Hi everyone - here, have an Underdogs short story! As a thank you to the 101 people (at time of writing) who have brought Uprising to 30% of its target (the equivalent of 98% of the original book's target- after ten days!), I'm resharing Christmas Day at Spitfire's Rise - otherwise known as "the Underdogs Christmas special". I hope you enjoy it, and thanks a lot for your support.

(A PDF version is available on request- feel free to contact me through either of the Facebook pages below. Oh, and the other Underdogs short stories can be found here.)

United by our differences,

Chris Bonnello

Underdogs on Facebook

Chris Bonnello - Author on Facebook

 

-----

 

Christmas Day at Spitfire's Rise

Peace on Earth and goodwill to all men. Yeah, my arse.

Ewan lay sprawled over the sofa, his chin placed on the armrest staring at the potted plant that Rachael Watts had decorated with glitter. It was a pathetic substitute for tinsel, sprinkled on a pathetic excuse for a Christmas tree, on a pathetic excuse for a Christmas Day.

He had always been the kind of child who complained how much he hated a traditional Christmas. Looking back that day, with everything traditional about his Christmas dead and not coming back, Ewan had started to realise what it was that he had actually hated-

‘Deck the halls with bowls of holly,’ sang Thomas in the middle of the living room, with the talent of any other untrained nine-year-old trying to sing a song he’d learned badly at school, ‘tralalalala, lala, la la…’

As irritating as the boy was at that moment, Ewan felt jealous of him. By Thomas’ age, Ewan had already learned about the demands of Christmastime: the season where Expectation Claus leapt headfirst down your chimney and commanded you to decorate your house to impress people, spend money to persuade people you love them, and – on pain of death – be happy and smiling all the bloody time, lest ye be judged by the ghosts of Christmas whatever.

‘Thomas, be quiet,’ Beth whispered from behind him, running around after him as always, as if the boy had two shadows. ‘Even on Christmas, we can’t afford to be heard outside!’

Bloody hell, Beth, can’t your son have even one independent thought without it being run through your Mummy filters? He’s a nine-year-old child on Christmas Day, for the literal love of God.

Thomas, being Thomas, met his mother halfway. He stopped singing, but turned around and stared at her face with his cheekiest grin… opening his mouth wide and drawing in breath every few seconds, just to see the panic on her face.

With the living room about to become The Beth and Thomas Show, Ewan recognised his moment to flee the sofa and go searching for a quiet spot in Spitfire’s Rise. It would be difficult with twenty people in the house, but the living room would quickly stop being an option.

It’s not ‘twenty people in the house’. It’s ‘twelve of us already dead’. On most normal Christmases, the empty places at the table would stand out more than the full ones.

He remembered all of them, of course. All of their names, in death order. Sarah Best who had been shot to death in a supermarket of all places, then Callum Turner who had run out of insulin, then Joe Horn who…

Ewan stopped himself before his brain got caught in its usual bereavement cycle, and walked into the kitchen. He knew as soon as he trod onto the fading lino that it wouldn’t be suitable: Lorraine was in there, talking about her daughter’s criminology course with David and Val Riley. They didn’t look impressed as far as Ewan could tell. Of course they wouldn’t be: this was their first Christmas since losing their eight-year-old Jacob on Takeover Day. Properly losing him. After eight family Christmases, a day in Spitfire’s Rise talking about Lorraine’s university student daughter was a poor substitute.

Ewan could sympathise. He had lost an eight-year-old relative too, along with everyone else in his family. It was his first Christmas without them round the table, with a properly cooked roast-

No, he thought, I won’t think back to it. The past is less painful when it’s left in the past.

It had been the part of Christmas he had dreaded the most: the onslaught of realisations that ‘this is my first Christmas without insert-meaningful-thing-here’. A whole day of firsts, none of which would be welcome.

