Bah! Humbug! Read online

  ANOTHER: When did he die?

  STOUT MAN: Last night, I believe.

  THIRD MAN: Why, what was the matter with him? I thought he’d never die.

  STOUT MAN: God knows.

  RED-FACED MAN: What has he done with his money?

  THIRD MAN: I haven’t heard. Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn’t left it to me. That’s all I know.

  ALL: Ha, ha, ha!

  THIRD MAN: It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral, for upon my life I don’t know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?

  ANOTHER: I don’t mind going if a lunch is provided.

  That got a laugh, Harry noticed. Maybe they think the lunch’ll be like those pre-prepared ones you get from supermarkets . . .

  No time for a silly thought like that, he reminded himself. Focus, focus . . .

  SCROOGE: What’s going on? What’s the explanation for this? Oh, these men, I know them. They’re very important, very wealthy.

  ONE: How are you?

  ANOTHER: How are you?

  ONE: Well! Old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?

  ANOTHER: So I am told. Cold, isn’t it?

  ONE: Seasonable for Christmastime. You’re not a skater, I suppose?

  ANOTHER: No. No. Something else to think of. Good morning!

  SCROOGE: How odd. I still don’t understand, Spirit. Where am I in all this?

  Ray glanced around the study. There was the laptop. Yes, Eva must have used it. It was lying on a shelf in a place he’d never have put it. He felt a heaviness come over him, and he had a sad thought: What if the family thinks of me not so much as Dad but as some sort of facility, nothing more than something useful? Anything he carefully put to one side, they treated as if it were theirs. That electronic pen thing that the guy from China gave me, Harry took that, didn’t he? As if it were his. I told Eva she can use the computer, but it would be great if she put it back where she found it, he thought. It’s not that hard, is it?

  He flicked the laptop open, and it came to life with a metallic note plucked from the heart of Silicon Valley. Eva had changed the screen saver. It was the promotional shot from a horror film coming up in the new year starring Eva’s favorite guy. Ray had heard her talking about it with Harry, something to do with a woman who is married to a guy for about ten years and slowly comes to realize that the guy’s not human . . . which means that the kids aren’t either . . . or are they? He laughed to himself. He knew that Harry and Eva would ask him to go and see it, and he would say he really had better things to do than sit for two hours in a theater watching grown men and women being paid millions of dollars to pretend that they’re not human. Oh, please.

  Oh, please. The phrase rebounded. He heard Eva saying, “Oh, please.”

  He looked at the face on his laptop screen. Hell’s bells, what had she done? The horrified, ghastly face of the Hollywood actor was very slowly turning into Eva.

  SCROOGE: Spirit, what is this miserable den to which you have brought us? It reeks of crime and filth and misery!

  (A woman with a heavy bundle slinks into the shop. Another woman, similarly laden, comes in too, and she is closely followed by a man in faded black. All are startled by the sight of each other. After a short period of blank astonishment, they all three burst into a laugh.)

  WOMAN WITH A BUNDLE: Let the charwoman alone to be the first! Let the laundress alone to be the second, and let the undertaker’s man alone to be the third. Look here, old Joe, here’s a chance! We all three meet here without meaning it!

  OLD JOE: You couldn’t have met in a better place. Come into the parlor. Come into the parlor.

  DICKENS: The parlor was the space behind the screen of rags.

  WOMAN: What odds then! What odds, Mrs. Dilber? Every person has a right to take care of themselves. He always did!

  LAUNDRESS: That’s true, indeed! No man more so.

  WOMAN: Very well, then! Who’s the worse for the loss of a few things like these? Not a dead man, I suppose.

  MRS. DILBER: No, indeed!

  WOMAN: If he wanted to keep ’em after he was dead, the wicked old screw, he’d have had somebody to look after him when he was struck with Death, instead of lying gasping out his last there, alone by himself.

  MRS. DILBER: It’s the truest word that ever was spoke. It’s a judgment on him.

  WOMAN: I wish it was a little heavier judgment, and it should have been, if I could have laid my hands on anything else. Open that bundle, old Joe, and let me know the value of it. We know pretty well that we were helping ourselves, before we met here. It’s no sin. Open the bundle, Joe.

  DICKENS: The undertaker’s plunder was not extensive. A seal or two, a pencil case, a pair of sleeve buttons, and a brooch of no great value, were all.

  JOE: That’s your account, and I wouldn’t give another sixpence, if I was to be boiled for not doing it. Who’s next?’

  DICKENS: Mrs. Dilber was next. Sheets and towels, a little wearing apparel, two old-fashioned silver teaspoons, a pair of sugar tongs, and a few boots.

  JOE: I always give too much to ladies. It’s a weakness of mine, and that’s the way I ruin myself. That’s your account. If you asked me for another penny, and made it an open question, I’d repent of being so liberal and knock off half a crown.

  WOMAN: And now undo my bundle, Joe.

  JOE: What do you call this? Bed curtains!

  MRS. DILBER: Ah! Ha, ha, ha! Bed curtains!

  JOE: You don’t mean to say you took them down, rings and all, with him lying there?

