Simon's Christmas Nightmare

Thursday, 24th, December 2009. Simon climbed into bed and pressed himself close to Amanda’s warm body. She yelped and elbowed him in the ribs.

‘Ouch ! That hurt’, he snivelled.

‘It was meant to hurt’, she told him,’Your hands are freezing.’

‘My ribs are broken too’, he added, like an indignant echo.

’Shut up and go to sleep’, she said, pushing him away, trying to avoid the cold parts of his offending body. He laid staring into the darkness at the edge of his side of the bed, and he had a very bad feeling.

Amanda loved Christmas, and each year she would start to refer to him as ‘Scrooge’ from about the middle of November. He’d been trying to make a special effort for years, but she never noticed. This year, he was making an extra special effort, but the more he tried the worse he felt.

He had bought a huge Christmas tree which was too huge. He dragged it through the front door, scattering cheap, second-rate needles everywhere, then he attempted to remove the top of it with a broken pruning saw. He succeeded in making the biggest mess of his life. But this was just the beginning... She made him dump the monstrosity at the bottom of the garden, then she went out to buy a decent specimen, leaving him to clear up his ‘Idiotic mess’.

A couple of days later, he bought himself an embarrassing Christmas jumper that was covered in snowflakes and reindeer. He put it on before they sat down to dinner with a more model couple. She burst into laughter the moment she saw it, almost choking on the wine she was guzzling.

‘Take it off for christ’s sake’, she said, ‘You look ridiculous.’

It wasn’t the jumper that she had an issue with, it was the contents that irked her.

In the chilly double bed, Simon thought about the Christmas present he’d bought for her, and he was overwhelmed by a sense of inevitable failure. The ill-fated gift was a very expensive ring which she was destined to hate. She never liked anything he gave her, not even the faked orgasms. He felt helpless, and he was consumed by festive gloom.

On the roof of 25 Ebenezer Court, a fat old man dressed in red lifted the final sack from his sleigh, then he sent his reindeer down to the snow white garden below. He pulled in his stomach, flicked his bleached white mane then stomped over to the chimney stack for his last descent of the year. Alice-in-wonderland-like, he drifted down the spacious, mock post-industrial flue and landed with a soft thump at the bottom.

The thump invaded Simon’s troubled dreams, and his ears popped up like a rabbit’s. He heard a rustle… He ignored it… He heard a clink… He sat up...

‘Burglars on Christmas Day ? Can’t be’.

He heard a belch.

’Surely, thieves wouldn’t belch’, he mused.

Mystified, he pulled himself out of bed, as a voice downstairs chirped, ‘Ho ! Ho ! Ho !’

He froze and shrieked,’It’s Father fucking Christmas’ then, remembering, he thought, ’But Father Christmas doesn’t exist’

There was another clink and another belch below. He picked up the wind-proof umbrella in the corner of the room, momentarily relieved that at last it had a reason for being there. Creeping down the stairs, he heard a CD that the intruder must have put on. It was “That’s my girl“ by 1960’s outfit The Monks. The bad feeling returned.

“Please let it be Father Christmas’, he whispered to himself.

Outside the living room, he took a practise swipe with the umbrella and prepared to jump Darth-Vader-like through the doorway… He was too slow. A huge red hand came down on his shoulder from behind, and his knees gave way. He was caught and lifted up from the ground. He gulped then dropped the umbrella, as he stared into the monstrous face of Santa Claus. His intruder preference had been granted.

‘Who the fuck are you ?’, he gibbered.

‘Who the fuck do I look like’, came the reasonable reply, in a voice like Brian Blessed.

He was put back onto the floor and ushered into the living room. Santa picked up the super-strength brolly and broke it over his knee, then he followed the shaken Simon through the doorway.

‘You need a drink’, bellowed the uninvited visitor, as he pulled out a five-litre bottle of whiskey from under his shocking, red coat. They sat down, drank and talked. Simon warmed to the once fictional character, and he told him all his woes.

‘Well, that’s a very sad story, Simon’, said the rosy-cheeked old man’. ‘Can I offer you some advice’

‘I’d appreciate that, Santa’, said Simple Simon.

The old man put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and thought carefully.

‘A woman doesn’t need a mouse’, he said quietly, and then, like Brian Blessed, he cried, ‘She needs a man !’.

He slapped Simon hard on the back, making him dribble whiskey from his nose, and then he said, ‘You are no man, Simon, I am the only man on this sofa’.

