Simon Guerrier: Last Christmas

Simon Guerrier

Last Christmas

It seemed like everyone else in the world. Four in the morning on Christmas Day, and the pub was dark, save for the gaunt moonlight peeking in at the windows. Snow fell outside, undisturbed. Inside, in the almost darkness, telltale clues told of the party had there that evening. Dirty glassware, stacked up in tall, skinny stalagmites, dominated one end of the bar, scraps of bright wrapping paper hid between the glasses, or elsewhere under tables, or in dark nooks and corners. Some of the gaudy decorations had come down and been trampled under foot. not all the ashtrays had been cleared. The regulars had been sent home, the chairs put up on top of the tables and the place locked up.The rest could wait until morning.

Two people were still up, in an alcove right at the back of the pub, at a table by the fire. They met here – in this pub, at this table, this time of night – every Christmas Eve. They had done this for years.

They had helped themselves to drinks, as they always did. The Doctor had a glass of tap water, Smith had his customary pint of dark, English ale. They sat in silence, mulling, drinking, and ignoring each other. Like they always they did. Willing the other to speak first. The traditions were almost a game, one with complex and indulgent rules. Very English, thought Smith. Very old school. He liked that.

They even wore the same clothes they always did. Smith was in his uniform, which he kept in check just for this annual outing. His only concession to changing times was his haircut. The Doctor wore the same linen suit, or another just like the one he’d had on that first day they met. Last year it had been reindeer antlers. But at least he had stopped brining presents.

‘I hate Christmas,’ said Smith, levelly. A smile twitched fleetingly at the corners of the Doctor’s mouth, but Smith ignored him. ‘It brings out the worse in people…’ he went on. ‘It always has.’

------

The Brits were fighting more bitterly today, with more determination and zeal, than he had ever seen before. Smith thought it must be their disappointment showing. They had all hoped for another football match. They blamed Jerry for not getting the day off.

Christmas meant nothing to Smith. He had never even heard of it until he joined the army. From what little he did know, he couldn’t understand the fuss. Did they really expect to have a party here, down in the squalor and mud?

But it didn’t do to say things like that. Not to them, not when they were all in the same surly mood. So Smith had spent the day keeping himself busy and out of people’s way. As a result, when the other soldiers called him over, he wondered what jovial game they had planned. He was no stranger to bullying. The way they joked and jollied him along while their eyes were vicious and cold didn’t make him feel any better.

They had someone to meet him, they said. A relative.

‘Another Indian, you mean?’ he asked, and they had all laughed at him.

Smith didn’t really like this one bit, but he stepped forward into the dug-out anyway, sure he could beat whatever trial they had waiting for him.

His ‘relative’ turned out to be a Brit, one he hadn’t seen before. Small, weedy-looking and not in uniform. He had on the sort the suit they wore in India – pale, cream-coloured and cool. His straw hat was slightly askew. He wasn’t covered in muck, he was clean-shaven, and he didn’t have that hang-dog look that comes from persistent lack of sleep. Who is him?

Smith put out his hand to the man.

‘How do you do, sir?’ he said, in his best English accent. It always got a laugh.

‘You must be Samarjit.’ The man said, kindly, taking ,smith’s hand in both of his.

Smith couldn’t remember the last time anyone had called him that. The brits never usually bothered trying to pronounce hit, hence his nickname. He found himself grinning at the man, amazed.

The joke, it turned out, was that this man was a Smith, too.

‘It’ll probably save any confusion if you call me “Doctor.”’ He spoke quietly, directly to Smith, as if uncomfortable with the heavy-handed joshing of the others. It might have been sympathy, if Smith hadn’t known better. But then the Doctor stepped back, allowing Smith’s captain to explain why he’d been called for.

‘Doctor Smith is on a mission.’ Captain Oakes said, gruffly.

Of course he was, thought Smith. Why else would he be here? From the looks on the other men’s faces, it would have to be a dangerous one.

