I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day - Milly Johnson Page 0,70
the bathroom.
‘Is this the one that makes things taste of fish?’ asked Charlie.
‘Yes, but you have to take it,’ Robin insisted.
‘Well I’m not. It’s not an essential one is it? Not like the ones in the green bottle.’
‘No, it’s the orange.’
‘Robin, I don’t want to eat turkey and Christmas pudding and have that off-salmon flavour infiltrating my tastebuds.’
‘Charlie, it’s a pain relief.’
‘I know what it is but I’m not taking it. And you can’t force me. I’m not a suffragette for you to stuff it up my nose.’
Robin’s hands flew to his hips. ‘Whatever do you take me for, Charles Glaser?’
Charlie’s hand came out to rest on Robin’s arm, his voice was soft when he answered that. ‘Someone who cares deeply, that’s what I take you for. I know how much you want to make this… this stage easy for me, but I’m not taking that one in the orange bottle any more. It ruins my pleasure in eating. I can put up with a little pain if it means I can immerse myself in the full Christmas epicurean experience, otherwise I might as well have been hooked up to drips in a hospital.’ Charlie smiled. ‘No point in having the appetite of a shire horse and not being able to enjoy stuffing my face.’
Robin huffed with frustration, ‘It’s your funer—’ He sliced off the word, shook his head at his verbal blunder.
‘Yes, my dear Annie, it is my funeral. Eventually. Not yet. Don’t let my last meals be fishy-flavoured. Please.’
Robin, purse-lipped, put the tablet back into the bottle. He would guide but never bully. If Charlie felt strongly about something, then he had the right to run his own show, they’d agreed that from the off.
The one stipulation he had managed to adhere to was Charlie’s insistence, after his diagnosis, that they continue as normal wherever possible. Let them carry on with their merry bickering; and Robin had carte blanche to be his usual nagging self, so long as it all fitted within the parameters of normal, because this was what would help Charlie deal with it mentally more than anything. But normality was an eggshell veneer, a shimmering illusion, and Robin could feel the cracks in himself destroying it a little more each day.
The fishy-tablet had stopped working anyway, though Charlie hadn’t said anything, not wanting to cause concern. He’d been spitting it into his hand out of Robin’s sight for a few days now, so it was time for a little honesty, but not too much. He had begun to ache everywhere, a bone-deep nag that was becoming harder to disguise and made it more difficult for him to sleep properly. Except, it had to be said, for the last two nights here in the Figgy Hollow Inn. He’d slept solidly like a milk-drunk baby and the pain was a mere low murmur in the background. He felt, this Christmas morning after a solid, restful sleep, as close to feeling fresh as a daisy as it was possible for someone in his condition to feel.
He put the book down on his bedside cabinet for later. Becoming reacquainted with the characters in Persuasion was like the cherry on his cake.
‘Right. Let’s go and see if Santa’s filled my stocking,’ he said, clapping his hands together. He grinned at Robin, who thought again how his grin never aged, how it lit up his blue-grey eyes and let him glimpse once more the Charlie Glaser he had fallen in love with three full decades ago. How would he ever be able to exist without this man?
* * *
It was funny how simple pleasures were often the best ones, thought Bridge, who had put on her pants warm from the radiator, then remembered how she used to always put them on the radiator whenever she stayed over at her posh schoolfriend Jane’s house. Jane lived in a semi-detached on an estate but they had central heating, which her dad used to leave on during the night, and their tiny box bedroom had a piano in it, which Jane’s mother called ‘the music room’.
Other snapshots of that portion of her past wriggled to the surface of this surprise memory pool, dislodged from the settled silt by the sensation of warm pants against Bridge’s bum. Jane’s mother had a tea service in a glass cabinet that was called ‘Eternal Beau’ and was used only on special occasions, and she only ever drank ‘Italian champagne’ called Asti Spumante that she bought in Marks and