He laughed like a Greek God on methylated spirits then said, ‘Shh’, and cupped a hand to his ear.

There was a creak on the stairs, and a few seconds later Amanda walked into the room. She looked tired and miserable, but when she caught sight of Santa across the room her demeanour was transformed. Her eyes glistened, and her face was filled with joy. She looked like that the moment Simon fell in love with her, but she hadn’t done since.

‘Ah, the beautiful Amanda’, said Santa, and he patted the side of one of his legs as if there was a puppy in the room.

Amanda giggled, danced over to Santa’s end of the sofa and hopped onto his lap. Her nightdress rode up a couple of inches, and he put a hand on her left shin.

‘You have fine knees’, he told her, and she tittered obligingly.

Simon had frozen to the spot. His mouth was open, but he was unable to utter even the shortest of syllables. Was this real ? Or was it the opening scene in a nightmare ? The old man nudged him and gave him a dirty wink that said “It’s both, mate”. Amanda groaned as Santa squeezed her like an overripe lemon, and her inadequate partner looked on and his bottom lip quivered. What could he do, he frantically wondered. The man was a psychopath and stronger than an ox.

Then there was Amanda...

‘What are you doing ?’ he asked feebly.

She giggled, and he ho, ho, ho’d.

’Simon’, said the bastard, Father Christmas. ‘How about you make us some breakfast ? I need to build up my strength’.

He growled into Amanda’s ear, and they laughed like long lost lovers. Simon clenched a fist and landed a blow on his opponent’s arm, and the laughing intensified. The red beast threw the giggling girl over his shoulder and stood up. His towering frame made the ceiling bow, and he puffed smoke from his nostrils like a prize bull. The jealousy of the gibbering wreck on the sofa was replaced by fear.

‘Breakfast, Simon’ hollered the giant, then he slapped Amanda’s behind for punctuation.

He wasn’t sure how he got to the kitchen, but when he did, he sat down and had a drink to calm his nerves. Then he proceeded to prepare breakfast, trying hard to not think.

‘Make sure there’s plenty off eggs’’ called out The Christmas Fraudster. ’Sunny side up.’

The laughing started again. Every word the man spoke was a double entendre to the frisky pair. He cooked slowly, keen to stay hidden under his cold, lonely rock, not knowing what else he could do.

At the table in the living room, he ate reluctantly and in silence. He got up to leave twice, but he was pushed back down each time by a big red hand. He decided to treat the phenomenon as a nightmare which would soon be over. He would wake to find his faithful partner snuggled up beside him, and they would have the best Christmas ever.

He belched, and she gave him a filthy look. Santa belched louder, and she laughed and rubbed his bloated belly then kissed him on the lips. He saw her greasy tongue slip into his grotesque Santa-Claus-Mouth, and he could eat no more.

After breakfast, they sat around the tree and opened presents. Simon felt sick, but he didn’t dare to ask for permission to be excused. The princess, engulfed in Santa’s arms, was not disappointed. The glorified ogre had brought her seven pairs of glass slippers, two V.I.P. tickets to Disneyland, a boxed set of Take That underpants, an oil lamp housing 3 of the world’s most sought after genies, a box of everlasting Turkish Delight, a pop-up villa, the deeds to a beach in the South of France, a book of spells to rid goddesses of embarrassing boyfriends and the crown jewels. She couldn’t wait to see what was on the other side of the tree.

‘There’s more where that came from, you gorgeous thing’, he told her, and she threw herself at him, wrapped her limbs around his obese body and held on like a leech.

As time passed, the pair became more and more love-struck. How could she do this to him ? He’d never heard of such a weird fetish before, but if he’d have known he would have put on weight and learned to belch properly.

Simon’s present to Amanda had been rewrapped in yellowing newspaper. She opened it, pulled a face and tossed the wrapping and it’s contents towards the overflowing wastepaper bin.

Santa farted and pushed a brown parcel over to the sad rejected Simon. He opened it, filled with dread. It was a second-hand book entitled “The Karma Sutra for Beginners”. It wasn’t funny, but how the two laughed. He picked up another dull package. The label read “To Semen from Captain Beefheart”. He ripped the paper open, and a huge fish head fell into his lap with a squelch. Amanda screamed and pushed herself up against the red bastard for protection.

‘I know how much you like Captain Beefheart, Simon, so I thought I’d bring you something avant-garde’.

