Christmas Days Read online

  I did not sleep till daylight and when I slept and woke again it was almost midday and already the light was lowering.

  Hurrying to get coffee, I saw that the dress was gone. I had left it dripping over the sink and it was gone. Get out of the house.

  I set off for the station. There was an air-frost that had coated the trees in glittering white. It was beautiful and deathly. The world held in ice.

  On the road there were no car tracks. No noise but the roar and drop of the sea.

  I moved slowly and saw no one. In the white unmoving landscape I wondered if there was anyone else left alive?

  At the station I waited. I waited some time past the time until the train whistled on the track. The train stopped. The guard got down and saw me. He shook his head. ‘There’s no one,’ he said. ‘No one at all.’

  I thought I would cry. I took out my mute phone. I flashed up the message: ‘TRYING 2 CALL U. LEAVE 2MORO.’

  The guard looked at it. ‘Happen it’s you who should be ­leaving,’ he said. ‘There’s no more trains past Carlisle now till the 27th. ­Tomorrow was the last and that’s been cancelled. Weather.’

  I wrote down a number and gave it to the guard. ‘Will you phone my friends and tell them I am on my way home?’

  On the slow journey back to Highfallen House I filled my mind with my departure. It would be slow and dangerous to travel at night but I could not consider another night alone. Or not alone.

  All I had to do was manage forty miles to Inchbarn. There was a pub and a guest house and remote but normal life.

  The text message kept playing in my head. Had it really meant that I should leave? And why? Because Susie and Stephen couldn’t come? Weather? Illness? It’s all a guessing game. The fact is I have to go.

  The house seemed subdued when I returned. I had left the lights on and I went straight upstairs to pack my bag. At once I saw that the light to the attic was on. I paused. Breathed. Of course it’s on. I never switched it off. That proves it’s a wiring fault. I must tell the housekeeper.

  My bag packed, I threw all the food into a box and put everything back in the car. I had the whisky in the front, a blanket I stole from the bed, and I made a hot-water bottle just in case.

  It was only five o’clock. At worst I’d be in Inchbarn by 9pm.

  I got in the car and turned the key. The radio came on for a second, died, and as the ignition clicked and clicked I knew that the battery was completely flat. Two hours ago at the station the car had started first time. Even if I had left the lights on . . . But I hadn’t left the lights on. A cold panic hit me. I took a swig of the whisky. I couldn’t sleep in the car all night. I would die.

  I don’t want to die.

  Back in the house, I wondered what I was going to do all night. I must not fall asleep. I had noticed some old books and volumes when I had explored downstairs yesterday – assorted dusty adventure stories and tales of Empire. As I sorted through them I came across a faded velvet photograph album. In the cold, deserted sitting room I began to discover the past.

  Highfallen House 1910. The women in long skirts with miraculous waists. The men in shooting tweeds. The stable boys in waistcoats, the gardening boys wearing flat caps. The maids in starched aprons. And here they are again in their Sunday Best: a wedding photograph. Joseph and Mary Lock. 1912. He was a gardener. She was a maid. In the back of the album, loose and unsorted, were further photographs and newspaper cuttings. 1914. The men in uniform. There was Joseph.

  I took the album back into the kitchen and put it next to my wooden soldier. I had on my coat and scarf. I propped myself up in two chairs by the wood-fired range and dozed and waited and waited and dozed.

  It was perhaps two o’clock when I heard a child crying. Not a child who has scraped his knee, or lost a toy, but an abandoned child. A child whose own voice is his last hold on life. A child who cries and knows that no one will come.

  The sound was not above me – it was above the above me. I knew where it was coming from.

  I put my hands over my ears and my head between my knees. I could not shut the sound out; a locked-up child, a hungry child, a child who is cold and wet and frightened.

  Twice I got up and went to the door. Twice I sat down again.

  The crying stopped. Silence. A dreadful silence.

  I raised my head. Footsteps were coming down the stairs. Not one foot in front of the other but one foot dragging slightly, then the other joining it, steadying, stepping again.

