Free Snow Garden by Rachel Joyce

the Northern Lights – a real thing, not a made-up one – and would be available to join her. She even had to pay for their tickets.
    ‘Maybe we should go home,’ says Mrs King. ‘Maybe we should cut our losses.’
    Christina glances up from her book. It is some sort of complicated guide to astrology. Her face is grim. And Tracey – who has bought herself an entire new snow outfit and is overheating by the second – says something she fails to hear. Mrs King is about to ask Tracey to repeat herself, but thinks better of it. Besides, she has other things to distract her. Fifteen buxom teenage girls in blue sweatshirts have just rushed into Duty-Free, followed by an exhausted-looking woman and a boy with a turban.
    ‘Lambs!’ croon the girls. ‘Aww! Look at the ickle fluffy lambs! Miss! Miss! Can I get one, Miss?’
    Johanna scans the waiting area but she can’t find Magda anywhere. There is so much to see it is hard to keep remembering that all she is searching for is a plain young woman in a grey hoodie. The Father Christmases have found a group of children and are performing some sort of juggling act. A makeshift tent has been set up, offering hot drinks and (cold) toasted sandwiches for breakfast. You can barely move without treading on a sleeping body. Johanna tries to remember exactly where she left Magda, she tries to spot the man and woman in their linen travel suits, but she can’t see anything she recognizes. She rings Magda’s mobile phone. No answer.
    She doesn’t know whether to run, to walk, where to look. She has no idea how to do anything. She searches the women’s toilets, the café, she scans the rows of seating, but there is no sign of Magda.
    A boy begins to cry. ‘I want my Buzz Lightyear outfit. I want it now!’
    Johanna hears the boy’s parents shouting and telling him he has to wait until Christmas, and then she hears the boy crying that it
is
Christmas, and his parents’ confusing reply that yes, it is Christmas, but it is not
real
Christmas until they get on holiday. ‘Why? Why?’ cries the boy. ‘Because, because,’ they say. The boy’s sobs hack straight through Johanna as if a part of her is crying too. And then, for the first time, the truth hits her and she reels. I am going to be a parent. I am going to share a child. A child who will want the impossible, whose needs will constantly bamboozle me, and who will cause me to say things I don’t fully understand. I must find my partner. I must find Magda.
    ‘But I don’t need perfume,’ says Mrs King.
    ‘It’s duty-free,’ replies Christina. ‘It’s cheaper than in the shops. It can be your Christmas present.’
    ‘Don’t buy me a present,’ says Mrs King. ‘We agreed. No presents. If you buy me a present, I will have to buy one for you.’
    ‘You haven’t bought us a Christmas present?’ gasps Tracey. She stumbles backwards like a snowy Michelin man.
    Mrs King glances from one daughter to the other. They couldn’t look less forgiving. ‘But we
said
we wouldn’t buy presents this year,’ she says weakly.
    ‘We didn’t mean nothing
at all
,’ says Christina. ‘You’re our mother. You’re supposed to give us presents.’
    ‘But you’re grown-up,’ says Mrs King, feeling her words lose confidence even as they leave her mouth.
    ‘This is typical,’ says Tracey. Despite her anger, her eyes fill with tears. She has to pretend she is blowing her nose.
    ‘What is typical, Tracey?’
    ‘Since Dad died, you only think of yourself.’
    Now it is Mrs King who wants to stagger backwards, but she doesn’t. She has noticed a change in her daughters. There was a time when they shared everything with their mother. Tracey would always ask for her advice about how to deal with problems at the school where she taught, and barely a day passed without Christina phoning, not to say anything in particular, just to check that her mother was still there, still listening. Mrs King used to hear the way her friends