One for My Baby (19 page)

What is wrong with me? I don’t know. It just feels like all at once I understand why she wants to go back to college. Why it means so much to her. This is the first time I have really understood that she is not some student doing a little part-time job. This is how she makes a living. This is what the next thirty years or so will be like for her. This is her future.

“There’s nothing wrong with cleaning for a living,” I say, as if I’m thinking aloud. “Nothing at all.”

“No. It’s not a bad job. But I want a better one. And I can get it if I go back to school.”

“Somebody has to do it. Cleaning, I mean.”

“Would you?”

People are staring at us. All these art lovers and their well-spoken flunkies squinting at the cleaner and the scruff standing on the pavement of Cork Street.

“Listen, your essay was okay.”

“Just okay?”

“That’s right. It’s full of some teacher’s opinions. Or some critic’s opinion. Not enough of you.”

She smiles at me. “You’re good.”

“What?”

“You’re a good teacher.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I can feel it. You’re a great teacher. You’re so right – there has to be more of me in there. So you’ll do it? You’ll teach me?”

I want to get away from here, away from Cork Street and Dream Machine, away from Desdemona and her dirty laundry.

But I think of George Chang, and how patient he is with me, how he encourages me, how he helps me learn because he thinks it’s the right thing to do.

I don’t know what comes over me.

“When can you start?” I find myself saying.

twenty

I ring my nan’s door bell but she doesn’t answer. That’s strange. I know she’s in there. At least, it sounds like she’s in there because I can hear the TV audience elaborately ooh-ing and ahh-ing as the numbers are drawn for the mid-week National Lottery. Is the prospect often million pounds why she’s not answering? Or is it something else?

I keep waiting to hear the soft shuffle of slippers on carpet coming slowly towards the door, followed by the scrape of the safety catch and then her smiling face peering around the door, her eyes bright with welcome, happy for some company. It doesn’t happen. There’s no answer to my nan’s door bell.

There’s also no smell of gas, no sign of smoke seeping under the door, no cries for help. But she is eighty-seven, almost eighty-eight, and I feel the panic rising inside me as I put down her shopping and fumble with the key that I hold for emergencies.

This is the way it happens, I think.

Everybody dies. Everybody leaves you. You turn your back for a moment and they are gone forever.

I burst into the little white flat. The TV is on much too loud. There’s no sign of my nan but I immediately see the unknown man by the mantelpiece, holding a silver-framed photograph in his hand, calculating its worth.

As he half turns, the frame still in his thieving paw, I see that he is more of an overgrown boy than a man. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, but way over six foot tall, a baby face flecked with wisps of facial hair.

I come quickly across the room and throw myself at him, cursing him, knocking him backwards against the mantelpiece, my voice and my body shaking with anger and fear. He drops the silver frame – his booty, the thieving bastard – but he is still on his feet, suddenly over the moment of shock at my surprise attack, and as we grapple with each other I can feel his superior strength, and his own rage and terror.

He swings me sideways, smashing me into the sideboard cabinet with all the holiday souvenirs, making leering leprechauns and smiling Spanish donkeys jiggle and jump behind the dusty glass.

And then my nan comes out of her tiny kitchen carrying a tray containing tea and biscuits.

“Oh, have you two met?” she says.

The young man and I are suddenly apart, boxers told to break by the referee, panting at each other on opposite sides of the coffee table. My nan gently places the tea and custard creams between us.

“I ran out of breath at the bus stop,” my nan says. “I was coming back from having a little look round the shops and it was just suddenly gone. Do you ever get that feeling, Alfie? That breathlessness?” She smiles affectionately at the young man I have just assaulted. “Ken helped me get home.”

“Ben,” he says.

“Len,” she says. “I felt quite peculiar. But Len carried my bag. Helped me get inside. Wasn’t that nice of him, Alfie?”

“Thank you,” I say.

The young man looks at me with total, all-consuming hatred.

“Don’t mention it,” he says. A quick smile at my nan. He is trembling. “I have to go now.”

“Ken,” I say. “Ben. Please stay and have some tea.”

“I really must run.” He is not looking at me any more. “I do hope you feel better,” he says to my nan.

I follow him to the door but he refuses to meet my eyes.

