Christmas 1988
For the first time, we did not all come home for Christmas. Flook was away, hitch-hiking across America. He sent frequent postcards offering glimpses of his adventures.
‘New York. Robbed on the subway – lost everything except my money and my life.’
‘Salt Lake City. Met a pretty girl and followed her in through a big door. She slammed it, it was a Mormon Church – narrow escape.’
‘Big Sur. Stood on a cliff drinking orange juice at dawn and saw a school of whales heading south. May follow them.’
Mum was neurotic for three days after each of these postcards arrived. She imagined her baby son being sold by white slavers, run over by lorries and seduced by mad women. Dad laughed. ‘Eleanor, for Christ’s sake. He’s having a wonderful time. He is twenty-one, precisely the right age to go to America, and at least he’s sending postcards.’ He looked at Mum’s wretched face and took her hand. ‘Come on. He’s fine. You are too full of sensibility and somewhat lacking in sense.’ Mum laughed and agreed not to worry, but continued to ask casual questions about mortality in the San Andreas fault.
Flook rang from San Francisco on Christmas Day. ‘It’s sunny, and I’m on my own,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t matter, because I can’t imagine Christmas without being at home. This is just another day. I’ll have Christmas next year.’
Brodie was hardly there either. Having worked for a year in the City he became dizzy with instant wealth, a commodity none of us was used to. After spending all the money on drink and drugs, he realized that banking was not for him. Uttering some crisply chosen phrases on the cynicism of exploitation, he traded his smart suits for a black-and-white guitar and a nose-ring. He formed a band by advertising for members in the New Musical Express and, soon after, they were sent to New York to record an album. Brodie came home on Christmas Eve, jet-lagged and unusually cheerful. His luggage was two bags of vanilla coffee and his guitar, his clothes were those he was wearing.
‘I forgot everything else. I suppose I’ll have to go back and get my stuff.’ Mum and Dad were surprised at his good humour. He even said he liked his Christmas presents.
‘Did you have a religious experience in New York?’ Dad teased.
Brodie was so tired he missed the joke. ‘No, I didn’t see any churches. Actually, I never got further uptown than Greenwich Village.’
I was disgusted. ‘You mean you didn’t go to the Metropolitan Museum, or Tiffany’s, or the Guggenheim?’ I squawked.
Brodie sighed. ‘I was working, you know. We never got out of the studio before two in the morning.’
Dad interrupted as I began to make a retrospective sightseeing timetable for Brodie and the band. ‘Va Va, you don’t understand,’ said Dad. ‘Rock stars disappear in daylight. They require night and a little stimulation, isn’t that so, Brodie?’ Brodie grinned. He started discussing downtown bars with Dad who, despite not having visited New York for fifteen years, could remember almost all the ones Brodie mentioned. ‘Brodie’s smiled three times in half an hour,’ said Poppy as we criss-crossed sprouts at the kitchen table. ‘He must have had fun.’
Dan’s girlfriend Tamsin came for Christmas lunch, bringing her own meat-free platter. Small, neat and blonde, she was a nurse he had met on his most recent stay in hospital. At ten o’clock in the evening, our lunch was ready. All day we had peered into the Aga, to be met with dough-coloured turkey. It sweated and hissed but would not cook. Finally Dan poured some paraffin into the Aga. It boomed from its heart and puffed into action, the hotplate turning angry red, then glittering pink with heat. Tamsin’s nut roast cowered beside the vast turkey when Poppy and I heaved it out of the oven. It was wedged with forgotten logs we had put to dry in the Aga days before. The turkey had a strong woody taste which we all decided we might as well like. ‘If we don’t we won’t eat for days,’ said Dan, his plate a small mountain leaping with an avalanche of peas.
On the day after Boxing Day, Brodie and I left for London. I went with him to the airport, and he flew back to America for six more weeks. I returned to work, noisily tapping at my typewriter to draw attention to the fact that I was in the office between Christmas and New Year. No one was very interested.