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short story
Illustration by Robert G Fresson
Illustration by Robert G Fresson

Exclusive short story by Rachel Joyce: The Boxing Day Ball

This article is more than 9 years old

Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, has written a short story exclusively for the Observer

It was too muddy to cross the fields and the girls hadn’t a car between them. They had no choice but to make their way along the back lanes, though it would add almost an hour to the journey. The land shone a dim blue in the moonlight as if all the colour had been chilled out of it. Sometimes they saw a light in the distance but mostly it was dark and cold.

There were ten girls, including the twins, and they moved in a weaving column of ones and twos. A few carried paraffin lamps. Patty Driscoll had a torch. Now and then someone would holler out a snatch of a carol to keep the rhythm going, something like “Good King Wenceslas looked out”, and the others would pitch in with “on the feast of Stephen”, boisterous and not quite in tune. They carried their best shoes in bags and gripped their coats tightly over their short dresses.

Maureen kept to the back of the line. Her fingers stung with the loneliness of the cold and so did her feet but it was not a sad loneliness. There was something in the air. She could feel it.

“Ain’t we there yet?” That was Patty Driscoll.

“Not yet,” shouted Esther Hughes. Like Patty, she spoke without sounding her “T”s. Maureen had lived in the village all her life and she still couldn’t get the accent. No matter how hard she tried, she still sounded like a stranger.

“Si-i-lent night,” sang the girls until one of them shouted, “blinkin’-cold night” and they sang that instead.

It was cold, all right. Clouds were no more than single ribbons beneath the silver-gleaming halo of the moon and stars were shot points in the sky. Sheep were pale as stones in the fields and birds sat pegged on the black branches of the trees. Everything was apart and waiting, as still as a held breath. Maureen imagined mice, half-frozen, poked down underground holes; there would be rats, voles, shrews, worms, spiders, rabbits and badgers. Foxes, even. Just beneath her feet. Right where she couldn’t see. All poised, all waiting.

Patty Driscoll shouted it ’ud half-kill her, the blinkin’ walking, and Maureen smiled, but only to herself, because even if she was like a stranger she knew you didn’t laugh at Patty Driscoll. She felt a swell of love for all of them that night, even Patty. The factory girls had watched her every morning on her way to school. She had not been allowed to mix with them, not even as a child, though she knew some of them by sight – the twins, for instance, along with Esther because she was so pale and elongated, almost starved-looking, and Patty Driscoll. Maureen had sensed their eyes raking her up and down as she passed their bus stop in the mornings and she had shrunk inside her school coat. Then out of the blue one morning they had called, “Hey, you!” and asked if she wanted a ticket for the Boxing Day Ball. She had assumed it was a joke. She had assumed they were laughing at her.

“Everyone goes,” one of the girls had said. “It’s the best night of the year.”

“No,” she had told them. “No, thank you.” But once the idea was in her head she had not been able to get rid of it. Her parents would not approve. “I think not,” her mother would say; “I think not.” When the girls called out and asked her again, a week later, she had said yes. Yes, she would like a ticket. The words were out of her mouth before her head could stop them.

“Thass it, then,” they had said. “We’ll go together, Maureen.” So they knew her name. They were not laughing at her, after all.

She had kept the ticket hidden in her coat pocket. She would not go. Girls like Maureen did not go to the Boxing Day Ball.

And now here it was again. That little throb of excitement, as if something were about to change. Maybe it was the nip of gin Esther Hughes had offered from a bottle at the start. Maureen had not tasted gin before and she could feel the sting of it still, like a hot hole at the back of her throat. Then a sudden wind lifted the girls’ coats like a dirty old man and they all shrieked, “Aghh, get off, will ya!”

“My hair will be a blinkin’ mess by the time we get there,” said Patty Driscoll. This time it was safe to laugh because Patty was shining her torch to her face and squishing up her mouth, showing a bruise under her left eye and her chipped teeth. She was right about her hair. It had sprung from its clips and fizzed out in a copper mane. Some of the girls had fixed their curls with tape. Esther Hughes wore her rollers pinned to her scalp. She was going to leave them to the last minute. “She had Elnett hairspray in her handbag and also a bottle of that Black Rose perfume. She had got it for Christmas, she said.

“You don’t wanna ask what I got for Christmas,” said Patty Driscoll.

