One For My Baby

“You must eat the cold porridge,” he told me once.

It’s a Chinese expression. Cantonese, I guess, because although he carried an old-fashioned blue British passport and was happy to call himself an Englishman, he was born in Hong Kong and sometimes you could tell that all the important things he believed were formed long ago and far away. Like the importance of eating the cold porridge.

I stopped what I was doing and stared at him. What was he going on about now?

“Eat the cold porridge.”

The way he explained it, eating the cold porridge means working at something for so long that when you get home there is nothing left to eat but cold porridge.

And I thought-who did he share a flat with out there? Goldilocks and the Three Bears?

That’s how you get good at something, he told me. That’s how you get good at anything. You eat the cold porridge.

You work at it when the others are playing. You work at it when the others are watching television. You work at it when the others are sleeping.

To become the master of something, you must eat the cold porridge, Grasshopper.

Actually he never called me Grasshopper.

But I always felt that he might.

And I tried hard to understand. He was my teacher as well as my friend and I always tried to be a good student. I am trying today. But I can’t help it-somewhere along the line I took eating the cold porridge to mean something else. Something completely different from its Chinese meaning.

Somehow I got it into my thick head that eating the cold porridge means being in a time of suffering. Living through hard days, months and years because you have no choice.

I got the cold porridge of the East muddled up with the bitter pill of the West. Now I can’t tell them apart.

That’s not what he meant at all. He meant giving up comfort and pleasure for a greater good. He meant deferring gratification for some distant goal.

Eating cold porridge now so that you will have something better tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow. Or the day after that. It’s got nothing to do with Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

But I guess the concept of self-sacrifice is easier to grasp if you were born in one of the poorer parts of Kowloon. Where I come from, they don’t really go in for that kind of stuff.

Eating the cold porridge-to me it means enduring something that has to be endured. More than that, it means missing someone. Really missing someone.

The way I miss her.

But she is gone and she is not coming back.

I know that now.

I will never kiss her again. I am never going to wake up beside her again. I am never going to watch her sleeping again.

That perfect moment when she opened her eyes and smiled her slightly goofy smile-a smile that seemed to reveal as much gum as teeth, and a smile that always made me feel as though something inside me was melting-I definitely won’t see that again. There are ten thousand things that we are never going to do together again.

“You’ll meet someone else,” he tells me, with all the patience that my real father could never quite muster. “Give it time. There will be another woman. You’ll get married again. You can have it all. Children and everything.”

He is trying to be kind. He is a good man. Maybe this is what he really thinks.

But I don’t believe a word of it.

I think that you can use up your love. I think you can blow it all on one person. You can love so much, so deeply, that there is nothing left for anyone else.

You could give it all the time in the world, and I would never find someone to fill the gap that she has left.

Because how do you find a substitute for the love of your life?

And why would you want to?

Rose is never coming home again.

Not to me.

Not to anyone.

And perhaps I could learn to live with it if I could resist this ridiculous urge to phone her. Things would be more bearable if I could remember, really remember, that she’s gone and never forget it.

But I can’t help it.

Once a day I go to call her. I have never actually dialed the number, but I have come pretty close. Do you think I need to look that number up? I don’t even have to remember it with my head. My fingers remember.

And I am afraid that one day I will call her old number and somebody else will answer. Some stranger. Then what will happen? Then what will I do?

It can strike at any time, this urge to call her. If I’m happy or sad or worried, I suddenly get this need to talk to her about it. The way we always did when we were-I nearly said lovers, but it was that and much more.

Together. When we were together.

She’s gone and I know she’s gone.

It’s just that sometimes I forget.

That’s all.

So now I know what I must do.

I must eat the cold porridge, and fight this overwhelming urge to reach for the phone.

1

THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH MY HEART.

It shouldn’t be working like this. It should be doing something else. Something normal. More like everybody else’s heart.

I don’t understand it. I have only been running in the park for ten minutes and my brand-new sneakers have luminous swoosh signs on the side. But already my leg muscles are burning, my breath is coming in these wheezing little gasps and my heart-don’t get me started on my heart. My heart is filling my chest like some giant undigested kebab.

My heart is stabbing me in the back.

My heart is ready to attack me.

It’s Sunday morning, a big blue day in September, and the park is almost empty. Almost, but not quite.

In the patch of grass where they don’t allow ball games, there is an old Chinese man with close-cropped silver hair and skin the color of burnished gold. He has to be around my dad’s age, pushing sixty, but he seems fit and strangely youthful.

He’s wearing a baggy black outfit that makes him look like he is still in his pajamas and he’s very slowly moving his arms and legs to some silent song inside his head.

I used to see this stuff every day when I was living in Hong Kong. The old people in the park, doing their Tai Chi, moving like they had all the time in the world.

The old boy doesn’t look at me as I huff and puff my way toward him. He just stares straight ahead, lost in his slow-motion dance. I feel a sudden jolt of recognition. I have seen that face before. Not his face, but ten thousand faces just like it.

When I lived in Hong Kong I saw that face working on the Star Ferry, saw it driving a cab in Kowloon, saw it looking forlorn at the Happy Valley racecourse. And I saw that face supervising some Bambi-eyed grandchild as she did her homework in the back of a little shop, saw it slurping noodles at a daipaidong food stall, saw it covered in dust, building spanking new skyscrapers on scraps of reclaimed land.

That face is very familiar to me. It’s impassive, self-contained and completely indifferent to my existence. That face stares straight through me. That face doesn’t care if I live or die.

I saw it all the time over there.

It used to drive me nuts.

As I struggle past the old boy, he catches my eye. Then he says something. One word. I don’t know. It sounds like Breed.

And I get a pang of sadness as I think to myself-not much chance of that, pal.

I’m the last of the line.

Hong Kong made us feel special.

We looked down on the glittering heart of Central and we felt like the heirs to something epic and heroic and grand.

We stared at all those lights, all that money, all those people living in a little outpost of Britain set in the South China Sea, and we felt special in a way that we had never felt special in London and Liverpool and Edinburgh.

We had no right to feel special, of course. We hadn’t built Hong Kong. Most of us hadn’t even arrived until just before it was time to hand it back to the Chinese. But you couldn’t help feeling special in that bright shining place.

There were expats who really were a bit special, hotshots in lightweight Armani suits working in Central who would one day go home covered in glory with a seven-figure bank balance. But I wasn’t one of them. Nowhere near it.

I was teaching English at the Double Fortune Language School to rich, glossy Chinese ladies who wanted to be able to talk to round-eye waiters in their native tongue. Waiter, there’s a fly in my shark’s fin soup. This is outrageous. These noodles are cold. Where is the manager? Do you take American Express? We conjugated a lot of service-related verbs because by 1996, the year I arrived in Hong Kong, there were a lot of white boys waiting on tables.

I was a little different from my colleagues. It seemed like all the other teachers at the Double Fortune Language School-our motto: “English without tears in just two years”-had a reason to be in Hong Kong, a reason other than that special feeling.

There was a woman from Brighton who was a practicing Buddhist. There was a quiet young guy from Wilmslow who spent every spare moment studying Wing Chun Kung Fu. And there was a BBC-British-born Chinese-who wanted to see where his face came from before he settled down into the family business on Gerrard Street in London’s Chinatown.

They all had a good reason to be there. So did the expats in the banks and the law firms of Central. So did the other kind of expats who were out on Lantau, building the new airport.

Everyone had a reason to be there. Except me.

I was in Hong Kong because I’d had my fill of London. I had taught English literature at an inner-city school for five years. It was pretty rough. You might even have heard of us. Does the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys ring any bells? No? It was the one in north London where the woodwork teacher had his head put in his own vice. It was in all the papers.

If anything, the parents were more frightening than the children. Open evenings at the Princess Diana would find me confronted by all these burly bruisers with scowling faces and livid tattoos.

And that was just the mothers.

I was sick of it. Sick and tired. Sick of marking essays that began, “Some might say Mercutio was a bit of an asshole.” Tired of teaching Romeo and Juliet to kids who laughed when one of the Shakespeareans at the back inflated a condom while we were doing the balcony scene. Sick and tired of trying to explain the glory and wonder of the English language to children who poured “fuck,” “fucking” and “fucked” over their words like ketchup in a burger bar.

Then I heard that a Brit could still go to Hong Kong and automatically get a work permit for a year. But not for much longer.

It was around the time that one of my pupils’ parents-one of the dads, funny enough, a man who was permanently dressed for the beach, even in the middle of winter-had a Great Britain tattoo on his arm and it was spelled wrong.

“Great Briten,” it said, just below the image of a rabid bulldog wearing a Union Jack T-shirt that was either cut a bit snug or a few sizes too small.

Great Briten.

Sweet Jesus.

So I got out. Deciding to really do it was the hard part. After that, it was easy. After twelve hours, four movies, three meals and two bouts of cramp in the back row of a 747, I landed at Hong Kong’s old Kai Tak Airport, the one where they came in for a heart-pumping landing between the forest of skyscrapers, close enough to see the washing lines drying on every balcony. And I stayed on because Hong Kong gave me that feeling-that special feeling.

It was a long way from “Great Briten.” It was another world, when what I wanted most in my life was exactly that. Yet it was another world that made me love my country in a way that I never had before.

Hong Kong made me feel as though my country had once done something important and unique. Something magical and brave. And when I looked at all those lights, they made me feel as though there was just a little bit of all that in me.

But I didn’t have a real reason to be there, not like the BBC guy who was looking for his roots and not like the people who were there because of Buddha or Bruce Lee.

Then I met Rose.

And she became my reason.

The old Chinese man is not the only sign of life. On the far side of the park there are some Saturday-night stragglers, a bunch of bleary teenagers who still haven’t gone home.

The members of this little gang are every shade of the human rainbow, and although I am very much in favor of the multicultural society, something about the way these lads are casually spitting on the pigeons does not make you feel overly optimistic about mankind’s ability to live in peace.

When they clock me struggling their way, they exchange knowing grins and I think: what are they laughing at?

I immediately know the answer.

They are laughing at a red-faced, panting, fat guy in brand-new running gear who clearly had nowhere to go on Saturday night and no one to go there with. Someone who gets a lot of early nights. Someone who is not special at all.

Or am I being too hard on myself?

“Check the cheddar,” one of them says.

Check the cheddar? What does that mean? Does that mean me? Check the cheddar? Is that new?

“He so fat that he look like two bitches fighting under a blanket, innit?”

“He so fat he gets his passport photo taken by, you know, like, satellite.”

“He so fat he get fan letters from Captain Ahab.”

As a former English teacher, I am impressed by this casual reference to Moby-Dick. These are not bad kids. Although they are roaring with laughter at me, I give them what I hope is a friendly smile. Showing them that the cheddar is a good sport and knows how to take a joke. But they just smirk at each other and then at me. Smirk, smirk, smirk, they go, radiating equal measures of youth and stupidity.

I look away quickly and when I am past them I remember that there’s a Snickers bar in the pocket of my tracksuit in case of an emergency. Watched by a tatty gray squirrel, I eat my Snickers bar on a wet park bench.

Then for a long time I just sit twisting my wedding ring around the third finger of my left hand, feeling lonelier than ever.

I met her on the Star Ferry, the old green-and-white, double-decker boats that shuttle between Kowloon on the tip of the Chinese peninsula and Hong Kong Island.

Well, that’s not strictly true-I didn’t really meet her on the Star Ferry. We didn’t exchange names or numbers. We made no plans to meet again. I was never much of a pick-up artist, and that didn’t change with Rose. But the Star Ferry is where I first saw her, struggling through the turnstile with a huge cardboard box in her arms, balancing it on her hip as she stuffed a few coins into the slot.

She joined the throng waiting for the ferry, a Westerner surrounded by every kind of local-the smart young Cantonese businessmen heading to their offices in Central, the chic young office girls with their cell phones and miniskirts and swinging black hair, the shirt-sleeved street traders hawking up phlegm the size of a Hong Kong dollar, young mothers and their beautiful fat-faced babies with startling Elvis forelocks, the tiny old ladies with their gold teeth and scraped-back white hair, Filipina domestics heading for work and even the odd gweilo(white ghost) tourist quietly baking in the heat.

Her hair was black, as black as Chinese hair, but her skin was very pale, as though she had just arrived from some land where it never stopped raining. She was dressed in a simple two-piece business suit but the large cardboard box made her look as though she was going to work in one of the little side-street markets above Sheung Wan, west of Central. But I knew that was impossible.

The ramp clanged down and the crowd charged onto the Star Ferry in typical Cantonese style. I watched her wrestling with her cardboard box and noted that her face was round, serious, very young.

Her eyes were too far apart and her mouth was too small. But you would have believed that she was beautiful until she smiled. When she smiled-quick to apologize after smacking some Chinese businessman in the back with her box-the spell was immediately broken. She had this bucktoothed grin that stopped her from being any kind of conventional beauty. Yet something about that gummy smile tugged and pulled at my heart in a way that mere beauty never could. She was better than beautiful.

I found a seat. And seats were going fast. She stood next to me, smiling self-consciously to herself as she clutched her box and the ferry pitched and heaved beneath her, surrounded by the raven-haired crowds.

It is only a seven-minute journey between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, the shortest sea voyage in the world, one brief kilometer spent weaving between junks, barges, cruise ships, tugs and sampans. But it must feel like a long time when you are carrying a box that is almost as big as you are.

I stood up.

“Excuse me? Do you want a seat?”

She just stared at me. I was really quite thin in those days. Not that I was Brad Pitt or anything, even during my lean period, but I wasn’t the Elephant Man either. I wasn’t expecting her to faint, with either desire or repulsion. But I expected her to do something. She just kept on staring.

I had assumed that she was British or American. Now I saw, with that hair and those eyes and those cheekbones, she could conceivably be some kind of Mediterranean.

“You speak English?”

She nodded.

“Do you want to sit down?”

“Thanks,” she said. “But it’s only a little journey.”

“But it’s a big box.”

“I’ve carried bigger.”

That smile. Slow, though, and a bit reluctant. Who was this strange guy in a Frank Sinatra T-shirt (Frank grinning under a snap-brim fedora in an EMI publicity shot from 1958, one of the golden years) and ragged chinos? Who was this man of mystery? This thin boy who was, on balance, slightly more Brad Pitt than Elephant Man?

Her box was full of files, manila envelopes and documents with fancy red seals. So she was a lawyer. I felt a flash of resentment. She probably only talked to men in suits with six-figure salaries. And I was a man in a faded Sinatra T-shirt whose wage packet, when converted into pounds sterling, just about crawled into five figures.

“I don’t think you’re meant to offer your seat to a woman on the Star Ferry,” she said. “Not these days.”

“I don’t think you’re meant to offer your seat to a woman anywhere,” I said. “Not these days.”

“Thanks anyway.”

“No problem.”

I was about to sit down again when an old Chinese man with a nylon shirt and a racing paper shoved me out of the way and plonked himself down in my seat. He hawked noisily and spit right between my Timberland boots. I stared at him dumbfounded as he opened up his paper and began to study the runners at Happy Valley.

“There you go,” she laughed. “If you’ve got a seat, you better hold on to it.”

I watched her laughing her goofy laugh as we came into Hong Kong Island. The great buildings reared above us. The Bank of China. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. The Mandarin Hotel. All the silver and gold and glass office blocks of Central, and beyond all of that, the lush greens of Victoria Peak, almost lost inside a shroud of tropical fog.

I was suddenly gripped by the fear that I would never see her again.

“Do you want a coffee?” I said, blushing furiously. I was angry with myself. I know women never say yes to anything if you can’t ask them without going red.

“A coffee?”

“You know. Espresso. Cappuccino. Latte. A coffee.”

“Come on,” she said. “The seat was good. The coffee-I don’t know. It’s a bit predictable. And besides, I’ve got to drop this stuff off.”

The Star Ferry churned against the dock. The ramp clanged down. The crowds got ready to bolt.

“I’m not trying to pick you up,” I said.

“No?” Her face was serious and I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me or not. “That’s too bad.”

Then she was gone, swept off in a tide of Cantonese with her cardboard box full of legal documents to the wharf and, beyond that, the business district of Central.

I looked out for her on the Star Ferry the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, expecting to suddenly find her smiling at someone she had struck with a large box of legal documents. Or-if I was very lucky-to strike me with her cardboard box. But she was never there.

Not that I had any slick new pick-up lines.

I just wanted to see that smile.

It was a Friday night and the penthouse bar of the Mandarin Hotel was crowded and loud.

I couldn’t really afford to drink up there on what they paid me at the Double Fortune Language School. Yet once in a while I liked to get the lift to the top floor of the famous old hotel and watch the sun go down over an ice-cold Tsingtao beer-the best beer in China. It was a special treat.

But tonight, as I sipped my beer at the bar, some goon from back home started spoiling everything.

“As soon as the People’s Liberation Army march in, you watch everyone in Central head for the airport,” he said. “And it will serve the buggers right. Hong Kong was a fishing village when we arrived and it will be a fishing village when we leave.”

He had a voice on him that cut right through me, full of private education and a lifetime of privilege and dumb words spoken with all the confidence in the world. His voice reminded me that not everything I hated about home had a bulldog tattoo.

“Give this place back to the great unwashed and just watch them kill the golden goose,” he said. “But of course the great unwashed will eat anything.”

I turned to look at him.

He was at a window table with some girl, trying to impress her. The girl had her back to me. I really didn’t notice her at first. I saw only him-a beefy young man in a pinstripe suit, fair-haired and fit from a diet of red meat and rugby and Church of England hymns. A slab of pure British beef, with possibly just a touch of mad cow disease.

Beefy was making no attempt to keep his voice down. The young Cantonese bartender and I exchanged looks as he poured me a second beer. The bartender-just a kid-smiled sadly, not quite shaking his head, and something about the infinite gentleness of his gesture pushed me over the edge.

No, this is too much, I thought, putting down my Tsingtao. It wasn’t just that Beefy was insulting the residents of Hong Kong. He was also doing the dirt on the special feeling that I got when I looked at all the lights. The barman’s eyes told me to leave it.

Too late.

“Excuse me. Excuse me?”

Beefy looked up at me. So did the girl. It was her. And she shone.

I mean she really shone-the sunset, made spectacular by toxic fumes pouring from the factories of southern China, was throwing the last of its technicolor light across her face.

It lit her up.

Beefy was as blond as she was dark, they looked like some kind of couple, perhaps in the early days of an office romance. At least in Beefy’s tiny mind.

“What?” he said. Rudely.

“Look at you,” I said. “I mean, just look at you. They give you a company flat and a Filipina maid and you think you’re some kind of empire builder. Who are you this week, pal? Stamford Raffles? Cecil Rhodes? Scott of the Antarctic?”

“I’m sorry-are you insane?” he said, uncertain if he should laugh out loud or punch my lights out. He stood up. A big bastard. Plenty of contact sports. Hairs on his chest. Probably.

“Calm down, Josh,” she said, touching his arm.

You might have tagged him a chinless wonder but you would have been dead wrong. He was all chin. His kind always are, in my experience. All chin and nose. His noble snout and jutting chin seemed to compress his mouth into a thin, imperious, mean little line.

If anything, he was a lipless wonder.

“We’re guests in this place,” I said, my voice shaking with something that I couldn’t quite identify. “Britannia no longer rules the waves. We should remember our manners.”

His lipless mouth dropped open. And then he spoke.

“How would you like me to teach you some manners, you awful little man?”

“Why don’t you try it?”

“Maybe I will.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Oh, shut up, the pair of you,” she said. “You’re both going home one day.”

Going home one day? Going home? That had never occurred to me. I looked at her and I thought-home.

Then I looked at Josh. And after staring each other down for a bit, Josh and I felt like idiots and realized that we weren’t going to beat each other up. Or, rather, that he wasn’t going to beat me up. She finally shoved him into his chair. Then she smiled at me with that goofy grin.

“You’re right,” she said. “We should remember our manners.” She held out her hand. “I’m Rose.”

I took her hand.

“Alfie Budd,” I said.

I even shook hands with old Josh. The three of us had a drink and, as Josh and I avoided eye contact, I told them about my job at the Double Fortune Language School. She told me about their law firm. Josh kept consulting his watch. Overdoing it a bit, I thought. Deliberately showing me-and her-that he was bored beyond belief.

But she smiled at me-that smile, those teeth, those baby-pink gums, effortlessly taking possession of my heart-and I felt it, I really felt it.

That somewhere in this world there really was a home for me to go to.

This is the way it starts. You look at someone you have never met before and you recognize them. That’s all. You just recognize them. Then it begins.

Rose suddenly slapped the table.

“Oh, wait a minute,” she laughed. “I remember you.”

It shouldn’t have worked. Her friends all thought she was too good for me and her friends were right. Rose was a Hong Kong Island girl. I was a Kowloon side guy.

She had a career. I had a job. She had dinner in the China Club surrounded by big shots. I had Tsingtao in Lan Kwai Fong surrounded by my fellow small fry. She came out to Hong Kong with a window seat in club class. I had an aisle seat in economy.

At twenty-five, Rose was already a success. Seven years older than her-and starting to look every day of it, what with the humidity and the Tsingtao-I was still waiting for my life to start.

She lived in a small but beautiful apartment on Conduit Road in the Upper Mid-Levels under the shadow of Victoria Peak-expat heaven. Security was a twenty-four-hour Gurkha. I had a room in a shared flat in Sai Ying Pun, rooming with a couple of my colleagues from the Double Fortune, the BBC guy from Gerrard Street and the Wing Chun man from Wilmslow.

Our place was one of those firetrap rabbit warrens with walls so thin you could hear the family down the hall watching Star TV. Security was a sleepy Sikh who came and went as the mood took him.

Rose hadn’t drifted out to Hong Kong, not like me. She was a corporate lawyer who had been sent out for a year by her London firm-she called it the shop-to cash in on a market that, in the last year of British rule, was booming like never before.

While I was struggling to pay my rent, behind the closed doors of Central fortunes were being made. Hong Kong was screaming out for lawyers and every day more of them came through the fast track of Kai Tak Airport.

Rose was one of them.

“I would still be making the tea in London,” she told me on that first night after Josh and I decided to have a drink instead of a fight. “Getting my bum pinched by some fat old man. Out here, I matter.”

“What is it you do exactly, Rose?”

“It’s corporate finance,” she said. “I help firms raise money with share issues for Chinese companies. Initial public offerings. Fire fighting, they call it.”

“Wow,” I said. “Brilliant.”

I had absolutely no idea what she was going on about. But I was genuinely impressed. She seemed like more of a grown-up than I would ever be.

Most of her colleagues-those loud boys and girls braying in the penthouse bar of the Mandarin every night, ignoring the sunset over the harbor-had an amused contempt for Hong Kong.

They saw a street sign for Wan King Road and howled about it for the duration of their stay, as though Hong Kong existed purely for their amusement. They collected and drooled over all the evidence of Hong Kong’s madness. And there was plenty.

The local brand of toilet paper called My Fanny. The Causeway Bay department store-a Japanese store as it happened, but let that pass-where they sold truffles named Chocolate Negro Balls. The popular Hong Kong antifreeze spray known as My Piss.

And I laughed too when I first saw the ads for My Piss-I’m not saying that I didn’t. But the lipless wonders never stopped. Sooner or later you should forget about My Fanny and go look at the sunset, go look at the lights. But somehow the lipless wonders never got around to that.

Rose wasn’t like the rest of them. She loved the place.

I don’t want to make her sound like Mother Teresa with a briefcase. The Cantonese can be an abrasive bunch, and confronted by a sulky taxi driver or a rude waiter or a pushy beggar, Rose was quite capable of feeling all the helpless frustration of any hot, tired expatriate. But the bad feelings never lasted for very long.

She loved Hong Kong. She loved the people and-unusual for a woman with her job, her salary, her skin color-she thought it was right that they were getting the place back.

“Oh, come on, Alfie,” she said one night when I was going on about the special feeling, and how I didn’t want it ever to end. “Hong Kong might be a British invention. But it has a Chinese heart.”

She wanted to find the real Hong Kong. Left to my own devices, I would have nursed a Tsingtao in Lan Kwai Fong and looked at the lights. Left to myself, I would have vegetated quite happily in the unreal Hong Kong, convinced that the special feeling was all I needed to know.

Rose took me deeper. Rose took me beyond the lights. As she did so, she turned affection into something more. For Hong Kong. And for her.

She took me to a temple behind Central where everything was red and gold and the air was choked with incense as little old ladies burned fake money in huge stone drums. Through the perfumed mist you could just about make out two brass deer gleaming on the altar.

“For longevity,” Rose said, and when I think about Rose talking about longevity now, it makes me want to weep.

Back in the days we thought would never end, she took me to places where I would never have gone without her. We had dim sum in a restaurant near my flat where we were the only gweilo. We walked the narrow streets between apartment blocks covered in TV aerials, potted plants and washing lines. She took my hand and led me down sunless alleys where toothless old men in flip-flops bet on two crickets fighting in a wooden box.

And I met her from work and we took the Star Ferry to Kowloon and a cinema where it seemed that every mobile phone in the audience never once stopped ringing. Everyone else I knew would have been maddened by the experience. Rose rocked in her seat with laughter.

“Now this is the real Hong Kong,” she said. “You want to find Hong Kong, mister?” She raised her hand to the symphony of mobile phones. “This is it.”

Yet she loved doing all the British things. Every Saturday afternoon, after she had finished work-the shop expected her to work half a day on Saturday-we had high tea at the Peninsula Hotel, looking out at Central on the other side of the harbor as we sipped our Earl Grey and tucked away our jam scones and noshed our little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Once or twice we even watched Josh and his hairy-arsed friends playing rugby and cricket.

It was fun to do these typically British things not because they reminded us of home but because we had never done any of them at home.

Cricket, rugby, sandwiches with the crusts cut off-who knew about these things? Not me. And not Rose, whose non-partisan accent disguised the fact that she came from a pebble-walled duplex in a modest corner of the Home Counties. Nothing had been given to Rose. She had earned it all with education and hard work.

“So where exactly did you lose your Essex accent?” I asked her once. “University?”

“Liverpool Street Station,” she said.

In Asia we found both the real Hong Kong and a Britain that we had never known.

Rose loved all of that.

And I loved her.

It wasn’t difficult. The only difficult thing was working up the courage to call her after she gave me her business card in the bar of the Mandarin. It took me seven days. Right from the start, she mattered too much to me. Right from the start, I could not imagine my life without her.

Because she was beautiful, smart and kind. She was curious and brave. She had a bigger heart than anyone I have ever known. She was good at her job but her sense of worth didn’t depend on that job. I loved her for all those reasons. And I loved her because she was on my side. She was on my side without conditions, without get-out clauses. It’s very easy to love someone when they are on your side.

Once, when we were all on the roof of the China Club, Josh said this interesting thing-probably a first for old Josh-after a few too many Tsingtao.

“If Rose met God, she would say: why are you so nasty to Alfie, God?”

He said it in this shrill, girlie voice and everyone laughed. I smiled, trying to be polite to the blockhead. But my heart beat a little faster. Because I knew it was true.

Rose was on my side in a way that nobody had ever been on my side. Apart from my parents. And my grandparents. But they were sort of obliged to be on my side. Rose was a volunteer. She cared about me. Those kids in the park-the cheddar gang-would laugh at the idea of a woman like that caring about a man like me. But she really did. I’m not making it up.

And by loving me, she set me free. Free to be myself.

There was a dream I had once had in London-the dream of trying to be a writer-that I had never really had the guts to pursue. Rose made me believe that if I was prepared to put in the hours, I could do it. I could become a writer one day. She saw not only the man I was, but the man I could be. By loving me, she made me believe that my dreams could come true.

That’s why it is all so difficult now.

That’s why I have to force myself to carry on today.

Because for a little while back there, I had it perfect.

The old Chinese man has finished his slow-motion dance.

As I jog past him for the second time-well, by now it’s actually more of a slow shuffle than a jog-he looks at me as though he has seen my face a thousand times. As though he recognizes me too.

He speaks to me again and this time I understand exactly what he’s saying. It’s not breed at all.

“Breathe,” he says.

“What?” I say, fighting to catch my breath.

“Not breathing properly.”

“Who?”

“Who?” he snorts. “Who? You-that’s who. Not breathing right. Too shallow, your breathing. No good. No breathe, no life.”

I stare at him.

No breathe, no life? Who does he think he is? Yoda?

“What’s that?” I say finally, not too friendly. “Some, like, wise old Chinese saying?”

“No,” he says. “Not old saying. Not wise old Chinese saying. Just common sense.”

Then he turns away, dismissing me.

So I try it as I run out of the park. Inhaling deep, filling my lungs, feeling them expand, letting the breath seep out. Doing it again. Inhaling, exhaling. Slow and steady.

Kicking through last year’s leaves, making myself take another breath.

It’s not easy.

You see, she was my reason.

2

W HERE DO DREAMS BEGIN? My dream of becoming a writer came from my childhood. That’s where my dream began, and it didn’t start to die until I was a young man. So that’s not too bad. It lasted much longer than most dreams.

My father was a sportswriter on a national newspaper. His regular beat was horse racing, football and boxing, the sports he had grown up with in the East End. He also covered athletics during the Olympics, tennis during Wimbledon and pretty much anything else when he had to. Toward the end of his sportswriting career he even wrote a few pieces about the modern kind of wrestlers, those angry men in sparkling latex who look as though they have been taking steroids when what they really should be taking is acting lessons.

My old man wasn’t a famous sportswriter. Most of the time he didn’t even get his picture printed next to his byline. But he was always a glamorous figure to me. Other dads, the fathers of my friends, had to be in the same place at the same time every day. My dad traveled the country, interviewing people who were worshipped, and although sometimes my mum and I didn’t see him all week, I always loved it that regular office hours meant nothing to him.

Even when I was a small child I knew that journalism wasn’t the same as two weeks in Benidorm. I understood the tyranny of the deadline, and how subeditors can leave the last line off your piece, and how today’s newspaper is the lining for tomorrow’s cat litter. But my dad still seemed to be about as free as a man could be.

My dad was never very fond of the slog of reporting-sitting in the press box at Upton Park, phoning in copy from ringside in the NEC Birmingham-but when he was given space to write about the men and women behind the results and the statistics, when he told you about the brilliant young footballer whose career had suddenly been ended by an ankle injury, or the Olympic hopeful who had just discovered a lump in her breast, his stuff could break your heart. He was a cockle warmer, my dad. He could warm your cockles in just a twelve hundred-word, two-page spread. And when my old man warmed your cockles, your cockles stayed warm for quite a while.