Which was why they had volunteered Smith to go with him.

------

‘Is it because of the war?’ the Doctor asked while Smith took another long swig of beer. ‘Is that why this time of year bothers you? what we saw that time…?’

‘No,’ said Smith. ‘It just reminds me how long I’ve been watching them all, seeing how they ruin their lives, over and over again.’ Then he stopped.

The Doctor was smiling smugly at him. Damn him.

After all the time he had known the Doctor, known what he was capable of, Smith still fell for his childish tricks. The Doctor had go him talking, and at the first attempt. Well, he wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

Smith gazed into the fire. The fake coal glowed white. It was no substitute for the real thing, he thought. When had they outlawed that? He couldn’t remember. And why did they still come to this place? The Doctor had never explained. They could have gone somewhere out of the city for a change, somewhere you could have a real fire, and maybe better beer. Perhaps, he thought, the Doctor was bound to this one building. Maybe those were the rules. Bloody serve him right.

‘Christmas is a time for putting bad things to one side,’ said the Doctor. he spoke so lightly, with so little gravitas, it was like he was talking to himself. Exactly the way to provoke Smith.

‘The very worst people are the ones who say that Christmas is a time for something.’ Smith snapped. ‘I’s all about family or kindness or forgiveness. Or not being so stupid and obnoxious. Just the things they should be doing all the year around anyway.’

The Doctor said nothing.

‘It’s like Christmas is a way of compensating.’ Smith went on. ‘It’s always the meanest ones who make a things about it. it makes you wonder about the people who surround their houses in thousands of lights, the ones with the life-size plastic Santas and twelve-foot inflatable snowmen. Don’t you think they beat their wives and abuse their children? What are they making up for?’

‘Christmas has been banned before…’ conceded the Doctor, pulling off his Santa hat.

He put it down on the table, his fingers lingering over it. He was such a child, especially when he felt guilty.

‘But it can be good for people,’ the Doctor said, with a slight smile. ‘To have a day for their families, I mean.’

It was the wrong thing to say. They had had this argument before. Smith couldn’t have a family. Because of the Doctor.

------

They hurried along the trenches, Smith leading. They dodged bullets and bloated rats and various bits of body parts. Smith would glance back every hundred yards, just to make sure the Doctor was still behind him. He knew he shouldn’t car. You couldn’t, not here. If the Doctor was wounded or killed, Smith would just go back to his regular duties.

Just once, the Doctor met his eye. the Doctor wasn’t squeamish, but he had that distasteful sour look on his face you only kept for the first few days. You had to just accept it all if you wee going to stay alive.

They reached the blocked-off pat of the trench without incident. The Doctor an forward to investigate. The trench had collapsed only a day or two ago, during a particularly hard shelling. A lot of men had died that night. Yet things had got more disturbing after the barrage had stopped. Captain Oakes had sent a handful of men to repot on the damage, and none of them had come back. A second party had been sent, and a couple of those had been hit from the German trenches. But the survivors had found nothing of the first search party. And Oakes had had them reassigned the moment they reported back: so that none of the others could hear what they had seen. Rumours were rife amongst the men. Some reckoned they were unexploded shells down here; not that uncommon, as Smith knew only too well. Others thought there was gas or something. There were even rumours of ghosts. The Brits were a superstitious lot.

Smith looked on while the Doctor worked, picking over the wreckage of the trench wall. It was quiet here – in the distance there were the sounds of fighting. The British machine-gunners were staging a diversion, as Oakes had promised. Jerry had never fallen for that kind of thin in the past, though. It would probably point them right here. Smith had his rifle ready, whatever good that might do.

The Doctor shook his head, dissatisfied. What had he expected? Whatever his suspicions, he wasn’t sharing them. without a word to Smith, he leapt nimbly up over the ruins of the trench wall, and hurried off in the direction the old trench had led. Smith gaped. The man was in direct sight of enemy snipers.

