5. WEAR YOUR LOVE LIKE HEAVEN

So Father Christmas is married... who would have guessed it?

“Don’t forget your wife,” said the fat man’s alter-ego as they climbed onto the penultimate step and Santa was beginning to believe that he might finally have reached his goal.

He could smell the fragrance of the woman standing there, and feel the love in her gaze as she watched his relief at just about standing one step away from her without falling.

“That was a long time ago!” he snorted.

“Tch tch,” chided the amorphous and very talkative alter-ego perched on his shoulder, “time has nothing to do with it. You were working in the factory...”

“I remember!”

“And Marlene was the tea woman. She came round every day with her trolley and cheery whimsies, trailing happiness and laughter behind her wherever she went.”

“She was too fond of cakes and idle chatter,” snapped the fat Santa, irritated by a recollection he’d prefer to forget.

“She had an eye for you, though,” smirked his alter-ego. “She would look at you as if you were sent to her from Heaven. That’s what she’d do, and to start with you’d barely notice. You were probably preoccupied with your work. After all, it was a toy factory and you’d never had enough toys as a boy.”

“There had been a war on!” he said sharply, “toys were in short supply with the country on a war footing. Even the factory I worked on had been used to make weapons! Bullets for guns, that’s what it had made. But that was before my time. I’d been a little lad back then wondering what all the fuss was about when people mentioned Christmas presents.”

“I felt so sorry for you,” murmured the other, suddenly sympathetic. “But you were given what your folks could afford and what was available. Times were hard, remember?”

“But when I worked in the factory it was back to making toys. Tin-plate cars, train sets, even dolls’ accessories. It was a jolly place. Men loved their jobs, loved the things they made, and so did the women. I don’t want you to think I forget the women!”

“You’ve never done that!”

“And one day the boss called me into his office,” remembered the fat man, “one day he called on me to consider a proposition. ‘Nicholas,’ he said, for that was my name before I changed it to Santa Claus by deed poll, ‘Nicholas, we on the board have been thinking of ways and means to increase sales, and we’ve hit upon a corker of an idea! We want a Father Christmas, you know the big bloke with whiskers and a red suit, to gather loads of children round him, and sell them our toys. I mean, they pay to sit with him and in return for paying they get a present. One of our cars, or maybe a coach and horses for a tiny fairy doll, or if they pay more, part of a train set. That would encourage them to collect the rest of the train set! What do you think of the idea?’

“And I thought about it for a moment and said, it’s a good one, but what’s it got to do with me?”

“As if you hasn’t guessed,” scoffed his alter-ego.

The fat man ignored the interruption. “’We want you to be that Father Christmas,’ the boss said solemnly. ‘You’ve got the right temperament and all that, cheerfulness and diligence, you’re always careful that your work is first class, so for a few weeks every year you can have the time off to sit with groups of children in grottos carefully placed where they’ll attract great attention, say large shops, market places, fair grounds, anywhere that families go… we’ll have the presents all nicely wrapped up, in blue for boys and pink for girls, maybe, and you can dress up in real fancy dress with a beard and everything. You can be the real Father Christmas! The kids’ll love you. They’ll worship you, and that itself will make your job worthwhile. But there’s one thing you must do first...’”

“This is the hard bit!” giggled the alter-ego.

“Shut up! I didn’t like this bit, but the rest seemed such a good idea that I went along with it. ‘What you must do is get a wife,’ he told me, ‘and that wife must be the perfect image of the kind of woman Father Christmas would have as a wife. I’ve got Marlene in mind...’

“Now, Marlene was the tea woman, the cheery, jolly, cake-eating tea woman! Oh, she was all right, of course she was! Everyone said so, but nobody suggested that she was wife material! She was a large woman...”

“Young though, and exceedingly well-chested,” pointed out his alter ego.

“Yes, that. Her chest flowed over the top of her blouse when the top buttons were undone, and they had to be or the seams would have burst open! There was a joke going round about her having the biggest you-know-whats in the country and that we should think about where the milk for our tea came from! Why, when she ran to catch the bus at the end of the day she almost set an earthquake going as they lobbed from side to side! Me marry her? No, I thought, never!

“So I said to the boss, ‘you mean pretend to have a wife? Make out that she’s Mrs Father Christmas so that the kids believe I’m a real family man with a real wife and probably real kids somewhere?’

“And he said, ‘no, she must really be your wife! We can’t have anyone suggesting there’s something wrong with the marital state of Father Christmas! It would be an outrage if that sort of thing got out! Think of the shame that would bring on you, not to mention the shame it would bring on the factory! You’re a single man and I know Marlene thinks a lot of you. So marry the girl, Nicholas, marry her and make an honest woman of her. There’s a pay rise in it for both of you.’”

“You were more than tempted,” sniggered his alter-ego.

“I thought to myself, I can always ask the girl and I’ll bet she says no! That’ll get me put of any bother with the boss, if she turns me down. Lads do get turned down by lasses, all the time, you know. It would be nothing new.”

“Quick thinking,” giggled the alter-ego.

“So I cornered Marlene and told her what the boss had said and that she’d get a pay rise, and I was sure she’d say she was intending to marry for love, not for a few extra pennies a week, and you know what she said, don’t you?

“I do!”

“She said she loved me, she’d always loved me, and of course she’d marry me, we’d be the perfect couple with half a dozen perfect children, a car and a house outside town where the posh people live!”

“But you didn’t have to go through with it. It’s not reasonable as a job description, that you must marry the tea woman with huge bazookas, is it?”

“But I did,” sighed the fat man, “and we did have six kids and we were the envy of the neighbourhood. I’d work for most of the year making tin-plate toys and she’d make urns full of tea in between having the kids. And for six weeks every year I’d be father Christmas, wearing his love like Heaven.”

“Talking of Heaven,” murmured the other, “we’re nearly there. Just one step further...”

“I need a rest first,” snapped Santa, “I’m just about shagged out!”

© Peter Rogerson 09.11.18