Alana is dreaming.

It is daytime – noon, it seems, for the sun is high in the sky and blazing brightly – and she has walked outside of their house and is wandering in a strange wilderness outside which, though she cannot recall ever seeing it before, seems not altogether foreign to her. The ground has about it the arid brown of a desert but at times it seems damp like a swamp, and scattered across the vast expanse of land are pools of dank water which at first she walks around until she finds they are too large and she has no choice but to walk through.

Reaching the largest of the pools she stops and looks behind her; Peter is there, following at a tentative distance.

We have to walk through, she says.

Go on then, he says. I’ll follow.

And so she walks in, hitching up the hem of the nightie she is still wearing and steps out into the murky water. At first the water reaches only her knees, then her thighs, then her waist, and then it rises rapidly until it is almost at her chin and, though she can still feel the ground beneath her, it too has become more and more damp until it is scarcely ground. Unable to walk, she tries to move in a sequence of leaps, buoying herself up on branches and other bits of flotsam and jetsam scattered throughout the ever-increasing sea. With each bound she twists her head backwards to see Peter, only he is still standing at the edge, watching. She opens her mouth to call out to him, mouths the words and jerks her throat to make the noise, to cough out his name into the air between them, but the dankness of the swamp swallows them, and soon each attempt to call sends her beneath the water – if it can even be called water – and she can only move in upward leaps of always decreasing magnitude until she is static, head just above the water, feet nowhere and Peter, on the edge, watching and not for one moment understanding what it would mean to enter the water and follow her there.

~

Once, at Christmas, Alana had been playing with her niece, some elaborate game involving little plastic animals, dolls and a train track, when Simon’s girl for the year – Grace, or something like that – had come in and watched the two of them playing and Alana assuming voices for each of their characters. After a few minutes she had laughed and said, You’re great with kids, Alana. I bet you can’t wait to have your own. Peter had walked into the room at that point and Alana had briefly, awkwardly, looked at him.

Sorry, Grace had said. Did I just put my foot in it? And they had both just laughed it off and Alana had tried her best to resurrect the game with Annabelle, neither she nor Peter knowing for the life of them if Grace had said something wrong but both feeling a dryness about them that neither had felt moments before.

~

Peter is telling her another story, and the story he tells her comes with pictures, three dimensional pictures which they walk through as though wandering through an ever-unfolding garden. In the story there is a small tree, a sapling only just planted, and at the tree stand a husband and a wife, each wearing the attire of peasant farmers from a forgotten Europe contained now only in the mists of folklore. The husband is kneeling at the tree’s roots, plucking, it seems, a tiny stem which grows there. And as he plucks the stem he lifts it up to his wife to show her, and from that stem grows a flower, microscopic at first then the size of a rose, then a sunflower, and then it explodes with a puff of sunshine and its delicate debris floats in the air until the wife leaps to collect some in her hands; and taking them she finds that the debris has become a liquid, thick and glutinous like a heavy syrup, and she takes her hands to her lips and drinks. Then she looks at her husband and smiles; and together they walk, holding hands, back to the cottage where they live.

And then it seems that time has passed and they are now wandering in their garden with a child at their side playing with them, planting seeds and pruning trees, and Peter looks at the husband and wife and sees that the wife has become Alana and he is no longer watching but has become the husband too. And as the child plants small trees in the soil around their cottage they see a man approaching, a tall man in a cloak walking up behind the boy, and as he approaches he looks at them and says that it is time, and the child stands up and looks at them too, unafraid, and walks away from his gardening with the man at his side; and Alana, now crying, looks at him and asks where he has gone, and Peter replies, We knew this would happen, it was always the condition, and Alana leaves Peter in the garden and he stands by the tree that their child has just planted and watches it grow and shrivel and grow.

Go to Day Twelve

Staying behind in the living room, Peter’s eyes skim the pages of the children’s Bible but in his head he is replaying every second of the conversation, his mind freezing over key moments, pausing, replaying, examining the scene from every angle he can find. At several points he thinks to get up and check on Alana but something continually tells him not to go. He would not know what to say; he would only make it worse. No, it’s better by far to stay and leave things be, rather than intervene and send everything further and further away from the realms of resolution…

Only, as he sits there, his mind begins to replay other times like these, times when Alana has left and he has not followed, times when, seeking to salvage things, he has done nothing, and those times all end the same way: with the very thing he has tried to avoid rearing its head in spite of all his good intentions.

And so, after what may have been minutes, maybe hours, of staring at the same page of the book, he picks himself up and walks into the room. Alana is in bed, lying on her side facing the wall, but her lamp is still on. He cannot see if she is sleeping or awake, and so he slips silently into the bed beside her and rests his arms around her waist. She does not move them away, but shifts slightly in response, as if to show that she is awake or has just woken.

