One For My Baby

31

SUDDENLY THE LITTLE WHITE FLAT is too much for my nan. Suddenly it is full of traps to remind you that it’s not the getting old that kills you. It’s the getting sick.

The stairs to her first-floor flat are all at once too steep. She needs to pause to catch her breath on the little half-landing, gasping for air as if she is drowning, her face raised to the ceiling. The bath is suddenly too high to get into without somebody supporting her, so my mother or Plum or one of my nan’s female neighbors-and all of her neighbors are female-has to be there to help her in and out of the water. And the wellmeaning bureaucrats of terminal illness are suddenly all knocking at her front door.

There is a cheerful district nurse who organizes a social worker, meals on wheels once a day and a scarred metal air tank that stands guard by my nan’s favorite chair.

My nan wants to please the district nurse, just as she always wants to please everyone, but the little white flat is her home and although she knows these people are just trying to be helpful, she does not approve of the commode provided by the social worker (“I’m not doing my business in that, dear, thanks all the same”), the fetid meals on wheels are left untouched (“I’ll just have a bit of toast, sweetheart”) and the air tank makes no difference at all to her fits of terrible breathlessness (“I think it’s empty, love”).

But she carries on. She meets her old female friends for coffee and cake and talk, and the talk, the human connection, the human thing, is the point of those meetings. She comes to my mother’s house for lunch on Sunday, she makes her daily trips to the local shops for the tiny supplies of white bread and “a nice bit of ham” that she seems to live on, plus the river of tea and the biscuit mountain.

When she starts to feel uncertain on her feet, the social worker kindly produces a walking stick. My nan rolls her eyes that it has come to this, and brandishes her walking stick in imitation of a doddery old pensioner, which is pretty funny coming from her at this time.

“Ooh, I remember the good old days,” she jeers, waving her walking stick, and we all laugh, even the social worker.

My nan faces cancer in exactly the same way that she has faced life-with good grace, with endless stoicism, with quiet humor.

As she would say herself, she doesn’t like to make a fuss.

Despite the nagging pain in her side from the tumor and despite the desperate battles for breath, for a while life seems to go on in the same old way. There are trips to the shops in the morning, some gentle housework in the afternoon and nights spent watching television, her favored programs circled in shaky blue ballpoint in the newspaper’s TV guide, forever tugging at my heart.

But in the middle of all this ordinary life, I become aware that something extraordinary is happening. The people who love my nan show that they are ready to walk though fire for her.

My mother and my father are there, of course, there every day, although rarely at the same time, and there are countless visits from elderly ladies who live in the nearby flats or who know my nan from the old neighborhood, the old house where my dad grew up, the Oranges for Christmas house, friends from the old life before children grew and husbands died and busy specialists said there was nothing that they could do.

Then there is Plum. Among my parents and the elderly friends, there is this awkward girl who has somehow formed a real bond with my grandmother. Enduring endless hours on trains to and from Bansted, night after night Plum sits with my nan watching the programs that have been circled in the TV guide and selections from her personal collection of wrestling videos featuring The Slab in all his large-breasted glory.

Plum holds my nan’s hand, strokes her forehead and brushes her thin, silver hair, as if this old woman is the most precious thing on the planet.

The district nurse and the social worker look in once a week, but I do not know how we would cope if my nan didn’t inspire so much affection in the people whose lives she has touched. If we had to rely on the kindness of the local council, everything would be lost.

Because someone has to be with my nan all the time now. It’s just too dangerous for her to be alone. We realize that she can lose consciousness at any moment. My nan still calls it “falling asleep,” but the doctor who comes around says these fainting spells are blackouts caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain.

One night I watch as my nan’s eyes close while she is staring at the news, without her usual running commentary of “ridiculous” and “disgusting.”

Her head suddenly drops, her mouth falls open and she pitches forward toward the little fireplace. Before I can move, Plum catches my nan, as Plum has caught her before, and very gently eases her back into her chair.

And after a while it becomes what we think of as normal, an unremarked-upon part of our lives, these blackouts that my nan waves away as nothing that a good night’s sleep couldn’t cure.

The staff room of Churchill’s International Language School is empty. It’s still early. There are a couple of students sneaking a joint down on Oxford Street but nobody is upstairs yet. I dump my shoulder bag on top of the coffee table, and a yellow flyer is lifted up by a gust of wind. The flyer is not one of ours. I pick it up and read it.

Dream Machine.

