by India Knight
By the same author
My Life on a Plate
Don’t You Want Me?
NON-FICTION
The Shops
Neris and India’s Idiot-Proof Diet (with Neris Thomas)
Neris and India’s Idiot-Proof Diet Cookbook
(with Neris Thomas and Bee Rawlinson)
The Thrift Book
Comfort and Joy
INDIA KNIGHT
FIG TREE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
FIG TREE
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
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(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
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(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published 2010
Copyright © India Knight, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Lyrics from ‘Babe, You Turn Me On’ by Nick Cave, printed by kind permission of Nick Cave and Mute Song.
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-14-197018-9
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part Two
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Three
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Acknowledgements
For Lynn Barber, with love and admiration
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. Christmas is real, obviously – that’s not a coincidence. But I made the rest up. I do feel I need to point this out forcefully. FICTION, innit. I do love the Connaught, though.
Everything is collapsing, dear
All moral sense has gone
And it’s just history repeating itself
And babe, you turn me on
Like an idea, babe
Like an atom bomb.
– From ‘Babe, You Turn Me On’ by Nick Cave
PART ONE
1
23 December 2009, 4 p.m.
So I’m walking down Oxford Street, sodden by the sheeting rain, like I walk down Oxford Street sodden by the sheeting rain every single bastarding Christmas. Well, I say Christmas – I mean ‘festive period’ (which always makes me think of menstruation, except while wearing a jaunty paper hat and blowing a tooter, for fun. Poot poot!). It’s not actually Christmas Day – that would be tragic or, come to think of it, maybe quite refreshing: just me and the odd tramp and our cosy cider, rather than me and my sixteen or so, um, loved ones.
No, it’s the 23rd and I’m picking up a few last-minute bits and bobs. Quite why I’ve left these bits and bobs so late is a mystery, but again, it’s an annual ritual. If you didn’t know any better you would think – fancy! – that there are people I subconsciously don’t especially enjoy buying presents for, people who pop right out of my head until 23 December every year, when I remember not only that they exist but that they are coming to spend Christmas at my house, yay and wahoo.
I couldn’t possibly comment, except to point out that the incredibly annoying and pointless thing about my approach – you’d think I’d have figured this out by now, since it happens every year – is that, in the last-minute panic, I end up spending far more money on the bits-and-bobby presents for the bits-and-bobby people than I do on presents for people I really love. Take this grotesque china cat with boogly eyes and improbable eyelashes, the one I am holding in my hand right now (I’ve come out of the rain and into John Lewis – as, apparently, has half of London). Perfect for my mother-in-law. £200, you say? Well, my goodness. I stare at the sales assistant in disbelief. Has she looked at the china cat? It’s eye-bleedingly hideous, it’s not very big, and here she is, saying ‘£200’ with a straight face. Also, ‘collector’s item’. Yeah, maybe, if you’re mad. I’d rather collect those dried white dog turds you never see any more (why? Where have they gone?). No, not really. I wouldn’t like to collect dog turds at all, obviously. I’m just becoming bad-tempered, which always makes me go a bit Internal Tourette’s. It’s just – it’s so much money. Having glared, I smile penitently at the sales assistant and gingerly hand the cat back.
But then I go trawling off round to the bath salts and ‘novelty gifts’ bit of John Lewis, and there are so many people, and having been cold fifteen minutes ago in my parka, despite the fact that it is designed to withstand temperatures down to −20 degrees, I am now boiling hot, and I think I can’t give her bath salts again, or soaps – it’s got to the stage where it looks like I’m making a point about personal hygiene – and she doesn’t read books and she doesn’t listen to music and she has no hobbies except collecting cats, so … off I return to the china animal concession, sweating lightly, forcing a smile that probably looks more like a death rictus. £200. £200! The financial markets are falling apart, Sam keeps muttering darkly that our mortgage is about to do something terrible, I’m wearing frankly shabby underwear that I’d like to replace, and I’ve just spent £200 on a china cat that looks like it came via a full-page ad in a Sunday supplement: Pretty Lady Pusscat needs a home. Look at her pleading eyes and feel your heart give way. Fashioned from the finest porcelain by skilled craftsmen, Lady Pusscat will be your cherished friend …
It gives me a lurch in my stomach to think of the cost, on top of which I’m now paranoid about dropping Lady Pusscat. I’m going to tell Pat, my mother-in-law, that this is what it’s called. I know exactly what she’ll say: ‘Oh, isn’t that grand. Lady Pusscat! What a beautiful name. Isn’t that grand.’ Pat likes to sandwich normal speech between two expressions. The thought of it makes me smile to myself with a mixture of love and irritation. This is more than I spend on my own mother, I note, as I hand over my credit card. Well, more than I initially spend on my own mother.
