7.49 pm: Doorbell. The first guests. Three elves. Correction: three elvesses, vaguely recognizable as Emily’s classmates, though not, as far as I am aware, her friends.
‘Hiya!’ they chorus, cutting past me, each in forest-green micro shorts, a Rudolph-red crop top, and a dangly hat with a flashing bell on it. Can’t help thinking that the gift-wrapping up at the North Pole must be slowed down considerably if the wrappers all insist, as these three do, on wearing four-inch wedge heels. As they move towards the sitting room, already shrieking with collective mirth, I note that the back of the crop tops, when they stand in line, forms a seasonal message. ‘Santa’s.’ ‘Little.’ ‘Humpers.’
8.13 pm: Give up answering doorbell. Leave door open. What’s that parable in the Bible, the one I learned in Sunday school, about the host who issues a general invitation to all guests? ‘Go ye out into the highways and the hedges and bid them come …’ Something like that. A lovely idea, and undoubtedly as Christian as you can get, but I always thought, on the quiet, that it was asking for trouble. I mean, what happened when he ran out of napkins? Had he forewarned his party planners about the sudden spike in numbers? Well, now I’m him. But without the charity.
9.14 pm: Finbar and Zig or possibly Zag have set up in the kitchen. Or, to be accurate, the kitchen has made way for them. On the table is a pair of what I still, I’m sorry to say, call record players. A vast, sullen boy stands over them, wearing headphones like halved grapefruit, nodding intently to the music’s thump. Some sort of amplifier is sitting where the microwave normally lives, which raises the question of where the microwave has gone. Presumably it has taken the place of the loo cistern, which has moved to where the fish tank used to be, meaning that the fish tank is now the new hi-fi. Wires snake out of the door toward the sitting room, where speakers the size of the Cenotaph are planted against each wall. In truth, the entire house has been transformed into one large speaker. Doors rattle to the beat, and a large crack, like a lightning bolt, has appeared in the window halfway up the stairs. That’ll be the eighteenth-century antique glass that we had mended by a gnarled old glazier, who took it away to reforge it in the fires of Mount Doom, or wherever, and returned it miraculously healed for a mere four hundred quid. He won’t like the crack.
Richard is suddenly beside me, listening appreciatively to the music, which just at the moment sounds like a squad of navvies demolishing an acre of tarmac.
‘Just like you said, darling. Christmas carols round the fire. Oh, and look. They’re thoroughly enjoying your mulled wine.’
‘That’s quite enough sarcasm, thank you!’
In one corner of the sofa, a boy is holding out a plastic cup one-quarter full of wine. A girl with bleached plaits, like Heidi’s evil twin, has reached into her bag, brought forth a half-bottle of supermarket vodka, and is topping him up. His cup runneth over, with a sort of pale pink poison. In fact it runneth over over my sofa, which until two hours ago was a subtle creamy beige, and now will never be cream again.
‘Why is it always vodka?’ I ask. ‘Vodka’s horrible. Doesn’t taste of anything at all. And why is it always girls who bring it these days? Shouldn’t the boys pull their weight? I used to think it was daring to have a Bacardi and Coke when I was seventeen.’
‘Oh, the girls bring it because they want to be one of the boys,’ Richard says, strangely knowledgeable. ‘And they don’t want to pull their weight, they just want to pull. And they like vodka precisely because it tastes of nothing. Right now, Kate, their sole purpose in life, their only reason for being, is to get drunk, and vodka gets you there quickest, with no taste or flavour to get in the way. Drowning their sorrows and all that.’
I look around at Emily’s guests. They’re sixteen, most of them. Seventeen tops. They really shouldn’t have collected enough sorrows yet to need drowning, but they are turning out to be the unhappiest generation. I wonder. By giving them a vocabulary of sadness and hurt feelings have we relieved their suffering or encouraged them to think suffering is the norm? They’re so suggestible at that age.
Richard gazes around, surveying his domain. Then he gestures towards the staircase, up which various couples are swarming remorselessly, like extras in a zombie film. ‘There they go!’ he says cheerfully. ‘Off to play a nice quiet game of Trivial Pursuit, just like you said they would.’
