Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

by Jeanette Winterson

  ‘The Chinese destroyed the original Rongbuk Monastery in the Cultural Revolution back in ’74, didn’t they?’

  Sandy wasn’t listening to me. He was on his knees searching in his knapsack, his big body curled over like a child’s. ‘I have lost my ice axe.’

  I knew I had to get out now. I stood up to put on my coat. My feet were numb. I was colder than I realised. The room was slowly petrifying. Whitening. The warm tones of polished wood had bleached, like a bone in the sun, like a body left on a mountainside. The fire had gone out, its ash a mountain of its own, grey and useless. The curtains looked like sheets of ice framing the frosted window.

  I was shivering now. The back of my neck felt wet. The pink velvet chair was spotting darker. As Sandy kneeled I saw his khaki shirt had snowflakes on it. Frightening. Beautiful. Can they be the same thing? It had begun to snow inside the room.

  ‘Sandy! Get your jacket. Come with me.’

  His eyes were such a pale blue.

  The wind started up. Like the snow, the wind was inside the room. The wind was raising and dropping the lid of the leather suitcase on the floor. The room was rattling. The wind blew out the candles on the mantelshelf. The oil lamp was still alight but the clear flame was faltering now, and the inside of the glass canopy was fogging with carbon dioxide. The air in the room is too thin. The wind is blowing but there is no air. Sandy was standing motionless by the window.

  ‘Sandy! Come on!’

  ‘May I kiss you?’

  Absurd. We’re about to die and he wants to kiss me. I don’t know why, but I went towards him. I put my hand on his chest, stood on tiptoe, as he bent his head. I will never forget that feeling of his lips, the burning cold of his lips. As I opened my mouth, just a little, he breathed in through his mouth, like I was an oxygen cylinder – that was the picture in my mind.

  He breathed in and I felt my lungs contract with the force of the air rushing out of me. His hand was on my hip, gently, resting there, so cold, so cold. And now my lips were burning too.

  I pulled away, gasping for air, my lungs ballooning with the effort. He was less pale now, his cheeks stung with colour. He said, ‘Hold on to the rope.’

  I was at the door. I had to use both hands to get it open against the drift of snow piled against it. I half-ran, half-fell down the steep stairs, stumbling in the dark. I found my way, somehow, back to the main part of the hotel. I had to get help.

  The bar was closed. The library where we had been sitting after dinner was deserted. The fire had long since gone out. I ran through into the lobby. The nightman was on the desk. He seemed surprised to see me. I said, ‘Where is everyone?’

  He raised his eyebrows and spread his hands. ‘It is four-forty in the morning, madam. The hotel is in bed.’

  I had hardly been gone an hour. But this was not the time to argue. ‘The young man who’s staying in the old part of the hotel – he’s going to freeze to death.’

  ‘There is no one in the old part of the hotel, madam.’

  ‘Yes! Through the door at the end of the library – I’ll show you!’

  The nightman picked up his keys and his torch and came with me. We went back through the library to the door in the panelling. I turned the handle. The door didn’t open. I was pumping the handle up and down, shaking it. ‘Open it! Open it!’ The nightman gently put a hand on my arm.

  ‘That is not a door, madam; it is for the decoration only.’

  ‘But there is a staircase on the other side. A room – I’m telling you, I was there!’

  The nightman shook his head, smiling. ‘We can look again in the morning, perhaps. May I escort you to your own room?’

  He thinks I’m drunk. He thinks I’m crazy.

  I went to my bedroom. 5am. I lay down wide-awake and woke with a start, the sun on my face, slanting through the open blinds. Outside I could hear the noise and bustle of the day. And I was in agony.

  I looked in the mirror. My lips were frostbitten.

  I showered, changed, coated my lips in Vaseline and went downstairs. Some of our party were standing in the lobby with their skis. ‘Hey! What happened to you last night? You just disappeared!’

  Mike was there. ‘Did you see a ghost?’

  General laughter.

  I asked Mike to come with me. First we went to the door in the panelling.

  ‘It’s faux,’ said Mike. ‘For the olde-worlde look.’

  I made him come outside with me, around the back, where the window should have been.

