One For My Baby

19

JACKIE TURNS UP ON OUR DOORSTEP when I am in the park with George. My mum lets her in, gives her a cup of tea and biscuits, tries to make her feel at home. My mother will let anyone into our house. It’s a wonder she hasn’t been murdered by now.

“She’s in the living room,” my mum says. “Nice young girl. Dressed a bit-well-tarty, perhaps.”

“Oh, Mum,” I say, sounding as though I have just broken my Action Man.

“Well, she said she had an essay for you,” my mother says breezily. “I thought she was one of your students.”

“My students are all foreigners, Mum.”

I peer through the crack in the living room door. There she is on the sofa, still dressed for dancing or double pneumonia. Strapless top, minimal skirt, heels that could take someone’s eye out. Sipping her tea, looking at the pictures on the wall, all these arty black-and-white photographs of working men that my old man collected when he started making some money.

I think about making a run for it. But she might start stalking me. Best to get it over with.

“Hi,” I say, coming into the living room.

“Oh, hello.” She smiles, trying to get up, and then deciding against it with the tea and biscuits on her lap. “Look, I’m really sorry to bother you but-”

“It’s okay. But I thought I made it clear that I’m not an English teacher.”

“Oh, you made it clear that you are an English teacher,” she says and laughs, making a little joke of it. “You just don’t want to teach me.” She places her tea and biscuits on the coffee table and picks up a manila envelope by her side. She hands it to me.

“What’s this?”

“An essay. About Othello.”

“Othello?”

“It’s the one about sexual jealousy. One that loved not wisely, but too well. Desdemona, Iago and all that lot.”

“I know the play.”

“Of course. Sorry.”

An essay about Othello? Just what I need in my life.

“Will you read it?”

“Look-”

“Please,” she says. “I’m desperate to go back to school. And I’m serious about this subject.”

“But I don’t-”

“And I was good at it! I was so good at it! Because I loved it! Books made me feel as though-I don’t know-as though I was connected to the world. Magic, it was. Just give me a chance, okay? Before you decide you don’t want to teach me-read my essay.”

I look at her, wondering what an Essex dancing queen could know about loving not wisely but too well.

“I’m really sorry to bother you. Really sorry to come barging in like this. But if you read my essay and decide you still don’t want to teach me, then I promise I’ll leave you alone.”

So I promise to read her essay just to get rid of her. And as I lead her to the door and she says good-bye to my mother, I feel a pang of sympathy for Jackie Day. She just doesn’t understand. Teaching has got nothing to do with it.

“What a nice girl,” my mother says when Jackie has left. “Bit on the thin side. I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s apron. But she speaks English already, doesn’t she? What does she need you for?”

“She doesn’t.”

There’s a new barmaid at the Eamon de Valera. Russian. Short red hair. Starting at Churchill’s when the new term begins, Yumi tells me. I watch the young Russian struggling with pints of Paddy McGinty’s Water and packets of pork scratchings before I introduce myself. She’s going to be one of my Advanced Beginners.

By now these conversations have developed their own internal rhythm. Where you from? How you finding London? Any trouble getting a visa (not applicable to students from the EU or Japan)? Do you miss your mum’s apple strudel/prawn tempura/chicken kiev?

Olga tells me what they all tell me. London is more crowded than she imagined, more expensive than she bargained for. Even the kids with rich parents flinch when they see the price of a room in this town. How much harder must it be for a young woman from a former Communist hell?

I can’t help Olga with her accommodation problem. I’m looking for my own place right now, and I’m also struggling to find somewhere I can afford, although I don’t tell Olga any of that. But this standard complaint about the price tag of everything in London gives me my favorite opening gambit.

“This city’s not cheap,” I say, leaning on the bar. “But there’s lots of great stuff that you can get for free.”

“Really?”

“God, yes. You’ve just got to know where to look. For a start there are the parks. The view of London from the top of Primrose Hill. The royal deer in Richmond Park. Holland Park is full of all these sculptures that you suddenly come across. Walking by the Serpentine-”

“The Serpentine?”

“That’s a lake-in Hyde Park, where there are these wide, sandy paths where people ride horses. Next door to Kensington Gardens.”

“Where Diana lived?”

“That’s the one. She lived in Kensington Palace. That’s a fantastic building. People still put flowers on the gates. Then there’s Saint James’s Park by Buckingham Palace-beautiful. And Kenwood House by Hampstead Heath. It’s this gorgeous house full of Rembrandts and Turners and in the summer they have these classical concerts. Mozart drifting across the lake as the sun goes down over Hampstead Heath…”

“Two pints, love,” calls a voice from down the other end of the bar. “When Mozart gives you a moment.”

I change the tempo when she comes back.

“You shouldn’t miss the Columbia Road flower market. Or the piazzas at the British Library.”

“I love pizza.”

“You can watch a trial at the Old Bailey. You should see Prime Minister’s question time at the Houses of Parliament. The markets at Brick Lane and Portobello Road. The meat market at Smithfield. The Picassos and Van Goghs at the National Gallery…”

I make it sound wonderful. And it is wonderful. That’s the beauty of it. I’m not lying to her. It’s all true. You can get anything you like in this city. And you can get it for free. You just have to know where to look.

She goes off to pull a few pints of O’Grady’s bathwater and when she comes back I tell her about the Harrods food hall and how there are always people giving away top-of-the-range nosh. She gets very animated, and at first I think she must really have been on a rotten diet back home, but it turns out she’s just excited about the prospect of bumping into Dodi Fayed’s dad. I tell her about the music at the Notting Hill carnival, the fountains at Somerset House, the way the Embankment of the Thames looks at night.

It’s all going great. It’s only when they ring for last orders that I realize I was meant to have gone to the airport hours ago, to meet Hiroko’s flight from Japan.

The arrival gate is deserted now, but Hiroko is still waiting for me at the meeting point.

It seems very Japanese the way she has stuck it out, a combination of stoicism and optimism. And here I come, ridiculously late, running across the empty hall to hug her, full of shame and relief, wishing she had someone to meet her who was much nicer than me.

She is exhausted after the flight from Narita, but we decide to go into town and have something to eat. We jump on the Heathrow Express and soon we are in a little noodle restaurant in Little Newport Street.

Hiroko is really starting to fade now. Behind her glasses her eyes are puffy from lack of sleep. But she has some presents she wants to give me. Two pairs of chopsticks, one large pair for a man and one smaller pair for a woman, thirty years of feminism apparently not yet reaching the Japanese chopsticks industry. Then she gives me a sake set-two small cups and a pot. And a bottle of Calvin Klein’s Escape from duty free.

“Thank you for these lovely gifts,” I say. There is something about Hiroko’s formality that encourages me to be formal too. “I will always treasure them.”

She smiles with delight. “Welcome,” she says, with a little nod of her head. And I feel bad that I haven’t even missed her.

We drag her suitcase down to the Bar Italia on Frith Street for a nightcap. And that’s where we see my father.

At first I think I must be hallucinating. My old man is dressed exactly like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

White three-piece suit, heavily flared trousers, dark shirt, no tie, stack-heel shoes. In any other part of the country the way he looks would get him arrested. In the middle of Soho he hardly attracts a second glance.

He comes into the Bar Italia, scanning the faces drinking espresso and latte, sweating heavily inside his white disco suit despite the hour and the season. Then he sees me.

“Alfie,” he says.

“This is Hiroko,” I say.

He shakes her hand.

“I’m looking for Lena,” he says. “We’ve been to a club in Covent Garden.”

“Some kind of seventies night?”

“How did you know? Oh, of course. The clothes.”

I feel that I can’t be too hostile to my father in Hiroko’s presence.

“She’s not here,” I tell him. “Get separated, did you?”

“We had an argument.” He runs a hand through his hair. He’s still a good-looking old bastard. “Nothing really. It was stupid.”

“What happened?”

“It was the music. It was all over the place. The DJ was playing stuff from the sixties, stuff from the eighties. As though it was all the same. Then he put on ‘You Can’t Hurry Love.’ ” He looks at Hiroko. “By the Supremes.”

Hiroko smiles and nods.

“And Lena said, ‘Oh, I love Phil Collins.’ ” My old man shakes his head at the memory of this sacrilege. “And I said, ‘Phil Collins? Phil pigging Collins? This isn’t Phil Collins, sweetheart. This is the original. This is Diana Ross and the girls. This is one of the greatest records ever made.’ And she said she had only heard Phil pigging Collins’s version, and who cares anyway? It’s only a bit of pop music. It’s just a bit of fun. Then I wanted to go home. But she wanted to stay.” He looks at us like a man in shock. “Then she left. Just like that. But she’s not there. She’s not at home.” My old man scans the Bar Italia. “And I don’t know where she is.”

“Do you want a cup of coffee or something?”

“No, no. Thank you. Better keep searching.”

My father says good-bye to Hiroko and me and goes back out into the Soho night, looking like the ghost of discos past.

After that first day, George and I do not get hassled in the park. It’s strange. We are out there very early on Sunday mornings when the place still belongs to the creatures of the night. But they leave us alone. They watch for a few minutes. Then they move on.

And it’s because of George. The way he moves, there’s nothing limpid or weak or namby-pamby about Tai Chi. His movements radiate internal strength. The drunks just walk on by.

“Why did you change your mind about teaching me?”

“I saw how much you want to learn.”

I read Jackie’s essay. It’s depressingly predictable stuff-talking you through Iago’s scheming, Othello’s rage and Desdemona’s innocence as though she is telling you the plot to Lethal Weapon 4. A tale of sexual jealousy, betrayal and revenge. Starring Mel Gibson. Up against the wall, Iago. This time it’s personal.

Just what you would expect from a high school dropout. She even produces Rymer’s hoary old quote about one of the morals of the play being “a warning to all good wives that they look well to their linen.” Whatever that means.

I feel sorry for Jackie, but it gives me a warm feeling to know that I don’t have to teach this stuff anymore.

There’s no cover note with her essay, nowhere to send it back to. Just a business card-DREAM MACHINE: CLEANING THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY-and a mobile phone number. I could wait until I see her at Churchill’s but I don’t want to leave it that long. I want to get rid of Jackie Day as soon as I can.

I call the mobile and get a recorded message that she is working at the Connell Gallery on Cork Street. That’s not far from Churchill’s. I decide to return the essay in person so that I don’t have to come home and find her camping out in our front garden.

Although it’s only a ten-minute walk, Cork Street feels like another city compared to where I work. You can smell the money in the air. I find the Connell Gallery, thinking I will drop her essay off at the reception desk. Then I see her.

She is not dressed for dancing. Her fair hair is pulled back and tied with an elastic band. She is wearing her blue nylon overalls. And she is cleaning the plate-glass window. When she sees me she stares at me for a moment and then steps into the street.

“What are you doing here?”

“Returning your essay. I didn’t have an address.”

“I would have picked it up. At Churchill’s. Or your mum’s house. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“I’ve got my own company,” she says. “Dream Machine. We work all over the West End.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me. And sometimes I bring in another girl. If the work’s there.” A pause. “What’s wrong?”

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

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

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

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

“Would you?”

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

“Listen, your essay was okay.”

“Just okay?”

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

She smiles at me. “You’re good.”

“What?”

“You’re a good teacher.”

“You don’t know me.”

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

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

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

I don’t know what comes over me.

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

20

I RING MY NAN’S DOOR BELL but she doesn’t answer. That’s strange. I know she’s in there. At least, it sounds like she’s in there because I can hear the TV audience elaborately ooh-ing and ahh-ing as the numbers are drawn for the midweek National Lottery. Is the prospect of ten million pounds why she’s not answering? Or is it something else?

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

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

This is the way it happens, I think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, have you two met?” she says.

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

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

“Ben,” he says.

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

“Thank you,” I say.

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

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t realize,” I say as he lets himself out. “I thought-”

“Dickhead,” he mutters.

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

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

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

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

She is blacking out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looks at me.

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

So I do.

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

It doesn’t feel much like play.

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

“Sure.”

“It’s rubbish.”

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

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Come in.”

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

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

Pictures of Rose.

Some classic Sinatra.

Electric kettle.

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

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

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

“And is it Harry Connick Junior?”

I almost drop the kettle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh.”

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

“Are you divorced?”

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

“A driving accident?”

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

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

“Thanks.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You want to study A Level English Literature.”

Her pretty, painted face brightens.

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

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

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

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

“Now I’m going to have another go.”

“Okay. Sit down, will you?”

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

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

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

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

I know my lines.

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

My door bell rings.

“Excuse me,” I say.

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

“What?”

“I think it’s my daughter.”

Daughter? What daughter?

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

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

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

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

The lump walks into my new apartment and looks around, clearly unimpressed.

“This is my girl,” says Jackie. “I hope you don’t mind if she sits quietly in a corner while we work.”

I stare at this woman dressed like she should be standing in an Amsterdam window lit by a single red light, and wonder why I ever allowed her into my life.

“Why do you think I gave up studying?” says Jackie, suddenly all defiant.

And I look at her surly, nameless lump of a daughter leafing through a wrestling magazine and think to myself: why do you think I gave up teaching?

21

W HEN I SEE HIROKO waiting for me outside Churchill’s, I remember this thing I once read in an advice-to-the-lovelorn column about the person who holds the power in any relationship.

