Nora's Aunt

We're having a party to celebrate the new year tonight. It's fancy dress. This is why we've put a costume on the plastic Santa in the garden. He's now a pirate.

My uncle Harry was talking to a man called Thomas in the local pub one evening, and they ended up discussing politics.

"I once saw a French man and a French woman arguing about politics," Thomas said.

"I didn't know you spoke French," Harry said.

"I don't. They were arguing in English."

"Why would they do that if they were both French?"

"I suppose they wanted everyone to know what they were arguing about. It was all a performance. In fact, she was wearing a fake nose and he was wearing a wig. Now that I think about it, they were probably actors. If I'd known that at the time I'd never have committed it to memory. I have a piece of street theatre in my head. What am I going to do?"

"I don't see any way of erasing the memory now. But you could forget that you remembered it. And I think I know just the thing that would take your mind off it. Harvey has been spying on Nora's house. There must be something interesting to see."

Thomas forgot about the street theatre as soon as he heard this. They went to Harvey, who was hiding in a shed, and spying on Nora through a telescope. Harry asked him what he was looking at and he said, "When I called in to see Nora last week the priest was there. He was trying to take something out of a box, and it was obvious by the look on his face that he didn't want to touch this thing. I wouldn't want to touch anything in Nora's house."

"Why not?"

"Because everything looks as if it was made by fairies. Good fairies who sprinkle fairy dust on things. And it's very easy to offend them. You say the wrong thing and they'll be shoving a carrot up your nose when you sleep. I didn't know if the thing that was in the box was repellent to the priest because it was like everything else in her house or because it was like nothing else in her house. A dead rat will make some people back away, which I find strange. A dead rat is never going to shove a carrot up your nose when you sleep."

"Did he ever get the thing out of the box?"

"He stopped trying when I arrived. He seemed glad to see me because I provided an excuse for him to have a break from his excavations on the box. He shook my hand. This was interesting because a lot of people would be repelled by my hand. A lot more would be repelled if they knew where it had been. I said, 'I hope I'm not interrupting anything.' The priest said I certainly wasn't interrupting anything at all, but Nora didn't seem so sure. She made the tea anyway, and I stayed there for about an hour. I didn't think any more about the priest or the box or about anything at all until the following day when I was driving past Nora's house and I saw the priest going in. He was there again on the following day. I know because I checked with the telescope. I'm not being nosey or anything, but I've been spying on them ever since."

"What have you seen?"

"Nothing much. I can only see him arriving at the house, and then about an hour later she goes into the kitchen to make the tea."

Harry and Thomas got bored of this shortly after Nora made the tea. "We've got to find out what's going on," Thomas said. "And the only way we're going to do that is by asking what's going on."

"I think we should spy on them for another few days," Harvey said.

"Spying is useless unless you can see into the front room, and you can't see through the curtains."

A few minutes later Nora's doorbell rang, and when she opened the door she saw Harry, Thomas and Harvey. She invited them in to the front room, where the priest was having his tea. She poured tea and cut some cake for the new arrivals.

Harvey couldn't wait any longer to ask about the priest's visits. He said, "You seem to be spending a lot of time here."

Before the priest could answer, Nora said, "My aunt donated her collection of religious artefacts to the church when she died. She'd spent a lifetime collecting them. She was an extraordinary woman. She could shoot things out of her ears. She was a very good shot. She could shoot down a crow a hundred yards away. She'd see one out of the corner of her eye and she'd shoot. Whatever was in her ear wasn't hard enough to kill a crow, but it would daze them. You'd have to be careful if you had a crow-like appearance and you appeared at the edge of her field of vision. If you dressed all in black and you were much bigger than a crow she'd think you were a crow who was much closer to her than you actually were. If you were a long way away you'd have some time to get out of the way before being hit by the contents of her ear. You were better off not standing at either side of her. In her later years she was always accidentally shooting things out of her ears. She hit many of these religious artefacts, which complicates the job of cataloguing them. It's a cleaning job as well."

Harry, Thomas and Harvey didn't feel like having any of the cake. They left the house shortly afterwards. All three of them were trying to think of something to take their minds off Nora's aunt, and that's when Thomas remembered the street theatre. It was exactly the sort of thing he wanted to think about then. He acted out the scene for Harry and Harvey. His impression of the French woman was very funny.

The moose's head over the fireplace is getting some very good reviews for his performance in the pantomime. As a Christmas present, we gave him a framed photo of him on the stage. It's hanging on the wall opposite the fireplace. The wife's uncle has been giving everyone bottles of wine this year. He says that decades of experience has taught him that this is the safest present to give. One Christmas he struggled to find the right present for the woman he was engaged to at the time. He ended up giving her a cannon ball. Ever since then he's been advising people not to give presents that contain an inherent invitation to drop that present on your foot. He also advises against giving swords (another lesson he's learnt the hard way).