Cleaning your work place the old-fashioned way-

on hands and knees

There’s a line drawing of what looks like a fifties housewife with a feather duster, both sexy and domestic, like Samantha in Bewitched, and below that there are two telephone numbers. One is an out-of-town number, the other for a mobile. I recognize both of them.

I can hear the sound of her vacuum cleaner across the corridor in Lisa Smith’s room. She’s in there, giving the tatty green carpet what she would call a good going over.

“What’s this meant to be?” I say, waving the flyer.

Jackie smiles brightly. “Didn’t I tell you? Business is booming. I’ve been putting flyers all over West One. I thought I’d drop a few around here. Even though I’ve got the job already.”

She seems very happy. God knows why.

“Dream Machine,” I snort. “You mean you. Dream machine-that’s you.”

Her face falls. “What’s the problem? Even if I get some extra work, it’s not going to interfere with our class. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Why should I mind?”

“I don’t know. But you do mind. I can tell. What’s wrong?”

What’s wrong? I can’t say what’s wrong.

I know I don’t like her working in Churchill’s, cleaning our rooms the old-fashioned way, on her hands and knees. I don’t want the teachers and the students staring straight through her, as though she is nothing. And yet I don’t want her working for the stuck-up snobs in Cork Street or-now that I come to think about it-anybody anywhere else. I don’t know what I want. Something more worthy of her than this. I know I don’t want her here. Not anymore.

“The whole cleaning thing. I don’t know. It’s getting me down.”

She has a laugh at that. “Getting you down? What’s it got to do with you? And if it doesn’t get me down, why should it bother you? I thought there was nothing wrong with cleaning.”

“There’s not.”

“I thought there was dignity in labor.”

“I didn’t say that. Come on. I didn’t say anything about dignity in labor.”

“You told me there was nothing to be ashamed of in doing what I do.”

“That’s right.”

“And yet you are ashamed.”

“I’m not. I just want something better for you. Better than cleaning a toilet that Lenny the Lech has recently taken a leak in. Why should I be ashamed?”

“I don’t know. But you are.”

“That’s ridiculous. I just don’t see why you have to do it here. The place where I work.”

“I have to do it wherever I can. I have to make a living. To pay my bills. Dead simple. I can’t rely on any man to keep me, can I?”

“Is that you, Alfie?”

Vanessa is in the doorway. She stares at Jackie. Jackie stares back. I don’t know if they recognize each other from that first day at my mother’s house. I can’t tell.

“Pardon,” Vanessa says.

“Come in,” Jackie says. “You’re not disturbing us.”

There’s only a few years’ difference in their age but they seem like different generations, Jackie in her blue nylon coat, Vanessa in some little red-and-black number from Agnès B. They look as though they come from different worlds, different lives. And I guess they do.

“I’m looking for Hamish,” Vanessa says. “He has some notes for me.”

“Hamish is not in yet.”

“Okay.”

She looks back at Jackie, as if trying to place her.

“Je crois qu’on se connaît?” Jackie says, and I am dumbfounded until I remember that her two A Levels are in Media Studies and French.

“Non,” Vanessa says. “I don’t think we have met.”

Jackie smiles. But she looks as though she wants to argue about something. “Pourquoi pas?”

Vanessa hovers uncertainly in the doorway. “I go now, Alfie.”

“See you later, Vanessa.”

“C’était sympa de faire ta connaissance,” Jackie laughs. “Ne m’oublie pas!”

“Leave her alone,” I tell Jackie when Vanessa has gone. “She hasn’t done anything to you.”

“Want a bet? She was looking down her nose at me.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because I’m cleaning up after her and all the little snot-nosed bitches like her.”

“I’m so glad you’re not bitter.”

“I’m entitled to be a little bitter. So would you be if you saw the world from down on your hands and knees.”

“I thought you boasted about that. In your stupid flyer.”

She shakes her head. “It’s funny how dirt seems to stick to the people who clean it up. Rather than the people who make it.”

She picks up her light little modern vacuum cleaner and heads for the door.

“But I’ll tell you something for nothing. I’m not ashamed of myself. I don’t feel the need to apologize for making a living any way I can. I thought you’d be pleased about the flyers. I thought you’d be happy that I’m trying to drum up a little extra work to pay my way through college. How naive of me.”

“Sorry.”

“Forget it.”

“The flyer caught me off guard. I don’t know. You’ll be an undergraduate soon. That’s how I think of you.”

