There was a nip in the air, just enough to set the cheeks and ears tingling. We walked past a cottage with smoke from the chimney-“Coal,” Daddy said, authoritatively. We had a wood-burning stove when I was small, that we used to cook the family meals on as well. When it went and the new electric cooker and fake fire came in, I was very sad.
We returned to a dark house and a worried-looking man pushing his car back off of ours. He did the little foot-to-foot dance of trying to look innocent, which is especially tough when your front bumper is entangled in someone’s station wagon.
Daddy did a low whistle. “Ooh, the woman’s not going to be happy,” he said to the strange man, as if the threat of my mother’s displeasure alone could convince a perfect stranger not to do a runner. He circled round the scene of the accident-not much, just needed to lift the other car off the bumper, spot of scraped paint. Even I could see it wasn’t serious. But the stranger had clearly had a bit of Christmas cheer and was panicking.
“Don’t know, now,” Daddy said, sucking his teeth. “Could be a lot of damage.” The man pleaded for leniency. The usual story-points on his license, poor insurance, wife at home about to give birth to a multiheaded Hydra and only his being home on time could save her.
“Tell you what,” my father said, stroking his chin. “Let’s have about two hundred off you and call it even.”
“I only have one-twenty on me.”
“One-twenty and that bottle of whisky in your front seat.”
A curt nod and the man handed over the goods. My father crouched low and, with a coordinated effort, they disentangled the bumpers. The man got in his sedan and drove off slowly, mumbling gratitude. We waved him round the corner.
“Well, that was potentially exciting,” Daddy said, unlocking the front door. He handed me half of the notes. “Let’s not tell your mother, shall we?” lundi, le 22 decembre
The first prostitute I ever met was a friend of my father’s. It was about this time of year. I was still a student.
He is not a pimp, I swear. My father is in the habit of taking on impossible projects. He’d probably qualify for sainthood if he was, you know, a dead Catholic. These altruistic efforts have ranged from resurrecting a doomed restaurant to rehabilitating a series of doomed women. It’s a tendency that has led to no small amount of frostiness on my mother’s part, but she has had some few decades to accustom herself to his softheartedness by now.
She could tell when he was embarking on yet another failed cause before he even opened his mouth. “There’s only one reason you’d be coming in with flowers,” she barked from the kitchen. “And it’s not our anniversary.” Maybe she’s the one whose name should be put forward to the Vatican, actually.
It was winter of the year, several Yuletides ago now. The holiday cheer was largely lost on me due to a recent breakup as well as not being Christian. The vulgarities of the holiday are sometimes charming, or occasionally grating, but that year they were unbearable. All I could see were so many people gaining joy from an event imbued with only minimal importance by most of the world, as represented by endless yards of tatty tinsel and unwanted gifts. One afternoon, standing in a queue at the bank, I saw my reflection distorted in a cheap red tree bauble, and it occurred to me how temporary and meaningless all of it-the holiday, the bank, the world in general-was. I felt incapable of even anger at being alone. Defeated. So I did what any spoiled eldest child would do and went home for a few weeks to sulk properly.
As a restorative jaunt my father suggested I go with him to visit one of his “friends.” She, I was told, had just been released from prison on fraud charges related to her drug habit. Having regained custody of her children, she was working as a cleaner in a hotel and trying to stay off the game. Charming. I smiled tightly and we drove off to meet the woman.
We sat in the car in silence for a quarter of an hour. “I know you know your mum doesn’t approve,” he said suddenly, by way of the obvious.
I said nothing and looked out the window, where people poured out of the shops into the night.
“She’s really a lovely person,” he said of the friend. “Her children are absolutely charming.”
My father is the most ineffectual liar. In her depressing kitchen she regaled us with the story of a septic infection in her thumbnail that culminated in a week off work. Her two sons were as I imagined: the elder, about fifteen, eyed my figure under three layers of heavy clothing, while his younger sibling could not be shifted from the telly.
I could not stop thinking of my last boyfriend, who had left me suddenly among accusations of my snobbishness and utter lack of sympathy for other people. Well, as Philip Larkin put it, useful to get that learnt.
The other adults and the teenaged son left the room to look at his bicycle, a rusting heap retrieved from a Dumpster, which lay crumpled outside the door. My father is if nothing else rather handy and promised to look into its health. I knew the effort was more likely to result in a cash gift to the young man rather than any resurrection of the bike and was left, scowling, to watch the younger son attack the remote control.
As soon as the room was empty, he turned to me. “Would you like to see my bird?” he asked.
Good gracious. Is this some sort of euphemism? “Okay,” I said.
We went to the window, and he opened it. Outside was a large holly bush. He clicked his tongue and waited. I waited. There was only the sound of motor scooters and festive drunks emerging from a pub.
He clicked his tongue again and whistled. A small bluetit beeped back and flew out of the bush to land on his shoulder. When he opened his hand, palm-up, it settled there.
Turning back in the window, he told me to put out my own hand. I did. He showed me how to play a game with it-I snatched my hand away so the tit would fall, only to catch it again as it opened its wings. “That’s how I taught it to fly,” he said.
“You taught it to fly?”
“A cat killed its mum, so we brought the nest in,” he said. “We got crickets and fed them with a tweezer.” There had been six in the nest, but only one survived. He showed me another trick, where with the tit on his shoulder he would look to the right, then left, then right again-and it would peep in each ear as he presented it.
The others came back in, the older son flushed with the satisfaction of having parted my father from some portion of his wallet. The bird flew out and the younger boy closed the window. Their mother was chattering gamely about some other minor recent illness, owing, she was certain, to the quality of food within Her Majesty’s prisons. “You get hardly nothing, starving all the time, but you still get fat.” We stayed for another cup of tea and a chocolate bourbon, then my father and I went home in silence. mardi, le 23 decembre
Long coat… check.
Dark sunglasses… check.
One hour’s alibi to the parents… check. I’m out the door and free.
I was on time for the rendezvous. He was late. I sipped a coffee and pretended to read the paper. He slid in the door unnoticed, sat across from me. I nodded hello and pushed the package across the table.
A4 lifted the lid discreetly and looked in the box. “You sure these are the goods?” he asked.
“None finer,” I said. “Guaranteed results.” He exhaled, his shoulders unclenching. “If you don’t mind my asking, do you really need so much product to get through a week with your family?”
“They’d kill me otherwise.” He opened the box again and sniffed deeply. “Soon as they start to smell blood in the water, I can throw these chocolate truffles their way. That buys me at least a few hours.”
“Secret recipe,” I fibbed. Actually I’d found it on the Internet. Butter, chocolate, cream, and rum. So simple even I couldn’t cock it up.
A4 and I dated for some years, we even lived together for a time. We didn’t have, as they say, a pot to piss in, but it was a comfortable domestic arrangement and we had a lot of common interests. Namely, complaining about the rest of the world. It lasted until I moved away in the first of several unsuccessful attempts to gain useful employment. I was upset, recently, to find that he thought the post-student house we’d shared was “a hovel.” I always remembered it fondly.