Silent Christmas.

Dead quiet on a heat-heavy afternoon, around two o'clock, except for the almost imperceptible shush of movement from the trees; an almost-audible shimmer of movement, mirrors of light, from the full-leafed shrubs; and some faraway grind of a bus on a hill. Far, far away. That was a week, three days, two days, before Christmas. 

I had finished school days before. The world was mine; the world being the garden, the street, the hill to the river, in another direction, another hill to a creek that wound, anyway, down to the same river. Another direction, around two corners to a small strip of shops that seemed asleep under the sun's oppression: side street; milk bar; haberdashery; newsagent; chemist; butcher; greengrocer; bakery; Four Square grocery; fish shop; another side street. The haberdashery was also an agent for the bank, a curiosity I found perfectly normal; the grey-haired cardiganed middle-aged woman who ran it seemed perfectly suited to taking one's money, putting it in the till, stamping your bank book with the datye, and signing it with what looked ike a series of concentric circles: C. O'C. Catherine O'Connor.

A car pulled up at the front of the house. I could hear the whine of the engine; a Morris Major, cream with two-tone leatherette seats and perky vertical rear orange indicators over bevelled round stoplights, a kind of pixie-eared look on such a small car. My father's older sister did this every year, a Christmas visit before Christmas; and it endeared her to me, showing a kind of considerate extra-curricular going-out-of-her-way thoughtfulness that thousands left unperformed in the great preoccupational peck-ordering of the season. 

She was an aunt and had aunt ways. One year she presented me with two 45rpm records. I suspected she may have been accompanied to Brashs or 100 Puckle Street by one of her two delicious twebnty-something daughters; the older one who looked like Brenda Lee, or the slightly younger who looked like Connie Francis. Before the aunt had reached the back door (the back door was effectively the front door) my mother had the kettle on and had put out plates of biscuits before disappearing into some upper room where she had secreted already-wrapped (last year's, reused) gifts for the cousins. 

The records were Rod Stewart's follow-up to Maggie May, You Wear It Well, and Johnny Farnham's Don't You Know It's Magic. That Christmas I received, in the post, a can of Planter's salted peanuts, wrapped in brown paper, from Tasmania, where my first girlfriend was staying over the Christmas break with her extended family. The tin had a rip-top aluminium seal and a plastic resealing lid, and I kept the tin after I'd eaten the nuts.