My dad was never a great sportswriter because he was never that crazy about sports. He would have had a far happier, far more successful career if he had been writing for the front pages rather than the back pages.

But my father was my hero. And for years I wanted to go into the family business.

Then he wrote a book. You probably heard of it. You might even have read it. Because Oranges for Christmas: A Childhood Memoir was one of those books that start selling and then never seem to stop. And after that, my dreams of writing started to seem a little ridiculous. For how could I ever compete with my father now? As a modestly successful sportswriter he had been inspiring. As a wildly successful author, he was intimidating.

I was at teacher-training college by the time my dad’s book came out, so I watched its ascent of the bestseller lists from a distance. It felt like one moment my father was what he had been forever-a journalist hanging around training grounds hoping for a few exclusive grunts from twenty-year-old footballers on thirty grand a week, and the next he was a bestselling author, cocooned by six-figure royalty checks, regularly appearing on the artier kind of talk shows, getting recognized in restaurants.

I know it wasn’t that easy. Oranges for Christmas took years to write. But success always looks like it has come quickly, no matter how hard the rock it is carved from. And it felt like almost overnight my father went from being an unknown sports journalist to a respected writer, doing events in bookstores where he gave a reading, answered questions and signed copies of Oranges for Christmas. People actually place a value on his autograph these days, just like those fans at training camps who wait for the twenty-year-old footballers on thirty grand a week.

Oranges for Christmas: A Childhood Memoir was a good book. I liked it a lot. I wasn’t bitter that it cast a massive shadow over my own half-baked dreams of writing for a living. It deserved its success.

The book was about my father’s childhood in the East End, about how they were poor but happy, and how my dad and his army of brothers and sisters almost died of joy if they got an orange for Christmas.

Oranges for Christmas is full of dirty-faced urchins having a rare old time hunting for rats on bomb sites while their next-door neighbors are being blown up by the Luftwaffe. There is a lot of death, disease and rationing in Oranges for Christmas but the reason it sold so well is because it is ultimately as comforting as a cup of hot, sweet tea and a milk-chocolate cookie. For all the gritty anecdotes about polio, nits and the Nazis, my old man’s book is endlessly sentimental about a kind of family that no longer seems to exist.

And that’s ironic because Oranges for Christmas dropped like one of Hitler’s buzz bombs among my father’s family. His brothers and sisters were all happily settled into respectable middle age by the time Oranges for Christmas appeared. Suddenly their adventures of half a century ago were in the public domain.

My dad’s eldest sister, my Auntie Janet, did not appreciate my dad telling the world about the time their own father had caught Janet jacking off a GI during a blackout. In the book the story was told as lovable, where-are-my-trousers farce, but the revelation caused a sensation at Auntie Janet’s branch of the Women’s Institute, where to this day she remains chief jam-maker.

My dad’s brother Reg also hit the roof when he saw Oranges for Christmas. A bank manager in the Home Counties for many years, Uncle Reg felt my father had gone too far by revealing how one night during the Blitz, Reg, then four years old, had struggled into the Anderson air raid shelter in their back garden with his pants around his ankles and his tiny winkle quivering with fear. Uncle Reg felt that wasn’t the image a bank manager should project to his customers in the current market.

Then there was Uncle Pete, a teenager in the book, whose exploits in the black market made many a young housewife with no nylons and a husband at the front willing to-as Pete called it-“put the kettle on.” Uncle Pete-or Father Peter as he is known these days-had a lot of explaining to do to his congregation.

Auntie Janet giving executive relief to a young American soldier bound for the beaches of Normandy, Uncle Reg wetting his pants as the bombs dropped, Uncle Pete exchanging his virginity for a pair of nylons-the reading public loved this stuff. And thanks to Oranges for Christmas, everybody loves my old man. Apart from all his brothers and sisters and most of the people he grew up with in the old neighborhood.

They don’t talk to him any more.

When you come back home after living abroad, you see your country with the eyes of a time traveler.

I was gone for just over two years, from the spring of 1996 to the summer of 1998. That’s not very long at all, but now time seems somehow dislocated. A lot of that is to do with Rose, of course. When I left I didn’t know she existed, and now that I am back I don’t know how I can live without her.

But it’s not just about Rose, this sense of displaced time.

It’s there when I am driving my dad’s car, looking at a newspaper, eating a meal with my parents. Everything is just a little bit out of whack.

There are refugees on the Euston Road for a start. That’s new. I see them from my father’s Mercedes-Benz SLK. And the refugees see me, because my old man’s little red roadster is a car that is designed to attract attention, although probably not from people who have recently fled poverty and persecution.

There were no refugees on the Euston Road when I went away. You got the odd drunk with his hopeful bucket but nobody from the Balkans. Now these thin men and boys swarm around the stalled traffic in front of King’s Cross Station, squirting windscreens and scraping away the grime, even when you ask them not to. The refugees point at their mouths, a gesture that looks vaguely obscene. But they are just saying that they are hungry.

That’s all new.

And it’s not just the refugees on the Euston Road.

Terry Wogan is playing REM on Radio 2. Princess Diana is rarely mentioned. And perhaps most shocking of all, my father has started going to a gym.

All these things seem incredible to me. I thought Wogan only played middle of the road music-but then perhaps REM became MOR while my back was turned. I believed that Diana would be as visible in death as she was in life. And I thought that my dad was the last person in the world who would ever start fretting about his love handles.

The old place looks pretty much the same-frighteningly like its old self, in fact-but everywhere there are clues that things are secretly different.

Michael Stipe is suddenly whining among the easy listening. Diana is a part of history. And my old man has jacked in the takeout chicken tikka masala and is talking about the benefits of a full cardiovascular workout.

Sometimes it hardly feels like the same country.

I am currently living with my parents. Thirty-four and still at home-it’s not great. But it’s not the house where I grew up-that would be just too sad-so living with them doesn’t feel as though I’ve completely regressed to childhood. At least, not until my mum hands me my pajamas, all neatly washed and ironed.

It’s just a temporary thing. As soon as I get my life back together, as soon as I get a job, I’m going to find myself a flat. Somewhere close to work. I want it to look exactly like the apartment that Rose and I had in Hong Kong. We had a good place. I was happy there.

And I know I should be trying to move on. I know that I should be trying to put my time with Rose behind me. I know all of that.

But if you believe that you can recognize someone you have never met before, if you believe that there is just one person in the world for you, if you believe that there’s only one other human being out there who you can love, truly love, for a lifetime-and I believe all of these things-then it follows that there’s no point in pretending that tomorrow is another day and all that crap.

Because I’ve had my chance.

They’ve got this huge house now, my mum and dad. One of those tall white houses in Islington that looks big from the front and then goes on forever once you get inside. They’ve even got a swimming pool. It wasn’t always this way.

When I was growing up and my old man was still a sportswriter, we lived in a tatty Victorian row house in a part of town that gentrification never quite reached. After Oranges for Christmas became a bestseller, everything changed.

The money is new too.

Now my dad is trying to write the follow-up to Oranges for Christmas, about how his family was horribly poor but deliriously happy in the immediate aftermath of World War II. It’s going to be a heart-warming look at the good old days of bomb sites, banana rationing and teeming slums. I don’t know how it’s going. He seems to spend most of his time down at the gym.

I know my old man is worried about me. And so is my mum. That’s why I’ve got to get out of their big, beautiful home. Soon.

My parents only want the best for me, but they are always having a go at me for not getting over Rose, for not getting her out of my system, for not getting on with my life.

I love my parents but they drive me crazy. They look exasperated when I tell them that I am in no hurry to get on with what feels like a diminished life. Sometimes my dad says, “Suit yourself, chum,” and slams the door when he goes out. Sometimes my mum cries and says, “Oh, Alfie.”

My mum and dad act as though I am a nut job for not getting over Rose.

I feel like asking them-but what if I’m not a nut job at all?

What if this is how you are meant to feel?

There’s a strange man on our front doorstep.

He’s wearing a pointy helmet like the one worn by the Imperial bikers in Return of the Jedi. Really going for that futuristic look, he also has on black goggles, a bright yellow cycling top and black Lycra trousers that passionately embrace his buttocks. Under his pointy helmet a Sony Discman is clamped to his head. He has dragged a bicycle up our garden path and now, as he crouches to look through the letter box, you can see the muscles tighten and stretch in the back of his legs.

He looks like a supremely fit insect.

“Dad?”

“Alfie,” my father says. “Forgot my key again. Give me a hand with this bike, would you?”

As my old man pulls off his pointy helmet and the Discman, I catch a blast of music-a cry of brassy, wailing exuberance over a sinuous bass line that I recognize immediately as “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” by Stevie Wonder.

With his funky bike and buglike demeanor, my father might look as though he listens to all the latest sounds. In fact he still loves all the old sounds. Especially Tamla Motown. Stevie. Smokey. Marvin. Diana. The Four Tops and the Temptations. The “Sound of Young America,” back in the days when both America and my dad were young.

I am more of a Sinatra man. I get it from my granddad. He’s been dead for years, but when I was little he would sit me on his lap in the living room of his big project house in Dagenham, the house that became the setting for Oranges for Christmas, and I would smell his Old Holborn hand-rolled cigarettes and his Old Spice aftershave as we listened to Frank sing sweet nothings on the stereo. It was years before I realized that those songs are all about women. Loving women, wanting women, losing women.

I always thought they were about being with your granddad.

Sometimes my granddad and I would spot Sinatra in one of his old films when they showed them on television. From Here to Eternity, Tony Rome, Some Came Running-all those tough guys with broken hearts who seemed like a perfect complement to the music.

“Granddad!” I would say. “It’s Frank!”

“You’re right,” my granddad would say, putting a tattooed arm around me as we peered at the black-and-white TV set. “It’s Frank.”

I grew up loving Sinatra but hearing him now doesn’t make me dream of Las Vegas or Palm Springs or New York. When I hear Frank, I don’t think of the Rat Pack and Ava Gardner and Dino and Sammy. All the things you are meant to remember.

Hearing Sinatra makes me remember sitting on my grandfather’s lap in a project house in an East End banjo-that’s what they called their cul-de-sac, because it was shaped like a banjo-hearing Sinatra makes me remember the smell of Old Holborn and Old Spice, and hearing Sinatra makes me remember being surrounded by an uncomplicated, unconditional love that I thought would be there forever.

My old man always tried to convert me to Motown. And I like all that ooh-baby-baby stuff-how could anyone dislike it? But as I grew up I felt that there was a big difference between the music my granddad liked and the music my dad liked.

The songs my father played me were about being young. The songs my grandfather played me were about being alive.

I open the door and help my dad get his bicycle into the hall. It is some kind of racing bike, with low-slung handles and a seat the size of a vegetable Samosa. I have never seen it before.

“New wheels, Dad?”

“Thought I’d cycle to the gym. Doesn’t seem much point in driving there. It’s good for me. Gets the old ticker going.”

I shake my head and smile, amazed and touched yet again at this transformation in my father. When I was growing up he was a typical journalist, slowly growing more portly on a diet of irregular meals and regular alcohol. Now, in his late fifties, he’s suddenly turned into Jean-Claude Van Damme.

“You’re really into it, aren’t you? This whole keep-fit routine.”

“You should come with me some time. I mean it, Alfie. You’ve got to start watching that weight. You’re really getting fat.”

Sometimes I think my father has a touch of Tourette’s syndrome.

I’m too embarrassed to tell Jean-Claude about my pathetic shuffle in the park. And I don’t feel like arguing with him. I guess that’s how you know you’re not young any more-you don’t feel the need to challenge your parents on every point of order. But as he wheels his bike down the hall and I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I think: what does it matter anyway? I’m not going out on the make.

My dad and I go into the living room where my grandmother is sitting in her favorite chair with a copy of the News of the World on her lap. She appears to be studying a story with the headline TABLE DANCING TART STOLE MY TELLY STUD.

“Hello, Mum,” says my dad, kissing her on the forehead. “Reading all the scandal, are you?”

“Hello, Nan,” I say, doing the same. We kiss a lot in my family. My grandmother’s skin is soft and dry, like paper that has been left out in the sun. She turns her watery blue eyes on me and slowly shakes her head.

I take her hand. I love my nan.

“No luck, Alfie,” she says. “No luck again, love.”

I see that she is holding a lottery ticket in her hands and checking it against last night’s winning numbers. This is one of the rituals that I go through every week with my grandmother. She is always genuinely amazed that she has failed to win ten million pounds on the lottery. Every Sunday she comes around for lunch and expresses her total astonishment at failing to get six balls. Then I commiserate with her.

“No luck, Nan? Never mind.”

“Work on Monday morning, Alfie.” She smiles, although neither she nor I have to go to work tomorrow. She starts to rip up her lottery ticket. This seems to consume all her strength and she nods off after completing the task.

Through the tall window at the back of the room I can see my mother in the garden, raking up the fallen leaves. Although she has sometimes seemed out of place in the big new house that was bought with the money from my father’s book, my mother has always loved this garden.

She looks up at me and smiles, jogging on the spot and puffing out her cheeks. It takes me a few seconds to realize that she is miming a run in the park. I give her the thumbs up and my mum goes back to raking the dead leaves in her garden, smiling quietly to herself. I know she was pleased to see me get out of the house for what she calls “a bit of fresh air.”

The front door slams and a few seconds later a smiling young woman sticks her head around the door. She looks like God’s second attempt at Cameron Diaz-an almost cartoon amalgamation of blond hair, blue eyes and ski-tanned skin. Lena is our Czech home help. She’s really smart. It’s only when she’s listening to the radio that she seems a bit stupid because she sort of dances around to the music, even if she’s sitting down and eating her bran flakes.

Lena’s not stupid, though. She’s just young. To be honest, I think she’s got a soft spot for me. One of those irrational crushes that ambush the very young. I might have to tell her, as gently as possible, that I’m not looking for a new relationship. She’s certainly a beautiful girl-she once inspired our paperboy to ride his bike right into a lamppost. There were free pull-outs and color supplements everywhere. How strange that I’m just not interested. Or perhaps it’s not strange at all.

The slammed door has woken up my nan and she beams at Lena, who she perhaps believes is some kind of distant relation.

“Sorry I’m late,” says Lena in English so good that she sounds like a native speaker. “The tube’s awful on Sundays. I’ll start getting lunch ready now.”

“It doesn’t MATTER,” my nan says very slowly. My grandmother also seems to believe that Lena is either deaf, stupid, unable to speak a word of English or possibly all of the above. She points at me. “HIM NOT HUNGRY.”

“So sweet,” smiles Lena, who speaks five languages and who is studying for an MBA at UCL. “I’ll get started on lunch.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” says my father.

“Oh, that’s okay.”

“But I want to.”

They go out to the kitchen and my nan and I watch a new kind of program where some people are exchanging blows because one of them has discovered that his girlfriend is really a man. I haven’t seen this kind of thing before. Even the rubbish is new.

From the kitchen I can hear the sound of laughter as my dad and Lena unload the dishwasher.

I have never in my life seen my father helping with the housework.

That’s new too.

3

I WALK AROUND CHINATOWN.

Since coming back to London, that’s what I do all day. I get a tube to the West End and I head for that tiny patch of London where the street names are in both English and Chinese. Then I walk.

Entering Chinatown by one of its three gates-Wardour Street on the west, Macclesfield Street on the north, Newport Court on the east-I make my way down those loud, busy streets until the place fills my senses, until it reminds me of that other place on the far side of the world.

In minutes I am back in Hong Kong. There are no spectacular views of skyline and harbor and peak. But many of the sights are the same as when I was in Kowloon or Wanchai.

Rows of laminated ducks in windows, good-looking girls with glossy hair talking into brightly colored mobile phones, old men with gold teeth pushing babies with eyes like brown jewels, young mothers with children dressed up to the nines, surly teenage boys with slicked-back hair hanging around outside the games arcade trying to look like gangsters, waitresses making their way to work in their monochrome uniforms or mopping the small square of pavement outside their restaurants, steam pouring from a tiny kitchen behind misty plate glass, men in filthy vests delivering boxes of iced fish.

Chinatown is the one place that I can be happy. It does more than remind me of Hong Kong. It reminds me of when Rose and I were still together.

There are shops, supermarkets and of course restaurants galore, but there are not really any places to stop and watch the world go by. Despite the proximity to the self-consciously Mediterranean street life of Soho, there are no little cafés or coffee shops or bars. If you want cappuccino and a quiet half-hour, then you are in the wrong place. That’s not a Cantonese thing. Yet I don’t care.

It means I keep moving-down the main artery of Gerrard Street, into Wardour Street where the western border of Chinatown shares space with pizza joints and nightclubs, then into dark, narrow Lisle Street, with its smell of roast duck and gas fumes, then maybe into Little Newport Street where you can see the huge head of a papier-mâché Chinese dragon in a martial arts shop called Shaolin Way, as if the dragon is guarding the punch bags and focus pads and cardboard boxes full of black Kung Fu trousers. Finally perhaps, after reaching the bookstores and theaters of Charing Cross Road, I’ll double-back on myself into Newport Court where you can buy Chinese magazines, Chinese CDs, Chinese anything you like.

As I haphazardly patrol the streets of Chinatown, a poem keeps coming back to me, a poem by Kipling that we studied when I was teaching English literature at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys.

“Mandalay” is about a discharged British soldier wandering around London after serving “somewheres east of Suez,” and as he roams the streets of Bank-is the ex-soldier now a messenger boy in the City? Does he make his living running errands for the ancestors of Josh?-he thinks of the wind in the palm trees and the elephants piling teak and the woman he left behind. Our ex-soldier should not be lonely-he tells us that, in the English drizzle, he steps out with fifty housemaids from “Chelsea to the Strand.” But he remembers when “dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay” and he remembers when she was by his side.

“So this is about his bitch, is it, sir?” one of my smarter, nastier students would enquire to guffaws of laughter from the back of the class. “Is it, like, a-what do you call it?-savage incitement of sexual tourism, sir? Not incitement, sir. What’s the word? Indictment, sir? Is it an indictment? Sir?”

“Mandalay” didn’t mean much to my pale thin charges with their Tommy gear and leering grins. It didn’t, in truth, mean much to me at the time. But now that I am back in London it runs around my head and will not let me go and makes me sick for my lost home, my lost wife.

For the temple-bells are callin,’ and it’s there that I would be-

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.

I like to get to Chinatown early, before the sauntering tourist crowds with their cameras and their blank looks and their paranoid rucksacks strapped on back to front. I like to arrive while the trucks are still unloading their produce and the old ladies are setting out their stalls and there are groups of men standing around gossiping in Cantonese, men who will later go to work in the restaurants or disappear into the basement gambling joints to play mah-jongg.

That’s when I like it best, when it is just the Chinese preparing for the day ahead. That’s when it reminds me most of Hong Kong.

I always eat my lunch here. Sometimes I eat early, usually dim sum at the New World on Gerrard Place, one of those old-fashioned dim sum restaurants, dying out now, where they still have the girls pushing trolleys loaded with steamed buns and barbecued pork and fried eggplant, the trolleys going slowly round and round the huge red and gold restaurant, and they let you choose straight from the trolleys rather than just giving you a menu the way most dim sum joints do these days.

Sometimes I eat late, maybe a bowl of noodle soup at one of the smaller restaurants on Gerrard Street, where they don’t mind if you ask for a table at four in the afternoon.

You can pretty much eat any time you like in Chinatown. That’s what I have always liked about the Cantonese. They let you get on with your life. They don’t make rules. They just don’t care.

There’s a lot to be said for not caring.

In my opinion, not caring is very underrated.

Ever since my time in Hong Kong, I have been a big fan of afternoon tea, that ritualized fix of sugar and caffeine just when your energy levels are starting to dip. Rose liked it too. She said that afternoon tea was the most indulgent of meals, because it was the one meal that happened when you were meant to be working.

Rose was always saying things like that-things that had a way of making your feelings understandable. I thought that I just liked stuffing my cake hole with scones and jam in the middle of the afternoon. Rose made me see that what I really liked was escaping from the Double Fortune Language School.

There’s a swanky hotel near Bond Street where they serve afternoon tea. The clientele are all tourists who are seeking a slice of ye olde authentic England in a pot of Earl Grey. Apart from me.

The room is ringing with a dozen foreign tongues when I walk in with my Evening Standard under my arm. The waiter looks at me as if I have wandered into the wrong place.

“Tea, sir? How many?”

“Tea for one.”

He brings me a pot of tea and a silver stand that looks like a wedding cake. The layers of the stand are loaded with chunky scones, pots of cream and ruby-red jam, and dainty little sandwiches.

The waiter is friendly. The tourists are not too noisy. The scones are still warm. The salmon and cucumber sandwiches have all had their crusts cut off. The tea is brewed from leaves not bags.

Everything is exactly as it should be.

But it just doesn’t taste the same over here.

The walk to the tube takes me through the shabby babble of Oxford Street.

Music that rattles my fillings pours from clothing stores, record shops, coffee bars. Once the cheap, vibrant glamour of this street seemed to be what London was all about. Now I feel out of place among the new music, the tired fashions, the acned mob. Now it just reminds me that I am getting old. Oxford Street has stayed the same while I have changed. I try to move quickly through the crowds but the rush hour has started and progress is slow.

Near the tube station there are a couple of young foreigners propped up against the wall like bored streetwalkers. They are the funky kind of foreigner, all moody looks and platform boots.

There’s an Asian girl with dyed blond hair and a boy from some sunny corner of the Mediterranean with a pencil-thin moustache and razor-sharp sideburns.

They both have a stack of leaflets that they are listlessly offering to the crowds as they chat to each other in bad English. They give every impression of not giving a toss if they hand out their flyers or throw them in the nearest overflowing bin.

I take one.

Learn Good English

@ Churchill’s International Language School

The First and Best

Start Any Monday

Low Low Prices

Near Virgin Megastore

Help with Visas, Work Permits, Accommodations

Ensuring Excellence!

The leaflet has a Union Jack border and inside that there’s another border made up of flags from around the world. I see Italy, Japan, China, Brazil and plenty more that I don’t recognize.

Next to the words “Churchill’s International Language School” there’s a black silhouette of a bald fat man who is either Alfred Hitchcock or possibly Winston Churchill. The man is flashing two fingers to indicate that you should get lost or possibly that victory is imminent. His mouth is stuffed with an enormous great sausage or possibly a cigar.

The silhouette has been drawn by someone with the artistic ability of a pigeon. I hate the glib modernity of the “@” symbol. I am stunned that an Oxford Street language school would stoop so low as to pilfer Winston Churchill’s name to give it a touch of fake authority. There’s something about all that cheap cynicism in one place that reminds me why I feel so lost on this street.

But I find that I can’t throw the leaflet away. There’s something about all those different flags and the generosity in the promises of help and the cheery exclamation mark after the assurance of excellence that lifts my spirits.

I don’t know. It looks sort of hopeful.

We were never very far from the water in Hong Kong.

From the little café on Victoria Peak to the tea room of the Peninsula Hotel, every spectacular view that we ever held hands to featured the waterfront. We were always on the Star Ferry, shuttling between our apartments on opposite sides of the harbor. And Rose’s firm had a company boat that they called the junk.

Calling it a junk conjured up images of one of those quaintly curved wooden ships with orange sails that bob in the Hong Kong harbor of a thousand tourist postcards. Which was probably the idea.

In fact this junk was a modern, motorized launch that gleamed with chrome and polished wood and was crewed by a smiling Cantonese husband-and-wife team in neat white uniforms. Even as late as the spring of 1997, out on the junk you could kid yourself that the changeover was never going to happen, that nothing was ever going to change, that life would always be this sweet.

The junk was meant to be for corporate hospitality, but if it wasn’t being used for entertaining taipan clients from London or Shanghai or Tokyo, then the staff from Rose’s shop could take it out and spend a day cruising around the hundreds of tiny islands that make up Hong Kong.

Usually it was taken out by parties of gweilo male lawyers courting Asian girls who worked as flight attendants for Cathay Pacific. Rose and I, already at the stage where you believe that the two of you need nobody else, always went out with just the crew.

The last time we took the junk out we sailed to a little island with no name where an old man in flip-flops served us cold beer and spicy prawns in a restaurant that was little more than a shack. I remember a wooden pier, half-wild dogs roaming the beach and a silence that was disturbed only by the murmur of our voices and the sound of the sea.

On our way back I nodded off on deck, my belly full of Tsingtao and what was surely the best seafood in the world.

I don’t know how long I was sleeping but the sun had changed position by the time I awoke. It was very hot now. The deck was burning through the beach towel that I was lying on. I heard the distant caw of gulls, the soft hiss of waves on the shore, the boat creaking beneath me with the swell of the South China Sea.

And then suddenly Rose was standing directly above me, smiling, the features of her face hidden by the dazzle of the late-afternoon sun.

I squinted up at her, shading my eyes. The sun glared down and I couldn’t really see her, just the dark shape of her, moving in and out of the blinding light. Still looking at her through scrunched-up eyes, I made a move to rise.

She held up her hand.

“Stay right where you are,” she said.

Putting her feet either side of me, she carefully adjusted her stance so that her head completely blotted out the sun. It burned around her like the rim of a total eclipse. Her shadow fell across me, allowed me to see.

I uncovered my eyes, blinking away tears. Her face was clear now. She was smiling in the shade, this shade of her own making.

Rose filled the sky.

“Can you see me now?”

“Yes.”

“Sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Good.”

For a long moment we were motionless. It was as if she wanted to brand her face on my memory, as if she wanted me to keep this moment forever, as if she wanted to make sure that she would stay in my bones.

Then she moved away.

“You should put something on,” she said. “You’re going to get burned out here.”

I walk past the doorway to Churchill’s International Language School three times before I find it.

The entrance is between an ancient denim store and a brand-new coffee shop, at the part of Oxford Street where the milling crowds are at their thickest, so small that it is hardly there at all. I drink two heavily sugared cappuccinos and almost buy a pair of Levi’s-unfortunately they don’t have my size-before I finally see the open door.

It is being listlessly guarded by two more of Churchill’s students. They are gabbing away and scratching their piercings-navel for her, nose and eyebrow for him-while offering flyers to the indifferent mob. They don’t look at me as I go past them and up a steep flight of stairs.

Churchill’s International Language School occupies one entire floor of a building that seems to open up the farther you go inside, like a secret cave or the magic wardrobe that led to Narnia. It echoes with foreign accents, distant laughter, the sound of a teacher patiently explaining the idiom, “to see the light.”

Churchill’s feels like a far happier place than either the Princess Diana or the Double Fortune. I can smell instant coffee and takeaway chicken teriyaki. The walls are yellow and peeling, but covered with notice boards and bright with posters. Someone is selling a rice cooker because they are going back home. There are messages in English, French, Italian and what looks like Japanese. Rooms to rent, household items for sale, classes offered and sought-all the bits and pieces of student life everywhere, conducted in every language under the sun.

This place doesn’t have the menace of the Princess Diana or the earnestness of the Double Fortune. It’s a young, bustling, friendly place. I feel so comfortable here that I ask at the reception desk if they have any teaching vacancies. After filling in an application form and waiting for twenty minutes, I am sitting opposite Lisa Smith, the principal. She has dyed red hair, combat boots and a pair of those chunky, vaguely ethnic earrings that look far too heavy for human ear lobes. Despite dressing like one of her students, she must be breathing down the neck of her sixtieth birthday. Her manner is business-like, unsmiling, only as polite as she needs to be. She studies my application form.

“The world needs English,” she says. “Our students will go on to look for jobs in tourism, business, information technology. Wherever they work, they can’t do it without good English. English is the global language. The language of the next century.”

“It’s funny,” I say. “I was in Hong Kong the night it was handed back to the Chinese. Everyone was saying that it was finally the end of empire, the end of colonial rule, the end of the Western century. All that. But the English language is stronger than ever.”

A thin smile from Principal Smith.

“Oh, our students don’t dream of becoming English, Mr. Budd. They harbor no ambitions to become British. They dream of becoming international.”

Becoming international. That sounds good to me. When I went to Hong Kong, my dream was to become a part of something bigger than myself. And I did for a while. I made it. I was bigger than myself. Not because of the bright shining lights but because of a woman.

Rose transformed me. She swapped me for the person I had always wanted to be. Thanks to her, I was on the way to becoming myself. I had even started writing a few small things. Then suddenly it was all over, and everything slipped away from me.

I don’t tell Lisa Smith that teaching has often sickened me. I don’t tell her that I was bored and frustrated teaching the designer-clad old ladies at the Double Fortune, that I was overwhelmed and frightened teaching the designer-clad young thugs at the Princess Diana Comprehensive for Boys.

I am on my best behavior, asking some questions about pay and working conditions, because I feel that I must.

But I already know that I want to be a part of Churchill’s International Language School, I want to be surrounded by people who still have their dreams intact, I long to be a part of all that distant laughter.

4

J OSH COMES OUT OF THE LIFT just after six o’clock, all blond and beefy inside his pinstripe suit, turning on the charm for some smitten secretary who is gazing up at him while he twinkles and smiles and pretends to be nice. Josh lets the young woman peel away into the home-going crowds before he approaches me, his smile fading.

“You look awful,” he says. “Want a drink? How about a drop of Mother Murphy’s Water?”

“Have they got Tsingtao?”

“No, they haven’t got bloody Tsingtao. It’s an Irish pub, Alfie. They don’t sell Chinese beer in Irish pubs. God, it’s pointless looking for the craic with you. You couldn’t find the crack in your fat ass, could you?”

Josh is my best friend. I often think that he doesn’t like me very much. Sometimes I believe he rues the day that I was born. When we go out for a drink, a large part of the evening is always spent with Josh insulting me, although he no doubt considers this mindless abuse constructive criticism.

As we walk to Mother Murphy’s, Josh informs me that I have wasted my life. He tells me that no woman will ever want me. And when he hears my good news about Churchill’s International Language School, he makes it clear that he disapproves of my new job, just as he disapproved of my old job.

Yet Josh is the closest thing I have to a real friend. We’ve stayed in touch since Hong Kong, when it would have been the easiest thing in the world to drift from each other’s lives, what with him doing so well in the City and me spending most of my time wandering around Chinatown. But we are closer now than we were in Hong Kong.

There are people who have known me far longer and like me far more. People I knew at college, people I used to teach with at the Princess Diana. But none of them are real friends.

It’s not their fault. It’s mine. Somehow I have let them all wander off. I do not return their phone calls. I make lame excuses when I receive their invitations to dinner. I do not make the effort, the endless effort, that you need to keep a friendship alive. These are good people. But the truth is that I just don’t care enough for the continual contact that friendship demands.

