If this is your first time, like all first times, keep tasting till you like it.
Your own mayo with home-made fries and rib-eye steak is a day-after-the-party dish even J.W. does the way I like it. Try it if you have gravlax for your New Year’s Eve party and need something for that hangover.
O’BRIEN’S FIRST CHRISTMAS
nyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the one that never stopped calculating the national debt. This one said ‘27 SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS’.
It might as well have said ‘27 DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON’. The frenzy was the same – the rush to buy as many things as you could that you didn’t want and couldn’t afford. Things so little wanted they were given as gifts – that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands.
And food. Why, at this time of the year, does it become essential to stock up on chocolate-covered pretzels? Why does anyone want instant stuffing? Or drinks blended from cheap whisky and sterilised cream? Or wafer-thin mints?
O’Brien wondered about the wafer-thin mints. What was the important word? Wafer? Thin? Mints? Were these chocolates aimed at anorexics? Waifer-thin mints. Was it all in the fact of the filling? O’Brien had personally tasted the fillings in all of the filled chocolate products. And she had personally tested all of the filled bottles of body lotion. Colour and texture and scent were identical. Somewhere, in a town no one visited, nameless and not on any navigation system, there was a factory dedicated to the manufacture of sticky stuff. Vats of it, made all year, stored at a low temperature and sold to profiteers who traded exclusively in Christmas.
The department store where O’Brien worked prided itself on Never Running Out. Shop as you like, the miraculous shelves were filled with goods the following day. Only too much was enough.
O’Brien didn’t like Christmas. If she went home to Cork, a hive of aunts asked her about her marriage prospects. Her father asked her about her job prospects. Her mother asked her about her hair. Her hair had always been lank and brown. She cut it straight across the back and straight across the fringe. ‘Why won’t you make something of yourself?’ said her mother. ‘You’re no beauty but do you have to look like the donkey at the derby?’
O’Brien wore brown. Her hair was brown. Her soul, she thought, was brown. She had read a book called How to Sparkle but she couldn’t get past the first affirmation: I AM A SPARK IN THE SPARKLER OF LIFE. Just saying it made her depressed.
All her friends had done better than her. Whatever that meant. She had done nothing that caught in the sieve of the world’s esteem.
‘And what is it that you do for a living, remind me?’
O’Brien was tired of being the runt of the litter, but the pride she had was fierce enough in its own way. She believed she could do better than nothing – and nothing, so it seemed to her, was all that was left when you took away the wrapping paper of people’s lives. They packaged themselves all right – but what was in the box?
But if she didn’t go home to Cork, she stayed in London by herself. Not by herself because her landlady never went anywhere on principle. She was a Scientologist and she was waiting to be released from her negative engrams. O’Brien could see that would make it difficult to go on holiday.
‘And I am Hungarian,’ said her landlady. She never explained why this was significant but it was her default position. If any of her lodgers asked her for something – a new carpet or an extra day to pay the rent – she never said yes, she never said no, she shrugged and shook her head regretfully. ‘I am Hungarian.’
O’Brien worked in the pet department at the store and she qualified for a 35% discount on anything alive. It made sense to have a pet and a pet would keep her company, but her landlady would not hear of it. ‘Hair carries stray molecules,’ she said. ‘And what is hairier than an animal?’
O’Brien didn’t know if anything was hairier than an animal. Instead she suggested a small tank of tropical fish. Her landlady shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. ‘I am Hungarian,’ she said.
So O’Brien faced another Christmas alone.
In her lunch break she went online to look at the lonely hearts. There were so many sites to choose from, and there seemed to be extra at Christmas, just as there was extra of everything else. How could it be that so many sane, slim, smart, solvent, sexy men and women, with no obvious perversions and a good sense of humour, would be spending Christmas alone? Like her.