My husband, I can see, is genuinely torn. On the one hand, he holds the entire situation in a kind of despairing contempt; at this instant, our house, and all who sail in it, is about as far from his ideal life as it is possible to get. Not enough chakras. On the other hand, he is grimly relishing the delectable satisfaction of being proved right in his predictions of disaster. Neither emotion is very becoming. Any notion that these kids, stupid and reckless as they are, might actually be enjoying themselves for once – or merely being kids, for heaven’s sake – is lost on him. He is, in the truest sense, a killjoy. Certainly, he has done a fine job of killing my joy of late. No sooner does the thought blaze up than I damp it down, but it was there.
9.33 pm: Letting poor, bewildered Lenny out into the back garden, I find, of all things, a copy of Sense and Sensibility. It normally lives in the little bookshelf in the downstairs loo. For a stirring moment, I wonder if someone has retreated there for a dose of peace and quiet, and started to read; I remember doing that myself decades ago, whenever a social event of any kind was all too much. On the other hand, if someone was reading the book in the loo, what is it doing out here?
I pick it up. Pages are missing. Whole chapters are missing, ripped out in what looks like a rush. Marianne may still be there somewhere, but Elinor’s a goner. Then a waft of something sick-sweet passes me by. I inhale. A gust of weed. I follow the waft, and find three earnest-looking boys and one girl, sitting on the cold grass, rolling joints. And yes, they are using Jane Austen for paper. Should I applaud their literary taste or yell at such wanton destruction? ‘Well, gentlemen, how nice a sense of decency is shewn on this occasion! To be conducting yourselves thus, in the company of a lady!’ That’s what I should say. But I don’t. I just ask them to stop, and they laugh.
10.10 pm: Richard is now standing guard by the front door, determined to confiscate alcohol and only admit those who have invitations. Since no one has an invitation, this is a testing experience. Also, everyone is in Christmas fancy dress, which is unlikely to speed the identification process. He is soon involved in a heated dispute with a snowman.
10.43 pm: Look out of kitchen window to see several Santas haring down the side of the house and entering via the back garden, hotly pursed by a team of reindeer in fake-fur onesies. Donner appears to be trying to mount Blitzen, thus forming what I’m afraid is a festive twosie.
10.51 pm: My daughter wanders past. What with the heaving sea of strangers, I had forgotten she was here at all.
‘Hi Mum, d’you like the music?’
‘Quite. Actually, Em, I didn’t know you were having a disco.’
‘It’s not a disco, Mum,’ says Emily, rolling her eyes. ‘No one’s had a disco in like forever.’
My daughter has changed into a diaphanous, flesh-coloured body with glitter over her nipples. Plus a pair of silver hot pants with the words ‘Happy New Twerk’ picked out in red on the back. She is wearing flesh-coloured fishnets, but I can still see some scabs on her thighs from that time she fell off the bike.
‘Darling, what on earth are you wearing?’
‘Just chill, Mum, I’m the Miley Cyrus Christmas Special.’ Her arm is linked in the arm of – well, I never – her frenemy, Lizzy Knowles, the belfie-boomer in person. Oh, well, if you can’t beat ’em, invite ’em to your party. Lizzy is sporting red knee socks and a T-shirt that reads, ‘O, Come On Me, Faithful.’
Control yourself, Kate. Remember, you are doing all this so that Emily doesn’t feel so left out. Mind you, is it really any easier being left in?
‘Hi, Kate,’ says Lizzy, ‘this is awesome. Like, so Christmassy.’
No, you horrid li
ttle witch, Christmassy is Andy Williams in a reindeer-patterned sweater. Christmassy is making very careful patterns on a chocolate yule log, with a fork, to make the icing look like a tree. Christmassy is angels and archangels. That’s what I think to myself, but I keep my mouth shut, which is more than can be said for the guests. Their mouths are all wide open: shouting, glugging from cans, or glueing themselves, seemingly at random, to other mouths. My house is roughly as quiet as a Grand Prix.
Midnight: Richard is standing by himself, in the utility room, guarding his cycling stuff and thoughtfully munching a carrot. I raise an eyebrow.
