Meet Me In Manhattan. Claudia Carroll
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And yet every Christmas morning without fail, there they’d be; real, live snow prints dotted all over our living room carpet.
Money was tight for Mum and yet still Santa never failed to deliver in style. A doll’s house that particular year, I remember. A little girl’s fantasy version of just what a proper Victorian doll’s house should be, right down to window boxes and plastic figurines in bonnets and corsets that you could move around inside.
‘You see?’ she said, beaming that wise, calm smile that’s imprinted on my mind to this very day. ‘Santa never forgets good children.’
It’s only looking back now that I realize how tough Mum must have had it really. She’d adopted me at forty-two, quite late-ish in her life, certainly for the nineteen eighties, a time when women in their forties rarely had kids and certainly didn’t go adopting on their own. It was an extraordinarily brave thing to take on, then as now, and until I arrived I think she never really thought it would actually happen. I was, as she used to joke, ‘her little surprise’.
Right from when I started pre-school, she was by far the oldest of all the mums waiting for us at the school gates. Not only that, but she was one of the few who worked full time too; all the others seemed to have husbands who were the main breadwinners. Back then, right bang in the middle of The Decade that Taste Forgot, I can still see all the younger mothers in shoulder pads with big hair and waaaay too much blusher all nattering excitedly about Talking Heads / Duran Duran / who was going to see Fatal Attraction that weekend.
And right there at the back, always at the back, Mum would be waiting quietly for me. More often than not, still in her nurse’s uniform of long blue trousers with a white top over it, navy woolly cardigan, flat, sensible shoes with her hair pulled back into a tiny bun. Neat as a pin, like always.
‘Is that your mammy or your granny?’ I remember one girl in my class innocently asking me. I never said a word to Mum about it, but I think she knew anyway. She knew by the way I hugged her tight that night and said, ‘I think you’re lovely … and not that old at all!’ She just knew, same way she always knew everything, mind reader that she was.
The subject of my birth parents was one she and I never went into, at least not until I was old enough to properly understand. Even though as a nosey kid I practically had the poor woman persecuted.
‘Molly in my class says you have to have a mother and a father to get born,’ I used to plague her, day and night, like a dog with a bone.
‘And Molly’s quite right,’ Mum would reply, briskly getting dinner ready, efficiently cleaning up any mess behind her as she went. Swear to God, our kitchen was cleaner than any hospital she’d ever worked in. You could have performed surgery right on our kitchen table, it was that sterile.
‘But then what happened to my real parents? Did they die? Like Jayne in school’s Dad did?’
‘Holly,’ she’d say calmly, barely looking up from the housework as if to reduce the enormity of where this conversation was headed. ‘How many times do I have to tell you that family is family and that all families are different? Sometimes you have a mum and a dad who aren’t able to bring up a child by themselves and sometimes you have someone like me, who’s on her own, but who wanted nothing more than a little girl exactly like you.
I wanted a child like you so badly, then you came along and you were like a miracle for me. It was December when you first arrived and suddenly there you were. My own personal little Christmas miracle.’
‘But Mum …’
‘… What’s really important,’ she’d add, stopping to affectionately ruffle the top of my head, ‘is that in our little family, no child could possibly be more loved than you.’
‘But where did my real mum and dad go?’ I persisted, with all the stubbornness of childhood.
‘Sweetheart, they didn’t go anywhere and if you ever wanted to meet them, then when the time is right I’m sure we can. But here in our little family, there’s just the two of us; you and me. And if you ask me, we’re the best, happiest family you could ever ask for.’
Didn’t stop me from being utterly consumed with thoughts of my birth parents though, particularly when I was old enough to fully understand and Mum told me everything. All about my birth parents, how ridiculously young they were when I was born, my biological mother nineteen and still in college, while my father was younger still, just eighteen and barely out of school. She told me how they’d no choice but to put me up for adoption.
But then before what happened I’d happily have battered down the Adoption Authority’s offices to track down my birth parents, wherever they were now, wherever life had taken them.
Whereas after, I gave up even caring. The only family I’d ever had was gone, so what was the point, I figured. After all, I’d been lucky enough to have the best parent anyone could possibly have asked for.
And that, for me, was plenty.
D-Day. Thursday. Date night.
I’m in News FM, but as it’s one of my ‘turn up for work even though I’m not getting paid’ days, I’ve got a secret, cunning plan to slip out of here about 4ish, grab a lightning-quick blow-dry, then race home to try on about twelve different outfits before fecking them all in a big mound on the floor as soon as I hit on ‘the one.’
But after years of toiling away in the doldrums, wouldn’t you know it? That’s exactly the moment when my whole career suddenly decides to go stratospheric.
Afternoon Delight is just wrapping up for another day and I’m at my desk packing up so I can surreptitiously slip off unnoticed. Next thing I’m cast into shadow as our presenter Noel, all six feet three of him – the brandy and port gut included – is suddenly towering over me.
‘Hey there, Holly,’ he smiles fake-sincere, in that man-of-the-people-I-feel-your-pain way he goes on. ‘Not in a mad rush off somewhere, I hope?’
I jump a bit, but then it’s pretty unheard of for Noel to linger round as soon as we’re off air. Ordinarily, he just skedaddles out of here the very minute the red studio light clicks off, then heads off to glamorous TV land for his far more salubrious night job presenting Tonight With … at Channel Six. In fact, we’re doing really well if we see or hear from him before the next day’s pre-production meeting.
Not to mention that this is the second time he’s deigned to single me out in the last week alone.
‘Ermm, well actually …’ I begin to say, but it’s a waste of my time as he just cuts right over me anyway.
‘Thought not, good,’ he says. ‘In that case, you can walk me to my car. It’s high time you and I had a bit of a talk.’
That, by the way, sounded like more of an order than a polite request, so with a ‘what the f**k?’ cartoon caption coming out of my head and on numb autopilot, I trail along in his wake. Hard though not to be aware of a lot of raised eyebrows from round the office, particularly from Maia Mars, who’ll doubtless start spreading rumors that I’m now having a hot affair with the boss right under everyone else’s nose.
I’m still utterly at a loss to know what this is all about and the two of us are all alone in the lift, before Noel even acknowledges that I’m actually sharing the same airspace as him.
‘So then, Holly,’ he says just a touch patronizingly as he focuses on his own reflection in the steel metal lift door, then starts