90° North

What a wonderland! What a heart’s desire! Beyond the wooden doors it was fearfully cold and yet it was not. It was bracing and wonderful and still and everything, just everything that is not hot, and fetid and grasping and hopeless.

She whisked on her cloak, dyed red with summer berries, while Nicholas straddled the stove and cooked an enormous fish, simmering in tundra grasses and berries. There are chickens and livestock here, there are potatoes which grow in special cloches, and cows which produce milk and butter and cream. In this barren land where explorers came to die, there was plenty.

She wrapped her arms around his broad belly. His laugh was always low, like the bellow of contented cattle. ‘Where do you go, Sinter?’

She nuzzled her face into his thick, white hair. ’51.51° North - 0.13° West.’

‘So London Town then,’ he said, without turning to gaze upon her wondrous, chubby cheeks.

‘There is a boy who must be saved,’ she said, ‘before it is too late.’

Nicholas took the fish from the stove and turned to face her, their plump bellies meeting a fraction before their lips could touch.

‘Is this the same boy you have visited before?’ he enquired.

‘For three years now,’ she said. ‘On the first day of December, when all the Christmas lights are twinkling and he becomes more and more invisible in the urgency of shopping. He believes me to be the leader of a cult, and I can hardly blame him for that.’

He looked at her and kissed her brow. ‘Do your best, wife. It is all that anyone can do.’

Sinter had been worried about Vixen. He didn’t rub along so well with his rhyming couplet, Blitzen, and nor was it the obvious name one would christen a reindeer, particularly a male one. She took the smallest sleigh and beckoned him forward. His brown eyes twinkled in the light and Sinter, a woman of extraordinary sensitivities, could not detect rancour from the other reindeer. Hers was not the glamorous job, not the enchanting one, and yet it was essential: if Vixen’s task was not the captain’s work, it was also true that the ship would always sink without the stoker, and the train would always stop in its tracks just the same.

She petted his brown nose and accepted a nibble of her lustrous white hair.

Sinter knows where the precious people are. He was under the railway arch, as always. His face was so pale, his limbs so stripped of flesh. His lips were blue and there were sores about and around them. He was not even sixteen years old.

She crouched down, uncertain how she might get up again, and asked him the same question she had asked him for three years.

‘Will you come now?’

‘I’m high,’ he mumbled, and Sinter shuddered to think how he could afford the oblivion.

She sighed. ‘I cannot take advantage of you in this condition,’ she said. ‘I shall have to come back next year, although …’

She made to leave, her plump thighs straining against gravity. Vixen was pawing the worn cobbles, as if intuiting a hopeless endeavour.

Outside the grim, soaked walls of the archway, yellow, meagre snow began to fall. It was like all the grime on the streets had already tainted it before it landed. She recalled a time when the city seemed less hopeless, when there was some camaraderie in beggary.

She walked to the sleigh, unseen by other eyes, and soothed Vixen’s nuzzle.

‘Wait!’ said the boy, struggling to stand just as much as this timeless woman had done. She turned to look at him and he waited for her to return. ‘What are those terms again?’

‘No terms,’ she said, cupping his chin, which she noted was growing some man hair upon it. ‘You will just not be quite how you are now.’

‘Then who will I be?’ Sinter adored this child. She knew everything about him, because, if she directs her mind, she knows everything. But despite Nicholas, and the uniquely cosy cold of 90° North, and the roaring fires and the love, the love of their, or at least her husband’s most legendary status, she knows that very few people can be saved. She has made a mistake, and he will be dead next Christmas.

A girl appeared. She might have been beautiful, about the same age as the boy, and they held hands as they stood before Sinter.

‘What’s the deal?’ the girl asked, wary and cynical.

Sinter felt the weight of it all. She felt defeated. All those centuries, for it to come this. Where it was once children of all ages who, if they did not share it, at least understood it, no one had ever stood before her and appeared to sneer at it. She thought of the big frying fish, and Nicholas, and even if it was only five-year-olds who still believed, it was a life and a belief and a magic worth preserving just the same.

She turned her back on them. Vixen nudged her neck and turned his wide eyes to the children.

‘What’s the deal?’ the girl asked again, although this time it turned softer in the poor snow. ‘Seriously. What’s the deal?’

Sinter suppressed the sigh. It was the hardly the first time, after all.

‘Well, you can both see me, and I suppose that’s something.’

The boy took a step forward. ‘Can’t everyone? I mean, the sleigh, the reindeer?’

She looked at him and smiled. ‘No one can see me,’ she said, ‘except those who need to see me.’

They took a step forward and Sinter took a small step back, and all the angst of the ages came out, just a little way.

‘Do you know how hard it is to be Mrs Christmas?’ she said. ‘I want you to come with me, but I won’t force you to.’

Vixen was getting restless, the snow was beginning to fade and the world seemed to be getting smaller.

‘What would happen to us?’ asked the girl

Sinter, keeping her distance, said, ‘You will diminish in size and you will grow pointy ears.’

‘What else?’ asked the boy.

Sinter rattled a sigh through her teeth, and then turned to him with one hand on Vixen’s reins.

‘You will not be addicted anymore …’

‘Rehab?’ asked the girl, with the trepidation of one who always wishes for that sort of thing to begin tomorrow.

