‘I’m going round to my friend Tabitha’s later,’ I explained. ‘I said I’d help her make sausage rolls.’
I had trouble making toast so my sausage-roll input would mostly be as an observer but it made it sound like I was all involved in someone else’s Christmas, and, as it was, Kathy already had the turkey in the oven, Shen was peeling potatoes and Michael was doing something to a mound of Brussels sprouts so I was only going to be in the way.
‘You’re going round for Christmas lunch, then?’ Kathy asked and I snorted, I couldn’t help it, because Tabitha never got up when it was still technically morning and she’d already told me her Christmas dinner would involve whatever she and Tom could get in Lidl half an hour before it closed on Christmas Eve.
‘Well, not lunch, but an early dinner and I never ordered a cab so I’ll have to cycle to Battersea and—’
‘Then you have to stay for lunch,’ Kathy said firmly. ‘End of discussion.’
‘But I have—’
‘I thought we were already finished talking about this. If you want to be helpful, you can go and entertain Melly and Alice so they stop coming in here every two minutes to ask when we’re going to open presents.’
Kathy Lee was good – really good, with the steely voice and determined glint in her eye, and I couldn’t imagine why she wanted me to stick around but she already had her hand on my shoulder and was steering me towards the living room, but not before I saw the grimace on Michael’s face, like my continued presence in his life and in his actual house was causing him immense physical pain.
I didn’t want to stay. Not just because being in the same room as Michael was like having my fingernails, toenails, teeth and nose hairs pulled out slowly one by one, but because I couldn’t deal with their happy families bullshit. Except it wasn’t bullshit – they were a happy family.
While they were opening presents, I took a diplomatic bath so it wouldn’t be embarrassing that I hadn’t got them anything and vice versa, but when I came downstairs again, Melly and Alice insisted that I have a pair of fairy wings and an Etch A Sketch from their combined haul, and there was also a Cadbury’s selection pack and a vanilla-scented candle because Kathy and Shen were the kind of parents who always had spare presents lying around for any last-minute guests. Michael only gave me another pained look as I helped to lay the table.
It was just your regular, run-of-the-mill, bog-standard Christmas dinner. We pulled crackers and put on our paper hats and groaned at the bad jokes in the crackers. There was an argument over who had the last pig in blanket and the home-made cranberry sauce ran out pretty quickly because the girls slathered their entire plates with the stuff.
They were all proper Christmas traditions but then, when I thought about it, I realised they were other people’s Christmas traditions. Apart from last year when Bethan had come home and we’d cooked a small but perfectly formed Christmas dinner and spent the day watching my MGM Musicals box set, our family Christmas traditions had sucked.
Pat and Roy would get us up really early. Not so we could open our Christmas presents but because Christmas dinner was at noon sharp. Then I’d get left with the clear-up while they took Bethan and went to put flowers on Andrew’s grave at a green burial ground in Buckinghamshire with a wild cherry tree and an environmentally friendly bench next to his plot. They never asked if I wanted to go with them, so I’d get left behind with a mound of dirty plates and a box of Quality Street.
Then, when they did get back, Roy would disappear to his shed and Pat would go to bed with a terrible headache and Bethan would hang out with me but she’d usually end up crying. And that had been our family Christmas tradition. Then I thought about how this would be the first Christmas that no one went to visit Andrew’s grave – last year Bethan had driven up on Boxing Day – and that made me feel depressed in a way that not even each of the Lees making a wish over their first spoonful of Christmas pudding had.
Everyone said that friends were the new family, I’d even written a blog about it, but as I sat at the Lees’ dining room table with cracker debris all around me and Melly and Alice treating us all to a rousing chorus of ‘Jingle Bells’, I knew I’d been totes wrong.
Friends shouldn’t be the new family. Your family should be your family and friends got sewn into the fabric of your family life. It was only people who didn’t have a family or had a crappy family who needed friends as a substitute. And then there were people who didn’t have a family and really, when you thought about it, didn’t have friends either.