The sob sister reckoned that the person with the power is always the one who cares less. And as Hiroko looks up at me with her open, hopeful smile, I see the wisdom of that sob sister.

There’s no reason why I should have any power over Hiroko. She is younger than me, smarter than me, prettier than me. She’s also a lot nicer than me. Whichever way you slice it, Hiroko is a far better bet than me.

But Hiroko cares more than I do. So in the end everything else-her looks, her youth, her niceness-doesn’t matter.

“I haven’t seen much of you, Alfie.”

“I’ve been really busy.”

“How’s your grandmother?”

“Still in the hospital. They’re doing tests on her while they drain some fluid off her lungs. But she’s made friends with all the other old girls on her ward.”

“She’s always so cheerful.”

“I think she’ll be okay.”

“Good. Well. Do you want to get some lunch later?”

“Lunch? Well, I’ve got to see Hamish about something at lunch.”

“Dinner?”

See, it was okay for her to suggest lunch. That was perfectly reasonable. But going for dinner too made her seem desperate and made me feel cornered. Dinner pushed me to the point of no return.

“Hiroko, I really think we need to give each other a bit of space right now.”

“A bit of space?”

She starts crying. Not the kind of tears that are meant to blackmail you. Not the kind of tears that are meant to make you back down, change your mind or offer concessions. Not the kind of tears that are meant to make you give in about dinner. Just tears.

“You’re a great girl, Hiroko.”

And it’s true. She is a great girl. She has never treated me with anything but sweetness. What’s gone wrong with me? Why can’t I be happy with this woman?

There’s never an agony uncle around when you need one.

The bad news at Churchill’s is that there has been a bit of a sex scandal involving one of the teachers. Lisa Smith has got smoke coming out of her ears, the students are all talking about it and we have even had a couple of uniformed cops on the premises, sniffing around and asking questions, as if the incident is just the tip of a very dirty iceberg.

The good news is that it has absolutely nothing to do with me.

Hamish has been arrested for his conduct in a public lavatory on Highbury Fields. I actually know the place, funnily enough-it’s one of those public toilets where, if you go in for a quick pee, all the guys in there think that you are some kind of sick pervert.

Anyway, Hamish has been arrested for lewd and indecent behavior because late one night he reached for what he imagined was some willing, perfect stranger and it turned out to be a policeman’s nightstick. Now the poor bastard is watching his world unravel. I take him for a drink at the Eamon de Valera.

“I feel like I’m in danger of losing everything,” he says. “My family, my flat, my sanity. Just for a quick jerk-off. It hardly seems fair. It hardly seems like justice.”

“How’s old Smith taking it?”

“She says she will have to see if the police are going to press charges. I’m not so worried about her. I can always get another job as badly paid as this one. I’m more worried about my parents. And my partner. It’s his flat we live in. If he gets rough…I don’t know what will happen.”

“Wait a minute. Your partner knows you don’t go over to Highbury Fields at midnight for a game of tennis. Or what?”

“I told him I’d given it up. The cruising thing. It upsets him.”

“Ah.”

“My mum and dad will be even worse. They’ll go crazy. Especially my father. Christ. He was in the Govan shipyards for forty years. When he finds out I’m what he calls ‘bent,’ he’ll never speak to me again.”

“Hold on. Your parents don’t know you’re gay? Your parents don’t know? Jesus, Hamish.”

“I come from the East End of Glasgow. We haven’t quite caught up with London. Not that there’s much difference between Glasgow and London, in the final analysis. You come to this city thinking it’s going to be so totally free and easy. Then you find out that in its own sweet way, this place is as repressed as anywhere.”

I feel sorry for Hamish, so I don’t tell him what I’m thinking. Which is: how can you have a private life when you take it into a public toilet?

And he’s wrong about London. There are some bad things about my city, but the best thing is that you can be anything you like here, anything at all. As long as you keep it away from the policeman’s flashlight, of course.

But you are free to invent your own life, I think to myself, watching Olga struggling to pull a pint at the other end of the bar.

You just have to be a bit discreet.

Sometimes I think that love is a case of mistaken identity.

It’s like Hiroko and me. She sees someone else when she looks at me-someone decent and good, someone she wants me to be. An English gentleman. David Niven. Alec Guinness. Hugh Grant. Someone I’m not and could never be.

Or it’s like Hamish and his partner. Hamish’s boyfriend probably likes to believe that Hamish really wants a serious, monogamous relationship. That he wants to go shopping in Habitat on Saturdays and give small, stylish dinner parties and sit around listening to Broadway musicals on CD and be faithful to only one partner. But that’s just another case of mistaken identity.

What Hamish wants is to go to public places and have sex with people whose names he will never know. That means more to him than anything. His partner just can’t see it. His partner doesn’t want to see it.

Does that still count? Is that still real? When you don’t know the other person at all?

For as long as I can remember, my nan has had a profound loathing of doctors. She always seemed to believe that she was locked in a never-ending battle for her freedom with the medical profession. My nan wanted to stay in her home. The doctors-“the quacks,” my nan called them, even the ones she liked-wanted to steal her away and lock her up in a hospital where she would be left to die.

But now she is actually in a hospital bed, my nan is showing signs of going over to the other side. She thinks her doctors deserve a raise, believes her nurses should be on television.

“They’re as pretty as weather girls,” says my nan. High praise indeed.

As my mother, Joyce Chang and I sit around her bed, my nan regales us with stories about the characters she has met in here. The nurse who “should be a model, she’s that lovely.” The old woman-younger than her-in the next bed who (this whispered) is “not right in the head, the poor old thing.” The Indian doctor who has told her that she will soon be “fit as a fiddle.” The orderly who is a flirt, the nurse who is a miserable cow, the elderly patient in the bed opposite who is her friend, who she has a right laugh with, who she will see for tea when they are finally set free. My nan doesn’t stop talking. She seems almost giddy with exuberance. Are they slipping something into her cream of tomato soup?

She seems happier than she has been for a long time, despite the squat, ugly machine on the floor by her bed that has a long thin tube rising out of it, slipping under the white gown that makes her look like an ancient angel, the tube piercing her side under that white gown, burrowing deep into her body, slowly draining the buildup of fluid from her clogged, breathless lungs.

One of her lungs showed up completely white on the X-ray, it was so full of fluids that should not have been there. The doctors gathered around, staring at it with awe. They were amazed she had kept breathing with all that stuff inside her.

But she seems happy, despite the humming of that ugly machine on the floor, despite the fluid being sucked out of her, despite the pain she must be in with that tube in her side. Night and day, the tube stays inside her. It will stay inside her until the fluid has all been drained. But my nan doesn’t stop smiling. How does she do it?

I know that my nan is a brave and tough old woman. But her sunny mood is more than courage, although she has plenty of that. Perhaps being in a hospital bed is not quite as bad as she thought it was going to be. Because she knows that, unlike her husband, my grandfather, she is not going to die in here. Not this time. Not yet.

She suddenly stops talking and we all turn to look at my dad standing awkwardly at the foot of the bed. He is carrying flowers and a box of Maltesers.

“Hello, Ma,” he says, coming forward to kiss her cheek.

“Mike,” she says. “My Mike.”

I am afraid that Joyce is going to start grilling my father about his sex life with Lena, but she remains stereotypically inscrutable, possibly for the first time in her life. She just takes my nan’s hand and tells her that she will soon be “as right as raindrops.”

My mother and my father seem more like brother and sister than husband and wife. They seem like two people who have a history together, but that’s all. There appears to be no hatred between them, and no overwhelming affection either. They are polite, businesslike, discussing doctors’ opinions and what my nan will need while she is in here. Only their avoidance of eye contact gives any clue that they both have a divorce lawyer.

And for the first time I feel sorry for my father. He hasn’t shaved today. His hair needs cutting. He has lost some weight, but not in any gym.

He has everything he wanted, but he doesn’t seem happy. Suddenly he seems to be getting old.

And he looks-what do you call it?

Only human.

Jackie Day’s first homework assignment was to write a critical appreciation of two poems: W. B. Yeats’s “When You Are Old and Grey and Full of Sleep” and Colonel Lovelace’s “To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars.”

I read her essay-neat, spidery handwriting-while she sits on the other side of the table, biting her painted fingernails.

Over by the window, the lump-does she have a name? have I already been told it?-is taking up most of the sofa and reading one of her disgusting magazines. The glossy cover features two sweaty, fat men rolling around on top of one another in spandex underpants. I wonder why her mother allows her to read this trash. I say nothing. Somewhere in the house, a cello is practicing scales. Outside the rain is falling.

“This is okay,” I say, placing the essay on the table.

Jackie looks disappointed.

“Only okay?”

“Well, you weren’t asked to review them. You’re not Frank Rich. You were asked to write a critical appreciation.”

“That’s what I did.”

“No, you didn’t. You stated a preference. You clearly liked the Yeats poem. And disliked the other one. The Lovelace.”

“I thought I had to put myself into my writing. That’s what you said. Put yourself into your writing.”

“Well, you do have to put yourself in there. But you weren’t asked to state a preference. Nobody cares which one you prefer. It’s not a beauty contest.”

“But the Yeats is so good. Isn’t it? It’s about growing old with someone. It’s about loving someone for a lifetime and still loving them even when they are old and worn out.”

“I know what it’s about.”

She closes her eyes. “ ‘How many loved your moments of glad grace, / And loved your beauty with love false or true: / But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face.’ ” She opens her eyes. They shine with excitement. “That’s so great. ‘One man loved the pilgrim soul in you.’ I love that.”

“You write very well about it. But you’re too dismissive of the Lovelace. In an exam, that will cost you marks.”

“This Lovelace bloke-what does he know about it? ‘To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars’ is all about putting things before love. Above love. Honor. Country. All that stuff.” She snorts contemptuously and puts on a ridiculous, high-pitched upper-class voice. ‘I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more.’ What a load of old guff. What a tosspot.”

“It’s one of the most famous love poems in the English language. I think you’d probably lose marks for calling Lovelace a tosspot.”

“Mum?”

It’s the lump.

The lump has spoken.

It lives.

“What is it, darling?”

“There’s a lady outside. Standing in the rain. She’s been there ever since we came in.”

Jackie and I go over to the window.

A young woman is standing under a lamppost on the other side of the street. The hood of her parka is pulled up and she is hiding under a Burberry umbrella that looks on the verge of collapse. Although I can’t see her face, I recognize the beige tartan of the umbrella, recognize the parka, recognize the waves of shiny black hair pouring out from the hood.

Hiroko.

She is holding a bunch of flowers. Perhaps they are for my nan. That’s just the kind of thing that she would do. That small, thoughtful gesture is typical Hiroko. She has a good heart.

“Why do you live like this?” Jackie asks me.

For a moment I can’t speak.

“Live like what? Jesus. I can’t believe I’m hearing this. What did you say?”

“Why do you hurt these girls?”

Jackie Day and her fat daughter are staring at me. My cheeks are burning.

“I don’t hurt anyone.”

“Oh, but you do,” Jackie Day tells me. “You do.”

22

T HE FACES ARE ALWAYS CHANGING at Churchill’s.

New students are constantly arriving at the school, eager and bewildered, no matter if the part of the world they come from is dirt poor and developing, or affluent and overdeveloped, while the old students all eventually go back home, transfer to some other college, get married to some love-struck local, get deported for working without a permit or simply disappear into the life of the city.

But many faces remain the same.

I have all of my Advanced Beginners in class today.

There’s Hiroko and Gen, both of them peering up at me through their shimmering, iridescent hair. Imran, looking sleek and quietly studious next to Yumi, her face of delicate Japanese beauty framed by what looks like a cheap blonde halo: Kyoto goes to Hollywood.

There’s Zeng and Witold, both fighting off the exhaustion of long hours slaving in General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen and the Pampas Steak Bar. Astrud, who is either piling on the pounds or in the early stages of pregnancy. Olga, sitting right up front, chewing her pen, struggling to keep up with the rest of the class. And finally Vanessa, inspecting her immaculate fingernails as I ramble on about past perfect forms.

Vanessa has her back to the door so she doesn’t see the man whose face suddenly appears in its little window, scanning the room. He is a good-looking forty-year-old, but seems a bit battered, as though something very bad has happened to him quite recently.

There’s a red mark on his cheek and one arm of his glasses is missing. There’s something wrong with the way his shirt is buttoned. He has made a quick escape from somewhere.

His eyes light up behind those broken spectacles when he sees the back of Vanessa’s golden head and I know immediately who he is, even before he begins to tap on the door’s little window. She turns around, gasps-really gasps-and then stands up, staring at our visitor in wonder.

“We often use the past perfect when we mention two past situations,” I am saying, “and we want to show that one happened before the other. For example-when he saw the woman, he knew he had been waiting for her all his life. Get it? He had been waiting.”

Nobody is listening to teacher. They are all watching the face at the window.

When the man opens the door, we see that he is carrying a stuffed traveling bag. He comes slowly into the classroom. We all stare at him, waiting to see what happens next.

“I’ve done it,” he tells Vanessa. “I’ve left her.”

Then they embrace, their mouths stuck together, their foreheads bumping awkwardly, his traveling bag hitting the ground with a soft thud, the broken spectacles rising from his face in protest.

I look at my class-Hiroko and Gen, Yumi and Imran, Zeng and Witold, Astrud and Olga-and we exchange self-conscious grins.

