Late night drive on Christmas Eve

Remembering an unusual 80’s Christmas Eve with my dad

He doesn’t do Christmas, never has.

Just as he never did summer holidays.

Well, he attempted it once or twice, but ‘family’ was always a bad fit.

Occasionally, I’d watch him try it on for size, the way a sturdy girl wrestles a ballet tutu in the dressing up corner. Pink hope ripped and split as the stark realisation dawns - this beautiful thing isn’t made for the likes of me - and it’s promptly discarded in favour of something more suitable. A first aid kit or tool box is hastily grabbed and one makes the best of what is practical rather than stretching the fabric of an impossible dream.

But this year, this Christmas Eve, he’s trying.

In his own way.

I wish I knew which year it was, but I don’t.

Only that it’s sometime in the mid eighties.

By this point, prison gates are revolving doors.

As a young teenager, I’ve fast had to familiarise myself with terms like ‘on remand’ and ‘sent down’.

My mum, brother and I are staying at my grandma’s house and he has dropped by to see us.

I say ‘dropped by’ as though it some casual hour like 3 or 5pm, but him being him, it’s closer to 11.30pm.

Like all brash tigers unexpectedly appearing in kitchens, he demands both eager audience and copious amounts of scalding sweet tea in equal measure. He guzzles the latter at a warp speed that makes the roof of my mouth crepe, he remaining unfazed by it. It is ‘builder’s tea’ - a shade I can’t for the life of me manage to sorcer without using at least two bags and nervously squashing the shit out of both.

He’s fresh out of jail again, booming, abrasive, an uninvited, intrusive ghetto blaster in my grandma’s tiny red brick terrace. Today, he would be no doubt diagnosed ADHD, his attention flitting from here to there like an unruly juvenile magpie, head turned by anything new and shiny.

“You know what I like doing?”

He says, suddenly glowing like a plastic toy with fresh batteries inserted.

“On Christmas Eve? Know what I like to do on Christmas Eve?”

“No.”

I say truthfully.

I know what he used to like to do when I was very little.

He liked to work.

“Double time! Can’t turn down double time…”

I can hear him repeating. The greedy mantra of a mileage-happy taxi driver.

I know what he likes doing now, every other night of the year. 

He likes ducking and diving, wheeling and dealing. He frequents smoke filled dens with a chocolate box assortment of cronies who pander to his gangster delusions.

He likes to drive to Salford casino and gamble. He likes fast cars.

He does not like - and has never liked - spending time with his family.

So what, pray, does this man - who feels more and more like a stranger these days - like to do on Christmas Eve?

“Go on”

I enquire, although he needs no encouragement.

“I like to drive into Manchester city centre and just see how quiet it is.”

Okay…...

“Normally it’s swarming, but go down there late on a Christmas Eve……it’s a different world. So still. So silent!”

The spontaneity in his lively green eyes begins to bubble over like an uncontainable witches brew.

“D’yer want to ’ave a drive down there now?”

He says.

“Yes”

I reply guardedly, yet all the same, I am instantly enthused by the idea of a run-of-the-mill Christmas Eve transformed at whim into an off the cuff midnight joyride!

Like it or not, in this respect. I am my father’s daughter.  I too, am best lit by ideas that scramble recklessly into my heart as rogue runaway horses. Two minutes later I have coat and shoes on and we’re leaving the others and climbing into his car.

The vehicle, as usual, smells of men I thankfully do not know. It’s an unapologetic odour of cigarettes, sweat, leather and aftershave. There is a weak attempt to mask this in the form of one of those dreadful rectangular car air fresheners that look like traffic lights on a strip of card, swinging limply on cheap chain.

The roads are ours, spanning before us as broad navy ribbons, cats eyes running through them, as if flecked by gold.

The car is quiet, bar his bristling voice that can’t help pluck annoyingly on the ruching bri-nylon of my psyche. 

When we were kids, he’d have had Elvis or Tony Christie blaring out, but not tonight. Tonight he has chosen no sound track, the absence of which, creates a sliceable cinematic tension.  It feels uncomfortable. With no obvious distraction, I fidget and shuffle. I sit in the back as though he my chauffeur, gnawing upon the smooth of my inner cheek, furring my own flesh in frenzy. I hope he doesn’t drive too fast, the way he always did on motorways when I was small. Thank goodness the well worn weave to Manchester is punctuated by countless zebra crossings and roundabouts. In the day time, they hinder with their cumbersome pauses. Tonight, they are my friend.

Narrator! I think randomly, as we skirt the suburbs. (Not so much ‘Walking in the air’ but milling ’round Moss Side.) They always chose me to be the narrator in the school play, Christmas or otherwise,

If he’d ever attended any of my school productions ever, he’d know this, I think resentfully.

“But that’s a compliment!”

Others would say.

“It’s because you have such a clear speaking voice!”

Much as I had craved a ‘real’ part, there I’d stood year after year - messenger. Chronicling some situation.

I remember a year or two ago, how I’d narrated ‘Twas the night before Christmas’

How I’d wanted to be Mama in her ’kerchief or one of the children nestled in their bed! What are sugar plums? I’d pondered as I’d read the words aloud, conjuring up a punnet of dusky Victorias sprinkled with Tate n Lyle, leaping about.

But isn’t that life, sometimes?

You take on a role, say the words, having no clue really what that script is about.

You blag it.

Sensing the weird silence, he breaks into chirpy ‘taxi driver’ banter, making superficial everyman statements and posing rhetorical questions about road conditions, the weather, traffic…..

“Freezin’ tonight int it?”

But my teenage ice maiden cuts him no slack. His patter falls flat, slamming into kerb as burst footballs.

“No-one about at this time o’ night”

He adds, once more attempting conversation.