The hallway wouldn’t work for him either, and he rolled his eyes when he walked in and found Raj mumbling to himself. He was rehearsing his Christmas speech, determined to keep the religious element in the festival despite his own religious leanings being unclear. He was repeating the same sentences over and over again – the only way he could manage rehearsal when he couldn’t write down his thoughts. He had Simon watching him closely: the perfect feedback partner who would stand and watch with no judgemental words – just giving thumbs up or down on each sentence – and Simon having Simon’s kindness, they were mainly pointed upward.

‘Give yourself some time off mate,’ Ewan muttered into Raj’s ear halfway through one of his sentences. ‘Today’s loaded with enough pressure without you putting it on yourself.’

‘Stuff that,’ said Raj with a scrunched up face. ‘This day’s gotta mean something. I won’t get this chance tomorrow.’

Ewan wanted to argue, but the words ‘stuff that’ had thrown him off-guard. Knowing that a little taste of conflict could build into something he would regret, Ewan decided to march down to the cellar while he was still only moderately stressed.

The cellar wasn’t suitable either. It was filled with Jack, Gracie and Svetlana sitting among the armoury’s empty assault rifles. All of them had gathered down there for the same reason that Ewan had – a little peace and quiet on a substandard Christmas Day. Unlike Ewan though, they didn’t mind wallowing in their sorrow around other people.

When Rachael followed him down the stairs, he decided to retreat back into the house. Three was a crowd, but four was a nightmare.

‘Don’t you have another potted plant to drown in glitter?’ Ewan said to her as he headed for the stairs. He didn’t know whether he had meant it as a hurtful comment, but Rachael’s half-smile dropped as he walked past her.

Boy oh boy, don’t I feel bloody festive today. Spreading Christmas misery all over the bloody place…

Ewan could feel something was coming.

The day wasn’t just a bad Christmas. It was a rolling snowball of stressors, and a conscious reminder of what they no longer had. Thinking space. Good food. Annoying but sentimental music. Family members. Even a smidgen of happiness.

When he reached the hallway, Raj and Simon had moved on. Presumably to somewhere they wouldn’t be disturbed by inconvenient people like Ewan. He started his journey up the stairs, to be met by a tall figure coming the other way.

Joseph McCormick stared at him from the landing with his predictable warm smile, wearing the most cringeworthy Christmas jumper Ewan had ever seen.

Oh McCormick… please no…

The jumper itself had a Santa beard attached to its collar, with LED baubles stretching down the beard until it met his waist. To add embarrassment to cringe, McCormick had topped it all off by wearing foam reindeer antlers on his balding head.

Before Ewan could speak out in protest, McCormick had read his mind and cut straight to the point.

‘Looking for a quiet place, Ewan?’ he asked, his voice soft as crunchy snow or something poetic like that.

Ewan nodded.

‘You may be out of luck I’m afraid. Mark’s in the clinic playing chess against Daniel, and Ben’s in there waiting his turn. But there’s only one person in the boys’ bedr-’

‘Where did you get that sodding jumper?’ Ewan interrupted, unapologetically.

McCormick didn’t seem surprised by the harsh response. His Christmas spirit seemed to shield him from its negativity.

‘In the loft,’ he answered. ‘I thought I’d bring some personality to the day! Why, haven’t you been a good boy this year?’

PDA, McCormick. I’ve been on the naughty list my whole life, according to nearly everyone I’ve ever known.

‘That was yours before the war, yeah?’ he asked, pointing to the appalling jumper. McCormick nodded, stroking its beard.

Ewan snarled.

‘Take it off,’ he said to McCormick. ‘Take it off now, put it back in the loft, and never speak of it again. Those bloody antlers too.’

‘Are you OK, Ewan? Do you need to talk?’

‘No,’ Ewan answered with his breaths growing inconsistent, ‘I need you to go back to the loft and pack them away before people start asking how your bloody Christmas jumper made it to Spitfire’s Rise!! Do you want people to know your connection to this place?’

McCormick dropped his head, and rested a limp hand on the bannister.

