The Apartment Store

Chapter 1, Part 1; in which we meet Lydia

The Apartment Store is the story of Lydia, a little girl who lives in a ramshackle attic apartment, in a ramshackle apartment building, down the ramshackle end of town. All Lydia wants is a proper Christmas, but it doesn't seem likely until a new tenant arrives in their building and changes Christmas for everyone in it.

The Apartment Store is a book length Christmas story of twelve chapters, split into twenty four episodes for Advent.

All Lydia really wanted for Christmas was a new father. She didn't mean it unkindly. In many ways she had grown quite used to the one she had, she supposed, but it was just that, well... you changed your shoes as your feet got bigger, didn't you? You grew up and stopped playing with the same toys, you started reading different kinds of books, you liked to eat new foods. Then why not change fathers?

What if you realised that the father who had seemed just perfect when you were a little baby, when you found pulling faces and silly jokes funny, just wasn't the right kind of father when you grew up?

Lydia didn't see why you couldn't change your father. He was, after all, just another kind of unwanted gift. It's not like you chose him for yourself in the first place. 

Her friend Chloe did it all the time. She got presents from her grandmother that she didn't want so she would make her mother ask for the receipt so they could go and exchange them for something proper. 

They were supposed to be presents, after all, they were supposed to be things you enjoyed. That's what the people who gave them had wanted - they wanted you to enjoy your present, so surely it was alright to take them back and get something else. And what if you weren't enjoying your father?

Of course, Lydia wasn't quite sure where she might be able to return her father to. She wasn't, after all, quite sure where he had come from in the first place. She imagined it would be somewhere like the big Krampus store in the middle of town. That seemed like the sort of place that would have a department for fathers. There were always plenty of them just milling around aimlessly inside anyway. They could just round them up and turn them to profit.

Krampus was an enormous department store, after all, so big it was even more than one building and had to have bridges between the parts, so you could cross the street without ever even once leaving the shop. Somewhere in there there might be hidden a department selling fathers.

It would be a quiet place - they seemed to like quiet, fathers. It would be dark and lined with wood and have big leather chairs that swivelled and it would smell of wood and leather and aftershave. There would be a lady and a big desk and you would sit down and she'd ask you all sorts of questions. How tall a father would you like? How fat? Would you like one that liked sport or one that liked cars? Piggy back or being tickled? Rich, like Chloe's father, or poor? Away on business or always about the place, getting under your feet, like Lydia's?

Perhaps you'd have to take your current father with you, to get him exchanged, and they'd look at him and say: "Hm, getting a bit saggy there about the middle", "There's a bit of fraying at the jumper cuffs", "Not quite clean shaven, could do with a haircut, a little bit of dried shaving foam behind the right ear." "Well," they'd say, "With a little bit of refurbishment, he might suit someone younger, someone sillier."

Then they'd take through to a viewing gallery and you'd be able to look down on all the fathers like you could with the puppies in the pet department. They'd all be in a special room, full of armchairs and magazines, so the fathers could sit and pretend to read when they were really asleep, and the shop assistant would point them out:

"Number 12 there I think would suit you very well, he's very practical, very good at making things."

"Hm... his nose is a bit hairy."

"It can be clipped of course."

"Will he behave himself being clipped?"

"Well, he is a bit temperamental... let me see: Number 16, there in the yellow trousers, he's a little calmer. Not so skilled at the DIY but he does have a good job that keeps him out of the house."

"Ah - that's interesting. He looks quite comfy, for bouncing on, you know. What about that one with the floppy ears?"

"Number 6 - he means well."

"He looks sweet."

"Oh he is, but he is a but - how can I put this? Dim."

“Well, not necessary a drawback in a father, really. Most of them are, after all.”

The Krampus Department Store was on Lydia's walk home from school. In fact, it was something of a short-cut for her. She could nip in through a corner door and wiggle her way through watches, jewellery, perfumes and the food hall to come out the other side of the store and only a few streets from her house. It often, though, became a long cut, really, and she would end up wandering up and down escalators, exploring strange departments full of ticking antique clocks or tea rooms hidden high up among the ladies dresses where the tinkling of a piano mingled with the chink, chink, chink of a teaspoon stirring tea in a china cup and the splashing of a small fountain among artificial ferns.

But in all her explorations and expeditions, Lydia had never found the department of returned fathers. She wasn't really looking, of course - she knew it didn't really exist - what she was doing was killing time, filling up the time between leaving school and having to go home.

Lydia and her father lived in an apartment block just a few streets behind the Krampus store. There were two sides to the town, on either side of the main street. There was what everyone called The New Town, where Lydia's school was, that had wide streets that all ran criss cross in a grid, with squares and gardens and statues of men on horses. Then there was the Old Town, where Lydia lived, where the narrow streets climbed steeply up a hill, all higgeldy piggeldy and the dark buildings loomed over twisting alleys and blank walled dead ends.