We know that we are watching two lives-three lives-no, even more than that, because doesn’t this man have children he has left behind?-being turned upside down and inside out before our eyes. All those lives that will never be the same again after today.

So we smile nervously, a little embarrassed, wanting to look away but unable to quite manage it, uncertain what our reaction should be, undecided if what we are seeing is gloriously romantic or totally ludicrous.

But something about the man’s broken glasses touches my heart-he had been waiting for her all his life-and makes me feel like giving them the benefit of the doubt.

June 30, 1997. Changeover night. The night that the British gave Hong Kong back to the Chinese when the clock struck midnight. The night that the skies above Victoria Peak opened and it rained as it had never rained before, as if the heavens were heartbroken because this glittering place was being given up.

The nobs were down in the harbor. Prince Charles and the last governor. The soldiers and the politicians. Watching the bands march and lowering the flag. But we were in Lockhart Road, Wanchai, with what felt like the rest of the expat population.

Rose in a Mao suit. Josh in black tie. Me in a Mandarin number looking like a particularly pasty member of the old Imperial Court. And a crew of boys and girls from Josh and Rose’s shop, all of them either in formal dinner gear or Chinese drag.

We splish-splashed and bar hopped through the flooded streets of Wanchai, once upon a time the old red-light district, now more of a drinking trough for big-nosed pinkies like us.

And we wondered how we should feel.

Were we celebrating or in mourning? Were we meant to be happy or sad? Was this a party or a wake?

There wasn’t much joy in the air. We started drinking early and didn’t know when to stop. We were not the only ones.

Fights were breaking out all over the Wanch. Outside an expat bar called the Fruity Ferret we saw a man in a rain-sodden tuxedo being head butted by a youth in a torn soccer shirt. They were both British. The Chinese were not fighting in the streets of Wanchai. The Chinese had better things to do.

We ducked inside the Fruity Ferret. Josh and I pushed our way to the bar. He had been in a mean mood all evening, muttering about the ingratitude of the People’s Republic of China, getting steadily stewed on shooters and Tsingtao. But as we waited for the Australian rugby player behind the bar to notice us, he seemed suddenly sober.

“Not long to your wedding,” he said.

“Next month.”

“Didn’t fancy getting married back home?”

“Hong Kong is our home.”

“Your folks coming over?”

“That’s right.”

He sighed.

“Before you get married to Rose, there’s something I want to tell you.”

I looked at him to see if he was joking. But he wasn’t. I turned away, shouting at the bartender for service. The big Aussie was busy up at the other end of the bar.

“I mean it. There’s something you should know, Alfie.”

“I’m not interested.”

“What?”

“I don’t care. Whatever you’re going to say, I’m not interested. Save it.”

“It’s about Rose.”

“Fuck off, Josh.”

“You need to hear this.”

I shoved him away and although the Fruity Ferret was packed to the rafters, he still went flying. Glass smashed and someone cursed in a London accent, but I was already gone, pushing my way through the mob, past a bewildered-looking Rose and the crew from the shop, all of them in their rain-soaked fancy dress.

“Alfie?”

But I was out of the bar and into the street, a red-and-white cab swerving to miss me as I walked into the middle of Lockhart Road and all the beautiful fireworks suddenly started to explode over the harbor.

Midnight. The night that everything was supposed to change forever. The night when they expected us to believe that the dream was finally over. As if it’s so easy to stop dreaming.

Then Josh was standing by my side, pulling my arm, the rain flattening and darkening his nice yellow hair, his dinner jacket sopping wet, his bow tie askew.

“You stupid bastard,” he said. “She’s just another girl. Are you such a soft head that you can’t see that? Rose is just another girl.”

I shook him off and went back inside the Fruity Ferret. Somebody from the shop had got a round in. Rose handed me a Tsingtao and I kissed her face. I loved her so much.

“What was all that about?”

“Nothing. He’s had a few too many. Come on. Dance with me.”

She laughed. “But there’s no dance floor. And no music.”

“Dance with me anyway.”

And she did.

A couple of months later my father gave us a video of our wedding day. And, as is the nature of all wedding videos, my dad wasn’t quite sure who was important to the happy bride and groom and who was more of a casual acquaintance. So he tried to film everyone.

The image that sticks in my mind from that wedding video is the slow, panning shot of the guests outside the Happy Valley church as Rose and I posed for our wedding photographs.

In the middle of all those aunts and uncles, those college friends and work colleagues, there is old Josh, a big handsome fellow in his morning suit, his arms folded across his chest.

He is watching the bride and groom.

And he is very slowly shaking his head.

I’m waiting for Jackie Day when she comes out of the Connell Gallery in Cork Street.

There’s some kind of launch party going on in there tonight. A mob of casually well-dressed people are all talking at once. Glasses of wine in their hands, ignoring the paintings behind them.

I say her name and she sees me, nowhere near as surprised as I thought she would be. I hand her the envelope.

“What’s this?” she says.

“That’s your money back. I’m sorry, Jackie, I really am. But I can’t teach you anymore.”

She looks at the envelope. Then at me.

“Why did you change your mind?”

“It’s just not going to work out. I’ve already got too much on my plate. You’d be better off at night school. I’m sorry.”

“I told you. I need to be flexible. For personal reasons.”

“I understand. I know it must be difficult. Working, bringing up a child alone.”

“You probably think I’m stupid. The Essex girl who wants to go to university. Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? It really does. It is a joke. Oh, I’ve heard all the jokes. And not just from your friend Lenny the Lech.”

“He’s not exactly-”

“There are a million like him out there. And you’re one of them. That’s fine. It’s okay if you think it’s a joke. It’s okay if you think I’m stupid.”

“Jackie, I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“People have been telling me I’m stupid all my life.”

“I don’t-”

“My parents. My teachers. My ex-husband. That bastard. But I thought you were going to be different.” She looks at me carefully. “I don’t know why. I thought I saw something in you. Some spark of decency. Or something.”

I find myself hoping that she’s right. “Jackie-”

“You don’t like the way I dress.”

“The way you dress has got nothing to do with me.”

“I’ve seen you looking at me. Down your nose. The Essex girl. I know.”

“I couldn’t care less how you dress.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something, mister.” Her voice is shaking now. “I think the way I dress is pretty. I think the way I dress is nice. What’s so great about the way you dress? Like some old tramp, you are.”

“I’ve never been much of a snappy dresser.”

“No kidding. You look like you should be sleeping in a doorway. You know what your problem is, Alfie? You think you’re the only person that anything bad ever happened to.”

“That’s not true.”

“I’m sorry your wife died. Rose. I really am. But don’t blame me.”

“I don’t blame you. I don’t blame anybody.”

“You blame the world. I know all about your hard life. You want to hear about my hard life? You want to hear about a man who got me pregnant when I was doing really well at school? The same man who knocked me around every time he got pissed for the next ten rotten years? You want to hear about any of that?”

I don’t say a word. There’s nothing I can say. There are tears of defiance in her eyes.

“I’m going to get this exam, mate. With or without you. I’m going to put it with the two I’ve got already and I’m going to the University of Greenwich to get my BA. It’s not Oxford or Cambridge, you’re right. But that’s my dream. You can sneer at it if you want. It’s still my dream.”

“I’m not sneering.”

“And when I’ve got my degree, my daughter and I are going to have a better life than the one we’ve got at the moment. That’s my plan. If you can’t help me-if going around breaking some poor foreign girl’s heart is more important than that-then I don’t know what you are, but you’re certainly not much of a teacher. And not much of a man.”

We stare at each other for a long time. Behind her, the launch party is in full swing. All those overpaid, overeducated people talking too loudly. And I realize that what she thinks matters to me.

“I wish I could help, Jackie. I really do.”

“But you can. You can make a difference. You don’t believe it, do you? You think the world is out of your control. You can’t imagine the changes you can make in someone’s life. It’s not too late for you, Alfie. You can still be one of the good guys.”

I don’t know what comes over me.

“I’ll see you Tuesday night then,” I say.

Now how did that happen?

23

G EORGE TEACHES ME TAI CHI in three stages.

First I learn the movement, carefully attempting to replicate his unhurried grace, although I often feel I must look like a drunk mimicking a ballet dancer. But I am starting to see that every single move has its purpose.

Next I learn to put the breathing to the movement, inhaling and exhaling as instructed, slowly filling my lungs and just as slowly emptying them. It is like learning to breathe again.

And finally and most important I learn-what? To relax? To do something without making excessive effort? To be in the moment and only in the moment? I don’t know.

As I try to clear my mind and calm my heart, to forget about the world that is waiting for me beyond this little patch of grass, I am not even sure what he is teaching me.

But it feels as if it has got something to do with letting go.

It is near midnight now and the hospital ward is as dark and silent as it gets, for this place is never completely dark and never totally silent. There is always a kind of twilight because of the lights blazing through the night in the nurses’ office at the entrance to the ward and there are always the sounds of distant voices, the creak of trolleys being wheeled across polished floors, the murmur of disturbed sleep, the soft sighs of pain.

When my nan is sleeping, I watch her face for a while and then leave the ward to find my father. He is in the hospital canteen, a half-eaten sandwich and a cold cup of coffee in front of him.

My old man comes to the hospital every day, but he is not good at sitting by his mother’s bedside. He likes to feel that he is doing something useful, so he jumps up and talks to the doctors about my nan’s progress, asking how she is doing, working out when she will be able to go home, or he runs endless errands to the hospital shop to get her the little things she suddenly discovers she needs.

He would rather be off buying her another bottle of orange cordial-she refuses to drink plain water, even when I tell her that it has been filtered through the glacial sands of the French Alps-than sitting by her bed. He can’t just be with her. He doesn’t feel as if he is doing enough.

“Is your grandmother asleep?”

I nod. “I think she’s still getting a lot of pain from that tube in her side. But she doesn’t complain.”

“That generation never does. They don’t know how to whine. That began with my lot.”

“Anyway. They’ve nearly got all the fluid off her lungs. So she’ll be home soon.”

“Yes.”

“And how are you?”

He looks surprised at the question. “I’m all right. A bit tired. You know.”

“You don’t have to come here every day. Mum and I can take care of her. If you’re busy. If you’ve got a lot of work to do.”

He sort of laughs and I know that he is still not writing. “Work’s not the problem it once was. But thanks for the offer, Alfie.”

I am thinking of the night I saw him in the Bar Italia, dressed in his John Travolta drag.

“How’s Lena?”

“I haven’t seen her for a while.”

“You haven’t seen her?”

“She walked out.”

“I thought she was going to be your PA. I thought she was going to be your wife.”

“It didn’t work out as planned.”

“What happened?”

“It wasn’t the same. It can’t be the same, can it? Not the same as when you are stealing the odd hour here and there.” He looks up at me. “The odd night in hotels. Away for the weekend.”

Business trips, I think. All those business trips.

“It’s exciting,” he says. “It’s romantic. But it’s not the same when you’re living together and the boiler is on the blink. When one of you has to put the rubbish out. I couldn’t quite get used to the idea that the girl in those hotel rooms was the same girl who told me that we needed a plumber.”

“But sooner or later we all have trouble with our pipes. And you knew it wouldn’t be the same. Come on. You must have known that.”

“I guess so. I’m old enough to know better, aren’t I?”

“What do you think?”

“It was more of a disappointment for her. She thought she had landed this-I don’t know-this older man. Mature. Sophisticated. A couple of bob in his pocket.”

“The author of Oranges for Christmas. Mr. Sensitive Bollocks.”

“And then he’s sitting around the house all day staring at his computer screen, and he doesn’t like the same music as her-in fact, he thinks the music she likes sounds like a burglar alarm-and he doesn’t want to go dancing in the kind of clubs where people wear their rings in their belly buttons. Then you don’t seem like an older man. You just seem like an old man.”

“Is she still in the flat?”

He shakes his head. “She moved in with some guy from Wimbledon she met at Towering Inferno. On the night I saw you. Christ, she was all over him.”

“What’s Towering Inferno?”

“It’s the seventies night they have at Club Bongo Bongo. You don’t keep up, do you?”

“I’m trying.”

“Don’t bother. It’s exhausting. She says she’s not having sex with this guy. She says he is just giving her a futon in his living room until she gets settled. Until she can find a place of her own.”

“You don’t believe her.”

“There’s no such thing as a free futon.”

For a moment I glimpse the world restored. I see Lena finding true love on that futon in Wimbledon. I imagine my father begging my mother to take him back, and her eventually relenting. And I glimpse a future where my mother is happy in her garden, my father is writing his brilliant, bestselling follow-up to Oranges for Christmas in his study and my nan never has to go back into hospital to have her lungs drained.

Then my old man spoils everything.

“I’ll get her back,” he says, and it takes me a few seconds to realize that the mad bastard is not talking about his wife or his mother. “I mean, I ask you-a futon in Wimbledon. She’ll see sense in the end. I know she will. And I just can’t live without her. Does that sound stupid, Alfie?”

No, I think.

That sounds like trouble.

If I have a Tai Chi lesson after work I eat an early dinner with the Changs at the Shanghai Dragon.

The Changs eat around six, after Diana and William have had their daily lesson and before the restaurant is open for business. These children study something almost every day, violin for Diana, piano for William, Wing Chun Kung Fu and Cantonese for both of them. It feels like they are either eating or being educated.