I have seen a few of them since coming back to London, for drinks or coffee, and it always seems quietly futile. The only person I really look forward to seeing is Josh. He is my last link to Hong Kong, my one way back to the life I shared with Rose. If I let Josh slip away, then it would really feel as though Hong Kong was over. And I don’t want Hong Kong to be over.

“You were always a tourist,” Josh tells me in an Irish bar full of Englishmen in business suits. “Sentimental about the locals. Gaping at the view. Treating the world like it’s one big Disneyland. Buying little knick-knacks to put on the mantelpiece back home. You and Rose. What a pair of tourists.”

Why did Josh call me up and ask me out for a drink? Why doesn’t he spend his time with other hotshot young lawyers? Because it works both ways. Because I am Josh’s last remaining link to his own happy past.

Josh is working in the City now. Making a lot of money, doing well, soon to be made a partner. He says he doesn’t miss his life in Hong Kong. But I think he secretly yearns for the sense of endless possibility that every expatriate experiences, the feeling that your life has somehow opened up, that you are finally free to become exactly who you want to be. You lose all of that when you come back home. You discover that you are suddenly your old self again.

I think that Josh feels robbed. In Hong Kong he was considered to be what he presents himself as being-a cool, confident son of privilege, educated at schools that cost £15,000 a year, arrogant, to the manor born.

But that’s not the truth. And back in London, some people see right through him.

There was a bit of money in Josh’s distant past. His father was an underwriter at Lloyd’s and for the first ten years of Josh’s life there were private schools, tennis lessons and a big house in the suburbs. But that way of life started to recede when his father had a stroke.

From the age of twelve, Josh went to a comprehensive school in the Home Counties where he was tormented in the playground because he spoke like Prince Charles. His father lost his job. Josh lost his future. And all the insurance policies in the world can’t give you back your future. By the time he became a teenager, all Josh had left was his name, his accent and his act. It’s a good act. It fools me-even now-and many others.

But there are people in Josh’s firm who really did go to Eton and Harrow and Westminster, pampered veterans of Barbados and Gstaad, who come from families where the money never ran out, where the father did not have a stroke at forty.

These people look at Josh and they smile. He doesn’t fool them for a minute.

It’s strange. Josh pretends that everything he has-the law degree, the fashionably empty loft in Clerkenwell, the brand-new BMW coupe-came easily to him. The truth is much more impressive. I know that none of it came easily and I think he resents that about me, I think that’s why he never fails to abuse me. But there’s something we will always have connecting us, something that other people will never understand.

“Hong Kong,” he says. “How can you miss Hong Kong? All those weddings and funerals in a language you don’t understand. The shore line changing every time you look at it. All those mobile phones going off at the movies. Checking your seafood for hepatitis B. Nobody smiling at you unless she’s a Filipina. The obsessions with money, sex and shopping. In that order. And the other obsessions with typhoons, canto-pop and Louis Vuitton. Weather so humid that your shoes grow leaves. Air-conditioning so cold that you get hypothermia in the supermarket. People throwing their garbage from the eighteenth floor of their buildings. Including fridges.”

“You miss it too, don’t you?”

Josh nods. “Breaks my bloody heart,” he says. “I remember the first time I ever had sex in Hong Kong. Think I’ve still got the receipt somewhere.”

Josh likes me. He tries to hide it, but he does. Sometimes I think he envies me. It’s true that I don’t have a career, or money, or a flashy car, or any of the things that you are supposed to want. But I also don’t have a boss, a suit and tie I have to wear, a position to protect. There’s no lucrative partnership that I want. And there’s nothing that anyone can take away from me. Not now.

Yet there has always been an edge to my relationship with Josh. His hostility is not just a cover because he likes me so much. I think Josh believes that I stole Rose away from him just when he was ready to make his move.

Personally I don’t believe you can steal one human being from another. You can’t steal people, despite what Josh thinks. People are funny.

They just slip away.

When we can’t drink any more, we walk the entire length of the City Road and Upper Street looking for a black cab.

We get to the far side of Highbury Corner, where affluence and fashion abruptly give way to poverty and function, and we still haven’t found a taxi. There’s a dirty yellow light revolving among a tired row of shops.

“You get a minicab,” I tell Josh. “I can walk home from here.”

“Something to eat first,” he says. “Got to line the old stomach.”

Although we have left the bright lights behind, I know there are some really good places to eat around here. On one side of the Holloway Road there’s Trevi, a little Anglo-Italian café, and on the other side there’s Bu-San, one of the city’s oldest Korean restaurants. But Trevi is closed and Bu-San is full.

“What about that place?” Josh says. “Looks like a dump but I’m desperate.”

He’s indicating a Chinese restaurant that is sandwiched between a dry cleaner’s and a kebab shop. It’s called the Shanghai Dragon and it is not much to look at. There’s a line of smoked windows decorated with ancient takeout menus, curling reviews from local rags and listings mags, and some big red Chinese characters that are probably the name of the joint. There’s a tiny sign in the window. NO DOGS, it says.

On the main door, a single rectangular slab of yet more smoked glass, there’s a leering golden dragon who has seen better days. But beyond all the darkened windows and dog-eared menus, you can see heads moving about inside. The place is busy. A good sign. We go inside.

The Shanghai Dragon is nothing fancy. The interior has the shagged-out minimalism of a minicab firm at midnight. It’s an L-shaped room with a large section for diners and a smaller area for takeout customers. In the restaurant section there are just a few courting couples left now, lingering over the coffee and mint chocolates. The takeout area is more crowded with people who have just come out of the local pubs. There are a few stray tables and chairs in this section but all of them are occupied. Suspended from the ceiling, there’s a large television set showing some TV movie about Charles and Diana.

At the angle of the L-shaped room, an old Chinese lady is leaning on the counter of a bar the size of a telephone booth and taking orders, which she scratches on her pad in Chinese characters. There’s a cup of green tea in front of her.

You can smell the kitchen beyond a tatty door at the end of the takeout section. Garlic and spring onion, frying beef and black bean sauce, noodles and rice. I look at Josh and I can tell he thinks it too. This smells like a good place. We study the menu.

“Next!” the old lady says.

A man with a shaven head and khaki shorts lumbers up to the counter. He is dressed like a young man although he is not young at all. He looks like a forty-year-old skinhead who is on his summer holiday, a style that is quite popular in these parts. His belly resembles a bucket of brewer’s slop that is being poured into the gutter. He stinks of drink.

“Bag of chips,” he says.

“Chips only with meal,” says the old lady.

The man’s face darkens.

“Just give us a fucking bag of chips, you monkey.”

The old lady’s bright brown eyes show no fear.

“No dirty words! Chips only with meal!” She taps a menu with her ballpoint. “Says so here. You want chips, you order meal. For goodness sake. I wasn’t born tomorrow.”

“I don’t want a fucking meal,” the man growls.

“No dirty words!”

“I just want a bag of chips.”

“Chips only with meal,” the old lady says in conclusion, and then looks over the man’s shoulder. “Don’t blame me if you got out of bed the wrong way. Next!”

The other customers are all waiting for their takeout. That means we are next. I step up to the counter and start to give our order. The man with the shaven head puts a meaty hand on my chest and propels me backward.

“Give us a bag of fucking chips, you old cow,” he says.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Josh says.

The middle-aged skinhead turns and brings his forehead smashing down onto Josh’s nose. My friend reels backward with shock and pain. Already there’s a Jackson Pollock-style splatter of blood across his white shirt and silk tie.

“And you can wait your turn, Lord Snooty.”

The skinhead grabs a fistful of the old lady’s jumper. She seems very small. For the first time she starts to look afraid.

I put a restraining hand on the old skinhead’s shoulder. He turns and-very quickly, very hard-hits me three times in the ribs. As I clutch my sides, good for nothing, I think to myself that he has either done a bit of boxing or watched an awful lot of it on satellite television. I also think to myself-ouch! No, really-ouch!

“I don’t want any greasy foreign muck,” says the skinhead in a tone of voice that contrives to combine fury with extreme reasonableness. “I don’t want any of your sweet and sour crap. Just…give…me…a…bag…of…fucking…chips.”

“Chips only with meal!” the old lady cries, and the door to the kitchen opens as the skinhead pulls her toward him.

A cook is standing in the doorway. He is about sixty and wearing a white chef’s apron that is stained and frayed. His head is also shaved. For a second I can’t remember where I know him from.

And then I get it. He’s the old man in the park who I saw doing his slow-motion dance. The one who told me to keep breathing. The Tai Chi guy.

The skinhead lets go of the old lady as the old man comes toward him. The two men look at each other. The skinhead squares up for a fight, his fleshy fists half-raised, but the old man simply faces him, doing nothing, waiting.

The skinhead seems clenched with violence. But the old man is perfectly relaxed, his arms hanging loose by his side. He’s clearly not afraid of the much larger man. The old lady barks something in Cantonese, gesturing at the skinhead.

“Chips only with meal,” the old man says, very quietly.

Then he says nothing.

The two men stare at each other for a long moment. Then the skinhead looks away with a short, contemptuous laugh. Muttering to himself about Chinks and chips and greasy foreign muck, he leaves the Shanghai Dragon, slamming the door behind him. The relief in the place is tangible. We all watch the old man, wondering what has happened.

The kitchen door opens again and another Chinese man, this one much younger and plumper, comes out carrying a stack of silver containers in a plastic bag. He looks at me and Josh and his mouth drops open.

I am almost weeping with pain. Josh is sprawled in one of the plastic chairs, leaning his head back, a bloody handkerchief over his face.

The old lady says something else in Cantonese, not quite so angry now. The old man looks at us for the first time.

“Come,” he tells us.

The old man takes us through a side door next to the steam and clatter of the Shanghai Dragon’s tiny kitchen and up some stairs into a little self-contained flat where a number of Chinese people, big and small, are watching the TV movie about Charles and Diana.

They turn only mildly curious brown eyes our way as the old man leads us into a small bathroom and examines us with cold, expert fingers. My ribs are already turning purple but the old man tells me they are not cracked. But Josh’s nose seems to be growing sideways.

“Broken nose,” the old man says. “Have to go to hospital. But first push back in place.”

“Push what back in place?” Josh says. “You don’t mean my nose, do you?”

“Makes it better later,” the old man says. “Easier to fix for doctors. At hospital.”

Whimpering a bit and going oh-God-oh-God, Josh gingerly straightens his nose. Then the old lady is suddenly in the bathroom with us, almost crying with emotion, angrily ranting in English and Cantonese.

“What do they know?” the old lady says. “Drinking beer. Fighting. Saying dirty words. That’s all they know. These English. For goodness sake. I am at the end of my feather. Eating sweet and sour pork. And chips. Chips and dirty words with everything.”

“Not all English,” the old man says.

The old lady looks at us, not remotely embarrassed.

“I’m talking about bad English, husband,” she mutters. Then she smiles at us. “Want a cup of tea?” she says. “Cup of English tea?”

Her name is Joyce and his name is George. The Changs. He doesn’t say much. She doesn’t stop talking. Joyce is like a force of nature, wreaking havoc on any idiom that stands in her way, taking clichés and making them her very own.

“It’s just a storm in a tea pot…pretending butter wouldn’t melt in his trousers…dead as a yo-yo…I put my feet in it…don’t mince your thoughts…you have hit the nail on the nose…don’t be a silly willy!”

Joyce and George. They are the kind of English names that the Cantonese love to adopt-the names of kings and maiden aunts, the kind of English names that vanished from England decades ago. So far out of fashion that they are in danger of making a comeback.

George patches us up, rubbing Tiger Balm on my sore ribs and gently swabbing most of the dried blood from Josh’s face. Then Joyce, talking all the while, serves us tea and biscuits in the living room.

The room is full of family. There’s George and Joyce themselves and then their son Harold, the plump young man from the kitchen. There’s also Harold’s wife, Doris-another one of those Cantonese names that seems straight from some lost, ancient England-a young woman in glasses who avoids our eyes. And there are Doris and Harold’s two children, a boy of five and a slightly older girl. We are not introduced to the children, although the old people make a continual fuss of them, George placing the girl on his lap and Joyce cuddling the boy as we all drink our tea-green for them, English for us-and we all watch the TV movie about Charles and Diana for a bit until the silence is broken by Joyce.

“What’s wrong with you?” she suddenly demands, sizing me up over the green tea. “Cat got your mouth?”

She is a strange old lady. And yet this flat full of Cantonese seems oddly familiar to me. Is it the way the television dominates the room? The way that three generations seem perfectly at ease with each other? Or is it just the sweet tea and biscuits happily consumed on a crowded, worn-out old sofa?

There’s something about this room that reminds me of a family from long ago, a family that I knew in my childhood, a family that somewhere along the way I have somehow got separated from.

5

W HAT I LIKE ABOUT TEACHING at Churchill’s International Language School is that my students are definitely not children. They are young men and women, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, although there are quite a few who are older, mature students who only made it to London after the collapse of a bad marriage in Seoul or after too many boring years in an office job in Tokyo or after repeatedly having their visa application turned down by some spiteful little penpusher at the British Embassy in Beijing or Lagos or Warsaw.

I like their optimism, their youth, the way their lives are not yet set in stone. And I admire their nerve, coming halfway around the world to master another language.

So why do they dislike me so much?

Sometimes my students turn up late. Sometimes they do not turn up at all. And if they make it to class, they yawn and stretch and struggle to stay awake.

I finally snap when one of them, a Chinese boy in broken glasses called Zeng, loses his heroic battle against sleep and nods off in the middle of my interesting talk on the present perfect.

“What is it with you lot?” I demand. “You don’t show up half the time. When you do show up you act as though you’ve been heavily sedated. Look at this guy. Dead to the world. Are my lessons really so boring? Come on. Let’s have it.”

They stare at me dumbfounded. One or two of them rub their eyes. Zeng begins to snore.

“Not at all,” says a Japanese girl at the front of the class. She is one of the new kind of Japanese girls-dyed blond hair, heavy makeup and platform boots. She looks like one of the Glitter Band. “We like your lessons.” She glances around at the rest of the class. There are a few nods of assent. “Present perfect? Present perfect continuous?” She smiles at me and I remember her name. Yumi. “Very nice indeed.” She nods.

“Then why don’t you turn up? Why is this guy out for the count? Why is everyone on the verge of total collapse?”

“Please,” says a tall, thin Pole who has to be the same age as me. Witold. It took him about ten years before they ticked his card at the British Embassy in Warsaw. “Zeng is very-how to say?-knackered.”

“He works every night,” says the good-looking Pakistani kid sitting next to Zeng. Imran. He gives Zeng a shake. “Wake up. The teacher is talking to you.”

Zeng grunts, opens his eyes, wonders what planet he is on.

“You work, don’t you, Zeng?” says Yumi.

Zeng nods. “General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen. The one on Leicester Square. Very popular. Very busy.”

“That’s no excuse,” I say. “I don’t care if you’ve got some little part-time job. You should stay awake in my lessons. Falling asleep is rude.”

“Not such a little job,” says Imran.

“Work until three in morning,” says Zeng. “Do you want fries with that? Anything to drink? You want the General’s Happy Meal special? Toilets only for customer use.” He shakes his head. “Wah,” he says.

“It’s not insult for you,” says Imran. “London so expensive. He has to work too hard. We all do.”

“I don’t work,” says a young French woman. There are only a couple of French at Churchill’s. She sniffs the air disdainfully. Vanessa. “But the rest of them have to, I suppose.”

“I work in Pampas Steak Bar,” says Witold. “A bad place. Many drunks. Call me bloody Argie. ‘What’s it like to lose a war, Argie? Hands off the Falklands, Argie, okay? Hey, Argie-you like shagging sheep? You keep your filthy hands off those British sheep, Argie.’ I tell them I am Polish and they say they will smash my face in, wherever I come from.”

“Very English, no?” Vanessa says and laughs. “Swear and fight and eat bad food. A good night out for the English.”

“I work in Funky Sushi,” says a Japanese boy called Gen. He’s very shy and hasn’t volunteered any information about himself until now. “You know Funky Sushi? No? Really? It’s one of those-” He chats to Yumi in Japanese for a bit.

“Conveyor belt restaurant,” says Yumi. She makes a circular motion with her hand. “Where the food goes round and round.”

“Conveyor belt,” says Gen. “Considered very low in Japan. Cheap place, for workmen. Driving trucks and so forth. Because sushi not fresh enough when it goes round and round and round. Too old. But here-very fashion. Funky Sushi always busy. Always the kitchen-what do you call it?-mental.”

“We all work,” says Yumi. “I work in bar. The Michael Collins.”

“Irish pub,” says Zeng. “Very good atmosphere. Guinness and The Corrs. I enjoy looking for my craic in an Irish pub.”

Yumi shrugs. “Have to work. London too much money. Worse than Tokyo even. So we get tired from work. Apart from Vanessa.”

“I get tired from my boyfriend,” says Vanessa.

“But we like your lessons,” Yumi says with conviction. She smiles at me, and I realize how pretty she is beyond all the war paint. “It’s-what do you say?-nothing personal.”

She looks down at her desk, then back at me, still smiling, until I am the one who is forced to look away.

When I get home I find Lena crying in the kitchen.

This shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does. Since Oranges for Christmas went through the roof and my parents moved to this big white house, there have been a succession of au pairs and I have seen a few of them crying in this kitchen. There was the Sardinian who missed her mother’s cooking. The Finn who missed her boyfriend. The German who discovered she didn’t like getting out of bed before noon.

My parents treated all of these young women very well. Neither my mum nor my dad had grown up around any kind of hired help so they were far more than friendly to our au pairs. They were almost apologetic. Yet the au pairs still found a reason to cry all over their low-fat yogurt.

I thought Lena was different from the rest. She has that untouchable air about her that only the truly beautiful possess. For those of us who are merely average looking-or in my case, slightly below average-beauty seems like a magic shield. You can’t imagine life ever wounding someone who has that magic shield around them.

But the ordinary looking always overestimate the power of beauty. Just look at Lena. A fat lot of good beauty did her. She has been crying her heart out.

Embarrassed to see me, she starts to dab away her tears with a piece of paper towel. And I’m embarrassed too, especially after I ask a stupid question.

“You all right, Lena?”

“I’m fine,” she lies, wiping her perfect nose with the back of her hand.

“You want a coffee or something?”

She looks at me with wounded eyes.

“Just some milk. There’s some organic left in the fridge. Thank you.”

I bring Lena her glass of organic milk and sit across from her at the kitchen table. I don’t want to get too close. In the presence of beauty, I always feel that I should keep my distance. Even at a time like this.

I watch her taking little bird sips from her milk, her lovely face red with spent emotion, her large blue eyes all puffy from crying. Strands of her blond angel’s hair are damp with snot and tears. She twists the piece of paper towel in her fingers.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, although I sort of know the answer already. An au pair doesn’t cry these kind of desperate tears just because she misses Mutti’s apple strudel.

This is man trouble.

Lena is silent for a while. Then she looks up at the ceiling, her mouth and chin trembling, her eyes suddenly full of tears.

“I just want someone who is going to love me forever,” she says quietly, and I feel a surge of sadness and fear for her.

Forever? There’s one thing wrong with forever. These days it seems to get shorter and shorter. That’s the trouble with forever.

Blink and you miss it.

In the morning my mother waits until my father has gone to the gym and then she tells me that she wants us to give him a birthday party.

My mum is full of smiles and very pleased with this idea, even when I try to talk her out of it.

“He hates parties,” I say. “Especially birthday parties. Especially his own.”

“He’s going to be fifty-eight,” she says, as if that makes all the difference. “And he’s got lots of friends, your dad.”

Sometimes when I am talking to my mother I get the impression that we are having two different conversations. I tell her that he doesn’t want to be reminded of his age. She tells me that he’s going to be fifty-eight and that he has lots of friends. My mum often makes me feel like I’ve missed something.

“Mum, what’s turning fifty-eight got to do with it?” I say. “You think he wants to be reminded that he’s fifty-eight? And he hasn’t got lots of friends. Who are his friends?”

“You know,” she says. “There are the journalists he worked with at the paper. All the sports people he knows. The book people.”

“None of these people are his friends, Mum. They are just people he knows. He doesn’t even like most of them.”

She’s not listening to me. She has made her mind up and she is busy getting ready for work. She already has her uniform on-a short-sleeved gingham dress made of nylon or some other man-made material with a kind of fake apron stitched on to the front. Later she will pull back her hair-still glossy and dark, although I think she might have been coloring it for a few years-and put on a little white pillbox hat.

My mum is a dinner lady at a local school. It’s not the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys, where I taught. She works at Nelson Mandela High, which is co-ed and even tougher. “The girls are as bad as the boys these days,” my mum says. “Worse.” But she refused to give up what she calls “my little job” even when the serious money started to pour in from my dad’s book. That’s why my parents need help with their big house. That’s why Lena’s here. Because my mum wouldn’t give up her little job.

My mum loves Nelson Mandela. She really does. She likes having a laugh with the women she works with in the kitchen. She likes getting out of the house and giving some kind of shape to her day. But what my mum likes best about her job are the children.

I say children, although of course many of them are hulking great baritones who would sell their granny for the price of an ounce of pot. At least that’s how I see them. My mother thinks that there’s no such thing as a bad child.

“My kids,” she calls them. She’s sentimental about the children she feeds even though she has seen the worst of them, even though she has experienced them in all their surly, foulmouthed violence, even though they are obviously not worth getting sentimental about. My mum still calls them “my kids.”

She doesn’t let her kids cheek her when they are lining up for their burgers and fries. She doesn’t tolerate bad language in the school canteen. She doesn’t even let the little bastards scrap with each other (better they beat the hell out of each other rather than their poor underpaid teachers, if you ask me).

My mother has been known to put down her ladle-or whatever it is she dishes out the gruel with-stride into the playground and break up a fight. I have told her dozens of times that she is barking mad, that she could get seriously hurt. She doesn’t listen to me. She’s only five foot two, my mum, but she’s tough. And very stubborn.

She has worked at Nelson Mandela for almost twenty years, back in the days when it was still the Clement Attlee Grammar School. This means that there are men and women on the verge of middle age who remember her from their own years at the school. You might be walking down the street with my mother when some beer monster will suddenly come up to her and say, “Hello, Mrs. Budd, remember me?”

“Used to be one of my kids,” my mum will say.

I don’t understand how she can feel the way she does about these children. I guess it’s because she has a lot of love to give. Far more than my father and myself ever really needed from her.

When I was growing up, my mother had a series of miscarriages. It’s not something we talked about at the time. And it’s not something we talked about later. But I clearly remember being a bystander to my parents’ loss.

I don’t know how many times it happened. More than once. I can remember that there were these times in my childhood when there was a lot of talk about me having a little sister or brother. Not from my parents-I guess after the first miscarriage you are too wary to count on anything-but I remember aunts and female neighbors smiling down at me, talking about how soon there was going to be someone that I would have to look after.

I didn’t understand what they were talking about. I didn’t understand the syrupy smiles or the coy allusions. I couldn’t imagine anyone being so desperate that they needed me to look after them. I just didn’t get it.

But later, when I saw my mother weeping without any apparent reason on the stairs of the little house where I grew up, when I saw her heart breaking while my father tried to comfort her, then I started to get it. The cute talk from the overconfident neighbors had abruptly stopped. I wasn’t going to have a brother or sister. My parents were not going to have another child. Not this time. Not now. And, as it turned out, not ever.

I wondered where they were, my unborn little brothers and sisters. Were they in heaven? I tried my best to see them in my mind, my little brothers and sisters, but they were never real children to me, not like the other children at school or in the park, and not like the brothers and sisters of my friends.

These unborn siblings seemed more like an idea that someone had once had, an idea that had been thought about and then quietly put away. But I remember my mother weeping on the stairs, I remember watching her heart break, I remember her weeping as though those children were as real as me.

She loved me. She loved my father. She was very good at it. When we had hard times-when my dad was trying to write his book while still working full-time, when I lost Rose-my mum was our rock.

But no matter how much love she gave us, I always felt that she had more to give. I am not saying that’s why she worked as a dinner lady at Nelson Mandela High. But all that unused love is why my mum can look at all those unlovely children and feel a genuine affection for them.

“We’re giving him a birthday party,” she says, putting on her coat. “Don’t tell your nan. Or Lena. Or him.”

“I don’t know, Mum.”

“It will do him good to celebrate his birthday,” she says, and for just a second there I catch a glimpse of the woman who, at fifty-four years of age, still breaks up fights in the playground of Nelson Mandela High.

The work is not going well for my old man.

When the work was going well, the door to his basement study was shut but you could hear music blasting out of his stereo. It was always the old-school soul music he played, music that is full of profound melancholy and wild exuberance, music that was the sound of young America thirty years ago.

When the work went well, my dad played all the mating calls of his twenties-the Four Tops, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie Wonder-but now the work is going badly, or not going anywhere at all, there is only silence in his basement room.

Sometimes I see him sitting at his desk, staring at his computer, a pile of fan letters by his side. People are always writing to his publishers to say how much they loved Oranges for Christmas, how they laughed and cried, how it reminded them so much of their own family. These letters, passed on by his publishers, should make my father feel good but all this appreciation seems to weigh heavily upon him, seems to make it even more difficult for him to get started on his new book.

My father is rarely at home these days. In the mornings he goes to the gym, pumping his pecs and crunching his abs and toning his buttocks until the sweat blinds him. At night he has endless chores and treats-there are drinks, dinners, launches, awards ceremonies and his wise, witty appearances at the artsy end of radio and television. Those long afternoons are the big problem for him. He stares at his computer screen for a while, Smokey and Stevie and Diana silent inside their CD cases and boxed sets, and then he calls a cab and slips off to the West End.

This is how my father fills his afternoons. He goes around the bookstores of Covent Garden and Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street, where he signs many copies of Oranges for Christmas. This makes his book easier to sell, so the stores are always pleased to see him, even though he is turning up unannounced and they have other things to do. The young staff fetch him a pile of books and a cup of coffee and my father sets to work.

I saw him once in one of those bookstores where they sell records, magazines and designer coffee, one of those new kind of bookstores where books are just one of the things they sell. He didn’t see me and I didn’t want to approach him. It would have felt like an intrusion into some private grief.

He looked so lonely.

It is possible that my father does other things in the West End when he escapes from his work and his family and his home. But that’s how I see him, that’s how he is fixed in my mind at this moment-sitting all by himself in the corner of a crowded bookstore, a cup of caffe latte growing cold by his side, passing the long, lonesome hours by writing his own name over and over again.

On Friday night some of my students want me to go to the pub with them.

I try to wriggle out of it, telling them that I don’t really drink very much and I don’t really go to pubs, but they seem hurt and disappointed and incredulous.

An Englishman who doesn’t like pubs?

What’s wrong with this guy?

So I tell them that I’ll come along for just a quick one and they say that’s fine, a quick one is good, because most of them have to go to work tonight in whatever bar or burger joint or sushi conveyor belt restaurant pays their rent.

Their local is an Irish pub off Tottenham Court Road called the Eamon de Valera, and although it’s not yet six, the place is already full of young men and women from all around the world and even a few locals knocking back the dark glasses of Guinness, Murphy’s and Coca-Cola.

“Irish pub,” Zeng tells me. “Very friendly atmosphere.”

We find an empty corner of the Eamon de Valera and pull two tables together. My students start to get their money out but I tell them that their teacher will buy them a drink. I get in a round of stout and Coke.

There are five of us-me, Zeng, Wit, Gen and Astrud, a Cuban woman, married to a local. But Yumi and Imran are already in the pub, talking at the bar, and they come over to join us. Then Vanessa arrives with Churchill’s other French girl and some young black guy with locks, and soon so many people are joining and leaving our party-Astrud thanks me for her Coke and goes, saying she has to meet her husband-that I can’t tell where it begins and where it ends.

There is something touchingly democratic about our little group. Not just because they come from every corner of the globe, but because you couldn’t imagine these people being friends or even sharing a drink in their home countries. Wit is pushing forty and Yumi is just out of her teens. Wit is permanently broke, sending every spare pound back home to his family, while Vanessa seems to have some kind of private income-all of her shopping bags are from Tiffany and Cartier. Then there is Imran, a handsome young man in Emporio Armani kit, and Zeng, who is wearing odd socks and spectacles mended with Scotch tape. They have nothing in common apart from Churchill’s International Language School. But studying there has created a bond between them and I find myself doing something that I haven’t done for a long time.

I find myself having a good time.

More drinks are ordered. Students shout at each other in fractured English over the sound of The Corrs asking what they can do to make you happy. Zeng is sitting next to me and I take the Guinness he is clutching away from him as he starts to nod off.

“Always sleeping,” Yumi tuts.

“Wah,” Zeng says, shaking himself awake. He smiles apologetically and reclaims his beer. “Sorry, sorry. Last night I did not sleep. My host family were arguing. Now I am very…I am very…fuck.”

Gasps of astonishment around the table. A few snickers of laughter.

“No bad words!” Yumi says.

Zeng looks embarrassed. “Excuse me,” he says, avoiding eye contact with his teacher.

“That’s okay,” I tell him. “These words are part of the language you’re studying. A lot of great writers have used the vulgar vernacular. This is interesting. What are you trying to say? That you’re very tired?”

Zeng sighs. “Yes. Last night my host family were arguing about some such thing. They were very drunk.”

“He rents a room from a family who rent the room from someone else,” Yumi says. “Illegal. And with very low people. Uneducated.”

“They are not so bad,” Zeng says. “But now I am very, very…fucking.”

“No,” Wit says. “You are fucked off.”

“That means angry,” I say.

“He is…perhaps…fucked up?” Wit suggests helpfully.

“He could say that. But that implies something other than tiredness. He could just say-I am fucked.”

Zeng chuckles. “Yes, it’s true. I am fucked.”

“So many of these bad words in English,” Wit says. “In German, there are many words for you. Du, dich, dir, Sie, Ihnen, ihr and euch. In English, there’s only one word for you. But many bad words.”

“Not so many bad words,” I say. “But lots of different meanings to the bad words.”

“Yes,” Gen says. “Such as-I do not give a fuck.”

Yumi gasps. Vanessa titters. Wit stokes his chin in contemplation.

“Means-I do not care,” Gen says loftily.

“Or you could call someone a useless fuck,” I say.

“Means he is not very good at making love?” Yumi says.

“No, no,” I say, blushing furiously. “It just means he’s a useless person.”

“Eskimos have fifty different words for snow,” Wit observes. “The English have fifty different words for fuck.”

“Fuck my old boots,” I say.