Maureen had received a book about deportment and a set of silver-backed hairbrushes. She had eaten Christmas lunch with her parents in the chill of the dining room, none of them speaking, wearing paper hats like crowns. Afterwards her mother had washed and put away the china tureens and best glasses, as if she were tidying away Christmas, and her father had taken his nap in front of the fire. His paper hat drooped over his eyes so that it looked less of a crown and more of a bandage and the pity of it had hurt Maureen like a wound. She wanted to grab hold of her childhood home – the matching curtains, the cross-stitched tea towels, the embroidered covers for armchairs in case of stains, the needlework samplers that said “A Woman’s Work is Never Done” and “One is Nearer God’s Heart in the Garden than Anywhere Else on Earth” – and ditch the lot. Instead she had fetched the ball ticket from her coat pocket. “What is that?” her mother had asked.

“You should put your hair up,” said one of the girls. It took Maureen a moment to realise the girl was talking to her. Her name was Charleen Williams. That was it. There were so many to remember. Her father had been a GI in the war.

“I am not very good at doing my hair,” said Maureen. She could feel herself blush. Her hair was dark and very fine and it never seemed to do anything except hang either side of her head.

“You’d look like that film star. Whass her name?”

“Audrey Hepburm,” piped up Patty Driscoll.

“Thass the one. You shoulda let me do your hair. Wanna ciggie, Maureen?” said Charleen.

“No, thank you.” Maureen did not smoke. She hadn’t even tried.

“Give us a ciggie!” squawked Esther Hughes and so did Patty Driscoll.

“I only got one packet,” complained Charleen, but she offered them around and struck matches between the girls’ cupped hands and their faces were briefly illuminated like ghosts in the dark. “So why do you still go to school, Maureen?”

She said, “I am going to university.” That sounded better than calling it secretarial college.

“Maureen’s clever, see,” laughed one of the identical twins, either Pauline or Paulette Gordon, it was impossible to tell which because they wore matching coats and boots and hair ribbons and went everywhere arm in arm. “She’s got more brains than the rest of us put together.”

“Better get a move on,” said Esther, checking her hair rollers and stepping forward. Someone began to yell, “Ding dong merrily on high” and they all sang along. When they got to the high notes of “Gloria” they cackled and screeched like witches.

Illustration by Robert G Fresson.

The Boxing Day Ball took place every winter. Maureen knew that much. People came from miles around. All sorts of people, not just the factory workers and the farm hands, but also the university boys home for Christmas, and even the young professionals if they weren’t yet attached. Charleen said she was going to land herself a nice office boy this year. She was fed up with them good-for-nothing tinkers and farm boys. The only parties that Maureen had attended were those of her mother’s friends. She had met their sons, all stiff partings and knitted pullovers, and she had tried on more than one occasion to fall in love, as required, over Viennese fingers and pots of tea. The women talked about their husbands, what they did for a living, and Maureen’s mother would go quiet, studying her hands, because her husband had retired early on account of his heart. He hadn’t even gone to war like the rest of the men, he had worked in the munitions factory, although Maureen’s mother referred to it as undercover work. “Do try to look interested,” she’d say to Maureen. “I am trying to look interested,” Maureen would answer. Her mother would draw up her chest as if she intended to self-inflate and say, “You are yawning.” And when Maureen replied that she only wanted to laugh, was that too much, her mother would lift her eyebrows and say, “I think not. I think not.”

Maureen would never be like her mother. When the chance came, she would say, “I think so” to everything.

Out of the darkness, lights began to emerge. The girls passed close-together cottages with lit-up windows and Christmas trees. Esther Hughes said she wanted to stop and look; she’d never had a tree in her house cos her brothers would only knock it over and shred her mother’s nerves. The pinched hardness melted from Esther’s face as she took in the shining baubles, the silver tinsel, the strings of tiny lights, the Christmas angel, until she looked like a child. Then the other girls crowded next to her, smiling and cooing, “Ahhh!” and Maureen could see the child in them too.

She thought of those people inside their houses, watching television if they had a set, or making sandwiches with leftover turkey. She imagined her father dozing at home in the armchair, her mother stabbing a cross-stitch tapestry with her needle, and she was glad she was out here, in the cold night. The wind had dropped again and the air smelt flinty. Roof tiles shone like blue fish scales.

“Thass it, look!” shouted Patty Driscoll.

Far ahead Maureen could make out the faint yellowy glow of the hall, and a dotting of smaller lights twining through the dark. She took a deep breath to steady herself. She fancied she could hear the faraway thump of music and it was like a part of her, like the beat of her heart.

