Christmas on Earth (beginning)

When Christmas morning comes around, dragging itself slowly, everyone is disappointed. The day itself is often grey, not crystalline and swathed in snow like in the movies. The morning comes reluctantly, like all winter mornings, so that it seems a half-morning, almost impervious to celebration. Small wonder then that behind our thick walls, having crawled from bed and downstairs, we react against it, that great sorrowful dullness of the winter day,  and want to light up a huge blaze in the grate, become ruddy-cheeked and drunken, to carouse, to wear down the weary day with the glitter of tinsel and the shining gloss of rosy-red wrapping paper. 

How horrible then, and yet how fitting, that at the end of the momentous day you realise your efforts have failed, and you find in yourself only a great apathetic horror, a slumbering, monumental dread that falls like the death of the year, a deadness to match not only the deadness of winter but the deadness of your plastic surroundings.

This, then, is the story of one typically sorrowful Christmas that had, atypically, a real jubilation and purity at the centre of it, albeit one very briefly known.

It began with Christmas Eve in the bedroom. All was pleasant, mild, sleepy at bedtime. There was a semblance of what seemed to be happiness. The heavy curtains were drawn, the cheering yellow lamp was switched on. The heavy, fragrant blankets were thrown back, and M and the girl beside him at first slept content. 

M and his "wife"- for so she seemed to him to be- had pacified each other with little kisses and pettings, sweet for the festive season,  with the maudlin memory of Christmas lights and tinsel incumbent on their drowsy minds. The girl in nightie, placid, respectable, and M himself feeling almost middle-aged as he settled down to sleep. Their bedroom was neat and softly carpeted, suggestive of rest, and with a sumptuous white-sheeted double bed. With the lamp turned out, and with heads hitting pillows, it did not take long for the room's real character to prevail. As M's restless eyes grew used to the darkness, the room seemed warmly staid, as comforting and banal as a womb, and M began to feel about it almost as an infant feels about the menacing shadows of his room at night, or a travelling salesman suddenly waking up to the anonymous contours of a cheap hotel room. But no, M banished those thoughts, buried his head in the pillow, and screwed up his eyes, vainly trying to intoxicate himself with the cheap fragrance of matrimony and Christmastime.

The girl beside him was a petite, neat-figured brunette, who had changed fussily into a clean nightdress and settled down beside him, laying herself carefully on the mattress like a sacrificial victim. Tonight, although full of lazy festive spirit, she seemed even more remote than usual, and the way she gathered the blankets around her seemed curiously formal and distracted. She had responded to M's goodnight kisses with smiles and words that weren't altogether convincing. 

When the lights went out she lay perfectly still beside him, with her back turned, seeming to be asleep almost immediately. Even by listening hard M couldn't hear her breathing. He wondered whether he had done something to offend her.

It was only after a period of sleep that the nightmares began.