The Great Christmas Breakup Part 1

The Great Christmas Breakup.

Geraldine Fonteroy.

PROLOGUE.

Christmas Day, December 25.

EVERY MEMBER OF THE hideous Teeson family was there to greet us on our arrival at the hospital. I felt the demon-like stare of my mother-in-law before I saw her. Then a sound, like a chainsaw stuck on metal, began its customary crescendo. My head, bandaged and bleeding, began thumping in tune with my elevated heartbeat.

*What have you done to my baby!' The question was rhetorical, because Cecily Teeson always had all the answers.

I grimaced as the newly dyed magenta hair and red booze face came towards me. The look was offset by a nauseatingly twee festive jumper embroidered with what looked like fornicating reindeer. Her usual s.h.i.+ny blue eyeshadow had been replaced with a color somewhere between orange and dung. Some sick hairdresser had put so many gold highlights in her light-globe hair that I noticed Cecily 2's long-suffering husband Rufus put on sungla.s.ses to protect himself from the glare.

*I want an ice cream,' said Rufus's son and Carson's nephew Howie, making rapid eye movements as he tried to source a kiosk.

*No, ice cream,' screamed his mother, Cecily 2. Pencil thin, with absurdly huge ears and a bulldog nose, Cecily 2's festive jumper was black with a huge cherry on it.

*Yes.'

*No.'

*Yes.'

*No.'

*Yeeeeeeees!'

*Noooooooooo!'

I had begged to die many times before, but this time I meant it.

Closing my eyes in preparation, I was forced to open them when the voice of doom spoke again.

*What did you do now, Scarface?' As she came closer to the gurney, the familiar scent of knock-off designer perfume only added to the urge to throw up.

So I did.

On her, which would have been satisfying had she not immediately spun about, spraying goop back over me and half the A&E.

*Errrrr!' Cecily Teeson hopped about like she'd been infested with conservatism. *What have you done to us? To my darling son?'

*There is a canteen on the fourth floor,' Howie declared, ignorant of the chaos.

*No,' said Cecily 2.

*Yes.'

*No.'

*Yes.'

*I said NO!'

Was Cecily for real? What have I done to him? What about what they had done to me?

I wanted to kill her.

And him.

Only I couldn't move either of my arms, which was more that slightly worrying.

Carson was being wheeled in. He gave me a sympathetic grin.

How dare he smile!

I may have deliberately driven at a body of water at high speed, but this was all his fault!

Suddenly, the painkillers the paramedics had given me at the scene of the accident began to kick in.

*Aren't you gonna answer me?' the putrid mother-in-law barked.

*Are those reindeer f.u.c.king?' I replied, pointing at Cecily's foul festive garb.

*Yes,' said Howie.

*No,' said Cecily and Cecily 2 in unison.

*Yes,' I told Howie.

And then promptly and conveniently, I pa.s.sed out.

CHAPTER ONE.

Wednesday November 22.

The problem with marriage is that when you think you've had enough, the best is often yet to come.

Jocelyn Priestly.

CARSON HAD GIVEN ME the Jocelyn Priestly calendar for Christmas the year before. It was a complete load of rubbish a the most horrific of eleven years of utterly pathetic and unromantic gifts.

Then, this morning, I'd gone to my re-gifting box, to plan how I would redistribute the awful, and in some cases offensive, gifts we'd received from the previous Yuletide. That's when I'd found the stupid thing.

Worse, I began to read it.

Apparently, if you read the blurb on the second of the flippy little pages of the cheaply made tat, Ms Priestly is some sort of marriage guru.

My motto, the bog standard and poorly s.p.a.ced Helvetica typeface read cheerily, is that any marriage can be resuscitated. It just requires the spiritual knowledge.

What the h.e.l.l does that even mean?

Carson's mum, or mom, as they say over here, bought it for him to give me. She must have done, no doubt during one of her charity shop expeditions.

I know what you're thinking a that's nice, supporting charity. It would be, if Cecily didn't just nick stuff straight from the bags of donations left out front of the shops overnight.

That's the family I married into: thieves, hooligans, and staunch Lefties who hated everything about me, including what they perceived as my privileged upbringing. Because they are American and I am English, they a.s.sume I am posh because of my accent. I'm anything but a my dad worked as head of the Gardens department of Bath Council, my mother's mother was a maid servant and the women of the family hadn't worked since.

However, I did come from Bath, which was, according to the Teesons, posher than Boston.

