Copyright © 2024 Alby Stone
Good King Wenceslaus looked out, God rested the merry gentlemen, and the night was silent and holy. But that was inside, where it was warm and bright and dry. Outside, it was damp and dark and chilly. She stood at the entrance to the supermarket car park with a placard and a megaphone the police wouldn’t allow her to use.
‘Spare a thought for the birds at Christmas,’ she said to those who passed. And most people did just that. They thought of robins on cards and songs about partridges in pear trees, colley birds, swans a-swimming, gravid geese, French hens and turtle doves. But mostly they thought of fattened turkeys, stuffed and roasted, served with cranberry sauce.
‘Spare a thought for the animals at Christmas,’ she said. And most people did think of the animals. They thought of flying reindeer, of camels carrying wise men to a stable, of sheep and goats and donkeys gathered around a manger. The stuff of seasonal pop songs and Nativity plays. But mostly they thought of roast beef and pigs in blankets.
‘Spare a thought for our woodlands at Christmas,’ she said. And they did. They thought of holly and ivy in carols, and mistletoe to kiss beneath, red berries and white, evergreen leaves they would celebrate for a while but ignore for eleven months of the year. But mostly they thought of spruce and fir prettily festooned with lights and baubles, chopped down in infancy and crammed into pots to die of thirst and starvation while being cursed for their shed needles.
Then they finished their Christmas shopping, loaded dead creatures and dying trees into their cars, and drove home, spewing clouds of polluting fossil remnants all the way, adding to those already emitted by overworked delivery trucks and vans. When they got home they would expend gigawatts of electricity on garish illuminations and vacuous television shows, and burn cubic hectares of gas cooking sumptuous feasts, half of which would end up in the bin because a human belly has only a finite capacity. The wasted food would soon be joined by countless tonnes of plastic packaging, millions of empty bottles and cans, torn wrapping paper and unwanted cards, stained cooking foil, and – eventually – broken toys and dead batteries. Recycling facilities would struggle to cope, incinerators would reach capacity, and the rest would end up in landfill to poison the surrounding soil and contaminate the water table. Sewage, its subterranean path to processing blocked by Yuletide fatbergs and compromised by winter rain, would be released into rivers and seas.
‘Spare a thought for the children,’ she said as the last shopper exited the store and the exhausted staff set about clearing up, closing up, and getting ready for their own festivities. ‘And what will be left for them and their children when you’re gone.’
And they did think of the children, and their children’s children. They thought about Christmas presents and games, the latest toys and gadgets wrapped in colourful paper and adorned with glitter. They thought about eager hands untying string or ribbon and clumsily peeling away tape, little faces breaking into happy smiles as they uncovered their shop-bought love.
But mostly they thought about themselves, their status and emotional security. Were their presents adequate to maintain the illusion of year-round parental attention and devotion? Would the kids appreciate the effort and money that had gone into the selection, purchase and presentation of gifts? Would their children’s presents be superior to those received by their peers? Would siblings be convinced that they had been treated equally – and would those little tell-tale signs of favouritism go unnoticed for another year? Would the household have some post-dinner peace and quiet so a couple of beers and a few whiskies could be consumed without guilt or stress while watching the festive repeats on the telly? Could they get through Christmas for once without tears or tantrums, screaming matches or the silent treatment? Would the New Year miraculously arrive without crushing debt and declined credit cards?
The supermarket darkened and the carols were abruptly terminated, and that was that. She trudged home with her placard and unused megaphone, knowing that her exhortations had barely been heard, and if they had, well, it was unlikely that anyone had listened. Her words had been drowned out by the annual triumphant scream as the infant Christ was crucified at the altar of Mammon, the anguished wails of innocents offered to the idols of the marketplace as the gutters ran scarlet with the blood of pigs and poultry.
Indoors, behind closed curtains in her own realm of righteous fear, she worried just as much as any harried parent with a houseful of ungrateful brats and a tight budget. The climate was changing and, despite her best efforts, continued to change. Mean temperatures up all over the planet, wildfires, mega-storms and drought. Water shortages everywhere but the rising, undrinkable seas. Earth was dying of heatstroke. Extinctions were underway, and when the animals had gone the plants would follow. Dead forests and gasping wildlife, the maternal ocean drowning her own spawn.