No gunshots rang out. Smith glanced quickly across the ruined terrain of No Man’s Land, but you could rarely see anything anyway. He had no choice. Knowing in his bones he was going to die, he leapt up and sprinted after the Doctor.

------

Neither had said a word for nearly an hour. Smith had finished his pint, but wanted the Doctor to break the silence before he got himself another. It would be like he was cheating otherwise. The Doctor seemed quite content gazing at the fire. In the end, smith could bear it no longer.

‘How many times have we spent Christmas together?’ he said.

The Doctor didn’t even look up.

‘Ninety-something,’ he said. ‘I’ve lost count.’

‘And every time you ask the same question.’ said Smith.

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor levelly, giving nothing away.

‘That’s all you’re ever really here for, isn’t it? am I ready to move on?’

‘I like to see how you are, as well.’

‘The answer is still no.’

------

They were not out in the open long. Not a hundred yards from where the blockage started, there was a huge impact crater. It reached fifty, sixty feet down into the ground. By the time Smith reached it, the Doctor was already scrambling down the shallower side. There was something at the bottom. Smith didn’t stop to look until he got down there. And then he couldn’t believe it.

Deep under the ground, and buried for who knew how long, was a stone building. A bit of courtyard and one wall had been revealed, and the wall had a doorway in it. smith stopped the Doctor from wandering straight in. they had no idea who else might be down here, or what had happened to the other men. Smith went in first, gun ahead of him, ever so cautiously.

Even in the gloom, Smith could see nowhere for anyone to hide. The room had an altar at the far end, but not one that would afford any cover. There were no other exits. It might have been a chapel. Smith didn’t know his Western history well enough to guess at the age of it.

The place was cold and calm, like similar buildings he knew in India. And it was incredibly quiet. He had thought the trench quiet a moment ago, but in here you were free from the constant barrage of noise he just took for granted. All he could hear was his own breathing. His ears were ringing in the terrible silence. It made his head ache.

He nearly had a heart attack at the sound behind him. The Doctor had lit a match. He pulled a silly, apologetic face when Smith glared at him. Then he was off investigating.

With a bit of light, you could see that the walls were patterned with all kinds of brilliant colours. Gold leaf twinkled in the firelight. Smith could make out people, medieval-looking people, in what he thought must be biblical stories. Curly-bearded men in crowns accepted gifts from what looked like dragons. Elsewhere, the dragons were ridden by children at some sort of fete. Was that something to do with Saint George? When the dragons had ascended to heaven, the kinds had built a temple. Probably this place, thought Smith.

‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ he said.

In the meagre light, the Doctor’s face was grave. He traced a finger down the inscription beneath one picture. The letters were like noting smith had ever seen before.

‘You can read it?’ he asked.

The Doctor nodded, but wouldn’t say what it meant.

------

Smith shifted uncomfortably in his chair. His leg still gave him hell, even now.

The Doctor noticed.

‘Don’t worry about this,’ said Smith. ‘I don’t blame you for it.’

‘Not any more, at least,’ said the Doctor.

Smith tutted.

‘I’ve got used to it…’ he said, crossing the troublesome leg over the other, so that he could reach the calf and massage it.

As he pummelled and prodded away with his thumbs, he said: ‘It’s just ironic that a ghost can have sore joints.’

------

Smith followed the Doctor out of the chapel and up the slope, back into No Man’s Land. The return to noise was staggering, and he found himself reeling and dizzy. Only the Doctor’s voice brought him back to his senses.

‘Keep up!’ he called as he scurried about, dodging up and over the torn-up ugliness of the battlefield. If not for the sense of terrible urgency in his eyes, the strange little man might have looked like a child at play as he dashed this way and that. He was full of energy.

Smith kept careful watch, dreading the inevitable moment when Jerry spotted them.