This is meant to placate her. It doesn’t.

“No problem. I’ll try to be gone by the time you arrive in the morning. You and all your hot little students. Then you can all pretend that the place was cleaned by magic.”

“Don’t be so angry.”

She turns on me, nearly catching my face with one of the vacuum cleaner’s furry attachments.

“Why not? You’re the worst kind of snob. You can’t clean up by yourself, but you despise the people who do it for you.”

“I don’t despise you.”

“But I embarrass you. Jackie the cleaning lady. Who wants to be a student, as though it’s the greatest thing in the world. When it’s nothing at all.”

“You don’t embarrass me, Jackie.”

“You don’t want to be around me. You don’t like the way I talk, the way I dress, the job I do.”

“That’s not true.”

“You felt like sleeping with me the other night. But only because you were drunk.”

“I like you. I respect you. I admire you.”

I realize that all of this is true. She doesn’t believe me.

“Sure you do.”

“Come out with me on Saturday night.”

“What? Come where?”

“My friend Josh is getting engaged. An old friend. We lost touch for a while but he’s invited me to the party. And I’m inviting you.”

“I don’t know. Plum-I don’t know.”

“You can’t have it both ways, Jackie. You can’t hate the world for shutting you out and then hate the world when you’re invited in. Stop feeling like a martyr, will you? Do you want to come out with me or not?”

She thinks about it for a moment.

“But what should I wear?” she says.

“Wear what you usually wear,” I tell her. “Wear something pretty.”

The day comes when my nan can’t carry on as normal. The pain is too bad, the breathlessness is too fierce. She is afraid of falling asleep in public, afraid of pitching into the road with no Plum to catch her and ease her back into her favorite chair.

So she stays at home. And then increasingly she stays in bed. There will be no more trips to the shops, no more coffee and cake and talk with her friends. Not now. Perhaps not ever.

I sit with her thinking that she is the one person in the world whose love for me was uncomplicated and unconditional. Everybody else’s love was mixed up with other things-what they wanted me to be, what they hoped I could become, their dreams for me.

But my nan just loved me.

Knowing that I am losing her, I take her hand, the bones and veins more visible than they should be, and I stare anxiously at her face, the face that I have loved for a lifetime. Her eyebrows are drawn on all wrong and crooked, and those uncertain pencil marks chew me up inside.

“Are you okay?” I say, asking her the most stupid question in the world, desperate for reassurance.

“I’m lovely,” she tells me. “And you’re lovely too.”

My nan still thinks I’m lovely. And I wonder if she knows me better than everyone else, or not at all.

32

H E LOOKS LIKE THE KIND OF GARDENER who should have his own TV show.

He is tanned and fit, casually funky, his sun-bleached hair pulled back in a ponytail and tied with a yellow elastic band. Inside his New Zealand rugby shirt, his body is lean and hardened by all that pruning, or whatever it is he does.

The funky gardener is wearing well. What is he? Fifty? At the very least, despite those space-age sneakers and a pair of combat shorts with an impressive number of pockets. But he is well preserved and has that kind of genial openness that you find in Aussies and Kiwis, or at least the ones who come over here and enjoy showing off about how easy-going they are compared to all us sour-puss Brits.

My mother and Joyce watch him snip quickly and expertly at the rose bushes.

“Spring’s almost here,” says the gardener. “Time to get rid of all your unproductive old stems and clear the way for your lovely new shoots.” He turns and flashes them a wide, white smile, snipping all the while. “Bish, bash, bosh.”

I expect them to set about him with their gardening tools for daring to touch my mum’s roses without permission. But they both seem charmed by the handsome gardener.

“What your age?” Joyce asks him.

“Ha ha!” he says. “Ha ha ha!”

“Good money as gardener?” she demands. “You marry?”

Under that tan he is blushing, which makes me think that beyond the slick charm offensive he must be a decent guy. Bastards don’t blush, do they? My old man isn’t the biggest blusher in the world.

“I notice you’re pruning just above the bud,” my mother says, restoring some order.

“This young lady’s got sharp eyes,” he says, and now it’s my mum who is laughing and going red. The gardener gets serious. “You always prune just above to control the shape of the bush, Mrs. Budd.”

“Not Mrs. Budd,” Joyce informs him. “She not married anymore. Divorce come through. Decree absolute. All finish.”

“Joyce!”

“She single.”

“Well, she’s too good-looking to be single for very long,” the gardener says.