Whatever that meant.

Cecily Teeson, her daughter Cecily 2 and her long-suffering and selectively deaf son-in-law Rufus imagined that, since my parents had never known the delights of a trailer park except for holidays to France, I considered myself too good for them.

Carson Teeson, however, is about as far removed from a trailer park as you can get. Having inherited the shrewd, calculating mind of his mother, and scored some genetic throwback in terms of brains, my darling husband somehow convinced Harvard that he was a diamond in the rough. Scholars.h.i.+p in hand, and in the face of his mother demanding he become a doctor so that she could sell illegal prescription drugs at his grandmother's care home, he earned a doctorate in law and became . . . a teacher.

Yes, that's right folks, a teacher.

What do you do when you've grown up dealing with ranting lunatics, uncontrolled bullying and disgusting food throughout your entire childhood? You seek out the same by working at a local, not particularly exclusive, private school.

It was the one thing that Cecily Teeson and I agreed on. Someone with a Harvard Law degree should not be teaching at Frithington Lodge. He should be ensconced in a cosy partners.h.i.+p somewhere on Madison, while I ran around Central Park with the dogs and a nanny took Jessie and Joey to school in a limo.

Instead, I ran around Flindes, the local cut-price supermarket, doing price checks and Carson took the kids to school on his way to work.

All in all, life wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't for the fact that Carson and I no longer had a relations.h.i.+p to speak of.

Sometimes I thought I hated him.

Perhaps hate was actually too kind a word.

Disgust and complete distain were better ones.

But it hadn't always been that way.

Had it?

- Cue melancholy memory number one: *Excuse me, what exactly is that garment for?' I knew, before I'd even turned around, that I was going to like the face, because the voice was knee-buckling. Deep, rich and intelligent sounding a a miracle in the New York street where I lived. I was surrounded by would-be gangsters who specialized in vocabulary exclusively populated by the words *f.u.c.k' and *mother'.

The market stall I worked at and co-owned sold dresses made by local fas.h.i.+on students. It was a joint venture between me and my best friend, Lolly. Lolly had managed to develop a distinct talent for sourcing hip products while scoring As on her college a.s.signments. I scored Cs, so my contribution was wearing a f.a.n.n.y pack and collecting the income.

It transpired that the face was as delicious as the voice. It was one of those faces that wasn't too handsome, but masculine, with a hint of stubble. I guessed the stubble was necessary because the guy had cherubic blond curls that were cut tight in an attempt to keep them under control.

He was tall too, about six two, which suited me. I liked tall men, because I was vertically challenged and could never reach the top shelves in shops without help.

Then I noticed that the lovely man was shopping for dresses. That meant one of two things: he was a cross dresser (the more likely option in my neighborhood); or he had a girlfriend.

*So, is it a teapot cover?' he asked again.

I looked at what he was pointing at. A knitted beret. In purple.

Must be shopping for a girlfriend. No self-respecting cross dresser would wear that!

Still, girlfriend or not, I had discovered the first flaw.

Bad taste.

My partner Lolly had made the purple beret as a joke. We'd taken bets on who would buy it a I said demented granny; she went for no-idea boyfriend buying a Christmas gift for the girlfriend.

It seemed Lolly was right.

*It's a hat,' I said.

He smiled, and with the exception of one tooth on his top row that stood out a little from the others, the effect was dazzling.

*I need to buy something for my mum. She's a little crazy, so I think she'd like it. Is it a one of?'

Ah. His mother.

*You think people would manufacture these in great quant.i.ties?'

*They manufacture bombs and those trousers with room for a football in the crotch, don't they?'

As he spoke he looked me up and down. I was pet.i.te and pretty reasonable looking a people said I reminded them of a cross between the brunette lead from Gossip Girl and the chick at the local McDonald's who was generally considered *hot' amongst my housemates.

My eyes, a dull brown, were helped along by enormous lashes that never needed mascara and the look was completed by mountains of long, curly auburn hair. I managed, with great effort and self-sacrifice, to keep my weight to about 52 kilos.

I laughed, and because I hadn't laughed in about a year, I did something I never, ever had done before.

I asked a guy out on a date.

52 kilos! Hah. Melancholy memory? Deluded longings, more like. Had I ever really been that slim? Now, I was trying to ease on size 16s, while telling myself I had to get the dryer serviced because it was shrinking my jeans.

Definitely deluded.

Some people eat when they are depressed.

Some people eat when they are happy.