  At the bottom of the stairs the footsteps paused. Then they did what I knew they would do; what all the terror in my body knew they would do. The footsteps came towards the kitchen door. Whatever was out there was standing twelve feet away on the other side of the door. I stood behind the table and picked up a knife.

  The door swung open with violent force that rammed the brass doorknob into the plaster of the wall. Wind and snow blew into the kitchen, whirling up the photographs and cuttings on the table. I saw that the front door itself was wide open, the entrance hall like a wind tunnel.

  Holding the knife, I went into the hall to shut the door. The pendant metal lantern that hung from the ceiling was swinging wildly on its long chain. A sudden gust lurched it forward like a child’s swing pushed too high. It fell back at force against the large semicircular fanlight over the front door. The fanlight shattered and fell round my shoulders in shards of solid rain. Flicker. Buzz. Darkness. The house lights were out. No wind now. No cries. ­Silence again.

  Glass-hit in the snow-lit hall, I walked out of the front door and into the night. At the drive I turned left and I saw them: the mother and child.

  The child was wearing the woollen dress. She had no shoes. She held up her arms piteously to her mother, who stood like stone.

  I ran forward. I grabbed the child in my arms.

  There was no child. I had fallen face down in the snow.

  Help me. That’s not my voice.

  I’m on my feet again. The mother is ahead of me. I follow her. She’s going towards the walled garden. She seems to pass through the door, leaving me on the other side.

  DO NOT ENTER

  I tried the rusty hoop handle. It broke off, taking a piece of door with it. I kicked the door open. It fell off its hinges. The ruined and abandoned garden lay before me. A walled garden of one acre used to feed twenty people. But that was a long time ago.

  There were footprints in the snow. I followed them. They led me to the bothy, its roof patched with corrugated iron. There was no door but the inside seemed dry and sound. There was a tear-off calendar still on the wall: December 22nd 1916.

  I put my hand in my pocket and I realised that the key from the Nativity was there. At the same time I heard a chair scrape on the floor in the room beyond. I had no fear any more. As the body first shivers and then numbs with cold, my feelings were frozen. I was moving through shadows as one who dreams.

  In the room beyond there was a low fire lit in the tiny tin fireplace. On either side of the fire sat the mother and child. The child was absorbed in playing with a marble. Her bare feet were blue but she did not seem to feel the cold any more than I did.

  Are we dead, then?

  The woman with the shawl over her head stared at me or through me with deep, expressionless eyes. I recognised her. It was Mary Lock. Her gaze went to a tall cupboard. I knew that my key fitted this cupboard and that I must open it.

  There are seconds that hold a lifetime. Who you were. What you will become. Turn the key.

  A dusty uniform fell out, crumpling like a puppet. The uniform was not quite empty of its occupant. The back of the faded wool jacket had a long slash where the lungs would have been.

  I looked at the knife in my hand.

  ‘Open the door! Are you in there? Open the door!’

  I woke to blinding white. Where am I? Something’s rocking. It’s the
car. I am in my car. A heavy glove was brushing off the snow. I sat up, found my keys, pressed the UNLOCK button. It was morning. Outside was the guard from the train and a woman who announced herself as Mrs Wormwood. ‘Fine mess you’ve made here,’ she said.

  We went into the kitchen. I was shivering so much that Mrs Wormwood relented and began to make coffee. ‘Alfie fetched me,’ she said, ‘after he spoke to your friends.’

  ‘There’s a body,’ I said. ‘In the walled garden.’

  ‘Is that where it is?’ said Mrs Wormwood.

  At Christmas in 1914 Joseph Lock had gone to war. Before he left for Flanders he had made a Nativity scene for his little girl. When he came back in 1916 he had been gassed. They heard him, climbing the stairs, gasping for breath through froth-corrupted lungs.

  His mind had gone, they said. At night in the attic where he slept with his wife and child, he leaned vacantly against the wall, rolling the child’s marbles up and down, down and up, pacing, pacing, pacing. One night, just before Christmas, he strangled his wife and daughter. He left them for dead in the bed and went out. But his wife was not dead. She followed him. In the morning they found her sitting by the Nativity, her dress dark with blood, his fingermarks livid at her throat. She was singing a lullaby and pushing the point of the knife into the back of the wooden figure. Joseph was never found.

