It's hot, that's the first thing I notice. Much, much hotter than it seemed through the lens of the windows. It's warm and thick, so I can barely breathe, making me desire to unwrap myself from my layers and leave them to pool on the floor behind me. I can imagine it now, as though I see it before me, framed into reality. I imagine removing my coat, feeling its humid weight pushing itself from my shoulders before melting into a black puddle behind me, with just the occasional trickle of the red lining. Fresh air would blow down my collar, its chill fingers working their way down my neck and back, cooling as they go. If only imagining made it so, but my powers of invention can only get me so far. My tie, I need to loosen my tie. But I am Joseph Chandler, and I do not undo in public.

The heat mocks me, like it knows I am a winter man. There is a comfort in the cold – it asks nothing of you, only that you respect it. It doesn't demand your flesh, and it allows you to hide yourself in its pockets, shrugging down low, because everyone else does the same. It was winter a moment ago, frosty and safe, before I came inside, entering through the glass doors that fail to do the one thing that doors are made to do, which is to close and remain closed. These doors slide open with their panorama at the whim of any oscillating passer by, or wayward child teasing the doorway. I myself stood on the threshold for several minutes while they attempted to second-guess my intentions, opening and shutting like a questioning mouth.

Well? Are you coming in or aren't you? they might have been saying. As usual, I had no answer to give. Eventually, the decision was taken from me by a jostle and a trip, and now here I am, in what feels like some sort of luminescent sauna, where everything drips with festive heat. The fake snowflakes hang heroically, stubbornly unmelted, despite existing in a temperature more suited to August. The tinsel sags and the music gurgles like water stuck in a pipe.

I am a man out of place here. I may be suited to the season of winter, but not Christmas. I like my lights singular, not assorted or wrapped like twine to border a severed tree, or (god forbid) twinkly. I've no issue with the season of goodwill per se – it's just all the trimmings I can't stand. The sheer misery of being happy. Of painting on a joyful smile to please other people while you try not to drown yourself in eggnog. (I don't even like eggnog – give me a vodka any day.) I'm not a scrooge, I will chip in for a Christmas party for the team, as long as I don't have to attend. I just prefer my own company.

My head flops around my neck to take in the scene around me. The air feels like a sultry soup, saturated with perfumes, cloying scents, sugary and sweet. I appear to have wandered into the part of the store that dedicates itself to the sense of smell, and it has taken on that devotion with enthusiasm. Different fragrances war with each other to grab my attention – I turn one way and I am overpowered with florals, if I face a different direction, there are spices and fruits and something cutting that might be alcohol. I dare say that, individually, these decorative bottles contain pleasant aromas. But like Christmas carols, you only want to experience one at a time. The alternative is to be smothered by musk, overcome by distilled plants. I've never had to buy perfume for anyone, and I don't think I intend on starting today.

I don't really know what I'm doing here.

It's all Miles' fault. He told everyone that my birthday was coming up last month, making them all feel obliged to mark it in some way. The whisky was agreeable, although it didn't last long, and I had to find space to display the cards, to reroute my desk to allow for all the extra furniture. And then there was Kent, wriggling, squirming into my office, shiny green bag in hand, the roped handles offering themselves on his fingers. He had stood in a similar stance, shoulders nudging his ears, the previous week when he and the rest of the team had been working late on a case and somehow we had all decamped to my flat. I'm still not quite sure how that happened – Miles was probably to blame again. He usually is. In the end, it wasn't as invasive an experience as I might have expected – everyone settled down to work quite naturally, fitting themselves around my table as though they were the well-apportioned outfit it had been missing. For all they had appeared to care, I might as well not have been there. Only Kent had seemed at all uncomfortable, and he was the only one whose presence I remained constantly aware of.

He often seems uneasy around me – I can't explain it. And his awkwardness seems to float through the air where it is inhaled by myself, infectious, a veritable virus of anxiety. It was the same on the afternoon of my birthday.