‘No. It will be like it never was, like when you were very young and not addicted to anything. You will have new names. You will be mortal and you will die in the normal course. You can have children, but they would be born elves and would not be able to return here. They too will be mortal and cared for in their ailing. You will be loved and cherished for all of your days. You will make things for children. If you don’t want to, we can send you back, if that is what you wish. You will be an elf, or you can take your chances. But you will both be dead by this time next year if you don’t, and I would so regret that.’

She strode the sleigh, lifting her heavy skirts, thinking of Nicholas and the heavy labours coming his way less than a month away. She gave Vixen a tap on his rump, but he wouldn’t move. Just a little wet snort, such was the nature of the beast. The children looked at each other.

‘Short with pointy ears?’ the girl asked.

‘Yes.’

‘But we would both be short with pointy ears,’ reckoned the boy.

‘And you will look similar, but for that,’ said Sinter. ‘You will look the same as every one else, excluding your own, unique faces and peculiarities.’

The children huddled by the entrance to the archway. Shiftless vagrants wondered by, incurious to the pow-wow. Sinter sat in the sleigh, thinking of the fish, and the glorious icicles about the front door, the log fires and the story books, and the endless polar nights. She had no idea how she came into being, of how she came to be married to Nicholas. It was as if the North Pole itself had answered a wild call to fill the dark. Unlike the elves, they were immortal, although the time was not interminable. Each year was a minute, and yet filled with so much. The welcoming black, the inquisitive creatures, the smell of burning wood, the laughter, and then the briefest of summers when growing things must be gathered and dried. Animals must be consumed, of course, but there was no killing. In the woven magic of a cold climate there was no pain but a slumbered death ordained by hands not of their making. They offered their carcasses as the chickens offered their eggs and the melt patches offered their plants.

She fell asleep with her hands on the reins. A child walked by with her father, hand in hand. She stood and looked in wonder at the sleigh as it stood, glorious in its finery, at the entrance to the creepy tunnel.

‘Look, Daddy! It’s Mrs Christmas!’

Her father gently tugged her from the middle of the road and smiled with nostalgia.

‘Then you must be my very good girl,’ he said. ‘I saw her once too, but she didn’t see me.’

‘It is her job to only see unhappy children,’ she said, and there was such certainty in it. Her father stopped just short of the kerb and looked at the two skanky adolescents conferring in the lamplight. ‘And does she see you?’ he asked.

She laughed at that. ‘Of course not, daddy.’

When the children approached, Sinter woke immediately. Sleep was not a necessity but it was a pleasing way to sweeten the blessed eternity.

‘Will we have new names?’ the girl asked.

Sinter looked into the distance for a while. She had already thought of a name for the boy: Maundy. But the girl was a new consideration, and her mind travelled to 54.4153° N, 4.0829° W. They have a name there for ‘darling,’ and she was a darling, really.

‘You would be Cariad,’ she said.

‘We’ll come’ said the boy. ‘What have we got to lose?’

She laughed, the sound like aeolian bells. ‘You have nothing at all to lose, Maundy. Just nothing at all.’

They flew into the air, and after some miles travelling north, the snow became thicker and more honest in its design; not dissolved by the city lights but left to fall as intended: not damaged before it had even begun.

The fish was still frying and the aroma was blessed. Nicholas was stood where she had left him, and they kissed again. ‘Successful, Mrs Christmas?’

‘I have brought back two,’ she said, heaving off her heavy boots.

‘Were they surprised to find themselves so small?’

‘I don’t think it dawned on them until they skipped across the snow to their cabin, whereas I was as stuck in it as ever! They like their new ears, I can tell. Cariad told me that in London Town, some people pay good money to have ears like that.’

‘Grown ups are strange creatures,’ he said, stroking his beard.

‘Indeed they are,’ she said, rubbing her red toes. ‘I have put spirits and beer in their home. They are young, but I can see they are in love. There is no harm in it. And I told them that I would return them in December next year if they don’t like it here. I don’t believe they were even listening.’

Nicholas was finishing off, a sprinkle of this and that in the pan, the potatoes steaming to the side. Something had occurred to him. Sinter could tell by the signature sniff, the cavernous intake of breath.

‘Have we ever returned an elf?’ he asked.

‘No, dear. Not ever,’ she said, settling her bare feet before the fire. ‘Although I would, of course, if I was ever asked.’

He slapped the fish on the table and pinched his wife’s cheek. ‘You are a wonderful mother,’ he said, unloosening his belt.

‘Hardly! Philomen is 85 this March!’

‘And you are so much older, Sinter. You are timeless, and ageless and priceless. Now, eat your fish.’

Later, when Nicholas was snoozing by the fire, Sinter looked out on the cabins and the workshops. She heard laughter and went to the door. Poking her head out, she saw a group of elves roasting something on a small spit, drinking cups of ale and sharing jokes. Maundy and Cariad had joined them, their arms around each other, still a little shy, perhaps, but that wouldn’t last.

‘Shut the door, wifey,’ Nicholas mumbled, still half in sleep. She dropped the latch and stood looking over him as he snored, surprisingly gently for such a big man.

What a wonderland! She thought. What a heart’s desire!