Frowns around the table.

“What is this-fuck old boots?” Wit says.

“It’s an expression of surprise,” I explain. “Like fuck a duck.”

“Sex with a…beast?” Zeng says. “Like in yellow films? Love with a duck?”

“We don’t call them yellow films. That’s a Chinese expression. Here we call pornography blue films.”

“Wah!”

“No, fuck a duck’s another exclamation of surprise.”

“Like-fuck all?” Wit asks.

“No, that means-nothing.”

“Fuck all means-nothing?”

“That’s right. You’re thinking of fuck me.”

“In the steakhouse where I work,” Wit says, “there were these bad men. Very drunk.”

“Mmm,” Vanessa says. “Very English, no?”

“They were unhappy with their bill and called for the manager,” Wit continues. “Then they threatened to kick the fuck out of him! And called him fuck face!”

“That’s very bad,” I say.

“What is this expression-to fuck someone’s ass off?” Gen says, as if he’s enquiring about some arcane point of etymology. “Is it sex-how to say?-in the rear? Sex-how to say?-up the anal way? That you are a back door man?”

“No, it’s got nothing to do with that. It just means sex that’s done with a degree of enthusiasm. You see?” I tell them. “The great thing about English-the reason you are studying English rather than Chinese or Spanish or French-is that it’s an endlessly flexible language.”

“But English is a strange language,” Wit insists. “What is this funny book-Roger’s Thesaurus?”

“Roget’s Thesaurus,” I say.

“Yes, yes. It’s not a dictionary. It’s a book of synonyms, yes? No book like that exists in my country.”

“I think a book like Roget’s Thesaurus is unique to English. That’s why so many English words find their way into other languages. You can do what you like with it.”

“Excuse me, please,” Zeng says, getting up to go. “I must fuck off.”

“He is leaving!” Gen says triumphantly. “Zeng has to leave for General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen.”

“He must fuck off to work,” Wit enunciates carefully, like a professor of phonetics concluding a particularly tricky tutorial. “Or the fuckers will give him the fucking sack.”

And soon more of them are slipping away. Gen to the kitchen of a conveyor belt sushi restaurant on Brewer Street, Wit to that grim old-fashioned red-plush steakhouse on Shaftesbury Avenue where the bad men go, Vanessa to some smitten English boy at the bar who is going to take her dancing.

Soon there’s only Yumi and me at our table in the Eamon de Valera and I’m finally speechless as I feel the effects of two pints of Guinness and her shining brown eyes.

“I like you, you’re nice,” she says.

Fucking hell.

6

M Y GRANDMOTHER IS TELLING some big shot from the BBC that she is eighty-seven and still has all her own teeth. My mother looks wonderful in a long red dress, her hair piled on top of her head, and she seems very happy as she smiles and moves among the guests, checking that everyone is okay.

I am hovering on the edge of the evening, trying to overcome the quiet panic that I always feel at parties, fighting the fear that there will be no one for me to talk to. But after a while even I start to relax. It feels like a special night.

It’s true that the guests are a very mixed bunch. The guffawing sports journalists with their Liverpool and Estuary and Irish accents seem to belong at a different gathering from the garrulous, well-spoken girls from television. The authors with their acres of corduroy and denim seem strangely subdued next to the leering late-night DJs with their big cigars. My nan, as frail as a sparrow in her floral party dress, seems to come from a different century from the man in Armani from the BBC.

But it is surprising how well people from different worlds can get on when there is goodwill in the air and expensive alcohol in their bloodstreams and good sushi being offered around. And there is real affection for my father in this room.

I told my mother that he had no real friends, but I was wrong. I feel that these people are all genuinely proud to know my dad. I sense that they admire and like him. They are honored to be here and excited about surprising him on his birthday. I feel proud of him, glad that he’s my father.

They have come from the four corners of the city to celebrate my father’s birthday. There are brash, beefy men who knew him from his years on the sports pages of national news-papers. There are youthful middle-aged men in colored spectacles, and loud girls in combat boots who know him from his appearances on their radio and television shows. There are people from his publishing house, sympathetic critics, important booksellers, talk show hosts, fellow writers, all these friends, colleagues and allies who have aided and abetted my dad’s brilliant career.

The party is around our indoor swimming pool. We are in here because it is the only room in the house big enough to hide almost a hundred people. They are milling around the pool, taking drinks and satay and tamaki rolls from the waiters, making jokes about going for a dip. But this is a good place for a celebration.

The bright fluorescent lights make the party feel like it’s being held in some kind of giant spotlight. The swimming pool shimmers turquoise and gold, the light catching the silver trays of the white-suited caterers as they move among guests holding twinkling flutes of champagne. A special night for a special man.

“He’s coming!” my mother announces and the main lights go out. But the room is still not quite dark because there are spotlights in the swimming pool, shimmering under water like yellow ghosts. Someone hits another switch and the room is suddenly pitch black.

Guests giggle and murmur in the darkness as we listen to my father’s Mercedes purring on the street. After a while the engine dies and soon there is the sound of his key in the door. There are another couple of self-conscious laughs which are urgently shushed. We wait for my father in complete darkness and total silence. Nothing happens. We wait some more. Still nothing happens. Nobody speaks. And then the door to the pool room finally opens.

There are shadows in the doorway, the soft ruffle of clothes, something like a sigh. We hear him step into the darkened room and wait for him to turn on the lights. But he doesn’t. Instead there’s the sound of creaking wood. He’s on the diving board! He’s going for a swim! All around me I can feel the laughter being stifled, the tension mounting.

Suddenly the lights come on and the room is full of grinning people and far too bright.

“Surprise!” someone shouts, and then the laughter abruptly dies in our throats.

My father is standing naked on the diving board, his disbelieving eyes slowly taking in the presence of everyone he knows. His eyes stop on my mother’s face for a short horrible moment, and then he looks away in shame.

Lena is kneeling in front of him, fully clothed, her golden head bobbing up and down to some inner rhythm. She is making the diving board squeak.

But I’m the one she fancies, I think. That should be me! It’s not fair! Then my father rests a hand on the back of her head. She stops moving, slowly opening her eyes, looking up at him.

The noise my mother makes is not a scream. It’s not quite as formed as that, not so clear in its meaning. The noise my mother makes is more of a howl that somehow manages to contain disbelief, humiliation and a shame she doesn’t deserve.

The party is paralyzed for a few seconds. Then my mother turns and barges her way through the guests, pushing aside a waiter, who loses his balance, seems to regain it for a second and then starts toppling toward the pool. A silver tray carrying half a dozen champagne flutes slips away from the palm of his hand and lands with a crash of metal and glass as he hits the water.

“Does this mean the party’s over?” says my nan.

My parents were always Mike and Sandy. Never Sandy and Mike. Always Mike and Sandy. Always and forever, my father had top billing.

They seem like old-fashioned names to me, Mike and Sandy, names from an England that no longer exists, the England that was there when my parents and their friends and neighbors and my aunts and uncles were young.

It was an England of country pubs, dinner dances and trips to the seaside on Bank Holiday Monday. A land of small pleasures, quietly savored-card games (men and women) on Christmas night, football (men and boys) on Boxing Day, a trip to the local for a game of darts and a couple of pints (men only) when we had “guests.”

That land was a cold, insular place with real winters, where every foreign holiday to Greece or Spain felt like the trip of a lifetime. The Beatles had come and gone and left behind a kingdom where suburban grown-ups smoked for the same reason that they wore paisley shirts and miniskirts, the same reason they nervously went to Italian and Indian restaurants-because they thought it made them look both young and sophisticated. The England of my childhood, that innocent place that yearned to be grown-up. Mike and Sandy’s country.

Mike and Sandy. They are friendly names, approachable names, sociably abbreviated, the name of a respectable married couple who know how to have a laugh. Within reason.

Mike and Sandy. They are not their given names, of course. My father was Michael and my mother was Sandra. But somewhere in the sixties and seventies, when the clothes and the television sets and the expectations were going from black and white to color, when the austerity that had clung to the country like acne for twenty-odd years was finally clearing up, the names of the young-and the not quite so young, the new mothers and fathers-were becoming brighter and breezier too.

Mike and Sandy. The names of a married couple that was at home in a country where nobody ever left, nobody got divorced, nobody ever died and every family lasted forever.

He somehow gets his clothes on and escapes with Lena-or maybe he doesn’t get his clothes on, maybe he just hops butt-naked into his flash car and drives away-but as the caterers fish the waiter from the pool we hear the Mercedes pulling away with a frightened shriek of rubber, as if he can’t get out of our lives fast enough.

The next morning I wander through the silent house, looking at all the top-of-the-range detritus of his life, all those things he values so much, and I wonder why my mother doesn’t trash the lot. It wouldn’t settle the score. But it might make her feel better.

My mother could obliterate every trace of his rotten life. I wouldn’t blame her. In fact I would be very happy to help her.

But she doesn’t touch any of his things.

Instead, when she finally emerges from her bedroom the next morning, pale-faced and red-eyed, still wearing her beautiful party dress, insisting that she is all right, adamant that she doesn’t want anything to eat or drink, my mother goes out to the garden she loves and sets about destroying it.

At the end of the garden there is a trellis where honeysuckle grows and smells sweet on summer mornings. My mother does her best to rip that down with her bare hands but she can’t quite manage it, she can only pull down half of it and leaves the rest smashed but still attached to the wall.

There are terra-cotta pots containing new bulbs that she hurls against the garden wall, leaving behind shell bursts of exploded dirt. She hacks at her flower beds with rake and trowel and fingers, aborting all the spring bulbs that she recently planted with such endless care.

By the time I reach her she is tearing her hands to pieces by pulling up the rose bushes. I put my arm around her and hold her tight, determined not to let her go until she has stopped trembling. But she doesn’t stop trembling. Her body shakes with shock and grief and rage and I can’t do anything to stop it. She keeps shaking long after I have taken her back into the empty house and drawn all the blinds and tried to shut out the world.

And now I can sort of understand how it works, I can see how the world turns around and the child becomes the parent, the protected becomes the protector.

“Don’t cry,” I tell her, just as she told me after I had lost my first playground fight. “Don’t cry now.”

But I can’t stop her. Because she’s not just crying for herself. She’s crying for Mike and Sandy.

You have to be a cold, hard man to walk out on a family and my father is not a cold, hard man.

Weak, perhaps. Selfish, definitely. Stupid, without question. But he is not cold and hard. At least, he is not cold and hard enough to do what he has just done-to amputate a family from his life-with ease. When I turn up at the doorstep of his rented flat, he looks torn. Torn between a life that is not quite over and another life that hasn’t quite begun.

“How’s your mother?”

“Take a wild guess. How do you think she is?”

“You’re too young to understand,” he tells me defensively, letting me inside.

Lena is not around. But there are the clothes of a young woman drying on a radiator.

“Understand what? That you felt the need for a bit on the side? That you thought you could play away and not get caught? That you’re an old man who’s desperate to recapture his youth? Understand what exactly?”

“To understand what can go wrong with a marriage. Even a good marriage. The passion wears off. It just does, Alfie. And then you have to decide if you can live without it. Or not. Do you want a cup of tea? I think we’ve got a kettle here somewhere.”

It’s a good flat in a rich, leafy area. But it is very small and it belongs to someone else. The color of the paint was chosen by someone else. The pictures on the wall were bought to satisfy the taste of some stranger. I try hard but I can’t imagine my father living here. In every way you can think of, this is just not his place. Everything feels rented, as though it could be repossessed at any moment, all snatched back by the rightful owner. The flat, the furniture, the girl. All just borrowed from someone else.

“How long is this going to last?” I ask him. He is still looking for a kettle. But he can’t find one. “Dad? Can we forget the tea? You no longer own a kettle, okay? Start living with it. No kettle. Okay?”

“What are you talking about?”

“How long are you going to stay here with Lena?”

“Until we can find somewhere better.”

“She’s-what?-twenty-three?”

“Twenty-five,” says my father. “Nearly.”

“Younger than me.”

“She’s very mature for her age.”

“I bet.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I slump onto the leather sofa. My father hates leather sofas. Or he used to.

“Why couldn’t you have just slept with her?” I ask, although I am very afraid that he is going to start giving me the details of their Olympian sex life. Please. Anything but that. “Isn’t that what’s meant to happen? I can understand why you’re attracted to her. I can even sort of see why she would be attracted by you. An older, successful man. All that. But you’re not meant to set up home together. This is madness, Dad.”

My old man starts to pace up and down. The flat’s living room is easily the biggest room in the place but it’s still not very big. He takes a few steps and then he has to turn around. He is wringing his hands. I feel a jab of pity for the poor old bastard. He is not cut out for this game. He can’t play it as ruthlessly as it needs to be played.

“These things have a momentum of their own. I tried to keep it under control, I really did. For a while there I felt like the luckiest man alive. I had the perfect wife and the perfect mistress.”

“Your perfect wife wants to throttle you.”

“But it doesn’t last,” he says, ignoring me. “That time doesn’t last. It moves on. You can’t have it all. And you have to decide.” He turns to me, pleading for understanding. “Isn’t that what every man wants? A wife and a lover? We want stability, support, a quiet life. But we also want romance, excitement, passion. Why should it be wrong to want the best of both worlds?”

“Because it’s too much. You want too much. You ruin other people’s lives by wanting too much.”

“I can’t help falling in love. I didn’t plan for it to work out this way, Alfie.”

“Love,” I say. “Give me a break. Don’t call it love.”

“What else should I call it?” he says, suddenly angry. “Look, I’m sorry about your mother, Alfie. I really am. It’s terrible the way she found out. But the heart wants what the heart wants.”

“Dad,” I say. “Listen to me. Lena is a great girl. But she dances when she eats. She still dances when she eats, okay? Haven’t you noticed that? She bops around when she’s listening to the radio, even if she’s eating her breakfast. She’s a child.”

“She looks cute when she does that.”

“Come on. She’s young enough to be your daughter.”

“Age has nothing to do with it.”

“You’d love Lena if she was your age, would you? If she was almost sixty? I don’t believe you. And she wouldn’t want you if you were some kid of twenty-three living on a student loan and working in a burger joint.”

“Twenty-five,” he says. “Nearly.”

“You can work it out with Mum. Apologize. Ask her to forgive you. We all make mistakes. You can’t end a marriage because some au pair wags her tail at you.”

“I can’t do that. I’ve left your mother. And I’ve done it for love. Sorry, Alfie. But I have my principles.”

I feel like hitting him.

“You’ve insulted love,” I say, thinking of my mother’s garden. “You’ve spat in its face, you ridiculous old man. You have someone in your life who has stuck by you for years, who supported you when you had nothing, and you do this to her. Don’t talk to me about principles, okay? Don’t paint yourself as some kind of romantic hero. You’re not. And you didn’t leave. You ran away.”

He stops pacing.

“I’m sorry, Alfie. But I think I’ve done the right thing.”

“Oh, you think you did the right thing, do you? You think that getting caught with your swimming trunks around your ankles in front of absolutely everyone you know was a smart move, do you? Well, Dad, that’s open to debate.”

“Leaving. I did the right thing by leaving.” He gives me a strange look. “Did you know that your mother was expecting you when we got married?”

“I worked it out. It didn’t take a mathematical genius. There’s five months between your wedding and the day I was born.”

“She was pregnant. That’s why we got married. I loved her and everything. But we got married because-that’s what you did back then. It’s not like now. And do you know what they all told me? My family, my friends, my in-laws? They all told me: you’ve had your fun. And I said nothing. But I always thought: that was it? That was my fun?”

“You think the party’s just beginning, do you?”

“Look, I want to live with the person I want to sleep with. Is that so wrong? You’re a man. You should try to understand. They say that if you want to stay with them you don’t want to fuck them and if you want to fuck them then you don’t want to stay with them. But I know now that’s not true. Because I want it all from Lena.”

“But it’s not real. You’ve been listening to too many old records. This is not a Smokey Robinson song, Dad. This is real life.”

My father looks at me with something approaching pity.

“Don’t tell me about real life, Alfie,” he says quietly, and I know exactly what he is about to say next so I get up to go. I try to leave quickly because I don’t want to hear it, I am heading toward the door of his rented flat before he can even get the words out.

“You’re still in love with someone who’s dead,” my father tells me.

Love didn’t make me a better person. Just the opposite. Love made me indifferent to the rest of the world. Love narrowed my horizons down to a pair of blue eyes, to a goofy smile, to one young woman.

Shortly after Rose and I had begun, I was on a plane flying back to Hong Kong. I had just spent a week with my parents, my first trip home since leaving London, a trip that had been arranged long before I met Rose. It was too late to cancel so I went to see my mother and father and grandmother but there was no pleasure in it for me; my heart was somewhere else. I wanted to get it over with, to get out of London, to get back to Hong Kong, to get back to her, to get back to Rose.

But there was a problem on the plane. A serious problem. A man-this middle-aged executive sitting across the aisle from me-suddenly became short of breath. He gasped for air, he made strange croaking noises, he looked like he was choking to death. At first I assumed that he had overdone the complimentary drinks. But then, as the stewardesses crouched by his side and the pilot asked if there was a doctor on board, it soon became clear that he was sick, very sick.

They laid him in the aisle, stretched out on the floor, right beside me, close enough to touch his terrified face, and two young doctors knelt by his side, pulling his shirt open, talking to him like priests beside a death bed.

We couldn’t fly to Hong Kong. The man needed a hospital and so our flight diverted to Copenhagen where a medical crew was waiting to take him off the plane. And all the passengers were very understanding about the diversion, of course they were, even when they learned that we would have to wait for hours at Copenhagen Airport until we could get another crew. Our pilot explained that our crew could no longer take us to Hong Kong because, with the diversion, they would exceed their permitted hours in the air. So we had to wait. For hours.

Everybody was very understanding. Everybody except me.

I hated that sick man. I didn’t want to divert to Copenhagen so that he could get medical treatment. I wanted the pilot to stick him in with the suitcases and let him take his chances. It was worse than indifference. I felt a rage toward him that I could hardly contain. I didn’t care if he lived or died. It meant nothing to me. I just wanted him out of the way so that I could get back to Hong Kong, back to my girl, back to my life, back to the best thing that had ever happened to me.

That’s what love did to me.

Love messed up my heart.

7

R OSE WAS BEAUTIFUL IN THE WATER. She had been diving for years, long before she came out to Hong Kong, and she had that still, weightless quality that separates good divers from the rest of us.

We looked like two different creatures when we were underwater. I was always a nervous wreck, struggling to maintain neutral buoyancy, constantly fiddling with the air in my BCD jacket, letting a little out as I started drifting to the surface, letting a little in as I began to sink, never getting it right for very long.

Rose just hung there, floating in space, doing it all with her breathing, doing it all with minor adjustments to the air in her lungs, remaining weightless with what seemed like little more than sighs.

I was never happy with my equipment, forever clearing my mask of water, nervously checking my air gauge to see exactly how much was left-I was a glutton for air, always having to return to the surface long before anyone else-and adjusting my tank as its heavy weight seemed to shift and slide on my back.

I just didn’t look happy underwater. Like all good divers, Rose looked as though there was nowhere else she would rather be.

She had learned to dive at home. She had gotten her scuba diving card in freezing dark waters off the south coast of England and in a flooded quarry in the Midlands. She had done it the hard way. So the dive sites of Asia-warm blue waters, endless coral reefs, so much marine life that sometimes the fish blotted out the sky-seemed like the next best thing to paradise.

I learned to dive because of Rose. I had a crash course on our honeymoon in Puerto Galera in the Philippines, getting used to breathing underwater in the hotel swimming pool with a local instructor and a couple of twelve-year-old Taiwanese, learning the theory in some little classroom behind the resort’s dive shop and finally being taken out into open water for the real thing. Rose was as excited as me when I got my scuba diving card. Maybe more.

And we had some good times. Once, on a weekend trip to Cebu in the Philippines, I sucked up most of my air in a ridiculously short amount of time and got sent up by the dive master. I had to make a safety stop for three minutes at a depth of five meters to let the excess nitrogen seep out of my body. Although her tank still had plenty of air, Rose came up with me and those few minutes making that safety stop were the best diving that I ever had. We hung there together in the shallow waters where the light was dazzling, the coral reef shining like a treasure chest, watching a school of angel fish swarm around us as our bubbles of air mixed together and rose lazily to the surface.

But diving was just one of the many things that Rose did far more easily than me. She was comfortable at parties and meeting new people and floating weightless 15 meters below the surface of the South China Sea. But no matter how much I tried-and I tried hard because I wanted to please her more than anything in the world-I really couldn’t be. It just wasn’t in me. That was the difference between us underwater and, now I come to think of it, everywhere else.

I swam.

She flew.

It felt wrong from the start.

On Friday night the weather had been still and clear, typical of this part of the Philippines in late spring, but by the time we were walking down to the beach on Saturday morning, the blue skies were turning to gun-metal gray and the waves out at sea were showing flecks of white foam.

We were already in our wet suits. I was carrying a big yellow dive bag containing our masks, snorkels and fins. We would rent the rest of our kit from the dive shop. I watched Rose squinting up at the sky.

“We could just chill out at the hotel,” I said. “The weather doesn’t look great.”

“It’ll be fine,” she said. “Ramon won’t take us out if there’s any problem.”

Ramon was the dive instructor of the resort, a stocky Filipino in his early forties, who watched over his dives with calm authority. A lot of dive sites in the Philippines have notoriously unpredictable currents, which means you can see some beautiful coral growth. But tricky currents also mean you need an experienced guide to take you out. We had spent a few weekends at this resort and Ramon had always led our dives and had taken good care of us. But when we arrived at the dive shop, Ramon wasn’t there.

In his place there was a skinny kid, no older than twenty, unusually tall for a Filipino, his worn and ragged wet suit pulled off his brown, bony shoulders. He was laughing with a pair of European tourists, a couple of tall blonde girls in bathing suits who looked so healthy and milk-fed that they could only be Scandinavian.

“Where’s Ramon?” I said.

“Ramon sick,” he said, glancing at me for just a second before turning his attention back to the blondes. “I take the dive today.”

I looked at Rose for a moment. She just shrugged and smiled. She really wanted to dive that day. So we joined the other divers next to a row of battered scuba tanks and started putting our equipment together as the little dive boat came into the bay and chugged toward the beach, its bow lifting and falling with the waves.

I selected a tank, BCD and regulator, strapped the BCD to the tank, made sure it was good and tight, then attached the regulator to the tank. The four black hoses of the regulator snaked around my feet like half an octopus.

Two of the regulator’s hoses had mouthpieces-a black one for me and a bright yellow one for anyone who might need it-another hose ended with gauges monitoring air supply and depth, and the final hose had a metal clip that I attached to the BCD. There was a little hose on my BCD so that I could regulate my buoyancy by inflating or deflating it. Finally I turned on the tank’s valve and, as it hissed into life, checked the air supply.

The gauge read 210 bar. A full tank. Everything was as it should be. Except somehow it wasn’t as it should be at all.

What I liked about Ramon was that he was always there while we were putting our equipment together. He would advise us about the amount of weights we needed, he would check to see that our kit was up to scratch, he would make sure our checks were done properly. I needed all that.

Ramon always gave me the impression that nothing was more important to him than safety. But as the rising wind whipped off the sea, I thought that this skinny kid acted as though nothing were more important to him than large Norwegian breasts.

I stood at the stern of the boat, feeling it pitch and fall beneath my feet, taking a part of my stomach with it every time it fell. The fins that I was wearing made it easier for me to keep my balance but harder for me to move. I stood there staring at the heads bobbing up and down in the choppy sea. They looked so fragile.

Everyone else was in the water. The skinny dive master. The Norwegian girls. A young Japanese couple. A rubbery old German who looked as though he had spent his life under the tropical sun. And Rose, her face half-hidden behind her mask but lifted toward me. They were all waiting for me.

It was raining hard now. The coast wasn’t far away-we had reached the dive site in less than twenty minutes-but it was completely hidden behind a mist that seemed to be growing thicker by the second. Black clouds rumbled and rolled above the dive boat. There was a clap of thunder overhead, a jagged slash of lightning on the horizon. The rain seemed to be coming in sideways. I placed one hand on my mask and another on my tank and stepped off the side of the boat.

I hit the water, went under for an instant and was suddenly on the surface. The waves were even rougher than they looked from the boat and I took in a mouthful of water, managing to gag most of it up.

My mask was already getting misty. I should have spat on the glass and cleaned it with sea water, as that always prevented it steaming up, but it felt like there hadn’t been enough time. The skinny dive master had taken us all up to the bow to talk through the dive plan and next thing after that we were getting into the water. I pulled off my mask, hawked on the glass and dipped it under the water, rubbing hard.

Rose was finning to my side. “You okay?”

“I miss Ramon,” I said, tasting the salt and bile.

“Me too. I think we’re off.”

I pulled on my mask and saw that the rest of them were already going down. I quickly stuffed in the mouthpiece of my regulator and faced Rose. She made a thumbs-down gesture, meaning going down, and I returned the signal. I released a few puffs of air from my jacket and exhaled, immediately starting to sink feet first below the waves.

I was aware of the hull of the boat, other divers nearby, the dive master floating weightless far below us. And that’s when I felt the excruciating pain in the bridge of my nose. I was going down too fast, the pressure on the air space in my sinuses was causing a squeeze.

Rose was beside me, making a soothing gesture with her hands, slowly waving them in front of her chest-take it easy, take it easy. I nodded, went up a meter and the squeeze immediately cleared.

With one hand I made my thumb and index finger into a circle-I’m okay-and with the other I pinched my nose, gently blowing through it as I once more tried to go down. This time it worked and I slowly began to sink without my nose feeling as though it was in a vice.

Visibility was poor. I was used to seeing these waters flooded with sunlight and marine life, but today the sea was murky and dark, with only a few fish swimming through the gloom, bright splashes of color in the enveloping darkness. Then I realized that Rose and I were alone.

Rose was floating weightless by my side, looking all around. But there was no sign of the other divers. They had left us. Water began to seep into my mask. I tilted my head upward, pulled back my mask and roughly exhaled through my nose. My mask cleared. Rose was looking at me, her blue eyes wide behind glass, jerking her thumb from side to side.

Which direction?

I checked around, hoping for the reassuring sight of some human shapes finning through the darkness. There was nothing. And every direction looked the same. I gazed up at the hull of the boat, far above us now. It seemed to be drifting away from us. Or perhaps we were doing the drifting. Rose jerked her thumb to the right.

Go that way.

I shook my head. Was she crazy? She was indicating that we should swim out to sea. I stabbed my thumb in the opposite direction, toward the shore. Or to where I imagined the shore to be.

Go that way.

She shook her head, tapping the compass she had strapped to her wrist. My finger and thumb formed a reluctant circle.

Okay.

She led the way and we finned into the darkness. My mouth was dry with nerves. I looked at my air gauge. Still plenty left.

Then we were suddenly on top of it, emerging out of the twilight like some great abandoned city, the rotting gray and black metal encrusted with more than fifty years of coral.

A sunken Japanese troop ship from World War II.

We grinned at each other with shock and elation. This ship was the reason for our dive. There was still no sign of the others but they were probably on another part of the ship. You could only see a fraction of it in this light. By now we didn’t care.

The ship was sitting in deep water but the upper deck and the bridge were just about within our limit. We finned across the deck and I felt something icy enter my heart. The gaping windows of the bridge were like empty eye sockets. The dead wood of the deck was like dried bones. Men had died in this place.

We were in a graveyard.

I knew that we shouldn’t be here. Rose indicated the gaping hold, giving me the thumbs up as she pointed into the black abyss. I emphatically shook my head. Was she crazy? I tapped my air gauge. Time to think about going up.

Rose hovered weightless above the void, her arms crossed casually in front of her chest, her breathing regular. Then she reared backward as a giant turtle suddenly emerged from the darkness of the hold and almost collided with her. She looked at me, her eyes wide with wonder, and I had to smile.

The turtle had the head of a thousand-year-old man and yet it moved with an impossible grace. Below the crusty shell its legs were like magic paddles and it glided across the surface of the sunken ship as if it believed itself to be a thing of infinite beauty. And in a way, it was. So I was hardly surprised when Rose began to follow it into the colder waters where the bottom of the sea abruptly dropped away beneath us.

The turtle-it had to be a female, it was so large-turned its bald head to look at Rose, its large eyes blinking with what seemed more like shyness than alarm. Rose gently touched the scaly shell and spun on her back, shaking her head with a joy that was unconfined. Then the current hit us.

It was like being seized by a giant hand and thrown into a tunnel that went all the way to the end of the world.

Rose and the turtle and the ship were gone. I was going down into the freezing blackness and I couldn’t stop myself. There was a sheer wall of coral by my side and I tried to fin toward it. I kept trying until my legs were heavy with exhaustion, but the down current was like being trapped in a broken lift, and I believed that this would be the last day of my life.

My face and body slapped hard against the coral, knocking my regulator out of my mouth and cracking my mask. I grabbed two fistfuls of razor-sharp coral and held on tight as it tore at my fingertips. Swallowing a gutful of sea water, I fumbled for my regulator through my broken vision and forced it into my mouth, gulping terrified mouthfuls of air. My mouth was dry. Completely dry. My wet suit was shredded on one side. There was a terrible pain in my hip.

I looked for Rose. I couldn’t see her. I checked my gauges. Forty meters. And down to 30 bar of air. But I couldn’t surface. Rose might be looking for me. Rose would definitely be looking for me.

Then I saw her, clinging to a clump of dead coral, her legs horizontal from her body in the current. She had lost her mask. Her eyes were half closed and almost blind. But she finned over to me, one bloody hand clinging to the coral, the other waving across her chest.

Calm down, calm down.

I nodded, sort of laughing and crying at the same time. I began to float upward. She gripped my BCD and pulled me down with a strength I never knew she possessed. If I came up too fast from this depth, I would certainly get decompression sickness and possibly die. But I couldn’t stop myself from drifting upward. I just couldn’t stop myself.

Rose pointed at my waist. I had lost my weight belt. Still holding on to me, she desperately tore a rock from the face of the coral and stuffed it into my hands to weigh me down. But my hands were ripped and torn, and I couldn’t hold it. It slipped through my fingers.

I looked at my air gauge. It was all gone. Rose forced her spare mouthpiece between my lips. But there was next to nothing there. The short gasps of breath seemed to stutter and die. We were breathing borrowed air.

Rose touched the top of my head.

Then we let go of the coral.

I started to ascend to the gathering light while Rose, looking like an astronaut cut from her mooring in space, no longer trailing bubbles, drifted down into shadows that seemed to stretch to infinity.