  ‘Are you going to call the police?’ I said.

  ‘What for?’ said Mrs Wormwood. ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’

  Alfie went out to see to my car. It started first time, the exhaust blue in the white air. I left them clearing up and was about to set off when I remembered I had left my radio in the kitchen. I went back inside. The kitchen was empty. I could hear the two of them up in the attic. I picked up the radio. The Nativity was on the table as I had left it.

  But it wasn’t as I had left it.

  Joseph was there and the animals and the shepherds and the worn-out star. And in the centre was the crib. Next to the crib were the wooden figures of a mother and child.

  n the early 1990s Kathy Acker moved from London back to the USA. Harold Robbins had tried to sue her for cutting and pasting a passage from one of his books, The Pirate, into her edgy re-release, Young Lust.

  Robbins, the mass-market soft-porn airport-novel novelist wasn’t interested in Acker’s life-long raid on power structures, or her deep-cut-and-paste method of ripping up existing texts – great or ­insignificant – to create new texts that disrupted the reader’s relationship with what they were reading.

  Reading Harold Robbins takes no mental effort at all so Kathy was surprised that the man who had sold more than 75 million copies of his sex and schlock formula should put so much mental effort into suing a literary bandit.

  But Robbins had a high opinion of himself as a writer. Kathy’s appropriation of his work had made it comically clear that out of the context of the page-turning sex-yarn – where language has no purpose except as a lubricant to slide the reader from one sex act to another – Robbins’s prose was awful. That was the problem. Kathy Acker had exposed Harold Robbins – to himself.

  Robbins insisted she apologise – which was really the kind of suck-my-dick attitude that Kathy hated.

  Kathy, being Kathy, wrote an apology more incendiary than the crime-bomb she had detonated.

  Then, in characteristic Acker-fashion, the battle-brave bandit suddenly felt vulnerable, criticised, misunderstood. She packed her things and went back to Manhattan.

  But Manhattan wasn’t quite right either – nowhere was ever quite right for Kathy, and not long afterwards she came to stay near me in a flat I found for her to rent. And soon it was Christmas-time.

  The flat was the last gasp of English eccentricity before every single place in London was gobbled up for greed and gain. It was a vaulted, echoing basement with a stone floor in an empty, grand Georgian house. I thought Kathy would like the long windows that opened onto an overgrown walled garden. The owner had died. The heirs were waiting for probate, and yes, Kathy could stay in the flat for almost nothing, and I would be down the street.

  But there were drawbacks. When I was telling this story to my wife, Susie Orbach, who is both Jewish and American, lived for a long time in Manhattan and is the same age as Kathy, she said to me, ‘Wait a minute, you put a Jew raised in Sutton Place in an apartment without a fridge?’

  I failed to understand. I said, ‘She didn’t need a fridge; there was no heating.’

  This was not the right reply. Susie put her head in her hands and said, ‘Sutton Place is one of the most exclusive addresses in Manhattan – it’s like Belgravia.’

  ‘But Kathy was an outlaw!’

  ‘She was also a princess!’

  True. And it explains why, that Christmas, Kathy wore her Russian fur hat indoors. I couldn’t understand it at the time but I do now.

  She never said anything about it, of course, because what is often forgotten about Kathy Acker, sexual runaway and post-punk icon, is that she had perfect manners.

  It was Christmas. I said, ‘Kathy, we need to make custard.’

  The history of custard goes back to the Romans, who realised that milk and eggs make a good binder for almost anything, savoury or sweet. As the Romans went everywhere, custard went everywhere too. By the Middle Ages, crustards were filled pies, like our quiches or flans – a crusty pie using egg and milk to hold the rest of the ingredients together.

  The French are fans of custard but they don’t have a word for it – it’s crème anglaise to them, but whether it’s filling for an éclair or a quiche, rest assured, it’s custard.

