The year the lights went wrong, Niamh Kelly was nine.
The tree in the corner of the sitting room leaned slightly to the left, draped in tinsel that shed on the carpet like metallic cat hair. The fairy lights blinked on and off in a slow, sleepy pattern, one bulb already gone dead so there was a dark patch near the top, like the tree had closed its eye.
Voices seeped out from the kitchen, low and sharp.
“She’s still awake. Can you not—”
“I’m not doing this in front of her, Deirdre.”
“You already are.”
The telly was on, sound down, some old film with people kissing in the snow. Niamh lay on the rug with her new jigsaw half-finished, a piece of sky clutched in her hand. The smell of turkey and gravy and overboiled sprouts still clung to the air, heavy and gone a bit sour. Her selection box was open on the low table, the good chocolate gone, the Turkish Delight abandoned.
Another voice joined in—the scrape of her father’s chair on the tiles. Then the thud of something hitting the worktop. She pictured it before she heard her mam: the mug. The good Santa mug she only took out in December, the one with the cracked handle glued back on.
“Don’t you walk away from me, Liam.”
There was a pause. A plate clinked. The fridge door opened and shut. Niamh pressed the jigsaw piece into place and realised she’d stuck it in the wrong bit; the sky on the cardboard didn’t match the sky on the picture. Her fingers fumbled to pry it back up.
“I’m done pretending, Dee.”
The words came through the half-open kitchen door, flat and final. Even at nine, she knew sentences like that changed the shape of a room.
“Pretending what?” her mam asked. Her voice sounded like when she’d been up all night with the flu last winter, scratchy and thin. “That you’re a decent father? That you’re happy? That you tried?”
“That this is working,” he said.
The fairy lights flickered. One, two, three.
Niamh turned over on her back and stared at the ceiling. The plaster above the light fitting had a hairline crack that ran like a road towards the corner. She’d made stories up about that crack when she couldn’t sleep; it was a river, a road, a line of ants.
Now it looked like the place where something might break.
There was a silence so big she could hear the fridge humming in the kitchen. Then her mam said, very quietly, “You’d leave now? At Christmas?”
“You’re the one who loves drama,” he said. “Maybe you’ll appreciate the timing.”
The jigsaw piece slipped from Niamh’s hand. It landed on the rug with the softest little sound, and she thought, wildly, that if she could hear that, then they could hear that she could hear them. That made her cheeks burn.
She scrambled up and padded down the hall in her socked feet, stopping just before the kitchen. The door was open a crack. Through it she saw her father’s back, the curve of his shoulders, the way his hands were braced on the table. The Santa mug sat between them, red hat grinning up at no one.
“You don’t mean it,” her mam whispered.
“I’m not staying for one more year of this,” he said. “I’ll come back for my things tomorrow. We’ll sort something out for… for her.”
Her, like she was a bill that needed paying.
Niamh’s heart skittered. She wanted to run in and shout, I’m here. I’m right here. But her legs wouldn’t move. She stood very still, the hall cold under her feet, the tinsel scratchy against her arm where it looped round the doorframe.
Her father’s head turned slightly, like he’d heard something, but he didn’t look back. He reached for his coat off the chair, pulled it on, and for one moment his hand smoothed over the fabric in the way he did when he was nervous. Then he said, “Tell her I’ll ring,” and walked out past the tree, past the fairy lights, past her school picture on the wall.
The front door opened. The rain made a white noise for a breath. Then it shut.
A minute later, her mam slid down the kitchen presses to the floor, her back thumping softly against the cupboards. Her hands came up to both sides of her head like she was trying to hold it together with her palms.
Niamh backed away before she could be seen. She crept into her bedroom and climbed onto the bed, pulling the duvet over her head so the fairy lights from the sitting room were just a faint coloured bleed through the fabric.
Outside, somewhere down the row of houses, someone shouted drunkenly in the street. A dog barked twice, then stopped. The washing machine in the bathroom clicked as it finished its cycle.
Under the duvet, the air grew hot and stuffy and smelled of her own breath. She whispered to herself, “It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine,” because that’s what her mam always said when she dropped a plate or burned the toast or opened a bill and went a bit grey round the mouth.
