The first pill was a shiny purple and tasted of mulled wine and bratwurst.
As Nick felt the edges of the lozenge began to fizz slightly on his tongue, he felt the air inside his lungs begin to pull inwards, tightening his chest and sending an adrenal pulse through his body. He couldn’t quite remember how many years that he’d been doing this. He wasn’t so old that he didn’t feel his blood begin to tingle with the idea of another festive season, but he was old enough to feel the Christmases that had gone before layered around him like tissue paper.
Each winter, when the nights began to park their dark tanks on his afternoons Nick knew it was time to go inside the room. He told himself it was a comforting place but the sense of reassurance came more from the regularity of his returning there than any quality of the room himself. There was a leather-ish armchair, a dark green plastic Christmas tree with a chaotic sprawl of coloured lights and tinsel and other decorations that he had accrued each year, a cupboard with some booze and foods, and a random collection of other objects and mementoes that he had often forgotten one year to the next, sometimes remembering them with a sudden jolt, other times a tingle, and sometimes a queasy sense of foreboding co-mingled with hindsight.
Sitting in his chair he would reach out for his decorated wooden box, a gift from a distant relative so early in Nick’s life he couldn’t remember, and take a pill between his fingers. (Nick never knew where they came from and never questioned why they arrived, honouring the ancient tradition of letting others do all the planning.) The pills weren’t always taken in the same order, not always on the same date, but the purple one was almost always the first and a greater distance in time from the others. It was his Advent herald, sitting in the first snug wooden chamber behind the lid of the box, expectant with a soft glow from somewhere inside itself. Nick would hold the pill between his fingers for a moment, which sometimes felt like hours, before slipping it in between his lips.
He wondered if the purple was the first because it drew him in, pulled at his senses, eased him on his way, prickled his curiosity. The first of the familiar hallucinations began to populate the corners of his thoughts. Cold air flooding his sinuses during late-night shopping, mingled with the sweet, stodgy scent of doughnuts and central European sausages. The crush of shoulders and elbows in weatherproof fabrics. Arcs of cigarette smoke and vaping clouds and chatter hanging sharp in the wintry evening atmosphere. The press of people going about their business and spending money, the quickening of the year towards its end, jobs to do, lists to cross, appointments to fret about, toys to pine for. Don’t tell me you forgot cranberries too!
These sensations could flash by in moments or Nick could feel cushioned by them for what felt like days, his legs kibbling and swinging as he felt the midwinter momentum pushing him on towards something worthwhile, something to be treasured. He felt enmeshed in the organism that was humanity, moving as a limb within a thousand arms and legs, a face among billions. Then, as long as it took, Nick would find he had reached for the next pill.
The gold pill tasted of margaritas and prosecco, frothing with wayward intent and streaked with a sweet, salty, bitter blend of tastes that refused to coalesce into one feeling. His vision became chalky and indistinct with sparkle. Everywhere he looked, his optics were overwhelmed with mirrors, sequins, disco balls and his synapses swam dizzily in the warm, bubbly jacuzzi of party time. The sense of myriad arms and legs began to condense into a few bodies, moving to hidden rhythms and obeying ancient misrules. The air in his mouth was warm now and tasted of other people’s mouths.
Hallucinatory mistletoe was everywhere, ripe with the promise of greasy made-up lips and hot boozy breath and giggles and holy transgressions. Office party bawdiness and bad karaoke and risqué outfits and cuddles that glued arm to waist for longer than would normally be allowed, the static cling of year-long crushes allowed to briefly flower. Xmas licences for all and for everything. His gorge engorged and it was gorgeous. Everywhere there were dark eyes and laughing voices and teeth. The same time next year was now, and it would never end.
With the next pill, silvery and bullet-shaped, the lights swiftly grew harsher and less forgiving, stabbing Nick’s retinas with horrible accuracy. His tongue shrivelled with the taste of paranoia and regret and sin, while his ears rang with disapproval and shitty takes. Faces seemed to turn inwards and the organism of humanity shrank away from him. His heart grew cold like the tears on his cheeks, and he could feel the cosmos turning under his unsteady feet, indifferent and huge.
Christmas was a joke, humanity a failed design. Love became a long-off star. Ghosts of Christmases that never came to pass mourned their inability to break through, paper hats damp with nightmares, waving mouldy crackers with pain-cramped fists, and keening through misshapen voices for the longing in their hearts for everything to find its end.
