Chapter 11: Where the Heart Is

When I awoke, buried deep in the straw in the reindeer stall, I was desperate for a Jimmy Riddle again. Rhyming slang? I’m using rhyming slang? Look, I lived in London for ten years, I’m entitled. Well, the straw is there for the reindeer to wee and poop in, so I squatted in the corner of the stall and urinated after untying the cord around my waist and pulling up the blanket. Ah, relief.

“Oh, you’re up at last,” said a voice behind me, “you know you’ve slept two whole days?”

I whipped my head around so quickly I almost fell over and earned myself a wet bum. Phew, I thought, it was Gronwynk standing at the open stall entrance with her hands on her hips.

“Gronwynk,” I croaked, my mouth dry, “what’s going on?”

“Here, drink this,” she passed me a cup of cool reindeer milk which I drank gratefully.

“From Rhondda?” I asked, the response a nod, “where is she?”

“With her calf. I’ve been here about half an hour, the soldiers think I’m mucking out the reindeer, I have a small pile of straw by the door, I’ll sweep it outside if I hear them coming back while you hide under the straw in the stall.”

“What is happening with the soldiers, Gronwynk?”

“They’ve taken over everything, they struck three nights ago and took over the main house and town within an hour of their arrival. We elves are slaves to the Saturnalists again, and they’ve locked all the Santas up in the cellar at the Main House. They are shining a UV light on everyone in the cellar which seems to prevent them porting out of there. A few of us house elves were allowed down there to give them bread and water. Junior quietly told me you were still at liberty, only he didn’t know exactly where you were. St Nick handed me this to give to you.”

It was a tiny wooden carving of a Santa.

“It’s beautifully carved,” I said, “but what is it?”

“It’s a one-way portal maker, you are to use it to go home.”

“But I want to stay here and help, not escape.”

“You can help, St Nick wants you to go home,” Gronwynk said with a smile, “I would suggest you get dressed as soon as you get home, and Santa says he’s already sent someone to you who can help us out.”

“Who’s he sending? How can just someone on his own be any help? And why would I trust someone if it is a stranger that St Nick is sending?”

“He didn’t say who it was but he anticipated your question,” Gronwynk said. I knew that if there was one person here who had a handle on everything going on, I guessed it was St Nick. “He said you would trust the person immediately and told me to tell you, ‘you can trust me on that’.”

“What do I do?”

“Hold the carving in both hands, clasp it to your chest and close your eyes then think of home. You will disappear from here and I won’t see you again until you return with St Nick’s helper to rescue us all.”

“But—”

“Just do it, Miss Jennifer, please,” she implored, “for all our sakes.”

I closed my eyes and thought of home.

I felt nothing, or at least no sense of movement. I didn’t think it worked. I opened my eyes and I knew it had worked, but things were not quite as straight forward as that.

I was in my lounge at my house in England, but it could have been a film set or stage made by someone who perhaps guessed my tastes but got the designs, textures and colours somewhat different to what I remembered.

The building was only completed in February and I had moved into Junior’s caravan towards the end of January once I completed my one month’s notice and took the five days leave owed to me. We furnished the house with basics and moved in during March, but didn’t complete the wallpapering and painting, plus complete the furnishing until late summer. We still had lots of work left to do once spring 2021 came around, in the basement and the garden had hardly been touched. So instantly I knew something was clearly different about the house. The North Pole, I know is not our Earth’s true North Pole, it exists in an alternate dimension. I felt that maybe I was in an alternative of my home.

It wasn’t exactly the same, the furniture looked different, but the view out of the window through the sun lounge and out across the valley of Christmas trees looked familiar enough. I twisted around to view the whole of the room, the paintings on the walls were changed, the carpet was green instead of the cream I had chosen only nine months before.

Then I saw a strange young man lounging in my lounge on my settee, although it wasn’t quite my settee.

“Who the hell are you?” I cried, both because I was naturally on edge and surprised by a stranger, a young man, sitting in what looked like my lounge, looking just as surprised at my presence as I was at his.

Then I thought this must be the person who St Nick sent to meet with me, someone I would apparently trust immediately. To be honest, though, I wasn’t expecting a kid.

“And,” I said, “aren’t you supposed to be expecting me?”

I don’t quite know who I was expecting to meet, only someone that St Nick expected to single-handedly take back control of the North Pole from the invaders. This wasn’t Arnold Swatzenegger, Chuck Norris or even Tom Cruise, but a thin youth, with long floppy hair that looked as though it had been slept in and was sat there wearing glasses.

“Well, no,” the youth said, “I was just laying down here, eyes closed fridging after college and I hear something in the room rustle. “I open my eyes and there’s this rather disheveled woman standing there with her back to me staring out the window in ... in ... is that a blanket you’re wearing as a skirt? And then you turned around and, er, I should tell you that with that blanket hanging loose over your shoulders ... you’re er, showing a little more flesh than is appropriate in front of a nova-bloodied youth of 19.”

I looked down and grabbed and closed up the blanket round my shoulders with both hands, dropping the tiny Santa figure from my hand. Both my breasts had been largely uncovered and I was sure that one nipple was showing before I covered myself up. “Oh shit!” I mumbled.

“So,” he said, now sitting up from his previous lounging position, “I should really be asking you who the hell you are because, no, I really was not expecting to see you or anyone else in here right now.”

Then he bent down and picked up the wooden Santa, examined it quickly and looked back up to me. “You’re from the North Pole,” he said, in a more relaxed matter-of-fact manner, “Now I recognise the woven elf designs on the sleigh blankets.”