Gravy

I had to turn off the light in the plastic Santa. People were becoming transfixed by it. The wife's niece went to visit Santa on Saturday. Mrs. Claus was there too, and she really was married to Santa. They had an argument about Christmas shopping while the wife's niece was there (her presence always increases the stress levels, and arguments are almost inevitable). She was filled with wonder because the argument convinced her that Santa and Mrs. Claus are real. She wrote a letter to Santa, and she posted it by throwing it into the wind from the top of a hill. She had heard about people who posed as post boxes. If you weren't careful you'd end up putting your letter into someone's mouth.

My cousin Gary and his friend, Martin, were short of cash one Christmas. They considered various ways to make money, but none of these were satisfactory because they all involved doing jobs where the only requirement was a complete lack of dignity.

"There is one way to make money quickly," Martin said. "And I have a certain expertise in this area."

"Then why haven't you mentioned it before?"

"Because it's burglary. Or cat burglary, to be specific."

"You have an expertise in cat burglary?"

"I haven't told you about this before because I was sworn to secrecy. I used to live next door to a former compulsive cat burglar."

"I know someone who had a compulsive cat. It was really a dog."

"He couldn't stop cat burgling, even though he wanted to, so he deliberately got fat to break the habit. His size made him completely unfit for the job. Sometimes he felt a need to break into a building at night, but this need was satisfied when he passed on his secrets to me. I never thought the information would be of much use, but I think the time has come to give burglary a go."

"But it's wrong."

"It would be wrong to break into an old lady's house and steal her china plates. But would it be wrong to break into my uncle Eamon's house, after all the rotten things he's done to me over the years, the things he's done to everyone? And he must be loaded. He's a miser. He wouldn't give me a penny on my first communion. He wouldn't even give me a button. I asked for a button."

Gary didn't need any more convincing than this. He suggested that they dressed up as Santas when they were undertaking the break-in. A lot of people would be out and about late at night coming up to Christmas, as they made their way home from parties. If they saw two Santas entering a house they'd wonder if they were hallucinating because of all the alcohol they'd consumed. Gary could speak from personal experience.

So they dressed up in Santa suits and brought two big black bags. Martin had a bottle of whiskey in his bag. He said it was to celebrate when they'd finished the job, and possibly to ease their nerves before it.

Breaking into the house was easy, but as they stood in Eamon's dining room they spotted a flaw in their plan. Because Eamon was so unwilling to part with his money there was very little to steal. He didn't have a television. There was an old sideboard in the room, but it was empty. The carpet was worn, and there wasn't even a table cloth on the table.

The room seemed even emptier when the light came on and Eamon entered. He was too shocked to say anything. He wasn't expecting to see two Santas. Martin saw a way out of the situation. He said, "Merry Christmas, Uncle Eamon. We've brought you some presents."

Martin and Gary put all the money they had on the table. Gary added a silver cigarette lighter, and Martin reluctantly parted with the bottle of whiskey.

There was a tear in Eamon's eye. "No one has ever done anything like this for me before," he said.

"That's because you poke people with sticks," Martin said.

"And yet despite all the times I've poked you with a stick you still do this for me."

"Well, it is Christmas."

"You're right. It's Christmas. The time for giving. I'm going to give something to the two of ye that will be worth a hundred times what ye've given me."

He left the room, and they heard him going up the stairs. When he returned to the room a few minutes later he was holding a pile of papers. "These are my memoirs," he said. "In here ye'll find out how I made every penny I have. I remember every one of them."

Gary and Martin started reading the memoirs that night. The manuscript was full of stories about people who tried to get one over on him. The metaphor he often used was of someone putting a hand into a drawer to take something that was rightfully his. He always slammed the drawer shut on the hand. Sometimes this involved chasing people through the fields with a pitch fork and sometimes it involved frightening them away with a fake hand grenade.

He also wrote about his love life. Martin never knew he had a love life. Most of these stories ended with a woman slamming a drawer on his hand after he outlined the reasons why he wouldn't be buying her a birthday present.

Eamon had made most of his money from his business ventures. These included a junk yard and a shop that sold everything from top hats to rat poison. It was clear that he saved most of the money he made. He only bought new clothes when the tramps started to ignore him.

Gary and Martin came across only one way to make money quickly. It concerned a man called Maurice, who had been a minor celebrity in the area ever since he won a twenty-mile race against a dog. About fifteen years ago, Maurice started having glimpses of an Otherworld, or so he claimed. He changed his name to 'Quigley Stevenstun Area Planet Bulb' because he said that this was his Otherworld name. He also started wearing face paint because this is what they do in the Otherworld. He believed that by doing these things in the real world it would ease the transition into the Otherworld, and his visits there would last longer.