O’Brien had tried online dating already. Her computer profile had matched her to a small, nervous young man who tuned pianos. O’Brien had ticked her boxes as someone who liked to play the piano and didn’t like tall, noisy men. So they had sent her the quiet one with the tuning fork. He hadn’t said much over supper – O’Brien had ticked the box that said she enjoyed a quiet night in, but she didn’t mean she enjoyed a quiet night out where her companion barely spoke.
At the end of the evening her companion had suggested they get married by special licence. O’Brien declined on the grounds that a whirlwind romance would be too tiring after so little practice. It would be like doing an hour’s aerobics when you couldn’t manage five minutes on the exercise bike. She asked him why he was in such a hurry.
‘I have a heart condition,’ he said.
So it was like aerobics after all.
Later she had joined a camera club, reasoning that digital had made the days of the darkroom a thing of the past so there would be no hairy hands groping her behind the black-out curtains with their joke-shop gorilla hands. In fact the club had turned out to be a cover for a group of male-to-female transvestites. She had liked them all, and she was given several handbags, but single she remained.
The aunts in Cork offered her advice. ‘Don’t set your sights too high, girl.’
But she did. O’Brien had loved the stars since she was a tiny girl growing up in a cottage on a country road. There, put to bed, she leaned out of the window every night and tried to count the myriad pins of light.
Now a young woman in a sodium-lit city, she had to imagine the stars more often than she saw them. But she set her sights up there – in the constellations; in the Seven Sisters, romantically alone, and Orion the hunter, his dog-star at his heels. In December, when the stars were bright, she sometimes walked up to Hampstead Heath, just to look into the dark. Just to look into the night and see herself in another life, happy.
Her boss came by. He was whistling ‘Climb Every Mountain’. His hobby was whistling. He had a lot of friends because all over the world people love to whistle and since the internet came along they can all whistle to one another.
He gave O’Brien a chocolate elf and told her to cheer up. It’s Christmas!
‘Find your dream,’ he said to O’Brien.
‘When did all this start,’ said O’Brien, ‘this dream-finding?’ Her boss looked blankly at her and went away with his bag of chocolate elves to check on the ferrets.
O’Brien wondered if the dream industry had started with Martin Luther King. But he did have a dream and it was a dream worth bringing into daylight. Then she wondered about dreams as messages, the Shaman dream. Then she wondered about dreams as repressed desires, the Freudian dream. Then she thought about Joseph Campbell and his dreams as symbols of the inner life.
Dreams were so tiring that she wondered how anybody ever dared to go to sleep at night.
The store was closing. O’Brien went down to her locker to get her things. She went into the Ladies’ and looked in the mirror. Brown, she thought. My life is too brown.
Unable to do anything with the thought except be burdened by it, she set off to the lower lift. To do this she had to walk along a corridor of stars and under a big sign that said FOLLOW YOUR STAR.
Everybody used to navigate by the stars; there was no other way. Did it make a difference if you were looking at the sky instead of a screen? A difference to yo
ur sense of self?
‘What did you say?’
She was outside SANTA’S GROTTO. Naturally, in a department store, the star led to a merchandising opportunity.
Santa had finished work for the day too. He pulled off his beard and hat. He was young and dark and clean-shaven. ‘You said something about looking at the sky, not at a screen.’
‘I was talking to myself,’ said O’Brien. ‘I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.’
‘I’m a country boy myself,’ said Santa.
‘Where are you from?’
‘The North Pole.’
‘What a coincidence, then – that you’re playing Santa.’ Then O’Brien realised that as usual she hadn’t got the joke. She blushed and hurried away, hating herself.
When she returned to her lodgings that evening, her landlady was hanging a holly wreath on the front door.
‘This is not for myself, you understand,’ said the landlady. ‘It is for my tenants. I am Hungarian.’
O’Brien went inside. The entrance hall was filled with home-made paper chains. Her landlady followed her inside and demanded help. Soon O’Brien found herself holding the ends of the paper chains while her landlady creaked up and down the aluminium steps, her mouth full of tacks like teeth like a vampire.
