by Yvette Clark
Christmas in New York is like a scene from a movie. Snow has begun to fall, delicate flakes sticking to my coat, the final special effect to complete the picture-perfect backdrop. Stalls selling Christmas trees have sprung up every few blocks, and Imogen and I manage to convince Dad to drag a tree home with us, even though it’s only a week until we’re moving back to London. Imogen wants a tall, elegant tree, but I notice a stubby one with unattractively knobbly top branches tucked behind its more glamorous siblings.
“Dad, please can we get this one?” I say, placing a gloved hand protectively on its branches.
“Kitty, why do you want the ugliest tree?” Imogen asks.
“I feel sorry for it.”
My sister snorts in derision and looks at Dad.
“I’ll let you have it for half price,” the stall owner says, sensing an opportunity to off-load this spruce pariah.
“Sold!” says Dad, who had been grumbling about spending money on a tree, and had already told us that apart from lights, he wouldn’t be buying any decorations since we have three boxes full in the attic in London. It’s always been one of my favorite parts of Christmas when Dad gets the boxes down and we sit and unwrap them, releasing them from their creased tissue-paper bedding. Seeing them again is like meeting long-lost friends. There are red, gold, and green shiny baubles, a set of crocheted reindeer bought from a craft fair, a host of tiny gold angels with intricate trumpets and harps, white glittery snowflakes, a family of sweet gray feathery owls, and two grinning Father Christmases made lovingly by Imogen and me out of toilet paper tubes when we were younger.
We go to buy lights, well, Dad does while Imogen and I stand outside the store holding the tree, and I scowl at anyone who looks at it disparagingly. It really is an ugly thing. Faced with the disdain of other shoppers who no doubt have perfect trees, Imogen becomes protective of it. She swings her superhero ponytail and glares at them, one arm defensively wrapped around its twisted branches. I grin at her, and she swishes her hair at me too.
By the time we get home, the snow is falling hard. Looking out of the window on the twenty-fourth floor, it feels like I’m in a snow globe that someone has shaken. Dad winds the lights around the tree, tests them, and unlike our lights at home, they all work the first time. Imogen and I bake star-shaped lemon cookies to hang on the tree and make paper garlands, while Dad pours himself a generous glass of ruby-red wine and turns on Christmas music. We work away in silence while Frank Sinatra instructs us to have ourselves a merry little Christmas. We stand back to examine our handiwork. Despite the lights and the star cookies, the tree still looks a bit sad.
“Hang on,” says Dad, rustling around in the bag the lights were in and producing a cardboard box. “I think we need this.”
“But you said no decorations,” Imogen says.
“I know, I know, but I saw this in the store. She was the last one. I couldn’t leave her there—you’ll see.”
I squeeze Dad’s hand and open the box. Inside, nestling in tissue paper, is a delicate-looking fairy. She has a sweet, familiar painted face, a cloud of golden hair, white sparkling skirts, and gossamer wings. The fairy looks a little like Mum on their wedding day—minus the wings, of course. Dad places her gently on top of the tree. We switch on the tree lights, turn off all the lights in the apartment, and sit looking at the delicate fairy, holding court from the top of the misshapen tree with its homemade decorations and cheap white icicle-shaped lights. It’s perfect. Mum would have loved it.
When I wake on Christmas morning, all is calm, all is quiet, and all is white. The snow has settled on the ground, and the sky is a deliciously rich blue. In fact, the sky is the same shade as it was on our first day of sightseeing in New York, St Giles Blue, color number 280. I don’t think England ever has an August sky in December. When I was little, I used to love to sneak downstairs before anyone else was awake to see if Father Christmas had eaten his slice of Christmas cake and Rudolph had munched his carrot. I realized embarrassingly late that it was Dad eating them, but we still used to leave them out every Christmas Eve. Last night is the first time we didn’t. When I walk into the kitchen, Dad is sitting at the table, gazing into his cup of tea. There’s a small pile of brightly colored and badly wrapped presents under the tree. Poor Dad, he would have had to wrap them all himself. He’s terrible at gift wrapping. Usually, it was only his present to Mum that looked as if it had been savaged by Cleo. All the rest had neatly folded corners and were tied up with ribbon that Mum used to curl with scissors. The idea of Dad wrapping presents on his own is heartbreaking, if a broken heart can be broken again. I suppose it can, just like an arm or a leg.