She followed the girls.

‘You are not going to the Boxing Day Ball,” her mother had said, “and that’s final.” But Maureen had stood her ground. “I am eighteen now,” she’d said. “You can’t stop me.” She could not look her mother in the eye. Did her father know? Of course not. He was a gentle man, softly spoken, always apologising for not being well, always saying he was a burden until it got tiring to keep saying, “No, no, you’re not.” “How do you think it is for me?” her mother had asked. And Maureen had shrugged uncomfortably because the question seemed to come from a part of her mother she had not met before. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” said her mother, turning on her heels and leaving the room.

The dance was already under way. A queue spilled from the door and several boys loitered in stiff jackets, smoking cigarettes between pinched fingers. Patty Driscoll and Esther Hughes shifted impatiently, trying to get a better view of the young men who would later partner them, trying to get a first picture of the hall. A shadowy couple was already up against the wall. “That Judith Hoggs, Christ, she ain’t got no shame,” said one of the girls. Another boy was on his stomach, half under the bushes.

Esther said, “Thass Peter Green. He ain’t having a good time unless he’s spewing up his insides.”

The girls stopped and cheered. “Go on, Peter. Spill it out, boy!”

It was no wonder Maureen’s mother had never been to a Boxing Day Ball.

The doorman was dressed as Father Christmas. He wore a red velour hat and a fake white beard along with a red jacket that didn’t quite button over the swell of his stomach. Holding each ticket to the light, he examined it as if he suspected forgery, so that even though Maureen had paid for her ticket, she felt nervous. Once he was satisfied that the ticket was a real one, he took an ink stamp and made a blue mark on the back of Maureen’s hand. “Ho ho ho,” he said to the girls, catching their fingers.

“Have we been a good girl?” he asked Patty Driscoll’s breasts.

“Oh fuck off, Santa,” she said, pushing past.

Inside the hall Patty shrugged off her coat and handed it to the woman in charge of the cloakroom. Maureen did the same. The other girls wore mini skirts and shift dresses and they tugged at their hems and shoulder straps as if they didn’t quite fit. “You are not going like that,” her mother had said, entering the bedroom while Maureen was getting ready. Maureen had been confused; she always wore her white blouse and plaid skirt. Her mother left the room as quietly as she had entered and returned with a black satin dress. “Try this.” The dress had a sweetheart neckline with a nipped waist and fitted skirt. Maureen had never seen it before, though she could tell from the neatness of the stitching that her mother had made it. She could tell, too, that it had never been worn. And all the time that Maureen’s mother had helped her into the dress and fastened the back and led her to the mirror, she had said nothing. She had only worn that tightened look that made Maureen feel both responsible and desperate to be free. “Does this mean you are letting me go?” Maureen had asked. In reply her mother had said, “I’ll wave from upstairs. No need to trouble your father.”

The parish hall was a big building with a polished wooden floor. The bare light bulbs had been replaced with more festive red ones and they hung the length of the dance floor like giant red berries. There were homemade evergreen banners and coloured paper chains strung between the metal rafters. A ball of mistletoe had been hung at the centre and anyone who passed beneath it and noticed quickly veered away. Tables were arranged along the walls, covered with paper cloths and sprigs of ivy. At the far end there was a makeshift stage, also decorated with evergreens and a small lit-up Christmas tree, where a DJ was playing records. Behind him the band were already unpacking their instruments. They did it slowly, tuning their guitars, setting up the drums, trying to look nonchalant. They wore suits and two-tone shirts and the singer had a necklace like a giant gold medallion.

The hall was already full, though only a few people were near the stage. They hovered as if they hadn’t quite decided whether they were going to dance or just stand there, having a look. Most people were gathered in groups close to the walls – the farm boys in what looked like borrowed jackets, the young men in full dinner suits and bow ties. Groups of girls clustered around the tables. When they greeted one another or took up their drinks, when they offered their laps as seats, and even when they laughed, they did it with a sideways glance to check who might be watching. Maureen recognised a boy with oiled hair from one of her mother’s friends’ parties. She thought the young man was called Howard. If he wasn’t, he ought to be. She looked away before he could spot her. The floor beneath the mistletoe ball lay empty and polished, like still water.