One day Eamon saw him holding a bunch of spoons. "Where did you get the spoons?" Eamon said to him.

"I stole them from the Otherworld," Maurice said.

"Can I have one?"

"No, get your own."

Eamon started to think that there was money to be made from this Otherworld, and he went out of his way to be friendly to Maurice. He visited Maurice's house almost every evening, and he often heard stories about the Otherworld. There were people there who didn't like his intrusions, he said. They sent him home in strange ways. They'd create a strong wind, and as it blew through wire fences it would form words, warning him to leave. Once he fell into a library that looked a lot like a hole in the ground, with roots of trees all around him, and then he found himself engulfed in ivy. Finally he fell into the real world and landed in a trough in a field. On another one of his visits they folded him up and put him into an envelope, and they told him they were posting him all around the world, but they only took him all around the priest's house. When the priest opened the door and saw him on the ground, the people from the Otherworld made him say, "I'm regretful of my past, Father, the one I found behind my ear." The priest took him in and spent hours talking to him about forgiveness and hell.

When Maurice's aunt came to stay with him, Eamon kept her occupied for three days by sending her on a wild goose chase after a chicken. Maurice was very grateful for this, and he promised to return the favour.

His visits to the Otherworld were lasting longer. He had more time to explore the place. From there he could see things in the real world that were invisible to the people who lived there. He saw where gold was buried. To say thanks for keeping his aunt busy, he gave Eamon a map with a red X marked on it. He told Eamon to dig a hole at that spot in the middle of the night. Eamon did as he was told, and he found a crock of gold there.

According to the memoirs, Maurice could be found at the ruins of a church at midnight. He'd be sitting on a stone, peeling an apple with a knife. Despite the frost and freezing temperature, Gary and Martin went there at midnight. They found Maurice sitting on the stone. Gary explained their predicament, and he mentioned that they had been referred to him by Eamon.

When Maurice finished peeling the apple he said, "Do me a favour and I'll make sure ye get the monetary value of that favour."

"What could we do?"

"Ye've come to me at the right time. There's something that ye might just be able to help me with. Ye'll have to pay an early morning visit to Agnes's restaurant."

Agnes has a restaurant in a shed. When she first opened it she catered mainly for builders and truck drivers, but all sorts of people go there now. She's done little to hide the shed-like qualities of the place. There's a corrugated iron roof and a concrete floor. The door is locked with a padlock at night.

Maurice told them that she had barred him from the restaurant after accusing him of stealing spoons (an accusation he strenuously denied). But he loved the food she served, especially the gravy she poured on the sausages at breakfast time. Ever since being barred he'd spent most of his time thinking about that gravy. This is why he wanted Gary and Martin to get the recipe. They said they'd do their best.

She started serving breakfast at six o' clock in the morning, so they started spying on her at five. They hid behind a ditch, from where they had a good view of the kitchen window. They used binoculars to watch Agnes at work as she made the gravy. Most of the gravy's ingredients came from a pig's head. She added in bits of a rabbit that made the pig's eyes seem appetising.

Gary and Martin wondered if they should tell Maurice the truth. It might well put him off the gravy, and the favour would be worthless to him. But they knew that if they gave him a fake recipe he'd try to make the gravy from it and he'd realise they'd lied to him. So they gave him a detailed description of what they had seen. It left him speechless. At first they thought that his mind was gripped by the horror of the gravy, but then a smile broke out on his face.

He kept his word. He gave them all of the money he had in his pockets, along with everything else he had in his pockets. He had managed to fit fifteen spoons into his trouser pockets alone. Some of them were silver. Gary and Martin sold the spoons, and they ended up making well over a thousand euros from the favour they did for Maurice.

The moose's head over the fireplace is enjoying the pantomime. His performances have been consistently good throughout the rehearsals, but the same can't be said for his fellow actors. The more they rehearse, the worse they get. The director has taken up smoking again to cope with the stress. A man promised to make a snow machine for the opening night, which is tonight, but the machine still isn't ready, and this 'machine' looks remarkably like a gun. He promises that no one will be injured when the snow is shot out.

Giles

I've put up some of the decorations in the garden. The illuminated plastic Santa has decided to flicker on and off this year, and I'm quite happy to let him do as he pleases. One of our neighbours objects to any visual representation of Santa because he still believes in the real thing. He says it's like making a visual representation of God, and that by giving them both white beards we're just trying to make them small enough to fit our understanding. But he makes claims about Santa that he'd never make about God. He says that Santa is Scottish. He also believes that Santa travels through the sky on a ship with masts and sails, and there are tiny cymbals attached to the hull. When birds hit the cymbals it sounds like sleigh bells ringing, and sometimes Santa deliberately tries to hit birds. I think these claims are derived from actual experiences.

