The 12 Days Of Christine is in great part about the compromises we have to make in our lives if they turn out to be lesser lives than we had been expecting. Christine doesn’t quite live in genteel poverty but she isn’t far from it; her flat, though nice and quite big, is obviously a studenty-type affair – which in itself is fine; I’m 62 and still live like a student - and clearly unaffordable for one person alone. Her flatmate Fung has her own and very different and separate life to lead and the two never really connect, hence this is a cohabitation of convenience. When Fung moves out, Adam moves in, not primarily because he and Christine are lovers (and about to be married) but because Christine, who works in a shoe shop and therefore presumably doesn’t earn that much money, can’t afford to pay all the rent herself.
So it’s uncomfortable from the offset and becomes more so when Christine becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son. Good-time lad Adam does his best but isn’t really cut out for fatherhood – at his age he just wants “fun” and ends up running off with his workmate Zara, hence the marriage breaks down and Christine is left alone with young Jack; despite the presumed divorce settlement and child welfare payments that Adam has to make, it’s tough and she has to ask her own mother to take Jack to school for his first day – an important date that she misses because, well, she has to be at work, the implication being that paying the rent on her own is a real burden and she can’t afford to take even one afternoon off.
In the Hallowe’en sequence I always wondered: what exactly is her gay best friend and fellow shoe shop worker Bobby doing in her bathroom getting made up? It’s never underlined but again the implication is that Bobby has now actually moved in and is sharing the flat with Christine and helping out with the rent. From this brief sequence it also appears that Christine is getting on a whole lot better with Bobby than she ever did with Adam – none of their scenes together is entirely free of discomfort – and only semi-jokingly ponders the possibility of their getting married. The theme running through the story is one of a longing to correct and amend missed chances and wrong turns in life, to start again and this time get it right.
How much of what we see is a confused fantasy – I will not underline the story’s twist – is purposely unresolved. Do Christine and Bobby really get together, does she really reunite with Adam at the end, are the pictures we see of her and Fung hanging out and having fun with chopsticks in the kitchen just manifestations of wishful thinking? Or did she end up so alone and strapped for resources that she had to drive out to the supermarket herself for some closing-time bargains?
The story’s other message of course is: when you’re having fun, just bloody well enjoy it, because you never know how long anything or anybody is going to be there, or anywhere.
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