5 Real Elves Read online

  REAL ELVES

  An Emily Castles Christmas Story

  by

  HELEN SMITH

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  For my daughter Lauren and her friend Harry, the former Head Gardener

  REAL ELVES

  “I want you to think of all the ways you could injure a child,” said Miranda. She was dressed as an elf. “I mean, really hurt them—not just a bump or a bruise. I’m talking about snapping a limb or bashing in a head, or even”—she lowered her voice—“loss of life.”

  Emily loved the run-up to Christmas, it was like the start of a poem: spicy cinnamon and glints of gold, green leaves and red robes, fairy lights and children singing. Even in the final scramble, in the week before everything shut down, when people frenziedly bought presents they couldn’t afford and drank too much at office parties, she always tried to remain cheerful and calm. Now, standing at the entrance to an enchanted forest, on the third floor of a department store in London, dressed in a red robe with a hood, carrying a wicker basket, she tried to be helpful. “I suppose you could hit them really hard with a cricket bat?”

  “I think you misunderstood me,” said Miranda. “I’m not suggesting you deliberately injure a child. I’m asking you to consider how a child could be injured by accident. In there.” She pointed into the dark interior of the forest, where exotic flowers had bloomed overnight, where the gnarled limbs of almost-human trees joined protectively over a meandering pathway that led to Santa’s grotto, where gold and silver baubles were strung up among strands of twinkling white lights that threaded through the branches.

  “Oh,” said Emily. “I see … Well, could they be electrocuted by the fairy lights? Injured by something falling from a tree?”

  Miranda nodded. Emily was on the right track.

  As is so often the way in briefing meetings, other members of the staff joined in now they knew what they were supposed to say. Unlike most staff meetings, however, everyone present was dressed as a character from a fairy tale.

  Ray—a woodcutter—thought that shards of glass from broken Christmas tree baubles might get embedded in little fingers. He thought that trailing wires from plug sockets might trip tiny feet, or bits of scenery might poke any part of the body, but especially the eyes.

  “Yes!” said Miranda. “It’s our job to protect them from all that.”

  Ray adjusted his green felt Robin Hood hat so it sat at a jauntier angle, the pheasant’s tail feather stuck in the side of it tickling the ends of his cornrows. Ray was a meaty young man who liked to work out in the gym four times a week. His big brown arms were sinewy and strong; he stood with his thick legs planted wide apart. He looked like a tree that had dressed up as a woodcutter. He shrugged and rolled his mahogany eyes, to show that he didn’t consider it his job to protect anyone “from all that.”

  Miranda pretended to be indifferent to his indifference. “Anyone else?”

  A centaur called Selena—the lower half horse, the upper half human, despite the long face—thought the children themselves might be the cause of trouble. There was a rumble of dissent from the group, but Selena was adamant. “Seriously, guys, it’s nonsense to believe that children are inherently good. They fight and cheat and steal and tell tales.”

  Emily wondered if Selena wasn’t getting children mixed up with cowboys.

  “We want the children who pass through the forest to be transformed by the experience—but only in a good way,” said Miranda. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  “It would be great if it did transform them,” said Selena. “Imagine that. Like, if Santa was real. You bring a few naughty kids and walk them through the forest, Santa has a chat with them, and they come out well-behaved.”

  “Or politicians!” said Ray. “Or bankers.”

  “We’d be famous!” said Selena.

  Miranda gave herself a little hug. “You know what? When I was at art school, I might have wished for fame—or notoriety. But then I grew up. I’ve got friends who sell their work for millions. But I’d much rather spend my time on community projects, summer festivals, a few commercial installations like this one. Because for half an hour or so, as they go through it, the children believe the magic is real. If I could have one wish for all of us, to celebrate our hard work, it would be that—just for one night—we could believe it too.”

  “I’d rather be rich,” said Ray.

  “Me too. Sorry,” said Selena. “What about you, Emily? What would you ask Father Christmas for?”

  “No need to ask,” Emily said. “He always brings me the same things: a chocolate orange, a pair of long socks and a puzzle.”

  Miranda laughed. The group started to pick up their coats and bags to show they were ready to leave. It was so late already.

  But Miranda had another strange question before she would let them go. “Do any of you know any children?” She stared beseechingly around the group. She might have been asking, “Do you know anyone from Bhutan?” as if children lived in an isolated kingdom a long, long way away from London, and it was impossible to meet them under normal circumstances.

  “You don’t need to worry about finding children to see Santa,” said Selena. “The store will do that.”

  “It’s a tradition,” said Ray. “People come with their kids year after year. You’ll get plenty of bookings.”

  They were pretending to reassure her, but really they were enjoying the smug feeling that follows the sudden realization that the person in charge is an idiot. It can make a pleasant end to a long day, unless that person is about to lead you into battle from out of the trenches.

  Miranda tugged at the sleeves of her green jacket, irritated at their smugness. “Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I know. We’re fully booked as soon as it opens. But we need a child to test out the forest before then. It seems we’ve thought of everything, but we won’t have. No matter how many times we walk through it, there’s always something. You have to have a child to go through it. My niece was going to do it, but she’s got chicken pox.”