But at least Pat will be really pleased with the cat. She’ll appreciate it and say thank you nicely, and put it on her special cat shelf, and possibly get a little piece of card and write LADY PUSSCAT on it in her best handwriting, and place it reverently underneath. The problem with Kate, my esteemed mama, isn’t that she’s on the list of people I can’t be bothered to buy presents for until the last minute. And neither – ha! – is she a person that I forget exists. The problem with Kate is that she has all the stuff she could conceivably want. She’s on a list of he
r own, called ‘People Who Have Everything’ (mind you, she doesn’t have a Lady Pusscat. Now there’s a thought. Maybe I could mix things up a bit and get her a Lord Puppy). There is nothing I can buy her, though obviously I’m going to have to buy her something.
The thing is – you wouldn’t think it from this rant, even though it’s true – I really love giving people presents. It gives me pleasure. I put a lot of thought into it. I start early, even if I do finish on the 23rd. And I’ve yet, in adult life, to give Kate something that provokes the kind of reaction I’m after: the gasp of delight, the genuine grin of pleasure that makes you think the whole flipping Christmas faff is worth it. She liked a clay ashtray I made at school when I was six. She still has it on her desk, all beaten up and manky and poignant in about ten different ways. It’s nice that she’s kept it, but I haven’t been able to match that present in the intervening thirty-four years.
What happens with Kate is I throw money at the problem. I think, if it costs enough, she’ll like it. This is a fatally stupid approach – it doesn’t work, and all that happens is that when she glances at her present, murmurs her thanks and then leaves it behind, I feel incensed and want to run after her telling her how much it cost. I did this once, to my shame. I’d bought her this amazing, hand-stitched sequined stole – beautiful, dull-gold proper sequins, not brash plasticky ones. It cost a fortune: I was still paying for it months later; in fact, if I remember correctly, there was an unpleasant episode with a red bill that I’d shoved in a drawer to make it magic itself away. She unwrapped the stole and said, ‘How sweet,’ and then she put it on the sofa next to her, never to be glanced at again. I couldn’t help myself: I said, ‘It’s by this amazing new designer. I had it commissioned for you. It, um, it cost …’ and I told her what it had cost. Kate put down her glass of champagne, closed her eyes as though in an agony of pain, and said, ‘Clara. I beg you. Please don’t be vulgar.’
I said I knew it was quite vulgar, but that I hoped she liked it because I’d had it made especially and …
‘Don’t, darling. And you shouldn’t spend that sort of money on me. I’m a simple person. I’d have been just as happy with a candle.’
‘A candle? What do you mean, a candle? Like, a scented candle?’
‘A beeswax candle.’
‘A beeswax candle?’
‘Don’t repeat everything I say, Clara, it makes you sound dim.’
‘But I’m just checking. That’s what you’d like for your present, ideally? One beeswax candle?’
‘Yes. Beautiful and useful, as William Morris said.’
‘Gosh. Well, I’ll know for next time.’
‘Quite. Pass me a blini, would you?’
What I should really do this year is go wild and buy her one lone stupid waxy candle and see what happens. ‘Here you go, Mother. Don’t burn it all at once!’ But I won’t, because I want Kate to love my present. I want her to love me for buying it for her. I want the present to say everything that we don’t say. That’s the thing about presents, isn’t it? Especially Christmas ones. The judiciously chosen present, the perfect gift, is offered up in the spirit of atonement and regeneration. It says, ‘Look, I know I don’t call as often as I should, and I know you think I’m grumpy and short-tempered’ – insert your own personal failings here; I’m merely précising mine – ‘but the thing is, I know you so well and I love you so much that I have bought you the perfect thing. And so now everything’s okay, at least for today.’ Which is all very lovely but a great deal easier said than done, and which is why I can feel the hair at the back of my neck curling with heat and stress. For a present to be eloquent, it’s got to be just right, and everything I’ve seen so far is wrong to the point of mutedom.
I’m back on Oxford Street now, headed for Selfridges, sharing the pavement with one billion people and a mere million arsing pigeons. Can I just say, about pigeons? a) Why aren’t they in their creepy old mank-nests, sheltering from the cold rather than festooning the streets with guano? Also, more urgently, b) Why do they walk along the pavement in straight lines, as though they were human? This has bothered me for years, and I find myself thinking about it once again as I slowly shuffle my way west, with one pigeon keeping pace on either side of me. We are walking three abreast, like a posse. The pigeons are my bitches: here come the girls. It is so, so wrong. But it always happens because, alone of all the birds, pigeons don’t just alight, strut about for a few seconds and take off again. No, they walk for miles. They follow the invisible horizontal for a freakishly long amount of time, pretty much keeping up with us. Pigeons think they’re people. It does my head in. It also explains why you see them on the Tube, pottering up and down the platform before walking into the carriage, calm as you like. In London, pigeons mostly walk – they only fly if you run after them. It’s bloody odd, is what it is. I don’t like it. Birds should fly.