He put Amanda back onto the floor, leaned over to Simon and whispered into his ear; his breath smelled like turpentine

Reluctantly, Simon said, ’Fast and bulbous’.

And Santa replied, in his Bonzo Dog Do Dah accent, ’That’s right the Mascara Snake, fast and bulbous’

‘Bulbous, also tapered’, said Simon, incorrectly but authentically.

‘No, Simon, you have to walt until I say Also a tin teardrop’

‘Oh, Christ’, thought the heart broken man lost in the wilderness.

Amanda, getting excited, giggled,’Again, again’, and jumped up and down like a Barbie doll on elastic.

Simon wished the day would end, but continued passively, ‘Fast and bulbous’.

‘That’s right the Mascara Snake, fast and bulbous. Also a tin teardrop’

‘Bulbous, also tapered’, said Simon, hoping that he wouldn’t be expected to participate in the ensuing track on the legendary L.P..

‘That’s right’, cheered Santa, as he slapped Simon hard on the back, making him fall, face first, into the prickly tree.

The lovers laughed and rolled about the floor, whilst the outsider began to think about murder.

He pondered extensively as he prepared dinner. He had no poison, and all the shops were closed, but given the right resources, it could be the perfect crime. He could hardly be convicted for killing a fictitious character.

As the cooking reached its conclusion, he looked with bleary eyes through the kitchen window and forgot his troubles for a bit. The garden was a beautiful winter scene. Snow drifted down onto the pure white ground, and it settled on the branches of the naked trees. He could hear children singing, and reindeer frolicked on the lawn.

‘REINDEER !’, he yelled in his head, as reality smacked him in the face. He sunk to his knees at the kitchen sink and rifled through the contents of the cleaning cupboard. There was bleach, disinfectant, caustic soda, shoe polish, insect-friendly insecticide… He stopped and returned to the stove. He had to be subtle, clever. Jack the ripper didn’t use a plastic picnic knife he was sure. He would have been a laughing stock.

When he returned to the living room to serve dinner they were both in dressing gowns, feeding each other grapes and rubbing noses.

When Santa saw the laid out table he said, ‘No crackers to pull, Simon ?’, then he cocked his leg lad-like, broke wind and said, ’No sprouts for me, thanks’.

The manacled pair were too distracted by each other to concentrate on their food, and Simon couldn’t concentrate on anything. Santa, the eternal show-off, pulled a red rose from Simon’s ear and gave it to Amanda, just in case she needed more gifts. The farcical meal finished with the Christmas hero slamming a foot onto the table and challenging the poor excuse for a man who sat opposite to an arm wrestle with his big toe. The toe was predictably victorious.

‘Cheer up, Simon’, bellowed the non-fiction, fictional character, as they retired to the other half of the living room. Amanda had gone to hide somewhere and was waiting for her new man to hunt her down and then pounce on her like a sex-starved Easter bunny.

Santa put a hand on the ex-boyfriend’s shoulder and said, ‘I can see you’re not happy with the new arrangement, Simon, but believe me, some of us are having great fun. She’s a bit of a goer, that girl. I’m sorry… I was forgetting… Look lad, I’m an old man. This may be my last chance for love. You are young, you have…well, not much according to Amanda and not much from what I see’. His special, turbocharged testosterone started to bubble, and he elbowed the sore point in Simon’s ribs and barked, Brian-Blessed-Like, ’Don’t worry, lad, I’ll sort her out’, then, half growling and half whispering he said, ‘Can’t wait to get her in the sack’, then he added, in a very hushed tone, ‘I hope you’ve got some ear plugs, lad’, then he bit his ear and shouted, ‘HO!’

The festive housebreaker-cum-kidnapper got up to leave. On the way out he farted extravagantly, belched unnecessarily and scratched his crotch like a barbarian in fancy dress.

He tossed “The Karma Sutra for Beginners” over to the broken man in the corner and called out, ‘Have fun, Simon. It’s CHRISTMAS !’. Then, hushed, he said, ‘We may be some time’, and then he slipped off to retrieve his goods.

The sound of a slap on a princess’s buttocks filled the lower floor of the house, and Amanda could be her heard erotically pleading, ’Take me upstairs’, and they scurried off.

Simon buried his head in the sofa cushions and came out only to empty his bladder into the kitchen sink and to seek out bottles of booze and other Xmas essentials. The bottles had started to pop up all over the place, and they were his sole comfort in this time of inescapable torment. The groans of ecstasy and the creaking of the bed upstairs seemed to never stop. He thought of going out, but it was freezing, and his coat and other outdoor garments had all disappeared.