Again they were blessed. The Doctor found what he was after before anything happened. It was a shell casing, resting in a hollow that would give them some cover. As they hurried to it, Smith realized he had been wrong. It wasn’t just a casing, it was an unexploded shell. on his hands and knees, the Doctor darted around it twice, like a dog at a hunt, collecting the kill. Then he crawled right up to it and without a moment’s thought started working on a panel. Smith was paralysed with fear. He knew the life expectancy of a sapper. It was even shorter than that of a pilot. He was definitely a dead man.

Using a bit of stone lying beside him, the Doctor began tapping at the base of the shell. every strike, though expertly done, echoed out all around them. smith found himself shaking. If only he had something to do. He raised his head up out of the hollow and scanned around. Nothing. He brushed a bit of dirt from the end of his gun. He bit his lip and tried to count to ten.

‘This is what we need!’ announced the Doctor, heartily. The square grey shay shape he held in his hand could only be one thing: the explosive. The Doctor had also removed some wires, a detonator and other innards, and now stuffed them into his pockets.

Then he thought again, and quickly switched things so that the detonator and explosive were in different pockets.

‘Ready?’ he asked.

Despite everything, there was something winningly mischievous about him, something that lived to break rules. How did he cope on the army?

‘Sure…’ said Smith, getting to his feet.

Which was when the bullets hit him.

------

‘I got a medal for it, you know…’ said Smith. ‘For gallantry. For what we did.’

The Doctor nodded. ‘We did the right thing.’

Smith’s smile had gone. ‘You really don’t think we could have saved more lives by not… by doing things differently?’

The Doctor shook his head.

‘It wouldn’t have done any good,’ he said. ‘It would just have caused more trouble.’

------

They were back in the chapel and Smith was in agony. He lay on his back in the darkness, pointing his rifle generally in the direction of the door. He expected them any minute, sure they wouldn’t be allowed to escape down here. He gritted his teeth. Was he crying, or did the have blood all down his face?

He had been shot several times, he knew. The one just below his knee was the most painful he had had to walk on it, managing to help the Doctor drag the bomb parts back down here. Anything to keep his mind off the pain, he thought.

They had made a good job of it, actually, the sort of thing he might get a medal for. Posthumous ones were always a better bit of tin.

Smith lay there, all feeling slowly pouring out of him. The door, the oblong of light, warped and blurred in his vision, and he knew he only had a short time left. If only the Doctor would leave him alone.

The Doctor hadn’t been hit once. He didn’t even look all that muddy. Having finished fussing over the bits of shell, he heaved Smith up into a sitting position and forced him to drink down a cup of water. The water was sandy and smelled funny, but Smith was so parched he gulped it down. It made him gag. There was something… wrong about it. he hadn’t seen a spring anywhere, and they couldn’t be sure it was clean. But then that didn’t matter, did it? he knew what his chances were. The Doctor wouldn’t meet Smith’s eye.

Then the Doctor hurled the mug back into the chapel and hauled Smith to his feet. All this without a word. Unless Smith just couldn’t hear him. He realized he was fading quickly: he could hardly feel the pain now. His legs didn’t want to work, so the Doctor had to drag him forward. They struggled through the door of the chapel and across the courtyard. The Doctor then yanked him up the slope, walking up backwards and dragging the wounded man behind him. Smith could feel the water he had drunk seeping through every part of his body. He wanted to be sick. He wanted to be left to die. He tried to say so, but the Doctor wouldn’t hear of it. Smith was feverish, but not with pain. His sight was going.

They wee nearly at the top of the slope. The Doctor was silhouetted against the sky, still immaculate and suddenly tall. He would be such an easy target. Weary, his consciousness fading. Smith let his eyelids close. He didn’t open them when he heard the shot, heard the Doctor cry out, just briefly, and felt him let go. It would have been quick. Then there was heat like Smith was on fire, or his body was giving up and he could feel pain again. Then something raining down on him. Mud, he realised. That was an explosion, not a gunshot. The Doctor had blown the chapel up, and now Smith was being buried alive. No, not alive.

------

‘I probably agree with you,’ said Smith.

The Doctor tried not to look startled, but those eyebrows gave everything away.