“I didn’t realise,” I say as he lets himself out. “I thought –”

“Dickhead,” he mutters.

It’s true. I am a dickhead. I can’t quite believe that kindness and goodness still exist in this world. I think it’s all a thing of the past. And I can’t even see what’s right in front of my dickhead face.

I go back into the living room where my nan is asleep in her armchair, a lottery ticket in one hand and a custard cream in the other. She has been falling asleep without warning a lot recently. Sometimes she pitches forward and I have to catch her before she does herself some damage.

“I fall asleep all the time,” she is always telling me. “Just tired, I suppose, love.”

But now I realise that she is not falling asleep at all.

She is blacking out.

“
Soong yi-dien!
” George tells me, time and time again. “
Soong yi-dien!
”

Soong yi-dien
. It’s one of the few Cantonese expressions I know. In Hong Kong you would hear it all the time in the little tailor’s shop next to the Double Fortune Language School when customers were complaining that the suit they were being fitted for was too tight.

“
Soong yi-dien!
” they would shout in the face of Mr Wu the tailor. “Loosen it up!”

George wants me to loosen it up. He believes that I try too hard. He’s right. My Tai Chi strains for effect. Everything is an effort for me. I make Tai Chi look like manual labour. But George moves the way Sinatra sang, radiating that kind of effortless power, as if all this craft and art is the most natural thing in the world.

“
Soong yi-dien
,” he says. “Very important for when we play Tai Chi.”

Play Tai Chi? Surely he means
do
or
practise
or
learn
Tai Chi? Surely he doesn’t mean
play?

Although thick with a Cantonese accent, George’s English is very good. He has none of the linguistic tics that his wife has. Sometimes his tenses get a little confused, and he has this habit of dropping the definite article. But you never have trouble understanding him. So I am surprised that he could get his choice of verb so wrong.

“You don’t mean play Tai Chi, do you, George? I think you mean study Tai Chi or something. Not play.”

He looks at me.

“No,” he says. “We play Tai Chi. We
play
. Always, always. Tai Chi not the gym. Not about sweating and getting six pack on belly. Not about
working out
. When you understand that, then you start to learn. Then you
soong yi-dien
. Why do westerners always want to strain? Okay, try again.”

So I do.

I spread my feet shoulder width apart, sinking into my horse stance, bending my knees but making sure they don’t extend further than my toes. Neck erect but relaxed. Chin tucked slightly in. Spine straight and lengthened, although without standing to attention. Butt tucked in. Trying to slow and soften my breathing, trying to make it deep but unforced. Relaxing my wrists. Throwing open all my joints. Trying to feel my
dan tien
, my energy centre, which I have learned is located two inches down from my navel and two inches inside my body.

It doesn’t feel much like play.

“You know that saying – no pain, no gain?” George says.

“Sure.”

“It’s rubbish.”

“I’m not early, am I?” says Jackie Day. “If I’m early I can –”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Come in.”

She comes into my new flat, staring at all the unpacked boxes.

I have finally found a place of my own. A one-bedroom flat in a Victorian house full of music students. You can distantly hear them scratching away at cellos and violins, but because they are so good it is more calming than annoying. It is a nice place. But with my nan going into hospital for tests and the new term starting at Churchill’s, I haven’t had time to unpack yet. Apart from a few essentials.

Pictures of Rose.

Some classic Sinatra.

Electric kettle.

I go into the photo-booth-sized kitchen to make instant coffee while Jackie wanders around looking for somewhere to sit down.

“I love this old-fashioned music,” she calls to me, as Frank finishes “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” and begins his timeless rendition of “Taking a Chance on Love”. “What CD is this?”

“It’s
Swing Easy
, which actually incorporates the vinyl album of that name with the entire contents of the LP that was originally released as
Songs for Young Lovers
.” I listen for a bit. “I like it, too. It’s one of my favourites.”

“And is it Harry Connick Junior?”

I almost drop the kettle.

“Harry Connick Junior? Is this Harry Connick Junior? This is Sinatra. Frank Sinatra.”

“Oh. He sounds a bit like Harry Connick Junior, doesn’t he?”

I say nothing. When I come out of the kitchen she is looking at all the pictures of Rose.