  But there was no window. I tried to explain. I was babbling like a fool. The kiss. The rope. Everest. The boy was going to climb Everest. Mike’s face changed. ‘Come and talk to Fabrice,’ he said.

  Fabrice was in his office surrounded by paperwork and coffee cups. He did not seem surprised by anything I said. When I had finished he nodded, glancing first at Mike, and then at me.

  ‘It is not the first time this young man has been seen on the mountain, but it is the first time he has been seen at the hotel. The room you describe – it used to exist, nearly a hundred years ago; look, I will show you the photographs.’

  There was the Palace Hotel in the early days of the Alps tours. A party of men holding wooden skis stood outside, smiling. Fabrice pointed them out with his pen.

  ‘Sir Henry Lunn. His son, Arnold Lunn . . . ’

  As he was talking I interrupted. ‘That’s him! That’s Sandy.’

  ‘Voilà,’ said Fabrice. ‘That is Mr Andrew Irvine. You know the name perhaps?’

  Mike’s voice was low and not steady. ‘The guy who climbed Everest with George Mallory?’

  ‘That is the one. Irvine and Mallory failed to return from their attempt to reach the summit on June 8th 1924. Unlike Mallory, Irvine’s body has never been found.’

  ‘And he stayed here,’ I said.

  ‘As you see. Staying in a third-class room in the hotel. He was a remarkable young man. Born in 1902. A gifted mechanic and engineer. The story goes that Mallory chose him as his partner for the final fatal climb because only Irvine could fix the oxygen cylinders.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘No one knows. Mallory’s body was not found until 1999, the rope still round his waist.’

  Suddenly I can see Sandy, in the white-out. ‘Hold on to the rope!’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing.’

  We were silent, all three. What can you say?

  Eventually Fabrice spoke. ‘Irvine’s ice axe was found in 1933. No clues since. But if they do find his body some day, there’ll be a camera round his neck, and the people at Kodak say it is likely that the film will be able to be developed. So perhaps we will know if Mallory and Irvine reached the summit of Everest.’

  I took my broken watch out of my pocket and put it on the desk. ‘That’s strange,’ said Fabrice. ‘Mallory’s watch was found in his pocket, broken. Broken perhaps at the moment when time stopped for him.’

  ‘Look at this,’ said Mike. He handed me his iPad.

  And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.

  George Mallory. New York City. 1923

  Like everyone else I douse my spirit in materiality, weight my ankles like a deep-sea diver. Refuse the call, because to answer it would be to live in the see-through air, to step off the mountain, to go and not come back.

  The overwhelming fires of existence.

  And the snow is falling round them. And the sky is over their heads. And in their eyes the old stars, lighting cold and bleak, in different skies.

  or the holiday season last year my wife, Susie Orbach, was thinking about preparing her usual feast.

  I said, ‘Why don’t I cook this year?’ She looked horrified.

  Susie
is an excellent cook. When we met I was an enthusiastic cook, but I soon realised that she didn’t want to eat any of my food – roasts, stews, pies, casseroles, sausage and mash, that kind of thing. I bought a Yiddish dictionary to find out what goyishe chazerai meant.

  Our friend, the Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie was visiting Susie and me that December, and I asked her about Christmas in Karachi, her home city of twenty-five million people. She told me a wonderful story, heard on American news, about the great support for the Taliban in Karachi, as evidenced by stick-on Taliban beards being sold at traffic lights.

  Kamila had called a friend in Karachi to verify this interesting detail – it turned out that the beards in question were the usual Santa Claus beards popular at the time of year.

  Kamila Shamsie is many things, including a wonderful writer, and she diplomatically managed the shoot-out between Susie and me last Christmas by offering to cook her own Pakistani version of a Christmas-time meal.

  Not to be left out, I made pheasant casserole from the Mary Berry Aga cookbook. I am glad to say that lots of our guests ate it, but there is no doubt that Kamila’s turkey – don’t call it curry – was the best.

  This recipe came out of our discussion about fruit in main courses (see my recipe for mulled wine on page 193). As ­Kamila said, ‘The British colonised half the world and still ate boiled ­cabbage.’