‘I’d thought of that,’ he answered, but in a tone that seemed to know he would lose the debate. ‘I wasn’t going to let people think it was mine. Just that I found it in the loft back in-’

‘And get people curious about what else is in the loft. Yeah, nice.’

Without another word, McCormick turned and made his way back to the landing.

Ewan wanted to call after him and say sorry. Really wanted to. But he was probably showing enough weakness already.

He must have bought that to make Polly cringe as they spent Christmas together. It’s his first Christmas without her too… and he knows who’s to blame for that.

Once McCormick was out of sight, Ewan wandered into his last bastion of solitude, to find his Temper Twin already hogging the bedroom.

‘Hey,’ said Charlie.

Ewan didn’t answer.

‘Crap day then?’

Again, Ewan didn’t answer.

Charlie, never one to take a hint, rolled over on his bed and poked his far-too-cheery face towards his best friend.

‘Can’t hear you mate.’

‘Piss off, Charlie.’

‘Merry Christmas to you too, Mister Scrooge.’

‘Seriously, I just want some quiet.’

‘I had quiet before you arrived. So how about we both just shut up?’

Ewan couldn’t argue with the logic, as much as he wanted to. It was a weird sensation, wanting quiet and wanting an argument at the same time. Then again, his mind was a bizarre place when it was stressed.

A minute of silence was enough.

‘Mate,’ he said, to Charlie’s surprise.

‘Hm?’

‘You know that feeling when you’re pretty certain you’re going to explode, but you don’t know what to do with it?’

‘Nope, never had it before,’ said Charlie with his sarcasm in full throttle.

‘Well… what do you do with it?’

Charlie rolled onto his back again and stared at the ceiling.

‘I usually just let it happen. Then wait for you to pick up the pieces. I mean it’s not a great strategy, but it works.’

‘Exploding on Christmas Day doesn’t seem like a good idea to be fair…’

‘Why? Are you close?’

Ewan didn’t answer.

‘Well, so what if you do explode?’ Charlie continued. ‘You always balance it out in the end. You work out what went wrong, and you put it right. Sometimes, you go even further. I mean I get where you’re coming from, it’s supposed to be Christmas but we don’t even have a tree. We’re all missing h-’

‘Rachael threw some glitter over a plant,’ Ewan interrupted. ‘And I bet McCormick’s going to have us gather around it like it’s a symbol of hope in the darkness or something.’

‘Yeah, probably. We’re all missing home, and-’

‘Home is where the family is,’ Ewan said, quoting an embroidered picture that Beth had made the other week, perhaps to make them all feel more close-knit as a fake knock-off version of a family.

‘And let’s face it, none of us are used to sharing Christmas Day in a house of twenty-one people-’

‘There’s twenty of us, Charlie,’ Ewan said. ‘Mike’s dead now, remember?’

‘Do you want my advice or not?’

Ewan sensed the demand in Charlie’s question, and treated it accordingly. He got up and left the bedroom, with no specific plan for where he would end up.

#

Ewan never got his silence. He sat on the stairs with his head in his hands: a nonverbal sign for everyone to leave him the hell alone, ironically while half the Underdogs watched him from a distance and wondered what was wrong.

The suffering ended and made way for new suffering, as McCormick called his miniature army into the living room for the grand Christmas ceremony.

Ewan had planned to stand as close to the door as he could, but Alex had beaten him to it, leaning against the doorframe as if trying to look as laid-back as he could. Ewan was forced to find a spot on the sofa, with Thomas perched on the armrest next to his seat while Beth sat at the other end of the room, her mouth half-open as if waiting to manage his behaviour.

‘OK,’ said McCormick as he rubbed his hands together for warmth, dressed in a regular sweater than made Ewan feel victorious but guilty. ‘Before we begin, I’d like to say a few words.’

‘Just a few?’ asked Mark with a huff, one that half-sounded like a laugh. Maybe he had grown a sense of humour for Christmas. Plenty of laughter followed from the people around him, all well-accustomed to McCormick’s surviving habits from his lecturing years.