  WOMAN: Yes, I do. Why not?

  JOE: You were born to make your fortune, and you’ll certainly do it. And these — his blankets?

  WOMAN: Whose else’s do you think? He isn’t likely to take cold without ’em, I dare say.

  JOE: I hope he didn’t die of anything catching? Eh?

  WOMAN: Don’t you be afraid of that. I an’t so fond of his company that I’d loiter about him for such things, if he did. Ah! You may look through that shirt till your eyes ache, but you won’t find a hole in it, nor a threadbare place. It’s the best he had, and a fine one too. They’d have wasted it, if it hadn’t been for me.

  JOE: What do you call wasting of it?

  WOMAN: Putting it on him to be buried in, to be sure. Somebody was fool enough to do it, but I took it off again. If calico an’t good enough for such a purpose, it isn’t good enough for anything. He can’t look uglier than he did in that one.

  SCROOGE: Oh! How horrible these people are!

  Harry filled himself with these thoughts. What would it really be like to see people picking up the sheets that once wrapped your own dead body and taking them off to sell? He shuddered to think of it, and so the audience saw Scrooge shudder.

  The first night that he had come home with the play, he had told Eva the whole story of the play in one sitting, and she had listened to him without making a sound, watching his face closely. As he told it to her, he thought that it wasn’t only a ghost story — it was a horror story.

  WOMAN: This is the end of it, you see! He frightened everyone away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he was dead! Ha, ha, ha!

  SCROOGE: Spirit! I see, I see. The case of this unhappy man might be my own. My life tends that way, now. Merciful Heaven, this is a fearful place. In leaving it, I shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go!

  The audience fell quiet, and Lisa looked slightly anxiously across to Eva. Was she all right with this? Eva, more than anyone else in the family, was in touch with the cycle of life. She went to a school where, for better or worse, the children knew that among them there were children who weren’t bravely and brilliantly getting along fine; some of them were very slowly slipping away to a point at which they wouldn’t come back.

  Eva, the family knew, was the expert on this. It’s what made her wise, Lisa decided.

  DICKENS: The Ghost conducted Scrooge through several streets familiar to his feet, and as they went along, Scrooge looked here an
d there to find his future self, but nowhere was he to be seen. They entered poor Bob Cratchit’s house — the dwelling they had visited before — and found the mother and the children seated round the fire.

  PETER (reading from a book): “And he took a child, and set him in the midst of them.”

  MRS. CRATCHIT: Your father will be home soon.

  PETER: He’s late. But I think he has walked a little slower than he used to, these few last evenings, Mother.

  MRS. CRATCHIT: I have known him walk with — I have known him walk with Tiny Tim upon his shoulder very fast indeed. But he was very light to carry, and his father loved him so, that it was no trouble: no trouble. (The door rattles.) And there is your father at the door!

  Ray was about to close the laptop again and head back to the office when a little niggle in his mind told him to look at the browser’s history. If Eva had been using it, what had she been looking at? He paused for a moment. Am I being sneaky here? No, I’m being a parent. I should know what my kids look at on this machine. I wouldn’t let them wander the streets, not knowing where they are, would I?

  He pulled down the menu. Sure, plenty of YouTube Singing Cat. Of course. What was this? Some medical sites. He clicked on the first one on the list. Up came a few ads, a remarkably white-toothed “doctor” talking about exactly the same condition that Eva had. Well, that was good. Eva wasn’t taking what he or Lisa or even the consultant at the hospital was saying as gospel. She wanted to know for herself. Hmmm. He wondered if this really was Eva, or was it Harry, or were they looking this stuff up together?

  If he’d been at home more, he’d know the answer to that one, he thought regretfully.

  He read on down the text of Dr. White-Tooth. It talked about what the doctor called a “linked condition.” Ray knew enough to know that this meant, “Don’t go here if you want to spare yourself imagining that life is over right now.”

  He paused and wondered if Eva — if it was Eva — had clicked that link too. Back to the history tab — no. Oh, that was good.

  Even so, he was drawn to the linked condition. He clicked on it and read. On and on and on, feeling himself dragged slowly into a sad scenario that he couldn’t bear. No, he said to himself. This can’t happen. It isn’t going to happen. It won’t happen. He looked at photos, diagrams, back to photos, and just as Eva had played around mixing the images on the screen saver, he saw Eva in every picture and diagram. Slipping away from them.

  He looked up from the screen and, for half a moment, wondered where Eva was. Why couldn’t he hear her in the house? Why couldn’t he hear them laughing at some singing cat? Oh, yes, they’re at the show!

  And why wasn’t he at the show? The course of the evening’s events flashed in front of him in a split second, and he was overcome with a sense of things slipping between his fingers. He snapped the laptop shut, jumped up, and ran out to the car.

  The laptop sat, flat and quiet, on Ray’s desk.

  MRS. CRATCHIT: Did you go there, Robert?