  Ray had a suggestion. He bent his knees and hunched down, resting his forearms on his big thighs. “Couldn’t we—”

  Emily was horrified. Couldn’t we what? Ray looked as if he was miming using the toilet.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Miranda held up her hand to cut him off. With a background in set design for the theatre, she was obviously better at interpreting mime than Emily was. “Asking a short person’s no good.” She sighed with the wearied air of someone who had tried asking short people to test out her Christmas installations many times in the past, and always found them wanting. “Children have a different way of seeing things. So, does anyone know any children?”

  As it turned out, the children they knew might as well have been in Bhutan. Selena had a baby, but the baby was too young to test the layout and functionality of the magical forest. The other staff were childless. They had neighbours. But none of the neighbours’ children were quite the right age for this project. They had nephews and nieces, but the nephews and nieces were in Cornwall or Dorset or Birmingham or Glasgow.

  Emily could see another problem, even if they identified a suitable child to test out the project. “Won’t they all be in school? It’s Friday tomorrow.”

  Miranda sighed again—at the selfishness of children, the inflexibility of the British educational system, the stupidity of her staff… Emily wasn’t sure exactly. The sigh was all-encompassing. “I think we could write a letter to the school, don’t you? An educational visit. Think what the child would learn.”

  To be fair to Miranda, she was right. Helping to create the magical forest had been the best job E
mily had ever had, like a form of extreme gardening. She had learned a lot. For the last five days, all day and late into the night, Emily had worked among craftspeople and technicians hammering, sawing, painting and stitching to create something magical and beautiful. And now it was finished, children would wander along the path that led to Santa, ushered by staff dressed as characters from fairy tales, accompanied by a responsible adult, choosing one piece of gold or silver fruit from the overhanging branches of the trees above the pathway and trading it for a gift from Santa.

  Along the way, to keep them entertained, they would pass by oversized musical boxes and cabinets that could be operated when the child turned the handle. The cabinets were filled with all sorts of wonders: dancing automata, films glimpsed through peepholes, shadow puppets, talking birds. Tickets were expensive. The chance to wander through this place, almost alone, for free, would be a wonderful experience for a child of the right age. But where were they going to find that child at such short notice?

  “Could we offer a kind of golden ticket?” said Ray. “The kid who wins it gets to come in and explore the forest before it opens.”

  “No,” said Miranda.

  Then Emily had a clever idea. One thing you must never do at work is have a clever idea. If you do have one, you need to keep quiet until the urge to share it passes. Emily should have known better. She really should. “There’s a neighbour of mine, he lives at the end of the street. Harry. He’s a retired Head Gardener and we’re friendly because he gives me tips on my garden, though I don’t know him well. Anyway, he said he doesn’t see enough of his granddaughter, Sophie. I’m sure she lives in London. She started school last year so she must be about six years old. At that age, it wouldn’t matter much if she missed the last day of term. And Harry would be so pleased if he could spend the day here with her.”

  “Perfect! You talk to Harry, tell him to ask the parents’ permission, find out the name of the school. Call me tonight, OK? We open on Saturday, so this has to happen tomorrow. I’ll write an e-mail to the head teacher and tell her Sophie needs to have the afternoon off. It’s a win for everyone. Sophie and Granddad get a tour of the forest; we show them how we transformed this place, and how this place can transform two ordinary people into two adventurers exploring an enchanted forest. We get a dress rehearsal. They get a magical experience, and they get to spend time together. What could go wrong?”

  With all permissions duly granted, the next day Harry collected his granddaughter from school just after lunch and brought her to Oxford Street on the 137 bus. They sat at the top at the right-hand side, directly above the driver, and enjoyed a lovely view of London as they made their way through tree-lined streets to the magical place where the branches of the trees were hung with gold and silver baubles.

  December in London is not nearly as miserable as January or February. In January and February, the rain is too wet, the air is too cold, and the days are too short. In December, there’s a bite of cold in the air, but it’s a puppy nipping playfully at your mittened hand, rather than the fully grown savaging of the later months. And when it’s sunny in December, London’s beauty sparkles. That day, as Harry and Sophie travelled on the bus through London together, it was sunny.

  Sophie didn’t talk much, so Harry talked. He pointed out places of interest: Battersea Park, with its Peace Pagoda, its boating lake and its fragrant rose garden; Chelsea Physic Garden, created by apothecaries in the seventeenth century to grow medicinal plants; Marble Arch with its nose-diving horse head statue; and Tyburn Covent with its enclosed order of nuns. He reminisced about what London was like in the old days, when he was a boy. The red buses didn’t have a door on the back—you could jump on and jump off at any point along the route, although you weren’t supposed to. He remembered running after a bus through the traffic with his two best friends, racing to catch up with a bus, jumping aboard and getting told off by the conductor. And, of course, you could smoke upstairs on the top deck. Everything he described sounded so wicked and wrong and old fashioned, as if people back then were trying to harm themselves deliberately. Could Sophie even understand what he was talking about?