The caller took his place at the front of the stage. And now here came the girls, stepping into line on one side of the hall, giggling with their friends, offering embarrassed half-glances across the dance floor, making a fuss about swapping places. Here came the boys, slowly, checking their ties, some of them still holding their drinks, with a look of studied casualness as if it were quite by chance that they, too, were falling into line. Charleen stood opposite the boy Maureen recognised and she gave a wonky grimace. Patty didn’t seem to have a partner. Esther’s curled hair was already flat. Pauline and Paulette Gordon were hand in hand. The band started up. The couples stepped forward.

And away they went, hands crossed, galloping the length of the floor, up one way and back the other, down the middle and along the sides, joining hands as they met again, some of them sliding into the walls, the top couple gripping damp hands to form an arch, the others hurtling beneath. One dance after another with only brief intervals to buy drinks from the bar. Left arms linked to move in a circle, then back-to-back, then casting off to dance outside the set. Crossed hands, counter-clockwise, figure of eight, up a double and back. Maureen could feel the pounding of their feet through the floor and it was as though the hall itself was dancing.

‘Ain’t you got no partner, Maureen?’ shouted Patty Driscoll. After over an hour of dancing, her face was red as a cherry. She could barely get her words out.

Maureen shook her head. She had stood on the side for a while and joined in for a while but now she was watching someone so hard she could not really see anyone else.

She had noticed him from the start. She couldn’t miss him. Whilst the other couples danced in groups and pairs, he jived by himself in the middle of the dance floor. Sometimes they bumped straight into him, sometimes they caught him in a circle, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Arms out, head shaking, legs kicking; the flaps of his coat flew like dog-tooth-check sails. It was as if he was dancing out something that was inside himself. He looked wild. Half insane. But he looked free. She’d never seen anything like it.

“Who’s that?” Maureen asked.

“We call him No-Mum,” said Patty Driscoll.

“Why do you call him No-Mum?” During the conversation, she’d lost him again, the wild-dancing young man. She was afraid he’d already gone.

“Cos he’s got no mum.”

“Where is his mum?”

“She left. And his dad’s a right bastard.” Patty closed her eyes and staggered a little, losing her balance. “I love the ball. I don’t ever want to go home.” She galloped back to the dance floor and Maureen shifted to one side for a better view.

There he was, the boy, still dancing alone. He was like a stranger in the room, a person from a foreign place, who did not understand how things were supposed to be done. She kept watching and she was aware of time passing and she smiled. So long as she could keep him in her eye line, that was enough.

Maybe he sensed her watching because he stopped suddenly and looked back at her. Then he danced some more, for another half-hour or so, and she continued watching but it was different now because he surely knew she was watching him. He did not stop and neither did she look away. It was the raw energy of him that moved her. The completeness of what he was. He stopped again. Caught her eye again. Then he threaded his way through the crowd and stopped so close she could feel the heat of his skin. He smelt sweet, like oranges.

He stooped with his mouth pointed towards her ear and lifted a small lock of her hair so that he could speak to her. The boldness of the gesture sent prickles of electricity shooting down the length of her neck. Maureen held her breath as if to stop time.

His voice touched her ear, surprisingly soft and close. It was as though he had actually slipped inside her head and was speaking to her from her bones. “You could always be my wife,” he said.

Did he? Did he say that? He moved aside and gazed down at her, waiting for her reply, his face serious to show that whatever it was he had just said, he meant it. Or was it, “You could always give me a light”? Was that what he had said?

She studied his face, searching for clues, and all she could see was the deep blue of his eyes. He did not stop gazing down at her. Clearly he needed his answer. In her embarrassment she felt her skin stain with heat, and before she could do anything about it a cry of laughter shot from her mouth. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t at all funny, but now that she had started, she really couldn’t stop. And all the time she laughed, he watched, a smile quirking the corners of his mouth, as though he were both intrigued and delighted that he had done this, that he had made her laugh so suddenly and uncontrollably. She had no idea if he had asked her to marry him or had asked for a light, and so she said the first thing that came into her head.

“You’d better buy me a drink first.”

She had never said that to a boy before. It was the sort of thing Patty Driscoll and the other girls would say.

Now it was the boy’s turn to laugh, and as he did, little tucks and creases folded from his eyes towards his cheeks. Then he shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

She watched him waiting his turn at the bar. He didn’t look back and it gave her a proper opportunity to take in his height, his hair combed into a quiff, his coat that stopped short of his wrists and knees and was too small for him. Perhaps it wasn’t even his. She had never seen anyone so complete and so alone, and it made her laugh just to keep watching. Then the woman behind the bar asked what he wanted and went away to fetch his order. The woman laughed when she came back to him with two drinks. It must be an effect he had.