The food the family eats bears little resemblance to the menu of the Shanghai Dragon. It is plainer, fresher, fiercer. Nothing is drowned in sweet and sour sauce, nothing is wasted. Tonight we are eating steamed fish, served whole, the head and tail intact, the fish eyes glistening blankly, with plain boiled rice and lots of vegetables-bean curd, baby corn, bean sprouts, Chinese cabbage and mushrooms.

Our plastic chopsticks clatter and clack as we decimate the fish, our heads dipping to greet the bowls of rice, which is shoveled into our mouths with noisy abandon. The Changs wash down their meal with tea or tap water, although they insist that I drink mineral water, fetched from the Shanghai Dragon’s tiny bar.

“It soon New Year,” Joyce tells me.

“New Year?” We are near the end of January.

“Chinese New Year. Very important for Chinese people. Like Christmas and Easter for Westerners. When I little children size, we don’t even think of Christmas. We don’t care for toys. We don’t care about Ken and Barbie going to the disco. Only Chinese New Year.”

“It’s based on the lunar calendar, right? When is it this year?”

Joyce confers with her family in Cantonese.

“New Year’s Eve, February fifteenth,” she says.

“It’s going to be the Year of the Rabbit,” William tells me in his pure London accent, his mouth full of noodles.

“We have party,” Joyce says. “Here. Shanghai Dragon. You come.”

“Can I bring someone?”

“Bring someone? Of course. Bring everyone. Bring your family.”

My family? That’s easy for Joyce to say.

This simple certainty about family is the thing that I envy most about the Changs. Joyce and George and Harold and Doris and Diana and William all know exactly what their family looks like.

But I am finding it increasingly hard to know where my little broken family begins, and where it ends.

24

O N THE DAY THAT MY NAN is discharged from the hospital, I am meant to be giving Jackie Day an English lesson.

When I arrive home from doing my nan’s shopping, a fistful of supermarket bags in my hands, Jackie is already waiting for me on the doorstep, her daughter by her side. The lump silently contemplates me from behind her greasy brown fringe.

“Jackie-sorry I’m late, I tried to call you.”

“My battery’s flat.”

“I had to do some shopping for my grandmother. There’s nothing in her flat. She just got out of hospital a few hours ago.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“But now I’ve got to take this stuff round to her.” I apologetically lift the heavy supermarket bags. A packet of jam tarts falls out and Jackie retrieves them for me. “I’ve got my mum’s car. So I can’t give you a lesson.”

“I’ll take her shopping round for you.”

The lump has spoken. Her voice is surprisingly high-pitched and girlish.

“What?”

“I’ll take it. If you tell me where she lives. I’ll get the bus.”

I think about it for a moment. Why not? She wouldn’t do in my grandmother for her jam tarts. Would she?

“Would you?” I say.

“Sure. Haven’t got anything better to do, have I? And you don’t exactly need me here, do you?”

“That’s really sweet of you, darling,” says Jackie.

“It’s not far,” I say. “I’ll give you the address and get you a taxi.”

“I can get the bus.”

“I’ll get you a cab.”

I realize, to my shame, that I do not even know this child’s name. Jackie saves me.

“Thanks, Plum,” she says.

Plum?

“Yes,” I say. “Thank you, Plum.”

She shuffles her feet, stares at the ground through her protective fringe, doesn’t know what to do with her hands.

“No problemo,” mutters Plum.

When we have called a taxi and Plum has been packed off with my nan’s address and provisions, I make a cup of tea.

“So,” I say. “You named your daughter after a fruit?”

“Don’t make fun of her.” But she doesn’t say it angrily. She says it almost gently, as if I am too stupid to know any better. “She gets enough of that at school. People making fun of her, I mean.”

“She gets bullied?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.” I manage to stop myself saying-she’s a big girl, I wouldn’t fancy meeting her up a dark alley. But I rephrase the statement in my head. “She looks like she can stand up for herself.”

“She’s a lamb,” Jackie says, and I am touched by the undisguised and unembarrassed affection in her words. “I know she’s a bit overweight, but she’s as soft as they come. And kids can be cruel, can’t they?”

“They certainly can.”

“They pick on anyone that’s a bit different.”

“They certainly do.”

“And for your information, I didn’t name my daughter after a fruit.”

“No?”

“No. I was in my doctor’s waiting room when I was pregnant and I picked up this glossy magazine. You know the kind of thing. Full of glamorous parties and famous people inviting you into their lovely homes.”

I know the kind of thing.

“And there was this sort of society page. Full of beautiful people having a rare old time. Not that all of them were beautiful. Under their suntans, you could tell that some of them were-what’s the word?”

“Ugly?”

“Yes, ugly. Especially the men, who tended to be a lot older than the women. But even though they weren’t all beautiful, they all looked happy. You know what I mean?”

“I guess so.”

“And there were these two girls. Now they really were beautiful. Models, they must have been. Or actresses or something. Or the daughters of rich men. They looked like sisters, but they weren’t. Blond, tall, tanned. Wearing dresses that were like little slips. The kind of dress that looks like you could sleep in it. They were smiling. White teeth. Leggy. What do you call those special glasses for champagne? The long, thin ones?”

“Flutes.”

“Flutes. They both had these flutes of champagne in their hands. I mean, I guess it wasn’t Spanish cava or Asti Spumante, right? They had their arms around each other. These long, thin, brown arms. And what I thought about them was-they looked as though nothing bad had ever happened to them in their lives. Nothing bad. Ever. And the funny thing is, they were both called Plum.”

Jackie sips her tea.

“It’s a pretty name for a girl.”

“Do you think so?”

“I do.”

“My husband-although he wasn’t my husband then-always thought it was…stupid. No, not stupid. Pretentious. They don’t like that where I come from. They don’t like you getting above yourself. My husband was typical. ‘You’re too clever by half, Jack. Too clever for your own good, Jack.’ I mean, as though being stupid was something to be proud of. But I went ahead and called her Plum anyway, went to the registrar of births, marriages and deaths by myself and had Plum put on the certificate. Stuff him, I thought. Stuff Jamie. If it wasn’t for Jamie, I wouldn’t have been in that doctor’s waiting room in the first place. And I would never have seen that magazine with the Plum girls.”

“You mean you were seeing the doctor because you were pregnant?”

“No,” says Jackie. “I was seeing the doctor because Jamie had just broken two of my ribs.”

When we have finished our lesson, we drive around to my nan’s place. Plum answers the door. She is smiling.

“We’re watching the wrestling,” she says.

Inside her white flat, my nan is propped up on the sofa. There are pillows behind her back and a blanket over her legs. She is staring with enchanted delight at the television where two fat men in luridly colored latex are screaming at each other. One of the men has a shaven head, the other has Pre-Raphaelite locks that tumble to his meaty shoulders.

“Oh, it’s The Slab,” says Jackie, as the screen fills with the image of a bald madman. “Your favorite, darling.” She turns to me. “The Slab is Plum’s favorite.”

“The Slab rocks,” says Plum. “The Slab kicks butt. Big time.” She sort of snarls at me through her fringe. “Your ass belongs to The Slab. He will bring you down. He will nail your worthless hide to the Tree of Woe, mother.”

“Language, darling,” says Jackie.

“Hasn’t she got lovely eyes?” says my nan.

We all stare at her. She’s talking about Plum.

“Me?” says Plum, blushing with disbelief. “Lovely eyes?”

“Have you ever seen this program, Alfie?” my nan asks me, as if I have been deliberately keeping its existence from her. “They’re having a right old punch-up.”

“But it’s all fake, isn’t it?” I sniff.

“It’s not,” says my nan. “Go on, mate-give him one in the cake hole.”

“Nice Greco-Roman style counter!” says Plum, shaking her fist. “Elbow strike to the face. Knee to the gut. Headlock take-down.”

“But it’s not sport, is it?” I say. “Not real sport.”

“It’s sports-entertainment,” says Plum, not taking her eyes from the screen. “Sports-entertainment, they call it.”

“Who’s The Slab fighting, darling?” Jackie asks. Thirty minutes ago she had been asking me about the dialogue of Carson McCullers in the same quietly inquisitive tone.

“Billy Cowboy. He sucks. Big time. His ass belongs to The Slab.”

For several minutes we watch the ludicrous waltz being played out on what I assume is some godforsaken satellite station. In normal circumstances I might have taken control of the situation and turned over to Newsnight. But I am grateful to Plum for bringing my nan her shopping, and I am glad to see my nan looking so happy after her ordeal in hospital. So we watch the pumped-up, buck-naked brutes beating each other up for our entertainment-or pretending to.

The bald wrestler-Plum’s hero, The Slab-appears to have the upper hand. He advances across the ring beating back the longhair-Billy Cowboy, apparently-with a series of forearm smashes that may or may not have connected. Billy Cowboy is soon flat on his back, his overdeveloped body glistening with sweat and baby oil.

“Your cold, candy ass is mine, he-bitch!” The Slab howls at the prostrate Billy Cowboy. “Your giblets belong to the buzzards!” He jabs a furious finger at his rival’s lifeless body. “Know your damn place and zip your damn lip! He-bitch!”

The Slab turns his back on Billy Cowboy to climb the ropes and lecture the crowd, who all appear to be grotesquely overweight children dressed for their yearly trip to the gym.

The referee turns away to consult with a judge at the ringside, and that’s when Billy Cowboy leaps to his feet, the fringes on his boots dancing with excitement, as one of his henchmen pushes a large silver trash can under the ropes.

“Oh yeah,” I say. “As if they would just happen to have a trash can in their corner. For those moments when what you really need is a trash can.”

“Ssshhh!” says my nan.

“Bow down before your master, he-bitch!” The Slab is shouting. “Smell the fear and pass the beer! For The Slab is back in town! Come with me to the Tree of Woe!”

Despite the ten thousand voices bawling at The Slab to turn around, Billy Cowboy manages to creep up behind him and brings the large silver trash can crashing down on his back. The Slab falls from the ropes like a dead bird and for the first time I believe that someone could get slightly hurt out there.

“What’s wrong with the referee?” I demand. “How did he miss that?”

“Come on,” says Plum. “If the referee saw everything, that wouldn’t be true to life, would it?”

Plum and my nan stare at me, amazed that I still don’t get it.

Then the pair of them turn back to the TV screen, as if what is being played out before them is neither sport nor entertainment, but all the injustice of the world.

25

“A RE YOU SLEEPING WITH OLGA?” Lisa Smith asks me.

“Olga?” I say.

“Olga Simonov. One of your Advanced Beginners.”

Lisa Smith squints at me over the top of her reading glasses. On the other side of her wafer-thin office door, we can hear the laughter of the students, the scuffle of their work boots, the rhythmic chatter of Japanese.

“I know her.”

“I know you do. But how well?”

The heat is on again at Churchill’s. Lisa Smith is watching me like a short-sighted, bilious old hawk. I am the focus of her attention once more because the police are not going to press charges against Hamish for what he did in that public toilet on Highbury Fields. My colleague was so relieved to be off the hook that he immediately walked down to Leicester Square and offered oral sex to an undercover policeman.

I really admire Hamish. There are plenty of cute young boys he could be chasing at Churchill’s-smooth-skinned East Asians, brooding Indians, tactile Italians-but he never goes anywhere near them. Hamish has that enviable ability to separate work and pleasure which I so painfully lack.

“I haven’t slept with Olga. On my life.”

“Is that the truth?”

It’s the truth. I have walked to the top of Primrose Hill with Olga on a Sunday morning-the one time of the week when she is free from the demands of both Churchill’s International Language School and the Eamon de Valera public house. We have held hands as we looked down at the city, and then walked to Camden Town where she let me chastely kiss her on the lips over a full English breakfast.

Olga and I have walked by the canals of north London, looking at the house boats as I slipped my arm around her waist and marveled at the springiness of youth. That’s what you lose as you get older-that springiness. We have wandered the wilder parts of Hampstead Heath on Sunday afternoon, eaten ice cream in the grounds of Kenwood House, and she has told me about her home, her dreams, the boyfriend she left behind. But I haven’t slept with her. Not yet. I’m still waiting for the green light.

Why not? What possible harm could it do?

When I come out of Lisa Smith’s office, I see that Hiroko is waiting for me down the hall. She is pretending to read the notice board-rooms to let, rice cookers for sale, bicycles wanted-but she slowly turns to face me as I approach her, her black hair swinging across her glasses, and I am afraid that she is also going to ask me if I am sleeping with the Advanced Beginner known as Olga Simonov. But she doesn’t.

“I want to apologize,” she says.

“You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“For standing outside your house that night. I just thought-I don’t know. I thought we were good. You and me.”

“We were good.”

“I don’t know what happened.”

I don’t know how to explain it. You cared too much for me, I think. And if you knew me-really knew me-you would understand that I am really not worth it.

You are kind and sweet and generous and true and decent, and I am none of these things, haven’t been for quite a while. You got me wrong. So wrong that it scared me off. Never give someone that power over you, I want to tell her. Don’t do it, Hiroko.

“You’ll meet somebody else,” I say. “There are a lot of nice people in the world. You could feel something for any one of them.”

“But I met you,” she says.

Then she smiles, and there’s something about that smile that makes me doubt myself. There’s something about that smile that makes me think Hiroko knows more about all this than I ever will.

