6. SEASON OF THE WITCH

So what became of Santa's wife?

“You’ve not been thinking of Marlene, though,” nudged the fat man’s alter-ego without a soupçon of sympathy in his words, “don’t you have any regrets about what happened to her? Don’t you think you were in any way responsible?”

Santa shrugged his shoulders, and the one step separating him from the top of the Stairway to Heaven suddenly became six. Or seven: it might have been seven. Anyway, as he looked he was once again a hefty climb still from the top and the lady waiting for him there.

“Marlene was a grown woman,” he mumbled, “she knew her own mind better than did!”

“Of course she did. But more than that, she knew that every time you looked at her you saw a scruffy mother of five kids who ate far too many pies and cakes for her own good and was bloating up by the hour,” murmured his alter-ego.

“Well, she did put on weight, and she was no fragile little thing to start with!” snapped Santa. “And that last year it became no joke, I can tell you! I had to tell her so. I had to mention that she risked losing my affection, getting to be as huge as she was.”

“That same year that you became a bit of a heifer yourself… You’re no beauty, you know, and you were getting an expanded waistline year on year yourself. Remember having to get your Santa suit let out? The way you tried to fasten the trousers at the waist and had to give up and get Marlene to alter them after a titanic and painful struggle?”

“I couldn’t help it. Anyway, I told her. I said that she’d never been any kind of beauty, not even when she was young and no more than a plump tea lady at the factory, but at least she’d been cuddly, and now she was obese and I couldn’t reach my arms round her!”

“That was unkind. Maybe it was your fault that she turned to food as a fattening alternative to a loving life with a husband who cared…?”

The fat man shrugged. “Maybe it was, but I was trapped with a woman who didn’t give one jot about what she looked like and what’s more how that affected me!”

“You might have tried to help her, show her some affection, walk with her down life’s highway.”

“I was only human, wasn’t I? And she was a witch, I tell you, a witch!”

“Yes, you were human. Human and pretending to be some sort of superhero, some kind of magical elf? You wanted everything and almost got it.”

“Almost…?”

“Marlene took that overdose. She couldn’t take it any more, and she popped more slimming pills than a pharmacist would dream of stocking! It was no accidental overdose, not even a cry for help. She wanted to die, and you drove her to it.”

“It was coming up for Christmas, was working all hours...”

“With other people’s little kids on your lap and listening to your tall tales of life in the frozen North and how you had an army of elves making all sorts of fancy toys that you’d be taking out on Christmas Eve on your sleigh with you and, taking with you down sooty chimneys. I know because, of course, I was there.”

“Children like a bit of adventure, tales of derring-do, magic in the frozen wastes and a big, big, castle with walls of ice… I was only feeding their appetites for risky escapades.”

“While your wife was feeding her body with bottles of poison,” sighed his alter-ego.

“I wasn’t to know that! The witch did it to damage my reputation! All she wanted was to be rushed into hospital and get pumped out and saved so that everyone would know what a cruel husband she had to drive her to do such a desperate thing. I know her … I still know her, blast her memory!”

“So you found her when you went home, a bit on the late side, wasn’t it?”

“It was the last few days before Christmas. I was busier than busy.”

“Did you call an ambulance? Did you give her the kiss of life?”

“She was cold. Dead. Beyond saving.”

“And next morning, when she was still dead?”

“You know what happened...”

“But do you?”

“Of course I do! I did it, didn’t I?”

“Then how about a cathartic bit of confession? How about ridding your soul of the poison of guilt?”

“I’m not guilty!”

“You were, sort of.”

“Then I’ll say it. I buried her in the garden… yes, that’s what I did, and I don’t care who knows now that you say I’m dead and beyond silly laws!”

“You went out in the early morning, when it was still dark… say more, let it out, all of it, free yourself!”

Santa might have wept, but he was beyond tears. The dead can’t cry.

“I went out and dug a Marlene-sized hole! And, yes, it was winter and the ground was frozen. It was hard work, I can tell you, hacking away at the frozen soil near the rhubarb patch. I’ve always liked rhubarb, with custard if I’ve got any in the pantry, and now I can tell myself that I’m nibbling on part of Marlene when I’m eating my rhubarb pie! It makes me feel that it might have all been worth while. But you can try to blame me as much as you like, it wasn’t me that killed her it was she herself, being a damned stupid witch that cold season!”

“And you carted her out to your hole?” The other wanted him to carry on with his story. To tell it all.

“Have you any idea how heavy she was? All those pies hadn’t just made her obscenely fat, they had made her heavy!”

“Of course. That stands to reason.”

“It was getting to be light by the time I got her to the hole I’d dug, and pushed her in. And that took all my strength, I can tell you. I had to take a shower before I went to work.”

“Being Santa Claus? Being the all-round good egg who fed the little children with wonderful dreams? Who made promises about cars and trains and dolls and prams? Of reindeer flying across the moon? Of sleepy heads on Christmas Eve?”

“It was in a department store that day,” murmured the fat man. “When it was discovered that Marlene had gone missing I used it as my alibi because I was questioned as if I might have killed her. Me! Santa Claus! Kill her! I hadn’t killed her, but shoving her under my rhubarb patch wasn’t the proper way of disposing of a dead body. It wasn’t exactly legal, and I knew it. The trouble was, I was ashamed of what she’d done. She’d gone against the ten commandments and taken her own life!”

“It doesn’t say anything in the ten commandments about suicide,” murmured his alter-ego.

“Thou shall not commit murder… that’s in there, isn’t it, and suicide’s a kind of murder, isn’t it?”

If his alter-ego could have shaken his head he would have done just that. But he couldn’t because he didn’t exactly have a head to shake. He didn’t have any physical form, actually.

“She was murdered, in a sense, and the murderer is the one who drove her to do it,” he said, quietly, “and that was you.”

© Peter Rogerson 10.11.18