I watched her drop away from me through the tears and bloody mucus that streaked the inside of my cracked mask. I tried to say her name but I couldn’t make a sound.

She was my reason.

8

W HAT I NOTICE FIRST about her are the clothes.

Her black raincoat is unbuttoned and you can see her tube top, short skirt and these sort of furry high heels. Are they called kitten mules? She looks like she’s on her way to a club. A bit too much makeup. Her skin is white and her tights are black and her hair is bottle blond. The roots need some attending to. Is that a gold ankle chain concealed beneath her tights? Probably. She doesn’t look as though she’s going to some funky, fashionable club in the middle of town. She looks like she’s going to a club in the deepest suburbs.

She is pretty but exhausted looking, like a former beauty queen who is down on her luck.

She’s in the staff room at Churchill’s when I turn up for work. Usually the room is empty when I arrive, but today this tired, pretty woman is occupying our only armchair, her face in a battered paperback.

That’s odd, I think to myself. You don’t see many teachers dressed like that.

“Have you read this?” she says, looking up.

Her voice is pure, working-class London. She has to be from Essex. Nobody talks like that in London anymore.

“What is it?”

“The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” she says. “By Carson McCullers. She wrote it when she was twenty-three. It’s about this young girl called Mick growing up in Georgia during the Second World War.”

“I know what it’s about. It’s about loneliness. I used to teach it.”

“Really?” she says, her painted eyes wide with wonder.

“Yes. To a bunch of fifteen-year-old boys who wouldn’t know their heart from their elbow.”

“You really taught this book?”

“That’s right.”

“But did you read it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, did you love it? Did it mean anything to you?”

“Well, I thought that the plot was a little-”

“Because to me it’s about the way life cheats you.”

“Well, the central theme of the book-”

“Look at Mick. She starts out full of dreams, full of plans. She wants to travel the world. She wants to be a musician. She wants to bust out of her little town. Everything excites her. And then she gets cheated.”

“Cheated?”

“Cheated. How old is she at the end of the book? Sixteen? Fifteen? She’s got a job in Woolworth’s because her family is so poor. And she already knows that none of her dreams are going to come true. Mick’s been cheated.” She smiles, shaking her head. “Wow! You taught The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Incredible.”

“I’m Alfie, by the way.”

She stands up. “Jackie Day,” she says.

Then she does something that makes me realize that she is not a teacher at all.

She goes to the cupboard in the corner of the room, forages around for a minute and comes out wearing a pair of yellow gloves. Why is she wearing yellow gloves to teach English as a foreign language?

Next she pulls on a blue nylon work coat, a bit like the one my mum wears in the kitchens of Nelson Mandela. Then she is standing there with a bucket in one hand and a bottle of disinfectant in the other.

It’s a bit like watching Clark Kent turn into Superman.

If Superman was a cleaning lady.

They pulled me from the sea and gave me oxygen on the deck of the dive boat.

I remember voices speaking in Tagalog, someone shouting into a radio, the boat’s engine kicking into life. Someone said something to me about a recompression chamber in Cebu. They needed to get me to a recompression chamber. I had come up from too deep, too fast. There were bubbles of excess nitrogen in my flesh and in my blood, although I couldn’t feel them yet. But I was definitely going to get the sickness. The decompression sickness.

I remember that I was flat on my back, the oxygen mask clamped across my mouth, the rain lashing my face. As I tried to sit up and tell them to wait for Rose, the bends began with a blinding pain in my back that made me gasp and weep. I had never known pain like it. My vision blurred with tears, and stayed blurred even when the tears were gone. With every second my eyesight was fading. I felt dizzy and sick, there was a tingling pain in all my joints, especially across my neck, shoulders and back, but what frightened me the most about the sickness was my fading vision. I was very quickly going blind. By the time we reached Cebu, I kept my eyes closed because the coming darkness terrified me, just terrified me.

Strapped to a stretcher, I was bundled on to the dock and into an ambulance. I couldn’t move my legs by now. I couldn’t even feel them. My head felt as though someone was hitting it with a hammer. A voice said something about an air embolism. They said it was a little bubble of air at the base of my brain, that was why I couldn’t feel anything in my legs. An air embolism. Jesus. I remember I kept my eyes closed. I remember praying. Even though I had lost everything that ever mattered to me, I didn’t want to die. I was very afraid.

The ambulance edged slowly through the thick Philippine traffic, its siren howling. At our destination there were excited voices in Tagalog and English as the stretcher was carried down crowded corridors. Finally we were in what seemed like some kind of cool, subterranean tomb. I remember there was the sound of a heavy metal door being opened and then, after I was carried inside, closing behind me. I remember I felt as though I had been deposited in a bank vault. This was the recompression chamber.

Someone was with me. A woman. A middle-aged Filipina. She held my hand and stroked my face and told me in good English that I was very sick but that everything was going to be all right. She promised to stay with me.

The chamber smelled damp and musty. It was all blackness. And I wondered how you know when you are dead, if it is possible to get it wrong, if you could mistake death for something else. I remember I kept thinking that perhaps I was dead already. Then after a stretch of time that couldn’t be measured, there were shadows in the chamber and a numb sensation in my legs.

The woman holding my hand told me that I was doing fine but I needed a special injection to stop the bubble at the base of my brain from swelling. A steroid injection. The woman laughed nervously and told me that she had only ever injected oranges before. There were people looking through the little portholes of the recompression chamber, telling her what to do, excited voices speaking in Tagalog, although all Tagalog sounds excited to me.

Frankly, the needle in the hands of the woman who had only injected oranges seemed like the least of my problems. And after all the nerves and anticipation and excited voices, her injection was next to nothing, like a bee sting given to a man who had just had the living daylights kicked out of him.

I remember she stayed awake with me. She constantly reassured me, and I felt like crying at her kindness. My vision slowly began to clear, my eyes sticky and sore, and she was revealed to me as a small woman about my mother’s age.

For the last ten hours in the chamber we were on special oxygen masks, and she squeezed my hand every time I had to take a breath. That’s what she had to do, that woman who saved my life. She had to keep reminding me to take another breath.

We were in that recompression chamber for two days and two nights, the sickness slowly seeping out of me. But sometimes I feel they didn’t get it all out. Sometimes I think sickness came into me that day. And it will be there for as long as I am.

It’s strange the way the loss of one person can leave such a giant hole in the middle of your life. It’s not as if the hole they leave behind feels like the size of another human being.

It feels more like the size of a world.

I should be going out more. I really should. Not all the time, of course. It’s far too soon to be going out all the time. It will always be too soon for that. But I should be going out once in a while.

One thousand years from today, I will be ready to go clubbing. I’ll put it in my diary. A man has his needs, you know. And a woman too no doubt.

But when I don’t see Josh, and I don’t see Josh all that often, I usually spend my nights in my room, listening to Sinatra on my mini stereo system, usually one of the great Capitol albums of the fifties, but sometimes a Reprise record from the sixties or seventies-not so good, of course, but not so familiar either.

What is it about this music? I like the upbeat stuff, songs like “Come Fly with Me” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” albums like A Swingin’ Affair! and Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! But what I like best are the songs about love breaking down. “In the Wee Small Hours,” “Angel Eyes,” “One for My Baby,” “Night and Day,” “My Funny Valentine” and all the rest.

Listening to Sinatra makes me feel as though I am not the only person in the universe who ever woke up to find themselves in some place that they never imagined. Listening to Sinatra makes me feel that I am not so alone. Listening to Sinatra makes me feel more human.

Frank recorded entire albums-Where Are You?, No One Cares, Only the Lonely-about missing some woman. The hippies think they invented concept albums in the sixties, but Frank Sinatra was doing it in the fifties. Sinatra will talk to you about it all night long, if you need him to. And I need him to.

I need this music the way normal men need food and football. Sinatra seems to point a way forward, to encourage me to get on with my life. When Sinatra sings of love dissolving, there is always the consolation of love to come. Love is like a bus in these songs. There’s always another one along in a minute.

But I know that’s not how it was in Sinatra’s heart. I have read all the classic texts, and I know that Sinatra never got over Ava Gardner. She was the woman who owned his heart. She was the one whose photograph he tore up, threw away and then stuck back together with Scotch tape. If Sinatra never got over Ava, then why should I get over Rose?

The music is an endless source of comfort, though. Sinatra makes missing someone sound noble, heroic, universal. He makes suffering sound as though it has some kind of point to it. And in the real world, it doesn’t. It just hurts like hell.

And there’s something else. As Sinatra mourns love, celebrates love, anticipates love, I can almost smell the manly cocktail of Old Holborn and Old Spice when my grandfather sat me on his lap, back when the world was young and everything was ahead and it felt as though everybody that I ever loved would live forever.

The way my mother deals with my father going away is to carry on as normal. She gets up in the morning, she goes to work in the kitchens of Nelson Mandela High, she comes home with an affectionate smile and stories of her kids. She even starts to take an interest in her garden-or at least she busies herself clearing up the mess she made when the old bastard walked out. This is how my mum reacts to a crisis.

It’s not that she ignores it. She just refuses to look it in the eye.

I go to work, wander the streets of Chinatown, listen to Sinatra in my room. And all the while I fantasize that one day my father will be there, bearing flowers and full of apologies, on his knees before my mother, begging for forgiveness. It doesn’t happen.

I don’t see how he can build a life with Lena on such flimsy foundations. I can’t imagine how they can form a lasting union when they don’t even own a kettle. I am convinced that one morning he will see her dancing in her chair as she eats her high-bran breakfast, and it will drive him nuts.

But I start to realize that even if their love nest does get repossessed, that doesn’t mean that my old man is ever coming back home.

There are phone calls between my parents. I make no attempt to listen because there are things that happen between your mother and father that you want to keep your distance from. The pattern is always the same. He calls her. There are long silences while he-I don’t know. Pleads for understanding? Asks when he can pick up his Stevie Wonder records? Asks if he can borrow a kettle? I don’t know what she tells him, but I can hear that she tries to keep the bitterness and hurt and anger out of her voice.

It’s impossible.

She likes to act as though nothing that my father does surprises her, that she knows him so well, that all this upheaval is only what she would expect from the man she has been married to for half a lifetime. It’s not true.

His new life in some other part of the city is beyond her imagination. She doesn’t understand how he got there, why this happened, when the world-sized hole in her life started to form.

When she comes off the phone she is smiling-a smile that is there for her protection, a smile as rigid as a bulletproof vest.

My mother and I have an early dinner at the Shanghai Dragon.

This is not a normal night out for us. Apart from the summer holidays of my childhood-bed-and-breakfasts in the seaside towns of southern England when I was small, the tourist canteens in the hotels of Greece and Spain when I was bit bigger-we have not spent a lot of time together in restaurants. Surprisingly for a woman who gets so much pleasure from feeding one thousand brats every day of the school year, my mother prefers “my own cooking, in my own house.”

But since my father went away, she is not eating very much and that frightens me. Always slim-where my dad’s life as a working journalist meant his waist size increased with every passing year, one extra pound per annum being the general rule-she is starting to look hollow-eyed and gaunt. I know that part of that is a lack of sleep because I hear her wandering around downstairs in the middle of the night as I toss and turn in my own bed, my own solitude. It is also because there are no more real family meals to prepare, because there is no more real family.

But my mum seems happy when she gets her first look at the Shanghai Dragon.

“Very nice, dear,” she says, admiring a grotesquely deformed root swimming in a jar like the outcome of some abominable scientific experiment. I now see that the dark nooks and crannies of the Shanghai Dragon are full of these roots. “Very nice indeed.”

Joyce emerges from the kitchen. She looks at my mother admiring the things in jars.

“You like?”

“Lovely!”

“You know?”

My mother squints at the jars. “It’s ginseng, isn’t it? The real thing. Not the capsules and pills that you buy in a drugstore.”

Joyce smiles, pleased with my mother. “Ginseng,” she says. “I can’t pull the sheep over your eyes. Yes, ginseng. Good for stress. When your body tired. When your body sad.”

“I could do with some of that,” my mum laughs, and I feel like hugging her.

“Please,” Joyce says, indicating the empty restaurant with an expansive gesture, asking us to choose a table.

The atmosphere in the Shanghai Dragon at six is very different from the mood at midnight. There are no drunks. Apart from my mother and me, there are not even any customers.

While we eat our Peking duck, my mum doing better with the chopsticks than I expected as we load our pancakes with spring onions, cucumber, plum sauce and duck, the Chang family are also eating their dinner at one of the tables in the takeout section. All the tables in the Shanghai Dragon have a white tablecloth apart from one. This is where the Changs eat their meals.

The entire family is there. George is spooning soup noodles from a huge bowl into six smaller bowls. He has his grandchildren next to him, the small boy on one side and the girl on the other side, both of them expertly wielding chopsticks that look far too big for them. The children’s dad, plump Harold, is noisily slurping noodles as though he has to do it within a certain time limit. His wife Doris is eating more slowly, but with her face so close to her bowl that her glasses are steaming up. Joyce barks instructions in Cantonese-at her husband, her son and his wife, and especially her two grandchildren-between checks to ensure that my mother and I are all right.

I realize how much I envy the Changs. I envy their closeness, their sense of belonging, the unbroken quality of their lives. Their completeness. Looking at them together makes me feel sad. But not really sad. It’s a kind of longing. Because I was once part of a family like that.

The Changs have dispersed by the time we pay the bill-George and Harold into the kitchen, the children and Doris to the flat upstairs. Only Joyce remains to welcome the first of the evening rush.

When we leave she pushes a brown paper bag into my mother’s hands that I know contains something to help my mum with all the things that are wrong in her broken world.

“My gift to you,” Joyce says.

What did Rose see in me? She could have had the pick of any lipless wonder in her firm’s office. Why did she choose me?

Because I’m a nice guy. That doesn’t sound like much-it sounds like the kind of thing that women say they want, just before they go off with the spunky hunk in his Maserati. But Rose wanted a nice guy. And she picked me.

It’s true. I was a nice guy. I always fell in love with the women I slept with, even when love was neither requested nor appropriate. I could never fuck around without feeling. A lot of the things that young men do without thinking were beyond me. Because I had listened to too many Sinatra records. Because I always wanted a trip to the moon on gossamer wings rather than a quick lay. Because I was looking for the one.

She saw something in me. Something that was worthy of love.

But niceness is finite. It’s like money and youth. It ebbs away when you are not looking. It leaks out of you. Look at me now. I’m nowhere near as nice as I used to be.

I don’t want to give up on life and love and all the rest of it, but I can’t help myself. It’s because life and love and all the rest of it have given me a good hiding. Life has made me feel like death warmed over.

I’ve lost my faith and I don’t know how I can ever get it back. Because I still miss someone. And because I will always miss her.

Is that okay, Rose? Is it okay to miss you?

9

I T IS THE DEAD PART OF THE AFTERNOON but the private members’ club is still full of soft-looking men and hard-looking women lingering over their drinks and talking about projects that will probably never happen.

Just like my father.

If you ask me, my dad’s new love is a project that will never get the green light. My old man and his girlfriend-something tells me they are going to be languishing in development hell. Just a hunch.

“You’ll come to the wedding, I hope,” he says.

I look at him, hiding behind a still mineral water in his Soho club, nervously hunting in the free bowl of Twiglets. I can’t quite tell if he is trying to provoke me or if he is completely insane.

“Whose wedding is that?”

“My wedding. My wedding to Lena.”

“Oh, did you get a divorce?”

“Not yet.”

“Did you even get a divorce lawyer?”

“Not yet.”

“Then maybe it’s a little premature to start playing ‘Here Comes the Bride’ and chucking around confetti, don’t you think? Maybe it’s a little early to start sending out the embossed invitations and ordering the cake.”

He leans forward, trying to keep this between the two of us.

“I’m just attempting to make you see that this is serious,” he says. “You act as though it’s laughable.”

“You’re mutton dressed up as ram, Dad. That’s not funny?”

“What would be funny would be if I wanted a woman my own age. But why would I want someone that looks like me?”

“Like your wife, you mean?”

“I love your mother, Alfie. Always did, always will. And I intend to take care of her.”

“All heart, aren’t you?”

“But passion dies. It does. You don’t believe me because you never got the chance to find out.”

“That’s right.”

“And I’m sorry about that, Alfie, I truly am. I loved Rose. You know that.”

It’s true. My dad loved Rose. He broke down at the funeral. Right at the end. He just fell to pieces.

“Passion fades away, Alfie. It turns into something else. Friendship. Affection. Habit. That’s enough for some people. And for other people, it will never be enough.”

I call for the bill, sick of talking to him, but he insists on paying. What a big shot.

When we are out on the street he puts a conciliatory hand on my shoulder and, although I make no move to touch him in return, I can’t help but love him. He will always be my father. I can’t imagine ever replacing him with a better model. I am stuck with him.

“I just want one more chance for happiness,” he says. “Is that so wrong?”

I watch him move off through the narrow streets of Soho, a good thirty years older than most of the people here, all sipping their designer coffee and eyeing each other up and letting the afternoon drift by, all these youngish people with time to waste, and I feel a surge of enormous pity for my father.

One more chance, I think.

Doesn’t he know? Doesn’t he get it? Doesn’t my father understand anything?

You get one shot at happiness.

The funeral was all wrong.

I had been to funerals before, but they were not like this, nothing like it. The funerals of my three dead grandparents were nothing like the day we buried Rose.

Too young. Not just her. The mourners were too young. In their twenties, most of them, friends from school and the old neighborhood, mates from university and the shop. Many of them looked as though they were going to a funeral for the first time. They had probably never even buried a grandparent. One or two of them might have lost a goldfish or a hamster. And they were in shock. They didn’t even own black ties-that’s how absurdly young they were. They didn’t know what to wear, how to act, what to say. It was all too soon. Too soon. I knew how they felt.

I was in the front car with Rose’s mother and father and I couldn’t find the words to comfort them because there were no words. It was worse than that. There was no bond. We were already strangers, we were already slipping from each other’s lives. The bond between us was in the car ahead of us, in a pine coffin covered with three wreaths of red roses. One from Rose’s parents, one from me, one from my mum and dad. Separate wreaths for separate grief.

The cortege reached the small church on top of a little hill. Below us the fields of rural Essex were covered in yellow. Fields of rape. A terrible name. Why can’t they call it something else? Because I still can’t look at those yellow fields of April without thinking of the day we buried Rose.

A vicar who had never known Rose talked about her qualities. He had tried his best, this vicar, he had talked to friends and family and me, so he spoke of her humor and her warmth and her love of life. But it was only when Josh climbed the steps to the plinth that I felt as if it meant anything.

“The words of Canon Henry Scott Holland,” he said. “ ‘Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.’ ”

I held myself together because it was worse for Rose’s parents, this quiet man and his kind wife who had been so proud of their lawyer daughter, this decent man and woman who I had spent Christmases with and who I would probably never see again. I held myself together because it would have been shaming to place my loss above their loss. They were doing the worst thing in the world. They were burying a child.

“ ‘Call me by my old familiar name,’ ” Josh said. “ ‘Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.’ ”

There was none of the comfort that you clutch at when you bury someone at the end of their life. Josh did his best. But this black day had arrived fifty years too soon. Nature had been violated. And although I tried to make sense of the words I was hearing, although I tried to tell myself that it was worse for her parents, all I could think was one selfish thought-I want my wife.

“ ‘Let my name be ever the household word it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the ghost of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was-there is absolutely unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.’ ”

It was a bad moment following the coffin out of the church, feeling all those eyes on me, feeling all that pity that I didn’t want. But I held it together while we were walking behind the coffin. And it was a bad moment when Rose’s parents were holding each other by the graveside and her oldest friends were starting to come apart. But I held it together at the graveside.

It was only when the funeral director-there are no more undertakers-took me aside and softly asked me if the wreaths were to be buried with the coffin or kept for the graveside that I began to unravel.

“All with her,” I said, “bury it all with her,” suddenly overflowing with helpless tears.

Not for myself or for her parents or even for Rose, no, but crying for the children who would never be born.

I always get a jolt of surprise when I enter my nan’s tiny flat. One little box in a block of sheltered accommodation, it’s as fashionably minimalist as any local restaurant or art gallery, all white walls and creamy blankness, a study in trendy emptiness. Damien Hirst would be right at home in my nan’s flat. One look at this place, and Damien would want to chop my nan in half and stick her in a jar of preservative.

Not that my nan is trying to keep up with the cutting edge of interior design. A few years ago the stairs got too much for her in the home she had lived in for over fifty years, the Oranges for Christmas house in that East End banjo, and this white flat is where the council put her. She refused to move in with my parents.

“I value my freedom, love,” she told me.

The TV has the sound turned down and Sinatra is playing. It’s Sinatra at the Sands with Count Basie and the Orchestra, Frank’s finest live album, in my opinion. My nan is a habitual player of Sinatra records. She is not really all that interested in music, but I know Frank reminds her of my granddad. No, it’s more than a reminder, hearing Sinatra swagger through “You Make Me Feel So Young” or “Fly Me to the Moon” or “The Shadow of Your Smile.” It’s a kind of communion.

Among all the souvenirs from other people’s holidays-my nan is keen on grinning Spanish donkeys and leering leprechauns-there are lots of family pictures on the mantelpiece. Rose and I on our wedding day. Me as a child. Me as a baby. My parents on their wedding day. Her own wedding day-she is black-haired and smiling, a beautiful young woman, a woman who shines-on the arm of her husband, my granddad. But the white flat remains stubbornly indifferent to these signs of life. My nan just hasn’t had the endless years to impose her personality here the way she did in the old place. As I watch her shuffling around the kitchen, laboriously making us some tea-she forbids me from making it as I am her guest-I wonder if she ever will.

“He was here,” my nan says. “Yesterday. With his fancy woman.”

For some reason I am dumbfounded.

“My dad?”

She nods, smiling grimly. “With her. His fancy woman.”

“He brought Lena? Here?”

“His fancy woman. His bit on the side. Bit of crumpet. Bit of skirt. His tart.”

I am glad that my nan is not siding with her son in the dismantling of our little family. She still comes around to our house for lunch on Sundays. Either my mum or I deliver a bag of shopping once a week. We talk on the phone every day, even when we have nothing much to say. We are all pretending that our family is still intact, and I am comforted by that pretence. But something stops me from smiling and nodding at these slanders on Lena.

“You really liked her a little while ago,” I say. “Lena, I mean. You thought she was okay.”

She snorts. “Young enough to be his daughter. What are they going to do? Have a baby?” Another snort. “He won’t be able to pick it up. The old goat. Do you want a biscuit?”

“No thanks, Nan.”

“Chocolate digestive or custard cream?”

“Not for me, Nan.”

“I’ll just bring some in case you change your mind,” she says. “That marriage hasn’t been right since her last loss. You know. Miscarriage. If you dip them in your tea, they go all soft. Do you have sugar? I can’t remember.” She laughs with delight, shaking her head. “Sorry, Alfie. It’s my old timer’s disease.”

“What did he want?” I say, helping her to cart the tea and biscuits to the low table that faces the television. She doesn’t mind me helping with this bit. “I mean, of course he wanted to see you. You’re his mum. But what did he want?”

“To explain. To explain everything, he said. And he brought her with him. Bold as brass. Sitting there holding hands, they were. Like some kind of courting couple. I said-I’ll have none of that in my house. None of your holding hands business. They brought me a box of Quality Street. And then she went and had the strawberry. Bloody cheek. He knows I like the strawberry. I can only eat the soft ones.”

I can believe that my nan has given her son and his girlfriend a hard time. My grandmother was endlessly tolerant when she was visiting my parents. She contemplated all manner of strange phenomena that she has never had any truck with in her life-au pairs, exercise equipment, foreign food, bestselling books-with a benign smile.

But in her own home she makes all the rules and expects you to obey them.

“He says he loves her.”

“Men say a lot of things. You can’t listen to what men say. Men will say anything to get what they want.”

“He says he’s not coming back.”

“I wouldn’t have him back. I’d kick him out. If he came back. I would. If I was your mum, I’d be hoping he came back so I could kick him out. I mean it. I knew something was going on. It’s ridiculous.”

Ridiculous is one of my nan’s favorite words.

“I’m worried about my mum,” I say.

“He’s disgusting.”

Disgusting is another one. She gets a lot of mileage out of ridiculous and disgusting.

“She’s lost without him. She pretends she’s not, but she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She put so much into him.”

But my nan is no longer listening to me. She turns off Sinatra and Count Basie and hits the mute button on the TV’s remote control, really pushing it as hard as she can, as if she has never got used to remote controls. Then she produces her lottery ticket from an old biscuit tin with a kilted Highland piper on the front and stares with rapt concentration at the chortling game-show host who is presenting this week’s live draw.

My nan is happy to debate adultery, miscarriages and fancy women with me.

But only if they don’t clash with the National Lottery.

10

I SAW THEM EVERY DAY, the old Chinese people moving through the morning mist of Kowloon Park, Victoria Park and Chater Gardens. But I never really noticed them. I saw no beauty and no meaning in their unhurried ballet. They were old and I was young and I believed that there was nothing they could ever teach me.

I saw them doing their slow-motion exercises-saw it most mornings for over two years-but it was never more than a little background color to me. The Tai Chi I saw in Hong Kong registered on the same shallow level as the stalls selling their nameless herbs on Ko Shing Street, the incense smoldering in a temple’s stone cauldrons on Hollywood Road, the skyline full of countless potted plants on the balconies of apartments ten, twenty, thirty stories high, the occasional talk of good and bad feng shui among the Cantonese staff of the Double Fortune Language School, the fake money burned in the streets every August for the Festival of Hungry Ghosts.

I saw all these things but they never even began to have meaning for me, they meant nothing beyond reminding me that I was a thrillingly long way from home. These images were all postcards with nothing written on the back.

But now, when I huff and puff my way around Highbury Fields, looking for a way to live inside my own skin, I see George Chang doing his Tai Chi and somehow this ancient dance finally starts to make sense.

Sometimes he is not alone. Sometimes he has a student or two with him, if you can call them students, these long-haired hippy chicks and those guys with nonaggressive shaved heads and John Lennon spectacles. Alternative types, I think to myself, everything in their lives organic. But they never seem to stick at it for very long, and I am sort of glad about that.

I like to watch him best when he is alone.

It is always very early, that fleeting moment of the day when the whole city seems to be sleeping. All the night people-the drinkers, the ravers, the screamers-have finally gone home to bed but the day people-the joggers, the go-getters, the early worms earning six figures a year-have yet to stir. The only sound is a distant truck barreling down the Holloway Road. This pause never lasts long. But George Chang moves as though he has all the time in the world.

He moves as though he is at once both rooted to the earth and weightless. His arms and hands have the supple grace of wings, slowly pushing and pulling and rising and falling without ever seeming to make any effort at all. As his weight shifts from one foot to the other, his back remains poker straight and his head stays up, an unbroken line running from the base of his spine to the back of his skull.

There’s an air about him that I can’t quite name. At first I think of it as tranquillity but it’s more than that. It is more than serenity. It’s a feeling that combines both peace and strength.

His face is calm, concentrated, composed. His upper body seems impossibly relaxed. It stays relaxed. Perhaps this is what holds my attention so completely. I have never seen anyone so at ease with himself. When he is finished I walk up to him.

“Thanks for the other night,” I say.

He looks at me for a second, placing me.

“How is friend’s nose?”

“Covered in bandages. But you were right. About pushing it back in shape straight away, I mean. Apparently it made it a lot easier to set.”

“Ah. Good.”

“I don’t think I told you. I lived in Hong Kong. I haven’t been back in London for very long.”

He looks up again. I realize he is waiting.

“For two years. I was a teacher. At a language school. I got married out there.”

He nods with what I take to be approval. “Hong Kong lady?”

“English lady.”

I don’t tell him anything else about Rose. I don’t talk about it all the time. I just don’t want to. Historically, the British are meant to be too shy for this sort of thing, for talking about their deepest, darkest feelings to strangers. But I find that’s something else that has changed while I was away, just like Terry Wogan playing REM and my father acting like Rod Stewart. These days the British can’t stop talking about their feelings.

Perhaps Diana had something to do with it, perhaps she persuaded us to exchange our stoic, stiff upper lips for emotional, wobbly bottom lips. Perhaps it’s because the hole in the sky is making not only the weather more Continental but also our temperaments. But our national character has certainly changed.

The problem these days is not getting the British to talk about their feelings. The problem these days is getting them to shut the fuck up.

“I saw a lot of Tai Chi in Hong Kong. In the parks.”

“Very popular in Hong Kong. More than UK.”

“That’s right. But I could never really understand what they got out of it. I mean, it looks great,” I say quickly. “Especially when you do it. I just didn’t get it.”

“Tai Chi for many things. For health. For stress. For stopping your body being attacked.”

“You mean for self-defense?”

“Many kinds of self-defense. You know? Many kinds. You can be attacked inside and outside. There’s the cheeky man who broke your friend’s nose.”

“The cheeky man?”

“The cheeky man. There’s also disease. Tai Chi good for internal organs. For sickness. You know what Chinese word chi means?”

“Well, I know it’s supposed to mean your body’s internal energy. The life force.”

“Yes.”

“But I don’t think I’ve got any. At least, I’ve never been aware of it.”

“Got any blood in your veins?”

“What?”

“Do you got any blood in your veins?”

“Sure.”

“You aware of that?” He nods with satisfaction. “ ’Course not. Same as chi. It’s there. If you know it or not. Chi means air. It also means energy. The spirit leads the mind. The mind leads the chi. The chi leads the blood. Tai Chi is about controlling your chi for better life. We say-every journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. The first step-that’s Tai Chi.”

I nod, sort of getting it, but suddenly feeling a bit hungry. I can feel my life force rumbling, so I pull out a Snickers bar from my tracksuit pocket. George Chang narrows his eyes.

“You want half of this?”

“Okay.”

I unwrap the Snickers bar, break it in half and hand him his share. We munch in silence for a few seconds.

“Prefer Mars bar,” he says through a mouthful of chocolate, peanuts and tasty nougat. He examines the Snickers bar like a wine connoisseur considering the bouquet of a particularly fine Burgundy. Then he closes his eyes, reaching for the memory.

“A Mars a day…helps you work, rest and play.”

“What’s that?” I say. “Some old Chinese saying?”

George Chang just smiles at me.

For a week the ginseng sits in our kitchen like a piece of modern sculpture. My mother and I spend a long time staring at it, like baffled art lovers searching for meaning in a work we don’t quite understand.

