I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day - Milly Johnson Page 0,82

hit two bullseyes.

‘I want to pull my cracker,’ said Charlie, holding his out to Robin.

‘BANG!’ everyone yelled.

Charlie won, unfolded his joke first, read it silently and then began to giggle in the way a schoolboy might while looking at an old page three of the Sun.

‘Come on, share it,’ said Robin, catching Charlie’s laughter.

‘What do you call snowman poo?’

‘I don’t know,’ everyone chorused. ‘What do you call snowman poo?’

‘Marshmallows.’ Charlie dissolved into fits. The others laughed more at his reaction than at the joke. Tears started to roll down Charlie’s cheeks as he kept reigniting his hysterics by repeating the word ‘marshmallows’.

‘That’s the worst joke I’ve ever heard,’ said Robin, rubbing his sides in order to relieve the ache in them.

‘It’s terrible,’ agreed Jack, consumed by hilarity to the extent that he had to wipe the tears spouting like a leaky tap from his own eyes.

So that’s what he looks like when he really laughs, thought Mary. She hadn’t ever seen the phenomenon before and was fascinated by it. The sight of Jack’s lips stretched wide, teeth showing, the crinkles gathered at the corners of his eyes… he was so perfect. Something pinged against her heart, like a thick elastic band, causing a sharp sting, a dilemma. She had decided what to do about Jack, but suddenly she wasn’t so sure any more.

‘Oh dear, Luke, you really have missed your way,’ said Robin. ‘You should be a comedian, not a Plant Boy.’

‘He absolutely shouldn’t,’ said Bridge, in near paroxysms.

They couldn’t stop laughing. As soon as they tried, the silence felt like a pressure bubble that needed to be burst. Then Charlie pulled out his cracker present, which was a marshmallow and that set them all off again. Minutes passed, joyous wonderful minutes in which nothing else seemed to exist but these six people laughing at the word marshmallows in an inn on the snowy moors of Yorkshire.

Eventually they were spent, everyone else pulled their crackers and the jokes were as bad if not worse. The other ‘presents’ inside were a shower cap, purloined from the stock cupboard upstairs, a pickled onion wrapped in clingfilm, a long green balloon with green lines drawn on it and a tag reading: ‘Grow your own cucumber’ and a keyring, made from a square of corrugated cardboard and a reshaped paperclip for a hoop. Luke had written ‘Figgy Hollow Six’ on one side, today’s date on the other. Robin had been delighted to win it and said he would treasure it for all time.

The Figgy Hollow Six. That’s what they would be forever, Charlie thought. He liked that. Their collective essence was woven into the air of this place now, their little gang was part of its history. Even when he was gone, he would still be one of them. For always.

Everyone declared Luke’s crackers the best, worst ones they’d ever had. It would be difficult after that to go back to shop-bought ones, said Robin, and asked if Luke would give him his email address so he could put in an order for next year. It was a joke that was immediately punctured by the burden of knowing that there would be no Charlie next Christmas. He drowned the thought with a throatful of Pinot Grigio blush.

‘We’d better eat before all this food goes cold,’ said Bridge.

‘I’ll carve the turkey,’ said Robin, jumping up.

‘And I’ll carve our nut roast, Mary,’ said Luke, who’d managed to cobble together something from chopped-up nut cutlets bound together with root vegetables and lashings of sage and onion.

Charlie had spent a lot of money in his lifetime on dining out and this lunch was right up there with the best of them. The roast potatoes were crisp against his teeth, fluffy on the inside, the turkey tasty and on the right side of dry, even the honeyed parsnips set his palate sighing with pleasure – and he hated parsnips usually. And there wasn’t as much as a hint of fish hovering around his tastebuds. They ate in a wonderful genial silence, entertained in the background by Radio Brian and his musical choices. Then one by one they set their closed cutlery on the plates, sat back in their chairs and the smiles on their faces mirrored the smiles in their stomachs.

While Bridge and Mary cleared up the plates and delivered them to the kitchen, Luke went to fetch the pudding and the trifle and Jack added more logs to the fire that crackled and hissed cheerfully as if joining