My mother throws her head back and laughs, having the time of her life.

“Yes,” she says, “and too clever to ever get married again.”

“Never say never, Mrs. Budd.”

“Sandy,” says my mother.

“Sandy,” says the gardener, savoring it in his mouth. “Sandy.”

It shouldn’t have worked out like this, but it is my mother who looks as though she has been released from some kind of open prison, with time off for good behavior. And it is my father, the one who made the break for freedom, who looks like the partner who got left, dumped, elbowed.

Now how did that happen?

While my mother has lost weight, done something to her hair and slowly put the pieces of her life back together, finding herself in her garden and in her friendship with Joyce Chang, my father seems to have unraveled before my eyes.

My mother helps Joyce in her garden, watches what she eats, works in her own garden. My father drinks too much, eats rubbish, doesn’t work enough. There’s a sad bloated look about him. For the first time that I can remember, he looks much older than his years.

Living alone in his tiny rented flat, he seems lost between two lives, the old one with my mother as a family man and the new one with Lena as a born-again mister lover-lover. With both my mother and Lena out of his life, he is neither a family man nor mister lover-lover. He is in a twilight zone of takeout pizzas and rented rooms, living the life of a student although he is almost sixty.

I see him every day at my nan’s flat. I watch him talking to my mum about what they should do. The situation seems to change daily. Phrases that meant nothing to us a while ago-words like “housebound” and “bedridden”-are now charged with meaning, coming home to us in all their awful reality.

Can she live here? Should she be moved? What does the doctor think? When will the doctor see her again?

My parents are polite to each other. My father treats my mother with an almost painful formality, as though he is well aware that the manner of his leaving inflicted a terrible wound that will take years to heal. She is far more natural with him, allowing herself to feel frustration or exasperation when they can’t decide if it is too soon to start calling hospices or homes, and then blowing her top-in her own sweet-natured, moderate way-because she feels guilty for even thinking about putting my nan into care.

My old man never lets his guard down that far. It’s only with me that he allows himself to be irritable.

When my mother has gone I put The Point of No Return on the stereo, knowing my nan likes to fall asleep to a bit of music. It’s one of the great underrated Sinatra albums, the last thing Frank recorded for Capitol in September 1961. A lot of Sinatra fans think that The Point of No Return was a bit of a throwaway, just a fulfilment of contractual obligations, but there’s some timeless stuff on there. “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “As Time Goes By,” “There Will Never Be Another You.”

All those songs that, when Sinatra sings, somehow make you feel a little less lonely.

“Does it always have to be Frank bloody Sinatra?” my father says. “Christ. I had eighteen years of this stuff when I was growing up.”

“She likes it,” I say.

“I know she likes it. I’m just saying that maybe we could put on something else once in a while. Some soul music or something.”

“She’s eighty-seven,” I tell him, ashamed that we are bickering about music while the woman who is my grandmother and his mother is in the next room being eaten up by cancer. “She hasn’t got any Bee Gees records. Sorry.”

“The Bee Gees are not soul music,” says my old man.

“What are they then?”

“A bunch of buck-toothed disco assholes.”

“I can tell you’re a writer. You’ve got a real way with words, haven’t you?”

“I’m off duty.”

“You’re always off duty.”

When Plum arrives he drives me home in the SLK and I find myself wishing that I could hate him more than I really do. His life is unhappy, and while I believe that he deserves to be punished for walking out on my mother, I wonder if the sad, undergraduate life he is living is not too much.

Does he really deserve all this? The nights alone in rented rooms, the takeout pizzas, the collapsing body, the abiding contempt in my heart?

Just for wanting one more go at getting it right?

“Did they know Rose?” Jackie asks me as we are leaving my flat.

I turn to look at her. She is wearing some Western designer’s idea of a cheongsam. It’s midnight blue with red piping, very tight fitting, cut short with a small slit up the side, but she doesn’t look anywhere near as tarty as she usually does. In fact, she looks great.

“Did who know Rose?”

“These people we’re seeing tonight. The people at the party. Did they know your wife?”

“Josh knew her. He worked with her in Hong Kong. He’s another lawyer. Nobody else. Why do you ask?”

“I just want to know if I’m going to be compared to her. To Rose. I want to know if they are all going to be looking at me and saying-oh, she’s no Rose, is she? She’s not like our Rose.”

“Nobody’s going to compare you to Rose, okay?”