‘A couple of sips of whatever that stuff was,’ Smith continued, ‘and look what happened to me. the army would have loved it. the elixir of life and they would have used it to kill more people. It was right that you blew it up.’

‘I wasn’t really an elixir. It had healing properties, yes – ’

‘I just wish you hadn’t given me any of it!’ Smith interrupted. ‘It would have been better if I’d died in the trenches.’

------

Smith woke up in the medical wing. It was Christmas Day. he could tell because some of the nurses were wearing paper hats, and someone had drawn pictures of Christmas trees and things and hung them above the patients’ beds. A very tawdry Christmas, thought Smith. He assumed his inability to feel his wounds was the result of whatever drugs they had given him.

Once they saw him awake, the nurses wouldn’t leave him alone. He would have welcomed the attention from so many pretty girls if they weren’t so morbidly fascinated by his survival. Nobody could understand how he had lived through the explosion, or how his wounds could have healed so suddenly. The Doctor’s body had not been found. A shell blast that size could do that to you.

Smith’s survival was a miracle, they said. Such a miracle that he was back in the tick of it by New Year’s Eve.

------

‘I couldn’t just leave you like that…’ said the Doctor.

‘But you knew what that stuff would do to me, didn’t you?’

The Doctor hung his head.

‘I wasn’t certain…’ he said, quietly and apologetically. ‘The place had been buried for nearly a thousand years. Anything could have happened. It might have finished you off.’

‘You took a gamble!’ Smith scoffed. ‘I keep asking you, but you never tell me, and now it’s getting ridiculous: how did you know what that place even was?’

The Doctor finished his water.

‘I’ve been around a long time,’ he said.

Of course he had been. Smith had not seen the Doctor drink the water, so how come he was still here a hundred years later, and not a day older? He had his own rules, didn’t he? He had probably been here when the chapel was built. Perhaps he’d helped bury it. Maybe he was one of the people in the frescoes. In amongst the kings and dragon people, there he would be in that same crisp white suit.

‘What do you do the rest of the year?’ asked Smith.

‘What do I do?’ asked the Doctor, thrown. He seemed, suddenly, to find his glass of water riveting.

‘What did you do yesterday, or the day before that?’ asked Smith. ‘How do you fill up the days you’re not seeing me?’

‘Oh, I potter about,’ said the Doctor, a little too quickly. ‘I see other people, places of interest. I’ve been to some very good museums…’

‘I don’t believe you!’ said Smith.

He picked up the discarded Santa hat, waved it in the Doctor’s direction. ‘That’s what this is about, isn’t it?’

The Doctor said nothing, took the hat, folded it, put it into one of his many pockets.

‘You jump, somehow, don’t you? From one meeting here to the next. if I don’t say what you want to hear, you pop ahead a year, and try again in a different hat.’

Again, the Doctor said nothing.

‘I’ve spent nearly a century plodding around this godforsaken world,’ Smith continued, ‘and I always come back here for the same night. But you… it’s been just one long conversation, hasn’t it? how much of your life have you actually lost? A day?’

‘Nearly nine weeks,’ said the Doctor. ‘Though I have taken a bit of time off. there was an invasion, and… What do you want me to say?’

‘How about why you’re even bothering?’ Smooth snapped. ‘What do you get out of it?’

‘I owed you a few hours every hear…’ the Doctor said, gently. ‘You’re right: giving you that drink was probably a mistake. So I’m to blame for this now. All I can do is hope to make some kind of amends, help you find some peace.’

‘The answer is still no, Doctor.’ said Smith.

‘You’ve changed…’ said the Doctor, after a moment. ‘I see it, year by year. You’re calmer, controlling your anger. Remember what it was like in the twenties? We used to have slanging matches into the morning!’

‘I have every right to be angry!’ Smith said, careful to keep his voice down. Still stupidly careful, after all these years. He hadn’t wanted to wake up the household above them. As if he could…’All that time in the war, and then I turn up in London to get a medal and a glorified cold strikes me dead!’