“Daddy,” I say, running over to him and climbing in his lap, using the name for him I abandoned when I was seven and Imogen started calling him Dad.
“Merry Christmas, love,” he whispers into my hair.
“Happy Christmas,” Imogen calls, appearing from her bedroom. “Race you to the presents, Kitty.”
I stay in Dad’s lap while Imogen goes and starts rummaging through the pile of presents, checking the gift tags for her name.
“Hang on,” says Dad. “I have a special present for you both to open first.”
He hands us each a small, impeccably wrapped box in glittery silver paper. Imogen’s is tied with a deep violet bow and mine with a rich red one. There’s a tag attached to the ribbon, and when I turn it over, my heart skips a beat. In Mum’s lovely loopy writing, I read, “Merry Christmas, Kitty. Love, Mum and Dad xxx.”
Inside my box is a charm, a tiny, perfect red ruby. Imogen’s contains a miniature purple stone.
“They’re your birthstones,” Dad says. “An amethyst for Imogen and a ruby for Kitty. Mum wanted you to have something from both of us for your first Christmas without her.”
I glance at Dad, who is looking from Imogen to me with a worried expression on his face. Maybe he thinks we’re going to start crying. Imogen is gazing into her box at her jewel. I study my tiny ruby. I want to ask Dad if Mum was the last person to touch it—had she been the one to put it into the box? I don’t ask him, though. He looks so sad.
“I love it. Thank you. Can you help me put it on?”
Dad fumbles with the small clasp, his nails too short to get a grip. When it’s attached, I nudge Imogen, who looks up from her box with a dazed expression. I fasten her charm for her, and we raise our wrists to each other as if toasting the gemstones, toasting our final Christmas present from Mum. I wonder what Imogen would want if she could have had any present from Mum at all. I know what I would have had—one last hug.
The rest of the day, we make an effort to jolly each other along, but there’s a gaping hole. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle missing the middle piece, which has disappeared between the floorboards, so there’s no point ever doing the puzzle again. It will never be complete. The numbers don’t add up. We are three-quarters of a family but feel like less than a half. You can’t be safe on a chair with only three legs. Between the three of us, we do manage to make a haphazard Christmas lunch, which we then push around our plates. Dad forgot the potatoes and roast potatoes are my favorite part of the meal. The stuffing goes in the microwave and doesn’t taste like Christmas, and we don’t have brussels sprouts, as only Mum liked them, but the table looks wrong without them. As we’re loading the dishwasher, I broach the subject.
“Can we have sprouts next year?” I ask Dad.
“Funny, I missed them too. Sorry, girls, not exactly a Christmas banquet.”
“It was fine,” Imogen said. “I’m glad we’ll be back to Mrs. Allison’s cooking soon. I bet she’s having a delicious lunch. Was Gran going to her house?”
“No, Gran’s gone to your great-aunt’s house, and Mrs. A. is in Spain with her Zumba crew. What do you want to do now, girls? It’s only two o’clock.”
Imogen and I shrug, the day stretching ahead of us.
“I know,” Dad says, a flash of inspiration and relief crossing his face. “We’ll go ice skating.”
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“Will the rink be open on Christmas Day?” Imogen asks in surprise.
“Lots of things are open,” Dad says. “It’s not like in London, where everything closes for the day. Come on, let’s wrap up warm and head out. It’s our last week in New York, and we’re not sitting around here moping all day. We’ll go to the rink in Rockefeller Plaza. Your mum loved it there.”
Despite the blue, blue sky, it is freezing outside. Only in New York can people wear winter hats and sunglasses without looking crazy, but all thoughts of being cold melt away as I see the most enormous skyscraper of a Christmas tree.
“It’s eighty feet tall,” says Dad, “and there are eighteen thousand lights. Glad I didn’t have to put those on!”
We swirl around on the ice hand in hand. Imogen is pink-cheeked and giggly, and we cling to each other as we spin around, laughing. I close my eyes and tilt my face up to the impossibly clear sky, feeling happier than I have all day. Dad watches us both grinning, and I wish Mum a silent Merry Christmas. I feel sure she’s sitting on her star watching us and smiling.
