The Man with the Santa Tattoo
an intractable tract for Christmas 2012

a Christmas fancy from
Paul Brazier & Juliet Eyeions

(I'll put the italics back in when I find out how)

? L eon was late. He disliked being late but was obdurate that he would not rush for anyone or anything. If a job was worth doing, it was worth doing properly and that meant not rushing it.
Absently, he stroked his great white beard as he considered which scarf he should wear to visit the widow this afternoon. The pale tan check given him long ago by his dead wife was his favourite. And the widow had said it brought out his eyes – but the paisley red one she, the widow, had given him as a gift last year was much newer and smarter. Although he didn’t really like the colour…
Oh, Hang it! he thought. No one would see it inside his coat and under his beard anyway. He pulled the paisley around his throat, picked up a gaily-wrapped package, clapped his cap on his head, and stepped out of the front door. The stables had brought his fly around a few minutes earlier and the horse, loosely tethered to the front gate, was stamping restlessly.
He pulled the knot free, climbed in and shook the reins. “Come on, Flodur,” he said. “Mustn’t keep the widow waiting.”
A few minutes later he was bowling down the lane to the village. The sun was brilliant and, for all that it was midday, very low in the sky. His blue eyes twinkled with the rush of wind and the sting of tiny snowflakes while the sun struck up from the white fields all around him. It was glorious! His cares seemed to fly away with the cloud of snow thrown up behind him.
He began to slow as he approached the crossroads on the edge of the village but through the brightness of the day didn’t notice the urchins lurking by the signpost until the chorus of “It’s Santa!”, “Father Christmas!” and “Where’s yer reindeer, Nick?”, assailed him, along with a shower of snowballs.
He was shaking the reins to make Flodur speed up again when a small boy risked life and limb to run up alongside his nearside wheel and call out, “Oi, Santa!” He recognised the boy, the draper’s son, Billy…? Concerned for the lad’s safety but stung by the jibe, he was turning his head to deliver a withering retort when he received a soggy mess of snow full in the face.
He reeled back, upsetting the balance of the fly. A wheel hit the concealed kerb and, to a gale of childish laughter, he was decanted unceremoniously into a massive snowdrift.
“I can’t believe they did it on purpose, Leon. Surely it was an accident – just a bit of Christmas fun.” She bit her lip; she shouldn’t have mentioned Christmas. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed. He was rubbing his beard vigorously with the towel she had found for him while she brushed the slush and snow from his jacket.
“Christmas fun be dashed! I doubt they intended me to crash but they were definitely being malicious. I’ll have the law on them, if I can ever find that feckless constable.” Where he was rubbing his beard, she thought she saw a mark on his cheek under the beard.
“What’s that?” she asked. “Have you hurt yourself?”
“Nothing. Never mind,” he blustered, making a great show of shrugging off his coat. The red paisley scarf fluttered free from beneath his beard.
She was impressed he had remembered and worn it although secretly she believed neither of them cared for its strange pattern. Still, she had made up for it this year.
“Come through and we can have a sherry,” she invited. He picked his now rather sodden parcel off the hall table and followed her into the lounge. A modestly-sized christmas tree stood on a table in the bay window, gaily bedecked with all manner of bright trinkets and the new electric lights (so much safer than trying to affix candles to needled branches). Beneath it lay a single parcel. As she busied herself with bottle and glasses, he put his parcel beneath the tree alongside it.
“Cheers!” she said, and he turned to find her proffering a waisted glass filled with golden liquid. He took it, wondering if it was his imagination that the glass got bigger every year, and raised it high.
“Your health! May you remain well so we can repeat this ceremony next year!” A shadow crossed her face but she rallied quickly enough.
“And yours! But who knows but that the year might bring something more for two as spry as ourselves.” They interlocked arms and drank the glasses dry in a single draught. A flush rose to her face and she turned away to busy herself with the bottle again.
“Perhaps we should open our presents now.” He appeared uncertain, perhaps embarrassed, seeking something to say.
“If you would only accept my hospitality on Christmas Day, we could share our gifts at the proper time.” The chastising tone was gentle to an extreme but it was there.
“Nayhh, woman, but you know I’ll have nothing to do with such superstitious nonsense…”
“…so let’s open our presents,” she interrupted, chastised. Twice she had mentioned it and twice he had reacted in exactly the same way as every year. She really ought to know better by now. Or he ought to…
“I wonder what it can be, in this rather soggy package,” she said stagily. “The paper is hardly being held in place by the ribbon and, by heaven, the ink has run on the card. What does it say…? ‘To bleeerchhach with alxded my blooorfvee, Leeeeynon’.”
As she began to unwind the brightly-patterned paper from the water-damaged box, he picked up the gift she had left beneath the tree for him and read the card – to Leon, with all my fondest love and best wishes for the new year. New technology can bring the most unexpected things, such as this device I found for you in London recently. Perhaps I, too, can dare to hope for the unexpected this year…
He ripped the tasteful wrapping and tore the box open. Out fell a small, furry toy in the shape of a bear with a pink ribbon around its neck bearing the legend, press my tummy to hear me sing. He pressed, and a tinny, barely recognisable voice began to sing, “We wish you a Merry Christmas…” as, across the room, an identical bear except for its blue ribbon piped up, “Glad tidings we bring to you and your kin…
The urchins at the crossroads kept to their hideyholes when they saw his fly rattling towards them, and watched his livid face as he thundered by, hooves and wheels slipping dangerously on the treacherous road. As he bounced off up the hill, a small, furry toy slipped from his pocket and splashed into a puddle. “We all like figgy pudding…” floated up the hill behind him.