‘You weren’t the only one who lost their life like that! It was an epidemic.’

‘But where is the sense in that? After everything we’d been through, after four years of fighting! After the elixir of life! The elixir of this sort of life! Keeping my mind alive after my body died! Of course I’m angry! How could I not be angry?!’

‘I don’t think it’s the elixir that’s keeping you here!’ said the Doctor, not for the first time. ‘Not anymore. I think it’s the anger!’

‘Oh, do you mean like a normal ghost? That makes it all so much better.’

‘If you want peace, you have to let go of the anger.’

Smith shook his head. ‘I tend to hang around this miserable city with its miserable people and their hopeless lives. But it’s no better anywhere else, believe me. They struggle and toil, and all they ever seem able to do is drag each other down. How can I not be angry? Somebody has to be!’

But even as he was saying the words, he didn’t feel it. he felt resigned, weary, cynical. But not angry. He remembered angry: a righteous fire inside him that made his muscles twitch. What had happened to that? How long ago had it gone?

’You just needed time, Samarjit.’ said the Doctor.

He couldn’t quite keep the smile from his face. He thought he had won.

‘The answer…’ said Smith. ‘The answer is still no.’

------

‘It’s horrible, cold stuff, this.’ said Smith, kicking the snow out from under his feet.

He could still move things around, but nobody seemed to notice him do it.

‘What do you want to be out in it for?’ he asked the Doctor.

This was a new tack. They hadn’t been outside together since that first time, in the trenches, not as far as he could recall. But the Doctor had told him a white Christmas was special, something to make a fuss about.

‘It makes everything pure and clean.’ said the Doctor. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Until it turns to sludge!’ said Smith.

He stuffed his hands into his pockets and began to walk up the street. He had taken about ten steps when he realised he wasn’t being followed. He turned around. The Doctor was still standing up in the doorway of the pub.

‘I’m not here to exorcise you!’ said the Doctor, with finality.

Smith stalked back to him. He was much taller than the Doctor, but he didn’t seem able to tower over him.

‘Not in the way you think, at least!’ said the Doctor. ‘You’ll have to find your own peace.’

‘Fat chance.’

‘Walk down the street. Look in the windows. Tell me if people are miserable, or not.’

The snow continued to fall around them. smith looked up the road. It was freezing. He wanted to be inside. The houses had lights on: Christmas trees and decorations left on through the night. A fire hazard. It was all so stupid.

And yet…

‘Not with your watching. I’ll see you in a year.’

------

Benedict had inherited the Doctor from the guy he’d bought the pub from. That guy, whose name Benedict had long since forgotten, had been unable to explain how the Doctor got in, or why he came every Christmas, or why he spent the night quietly talking to himself. Benedict, keen to make his mark on the place, had changed the locks that first year. He should have been cross to find the Doctor sat there, that first Christmas morning. But somehow, in a matter of minutes, the Doctor had convinced him that it wouldn’t be in keeping with the season just to throw him out. Benedict had even invited him to have lunch with the family. That had been years ago, when Benedict’s kids were small. Now, the Doctor’s Christmas morning visits were part of the tradition. The kids came home with their own children to see him.

So Benedict was surprised to find the Doctor asleep at the table. That had never happened before. He was always up, bright-eyed and full of good humour, eagerly accepting his cup of tea. For the first time ever, the Doctor seemed different. He looked a year older.

Benedict put a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder. He didn’t even get a chance to shake him, the Doctor leapt up awake. For a moment he glared at Benedict, but then he shook off his startlement and grinned. Benedict could still see the ill-ease behind the man’s eyes.

‘Merry Christmas, Doctor!’ said Benedict, magnanimously. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

The Doctor smiled, as though he’d heard those words before.

‘No,’ he said, taking the last of his tea, now completely tepid and bitter. ‘Not this time. so, how’s your year been?’

It was the last time Benedict ever saw him.