LITTLE THINGS
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore & David Lloyd. I write these stories for the love of it.
Christmas is all about the little things.
When you peel it all aside, peel away the supposed greater purpose of it all (which nobody seems to really remember properly anymore - the birth of a saviour who gave his life in payment for the sins of others) it's all about far smaller, far more homely concepts.
For one person, perhaps, it's all about the cake his mother used to make. Christmas in his mind isn't truly Christmas unless the whole house is suffused with that heady smell of fruit steeping in brandy and the warm scent of the oven, just as it always used to be when he was young.
For another it may be the sight of paper angels, their hair a fuzz of yellow wool and their wings glorious in tinfoil, hanging in a line from the mantel, the same ones she made when she was six and that have been so lovingly preserved.
Who can say that they haven't, at some time in their lives, said: "Oh, but it can't be Christmas. We don't have -" and then named something so small and yet so terribly important that its lack seems to cast a blight across all the glitter, gifts, glamour and lights? It's not about the biggest, the brightest or the spectacle. It's about home, and safety, and coming back to things we know so well they can't help but comfort.
For V, Christmas is currently all about copper wire.
Copper wire is indeed an extremely small thing. It can be found lurking deep within the innards of radios, and once unravelled is so thin it's like stiff strands of long red hair. V pulls out a length from a bag slung across his body, his wig whipped by a freezing winter breeze, and proceeds in his task.
Cracks in stonework are also very small things, but equally important to the jobbing vigilante at work: his gloved hand and boots cling tenaciously to what appears a very tenuous stone lip indeed. For a man hanging without safety rope or net almost one hundred feet above the ground, he shows remarkable calm. But then V is not as ordinary people are, and has no ingrained concept of home or safety anymore.
It is almost half past two on Christmas morning, and a good time to go visiting the Old Bailey if your intent is not to get inside and gawp at the fittings, but merely scale the walls. People have other things to think about. Staff have gone home. Even guards, shuffling and chafing somewhat at having drawn the short straw and having to be away from their families tonight of all nights, cannot help but be distracted.
It is V's first visit to the Bailey. It will not be the last.
Like Christmas, some things take a huge amount of preparation, patience, and planning. There are all sorts of things to buy or otherwise procure, and quite often these things are difficult to get in Britain these days. There are schedules to keep, and as Christmas is one very specific day a year, there is a merciless deadline. And like Christmas, some things aren't purely about oneself. They're mostly about other people.
V holds the copper wire firmly in one hand as he clings to the stonework with the other, and goes about the laborious process of winding it tightly into place. It had taken several years for the Christmas decorations of London to be completely phased out: the famous shopping districts of Oxford and Regent Street had clung on until the last, when the regime had finally triumphed and condemned them as a drain on resources. The London that stretches out below V as he peaceably goes about his business now is a dark London, a post-curfew London where even the last few bedroom windows are finally extinguishing in the gloom. The streets are full of shadows. V, with the careful delicacy of a man snipping a piece of gaudy ribbon, cuts the wire with a pair of clippers and then tucks the debris, wire, clippers and all back into the bag.
The other enduring oddity of little things is that despite their importance, if taken by themselves, they are almost always overlooked. One bauble on a Christmas tree, gone missing or broken, may not be noticed in the grandeur of the whole: the bowl of Christmas nuts is depleted so gradually that one may not even notice when the last nut is finally cracked, or indeed notice who ate it.
It is only if you notice all at once that the bauble is gone, the nut bowl is empty, and to top it all off there's a present missing from under the tree that it becomes an issue: that little things which are seen to band together become a big thing .
V knows this extremely well, and relies upon it, and it is the driving reason why he is up the side of the Old Bailey in the small hours of Christmas morning, just under a year before his deadline, tying copper wire to a moulded ledge. If V was an ordinary man and had a need to buy Christmas presents, he would undoubtedly be one of those irritating folk who have done all their shopping and written their cards by July. Possibly even the previous May. The sort of person everyone hates but secretly wishes they could emulate.
He descends the Bailey with his usual careful grace. Many people would describe such a feckless abseil as balletic, gymnastic or simply supernatural. With V, the word which most often springs to mind watching him move is measured. No wasted energy. No wasted time. He'll be back, in perhaps a month, with another little bag and a few more little things to attach, like barnacles to the bottom of a boat, to the Bailey's hulking stone skirts.
And it's unlikely that all this effort, all the careful, loving attention he's paid to making sure that there is a place for every little thing and every little thing in its place, will be noticed at all. His boots hit the damp, chill tarmac of the street without a sound. People don't change on the most basic level. Just as when they were children at Christmas, all those years ago, they may well gasp in awe at a parcel which took hours of careful taping, metres of shining paper and fancy bows before demolishing it without so much as a thought for all their loving parent's hard work once they have their eyes on the prize within.
V melts into the shadows, black into black. The matt fabric of his coat and tunic swallows what little light there is, the brown-red highlit flash of the wig and the bone white of the mask catching only briefly in the flare of the headlights on a passing van from the Ear. Of course, as often also happens with children, they may be so enthralled by the packaging that the expensive gift itself pales into insignificance. V's dim reflection flickers through the windows of a department store, flanking him as he runs.
He darts up the side of the building, as sure-footed and agile as any cat, hands grasping easily at ledges, until he reaches the rooftops, an easier place to run unseen, for anyone brave or foolhardy enough to move at speed. A Christmas miracle: it is beginning to snow, but even good snow, it seems, is a little harder to come by in today's world. A few wet white flakes dapple V's black shoulders and vanish with the warmth of his body. He changes course. Wet weather means a few of the roofs ahead will be dangerous, even for him.
He is only brave, not yet foolhardy. His boots ring on the roof tiles of a residential terrace, and in her tiny attic room a little girl, no more than six, wakes in her bed with a short indrawn breath.
Boots on the roof at such a time? That can only mean one thing. She throws her bedding aside in her haste, rushes to the window to draw the curtain aside.
He knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake -
The shadow of V, only a foot or so away from her window, turns sharply at the twitch of motion as the curtains move. The girl stares, mouth opening slightly in surprise. V stares back, the empty black of the mask's eye sockets offering no cues, the frozen smile seeming for once almost jovial, benevolent.
He knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.
V raises one black-gloved finger to the mask's lips. Sssssh. And the little girl, in awe and delight, mimics him solemnly, her own little pink hand raised to cover her mouth entirely. She watches him from her window until his black form is lost to view in the darkness that comes before the dawn. And then, after she succumbs to sleep and the morning brings things like presents and special foods that have cost hundreds of hard-saved coupons to buy, she has forgotten him entirely.
The other thing about Christmas is that come the actual event, despite their undoubted importance, the little things are the most easily overlooked. Especially by the children who have clamoured and whined for them the most. Only V, already back in the closeted warmth of the Shadow Gallery, makes his list, checks it far more than twice, and overlooks none of them.