My cousin Hugh and his fiancee, Annabel, once spent a weekend with Annabel's sister, Amy, and Amy's husband, Gavin. They live in an old house out in the country. The weekend away was shortly before Christmas, and the ground was covered in snow.

Hugh drove to Amy and Gavin's house, and Annabel kept talking throughout the trip. Some of her sentences were ten miles long. Hugh was more interested in staying on the road than in following the winding route her words took. She spoke about how there were different types of Christmas. There's one for the shoppers. This one begins shortly before Halloween, as soon as they've got their Halloween shopping out of the way. It really gets going in November and it doesn't stop until the sales in the New Year. She said she could be a shopper without taking the role too seriously. She knew it was just a role, even though she enjoyed playing it, but in essence she was a lover of a traditional, simple Christmas, a time when little money was spent on presents, and decorations were kept to a minimum. If he'd been interested in starting an argument he'd have pointed out that she spent a lot of money on presents and that decorations were only kept from the maximum by her inability to put lights on the cat.

When they arrived at the house, Gavin was busy laughing at a joke he'd heard three days earlier. Amy and Annabel were going to a nearby town to do some Christmas shopping. Hugh decided not to join them. Amy told him to help himself to a drink while he waited for Gavin to finish laughing.

Hugh poured himself a whiskey and he sat down by the fireplace. He noticed a book on a small table next to the armchair. It was about the myths, customs and characters associated with Christmas in the local area. He read some of it to pass the time.

According to the book, in the seventeenth century people believed that a bright eye would appear in the sky every Christmas Eve. The eye would see into their souls, and its light would pass right through them, illuminating their sins, and these sins would be visible to anyone standing behind them. This is why people would go to confession just before Christmas, or else they'd make sure no one was standing behind them. Another story dealt with the man who ran through the fields every Christmas night. He had cups and cans attached to his coat. Amy had written a note in the margin here. It said that her idea of a holiday was running at night, and that she could think of herself as a bird as she ran through the fields.

One chapter was devoted to a monastery, and the activities of the monks at Christmas. Amy had written another note here. It said that the monks' way of life was often on her mind. They seemed so happy. She wanted to escape those thoughts. She found it easy not to think about things she couldn't have, but she couldn't escape thoughts of what she could have if she gave up everything she had. It was always niggling at her mind, the idea of clearing away all of the unnecessary things from her life and starting again.

Hugh hated having to read these notes. He knew that she only wrote them so other people would read them. He tried to focus on the book. He came across a story about a monk who was known as Giles, but this was just a nickname. Before he became a monk he had an unfortunate habit of seducing married women, of running away through the fields in the middle of the night, jumping over ditches with angry husbands in pursuit, their bullets overtaking him.

A group of locals who called themselves 'The Ethics Committee' decided to do something about him. They told him to abandon this lifestyle or else face action. He thought they had no power, but after their warning he had a feeling he was being followed at night. After a few weeks he was reduced to a nervous wreck, and he decided to became a monk to get away from the women. He moved into the monastery. The feeling went away and he recovered his mental health, but over time he began to return to his old ways.

The monks were getting a bad name because of his behaviour. Some of them wanted to do something about Giles. Some used him as an excuse to behave badly themselves. Giles would get the blame if a man returned to his house late at night and saw a monk leaving through a window.

One of the monks taught him how to paint, as a way to take his mind off women. He painted elephants and giraffes when he was full of passion; mice and ants when he felt empty. This new hobby did have some impact in curtailing his nocturnal adventures.

He taught some of the monks how to read women's minds by looking at their necks, and this was actually beneficial to the daily lives of everyone in the monastery. Before Giles had arrived, anarchy would take hold in the monastery about once a year and it would last a few days. A lot of drink would be consumed, women would be allowed into the monastery and parties would go on long into the night.

But it always left them with an empty feeling. They'd return to their very rigid rules. This is how the monastery used to operate, but they found that Giles brought a balance to their lives, just the right amount of anarchy, enough of a bad influence on the others, but not too much. They no longer vacillated between two extremes.

According to the book, Giles was in his sixties now, and he was still a monk. The monastery wasn't far from Amy and Gavin's house, so Hugh decided to go for a walk through the fields to find it.

It was late in the afternoon when Hugh found the monastery. He walked all around the outer walls. He was just about to head back towards the house when a man came running around the corner. He opened a door in the wall, and Hugh saw that there was a storeroom for gardening tools inside. The man hid in there. A few seconds later a group of about ten men came around the corner. They were holding sticks and guns. One of them said to Hugh, "Did you see a man go by?"

"Yes," Hugh said. "He went into the monastery through the front gate."

