A Boy Called Christmas

by Matt Haig

‘Some people live in Sweden. And there are about seven people who live in Norway. Maybe even eight. The world is a big place.’

Well, Nikolas liked to think that Miika was listening but really he was just fantasising about cheese. Which took quite a lot of fantasising, as Miika was a forest mouse, and there weren’t any cows or goats in this forest, and he had never seen or smelt cheese, let alone tasted it.

Joel walked over to the door. It wasn’t a long walk. It only took him one step.

She looked around the small one-roomed cottage. ‘Do you know why I came?’ she asked. ‘Did he tell you?’ ‘To look after me.’ ‘Ha! Ha! Hahahahaha!’ Her laugh flapped out of her, suddenly and scarily, like bats from a cave. It was the first and last time he would ever hear her laugh. ‘To look after you! Oh, that’s good. That’s funny. What a world you must live in, to think people just do good things for no reason! Do you really think I came here because I cared about you? No. I did not come here for a skinny, grubby childish fool. I came here for the money.’

Was there an unluckier boy in the world? Yes, actually, there was. There was a boy called Gatu who lived in India who’d been struck by lightning while going to the toilet in a stream. Very nasty.

A Very Short Chapter with a Long Title in which Not Very Much Happens

‘An impossibility is just a possibility you don’t understand yet . . .

‘To see something, you have to believe in it. Really believe it.

Sebastian fell back to his snoring. The sound was like a motorbike, but motorbikes hadn’t been invented yet, so Nikolas couldn’t compare it to that.

There was a very long pause. It was a pause far longer than these two sentences, but eventually the pause came to an end.

the easiest way to make other people happy was to be happy yourself, or at least to act as if you were.