“I’m sorry,” he says, after a time.

“You should have known,” she replies.

“You’re right,” he says. “I was an idiot.”

Alana turns over to face him and, in the half-light of the bedside lamp, he can see the vague gloss of tears on her cheeks. For a time they lie there, neither making any noise, until Alana’s body begins to shake and he holds her, everything in him wanting to silence the quivering in her body but seemingly powerless to do so. He finds himself saying, “Ssshhhh,” as if to make her still, but the shaking continues and so he continues to wait, saying nothing, until finally her body slows down its shaking and is still.

For a long, long time he does not move but also does not sleep. His head remains full of words he would like to say to her and with anticipation of her responses to him; though she is now still in her body, in his mind she is constantly moving, throwing off his best attempts, pushing away every answer, every word he would say to her, and his mind rotates in anxious, aborted solutions and mute, circular arguments.

Sometimes he fancies he is asleep, and sometimes perhaps he is, for after a time he finds he is telling her the story again of Hannah and Elkanah, only this time he is telling her the story’s conclusion: the story of Hannah in the temple, praying frantically, and Eli the priest watching her lips move and her body gyrate while no words come out; and Alana is laughing at the comedy of the story and at Eli’s insistence that Hannah stop making such a drunken show of herself. I’d get drunk if I was Hannah, she says. But you are Hannah, he says. And she smiles and says, Really? as though this were the nicest thing he has ever said. And he smiles back and says to her, It will happen, and then again, because she did not seem to hear it, “It will happen.”

Alana mumbles her response – something he does not hear. She rolls over again onto her side and returns to sleep, but he is now awake again, awkwardly aware that the conversation has gone the way of all dreams and never actually occurred.

Go to Day Eleven

The Story of Hannah and Samuel

There was once a man named Elkanah who had two wives. Their names were Hannah and Peninnah. Elkanah loved Hannah more than Penninah, because she was a kinder person and her conversation was more engaging than Peninnah’s who, as her name implies, was a bit of a ditz.

(“How does her name imply that?” asks Alana flatly. “It just sounds ditzy,” says Peter. No response. He keeps going with the story.)

And so Elkanah favoured Hannah, and always chose to spend more time with her than he did with Peninnah. On days when Peninnah went into town, Elkanah and Hannah would go for long walks together, enjoying the opportunity to be alone, to talk properly, without Peninnah’s incessant complaining and self-centred rambling.

The only issue was that, while Peninnah had given Elkanah several children, Hannah had not yet had any children of her own, and so not only did Peninnah demand large amounts of Elkanah’s time in taking the children to school, making their lunches, watching them play sport and the like, she also would use her many children as a way to taunt Hannah, whom she knew Elkanah loved more than her.

(Peter pauses in his telling of the story. He looks down at the page to the picture of Hannah crying by herself. It isn’t a very comforting picture for a children’s book, he thinks. Nor does the story lend itself to the wild embellishments he had hoped for. For a story about a miracle, this one seems remarkably sedate, remarkably like real life. He glances at Alana. He cannot tell from looking at her how the story makes her feel. Not knowing what else to do, he continues.)

Elkanah always did his best to console Hannah. Whatever time he was not required to spend with Peninnah he spent with Hannah; and yet Hannah could see, for all the frustrations they caused, the joy that Elkanah drew from his children, and longed to be able to give him that same joy herself.

When she felt sad, Elkanah would try to comfort her by asking, “Aren’t I worth more to you than seven sons?” and Hannah did not know what to say.

It depended, I suppose, on what you thought of the pros and cons of having seven sons. Peninnah had five, which was close enough, and on days when they had been running around outside and came in tired and filthy Hannah did not feel at all jealous; neither did she envy Peninnah when the boys ran through the house and broke Peninnah’s precious ornaments. At times like that, she rather fancied the score was even.

But then she would watch Elkanah helping the boys with their homework or drawing pictures with them or sitting and talking to them or chasing after them outside and, yes, at those times her old friend Envy was very nearby. And when she saw the girls – three of them now, though Peninnah was pregnant again and hopeful of another girl – with their wildly imaginative games, almost always involving the toy horse they had in the backyard (games the boys could sometimes join but only if they kept strictly to the terms and conditions set by their sisters), she would start to feel her scalp tickle and burn with that heated sensation she had when she was nervous or afraid and her future would flash before her eyes, a future where Elkanah was surrounded by grandchildren all looking like Peninnah and she, Hannah, was sitting in a rocking chair in the corner, all but forgotten, all bit invisible, valued only for the booties she knitted –

~

Peter stops. Alana is silent but is looking away from him, away from the book and its illustrations of the story he tells. Closing the book, he moves closer and puts his arm around her shoulders. She shrugs, as if to shake off his hand.