What more could she do to save the world? She recycled, saved water, eschewed waste, used eco-friendly cleaning products. Her small house was almost buried beneath solar panels and inadequate heat pumps. Her wardrobe was filled with secondhand clothes, natural plant-based materials only. She only bought food from market stalls where she could put the goods straight into her shopping trolley with packaging, or shops where she could refill containers. Rechargeable batteries, bags for life, the raw fruit-and-veg diet of a Palaeolithic vegan. No cosmetics or medications that had been tested on animals. Used books only. No television or internet, only a hand-cranked radio despite the sun-given electricity. She was a smoke-free, teetotal, decaffeinated zone with a dozen undiagnosed illnesses, who hadn’t had fun in a decade or more. She suffered so that others might not.
And it had failed. No matter what she did, or shunned, or gave up, or gave away, the world continued to overheat, until one day it would crack and flake away to nothing like a desiccated turd, taking all its surface microbes with it. She would have cried, but self-indulgence wasn’t an option. She would just have to redouble her efforts.
In her kitchen, she drank half a cup of water, conscious of the thirsting millions elsewhere and not wanting to put additional strain on the fragile water supply network. She ate a couple of hazelnuts and a wrinkled apple, local produce, hardly any carbon footprint, seasonal and a bit elderly, but still edible, and surveyed her surroundings. The furniture was all metal and durable plastic – a hard ethical choice, but with care it would last her lifetime and hopefully grace someone else’s home when she was gone – but better that than murdering trees for her own comfort. No devices other than LED bulbs that ran on solar-generated electricity, no cooker or boiler, no refrigerator, washing machine, dishwasher or tumble drier, no kettle. The other rooms were equally spartan. And just as filthy. Cleaning products were just not worth the risk. One thimbleful of detergent might just tip the balance and hasten the now-inevitable eco-catastrophe.
Despite the triple-glazing, solar panels and heat pumps, her little house was very cold, so after depositing the apple core and broken nutshells in her compost bin she put on an extra sweater, ear muffs, and fingerless gloves. Then she went into her living room and sat on the sofa, where, wrapped in a cotton duvet, she began to read.
She never bought books, magazines or newspapers. Public libraries were the sensible way to acquire knowledge, where a single copy of a book could be read by hundreds of people, perhaps thousands. If everybody read only library books, it would save dozens of forests. Yes, it would put bookshops and a few publishers out of business, but so what? The vast majority of their customers read only frivolous trash – fiction, self-help nonsense, whatever the stupid media told them they ought to read, which was invariably worthless. But people didn’t listen to sane, common-sense arguments. No, they were too frightened of missing out – of being thought uncool – so they carried on enjoying their environmentally-destructive entertainments. As for all the staff her ideas would put out of work, surely they would be better employed as conservationists, herbalists or organic farmers?
She settled down and opened her new book, and old environmentalist classic – Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which had alerted the world to the horrors of synthetic pesticides. Waiting on the coffee table were Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle, Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest, and Small is Beautiful, by E.F. Schumacher. Pointers toward a better future, the books people should be reading at this time of year instead of meaningless, pointless rubbish about Grinches, heartless Victorian misers, Father Christmas, flying snowmen, and other ridiculous imaginary creatures. Her head would never be filled with such distracting, mind-rotting shit. No empty-headed dross would deflect her from the true course.
She shivered and pulled the grubby duvet tighter. As usual, she’d slimmed down for winter. That was inevitable, given the lack of protein and absence of carbohydrate in her diet, and her reliance on local food sources and reduced availability in the cold midwinter. Normally, she relied on pickled vegetables from her garden – vinegar was surprisingly easy to make at home – but it had been a bad year. Slugs, snails, birds and insects had, as was their natural right, decimated what remained of her garden crops after an arid summer and an autumn deluge. In the past she had been able to supplement her diet with Fairtrade vegan goods from a nearby health food shop, but since losing her job such treats were too expensive. She was reluctant to buy cheap from chain stores or big companies. Yes, that was only a minor sin and she had to stay alive, but who else was going to save the world? All those campaigns – the oil-stoppers, the XR bunch, Greenpeace and the Green parties, all of them – were failures in her eyes, poorly organised and impotent against the state and its corporate backers, or more concerned with counter-productive publicity stunts than taking proper action. The ones in politics – well, they became politicians. Sell-outs, diluting their ideals, messages and deeds in exchange for pounds, dollars and euros from government coffers.