She didn’t sleep. The fairy lights kept blinking, on and off, on and off, throwing faint ghosts of colour through the fabric until her eyes ached.
St Stephen’s Day, when she padded into the kitchen, there was a note under her plate.
Just her name at the top—Niamh—like a heading in one of her schoolbooks. Then grown-up words about loving her, about needing space, about seeing her “soon”, about “arrangements”. Words that said: it wasn’t you, but I’m still gone.
Her mam didn’t say his name all day. When her granny rang from Cabra, asking how Christmas went, her mam smiled a wrong smile and said, “Ah, grand, yeah. She was delighted with herself. Spoiled rotten.”
After that, Christmas became the day Niamh learned that adults could lie in two directions at once: out loud to other people, and quietly to themselves.
On the next road over, in a semi-detached with flaking cream paint and a front garden full of bikes, Christmas was loud enough to shake the windows.
Declan Hayes woke to the smell of frying rashers and the thud of someone bombing down the stairs. His little brother Fionn launched himself onto the end of the bed, narrowly missing Declan’s feet.
“Decks, Decks, Santa came! Santa actually came, I swear!” Fionn panted, hair sticking up like static.
“Did he, yeah?” Declan croaked, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Or did Mam just break into the house again?”
“Santa.” Fionn glared down at him, scandalised. “Get up.”
In the sitting room, the tree was smaller and barer than the Kellys’ but it sparkled with mismatched baubles collected from school markets and pound shops over the years. Tinsel drooped from lampshades, there were fairy lights round the telly, and someone had stuck Blu Tack to the ceiling to hang paper snowflakes that listed slightly to the left.
Wrapping paper exploded across the carpet as his sisters tore into parcels. The baby screamed in outrage at not being allowed to eat the ribbons. The telly blared out a Christmas special. His da, in a Santa hat that had seen better days, tried to assemble a plastic dollhouse with one hand and pour tea with the other.
Declan got a second-hand guitar with three new strings, a Liverpool jersey two sizes too big, and a box of new socks that his mam insisted he hold up for a photo “because no one ever appreciates the socks”.
“It’s brilliant, Mam,” he said, and meant it. The guitar wasn’t new, but it was his. He strummed it, clumsy, while his cousin Ciara sang the wrong words to “Fairytale of New York” and everyone shouted when she got to the rude bit.
All day there was noise: clinking plates, the sizzle of fat, his aunties laughing over the sink, the creak of the front gate as more cousins tumbled in. Someone put on a CD; someone else started a game of charades and knocked over a bowl of crisps. When the turkey came out, his mam stood in the doorway, flushed and tired and glowing with it all.
Later, belly full and somewhere between wired and sleepy, Declan slipped his new socks on and went to the front window. Outside, the sky had that particular Dublin winter colour—grey with a hint of orange from the streetlights. Across the way, windows were lit up in rectangles of yellow and blue.
He could see the Kellys’ house from here. Their tree light blinked behind the net curtains. He grinned, fogging up the glass, and wiped a clear patch with the sleeve of his jumper.
He expected to see the outline of Niamh maybe, waving back or pulling a funny face. She’d been talking all week about the jigsaw she wanted, the one with a thousand pieces of some mad castle. He’d teased her that she’d go cross-eyed.
Instead he saw her just for a second: a small shape at the hallway, in pyjamas, staring at something on the table. Her shoulders were too straight, too stiff, for a Christmas night. Before he could wave, before he could tap the glass and make a show, she turned away. The light in their hall snapped off.
He frowned. Maybe she was wrecked. Maybe she had the flu.
His da shouted from the kitchen, “Decks! Get in here and help your mother, would you? You’re not a guest.”
He gave the window a quick wave anyway, just in case she’d come back, then turned away into the heat and chaos and the smell of gravy and Fairy Liquid and Roses chocolate.
By the time he thought to look again, the Kellys’ tree was just a blur of coloured dots through the net curtain, blinking steady, like nothing had happened at all.
Back at school in January, the air in the corridor was cold enough to see your breath if you blew hard. Coats squeaked on pegs, the floor smelled of wet shoes and Dettol, and everyone talked louder than normal, as if they’d forgotten the indoor voice rule over the holidays.