Lydia's house was one of these tall, thin buildings. It had been a whole house once, where a rich family had lived (they must have been rich to have a whole house to themselves) but it had long ago been divided up into different apartments. There were six floors, if you included the basement and the attic, and Lydia always included the attic, because that was where she lived. She could have done with not including the basement, because that was where Mr Krebs, the building supervisor lived, with his mother. Mr Krebs was the only person living in the building that Lydia wasn't friends with, but then he didn't seem to be friends with anyone, so perhaps it wasn't entirely her fault.

Above Mr Krebs in the basement, was the Olympic Mini-Supermarket, which was owned by the Family M, who lived in the apartment above that. The store wasn't anything to do with the Olympics and had been called that even before Mr M had bought it, but the sign was expensive to replace so he had just left it with the name it was used to. Besides Mr M's actual name was so hard to pronounce that everyone just called him Mr M, so it probably wouldn't have been a good name for a shop, either.

The Family M's apartment filled a whole floor of the building, but then it was full of people, Mr M, Mrs M, Granny M and a whole three little Ms, two small girls who were younger than Lydia and a fat little baby boy who spent his time sitting in the kitchen, watching Granny M cook while he kicked his feet happily and stuffed his chubby cheeks with scraps of pastry.

On the floor above them, there were two apartments. On the left were Peony and Pansy Pleasaunce, two elderly sisters who always wore smart matching outfits but who didn't go out very much. Lydia, in fact, often ran errands for them and was always invited to tea as a thankyou, sitting with the pale, delicate sisters in their pale green living room full of plants, drinking green tea in delicate china cups and eating delicate, pale green cakes in companionable silence.

The other flat was more lively. That belonged to John and Fairuza Childeric and they were Lydia's favourite and she, she hoped, was theirs. Fairuza was an artist and kept her brushes in her hair and had paint on her shirts and John wrote things, Lydia thought, but more importantly he cooked things - delicious things; and Lydia would sit and eat them while Fairuza drew people for her on scrap bits of cardboard and they all made up stories about them.

The building got narrower as it got taller, so the apartments on the floor above only had one person each in them. Above the Misses Pleasaunce was George Joseph Sweet, a small, neat young man who, if he was a sweet, was something hard and oddly flavoured - a sweet that you strongly suspected might actually be some kind of medicine. Opposite him was Ivy, who was a student. Ivy came in and out at odd times of the day or, more likely, the night, and taught Lydia dances and songs that Fairuza said weren't strictly appropriate for someone Lydia's age. Ivy said that George Joseph had hidden depths that she would bring out of him one day, although Lydia suspected that this was likely to take more work than Ivy was willing to put into it.

And then you were up in the attic, where Lydia and her father lived in a tiny apartment with sloping ceilings and not enough bedrooms. There were, in fact, two tiny apartments up there, one where Lydia lived and one that was empty. Lydia didn't see why they couldn’t just have the empty apartment too if no one was using it but her father just said she'd have to ask Mr Krebs about that, and she hadn't quite decided whether she dared yet.

So there they were in their one tiny apartment, that only had one bedroom, which was Lydia's and one other room which was their kitchen and dining room and living room and her father’s bedroom all rolled into one. There wasn’t even a bathroom, not a proper one at any rate. There was a little cupboard by the front door that had a lavatory and a sink in it. The bathroom was out on the landing. Properly speaking they shared it with the other apartment in the attic, but since there was no one in there, it was really all theirs. Even so, every time she wanted a bath, Lydia had to wrap up in two dressing gowns, leave the front door on the latch and run across the bare floorboards of the cold landing to dash into the bathroom. And the lock didn’t even work properly. It was a good thing they didn’t really have to share it.

But while not having a bathroom was incredibly annoying, not having anything else was worse. For a start, only having one other room meant that Lydia was forced to stay in her bedroom if she was going to get any kind of privacy away from her father, who spent most of his time when he wasn’t working pottering around in the main room, tinkering at the table or cooking or snoring.

Whatever he was doing, it was liable to be irritating. His tinkering he did at a desk he had made for himself that was, of course, the first thing you saw when you came in. It was far too big and ridiculously patched together out of old doors and planks and bits of furniture he had found about the building. One afternoon Lydia had even discovered him lugging a broken down chest of drawers up all the stairs just so he could take it apart and build the drawers into his monstrous construction. It was so big because of the most ridiculous thing about it: it was also his bed. He couldn’t even sleep like a normal person. Instead he had made himself a bunk bed like an enormous child, so he worked at the desk all evening and then climbed up on top of it at night to snore away up at the ceiling. He had made doors for his desk out of an old wardrobe, so he could close the whole thing up every night. It looked like he was sleeping on top of a junk yard.