The men ran on and went in through the gate. The man emerged from the door shortly afterwards. "Thanks for that," he said to Hugh.

"You were lucky they weren't following the footprints in the snow."

"Guns aren't much use if you don't have the brains."

"I still wouldn't trust a man with a gun if he didn't have much in the way of brains."

The man went over to Hugh, shook his hand and said, "My name is Giles."

"Giles? The Giles?"

"I suppose I have to take responsibility for my actions and admit that I've brought the 'the' on myself."

"I've just been reading about you."

"I'd love to stay here chatting, but I need to leave. They'll meet someone inside who'll pour them a drink while I find a place to hide."

Hugh asked if he'd like to come back to Amy and Gavin's house, and Giles accepted the offer.

The house was in silence when Hugh and Giles arrived. Hugh assumed that Gavin must have gone out. He poured a whiskey for Giles and one for himself, and they sat down by the fire. Hugh said, "Forgive my curiosity, but I have to ask you why those men were chasing you."

"I'm only too happy to tell the story," Giles said. "If you've read about me, you won't be surprised to hear that there's a woman at the centre of this story. Her name is Sylvia. She's no ordinary woman. The hairs on her head can sense things, the sort of things that are beyond human perception. They pass messages on to her, and she passes the messages on to whoever they concern. Some messages are cryptic, like 'The blue ants hide in pies when the yellow sun hops behind the rock'. Some are easier to comprehend, like 'Watch out for that swan'.

"There's a group of people who live in a converted barn not far from here. I suppose you'd call them a commune. People are suspicious of communes. There was a time when people were suspicious of monks. This particular commune in the barn spend their days playing the roles of hairs on an invisible head. They have a strong sense of the head's presence, even though they can't see it. They'll never claim that the head is divine, but they won't deny it either. They all wear the same colour clothes and they stand closely together. It looks like a lot of fun. Sometimes they dye the hair and they change the colour of their clothes. Sometimes they'll give it a new style. Recently Sylvia has started to feel a connection to them. A lot of the messages her hair was picking up concerned them.

"This was of little concern to me when I fell in love with her. There were occasions when we managed to find a few quiet moments together, a chance to express our love for each other. But while each of these encounters took place, the hair commune went on a rampage. They broke windows in houses and in cars. They vandalised sheds. This only made Sylvia want to do it more often.

"When news of our affair became public her husband was furious. Sylvia deals with every awkward situation in the same way: she makes a salad. This is what she did for her husband, and it worked. It always works. His anger dissipated. The people who were chasing me all had their property vandalised by the rampaging hair. They're blaming me for it. They said I could have put a stop to it after the first or second time."

"Aren't you worried they'll catch up with you eventually?"

"No, they'll be fine after Sylvia has had a chance to make salads for them."

Hugh re-filled their glasses and Giles told more stories. When it was completely dark outside, Hugh noticed that the flames from the fire were creating some unusual dancing shadows on the wall. He looked at the shadows, and he became transfixed by them. He thought he could see people dancing.

His trance was broken by the sound of Gavin laughing upstairs. When he looked around he noticed that Giles was gone.

Amy and Annabel returned from their shopping trip. All they had bought were two twigs with fake snow on them -- they had bought one each. The twigs were Christmas decorations. Amy said they felt completely fulfilled after their afternoon's shopping because the twigs were the perfect example of the simplicity she was looking for.

The balance was all wrong, Hugh thought. He felt a need to go shopping, to buy widescreen TVs and iPhones, things he didn't need and expensive gifts that no one wanted. But then he found out that each twig cost two-hundred euros, and everything seemed right again.

The moose's head over the fireplace will be appearing in the local pantomime again this year. They're doing 'Jack and the Beanstalk'. The beanstalk is being played by two small men after a tall man had to pull out of the production (he got his finger stuck in a bottle). The two small men used to be the donkey in previous pantomimes. This year the moose's head will play the head of the donkey. The rest of it will be played by a pig and a woman called Deirdre.

A Life of Letters

I'm going to have to get the Christmas decorations out of the shed soon. Some people have their decorations up already. Some people have hidden their houses beneath lights and plastic reindeer. My great-grandfather wrote a dissertation on Christmas decorations. He did a lot of research in the library and he came to the conclusion that all you'd need to decorate your house was an apple and a feather.

My cousin Craig used to live in an apartment with some friends of his from college. One of those friends, Thomas, used to make his own music. He believed he had discovered a type of music that would send nurses into a trance, making them move en masse at night, like zombies. He never played this music. He was saving it for when he needed to repel actual zombies (unless they were good zombies). He had another sort of music that would make women's hair fall down over their shoulders.

