Keffie’s Christmas

Keffie shifted gum from one cheek to the other and squinted at the bent metal in the alley.  It  wasn’t unusual to find detritus decorating the gulley outside her flat and Keffie wasn’t too proud to upcycle, like the grey smelly duvet someone had ditched.  Great, that had been, and the damp stink had disappeared after she’d hung it over her balcony in the weak sunshine.  Still, you’d have to be bleedin’ desperate to take in a lump of tin, she thought.  Even she wasn’t that hard up.   She kicked it with her trainer and waddled back to her scarred door, splashing through puddles of brown slush.  Christmas on the Eastside estate was looking pretty grim.

Keffie’s real name – the one her waste-of-space mother had landed her with – was Kefalonia.  Named after a holiday her mum had taken with some random bloke.  The holiday had made such an impression on her mum that when she returned and found she was expecting, she swore she’d give the kid a classy name.  “Bloody good job she didn’t go to Beirut!” chortled her mate Shaz – she had no idea where Beirut was, only that it was hilarious.  Keffie muttered that if she caught anyone calling her Kefalonia they’d get battered.  Privately she thought that wherever Beiruit was, it couldn’t be less dire than Eastside.

Keffie was an overweight, pasty skinned teenager with the jowly face of  an elderly dowager addicted to junk food and cider.  She worked spasmodically in a bar close to her spartan flat, had given up ever dating anyone off X Factor and spent most evenings on her faux leather sofa balancing chips on her soft domed stomach, watching soaps.

Next morning the tin still lay on the path as Keffie shuffled to the bins.  She bent with difficulty to look closer and realised it was some sort of container and less mangled than she’d thought.  She lifted it curiously and, in the spirit of recycling brought it into her tiny kitchen.  It seemed to glow dully and Keffie thought it might look OK with a few artificial flowers in it, and dug out a rag to give it a shine.  The blinding flash gave her such a turn she thought the oven had exploded, and from a crouching position on the floor she looked fearfully up to see what she could only describe later as “a bleedin’ angel, innit?”

“Turns out” recounted Shaz to her mates down the Labour Exchange “This ‘ere angel, he only wanted to give Keffie the wish of her life!  Lucky cow …”   Her audience of Big Eddy, Dee-Dee, the bloke who never spoke except to the counter clerk, and Cokey who only came in to get warm, gawped, chewed and whistled their responses to the unlikely tale.  It took a lot to impress, and weirdos leaping out of tins wasn’t going to do it, even if the tale did make a change from which skips had the least manky food.

Shaz wasn’t wrong – or at least she was partly right, having heard the story second hand from Keffie whose grasp of language was limited to ordering pizza and heckling coppers.

The creature Keffie had released had perched next to her greasy cooker, unfazed by the layers of lard.  It smiled down on the plump trembling girl with the lank hair, ill fitting top and too short skirt.  Keffie’s hands with their bitten down nails were clamped over her eyes, and even from the cooker, the creature could clearly hear whimpering.    “Be calm, child” It murmured in a warm treacle voice.  “Uncover your eyes and look at me.  Am I not pleasing?” One of Keffie’s extravagant false eyelashes had come adrift and stuck out alarmingly like an injured tarantula – which was one thing the angel didn’t have Christian charity for – but nevertheless it appreciated being released from its container and felt an obligation to return the favour.  Keffie peered upwards, wondering whether she’d left the burner on, and if she should mention it.  “Er, yeah, you’re allright, you are.  Dunno ‘ow you got ‘ere but I got some biscuits somewhere if you ….”  Patiently, the creature explained the great gift It was bestowing, the chance to have any dream fulfilled – a one and only offer of a lifetime as it were.  It being Christmas and all.

Keffie squinted in concentration.  She wasn’t used to complex thought processes, and this wasn’t to be rushed.  The creature waited with infinite patience, one glowing arm draped across the cooker hood and obscuring a “thin girls are sick in the head” magnet.

“Got it!” she yelled.  “You ain’t gonna back out, are you?  Not with you being ET an’ all.”  This puzzled the creature momentarily but it waited expectantly.  “There’s somewhere I wanna go.  I’ve never ‘ad a holiday abroad an’ well, it’s summat I need, see?  Get me outta this ‘ole and into the sun..”

“Not a problem, fair one” replied the being, for whom all humans looked the same.  “Name the place.”

“Beirut!  I wanna go to Beirut!”