Ten to midnight, and there was a man on the telly with blond crimped hair like a woman singing a song called ‘The Final Countdown’. Not a good song, in fact I thought it was a really bad song, but I knew, because Donald was humming and tapping his feet on the rug in front of the gas-fire, that the tune was going to stick in my head for days.
Barbara had called me down when the buffet had been prepared and primped and spread over the coffee table. You didn’t know if you were supposed to eat it or take a picture of it. The tomatoes had shrunk, and sat on tea plates in their puddles of leaked rosy fluid.
‘Well, this is nice, isn’t it?’ Barbara said, and patted her knees. There was a stack of green napkins with golden bells on them. A pile of them – as if this was a proper party – and she’d folded the one on the top into a fan. So much effort.
I looked at the Christmas tree, stripped of all the crackers and foil-wrapped chocolate bells. About now, I thought, looking at the clock and imagining spray cans full of silly string, and pearl-coloured balloons filled with white and silver confetti. Everyone would be kissing everyone else on the stroke of midnight – Chloe and the friends of the family and the limited amount of alcohol. All the adults would be so wrecked she’d have no problem sneaking out to meet Carl either. I imagined their mouths going like fish – the moist chomping I heard whenever they forgot I was there. At least there’d have been the cousins to talk to. Donald rubbed my head, grinned at me and turned back to the television.
‘Na, na na na,’ he was singing now, under his breath. ‘I’ve never danced to this one.’
Barbara yawned and got up.
‘I’d better empty the bins. Give the cooker top a once-over. Shan’t be two ticks.’
She was tipsy. Her lips were soft and her words were frayed at the edges and blurring into each other. It was a kind of tradition with Barbara, a family custom she was trying to pass on to me. Not getting tipsy, because even though it was New Year’s Eve, I hadn’t even been allowed a sip. No. Getting clean.
The house had to be totally clean on the strike of midnight, something to do with throwing away all the muck of the past year and making sure you go into the new one clean and new. When I was little I always used to have a bath and my fingernails cut before the bells, always had to be inspected and passed: new Christmas pyjamas that had to be fresh on, fresh from the packet that evening. But the cleaning was a laugh, because Donald was sitting there in a crumpled shirt stained with tomato soup and with smudges of black marker pen on his fingers.
Barbara was emptying the pedal bin in the kitchen and calling through to us. The man on the television leaned over his microphone and shook his hair over his face.
‘I’m just taking this out to the wheelie,’ she said. ‘I won’t be a minute.’
I moved from my cushion on the floor in front of the television and sat on the sofa next to Donald. I had to squeeze myself through the small gap between his knees and the coffee table, which was groaning with saucers of crackers and cheese on sticks and little dishes of pickled onions. Curly strips of cucumber and the special tomatoes. They looked like wet, fleshy roses. Vol-au-vents had prawns sticking out of the top like they were trying to somersault their way out onto the carpet, and I didn’t blame them.
Hardly anything had been eaten, and I looked at it for a second, looked at the little bottle of sherry and the two tiny gold-rimmed glasses that were only used once a year. What that is, is pathetic, I thought. Not even sparkling wine. I took a handful of the things on the table and shoved them into my mouth one by one, pushing something more in every time I swallowed. It took a few minutes, but it made the table look more respectable.
‘Can I have a beer, Dad? Seeing as it’s New Year?’
Donald looked blankly at the television. The song had changed and I knew that one. It was Prince, or the Artist Formerly Known As, or whatever, singing something about ‘partying like it’s 1999’. I didn’t think it was funny, or entertaining, or even ironic.
‘Best not, love,’ he said after a while, when I’d already thought he was going to ignore me. ‘Your mother wouldn’t like it.’
‘It’s New Year, though,’ I said. ‘Chloe’s parents let her drink on special occasions. They say it stops you being an alcoholic when you’re older.’
‘Do they,’ he said blandly. He looked away from the tele vision and let his eyes rest on the coffee table.
‘Do you want something to eat, Dad? Shall I get you a plate? You never had much tea, did you?’
Donald looked at the things on the table as if he wasn’t sure if they were food or Christmas tree ornaments. I started talking, not realising how much I sounded like Barbara until I’d stopped.
‘I’ll just go in and get you a plate, and you can sit with it on your knee and pick at it here and there if you fancy it. It looks a lot, laid out like that, doesn’t it?’ I got up. I carried on from the kitchen, ‘You should think of it like your supper.’
I was getting a plate from the drainer when I saw the green glass bottle on the side near the cooker.
It isn’t fair that I’m not even allowed a little bit to drink on New Year’s Eve, I thought. It’s taking away my human rights. It could be argued that taking away someone’s basic human rights is a form of mental or emotional abuse.
The striplight was on in the kitchen and the curtains were open: the back garden was nothing behind the kitchen window because it was dark outside, pitch black and hailing in tapping gusts that came and went, and Barbara was still out there messing about with the wheelie bin. And probably getting an ideal view of me in here with a plate in my hand, eyeing up the booze and leaving my father to his own devices. I went back into the sitting room, loaded up the plate, sat down.
‘Cheese gives me nightmares,’ Donald said, and I was about to tell him that I knew the book where that came from because we had to read it in English in the last week of school, and all write essays about it. And it was all right, because it was a kind of Christmassy book and got everyone in the mood, and I did well on that essay too, so it would be a safe thing to bring up. And sometimes Donald liked to hear about interesting facts like that.
The picture on the television changed quickly, from the music programme to the adverts. The first picture was bright yellow because it was an advert for summer-smelling washing powder, and the shock of it in his eyes must have startled Donald because he moved slightly and the plate tipped and the cheese cubes fell onto his lap and some of them bounced onto the rug. I was going to have to clean all that up and where was Barbara, who had been out with that bin in the hailstones for about a million years?
I didn’t move to collect the food from the carpet, and Donald didn’t acknowledge it even though some of it still rested in the creases of his shirt and trousers.
‘Some weather we’re having, eh?’
I nodded. ‘Hail every day for a week, apart from Christmas Day. Did you put a bet on this year?’
‘Yes, same as usual. And it’s not a white Christmas, no matter how white it is, unless there’s a flake falling in London on Christmas Day itself.’
‘What’s so good about London?’
‘It’s where the weather’s measured. It only counts as weather if it snows down south.’
When neither of us was speaking, you could hear the hail battering against the windows.
‘It even snows under the sea, you know,’ Donald said.
That was the thing with my dad – half of the things he said sounded as if they couldn’t possibly be true, and you’d be an idiot for believing them.
Barbara came in then, round lumps of hail in her hair, which was clipped up in some kind of roll on the back of her head. I got up quick, and gestured towards Donald and the lumps of cheese.