I, like her, spend the Christmas season, when so many world disasters happen, wrapping presents and attaching baubles. Warfare by generosity. Potlatch: who gives, wins.
‘On my seventh birthday the Vietnam boat people took to the seas and my mother adopted a little Vietnamese boy. She always preferred sons. On my eighth, the Iranians rose against the Shah and welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini (out of the kettle into the fire, some say) and I was given the most expensive bicycle Harrods could offer. For my ninth my mother was away in the States for John Lennon’s funeral; on my tenth my mother should have been at Greenham, but she wasn’t. My mother was not the kind to damage her nails linking hands with muddy women, not even to save the world.’
‘Perhaps this obsession with birthdays,’ remarked Miss Jacobs, ‘is because you feel deprived by fate. Children whose birthday is near or on Christmas Day often have to make do with one set of presents.’
‘You must have told my mother that,’ said Clarissa, ‘and she believed it. I always got at least five times as much as my many and varied siblings, and they know it, and dislike me for it, and the more they dislike me, the more I feel obliged to give them.
‘In December 1980 at least two thousand people were killed by Union Carbide at Bhopal, but nothing daunted my mother’s gift-wrapping fervour. Could we have bread and cheese for Christmas dinner, and do without on their account? No. In October 1987 a tree fell through a conservatory roof in the great gale so that Christmas we ate in the kitchen and the maid stayed home, but that was our own misfortune, not the world’s. In December 1988 an earthquake in Armenia wiped cities off the face of the earth and a hundred thousand died, but my family’s annual Christmas fund remained undented. On my birthday in 1991 Gorbachov resigned and the Soviet Empire came to an end, and our turkey was too big to go into the oven. In December 1993 the South African parliament voted itself out of existence and over the Christmas Day sherry, I heard my mother ask someone, “What is apartheid anyway? Is it a city?”
‘Do you know what I have in all those wet shopping bags? I have gifts for my sisters Saffron, Jubilant, Cleopatra and Severo, and my brother Aurelius, and my little adopted brother Min, and presents for my father Harry, and his later wives, Mandy and Debbie and Peacock, a transsexual, and my ex-stepfather Richard, and his boys Charles, David and Bill, and my new stepfather Gavron and his sister Cassandra, who’ll be upset if she’s left out – she is suicidal. And there are so many grandparents on all sides, not to mention aunts, uncles, cousins, I don’t know what to do, but those you forget don’t forgive. And Saffron and Jubilant are both pregnant and what worries me is that now the next generation is coming along and, as with the flat-folded non-destructible prion, growth of family members will be exponential and podatch frenzy never be at an end, and how will I ever find time or strength to save the world? I blame my mother. And the shops are shut and I have no gift for Saffron’s partner or Jubilant’s husband and I can’t even remember their names. I’m so tired.’ And Clarissa’s tears were renewed.
‘What we regret for the dead, the poor and distressed,’ said Miss Jacobs, ‘is that they are not alive, spending and happy. We might as well have a good time while we can, in their honour, if indignation will allow. There’s such a thing as going too far, I do agree, but all will yet be well.’
When Clarissa was calm again she and Miss Jacobs both put on raincoats, and went down the street to where there was a skip and emptied out the contents of the carrier bags – a myriad packages and parcels, gold and red and green, all glittery with Christmas goodwill – so they tumbled down into wet rubble and in between paint-peeled planks of worm-eaten wood. And if the minute Miss Jacobs and Clarissa were gone a host of shadowy figures stretched skinny arms out of the damp dark to retrieve them, so much the better.
The woman drove. The man was the passenger. She was English. He was German. She was in her fifties, tough and bright and not yet finished with sex. She wore a vivid green shirt and jacket. His hand rested on her knee. He was thirtyish, blond, gentle-eyed; sharp, childish features clouded by a soft fuzzy beard. He thought she was invincible, wonderful, and often told her so.
Stella had things to do in Oslo, she said: a couple of people to see: a few loose ends to tie up. She’d appreciate company. Lothar was a children’s book illustrator; a couple of commissions had fallen through: he had time to spare. They’d met in a bar in his home-town, Berlin, and gone home together. She was in business, she said; he was not sure what it was. She lived in Ipswich, England.
She knew her way through the backstreets of Oslo; the ship had docked at 6 a.m.: early: they’d picked up the hire car at the port, a BMW, executive style, glossy black, bullet-proof windows. Lothar didn’t drive – he did not, he often said, wish to be an accomplice in the pollution of the planet; besides, he enjoyed his passenger status. He thought her hands gripped rather tightly on the wheel as they approached Grunnerloekka.
‘I hate this place,’ she said.
Early sun shone on snow-sprinkled trees. Lothar looked round for any possible source of her hate, but could find none. It was a district much like the one he himself lived in, only in Oslo, not Berlin. A run-down, attractive village-within-the-city, where artists and academics clustered, and now the immigrants moved in because rents were cheap. Already people were about. A bouncy blonde mother wheeled out twins in a high, well-sprung pram: a group of shrouded Islamic women hurried by; a pale young man with ringlets played folk-songs on a flute. A Turkish foodstore stood next to a shop selling Japanese paper lampshades and beeswax candles: there was an espresso bar next to a clinic offering Chinese medicine and acupuncture. A gang of children raced along the shop fronts, banging hands against shutters and doors as they went – clang, clang, reverberating – but otherwise they kept silent, as if like a flock of birds they could read each other’s minds. Vietnamese, he thought: lithe, graceful and dangerous; those, you could be sure, whom earlier generations had wronged, now thriving on the guilt of the descendants.
‘It seems much like anywhere else,’ said Lothar cautiously.
‘It’s going down in the world,’ she said. ‘Black faces everywhere.’
He felt shocked. He’d been on the verge of falling in love with her. He moved his hand away from her knee. She felt it go and smiled.
‘I am concerned for property prices, that’s all,’ she said.
‘Rentals and so forth.’
They came to a park. An untidy slope of snow, thawing, green and brown tussock showing through the white, ran down to a partly frozen stream, tree-lined. Ducks swam in patches where the ice had melted, milling around, uncomfortably close to one another. Stella parked the BMW on the gravel verge. On the other side of the road, overlooking the park, stood turn-of-the-century apartment blocks, balconied, shabby but attractive in their deep Hanseatic colours. They had been built in an age where there was more space, fewer people; the buildings stood at a leisurely distance from one another, their proportions pleasant.
‘How attractive,’ said Lothar, who would always rather praise than blame. Good humour, he felt, made the world go round.
‘I lived here for eleven years,’ said Stella. ‘Up there on the fourth floor. The balcony with all the house plants.
I
