‘Little man’ isn’t a phrase I’m any too fond of, but they seemed nice, and if it wasn’t for rough diamonds I wouldn’t have any diamonds at all. Sometimes the wheelchair acts as a lie-detector, and I certainly didn’t think they were messing me about. ‘Nothing much,’ I said, not thinking anything of it. ‘Come to ours, then,’ he said. ‘I’m Frank and this is Shirley. It’ll be a laugh.’ As I say, I didn’t take it seriously in the slightest bit, but Frank was very insistent, asking for my phone number (and getting Shirley to write it down on her hand). He said, ‘I know I’ve had a drink, mate, but I mean it. Come to ours for Christmas. That’s twice I’ve asked you drunk, and I’ll phone tomorrow to ask you sober. That’ll make it official.’ Just then a groan went up, not from me but from the whole packed room. The disc-jockey had followed ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ with Little Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool’. Frank didn’t seem surprised, saying, ‘Bill said he’d do that, but I didn’t think he’d see it through.’
It was a minor outrage in relative terms. One legendary night ‘Bill’, assuming it was the same character, played Velvet Underground’s ‘The Murder Mystery’ (an evocation of a bad trip generally agreed to be more damaging than the real thing) four times in a row, then followed it with ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, which by all accounts began to sound equally sinister.
People groaned at the Osmond song partly because they knew there was a fair chance they would wake up the next morning with that tune in their heads, and would have to be vigilant and avoid humming for the rest of the day.
Blow me down if Frank didn’t phone the next day and repeat the invitation, and by this time I was beginning to take him seriously. He said he and Shirley lived in a basement flat on Victoria Avenue, but we’d all manage somehow.
And in fact my first experience of a family festival without a family was a fair success, though once was probably enough for all parties.
Frank and Shirley’s basement was below a barber’s (Alley Barber’s, if you must know). I was expecting it to be dark, but hadn’t entirely reckoned on the cold and the damp. There was only an outside lavatory, across a little yard, which was a bit of a shock to the system. There had been indoor plumbing on Coronation Street for years. Frank’s record collection was enormous, though I wouldn’t have been surprised to see moss growing on the vinyl of records he hadn’t played for a while.
He worked in the record department of Miller’s music shop on King Street, an old-fashioned sort of business which sold instruments and hired pianos to students. He was in charge of the pop record section, which was smaller than the classical one, and his real interest was the even smaller section labelled New Wave & Progressive. There were only two racks, New Wave & Progressive A — L and New Wave & Progressive M — Z, though he was hoping they would expand to three.
The discount he got as a Miller’s employee explained the size of his collection. ‘I like a good beat,’ he told me, ‘but why settle for one when you can have two or three, all going on at the same time?’ We listened to Gentle Giant, to Caravan, to Gong, and of course to Frank Zappa, not only my host’s namesake but the uncrowned king of New Wave & Progressive M — Z.
The only sentimental moment of my stay came on Christmas Eve, when Frank played ‘Lucky Man’, a track from Emerson Lake & Palmer’s first LP. It was a sort of soulful folk song, with an anti-war message, and it acted on him like a thousand Christmas carols rendered down. He had been rolling a joint when the song started and he froze, though he must have known what was coming since he had just put it on. He wept openly all the way through and then sat still, wiped clean of emotion. If he had wanted to give that joint a festive touch he could have moistened the edge of the rolling paper with tears rather than the traditional saliva.
Shirley worked as a secretary at a firm of solicitors. I told her she should become a lawyer herself, but she just laughed. It seemed to me that once you got a foothold in the world of work there was nothing to stop you, but that wasn’t how Shirley saw it. She was very sure she wasn’t clever. ‘I’m hopeless,’ she said. ‘Frank bought me The Naked Eunuch for my birthday in June, and I still haven’t got past Chapter One.’ It was tantalising not knowing which of two famous books of the period she actually meant.
Shibboleth nut roast
Frank did most of the cooking, and came up with plenty of vegetarian basics. I had told him in advance that he should stick to his normal style of eating, and for form’s sake he had decided to roast a bird on the day. I was really agitating against that strange shibboleth nut roast, something that nobody much likes, a misunderstanding that has turned into an iron-clad ritual, with each party convinced of making a concession to the other.
And what could possibly be wrong with a plate of sprouts, carrots and bread sauce?
Everything went swimmingly until Shirley asked me, while Frank was making our omelettes, if I wanted to come with her to Midnight Mass. She said she was as lapsed a Catholic as it was possible to be, but she didn’t feel right not going on Christmas Eve, and I agreed. She warned me that Frank wouldn’t come.
I don’t think she’d realised that there was a difference between her going to Midnight Mass on her own and her saying that ‘we’ were going to Midnight Mass. He was obviously put out about it, though he wouldn’t own up. We begged him to come along, but of course that wasn’t the point. He should have been asked first. Finally he said he was going for a training run. Never mind that he’d been half asleep over his beer half an hour earlier.
It turned out that Frank was an exercise nut in between attempts to drink and smoke his way to oblivion. Now he pulled on his Dunlop Green Flash tennis shoes, which everyone understood in those days were the mark of the committed athlete, did a couple of stretches and toe-touches, and went out into the night. This was apparently his favourite way of working off a hangover, just as a joint was part of his winding-down routine. Smoking and drinking were known to be unhealthy, but the experiments that young people conduct on themselves are invariably designed to prove the immortality they assumed as first premise. What’s a flawed methodology between friends?
It was strange to be joining a congregation at the very Catholic Church whose off-kilter bells had haunted my insomnia from the first week of my first term. I might have enjoyed it if I hadn’t been worrying about the domestic tensions of the household I was installed in.
I had Frank and Shirley’s bed, while they slept on a pile of cushions. For extra warmth they zipped me up in a sleeping bag. Just as I was slipping off to sleep I thought there was a moment when the silence between them lost its sharp edges and became tender, but I didn’t have a lot to go on.
Shirley brought me breakfast in bed on Christmas morning. Hot chocolate followed by tomato soup — a rather harrowing transition for the taste buds, but effective in boosting body heat. I particularly remember from that morning a gesture Shirley made with her hand, like the one furtive smokers use to hide their cigarettes, except that (unflappable hostess) she was unobtrusively plucking from my sleeping bag a wandering slug, cupping it out of sight in her palm. I realised that this gastropod was a bit of a rarity, since the ones that don’t die in the autumn usually hibernate, but even so it didn’t rank highly as a Christmas present, despite the trail of mucous tinsel it left behind on the nylon facing of the sleeping-bag. Oh Maya, you shouldn’t have!