Chapter 12: Saving for Christmas

Nix had made some smoothies for us that were quite refreshing. I knew I was tired but I was curious to find out what he had to say as I followed him into the living room. He guided me to sit on one of the bigger settees with a coffee table in front of it, where we set down our drinks. Nix sat down next to me.

He pointed to the small wooden box that was the centre-piece to the coffee table. Both the coffee table and the highly polished box were no doubt made by the elves, they were such consummate craftsmen. They poured so much love into what they made because the delight the object gave to the intended recipient was worth the effort put into it.

“What do you think of the box?” Nix asked.

“It’s beautiful,” I replied, “from the North Pole I presume?”

“Yes, my mother, you actually, gave it to me on my 12th birthday, or you will be giving it to me, er, six-and-a-half years ago.”

“No, I didn’t give it to you, when you were 12, remember, I was winging my way through the decades, the years, the hours and seconds that went by in a flash to get here three hours ago. Your Mums gave it to you, not me. What was in it anyway?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“No, I can’t and I’m really fed up with playing games, I’ve been worried sick about all the people I love for the past four days and I have now discovered that I was worried for nothing because nothing happened other than everybody has carried on living their own sweet lives without me.”

“No, we didn’t Mums. You have go back and then you do rescue everyone and yes, I think that because I believe that you go back to before that invasion actually happened and you stop it, so that it all appears that nothing actually happened.” Nix smiled his cute little-boy-Junior smile that he inherited from his dad, “And only you, me and, almost certainly St Nick, who gave you the teleporter, are the only ones who know anything at all about it.” He then placed the little Santa figurine that I used to teleport here to the future on the coffee table in front of the box.

“O-kay, good theory,” I replied, “so what was in the box?”

“I have a rough idea but I’m not absolutely sure. You see I’ve never opened it. You,” Nix pointed at me with a very theatrical gesture, stretching his arms up in the air and jabbing both index fingers at me, “told me not to open it until, You said,” pointing at me again, “you’d instructed me to.”

“And this was on your 12th birthday?”

“Yes, and not just me. My bothers and sisters got one, too. We’ve all had one, all individually and all on our own 12th birthday.”

“And you’ve never seen inside?”

“I’ve not actually seen inside My one,” he grinned mischievously, “but I was shown what was in Sati’s box.”

“My best friend Sati got one of these boxes from ... er, me?”

“No, your daughter Sati—”

‘Oh shit, Nix, I said no spoilers.”

“You just said, ‘don’t worry about the spoilers’ when we were in the kitchen just now.”

“Yeah but that was before you said you knew I had to go back and ... oh, well, never mind, tell me about your sister Sati.”

“We all call her Sats,” he smiled recalling her, “My Sis, well she’s so fridge she’s solid, no chunk, no chat, she’s a freezer burn babe.” I must have looked confused. “Sorry, I’ll try to stick to how old persons speak—”

“Hey! Watch the old persons, I’m only eleven years older than you, kid.”

“Yeah, sorry. Now my sis Sats can get away with murder, You, her loving mother, never ride her or criticise her, she’s untouchable. Which is fridge.”

“Fridge, means cool, right?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen old films and repeats, she’s cool only more so, like absolute zero fridge.” He started to chuckle, “Oh, Sats would be so chucked to see you like this, with short hair and, and, well I thought earlier that even the mess you were when you showed you’d be supernova and, lady, after your shower you are more like galactic.”

“This isn’t happening, tell me you’re not hitting on me, Nix. I’m not only old enough to be your mother, I am your bloody mother ... well, sort of, damn it, as near as a mother can get without actually giving birth to you.”

Nix fell back on the settee and laughed, “Oh, Mums, I love the new you, but I assure you, you’re not my type.”

“No?” I replied, “What’s wrong with me? ... Hey, wait a minute, am I the wrong sex? Well, if I am that’s all right, nothing wrong with being gay, or whatever you call same-sex relationships nowadays.”

“Haha, no, I’m really not one way or the other, I think I’m hetro but not really sure. I can’t find a girl I like and I don’t think I’m into guys either and I don’t want to commit either way until I’m sure. I’ve got lots of friends, bros and bitches, and I like being out with them as friends but just not prepared to take any of my relationships any further.”

“What are you, only 19? Nix, everyone gets confused, you have all these hormones flooding into your body and you don’t know what to do with them. And don’t call girls you know bitches, we don’t like it. Look, I was shy and afraid to commit, too, when I was your age, I didn’t really have a steady boyfriend until I was 20 and living away from home and felt that even if I made a mistake no one at home would find out, so I really went for and committed myself to the first guy who really showed any interest in me. Bad mistake, he was interested in any girl, even a gawky, misfit girl like me, and he did treat me like a bitch. I ended up stuck with an abuser for about eight years that I regretted as wasted time until I found your Pops. Actually he found me, saved me from my own insecurities. Yeah, he really popped the bubble I was in and Junior, for me, just turned out to be the perfect man, just perfect.”