This had nothing to do with Michael Lee sitting across the table from me, not looking at or talking to me as I didn’t look at or talk to him right back, OK? I wasn’t even angry with him any more, though I was still a little bit fumy about the Twitter thing and also the thing about him not being able to deal with my success. But now I was starting to wonder if it wasn’t that Michael couldn’t deal with my success but that he couldn’t deal with me, because I was a hell of a lot to deal with.
I sighed and Kathy gave me a look. Not one of her old ‘God, I wish they’d never banned corporal punishment in schools’ looks but one of her new ‘Oh, poor little Jeane’ looks.
‘Everything all right?’ she asked with a little head tilt to show that she was there for me and, oh no, now I wanted her to be there for me. I barely recognised myself.
‘Everything’s great,’ I said with huge amounts of false enthusiasm and I was saved from having to go into details about just how great everything was by my phone beeping. It was a text from Tabitha.
We’re awake! Get your arse over to ours. I have a rolling pin with your name on it. Tab xxx
It was no wonder I was having a deep crisis of faith. I’d been spending far too much time with the Lees and that was why I was suddenly hankering for all this happy families nonsense. How could you hanker for what you’d never had? It was pointless. I’d feel much better when I was back with my own people.
Kathy and Shen and even Melly and Alice were very reluctant to let me go, whereas Michael grunted something and went to load the dishwasher as I said my goodbyes and promised faithfully to call and let them know when I got home that night, and if I did want to stay over for a few days that was all right too, though Kathy’s elderly aunt was coming over on Boxing Day and, according to Melly and Alice, ‘She smells of actual wee.’
They even made noises about giving me a lift home, but I insisted frequently and a little forcefully that I was fine walking and finally, eventually, at last the front door was opened and I was free.
36
It was 6.30 on Christmas Day evening and I wasn’t sure if I was going to have another mince pie, throw up or fall into a food coma.
I was lying on the living room floor, back propped against the sofa where Mum and Dad were snuggling, even though they’d been told repeatedly to stop because parental PDAs were revolting. I had a Melly and an Alice cuddled up on either side and we were watching the Doctor Who Christmas special. All five of us were still wearing our paper hats and I’d hidden the last three roast potatoes at the back of the fridge to eat later.
God, I love Christmas, I thought, and then my brand new iPhone beeped.
I had an email from Jeane and just like that my warm fuzzies went cold and I really thought I was going to puke. An email from Jeane felt like getting followed round a store by the security guard. It gave me a sense of foreboding and even though I hadn’t done anything wrong (or I thought I hadn’t, but it was hard to tell with Jeane), I immediately felt guilty.
Because, yeah, she was all me, me, me all the bloody time, but now I was starting to realise that the reason she was so self-involved was because she had nobody else in her life to get involved with. She shouldn’t have to deal with broken house stuff – I didn’t even know how to put the washing machine on – and she shouldn’t have been on her own on Christmas Eve. And, yeah, I should have come clean about who I was on Twitter and, oh God, I suppose I should have admitted that I was jealous of how she was do
ing amazing things with her life when I didn’t even know how to put the washing machine on.
It still didn’t make it any easier to have her in my house, sucking up to my parents and my little sisters and looking all wan and fragile. I was still pissed off about how she’d behaved in New York but I didn’t want to be pissed off with her any more and so, even though I could have left the message unread and gone back to the Daleks, I decided to read it and then send her back a friendly but not too friendly reply.
Hey Michael
I never got to say Happy Christmas to you, so, hey, Happy Christmas and all that stuff. Are you lulled into a sense of false security with my unexpected festive felicitations? Probably not, so it’s better if I just come out with it.
I’m actually at my flat – Christmas dinner at Tab’s never happened because Mad Glen and his alcoholic mate Phil came to blows over some fake After Eights from Lidl so Tab and Tom had to take them to A&E and the thing is that actually I WOULD love to stay over at your place for a few days. Like, your mum and dad both offered repeatedly and I think your mum and I are SO over the New York business and Melly and Alice are totes my spiritual twins.