‘You are not going home for Christmas?’ said the landlady. It was a question but it sounded like an order.
‘No. I am resolved to think about my life and change it. My life is meaningless. What is the point?’
‘Life has no point,’ said the landlady. ‘You would be better to get married or start an evening class.’
This was too circular for O’Brien. She had tried to do both.
‘Your past is your trauma,’ said the landlady. ‘If you become a Scientologist you can clear your engrams and eventually you could become a Thetan.’
‘Are you a Thetan?’
‘I am Hungarian,’ said the landlady. And then, perhaps because O’Brien looked sad, perhaps because it was Christmas, perhaps because she was Hungarian, the landlady said, ‘Can I offer you a tin of sardines for your supper? They are not in olive oil but tomato sauce.’
Alone in her room, O’Brien made a mental list of the things people thought of as their future: marriage and children – the aunts in Cork were right about that. A good job, money, more money, travel, happiness. Christmas-time swivelled the lens and brought these things into focus. If you had some, all, any of these things you could feel especially pleased with yourself over the twelve days of feasting and family. If you didn’t have some, all, any of these things you felt the lack more keenly. You felt like an outsider. And what if you couldn’t afford to buy presents? Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.
O’Brien didn’t know much about theology but she knew there had been a muck-up somewhere.
‘Maybe I’m just not normal,’ she said out loud.
‘We should all try to be normal,’ said her landlady, appearing in the doorway without knocking. ‘There is nothing wrong with being normal. Here are the sardines.’
Nothing wrong, thought O’Brien, but what’s right for me?
She lay awake through the night, the radio on low, listening to music and talk programmes. There was a story about a princess who was invited to a ball. Her father offered her a hundred gowns to choose from, but not one of them fitted and her father refused to have any of them altered. No dress. No ball. But the princess climbed out of the window and ran all the way to the ball with her hair down, wearing her silk shift. And still she was more beautiful than anyone.
O’Brien must have fallen asleep or she couldn’t have woken up with the sense that she was no longer alone in the room. She was right. Sitting at the bottom of her bed was a small, sprite-like woman wearing an organza tutu.
O’Brien didn’t panic. The other lodger who lived on her landing worked in adult entertainment. All Vicky’s friends wore exotic outfits, and some came to visit late, after their shift was done.
‘Vicky’s room is by the stairs,’ said O’Brien sleepily.
‘I’m the Christmas Fairy. I’m here for your wish.’
O’Brien realised her visitor must be drunk. She swung her legs out of bed and sat up. ‘Come on, I’ll show you the way.’
‘This is the address I was given,’ said the fairy. ‘You are O’Brien. I am here to grant you a wish. You can have love, adventure, whatever. We don’t do money.’
O’Brien thought for a moment. This must be a joke from someone she knew, except that she didn’t know anybody. She decided to play along. ‘OK, what can you offer?’
The fairy pulled out an iPad. What kind of a fairy has an iPad?
Reading her mind, the fairy said, ‘Elemental beings run on electrical energy. Humans have begun to make progress. With us, iPads self-charge. You’ll get there.’
O’Brien looked at the screen. She read the heading: ‘Eligible Men’.
‘Choose a pixie,’ said the fairy.
‘You mean a pixel,’ said O’Brien.
The fairy looked annoyed and wiped the screen. ‘Here are all the eligible women. It’s all the same to me.’
‘Shouldn’t you be singing this?’ said O’Brien.
‘Why?’ said the fairy. ‘Does conversation bother you?’
‘No, but you are some sort of singing telegram or singing webpage, or . . . ’
‘I am a fairy,’ said the fairy. ‘Your auntie O’Connor summoned me by mistake – then because she didn’t know what to do with me, and I may not depart when summoned until I have completed my task, she sent me to you. Does that explain it for you?’
It didn’t. O’Brien looked at the clock: 4.30am.
