was within walking distance of his flat.
He didn’t have a single believable excuse not to turn up to the team night out.
He did have Anna’s number, so he could just call her and admit that he didn’t want to go. But it felt too mean-spirited and he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.
And so he found himself outside the bowling alley at five minutes to seven. There was a group of people he recognised in the foyer; Anna detached herself from them and came over to greet him. ‘Hey, Jamie! Glad you could make it.’
He’d seen her several times at work during the week, wearing a smart shirt and skirt beneath her white coat. In jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and with her dark wavy hair loose, she looked very different: younger and very, very approachable. He was suddenly aware of her curves and how the faded denim clung to her.
Oh, for pity’s sake. He wasn’t a hormone-laden teenager. He’d seen plenty of women dressed casually.
But they didn’t make him feel suddenly hot all over, the way Anna Maskell did.
Tonight was definitely a mistake. Even if she wasn’t involved with someone, he was only here in Muswell Hill for three months, and then he’d move on. He wasn’t in the market for a relationship, even a temporary one. He could never give his heart again. He’d buried his capacity to love right there in the grave with his wife and his daughter.
But he forced himself to smile back. To fake a semblance of being a normal member of the team. He let her introduce him to the people he hadn’t yet met from their ward, swapped his shoes for bowling shoes, paid for his games, and chipped in his share of the food and drink order. He played the frames along with the rest of the team, sitting squarely in the middle of the scoring and being neither spectacularly good nor spectacularly bad.
Though Anna was playing on his lane, and she’d been right on the money when she’d told him that she was terrible at bowling. Without the bumper bars being put up, her ball would’ve gone straight into the gutter every single time; as it was, she seemed to have a strategy of zig-zagging the ball between the sides of the lane in the hope of hitting the pins in the middle, more by luck than by judgement.
‘Yes! Six pins! Best roll of the night for me so far,’ she whooped as the pins went down.
‘Best roll of the last four years, by my count,’ one of the others teased.
‘I know! How cool is that?’ She punched the air and then grinned. ‘Go, me.’
Everyone else on the team high-fived her, so Jamie felt he had to follow suit.
But when the palm of his hand grazed briefly against hers, it felt like an electric shock.
He was pretty sure she felt it, too, because those beautiful sea-green eyes widened briefly. And for a second it felt as if it was just the two of them in a bubble: the sound of bowling balls thudding against pins on the other lanes, of the electronic scoreboard, of music playing and people laughing and talking, simply melted away.
Then he shook himself. This wasn’t happening. Anna was his colleague for the next few weeks, and then he’d be moving on.
But he couldn’t shift his awareness of her. The tall, energetic, human dynamo of their department. The woman who was definitely attracting him, despite his common sense.
When their food order arrived, they took a break, and Jamie found himself sitting next to Anna. His fingers accidentally brushed against hers as they reached for a piece of pizza at the same time, and again it felt like an electric shock. He was going to have to be really careful.
‘So have you had a chance to look at the Christmas menu yet?’ she asked.
The Christmas meal he really didn’t want to go to. ‘Sorry, no.’
She looked disappointed. ‘Well, we’ve still got a bit of time,’ she said. ‘And maybe I can talk you into being Father Christmas for me.’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry. Absolutely not.’
‘Don’t tell me—you’re allergic to red suits and big white beards?’
If she’d been pushy or snippy or sarcastic, it would’ve been easy to resist. To push back. But this, the jokiness underlain by a sweetness—this was much harder to resist.
He was going to have to tell her the truth.
‘I really don’t like Christmas,’ he said, and waited for her to start probing.
To his surprise, she didn’t.
‘A lot of people find Christmas hard,’ she said. ‘And it’s really rough on our patients and their parents. The patients who are old enough to want to be home with their families and are still young enough to believe in Father Christmas all want to know if that’s what he’ll give them: the chance to go home for Christmas. I hate telling them he can’t do that. The ones who are too old to believe in Father Christmas—for them it’s seeing their families and knowing how much it hurts them to be apart at Christmas, especially when they’re trying to juggle family celebrations with hospital visits and kind of splitting themselves in two. Christmas can be horrible.’
The way she said it made him realise how she felt. ‘But you don’t think it is?’
‘No. I love Christmas,’ she said. ‘I love the way it breaks down barriers and makes people kinder to each other, if only for a few hours. And I love the look of wonder in our younger patients’ faces when Father Christmas strides onto the ward, saying, “Ho-ho-ho,” and hands them a special gift from the Friends of the Hospital. It’s nothing hugely expensive, usually a book or some art stuff or a teddy bear, but enough to show them that Christmas in hospital isn’t completely bad. I bring my guitar in and we sing a few Christmassy songs; being part of that is just amazing. Despite all the worry and the fear, there’s still hope and love.’
Hope and love. Things he’d lost a long time ago.
‘I’m sorry for being pushy. I completely understand that you’d rather not be Father Christmas.’ She gave him a wry smile. ‘It’s really starting to look as if it’s going to be Mother Christmas this year.’
He suddenly realised what she was getting at. ‘You’re going to dress up in the Santa suit?’
‘I haven’t been able to talk anyone else into it,’ she said, ‘so it’s either no Father Christmas at all, or me. I guess at least I’m tall enough to get away with it.’ She spread her hands and grinned. ‘I might be able to borrow a voice-changer from my nephew or someone and hide it behind the beard. That, or I’m going to be channelling a Shakespearean actor and learning how to do a deep, booming voice.’
Anna Maskell was tall, yes, but there was nothing remotely masculine about her. She wouldn’t convince anyone that she was Father Christmas.
Jamie knew he should be nice and offer to help. But he just couldn’t get the words out.
Why did Jamie Thurston dislike Christmas so much? Anna wondered.
Maybe he’d had a difficult childhood, one where his family had rowed all the time and Christmas just made things worse—people being forced together for longer periods of time than they could stand each other. The Emergency Department was testament to how bad Christmas tensions could get. Add alcohol to the mix, and it was often explosive and painful.
But it would be rude and intrusive to ask.
She switched the conversation to something lighter. ‘There’s a team football thing in the park next weekend. Partners and children included, if you’d all like to come along.’
‘No children and no partner,’ he said, and the bleakness in his eyes shocked her.
Maybe he was divorced, and his former partner had moved away so he never got to see the children.