After his desk, which was opposite the door to Lydia’s room, so she couldn’t avoid being confronted with it every time she left, there was a tall bookshelf that stuck out into the room, dividing it up. The room was small enough already, what with her father’s mad desk in it, but then he had to make it even smaller with his huge bookcase, piled up with massive books full of pictures, stuck all about with ragged bits of paper as bookmarks. Beyond the bookcase, the ceiling began to slope down with the roof. This was what they had for a living room; a broken down old sofa, a tiny folding table and mis-matched chairs and a little kitchenette: a cooker, a sink and a fridge. You will have noticed, much to your astonishment, and much to Lydia’s fury: no television. None. They had a radio that her father argued with and listened to tinny classical music on, but no TV. None at all.

Lydia had wondered to John and Fairuza whether she had grounds to call the police, but they hadn’t thought so. At least she could sneak out and watch theirs, or the M’s, while her father hunched over his desk and muttered away to himself as the radio crackled beside him. And doing what? Snowglobes. Yes, really, that’s what he did all evening - make snowglobes. He would spend days and weeks and months making little scenes, little forests and towns and people, whittling furniture out of bits of plaster, sealing them and painting them with thin brushes while he whistled tunelessly to himself between his teeth. Then he would carefully place the dome over them, fill them with fake snow and water, seal them up and put them on the shelf above his desk. That was it! That was all! He didn’t sell them or give them away, just collected them, endlessly, pointlessly.

Endless snowglobes and no TV. He could make even doing nothing irritating. Surely she deserved a new father.

I mean, he was even irritating when he wasn’t there.

Because when he wasn’t in the flat he was working, and when he was working he was practically in the flat anyway, because Lydia’s father worked in Mr M.’s shop. In a shop. In a shop that was literally just downstairs. In a shop where everyone in the building, everyone that Lydia knew, could see him, could just wander in and look at him, talk to him, buy mortadella from him. Unbearably irritating.

You can see how she might want a different father. One that did something sensible, that worked in an office in a skyscraper or something. Chloe’s father worked in a huge building in the New Town and when he wasn’t he was travelling to all kinds of different places and cities and countries and bringing Chloe presents home. The only presents Lydia got from her father’s work were the loaf of bread left over at the end of the day and maybe a pocket full of the strange, gaudy sweets Mr M insisted on ordering. It wasn’t even her father’s shop. He was just an assistant, a clerk, running and fetching and following orders. Lydia knew, of course, he was useless - she had a list she was keeping of exactly all the things he was useless at - but she wished, sometimes, that he might be just useful enough to do something exciting, or something practical or something she could at least bear to tell someone else about.

So that was why Lydia was killing time with her long cut through the Krampus department store: she was delaying the moment that she had to go home, steeling herself against the irritation that was her father. Especially now Christmas was coming.

Lydia had complicated feelings about Christmas. Every year, just after Halloween, as the trees began to turn, the wind blowing up through the squares of the New Town, up from the sea, began to get sharp and damp. As the mornings began to fill with fog up in the narrow alleys of the Old Town, and the nights were dark and hissing with rain, and the lights of the houses and shops warm spots of life on the bare and bustling streets, then the vans would arrive. They would pull up onto the pavements of the main street as you walked home, and men would pile out, wearing bright orange tabards, hauling ladders, drinking coffee, talking, waiting. Ever since Lydia had been small, she had thought of them as the Christmas Elves. Whenever her father had told her about Father Christmas and his elves, beavering away all year in their workshop in the cold far north, making toys for Christmas Eve, she had pictured them not like the small, cartoony creatures of the picture books, but like these men. Hearty, hulking, with large, worn, capable hands, whistling and shouting and throwing around tools and jokes. People who did work. People who put up Christmas lights, for instance.

Because that’s what they were doing. At night, in the secret quiet, when only the late night taxis and delivery trucks growled singly down the street, they slung up their ladders against the shop fronts and street lights, rose up into the damp dark on their cherry picker platforms and hung up the Christmas lights. They were always the same lights every year. Mr M said it was tradition which was a good thing at Christmas. Fairuza said it was cheap, but Lydia agreed with Mr M. She liked seeing them go up, even before they were lit, the same old swags of lights across the pavements, the same old holly leaves and mistletoe and stars and trees, all picked out in the same old lights, all glittering white and gold, red and green in the drizzling rain.

And then the shops started to join in the act. Fake snow started to appear, sprayed around the window, cardboard sleighs heaped incongruously with tubs of vitamin pills and walking shoes, paper stars turning lazily in the air conditioning and moth-eaten fluffy robins and reindeer perched on the top of the shelves. But the windows everyone was waiting for were the windows of the Krampus department store, famous through all the town, through all the country, probably through the whole world, Lydia thought.