‘Snowman’s nose,’ he explains. ‘He was being a pain. So I reached out and wrenched the bugger off. Now he can’t breathe.’
I am slightly concerned as to how the night will end.
12.20 am: Someone shouts that there’s a problem with the downstairs loo. I charge in to find vomit spewed over a wide area and the snowman snorting snow through a straw. Being noseless has clearly not undermined his drug habit. He could be sniffing the pack of royal icing I bought for the Christmas cake, but I fear not. I tell the snowman to get out or I’ll call the police. He stares at me with his little coal eyes. I back away.
1.11 am: A beleaguered Richard is rationing access to the afflicted toilet. It’s like Custer’s Last Stand. Only those in direst need are allowed to use the loo.
‘Number Ones or Number Twos?’ booms my husband at any kid who tries to enter. ‘If it’s just Number Ones, then do it in the garden!’
A hysterical Emily finds me collecting discarded Bacardi Breezers under the coffee table. ‘Mum, it’s sooo embarrassing, Daddy is like literally asking people if they need a poo or a wee. If it’s a wee they can’t use the loo and have to go in the garden. Please make him stop.’
1.30 am: I go upstairs to our own bedroom, the one with the small, unfinished en-suite bathroom and the large printed and laminated sign reading ‘Do Not Enter’ stuck to the door. To my surprise and relief, there is no one inside. Amazingly, the kids have obeyed the instruction. I find that oddly moving; after all the chaos and the raising of hell, at least they have some respect for boundaries left. At least they know parents, too, require their own zone. At least they—
‘Oh.’
Two kids are having sex in the en-suite. They have ignored the sign on the bedroom door; they are not not entering, in a big way. The girl is sitting next to the sink, on what will henceforth be known, in tribute to this memorable night, as the depravity unit. Given her current location, I estimate that her fanny is right on top of my toothpaste. Her legs are wrapped around someone, her eyes are closed, and I don’t recognise her. The boy I don’t recognise either, mainly because his bottom is the only part of him that’s really visible. He doesn’t miss a stroke; probably hasn’t heard me walk in.
For maybe four seconds, I stand and watch. Not because I am a sad voyeur, or because I am too indignant to speak (though I am), but because what they are doing, and the zest with which they are doing it, seems like a vision of long ago. It’s like turning on the TV and finding a Western. Has it really been that long? When was my last Wild West?
The girl opens her eyes and sees me. Recognises her hostess. Gives me the most polite and well-bred smile I have seen all evening, and whispers, ‘Nearly finished.’
I turn and creep away, out of my own safe space and right into my danger zone. In Ben’s room, mercifully empty because he has a sleepover with Sam tonight, I turn on my computer and scroll through cyberspace for any sign of Mr Forbidden Fruit. Nothing from Jack. Still nothing. You know how the sight of other people being happy, kissing, making love, can make you long so badly for those things yourself? That.
2.25 am: In what, by his standards, counts as a remarkable initiative, my husband has found a way to get rid of the guests. There was a time when it seemed that all of them – Sixty? Eighty? Threescore and ten? – would be stuck in the house until morning. The whole place was still reverberating, until Richard went into the larder, reached behind the dog food and flicked the fuse reading ‘kitchen sockets’. The turntables ground to a halt. The speakers spat and died. Richard came out of the larder ostentatiously bearing a jar of coffee. ‘Got it,’ he said.
That was a good start, but there is still a mob, swilling and milling restlessly, and craving further mayhem.
‘How can we herd them away?’ I ask.
Richard looks at me and then, to my astonishment, kisses me on the cheek.
‘Brilliant,’ he says.
‘Brilliant what?’
‘Brilliant you. The verb. You’re right, we don’t kick them out. We herd them. For God’s sake, half of them are dressed as reindeer anyway. They deserve to be herded.’
So what does Rich do? He only gets in the car and rounds them up, doesn’t he? Sometimes he can use his killjoy, party-pooper powers for good and not for evil. He actually sits there in first gear, headlamps on full beam, and as I usher them out of the house onto the street outside, he revs and growls the car and slowly inches towards them, so that, grudgingly but steadily, they mooch and moo away down the road, some locking antlers as they go. Where they go, God knows, but right now it isn’t our problem.
