A Christmas Gift. Sue Moorcroft

the door.

      He flopped into the same brown chair he’d occupied earlier, threw off his glasses and covered his eyes.

      Oggie laughed at his theatrics. ‘What?’

      Joe didn’t move. Mortification was easier to deal with from behind eyelids. ‘Georgine France. I was at school with her. Here, not in Surrey. I’m behaving like a teenage doofus around her.’

      Oggie stopped laughing. ‘Oh! Will it be a problem?’

      Joe pressed his palms harder against his face, the short, freshly cut ends of his hair and his close-shaved cheeks feeling weird to his touch. Since he’d gone clean-cut he felt a stranger to himself. ‘I don’t know.’

      ‘Did she recognise you?’

      ‘No sign of it. Everyone changes a lot between fourteen and thirty-four. When I knew her I was blond and scrawny and looked as if I lived in a skip.’

      Oggie’s voice dropped sympathetically. ‘You’re not that person now. Did you know her well?’

      Slowly, Joe slid his hands down from his eyes, blinking at the raw winter light streaming through the window. ‘Reasonably.’ Then, because he’d never wanted to bullshit Oggie, corrected himself. ‘We were friends from age eleven to fourteen.’ He sucked in a huge calming breath. ‘I had the most gigantic, painful crush on her. She was one of the popular girls. Her dad had money and she went on holidays abroad and had dancing and singing lessons after school. The princess to my pauper.’

      ‘A monied princess?’ Oggie looked slightly surprised.

      ‘Compared to me. She came to Bettsbrough Comp on the bus from Middledip or in a posh car. I lived on the crappiest estate in Bettsbrough with a couple of alcoholics masquerading as parents. The Shetland estate was known as “Shitland” back then and I was part of the infamous Shitland gang, but she was always nice to me.’ He swallowed. ‘I recognised her instantly. Not even Georgine’s sister had the same unusual colouring.’ Her hair was what she’d used to tell him was ‘cool strawberry blonde’, her skin golden and spangled with faint freckles like a blonde photographed through the palest sepia filter. Except for her eyes. Not green, nor grey or blue, but a mix of the three, like a winter sea.

      He’d had to paint her portrait once in art class and the teacher had said, ‘Good effort!’ Some of his moron mates from the Shitland gang had jeered and so he’d painted the ends of her hair like worms, because clowning around was a good way to distract them from how he’d felt about Georgine. He was the fool, the kid who never had the right shoes or uniform or PE kit. The one whose stepdad was known throughout the town by just his surname, Garrit, and ridiculed, along with Joe’s mum, for being drunk on cheap lager almost every day.

      Garrit hadn’t been funny to live with.

      In fact, not much about Joe’s life had been funny. If he hadn’t developed strategies to make people laugh with him instead of at him he would have punched their stupid heads in for not using their stupid eyes to see how stupidly unfunny it was to be him.

      He rose on what felt like hollow legs to get a drink from the small cooler in the corner. ‘She doesn’t know me as Joe Blackthorn, or by my full first names, John Joseph.’ He kept his back to his friend as he sipped from the flimsy disposable cup. ‘You probably remember me telling you I had my stepdad’s surname from the age of two or three. Then all the Shitland gang got nicknames and mine was “Rich” because I wasn’t. Everybody called me Rich Garrit.’

      He dropped back into his chair and sent Oggie a rueful smile. ‘Sorry to be a diva. It was a shock to see Georgine and after the crap that’s happened with the band lately …’

      Oggie nodded, not rushing in with platitudes or questions, but letting Joe work through things in his own time, just as he had all those years ago. His Uncle Shaun had rescued Joe from Cambridgeshire and put him in the school in Surrey with, for the first time, all the right uniform and all the right PE kit. Even the right haircut. If he hadn’t had the right accent to begin with, well, he’d soon changed that. He’d claimed the name on his birth certificate, but chosen to be Joe instead of Johnjoe, which his mother had called him, another way of disassociating himself from what he’d used to be.

      He still remembered the pleasure and relief of blending in.

      Freed of the expectation of clowning, he’d worked at the subjects he liked, such as music and art. Oggie had noticed him spending break times alone and got him painting scenery for school plays. He’d made friends.

      It was to Oggie that he’d admitted his uncle was teaching him piano and drums. Oggie who talked to Shaun about weekend sessions at a local stage school; Oggie who’d arranged extra music lessons so Joe got the GCSE he needed for a place at music college. There he’d got together with Billy, Liam, Nathan and Raf and his life had changed again …

      ‘If you’re going to stay here, you’re going to encounter Georgine a lot,’ Oggie said, jerking Joe back to the present. ‘She’s at the heart of Acting Instrumental. We did talk about the possibility, even probability, of you meeting your past head-on if you came.’

      ‘Yeah.’ Joe drummed his fingertips on his leg. ‘I could have coped with anyone better than her.’

      Oggie grunted. ‘Perhaps you should consider how you’ll feel if she remembers you. It might be easier if you remind her first. Get it over with.’

      ‘Yeah.’ He tried to envisage it. Those green eyes had gazed at him with zero recognition, as if Rich Garrit had never existed, which made him both glad and sorry. ‘It could be a tactical lack of memory on her part. We parted on bad terms.’

      Because he’d acted like a moron on the last day of term before Christmas. Made her the object of ridicule because he knew that baring his young heart in front of the Shitland gang would have set her up for cruel teasing. But the hurt in her eyes had sent him home hating himself, vowing to apologise at the school Christmas party that evening.

      But Georgine hadn’t shown up. He’d waited outside because he didn’t have the entrance money – or anything to wear or a gift for the Secret Santa.

      Eventually, he’d trailed home to find waiting for him an uncle he hadn’t known he had, ready to transform his life.

      Joe’s Christmas miracle, fairy godfather and Secret Santa rolled into one. He’d gone to live with Shaun in Surrey and rarely looked back.

      When he did, it was to think about Georgine France.

       Chapter Three

      At lunchtime, Georgine knew she had to let life outside Acting Instrumental intrude, so held back from the rush to the cafeteria. Zipping herself into her jacket, which was an inadequate defence against the sharp wind unless you were running, she slipped outside. She rounded the jut of the big rehearsal room to huddle behind the main building. The garden there was frequented mostly in summer sunshine when the grassy area held more attraction.

      She hunched her shoulders against the wind blowing from Siberia, took a deep breath and rang Aidan, knowing that the man who answered would be a lot different to the one she’d met a couple of years ago on a rare visit to a nightclub with Blair. She’d been attracted to his happy-go-lucky nature, maybe because she felt she always had to be so sensible and together. Unfortunately, the happy-go-luckyness later proved to be hugely dependent on the ‘happy’ part. When the going got tough Aidan had retreated into bad moods and deception. He’d even begun taking money from her purse with the excuse that ‘couples share’. When she discovered he’d been unable to pay his share of the household bills and had continually lied that he had savings to cover them, it was the last straw. It was months since she’d called time on their relationship and asked him to move out of her house, yet still she was suffering the repercussions of being involved with him.

      He answered, ‘’Lo, Georgine.’