Only she could save the world. Of course, she recognised that she was only one woman and it wouldn’t be enough, but that was beside the point, which was that nothing else was enough, either. Who would listen to reason when all they wanted was a quick buck, an easy life, hedonistic holidays abroad, social media likes, or mindless self-gratification? Few people were as dedicated, self-sacrificing and moral as her. Maybe a couple of dozen out of nearly seven billion, or however many the endlessly self-replicating locusts numbered now.
Actually, that was unkind to locusts, who only swarmed occasionally when environmental conditions triggered physiological and behavioural changes that resulted in over-breeding and migration. Humans did it constantly, though Christmas-time was the worst, when they consumed everything in sight for the sake of a few days of manic ho-ho-ho while poor old Gaia was poisoned, raped, plundered and eaten as if she were an infinite festive feast.
Outside, the wind picked up and rain hammered on the windows, but did nothing to dispel the cold. She thought she might run a bath, though she knew the lukewarm water from the solar tank would be chilly after only a few minutes. Still it would allow her a short time to wallow in the aroma of her home-made soap – local nut butter, sodium bicarbonate and lavender from the tiny section of garden she used to grow non-edible plants.
As the wind howled, she laughed scornfully. How could any child believe that reindeer would be hauling a fat old man and a vast stack of presents on a sleigh through the sky on a night like this? She supposed it was the same ones who swallowed the story of Father Christmas climbing down the chimneys of homes that didn’t have one, or that their presents were made by elves rather than less fortunate children slaving in sweatshops and factories in foreign lands. The same ones who believed that the Baby Jesus was born in a stable, laid in a feeding trough and spent his first night alive surrounded by wise kings from afar, shepherds, sheep and cows, and an angel. Like everything in or derived from the Bible, it was nonsense and she believed none of it. She did have a sneaking regard for the story of the Holy Innocents, though. There was a kind of truth in it, Were the innocents not massacred and eaten every Christmas, and all for the benefit and glory of one boy-god?
She became engrossed in Silent Spring, still a good, enlightening read after more than sixty years. And despite being about the United States, it was close to home. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. That was how she remembered the place she roamed as a child, where that supermarket now stood. The footpath was now an access road, the pond replaced by a petrol station, trees and shrubs supplanted by rows of trolleys and that ugly, brick-like building, surrounded by a housing estate and yet more roads, the stink of traffic edging out the fragrance of soil and vegetation. She’d protested, of course. Letters to councillors and her MP, marches and banners and chanting, daily pickets that only fed her heartbreak as the local beauty spot was transformed from unofficial nature reserve to building site and, ultimately, a monument to consumerism and a nest for the human locusts. The memories always hurt, but the pain was a spur.
She yawned and rubbed her eyes. It was getting on for midnight, almost Christmas Day, for whatever that was worth. Glancing at the window she was surprised to see a shooting star flash through the calm, dark sky, briefly turning falling snowflakes into a glorious shower of glitter.
She frowned. Hadn’t she drawn the curtains when she came in from her festive protest? Wasn’t it windy and pouring with rain only a few minutes ago? She yawned again. Obviously, she’d been mistaken on both counts. Well, she was very tired from a hard day’s protesting. Snuggling deeper into the thin, worn duvet, she returned her attention to Rachel Carson’s warning to humanity.
Spare a thought for the birds. And the sparrows, blackbirds, wood pigeons, robins, thrushes, goldfinches and wrens chirped and twittered and cooed as they swirled and swooped around the room, feathers and song bright with the joy of flight. Birds she hadn’t seen or heard in the neighbourhood since the bulldozers flattened the woodland, destroying nests and habitat, driving nature further from her door. Starlings had visited her garden a couple of times over the years, and magpies had begun to roost in the mangy string of cypresses the developer had planted to ‘conserve nature’ in the area, but the old birdsong was no more. Now every spring was silent.
Spare a thought for the animals. And the birds were joined by grey squirrels, shrews, foxes, and badgers, leaping and snuffling and scurrying across the laminate floor, climbing up the curtains, ruffling the green cotton rug. Frogs and a couple of toads hopped and crawled among them, and the air was alive with grasshoppers, bees, wasps and butterflies. A small, harmonious zoo and aviary, right there in her own living room. But the woodland clearance had excavated the sett and earths, wrecked dreys, drained the pond where the amphibians had thrived.