The next mossy, flint-grey tablet, chalky on the tongue, worked fast to re-establish very old ideas, reworking the pain and chaos into regular patterns. Visions gripped Nick hard and heavy, just as they did every year. He saw each and every year stretching away from him like a map. He felt frost crystallising on his fingers. He heard medieval mystics quietly praying to their gods and bad thoughts muttered behind Victorian beards. Gaudate! Christus est natus! He saw standing stones bearing witness to the circuits of a million tiny, wintry suns. He smelt the fusty smoke of a peat fire. He imagined straw and myrrh and the stuttering breath of awestruck shepherds.
This was the pill that enabled Nick to commune with his ancestors, both foreign and domestic, to conjure up half-forgotten bedrooms and four-fifths-forgotten comforts and securities. His parents stood beside him, just out of eyeshot. His old lives were continuing in adjacent rooms without him. Old loves, old gifts, old assumptions, old friends collected in deathlessness. Forgotten presents in forgotten corners of forgotten rooms. A mille-feuille of lives at one remove, time and space overlapping each other like wet tracing paper.
He was an altar boy watching his new digital watch turn to 00:00 at Midnight Mass. He was driving a remote control car around the long-sold family home with his brother, listening to NOW 10. He was on the ‘phone to his university girlfriend, making warm promises about what the next year would bring. He was sat with another girlfriend in the middle of a day of glorious nothing, soothed by ‘Christmas Eve’ by Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and the twinkling lights in the window and fizzy advocaat. He was sat in an old flat, playing Call of Duty and recording Christmas music with his bandmates. He was basting a turkey and drinking his way through a Xmas store of whiskey and mulled wine and White Russians in his first married home. He was leaving presents for his two-month-old son under the Xmas tree, trying to work out how to sign ‘Dad’. He was warmed and worn-down and now and then and sometime in the future, grief for the past and anxiety for the yet-to-come contained within the impossible pattern of what-always-was.
The next pill tasted of mince pies and whiskey and carrots, and it left Nick with a towering sense of kinetic potential at the top of the festive rollercoaster, looking around the room last thing before bed on Christmas night. Presents piled under the tree, lights glowing, plans realised (albeit imperfectly), offerings to Father Christmas nibbled upon, offerings to the gods of social media posed and posted, everything hanging with possibility. The moment the ball of the year was about to roll back down the hill, the bubble was about to break.
Nick’s fingers gripped the faux-leather of the chair’s arms with excitement, trying to hold onto the moment, to the expectant buzz for as long as possible. He never felt more like he was in the right place at the right time more than he did right now.
The next pill from his box of Russian Revels was wrapped in the most electrically shiny paper that Nick could imagine, Quality Street magnified to the power of ten. The more quickly and furiously he tried to unwrap it, the more difficult it seemed to be get to. His fingers trembled; he felt a child’s scream of excitement rising up his throat. Frustration building, Nick eventually crammed the whole package into mouth and felt a warm trickle of beer and chocolate run down his tongue and into his throat. But he wanted more.
More drink, more food, more chocolate, more toys, more presents, more time, more joy, more people, more sex, more fun, more more. He felt himself become a machine driven by consumption, his wiring fusing and shorting with the lust for more, more, more. His chair was old and shitty; he couldn’t bear the sight of it any longer. He needed another phone, another credit card, another stomach, another tail to wag, another box of delights, another line, another holiday, another life, another pill.
The jade pill that Nick next stuffed into his face seemed to swell inside his belly, turning his appetites upside down and inside out and leaving him feeling nauseous and bloated. Everything in the room was off. The wallpaper looked greasy and dull. The decorations soured before his very eyes, growing torn and out of date. The music was depressing, but not as much as the jokes in the crackers. He heard racist opinions dropping around the table like turds in the trifle and royalty addressing the nation from gold toilets and Mariah Carey and hypocritical carols and priests advising not to give alms directly to the poor and self-serving charity singles and nightmare-ish Christmas TV specials like Mr Blobby’s Boys and Have I Got Songs of Praise For You. Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?
The Christmas he had constructed around himself was painfully embarrassing, poisoning his sense of a carefully curated self. He needed to get out and to get it out. The jade pill was the purgative that every Christmas needs. It tasted like salt water and smelt like bleach. Its sacred release could not come quickly enough.
He didn’t even remember taking the next pill. He no longer knew what day of the week it was. How was it still Sunday? It had been a month of Sundays, a year of non-days. Had the pill been a foggy, sunless grey colour? Where had that taste of porridge and stuffing come from? Time was a looped piece of paper, hanging in a chain from the ceiling. Nobody had any time or place to go.
