New York becomes flu York

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Jun 08, 2007 

I can't remember exactly who lent us the apartment. The friend of the friend of a friend, I think. We were in New York to spend Christmas with some people who had recently moved there from London but their own place was tiny. And, back then, with three small children in tow, we couldn't really afford a hotel. So this very kind person - a young woman we'd never met and probably never would meet - said: "I'm away for the holidays. Here's my key. " She arranged to leave it with the doorman and, just like that, we were fixed.

We arrived in the middle of the night. Our children - seven, five and four at the time - could not believe they were really finally going to the land of Spider-man and Superman, the twinkly sticky-up landscape made familiar by a million Disney Christmas films. We'd hoped they might sleep on the plane but no such luck. The littlest one managed to stay wide awake until just a few seconds before we arrived. Then, just as the Manhattan skyline loomed into view, his chin dropped and he was gone.

The apartment was on the Upper West Side, on the top floor of a 1930s block. It was tiny and pink and smelled of pot pourri. It was also very, very hot. Tearing off our coats, we tried to find a way of turning the heating down but there didn't seem to be a thermostat. So we stripped the children to their underwear and set about getting them to bed.

There was a small pink bedroom with a double bed for us and, for the kids, a large mattress on the floor in the small pink sitting room. There was a tiny pink kitchen with a sink and eight packets of Cheerios and a fridge full of brightly coloured drinks that soon began to obsess the children and a pink bathroom full of coconut shower cremes and Wella shampoos. The sitting room contained a lot of wicker furniture, spider plants in macramé holders and a few soft toys. "Don't, " I told the kids who immediately started fighting over the floppy rabbit with the pink plush ears. "They belong to the person who lives here. They're not toys. "

It was late, they were teetering on the edge of jet lag and the moment their heads hit the mattress they plummeted into sleep. Still unable to turn the heating down, we got the window open but loud traffic and sirens poured in, so we shut it again.

Late in the night I woke feeling strange. The room was bright with street light, a dazzle that felt like toothache, and I was shivering. The shivering woke my husband. "You can't possibly be cold, " he said. "It's boiling in here. " My teeth chattered so hard I couldn't speak.

"You're ill, " he told me as he crouched naked by our suitcase and hunted for the paracetamol.

He was right. I was ill. Morning came and I lay there, felled by the kind of flu where you no longer know who you are (a mother? a joke? a parcel of nerve endings?) or care who does what with whom. The kind of flu where the pattern and nap of the duvet (a stranger's duvet) takes on a whole new rhythm and texture, where the possibility of a single sip of cold water breaks the day in two.

I was ill. My husband took the kids to the Natural History Museum - or at least I think he did. They seemed to come back less than three minutes later, opening and closing the fridge and talking in harsh, jangly voices about spiders.

"Why are they talking about spiders? "

"It's OK. Go back to sleep. "

"What's wrong with Mummy? " Chloë's voice was so loud it hurt. "Will she be better for Christmas? "

Another night passed and the shadows in the apartment turned into bears. I thought I was back in my own bed at home and I wondered why the bears were there. Then I remembered: we were in America and these were pink, American bears. My husband fed me pills and brought me water but we couldn't keep three small children in that overheated apartment all day so I spent more hours alone dreaming strange things about the strange pink wall.

On Christmas Eve I felt well enough to crawl to the big mattress on the sitting room floor. There was a small black-and-white television. There I found feverish comfort in the old film of A Christmas Carol with Alistair Sim. It absorbed me and I remember how very odd yet strangely right it felt to drift backwards and forwards between snowy Dickensian London and my bed on the floor of a hot, pink room in Manhattan.

Maybe if I hadn't been so ill in it, I would have forgotten that apartment by now. But it still looms large - a generous gift from a stranger that turned into a three-day nightmare lived out among that kind, faceless person's spider plants and pink furnishings.

The next day was Christmas Day and I was better enough to lie, pale as a ghost, on a sofa in our friends' airy (white) apartment and watch everyone open presents. I couldn't drink any champagne but it didn't matter. I was in that blissful place that only the recently ill can understand: loose-limbed and shaky but comfortable and and just so glad to be back in the world again.