“What is it?” he asks. “I thought you wanted to hear…”

“Not like that,” she says. “You’re rubbing my face in it. I wanted to hear the ending, not that part.”

She gets up and leaves the room, back to their bedroom. Her back tells Peter not to follow.

Go to Day Ten

Slowly the story returns to him. Hannah was the second wife of Elkanah, and unable to have children when Elkanah’s other wife, Peninnah, had already given him several children. Elkanah loved Hannah more than Peninnah, however, and whenever they went to the temple to offer their sacrifices he gave Hannah an extra helping of the food he had offered. And yet this was not consolation enough; Hannah still longed for children, and one day in the temple made such a show of despair while she prayed for a child that the priest Eli saw her and thought she was drunk. Hearing Hannah’s assurance that she was not drunk, merely in deep distress, Eli hoped that God would grant her her request. Hannah, promising to give to God any child she conceived, went away more hopeful than before. And soon enough she conceived a child and gave birth to a boy, Samuel, who, once weaned, went to serve with Eli at the temple and became one of the greatest prophets of Israel.

How strange, Peter thinks, in this day and age to read a story of a woman whose only wish is to produce a child, not to raise him herself. It hardly seems a story a child of the late twentieth century would have understood; and yet there it is in Alana’s children’s Bible. What, he wonders, did it mean to her when she first read it? Was it simply a fantastical tale to fill her with wonder?

Closing the book, he wanders the room, gazing aimlessly at the objects that scatter the living room – shared memorabilia; wedding photographs; their Leunig calendar with those circles around the 19th to 24th of December, an indication not of the prospect of Christmas but of their increased regimentation in something that used to be spontaneous. His eyes settle on the calendar – the circles, the handwritten notes about family gatherings, the swirly and whimsical cartoon on the page above – and he stands staring at it in a mixture of interest and coldness until he feels Alana’s arms around his waist and her head rested against his shoulders.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says.

“I didn’t try,” he replies.

She pulls her arms away slowly and walks to his side.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You know how these things get to me.”

She slowly walks over to the couch where the children’s Bible still sits. Peter follows.

“Read me the story,” says Alana.

Peter picks up the book, still open at the appropriate page, and then looks at Alana.

“Do you want to hear the actual story?” he asks. “Or my version?”

Alana looks at him tiredly. “You decide,” she replies.

He tries for a moment to interpret the look on her face: is it a cue for him to entertain her, to distract her with his silly voices and far-fetched embellishments, or a sign that she is too tired for that sort of thing? He cannot tell. He only has guesswork and a track record of past successes to go on tonight.

“Well then,” says Peter, “my version it is.” And he begins.

Go to Day Nine

Peter and Alana have spent the day shopping for Christmas presents. The task is always a challenging one. Peter’s family is small and easily pleased but Alana’s is another matter. She has two brothers and one sister, and they have their respective partners and families to shop for. This year her oldest brother Simon, the only unmarried one in the family, is bringing a girl; it’s not unusual for him to bring a girl once, although it is unusual for him to bring one a second time. This girl, Stacey, has never been to a family gathering before and will probably not come to another one, but Alana needs to treat her as if she is already a part of the family. And so Alana has spent hours searching for an appropriate gift to buy a girl she has never met, finally settling on a bag that looks stylish enough for most girls but neutral enough not to offend against the vagaries of personal preference – quite an accomplishment really, but the process has exhausted her so that, by the time she starts looking for a present for her niece, she finds she has no energy left to give much thought to it and, in the end, can only stare at aisles and aisles of toys and books with a vacant gaze that sees everything and takes nothing in. It takes Peter’s intervention to actually choose something, and then requires a coffee, consumed in almost complete silence, at one of the more quiet shops on the perimeter of the shopping mall to regenerate them both enough to head home.

By the evening, they are both exhausted, eating dinner in relative silence. From time to time they try to make conversation but most attempts end in one of them snapping at the other or misunderstanding what was said. Silence seems preferable. It isn’t long before Alana takes herself off to their bedroom. Peter, unsure, stays in the living room for a while longer, flicking through channels on the TV until he realises that he has not paid attention to anything that he has watched for the last ten or twenty minutes and so decides vaguely that it might be time to sleep.

When he goes to their room, Alana is sitting in bed in her nightie, the lamp on, flicking through the pages of a book.

“What are you reading?” Peter asks her.

She absently tilts the cover over so he can see it: her old children’s Bible, a book that has sat on their shelf for some years untouched.

