The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter Thirty

Nothing happens, then, until Mariana appears during visiting hours on Christmas Eve, and she's nervous, oddly quiet, so I guess right away that she's trying to give me a message.

'I hear you're going to your dad's tonight,' she says in the end. 'So apparently you should make sure you take what you need.'

'Take what I . . . ?' Then it dawns on me. 'Tonight? Really? Tonight?'

She sighs. 'I have to go.' And she gets up.

I stand up too, take her arm and lean close, but I'm improvising, and I just hope it doesn't show. 'Come with me for the Christmas thing tonight at my dad's.'

She looks at me, the same what-the-heck look I saw too many times on her cousin's face the other day. 'Your dad won't mind?'

I shake my head. 'Of course not. Come. I want him to meet you anyway.'

She makes a face. 'You want him to meet me?'

I shrug. 'Sure. Believe it or not, you're my friend and I care about you.'

She raises an eyebrow. 'Cool it, Hemple. Don't get all warm and fuzzy on me.'

So yeah, because it's Christmas Eve, I am, for one night only, allowed out of Correctional to have dinner in the cantina in East with my dad and Olivia and then go back to their quarters to watch the Christmas movie and play games. God only knows what she and her kids are making of having his crazy daughter over for the evening but that's not my concern. My concern is that Ronaldo is taking me over there and coming to bring me back before midnight Mass begins on the screens, and obviously somehow, on the way back, I need to work out how to give him the slip. So here I am, getting ready, getting dressed with shaking hands, wishing I could talk to Dom, knowing that I can't.

All the way there Ronaldo walks next to me like he senses something (which he probably does) but anyway once we get to the cantina there is hideous Christmas music playing, same as every year, and all this forced jollity and people wearing paper crowns, and a smell of food that is almost like the bathroom drains, and in among it all is Olivia waving at us from where they are sitting.

'Well, you sure are a pretty little thing still, Seren, even though you let yourself get thin. Now come and eat something,' she says, while my dad stands slowly and kisses me, and Olivia carries on. 'Will you stay, Ronaldo – will you join us?'

'No,' I answer for him, while everyone looks embarrassed. 'He has to work,' I say, to cover it up. 'Don't you?'

And he watches me while he says, 'I do.'

'Not exactly the Christmas spirit, Seren,' sighs my dad as we watch him leave and then sit.

'I know, it's just I invited someone, a friend, and they don't get on.' As I look around for Mariana I see her and wave. 'There she is.'

And even though she's a little jumpy and quiet, especially when we finish the food and have to do the carol singalong, it seems they like her plenty, and back at the quarters the kids show her their little standard-issue Christmas tree and pull her on to the bench to play some weird game on their pods. I guess this is about when Pan and Cain arrive, having had dinner over in South with Cain's parents, both pretty drunk and talking over each other about how Cain made a little mobile for Deborah for Christmas in the metal shop and then someone thought it was offcuts and crushed it and don't we think she's grown already and look how she's got Cain's nose. And all this time Mariana is shooting this wide-eyed look over at me which makes me wonder if she's about to bolt for the door, but before I can go to her my dad takes my arm and steers me through to the bedroom to give me my present. It's a printed picture on a magnet and once I look at it for a moment I realise it is my mum.