Leon never went out on Christmas Day. There were too many sad memories. Sitting in his parlour, nursing a bottle and staring out of the window at the dramatic winter landscape, he tried not to think of all he had lost ­– the bright eyes, the drunken tattoo (he stroked his cheek) – when a tap-tap came at the back door.
He was minded to ignore it and return to his reverie – everyone knew not to disturb him on this day of all days – but something pushed him to stumble to the door, slip the bolts, and pull it open.
There was no one there. Then he heard, down by his feet, “We won’t go until we’ve got some…” and, looking down, he saw the furry automaton he thought he had lost. He picked it up and brought it into the house, slamming the door behind him.
“I wonder how you got here?” he pondered aloud as he put the bear down on the table and turned to get his bottle from the window sill.
“How d’ye think?”
“Who’s there,” he cried. “You mean little wretches, I’ll have all your fathers arrested…”
“Dere’s no one here but you, me and your imagination.” He gazed about him in bewilderment. Who was speaking? Then he looked down and saw the bear, sitting on the table propped against the loaf and cheese his housekeeper had left so he wouldn’t starve. The bear looked him in the eye and spoke.
“T’was yer little man, Billy Draper. He didn’t want to crash your cart and felt terrible mean after. But when he saw you drop me in the road, he thought he might make it up and bring me home to you. But he didn’t have the nerve to face you, so he hid after he knocked the door.” Leon looked at the bear, and the bottle, and the bear again, and the bottle again.
“I didn’t think I’d had a lot to drink” he mumbled. “Perhaps I banged my head and I’m hallucinating.”
“Don’t be an omadhaun. And ye’re no fluthered. Jeez, you people. Never know what you’re up to in the real world.” Leon leaned heavily on the table, put his bottle down, then collapsed gently into the great carver armchair that had been his father’s and his father’s before him. He reached forward and tore a chunk off the bread.
“You’re a talking bear and Billy Draper brought you here after I dropped you in the road?”
“Oi’m a singin’ bear! There’s not many as lucky as you to know I can talk. But some needs it more than others.”
“But how? I mean, I know about the singing technology, I saw it demonstrated at the big show in London. But how can you talk?”
“Typical bloody human. Something marvellous comes along and all you want to know is ‘how’, never ‘why’. Well, I tell you, when you get that sorted out, most of your troubles’ll be over.” Leon took a bite from the bread and chewed this over.
“I know how you sing,” he said. “It’s the same technology as the gramophone and the cylinder except they’ve managed to record sound onto a wire wound on a clockwork-driven drum. When this wire is pulled through a hole in an artificial tympanum, it reproduces the recorded sound approximately, in a tinny but rather cheerful manner. The wire is wound onto the drum in such an ingenious way that when it gets to the end it is at the beginning again. It’s a kind of multiple loop. But that is pre-recorded sound. It doesn’t explain how you can speak.”
“And there you go again, worritin’ about how, not why. You build your devices to go round in loops, just the way you live your own lives, and don’t realise that the spark of consciousness isn’t designed for loops.”
“What do you mean, ‘live our lives in loops’.”
“Sure, you could see it if you’d only look at yourselves for a minute. Here you are, after how many years, spending Christmas Day on your own again. And getting angry with anyone who wants to enjoy the season because your wife and child died in childbirth on this day all those years ago and you’ve a fear in you that if you let yersel’ enjoy it you might forget about them.
“And that tattoo on your cheek that you had done as a special surprise for her but she never saw. Keeping it covered up with that ridiculous beard just makes you turn back in on yourself more, round and round the same loop, and never letting yourself be happy.
“And that widow down in the village. How many years have you been half courting her but never being able to make a commitment? When she thinks you’re working up to asking her to marry you, she gets ready to say yes, then when you sheer off again she takes another glass of sherry.
“I don’t know where I came from, nor how I came to be here, nor how I came by this accent – there are no bears in Ireland – but I do know that when the designers of the singing bears made that convoluted loop of recording wire they sparked a consciousness into being in me. It didn’t happen with all the bears but some of us sat there on the shelves in the factories and shops with nothing to do but think and discuss and gradually we grew to understand what had happened to us and what a limited future we had as intelligent beings. We came to dread being bought and taken home and played with for an hour or two on Christmas Day and then being dropped and forgotten in the dust behind the Ottoman.
“But we didn’t despair. We thought and planned and tried to talk to the customers the way we did with each other. It didn’t always work and some dear friends were lost in the experimentation but eventually we discovered we could influence buyers we didn’t like away from us. Then we found we could also attract buyers we approved of. So we waited and watched and when a suitable owner came along one of us would convince them to choose us rather than any of the dumbears around us. I was lucky to be chosen by the widow for you and my partner was even more fortunate when you came along twenty minutes later and bought her for the widow.”
“You mean,” he spluttered. “You mean you chose us rather than the other way around?”
“Aye, that’s the trut’ of it, and now if you’ll be after getting your coat on we can walk down to the widow’s cottage – yes, leave Flodur in his stable and the groom in his bed for today – and see if there’s any dinner left for you.
And so it came to pass that on New Year’s day such a wedding as had rarely been seen in the village took place. There was great rejoicing. Now Leon and the widow had finally got together it seemed a shadow had lifted from the village. And no one was ill-mannered enough to ask why, instead of the traditional bride and groom models on top of the cake, there were two furry toy bears. Although if they had examined them closely enough, they would have found they looked every bit as content as the real bride and groom.

the end

The Man with the Santa Tattoo is copyright © 2013 Paul Brazier & Juliet Eyeions

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