"I… er… I noticed you didn't have many pictures up in your flat," he said by way of explanation, proffering the glossy gift bag. "And maybe you like it that way, so… umm… don't feel you have to accept this. But if you maybe wanted to start putting some photos or something up, then I thought you might like a frame. So… umm… yeah… here. Happy birthday, sir."

The office was stuffy, which was odd, because I'm fairly sure I had turned the heating off a few hours earlier. The outlines of Kent's fingers were stencilled onto the bag's sheeny surface, silhouetted in sweat or condensation, and his hands were clammy as they glanced against mine. That would normally have bothered me, so it's interesting that I didn't mind the soft lick of knuckles as he delivered his gift to me. Perhaps it was because my hands were also stifling in their own warmth. There was a ripple of black ink blossoming on his index and middle finger from hours spent note-taking with a leaky pen. It is by now an almost indelible tattoo testifying to his work. Whatever else I might say about DC Emerson Kent, he is the hardest worker here, and has for a long time been one of my most reliable and valued officers. I don't think it's too much to say that I wouldn't have survived my first week here without his support. He wears that ink stain like a medal. But there's a part of me that sees a sadness in the smudge. It spreads like a black hole across his hand, empty and hollow. Maybe I'm overthinking (it wouldn't be the first time), and I shouldn't really be interested in my team's private lives, but it seems to me that Kent is lonely. And I speak as one who is familiar with the sensation, who knows how heavy emptiness can be. I've got used to it and come to accept it. But he shouldn't have to. He's still young and, objectively, good-looking, I suppose. He deserves someone, a boyfriend… or a girlfriend, I don't know his preference. And why should I?

He certainly doesn't give the impression of having much of a life outside of work – he can't do, if he has the time to be shopping for birthday presents for me. I was touched that he seemed to have put a certain amount of thought into it, but perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. He is built more of thoughts than of words, and I find I know less and less about him the more I look.

Not that I am looking.

The present itself was thoughtful as well. A filigree picture frame – large enough to hang on the wall, and small enough to stand on a table or mantelpiece. The back of the frame has both a loop of ribbon and a pull-out support, so that I could choose either. Within the frame Kent had already put a photograph of the whole of our team.

"I won't be offended if you want to change the picture, sir," he said, blushing and creasing his face at me. "I only put it in so you weren't just getting the stock photo. And if you don't like it, just… I can easily return it."

I can't quite remember what my response was – I hope I was gracious in accepting it. It is in fact a very beautiful thing – dark and curling like delicate locks of hair around a circular face. From a distance, it looks soft, as though it would blow and shift in the wind. But up close, it is firm and defiant. Just what you need in a support.

It's been a month now and I still don't know where I'm going to put it. Until yesterday, it remained wrapped in its green casing, living in my spare room. But I took it out again last night to look at it, and now it sits on my bedside table, the most prominent thing there. I hadn't seen the photograph before – it must be one of Kent's own. It has a dreamlike quality to it, slightly blurred but not unpleasant for that. Kent has edited it a little, I think, put it into black and white and arranged the light and shade just so. The photograph depicts all of us, but my eyes are drawn to the centre where Kent and I are standing. Maybe it's just my vision, or the way the light falls, but the others, Miles, Mansell, Riley and the rest, seem shrouded in shadow, whilst Kent and I are forced into the limelight. I know I haven't seen this image before, yet it feels familiar to me. Familiar yet backwards, like a reflection in a mirror. Of course, I remember it being taken, but it's strange how viewing yourself through a lens can alter your appearance. It's like a facsimile drawn on different paper, paper with a matte texture that drinks up every blot of ink, extending it with branches and fingers. Am I really that much taller than everyone else? Picture-me seems to loom inaccessibly over my team. Maybe it's I that casts them all into shadow, away up in the distant heights? Only picture-Kent escapes my darkness, lit as he is with his own luminescence. Kent is alone in looking at the camera, as though he was the only one of us who expected the flash. The only one who saw it coming. I suppose he has practice in seeing things before they happen. He's had to – he learned the hard way what happens when you don't. As I looked at Kent's image, glad to see him smiling, my eyes met with my own. I hadn't noticed before that picture-me had his eyes also directed towards Kent, and all four of my eyes met while looking at him.