The window of the Shanghai Dragon is full of flowers and light. Displays of peach, orange and narcissus blossoms are aglow with the warm light coming from dozens of red candlelit lanterns. The restaurant is a riot of scent and color among the drab grays and traffic fumes of the Holloway Road. There is aCLOSED sign on the door, but the old place has never looked more alive than it does tonight.

We stand on the street looking at this small miracle on this busy north London road. My mother, my nan, Olga and me, basking in the warm glow of all the red lanterns.

“So beautiful,” says my mother.

Pasted to the door of the Shanghai Dragon are two red posters with gold Chinese characters, signifying happiness, long life and prosperity. There are also two smiling, bowing figures on the door, a girl in traditional Chinese dress and a boy also in traditional Chinese dress, mirror images of each other, their hands clasped, open hand on closed fist, in salutation to the New Year. They both look absurdly cute, happy and fat. And, above all, prosperous. We ring the bell.

William suddenly appears behind the plate-glass door, his round face grinning as he fiddles with the catch, swiftly followed by his sister Diana. Then there are the parents, plump Harold and shy Doris, followed by Joyce and George. They are all smiling with pleasure. I have never seen them so happy.

“Kung hay fat choi!” the Changs tell us, as we go inside.

“Happy New Year to you too!” My mum smiles, although kung hay fat choi means “wishing you prosperity” more than anything to do with the passing of another year. Or perhaps the Chinese believe that prosperity is necessary for happiness. I reflect that sometimes this family seems completely British to me-when George is diving into his fried chicken wings at General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen, or when I see Joyce drinking “English tea” with my mum, or when Doris is watching Coronation Street, or when I hear the undiluted London accents of Diana and William, or when Harold goes off to play golf on Sunday morning. But tonight the Changs are Chinese.

Inside the restaurant we can hear the sound of fireworks.

“It’s only a tape,” William tells me, rolling his eyes with all the world-weariness a six-year-old can muster. “It’s not real fireworks.”

“Chinese people invent firework!” Joyce tells him.

“I know, Gran, I know.” Trying to placate her.

“But authority don’t like people having real firework,” she says, calming down a little. “They get all in a dizzy. So now everybody use tape to scare away devil spirits. Works just as well.”

I introduce the Changs to Olga, who Joyce immediately sizes up with an expert eye.

“Alfie not getting any younger,” Joyce tells her. “Can’t live like playboy forever. Need a wife pretty quick.”

Everybody laughs, apart from Joyce, who I know to be perfectly serious.

In any other gathering, Olga, as the youngest, hottest woman on the premises, would be the belle of the ball, the center of attention and the first to be offered drinks. But in the Shanghai Dragon tonight, and in Chinese homes around the world, it is age that takes precedence. My nan is the star guest here.

She is seated at the head of a table covered with plates of what looks like uncooked dumplings, or triangular ravioli, which she eyes dubiously, as if hoping to spot something she recognizes, such as a fish finger or a custard cream. William and Diana both bring her green tea, which she tastes carefully, before giving a jaunty thumbs up.

“Tastes a bit like Lemsip,” she says.

We have chicken for dinner. Chicken and steamed rice and some dishes that I can’t even look at-silkworms, blackened in the pan, full of their white mushy meat-and food that I love, like little sausages that look as though they should be on the end of a cocktail stick.

I sit next to Joyce and she keeps dropping bits of chicken into my rice bowl, making me feel like a baby bird having worms dropped into its nest. Olga says she is not so hungry because she had something to eat at the Eamon de Valera, although I think that she is just a bit embarrassed by her chop-stick technique. There is really no need for her to feel bad, because the Changs assume that every gweilo needs Western cutlery. My nan can’t use chopsticks either, so she saws away at her tiny piece of chicken with a knife and fork.

“My husband was fond of red meat,” she tells Joyce. “Bloody, he liked it. ‘Just wipe the cow’s arse and bring it to the table,’ he used to say. He was a bit of a joker.”

After dinner we make more dumplings to eat at midnight. They look like what Yumi and Hiroko call gyoza, but Joyce tells us they are called jiaozi. We clear the table and make plates and plates of jiaozi dumplings, hand rolling the flour, stuffing in the pork filling, sealing it up and handing it to Joyce and Harold to fry.

Olga can’t quite get the hang of making jiaozi, so she sits in a corner, smoking a cigarette, smiling at our efforts. George tells us that three of the dumplings are very special. One contains sugar, one contains a coin and one contains vegetable.

“For love, for fortune, for intelligence,” he says.

We eat the jiaozi as the clock chimes midnight and the Year of the Tiger makes way for the Year of the Rabbit.

Diana gets the jiaozi that will bring her love.

Her father Harold gets the jiaozi that will bring him fortune.

And I get the jiaozi that will bring me intelligence.

So everything works out perfectly.

“Like putting a sixpence in a Christmas pudding,” says my nan. “They don’t do that any more, do they?”

Then it is time to go.

“Kung hay fat choi,” I tell George as we are leaving, sticking out my hand. He takes it, although he is not a great hand shaker, and I am surprised, as always, to feel the infinite softness of his grip. Behind us we can hear my nan and my mum and Olga saying good-bye to the rest of the Changs. Outside it is past midnight, a freezing February in London. The red lanterns in the Shanghai Dragon burn like fire.

“Kung hay fat choi,” George says. “How is back?”

“My back’s fine now.”

“No painkiller, okay?”

“Okay, George.”

“Not so good, the painkiller. Sometimes best to just feel the pain. Sometimes the healthiest way. The way to get better.”

I can’t explain why, but I realize that George is not really talking about my back.

He is talking about Olga.

And I suddenly see that bringing her tonight was not the best idea that I ever had. Olga has been made welcome by the Changs, and she has made every effort to enjoy the food and be enchanted by the rituals of Spring Festival, but it was all a bit forced, all a bit of a strain.

I know that in all honesty she would probably have had a better time in the bar of the Eamon de Valera with some disco hunk with a pierced knob and the complete works of Robbie Williams.

She didn’t enjoy Chinese New Year at the Shanghai Dragon the way that, say, Hiroko would have enjoyed it.

I see for the first time that-despite her endless legs, her lovely face and her enviable youth-Olga is not the girl for me and I am not the man for her.

And armed with that knowledge, we go straight back to my place and make our baby.

26

THEY HAVE HAD SOME KIND OF ARGUMENT.

Jackie and Plum come into my flat and the silence between them crackles with resentment. Jackie goes straight over to the table where we work, moving surprisingly fast in those leopard-print boots, unbuttoning her raincoat with barely contained fury. Plum lingers in the middle of the room, staring morosely at her scuffed sneakers, her fringe dangling in front of her face, hiding her from the wicked world.

And then I say something stupid.

“What’s wrong?”

Jackie whirls on me.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Madam here gave her dinner money away, didn’t you? And her bus money. And her bus money, if you please.”

Plum peers up through her greasy brown veil, her face collapsing with agony.

“I didn’t.”

“Don’t lie to me.” Jackie takes a step toward her daughter, and for a second I am afraid that she is going to hit her. The girl fearfully retreats a couple of paces. “She lets them walk all over her. Those bloody kids at her school.”

“I didn’t. I lost it. I told you.”

“Do you know how long it took me to earn that money? Do you have any idea how many floors I had to clean to get that money? That money you gave away? Do you?”

Plum starts to cry. These terrible, bitter tears running down her pudgy young face.

“I lost it. I did. Really I did.”

“She lets them walk all over her. If they tried it with me, I would have killed them.”

“But I’m not you, am I?” Plum says, and it sounds exactly like something I might say to my father. I feel a stirring of sympathy for this awkward child. “And I lost it.”

This feels like it could go on forever. I step between them, like a UN representative mediating between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

“Jackie, what were we doing last week?”

“Studying emotions in a dramatic extract,” she hisses, still staring angrily at her daughter. “From The Heart Is a Lonely pigging Hunter.”

“Okay. Well, can you get on with that while I take Plum round to my grandmother’s place?”

They both look at me.

“Your grandmother’s place?”

“My nan would be glad of the company. She’s going back to the hospital next week.”

“What’s wrong with her?” says Plum.

“She’s getting the results of the biopsy they took to find out what caused all that fluid on her lungs. She’s a bit nervous.”

“Okay,” says Plum.

“Fine,” says Jackie.

So while Jackie takes out her copy of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and studies emotions in a dramatic extract, I take Plum round to my nan’s. We drive in silence for a while, as Plum flicks through the radio stations looking for something that interests her. Eventually she switches it off with a sigh.

“Who’s bullying you at school?”

She shoots me a look. “Nobody.”

“Nobody?”

She stares out of the window as the shabby end of north London drifts by. Rental agents and shabby pubs, kebab shops and junk stores.

“You don’t know them.”

“I probably know the type. Want to talk about it?”

“What good would it do?”

“Are they boys or girls?”

A moment’s silence. “Both.”

“What are their names?”

She smiles at me. It’s not friendly. “You going to come to my school and give them a detention?”

“Sometimes it helps talking about things. That’s all.”

She takes a breath.

“The girl’s called Sadie. The boy’s called Mick. They’re big. The way some kids are big, you know?”

“I know.”

“He shaves. She’s got tits. They’re only my age. And they’ve got this little gang. All the cool kids. The hard kids. The kids that have been having sex since the first year. And they hate me. They fucking hate me, don’t they? I can’t walk down a corridor without someone saying something. ‘Fatty Day.’ ‘Fat Slag.’ ‘Who ate all the pies?’ Every single day for two years. Since the very first day of the very first year. They think it’s funny.”

We pull up outside my nan’s block of flats. A small white block containing all those little old ladies living on their own. I can’t imagine Plum at that age. It feels like her teenage years are going to drag on forever.

“How much did they take?”

“I told you-I lost it.”

“How much?”

“Sixty pounds.”

“Jesus. You must eat a lot of school dinners.” I immediately regret it.

“Yeah, that’s right. That’s why I’m so fat. Didn’t you know?”

“Come on. That’s not what I meant.”

“I’ve got a problem with my glands, okay?”

“Okay. Why did you have so much money on you?”

“Dinner money for the week. Bus money for the month. And my savings.”

“Your savings?”

“I was going to buy a book.”

“A book?”

“A book called Smell the Fear, He-bitch. It’s a hardback. They don’t come cheap, mate.”

“Smell the Fear, He-bitch? Is it the new Salman Rushdie?”

“Who’s Salmon Rushdie?”

“Never mind.”

“Smell the Fear, He-bitch is the new book by The Slab. He’s a wrestler.”

“I remember. Sports-entertainment. So you lost all this money. How did you manage that?”

“I thought it might make them like me but-” She stops, laughs, shakes her head. “Tricked me, didn’t you? Typical teacher.”

“It takes your mum a long time to earn sixty pounds.”

“Don’t you start.” She is staring down at her hands. Her fingernails are chewed to the quick and there it is again-a surge of sympathy for this sad, lonely child. “I realize it takes her a long time to earn that money. I do know that. I’m not a complete idiot.”

I take out my wallet and pull out three £20 notes. “In fact, it takes anyone a long time to earn that kind of money.” I hold out the notes. “Be more careful next time, okay?”

She looks at the money, not taking it. “What’s this for?”

“You’ve been good with my nan. I appreciate that. So-just take it, okay?”

“I don’t need paying. I like her.”

“I know you do. And she likes you. I just don’t want you and your mum to fall out over a couple of creeps like Mick and Sadie.”

“How do you know they’re creeps?”

“I’ve met them.”

“That’s a lie. You never met them.”

“Their kind. I met their kind. Lots of times. When I was a teacher. And when I was a kid.”

She looks at the money. Then she takes it. “Thanks, Alfie.”

“Don’t mention it. And don’t tell your mother. Shall we go up and see the old girl?”

“Okay.”

After ringing my nan’s bell we wait patiently as her carpet slippers shuffle slowly toward the door. I turn to face Plum. She is still hiding behind her fringe, but looking a little happier.

“What is it with you and The Slab anyway?”

“The Slab?”

“Yeah. I don’t get it.”

“What do you think I should be into? Some dopey girl singer with long hair and an acoustic guitar going ‘boo-hoo-hoo, nobody understands me’?”

“Something like that. Why does The Slab mean so much to you?”

“Isn’t it obvious? The Slab doesn’t take shit from anyone.”

Olga calls me just before midnight and says she has to see me.

I am just about to clean my teeth and go to bed, so I suggest tomorrow at morning break, in the coffee shop across from Churchill’s. She says it has to be now, and something about her voice-how quiet it is, how full of an emotion that I can’t quite place-stops me from arguing with her. I get dressed and take a cab down to the Eamon de Valera.

We sit at a corner table surrounded by the dregs of a dozen glasses, and I expect her to tell me that she has had a conversation with Lisa Smith about me, or that she has some kind of visa problem, or that her boyfriend is coming to London. But it is worse than all of that.

“I’m late.”

“Late?”

“My period hasn’t come.”

“Maybe it’s-I don’t know-can’t it be different every month?”

“I took a test,” she says, and it occurs to me how much of the language of procreation resembles the lexicon of student life. Being late with something, taking tests, getting your results. But what’s a pass and what’s a failure? That’s the question. “One of those tests that you buy in a drugstore.”