He clicked his fingers. “You teleported into here just now, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“That’s why the door alarms didn’t go off, obviously. Did Pops send you to frighten the panda clowns out of me?”

“No, it was not whoever your ‘Pops’ is, it was St Nick that sent me. He gave me that Santa figure to use as a one-time, one-way portal to here and told me through a mutual friend that he had already sent someone here to meet me who would help me free the Santas and elves from slavery. Actually he didn’t directly give it to me because he’s locked in a cellar, so my friend Gronwynk passed it to me.”

“Are we on TikTok Universal?” the youth grinned, looking around, scanning the room carefully from his sitting position. He looked at me again with eyes narrowed and pointing at the blanket ‘skirt’, “or are you appearing in one of Gina’s pantos? Is it Aladdin they’re playing this year?”

I looked at him blankly. What the hell was he talking about?

He carried on speaking, “Look, I’m really into vid-spoofs. I’ve seen the scam set ups on the waves, even when the spoofers point directly to the cameras, the marks are never really able to see them, you can tell that by the eyes still searching. Now, I know that St Nick’s too serious to be a tic-tokker-joker, so it must be Mums that sent you, because my old lady never ever takes life serious, except my life of course, she’s always on my back. Other than that Mums is seriously fridge.”

“No, it was not ‘Mums’, whoever your ‘old lady’ is. Does she allow your hair to grow so long and those shorts you’re wearing are definitely not fit to go out of the house in, even to carry out the bins, let alone go to and from college in. No, it was really St Nick that sent me and he hinted he was sending me a one-man liberation army and I must say that so far I’m not all that impressed. Are you sure you didn’t get a text from him explaining what has been happening this weekend in the North Pole, following last week’s assassination attempt?”

“Nothing’s going on in the North Pole lady, let me tell you. I only got back home yesterday after a long weekend with the Rents, because I’ve had a couple of lectures at college this week that I couldn’t miss and the college students’ Christmas par-taay is on Friday night. The Rents are expecting me back on Saturday night in the beat-up old ejet that they let me fly. Now I know sure-thang that you must be from the North Pole because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation ... and that’s how I know you can’t be streaming this conversation, because that would never be allowed.”

“Wait a minute, earlier you said ‘home?’” I asked, “you call this home? Are you squatting here? Because if you—”

“Of course I’m not house-squatting, lady, that’s just as illegal as urban-squatting, in fact even more so because of the compensation community hours they add on if you’re convicted. Let me tell you that this has been my home pod ever since I was born in 2026.”

“2026?” I asked in a daze, “what the— What year is it now?”

“2045, mid-December, Wednesday, not sure of the date.”

“And your name, young man?” I asked tentatively, wondering what the answer could be.

“Nix,” he answered, “Nix to my friends anyway.”

“Nicks, as in N-I-C-K-S?”

“No, ‘Nix’ as in N-I-X, short for Nixon. It just sounds way more fridge than Jimmy Nixon, which is what the Rents insist on calling me.”

“So you are the son of Junior and Jennifer Nixon?” I asked, “they are your ‘Rents’ and this is still their house?”

“I am one of their sons, yeah. And this is actually where the Rents live for most of the year except for December.”

“Don’t tell me any more about any of your siblings, please,” i said, “I really can’t take any spoilers at this stage. You’re a lot more than I expected from this teleporting lark.”

“Mmm, well, Lady, as you don’t seem to know what the date is, would you like to tell me what you thought the date was first, then tell me exactly who you are and why you think St Nick would send you here to my Rents’ pod to see some super saviour?”

“Pod?”

“Sleep pod, where I lay my weary after six hours of lectures every day. And usually another two hours of lectures in the evening from the Rents, you’re not so old not to know how parents can be.”

“Sounds like a hard life. Slave drivers, eh, your er, ‘Rents’?”

“Yeah, always on my back attempting to drive me forward. They want me to make something of myself, but being the youngest son, I know I’ll never be Santa, and to be honno I don’t really want to be. So Mums keeps pushing me towards the business but I can’t get interested in the family business at all.”

“Webster’s Haulage?”

“Webster’s Wingers, everything gets delivered depot-to-door by air now, drone deliveries, cutting out the middle man, so Webster’s had to run down the e-lorry part of the business over the last few years and build up the delivery drone side instead. They’re successful but the business has to be largely automated through AI and, quite frankly, boring monitoring for emergency interventions.”

“So what do you want to do with your life?”

“I always wanted to be a fighter pilot but Pops says it’s against our code. I accept that but to be a rescue and emergency pilot the easiest way in is though the military, probably the Royal Navy, and they already do mostly rescue rather than physical enforcement.”

“You could always work on the rigs in the North Sea, they use helicopters all the time.”

“Oil and gas rigs? Where you been for the last two decades, Lady? The bottom fell out of that market years ago.”

He stood up, he was taller than I thought and very slim. “So, before I kick you out, although you’re hardly dressed for the outside, bedroom slippers, bare legs, and a couple of thin blankets and ... well, to be honno, you really could do with a shower, you smell sort of farmyardy. I can offer you a pair of jogger pants and a jumper from Mums’ room and one of her older winter coats. We’ve got plenty of boots in the utility, you may be able to find a pair that fits.”

“Yes, I probably do smell, haven’t had a wash or slept in a bed since Saturday and my hair’s a mess —”