  So for those of you who like dried fruit and fresh spices and have too much turkey on your hands, try this – reproduced by kind permission of the cook.

  Kamila says: Turkeys are not birds you’re likely to see in Pakistan so I can’t explain why there were two of them at a farm in Punjab, which belonged to family friends, that Christmas in 1980 when I was seven years old.

  The first turkey made its way to our plates on the day my parents and sister and I arrived, and, having never seen it in living form, I had no qualms about eating it – roasted, ‘English-style’. But the next day five of us – my sister and I and the three siblings of the family we were staying with – heard an extraordinary noise, which we followed to an even more extraordinary sight: a puffed-up beast, all feathers and wattle and beak. We named him Aha!. (There were also, on the farm, two ducks whom we had named Déjà Vu and Voulez-Vous. We didn’t speak French but there was a café, recently opened, in Karachi named Déjà Vu and we all knew the ABBA song ‘Voulez-Vous’. And because the chorus of that song went ‘Voulez-vous . . . aha!’ it gave us the name for the turkey.)

  This Aha! was soon discovered to have a characteristic that provided us with endless delight: if you raised your voice and spoke or sang to him in tones of a certain pitch he would reply, in ‘Turkish’, for exactly the length of time that you had addressed him. ‘Voulez-vous . . . aha!’ we would sing. ‘Gurgle gobble yip,’ he’d reply. ‘The hussy! – Ought to be ashamed of herself!’ we’d say (a favourite line from the musical ‘Oklahoma!’). ‘Gurgle yip gobble yip-bark gobble gurgle,’ sent back the turkey.

  This story doesn’t end well, of course.

  One day, Aha! disappeared. ‘He’s run away with a wild turkey,’ we were told and, to give this story credence, children and adults set off to try and find him. ‘A wild-turkey chase,’ we all cried out as we set off on foot, and in Jeeps, past the cotton fields and sugar-cane fields and orange groves and onto the sand dunes, which mysteriously bordered the verdant farm.

  Aha! was never found, and it wasn’t until well into adulthood that two of the children who had been on the farm told me the terrible, inescapable truth: Aha! hadn’t eloped romantically into the desert; he had ended up on a chopping block.

  But what happened after that?

  ‘We ate the turkey that night,’ the siblings insisted, and continue to insist.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We had turkey the first night, before we knew Aha!. I wouldn’t have held on to the turkey-elopement story for all these years if he’d appeared on our plates for dinner.’

  Looking back, I can only surmise that we must have eaten the turkey in disguise. At the end of that day of searching, something would have appeared on our plates, presented as chicken, and I would have munched down on it thinking the darker flavour was the taste of my sorrow.

  I dislike a plot with holes and so I’m compelled to imagine that in-disguise meal of Aha!.

  I like to think it was turkey biryani.

  That seems a fitting send-off for a bird of panache, one who offered so much by way of delight – down to the last morsel.

  Overleaf you will find my left-over turkey biryani recipe (gobble gobble gobblegobble).

  YOU NEED

  Left-over turkey, diced (or if you want to start from scratch, roast a couple of turkey legs and then chop up the meat into cubes. The skin you can discard or devour as you choose – fowl skin never finds its way into Pakistani cooking.). I’ll suggest 500 g, but really it depends how much turkey meat you have left. You can adjust other quantities in this recipe as need be.

  500 g rice. Only basmati will do. Please believe me on this point. (I use Tilda.)

  2 large onions, chopped finely

  1 tablespoon grated ginger

  3 garlic cloves, crushed

  Red chopped chilli or 1 teaspoon chilli powder (or more, depending on your tastebuds)

  1 teaspoon turmeric powder

  1 teaspoon salt (can be adjusted, as can all ingredients here, to suit your particular needs/desires)

  8 green cardamom pods

  6 cloves

  1 teaspoon whole black pepper

  1 cinnamon stick

  1 tablespoon coriander seed

  3 medium tomatoes, diced

  100 ml milk (if feeling extravagant – and why not? – infuse a little saffron in the milk when you start preparing the biryani)