Craig always kept a CD of this music in the CD player in case Sharon came to visit. She worked for an interior design magazine. She went around to apartments and houses and inspected them for possible inclusion in the magazine. Craig invited her to inspect his apartment. He had no desire to see it in the magazine, and neither would Sharon after she saw it, but he really wanted to see her again. He'd play her the music and her hair would fall down over her shoulders. She'd drop her clipboard and forget about the apartment, becoming fascinated by him instead. Two months went by and she still hadn't called around, but Craig didn't give up hope.

Beverly lived across the hall. She wrote an advice column for the local newspaper. A lot of people wrote letters to her simply because they enjoyed writing letters. Some of those letters would be over ten pages long, and the pages would be stapled together. Some people sent the staple in a small envelope of its own, and there would be two tiny holes in the corner of each page. There would be a note telling her she could insert the staple if she wanted to. She hardly ever got paper clips. She could spend hours talking about this.

One day she called around to Craig's apartment and asked if she could use his phone. She had lost her own phone in her Christmas tree and she couldn't find it. The tree was too thick. It had been engulfed in ivy as well, and there were animals living in it. And then there was the layer of decorations. She searched for the phone every time it rang, but to no avail. She didn't mind because most people communicated with her by letter.

Just before she knocked at the door, Craig had been listening to a Christmas song that Thomas had recorded. He performed it in the style of MC Hammer, only he did it with a Chinese accent so no one would accuse him of copying MC Hammer. Some people accused him of copying a Chinese MC Hammer impersonator.

After Craig opened the door and let Beverly in he pressed 'play' on the CD player so she could hear the Christmas song, but he'd forgotten that force of habit had made him remove the CD and replace it with the one that would make hair fall down. When he realised his mistake he turned around to look at Beverly. She looked much more beautiful with her hair down over her shoulders, and she was smiling at him. He asked her if she'd like to go out for a coffee, and she said she would.

They went to a cafe at the other side of the street. She told him about a man called Ron who had been writing letters to her for over a year. In the first letter he had sought advice on growing turnips. Beverly didn't include this one in her newspaper column but she responded with a letter that contained everything she knew about turnips.

He wrote back to her. He thanked her for her advice and he told her how much he had enjoyed writing to her. He asked if it would be okay for him to write to her again. She wouldn't need to respond to any letter he wrote in the future. All he wanted was the reassurance that someone was reading them. She wrote back to him and said she'd gladly read anything he sent her.

Ever since then she'd been getting letters from him once a week. She gave Craig this summary of the previous year's worth of letters:

He bought some geraniums. He saw a horse and a cart on the road. His aunt went to Scotland. He bought some homemade butter. His wife died in an explosion on a boat. He lost his scarf. He had his piano tuned. He married a woman called Imogen. He came to the realisation that there were nothing special about strawberries. He got his car serviced. His dead wife started haunting his house. He found a Toblerone. A woman known only by the initial Y came to live with them. She promised to get rid of his wife's ghost in under a month. There were minor inconveniences surrounding Y's presence in the house, like having to fight off demons, and finding eyes in the soup. He's been watching snooker on TV.

Three weeks had gone by without a letter from Ron. Beverly had written to him, asking if everything was okay, but she didn't get a response. She had considered visiting his house, but she didn't want to go there on her own, so Craig said he'd go there with her.

Ron lived in a Georgian house on a quiet street. Beverly rang the doorbell, and the man who opened the door looked as if he desperately needed a good night's sleep. Beverly introduced herself and Craig. The man's face lit up. "I'm Ron," he said, and he shook her hand.

He invited them in, and he explained the reason for his lack of sleep. Y had been missing for weeks, but throughout this time they could hear her voice. She was talking to Ron's dead wife, Martha. They kept talking through the night, often rambling on about stupid things and laughing for no reason.

As Ron, Beverly and Craig sat in the drawing room they heard the voices of Y and Martha.

"It's very, very odd," Y said.

"Very odd," Martha said.

"Very, very odd."

"What is?"

"You were the one who asked me about it."

"What did I ask you about?"

"Something that was very odd."

"Oh yeah. It's very, very odd."

"I was just thinking that myself."

"I said to him, 'What are you going to do with that beard?'"

"And what did he say?"

"He didn't say anything. He just cried. No, not 'cried'. He sobbed. Softly."

"Do you know what else is odd?"

"What?"

"Cats."

Beverly joined the conversation at this point. "I have a very odd cat," she said loudly, almost shouting. "A very, very odd cat."

There was silence for a few seconds. Then Y said, "In what way is he odd?"

"It's difficult to put your finger on it. There isn't any one thing. But the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and the parts add up to a very, very odd cat. I have him here if you'd like to see him."

"Very much so," Y said. "Go to the spare bedroom on the second floor and look behind the wardrobe. You'll find a small brass button on the skirting board. Press that."