I say nothing. I am waiting, unable to really believe that this thing is happening at this time, with this girl. This woman. And not my wife.

Rose and I tried for this moment and it never happened. We really tried. It was never ending. I remember the constant cycle of disappointment and her crippling period pains, I remember being asked to produce an erection every time the ovulation arrived. We laughed about it-“You’re performing tonight, Alfie, so no mucking about with yourself in the shower”-but it was slowly breaking our hearts, this longing for a baby, a baby who would complete our world.

Is it that the people who want a baby don’t get it, and the ones who don’t want a baby do? Is that the way it works? Rose and I tried for almost a year. It didn’t happen for us. It will never happen for us now.

“I’m pregnant,” Olga says, this woman who is not Rose, with a little laugh that signals that she feels the same disbelief as me. “I’m going to have a baby.”

We let the weight of it sink in. They are clearing the glasses all around us. Someone is shouting for last orders.

“A baby. God, Olga.”

“I know. I know.”

On Chinese New Year Olga and I returned to my flat and discovered that the Hong Kong souvenir sugar bowl where I kept my supply of Gossamer Wings condoms was empty. And we decided to take a risk. No, that’s not true. It wasn’t as rational as that. We just didn’t think about it. We did not think.

She starts to cry a bit and I reach out and take her hands. They are sticky with beer, because she has been working tonight. She works every night.

“I’ll stick by you,” I say, unable to come up with anything better than the cliché. “We’re in this together, okay? This is our baby.”

She pulls her hands away from me.

“Are you crazy? I’m not having a baby with you. I’m twenty. You’re nearly forty. You’re just a teacher in some little language school. I’ve got my life ahead of me. My boyfriend would kill me.”

So after that we do not discuss the baby.

We only talk about the abortion.

Later I take her back to the flat she shares with three other Russians in a part of south London that gentrification passed by, a neighborhood of burned-out cars and distant cries and sprawling projects.

When I try to kiss her cheek, she turns her face away. After deciding what we are going to do, or rather what we are not going to do-we are not going to have this baby-every gesture of affection or support seems inadequate, laughable, pathetic.

She disappears into her block of flats. We have not even said goodnight.

At the moment of this small miracle, this baby she has growing inside her, we have never seemed more like total strangers.

First Rose, now this baby. I am tired of thinking about it all, too ashamed for words, sick to my stomach with guilt.

I feel like I am getting away with murder.

27

I CAN SEE WHY she doesn’t want to have a baby with me. I am not so stupid that I can’t see that. But as we make the arrangements for the termination, which seems as cold and clinical as arranging to have a car taken in for its annual service, I can’t shake the feeling that we have somehow contrived to turn a blessing into a curse.

It’s not a baby, I keep telling myself. Not a real baby. Not yet. It never will be. But the problem is, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it for a second.

It would be a baby, if there was any space for a baby in our selfish, stupid, fucked-up lives. It would be a baby if we just left it alone. That’s not much to ask for, is it? Just to be left alone. Then it would be a little boy or a little girl. If we weren’t making these arrangements to get rid of it.

But that’s what we are doing. Getting rid of it. I can’t believe-I just can’t believe, although I wish I could-that what we are about to do is just another kind of contraception. That what we are going to do is no different from buying a packet of Gossamer Wings condoms. This is not contraception. It’s too late for all that.

We have brought a life into being that nobody wants. Olga doesn’t want it. I try to want it, I really do. I try to want our baby, but it is too much for me when I contemplate bringing up the baby by myself.

I see myself feeding the baby its bottle, taking it for a walk in the park, giving it a go on the swings. Is that what you do with babies? Or does that come a bit later? The truth is I would not know where to start. Bring up a child? I can hardly look after myself.

We have an appointment at the clinic. Olga has to talk to a doctor to explain why this baby’s existence is impossible. It doesn’t take long. What was I expecting? Tears, anger, emotional pleas on behalf of the unborn baby? I would have liked some of that. I would have liked to have heard someone standing up for the baby. I would have appreciated hearing someone say-don’t do it. Don’t get rid of this baby.

But the forms are signed, a bill is presented and I put it on my credit card. It’s that casual, that cruel, that simple.

Killing your unborn baby?

That’ll do nicely, sir.

I know it’s the only way. Isn’t it? Don’t I? But it still feels like we are stealing something from someone. Stealing a life. I try to support Olga at this difficult and painful time, I really do. I assure her that everything is going to be all right, yet it’s suddenly as if we have never met.

Maybe she feels it too. Maybe she also believes that we are stealing something sacred. Or perhaps she is just sick of the sight of me. That’s another possibility. I know we have to do this thing because our fragile little relationship was already collapsing by the time we made the baby. I can see that. I don’t for a moment think Olga wants to spend her life with me. To be honest, I don’t think she wants to spend an evening with me. I think she would be happy to never see my face again.

It would never have worked out between us.

The baby should thank us.

Yeah, sure.

Josh once told me, “No relationship can survive an abortion.” The line was delivered with such world-weary certainty, such manly conviction, that I thought it must surely be true. He had got a girl into trouble-on this subject, I always find myself reverting to my mother’s vocabulary-in Singapore on some drunken rugby tour.

She was a lawyer, BBC-British-born Chinese-expensively educated, very well spoken, which always got his attention, and Josh was keen. But when he told me about it over Tsingtao at the top of the Mandarin Hotel, he said that there was no real future for them after the termination. “Something about this thing messes with nature,” he said, “just messes it all up forever,” and I thought how much older and wiser he seemed than me.

Yet when I pick Olga up at the clinic, I find that I like her more than I ever did.

She looks so young and so pale and so drained, as though she has been through something that will stay with her for the rest of her life, something that will change the way she looks at the world, and I don’t want to split up with her. I really want to make a go of it. To try. This feeling lasts until the moment I put my arm around her and she gives me a flat, dead look.

“I’m okay.”

“Come back to my place.”

“What?”

“Don’t go back to your flat. Come back to mine. You can have your own room. I’ll sleep on the sofa. Just until you-you know.” What are the words? “Feel better.”

I can tell she doesn’t like the idea much. But the idea of returning to the damp south London apartment she shares with three other Russians appeals to her even less. So we get a taxi and-silently, not touching me, huddled inside her cheap black coat-she comes back to my apartment, where she moves very slowly, as if in great pain or afraid of breaking something, and she spends a long time in the bathroom before going to bed.

I look in on her after a while and see her sleeping, her face almost as pale as the pillow she rests on. Later she gets up and asks me if she can make a phone call, and I say of course you can, you don’t even have to ask me, and she spends a long time talking in Russian to someone I guess is her boyfriend, the glottal stops of the language made even harsher by her crying.

I have no idea how much she tells him. But she politely thanks me for the use of the phone, as if we have just been introduced and I have just passed the salt, and then she shuffles off to bed, soon falling asleep as the winter day quickly dies and darkness creeps into my flat. I don’t turn the lights on.

What makes me laugh-no, what makes me sit with my face in my hands in the living room, sit alone in the gathering darkness with Olga sleeping in my bed, sometimes muttering in her sleep, sometimes crying out what could be a name-is that Rose and I wanted a baby so much.

It would have been the best thing in the world. For us.

My wife and I. We tried. We had been trying since our wedding day. She even had all the equipment. By her bedside there was this little white and pink box the size of a glasses case with a thermometer to take her temperature when she woke up. She also had this stick thing that she took into the bathroom every morning to tell her when her ovulation was on the way and we should think about getting started. Pencil the date into our diaries.

Trying tonight.

Oh, she had all the kit.

After almost a year of disappointment, we were about to take the tests. Me making love to a little plastic jar, Rose having her plumbing checked out-whatever it is you have to do. We tried to make a joke of it, the way we tried to make a joke of everything.

“And how would you like your eggs, madam?”

“Fertilized!”

We ran out of time. It never happened for us. Our baby never came. And then Rose was gone.

She really wanted a child with me. You might find that hard to believe. It’s true. She thought I would be a good father. That’s not a joke. “You’ll be such a wonderful dad, Alfie,” she said to me. Rose really wanted to have a baby with me, although of course that was back in the years when I was really alive and, I realize, a far better man than I am today.

The next morning I leave Olga asleep and go to my local book shop to buy a gift for Plum.

“I’m looking for a book,” I tell the young man behind the counter. “It’s called, ah…”

“Title? Author?”

“It’s…ah…Smell the Fear…something-something.”

“Smell the Fear, He-bitch? Yeah, it’s the new one by The Slab. The wrestling person. You’ll find it by the door.”

Right by the double doors at the front of the store, I find a huge display of Smell the Fear, He-bitch. I pick up a copy and look at a massive, seminaked bald man grinding his teeth on the cover. He looks like a bodybuilder modeling underpants.

I flip through the picture-packed pages. Most of the images are of The Slab beating up other big men in skin-tight Lycra-or at least pretending to. But there’s one section toward the back of the book where The Slab is seen posing with small children of every race and color. In the large print surrounding the photos, The Slab speaks of his philosophy. The importance of charity work, the need to combat racism, the moral imperative of being good to each other when the day’s bloody mayhem is done.

He calls it doing the human thing.

And I find that, no matter how hard I try, I just can’t raise a sneer today.

“The Slab says do the human thing-or I will whip your candy ass all the way to the Tree of Woe.”

Do the human thing?

It feels like the best advice I have heard for years.

When I get back home I discover that Olga has gone. No note, no good-bye, just a few stray red hairs in the bathroom sink. I decide we can’t end it this way and call her flat. I am anxious to do the human thing. One of her roommates answers and goes to get her. Then she comes back to tell me that Olga doesn’t want to talk to me.

Sometimes you can leave it too late to do the human thing.

And I think about Chinese New Year, Spring Festival, and how much I love what I think of as the symmetry of the Changs.

George and Joyce, Harold and Doris, little Diana and William-there is a balance and harmony about their family that makes me ache with envy.

My own family feels like all broken bits and jagged edges and half-forgotten leftovers compared to the Changs.

My nan with her husband long dead, my mum with her husband run away, and me and Olga, who must have looked like something approaching a normal couple on Chinese New Year, but who, out of all my shattered family tree, have turned out to be the most defective branch of all.

But I had a family once, and we had a plan. We were going to have children and everything.

That’s what we wanted, Rose and I, that was what we wished hard for, that was our plan. Children and everything.

28

I KNOW THAT HIROKO WILL TALK TO ME. I know that Hiroko still gets the soft look in her eyes when she sees me. Hiroko will do the human thing. Especially if she can sneak me past her landlady. Then we will do the human thing from midnight to dawn. Well, at least until about five past twelve.

I meet her at the little fake French café where we used to have our full English breakfasts and cappuccino-flavored kisses. I wonder why I let that time end and feel a huge wave of relief when she walks into the place, her shiny hair swinging just as it always did, her eyes still shy and gleaming behind her black-framed glasses. She is such a wonderful young woman. Why did I ever let her get away? Was it something to do with her liking me more than I like myself?

It’s early evening and the place is full of couples. We have come to the right place. I put my arm around her and try to place my mouth on top of her mouth.

“No,” she says, laughing and turning her face away.

I find myself pecking the side of her head, tasting a cocktail of hair, ear and spectacles.

“No?”

She holds my hands by my side. It seems partly an act of affection and partly a self-defence technique.

“I still care about you,” she says.

“That’s great. Because I still care about you too.”

“But differently.”

“That doesn’t sound so great.”

“You said I would meet someone else.”

“Yes, but there’s no need to rush things.”

“I’ve been spending a lot of time with Gen.”

“Gen?” I see the quiet, funky Japanese boy in the front row of my Advanced Beginners, peering up at me through a haystack of dyed brown hair. “But Gen’s just a kid.”

“He’s the same age as me.”

“Is he? Wow. I thought he was younger.”

“We’re going traveling. After the exam. Maybe Spain. Maybe Thailand. Up north. Chiang Mai. Neither of us have really seen Asia.” She laughs, reaching out to squeeze my hand. “And it’s true what you say. There are a lot of nice people in the world. What’s the idiom? So many fish in the sea.”

And all of them so slippery.

It was always simple with Vanessa.

Fun and easy. The way it should be. Never a pain, never a strain. Never a what are you thinking? Or why are you crying? As I recall, there were no arguments, no recriminations. That’s a French woman for you. Sophisticated enough to keep it uncomplicated. Suddenly I miss Vanessa like crazy.

When I call her flat, a man answers. I guess I imagined that the man would have faded from the scene by now, the way people so casually and quickly fade from my own life. What did I expect? I expected him to go back to his wife. To go back to his life.

“Hello?”

“Is Vanessa there?”

A pause on his end. “Who’s calling?”

A pause on my end. “Her teacher.”

“Hold on a second.”

The receiver is placed down with a clatter. I can hear voices in the background. The man’s suspicious baritone, Vanessa’s singsong, slightly defensive response.

“ ’Ello?”

I smile to myself. There’s no contest, is there? This really is the greatest accent in the world.

“Vanessa, it’s Alfie.”

“Alfie?” She puts her hand over the phone for a second, does a bit of explaining to her married man. As if she owes him any kind of explanation. “What do you want?”

“I was wondering if you would like to come out for a drink or something.”

“With you?”

“Of course with me.”

“But that’s not possible. I’m not living alone anymore. I thought you knew that.”

