But they weren’t normal people, they were my parents. Connie was charming and bright, but my father smelt the artiness on her and it made him anxious. My mother was bemused. Who was this attractive, glamorous, outspoken creature, holding hands with her son? ‘She’s very vivacious,’ she whispered as the kettle boiled. It was as if I’d turned up wearing an immense fur coat. Separate rooms would have been too draconian, but despite there being a perfectly good double bed, we were shown into the spare room with two singles, my mother holding open the door as if to say, ‘Here it is, your den of filth and shame.’ Connie was never one to shy away from a fight, and I imagined my parents in the dining room below, staring at the ceiling, cigarettes suspended halfway to their mouths at the sound of Connie and me pushing the beds together, giggling. Teenage rebellion, at the age of thirty-three.
The revolution continued at dinner. Despite smoking like a pair of burning tyres, my parents were rather reserved about alcohol and kept their sparse selection of ancient bottles in the garden shed with the spiders. Sherry was for trifles; brandy was for shock. Alcohol loosened inhibitions, and inhibitions were worn tight here. When it became clear that my parents were not going to open the bottle we had brought with us, that it would join the miniature of whisky and the curdled advocaat at the end of the garden, Connie made a great show of ‘popping out for some more wine’, returning in the car with two bottles and, it transpired later, a small bottle of vodka concealed in her coat.
I wish I could say the alcohol made things go with a swing. Over a dinner of fatty pork, talk somehow turned to immigration policy because, famously, nothing brings people together like the subject of immigration. We had all been drinking now, Connie and my father in particular, and my mother had asked a question about the relative racial mix of Kilburn in comparison with Balham. Were there still a lot of Irish there, as opposed to West Indians or Pakistanis? The implication being, I suppose, that the Irish were in some way ‘not so bad’. Connie had replied, in moderate tones, that there were all kinds of communities there, that often when people said Pakistani they meant Bangladeshi, which was like confusing Italy with Spain, and that the racial mix was part of the excitement and pleasure of living in London. But did she feel safe at night? asked my father.
It is probably not necessary to transcribe the argument that followed. In their defence, my parents’ views were widely held, but they were expressed with inappropriate anger, my father’s curled finger tapping an invisible window pane with every spurious ‘fact!’, and soon Connie was shouting, ‘My step-father is Turkish Cypriot, should he go home? My half-brothers, they’re half English, half Cypriot. What about my mum, she’s English, Irish, French, but she’s married to one of them — should she have to go, too?’
‘Maybe we should change the subject?’ I suggested.
‘No, we will not!’ said Connie emphatically. ‘Why do you always want to change the subject?’
And so we went on. The insinuation on Connie’s part — perhaps she even stated it outright — was that my parents were provincial bigots. The contention on my parents’ part was that Connie was ‘not in the real world’, that she was not waiting for a council house with her three kids, that she was unlikely to lose her job in some swanky art gallery to somebody who had just got off the boat from Poland. ‘You don’t get the boat from Poland,’ said Connie, petulantly, ‘you
There was a pause, and we all looked at our congealed dinner.
‘You’re very quiet,’ said my mother, in hurt tones.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I agree with Connie.’
For the most part I did agree with Connie. But if Connie had been arguing for a moon made entirely of cheese, I would have agreed with her too. I was going to be on her side from now on, and my parents saw this, and were saddened by it, I think. But what choice did I have? In a fight you side with the people you love. That is just how it is.