  BOB: Yes, my dear. I wish you could have gone too. It would have done you good to see how green a place it is. But you’ll see it often. I promised him that. My little, little child! My little child! (Sobs.) Mr. Scrooge’s nephew — now there’s an extraordinarily kind man. I looked a little — just a little down, you know. He asked of me what had happened to distress me. I told him . . . He said, “I am heartily sorry for it, Mr. Cratchit, and heartily sorry for your good wife. If I can be of service to you in any way,” he said, giving me his card, “that’s where I live. Pray come to me.” It really seemed as if he had known our Tiny Tim, and felt with us.

  MRS. CRATCHIT: I’m sure he’s a good soul!

  BOB: I shouldn’t be at all surprised, mark what I say, if he got Peter a better job.

  MRS. CRATCHIT: Only hear that, Peter.

  GIRL: And then, Peter will soon be setting up for himself.

  PETER: Get along with you!

  BOB: It’s just as likely as not, one of these days; though there’s plenty of time for that, my dear. But however and whenever we part from each other, I am sure we shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim — shall we — or this first parting that there was among us?

  ALL: Never, Father!

  There were times when Harry felt uncomfortable hearing this. He hated that the story seemed to dangle in front of his eyes the thought that he might hear people saying, “And none of us will forget Eva, will we?” And he felt sorry that he had even thought those words.

  Why had Miss Cavani said, “Remember, everyone, this is a story about life!”?

  BOB: And I know, my dears, that when we recollect how patient and how mild he was — although he was a little, little child — we shall not quarrel among ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it.

  ALL: No, never, Father!

  SCROOGE: Specter, something informs me that our parting moment is at hand. I know it, but I know not how.

  DICKENS: The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come conveyed Scrooge, as before.

  SCROOGE: Ah, yes, there! My place of occupation.

  (The Spirit stops; the hand points elsewhere.)

  SCROOGE: The house is yonder. Why do you point away?

  DICKENS: Scrooge accompanied the ghost until they reached an iron gate.

  SCROOGE: A churchyard?

  (The Spirit points down to a grave. Scrooge advances toward it, trembling.)

  Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point, answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be, only?

  DICKENS: Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.

  (The gravestone is lit, revealing: “Ebenezer Scrooge” )

  SCROOGE: Is this . . . Am I that man they spoke of in the street, and in that wretched den?

  (The Spirit’s finger points from the grave to Scrooge, and back again.)

  No, Spirit! Oh no, no! Spirit! Hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I would certainly have been but for these events. Why show me this, if I am past all hope? Good Spirit, your nature pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life! I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The Spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!

  Harry caught sight of Lisa’s and Eva’s faces in the white moonlight cast from the stage. He had never felt so proud, so strong as he did at that moment. Maybe Dad wouldn’t ever understand what really matters. At the end of the day, what mattered here was that Harry himself was understanding it.

  He was getting the point of what Scrooge had discovered.

  Ray revved the car and pushed it faster.

  At the light, he rummaged in the old CD case in the glove compartment and nearly pulled out some ancient thing the kids had loved when they were much younger, something to do with Captain Banana and the Banana Skins.

  He smiled.

  Hey, I smiled, he thought, and his fingers found their way to an old soul album that he and Lisa used to play. It was near the top, which must have been because Lisa had played it the last time she was using the car on her own — Sam Cooke: “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

  Ha!

  The lights changed.

  Ray pushed the car on.

  SCROOGE: I will live in the past, the present, and the future! The Spirits of all three shall strive within me. Oh, Jacob Marley! Heaven and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob — on my knees! These bed curtains — they are not torn down, they are not torn down, rings and all. They are here; I am here: the shadows of the things that would have been may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will! I don’t know what to do! I am as light as a feather; I am as happy as an angel; I am as merry as a schoolboy. A Merry Christmas to everybody! A Happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Who
op! Hallo! There’s the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley entered! There’s the corner where the Ghost of Christmas Present sat! There’s the window where I saw the wandering Spirits! It’s all right, it’s all true, it all happened. Ha, ha, ha!

  Harry felt real joy. Of course it was sad that Dad wasn’t here, but now Harry knew that he had to feel strong enough in himself and not just see himself as missing something or lacking something. Mom and Eva shone in the light of what he was doing, and Miss Cavani too.

  He looked across at Shona. She, too, answered and replied to him onstage now in the performance more than she had done at any point in the rehearsal. He felt her look and it was a moment he wanted to keep deep inside him.

  What Harry didn’t know, though, was that Ray had crept into the back of the auditorium.

  DICKENS: Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!

  SCROOGE: I don’t know what day of the month it is! I don’t know how long I’ve been among the Spirits. I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop! Hallo here!

  (Church bells ring outside.)

  SCROOGE: Oh, glorious, glorious! (Opens window.)Golden sunlight; heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious. Glorious! What’s today?

  BOY: Eh?

  SCROOGE: What’s today, my fine fellow?

  BOY: Today? Why, Christmas Day.

  SCROOGE: It’s Christmas Day! I haven’t missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!

  BOY: Hallo!

  SCROOGE: Do you know the poulterer’s, in the next street but one, at the corner?

  BOY: I do.

  SCROOGE: An intelligent boy! A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize turkey that was hanging up there? Not the little prize turkey — the big one?