The Christmas Plan

The young man carried the newest selection boxes to the display stand, and set them up next to the sun-cream.

The shop sound-system looped back to the beginning of the CD and Noddy Holder shouted out maniacally once again. The young man removed his santa hat and wiped the sweat off his forehead before replacing it.

“Brian?” His supervisor shouted over.

“Yeah?” He shouted back.

“We’re going to need a refill on the mulled wine after this. It’s next to the Pimms.”

Brian wished that there were windows in the Supermarket. He looked at his watch. Nine-thirty at night. He wished he could be in the pub garden with his friends. He wished he could see the sun instead of just feeling the heat.

Slade gave way to Wizzard, who sang that they wished it could be Christmas every day.

Finally, it was too much for Brian. He sank to his knees in front of the selection boxes and burst into tears.

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It was an announcement that nobody expected. It came during the budget statement, and the Prime Minister stood up to support the Chancellor while he made it. The financial situation in the country had become untenable, and something had to happen. Every measure they’d tried had failed. It was time for something drastic.

The Chancellor explained that the build-up to Christmas was always a strong one for the economy. And so, for the next calendar year, Christmas would not be held just once a year as it had always been, but would instead be held every Sunday. Fifty-two weeks in a row.

The live twenty-four hour news coverage ground to a halt due to none of the presenters or producers quite knowing how to react. There was silence across the channels for a full two minutes before the voice of the producer on BBC Live 24 was unintentionally broadcast, screaming to get the fucking Archbishop on the phone.

When they actually managed to get the fucking Archbishop on air, he gave a very hesitant endorsement of the idea, since worshipping the birth of Our Lord was obviously a good thing, wasn’t it? And since more people going to Church each Sunday would be good for the Church, wouldn’t it? It sounded like he was actually thinking it through while answering, since he ended up far more confident about the idea than he did when he started.

Richard Dawkins refused to take part in any interviews.

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The first week it happened went smoothly. Presents were bought, roasts were cooked and churches were attended. TV channels had been given enough notice that a completely new schedule of Christmas specials filled the TV screen throughout the day.

Even the Queen’s speech had a lighter touch than normal, as she giggled twice during it. Of course, for her, this had been the biggest change in her routine that her life had ever seen. A Queen’s Speech during the first week of January was possibly the most mind-blowing thing she had ever been asked to contemplate, but there she was anyway.

The second week wasn’t quite as good.

The Queen forgot her words and froze. Shops ran out of Brussell sprouts, wrapping paper and cranberry sauce, having not had time to order in advance. There was a new status quo and they just weren’t prepared.

The protests outside Downing Street started on the fourth week, although they ended by the seventh week, when it was deemed illegal not to celebrate Christmas, using an extremely old law dating back to the early celebrations of the fifth of November.

At first, it seemed that the law was on shaky ground, however the Government made clear that they would not extend this law to other protests, and it was, after all, only for one year. When the arrests started, the population began to realise that they were tied into it after all.

The TV specials had notably declined in quality, as the lead-time ran out. By June, the Christmas Special of Doctor Who involved Matt Smith in a sixty minute story featuring him fighting no enemies at all, and just having a Christmas dinner with former companions. Although, to be fair, this was actually the most critically acclaimed episode of the entire year, and was seen as a triumph for Stephen Moffatt. The September episode where Matt Smith was ill and spent most of the hour trying not to vomit was less well received.

Suicides reached their peak in May, which surprised statisticians. They’d expected them to keep rising throughout the summer, but they gradually fell off throughout the year. “Maybe it’s the thought that we’ve got less to go than is already done,” one theorist said. Less optimistic statisticians pointed to the overall fall in the poverty rate, suggesting that those least able to afford Christmas had been the main ones to go, but other than the Guardian, nobody bothered reporting that. It just seemed a bit too grim.

The rich had their own problems. Sundays had just become doubly expensive to pay anybody to work, so employment cost a bit more over the year than it had done before.

However, by August, it had to be admitted that, on a basic financial level, these measures were working. Spending had definitely gone up. Savings were being depleted, but profits were up.

The response was taken well by some, but others were devastated. A large part of the population was hoping that it would be judged to be a complete disaster, and the plans would be abandoned. Royalists were also up in arms, as the Queen was visibly more and more distressed as the weeks went by (although by September, she stopped giving a shit and just stared angrily at the camera for the length of the speech each time it was on). There was a small and continually growing group of people who seemed to completely love it, though. The whole thing. Not just Cliff Richard fans and people who owned novelty ‘Keep Calm, It’s Only Xmas’ mugs either. Some people seemed to carry Christmas around with them all year in a way that suited them.