  But she listened solemnly and nodded. A couple of times she said, “I’d like to do that!”

  He wondered if she meant she’d like to run through moving cars to jump onto a bus, or jump off into the traffic. Or was it the smoking she liked the sound of? He wouldn’t get many more opportunities to spend time with Sophie if she went back to her mother and told her that. Fortunately, the excitement of a stroll through the magical forest and meeting Santa should give her plenty of positive things to talk about when she got back home.

  Emily was waiting for them when they arrived. So was Miranda. Emily was dressed in her red, hooded cape. Miranda was dressed in a green tunic, green pointed shoes, green tights and false ears. She was accompanied by a large poodle whose fur had been styled to make him look like a reindeer. He was wearing antlers and an embroidered saddle. Miranda was carrying an aerosol can of cinnamon-scented spray.

  “Is that your poodle?” Emily asked her as they waited.

  Miranda gave the air an excited squirt of cinnamon. “Use your imagination! He’s not a poodle. He’s a reindeer.”

  An elderly, creaky-looking man with rheumy blue eyes approached them, with a small, blond child of about six years old.

  Miranda whispered, “Showtime!”

  Emily was to greet each child in a warm and friendly manner, ask the name and confirm the spelling with the adult accompanying them, then write the name on a sticky label and press it firmly to the child’s coat, on the left-hand side near the shoulder. This would allow Father Christmas to greet the child by name, giving the illusion that he had been keeping up with their good deeds and misdemeanours. It would remind the responsible adult accompanying the child that they were not anonymous. The name would be checked off against a list of prebooked tickets. There was no readmission.

  So this was the procedure Emily followed now. She greeted Harry and asked his granddaughter her name. Harry touched the little girl lightly on the shoulder, to get her attention—his hands were knobbly with rheumatism.

  The little girl had been petting the reindeer poodle, but she stopped and gave her name. “Sophie.”

  Emily wrote the name on a label and stuck it to the child’s coat. From a basket on the table next to her, Emily took a sealed letter addressed to Father Christmas, which was to be delivered by the child to the woodcutter. This letter allowed entry to the forest.

  There would be several woodcutters dotted around the forest. Their job was to help the young child remove the dangling bauble once they had selected it from whichever branch of whichever tree they wanted—and, of course, ensure that only one was taken.

  “It’s difficult to see woodcutters as heroes, isn’t it?” said Miranda, as they watched Sophie hand over her letter to Ray. “With deforestation and everything.”

  From deep within the forest, they heard the sound of Santa trying out the acoustics in his grotto. “Ho ho ho!”

  Miranda rolled her eyes. “Sounds like a drunken uncle at a family gathering—not even a proper uncle, a former neighbour that everyone calls uncle out of respect, and now the respect has gone. I didn’t want Santa, to be honest. A whiskery old man squatting in the middle of my forest asking impertinent questions of children about their behaviour. What’s that all about? I’d much rather have had a Fairy Godmother. But the store owners insisted. Do you think little Sophie will choose a gold bauble or a silver bauble?”

  “Gold? I don’t know.”

  “There’s a perceived difference in value, but the gifts all cost about the same, of course. I’m doing a study to see how the choices break down on gender lines. Do you know the most useful thing I learned when I was at art college?”

  Emily tried to remember the most useful thing Miranda had taught her over the past few days. “Welding?”

  “How to apply for funding. I should get a little extra money from a un
iversity for this study. You want to come to the security booth? You can meet my godmother.”

  Miranda had a fairy godmother?

  “She’ll be watching the CCTV to make sure my study’s set up properly.”

  Miranda had a fairy godmother who kept watch on people via CCTV? Of course Emily wanted to meet her. She followed Miranda to the security booth.

  On the way, Miranda tried to justify the use of cameras. “With the low lighting in the forest, you’d be surprised how many people are tempted to steal—both staff and members of the public. And then there are the various hazards. You’ll have children pulling down fairy lights, poking themselves in the eye with sharp objects, walking into walls in the poorly lit grotto, rolling out of control on their wheely shoes. And then there are the pranks. Every year, in a project like this, someone plays some sort of prank. It’s not always malicious, but seasonal work attracts disgruntled staff. Students. They think they’re better than the job on offer. You know the sort of thing. A partridge in a pear tree replaced by a penguin.”

  Emily couldn’t help it. She giggled.

  “And, of course, we have to make sure no child gets separated from its parent. Have you ever lost a child, Emily?”

  She hadn’t.

  “Even if it only happens for five minutes, it’s absolutely the worst thing. For those five minutes, you can’t promise yourself you’ll ever see the child again.”

  Miranda had that carelessness that often came with creativity. Emily took a moment to wonder how many children she might have lost over the years. Emily had never experienced anything like it herself, but she had seen it happen: the absolute still of the parent, like someone drowning, in the moment when the body shuts down, right before they sink beneath the waves. A few times she had lost sight of her dog, Jessie, in the park, and that had been bad enough. But when she called her, Jessie had always come bounding towards her with her big cheerful golden retriever smile.