Creative Writing: "Carry You Home"

This was written for the Folktales Christmas Special (3-4pm every Sunday on LSRfm.com). It's written to "Carry You Home" by the Lancashire Hotpots, which is the best Christmas song of all time, no contest. It's the first piece I've written in ages with dialogue, and I'm crap with dialogue, so go easy on me. Merry Christmas, everyone. 
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“I’m back!” I shouted as I came through the front door, stamping snow off my boots. No answer. It was the night before Christmas and all through the house, no creature was stirring, not even Jessie. I pushed the door shut and shouted again.
     “Jessie! Where are you?” I paused, waiting for her to shout back. When there was nothing, I tried again. “I have pizza!"
     “I’m in the living room!” came the muffled reply. Pizza always gets a response. 
      I kicked off my shoes and padded down the hall. Sure enough, there she was, huddled next to the radiator by the window and wearing one of the hideous jumpers her grandma knits to keep warm. She’d been looking at the old photographs again; there were piles of them surrounding her feet and she clutched an empty wine glass between icy fingers. I didn’t need to look at her rid-rimed eyes to know that she’d been crying. 
I disentangled the wine glass from her grip and replaced it with a pizza box. “You look like you need something stronger than Chardonnay,” I told her.
     “Mmmm.” She looked at me blearily. “What’re you offering?”
     I opened my jacket to show her what I had picked up from the off-licence on my way back to the house.   “Why if it isn’t our good friends Mr Rum and the good Lord Whiskey, come to warm our cockles this cold winter’s night!” I sounded like a reject from a Dickens novel, but it made her smile all the same. “Which one do you want?”
      Jessie raised a weary arm. “Eenie, meenie, minie, mo, catch a – no, you know what, just give me the whiskey.” 
     I handed her the bottle and watched as she took a good long swig. “That’s the spirit,” I said cheerfully as she grimaced, the alcoholic burn obviously hitting her throat. 
     “Spirit?” Jessie grimaced again, but with humour this time. “That’s a terrible pun, even for you, Mickey.”
     “Ah well, it’s Christmas Eve, you can let me off my lack of wit and charm just for one night.” I plonked myself on the floor opposite her and helped myself to some pizza. For a while we both chewed out slices in silence, listening to the distant rumble of traffic from the street outside. I stared at the photos that littered the floor, all those smiling faces looking up at me, frozen in time. God, we were beautiful. 
     There’d been a whole bunch of us in the beginning. It was going to be fantastic, the best idea we ever had, heading south to live the dream. But they’d all slowly fallen away, some more tragically than others, and now it was just me and Jessie, alone in the Big Smoke and far from home. James, four months back, had been a terrible shock. When I close my eyes I can still see his face, pale on the crisp white hospital pillow, looking strange behind an alien mass of tubes and scars. We watched him slip away without saying another word. I often wonder if he felt it or if he heard the bang when the lorry hit. We’ll never know. 
    A picture caught my eye; a picture of myself, head down and looking terrible, being supported by two laughing girls. Beth and Katy: both brilliant, both gone. Beth had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time that fateful July when the terrorists had hit the Underground, and Katy… well, who knows where Katy was now. She was never the same after Beth died and one day we came home to find her stuff gone and a note on the kitchen table that simply read “love you guys.” She’d never got back in touch. I hoped that wherever she was this Christmas, she was happy. 
      I waved the photograph at Jessie. “Remember this?” I asked. “God, what a night!”
Jessie took the photo and laughed, igniting for a moment that spark of joy that had always been alight in those blue eyes before it was doused by too much sadness and loss. “Do I! Man, you were so wasted! We had to drag you out that club, you kept trying to dance with the bouncer!”
I took a gulp of whiskey and shook my head. “I think you made that up. I don’t remember that happening.”
Jessie rolled her eyes. “Of course you don’t remember it, drunkard. You’d had at least twelve JD and cokes.”
     “Alright, alright,” I conceded. “But people have done worse things under the influence. I remember when a certain someone got too happy with the Lambrini and ended up half naked in the fountain in the middle of the village…” Jessie tried to protest but her mouth was too full of pepperoni, extra cheese. “You know,” I continued with mock seriousness, “you could have been arrested…”
Jessie swallowed her mouthful. “Whatever, Mickey…” We lapsed into silence again, occasionally passing the whiskey bottle back and forth. After a while, Jessie gave a dry little sob. I took her hand.
     “I know, Jess, I know…” I couldn’t think of anything to say, any new words of comfort. I’d said them all before. “I miss them too…” I held her close as she cried, her tears flowing down her face onto my shoulder; I’d lost count of the amount of times we’d sat in the same place recently, doing the same thing. I felt so damn helpless…
     Wait, I could do better than this. I could take her mind of this empty house that was too full of memories. I leapt to my feet.
     Jessie looked up at me. “Mickey, what is it? Did you hear a burglar?” Her tone suggested that she thought that would just be typical. 
     “I’ve had an amazing idea,” I said excitedly. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? It made so much sense! “Come one, grab your stuff, let’s go.” I began pulling her to her feet.
     “What are we doing?” Jess asked bewilderedly, allowing me to drag her from the room and upstairs.   “What’s your amazing idea?” I didn’t answer until I managed to pull her all the way onto the landing and had started to root through the piles of stuff, looking for my rucksack. 
     “Why is it,” I said, abandoning my search and running into the bathroom instead to seize both our toothbrushes, “that at Christmas, at this supposedly festive and joyous time of year, we’ve confined ourselves to this miserable house with its miserable memories and committed ourselves to having a miserable time?”
     “Because we’ve got no where else to go?”
     Time for the big reveal. “But we do, don’t we!” I said triumphantly. “We can go home!”
     I saw the realisation dawn behind Jessie’s eyes. “But home’s miles away! Hours and hours! It’ll be Boxing Day before we get there!”
     “Not if we drive all night. We’ll get coffee and take it in turns driving.” I thought about the battered old Ford that stood on the driveway. “The car’ll probably make it. And if it breaks down, well… I’ll carry you home this Christmas! Because there’s no way we’re spending it here, not like this.”
     Jessie was laughing now, for the first real time since James’ accident. “You’re mental. You realise how angry my mum will be when I turn up on the doorstep and she realises she hasn’t cooked enough potatoes?”
I thought of my own mother’s hysteria when it came to orchestrating Christmas dinner. My sudden arrival would put a real spanner in the works. She’d be furious. I couldn’t wait. 
     “She’ll get over it,” I said. “Jess, it’s been a crappy year, but by God it’s not going to be a crappy Christmas too. Christmas isn’t a time for being sad and alone. It’s a time for laughter and getting drunk and eating till you explode. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t think either of us are going to get all that from a bag of crisps for lunch and watching re-runs of Only Fools and Horses on TV.”
     I could see in her eyes that I’d convinced her. She didn’t want to be sad this Christmas any more than I did. I’d won. We were going home. Jessie grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight. 
     “Alright, crazy Mickey. You’re on. I’ll meet you by the car in five minutes.”
     “Five minutes,” I repeated. And, grinning like a loon, I ran into my room to pack for what was hopefully going to be an unexpectedly very merry Christmas.