Dying for Christmas by Tammy Cohen

last year, I’d presented him with that little plastic stick with the blue line in the windows like a nervous beau proffering a ring box to his beloved, and he’d taken one look and then made that comment about backstreet abortions, and that had been that. Two weeks later I’d had the procedure – that’s what we called it, so we didn’t have to think about what it actually was. He took two days off work. On the first day he made a fuss of me, but by the evening I could see him getting restless, and the next day he got up at seven to go to the hospital. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he said. ‘There’s something important I have to do.’ We’ve never talked about it again. And I never told him that sometimes I wake in the night with a fluttering inside me like a phantom baby moving around.
    So that was the context in which I started up a conversation with a strange man in a department-store café.
    When the sound of heavy chain links clinking against each other woke me in the early morning of Christmas Day, catapulting me right back to reality, Travis was on my mind.
    I lay very still, my teeth chattering with cold, trying not to make a noise, and imagined him lying in our double bed, the plump duvet pulled up around him. I imagined myself slipping in beside him and curling myself around him for warmth, but it was too painful and I had to stop myself thinking about it. I wondered if he’d have called the police yet and decided probably not.
    Not after the airport thing.
    Around a year ago I’d gone to work as usual and something odd had happened between leaving the office to come home again, and actually getting home. I’d been having episodes where voices exploded in my head, too many to control, leaving me spent and shaken with a gap in my memory of five minutes or ten. A couple of times it had been an hour or more. But this was different. I left work at the usual time, just after six. I remembered walking out of the building, but then nothing. Until I called Travis at just after midnight.
    From Luton airport.
    All I know is, one minute I was patting my pockets down as usual to make sure I still had my Oyster card, and the next I was sitting in a padded chair at Luton airport departures hall and six hours had passed. ‘But you must have some recollection of what happened?’ Travis had stood in front of me rattling his car keys, still wearing his innies, as he calls his pyjama bottoms, and looking very cross. Travis just couldn’t get his head around these ‘lapses’, as he’d taken to labelling them, as if they were some kind of character flaw.
    It hadn’t happened since, at least on that scale, but he still brought it up from time to time.
    So no, on balance I thought he probably hadn’t called the police.
    Today was another matter. Today we were due at my parents’ house at 12.30 p.m. My mum would have made blinis with smoked salmon and cream cheese sprinkled with dill for us to wash down with champagne and orange juice. As usual, we’d be the first to arrive – my brothers being given papal dispensation to come and go as they choose on account of their having reproduced.
    When Travis woke up and I wasn’t there, he’d be worried. I imagined him putting on his glasses to squint at the phone in that way he does first thing in the morning, frowning as if he couldn’t quite trust his own eyes yet. It was now, I decided, he’d feel the first creeping sense of dread. Maybe he’d call the police then, prefacing his call with an apology. ‘I hope this isn’t wasting your time, but …’ Or maybe he’d decide to wait and go to my parents’ anyway, thinking I might have turned up there. I’m not a child – I could just be at a friend’s house sleeping off a heavy night. Except that I don’t have any friends like that.
    That scenario seemed most likely. Travis would get in our old Golf, forgetting as usual that the central locking only works from the passenger-door side, and he’d make his