‘I’ll do my best,’ McCormick said, smiling. He rested his hands on his hips, and drew a long breath. ‘When I was growing up, celebrating my young Christmases up in Teeside, I was always told that Christmas was about-’

‘You were born after Jesus?’ yelled Charlie with a self-satisfied grin. He looked embarrassed to not receive the same laughter that Mark did.

‘While I was growing up,’ McCormick restarted, making sure to at least give Charlie a smile, ‘I was always told that Christmas was about family. Family, whether I liked it or not. And like most young people, I had relatives I liked and relatives I tried to avoid. It took me a few too many years to realise that, a lot of the time, we choose our own families. I had uncles and aunts who weren’t my literal relatives, but let’s face it… they might as well have been. When Barb and I grew up and grew old, we knew friends who weren’t literally our cousins, our nieces, nephews, grandchildren and so on… but let’s face it. They might as well have been.’

Ewan sighed as he remembered McCormick’s stories about Barbara’s infertility, and how they had coped with it. Joseph and Barbara’s lifetime of parental love and compassion had been scattered across a hundred younger people they had known and loved, to commemorate the baby McCormick who had never had a chance to exist. But there had been an interesting lack of sadness as McCormick had told him the story. Perhaps his legion of loved ones over many years had been a decent substitute for a baby after all.

‘I’m not going to talk about how miserable this Christmas may be for us,’ McCormick continued. ‘We all know where we stand. So all I’ll say, before inviting Kate and Sally to the front, is that today means something particularly special to me. For the first time in my life, I’m sharing Christmas Day with twenty family members – or let’s face it, you might as well be – and just this once, there’s not a single one of you I want to avoid. I love one hundred percent of the population of this house, and that’s a beautiful, unique thing. Merry Christmas, everyone.’

‘Merry Christmas,’ came the subdued yet happy tones of the living room’s population, all except Ewan. His brain was still processing the most hurtful sentence of the speech: there’s not a single one of you I would want to avoid. Perhaps if Ewan hadn’t spent his Christmas Day actively avoiding every last person in the house, it might have felt like a compliment.

‘Kate? Sally?’ McCormick finished. ‘Your turn.’

There was a tiny sub-memory in Ewan’s head about Kate, Sally and Christmas Day. He couldn’t remember what the significance was until Kate emerged carrying a large metal bucket to the front of the crowd.

Oh, crap. Oh no, no, no. There’s no way I…

Kate’s hand dipped into the bucket, and emerged with a painted rock.

They’re actually doing it. I’m going to be the odd one out. And they’ll know it was me who forgot all about it.

‘I’d like to thank, er, everyone who took part in this,’ Kate began. Ewan could already tell that her nerves were getting in the way. Less than a month earlier she had single-handedly battled her way, outnumbered and outgunned, past four armed clones without batting an eyelid – only panicking about it once she’d met the others at the Floor Z exit. But public speaking was a different kind of fear.

If Ewan had been lucid, he would have noticed himself realising an important fact about Kate Arrowsmith. He had seen her afraid more times than he could count, but he had never seen her turn tail and run. Long ago, his dead father would have called that bravery.

But instead, his mind was fixed on the stones.

Who did I even have again? Who was my present going to be for?

Clearly someone I didn’t care enough about to paint a bloody rock for, knowing they wouldn’t get anything else in the world for Christmas…

‘This one’s f-for… Gracie,’ Kate said. She leaned her arm out towards the middle of the room, and after enough seconds had passed, Gracie decided to lean forward and grab the stone rather than waiting for Kate to throw it to her. She seemed disappointed when she analysed her Christmas present. There had only been a slim chance of it being from Jack, but she must have been single-mindedly holding onto the hope of it.

A Secret Santa with painted stones. A sad substitute for actual presents, but in a way it was beautiful. Or would have been, if Ewan had been in the mood to appreciate it.

‘Lorraine,’ said Sally, gruffly. ‘From Ben.’