Last out of the house is a young man in corduroys and cashmere sweater, plainly sober, who shakes my hand, and then Richard’s, and says, ‘Thank you so much for an absolutely delightful party. I feel terrible about leaving you with all this mess. I would love to come and help clear up in the morning, but sadly I have to be in work by eight. But thank you again, and, if I don’t see you, have a lovely Christmas.’ Then he gets onto a bike and pedals off.
Richard and I watch in awe as he rides away.
‘Who on earth was that?’ Richard asks.
‘I’m not sure, but I think it was the baby Jesus.’
3.07 am: At last. Richard and I are in bed. The party is over. Nobody died. To that extent, and that extent only, it was a triumph. Emily and the nine comatose Santas who have crashed on the living-room floor can damn well clear up in the morning. Emily seemed transformed tonight, contented and glowing in her own skin. She actually came up, pulled me onto the dancefloor, and we sang ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ together at the top of our voices. As I turn onto my side and drift off this thought makes me very happy.
3.26 am: I ask Rich to please stop snoring.
‘I’m not snoring,’ he says. We both sit bolt upright and listen. The porcine snufflings are coming from the wardrobe. Richard stumbles out of bed and flings open the door. A reindeer, missing the bottom half of his costume, is slumped next to an angel, who is missing the top half of hers. They are lying on my beloved Joseph sheepskin coat. The reindeer opens its eyes. ‘Oh, hi,’ he says, ‘you must be Emily’s parents. Great party. Awesome.’
Aftermath of Emily’s Party:
Number of calls by neighbours to the police: 4
Number of letters received from neighbours saying, ‘You’re an absolute disgrace to the neighbourhood’: 1
Estimated clearing-up time: 13 hours
Number of empty bottles actually collected: 87
Number of half-empty bottles found on shelves, in wardrobes, under kitchen sink, behind loo, etc: 59
Number of Carlsberg lager cans discovered so far in flower beds: 124
Date at which garden can reasonably be expected to be a Carlsberg-free zone: between 2089 and early twenty-second century
Number of years Richard will be able to crow, ‘I told you so’: 35 or until death us do part
Estimate for redecorating hall and living room, replacement of window pane and toilet cistern: £713.97
Despite all of the above, I still think it was a good idea. I would willingly spend every last penny, and allow my house to be trashed, if it stopped my daughter being withdrawn and lonely.
‘Everyone says it was like the coolest party ever, Mum,’ a buoyant Emily reported over breakfast a couple of days later. ‘I know Daddy thinks it was like really bad, but they’re usually much worse. At Jess’s party,
they gave the chickens alcopops and they all died.’
17
THE ROCK WIDOW
Monday, 1.46 pm: Barbara has been arrested for buying a chainsaw with a stolen credit card. Sorry, what? It takes me a moment to process what Donald is telling me down the phone. The train enters yet another tunnel and he breaks up. My body and my briefcase are on the way to West Sussex to meet the Rock Widow, but my mind is up in Yorkshire with my poor father-in-law.
I call him back and he continues the story. ‘You know Barbara started tidying everything away because of the dementia, Kate?’
‘Yes, yes, I do.’
‘Well, Margaret—’
‘The carer?’
‘Yes, well Margaret generally leaves her handbag on the side and Barbara found Margaret’s purse and took it. Not stole it, she was tidying up. She didn’t know she shouldn’t. Then, this morning, I left her on her own for ten minutes while I went to the shop to get the paper and some milk and she escaped through the conservatory door and wandered off. Got on that Hopper bus at the end of our road and ended up at B&Q, you know the one by Asda?’
‘Yes, go on.’
‘Well, Barbara was in B&Q and she had a few bits in her trolley, but the girl at the till got suspicious because of the chainsaw.’
‘I can see that.’
‘Quite a large 58cc petrol chainsaw, which did excite some comment. Barbara tried to pay with Margaret’s credit card, but she didn’t know the PIN, of course, and the girl called the manager who then called the police. Luckily, they found our address on Barbara’s library card, which was in her pocket.’
How Hard Can It Be? Page 28