AWAY IN A MANGER

For once, the church was crowded. Its pillars stood like an avenue of stone trees, soaring into the dim, jewelled shadows of a winter afternoon. Candles flickered as the parents came in, wearing their heavy coats and smart leather shoes, eyes sliding over the notice-board pleas to donate money to Third World charities. There was a smell of damp and beeswax. To one side of the altar, a scrawny Christmas tree stood shivering with tiny lights.

I haven't been in a church for years, thought Georgie. She was praying Cosmo wouldn't forget his lines. He was playing the Innkeeper, one of the best parts. Both she and her ex-husband had tried to coach him. Dick, of course, hadn't made it to see their little boy make his first appearance on stage. She searched for Cosmo, sweating with sympathetic anxiety. There he was, a checked tea-towel round his head, looking dazed.

The headmistress peeped round the vestry door; then, satisfied that they had a full house, stepped in front of the altar to begin her welcome speech.

She spoke of how hard the children had worked, and the parents all smiled: they knew what it was to work hard. They were ugly and sick and old with it.

"For many of them," the headmistress said with her bright, cheery smile, "this is the one time they will ever be in a Nativity play, or a church."

The parents shuffled their feet and coughed, embarrassed. Of course, thought Georgina, none of us go to church. Many of the parents there were Muslim or Jewish or atheists; or, like herself, just too exhausted to add one more burden to the week. She had tried, at the beginning when in flood of relief rather than belief she had taken the infant Cosmo along to the Family Service on Sunday mornings; she had thought it would be good for him to know the Bible, and good, too, to have some sense of religion. But then it had all become too much of a struggle. Cosmo had flatly refused to be left in the crypt with the other children, and said in his piercing voice that he was bored during services. Well, she couldn't blame him really.

A teacher thumped out the opening chords. With a rustling sigh, the congregation stood up.

Once in David's Royal city
Stood a lowly cattle shed
Where a mother laid her baby
In a manger for a bed.

A hard pain rose in Georgina's throat. She had not sung carols since her own childhood, and her voice sounded like a key trying to turn in a stiff, old lock. Everyone was half-singing, half-droning, terrified of actually being distinguishable in the congregation. To her horror she felt tears rise in her eyes as she sang the simple, beautiful words about birth and joy and peace and love. This was one reason why she hated church. That feeling, that yearning for something beyond the daily triumphs and disasters of ordinary life was something she usually managed to forget or ignore. By the time the carol ended, her first Kleenex was soaked and her attempts to pretend that she had a bad cold had become less than convincing. There was a high-pitched whirr and whine. The man in front of her - wearing like most of the dads a suit badly in need of cleaning - blocked her view of Cosmo's class, busily recording every moment of his daughter's performance. People looked at him with dislike, because he was the richest parent in the school, and so, of course, his daughter was playing Mary.

"Long-ago-in-a-land-called-Bethlehem-there-was-a-virgin-called-Mary," began the narrator.

The piping voices were barely audible in the great church, fluttering like lost birds in the rafters. Various younger siblings started to wail, or patter up and down the aisles. Each mother silently mouthed the words of the script, painfully learnt over the past six weeks. It wasn't until you had a child in a play that you really understood what learning by heart meant, thought Georgina. Each mother silently prayed that hers would not be the child who corpsed during the Nativity Play. Georgina craned her neck. Cosmo still hadn't seen her yet. Her heart ached for him, for the look of solitary, withdrawn, watchfulness on his face. He was looking everywhere for her, everywhere but the right direction, afraid she hadn't come, and she didn't want to distract the other children by waving.

Mary, a round-faced Asian child, listened to the Angel Gabriel's announcement that she was going to have a baby with complete indifference. It was meaningless to them, Georgie thought. To them, every birth was like this: sexless, chaste, as beautiful as the glass fruit borne by the Christmas tree. Beside her, a woman with grey hair, whom Georgie knew had had years of IVF treatment before conceiving in her 40s, began to dab her eyes. Her son was Joseph.

"Joseph," the little girl said, "We're going to have a baby called Jesus."
"Good," said Joseph, stolidly. "I like babies."

The fathers in the audience laughed, a hearty, male rumble. Georgina wondered how many had reacted the way her own ex-husband had done: at first ecstatic, then crushed with anxiety about how much a baby would cost, then full of resentment at the way it was going to cramp their style, and then uneasily besotted. Damn him, where was he? Benedick had promised to make the show: after all, he had a professional interest in seeing their perform for the first time. He had squeezed every ounce out of his son's three lines.

"You've got to say it as though the words are just coming into your head. Sorry - there's NO room at the INN. Then you suddenly have this really great idea pop into your head. You've got a stable. Wow! They can stay there. But - it's DIRTY and DUSTY. Oh no! You're really, really embarrassed. Come on, I want to hear you sounding embarrassed."

