The Snow Globe

Part 1

Sixty-year-old Henry sang along with Bing Crosby as White Christmas blared from the jukebox in the bar of the Three Crowns. When the song reached the part that mentions glistening treetops and listening children, the inebriated accompanist left Bing to manage on his own momentarily as he licked the paper of a cigarette he’d rolled.

It was early evening on the final Saturday before the 25th, and the bar was doing brisk trade as last-minute shoppers called in for well-earned festive drinks or to hush barking dogs.

Landlord Figgis, a portly gent of middle age, had turned up the jukebox volume so customers could hear the music above the hum of conversation. Satisfied he had found a suitable level, the gaffer retired to the top end of the bar, where he adopted his usual stance of hooking his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets and surveying his indoor empire from beneath the brim of a bowler hat.

Henry rose, took his overcoat from the back of a chair, and put it on. He picked up his glass containing a small amount of beer and drank the contents. After wiping his mouth on his sleeve, Henry put the cigarette between his lips and turned to go outside for a smoke.

The bar was heaving with customers, and the path to the smoking yard was beset on all sides with the compliments of strangers and the goodwill of decent men. Henry walked crab-like through the mass of bodies, shaking hands, kissing cheeks, and slapping the backs of well-wishers who arrested his progress to convey greetings of the season.

Above the door, a solitary bulb in a glass casing offered the only light in the narrow yard, which led to a bolted gate. Two stone steps midway between the bar door and the gate took the flagstones down a level. Over the years, that drop had caught out many a squiffy customer in the darkness.

The only person in the yard was Hannah, a friend of Henry’s of a similar age. She leaned against a cast-iron drainpipe, puffing on the dog end of a cigarette, the collar of her coat turned up against the cold. They exchanged greetings, and Henry lit his cigarette from Hannah’s.

“All set then?” Hanna said, referring to the other’s Christmas preparations.

“Just about. I didn’t think I’d be ready in time, but standing my two Christmas cards on the sideboard didn’t take as long as I’d anticipated.”

“Oh, Henry. You shouldn’t be on your own at this time of year.” Henry didn’t respond.

“See what I picked up at the market,” he said, demonstrating a talent for speaking with a cigarette in his mouth. He showed Hannah a snow globe, inside which stood a house with snow on the roof. He shook it vigorously. “It’s glass, not plastic, see.” Hannah merely glanced at it.

“By picked up, do you mean you paid for it or that you picked it up in a shoplifting sense?” Henry smiled.

“Well, you know,” he said.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Henry,” Hannah said, “those stallholders work bloody hard to earn a living. They can do without you robbing them of their stock.” She hadn’t finished her chastisement but gave way to a fit of rich, wet coughing. When it abated, she patted her chest, cleared her throat, and continued, now in a croaky voice. “And pilfering is hardly in keeping with the spirit of Christmas, is it?”

“Old habits, “ Henry said. Hannah flicked her cigarette away.

“Come on then,” Hannah said, “you might as well make a wish with it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You make a wish on the snow. Haven’t you heard of it?”

“Never.”

“When I was a child, we had one, and I made many wishes on it.”

“Did they ever come true?” Henry said.

“Well, no, apart from one night, I wished our missing cat would come home, and two days later, it did.”

“A reliable predictor, then,” Henry said from the side of his mouth not occupied by the cigarette.

“Here’s what you do,” Hannah said. “Shake the globe, and hold it in the flat palm of your hand, and then, before the snow settles, say,

No one knows what the snow may bring

But please, Lord, grant me this one thing.

And then you close your eyes and make a wish. Try it.”

Henry flicked away his cigarette and shook the snow globe. He held it as instructed and chanted the spell. Then, he closed his eyes.

“I wish tha — “

“Not out loud, you ninny,” Hannah said, laughing, “keep the wish to yourself.”

“Done it,” Henry said.

“Well, don’t tell me, although I have an inkling of what you wished for.”

“I think that’s obvious.”

“Henry, I’m your friend. I know what you’re going through. It must be terrible not seeing Emily, especially at Christmas.”

“I thought it would have blown over by now, but David takes after his mother. Obstinate bastard.”

“You did spend his lottery stake on tobacco instead of buying the tickets, Henry. And his numbers came up.”

“Twenty-five quid. It’s not like he’d won the jackpot.”

“I think it might have more to do with trust and respect than the money, sweetheart.”

“Well, sod him,” Henry said, “whatever happened between us, he shouldn’t stop Emily from seeing me. I’ve not clapped eyes on her since the autumn. Cruelty, that’s what it is.”

“Talk like that about him, and your wish will never come true,” Hannah said. “Here, I’ve had a rotten year. Hand me the globe, and I’ll wish for better things too.” Henry laughed as he took the glass ball from his coat pocket.

“Look at us,” he said, “blind faith.”

As he stepped forward to hand over the snow globe, Henry slipped on a patch of ice and fell back like Charlie Brown attempting to kick a football. His head hit the flagstones with a thud that sickened and alarmed Hannah. As he fell, Henry dropped the snow globe, which perfectly reenacted the deathbed scene from Citizen Kane as it rolled down the stone steps and broke.

A pool of blood formed on the ice, and Henry didn’t respond to Hannah’s frantic pleas for him to speak, so she hurried into the bar to raise the alarm. The strains of Fairytale of New York escaped sporadically into the night air as the door opened and closed as customers came out to the yard, some to assist, others to gawp, and one in a bowler hat to bark that those driven by nosiness or morbid curiosity should piss off back inside. Finally, Henry groaned a response, and the music yielded to the wail of an ambulance siren.