‘Thank you Ben,’ said Lorraine, reaching towards Sally and collecting her stone. Ewan didn’t bother to look at Ben’s smiling response, too busy preparing his own excuses. Alex, Thomas, Daniel, Simon and Rachael each received theirs in turn before Ewan’s concentration blacked out and the snowballing worries became the only thing in his brain.

Christmas is meant to be about family, is it? He thought towards McCormick. Well I guess that makes me the black sheep. A pitch-black sheep in a field almost entirely made of regular black sheep. Bloody hell.

The last stone in the bucket went to Svetlana, painted haphazardly for her by Jack. Ewan took a deep breath, and hoped for silence.

‘Looks like that’s it,’ said Kate. ‘So… thank-’

‘Hang on,’ said David, sticking a thumb in his wife’s direction. ‘Val’s not got hers yet!’

It was Val Riley. The mother who had spent the day mourning little dead Jacob, her only Christmas gift forgotten by a teenager who couldn’t possibly have been as good a person as her late son.

Sally looked as confused as she normally did. Kate looked frightened, as if she had personally done something wrong.

Ewan could have kept the tension going all day. Anything to avoid being exposed. But when Kate opened her mouth with panic in her eyes, clearly preparing to apologise for all her mistakes, he decided enough was enough. Ewan was a bad enough person without making Kate suffer on his behalf. She didn’t deserve to have her nerves shot to pieces because of a mistake he had made.

‘It was me,’ he said.

All eyes fell on him. He dipped his own to the dusty carpet.

‘I forgot to paint the bloody stone. No excuses. Not even been busy. Just straight up forgot. Sorry Val.’

Ewan had expected a faked, insincere ‘don’t worry, it’s OK’. But Val wasn’t able to say a word. McCormick told him it was fine, and there would be time later. Ewan told him there was no bloody point because the moment was gone. Alex told him to stop ruining the magical spirit of Christmas, and Ewan told him to piss off.

Someone somewhere told him to ‘just calm down’, and that sealed the ending.

Ewan West, the lead soldier of Great Britain’s last army, stormed out of the living room like an angry child.

‘It doesn’t count as family if half the family’s dead!’ he yelled behind him as he went.

As he opened the cellar door and ran down the steps, he wondered whether twelve really was half of twenty, if that was even how halving things worked. When his brain worked normally he at least stood a chance with numbers, but…

He hadn’t planned to break one of the biggest rules of being an Underdog, but once he was in the cellar, the exit door looked all too tempting – and he was already enough of a Christmas-ruining outcast. It made sense for him to act like the outcast he had always been in his previous life, back when the world had been bigger than one house.

Ewan pushed open the door to the underground tunnel, and left Spitfire’s Rise.

Someone, at some point that day, would notice he wasn’t hiding in the farm. Or even in the generator room where Mike had killed himself not long ago. But that would be a problem for later. They knew to leave him alone, so he would have a long head start.

When Ewan reached the outskirts of the village, he began to wonder whether his response had been proportionate, and whether he might have been forgiven if he had stayed. But he didn’t listen to himself.

When he reached the top of the hill halfway to the next town, he looked at the dulled sky: an overcast blanket of grey cloud that threatened to spit on him, the possibility of snow out of the question. He wondered what he would do if dusk fell before he was brave enough to face the people he had wronged.

When he reached the sign that read ‘welcome to Harpenden’, his brain had collected itself enough to remember the basics of scouting. Only then did Ewan start looking around for clones. Only then did he realise he was unarmed.

I should have run to comms, he thought to himself. People would have known to look for me there, but I’d have been safer. I should have handled this better.

Then again, I should have painted a bloody rock.

Ewan rested himself against the nearest lamppost, and took a long breath. As his brain reconstructed itself, he started to hear Charlie’s voice in his mind: so vividly that he looked up and down the lifeless street to check where his friend was.

You always balance it out in the end, Charlie had said. You work out what went wrong, and you put it right. Sometimes you go even further.

