A Christmas Gift. Sue Moorcroft

unlikely to arise to take the opportunity to say “I don’t want to be Rich, I want to be Joe,” let alone sussing out that this was a perfect time to let someone in authority know that it said Blackthorn on my birth certificate.

      ‘Letting my proper identity slip away – it was all part of the powerlessness I felt back then. I was different to the other kids – but the Shitland rat pack shared more experiences with me than the rest of you. A gang … you have a love/hate relationship with it. Sometimes it’s your best friend and sometimes it’s a tyrant. The gang pushed me into doing shit I didn’t want to do, just as Garrit did. I identified with the other members, though, and let them influence me.’

      ‘And you were standing with the gang when I came up to thank you for the card …’ Georgine broke in, the scene suddenly shockingly clear.

      He nodded. ‘I’d slipped it into your bag at the end of art, the last lesson in the afternoon. You were meant to open it on your way home on the school bus. You weren’t meant to turn around and gallop back to find me to thank me, showing everybody the card.’

      She screwed up her eyes in pain at viewing the scene from a new perspective. ‘It was so pretty. You probably thought it made you look soft. So you said it wasn’t from you, snatched it off me and ripped it up.’

      ‘I had to,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I didn’t care for myself but a lot of us in Shitland would wake up on Christmas morning to nothing. It made us angry at the rich kids who had nice parents to supply a sack of presents. Those guys in the gang would’ve enjoyed ridiculing you; and considered it a victory if they could have made you cry. Some of them had even begun to look specifically for rich kids to bully out of their money and designer kit. And there was you, wearing your gold watch, with Nike trainers in your school bag, pointing out that we were friends! I’d already told them we weren’t really friends but just happened to be in the same lessons because I was terrified they’d start pressuring me to steal your stuff. Acting like a moron and denying any knowledge of the card was the best way to protect you.’

      ‘Wow,’ she breathed. It had never once occurred to her that their friendship could have made things uncomfortable for him.

      Then he lightened his morose expression with a comical eye-roll. ‘I can’t imagine why people visit psychologists to confess all the stuff that festers inside them. It’s plain awkward.’

      She found herself half laughing, though her heart ached to see that even now he mocked himself as a defence mechanism. ‘Stop if you want. We were fourteen—’

      But he shook his head. ‘Let me get it over with. I wanted to apologise. I thought I’d be able to talk to you at the Christmas party that night. I waited outside for you all evening. But you didn’t turn up.’

      She felt her cheeks burn. ‘You’d shredded my feelings. I told my mum I felt ill so I didn’t have to go. And then …’ She breathed in deeply, surprised that she still remembered the hurt so clearly after two decades. ‘You just vanished.’