Part 2

“I told you it would be dry. Didn’t I say it would be dry?” Podmore said, referring to the turkey served with Christmas lunch in the neurology ward of All Saints Hospital. He was an ardent moaner of some seventy summers who occupied the bed next to Henry’s. Podmore’s admission to the ward was due to a head injury he’d received when a motor scooter collided with him as he crossed a road.

Henry had no such complaint about the festive fare. He was on a drip, and no food or drink had passed his lips since he drained his glass at the Three Crowns before going outside for that fateful cigarette two days earlier.

He had suffered a fractured skull and broken ulna in the fall. Medics had shown great concern about the injury to his head, fearing an inward-pointing piece of bone at the fracture may have punctured the meninges, the layers of membrane between the skull and the brain. During that time of concern, Henry underwent regular checks to ensure there was no deterioration in his condition. As well as having his temperature and blood pressure taken, he was tasked with squeezing the nurse’s hand, wiggling his toes, and saying how many fingers the nurse held up.

There was some relief when results showed that the meninges hadn’t ruptured, and Henry was cleaned up and given twelve stitches in his scalp, all held in place with a bandage around the head. A sling for his broken arm completed the wounded soldier look.

In the evening, Podmore was in bed, reading a Christmas TV guide and complaining about the number of repeats shown. Then he noticed that the film The Apartment was about to start on BBC2. Podmore was a fan of the Billy Wilder masterpiece, so, not being tethered to a drip like Henry, the carping convalescent left the ward for the communal TV room along the corridor.

A nurse came to check on Henry, and she helped prop him up with an extra pillow and, at his request, turn him onto his left side so he would have his back to Podmore when he returned from the TV room. So positioned, Henry could pretend to be sleeping if Podmore started complaining. He asked the nurse to pull the curtain across so he could look down into the car park.

Snow was falling steadily, and a pair of parked cars had almost vanished under the all-covering white blanket. The scene reminded Henry of the snow globe, and he thought of Hannah and how she never got to make a wish.

The headlights of a turning car blazed. It was a car Henry recognised and a nervous thrill shot through his body. Two adults and a child stepped out of the vehicle and walked toward the hospital. With some grimacing, Henry managed to turn onto his back to watch the door to the ward.

Twelve-year-old Emily hurried in, clearly excited. She scanned the three occupied beds in search of the grandfather she’d not seen in months, at one point looking directly at Henry but failing to recognise him under the bandages.

“Hey,” Henry said. Emily turned and smiled, and she ran to her grandfather’s bed.

“Grandad,” she said to Henry, who expressed surprise at how much she’d grown. David and his wife Anne entered, the former carrying a bag of gifts. To the relief of all, there was no awkwardness as Emily played Santa in handing Henry his parcels, which she helped him unwrap because of the manual restrictions caused by the plaster cast on his arm.

There was laughter at how unusable the gifts were to Henry in his current situation. He couldn’t sample the brandy or chocolates because of his nil-by-mouth status. Nor could he enjoy the tobacco, as smoking wasn’t allowed anywhere in the hospital. Even turning the pages of the paperback crime thriller would prove problematic with his arm being in a sling.

But nothing mattered as they chatted and laughed as a family again.

“Are you still an avid reader?” Henry said to Emily.

“You bet,” she replied, “I love it.”

Aside from being an inebriate scoundrel, Henry was well-read, and he had passed on a love of reading to his granddaughter. Half a decade earlier, when Henry looked after Emily while her parents went out for the night, he read Dickens to her, and they wrote silly duologues, which they acted out. Those performances rarely got to the end, as the actors collapsed in fits of laughter at outlandish accents and shameless overacting.

Henry asked Emily what she’d recently read, and he hadn’t heard of any of the titles and authors she mentioned. He wasn’t disheartened. He knew he had played a part in Emily’s development as a reader, and the foundations he helped lay would stand her in good stead for the rest of her life as she found her way. It was like when he taught David to ride a bicycle. He let go of the saddle, and David pedaled without his father’s assistance. As David had explored the area surrounding his home on his bike, Emily had a world of literature to delve into. And Henry had played a part in setting each of them off on their journeys.

Henry chatted with David and Anne about his accident, and he told them about the snow globe and the wish he’d made. “I guess it came true in a roundabout way,” he said.

“Ooh, it’s like The Monkey’s Paw,” Emily said, the show of bookishness further fuelling Henry’s pride.

“But not so gruesome, if you don’t mind,” Henry said, and they laughed.

“Tell Grandad about the poem you did at school,” Anne said.

“We had to choose a poem from a list to research and recite. I did the Walt Whitman one about the death of Lincoln.”

“I know the one. We watched the film together, remember?” Henry said. Emily nodded. “Do you know it off by heart?”

“I learned it all, and the teacher said I recited it beautifully.”

“Come on then,” Henry said.

“All right, I’ll try,” Emily said, clearly enjoying the limelight. “I might as well do it like they did in the film.” She stood on her chair and began to recite. “O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done. The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won…”

And she narrated the whole piece flawlessly. Two nurses who had stopped to listen applauded, and Henry had to blink several times to get his sight back into focus.

(Story originally published in Medium)