At the time, they had been words that Ewan had chosen to ignore while he waited for a chance to interrupt. But after a little reflection, he realised that his Temper Twin had told him how to become a worthy Underdog again. He wasn’t just going to paint a rock and give it to Val. He was going to go further.

#

The garden centre seemed like the most likely venue to find rocks. Ewan walked through the abandoned entrance of the place he had always hated visiting as a child, to find the whole centre hilariously overgrown with wild garden plants.

The more he searched though the jungles of ivy and shrubs and wild poinsettias, the more he found himself struggling. The garden centre was full of pebbles for decorating the side of a posh person’s pond, or square slabs to use as paving stones, but nothing smooth and hand-sized like Kate and Sally had found. Ewan snarled as he hacked his way through a bunch of pampas grass like a wilderness adventurer, and wished he’d been interested enough to ask Kate where she had found a bucketful of nice-looking rocks.

Ewan found his way to a plantless area of the garden centre, full of tools and ornaments and enormous gravestone-sized slabs of flat rock. Taking a breath of dusty air and resting his arms against the disused cash register, he looked at the tallest, flattest and cleanest vertical slab of rock, and wondered how many smaller rocks he could smash it into with the right kind of hammer. He would express his apology in the form of a hundred painted stones, if that’s what it took to balance things out and earn back his place in the Underdogs family.

It doesn’t count as family if half the family’s dead, his own voice said back to him. He had not truly meant those words, speaking as someone whose actual family was dead. He had just wanted to defy McCormick in his anger. But all the same, regardless of his mood there had been a lot of their family missing that day… and the more Ewan thought about it, the more an idea formed in his brilliant mind about what his Christmas present to the Underdogs could be. Something that wouldn’t just make up for his own forgetfulness, but also build upon McCormick’s warm words about family.

Ewan reached for the vertical slabs and picked out the largest one he believed he could carry: one that was sturdy and tall, but thin and light enough for him to carry back home without dying from exhaustion. It would take most of his Christmas Day to haul it back to Spitfire’s Rise… but his friends were worth it.

#

Ewan arrived home to a quiet Spitfire’s Rise, stunned at the fact that so long had passed without anyone noticing he was gone. But somehow, he could tell it was love that had made them leave him alone rather than fear or apathy. He had just enough remaining energy to rest the stone slab against the cellar wall, and then collapsed against the shelf of grenades.

He had carried it for miles. His hands barely functioned anymore, and his back felt like a pensioner’s. He had ambled from Harpenden to Spitfire’s Rise without weapons or even a free hand to hold one, but it was OK: he had done right by his friends.

Upstairs, the smell of boiled vegetables crept down the stairs, and Raj’s voice could be heard in full-on speech mode. Ewan had missed Christmas dinner for the first time in his life, but had made the sacrifice worth it. And in the meantime, Raj’s miniature Christmas service would give him enough time to rest his fingers. He was glad that he had done all his carving back at the garden centre, because the stinging muscles in his hands would probably be useless until New Year’s Day.

Five minutes passed, before a gentle applause upstairs revealed that Raj’s speech had been received well. When the claps faded, Ewan called out up the stairs.

‘Everyone!’ he yelled, at a volume that would probably give Beth Foster a heart attack. ‘I’ve got a present for you all!’

It took less than a minute for every surviving Underdog to crowd into the cellar. An impressive response time. Perhaps they had been worried about him, but they were soon distracted by what he had carved lightly into the stone slab that rested against the cellar wall.

 

UNDERDOGS MEMORIALL WALL

Sarah Best

Callum Turner

Joe Horn

Elaine Dean

Arian Shirazi

Teymour Shirazi

Rosanne Tate

Miles Ashford

Chloe Newham

Tim Carson

Roy Wolff

Mike Ambrose

 

Ewan couldn’t tell whether he had spelled the title right. But he knew damned sure he had spelled everyone’s names correctly. He had made himself memorise them long ago. They had earned the right for their correct names to be remembered.

Against his own defiant instincts, he had left enough room beneath those names for another twenty Underdogs. If the worst happened and the war was lost, the rest of them would deserve remembering too.