At one point, a Wednesday lurked into view. Nick hoped he would be reincarnated as an astrophysicist.
A cloying taste of turkey clung to Nick’s teeth as the next pill began to take effect. He felt cosy and immovable as though lying under an illimitable pile of Christmas jumpers. There was a drink of something rosy and warm in his hand. There was a drink of something else milky and welcoming in his other hand. A box of chocolates sat within easy reach. Snatches of the big Christmas movie drifted past. Shakin’ Stevens offered helpful words of encouragement while Morecambe & Wise danced with Angela Rippon. Children squealed and hugged one another, while grown-ups fondly kissed, happy with their life choices.
Almost accidentally, with somnolent fingers, Nick missed the chocolate tin and popped another pill into his mouth, and the situation span round in his head.
It was black and bitter like tarmac. It tasted like adrenalin and the kind of chemicals a brain might leak after a car crash, burning the back of his throat. Nick felt his skull pressed on all sides by unbearable weights, as the screams and yelps of the children shredded his frontal lobes, blurring his vision and sending lightning across his scalp. His paper hat itched at his temples, sending jolts through his skull like a course of electro-shock therapy.
He felt trapped. Trapped by his family, trapped by debt and the insatiable desire for more stuff, trapped by the cruelty of capitalism and uncaring bosses, trapped by the Tories, trapped by his nearest and dearest, trapped by the dark night outside, trapped by everything he had ever done. Anger picked him up and carried him along in its yearly lava flow. He raged against the twinkling of the Christmas lights. He boiled at every imagined sideways glance, at every thwarted Christmas wish, at every absent toffee penny, at every ungrateful grunt. He turned himself inside out with every tiny noise, his ugly innards on show for anyone unlucky enough to be celebrating the festive season in the room with him.
He was full fathom five deep. He was Scrooge watching Tiny Tim breathe his last God-fearing breath. He was exactly the kind of person Jesus had come to Earth to save and exactly the kind of person who would have nailed Jesus to the cross. He was the bad penny in the pudding, the poison in the punch, shaping the bad memories that his children would carry on into their own soured Christmasses. He was bending the Yuletide spirit until it cracked and split and couldn’t be fixed again. Every thought was torture, every movement an insult. He reached again for the box.
Gradually, the murderous mist cleared and Nick allowed the love back in his system, the warmer hormones trickling into his bloodstream. He watched the blue flame of the brandy-soaked pudding in the middle of the family table spreading across the room, tongues of flame connecting everyone together once more. The paper hat became a crown once again, as Nick sat straight-backed with turkey leg sceptre and orb of brandy butter, the centrepiece of family and friends – glory to re-crowned king!
His spirit was doused with easy laughter and molten affection. Everyone was present (even the dead and distant) and everything was in its best place. He reached out with colourful nylon arms and pulled the world in closer, gathering in all the feels and leaving no one outside in the cold. The windows were slick with condensation from the all the warmth in the room. Somewhere in the near distance a tiny bell rang and someone asked for a turkey wing. Boardgames were broken out but fights did not. Crackers were pulled apart spilling out the terrible jokes that pulled everyone together. Bonds were wrapped around and around until they were thicker than blood, thicker than trifle, thicker than time and space.
Nick knew that it was time for the final pill, the Twelfth Pill of Christmas, a pill that was neither sweet nor bitter, neither red nor blue, neither heavy nor light. The post-solstice sun was now throwing its light from a different direction as the year rolled on into another loop through space. He sensed the shift. The calendar was waiting confidently with empty pages and credible plans.
The pill was colourless and tasted like fresh spring water. Nick’s eyes were clear and his breath was even. He had new air in his lungs and fresh blood in his legs. Everything seemed possible and within his grasp. He felt his hand smoothing a giant sheaf of paper, cool to the touch and dense with possibility. In one final vision, a horse’s skull in a huge dark-green cloak spoke to him with a Carmarthenshire accent, reminding him who he was and where he was and what might lie ahead of him and how he could go about navigating the year-or-so lying at his feet, then handed him a brand new biro before mouldering into the shadows behind the wilting plastic tree.
Nick got up from his chair and crossed the room to the door. Without a backward look, he set foot into the future, a hot coal of plans and dream smouldering in his pocket. His hand flicked the switch, the lights blinked off, and he firmly closed the door. Sometime in the distance, he would be back to the room again to travel along this curious ceremonial journey once again, and every year, to remind himself who he was and where he was and what might lie ahead of him and to remind himself of the love of others and the grief of absences and the power of their cosy ghosts, until he had no more years to run.