In October (the same month that the murder levels reached their peak), Mary Berry was fired by the BBC, for her diatribe on a live episode of the Great British Christmas Bake-Off, in which she declared she “couldn’t take any more fucking cake. I’m done. I’m done with fucking cake.  I’m done with fucking Christmas Puddings. I’m done with fucking crackers and their shitty gifts inside. I’m done with fucking Mass every Sunday, and I’m seriously tempted to kill the next fucker that sings ‘Silent Night’. No, don’t try and stop me, Sue, I’m going to have my say. There is no God, this is just a sham, and fuck you all.” Paul Hollywood tried gamely to keep the show going with her replacement, Vanessa Feltz, but the magic was generally agreed to have gone. Mary Berry, meanwhile, was offered a job on Channel 4, where she seemed to massively enjoy her new role in charge of the hit show “Mary Berry’s Merry Bally Christmas”, where she was encouraged to rant. Sales of ‘Mary Berry Was Right’ t-shirts suggested they were an increasingly popular Christmas gift.

The strangest thing happened in the third week of November. TV ratings dropped almost entirely, and everyone appeared to spend time with their families and actually enjoy themselves. The crime rates dropped to almost zero, and the overall mood of the nation grew rapidly.

It appeared that the usual point where the serious run-up to Christmas started was actually the point where people started actively anticipating the end of the year. The blitz spirit had taken hold of the country, but it could only have endured as long as people had an end in sight.

The 25^th of December itself was an enormous party, although the nation as a whole seemed to suffer from a metaphorical hangover for the final week.

The 31^st of December was a sedate affair. People nodded at each other when they passed in the street, the weathered and aged faces reflecting what they had been through. Nobody spoke about it. Nobody needed to.

The country had endured and come through stronger. The economy was undeniably doing better, and the boost had definitely helped.

But six months later, it was down again.

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The Chancellor stood up in parliament. His eyes were sunken, like someone who had spent the entire previous night crying.

“I have an announcement…” he began, knowing he was throwing away the next election.

50 Shades of Sugar - Chapter One

It's a quarter to two when I arrive at the Amsprop centre, a huge five story office building,  all grey and brick. I am greatly relieved I'm not late as I walk into the glass, steel lobby, past the fleet of taxis outside.

Behind the bland desk, a strict looking woman stares at me, looking unimpressed. She is dressed immaculately and raises an eyebrow at me.

"I'm here to see - "

"Yes, I know." she says, cutting me off. "I suppose you think you're dressed appropriately?" She lowers her eyebrow before raising it again and tutting.

I am beginning to wish I had dressed more appropriately. I have made an effort, though.

"I thought so, yes", I reply.

"Hmm." she snips.

She hands me a security pass. I can't help my smirk. Surely it's obvious I'm just visiting. I don't fit in here at all.

She picks up the phone. "It's Karen, My Lord. She's here." She then nods primly as if there were a camera watching her.

"You'll want the last elevator on the right. Press for the fourth floor."

The elevator whisks me with terminal velocity to the fourth floor. The doors slide open, and I'm in a tiny lobby with two sofas and pictures of cityscapes. There is a white haired man standing there to greet me.

"Hello, I'm Ana", I say.

"Ugh," he says, rolling his eyes dramatically.

"I'm here to see - "

"Yes," he says, shaking his head in a disappointed manner. "He's through there."

I push open the door and stumble through, tripping over my own feet, and falling head first into the office.

Double crap - me and my two left feet. I am on my hands and knees in the office doorway and rough hands are around me helping me to stand. I glance up. Holy cow - he's so short.

"Miss Kavanagh," he extends a stubby-fingered hand to me once I'm upright. "I'm Alan Sugar. Are you all right? Coming in here, falling over. Why don't you sit down. It's why chairs were invented." He gives a little smile and looks around awkwardly, as if he's just made a joke.

He's attractive, very attractive. He's short, dressed in a suit, with grey hair and strange, gnarled features. He looks like a sexy shaved gnome. It takes me a moment to find my voice.

"Um...." In a daze, I place my hand in his and we shake. As our fingers touch, I feel an odd exhilerating shiver run through me.  "Miss Kavanagh is indisposed, so she sent me. I hope you don't mind, Lord Sugar."

"And you are?"  His voice is gravelly, and he emphasises words in an odd manner, but it's difficult to tell from his eyebrows, which are bunched together like a seductive scrotum.

"Anastasia Steele. I'm studying with Kate, um...Katherine...um...Miss Kavanagh at Royal Holloway."

"I see," he says simply. I think I see the ghost of a smile in his expression, but it could be acid reflux.

I look at the room while I get ready for the interview. It is one enormous table, set up in front of huge frosted sliding doors for no reason. I set up the mini-disc recorder, and inexplicably slice off one of my fingers. I hope he doesn't notice the blood spurting out of the bloody stump. Damn my clumsiness. I'd blush, except for the blood-loss.