“Just a drink, Vanessa,” I say, trying to keep the rising panic out of my voice. “I’m not asking you to pick out curtains.”

“But what’s the point?”

“The point? Why does there need to be a point? That’s what I always liked about us. There was never any point. Why does everybody always need a point?”

“Sorry, I can’t.”

“It doesn’t have to be this minute. I’m not talking about now. How about Friday? How’s the weekend looking for you? Pick a night. Go ahead. Any night. I’m free all weekend.”

“I’ve got to go, Alfie.”

“Hold on. I thought we got on well together.”

“We had-what do you people call it?-a laugh. Okay? We had a laugh. But that’s all it ever was, Alfie. Just a laugh. Now I want something more than just a laugh.”

I have a few Tsingtao by myself in a pub in Chinatown and find myself in the Eamon de Valera just before closing time. It is packed with foreign language students from Churchill’s. Yumi and Imran are sitting by the door.

“Let me get you a drink,” I tell them.

“No thanks,” Imran says.

“Why don’t you go home, Alfie?” Yumi says. “You look tired.”

“What you drinking, Imran? Get you a pint of Paddy McGinty’s stout?”

“I don’t drink alcohol.”

“Don’t you? Don’t you? I never knew that.” I look at Yumi. That beautiful face surrounded by the mass of fake yellow hair. “I never knew that Imran doesn’t drink alcohol. Is that a religious thing?”

“Yes. It’s a religious thing.” Not looking at me, the handsome bastard.

I put my arm around him, press my face close, watching him recoil from the fumes of a few Tsingtao. “But your religion doesn’t stop you from stealing someone else’s girl, does it, you hypocrite?”

They get up to leave.

“Nobody stole me,” Yumi says. “You can’t steal a woman. You can only drive her away.”

Then they go.

I see Olga behind the bar and push my way through the crowd. Laughter, smoke, the sound of breaking glass. Zeng and Witold are at the bar.

“You okay?” Zeng says.

“You look all funny,” Witold says.

I ignore them.

“Olga,” I say. “Olga. I want to talk to you. It’s important.”

She moves to the other end of the bar. A guy with an Australian accent tries to serve me. I tell him I want to be served by Olga. He shrugs, walks away. Zeng is pulling at my arm. I shake him off.

“This is not so good,” Witold says. Olga is still at the other end of the bar. She is laughing with someone.

“Olga!”

Someone taps me on the shoulder.

I turn round and have just enough time to watch the fist coming toward me but not enough time to get out of its way.

The fist-all bony knuckles, plus the sharp sliver of a ring-smacks into the side of my mouth and I feel the warmth of split lips on the tip of my tongue. My legs have gone, and I find that I am only on my feet because of the elbow that I have resting on the bar. A pale, thin boy in cheap clothes is facing me, blood on his fist and something like hatred on his face.

He is being held back by Zeng and Witold but he is clearly ready for more. All around us the conversation has stopped and the patrons of the Eamon de Valera are looking forward to the floor show. Why are people so nasty? Why can’t they do the human thing? Why don’t they listen to The Slab when he’s talking to them?

“Who are you?” I say.

“I’m Olga’s boyfriend.”

“Really? That’s incredible. Me too.”

“No,” he says. “You’re nobody.”

Then they throw me out. The two bouncers. The big black guy who is built like a fridge and the big white guy who is built like a dishwasher. They pin my arms to my side and march me to the door, where they eject me into the street with more force than is strictly necessary.

There’s a beggar and his dog sitting on the pavement outside and I sort of stumble over them, lose my balance and pitch head first in the gutter.

I lie there for a while looking up at the stars faintly shining beyond the sick yellow of the streetlamps. My skull aches. My mouth hurts. There’s blood smeared down the front of my shirt. The dog comes over to me and starts licking my face but the beggar calls his name-“Mister,” which I have to say is a pretty good name for a dog-and finally even the beggar’s dog decides to have nothing to do with me.

And suddenly I know what I have to do now.

I have to sleep with Jackie Day.

29

I CATCH THE LAST TRAIN OUT TO ESSEX.

My carriage is full of young men who dress in suits and young women who dress like Jackie Day. It is like the rush hour for overdressed drunks. Everyone is loud and happy. There’s no trouble. The carriage smells of kebabs, lager and Calvin Klein.

Near midnight the train slowly rattles out of the great metal barn of Liverpool Street Station. It is difficult to know where the city ends and where the suburbs begin, where the underground stations give way to small towns, what is London and what is Essex.

Drifting by in the darkness I can see the rotting hulks of sixties tower blocks, endless railway yards, lots crammed with second-hand cars, and then a track for dog racing, pubs, drive-through burger bars, Chinese and Indian restaurants, more pubs, ratty strings of shops, projects that seem to go on and on for ever. A world of cars, public housing and small pleasures. Essex looks like London with the big money gone.

The stops clatter by-Stratford, Ilford, Seven Kings, Chadwell Heath, Romford, Harold Wood, Billericay. The urban sprawl stretches deep into the night, the city never seems to come to an end. And then, after almost an hour, with most of the overdressed drunks sleeping or gone, it suddenly does.

The city’s overspill is abruptly replaced by flat green fields, black and silent beyond the lights of railway and road, and the next stop is Bansted. Out where the city finally starts trying to pass itself off as the countryside.

Bansted. Their home town.

The minicab drives slowly down a narrow street of modest houses. Some of the houses have pretty little gardens, full of terra-cotta pots and flower beds. Others have their front lawns brutally bricked over, a car or a van parked where the grass should be. Almost as if you have to choose between the flowers or the cars. And maybe you do.

Jackie’s house has grass out front, but that’s all. No border for flowers, no space for plants. Just a plain grass lawn. I pay the minicab driver and walk up the drive she shares with her next-door neighbors. The house is in darkness. I ring the bell.

She answers the door in-what’s it called? the silky Japanese robe?-a kimono. And I smile to myself because that is just so typical of Jackie. She couldn’t have an ordinary dressing gown like everyone else. It has to be a kimono.

“What happened to you?” she says.

“You’re never knowingly underdressed, are you?”

“Have you been beaten up?”

My face. She is looking at my face. I touch it and feel the dried flakes of blood by the side of my swollen mouth. I shrug bravely and she lets me into the house, turning on a few lights, offering me tea or coffee. The house is small and tidy, nothing fancy, with little red flowers on the wallpaper.

There’s a photo by the door of Plum as a little girl, smiling in the sunshine of what looks like the English seaside. A lovely little kid. Not overweight, not hiding behind her fringe, not sad at all. What happened?

I look at Jackie. This is the first time I have seen her without makeup. Liberated from all the usual war paint, her face is quite shockingly pretty. We go into the living room. There’s a huge TV set, a terrible orange carpet, more pictures of Plum, some of them with Jackie, young and laughing, and a lot of the kind of mementos that my nan loves-Celtic crosses, Spanish bulls, Mickey Mouse waving a white-gloved paw, a souvenir from Disneyworld.

“What are you doing here?”

“I just wanted to say-it’s great.”

“Are you drunk? You’re drunk, aren’t you? I can smell it on you.”

Plum’s voice from the top of the stairs. “Mum, who is it?”

“Go back to sleep,” Jackie calls up to her.

“I think it’s great that you want to go to college,” I tell her. “I mean it. Get an education. Change your world. I admire your determination. I really do. I wish I could change my world. My world is just about ready for a change.”

“That’s it?”

“What?”

“That’s what you want to tell me?”

“And-I like you.”

She laughs, shakes her head, pulls the kimono a little tighter.

“Oh, you like me, do you?”

I collapse on the sofa. The leather creaks with protest beneath me. I suddenly feel very tired.

“Yes.”

I realize that it’s true. I like her a lot. The way she is bringing up her daughter alone, the way she works hard at her crappy job, doing things for all the phonies in Cork Street and Churchill’s that they can’t do themselves, dreaming of going back to college. No, she’s not dreaming. She is making it happen. Cleaning floors and toilets in Cork Street and then writing essays about The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in her spare time. It’s impressive. She has more fight in her than anyone I know. I admire her. The way I haven’t admired anyone since Rose.

So I go to put my arms around her, feeling a great undigested chunk of affection mixed with all that Tsingtao welling up inside me. But she pushes me away.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she says, taking a step backward, tightening the kimono a bit more. “I don’t think that would be the greatest idea in the world. Jesus Christ. Do you have to go to bed with all your students? Can’t you just-I don’t know-teach them or something?”

“Jackie, I didn’t mean-”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve. I mean it. This is not funny. What made you think you could come here and have sex with me?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “The way you dress?”

“I should give you a slap. You bloody bastard. You make me so angry.”

“I don’t want you to be angry with me. I just wanted to see you. I’m sorry. I really am. I’ll go.”

“Where? You’re not in Islington now. You think you can just step into the street and flag down a black cab? There are no taxis, no trains. Not at this time. You’re in the sticks now, mate.” She shakes her head, the anger subsiding in the face of my total ignorance. “Don’t you know anything at all?”

So she lets me sleep on her sofa. She says the first train to London isn’t until the morning, and although she thinks I deserve to be curled up in the photo booth on Bansted station, she is going to take pity on me.

She goes upstairs and I hear voices. Two women. No-a woman and a girl. Then Jackie comes back down with a pillow and a single comforter. She throws them at me, still shaking her head, but smiling at the same time, as though, now that she comes to think about it for five minutes, I am funny-pathetic more than offensive-pathetic. She leaves me to it, still adjusting her kimono.

I make up my little bed on the leather sofa, take off my trousers and climb under the comforter. The only sound I can hear is Jackie cleaning her teeth in the bathroom. It is very quiet out here, there’s none of the city’s constant background noise of sirens, faraway voices and the roaring traffic’s boom.

I find myself nodding off, only waking up with a start when I feel someone looking down at me.

It’s Plum in her stripy pajamas.

“Please don’t hurt her,” she says.

Then she is gone.

In the morning I wake up when I hear the front door close. It’s still dark, but there’s the sound of a bicycle being wheeled down the little drive. I push back the comforter and go to the window. And there’s Plum, wrapped up inside one of those big down jackets, a woollen hat jammed down on her head, an orange bag slung around her shoulders, pushing her bike. She sees me, grins and waves. I watch her cycle off down the silent street.

“She’s got a paper route.” Jackie is in the doorway, already dressed. “I hope she didn’t wake you.”

“A paper route? You Day girls work really hard, don’t you?”

“We have to,” she says, and her smile makes her words softer than they really are. “There’s nobody else to do it, is there? Want a cup of coffee?”

I put on my trousers and follow her into the kitchen. My mouth feels dry and sour. Now that the night and the Tsingtao have gone, I am embarrassed to be here.

“How do you feel?” she asks me. “As bad as you look? Surely not quite as bad as that?”

“Sorry. It was a dumb idea to come here. But I didn’t come all the way out here just to sleep with you. I wouldn’t do that.”

“You’re a smooth talker, aren’t you?”

“I just felt like talking to someone. Something happened. Something bad.”

She hands me a cup of coffee. “Want to talk about it now?”

“I don’t know how.”

“Want to give me a clue?”

“It was a girl. At my college.”

“Ah, one of your students. Of course.”

“She had an abortion.”

Then she is not laughing anymore. “That must have been a hard thing to go through.”

“It was the worst. The worst thing.”

“How old is she?”

“Not very old. Early twenties.”

“I was seventeen. When I fell with Plum.” Fell with. Sometimes she uses the expressions of my mother and my grandmother. “Not that I thought about an abortion.”

“You didn’t even think about it?”

“I’m a Catholic. I believe that all life is sacred.”

“That’s a good thing to believe. If you’re going to believe in anything.”

“But having a baby changed my life. I left school. Didn’t go to university. Didn’t get my degree. Couldn’t get a good job. Stayed in Bansted. Not that Bansted is such a bad place.”

“You kept your baby. And it-she-messed up everything.”

She shakes her head. “No, it didn’t. Not really. It just put things on hold for a while. I’m going back to college, aren’t I? Thanks to you.”

“You never regretted it? Having the baby?”

“I can’t imagine a world without my girl in it.”

“She’s lucky to have a mum like you.”

“And she’s unlucky to have a dad like her dad. So I guess it all evens out in the end.”

“What’s wrong with her dad?”

“Jamie? There’s not a lot wrong with him when he’s sober. When he’s had a few, things happen. Usually to me. But he started on Plum, so we left. Two years ago. Got this place. I didn’t recognize him by then.”

“You must have liked him once.”

“You kidding? I was nuts about him. My Jamie. Tall, dark, built like a brick house. He was a good little footballer. Midfield. A good engine, as they say. Very fit. Had a chance of turning professional. Trials with West Ham. Then he did his knee in. The left one. So now he works as a security guard. And gets pissed. And knocks around his new partner. But not me. Not anymore. And not my daughter.”

“Why did you leave it for so long? I don’t mean leaving your husband, leaving Jamie. The education thing. Why wait? If it was so important to you, why didn’t you do it years ago?”

“Jamie didn’t want me to. I think he was a bit jealous. He didn’t want my dream to come true when his dream didn’t. Men are very competitive, aren’t they? Another word for simple. My ex-husband wants the world to have a bad knee.”

“Well, we’ll get you through your exam.” I raise my coffee cup in salute. “And I hope it makes you happy.”