Eventually, he went to the bathroom upstairs, due to the limitations of the kitchen sink. It was quiet in the bedroom next door. He put a glass up to the wall and poured whiskey into his ear then left quickly, suspecting that they may have the place booked for a kinky shower scene. At the top of the stairs he heard voices.

‘Oh, Santa, it’s so soft. See the way it rubs up against me when I stroke it’.

Simon suddenly cracked and threw open the bedroom door. Inside, his tormenters were sitting naked at the end of the bed. He was smoking a clay pipe and blowing bubbles from his ears. She was petting a cute, affectionate pony; Santa's latest gift.

She turned to the enslaved man at the door and said, ‘Well, I already have a stallion’.

The pony licked her face, trying to avoid her greasy tongue, and Simon went downstairs to call the RSPCA, but the telephone cable had been ripped from the wall.

On the street outside, he heard a crowd. They were looking up at the roof, and some were taking photographs. He went to the kitchen and filled a bucket with water to throw over the gathering, but when he got to the front door he found the lock had been changed. His patience snapped, he turned, ran up the stairs, got caught in a pair of red trousers, screamed, fell back and got drenched by the bucket of icy water at the bottom. As he pulled himself up and dribbled over the carpet, the evil pair up stairs began a thirty minute version of “In the bleak mid winter”, delivered in perfect harmony.

On the sofa that night, Simon dreamed that Santa was a colossal slug. He covered the mollusc with salt from a tipper truck and watched the brute fizzle to death. Amanda saw the error of her ways and begged him for forgiveness, promising to have real orgasms in future. When he woke, his mind was racing. Salt wouldn’t kill the bastard, but the Methaldehyde slug pellets in the shed just might.

Using his duvet for a coat, he pulled open the back door and was greeted by a herd of angry reindeer, growling viciously, hungry for meat. He slammed the door and cursed his predicament.

In the living room, he found a 5 litre bottle of gin under the Christmas tree. He unwrapped it and decided to have a drinking race with himself. He wondered how long it would take him to die.

From then on, everything was a blur and he didn’t know if he was awake or dreaming. One moment he was running in slow motion through a cornfield on a beautiful sunny day with Amanda at his side, then he was force feeding her slug pellets or chopping her into pieces with his broken pruning saw. The sound of creaking bedsprings got louder and louder, and each creak was accompanied by a vision of Santa’s gigantic, fat, hairy behind going endlessly up and down like a nudist on a pogo stick.

He tried to pull out his hair, but there was none left. He vowed, repeatedly, to kill them both but every time he got to the bottom of the stairs a torrent of underwear blocked his way. He imagined he was making love with Amanda on the snow outside, but then he heard the dreaded “Ho, ho, ho”, and he opened his eyes to see she had been replaced by him. He was helpless, he was crushed and he longed for release.

On December, 31st, he woke on the double bed. His body ached all over, and his head was thumping. The house was quiet and still, and he struggled to remember what had been going on. He felt as though he’d been asleep for a long time and been plagued my very bad dreams.

Then it all came back like a cricket bat around the face, when outside in the garden he heard, ‘HO ! HO ! HO!’

He dragged himself over to the window, he pulled open the curtains and then he watched with both despair and relief as Santa, the giggling girl and the thuggish reindeer ascended into the clear blue sky. He returned to the sofa downstairs and tried to sleep, hoping that the pony was not still in the house.

Santa Claus and his new, rather exhausted, princess touched down somewhere in the North Pole late that night. They went straight to bed and didn’t get up until the following November to carry out their festive duties. Amanda became suspicious about Santa’s activity when he didn’t return from his Christmas Eve deliveries until December, 30th. He told her a cock and bull story about getting stuck in traffic then asked her if she’d like to go upstairs.

He died from Metaldehyde poisoning the following year, and Amanda fell in love with a handsome elf called Ivor Duvet. They attempted to beat the happy-ever-after world record, but two years into the quest the elf choked to death on plastic fish heads.

Simon was miserable and half insane for the rest of his days. He drank himself to death, unable to share his fantastical nightmare with any fellow being. In the gutter where he spent his final moments, he shook a feeble fist at the heavens above and spat out his last words, ‘You fat red bastard’

I pray, for Simon’s sake, that it is not Christmas in heaven every day.