I've come to realise that I rarely see things approaching.

When I sleep I do not dream, although maybe I did a little last night. I have no memory of it (it too was in monochrome) but I woke with the desire to reciprocate Kent's thoughtfulness – to find a Christmas gift for him that might match this that he has given me. They say things are clearer in sleep.

So here I am.

I have been drifting around the department store for some time now, a rootless itinerant with no map to follow or any real idea where I am aiming. Any landmark, any compass point that may be here is hidden in swathes of reds and greens and bells and candy canes. And the staircases – how can anyone find their way among this forest of steel steps, groaning ahead, swaying and climbing? I notice that one of the escalators has stopped working, its steps paused mid-slide, no longer sure whether they are going up or down. I feel caught in an illusion, like I am trapped in an M. C. Escher drawing, where every flight of stairs seems to lead to another and another, on and on without end. They loom and twist impossibly, upside down and inside out, and I don't know how I'm ever going to find my way.

Something whirrs close to my cheek, ruffling the air on my face, and I realise that I have inadvertently wandered into the children's toy department.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," a woman says to me, her voice straining as tightly as her arms are holding onto her child's hand. With a flustered movement, she picks up the toy helicopter that has landed at my feet and stamps it back onto the shelf behind her. "I've told him he can't have it, but he just won't listen."

She looks genuinely apologetic as her harried eyes take in my buttoned appearance, as though she expects their small incursion into my space to have left an unsightly smudge, like a finger on easily bruised skin. She can tell I'm not supposed to be here. I think anyone with any one of the five senses can tell that. I must reek of unease.

I murmur something appropriately mollifying and carefully tread around to find an exit, looking closely at my feet so as not to step on or trip over any of the small human beings currently making the floor their battleground. But I appear to have taken another wrong course, as I find myself in a sea of plush toys and dolls' houses and things that spin and flash. Half recognisable melodies are recreated in high pitch, in a sound which is a mixture of a bell and a foghorn.

I am sailing dangerously close to the end of a queue of people, a line to which I am certain I do not belong. Anticipation, excitement, leaps from every body there, from the children heaving on the hand of a parent four times their size, to the adults whose tired grimaces don't completely conceal a glow of joy that I can't say I understand. Some yards ahead, the reason for their exhilaration sits enthroned in snowy make-believe, bedecked in scarlet trousers and jacket, and extravagant beard. He and I are the only ones in suits, but we couldn't be more different. I was one of those children who was frightened of Father Christmas, and I still feel a slight nausea at the thought of an old man, however fictional, creeping secretively into my house while I sleep. One of my earliest memories is of lying awake on Christmas night, refusing to succumb to the dead of slumber for fear of a crimson-cloaked intruder creaking open my door and bending his hefty weight beneath the miniature tree in the corner of my room. He knows when you're awake. I kept my own tally of the times that I was bad, the times when I failed to live up to the indefinable standard set for me – there was no need for his list. I knew my name would be at the top of it anyway. But here there are children and parents and guardians of all genders and ages, happy and hopeful, who see Santa Claus as some sort of hero. And I am like none of them.

I step away from this column of people, pushing myself free with hands flat and outstretched. I need to make it clear, to myself and to those coming up behind me, that I recognise my mistake. This is not where I intended to be. As I turn to leave, to swim my way back to more a familiar location, I take one more deep look at the festive scene. I gaze upon it like a camera lens, my eyelids flickering like a broken shutter. I am both there and not there. I fancy that much of my life has been carried out offscreen, just behind the lens, just out of shot. There's more control that way. The photographer is the eyes of the photograph, every pixel exists because of them. But they are nowhere to be seen, unless it be in an accidental thumb print or a shadow upon the ground. My career is a different matter – that has been all flash photography and startled cameos and my face careening across tabloids. But my life, where I am me, whatever that is, is angled and filtered just so, to my exact liking. Only I am not really there, not visible unless I waver.

