by India Knight
‘I bought some when we came here when I was little, do you remember, Kate?’ says Evie. ‘I felt so sorry for them. They pack them into those awful tiny cages, all stacked on top of each other.’
‘I remember having to smuggle them into Britain,’ says Kate. ‘In my handbag. I think they were illegal at the time, tortoises.’
‘And Daddy was furious,’ says Flo. ‘And you said fine, you were going to take them out of your handbag and leave them to roam about the airport. Do you remember? And then he refused to sit with us.’
‘He feared arrest, the fool. Anyway, they absolutely loved Notting Hill, those tortoises,’ says Kate. ‘They thrived on west London soil.’
‘What happened to them?’ I ask.
‘They wandered off to hibernate and we never saw them again,’ says Kate. ‘Such is the way of tortoises. They have wild, ancient souls. Very spiritual beasts.’
‘Aye,’ says Pat. ‘You’re not wrong. They’re that wise. You can tell by their faces.’
Dinner now starts arriving in earnest, dish after dish of it in enormous quantities, not least because half the table is vegetarian and half isn’t and so the already generous quantities of food are doubled.
‘This is the most food I’ve ever seen in my life,’ says Pat. ‘It’s like a foreign wedding.’
‘Please don’t sniff it all,’ I say, trying to make my voice sound pleasant and amused, but tormenting my napkin at the very thought of it.
‘It smells nice,’ Pat concedes, mercifully sniffing the air rather than the table. ‘But I’ll just be having some plain chicken for my main. Your mum organized it for me. Thanks for that, Kate,’ she says.
‘You’re welcome, but you’re really missing out,’ says Kate. ‘And I don’t know how good your mashed potatoes will be – they’re hardly the national dish. That méchoui smells so fantastic that even I’m tempted to try it. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a taste? It’s roast lamb, except over charcoals, and cooked for hours and hours. There’s nothing overwhelmingly … complicated about it.’
‘Ooh, no,’ says Pat. ‘I wouldn’t fancy that. You don’t know where the lamb’s come from, do you?’
‘Its mother the sheep, one expects,’ says Kate.
‘Imagine it’s barbecued,’ says Sam. ‘Which it kind of is.’
‘No thank you,’ says Pat.
‘Imagine the barbecue is at home, in someone’s back garden,’ says Kate.
‘Oh,’ Pat laughs. ‘You’d never get anything like this back home.’
‘But that’s precisely why we’d all love you to try it,’ Kate persists. ‘And the tajines … try the tajines. They’re just meat and vegetables, Pat. Stew. Barbecued lamb and stew and some salads. Perhaps if you imagined them being carried to the barbecue by overweight ladies with ham-like arms, clutching Tupperware and speaking English? Do you see? It’s perfectly normal food, except nicer. Live a little.’
‘I don’t like the look of those wee yellow seeds,’ Pat says, eying up a bowl of couscous with mistrust.
‘They’re grains,’ says Flo. ‘Like rice, but not.’
‘And anyway,’ Pat says, looking coyly down at her abdomen, ‘I have a delicate stomach. I don’t want to be getting diarrhoea from foreign food. Tumtum ow,’ she adds for the benefit of Fatima, who is hovering nearby with more plates. ‘Bad lavvy.’
‘How absolutely revolting,’ says Kate. ‘Please don’t update us on your gastric anxieties while we’re eating, Pat.’
‘I just like plain food,’ says Pat, patting her stomach. ‘Plain food is best, for me.’
‘I despair of you,’ says Kate, but she says it in such a way that Pat smiles at her companionably. I don’t. It really irritates the crap out of me, this food thing – not just the sniffing (though, God, the sniffing) but the reluctance to try anything new. Is that wrong of me? Is it culturally insensitive, unattractively prejudiced towards the simple, plain foods of the British Isles? I don’t know. But it gets on my nerves. I want to shout ‘IT’S NOT MADE OF POO!’ about every dish Pat refuses with a wince and an unintelligible phrase in her weird new language (‘Mercy no, yucka eat’). The food spread out before us on the table is so appetizing – and so delicious – that it would test the mettle of a gastric-banded hunger-striker. And she literally won’t try a single mouthful of it. Her loss, but it’s pretty maddening; also she’s a woman in her sixties.