Beverly and Craig followed Ron to the spare bedroom. They pulled back the wardrobe and looked for the button. Beverly found it, and when she pressed it a small door opened in the wall. It had been concealed by the wallpaper. There was a long, narrow room at the other side.

Ron was the first to look into the room. He saw Y and Martha. At first he thought he was looking at a ghost, but she was holding a glass of brandy and eating chocolates, and the idea dawned on him that she was alive and well.

She confessed to being alive. She had a few other confessions to make as well. She had faked her death on a boat because she was having an affair. She wanted to run away with this other man and start a new life. But the man she was supposed to run away with ran away from her when he fell in love with the nurse who came to his aid when he fell into a hole.

The secret room had been built by the previous owner of the house so he could hide from certain relatives -- he had told them he had gone into space. He installed vents in all of the rooms and they were connected to the secret room by pipes, so he could hear the relatives whenever they were in the house and he'd know when they'd left.

Martha had discovered the room years earlier. She used to hide her supplies of brandy and chocolate in there, and she hid there with them after her planned new life fell to pieces. She was furious when Ron re-married so soon after her death. One night she was saying something about him in her sleep. He heard it through the vents and it woke him up. She woke up shortly afterwards, when she heard him panicking about the ghost in the house. She realised that the ghost of his dead wife would be the ideal spanner in the works of his new marriage, so she'd been 'haunting' them ever since.

Ron laughed when she finished her tale. The sight of so much brandy always had a strong influence on his spirits. Beverly and Craig thought it was a good time for them to leave, but Beverly was looking forward to the next letter.

It arrived a few days later. It started like this:

Dear Beverly, it's a nightmare having to buy Christmas presents for two wives, and for Y. Christmas dinner with three women isn't likely to be much fun either. I'm reading a very interesting book about spiders...

The moose's head over the fireplace has been listening to a lot of hip hop recently. I think it's just a way of drowning out some of the Christmas songs in his head. The wife's uncle says he once played piano on a Christmas single released by a country band. The song was about a sad duck on Christmas Eve, but his Christmas wish came true when Santa brought him a wig that made him look like Joan Collins.

A Musical Day

December has begun and the final defence against the flood of Christmas has been washed away. The garden has been covered in frost in the morning over the past few days. It seems a shame to ruin this natural decoration by putting up Christmas lights. I've been reading more of my great-grandfather's guide book. He wrote about people listening to the frost in the fields to hear voices from the Otherworld. His theory was that this tradition started with people trying to find where they'd buried their dynamite.

My cousin Charlie once joined a band called Ballooning Spinsters. The lead singer was Jamie, one of Charlie's friends. Jamie had started the band because of his belief that each day was like a musical. Most days had a happy ending. In winter the musicals were very dramatic. The blizzards had eyes that could transfix him.

He could create a narrative for the day and choose what characters to include by choosing who he'd visit. Some days would require the inclusion of a woman who wept songs instead of singing them, but on most days he'd try to avoid her. Some things were beyond his control. There was always an element of improvisation.

He started to see his friends as backing singers, so it was only natural that he'd form a band. Hearing people sing sounded as normal as the song of the birds. When he heard people talk he was often reminded of colours. The babble of his backing singers in the back of his van sounded red sometimes, and sometimes it was green, or even blue.

Peter, Jamie's brother, loved books. They provided the perfect escape from the worries and fears of daily life. Whenever he saw a tree he imagined the book it could be. He believed that all of his dreams were recorded in books somewhere out in the world, even though he hadn't found any of them. He didn't need to read at night because dreams provided his escape.

Then one day he found a book that was like one of his days and he started to question his conception of reality. He remembered the advice of his grandfather: Be like a dart through the night to the blue of the morning. Get there as quickly as possible and don't get lost in the wilderness of a dream.

He wondered if days were really like dreams, full of unreal events that couldn't hurt him. His grandfather could have been suggesting that the dream world was real, a place he should fear.

He stopped reading and started exploring the world around him, and his fears faded away. He saw evidence of his theory that the world around him wasn't real. His brother asked him to be in a band that would perform a musical every day. The old Peter would have been terrified of performing in front of other people, but the new one saw no reason to worry, and he joined the band.

He enjoyed being part of Jamie's musicals. Some days were mysteries. Most days ended with a gig and a party. On summer nights the band often ended up in the fields around the town, where people sat on deck chairs and looked up at Bertrand flying his fighter plane. Almost everyone thought that this was more entertaining than going to the cinema. Not that Bertrand and his plane were exciting, but the films in the cinema were terrible.