I blink my eyes twice, burning the image of the Santa's grotto onto my brain. Ahead, on the rostrum, one of the actors playing an elf has their back to me. He is bent at the hip, and crouched so that all I can see is a twist of shoulder as he reaches into a sack and plucks out a wrapped gift, as fruit from a tree. The next few seconds happen all at once. There is a spinning of standing, a toe-led upward motion, during which the present somehow passes from the elf's hands to those of a young girl stood beside him. Then another spin, which manifests as a dizziness in which my ears and my feet communicate, but nothing in between, and the elf is looking directly at me. His eyes narrow, then widen, and my chest does the same. We're both unmoving as a picture, our eyes capturing our opposite images – his of me and mine of him. I wonder what he sees? If I could I would put into words the information that my retinas are printing on my brain but language has deserted me. My head's like an abstract painting all jumbled and messy and up in a muddle like my words. Perspective and punctuation are what I need and I have neither. There's a familiar shock of corkscrew hair and it's Kent there's a mouth and it's upended and open between two lips and it's Emerson Kent there's a hand and another one with slender fingers scouring at his forehead and it's Kent it's Kent I can't stop looking it's Kent and I don't know where to look it's Ke…

My eyes are stinging and I realise I haven't blinked for some time. The first closure of my eyelids is dry and watery at the same time and it's this, this, surely it must be this that refocuses what I see. I'll open my eyes and it won't be Kent, will it? No, it'll just be someone with a similar curl to his hair, someone else, someone not Kent. My eyelids scratch open again. It's a reset alright, a reframing perhaps, but not in the way I had imagined. A sudden flicker, a snap and a click and everything seems different, like I'm seeing myself for the first time and Kent for the first time and we're in separate frames but the same one concurrently. I am both the photographer and the image, both the seeing and the seen. It makes no sense, and I don't understand it, but there it is nonetheless.

It's his clothes that I can't seem to stop looking at now. This ridiculous and tawdry elf costume has kidnapped my attention and held it hostage, burning its negative into my brain. It's the colours perhaps, the primary brightness of the palette, which offset with Kent's pale complexion creates a pleasing juxtaposition. I feel like a man who has only seen the world in black and white until this moment, and am now dominated and submerged by all these new, nameless and unencountered hues. I'm being blinded by too much sight. My head, and my whole body following it, tumbles into the kaleidoscope before me. The different shades scintillate, moving sensuously, rutting and grinding together in a shocking blur. It's like the colours are solid, solider than I am even, and each time they rub against each other they set off a new spark which pulverises them just a little bit more into inkdust. It's terrifying and exhilarating and ludicrous, and I have no idea how I fit into it. Perhaps I don't know myself at all.

There's a lingering crinkled taste in my mouth, like burnt paper – a photograph on fire, its edges curling, its pigments boiling as it is consumed by flame. It licks its way down my throat and is swallowed, leaving a rainbow ash on my tongue. Eventually, my senses clear and I can see beyond solely colours. I start to discern scale and shape and form. Kent's clothes, for example, are… fascinating. They are tight, though not obscenely so. Not inappropriate for the time or place, but enough to invite the imagination. My imagination. And I can no longer deny that I've been imagining, can I? All those times that I told myself I was just wishing him well, I was also wishing him, well, myself with him wasn't I? The picture I believed I had in my head for him, a picture of companionship, of someone for him, has shifted and been redrawn. When I said that he should have a boyfriend… didn't I really mean… wasn't I hoping, just hoping, that that boyfriend might be me?

Oh Jesus Christ, what am I doing? I can't do this. I can't have this, can I? There are so many countless reasons why this is wrong. My verbal mind strains to assert control, throwing up its hard worn boundaries of words, reasons, excuses. But my visual mind refuses to listen and wanders, lingering over Kent's contours as though it had never experienced a curve before.

You cannot do this. You are his boss.

But just imagine those curves turned to liquid in your hands, running through your fingers like fresh paint…

Oh hell, I think I'm going to be sick.