Actually I think that deep down Pat would probably like to try it, or some of it, but the ‘your food versus my food’ thing has become such an issue over the years, such a significant statement about herself – it basically means ‘I’ll go along with your middle-class lifestyle, but only up to a point’ – that she couldn’t even if she wanted to. It’s a line that she’s drawn in the sand. At least she’s stopped turning up at my house with a whole suitcase of ‘her’ food – fizzy drinks, tinned pies, crinkled oven chips stacked in a giant cool-bag, plastic bread, crisps, cans of mince. She did this for three years, until she could be sure that I wasn’t going to make her eat anything ‘weird’ or, God forbid, ‘foreign’ (curries are considered British), and that I was familiar with the concept of the crisp. Imagine it the other way around: me going up to her house with a couple of bottles of Sauvignon Blanc, some vegetables, pasta, yogurt, salad, all because I considered her food so alarming that I didn’t want to put it in my mouth over the few days I was staying. I mean, rude to the nth degree. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she wouldn’t be offended at all. And at least with the chicken and mash that’s now placed before her by saintly Fatima, there is only one plate to be sniffed. Pat duly raises it to her nose, inhales deeply and sets in down again.
‘No spices, nothing,’ says Fatima, looking a bit baffled. ‘Like Madame ask.’ I wonder if she maybe thinks Pat is a tragic, and possibly insane, invalid.
‘Lovely fresh smell,’ says Pat.
‘How’s everyone back home, Ma? Did you get a chance to speak to them?’ asks Sam.
‘I had a quick word,’ says Pat. ‘I’ll call again in the morning to wish them a merry Christmas.’
‘Are they all okay?’ I ask.
‘They’re fine,’ says Pat. ‘Tony’s a bit down, you know, because of the time of year, but he’ll be all right.’
‘Oh God, is that still not sorted?’ I say, not altogether kindly. But I know what conversation we’re about to have next and I don’t much care for it: it makes me feel like the late Michael Jackson, tearing at my clothing with misery and wailing about how we must all think of the Earth’s children. The problem is that, where Pat comes from, if men and women separate acrimoniously and they have children together, it is an accepted fact that one of them will behave like a bastard: there’s no attempt made at imagining what things would be like if both people behaved – or could be persuaded to behave – well. What drives me mad about it is that it’s so resigned: all the platitudes come out – ‘He lives for that kid,’ and so on – but no one ever seems interested in helping to nudge things in the right direction. So for instance if the father – Sam’s brother Tony, in this case – is denied access to said child by a still-angry wife and for no good reason, it is taken as a given that that’s quite simply that: the unhappy status quo is now how things are, and nothing can be done to challenge it.
‘It’s a shame, so it is,’ says Pat. ‘You should see the presents Tony’s got for him. Trucks and everything. Lego.’
Every time we have this conversation, I tell myself that I need to keep my mouth shut next time. And every time I fail, because I say:
‘Why doesn’t he just take them round?’
‘He’s tried for the past two years. She wouldn’t let him in,’ says Pat.
‘He’ll never know if he doesn’t try again,’ I say. ‘This might be the year she regains her sanity.’
‘It’s not that simple,’ Sam says. ‘She wants to punish him.’
‘Actually, it is that simple. It is unbelievably simple. If she’s behaving that badly, he goes back to court. I bet you ev
en a lawyer’s letter would do it.’
‘He doesn’t want to go to court,’ Pat says. ‘All that fuss. And they never believe the dad,’ she adds, as though she were, in fact, an expert in family law.
‘I think he’s prematurely defeated,’ I say, immediately resolving to keep my mouth shut next time. ‘I think you all are. Sorry, Pat. But you know how I feel about all this.’
I am, tonight, particularly incensed by the idea of Tony’s little boy being deprived of his dad’s company over Christmas just because his mother is antagonistic. I turn towards Tamsin and Jake, who are engrossed in a shopping conversation with Flo and organizing a visit to the leather souk, where the tanneries stink to high heaven. Pat has turned away and is already tucking into her chicken with gusto and telling Evie about the tortoises.
‘Don’t wind yourself up,’ says Sam.
‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him. ‘It’s not fair on her. Or on Tony. Or on anyone. But it pushes all the wrong buttons. Does it really not occur to a single one of them that this little boy is growing up thinking “Where on earth is my daddy?” – to which the answer is “About a mile down the road”? Or that he’s going to start thinking – if he doesn’t already – “Why doesn’t my daddy want me?” I mean, you know. It’s so demeaningly simple-minded, their approach. It could all be avoided so easily.’
‘You over-identify with this,’ says Sam. ‘Calm down.’
‘Too bloody right I do,’ I say. ‘I can’t help it. It’s very much my … territory, as you know, but that’s not the reason. The reason is that it just sucks and everybody sits around going “Oh dear” and doing nothing about it. They’re not stupid people. What’s the matter with them?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Sam a little bit sadly. ‘Or maybe I do. Patterns. The past. Not doing things differently. They all find it remarkable that you and I still talk. Let’s not go there. Anyway – what about your dad?’
‘My dead dad or my live ex-step-one?’
‘Your dead one.’
‘Well, he died, as you know,’ I say, heaving a sigh. ‘Not long after I had that conversation with Kate about him last Christmas.’
‘Yes, I know that – I mean, where does it leave you?’
‘It leaves me being half an orphan,’ I say. ‘Which is weird. I don’t want to go on about it because it makes me feel a bit fraudulent. It was such a strange situation – us not actually knowing each other. Obviously it would be a million times worse if we had. But I still felt … a bit churned up. Half my DNA, you know? My genetic material. Half of what made me, gone. Never to return. We were destined never to run towards each other in slow motion, weeping with emotion.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know. Thanks. Kate has this stuff – paperwork, something to do with probate coming through – that she’s been trying to show me for a few weeks. But I don’t know that I have the stomach for it. Every time I start thinking about it I feel angry and sad all at the same time.’
‘With Kate?’
‘Not so much any more. Just with things generally. With him, I suppose, for never wanting to even meet me for a drink. With myself, for thinking it didn’t matter.’
‘Perhaps it doesn’t,’ says Robert, who’s swapped places with Pat.
‘I didn’t think it did,’ I say, ‘but I liked the idea of having my options open in case I changed my mind.’
‘Doesn’t work, at our age,’ says Robert.
‘How do you mean?’
‘We’re too old to keep our options open,’ says Robert. ‘We need to act.’
‘Rob! We’re in our early forties. We’re in our prime. What’s got into you?’
‘Yeah. Like I said, too old. We’re at the age where you seriously have to seize the day. Carpe diem and all that. People think it’s a young person’s motto, but they’re wrong. This – now – is when people die, buses knock you over, people get ill, parents go gaga, things go wrong …’
‘Happy Christmas,’ says Sam.
‘Yes, happy Christmas, cheery-chops,’ I say. ‘Have some more food. Have a drink. Quieten your Voice of Doom.’
‘I’m being factual. There is absolutely no point in “wait and see” or “I might do it some day” any more. As you’ve just discovered in relation to your own dear papa.’
‘God, how depressing. Do you really think so?’
‘I really do, Clara. If I want to do something, I do it. If I don’t, I don’t. Same thing with people: if I want to see them, I see them. If I don’t, I disappear. And I only see radiators these days – you know, people who give out heat and warmth. Might make me a selfish cunt, but I’m much happier. No more procrastination. It’s too late.’
‘Blimey. What brought this on?’
‘Oh, the usual. I cocked up a love affair. It was my fault. I thought I’d bide my time because I wasn’t sure. And then of course, something – or more accurately somebody – else turned up in the picture, and that was that. I know you’re going to say it can happen at any age, but my powers of recovery aren’t what they were. Plus,’ he adds, sounding more like his usual self, ‘I suddenly know too many ill people, and it’s freaking me out. Cancer and stuff. Headaches that turn out to be tumours. Bits being hacked off them. Remember Rosie from our art department? She got breast cancer. She had a mastectomy. We’re not as young as we used to be. Listen to your Uncle Robert, for he is wise.’
‘No, I am listening,’ I say. ‘I always listen when you talk like a normal person. And I suppose you’re right. Is Rosie okay?’
‘She will be in about six months’ time, I hope. But, you know – she’s our age. Couple of years younger, actually. She’d prefer to have her own hair and her old face back.’
‘Oh God. I’m so sorry,’ I say.
‘My point is: no point in delaying anything at this stage. No procrastination. Life’s too short. Anyway. I’ve finished now. I’m depressing myself,’ says Robert. ‘Let’s have some more wine. What’s up with you, Clara?’