“What story are you reading?” he asks.

“Hannah,” says Alana. “Samuel’s mother.”

Peter tries to remember the story; something, he recalls, about a woman praying desperately at the temple and the priest telling her to “stop making a drunken show of herself”. He remembers that phrase well from the Good News Bible of his childhood; the rest of the story is vague.

“Do you want to read the story to me?” he asks.

Alana closes the book and puts it on his lap.

“I’m tired,” she says. “I think I’ll just go to sleep.”

She turns off the lamp and rolls onto her side.

Peter sits in bed for a time, strangely unable to make the decision to lie down and sleep, tired yet made strangely alert by Alana’s aloof responses to him. It has been a long day for them both, he knows, and the glimpse he caught of a packet of tampons in their shopping bags this afternoon has confirmed what he, by instinct, already suspected; he knows to tread carefully on days like this. And yet the the ordeal of the afternoon’s shopping has left him tired and impatient. His mind as he sits there is continually drawn to Alana’s repeated rejection of most of his attempts to help her that day and he thinks, not for the first time, that, if he must be brought along to help her shop, he should at least be allowed to have some input, otherwise he is nothing more than a glorified mule there only to help carry the bags. They would still be there in the children’s section of the store staring blankly if he hadn’t stepped in and chosen the Christmas storybook that caught his eye at just the right moment. Something about the book had appealed briefly to a shared sentimentality and Alana had agreed that the present seemed perfect. And so she had bought the present, in that action making a brief though unacknowledged concession to Peter’s judgment. And then, only moments later, her mind had returned to the question of Stacey’s present and whether or not it would make her or, more importantly, Simon, happy; how fleeting that moment of success could be.

Absently, he turns on his bedside lamp. Thoughts of the storybook they bought Eliza have reminded him of the children’s Bible on his lap – had Alana put it there for him to read, or was she just too tired to put it away herself? – and so he begins to flick through it, not through any great interest in what it contains but because he would rather do something than sit in bed and stew on his thoughts. His eyes brush over the dedication page – To our dear daughter Alana, on her fifth birthday – and moves over Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Moses, arriving at the page where Hannah’s story is told. He glances at Alana; briefly softened by the sight of her sleeping, he decides to go into the living room to read and not disturb her. Switching off his lamp, he tiptoes out of the room, the children’s Bible in hand, sits on the couch and begins to read.

Go to Day Eight

The neighbours were all ready to hurl their puddings and their dishes right in the mother’s face, only they were interrupted by a small, unobtrusive family who appeared in amongst the crowd and started to speak, quietly at first but with a quality in their voices that made everyone else stop and listen. It was the bitter family from down the hill, only, they looked unlike they had ever looked before. They stood together, shoulders lowered, features softened, arms placed gently around one another in a quiet, almost sheepish manner.

“We ate the pudding,” said the mother of the family. “We didn’t even ask for one. It was just on our doorstep when we got up this morning. At first we said we wouldn’t eat it, because nothing good had ever happened to us so why would strange food randomly placed on our doorstep be any different? But then we ate it; and soon our mouths started to taste something, not sweet, but calm, and soon the shack we lived in started to look beautiful, and soon we looked beautiful too. The pudding tasted soft, gentle, not a strong flavour…It tasted somehow like…like it tastes to accept things. For the first time in years we ate a meal that didn’t hiss like metal on our tongues.”

All the neighbours were amazed. Of all the families who had eaten the pudding, only this one family, the bitterest family in all of these hills, had tasted what the pudding was meant to taste like. What no-one knew was this – that the bitter family, who had drunk the fruit of bitterness for so long that it no longer affected them, were transformed by the faintest taste of the magic liquid the mother had put in to the pudding. The goblin’s poison had no power over them.

But what, you might be asking, was in that magic liquid? Well, to explain that, I would have to tell you a story from long, long ago, before those hills even existed, and I would tell you the story, but not tonight, because

~

Peter looks over at Alana, now sleeping beside him. Leaning over to switch off the bedside lamp, he pauses to kiss her forehead.

Alana stirs.

“Did I fall asleep?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says. “The story is over. Did you hear the happy ending?”

Alana says something he does not catch. He asks her what she said.

“It’s not true,” she says slowly, dreamily.

“Not true?” says Peter. “What do you mean?”

“The story. It wasn’t true.”

“Of course it wasn’t,” says Peter, with a laugh. “Goblins aren’t real and there’s no such thing as a magic Christmas pudding and…”

“No,” says Alana. “I mean what you said in the story. They don’t accept me.”

“I don’t know what you…”

“My parents,” says Alana. “They don’t accept me. The story isn’t true.”

End of the First Candle. Go to the Second Candle.