This is not some cunning ploy to worm my way back into your good graces or, like, your pants. I know that we’re over and even when it was ongoing we both knew it was doomed. That’s OK. I’m cool about that. I’m even cool about you because I know I’m impossible. I do know that, Michael, and I know you’re not cool with me. You can hardly bring yourself to look at me or talk to me, though I do appreciate you coming round when I lost it over the shower door.
So if the thought of me spending maybe two or three days at your place is going to be too awkward then please say. I will understand. Or, like, I’ll TRY to understand (I plan to be big with the empathy next year).
Do let me know if you could bear to have me around. I promise to be on my best behaviour, though that isn’t saying much.
Jeane
She was right. She was impossible. Impossible to say no to, because Jeane was seventeen and she was on her own and it was Christmas and even though I don’t think I’ll ever stop being a little bit mad at her, she didn’t deserve to be on her own at Christmas.
I turned my head and winced as I saw Mum and Dad nuzzling.
‘Can you stop that?’ I waved my phone. ‘Had an email from Jeane. Her Christmas dinner got cancelled and she wants to know if she can come and stay for a couple of days.’
It would have been all right if Dad had groaned and Mum had said, ‘But I only offered to be polite,’ but Mum was already getting up. ‘I’ll make sure she’s got clean towels. Will you go and pick her up, darling?’
I wasn’t sure which darling she was referring to but Dad was levering himself up off the sofa and Melly and Alice were asking if they could come with him because, ‘We really want to see the shower door and do you think Jeane might have different-coloured hair?’ and even if I had minded – and, well, I did a little bit – I was totally outnumbered. I emailed Jeane back.
It’s OK, Dad and the brats will be there to pick you up in a bit. I hope you like cold turkey ’cause that’s all we’re going to be eating for the next few days.
An hour later Jeane was in the house, laden down with a Fortnum & Mason’s hamper, a present from her agent which she re-gifted to Mum and Dad, and a heap of brightly coloured crap for the girls (she was always being sent heaps of brightly coloured crap by PRs who wanted a mention on her blog): hairslides to toy robots to mounds of sweets that sent them into ear-splitting squeals of delight. There was nothing for me but as she was ceremonially escorted by Melly and Alice to the spare bedroom to unpack, I checked my iPhone (I’d been checking it every five minutes since I set it up), there was an email from iTunes to let me know that Jeane had sent me a £100 gift card.
I couldn’t help but notice that your email came with the tag ‘sent from my iPhone’. This should get your apps collection off to a good start.
Even though she’d only had an hour to pack, she’d used part of that time to write me a long, detailed list of all the apps I had to buy.
But not Angry Birds. Please don’t be that predictable.
It wasn’t like she was magically forgiven or that I wanted to start something up again that I never should have started in the first place, but I couldn’t fault Jeane’s generosity. Even during that argument on a street corner in Greenpoint, even though she’d hurled insults at me, not once had she reminded me that if it hadn’t been for her I wouldn’t have been standing on a street corner in Greenpoint in the first place.
And when I thought of New York, I remembered that I had a ton of sweets bought at Dylan’s Candy Bar, which Jeane had stuffed in my bag when she’d packed for me. I could give them to her as a Christmas present, but it was very hard to find a good time to hand them over.
The first evening Jeane crashed out ridiculously early again and on Boxing Day she was more interested in helping Mum concoct huge turkey sandwiches smothered in chutneys, pickles and other condiments. When Great Aunt Mary arrived and Alice point-blank refused to go near her (which was perfectly justified because she smelt like she’d been left out in the rain), Jeane took the girls to the park with their new scooters.