“Yeah, Pops is amazing, we’re X.”

“X?”

“Yeah, like he’s so diagonal he’s a bona slash, so him and me we’re both super half-Xs, yeah? He’s like the fridge back slash and I’m like the fridge forward slash, so together we’re smackin’ X. Sorry, I guess the language has moved on since your last days here in the pod. Anyway, my Pops, your Junior, he’s so fridge he’s what kids would call ‘ice’n’nice’. Out of all the dads I know, he’s like all my friends’ shining example of what a father could and should be.”

“Yes, he’s pretty special, I’m going to miss him.”

“Noo, Mums, noo! You and me we are going to put everything right. Now, Sats, when she got her box, I was only about 9. She had the box in her room and we were playing a group game on our tablets, and another one of my sisters was ribbing her about the box, teasing her that because Mums said Sats wasn’t to open it she wasn’t as badarse as she always boasted she was. So she opened it, against your explicit instructions...” Nix looked at me and I shrugged. He continued, “inside hers, was a carved figure a bit like this,” he pointed to St Nick’s figurine, “only Sats’ was a snowman I remember, about the same size, with a note wrapped tightly around it, tied with cord, that she unrolled and read out. I can’t remember it word-for-word exactly, but it was something like, ‘remember what I told you, Sati, do not open this box until I and only I tell you to. That won’t be for years yet, so keep it safe in your room here, even if you move out. Then you grab your brother James and all his fully loaded guns and the three of us will all wrap our hands about each other’s hands and around the snowman and I will return us to where I came from’.”

“And that note was in my handwriting?” I asked, “And you do have fully loaded guns?”

“It was your handwriting I think, you used to leave me reminders to do my practice all the time. But I need to take you to the games room to check out the guns first. Then you need more sleep before we go.”

“But time is—”

“Yes, time is of the essence, but we have that time on our side. You determine where and when we arrive and, if we are to succeed, you need to be rested and I need to make sure we have all the resources we need to take with us. OK?”

“All right, but you said you were only about 9 at the time?”

“Yeah, I see where you’re coming from here, but they are not that type of guns,” Nix spoke as he directed out of the sitting room into the sun room.

“The games room isn’t in the cellars?”

“No, I don’t know when you and Pops moved the games room, but it has been in a separate building ever since I was little.”

We stepped outside and it was warm outside for mid-December. We walked along a path running behind the garage, which itself had doubled in size since 2020, the pathway lighting up by sensors as we walked along, up to a newish-looking low building and stepped inside.

“You keep guns in here and you leave the doors unlocked?” I said, thinking I probably sounded like his nagging mother. Perhaps it comes natural, I’ve only been a mother of seven for about three hours and that comment just came out sounding like it had become my normal ‘critical mum’ voice.

“All the doors are locked,” Nix said, with the sort of voice that you might use to a simpleton who has woken up from a long sleep with no clue how the modern world works. “The handles are programmed to recognise me, if it didn’t the door would remain locked. I expect you could open the door too, all the door handles are all programmed to recognise us and even log the comings and goings so even if Mums is in the North Pole, she knows if I’ve come home late, or that I raided the fridge at night.”

“Does she do that?”

“No, at least I don’t think so, but all the kids at school say the same door lock jokes, everyone has these locks on domestic properties, and in public ones the toilet doors know someone has entered, so only the inside handle works until that handle opens the door again. It’s very simple technology for the toilet door handles coated in a pressure sensitive surface and don’t need to be programmed for individuals, unless you have executive toilets.”

“Wow, such a simple idea.”

“It works, great for keeping nosy siblings out of your bedroom. Anyway, to stop my other version of my mother freaking out, I’ll get into the system and delete your presence.”

“Oh, yes I know that I would freak out if I thought there were two of me running around.”

We both relaxed and laughed at that.

I looked around, it was better than the room we thought we were going to make in the cellar. It was a huge room with all sorts of games machines, a pool table, an antique jukebox, some settees and armchairs to relax in, some of which were originally in the house, old but well made and still being used. Nix opened a cupboard on the far wall and inside were at least a dozen short and stubby guns. Nix pulled one out and showed it to me.

“They are electric and kept fully charged by the holding rack. They are fitted with quite a small but powerful battery, and this black coating all around the barrel is also able to collect solar power from the sun, enough to keep you firing all day if it’s sunny enough. The power is used to compress air, which is released to fire the paint pellets or store the charge in the battery in the stock.”