On New Year’s Eve, we finish packing up the apartment. It takes a surprisingly long time, and we seem to have accumulated an awful lot of stuff in four months.
“I’m going to have to pay for excess baggage,” Dad groans, looking at Imogen’s bags. “What on earth’s in all these bags, Imogen?”
“Clothes,” she says. “And makeup. And shoes.”
We try to stay awake to watch the ball drop in Times Square but are all yawning by ten o’clock.
“Come on, girls, bed. We watched midnight in London. We saw Big Ben, so we can give the ball a miss. We’ve got an early flight in the morning.”
At six a.m. on New Year’s Day, I walk a loop of the apartment. It looks exactly as it did the first time we saw it. Even Imogen’s Ice Cream has been painted over with a flat white emulsion. The sky is as blue as the day we arrived, but now the lawn below is blanketed with snow rather than sunbathers. The white walls wait silently for the next family. I’m ready to go home.
Chapter Twenty-Six
January Blues
After the Technicolor extravaganza that is New York City, London seems gray and heavy. New York is a rambunctious toddler of a city, and London is a cantankerous old lady. The oldest building here is the Tower of London, built in 1080. Just imagine all the ghosts roaming the streets, soaking into the bricks and cobbles. Manhattan’s oldest building is a mansion, built in 1765. If London were a character from a book, she’d be Miss Haversham from Great Expectations. New York would be Fudge from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.
Our taxi ride from Heathrow Airport is the opposite of our hair-raising arrival in New York four months earlier. I gaze out of the window at the passing fields and trees. A visiting tourist on their way from the airport to the city would get a glimpse of the England of their dreams, before being plunged into a never-ending series of suburbs for the next hour. It’s hard to know when you’ve arrived in London. In Manhattan, you either cross a bridge or emerge from a tunnel, and ta-da, you’re there. It strikes me that I’ll probably spend the coming months and possibly years comparing the two cities. I read a book once about a girl who had lived in England and India. She said that once you’ve lived in two countries, you never feel at home in either one.
When we get to Belsize Park, I do feel a shiver of happiness on seeing our friendly little house. Mrs. Allison and Gran are there to welcome us home with cups of tea and a pile of freshly baked scones and homemade raspberry jam.
“Gosh, don’t you girls look grown-up. I’d hardly have recognized you, Kitty. Perhaps we need a trip to Marks & Spencer for you know what,” Mrs. Allison says.
“It’s only been a month since you saw me!” I say. “People go to Victoria’s Secret in New York. There is no M&S there.”
“No M&S,” she says sadly. “Imagine that. All the wonderful shops they have in New York, but no M&S.”
Imogen laughs. “Mrs. Allison, Kitty didn’t need the first bra, let alone a second. If anything, her boobs are getting smaller. She’s becoming concave!”
“Don’t be horrid, Imogen. Anyway, what on earth is Victoria’s Secret?” asks Gran.
“An underwear shop,” I say.
“That doesn’t sound at all appropriate for teenagers. Rob, do you know about this so-called Victoria’s Secret?”
“It’s fine, Gran,” I say. “It’s just like Gap except they only sell underwear and pajamas.”
“Then I suggest you go to the Gap in future,” says Gran, clearly picturing Victoria’s Secret to be some terrible place. The way she says “the” Gap, with the emphasis on “the,” makes me smile. I grin at her, and she smiles back at me. I’ve missed her so much.
Mrs. Allison is delighted with the dog jacket we bought for Sir Lancelot.
“Ooh, Sir Lancelot, won’t you be elegant and toasty warm in this?” she says, struggling to squeeze his barrel of a body into the yellow-and-black tartan jacket.
“I told you he’d need an extra-large,” mutters Dad as Sir Lancelot slobbers on his new shoes, part of his New York City wardrobe upgrade.
“Look, Rob, he missed you,” Mrs. Allison says. “You know, it’s funny because he doesn’t usually like men, but he’s never minded you.”