‘I’m in Marrakesh. It’s Christmas Eve. I went to buy herbal Viagra with my ex-husband earlier. He is you.’
‘How hilarious you are. I meant generally. In your little life.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I don’t really know.’
‘Do you mean “pas devant les Sams”?’
‘Oi,’ says Sam. ‘I’m not, like, deaf. Or an idiot.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I mean, I don’t really know. Everything’s fine. Work’s good. Children are good. You know. It’s all fine.’
‘Oh,’ says Robert. ‘I see. Has your future third husband vanished before you could drag him up the aisle? Done a runner? Met the folks, perhaps?’
Robert and I haven’t lived together for nearly a decade, but he retains the fantastically irritating ability to read me quite well.
‘I don’t know that, either,’ I say. ‘He hasn’t been in touch for two weeks, which seems a bit weird. I mean, it was always an elastic and sporadic arrangement – there was no aisle, it was more –’
‘Fuck buddies,’ says Robert matter-of-factly. ‘You said on the phone.’
‘Well,’ says Sam. ‘Isn’t that nice.’
‘Well, no, it wasn’t quite fuck buddies by the end. I mean, it’s been going on for a year and a bit, on and off. It wasn’t Aisle but it wasn’t just Fuck, either. Not strictly just Fuck.’
‘Fuck Plus,’ says Robert.
‘Yes, I suppose so. Fuck Plus Plus.’
‘Lovely,’ says Sam. ‘How gorgeous.’
‘Are you sure you didn’t think it was Aisle?’
‘Positive.’
‘Clara!’ says Robert. ‘Come on. If it wasn’t Aisle, why are you looking so bothered by it?’
‘It wasn’t Aisle! Why do you want me to say it was Aisle, you weirdo? No more Aisle for me, thanks. But … Maybe it was Fuck Plus with Like Squared.’
‘You know TMI, too much information?’ says Sam. ‘Well, that. Happening right here, right now.’ He points both index fingers at himself. ‘In t
his chair. Live and direct.’
‘You don’t have to listen,’ I say. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. You culled me, remember? And if you do listen, you don’t have to sit there twitching like an old nan. Go and talk to Max.’
‘Oh God, I can’t,’ says Sam. ‘Don’t make me. He’s so posh that I literally don’t understand what he’s saying. Maybe one word in five. It’s like radio waves – you have to be English, I think, to be able to tune in.’
‘Max doesn’t need anyone to talk to,’ Robert says. ‘He just likes watching us and smiling to himself. He treats it all like a trip to the circus. And anyway, he’s got his BlackBerry and Kate next to him – he’s fine.’
‘And don’t call me an old nan,’ says Sam. ‘Fuck’s sake, Clara.’
‘I’m sorry for you, if it was Fuck Plus with Like Squared,’ says Robert. ‘You should have seized the day. I’m never wrong. You’ll know for next time. Pass the aubergine, would you?’
At times like these, sitting around and getting on and loving the children you have together, you sometimes wonder whether the hassle of separation was worth it. I know: it’s an outré thought. Nobody’s supposed to think, ‘I wonder if we made a terrible mistake’: you’re supposed to carry on instead, onwards and upwards and saying to yourself, ‘Phew, I’m glad that’s over.’ Which I broadly do.
Not that I had much choice in the matter, separation-wise: Sam huffed out. I’m guessing, though, that he merely precipitated the inevitable: I was feeling intolerably huffy myself by that point, and I expect I’d have huffed if he hadn’t helpfully taken the huffing initiative (annoying, though, to be out-huffed). Was this the right decision, to huff? This is my constant question, and I don’t mean merely in relation to Sam: is it worth putting up with stuff you really don’t go a bundle on in exchange for a superficially easy life? Is it somehow spoiled to stamp your foot and say, ‘Ew, I’m really not liking it’ – is it something you’re supposed to stop doing in your twenties? Is it folly to assume that beyond a certain point things can’t be fixed? People fix the most seemingly unfixable things, after all – addiction, chronic illness, serial infidelity. In that context, you think maybe it’s a bit silly to huff out because you look at the face next to yours on the pillow and think, ‘Oh. It’s you. Well, whoop-de-do.’