Rose on her firm’s junk in Hong Kong. On our wedding day. At a New Year’s Eve party on Victoria Peak. On Changeover Day.

And – it’s my favourite picture of her – a blow-up of her passport photograph, Rose looking straight at the camera, impossibly young and serious and beautiful, her hair longer than I ever saw it, although the picture was taken shortly before we met.

I always thought Rose was the only person in the world who ever looked good in a passport photo.

“Your girlfriend?” Jackie Day says with a little smile. “This is not the girl I saw at your parents’ place.”

It takes me a second to realise she’s talking about Vanessa.

“That was just a friend. This is my wife. Her name is Rose.”

“Oh.”

I can almost hear her brain ticking over. And I think: why do I always have to have this conversation? Why can’t they just leave us alone?

“Are you divorced?”

“My wife died,” I say, taking the photograph from her and giving her a cup of instant coffee in exchange. I carefully place the picture back on top of a packing case. “She died in a diving accident.”

“A driving accident?”

“A diving accident. When we were living in Hong Kong.”

“God.” She stares at Rose’s picture. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“How terrible for you.” She looks at all the photographs – I suppose it’s a sort of shrine – with real pain on her face. “And for her. How old was she? How old was Rose?”

“She was twenty-six. Almost twenty-seven.”

“You poor man. That poor woman. That poor girl. Oh, I am so, so sorry.”

There are tears shining in her eyes and I look at her, really wishing that I could feel some genuine gratitude for this sympathy.

But it’s difficult to take her show of compassion seriously when under her leather coat she is dressed for another night picking up strange men at the Basildon Mecca. French Connection T-shirt, pastel-coloured miniskirt, high heels that leave little dents in the wooden floor of my new flat. I wonder what we are doing here. Then I remember.

“You want to study A Level English Literature.”

Her pretty, painted face brightens.

“If I can just get this one subject, I can go back to school. Put it with the two I’ve got already. French and Media Studies. I told you. Go to the University of Greenwich. Get my BA. Get a good job. Stop cleaning the floors of art galleries in Cork Street and language schools on Oxford Street.”

“Why does it have to be the University of Greenwich? It’s not exactly Oxford or Cambridge, is it?”

“Because that’s my plan,” she says. “You’ve got to have a plan. I’ve got an acceptance letter and everything. I was doing so well at school. I really was. But then I had to give it all up.”

“For personal reasons. You told me that, too.”

“Now I’m going to have another go.”

“Okay. Sit down, will you?”

She looks around. There’s nowhere to sit. I pull up a couple of chairs either side of a large packing case.

“The core of English Literature works from a very concrete base. The subject is very specific about the basis of study.” I tick them off my fingers. “One prose work. One work of poetry. One work of drama. And one Shakespeare play. In the end, you need to learn two things to pass this subject. To read and to write.”

“To read and to write. Okay. Fine. Good. Yes.”

“That is, you need to understand the text and then demonstrate your understanding of the text. That’s the essence of this subject.”

I know my lines.

This is a speech that I remember from the dark days at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys, although by the time that A Levels came around, most of my students had graduated to the technical college of life.

My door bell rings.

“Excuse me,” I say.

“Oh, that’ll be for me,” says Jackie Day.

“What?”

“I think it’s my daughter.”

Daughter? What daughter?

Together Jackie and I go out of the flat and down to the front door of the house. An enormous great lump of a girl is standing outside. It’s difficult to judge her age. She hides her face behind a curtain of greasy brown hair. Her clothes are as dark and shapeless as Jackie’s are tight and bright.

“Say hello to Mr Budd,” says Jackie Day.

The lump says nothing. Behind the unwashed veil of her fringe, a pair of bright-blue eyes swivel briefly towards me and then turn away with shyness or contempt or something.

She has a fistful of magazines in her hand. They feature men in masks and spandex grimacing and grunting and climbing on top of each other. At first I think this awful child has hard-core pornography in her possession. But then I see that the magazines are about some grotesque new kind of wrestling. In a daze, I return to my flat, Jackie and the lump following behind me, Jackie all happy chatter and questions as they come up the stairs, the lump replying with monosyllabic grunts. Although there is no physical resemblance between them, there is no doubt that they are mother and adolescent child.