Spare a thought for the trees. And then she was among ash and birch, beech, holly and blackthorn, alder and guelder rose. There was the huge oak, centuries old, that had been felled and discarded with all the rest. She remembered eating greengages plucked straight from the branch, the bitter crab apples. She remembered her tears when the trucks took away great piles of splintered branches, chainsawed trunks and withered leaves.
Spare a thought for the children. And they were there, running among the trees, throwing snowballs, playing tag and hide and seek, laughing and squealing with the joy of being alive and young in the wintry woodland. Identifying avian and mammalian tracks in the snow, admiring icicles, daring one another to brave the pond’s thin ice, a challenge none would accept. All her old friends, neighbours and schoolmates, in scarves and gloves, bright jumpers and woolly hats, anoraks and duffle coats and wellington boots. She’d had friends in those days, so long ago. What had happened to them? Where had they gone?
‘You know what happened to them,’ said the woman sitting next to her on the sofa, her mirror-image, her twin. ‘You drove them away, with your preaching and moralising, your holier-than-thou sermons and ethical rigidity. They got sick and tired of never being good enough. They didn’t recycle enough, or pick up enough litter, or march and demonstrate enough. They didn’t join all the pressure groups you did – you know, the ones you left in anger because they weren’t doing enough either.’
The döppelganger didn’t really look like her, she thought. Too pale, gaunt and skinny, eyes bright with fever, lips dry and cracked, hair lank and stringy. A parody of the face she saw in the mirror every day. This, she decided, was a dream. She must have nodded off over Silent Spring. Her anxiety-ridden mind had superimposed a feared – no, inevitable – environmental catastrophe upon her own features. This ailing figure was the embodiment of the global ecosystem, Gaia herself. It was only right that Gaia should adopt her own face. She was, after all, the earth’s staunchest defender and most relentless advocate.
But she didn’t understand what Gaia was saying. ‘I didn’t drive any of them away. They were weak and selfish. They fell by the wayside. So I carried on alone.’
‘You built a road that was impossible for them to follow. You abandoned kindness, compassion and tolerance, choosing instead to despise all ordinary human needs while magnifying your own sense of virtue. You harangued and mocked and cursed anyone less committed – less fanatical – than you. You chose to hate humanity because they could not be exactly like you. You loathed their refusal to sacrifice themselves, as much as you loathe the self-sacrifice of the Christian God. You hate the story of the massacre of the Holy Innocents, even though you would rejoice in your withered soul to see every last man, woman and child lying dead in the snow. But you hate yourself most of all because in your heart you know that you are not really the environmental saint you aspire to be. For that you need love. And you have none. You traded love for self-righteousness, for self-importance.’
Who is this creature? What is she? Surely Gaia would never be so cruel to her champion, her primary adorer. An impostor, perhaps an illusion projected into her mind by some arcane corporate technology. Shadows blossomed darkly beneath its cavernous eyes, the skeletal head now too big for the shrunken, bony body. A pallid, febrile goblin, taunting and accusing.
‘You’re not Gaia,’ she croaked. ‘Who the hell are you?’
The creature smiled sadly. ‘I am the Ghost Of All Your Christmases Come At Once. There will be no more after me.’ The double stood and extended a hand. ‘This is the end to all your torment. No more tortured memories or long, lonely nights in this cold, cheerless squalor. No more starving yourself to create an illusion of doing good. No more killing yourself by millimetres every day to prove an empty point. Your suffering is over. Come, take my hand.’
She took the creature’s hand and rose effortlessly from the sofa. Looking down, she saw herself, still sprawled there beneath the duvet, cold and still, and realised she now looked identical to the creature whose hand she grasped, just as sick, just as dead. But that wasn’t true, was it? The creature now looked just like her at ten years of age, pink-cheeked, clear-eyed, and dressed for a winter’s day out.
‘Will I go to a bad place?’
‘Well, they say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. That’s certainly how you started out. But there is no bad place. Only the possibility of new beginnings. Come on.’
She took a step forward, into snow and light, into holly and ivy and mistletoe and rowan and yew, glistening green leaves studded with red and white berries, branches heavy with snow and icicles. Animals played at her feet, and her friends called her name from a clearing only yards away.