Here we are. Even my temporarily unseasonal heart gladdens a little bit at the sight of Selfridges’ Christmas windows, a stunning exercise in glitter and luxe. They’ve done fairy tales this year, but subverted them a bit, so that bosomy Goldilocks is looking minxy in boned Vivienne Westwood and the three bears give the impression that never mind the porridge, come and sit on our laps (even the baby, disconcertingly. I’m not mad about the idea of Baby Bear with a boner). Little Red Riding Hood is wearing fuchsia silk underwear under her billowing cloak, which has fallen open for the wolf’s delectation. So much sex, I think, as I watch an exhausted-looking couple and their two small children staring at the displays. Sex everywhere. The children practically have their noses pressed up against the glass, mouths open in amazement and delight. I suppose it goes above their heads, the fact that everyone looks like they’re about to ravish everybody else. (I find myself wondering how they pick the fairy tales at the window-display meetings. Does someone clear their throat and point out that yes, you could technically put the Little Match Girl in sexy knickers but that it wouldn’t necessarily add to the joyous Christmas vibe when she dies, broken and alone?)
They’ve done a nice thing with ‘The Ugly Duckling’, though: the Mother Duck is old-school glamorous; and the Ugly Duckling is new-school nerdy, with fabulous clothes that look like a beautiful mess and big black glasses. She looks good, the Ugly Duckling. She makes the Mother Duck look like she’s trying a bit too hard. I expect the Mother Duck spent the Ugly Duckling’s childhood trying to wean her out of vintage – then called second-hand – and into Laura Ashley. And I bet the Mother Duck didn’t like the Ugly Duckling’s boyfriends, because they weren’t called Rupert or Jeremy. The jewels glitter on the Mother Duck’s hands; the Ugly Duckling is wearing a plastic necklace. I realize that I, too, practically have my nose pressed up against the glass, and that my mouth is slightly open.
God, Christmas. It makes my brain melt. Because – I’ve finished over-identifying with the Duckling and am now, appropriately enough, in the beauty hall – I love it so much, and I want it to be so lovely, so redemptive, so right. There’s no point in doing it craply, is there? I know people who do do it craply, sitting there miserably with their substandard presents and their overcooked titchy bird, but that’s not how I roll. The idea of that kind of Christmas makes me want to cry: I can’t bear even to watch pretend people doing it on television. It’s not that I want it to be perfect in the Martha Stewart sense – I don’t even own any matching crockery. I just want it to be … nice. Warm. Loving. Joyous. All those things. Christmassy.
My feet lead me to the Chanel counter, for Kate. They have these fantastically expensive – of course – special scents, called things like Coromandel, which I start spraying on thick, heavy paper strips. Why am I not able to roll that way? Why can’t I just go, ‘Eh, Christmas, it’s just another day – more food, more stuff, but it’s just a day, a mere day, one lone day that in the great scheme of things doesn’t matter very much’? I don’t know. If I knew, I would fix myself. I just know that I want it to be right, absolutely exactly minutely right, and that peop
le who bang on about the pressures of commercialism – she said, from the beauty department of a luxury store – are missing something. That’s not what the day’s about – well, not entirely. It’s about love, and family, and, like I said, redemption. If I didn’t want to run the risk of sounding like the king of the wankers, I’d say Christmas was about hope. Yeah. Hope. And optimism. It’s like the fairy tales in the window: for families, every Christmas is a new opportunity for Happy Ever After.
No pressure, then.
So Kate now has the scent – it’s called ‘31 rue Cambon’ and they package it in a thick black box with a fabric magnolia inserted behind the grosgrain ribbon, and I feel temporarily reassured, because it really does smell delicious and will be perfect on her skin. But then, as I head towards Jewellery – crammed with men emergency-buying stuff for their wives without really looking at it properly – I think: I can’t just give my mother one lone bottle of scent, even if it is super-scent. I’m veering dangerously into shout-out-the-price territory again (‘I’d have been just as happy with a rose petal’). I need to get her a couple of other things. Small things. And pick up something for Jake. And I need to bump up Sam’s present. Sam’s present is too small, because I’ve been annoyed with him recently. And he with me. But it’s Christmas. And while I’m at it, I could have a quick look for things to add to the children’s stockings. Maisy’s (I know: I did actually name my daughter after a cartoon mouse whose face is only ever seen in profile) is done, because she’s five and it’s easy, but my boys are teenagers and when you’re a teenager and the only things you’re into are bands and techy stuff, your stocking suffers. An iTunes card barely fills the toe; a DVD lies there all flat, making the stocking look tragic. And again, brain-melt: I am whooshed back through time to my own teenage years, at home with my own much younger sisters, Flo and Evie, clocking their fat, bursting-at-the-seams stockings and looking down at my own considerably thinner one.