‘Time is running out,’ said the fairy. ‘What is your wish?’
‘OK,’ said O’Brien, wanting to go back to sleep. ‘I wish I was blonde.’
‘That is rather a superficial wish,’ said the fairy, ‘but it is your wish. As it is Christmas, I will throw in a wash, cut and restyle. When you wake up your wish will be granted.’
‘Where are you going now?’ said O’Brien.
‘Off duty. I have a date with a pixel.’
O’Brien slept deeply. She slept through her alarm and woke too late for anything but a shower and a murky dive into her clothes – at least they always matched, being brown.
In the lift, on her way down to the pet department, she met Lorraine from Lingerie, also in the basement.
‘Wow!’ said Lorraine. ‘I didn’t recognise you! Your hair is amazing! Must have cost a fortune!’
Lorraine always spoke in exclamation marks because she had to sell bras and knickers that made women look fantastic!
On her way to her locker, O’Brien bumped into Kathleen from Fabrics and Furnishings. ‘It really suits you. You should do more with your make-up now.’
More? O’Brien didn’t do anything so even choosing a lipstick would count as more. She could manage that.
She went into the Ladies’ and looked in the mirror.
She was blonde. She was blonde as a Viking. She was corn-coloured with honey highlights. Her hair was thick and fashionably floppy. Perhaps it was a wig. She tugged at it. It wasn’t a wig.
People went white overnight – but could they go blonde? And in winter? Corn on the cob. Polenta. Madeira cake. Lemons. She hadn’t eaten any yellow food. She must be ill. She must have jaundice. That’s yellow. But she didn’t feel ill. She felt strangely and unaccountably happy.
As she came out of the Ladies’ there was Santa, emerging from the Gents’, wearing red trousers and braces and carrying his fur-trimmed jacket.
‘Can you strap me into my tummy bulge?’ he said.
Shyly, O’Brien belted the stuffed pad around his flat stomach, fast
ening it at the back. She could feel the warmth of him. ‘You need a square meal,’ she said.
‘Are you offering?’ he said, but he was turned away from her and he didn’t see her blush. When she was done he turned round and looked down at her head. He was at least a foot taller than her.
‘Great hair!’ he said. ‘You did that last night, right?’
‘Kind of,’ said O’Brien. Then she said, ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ Immediately regretting it.
‘Sure I do! I’m Santa Claus!’ He had a nice, friendly smile and a direct look in his blue eyes. ‘Listen, I have to blow up two dozen inflatable gnomes for the kids’ Christmas Eve party in the grotto. The grotto is made of polystyrene, which is bad for the lungs anyway, so I’m not blowing them up in there. How about we do it together? We can blow them up in Pets. I’ll buy you lunch afterwards.’
‘How do you know I work in Pets?’ said O’Brien, but Santa, whose name was Tony, just smiled.
At the vegetarian café round the corner, where every lentil bake came with its own sprig of holly, Tony asked O’Brien if she’d like to come to a show with him. ‘I’m an actor. An out-of-work actor, just now, but my pals are in a show. We can go for free.’
‘Can we stay out till after midnight?’ said O’Brien.
Tony looked puzzled. ‘Sure, we’ll be having a drink afterwards. But why?’
‘I just want to check my hair, since I had it done by a fairy – I mean, it might go back to brown at midnight.’
Tony laughed. ‘I like a girl that can tell a joke against herself. You’ve got a good sense of humour.’
O’Brien was astonished. Isn’t that what everybody wanted in the lonely hearts? GSOH?
They went to the show, and O’Brien liked Tony’s friends, and Tony’s friends liked her, and at five minutes to midnight they were at the street corner where O’Brien lived and the clock struck twelve.
‘Do you think I could kiss you before that fairy comes along?’ said Tony.
That next day was O’Brien’s day off work. So she went shopping like everyone else. She bought a few new clothes, none of them brown, and some nice food and, in honour of the occasion, a set of fairy lights.