There were shadows like bruises under Cosmo's eyes. He had wept, occasionally, trying to remember the words. At other times rattled them off, all jumbled up, with insouciance. Once, she had become so tense herself that she had shouted at him,
"It's only two lines, you're a big boy now, of course you can learn them!" After that, Cosmo had refused to practice them at all.

His poor, white little face. Why had she been so horrible to him? What did it matter? Georgina knew he was preparing himself for the moment when he would have to speak his lines, and that she and his father had made it all far worse than it should have been. This was torture for a shy child. They had been so proud to learn he had a speaking part; Benedick had even said that it was a predictor of future success, that if you were a sheep you went on being a sheep for the rest of your life. Now she wished Cosmo had been chosen for a sheep. So what if it was undemanding, he would have been happy. She suddenly hated every other child in his class who had successfully spoken their lines, like Herod. She could have massacred Herod, she really could. It was mean of her to feel this, but she did, just as every parent whose daughter wasn't Mary secretly hated the child who was playing her.

The Holy Couple set off on their journey to Bethlehem, looking glum.
"I-don't-think-I-can-carry-on-much-longer," said Mary; and the mothers in the audience, none of whom had enjoyed an unbroken night a sleep for years, grimaced.
"It's-not-long- now," said Joseph. "We-have-to-keep-going-dear;" and the fathers, recognising this, too, straightened their shoulders.

"We are the stars in heaven above," chorused the little girls in a stumbling drone. Well, it was all very well for them, they spoke in a group, though Georgina indignantly. Their parents sighed and beamed with delight, seeing them dressed in white, with tinsel crowns and wings. "We watch people and see everything that happens in the world below."

How long would it be, Georgina thought, before they discovered that stars and sun and moon were not friendly faces, alive with good intent, but dead worlds, billions of years away? How long before they understood that nothing was watching over them, and nobody would ever love them as much as their parents did, now?

And now it was time for Cosmo's lines. The world slowed to a heart-beat. She was more afraid for him than she had ever been for herself. She remembered the lurch of terror she herself felt whenever she had spoken in public. Oh God, she prayed, to the being whose existence she could never entirely believe in, don't let him be the one to forget. I'm sorry I haven't been to church more often, but he's innocent. Don't let this be a humiliation for him. Have mercy.

Cosmo took a deep breath, and said,
"Sorry-there's-no-room-at-the-inn. But-you-can-sleep-in-my-stable-with-all-of-the-animals-it's dirty-and-dusty-but-it's-clean-and-dry."

A wave of pride and relief burst over her. He'd done it! He hadn't forgotten a single word, he had said it all perfectly - perfectly. Thank you God. Oh, she had never been so proud, or so relieved. Only five years old, and he had remembered it all. What a fool she had been over nothing. He caught her eye, and beamed.

Mary and Joseph were put up in the stable, and here, after turning her back on the audience, Mary brought out a doll wrapped in a blanket. She rocked the doll, and a faint almost womanly smile touched her lips. Georgina remembered the twenty-three hours she had spent on the hot high plastic bed of the labour ward, of the animal roars and panting gasps that had been wrenched out of each and every woman as they struggled with their own flesh, with their ultimate loss of innocence.

"Were you pleased to see me?" Cosmo always asked, fascinated. "Did you love me at once?"

The shepherds and the three kings brought their gifts. She loved them all, now, the tiny ones barely out of nappies who were playing sheep, the ox, the ass, the angels, the stars, Herod and his soldiers. How beautiful they all were, pumped and plumped with life, how entirely right and sweet and good. Georgina smiled at the parents she knew, and gave them a thumbs-up for their child, and got one in return. The camcorders whirred.

What can I give him, Poor as I am? sang the congregation, huskily. Her ex-husband slid into the pew beside her as the collecting bowl went round

"Sorry, traffic," he whispered, under the clink of coins. "Did I miss him?"
"Yes," she said. "But I don't think he knows."

Cosmo saw them both together, and his face was suddenly radiant. I love you, he mouthed. "I love you, I love you."

Benedick raised a camera, and sent a flash as brilliant as starlight towards their son in return.

The adults rose, a great sighing rustling sound.

Noel, noel, the angels did say….

You would never believe these children had once been angry, ugly, blood-stained. That they had cost so many sacrifices, willingly given, that they had already, just by existing, caused so much suffering. They didn't understand the story they were enacting, only that in some way it was their own. Every one of them had been born to redeem their parents. Those tiny hands and ears and noses, reborn, were heavenly perfection, were the faces of angels, were the face of God. The congregation looked, singing for the last time in that dim vast space of mystery, and were filled with love, with love and hope.

NIGHT & DAY, YOU MAGAZINE, Mail on Sunday, December 2001

Amanda Craig's new novel, (about Georgina, Benedick and Cosmo) In A Dark Wood, is published by Fourth Estate £6.99.