The ginseng looks like a vegetable from another planet. It is pale yellow and white, horribly misshapen, dangling a tangle of thin roots like tentacles. Those trailing membranes make it look vaguely squidlike.

“And I thought you bought it in Boots,” I say. “In convenient handy-to-swallow capsules.”

“Perhaps you’re meant to boil it,” my mother says thoughtfully. “You know. Like a carrot.”

“Like a carrot. Right. That sounds possible.”

“Or maybe you chop it up and fry it. Like an onion.”

“Like an onion. So you could even eat it raw.”

We study the ginseng. It is the only plant I have ever seen that reminds me of the Elephant Man.

“I wouldn’t fancy that very much, dear,” says my mother.

“No. Me neither. Look, why don’t we just ask Joyce what you’re meant to do with it?”

“Now?”

“Why not? It’s only six o’clock. The restaurant’s not open yet. You want to use it, don’t you?”

“Oh yes, dear,” my mother says. “It’s meant to be very good for stress.”

There’s a voice being raised inside the Shanghai Dragon. A woman’s voice. My mother and I hesitate for a moment and then go inside.

It is cool and dark in the restaurant. We are expecting to find the entire family clustered around the dining table, happily eating their soup and noodles. But tonight there is only Joyce and her small grandson. She seems very angry with him, and barks at him in a mixture of English and Cantonese.

“You think you’re English?” she asks him. A blast of Cantonese. “Look at your face in the mirror!” Some more Cantonese. “Look at your face! You’re not English!”

Although he can’t be more than five years old, the boy is bent over some homework. He is writing in his little exercise book, his big beautiful moon face all damp with tears.

“You are Chinese! You have Chinese face! You will always have Chinese face!” Some Cantonese. “You have to be smarter than English!”

Joyce notices us hovering in the doorway. She looks at us without embarrassment. I realize that I can’t imagine Joyce ever feeling embarrassed about anything.

“Hello!” she seems to shout. She is still very excited. “Didn’t see you. I don’t have eyes in the back of my face.”

“Is this a bad time?” I say.

“What? Bad time? No. Just teaching cheeky grandson that he has to work hard.”

“He seems very young to be doing homework,” my mother says.

“Father sets homework. Not school. School just let them do anything. Relax. Watch television. Watch video games. Just relax. Like millionaires. Like playboys. As though the world owes them a loving.”

“I know, I know.” My mother sighs, staring sympathetically at the child. “What’s your name, darling?”

He says nothing.

“Answer lady!” Joyce roars like a sergeant major faced with a dopey private.

“William,” he says. A tiny voice, full of tears.

“Like Prince William,” Joyce says. She ruffles his thick mop of shiny black hair, pinches his smooth round cheek. “Sister called Diana. Like Princess Diana.”

“What lovely names,” my mother says.

“We were wondering how you prepare the ginseng,” I say. I want to get out of here. “How you are meant to take it.”

“Take it? Many ways. Can drink it. Like tea. In a nice cup of tea. Can put it in soup. Like Korean people. Easiest way-just chop up ginseng. Put it in saucepan with water. Boil it. Let it simmer for ten minutes. Strain it off. Use one pint of water for every ounce of ginseng.”

“That sounds easy enough,” my mother says, smiling at William.

He stares up at her with blank wet eyes.

“You tried ginseng yet?” demands Joyce.

“Not yet. That’s what we-”

“Good for you.” Her fierce brown eyes blaze at my mother. “Especially women. Older ladies. But not just older ladies.” She looks at me. “Good for when you not sleep. Tired all the time. Feeling-how to say?-a bit run over.”

“Run down.”

“Yes. Run over.” She pushes her face close to mine. “You looking a bit run over, mister.”

“Just what I need!” says my mum, clapping her hands with delight.

Joyce offers us tea-English tea, she calls it-but we make our excuses and leave. Before we are out of the door, Joyce is shouting at William about having a Chinese face.

And for the first time I get a sense of how hard it is when you want to become international.

“I can’t stay long,” Josh tells me when we meet for lunch in a crowded City pub where I am the only man not wearing a suit.

“Got to reach somebody in Hong Kong before they leave the office?” His firm still does a lot of business with Hong Kong and I like hearing about it. It makes me feel as though I still have some connection with the place. Something more than memories.

“No. Got a client coming in. A woman. You should see her, Alfie. Top-of-the-range pussy, mate. Looks like Claudia Schiffer but talks like Lady Helen Windsor or somebody. A real plums-in-the-mouth job. Not so much tits and arse as tits and class. Quite fancy my chances, I do.”

“A bit of posh? Just right for you, Josh. Knock off your rough edges. Show you which fork to use. Teach you when to say lavatory and when to say sofa. Stop you wiping your nose on your sleeve. Keeping coal in the bath. All that.”

He flushes, not liking it very much when you suggest that he is not quite the Duke of Westminster. Usually you can say what you like to Josh. He has the sensitivity of a brick. But you are not allowed to suggest that he wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, or up his butt.

“She’s coming into the office at two,” he says, looking at his watch. “Can’t stay long.”

I am not offended. Our meetings often begin with Josh telling me that he has to be somewhere else very soon. I’m used to it.

We order curry at the bar and I notice that the damage to his face is fading. The bandages are long gone and there’s no sign that his broken nose has been reset. There are black and yellow bruises under his eyes, but they look as though they are the result of a night without sleep rather than a head butt from a drunken middle-aged skinhead. We collect our curries and find a glass-strewn table in a smoky corner of the pub.

“You ever think about that night?” I ask him.

“What night?”

“You know. That night in the Shanghai Dragon. The night you got your nose broken. The night I got my ribs smacked.”

“I try not to.”

“I think about it all the time. I can’t quite work out what happened.”

“Surprise attack. Caught me off guard. Pearl Harbor and all that. Fat bastard. Should have called the police.”

“I don’t mean what happened to us. I mean the old man. What happened to him.”

“Nothing happened to him. It was all over by the time he showed up.”

I shake my head.

“That guy-that fat skinhead-was ready to fight anyone. Then the old man turned up. And the skinhead backed down. I didn’t understand it then. I still don’t.”

“There’s no great mystery,” Josh says through a mouthful of curry. “The skinhead probably thought that Charlie Chan had fifty of his relations out the back, all armed with machetes. Come on. I can’t hang about. Eat your curry before it gets cold.”

“That’s not it. At least, I don’t think that’s it. It was just that he was-I don’t know. Perfectly relaxed. You could see it in him. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid of a much younger, much bigger man who was ready to fight anyone. He just wasn’t scared of him. And the skinhead could sense it. There was no fear in him.”

Josh snorts.

“Did you feel a tremor in the Force, Alfie? Did you sense that the Force was strong in the old cook? Were you once more privy to the mysteries of the East?”

“I’m just saying that he wasn’t afraid. That’s all. And he should have been afraid.”

Josh is not listening to me. He is quickly shoveling in his curry and thinking about the blonde, upper-class client who is coming into his office at two. He is thinking about his chances with her. But I still feel the need to explain something to him.

“It just made me think how great that must be-to go through your life without fear. Imagine how liberating that must be, Josh. Imagine how free that must make you feel. If you’re not afraid of anything, then you can’t be hurt, can you?”

“Only if they’ve got a baseball bat,” says Josh. “How’s your old man? Still shacked up with Miss Sweden?”

“Miss Czech Republic. He’s gone for good. I’m pretty sure of it.”

Josh shakes his head. “You’ve got to take your hat off to him. Still getting the shaven haven at his age. It’s not to be sniffed at.”

“I don’t want some old swinger for a father. Nobody does. Everybody admires Hugh Hefner. Everybody likes the old boy who plays around. But nobody wants him for their dad.”

“Not much of a role model, I suppose. Shagging the hired help.”

“He doesn’t have to be a role model. I just want a bit of stability. A bit of peace and quiet. That’s all anybody wants from their parents, isn’t it? That’s the best thing they can give you-a little less embarrassment. I don’t want my dad to be out there chasing young Czech women and trying to pump up his biceps and all the rest of it. I want him to think about other things. He’s had his time. He should understand that. He’s had his time for being young. Nobody wants to get old any more, do they?”

“Not if they can help it.”

“Nobody wants to get out of the way and let the next generation come through. Everybody wants one more chance.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“It makes a mockery of the past. Every time you start again, it diminishes what you’ve had before. Can’t you see that? It chops your life up into these little bite-sized morsels. If you have endless goes at getting it right, then you will never get it right. Not even once. Because constantly starting again turns the best thing in the world into just another takeout. Fast love. Junk love. Love to go.”

“Don’t you want one more chance, Alfie?”

“I’ve had my chance.”

11

J ACKIE DAY IS IN THE STAFF ROOM when I arrive. She has her bucket in one hand and her copy of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in the other. She has all her kit on-the yellow gloves, the blue nylon coat, the flat shoes she cleans in-but she is making no move to go to work. It’s nearly nine o’clock but she still has her face buried in that old paperback.

“How’s Mick?” I ask her. “Still got her dreams?”

“Hello,” she says, not looking up.

Lenny the Lech walks in. Lenny is one of those short, fat men who swaggers around as though he is some kind of tall, thin catch. Like me, Lenny is a former teacher who went out to sell English by the pound in Asia-Manila and Bangkok in Lenny’s case. Something about him spoiled out there. He has that soft, bloated look that Europeans often get when they stay too long in the tropics-or when they stay too long in tropical bars. Lenny got laid a lot more in Asia then he ever did at home and now he looks at women the way that a farmer sizes up his cows. At Churchill’s his lechery is legendary.

“Have you seen that new little Polish number in the Advanced Beginners?” he asks me, rolling his eyes. “I wouldn’t mind showing her a bit of solidarity. What do you reckon, Alfie? I wouldn’t mind letting that comrade get her hot little hands on my means of production.”

“I don’t think the Poles are Communists anymore, Lenny.”

“She’s a little red minx, that’s what she is,” says Lenny the Lech. Then he notices Jackie. “Ah, our resident Essex girl. Top of the morning to you, my girl.” He goes over to her and puts a proprietorial arm around her shoulders. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one, darling. Why do Essex girls hate vibrators? Give up? Because-”

Suddenly Jackie is on her feet, her eyes blazing, accidentally kicking her bucket.

“Because they chip our teeth,” she says. “Heard that one already, Lenny. Bit obvious, that one. What else would an Essex girl do with a vibrator but suck on it-right, Lenny? You’re going to have to do better than that.”

“Steady on,” says Lenny. “It’s just a joke.”

“And I’ve heard them all,” she says. “Why does an Essex girl wash her hair in the kitchen sink? Because that’s where you wash vegetables. What do Essex girls and beer bottles have in common? Come on, Lenny, come on.”

“I don’t know,” says Lenny, practically scratching his fat head.

“Both empty from the neck up.”

“Now that’s funny,” chuckles Lenny.

But Jackie is not smiling. “Think so? Then you’ll like this one. What do a blonde Essex girl and a plane have in common?”

“They both have a black box,” says Lenny. “I know that one.”

“You do? But I bet you don’t know as many as me. I’ve heard the lot, Lenny. What’s the difference between an Essex girl and a mosquito? A mosquito stops sucking if you hit it on the head. Why do Essex girls wear pants? To keep their ankles warm. How do you make an Essex girl’s eyes sparkle? Shine a torch in her ear.”

Lenny smiles, but it is starting to look a little strained. Jackie is standing in front of him, holding her copy of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in one of her yellow-gloved hands, trying to stop her voice from shaking.

“I know all the jokes. And you know what, Lenny? I’m not laughing.”

“Keep your hair on, darling,” Lenny says, quite offended. “It’s nothing personal.”

“I know it’s nothing personal, Lenny. And I even know it’s nothing to do with Essex girls. I know that a man like you thinks all women are stupid whores.”

“I love women!” protests Lenny. He turns to me. “If I can say that without sounding like Julio Iglesias.”

“I don’t think you can,” I say.

“From what I hear around this place,” says Jackie Day, “only one person in this room is a dumb tart. But do you know what, Lenny? It’s certainly not me.”

She slips her book inside her nylon coat and picks up her bucket. Then she walks out without saying another word.

“Some people just can’t take a joke,” says Lenny the Lech.

Lena is waiting at the end of our street.

There’s an old spit-and-sawdust pub on the corner and grinning men with pints in their fists are looking out of the stained windows at her, leering and evaluating and scratching bellies that are displayed like prize gourds.

“Alfie.”

I walk straight past her.

“You used to like me.”

I look at her, this young woman who has bewitched my father, made him move to a rented flat, encouraged him to search for his youth on a rowing machine, made him drop his swimming trunks in a public place, and I try hard to find her ridiculous. It’s difficult. She has got the blonde hair and legs that go on like a river, but I know she is no bimbo. I know that she is smart. Although how smart can she be if she has shacked up with my old man?

Lena is not ridiculous. It’s the situation that’s ridiculous. It’s my father who is absurd.

“I still like you,” I say.

“You just don’t like the thought of anyone having sex with your father. Except your mother.”

“Not even my mother, now you come to mention it.”

We smile at each other.

“I don’t know what to say to you, Lena. It’s hard to think of you as a friend of the family. My family is in pieces.”

I look at her, trying to imagine how my father sees her. I can understand how he could fall for the face, the legs, the body. I can understand how exciting she must be after half a lifetime of marriage. But surely he can see that wanting her is being greedy?

“You should understand, Alfie. If you love someone, you want to be with them.”

“My father doesn’t know the first thing about love.”

“Why are you like this? I know you feel sorry for your mother. But it’s more than that.”

“Because he wants too much. Too much life. He’s had his life. He should accept that.”

“You can’t want too much life.”

“You can, Lena. You can be a glutton for life, just like you can be a glutton for food or drink or drugs. If this thing with you is more than just a fling, if my dad really wants to start again, if it’s serious, then he wants more than he deserves.”

She asks me if I want a coffee and I agree to go across the road with her to the little Italian café called Trevi, just to get her off the street. It’s not the grinning fat men in the old spit-and-sawdust pub that bother me. It’s the thought that my mother might come around the corner at any moment.

“I just don’t understand what’s in it for you,” I say when we have ordered our cappuccino. “You haven’t got any visa problems, have you? There are no problems staying in the country, are there?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Why not? I don’t get it. Even if you want an older man, you don’t have to go for my dad. I mean, there’s old and there’s ready for the knacker’s yard. There’s old and there’s Jurassic Park.”

“He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. He’s wise. He’s kind. He’s lived.”

“I’ll say.”

“He knows things. He’s seen life. And I love his book. Oranges for Christmas. It’s just like him. Full of tenderness and heart.”

“What about my mother? What happens to her? Is she just meant to crawl into the corner? Where’s the tenderness and heart for her?”

“I’m sorry for your mother. I really am. She was always very good to me. But these things happen. You know that. When two people fall in love, someone else often gets hurt.”

“It can never work. He’s an old man. You’re a student.”

“Not anymore.”

“He’s not an old man anymore?”

“I’m not a student anymore. I’m not going to do my MBA. What’s the point?”

“What happened?”

“I dropped out of college. I’m going to be Mike’s personal assistant.”

“Mike doesn’t need a personal assistant.”

“He does, Alfie. There are always people calling him up and asking him to write things. To do events. To appear on TV or radio.”

“What he needs is an answer machine.”

“He needs someone to protect him from the outside world. He can’t concentrate. I can help him. He can take care of the writing. I’ll deal with everything else. That’s more worthwhile than any degree. And it will give us a chance to be together all the time.”

“Sounds like a nightmare.”

“You should be happy for us, Alfie. He needs me. And I need him.”

“You both need your heads examined. Especially you.”

“Older people can be amazing, Alfie. We saw your grandmother. We took her some of those chocolates she likes. With the old-fashioned soldiers and the ladies on the box. Something street.”

“Quality Street. She said that you ate all the soft ones.”

“I don’t blame you for being angry at me.”

“I’m not angry at you. I feel sorry for you. I’m angry at my father. You’re silly. He’s a cruel, stupid coward.”

“Oh, Alfie. He’s a wonderful man.”

I shake my head. “He’s only doing this-setting up home with you-because he was forced into it.”

“It would have happened anyway.”

“That’s not what married men do. Married men stay. They stay in their homes for as long as they can.” Under the table, I touch the ring I still wear. “They stay until they are forced out.”

I get a complaint about Lenny the Lech from one of my students. Yumi, the Japanese girl with all the blond hair, stays behind after class and tells me he has been pestering her.

“In the corridor he tries to touch me. He always says-‘Come for a drink, baby. Let me give you extra lessons, baby. Oral lessons, baby. Ha ha ha.’ ” She shakes her head. “I don’t want those kind of lessons from Lenny the Lech. He’s not even my teacher. You are.”

“Can’t you tell him you’re not interested?”

“He doesn’t listen.”

Her eyes well up with tears and I pat her arm.

“I’ll have a word with him, okay?”

During morning break I find Lenny in the staff room. He is drinking instant coffee with Hamish, a fit-looking thirty-year-old down from Glasgow who is far too good-looking to be heterosexual.

“So basically you came to London because you’re a bum bandit?” Lenny is saying.

“You could put it like that,” says Hamish. “I came here because it’s the best place to pursue a discreetly gay lifestyle.”

“And does a discreetly gay lifestyle mean you have a committed relationship with one partner? Or that you get jerked off on Hampstead Heath every night by a succession of anonymous strangers?”

“Can I have a word, Lenny?” I say.

I take him to one side. He puts his arm around me. Lenny is a very tactile man. But it’s more than that. I think he actually likes me. Because I have also taught in Asia, he is under the illusion that we are the same kind of guy.

“What is it, my old mate?”

“It’s a bit embarrassing, Lenny. One of my students has had a word with me. About you. Yumi.”

“The little Jap model? Miss Toyota, 1998? Not very big but you can bet she really burns your rubber.”

“Yumi. The girl with all the hair. The thing is, Lenny, she says you’re misreading the signals.”

“Misreading the signals?”

“How can I put it? She’s not interested in you, Lenny.” Lenny’s monstrous sweating head is corrugated with a frown. “God knows why not, Len, but there you go. Women, eh? It’s just not going to happen, mate.”

“I’m sorry, mate,” Lenny says. “I really am. I had no idea little Yumi was spoken for.”

“No, it’s not-”

“There’s plenty more fish in the sea.” He chortles in that Lenny the Lech way. “I’ll cast my enormous hook elsewhere.” He slaps me on the back. “No problemo.”

I turn to leave.

“And Alfie?”

“What?”

“Give her one for the Lech.”

Yumi is sitting by herself in the Eamon de Valera, nursing a mineral water at a corner table.

“He’s not going to bother you anymore,” I tell her.

“Thank you. I buy you drink.”

“That’s okay, Yumi.”

“But I want to.” She goes to the bar and spends half the night counting out her money in loose change. Usually I feel a kind of envy for my students but right now I feel sorry for Yumi. Coming halfway round the world to improve your English and then getting some fat old Englishman like Lenny the Lech offering you oral lessons. She returns with a pint of Guinness clutched in both hands and sets it before me.

“He’s a very bad man,” she says. “All the girls at Churchill’s say so. He wants rub-rub with just anyone. Any student with nice face. And even some ugly ones. If they are large breasted.”

Then she stares at me with these eyes, these moist brown eyes, that make me realize just how lonely I have been.

“Incredible,” I say. “What kind of teacher does a thing like that?”

12

Y UMI’S ROOM IS AT THE END of a dark corridor in a large, crumbling town house that has spent the last fifty years being chopped up into smaller and smaller flats. As we make our way down the hall you can hear music, voices, laughter, doors slamming, telephones ringing. The cacophony of too many people in too small a space. And having the time of their life. We take off our shoes at her door and go inside.

It’s not much to look at. A bay window dominates the tiny flat, but it overlooks some kind of junkyard piled high with trashed cars. The room’s exhausted carpet looks as though it has been trodden on by an itinerant army of students. The only heating comes from a two-bar electric heater.

It’s a dump. Yet it doesn’t feel like a dump because all over her modest apartment Yumi has decorated the peeling wallpaper with photographs from home. Everywhere you look there are all these Polaroids, snapshots and photo-booth pictures of smiling Japanese girls making V signs. One round-faced, shyly grinning girl seems to feature in many of them.

“Younger sister,” Yumi says.

There is something deeply affecting about Yumi’s attempts to turn this cold, rented little box into some kind of home. Armed with just her memories and a stack of photographs, she has tried to make it her own.

Yumi lights a perfumed candle, turns on the radio to jazz FM and unrolls a futon. The unfurled mattress takes up most of the floor. We stand facing each other for a moment and I realize how nervous I am.

“I haven’t got anything,” I say.

“That’s not true,” she says. “You have good heart. Lovely smile. Nice sense of humor.”

“No, I mean I haven’t, you know, got any condoms.”

“Ah. Okay. I have some. I think.”

“And I haven’t been with anyone,” I say. “Not since my wife, I mean.”

She touches my face.

“That’s okay,” she says. “Whatever happens, everything’s okay.”

It’s what I need to hear. I take it as slowly as I can, and although at first I am overwhelmed by how different she seems to Rose, it is much better than I could ever have hoped. Her body is shockingly young and lithe, and she is a sweet and tender lover, smiling at my excitement, but in a way that doesn’t make me feel bad. Yumi makes me feel nothing but good.

Afterward she hides her face in my chest and laughs, calling me her favorite teacher-her favorite sensei-and hugging me with a strength that surprises me. I laugh too, relieved and pleased, dumbfounded by my good fortune.

Later she sleeps in my arms while I watch the candle burn down until the only light in the little room comes from the glow of the two-bar electric heater. And then, feeling happier than I have in a long time, I start to drift away too.

Just before I slip into sleep I notice the large red suitcase in the corner of the room, as if Yumi has just arrived, or is just about to leave.

I wake up as the first light is creeping into the room. Yumi is sleeping wrapped up around me, that incredible mass of blond hair almost completely covering her face so that only the tip of her nose is visible. I smile to myself. I can’t believe that she’s with me.

I gently disentangle our limbs, slip off of the futon and pull on my Calvins. Quietly letting myself out of the room, I pad down the hallway, looking for the bathroom.

Suddenly he is on top of me. A naked man. The metal studs and rings that pierce his stubbled face glinting with menace in the darkness. His head is shaved. His mouth is above me and wide open, a great black maw that seems about to take a chunk out of my throat.

“Sweet Jesus!” I mutter, leaping backward.

But the man is only yawning. When his mouth has completed the yawn, he smacks his lips, scratches his exposed scrotum for a bit and then blinks at me a couple of times.

“Mind if I use it first, man?” he says in an Australian accent. “Bit of a heavy night.”

Trembling, I lean against the flaking plaster of the hall, trying to stop the pounding of my heart. A toilet flushes and the man emerges from the bathroom, soon disappearing once more into the darkness.

Back inside on the futon, Yumi stirs, warm as toast and smooth as ice cream, as I try to explain the terrible vision I have seen.

“Oh,” she says sleepily. “Roommate.”

We have a perfect weekend. It’s the kind of time that I like best. It seems ordinary and special all at once.

We wake up late and Yumi says she will make us breakfast. But someone-probably the pierced roommate, if you ask me-has stolen her bread from the communal kitchen and the milk that she thought was still okay has gone bad. So after taking a shower together-it seems like a good idea, but we are surprisingly shy with each other-we go to a little café at the end of her street and order full English breakfasts. It takes Yumi ages to work her way through all that fried food.

We spend the afternoon wandering around Camden market. Yumi loves looking at all the second-hand clothes, and seeing her happy makes me happy too.

We hold hands and she gives me little kisses when I am not expecting them. I realize things about her that never really registered at Churchill’s. Her clothes are a little off-beat-today she is wearing some kind of antique dress that looks like it once belonged to Zelda Fitzgerald-and an Asian girl with a mop of dyed blond hair gets a lot of stares. But I am proud to be seen with her. She’s a great girl, funny and smart, and we drink latte in a little café while she tells me about her family back in Osaka.

Her old man was a hotshot salary man at a big corporation who lost his job in the recession. Her mother was a typical Japanese housewife who suddenly found she had to support a family with her secretarial work. Her sister is a brilliant violin player who her parents always preferred because she never dyed her hair or went out with boys who had dyed hair. Yumi says she came to London because life in Japan felt like it was a play, and everybody knew their role. Except her.

And I tell her my story. I want to. I tell her about teaching in London, moving to Hong Kong, meeting Rose. I tell her about losing Rose, about the accident, all of that, and she holds my hand, tears in her brown eyes. I even tell her about my father and his girlfriend.

Then I remember that I have to do some shopping for my nan. I expect Yumi to go home or to go off somewhere, but she tells me she will do the shopping with me. So we find a supermarket and I get my nan’s usual Saturday shop-white bread, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, baked beans, corned beef, spam, bacon, sugar, milk, tea bags, custard creams, chocolate cookies, ginger nuts and a single banana. That single banana always tugs at my heart. It seems to me like more than an old person’s shopping list. It feels like a shopping list from long ago.

My nan, always delighted to see new faces, welcomes Yumi with open arms. With Sinatra’s A Swingin’ Affair! in the background-for me, Frank’s finest album, although of course traditionalists would always nominate Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!-they sit chatting while I unpack the shopping.

Yumi tells my nan that she really has to see the temples of Kyoto and the snow on Mount Fuji and the cherry blossoms of a Japanese spring. My nan agrees that all these things will go straight to the top of her agenda.

“Lovely teeth,” says my nan when Yumi goes to the bathroom. “Must be all that rice. Where did you say she’s from again, dear? Is it China?”

“Japan, Nan.”

“Everybody speaks English these days,” says my grandmother.

Yumi is a gracious guest, gamely eating the ginger nuts she is plied with by my nan and tapping her foot along to A Swingin’ Affair!

“Ah,” she says. “Old music.”

“Like a bit of Sinatra, do you, sweetheart?” asks my nan.

These casual endearments are one of the loveliest things about my grandmother. Even total strangers get called the sweetest names under the sun. Sweetheart and dear, darling and love. My nan says these words to everyone she meets.

In Yumi’s case, it feels like only what she deserves.

As the year starts to run out, my mother goes back into her garden.

I would have thought that the garden was dead in November, but my mother happily tells me that there’s lots to do.

“You don’t know a thing about gardens, do you?” she laughs. “At this time of year you have to finish planting your tulips and all your other spring bulbs. You have to clean and store all your flower pots and seed trays. And you have to get ready for your roses. Remove the weeds, add lots of compost and fertilizer, plant your roses.” My mother smiles at me. “Do you know how much work that is, getting ready for your roses?”

Sometimes I come home and find she’s not alone out there. I can hear smatterings of Cantonese mixed up with the English and I know that Joyce Chang and her grandchildren are in the garden with my mother, Joyce and my mum side by side on their hands and knees, laughing about something as they sink their fingers into the dirt while William and Diana solemnly sweep up the last of the dead leaves with brooms that are bigger than they are.

“Good time to make ground for new vegetable plot,” Joyce tells me. “How’s the job?”

“What?”

“How’s new teaching job? Good money? Teachers treated very badly in this country. No respect for teachers here. In China, teacher equal to father.”

I look at my mother accusingly but she is busy with her soil. How much is she telling this woman?

“It’s going okay, thanks.”

“Teaching not well paid but steady,” Joyce informs me. “World always need teachers. Hard work, though. Teaching not money for old string.” She digs her gnarled hands into the dirt. “Have to help mother.”

Is she talking about me or her or both of us?

“November,” Joyce says. “Best month for vegetable plot.”

“Joyce is going to help me make a vegetable garden,” my mum says. “Isn’t that wonderful, darling?”

My mother does something that I would have bet was impossible with my old man gone. She carries on getting ready for the roses. And I know she wants the same for me.

“I’m glad to see you getting out a bit more, darling,” my mum tells me.

Joyce nods agreement, fixing me with her shrewd, beady stare. “Need to put your hair down. Not too old in the tooth.”

I shake my head. “You mean let my hair down. And I’m not too long in the tooth.”

“You know exactly what I mean, mister.”

That’s true enough.

13

S ATURDAY NIGHT WE GO DANCING. I try to get out of it, but Yumi insists that Saturday night is for dancing, so we go to this little club in Soho where the music is not as bad as I expect it to be and where the atmosphere is not as fashionable as I fear it will be. And it’s great. It’s not like when I was twenty. Nobody is trying to look cool or tough. Nobody cares what you dress like or dance like. So we just leap about and bounce around and have a laugh, and soon Yumi is trying to sit down and rehydrate with a little bottle of Evian while I want to keep on dancing.

Late at night we go to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant on Brewer Street. You sit at a long round bar, small plates of sushi trundle past your eyes and you help yourself to whatever takes your fancy. It turns out to be the place where Gen works and he comes over to say hello. For some reason he doesn’t seem surprised to see Yumi with me.

Then Gen goes back to work and Yumi tells me that Japanese people do not usually like these kinds of places because the fish is not as fresh as when it’s made to order. But it tastes pretty good to me, and we demolish a pile of different-colored plates bearing two pieces of tuna, salmon, eel, egg or prawn.

Back at her flat we make love-slowly, sleepily, relaxed with each other now-and when we wake up around noon the next day, we take a walk to the very top of Primrose Hill where it’s one of those shining winter days and we can see the whole of London spread out before us.

“So beautiful,” Yumi says.

“Yes,” I say, looking at her face. “So beautiful.”

Monday morning, after my mother has gone off to dish up the burgers, beans and tacos at Nelson Mandela High, my father comes to the house.

I am sort of glad to see him. I miss him. Just miss having him around. Miss the way it used to be. But I can see that his timing is an act of supreme cowardice and that makes me despise him. I sit on the stairs as he fills a couple of suitcases. Files, books, clothes. Videos, documents, stacks of CDs.

Taking them, leaving us.

The CD on top of a pile waiting to be packed is called Dancing in the Street-43 Motown Dance Classics, a window to a world of youth and optimism and perfect grooves that seems out of place and out of time.

“So how’s the new book coming along?” I ask him. “Getting it done, are you?”

He doesn’t look at me, just carries on trying to close a Samsonite that is far too full. He’s going to struggle to get that into the SLK’s boot. I don’t offer to help him.

“The book will be fine.”

“Good stuff.”

“You think this is easy for me. But it’s not. I miss my home. You can’t imagine how much I miss it.”

“What about us?”

“What do you think? Of course I miss you. Both of you.”

“What I don’t understand is how you explain it to yourself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Leaving, I mean. You inflict all this pain on Mum, and I don’t understand how you live with it. You must justify it to yourself. But I don’t know how.”

“Lena’s a special girl. Hardly a girl. A special young woman.”

