral was on the other side of town. He felt courageous and exhilarated and as though the world were finally, finally with him. As he approached the doorway he saw within the shadows - the sun already mostly set - some male. He had his arms around the catholic girl and was nuzzling, he supposed, into her neck, as though it were far colder than it was. She was smiling while he did it in a way that alluded to happiness and she angled her face back towards his for a kiss, then turned around and did it further and more elaborately. He was unsure whether she had seen him but assumed she likely had, that this performance was for his benefit, an exemplar of fine lust and of all he hadn't. She was mean for a Christian. The male would probably finger her in the doorway to the lobster joint. That's what he would do. Finger's fine in the eyes of God. That's scripture. Her tan coat rode up as she took to her tiptoes for passion and he saw her jumper beneath, cable knit and pale. It was a very sensual experience. He thought about thigh fucking her in the toilet of a nightclub and his seed shot right up her belly and set off for home.