twenty-four hours it was decided to make Sunday lunch a family get-together. Two of my sisters are coming, with their husbands and solemn children. Only Rebecca will escape. She’s in Bosnia working for the UN. Bless her.
My Saturday morning chores now involve moving a ton of plumbing equipment from the front hallway into the basement. Then I have to rake the leaves, oil the swing and get two more bags of coal from the local garage. Julianne is going to shop for the food, while Charlie and her grandparents go to look at the Christmas lights in Oxford Street.
My other chore is to buy a tree— a thankless task. The only truly well-proportioned Christmas trees are the ones they use in advertisements. If you try to find one in real life you face inevitable disappointment. Your tree will lean to the left or the right. It will be too bushy at the base, or straggly at the top. It will have bald patches, or the branches on either side will be oddly spaced. Even if you do, by some miracle, find a perfect tree, it won’t fit in the car and by the time you strap it to the roof rack and drive home the branches are broken or twisted out of shape. You wrestle it through the door, gagging on pine needles and sweating profusely, only to hear the maddening question that resonates down from countless Christmases past: “Is that really the best one you could find?”
Charlie’s cheeks are pink with the cold and her arms are draped in polished paper bags full of new clothes and a pair of shoes.
“I got heels, Dad. Heels!”
“How high?”
“Only this much.” She holds her thumb and forefinger apart.
“I thought you were a tomboy,” I tease.
“They’re not pink,” she says sternly. “And I didn’t get any dresses.”
God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting is pouring himself a scotch and getting annoyed because my mother is chatting with Julianne instead of bringing him some ice. Charlie is excitedly opening bags.
Then she suddenly stops. “The tree! It’s lovely.”
“So it should be. It took me three hours to find.”
I have to stop myself telling her the whole story about my friend from the Greek deli in Chalk Farm Road, who told me about a guy who supplies trees to “half of London” from the back of a three-ton truck.
The whole enterprise sounded pretty dodgy, but for once I didn’t care. I wanted to get a flawless specimen and that’s what it is— a pyramid of pine-scented perfection, with a straight trunk and perfectly spaced branches.
Since getting home I have been wandering back and forth to the sitting room, marveling at the tree. Julianne is getting slightly fed up with me saying “Isn’t that a great tree?” and expecting a response.
God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting is telling me his solution to traffic congestion in central London. I’m waiting for him to comment on the tree. I don’t want to prompt him. He’s talking about banning all delivery trucks in the West End except for designated hours. Then he starts complaining about shoppers who walk too slowly and suggests a fast- and slow-lane system.
“I found a tree today,” I interject, unable to wait. He stops abruptly and looks over his shoulder. He stands and examines it more closely, walking from side to side. Then he stands back to best appreciate the overall symmetry.
Clearing his throat, he asks, “Is it the best one they had?”
“No! They had dozens of better ones! Hundreds! This was one of the worst; the absolute pits; the bottom of the barrel. I felt sorry for it. That’s why I brought it home. I adopted a lousy Christmas tree.”
He looks surprised. “It isn’t
“You’re fucking unbelievable,” I mutter under my breath, unable to stay in the same room. Why do our parents have the ability to make us feel like children even when our hair is graying and we have a mortgage that feels like a Third World debt?
I retreat to the kitchen and pour myself a drink. My father has only been here for ten hours and already I’m hitting the bottle. At least reinforcements arrive tomorrow.
I was always running in my childhood nightmares— trying to escape a monster or a rabid dog or perhaps a Neanderthal second-rower forward with no front teeth and cauliflower ears. I would wake just before getting caught. It didn’t make me feel any safer. That is the problem with nightmares. Nothing is resolved. We rouse ourselves in midair or just before the bomb goes off or stark naked in a public place.
I have been lying in the dark for five hours. Every time I think nice thoughts and begin drifting off to sleep, I jump awake in a panic. It’s like watching a trashy horror movie that is laughably bad, but just occasionally there is a scene that frightens the bejesus out of you.
Mostly I’m trying not to think about Bobby Moran because when I think about him it leads me to Catherine McBride and that’s a place I don’t want to go. I wonder if Bobby is in custody, or if they’re watching him. I have this picture in my head of a van with blacked-out windows parked outside his place.
People can’t really sense when they’re being watched— not without some clue or recognizing something untoward. However, Bobby doesn’t operate on the same wave length as most people. He picks up different signals. A psychotic can believe the TV is talking to him and will question why workmen are repairing phone lines over the road, or why there’s a van with blacked-out windows parked outside.
Maybe none of this is happening. With all the new technology, perhaps Ruiz can find everything he needs by simply typing Bobby’s name into a computer and accessing the private files that every conspiracy theorist is convinced the government keeps on the nation’s citizens.
“Don’t think about it. Just go to sleep,” Julianne whispers. She can sense when I’m worried about something. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since Charlie was born. You get out of the habit after a while. Now I have these pills, which are making things worse.
Julianne is lying on her side, with the sheet tucked between her thighs and one hand resting on the pillow next to her face. Charlie does the same thing when she’s sleeping. They barely make a sound or stir at all. It’s as though they don’t want to leave a footprint in their dreams.
By midmorning the house is full of cooking smells and feminine chatter. I’m expected to set the fire and sweep the front steps. Instead, I sneak around to the newsstands and collect the morning papers.
Back in my study, I set aside the supplements and magazines and begin looking for stories on Catherine. I’m just about to sit down when I notice one of Charlie’s bug-eyed goldfish is floating upside down in the aquarium. For a moment I think it might be some sort of neat goldfish trick, but on closer inspection it doesn’t look too hale and hearty. It has gray speckles on its scales— evidence of an exotic fish fungus.
Charlie doesn’t take death very well. Middle Eastern kingdoms have shorter periods of mourning. Scooping up the fish in my hand, I stare at the poor creature. I wonder if she’ll believe it just disappeared. She
“Charlie, I have some bad news. One of your goldfish has disappeared.”
“How could it just disappear?”
“Well, actually it died. I’m sorry.”
“Where is it?”
“You don’t really want to see it, do you?”
“Yes.”
The fish is still in my hand, which is in my pocket. When I open my palm it seems more like a magic trick than a solemn deed.
“At least you didn’t try to buy me a new one,” she says.
Being very organized, Julianne has a whole collection of shoe boxes and drawstring bags that she keeps for this sort of death in the family. With Charlie looking on, I bury the bug-eyed goldfish under the plum tree, between the late Harold Hamster, a mouse known only as Mouse and a baby sparrow that flew into the French doors and broke its neck.
By one o’clock most of the family has assembled, except for my older sister, Lucy, and her husband, Eric, who have three children whose names I can never remember, but I know they end with an “ee” sound like Debbie, Jimmy or Bobby.