No shit. It’s past midnight!

Do I say this or just think it?

“All at home with their families now!”

He says it as though an alien reporting back on new forms of life, he has observed with interest.

Snow is now falling. Street lamps halo each flat flake as feathered meat slices carved from a generous pale breast of sky.

We are pulling into the city centre.

Atmosphere hangs awkward as a lone earring. A slanted painting. I am drawn to peer into the fronts of the grand department stores; Lewises, Debenhams….to take in their engaging window displays.

‘The Christmas Tree Train’ comes to mind. A cartoon film they used to show each year about a bear cub and a fox who find themselves aboard a log train headed for the big city, and later, lost in a department store. Which little kid hasn’t had that dream? Of being locked inside some huge emporium surrounded by goodies - Hamleys or the toy floor at Harrods!

But close up, at night, the mannequins are nothing less than creepy in their festive attire. It’s a soulless tableau of long limbs, empty eyes and impossible cheekbones. Without shoppers to lend them life via their breath of want, their aspiration is exposed as materialist froth and no substance. It dawns that every single glittery parcel in this deliberately deceiving scene is a glossy box of lightweight nothing.

Further down the road, we see huddles of homeless men in hooded doorways. Their puffy sleeping bags spill over from damp, flattened boxes which they share with faithful smooth hounds and numerous bottles of numbing agents. The construct of the corrugated cardboard mirrors and mocks the accordion folds in ‘Fairy Tale of New York’. Eyes of dogs are heavy, their tongues hang as flat bacon goblets waiting for a building bead of ice to spill from a decanter roof. “Mange!” I can hear my mum saying in disgust as I notice the bare patches on their coat.

Christmas trees patrol open space as gaudy light-clad triangles.

“What am I doing here?”

They seem to scream.

“I should be in a forest somewhere, not here on show in the centre of bloody Manchester….”

And it comes to me, that this is how many adults experience Christmas. Especially those bereaved or estranged. They are forcibly removed from the ‘safe forest’ of their routine and plunged into a chaos they feel no affinity with. The land of happy families. And so they pull a cracker, don a paper crown, but always with that feeling of onlooker, fraud. Celebration is a field study. They think they are fooling others as they down a tot of sherry, read a joke or plunge a spoon into a waiting wobbly trifle. And there comes a point for some, when they can no longer fake it. When the twinkle of the fairy lights shows every swollen tear, boating in their jaded eyes.

They are dead inside just like that Christmas tree, merely decked out and put on display.

And now I have become aware of this phenomenon, I know I will notice it forever more. The barbarity of emotional nakedness at Christmas.

Despite these truths I meet as glaring ghosts, there is still something achingly beautiful about Manchester post midnight on Christmas Eve - now Christmas Day. It is raw and nourishing as milk. It is real.

And as we survey this scene together, for a minute, our masks slip, ever so slightly.

He stops making cabbish small talk. I lapse into the odd smile, as I decide acting the teenage arse isn’t quite as much fun sans spectators.

He tells me he is thinking of setting up a clothing company and calling it ‘Jack the Lad’.

“Like that Joe Bloggs one, but Jack the Lad. ‘Cause everyone wants to be Jack the Lad, don’t they?”

No, I think.

Not everyone does, actually.

Some guys your age are like my friends’ dads.

They played Father Christmas, they patiently assembled toys, they sat around the table fending off sprouts and dozed off with a tipple during the Queen’s Speech.

“Why aren’t you fucking normal, dad?”

I want to yell.

“Why aren’t you like Hannah’s dad who watches Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with her, or Nicola’s dad who tells naff jokes? Why did we never play Pop Quiz or Question of Sport? Why can’t I buy you a can of Brut or some shit socks? Why do I get YOU? Why?”

But I don’t. Say it. For I sense, he can only ever be himself. This self - a misfit, struggling to make the best of a world to which he does not belong. Tonight he has showed me his spiritual home, a bleak city centre full of loneliness and despair.  There is no-one to latch on at Christmas. You are outed as the social deviant you actually are.

You belong………or don’t.

“Sometimes….. “

He pipes up.

“….you see a little group of Carol singers huddled round a street lamp.”

I imagine one of my genteel Victorian inspired scrap book pieces superimposed on to this gritty urban scene. Bonneted ladies by the Arndale, Top hatted gentlemen in Piccadilly Gardens.

“Here, usually……. just by here!”

He asserts with certainty, rounding another block.

“….or maybe here…..”

He drives around, hopeful his persistence will pay off and unbox this delight for me. This vision he so wishes to acquaint me with.

But tonight there is no such gathering.

It’s just him and me.

He chucks “D’yer remember” and “When you were lickle” around as liberally as lengths of silver tinsel, realising as he does, that there was never really anything substantial to work with. Nothing much can ever be retrieved from a box with sod all in it to start with.

And so, we rattle around in the car on the way home, two bolshy looking baubles mindful not to smash into the glass of the other and risk breakage.

“Things change”

He says as we pull up in front of my grandma’s privet hedge and wrought iron gate.

And how they do.

How Christmas changes!

From my seventies candylands of pink sugar mice and Johnny Mathis, to the post punk Thatcher rat trap of an eighties wasteland.

How a city is transformed at night, from bustling showboat to predatory black widow.

How my dad is changed without his supporting stage cast and pantomime backdrop.

Tonight, I caught a glimpse of the person he actually is, beneath the veneer of feckless folk devil created in his name.

Tomorrow he will be just that again.

Villain, Wrong ’un, Jailbird.

But tonight, for a few hours, I bore witness only to a damaged, restless, fallible human, and although I’d never admit it to him, the prod of his unusual olive branch has briefly brushed my dove heart.