She raises her own cup. “You think it won’t. You think I’m expecting some student paradise that doesn’t really exist. Beautiful young people sitting around talking about The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. And you don’t think it’s like that. You think it’s all a waste of time. Qualifications. Education. Getting my exams, as my old mum would have said. But it wasn’t a waste of time for Rose, was it?”

“Rose?”

“She came from out here, didn’t she?”

“Not far away.”

“If she hadn’t got an education, you would never have met her. If she hadn’t gone to university and become a lawyer and gone to Hong Kong, you would never have known her. If she had had a baby at eighteen with someone else-don’t look at me like that-then what would your life have been like?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without knowing her.”

“You were mad about her, weren’t you?”

“I still am. But what can you do? I loved and lost. I’ve had my turn.”

“Your turn?”

“My turn at-come on, you know. Love. Romance. Relationships. All that stuff.”

She shakes her head. “Well, I don’t think I’ve had my turn. Not after Jamie. Are you kidding? I reckon I deserve a second turn after that lot. I reckon everyone deserves a second go at being happy. Even you, Alfie. You should have a little more faith.”

“A little more faith?”

“That’s right. A little more faith. Don’t be like my ex-husband. Don’t sit around wishing that everyone had a bad knee.”

“I just think you get one chance-one real chance-then it’s gone forever. I don’t think that you can go around starting over again and again. That’s not the real thing, is it? How can it be the real thing if it comes along every few years or so? That makes a mockery of the real thing.”

“Maybe. But come on. What else are you going to do with the rest of your life? You don’t have to stick with your students just because you know they’re going home one day. You don’t have to stick with young women who can’t really hurt you.”

“Is that what you think I do?”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You’re not very smart for a teacher, are you?”

“I’m one of the stupid teachers.”

“Yeah, it shows.”

I watch Jackie washing up our cups in the sink and I think: perhaps she’s right. I don’t want to be like someone’s bitter ex-husband.

I should have a little more faith.

30

A BABY IS LOOKING AT ME.

The baby is as bald and round as a billiard ball, a half-pint-sized Winston Churchill in a pink bodysuit, a thin stream of drool coming from the corner of its pouty little mouth. The baby looks brand new. Everything about it-her? How do you tell? Just by the color of the bodysuit?-looks freshly minted.

The baby is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. And it is watching me. Because it knows. The baby can tell.

Those huge blue eyes follow me as I move slowly toward the hospital’s reception desk. I stop and stare back at the beautiful baby, overwhelmed by its perception.

The baby can see into my heart. The baby can read my mind. The baby knows the terrible thing I have done, the unspeakable act I put on my credit card.

The baby can’t believe it.

I can’t believe it myself.

The baby is surrounded by happy, laughing adults, parents and siblings and grandparents by the look of them, people happy to see the baby, meet it for the first time perhaps, but the baby ignores them all and just kicks its limbs as if it is testing them for the first time; the baby does nothing but lie there and flex its new little arms and legs and watch me, watch me with this terrible accusation.

“You all right, love?”

I nod uncertainly, tearing myself away from the baby, taking my nan’s arm.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about today,” she says.

I reassure her that this is just a checkup, that she has been through the worst, that the fluid is off her lungs and this appointment will soon be over and she will be free. And I truly believe it. But it doesn’t work out like that.

First we are directed to a small waiting area that is so crowded we have to stand. Most of the people here are old and frail, but not all of them; there are young people with no luck who have ended up here fifty years before their time, and it is one of these unlucky young people, a dangerously overweight woman, who gets up to offer my nan her seat.

What everyone waiting here shares is a kind of gentle cynicism. They deal with the indignity and anxiety of this place with little jokes, knowing smiles and endless patience. We are in this thing together, they seem to say, and I feel a rush of love for these people. It is no surprise that my nan acts as though she knows them. They remind me of everyone I grew up with.

Eventually we see the specialist, a doctor whose name my nan has difficulty with, so she always calls him “that nice Indian gentleman,” although I have no idea if he is really an Indian; his name could just as easily be from some other part of the world, and he is a good man, I like him a lot too, so we don’t even complain or roll our eyes or sigh when he immediately tells my nan that he would like her to go and have an X-ray and get a blood test and then come back to him later.

More waiting. More standing room only. Another little ticket that you hold on to until your number appears after a wait that seems never ending.

The blood test is easy enough. I go into the little room with my nan, watch her roll up the sleeve of her blue Marks & Spencer sweater and stare at the needle with a childlike curiosity as the nurse slips it into her pale, papery skin. The nurse sticks a Band-Aid on top of the bubbling pinprick of blood and we are out of there.

I can’t accompany my nan into the X-ray department. People have to get undressed in there, my nan has to get undressed, and so of course I stay in the waiting room while she goes inside to get changed. But the terrible thing is she gets a little confused after she undresses for the X-ray, and I can see her standing in the middle of the corridor of the X-ray department in her hospital smock, and what really does me in is that she hasn’t fastened her smock at the back, she has left it open, so the world can see her poor old back and legs, those bones so delicate they always remind me of a baby bird, and I want to protect her, I want to do up her smock and find out where she needs to go, but I can’t, I am not allowed in there, and she wouldn’t want me in there, wouldn’t want me to see her not coping, with half her clothes off, so she just stands there half-naked in the X-ray department, looking around, her face frowning with confusion, when all she wants is to be at home with Frank Sinatra and the National Lottery and a nice cup of tea, not much to ask for, until a friendly nurse with a loud, cheerful voice sees her and points her in the right direction.

Then we go to see the nice Indian doctor that my nan likes so much, and he tells her-so matter of fact that I will remember it forever-that she is dying.

“We’ve had a look at the result of your biopsy, Mrs. Budd, and I have to tell you that we have found a tumor in the lining of your lung. And, as I would expect in someone of your age, the tumor is malignant.”

They have known this for how long? Hours? Days? Weeks? Certainly before we arrived today, before the hearty good mornings and my nan wandering the X-ray department with her hospital smock undone.

But it is news to us.

Tumor. Malignant. Nobody says the word. And I feel ashamed that nobody in my family-not me, not my mother, not my father-has had the courage to say the word since all this began. We assumed-we were so sure-that the word would go away if we never said it. And here it is, still not being said out loud, but growing in the lining of my grandmother’s lung.

They didn’t know, the doctor says, absolving my family of cowardice at not saying the word. They couldn’t know until the fluid was drained from her lungs and the biopsy had been performed. And he really is a good man, but he does not burst into tears or allow his voice to tremble with emotion when he tells my nan that there is nothing that can be done, no chemo, no surgery, no miracle cure, and that the tumor in the lining of her lung is secondary, meaning that the source of this thing, this terrible thing, is somewhere else, could be anywhere else in her poor old body, and they just don’t know.

It is not the first time that the doctor has given this speech. Perhaps not even the first time today.

More undressing, more examination. When the doctor and I are alone, and my nan is chatting happily to the young nurse on the other side of the screen, I ask him the obvious question.

“How long has she got?”

“In a patient of your grandmother’s age-probably a few months. Perhaps even until the summer.”

He talks about the medical term for what my nan has, the technical word for this pleural tumor-it’s called mesothelioma-and I get him to write it down, mesothelioma, thinking how you should know how to spell the thing that is going to kill you.

When my nan is examined and dressed, she thanks the doctor. She really likes him. She is a woman of courage and manners, and I feel ashamed again, wondering how I will carry myself when this day comes for me.

Outside the hospital her mouth is set in a firm line. I notice how crooked her eyebrows are drawn on today. The gap between her desire to look nice and her inability to do it as well as she once did shreds my heart.

She rubs her side, the side where they drained her lungs, and I remember that we thought it was where the tube had been stuck into her side that was hurting, a wound that wouldn’t heal, but we now know it was always more than that, this pain that comes in great waves and doesn’t let her sleep and takes her from her bed in the middle of the night.

“I’m going to beat this thing,” she declares, and I don’t know what to say, because I know it can’t be beaten-can it?-and so anything I say will sound either like surrender or a lie.

We go back to her little white flat and she slips into her old routine. Kettle on, music on, Sinatra singing “I’ve Got the World on a String,” the Mirror on the coffee table, turned to the TV page, circles in blue ballpoint around the programs she wants to watch while the rest of us are off doing something else when we should be with her, making the most of every day, every moment, and these shaky circles around her favorite TV programs make me feel like crying.

She is singing. I am shaking, scared of what I have to do. I have to call my father, I have to call my mother. But that can wait. Now we sit on the sofa, drinking our hot, sweet tea, listening to Sinatra sing “Someone to Watch over Me,” and my nan holds my hand like she will never let it go.

When I go to the park for the first time in ages, the morning is cold and frosty, the scrubby grass covered in a mist that the weak winter sunlight can’t burn away. He is there, of course, as I knew he would be, and I watch him for a while as he moves under the bare trees with that unhurried power, making what he is doing look like everything-meditation, martial art, physical exercise, breathing lesson and slow, lonely dance. Making every movement special, making every second sacred.

But today George Chang is not alone.

There’s a bunch of young business types in their dry-cleaned running gear politely watching him. There must be ten of them, mostly young men, their soft office bodies pumped up from weight training and contact sports, but there are also a couple of thin women with dyed blonde hair, good-looking but hard as nails. Modern boys and girls. They all look as though they should be going for the burn in a gym, or whatever it is they do in there.

“Alfie?”

It’s Josh. He looks a little heavier than I remember. And I am accustomed to seeing him in a suit from Hugo Boss or Giorgio Armani or Paul Smith, not a tracksuit from Nike. But it is definitely old Josh.

“What are you doing here?” I ask him.

He indicates George.

“Our company sent us to him.”

“What for?”

“Tai Chi is part of our new corporate strategy for stress management. Our firm loses too many person-hours to stress.”

“Person-hours?”

“Yes, too many person-hours. Tai Chi is said to reduce stress levels. And it’s also to help us think outside the box.”

“Think outside the box? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Change the way we use our imagination. Help us think creatively. Stop us using the same old tired business techniques. Think outside the box, Alfie. At first I thought it was just a load of New Age business bollocks, this year’s half-baked corporate philosophy. But I’ve changed my mind after watching Master Chang.”

Master Chang? George never calls himself Master Chang. Who are these posers and what are they doing in our park?

George demonstrates the opening moves of the form. Then he gets them to do it. Or to try. It’s very basic stuff. He doesn’t even get them to put the breathing with the movement. As Josh and his friends wave their arms about, I take George to one side.

“You’re not really teaching these idiots, are you?”

He shrugs. “New students.”

“I don’t understand how they got here. I don’t understand how our park is suddenly full of suits talking about thinking outside the box and person-hours. All these suits talking about Tai Chi saving money for some rich company that has probably got too much money in the first place. This is our park.”

“Their boss comes to Shanghai Dragon. Good client of mine. Lives not far. Big-shot lawyer. Says, ‘George-I want you to teach Tai Chi to some of my people. Hear it good for stress. Will you do it, George?’ I say, sure, why not?”

“Why not? Because they’re not going to stick at it, that’s why not. You think they’re going to stick at it? They’ll last five minutes. Next week it will be something else. Yoga. Muay Thai. Morris Dancing. Anything.”

“How long did you last?”

“That’s not fair. I’ve had a lot on my plate lately.”

He turns and faces me. “Everybody always has a lot on plate. Everybody. Always. Lot on plate. You talk, talk, talk. Talk as though this is part of rat race. One more thing you have to do in busy life. It’s not. Tai Chi is get away from rat race. Understand?”

“But I liked it when it was just you and me, George.”

“Things change.”

“But I don’t like change.”

“Change part of life.”

“But I can’t stand it. I like it when things stay the same.”

He shakes his head impatiently. “Tai Chi all about change. About coping with change. Don’t you know that yet?”

When Josh and the other off-duty suits have finished waving their arms around, George announces that he is going to show us some pushing hands. I’ve never done pushing hands before, I have never even heard of it, but I try to look like I know what I’m doing when George asks me to help him demonstrate.

“Pushing hands,” he says. “Called toi sau in China. Not about strength. About feeling. For two peoples. Can be improvise. Can be set moves. About anticipate.”

That’s the introduction. George is not much of a talker. He prefers to show you rather than tell you.

I copy George. We face each other in a left bow-and-arrow stance-left leg forward and bent, representing a bow, right leg behind and straight, representing an arrow-and, following his example, I lightly place the back of my left wrist against the back of his left wrist. We are hardly touching.

He closes his eyes and slowly starts pushing his hand toward me. Somehow I know what to do. Staying in contact with his wrist, I turn my waist, rolling the back of my hand over his hand, letting him fully extend his arm, then I slowly push back toward him. He receives my force, goes with it, slowly brushes it aside. Our hands never lose contact.

It goes on. We push and yield and neutralize, push and yield and neutralize, and soon I trust myself enough to close my eyes too, letting go of everything around me, to forget about the suits and Josh and person-hours and thinking outside the box, to forget that we haven’t spoken since I disgraced myself at his dinner party, to forget about hospital waiting rooms where they tell you there’s nothing that can be done, to forget the mist on the bare trees and my swollen lips and my chipped tooth, to just feel the light touch of skin against skin, to embrace the giving and taking, relaxing into the ebb and flow, just feeling what I need to do, and becoming what I need to become.