right angles.
Lee immediately began clicking, not shots of the great man, but of the children as they gathered around him, touching and admiring his red velvet robe and mitred hat, his sceptre, the bushy white eyebrows and long, flowing white beard, which was matched by equally long, crimped hair. The commitment to the costume was a significant step-up from the rather feeble Father Christmas outfits she had seen growing up in England, where a pillow was stuffed under a thin red velveteen jacket and the straggly white beard was attached by elastic ear loops.
She saw the wonder in the children’s eyes as he began talking to them all, asking whether they’d been good, and she worked quickly – glad she was forgotten now, a background figure, able to get the images she wanted – capturing spontaneous laughs, eyes that shone, heads that were raised.
He went over to the boy in the first bed and sat on the edge of it, carefully holding open his large book. ‘Now then. Tomasz—’
The little boy’s mouth opened in amazement that Sinterklaas knew his name without having to ask.
‘—have you been a good boy this year?’ The bushy white eyebrows rose up questioningly.
Tomasz nodded.
‘Well, let us see.’ Sinter ran his finger down the page, stopping a third from the bottom. There was a short pause. ‘Hmm. It says here you painted your father’s car.’
‘Because it had scratches from when mama hit a bollard in the car park.’
‘I see.’ Sinter looked at Tomasz from the depths of his snowy white hair. ‘Well then, that was kind of you to try to colour it in.’
Tomasz nodded earnestly.
Sinter read some more. The eyebrows went up again. ‘And I see you let your sister’s rabbit out of its hutch.’
‘It wanted to run around the garden. It was bored.’
Lee had to suppress a bark of laughter, but she wasn’t entirely successful and Sinter’s eyes swivelled towards her briefly. She remained hidden behind her camera but she saw, through the crystalline clarity of her 35mm lens, the eyes of a man significantly younger than the plumes of white hair suggested.
‘Yes, well, again, that’s very . . . kind of you, Tomasz. I can see that you’re a caring boy. That’s why you’re on my list of Good Children.’
‘I am?’ Tomasz breathed a sigh of relief.
‘And because you’re such a good boy—’ Sinter turned the page on his ledger to a large blank sheet of paper and, with a navy felt-tip pen, drew in the space of a few brushstrokes an image of a rabbit with enormous, outsized twitchy ears. Across the bottom, he wrote: Kindness echoes. ‘That’s for you. To remember to keep being kind.’
Lee clicked away, both impressed and intrigued. She hadn’t realized Sinterklaas did party tricks! Nor that he had such sexy eyes. Who knew?
‘Oh sorry, I thought this was the ladies,’ she said, stopping in the doorway, one hand still on the door.
‘Unisex,’ the man replied, glancing at her in the mirror. He was stuffing something into a bag.
‘Oh.’
‘. . . I’m leaving anyway,’ he added, seeing how she still hesitated. He shrugged on a coat, his eyes grazing questioningly over her inert reflection, catching sight of the bag slung across her body. He turned suddenly, looking at her more closely, as though she had just come into focus. ‘Wait – aren’t you the photographer?’
Her gaze fell in turn to the large bag on the floor beside him. A tuft of snowy-white hair was tickling out the top. ‘You’re Sinter?’ she gasped.
The man stopped moving and looked guilty, as though he’d been caught red-handed doing something he shouldn’t. ‘Don’t tell me you still believe?’ he asked slowly.
Lee laughed at his joke, walking in and letting the door close slowly behind her. ‘I’m English, I only believe in Santa Claus!’ she quipped. ‘I just can’t believe you’re Sinter. You’re like . . . a baby!’ He couldn’t be more than . . . thirty-ish?
‘They’re what do it.’ He waggled his eyebrows, even though they were no longer white. He watched her scrutinize him, trying to marry the image of the dark-haired, dark-eyed man in here with the hirsute septuagenarian from the children’s ward. The scarlet robes had been swapped for dark jeans and boots; he had artfully scruffy, loosely curly chestnut-brown hair, with exceptionally round and dark eyes. His skin was olive, but pale at this time of year, a prickle of stubble along his jaw. Nonetheless, there was a certain porcelain-like quality to him, a generous Renaissance beauty