"Sorry," I stutter. "I'm not used to this."

"It's a shame. I had plans for that finger."

He's teasing me? I hope. I blink at him, unsure what to say, and I think he takes pity on me. "No, I don't mind."

He takes a seat. It's a large throne with a booster seat. He hops up onto it in a lithe, athletic manner that belies his aged appearance.

He sits there like a hotter version of Yoda. I cannot help but feel a little shaky just looking at him.

"So, to what do you owe your success?"

"Well, I grew up in a rough area, a part of London where you didn't have your fancy mini-discs, or lifts, or cars, or... or paths."

"I see."

He juts his neck out to emphasise when he talks, like an erotic turtle. "And you know, I've just been around for long enough. You buy, you sell. It's simple."

“You sound like a control freak.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.

“Oh, I exercise control in all things, Miss Steele,” he says. “Like when I owned Tottenham Hotspurs. I flogged my way through seven managers, but they would have had it easier if they’d believed that Les Ferdinand would play better with nipple clamps.”

“Do you feel that you have immense power?”

“I employ dozens of people, Miss Steele. That gives me a certain amount of responsibility. Besides, immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret, masturbatory, reveries that you were born to control things.”

I cannot help but think about that image. It’s like a sexy walnut lying on a bed playing with itself.

“I’m sorry, but I really should go,” I say. “I have a long drive back to Enfield.”

“No,” he says gesturing towards a bed that I noticed in the corner. “I think you’ll stay. We have some very good benefits here, and – “ he says, beginning to unbutton his shirt, revealing the wrinkled, leathery skin underneath “ – I can be a very….generous and attentive teacher.”

I can’t help myself. His sexy stony  eyes look into my soul and locate my inner goddess.

“You mean….”

“Yes,” he says, licking his lips like a lecherous lizard. “You’re fucked.”

Left - Short Story

I fell asleep on the sofa an hour after my wife went to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night, which is always disconcerting. I stood up, noting an ache in my lower back from the uncomfortable position, and set about turning lights off and joining her in bed. They were already off, which sleepily confused me.

I quietly opened the bedroom door and crept in. One advantage of my mobile phone is that just switching the screen on gives me enough light to see where I'm walking without making enough light to wake her up. It wasn't until I was around to my side of the bed that I felt a sudden cold wave of fear and confusion flow down over my skin like ice water.

Next to my wife was someone lying in the bed, quietly sleeping.  I froze, trying to make sense of what I was looking at, and also thinking how quietly I could retrieve the cricket bat from inside the cupboard. I looked over at my wife, who was sleeping heavily, but breathing obviously. I then looked more closely at the figure's face.

I saw my own face lying on the pillow, eyes closed.

I recoiled, horrified and confused. I couldn't make sense of it. I just stood and watched the two in the bed sleep for a while. When he turned over, I could see that he was wearing the same t-shirt that I was wearing.

I walked carefully around to the other side of the bed again, and shook my wife softly. I didn't understand what was happening, but she was always my first port of call when I was upset, or when I needed to talk. She continued to sleep.

I shook her harder. She didn't wake up. I was scared about waking him up, but eventually, I couldn't bear it any more. I shouted her name, and I shook and slapped her to try and wake her up.

Nothing.

Had he drugged her or something? I went back around to my side of the bed and shook him this time. He didn't respond either. Neither of them did. I eventually screamed, but to absolutely no avail.

Not knowing what else to do, I went and sat on the sofa again. I cried out of frustration and confusion before falling asleep.

I woke to the sound of voices. She was in the kitchen while he was getting dressed, and they were discussing their day. It took me a few moments to recognise my own voice, with the slightly unusual quality of hearing it at a remove.

I raced through to the kitchen, and shouted, but she ignored me again. When he walked into the room, he didn't walk through me, but he may as well have. I was pushed easily out of the way when he brushed against me. It felt like I'd been hit by a car, and when I fell against my wife, it was like being hit hard in the opposite direction. I scrambled out of both their ways but continued talking. They couldn't hear me.

I stood up and watched him stood next to me, talking to her. He was exactly my height, my weight, wearing my clothes, speaking with my voice.

After a while, he went to work. I tried to follow, able to get onto the bus, but I lost my nerve when I got to the train station.

Instead, I trudged back to the house, and sat all day. I wasn't hungry. I didn't need the toilet. Nothing like that.

I could interact with household objects, I found. That first day, I wrote messages, but when my wife got home from work, she either didn't see them or didn't read them. The letter was treated as rubbish. The message written with her lipstick on the mirror was perfunctarily wiped off, without so much as any sense of comprehension.