Dad moves his spittle-covered shoe away from Sir Lancelot and looks offended, as if Sir Lancelot or Mrs. Allison, or maybe both of them, are questioning his masculinity. Cleo, who has been sitting on my lap purring, springs gracefully onto the counter, stepping neatly between the piles of mail and cups of tea. She watches Sir Lancelot from on high with a mixture of loathing and pity. Can cats roll their eyes? Cleo certainly seems to when she gets an uninterrupted view of Sir Lancelot stuffed into his new tartan jacket. He looks simultaneously comical and depressed. She averts her gaze and starts washing her already immaculate paws.
“Well, sorry to love you and leave you, but I need to adjust a recipe for my book. I’ve got an important meeting this week with my publisher,” says Mrs. Allison.
Gran rolls her eyes and continues flicking through the book of New Yorker cartoons we bought for her. Mrs. Allison bustles off with Sir Lancelot, who looks frumpy in his new jacket. He has fat rolls bulging out of the leg, neck, and tail openings.
“That dog is getting obese,” Gran says. “I’m sure she feeds him chocolate cakes and sticky toffee puddings. Girls, you should take him for a run in the park. The farthest Mrs. Allison walks him is up the street, and then they stop every few minutes for him to get a dog biscuit. Remember that time we took him out fundraising, Kitty? Once we got him up the hill, he started looking much perkier.”
“Sir Lancelot can’t run, Gran,” I say. “He sometimes trots when he gets close to home or the butcher’s shop, but he can’t do that for long. It’s difficult to get him all the way to the park because he’s too heavy for me to carry onto the bus, and there’s no way he can walk there and back.”
“His legs are super short as well,” says Imogen. “I bet Mrs. Allison wishes she’d chosen one of those cute little dogs that all the celebrities have that you can fit into your handbag. There were loads of those in New York.”
Jess arrives later that afternoon. We squeal and jump up and down in the hallway for a few minutes before racing to my bedroom. Jess starts rummaging through my suitcase.
“You have the best clothes, Kitty,” she sighs. “I need to borrow everything.”
“Here you go, belated Christmas present.” I hand her a Brandy Melville bag containing an identical hoodie to the one I’m wearing.
“I love it. Thanks!” Jess pulls it on immediately.
“What’s been happening at school?” I ask.
Despite our weekly FaceTime calls, I feel disconnected from Jess and my old life. Haverstock Girls’ School, Jess, Gran, Kate, Mrs. Allison, and Sam have all seemed weirdly separate and hazy while I’ve been in New York, as if I were trying to see them through a fogged-up windowpane. Jess regales me with stories of Mrs. Brooks’
latest draconian dress code rule—no scrunchies permitted other than navy, black, or brown.
“Who even owns a brown scrunchie?” says Jess. “I’ll tell you who; nobody, because it would be disgusting! My purple one was confiscated. I was supposed to get it back before the Christmas holiday, but the lost property was already locked up when I went to the office. My scrunchie wasn’t lost property anyway; it was stolen.”
I let Jessica’s familiar voice wash over me. With every word she speaks, Henry, Ava, Jen, Dash, and my New York life seem further and further away. As they recede, London shifts into focus. It reminds me of when I went to the optician, and they kept flipping lenses down to see which one worked best.
“Here’s your present, by the way,” Jess says, handing me a small parcel. Inside is a lavender heart pillow the size of the palm of my hand. “I made it for you. Do you remember making them at school when we were little?” she asks, studying my face.
Of course I remember. It was a pre–Mother’s Day activity at school when we were about six. We’d carefully cut out circles of floral fabric using pinking shears, which left lovely zigzag edges. Jess stuck out her tongue as she always used to, and sometimes still does, when she’s concentrating hard. We filled the fabric circles with dried lavender flowers, and the teacher put an elastic band on to secure them before we struggled to tie matching silk ribbons around the top. Both of our mums’ bags had exploded in their drawers, scattering bits of dried lavender everywhere. Mum had produced a faded sprig of the purple flower from her bra at the breakfast table one morning, much to Dad’s surprise. I smile at the memory and hug Jess tightly, glad to be back with people who know my story without me sharing it. People who understand what Dr. Feld would call “my narrative” without me saying a single word. Back to as normal a life as I can have without Mum. An image of Mum pops into my head, as clear as day, saying one of her catchphrases, “Normal is overrated, Kitty darling.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven