I’m still not convinced that isn’t just worrying in longer sentences.
Still, she said that if there was someone I found myself thinking about repeatedly, especially if I felt responsible for them in some way, or guilty around them, or protective of them, then it might help to write about them plainly, without trying too hard to turn it into something clever.
So this is about C.
His real name is Callum, though nobody really calls him that anymore. We mostly call him C. He is also a carrot, which is probably the sort of detail I should mention early on because otherwise people may become distracted later when I get into more important parts of the story.
He is about six feet tall, with little root fibres around the feet and a thick green stem on top of his head which made hats difficult even before he became attached to the Santa hat after the accident. His skin is that deep burnt-orange colour carrots get after rain, and in winter it used to dry out badly around the cheeks. Sometimes he wore oversized hoodies with the drawstrings pulled tight around the stem because he got tired of people staring.
Eventually, his being a carrot became less remarkable than the fact he was always late. He was just our mate C. Still, I think it matters to what happened later that he already knew what it was like to stand out.
I have known C since primary school.
Kids were horrible to him, obviously, though not in any especially original way. Everyone who has something different about them gets picked on at school, and mostly it was the same jokes over and over again. Asking whether his parents were organic. Pretending to nibble his arm in lunch queues. Singing songs about rabbits whenever he walked into a room.
Adults were sometimes worse because they became too nice.
Teachers spoke to him with this careful voice, as though he might burst into tears at any moment, which he hated. Shop assistants overexplained things to him. Strangers praised him for being “confident” when all he had done was buy a chocolate bar.
By secondary school he had developed this very dry sense of humour where he would make the joke about himself before anybody else could get there first.
“Don’t worry lads,” he once said while someone stared openly at him on the bus, “I’m one of the non-GMO ones.”
Everybody laughed, including the bloke staring.
Afterwards, when we got off the bus, I told him the joke was actually funny.
He shrugged.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s why I said it before he did.”
At the time I thought that meant he was confident. Looking back now, I think he was tired.
Before the accident he was honestly one of the most serious people I had ever met, like properly serious. He was studying accounting, which suited him perfectly. He liked systems and rules and all that sort of thing, and he could talk about tax codes for hours if you let him. We once sat in a pub for nearly an entire evening while he enthusiastically explained VAT thresholds to me in painful detail as I slowly lost the will to live over a pint.
The strange thing is that he hated Christmas before all this happened.
Or maybe dislike is a better word than hate. He found it embarrassing. He said Christmas songs sounded emotionally manipulative and complained every year that decorations went up too early because apparently society had forgotten it was all a commercial money grab anyway. If you had told any of us back then that one day he would become obsessed with Christmas, we would have thought you were bonkers.
Then, six years ago, a delivery van mounted the pavement outside a garden centre and hit him.
The injury was strange because in lots of ways he stayed exactly the same. He still remembered people. He could cook, travel about on his own, sort bills out, all that stuff. Sometimes you can spend an hour talking to him and forget there is anything wrong at all.
Then, completely out of the blue, he will ask if you have finished wrapping your presents yet.
At first we assumed it was temporary confusion because after he came home from hospital he had become completely convinced it was Christmas Day. Then every morning after that he woke up believing it was Christmas Day again.
The doctors explained it using loads of technical language that sounded impressive but did not really help much in real life. Brain injury. Frontal lobe damage. Temporal disorientation. Confabulation. What it actually meant was that C now lived permanently inside Christmas, and trying to convince him otherwise only upset him.
I tried once, early on.
I told him gently that it was April, and he just looked at me quietly for a few seconds before asking why I was trying to ruin the day.
The worst part was that he did not say it angrily. He sounded genuinely hurt.
After that we mostly stopped correcting him because there did not seem much point. It only distressed him, and five minutes later he would still think it was Christmas anyway.
So instead we learned how to manage it and how to distract him.
His flat stayed decorated all year because taking things down upset him. Not massively decorated or anything tacky, just enough to keep him settled. Lights around the windows, a few cards left up, tinsel in certain places. We kept emergency presents in a cupboard because sometimes he would become agitated if nobody had anything for him to open. Mostly books or socks or random bits from petrol stations wrapped quickly in old paper. One time, because I forgot to buy anything else, I wrapped up his own umbrella and gave it back to him.
He cried opening it.
Christmas dinner became a sort of negotiation. We could not let him eat turkey every single day, and obviously nobody ate carrots around him because that would be insensitive. Which sounds funny until you realise how quickly little things become emotionally loaded when somebody’s entire reality depends on them.
To be fair, gravy covered a lot of problems. We discovered pretty quickly that if enough gravy was involved then most meals still counted as Christmas dinner in C’s eyes.
Some people found him charming.
But it wore thin after a while.
Strangers only got little bits of him. A cheerful Merry Christmas in June, the Santa hat, a bit of humming in supermarket queues. They did not see what it was actually like trying to keep pace with somebody who woke up every morning already operating at Christmas Day emotional levels.
Christmas is exhausting when it never ends.
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