  The runny, pouring custard so popular at Christmas became a big hit in the 19th century – along with Christmas itself in all its glory. For this we have to blame or praise a Birmingham chemist called Alfred Bird, whose wife was allergic to eggs. Poor Mrs Bird liked custard but couldn’t eat it, so in 1837 Alfred knocked up a powdered version that used cornflour instead of eggs. Mr Bird added sugar and yellow food-colouring to his cornflour and soon Bird’s custard powder was to be found in cheerful tins all over England and the Empire.

  The craze for a tin of powdered stuff to be diluted with milk crossed the Atlantic when the Horlick brothers emigrated from ­England and in 1873 set up a plant in Chicago to produce their world-­famous drink.

  For some reason, from the late 19th century onwards, perfectly well-nourished men and women began to fear an entirely invented problem called ‘night starvation’. Drinks like Horlicks would solve this problem.

  Kathy Acker liked Horlicks and I used to make it for her. Kathy, drinking Horlicks and laughing about the impossibility of custard (she could not cook – she could not even stir), and obsessive about everything, found out for me that Dylan Thomas had invented a fantasy product called Night Custard.

  In the 1930s while Dylan was dossing on the sofa of a well-paid friend in advertising, who happened to have a contract with Horlicks, Dylan thought he might make his fortune with Night Custard, and speculated that it might also be used as hair crème or a vaginal lubricant.

  This rather put me off custard for a while. But Christmas is Christmas and Christmas is custard.

  In fact Acker, with her bluestocking fascinations and zero ­culinary skills, had now blended together forever custard and New York City.

  After all, Bob Zimmerman had changed his name to Bob Dylan because of his hero Dylan Thomas (maybe ‘Tambourine Man’ owes everything to Night Custard).

  And Dylan Thomas died in New York in the Chelsea Hotel.

  Whenever I make custard I think without thinking, image without imaging, a New York City now as lost as Atlantis; of Beat hotels and drunk poets and diamond voices as various as Andy Warhol and Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas and Kathy Acker . . . who died not many years after this time, in 1997, furiously fighting cancer and upholding Dylan Thomas’s poem:

  Do not go gen
tle into that good night . . .

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Our grand gestures and our small acts are not so far apart. We remember our friends for the insignificant and silly things we did together, and for the greatness that they were too.

  Here’s the custard.

  YOU NEED

  Pint (570 ml) of milk

  Dash of cream

  4 egg yolks

  1 oz (30 g) castor sugar or sieved demerara

  2 teaspoons of cornflour (optional)

  METHOD

  Whisk the egg yolks nice and fluffy in a bowl. You can use the whites to make meringues or an egg-white omelette.

  While whisking add the sugar.

  Heat up the milk and cream but don’t boil it.

  Pour the milk mixture into the bowl with the egg mixture and whisk, whisk, whisk!

  Return everything to the pan and return the pan to the heat. Do not boil!

  Yes, you can add brandy or rum. Some people like to add vanilla – in which case that goes in with the milk and cream.

  And, like Mr Bird, you can add cornflour as a thickener – just a couple of teaspoons in with the egg mixture, NOT the milk mixture, and whisk, whisk, whisk.

  The whisking business goes best with a balloon whisk. I use a copper whisk and a copper bowl and a copper warming pan, but that’s just for looks.

  The key is to keep stirring once the custard is back in the pan and heating up. If you’re using some kind of a poet or dreamy type to do your stirring for you, you might end up with scrambled egg.

  Pouring-custard like this should be served at once. And eaten.

  CHRISTMAS IN NEW YORK

  he week before Christmas me and the guys at work like to go out for a cocktail and a few plates. There’s a place we know on 12th Street called Wallflower, where the ceiling’s made of tin and the banquettes are made of orange stuff. It serves French food and American cocktails.

  The night we went out we got talking about Christmas past – our childhoods mostly, when, according to memory, our affidavit against history, Christmas wasn’t commercialised, so although no one went shopping there were always presents under the tree. Kids went sledging and came home to play board games in front of the fire. Everyone had an old dog and a grandma who played piano. We all wore hand-knitted sweaters.