by Jonathan Coe
Sure enough, as I was stooping to examine the other virgin packages, I heard a voice from upstairs, screaming in anger. Soon my mother’s footsteps hammered down the stairs. The front door opened and slammed, and then, standing up, I saw her furious, diminutive figure crossing the snow-covered forecourt of our house, heading towards the smaller garage. She was still wearing her pyjamas. A few seconds later, the Volkswagen reversed out across the forecourt and tore off down the empty snow-covered street with a belch of exhaust smoke. When it had gone, the house seemed eerily silent.
This was not looking good.
‘I think we should open them. I really do,’ said my brother.
‘Shut up, Jo,’ I said.
‘We leave them as they are,’ said my father.
With a sigh of impatience, Joseph turned away from the still-untouched circle of presents. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. We had forgone Christmas lunch: instead, Dad had taken three TV dinners out of the freezer. Now the winter light was beginning to fade.
‘What about a walk before it gets dark?’ Dad said, with strained brightness.
‘Do you know how cold it is out there?’ said Joseph.
‘We can’t do that,’ I protested. ‘She might come back.’
‘I still think you should phone the police,’ said Joseph.
‘There’s no need,’ he answered. ‘She said she was going to do something like this. She’ll be back. Sooner or later.’
The television shows I watched that Christmas are stamped on my memory. When we had first arrived in Canada, I can remember writing letters to my school friends back in London, all starting with the same sentence: ‘We’ve got colour television!!!’ The excitement of it had almost outweighed, for a short while, the heartbreak of leaving my friends behind. But then, when Christmas came around, nothing made me more achingly homesick than the realization that all those treasured programmes had been replaced by unfamiliar ones: instead of Christmas Night with the Stars, we got the Bob Hope Christmas Special; instead of Billy Smart’s Circus, we got a cartoon version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. That Christmas, though – the one when my mother disappeared – I now remember as the Christmas I fell in love with American television. While the unopened presents continued to stare back at me mockingly from beneath the tree, I snuggled up next to Dad on the sofa and we watched the special Christmas episodes of The Doris Day Show and The Ghost and Mrs Muir. We dozed in front of our fake-log fire to the narcotic strains of Perry Como at the Hollywood Palace. And we nibbled our way steadily through the thirty-six perfect pecan butter tarts that Mum had finished making just before midnight on Christmas Eve, and had left behind for us in the fridge.
At about five o’clock on Boxing Day, Joseph stomped into the room, slap in the middle of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and went over to the tree.
‘This is bloody ridiculous,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough.’
He grabbed the neck of his guitar and roughly tore the wrapping paper off. Dad stared at him but said nothing. Joseph came over and, putting his arm around Dad, gave him a brusque hug.
‘Thanks for the present,’ he said. ‘Just the one I wanted.’
He took the guitar upstairs to his bedroom and a few minutes later we heard a strangulated version of ‘Paperback Writer’ leaking through the floorboards. Dad gave me a friendly grimace and stooped forward to turn up the volume on the TV.
The next morning, the three of us finally left the house. I still wasn’t used to the cold in this town – coming from London, where anything below freezing had usually kept us indoors, the Canadian temperatures seemed simply unreal – but I was determined to go tobogganing, even if it was just for a few minutes.
The hill above Rotary Park was our chosen spot. From here you had a clear view of the river, spanned by the sweeping, frosty grandeur of Broadway Bridge. The first time I’d seen it, this view had taken my breath away: I’d grown more used to it lately, but still, there was a part of my thirteen-year-old self that regarded our very presence here as a kind of miracle. Today, under a crystalline blue sky, with the parkland submerged beneath rolling waves of pristine snow, my home town (and perhaps it was the first time I had called it that) seemed the most beautiful place on earth.
I was the first one to take the toboggan down the slope; after that, Jo and I took it in turns. My sixth or seventh ride was the longest and most successful yet. I skidded right down almost to the river’s edge, and found myself faced with a long trudge back to the top of the hill. I had nearly got there when, looking up, I saw my mother. She was standing on the ridge, wearing her long black coat, the winter sun behind her, turning her hair into a blazing halo of gold. She was a small woman – tiny, even – but you could feel, today, the energy that she radiated, the compounds of emotion so tautly concentrated in this slight figure. I let go of the toboggan and ran towards her, looking up into her face, which was wearing the smile I had come to associate with the best of her – a smile of brittle, effortful love; a love which would never come naturally, no matter how often she tried to will it into being.
She took me in her arms. ‘Happy Christmas, darling,’ she said.
It was a few seconds before I could speak.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Oh, just having a break. You know how it is.’
I didn’t. But I was too brimful of joy to say so.
‘Where are Dad and Jo?’
‘They’ve already gone home in the big car. Come on, let’s go and join them. I’d better put that turkey in the oven.’
And so we resumed our family Christmas. As usual, the four of us managed to act as though nothing had happened. Wherever she had been, whatever she had done, for the rest of that holiday my mother was in tremendous spirits. She cooked us an impeccable Christmas lunch, even if it was two days late. Somewhere on her travels, she had even bought Dad a bonus present – a selection of six eight-track cartridges: Brahms, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all his favourites. The lovely, mysterious box with my name on the label turned out to contain a pair of ice skates, which I tried out that afternoon at the Meewasin rink. As for my brother … Although he and my father must have driven home from Rotary Park in a tremendous rush, allowing them ten or fifteen minutes to rewrap the guitar, it was obvious that my mother wasn’t fooled. She didn’t say anything at the time, but when he feigned his delight and hugged his thanks, there was a glint in her eye that I recognized, and knew not to trust. He would suffer for this, sooner or later. Which meant that we all would. But in the meantime, I had my mother back, and my happiness was complete.
Author’s Note
Three of these stories – ‘9th and 13th’, ‘V.O.’ and ‘Ivy and Her Nonsense’ – originally appeared in the collection 9th and 13th (Penguin, 2005), and its French counterpart, Désaccords imparfaits (Gallimard, 2012). At the time I said that they represented my lifetime’s output of short stories but this was not strictly true: a little wisp of a thing called ‘Loggerheads’ was also sitting on an unviewed floppy disk, and although it’s not exactly substantial I do have a fondness for it, so I’ve decided to include it here. And then, just a few weeks ago, I was clearing out a storage cupboard when I came across a box of old manuscripts, including a story I had forgotten writing: it’s called ‘Leiden’, and must date from 1987 or 1988. I can see that it’s full of youthful faults, but – to me at least – there’s still something atmospheric about it, and the consensus among those with whom I shared it was that it deserved resurrection. The central figure of Thea, incidentally, bears no relation to the character of that name from The Rain Before It Falls.
The two other stories in this collection, ‘Pentatonic’ and ‘Rotary Park’, were written in 2012, commissioned by Penguin and the Sunday Telegraph respectively. Like ‘Ivy and Her Nonsense’ they are self-contained stories that also function as sketches, fragments, of a much larger project called Unrest, in which I aim to trace the history of a fictional middle-class Midlands family throughout the twentieth century. My
novels The Rain Before It Falls and Expo 58 are also part of this project and, who knows, there may be a handful of readers out there who have read these books attentively enough to see some of the connections. What form the final sequence will take I’m not yet sure.
For the help they gave me in choosing and assembling this collection I would like to thank Tony Lacey, Tony Peake, Ellie Smith and especially Sarah Coward.
Jonathan Coe
December 2013
THE BEGINNING
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These short stories first published as an electronic edition in Penguin Books 2014
Copyright © Jonathan Coe, 2014
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ISBN: 978-0-241-96902-1
