‘So long as you don’t charge me for my telling you,’ said Clarissa, fine eyes flashing.
‘Of course I won’t,’ said Miss Jacobs. ‘I am retired now and my pension is quite adequate.’
‘Potlatch,’ said Clarissa, ‘Potlatch has exhausted me. Four o’clock on Christmas Eve and the shops slam shut their doors, and turn off their lights, and the frenzy of shopping must stop, like the frenzy of killing when the blue UN helmets appear –’
‘If only it were so,’ murmured Miss Jacobs, but Clarissa did not hear, so bent upon her theme was she.
‘– and a forlorn peace descends upon the land, and the streets empty, and the taxis vanish. I walked all the way here.’
‘Poor you,’ said Miss Jacobs.
‘But if you watch the darkened shop windows you can see dim figures the other side of the glass, bending, stretching, reaching, putting up the New Year sale notices, bargain screamers, prices slashed. The battle is over but the dogs of war sleep for only minutes, already they are stirring, whimpering for a fresh attack. Warfare by way of gifts. Slaughter by generosity. Potlatch.’
‘I don’t quite understand what you mean by potlatch,’ said Miss Jacobs.
‘Perhaps just half a teaspoonful of sugar in my tea after all,’ said Clarissa, ‘and just a drop of milk. I do feel a little faint. With any luck there won’t be a faulty prion in the particular drop you give me. Do you understand about prions? Minute particles of protein; they normally fold in a rather pretty, attractive corkscrew whirl, but this way of folding leaves them vulnerable: heat can destroy them, or radiation or mould, or the simple entropy which affects us all. But now another prion has arisen, a rogue prion, which cares nothing for charm, but puts self-interest and survival first: it has flattened out its whirls to present a straight, sharp, flat, almost fascist surface to the world, which nothing so far known can destroy. And every gentle, old-fashioned prion this immortal, indestructible being encounters, gets the message at once, and flattens its own shape. It is not infected: it simply imitates, copies, in the interests of its own survival. The growth of the flat prion is exponential. The news spreads like wildfire in the prion world: merely flatten and survive! If a flat prion, and there are more and more and more in existence, encounters a brain cell in man or beast, it locks, apt surface to apt surface, and stays and lies in wait for newcomers, and then holes begin to appear in the brain – spongiform encephalitis – and all reason evaporates –’
‘We were talking about potlatch, not prions,’ said Miss Jacobs, ‘though I can see it is very frightening.’
‘They are linked,’ cried Clarissa, passionately. ‘Don’t you see? Potlatch is the extravagant ceremonial distribution of property by North Pacific Indians, in particular the Kwakiutl. Potlatches are given by chiefs by way of wreaking vengeance on an enemy. The one who gives least is humiliated and shamed. “Take this war canoe, my friend; finely painted and beautifully carved: see how subtly-shaped the paddles!” “We much admire the gift, friend, but here we have a many-coloured tepee for you: six squaws lost their sight embroidering its fringes, and take as well this humble war canoe, with simple filigreed prow and paddles silver-tipped!” “Thank you, thank you! Now take these six virgins, reared specially for you, friend. See how plump and sleek they are!” “How thoughtful of you, and surprise, surprise, we have twelve virgins for you and all your tribe, and all our virgins can read and write, and see here, the heart of a slaughtered slave.” And so on, until the one outdone by the other, the poorest in generosity, creeps away disgraced. My mother practises potlatch. And I, like the prion who has discovered how to survive, now practise it too. I cannot help myself, but hate myself.
‘I was born on Christmas Day 1972, and the earth moved. Ten thousand people died in an earthquake in Nicaragua. I was the youngest child of six, an afterthought, born when my mother Juliet was forty-two. She only became pregnant with me, my mother once told her friends, and I overheard, to give herself an excuse to stop seeing you.’ ‘Really,’ remarked Miss Jacobs, puzzled, ‘can that be so?’
‘It’s what she told me,’ said Clarissa, ‘which makes you responsible for my life. I have always felt so, and never passed your door without a certain frisson. Anyway, my mother’s guilt was such, great sums of money were spent converting a box-room into a nursery on my account, the better to welcome me into the world. It would have been better sent to the victims of the earthquake. I could have shared with Severo, aged two at the time of my birth.’
‘Perhaps your mother just wanted to welcome you into the world,’ observed Miss Jacobs, ‘it may not necessarily have been guilt that motivated her.’
‘On my first birthday,’ said Clarissa, ignoring this, ‘the nation was in the middle of a three-day week; the power stations closed; TV programmes stopped at ten-thirty, and my mother bought me a teddy bear so big it could hardly get through the door. It sits at the end of my bed to this day. My father left home on Christmas Eve; he’d found a lover in my mother’s bed. The couple were both asleep and I had crawled in beside them. I don’t remember the scene; I have buried the memory, no doubt. But the teddy bear from my mother was guilt on her part, of course it was. Only spend, my mother thought, and all will be well. She should have given the money to the striking miners.’
‘Should, should,’ murmured Miss Jacobs.
‘Potlatch only happens when there is plenty,’ said Clarissa.
‘The North Pacific Indians lived in a pleasant, fertile land. Deer were plentiful, edible roots were at hand, and salmon ran up the rivers. My father made millions as a designer of contemporary furniture. And of course he felt guilty too, for his five abandoned daughters and one abandoned son. Tax never took enough away.’
‘That is quite a rare response to tax,’ said Miss Jacobs. ‘In fact in all my working life I have never heard anyone say such a thing.’
‘By Christmas 1974,’ said Clarissa, ‘inflation in Britain had reached 25 per cent. Teachers that year got a 32 per cent pay rise. And what was my mother’s response? Spend, spend, spend! The Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay Act came into force three days after my birthday in 1975, and did my mother get a job? No, she just asked for more alimony. By my third birthday my leisure years were considered over, and while a Rhodesian terror gang killed twenty-seven of their own – how puny massacres were in those days – I was finger-painting Christmas cards for my four sisters, my one brother, my absent father, my new stepfather and his three sons. And after that, it was downhill all the way. My mother’s generosity and kindness increased my annual present list exponentially. Thanks to you she never quarrelled with husbands or lovers, she simply left or was left, and kept on good terms with everyone, even my father. Like wrongly-folded prions, those in need of gifts and friendship latch on, and I, like her, spend the Christmas season, when so many world disasters happen, wrapping presents and attaching baubles. Warfare by generosity. Potlatch: who gives, wins.
‘On my seventh birthday the Vietnam boat people took to the seas and my mother adopted a little Vietnamese boy. She always preferred sons. On my eighth, the Iranians rose against the Shah and welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini (out of the kettle into the fire, some say) and I was given the most expensive bicycle Harrods could offer. For my ninth my mother was away in the States for John Lennon’s funeral; on my tenth my mother should have been at Greenham, but she wasn’t. My mother was not the kind to damage her nails linking hands with muddy women, not even to save the world.’
‘Perhaps this obsession with birthdays,’ remarked Miss Jacobs, ‘is because you feel deprived by fate. Children whose birthday is near or on Christmas Day often have to make do with one set of presents.’
‘You must have told my mother that,’ said Clarissa, ‘and she believed it. I always got at least five times as much as my many and varied siblings, and they know it, and dislike me for it, and the more they dislike me, the more I feel obliged to give them.
‘In December 1980 at least two thousand people were killed by Union Carbide at Bhopal, but nothing daunted my mother’s gift-wrapping fervour. Could we have bread and cheese