He pushed his way towards her, holding out two plastic cups. When he saw her waiting, she could tell he was moved, that he had worried she would have gone and was both relieved and touched that he was wrong. He smiled in a shy way, as if he couldn’t quite face her, and she smiled too to show him not to be afraid. They touched their plastic cups carefully. She didn’t want the gin but she wanted to accept his drink so she gulped to clear her mouth and then lifted the cup to drink as quickly as she could. She decided to empty the glass in one go and get it over and done with.

It was tap water.

Maureen smiled, more deeply this time, as if she knew the boy and he knew her. “Thank you,” she said, projecting her voice clearly above the music so that he could be in no doubt.

“That’s OK.” He lifted his cup to his mouth and knocked it back. Afterwards he wiped his mouth with the side of his hand. “What’s your name?”

“Maureen.”

“Maureen.” He said it again, “Maureen”, as if he were trying to get the taste of the word. Maureen had a feeling that he wanted to stay and tell her something else and she wanted the same, and yet there was nothing else to say and so they looked at the dance floor.

In the far corner Maybe-Howard was approaching a girl in red. He gave a little bow as he offered his hand and then he turned the colour of her dress while he waited for her to answer. She shook her head but the girls around her pushed her forward so that she landed against him, then he in turn pushed her away as if overwhelmed.

It was almost the end of the evening. Maureen had no idea how it had passed so quickly. The singer left the stage and the band began to play “Auld Lang Syne”, and once again the floor began to fill. Maybe-Howard and the red-dress girl were shuffling in a stiff wooden circle, her hands perched like claws on his shoulders. Pauline and Paulette Gordon swayed in a threesome with Peter Green. Patty Driscoll was slow-dancing with Esther Hughes, her chin heavy on Esther’s bone-thin shoulder, the halo of her orange hair touching Esther’s lips, her large hands around Esther’s scrawny fingers. And there was the singer, his mouth open wide over Charleen’s, as if he were emptying every song he knew straight inside her.

Illustration by Robert G Freeson.

Maureen watched them all. This was how it was, she thought. People would find one another, and sometimes it would last moments and sometimes it would last years. You could spend your life with a person and not understand them and then you could meet a boy across a dance floor and feel you knew him like a part of yourself. Maybe it was the same out there in the fields. Maybe the sheep were sitting two by two with the foxes and so were the rats and worms.

She thought of her mother, the way she had looked down from the upstairs window as Maureen walked away, a pale face alone in the dark.

“You look in a world of your own,” said the boy.

She smiled. “I was.”

“They were saying at the bar there’s snow.”

“There can’t be.”

“I know,” he said. “Still. That’s what they’re saying. So you and I could stay here, wondering about it. Or we could go outside and look.”

Without another word he turned his back on her and moved towards the door. This time she followed. She did not think. He reached his hand backwards as if, even without looking, he knew she would be there. His fingers curled in a perfect fit around hers.

And if anyone had said to her that night as they made their way past the embracing couples, across the parish hall with the floor all sticky now, the evergreen garlands unhooked and hanging like limbs, the paper chains in torn-up fragments on the dancers’ shoulders, if anyone had said that this was the man she would soon marry, that they would share a child and one day lose him, that they would move into separate bedrooms and talk over breakfast about nothing because silence, or something close to it, would be easier than words, that they would forget the Boxing Day Ball and the things that had seemed so funny, she would have hung her head so that her long hair lapped her cheeks. “No, no,” she would have said, and then perhaps, “I think –”

But this was all to come. For now, the boy pulled open the door and the sting of the cold almost pushed her backwards.

“Well, look at that.” He laughed.

The moon was gone, the land an even paler blue. All around them swirled the Boxing Day snow, like melting stars. It seemed to be both lifting out of the ground and tipping from the sky. Her life was her own. It wasn’t her mother’s and it wasn’t Patty Driscoll’s or any of those other girls’. She thought of the boy dancing, the question he had posted into her ear. The answer was so simple, so clear, there was nothing to do but laugh, as if to laugh and feel happiness was the most serious thing in the world. Almost unbearable.

She said, “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.” She did not turn her head to face him. She did not need to. She would see him now, everywhere she looked. He would be a part of everything and she did not even know his name. It was no less than a small miracle.

She stood in silence and looked up at the falling snow.

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