The World’s Worst Eskimo

The World’s Worst Eskimo was sit­ting in my living-room, sip­ping from a mug of cocoa clasped between her trem­bling, frozen hands. The chat­ter­ing of her teeth quite drowned out the reas­sur­ingly dull drone of the passing traffic, five floors below, as it headed for the con­sumer­ist bright lights and a fren­zied bout of last gasp fest­ive indul­gence at the elec­tron­ic­ally chim­ing tills.

“I’m s-s-s-still c-c-c-cold,” she mur­mured, stick­ing out her bot­tom lip in a most dis­gruntled pout. This had been her man­tra since she arrived at my front door earlier in the even­ing. The knock­ing had been tired and quiet — barely there, yet non­ethe­less insist­ent. I hollered to the unex­pec­ted caller to let them know that I was on my way, but the tap­ping con­tin­ued unabated: the sound of an exhausted, demen­ted wood­pecker determ­ined to make a break­through by sun­set. It was only when I finally opened the door and found her right hand held in mid-air, still shud­der­ing against noth­ing­ness, that I real­ised quite how viol­ently she was shivering.

I offered to take her coat as I ushered us both into the dimly lit, arti­fi­cially heated warmth, but she refused, instead pulling the heavy parka even more tightly around her and yank­ing its hood for­ward so that her face gazed out at me, wide-eyed and enquir­ing, from inside a thick, fur-lined tunnel.

“Are you kid­ding? I only got this last week, and I’m not tak­ing it off until the tem­per­at­ure is back to some­thing at least vaguely liveable.”

I was curi­ous, even puzzled. I may have only stud­ied Eski­mos in the pages of simplistic, brightly col­oured pic­ture books at primary school, but even that curs­ory know­ledge taught me that their coats are of the utmost import­ance to them — the mix of fox fur and seal skin offer­ing these hardy souls some badly needed pro­tec­tion from the harsh winds and bit­ter chill of their nat­ural envir­on­ment. Seem­ingly not.

“I don’t believe in cruelty to anim­als. Plus, those tra­di­tional Eskimo gar­ments are so bulky, and can have such a linger­ing odour about them. Frankly, they whiff a bit. So I bought this one at Marks & Spen­cer in Ham­mer­smith. It was a bar­gain in the sale. It’s my first winter coat, too — my dear mother back home will be so proud that I’ve finally seen sense. I was bloody freez­ing before that, run­ning around in t-shirt and jeans at minus thirty degrees. I had goose pimples in places you don’t even want to know about.”

I showed her into the living-room and expec­ted her to take a place on the sofa. But no, she seized one of the cush­ions and hur­riedly dragged it over to the radi­ator, squeez­ing it round the top of the cast iron frame, whereupon she hois­ted her­self up on to the hast­ily built seat. Clos­ing her eyes, she sat abso­lutely still for a moment — as if feel­ing the wel­come heat sur­ging through her body — before sigh­ing, almost con­ten­tedly. Almost.

“Get­ting bet­ter. Could be bet­ter still. I can’t feel my fin­gers yet. Or my toes. Or the end of my nose. It turned blue earlier. My nose turned blue! How you people man­age to cope in such weather is bey­ond me, really it is. Now, can I have some­thing to eat, please?”

Delving once again into my lim­ited classroom learn­ing, I informed my vis­itor that the con­tents of my fridge — a word that made her once again vis­ibly shiver — sadly rather lacked much in the way of seal meat or freshly-speared whale, though I did have a tin of dolphin-friendly tuna chunks that might be to her lik­ing. She sniffed dis­missively, turned her nose up at me, and asked for a saus­age sand­wich. With ketchup.

I had, up until this point, been very patient and polite, but my bewil­der­ment had at last risen to the sur­face. I wanted to know just how an Eskimo could be quite so unused to the arc­tic winds, the sub-zero tem­per­at­ures, the ice, frost and snow. How an Eskimo had never owned a winter coat prior to spot­ting one going at a sub­stan­tial dis­count in an M&S sale. How an Eskimo pre­ferred Wall’s bangers on a door­step of white bread to some tasty char-grilled seal steaks.

“The loc­als always called me the World’s Worst Eskimo,” said the World’s Worst Eskimo, between gobbled mouth­fuls of sand­wich. She dabbed a fin­ger at a tell-tale trail of tomato ketchup that was slip­ping from the corner of her mouth, before con­tinu­ing. “But I wasn’t. I really wasn’t. I just enjoyed being different.”

“And now?”

“Now I’ve decided that I’m quite dif­fer­ent enough. Dif­fer­ent enough from every­one else, any­way. I just want to be warm, thank you very much. Speak­ing of which — do you have a hot water bottle?”

When I returned from boil­ing the kettle, I dis­covered that my arc­tic vis­itor had grabbed every spare pil­low, duvet, blanket and winter coat she could for­age from my cup­boards, draw­ers and ward­robes, using them to con­struct a make­shift igloo in the middle of the floor. I allowed myself a brief smile at the thought that even this wil­fully dif­fer­ent Eskimo didn’t go against her nat­ive tra­di­tion in every way.

I turned out the light and closed the living-room door. As I did so, there was an almighty sneeze from inside the heav­ily cush­ioned refuge.

“Bug­ger. I think I’m get­ting a cold.”