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.But I also felt the weird relief that comes from knowing that the inevitable destruction of precious things, though done in your house, was not done by your hand.Christmas, childhood, the past, families, fathers, regret of all kinds—no one wants to be the grinch who steals these things, but you leave the door open with the hope he might come in and relieve you of your heavy stuff.Christmas is heavy.Anyway, it’s done now.And this is me and my dad one Christmas past.I’m five and he’s too old to have a five-year-old.At the time, the Smiths lived in London in a half-English, half-Irish council estate called Athelstan Gardens, one black family squished between two tribes at war.It was confusing.I didn’t understand why certain football games made people pour into Biddy Mulligan’s pub and hit other people over the head with chairs and bottles, and I didn’t get the thing about people pouring into the Prince Charles the next day and repeating the procedure.I didn’t get the men who came around collecting for the IRA on Christmas Eve, and I didn’t have to give them anything either—once they saw my mum, with her exotic shift dress and her cornrows, they respectfully withdrew, thinking we had nothing to do with their particular argument.In fact, my parents were friends with an Irishman who gave us a homemade fruit bowl this same Christmas and then the following winter betrayed the spirit of Christmas by making a different kind of homemade gift with which he tried to blow up No.11 Downing Street.We knew nothing about the bomb until years later, but we all knew about the ugly fruit bowl, ceramic and swirly and unable to stand straight on a tabletop.This was filled with nuts and laid on the carpet to limit the wobble.It’s out of the frame in this photo, on the floor by Dad’s feet.My brother Ben, a little fat thing back then, has it between his legs like Buddha with his lotus flower.Ben was always on food detail in the war that is Christmas.I did, or overdid, the decorations (as you will note, the tree is bending to the left under the weight of manga-eyed reindeer, chocolate Santas, swollen baubles, tinsel, three sets of lights and the presents I tastefully nestled in the branches).Dad cooked.Mum marked out television schedules with a pen.Ben ate the food.Just as Joseph tended to the Virgin Mary, we tended to Ben, making his comfort our first priority.He ate what he needed, and whatever was left we ate.I think it’s Carole King’s Tapestry on the record player.But which song? “It’s Too Late” would make thematic sense—my dad’s smile has the let’s-just-get-through-this tension of a code-red marriage.As for the “Natural Woman” Christmas or the “You’ve Got a Friend” Christmas—these predate my consciousness.But they must have existed, what with Ben being a September baby and me October.Those were the sexy Noels, delivering babies like presents nine months later.By contrast, Luke, my youngest brother, came in July and is still unborn in this photo.I’ve always assumed he was the result of awe-haven’t-had-sex-in-five-years birthday treat (Dad’s birthday is in late September), and by the time he turned up, Blood on the Tracks had replaced Tapestry as the family Christmas soundtrack.Maybe you wonder about the black man in the pink hat.I wonder about him, too.I think he’s an uncle of mine by the name of Denzil (spelling uncertain).My mother claims an uncertain number of siblings, certainly more than twenty, most of them—in the Jamaican parlance—“outdoor children,” meaning same father, different mother.Denzil must have been one of these, because he was six foot seven, whereas my mother is five foot five and shrinking, as I’m sure I will, and as my grandmother did before us.This Christmas was the only time we ever met each other, Denzil and I.He was the gift that kept on giving, with his strange patois and his huge feet and the piggyback rides he conducted out on the balcony because the ceilings were too low [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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