Free Paperboy by Christopher Fowler

did not cry or apologize. She started, in her own small way, to fight back. My father did not tip over any more meal-laden tables.
    He took things to a more troublesome level.

9

    Horror Story
    MY FATHER HAD a problem with Christmas. Although he appears in old photographs to possess a whippy, muscular frame, he was actually a frail man, and usually managed to cause some kind of drama just before the festivities were due to begin. One Christmas Eve he drunkenly crashed his motorbike and sidecar, overturning it on to his chest, and spent the holiday in intensive care. The following year he fell through a cracked coal-hole lid and broke his leg. The year after that, he sat in the darkened front room that was saved for best (he hardly ever put the lights on) and ate an entire box of ‘Eat Me’ dates that he’d bought cheap in the market, the ones that came on a cream-coloured plastic branch, not realizing that they were green and furry with mildew. That Christmas, instead of having his bones reset, he had his stomach pumped.
    But there was one magical moment in a string of awful Christmases.
    After glass-blowing, Bill had moved into a scientific lab where he designed and built vitreous instruments. He was regarded as brilliant at his job, and once constructed a human brain in glass just to show off his skills. When the company moved to Toronto he decided not to go with them, presumably because his mother would disapprove of the move. It broke his heart to watch his colleagues leave without him, and while he was looking for a new job, the family tightened its collective belt still further. But on that freezing, penniless Christmas night, I awoke to find the old leather armchair at the end of my bed covered in twinkling red and yellow lights my father had made, which were threaded around a dozen small boxes containing what seemed at the time to be the best train set in the world. How had he managed to pay for it? There was even a box of miniature coal pieces for the tender, to which I could add rubberized soot from Mr Purbrick’s shop.
    Bill and Grandfather William spent the whole of Christmas Day and Boxing Day crawling around on the floor getting electric shocks. They finally decided on a suitable layout for the set, and permanently mounted it on framed hardboard that was unfortunately too big to go out of the sitting-room door, so it had to be sawn in half and put on hinges, during which Bill accidentally sawed through the coffee table. When the grown-ups grew bored with the technicalities of point-switching and went in search of brown ale, I finally got to enjoy the fun of being intermittently electrocuted.
    A truce had been called, but it did not last long. My mother withdrew her money from the Christmas savings club and treated herself to a dress, flared and flowered – the only one that ever turned up in family photographs. It made her look like part of the modern world and therefore slightly weird, like a blonde Alma Cogan or a prettier Fanny Cradock.
    My father went nuts. He told her she looked like a cheap tart, and that she was trying to encourage the men of the neighbourhood, only two of whom were ever visible during the day: octogenarian Mr Hills and the bloke with Down’s Syndrome who sat on his front step with his trousers pulled up high, looking like a big smiling baby. Dad never allowed Kath to wear any sort of make-up. There were only two items in her side of the bedroom cupboard (there being no bathroom). One was a Pifco hair-dryer in cream Bakelite that weighed the same as a leg of lamb, and was kept in its original red satin-lined box like a school trophy. The other was a scary-looking contraption with a pink rubber bulb and red tubing attached. There was an indecent intimacy about this device, but I could not begin to imagine what it might be for, other than watering plants.
    The dress brought up the question of money, and money brought up unemployment, and the vexing embers of low self-esteem began to