“But what if she’s not, Dad? What if she’s just another girl who happens to be really pretty? Does that mean you got it wrong? That all of this was a mistake? Will it still be worth it?”

“She’s far more than a pretty face. Do you really think that I would turn my world upside down for a pretty face?”

“Absolutely.”

“Anyway,” he says, getting the Samsonite to shut at last. “It was a relief to finally get it out in the open.”

“Your nasty little knob?”

“My relationship with Lena. I was sick of sneaking around. It couldn’t have gone on like that forever.”

“So Lena is-what?-your mistress?”

“God. No. Lena is certainly not my mistress.”

“But you must give her money? You slip her a few quid, don’t you?”

“Well, yes. Not that it’s got anything to do with you.”

“For exclusive rights.”

“That’s not the reason.”

“You slip her money for exclusive rights. If that’s not a mistress, then what is? And you see her when you can, right?”

“Not anymore.” He looks at me for the first time with a bit of defiance. “Now I see her all the time. When I want.”

My old man has nearly finished packing. There are lots more of his possessions here. Wardrobes full of suits. A study full of books. Enough sports equipment to stock a small gym. But this is just a quick raid to grab the bare essentials. Today is not the final reckoning. Right now he just wants clean underwear and his Diana Ross compilations.

“How did it work?” I ask him. “How did you get away with it? You must have lied through your teeth. You must have been pretending to do one thing when what you were really doing was Lena.”

“Would you like to watch your mouth?”

“Didn’t that make you feel a bit grubby? Lying like that?”

“I didn’t enjoy it.”

“But you didn’t hate it so much that you stopped doing it.”

“I guess not.”

“And she never knew. Mum, I mean. Never even suspected. Ignorance is certainly bliss, isn’t it? Or at least it’s very underrated.”

“I really must go.”

“Mum trusted you, you bastard. That’s why you got away with it for so long. Not because you’re clever. Because she trusted you. Because she’s kind and good. And you probably think that you’re a decent guy, don’t you? Is Mum just supposed to crawl away and die now? Is that what she’s supposed to do?”

“Christ! You’re making more of a fuss than her.”

He tries to leave. I step in front of him.

“Look, I’m not a kid, okay?”

“Then stop acting like one.”

“I can understand how you would want to go to bed with Lena. I can even understand how you might want to do it more than once.”

“Thank you so much for your understanding.”

“What I don’t understand is how you could be so cruel.”

“I’m not trying to be cruel. I’m just trying to get on with my life. Didn’t you ever feel like that, Alfie? Like just getting on with your life?” He shakes his head. “No. Probably not.”

And there’s something else that I don’t understand. What happens to all the old photographs? All the old photographs in their albums and the shoe boxes and drawers-where do they go now?

My father is not going to take them with him. He’s not going to sit around in his rented love nest looking at all the old photographs with Lena. She doesn’t want to see pictures of me and my mum and my dad at the seaside, in the garden of the house where I grew up, grinning in our party hats at all those lost Christmases.

Lena’s not interested in all that stuff. And neither is my father. Not anymore. He doesn’t want reminders of his old life. He wants to get on with his new life.

And the old photographs are not much good to my mother. She doesn’t want to see them anymore. That’s what I resent most. My father’s actions haven’t just contaminated the present. They have reached back across the years, making our happiness seem misplaced, our innocence seem foolish, all that was good seem second-rate.

Our party hats at Christmas, our smiling faces in the back garden, looking happy and proud in our best clothes at some cousin’s wedding-how wrong it all seems now. The old photographs are all ruined.

My father hasn’t just messed up the present. He has messed up the past.

I buy her some flowers on the way to work. Nothing too flashy. I don’t want to overdo it. Just a bunch of yellow tulips for when we get a moment.

But it’s strange. Yumi doesn’t act differently. That is, she is just the same as she always was-making jokes and cheeky comments in her Advanced Beginners class, but always working hard, getting the job done, being a good, conscientious student. Same as always. As if nothing has happened. As if the world hasn’t been changed. At lunchtime she picks up her books to leave.

“Can we talk?” I ask her, producing the tulips from under my desk.

“Later,” she says, not looking at the flowers.

My heart sinks, but she kisses me quickly on the cheek, slightly crushing my tulips. And my heart soars.

But at the end of the day I take my flowers to the Eamon de Valera and as I stand in the doorway I see that Yumi is at the bar with Imran. I move toward them but then I stop, because Imran has one hand wrapped around her tiny waist while his other hand is giving her small tush a familiar pat.

She kisses him on the mouth, and then rubs her head against his shoulder, like a little cat that hasn’t gotten the cream, but expects to get it some time soon. Like she did with me. I quickly turn and walk out of the pub, holding the flowers so tight that I can feel the stems breaking in my fist.

Then Gen is by my side, looking at me with concern.

“She likes him,” he says simply.

“I don’t care.”

Gen shrugs. “She likes him long time. Since he began at this college.” He stares at me, searching for something else to say. “Sorry.”

“Thanks, Gen.”

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Come back inside, sensei. Have Guinness. Listen to The Corrs.”

“Some other night.”

“Good night then, sensei.”

“Good night, Gen.”

You’re so stupid, I tell myself, stuffing the flowers in the nearest trash bin. But for a few sweet moments there-dancing in that little club, Sunday morning on Primrose Hill, making love while her red suitcase stood guard-I honestly thought that I heard tomorrow calling.

Whoops, wrong number.

I see her. Rose, I mean. See her on a London street, see her in a place where she could never possibly be.

I am in a cab coming back from the West End. And suddenly there’s Rose-not a woman who looks like Rose. But Rose herself-the same face, the same patient expression she always wore when she was waiting for something. The clothes are different but she is the same girl. And although I know it could not possibly be her, for a long, dizzy minute, I cannot help believing.

She is waiting at a bus stop. I have to restrain myself from shouting at the taxi driver to stop and rushing to her side. I know that if I approach this woman, Rose will disappear to be replaced by some imperfect stranger. It isn’t Rose. She has gone and I will never see her again. At least not in this world.

Me get in touch with the dead?

That’s a joke.

I can’t even get in touch with the living.

14

I T’S MONDAY MORNING and my students are driving me nuts.

Zeng is nodding off at the back of the class. Imran is staring blankly at a text message on his mobile phone. Astrud and Vanessa are gabbing. Witold is trying to stop crying while Yumi tries to comfort him. Only Gen is looking up at me, waiting for something to happen.

I stand in front of them, waiting for my physical presence to register. Zeng starts snoring.

I clear my throat.

Imran taps a text message into his phone. Astrud and Vanessa burst out laughing. Witold starts weeping, burying his face in his hands. Yumi puts her arm around him. Gen looks away, as if embarrassed for me.

“Right, who’s got that homework for me?” I ask them. “Homework? Anybody?”

By the way they all shift in their seats and avoid eye contact, I can tell that none of them have done it.

Usually I would let it go. But today the lack of homework makes me wonder what I am doing here. And also what they are doing here.

“Can anyone remember what the homework was?”

“Discursive composition,” Yumi says, handing Witold a tissue. “Giving information and your own opinions on something.” We stare at each other. “Very formal style,” she says.

Very formal style? Well, that’s right. But I don’t know if she’s talking about discursive composition. Or us.

“What’s wrong with you, Witold?”

He shakes his wizened Polish head.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing’s wrong?”

“No.”

“Then why are you crying?”

Yumi puts a protective arm around him. “He misses his family.”

Witold starts sobbing harder, his shoulders shaking and his nose all snotty.

“My wife. My children. My mother. So far away. This place is so…hard. Oh, this is a hard place. The Pampas Steak Bar is a hard place. ‘Hands off the Falklands, Argie. Tell Maradona we are going to chop his hands off, Argie.’ ”

“You spend ten years trying to get a visa to this place and then you miss your family?”

“Yes.”

“Well, in future be careful what you wish for, Wit. Because you might get it.”

Yumi glares at me. “He has a right to miss his family.”

I glare back at her. “And as your teacher I have a right to be treated with a little respect. That means no nervous breakdowns in class. It means no mobile phones in class. Thank you, Imran. It means you treat this place as somewhere to study rather than a place to get forty winks.”

“Forty winks?” someone says.

“New idiom,” says someone else.

Zeng is still fast asleep. I crouch next to him. His skin is soft and smooth with just a few wispy black hairs on his upper lip. He doesn’t look as though he shaves more than once a month. I put my face close to his ear.

“Would you like fries with that?” I hiss and he awakes with a jolt. Vanessa and Astrud laugh, but stop when they see my face.

“Why did you come to this country, Zeng?”

“A better life,” he gasps, blinking furiously.

“If you want a better life, then try staying awake in class.” I give him a cold smile. “A little less effort in General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen. And a bit more effort at Churchill’s International Language School. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Then I get the little bastards to write a discursive composition. The subject is developments in science and technology and whether these will affect mankind positively or negatively. As they scribble away I wander among them.

“I want to hear both sides of the argument,” I say. “For and against. Negative and positive. Link your points with expressions such as, some might say…others might argue that…there are, however, some risks such as…”

Usually they would ask for advice and kid around with me but today they are all too frightened or too angry to ask for my help. And it makes me feel blue to think that they don’t like me anymore.

When the bell rings they all get out of there as fast as they can. Apart from Yumi. I am packing my things away when I feel her standing by my desk.

“Don’t take it out on them,” she says.

I don’t look at her.

“I’m sorry, Alfie.”

“Sorry for what? There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

“I had a good time with you,” she says. “But you frightened me.”

“How did I frighten you?”

“The flowers. The flowers frightened me. They made me feel you want-I don’t know. Too much.”

I finish stuffing my books in my bag and zip it closed.

“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her. “That’s the last of the flowers.”

Josh and his new girlfriend are at that stage of their relationship where they want to share their happiness with the rest of the world. I don’t understand why happy couples can’t be happy in private. Why do they need the rest of us to validate their happiness? Is it that they don’t really believe in what they have found? That they suspect it might be a mirage? Why can’t they just fuck off and leave us alone?

Josh and Tamsin-the new girlfriend, who happens to be the client he was so keen to rush back to the last time we met-are having supper at her place. It’s their coming-out ball as an official couple, so I can’t get out of this dinner party, although God knows I have tried. I came up with a couple of really good excuses but Josh kept giving me alternative dates, the cunning bastard. The only way to get out of it would have been to say to him, oh, just fuck off and die, Josh-I never liked you anyway. Which does cross my mind. But I can’t say that because Josh is my best friend, the only link to the past that I have left, and I am afraid of losing him.

So that’s how I come to find myself outside a big white terraced house in Notting Hill, holding a bottle of something dry and white, and getting buzzed up to the third floor. I am a little spooked because I saw someone on the tube reading the paperback of Oranges for Christmas. That always feels strange to me. Especially when they start laughing at one of my father’s hilarious anecdotes about all that adorable East End poverty and deprivation.

Josh opens the door and lets me into an expensive little box. There are highly polished wooden boards on the floor and black-framed Japanese prints of bony peasants struggling through rainy landscapes on the wall. A rectangular glass table set for six people. The place is as spartan as a morgue.

Josh is not wearing a tie, the sure sign that he is off duty. He slaps me on the back, a grin splitting his face, very pleased with himself. He has that glow about him that everybody gets when they get it bad.

I can smell some kind of lemony fish being grilled. The aroma of food cooking gives the place its only sign of human life. Then a smiling blonde in bare feet comes out of the kitchen, drying her hands and walking toward me.

“Something smells good,” I tell her. “And it’s not me.”

“Alfie,” Tamsin says, kissing me on either cheek. “I know it’s a cliché, but I really have heard so much about you.”

I can understand why Josh is dead keen. There’s an ease about her that I really like, and while Josh is fussing with the dessert that he’s making-doing his enlightened man bit, which is the joke of the century-Tamsin and I sit on the sofa and I tell her about my train journey here, and how strange I felt seeing someone reading my father’s book.

“Oh, I love that book!” she says. “It’s so warm and funny and real!”

“But the interesting thing,” I tell her, “is that my dad is none of those things. Warm. Funny. Real. He’s not like that at all. He’s more cold, unfunny and fake. In fact, he’s a right-”

Josh sticks a bowl of chips under my nose.

“Pringle?” he says. “Cheese and onion or barbecue flavor?”

Josh opens a bottle of champagne and Tamsin tells me about her job. As far as I can understand, she does something important for a merchant bank and came to see Josh for advice about a company flotation.

“Our shop has one of the largest corporate finance practices in Europe,” Josh boasts. Tamsin stares up at him adoringly. My hero. But I can understand why they are happy, and we have a good time until the other guests turn up.

Then the evening starts to go horribly wrong.

First, another couple arrives. It’s one of Josh’s rugby-playing mates from his company and his snooty, stick-thin wife. Dan and India. They breeze in, and as Josh keeps the champagne flowing, they are soon acting as if they own the place.

“And what do you do?” India asks me.

“I teach,” I say, and they both look at me as if I said, “I clean the sewers of the city with a second-hand toothbrush.” Or maybe that’s just my imagination. Or the champagne. But they don’t say anything after I tell them what I do, so while Tamsin and India talk about the celebrity chef who invented tonight’s fish and while Josh and Dan bellow at each other about various areas of commercial law, I sit silently on the sofa, slowly getting completely and utterly stewed. Just when I think I am so drunk that I might curl up and have a little nap, Josh looks at me with a secret smile.

“Guess what I’ve got for you,” he says. He goes to the kitchen, gets something out of the fridge and comes back pouring a foaming, yellow beer into a tall glass. I immediately recognize the silver and green can he is holding.

“Tsingtao,” I say.

“Your favorite,” Josh says.

I am touched. I know this means Josh has gone to great lengths to make me feel comfortable tonight. But the beer on top of the champagne turns out to be not exactly the best idea in the world. In fact, it’s a rotten idea. Soon my eyes start crossing if I don’t make every effort to keep them in focus.

“Alfie’s father wrote that wonderful book,” Tamsin tells India, trying to include me in the evening. “Oranges for Christmas.”

“Really?” India says, interested in me for the first time. “Oranges for Christmas? God, it’s such a classic, isn’t it? I bought it ages ago. Keep meaning to read it.”

“He’s getting more famous,” I tell them. “My father, I mean. There was a picture of him and his girlfriend at some party the other day. In the Standard. They were grinning and trying to pretend they didn’t know their picture was being taken.” I have a swig of my Tsingtao. “He’s getting more famous but, the funny thing is, he doesn’t deserve it. Because he’s not even writing anything. And-I ask you-how’s that meant to make me feel?”

They all stare at me, dumbfounded.

“I wanted to be a writer. I really did. First of all, I was going to write about Hong Kong. About why it’s important. About why it’s touched with magic. Now-well, I don’t know what I would write now. I sort of lost the urge.”

“Why don’t you write about some stupid dickhead who can’t hold his drink and who is not fit to be in civilized company?” says Josh. “You’ve got to write about what you know.”

Then the buzzer goes again and the final guest arrives. A pretty, rather overweight young woman called Jane from Josh’s firm. Mid-thirties. Very friendly. A bit nervous. We are seated next to each other at dinner. I’m not meant to get off with her, am I? Plates are put in front of us containing some kind of fancy salad.

“Warm salad of radicchio, gem and pancetta,” Tamsin says.

“She’s such a genius,” Josh says, and they exchange a little sweet kissy-kiss that provokes an involuntary sneer on my flushed face. Some distant part of me realizes I am not being the perfect guest.

“Delicious,” India declares.

“Radicchio, gem and pancetta?” Dan says. “Sounds like a firm of Italian lawyers.”

Everybody roars apart from me. I can feel Jane looking at me, trying to think of something to say.

“Josh told me you were in Hong Kong,” she says pleasantly.

“That’s right.”

“I was in Singapore for two years. I really fell in love with Asia. The food, the people, the culture.”

“Not the same thing,” I tell her.

“Excuse me?”

“Not the same thing. Hong Kong and Singapore. It’s the difference between a rain forest and a golf course. Singapore being the golf course.”

“You don’t like Singapore?” she says, her face crumpling.

“Too sanitized,” I say firmly. “Singapore is nothing like Hong Kong. Didn’t somebody once say that Singapore is Disneyland with the death penalty?”

Jane sadly turns her face to the fancy salad before her.

“When were you ever in Singapore, Alfie?” Josh demands.

“What?” I say, playing for time.

“I said-when exactly were you in Singapore?” He is not smiling at me any more. “I don’t recall you ever going to Singapore. But suddenly you’re the big expert.”

“I’ve never been to Singapore,” I say with an infuriating smugness.

“Then you don’t really know what you’re talking about, do you?” Josh says.

“I know I wouldn’t like it.”

“How do you know that?”

“I wouldn’t like anywhere that they say is like Disneyland with the death penalty.”

“Singapore Sling,” India says. We all look at her as if she is mental. “Fine cocktail,” she adds, spearing a piece of gem lettuce. Then they are all yakking about their favorite cocktails, even poor old Jane perking up a bit as she weighs in with her thoughts on the humble Piña Colada.

“I like a Long, Slow Screw Up Against the Wall,” Dan says, predictably enough, and they all hee-haw their stupid laughter.

“I bet you do, mate, I bet you do!” cackles Josh.

“How about you, Alfie?” Tamsin asks me pleasantly, still trying to include me in the evening, acting as though she knows it’s a meaningless question but it’s just a bit of harmless fun. How did Josh ever get a woman like her? Isn’t she much too good for him? “What’s your favorite cocktail?”

“Not much of a cocktail man,” I say lightly, as if this conversation is beneath me, draining my beer. “Not much of a drinker really.”

“Clearly,” Josh says.

I examine the empty glass in my hand as if I am secretly some kind of expert.

“But I do like a Tsingtao. Reminds me of home.”

“Home?” Jane says. “Do you mean Hong Kong?”

But India has a question of her own.

“Why are you wearing a wedding ring?” she says, looking at the hand that holds my Tsingtao, and everything around the table seems to get all silent.

“What?”

“Why are you wearing a wedding ring?” she asks again. “You’re not married, are you?”

I set down my glass and look at the ring around the third finger of my left hand as if I am seeing it for the first time.

“Used to be,” I say.

“And you still wear your ring? Ah. That’s sweet.”

“Lot of divorce about these days,” Dan says philosophically. “Rotten for the kids. Still, probably better than if the parents stay together and, you know, don’t get along.”

“I didn’t get divorced,” I say.

“No,” Josh says. “He didn’t get divorced. His wife died, didn’t she, Alfie? She was a beautiful girl and then she died. While scuba diving. And that means we all have to feel sorry for you, doesn’t it? Poor little Alfie and his dead wife. The rest of us are meant to apologize for going on living.”

“Josh,” says Tamsin.

“Well, I’m sick of it.”

Suddenly Josh and I are standing up. If there wasn’t a glass table and half a dozen fancy salads between us, I swear we would be exchanging punches.

“I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, Josh. That’s not necessary. But it would be nice if you would leave me alone.”

“Perhaps I will in the future.”

“Perhaps you should.”

I bow stiffly to Tamsin and leave the table. Josh follows me, getting more angry by the second. He’s not going to let me go that easily.

“Your wife’s dead and that’s your excuse for coming in here and acting like a complete asshole, is it? Is that your excuse, Alfie?”

But I don’t answer him as I make my way to the door. I think to myself-no, that’s not my excuse.

That’s my reason.

15

THERE IS NOTHING CASUAL ABOUT JACKIE.

Every morning she arrives for work dressed for a date with Rod Stewart. Her heels are high and her skirts are short, but there is a curious formality about her. She looks as though she has spent a long time deciding what to wear. She looks as though putting on her makeup took about as long as minor heart surgery. But her provocative clothes are like a uniform, or a shield, or a glossy shell. It’s a very self-conscious sexiness. As if she looks that way not to advertise something, but to protect it.

Even when she has changed into her cleaning kit, Jackie is still as formal as a flight attendant or a policewoman. It’s got something to do with the highlights in her hair, the mascara that is just a touch too heavy. She spends far too long trying to make herself look good. She looks good already.

Sometimes I see her in the staff room, or the corridor, or a class that is empty of students. Bumping around with her bucket, polishing something in her yellow gloves. For some reason I don’t understand, I never ask Jackie about herself. I always ask her about the young girl in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

It makes me feel good to ask Jackie about the book. It’s like a secret we share.

“How’s Mick?” I say.

“Still dreaming.” She smiles.

My students are not like Jackie. My students dress down. Depending on their personal circumstances, and their country of origin, they are either expensively scruffy or poverty stricken scruffy. Vanessa, for example, wears white or black Versace jeans every day, while Witold always wears the same pair of counterfeit Polish denims with “Levy’s” misspelled on the back. But unless they have a hot date after class, they stick with T-shirts and sneakers, combat trousers or jeans. Except for Hiroko.

Hiroko was an office lady in Tokyo and she still wears the classic OL uniform-pale, neat little matching jacket-and-skirt suits, black high heels and even those flesh-colored tights that OLs seem to favor. I have seen those flesh-colored tights on young female Japanese tourists buying their designer tea bags at Fortnum & Mason-I couldn’t help noticing-but I have never seen them on any of my students.

Apart from Hiroko.

Hiroko is not like Yumi. Hiroko is twenty-three going on fifty. With her dyed blond hair and funky fashion sense, Yumi looks like the maverick, but in fact she is far more typical of the Japanese girls at Churchill’s than Hiroko.

It’s not just Hiroko’s clothes. She is diligent in her work, deferential to her teachers, never speaking unless she is spoken to, and then only in bashful, monosyllabic sentences. She doesn’t actually bow, but when you are speaking to her she gives all these suppliant, encouraging little nods of her head that strike me as pure Japanese, far more so than the legendary bowing. Sometimes I think Hiroko has never really left that office in Tokyo.

Hiroko is having problems with her course. She is one of my Proficiency students and her written work is faultless. But she is having trouble with her spoken English. Hiroko doesn’t like talking. Hiroko hates talking. At first I thought it was because she is cripplingly shy. But it’s far more than shyness. Hiroko has that very Japanese terror of doing something imperfectly. She would much rather not do it at all.

So she sits in my Proficiency class, silent as a mute, hiding her sweet, bespectacled round face behind a long black curtain of hair. It gets so bad that I have to ask her to stay behind after class and she nods her assent, her eyes blinking nervously behind her glasses.

I start off with the good news-she is one of my best students, I can see how hard she works-and then I tell her that she has to start talking more in class or she will flunk her exam on the oral section. In her strained, faltering English-she visibly flinches at every minor mistake she makes-Hiroko asks me if she should drop down a level or two. I tell her that the problem would be exactly the same even if she was with the Advanced Beginners.

“Listen, you just have to get over your hang-up about speaking English,” I say. “Don’t let it become too important, okay? Even native speakers make mistakes. It doesn’t matter if it comes out sounding different from the textbooks. Just open your mouth and give it a go.”

Hiroko looks at me with wide, frightened eyes, furiously nodding in agreement. Where does it come from, this myth that all Asian eyes are mean little slits?

She stares at me with a kind of touching trust, waiting for something else to happen, and so very soon the pair of us are sitting in the Eamon de Valera with Hiroko nursing a spritzer and me sipping a stout. That’s where she tells me all about her broken heart.

“It’s no good if it’s too important,” I said to her on the way to the pub. “That’s what I’ve learned. If you make it too important, then it ruins everything.”

Hiroko of the broken heart.

There was a man back in Tokyo. A man from Hiroko’s office. An older man. Hiroko lived with her parents and the man lived with his wife. Their work brought Hiroko and the man together. He was friendly and charming. She was young and lonely. She liked him a lot. And so they began.

Hiroko and the man had to go to love hotels, those briefly rented rooms in buildings shaped like ocean liners and castles and space ships. She knew he wasn’t free but she also knew that they really cared for each other. He was funny and kind and he told her that she was beautiful. He made her feel good about herself, as though she could really be the person she had always wanted to be. And he told her that he loved her, he told her that he loved her so very much in one of their two-hour stays in a love hotel. Then he went home to his wife.

Something happened. Something momentous that makes her eyes fill with tears, something that she will not talk about.

“You got pregnant, didn’t you?”

A quick bob of the head. Heartbroken assent.

“But you didn’t have the baby.”

A small shake of the head, her hair falling over her face.

“And pencil dick stayed with his wife.”

Her voice is not much more than a whisper, but I am struck by how little accent she has. When she doesn’t think about it too much, her spoken English is actually pretty good.

“Of course.”

I reach out and touch her hand.

“Don’t worry about him, Hiroko. He’s going to have a really unhappy life.”

She looks at me gratefully and smiles for the first time.

“Promise me that in the future you will steer clear of pencil dicks like that,” I say.

“Okay,” she says, laughing and crying all at the same time. “I promise.”

“No more pencil dicks?”

“No more-no more pencil dicks.”

Two drinks and a £10 black cab ride later, Hiroko and I are outside the house of her host family in Hampstead. It’s a hell of a house-a big, detached mansion on one of those wide, tree-lined avenues that they have up there-but not much of a family-just one rich old lady who rents out a room to female students because she gets lonely. Hiroko makes sure that the old lady is tucked up in bed with Tiddles the cat and Radio 4 and then she sneaks me up the stairs to a converted loft where a shaft of moonlight pours through the skylight and onto her single bed.

And as she showers-they are so clean, these Japanese girls, always jumping in the shower and wearing their pants in bed-I think to myself that there’s another way that Hiroko is different from my other students.

Most of them are in London looking for fun. Hiroko is here looking for love. Or perhaps she is just escaping from it.

I know she will never feel the same desperate passion for me that she felt for that second-rate salary man back in Tokyo. And I know that she will never own my heart in the way that my wife owned my heart. Yet that’s okay. It doesn’t seem sad tonight. In fact, in some way that I can’t quite understand, it feels sort of perfect.

“I’m very exciting,” she says.

She means: I’m very excited.

It is, apparently, an easy mistake to make. I have had a number of students say to me, “I’m very boring,” when what they really mean is, “I’m very bored.” There’s some glitch in the translation from Japanese to English that causes the mistake. But I like it. I like that mistake.

I’m very exciting too.

A panic attack on the train.

At first, when I get a twinge in my chest and feel the cold, creeping fear dripping down my back, I think that it’s just another one of my phony heart attacks.

But it’s much worse than that.

I am bumping south on the Northern Line, escaping from Hampstead before Hiroko’s nice old cat lady stirs, before Tiddles alerts her to my presence. I am strap-hanging in a crowded carriage because the rush hour starts just after dawn these days, when without warning my breath starts coming in these short, fast gasps, like a diver who finds himself a long way down and suddenly sucking on the last drops of air in a broken tank.

Panic.

Real, terrified, sweating panic. I can’t breathe. It’s not my imagination. I literally can’t breathe. I am horribly and desperately aware of the crush of people around me, the sick yellow light of the carriage, the dead air of the tunnel, the entire weight of the city pressing down on us.

Trapped. I feel like weeping, screaming, running, but I can do none of these things. I need to be out of this place immediately and there is nowhere to go, there is no end in sight.

Pure, howling terror. My eyes sting with perspiration and tears. I feel like I am choking, falling, watched. Passengers-all the other calm, unforgiving passengers-glance my way and seem to stare right into my cracked soul. My face crumples and I close my eyes, my legs gone to jelly, the roar of the train deafening, gripping the worn leather strap until my knuckles are white.

Somehow I make it to the next station. I stumble from the train, up the escalators, burst into the light, the air. Filling my lungs. When I have stopped trembling I start to walk home. It takes a long time. I am miles from home. The streets are crowded with commuters on their way to work and school. I seem to be going in a different direction from everyone else.

My walk home takes me through Highbury Fields where George Chang is standing in his patch of grass.

His face seems young and old all at the same time. His head is erect, his back poker straight. He doesn’t see me. He gives no indication of seeing anything. I stand perfectly still watching his slow-motion dance. His hands move like punches, and yet there is no violence in them. His legs and feet move like kicks and sweeps, but there is no force in them. Every move he makes looks like the softest thing in the world.

And I realize that I have never in my life seen anyone who looks so totally at peace inside his own skin.

“I want you to teach me,” I tell George. “I want to learn Tai Chi.”

We are in the new General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen on the Holloway Road. George is eating his breakfast. Chicken wings and fries. You would think that a man like George Chang would avoid fast-food joints like General Lee’s, that he would be squatting somewhere with a bowl of steamed rice, but you would be wrong. George says the food in General Lee’s is “very simple.” He’s a big fan.

“Teach you Tai Chi,” he says. The way he says it, it’s neither a question nor an agreement.

“I need to do something, George. I mean it. I feel like everything’s falling to bits.” I don’t say what I really feel. That I want to be comfortable inside my own body. That I want to be like him. That I am sick and tired of being like myself, so sick and tired that you wouldn’t believe it. “I need to be calmer,” is what I say. “Much calmer. Right now I can’t relax. I can’t sleep. Sometimes I can’t even breathe.”

He sort of shrugs.

“Tai Chi good for relaxation. Stress control. All the problem of modern world. Life very busy.”

“That’s right,” I say. “Life’s very busy, isn’t it? And sometimes I feel so old. Everything aches, George. I’ve got no energy. I feel frightened-really frightened-but I can’t even say what’s wrong. Everything seems to overwhelm me.”

“Still miss wife.”

“That’s right, George. But every little thing that goes wrong feels like a major trauma. Do you know what I mean? I lose my temper. I feel like crying.” I attempt a little laugh. “I’m going crazy here, George. Help me. Please.”

“Tai Chi good for all that. For tension. For tired.”

“That’s exactly what I need.”

“But I can’t teach you.”

My heart lurches with disappointment. Once I had worked up the nerve to ask him, it had never even crossed my mind that he would turn me down. I stare at him munching his chicken wings for a while, waiting for him to offer some further explanation. But the silence just grows. He has apparently said it all.

“Why not?”

“Take too long time.”

“But I see you teaching people all the time. There’s often someone with you.”

He smiles down at his chicken wings.

“Always someone different. Different man, different woman. Come for a few mornings. Maybe a little bit longer. Then stop coming. Because Western people don’t have patience for Tai Chi.” He looks at me over a chicken wing. “It’s not pill. It’s not drug. Not magic. To be any good for you, for anyone, take a long time. A long time. Western people don’t have time.”

I almost tell him that I’ve got all the time in the world, but I don’t bother.

Because suddenly I see myself with George in the park, both of us in our black pajamas, doing a graceful slow-motion waltz as the packed tube trains rumble 100 meters below our slippered feet, and the image just seems ridiculous.

George is right. There are some dances you never learn. That stillness, that peace, that grace. Who am I kidding?