Then when she got back, she bonded with Great Aunt Mary over her pink rinse and once Great Aunt Mary had been ferried back to Ealing and Mum had spritzed a whole can of Febreeze over the armchair where she’d been sitting, she and the girls and Jeane commandeered the sofa and started watching musicals. Proper old musicals in glorious technicolour where everyone kept breaking into these big song and dance numbers about having a night on the town and singing in the bloody rain. It was horrible. Usually, Melly and Alice counted as one person and the sexes were evenly represented, but with Jeane in residence the power balance had shifted and Dad retreated to his study to watch a documentary about leprosy and I lay on my bed playing Angry Birds until I couldn’t see straight.
So Jeane stayed out of my way and I stayed out of hers until the next morning when Melly and Alice were off to an all-day birthday party and Mum and Dad were braving the sales to buy a new washing machine.
‘I filled up your car with petrol the other night,’ Dad said as we were finishing breakfast. ‘Why don’t you and Jeane go out somewhere?’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Jeane said through a mouthful of toast and jam. She had let Melly and Alice do her hair, which now had at least twenty clips and bows in it. ‘I can amuse myself for a few hours.’
‘It would be nice if you two did something,’ Mum said with a pointed look at me. ‘And it would be really nice if you stopped playing that bloody game with the pigs and the birds and the incessant noise, Michael.’
I looked at Jeane who looked back at me with a blank expression and then we both looked at my mother who had her ‘My word is law’ face on and half an hour later we were in my car.
‘So where do you want to go?’ I asked Jeane politely, because she was so in with my mother I’d be in trouble if I were rude. Not that I was going to be rude but the whole thing was weird. And Jeane was being weird. Not once in the last thirty-six hours had she lectured anyone on obscure girl groups or the God-like genius that was Haribo and I didn’t want to talk about what had happened with us or what was going to happen with us because we’d start arguing and so I didn’t know what to say to her.
‘You don’t have to take me anywhere,’ she said as she crossed her arms. ‘Like, you could take me to a café and I could hang out there for a couple of hours and no one would ever know.’
Then I’d have to find another café to sit in for a couple of hours in case Mum and Dad came back early, which was just stupid.
‘Look, we can handle spending some time together, can’t we?’
‘Well, yeah, we should be able to, but it’s going to be hard when you’re not really talking to me,’ Jeane said calmly.
‘No, you’re not talking to me,’ I said, and I wished I didn’t sound so sulky.
‘I didn?
??t think you wanted me to talk to you.’
I didn’t know what I wanted any more except not to get tied up in one of Jeane’s conversational knots. ‘I’m starting the car now. Where shall we go?’
‘I suppose we could go to the seaside. Going to the seaside in winter is quite cool, though everything will probably be closed,’ Jeane mused. Inevitably she started doing something with her iPhone, then she switched on the Sat Nav I’d inherited from Dad, who’d got a swizzy new one for Christmas. ‘How does this work? Do I just put in a postcode?’
‘Yeah.’ I took my eyes off the road long enough to jab at it then watched Jeane tap in a postcode. ‘Where’s that?’
She frowned. ‘I’ll tell you when we get there. It’s not going to be the funnest road trip ever but it can be your Christmas present to me.’
‘I didn’t get you a present because I didn’t know my parents were suddenly going to adopt you! I still have the sweets I bought in New York, I’ve been waiting for a chance to give them to you.’
‘It wasn’t a dig and I did ask you before I turned up.’
‘I could hardly say no.’ I glanced over at Jeane. She was sitting there with her arms tightly folded and her lips moving silently. I swear she was counting up to ten so she wouldn’t start shouting at me. ‘I really don’t mind you staying over. I just don’t understand why you’d want to and, to be honest, that whole scene with the shower door freaked me out.’
‘Yeah, that scene with the shower door was quite an epiphany,’ Jeane said unhelpfully and then she started asking me questions about Cambridge and if I was going to do the internship in San Francisco and when the Sat Nav told me to take the next exit off the motorway, I realised that we’d managed a whole hour of not arguing.