The local cinema was owned by a man called Clarence. Business was terrible because of Bertrand and his plane, and Clarence decided that he'd need to make his own film to win back his customers. He came up with the idea of filming one of Jamie's musicals. Jamie and his band were all in favour of the idea, but Clarence was worried that people wouldn't pay to see a simple musical. He thought he needed to spice up the action a bit, so he hired actors to appear in Jamie's day, and he didn't tell Jamie about this.

The film crew began filming the band at ten o' clock in the morning. By midday Charlie was starting to suspect that something funny was going on. They'd already met two beautiful young women who looked like models. The women said they were tourists and they asked Jamie if he'd show them the best sights in the locality. When they were walking through the woods they were attacked by Ninjas, right in the middle of Jamie's song about the trees, and just after they left the woods Bertrand's fighter plane flew low over their heads. Peter remained calm in all of these situations. Even when the Ninjas appeared he wasn't in the least bit surprised. He fought them off with a stick while the others ran away.

Jamie still didn't see anything odd about this, and Peter was seeing everything in a dreamlike way. He didn't see any real danger. Charlie and the rest of the band were starting to suspect that something was going on.

They took the women to see the ruins of a castle, but two men with handguns emerged from the castle and told them to put their hands up. Peter took no notice of them. He was more interested in the litter on the ground. It was blowing around in circles. "I get the feeling that the litter isn't as inanimate as it should be," Peter said, "as if it's alive."

He examined the ground where the litter was, and he found a concrete manhole cover. He lifted the cover and climbed down into the manhole.

The actors wondered if this was meant to be part of the plot, something that Clarence hadn't told them about so their reactions would be real. They decided to remain in character. One of the men with the guns said, "Right, everyone down the manhole."

The two women went down first, followed by Jamie and his band, then the other two actors, and finally the film crew.

Peter had a small torch in his pocket. He turned it on, and they could see that they were in a tunnel. There were murals on the walls, images of violence, of beings that were half human, half machine. In one of the murals there was a man attached to a car battery.

Peter walked down the tunnel and the others followed. They came to a stone staircase. Peter climbed it. There was a wooden trapdoor at the top of the stairs and he knocked on this. He could hear footsteps above him, and the trapdoor was opened by a man who smiled and said, "Come on up and join the party."

Peter, his band-mates, the actors and the film crew climbed into a room. There were only five other people at this party. They were all holding drinks. The atmosphere seemed tense. The man who had opened the trapdoor was a tailor who was impeccably dressed. He said, "We always have a party after our official meetings. One member of our club has to be standing outside at all times during the meeting and during the party after it. This has been in the rule book for over a century. That's why Jerome is standing outside the window." They looked towards the window and they saw a man outside. He waved at them. "Jerome often volunteers to go outside because he's been standing for four years."

The tailor turned to a priest and asked if he had a contribution to make. "Not at this time," the priest said.

"When is the time?" the tailor said. "That's what I'd like to know. There never has been a time."

Charlie asked the tailor how they'd get out of the house. The tailor pointed towards a door near the fireplace and he said, "Ye can leave through that door or else ye can go back the way he came. Before ye decide, it's worth considering the fact that death is a depressing matter, but death has bad eye-sight. As long as the lights are low you don't need to worry too much."

Charlie wanted to ask if he was he speaking metaphorically, but before he could say anything Peter was walking towards the door. He opened it and entered a dimly-lit corridor. The others followed him.

There were paintings on the walls on either side. They looked very real, but it was hard to see them clearly in the dim light. Then Charlie saw one of the paintings move and he realised that there was a real person behind the glass.

A door opened at the end of the corridor. A man emerged from a room. There was a light on in the room behind him, and he seemed to have trouble adjusting to the dim light. He was wearing a black suit, a white shirt and a black tie. He had thick glasses and he was holding a handgun. He fired over their heads.

The actors didn't know if this was real or just a set-up. They decided to play it safe and they ran away screaming. So did everyone else, apart from Peter. The cameraman pointed his camera backwards as he ran away, and the last shots on the tape were of Peter talking to the man in the black suit.

The club members laughed at the stream of people disappearing down into the tunnel. They stopped laughing when Peter calmly entered the room shortly afterwards. He said goodbye to them as he climbed down the stone steps.

When the actors and the film crew met Clarence that evening they asked him if he set the whole thing up. He said he did, but he didn't sound too sure about that.

Peter ended up being the hero of the film. At the end they made it look as if he'd killed the man in the black suit. They filmed another scene of Peter with a gun, and a man in a black suit lying on the ground in front of him, and then one of the women, who was a model, ran to him, kissed him and said, "You killed the man who killed my family and made me become his bride. How can I ever thank you?"

Peter saw this as further evidence that real life was much better than dreams.

The moose's head over the fireplace had his fortune told by one of our neighbours. She told him he'd travel the world and make a fortune selling camels. She said she could see his future clearly, but she failed to spot the dubious expression on his face.