Miss Byrne clapped her hands at the front of the classroom. “Right, settle. Who’s going to tell me about their Christmas? Hands up.”
Hands shot into the air. “We went to my granny’s in Wexford.” “I got a PlayStation.” “Our pipes burst and the sitting room flooded.” The usual mix of good and bad, all said with the same breathless excitement.
Declan’s hand went up too, almost on its own. He wanted to talk about the guitar, about the noise, about Ciara singing the wrong words. He wanted to make his friends laugh with the story of his da dropping the turkey.
“Declan?” Miss Byrne nodded at him.
He puffed out a cloud of cold and grinned. “Santa nearly broke the house getting in, miss,” he said. “But I got a guitar and Mam says if I drive her mad enough with it she’ll send me away to a posh music school.”
The class laughed. Miss Byrne rolled her eyes fondly. “Lucky them. Very good. Anyone else?”
Niamh stared down at the lines on her copybook. Her pencil dug a groove into the margin. She could feel Declan’s happiness like a bright light in the corner of the room. It made the inside of her chest burn, and not in a nice way.
She hadn’t told anyone about the note under the plate. Her mam had scrubbed Christmas away before New Year’s—tree down, tinsel binned, fairy lights wrapped in newspaper and shoved to the back of the hot press “to get ahead of next year”. When Granny came over, they’d all talked about the sales and the weather and the RTÉ film, and nobody had mentioned that there was one less mug on the draining board.
Miss Byrne’s gaze moved round the room. “Niamh? How was your Christmas, love?”
Niamh felt the class’s eyes tilt towards her. Even without looking up, she could sense it.
She thought of saying, It broke. All of it. There’s still bits of it on the floor.
Instead, her mouth said, automatically, “Grand, miss.”
“Anything nice?” Miss Byrne prompted.
She could feel Declan’s eyes on her too, waiting. Of course he was fine. Of course he’d had the best time. Of course his house had been full and loud and packed with people who stayed.
She lifted one shoulder. “Got a jigsaw,” she muttered.
“A thousand pieces, miss,” Declan piped up from two desks over. “She said it nearly killed her.”
The class laughed again. Miss Byrne smiled. “You always did like a challenge, Niamh.”
Niamh’s cheeks burned. She shot a look at Declan, sharp as broken tinsel.
“Shut up,” she hissed when the teacher turned to the board.
He blinked, taken aback. “I was only—”
“Not everything’s a joke,” she snapped, so low he almost didn’t catch it. “Not everyone had your big happy Christmas, okay?”
He stared at her, really stared, and something shifted in his face.
“What happened?” he whispered.
“Nothing.” Her hand tightened round the pencil until the wood creaked. “It was grand.”
Grand. The same word her mam had used down the phone to Granny, voice too bright.
Declan opened his mouth, then shut it again. The teacher started writing sums on the board, chalk squeaking.
He wanted to say, I saw you at the window. I know something wasn’t grand. He wanted to promise her, with all the solemnity of a nine-year-old, that he’d fix whatever it was, that next Christmas would be better, that she could come to his house and nick his selection box and laugh until the bad bits blurred.
Instead he sat there, the new guitar callus rough on his finger where he gripped his pencil, and said nothing.
Niamh stared at the neat blue lines marching down the page and made herself a quiet promise, the kind that lodges in the bones.
Next time something broke at Christmas, she wouldn’t be caught believing it was magic.
She’d clap with everyone else when they turned on the lights, sure. She’d smile at Santa for the photos. But she’d stand just that bit back from the tree.
And she’d never again begrudge anyone their happiness out loud, even if it made her teeth ache, because happiness was dangerous and fragile and belonged to other houses, other families, other people.
Years later, when she stood under a much bigger tree with a man and a microphone and the whole neighbourhood watching, that old crack in the plaster would open again in her chest.
But for now, it was just two children at adjoining desks in a Dublin classroom: one trying not to cry in front of anyone, the other trying to fold his own joy small enough that it didn’t hurt her more.
It was a decision that would carry her far further than she meant it to, all the way to the day she would find herself back in that same square with a clipboard instead of a snow globe, wondering when exactly she had started to come back in from the cold.