I couldn't communicate with her in any way. When he came back, and they ate, I just sat and watched. When they sat on the sofa and watched television, I sat on a chair and just watched with them. Sometimes, he said the exact thing I was thinking. Watching quizzes, we would often answer the same questions.

One day, I followed him all the way to work. I wandered around the office while he worked at times, but at other times, something was nagging at me that took a long time for me to fully realise.

He was better at it than I was. He was working hard throughout the day, and seeming less distracted than I sometimes felt.

But then he was better at everything than I was. Not by much, but it was enough for me to notice. Better at exercising, better at working, better at listening and taking note of what my wife said. He was a bit neater than I was. A bit fitter. Better at making love.

Or was I just jealous of him, and looking down at myself?

I don't know, but eventually I got used to it. I became his shadow, more or less. I could spy on anyone, and find out information by myself, but I had nobody to share it with. It was so much less effort to allow him to make the decisions.

Sometimes, I sat around her while she went around her day. It felt like I was spending time with her.

Sometimes, it felt real.

One time, when I was stood in the bathroom behind him while he got ready for work, he looked in the mirror, and his eyes shifted from himself to my reflection behind me. He had never done this before. His eyes locked with mine.

And he smiled.

Motion Blur

I was sitting in the pub, quietly sipping a pint of ale when Blur came in and sat at the table with me.

"Did you see it?" Damon asked, his eyes shining with an excitement that belied the aged skin around it.

"What, you guys at the Brits?" I asked. "I actually did. Well done, that was a good show."

"Yeah. Yeah, it was. And did you see that we're on the Olympics closing concert as well?" He asked, nudging Alex James.

"I did. Congratulations. You must be very excited."

"We are." he said. "We're totally excited. We're not messing around this time. No new stuff. Just wall to wall, balls out, classics."

I realised that I wasn't going to get to drink my ale in private, so I put it down and attempted to properly engage with the conversation.

"No new stuff?"

"None."

"I thought you wanted to write, like, new stuff all the time. Like opera."

A glimmer of sadness formed in his eyes, and he briefly looked like a little boy lost in a man's set of clothing. Much like Richard Hammond. "All I ever wanted was to speak to God," he said. "He gave me that longing."

Then he focused and the sadness was replaced with anger.

"No, not this time." he said.  "I didn't want to do it this time. The Olympics, they asked me if I would, right, but I didn't want to. Alex wants us to - "

Alex interrupted him. "I have this great idea for a new chorus. It goes 'Doo doo doo doo doooooooo....I'm loving it'".

"Shut up, Alex." Damon said. "But we're not doing it this time. We're concentrating on what works."

"That's good," I said, beginning to look for my nearest exit. Damon was looking a little bit manic.

"And do you know what the best thing is?" He asked.

"....no, Damon, I don't know what the best thing is."

"It means we win."

"You win?"

"Yeah," he said, nodding his head. "We win. You saw The Brits. You saw Noel Gallagher. Reduced to duetting with fucking Coldplay. He didn't even win Best Solo Male Artist."

"So?"

"It proves we were best. Nineteen Ninety Four, 'Country House' versus 'Roll With It'. We won then, but people thought we lost the war. Everyone was all 'oooh, Oasis, they're brilliant', but look at them now. Where are they now, eh? Nowhere, that's where."

There was a dangerous glint in his eyes that scared me.

"Do the rest of the band feel the same way?" I asked him.

"Who cares what the rest of the band felt?" he responded angrily. "Noel Gallagher, right,  didn't even win best solo artist, and then everybody cheered for us. We won. Like we should have won all the time."

"Damon," Alex said, "Wait. Think about this. If we lose all the anger at Oasis, we can just have fun again. We can project a nicer image, and maybe get corporate sponsorship, like McDonalds. And McDonalds is brilliant, isn't it Damon?"

"Shut it, cheese-fucker." Damon growled. I couldn't help but raise my eyebrows as Alex looked sadly at the ground.

"Maybe you're being a bit obsessive." I tried to say to Damon.

"Everyone's going to be saying how brilliant we are at the Olympics, while Noel Gallagher is sat outside with a piece of card saying 'I used to be relevant, why did I ever argue with Damon'. That's what he'll be doing. While I walk out as the fucking God of Brit-Pop."

"Look, you need to calm down" I said, as Damon continued to raise his voice.

"You know what my last concert is going to be? It's going to be us doing a concert on Noel Gallagher's grave. We're going to dance all over it and sing Song 2."

"I'm going to leave now," I said.

"Woo-hoo, Chris! Woo-Hoo."

As I left, Damon continued shouting "Woo-hoo", getting more and more out of breath.

Alex ran up after me. "Look, I just wanted to say..." he said. "...I don't fuck cheese. I just really like it."

"I know, Alex," I said. "I know."