I just don’t have it in me.

16

H IROKO IS GOING BACK TO JAPAN for Christmas. I meet her at Paddington, under a huge fir tree decorated with brightly colored boxes that are meant to look like presents, and we catch the Heathrow Express to the airport.

Saying good-bye to her feels strange. I am sad to see her go. At the same time, I am glad to feel something, anything. But-and this is the important bit-not too much.

We embrace at the departure gate and Hiroko waves to me right up until the time she disappears behind the screen before passport control. Then I wander around Terminal 3, reluctant to go home. The airport is awash with real emotion today. Lovers are saying good-bye and being reunited. Families are separating and coming back together. There are lots of hugs and laughter and tears. The departure gate is pretty interesting but the arrivals hall is even better, because you can’t do it in your own time at arrivals. You can’t decide when it’s time to say hello in quite the same way that you can decide it’s time to say good-bye. Hello just happens. The people anxiously waiting for someone don’t know when that face is suddenly going to appear before them, slowly pushing a luggage trolley, smiling through the jet lag, ready for a kiss and a cuddle, ready to begin again.

There’s something else that I notice about the arrivals hall. It is full of young women arriving in the UK to study English. Everywhere you look there is shining black hair, bright brown eyes and Louis Vuitton luggage. They don’t stop coming.

It’s a kind of miracle.

Behind the barrier there are bored drivers and chirpy representatives of two dozen language schools standing with their little signs and placards and notice boards, waiting for the next Jumbo from Osaka or Beijing or Seoul or somewhere else where Christmas doesn’t really matter.

And as I stand among the men and women with their placards-MISS SUZUKI, KIM LEE, GREEN GABLES LANGUAGE SCHOOL, TAE-SOON LEE, MIWAKO HONDA AND HIROMI TAKESHI, OXFORD SCHOOL OF ENGLISH, MISS WANG AND MISS WANG-I suddenly realize that this city is full of young women learning English.

The Terminal 3 brigade is Asian. At the other terminals, you would no doubt find the Scandinavian regiments, or the Mediterranean battalions. But there are thousands of them, an entire army of them, with fresh reinforcements arriving daily.

For the first time I understand that there’s no reason for me ever to be lonely again.

Some of these young women-laughing, confident, looking forward to their new life-find their drivers or their schools’ representatives immediately. Others struggle to make the connection. They wander in front of the barrier, looking for their name on one of the little hand-held placards. Hopeful but a touch worried. And my heart aches for them.

I watch them for the longest time, these beautiful stragglers in this magnificent brown-eyed invasion, fresh off the plane and looking for a sign.

And somewhere high above me, in the Muzak that is pumped around the airport, “Silent Night” segues into “O Come All Ye Faithful.”

As soon as my nan has her front door open, I can smell the gas. I brush past her and quickly go into the kitchen where the smell is even stronger.

“Alfie?”

One of the gas burners on her cooker is turned up to full and unlit. The gas feels so thick it’s like you could reach out and touch it. Coughing like a madman, I turn it off and open up all the windows.

“Nan,” I say, sick and eyes streaming, “you’ve got to be more careful.”

“I don’t know how that happened,” she says, all flustered. “I was making-I don’t remember.” She blinks at me with her watery blue eyes. “Don’t tell your mum, Alfie. Or your dad.”

I look at her. She has her makeup on. Her eyebrows are two shaky black lines and her lipstick is very slightly off, like a double exposure on a photograph. The sight of her worried face and erratic cosmetics makes me put my arm around her shoulders. Inside her cardigan she feels as small and fragile as a child.

“I promise I won’t tell anybody,” I say, knowing she is worried that my parents already think she is unable to live alone, knowing that her great terror in this world is that she will one day be taken from this place and put in a home. “But please don’t do it again, okay, Nan?”

She beams with relief and I watch her make a cup of tea for the pair of us, muttering to herself, elaborately turning the gas off after the kettle has boiled. I feel for the poor old thing, constantly being assessed for signs that her warm, intelligent, curious mind has finally turned to mush. At the same time the gas has frightened me. I am afraid that one day I will stand outside her flat with the fumes seeping under the door and nobody answering the bell. Then I remember why I am here. Jesus. I’m getting a touch of old timer’s disease myself.

“Where’s your tree, Nan?”

“In the little room, love. In the box with Christmas written on it.”

My nan loves Christmas. She would put her tree up in mid-August if we didn’t physically restrain her. Although she always spends Christmas Day with my family-and this year she will spend it with my mother and me, which is all that’s left of my family-she still likes to have her own tree, alleging that it’s “nice for Alfie when he comes round,” as if I am just coming up to my fourth birthday.

I can remember the Christmas Days we had with my nan when I was small. She was still in her old house in the East End, the house where my father grew up, the house in Oranges for Christmas, the house with a chicken run in the back garden and a stand-up piano in the living room. The place always seemed to be full of my uncles and aunts and cousins, the children playing with their new toys while the adults got merry-big glasses of dark beer for the men, small glasses of something red and sweet for the women-and played brag and poker, or bet on the horses that were racing on television. The old house was constantly filled with people and music, cigarette smoke and laughter. There was a huge tree that looked as though it had come straight from some Norwegian wood.

Now the old house has gone and so has my grandfather and so has my father and my nan lives alone in this small white flat, the belongings of a lifetime shrunk to fit a few bare rooms. The uncles and the aunts are scattered, spending Christmases with their own children and grandchildren, and the real tree has been replaced by a fake silver one that comes in three parts-top half, bottom half and base, like a fake Santa half-heartedly going ho ho ho. I find the tree and a collection of fairy lights and assorted decorations in a torn cardboard box marked “Xmass.” My nan watches me with excited eyes as I screw the thing together.

“Lovely,” she says. “That silver looks smashing, doesn’t it, Alfie?”

“It does, Nan.”

As I stretch to put the angel on top of the tree I feel something bad happen to my back. Some muscle seems to go at the base of my spine and I am suddenly hunched up with pain, the angel still in my fist.

And as I sit on the sofa waiting for the pain to pass, and my nan goes off to make another cup of tea, I think I finally understand her passion for her fake tree.

Christmas trees are a bit like relationships. The real thing is certainly more beautiful, but it’s just too much fuss, too much mess.

You can say what you like about fake ones.

But you can’t deny that they are a lot less trouble.

The way I come to sleep with Vanessa is that I find her standing outside the college with Witold handing out new leaflets for the school.

The massed ranks of late Christmas shoppers are not paying them any attention so Vanessa is folding the flyers into little paper planes and throwing them into the crowd. Witold is watching her with an embarrassed grin.

“Study with the best!” she cries, launching a leaflet at a middle-aged businessman. “Estudia en Churchill’s! Studia alla Churchill’s! Studieren in Churchill’s!”

“What are you doing, Vanessa?” I ask her, rubbing my back.

“Getting new students!” she laughs. “Nauka w Churchill’s! Etudiez à Churchill’s!”

“Well, knock it off,” I smile.

“But nobody’s interested,” she says, stamping her foot and giving me one of her sulky pouts. She puts her hands on her hips. “It’s Christmas.”

“Just give them out normally,” I tell her. “Please.”

“What will you do for me? Give me an exam paper in advance?”

“I’ll buy you a drink.” Vanessa is the kind of woman who makes you think that banter is compulsory. “As it’s Christmas. You know. A glass of German wine or something.”

“Anything but German wine.”

“I like German wine,” Witold says.

And so later I find myself in the Eamon de Valera having a drink with Vanessa. She is not herself. She doesn’t dance, or flirt, or shout across the pub to someone. She tells me that she is not going back to France for the holiday-it’s difficult to know where she should go now that her parents are divorced-but staying in London is even worse.

“Why’s that?”

She looks at me for a second.

“Because I will not see my boyfriend,” she says. “He will be with his family.”

Later still I see pictures of the boyfriend in Vanessa’s flat.

It is a good flat in an affluent part of town, nothing like the tiny bedsit that Yumi lives in, or the room in a shared house that Hiroko occupies. Vanessa has her own small but beautiful one-bedroom flat in one of the swankier parts of north London. It must cost well over £1,000 a month and judging by the number of photographs of Vanessa and her boyfriend-this gym-fit forty-year-old, his arm casually circled around Vanessa’s waist, a platinum wedding ring glinting on the third finger of his left hand, a wide white smile on his face-I guess that he is the one paying the bills.

“Difficult time of year for him,” Vanessa says, picking up a photograph of the pair of them sitting outside some country pub. “He has to be with his family.” She replaces the picture. “His children. And her. But he doesn’t sleep with her anymore. He really doesn’t.”

I go to bed with Vanessa and that cheers her up. Not because of my dazzling sexual technique but because she seems to find it mildly amusing being in bed with me. She’s physically very different from Yumi or Hiroko. Just everything. Her hair, her breasts, her hips, her skin. I find the novelty exciting-I’m very exciting-and I’m about to say rash things, but luckily Vanessa’s small smile stops me from saying anything stupid. I know that she takes tonight very lightly because somebody already owns her heart.

And I understand completely. I’m not offended.

Later she has a little cry into the pillow and I can hold her without saying, “What’s wrong, darling, what’s wrong?” because I know for certain that it has absolutely nothing to do with me.

I lie awake in the darkness of a strange bed and I think about Yumi. About Hiroko. About Vanessa. About waiting in the arrivals hall at Heathrow. About how I have realized that I need never be lonely again.

And I know why I am attracted to the girls in the arrivals hall. It’s not because, as a nut doctor might suggest, a permanent attachment is unlikely.

It’s because they are all a long way from home.

Even if they have many friends here, even if they are happy in this city, they have their lonely hours. They don’t have someone who is always there. They don’t have to rush home to anyone.

They are all ultimately alone.

It’s funny. They sort of remind me of me.

17

I AM TRUE TO MY WIFE. Even in these other beds, with these women who sometimes talk in their sleep in a language I do not understand, I am always true to my wife.

Because nobody else touches me. Nobody even comes close.

And I come to see that as a kind of blessing. To love without loving-it’s not so bad once you get used to it. To be that far beyond harm, where nothing can hurt you and nothing can be taken away from you-is that really such a bad place to be? There’s a lot to be said for the meaningless relationship. The meaningless relationship is hugely underrated.

There are no little lies told in these trysts, these transactions. The rented rooms we meet in are not cold places. Far from it. There’s no contempt, no boredom, no constant searching for an exit sign. We are there because we want to be there. The death by a thousand cuts that you get in most marriages-there’s none of that.

And who is to say that these relationships are meaningless?

I like you-you’re nice.

Is that really so meaningless?

Or is that all the meaning you need?

Things start to go wrong when Vanessa gives me an apple.

There’s a knock on the staff room door and Hamish gets it. When he turns to look at me-his impressively plucked eyebrows lifting wryly above his handsome face-I see Vanessa’s smiling blond head over his shoulder. She has a shiny red apple in her fist. Bringing me an apple is a very Vanessa thing to do.

Both genuinely affectionate and mildly mocking.

“An apple for my teacher.”

“Sweet.”

Then she softly places a kiss on my lips-still acting as if it’s all a joke, which it is to her-and just at that moment Lisa Smith comes up the stairs and sees us. Vanessa turns away laughing, oblivious of the principal’s dirty looks. Or perhaps she just doesn’t care. But Lisa glares at me for a few long seconds as if she wishes I were dead by the side of the road. She goes into her office on the other side of the corridor.

Back in the staff room Hamish and Lenny are both looking at me. Hamish mumbles something to me but I am not quite sure if it’s, “You should watch that, mate”-meaning Vanessa-or “You should wash that, mate”-meaning the apple.

Lenny, once he gets over his initial shock, is more forthright.

“Vanessa? You haven’t got a multiple-entry visa there, have you, mate? You’re not going full speed up the newly opened Euro tunnel, are you?”

Before I can lie to him the phone rings and Lisa Smith tells Hamish that she wants to see me in her office. Now.

“Jesus,” says Lenny. “She’s going to have your bollocks for ethnic earrings, mate.”

Lenny lifts his eyebrows and smirks. There is a hideous admiration in his eyes.

I’m not like Lenny the Lech, I tell myself. I’m not.

“I don’t understand, Lenny. You get away with murder. And I get lifted. Why haven’t you ever been busted?”

“Why? Because I’ve never screwed any of the students, mate.”

“What?”

“It’s all talk with me, mate. Dirty talk, I’ll grant you. Filthy talk, even. But I wouldn’t actually put my barnacle-encrusted old todger anywhere near this lot. Are you kidding? In the current climate, it’s more than my knob’s worth.”

“Never?”

“Not once. Well, there was a cute little Croat who let me put my hand inside her Wonderbra at last year’s Christmas party. But that modest handful is the only penetration there has ever been.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“It’s true, mate. Besides, what would all these hot young things want with a fat old cunt like me? Go on, off you go.”

So it’s true. I’m nothing like Lenny the Lech. I’m much worse.

As I leave the staff room, I hear the clank of a bucket at the other end of the corridor. There she is, going about her work-a thin, blond figure in a blue nylon coat, her copy of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter stuffed in a torn pocket, mopping the floor in a pair of mules that were designed for dancing. No flat shoes this morning for Jackie Day.

And I can’t tell if she is staring into space or looking right through me.

“It’s sexual imperialism,” Lisa Smith says. “That’s what it is. That’s all it is.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, my face burning, my back aching.

“Oh, I think you do,” she retorts. “Yumi. Hiroko. Now Vanessa. I saw her give you that golden delicious.”

I’m shocked. I was caught red-handed with Vanessa. But how does she know about Yumi? How does she know about Hiroko?

“Do you think our students don’t talk?” she says, answering my question, and I think: Vanessa. Vanessa and her big, mocking mouth. “And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ve insulted this college. Please don’t insult my intelligence.”

“Okay,” I say. “But I honestly don’t feel that I’ve done anything wrong.”

Lisa Smith is dumbfounded.

“You don’t think you’ve done anything wrong?”

“No.”

“Can’t you see that we are in a position of trust?” she asks me, crossing her legs and impatiently tapping a combat boot against the side of her desk. “Can’t you see that you’re exploiting your position?”

I never saw it as exploitation. I felt that we were always sort of equal. I know I’m their teacher and they are my students, but it’s not as though they are children. They are grown women. Most of them are more mature than me. And yet they are young. They are gloriously young, with all their lives stretching out before them. True, I’m the guy with the piece of chalk, but they have time on their side, they have years to burn. I always felt that gave us parity, that their youth leveled it up. Youth has its own kind of power, its own special status. But I can’t say any of this to the principal.

“They’re all old enough to know what they’re doing,” is what I say. “I’m not cradle snatching.”

“You’re their teacher. You’re in a position of responsibility. And you have abused that position in the worst possible way.”

At first I think that she is going to sack me then and there. But her face softens.

“I know you think that I’m some kind of old battle-ax who can’t stand to see anyone having a good time,” she says.

“Not at all, not at all.”

That’s exactly what I think.

“I understand the temptations of the flesh. I was at the Isle of Wight for Dylan. I spent a weekend at Greenham Common. I know what happens when people get thrown together. But I can’t condone sexual relations between my staff and my students. Do it again and you’re out. Is that understood?”

“Absolutely.”

Even as I am nodding, I am thinking to myself: you can’t stop me. This city is full of young women looking for friendship, romance and a little help with the native tongue. Even as I am being given my final warning, I am telling myself that it is going to be all right, that I need never be lonely, that I am doing nothing wrong.

I like you, you’re nice.

Where’s the harm in that?

When the pain in my back gets so bad that the painkillers no longer have any effect, I go to see my doctor. At first he looks at me as though it’s another psychosomatic thing, like my heart feeling as if it’s an undigested kebab, but when I tell him about the angel on top of my nan’s Christmas tree, he gets me to take my shirt off and gives me a full examination.

Then he tells me there’s nothing that he can do.

“Tricky thing, the lower back,” he says.

I bump into George Chang on my way home. He is coming out of General Lee’s with takeout, on his way back to the Shanghai Dragon to help with the lunch trade. He looks at my face and asks me what’s wrong.

“Done my back in,” I tell him. “Putting up my nan’s Christmas tree.”

He tells me to come to the restaurant with him. I say that I’ve got to get back to work, but he does this thing that I’ve noticed his wife does all the time. He just acts as though I haven’t spoken. When we are inside the Shanghai Dragon, he tells me to stand perfectly still. He places his hands at the base of my spine. He is not quite touching me, but-and this is strange-I can definitely feel the warmth of his palms. He is not touching me, but I can feel the heat of his hands. It’s like standing next to a quiet fire. How do you explain that?

Then he tells me to lean slightly forward and very gently pummel my lower back with the back of my hands. I do what he tells me. And then I look at him. Because something inexplicable has happened.

The pain in my back is going away.

“What happened there?”

He just smiles.

“How did you do that?”

“Keep doing that exercise.” He leans forward and lightly paddles his back. “Do it every day for a few minutes. Not too hard, okay?”

“What-what was that? George?”

“Very simple Chi Kung exercise.”

“What’s Chi Kung? You mean chi as in Tai Chi? Is it the same thing?”

“Any kind of exercise with the chi is Chi Kung. Okay? For keeping healthy. For curing sickness. For martial arts. For enlightenment.”

“Enlightenment?”

“That’s all Chi Kung. You remember chi. You told me you don’t got any chi. Remember?”

I feel foolish. “I remember.”

“Does it feel bit better?”

“It feels a lot better.”

“You think maybe you got some chi after all?”

He is laughing at me.

“I guess I have.”

“Then maybe you should come to the park on Sunday morning.”

“You’re going to teach me?”

He sort of grunts. “I’ll teach you.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“Sunday morning. Don’t be late.”

This year my family teaches me the true meaning of Christmas-surviving the thing.

But the long hours between the Christmas pudding and the blockbuster movies and my old man’s sheepish arrival with his last-minute booty from Body Shop give me a chance to do some thinking.

With the sex police patroling the corridors of Churchill’s International Language School, I figure that it is going to be difficult to meet new faces at work.

So I decide to go private. I place an ad in the back of a listings magazine, in the Personal Services section, which comes just after Introduction Agencies and just before Lonely Hearts.

Need Good English?

Fully qualified English teacher seeks private students.

We can help each other.

Then I put on Sinatra singing “My Funny Valentine” and I wait.

18

I T FEELS GOOD to be starting something new on such a beautiful day.

There’s a light frost glinting on the park’s stubby grass, but above our heads the usual flat gray shroud has been replaced by an endless blue sky and sunlight that is more dazzling than high noon in August. Although our breath is coming out as chilled steam, George and I are squinting our eyes in the light. We face each other.

“Tai Chi Chuan,” he says. “Means-the supreme ultimate fist.”

“Sounds violent,” I say.

He ignores me.

“Everything relaxed. All moves soft. All things relaxed. But all moves have martial application. Understand?”

“Not really.”

“Western people think-Tai Chi Chuan very beautiful. Very gentle. Yes?”

“Right.”

“But Tai Chi Chuan is self-defense system. Every move has a reason. Not just for show.” His hands glide through the air. “Block. Punch. Strike. Hold. Kick. But flowing. Always flowing. And always very soft. Understand?”

I nod.

“Tai Chi Chuan good for health. Stress. Circulation. Modern world. But Tai Chi Chuan not the weakest martial art in the world.” His dark eyes gleam. “Strongest.”

“Okay.”

“This Chen style.”

“What style?”

“Chen style. Many style from different family. Yang style. Wu style. This Chen style.”

I am not quite following every word of this. How can something so soft also be hard? How can something so gentle be a kind of boxing?

George steps away from me. He is wearing his usual black Mandarin suit and soft, flat-bottomed shoes. I am in a tracksuit with the helpful reminder of JUST DO IT inscribed down one leg. He moves his feet about shoulder-width apart, standing with his weight evenly distributed and his arms hanging by his side. His breathing is deep and even. His weight seems to sink into the ground. He looks both completely relaxed and yet somehow immovable.

“Stand like a mountain between heaven and earth,” he says.

Stand like a mountain between heaven and earth? No problem, Yoda. This kind of talk should embarrass me. But I find that if I make a big effort, it doesn’t. I try to stand like George. I close my eyes, seriously thinking about my breathing for the first time in my life.

“Open your joints,” George tells me. “Let your body relax. Sink your weight to the center of the earth. And keep breathing. Always keep breathing.”

Like diving, I think to myself. That’s the first thing they teach you when you learn to scuba dive. You must always keep breathing.

Then I hear the laughter behind us.

“Look at this pair of buttheads. Fuck me. It’s Come Dancing for fags.”

There are three of them. Saturday-night stragglers, foaming brown bottles in their fists, their faces as pale as curdled milk. Although they can’t be older than about twenty, they already have the telltale swelling stomachs of committed boozers. Yet they are all wearing vaguely sporty clothes-sneakers, hooded running tops, baseball caps. Sort of funny, when you think about it.

But I feel a sudden rage inside me. These morons-dressed for sports day, built for happy hour-remind me of all the morons just like them that I taught at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys. Maybe that’s why, when I open my mouth, I sound just like a teacher on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“Haven’t you lot got somewhere to go? Go on, piss off out of it. And take those stupid expressions off your faces.”

Those faces darken, tighten, harden. They glance at each other and then all at once they are coming toward me, the bottles in their hands, their teeth bared like nicotine-stained fangs.

George steps in front of them.

“Please,” he says. “No trouble.”

The biggest one, his podgy face scarred by the livid souvenirs of acne, stops and smiles at his mates.

“No trouble at all.”

Then he goes to put his meaty hands on George’s chest, but as Zit-face attempts to grab George, the older man sort of goes with him, transferring his weight to his back foot as he intercepts Zit-face’s hands by simply lifting his arms. Those meaty paws do not touch George. And suddenly Zit-face is pitching forward, grasping nothing, completely off balance. Lightly holding Zit-face’s arms, George seems to twist his waist and casually tosses the youth to the ground. It is far too gentle to be called a throw. It is more as if Zit-face is a big insect with rather bad skin and George is gently swatting him aside.

“Jesus,” I murmur.

George tries to help him up but Zit-face angrily shakes him off, although he appears to be more humiliated than hurt. I can see that George has used only the minimum of force on Zit-face, although I don’t quite understand how that can be. I mean, I don’t understand why George and I are not being given a good hiding right at this moment.

There’s a second where I think it is going to get worse for us, but then the three of them skulk away, their faces twisted with shock and loathing beneath their baseball caps, Zit-face still clutching his shoulder, telling us to watch our fucking backs if we know what’s fucking good for us. But he doesn’t sound very frightening any more.

And I stare at George, realizing for the first time that I am not in dance class. We look at each other.

“How long before I can do that?”

“Practicing hard?”

“Yes.”

“Very hard?”

“Very hard.”

“About ten years.”

“Ten years? You’re kidding me.”

“Okay. Maybe not ten. Maybe more like twenty. But remember-Tai Chi Chuan not about external strength. About internal strength. Not strength in muscles.” He gently slaps his chest three times. “Strength inside.”

Then he gives me a patient smile.

“Lots to learn,” he says. “Better get started.”

I am expecting the girl from Ipanema. What I get is the girl from Ilford.

Jackie Day is standing on my doorstep.

“Alfie? Hi. We spoke on the phone? About the ad? To learn English?”

I am thrown. It’s true that we have spoken on the phone. Unfortunately there have only been a handful of callers, perhaps because we are in that dead period between Christmas and the New Year, or perhaps because they can smell an Alfie-sized rat. But Jackie called. She was shocked and delighted to discover that it was her old pal from Oxford Street who was offering English lessons. And I naturally assumed that the cleaning woman from Churchill’s was enquiring on behalf of somebody else.

I don’t know who. I didn’t even think about it.

Some hot Hungarian fresh off the jumbo who Jackie met while cleaning at another language school? Some leggy Brazilian who Jackie bumped into doing the lambada in a suburban nightclub? But there’s no hot Hungarian, no Brazilian beauty.

Jackie brushes past me as she comes into the hall and I see that the roots of her blond hair need some attending to. As usual, she’s all dressed up, as if she has somewhere to go. For some reason she is acting as though this is the place.

Our telephone conversation was short and sweet. Was that really me? Yes, it was really me. Small world! What were my rates like? How flexible were the lessons? I told her that my rates were reasonable, and my flexibility was endless. She thanked me and said she would think about it. But I swear to God I thought she was thinking about it for some foreign friend.

And now we look at each other. Jackie smiles eagerly. If I were a cartoon, a question mark would be hovering above my head.

“I’m so glad it’s you,” she laughs. “What a coincidence. I can’t believe my luck.”

I show her through to the living room, thinking that eventually all this will be worth the trouble. Be patient, Alfie. Somewhere out in the night the drums are calling and they are doing the lambada.

But it’s still the middle of the afternoon. I’ve only got the run of the house because my mum has taken my nan to the sales in the West End. So I sit on the sofa with Jackie, note her tight little sweater, strappy shoes, the skirt the size of a face towel. I don’t know how she can walk around like that. She dresses for seventies night even when she’s trying to look respectable. She crosses her legs demurely.

“And who would the lessons be for?” I ask her.

She looks a little surprised.

“Sorry, I thought that was clear.” A pause. “They’re for me.”

“But-why would you want to learn English?”

“You told me once you taught English Literature? Before you taught English as a foreign language?”

I nod cautiously. It’s true that Jackie knows the details of my glorious teaching career. But I thought she understood that my ad had nothing to do with the subject I taught at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys. I thought she was just getting a few details before she introduced me to her Brazilian pal.

So that I could teach English as a foreign language.

“Well, that’s what I want,” she says brightly. “Lessons in English Lit. See, I need to get an A level in English Literature. I mean, I really need it. So that I can go back to college. So that I can restart my education.”

“There’s been some mistake,” I say. “My advertisement was for students who want to learn English as a foreign language. Wasn’t that clear? I’m not looking for students who want an A level in English Literature. Sorry. I honestly thought you were calling for somebody else. Some-I don’t know-Brazilian, possibly.”

“Some…Brazilian?”

“I don’t even know why I said that.”

Her smile fades away.

“You’re not qualified to teach English to A level standard?”

“Well, I am. But that’s not-”

“I’m thirty-one years old. I was thirty-one on Christmas Day.”

“Well-happy birthday.”

“Thank you. Twelve years ago I was doing really well at school. Top of the class. Straight A student. All that. Then I had to drop out.”

This is more than I need to know. I stand up. She remains sitting.

“I’ve got two A levels. French and Media Studies. Very good grades.” She looks at me a little defiantly. “I’m not stupid, if that’s what you’re thinking. And I’ve got money. What I need is an English A level so that I can go back to school.”

“Well, that’s great, but-”

“I know the course I want, I know the college I want. If I get that English A level, I can study for my BA at the University of Greenwich.”

I stare at her.

“Go to night school,” I tell her.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I need a private tutor. I need to be more flexible than night school would let me be.”

“And why’s that?”

Her pale, pretty face darkens, as though a cloud has suddenly passed over it.

“Personal reasons.”

I let my voice go all firm and commanding. Playing the teacher. Which is sort of ironic, when you think about it.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Jackie. I really am. But I’m not teaching anyone A level English. Not you or anyone else. I’m teaching English as a foreign language. And you don’t need that. Do you?”

She makes no move to get up. I can see how disappointed she is, and I feel a stab of compassion for this overdressed, undereducated young woman.

I like her. I have always liked her. I just don’t want her for a student.

“If you take an old man’s advice, Jackie, qualifications are just meaningless pieces of paper.” Trying to make my voice all jaunty and friendly. “They do you no good in the end. Believe me, I know.”

“That’s easy for you to say. Because you’ve got them. They’re not meaningless bits of paper to me. They’re a way out.”

Vanessa’s sleepy voice drifts down from the top of the stairs. “Alfie? Come back to bed. I have to go soon.”

I don’t usually entertain at home. I’m lucky that the sales are on.

Jackie Day stands up. She seems to see me for the first time.

“What kind of a teacher are you anyway?”

Sometimes I wonder that myself.

On the first day of the new year my father comes around to pick up the last of his stuff. This is it. He is taking the final traces of his existence from this house. It should feel more traumatic than it does.

But with the shabby white van he has hired sitting outside the house, it feels anticlimactic, like this has all been dragging on for much too long and everybody wants it to be over.

My mother doesn’t even bother disappearing. She doesn’t come into the house while my old man is here, she stays out in the garden with Joyce and her grandchildren. But she doesn’t run away either. She stays in her garden with her friend.

As my father lugs boxes down the stairs I stand in the living room watching my mum and Joyce and Diana and William through the window. I am afraid that Joyce is going to barge into the house and corner my father with one of her impromptu interrogations.

Who is this young woman you live with? How old? Will you marry? Do you want children? Do you think you are a wise man or an old fool? Is this girl just a gold digger? Is it about more than getting your end far away?

But she doesn’t. Joyce just stays out in the back garden with my mother, planting lilies in patio pots, moving shrubs that have outgrown their space, preparing for the new season as the two children gently brush the morning’s fall of snow from evergreen shrubs and conifers.

“January,” Joyce had barked at me. “Busy time of year for garden. Time to get smacking. The early bird is always on time.”

“Catches the worm, Joyce.”

“You know what I mean, mister.”

According to Joyce, it is always a busy time of year for the garden. And I can hear her voice now, surprisingly gentle as she murmurs to my mother, and although I can’t hear her words, I am certain that they are not talking about my father. That feels like some kind of victory.

I turn to watch my dad coming down the stairs with the last of his things. It is a box of old vinyl albums. I can see Four Tops Live! and Stevie Wonder’s I Was Made to Love Her and Gladys Knight and the Pips’ Feelin’ Bluesy.

“Aren’t you getting a little old for all that baby, baby, baby stuff?” I say, nodding at the box of Motown records in his arms, wanting to hurt him.

“I don’t think you’re ever too old for a little bit of joy,” he says. “You believe in a little bit of joy, don’t you, Alfie?”

And I hate him so much not because I can’t understand him, but because I understand him so well. He is my father, he will always be my father, and I am afraid that there is much of him in me.

Our lives feel closer than I care to admit. All those nights in rented rooms with women who keep a suitcase by their bed and talk in their sleep in a language you can’t understand. All that sneaking around, all those little lies, all that settling for something that you know in your heart is only second best.

Yes, I believe in a bit of joy. These days that’s pretty much all I believe in. But I have this fear that, for me and my old man, those rented rooms are the only home we will ever know now, the only home we will ever deserve.

Then he is gone, bumping awkwardly out of the front door, while in the back garden I can hear the laughter of the women.