  Handful of large raisins (optional)

  Handful of cashew nuts (optional)

  Method

  Do this well ahead of time, if it makes life easier:

  Rinse the rice until the water runs clear. Place in a pan and add 500 ml water. Cook on a high-ish heat until the water is absorbed (approx 8-10 minutes). The rice should be parboiled. If you think the rice is cooking too fast and the water hasn’t been completely absorbed, just strain out the excess water. I get the rice-to-water quantity right about two times out of three – possibly because I don’t actually measure out the water before placing it in the pan. The parboiling is what matters most here – if you press down on a grain of rice it should be mostly yielding, but with a hard centre. Fluff it all up with a fork to prevent the rice kernels from sticking together as it cools.

  In a separate pan, cook the onions over a high heat until they are golden brown. This is an important step. The heat should really be high and nothing less than golden brown will do. Of course, you’ll need a generous quantity of oil so that the onions don’t stick to the bottom. Remove a tablespoon of the fried onions and set aside to use for garnish later.

  Add all the spices to the onions that remain in the pan. Stir them about for a minute or two – they should start to release a fantastic fragrance. (Not everyone loves the fragrance of frying onions and spices – one way to counter it is to place a stick of cinnamon on the stove in boiling water. That will absorb the scent.) Add the diced tomatoes to the spice mix, and turn down the heat to low. Cook until the tomatoes and spices form a thick paste (you may need to add a tiny bit of water if the mixture appears to be sticking to the pan). This should take 15-20 minutes (trust your eyes more than you trust the timing I’m giving you).

  Add the turkey and cook for around 10 minutes, still on a low heat, so it can absorb the flavours.

  If necessary at the end, turn the heat up high for a few minutes to absorb any excess liquid.

  Do this 40 minutes before you’re ready to serve:

  Grease a casserole dish. Spoon a third of the rice onto the bottom of the dish. Sprinkle milk on to
p. Layer half the spiced turkey mix on the rice. Add another layer of rice. Sprinkle milk on top. Add the rest of the spiced turkey. Then cover with the remaining rice. Sprinkle milk, the fried onions you had set aside and a generous quantity of shredded coriander leaves on top. Cover with foil or a lid. Place in the oven at 180°C for about half an hour, maybe slightly more.

  Final optional step – depending on how deeply you’ve been scarred by fruit and nuts DONE WRONG in Christmas food:

  Fry the raisins in a little oil until they swell up. Set aside. Fry cashews for a minute or so.

  Before serving the turkey biryani, scatter the raisins and cashews on top.

  THE SILVER FROG

  rs Reckitt’s Establishment for Orphans was preparing to celebrate Christmas.

  In the spacious entrance hall stood a mighty spruce tree soon to be decorated with impressive ornaments.

  On the front door hung a holly wreath the size of a lifebelt. That the front door was black was perhaps unfortunate, as the combination of the sombre colour and the wintry wreath had something of the funeral parlour about it.

  Yet the brass knocker was polished to a shine and the brisk bell-pull gleamed for visitors. And visitors there were: the great and good of Soot Town were coming to Christmas dinner.

  Soot Town had paid for the dinner, in honour of the day, and in charity towards the poor, parentless children who had taken shelter under Mrs Reckitt’s ample wings.

  Had she been a bird it is unlikely that Mrs Reckitt could have flown far – or indeed flown at all – for in most respects Mrs Reckitt resembled a giant turkey. Not a wild turkey. No. A bred bronze bird with a substantial breast, a folded neck, a small head and legs – but no one had ever seen Mrs Reckitt’s legs, the fashion of the times being for concealment. Suffice to say that her legs, assuming she had them, were of the turkey type. That is, not designed for travel.

  If in most respects the lady resembled the celebrated bird of the Christmas feast, in one singular respect she bore another resemblance.

  Mrs Reckitt had the face of a crocodile. Her jaw was long, her mouth was wide. Large teeth lurked inside it. Her eyes were small and crêped and protruded from her face with an expression of watchful murderousness. The skin on her neck and décolletage had more of handbag than human about it. But she was not green. No, Mrs Reckitt was not green. She was pink.