When he looked at the crowd in front of him, some of his friends were in tears. But somehow, smiling at the same time. Their faces wore the full emotional range that Ewan so often tried to hide from them in return.

‘Like he said,’ Ewan began, pointing an exhausted twitching finger at McCormick, ‘sometimes we build our own families. And now, the whole family’s here.’

The reactions among the group were heartwarming to watch, confirming to Ewan that he was safe in the group again. Thomas hugged his mother impulsively – and as Beth hugged back, Ewan noticed in the gripping of her tight arms the motherly love she must so often have felt, even if it was so often hidden behind her need to raise him correctly. Charlie repeatedly asked where he had managed to find such an enormous stone, Ewan dismissing his questions every time.

Somewhere at the back, he could see Val giving her husband a kiss.

I got something right today, Ewan thought to himself.

More than that… maybe Spitfire’s Rise became a brighter place today because of something I did.

Collapsed on the floor in the cellar of somebody else’s house, Ewan West found himself smiling on Christmas Day. Not a great Christmas miracle, of course… but in a way, it was. He closed his eyes and rested, listening as the room became quieter and quieter. The others were heading back upstairs without pestering him too much: others may have interpreted their silence as not valuing him, but Ewan knew they were being considerate enough to let him have his own space. It felt good to have people knowing him that well.

When he opened his eyes again, there were five left in the room, one of whom was McCormick. Ewan held a brief moment of eye contact with him, putting something in his facial expression that he knew the man would be able to translate. As predicted, McCormick hung around while the other Underdogs headed back up the stairs, and watched Ewan rise to his feet again.

‘I’m impressed,’ McCormick said to him.

‘Thanks.’

‘Give me a day or two and I can have this Memorial Wall mounted up there at head height. If it’s alright with you, I can even source a few tools and have the names chiselled in properly.’

‘You’re not worried about how many rules I broke to get this here?’

‘How much would you learn if I spent Christmas evening telling you off? I’m just happy you’re back… and I admire that you were so determined to make things right. It’s something you’re very good at, Ewan.’

Ewan turned to face the Memorial Wall: not to gaze upon its glory, but to avoid looking into McCormick’s face. The man at his side was everything that so many of his teachers hadn’t been: focussed more on his strengths than his weaknesses, and more on his character than his mistakes.

It was enough to deserve a sentence of appreciation, even if facial stares would be too much. One way or another, the man needed to know what he meant.

‘It’s like you said earlier,’ Ewan said to him. ‘You’re not literally my family… but let’s face it. You might as well be.’

McCormick smiled at his side. Ewan could not see it, but could sense it.

‘Thank you, Ewan. You’re like family to me too. Just in case you hadn’t worked it out.’

‘I had,’ said Ewan. ‘I know you’re always there and everything… but even after seven months of being lead soldier, sometimes it’s still difficult living here. I like everyone, but… the fear of judgement never really dies, you know? I think I’ll always be afraid of them, in a way. Even though I like them. It’s just how my head works.’

McCormick leaned forward to lay a hand against the new Memorial Wall. As he did he turned his face just slightly, to see if Ewan would accept him in his peripheral vision. Ewan chose to stay still and allow him in. McCormick smiled and spoke again.

‘You are loved here, Ewan. Deeply and profoundly loved. And I don’t think you realise that.’

At first, Ewan opened his mouth in protest. Which part of McCormick’s words he was protesting against, he didn’t quite know. Perhaps he just didn’t like being told what his reality was. But all the same, when he took a moment to think, the first thing he recalled was the crowd of smiling faces as they had gazed upon his Christmas present. And the fact that – when he thought about it – nobody in the Underdogs had criticised him for a single thing he had done that day. They had accepted him for who he was, whether he had behaved correctly for them or not.

‘I’m beginning to,’ Ewan said to McCormick, heading for the stairs to take part in Christmas Day again.

#

Copyright © Chris Bonnello 2020-2021