“Honest?”

“Honest. She was never their Rose. They never knew her. Only Josh. And he’s not-he doesn’t-oh God. Jackie, shall we just go?”

“How do I look?”

She smoothes the sides of her dress with her hands, and something about the small, insecure gesture tugs at my heart.

“You look-incredible.”

“Really?”

“Really. Incredible is exactly the word. Believe me. I know words. I’m an English teacher. Incredible, adjective. Hard to believe, amazing. You really do.”

Her smile just beams.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I just feel that Rose is this perfect woman and nobody can ever compete with her and nobody can ever be as good as her.”

“Jackie-”

“This perfect woman who never said the wrong thing and always knew exactly what to wear and who always looked beautiful.”

“How do you know what she looked like? How do you know how she dressed?”

“I’ve seen enough pictures of her. In your shrine. Sorry, I mean-your flat.”

“Look, you don’t have to compete with Rose. And nobody’s going to compare you to her.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Apart from me, I think.

But that’s nothing personal.

I’ve done it to every woman I’ve met since Rose died.

I just can’t stop myself.

I look at them all-Yumi, Hiroko, Vanessa, Olga, Jackie, all of them, even the smart ones, even the beautiful ones, even the incredible ones-and I always think the same thing to myself.

That’s not her.

33

SOMEONE BUZZES US UP to the third-floor flat of the house in Notting Hill. We can hear the roar of the party behind the closed front door. Laughter, glasses clinking, everyone speaking at once. I go to knock. Jackie stops me.

“Wait, wait.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, Alfie. I mean, I really don’t know. What am I doing here? Why am I here? What’s the point? Really?”

“To meet my friends,” I say. “To have a good time. Okay?”

She shakes her head uncertainly but I go ahead and knock. Nobody answers. I knock louder, longer, and Tamsin opens the door, pretty and friendly, blonde and barefoot, smiling at me as though I have never disgraced myself in this flat, as though I didn’t act like a prize dickhead after one Tsingtao too many, as though I am her best friend in the whole wide world. I do like her. There’s a generosity of spirit about her that disarms me. We kiss cheeks, squeeze arms, and she turns on Jackie with wonder.

“I love your dress,” Tamsin says. “Where did you get it? Tian Art? Shanghai Tang?”

“No,” Jackie says. “Basildon.”

There’s a second of silence. Then Tamsin throws back her head and laughs. She thinks Jackie is joking.

“I’ll give you the address if you like,” Jackie says, smiling uncertainly. “It’s near the market. A shop called Suzie Wong. They say Posh Spice went there once. But I don’t believe it.”

“Come in and meet everyone,” Tamsin says, ushering us inside.

The place is packed. Everyone seems to know each other. Champagne flutes are put in our hands, then someone-a woman-gasps with shock at the sight of Tamsin’s engagement ring and she is whisked away to display it. There is something overstated about these people. Every twist and turn in a conversation-about property prices, private schools and, above all, work-is greeted with something approaching awe.

Josh is in the middle of the room braying about Tai Chi.

“Taught by this marvelous little Chinaman. Really knows his onions. Damn good for stress. Encourages you to think outside the box, Tai Chi.”

Josh begins waving his arms around, champagne sloshing from his flute.

“Oh, I know Tai Chi,” says a woman I vaguely recognize. India. From the dinner party. “It’s the exercise tape by that big black man.”

“That’s Tae Bo, darling,” somebody says, and they all have a good chuckle about her adorable mistake.

“Tai Chi, Tae Bo, tie-dyed-it’s all the same to me!” India chortles, her thin little face creasing with laughter.

“They’re so confident,” Jackie whispers. “Even when they say something really, really stupid.”

I recognize Dan, India’s husband, and Jane, the fat, pretty girl from the dinner party, who seems to have lost some weight and gained a man. She nods at me with some coolness. I can’t blame her. Dan stares right through me. It’s not hostility. I think he probably has the memory banks of a tropical fish.

“Old Josh getting married,” says Dan. “How does a woman know when her husband’s dead?”

“The sex is the same but you get to use the remote control,” says Jackie.

“What’s the difference between a girlfriend and a wife?” says Josh.

“Forty-five pounds,” says Jackie.

“What’s the difference between a boyfriend and a husband?” says Josh.

“Forty-five minutes,” says Jackie.

“Bloody funny,” says Dan.

We are having a good time, Jackie and I, knocking back our champagne and sort of holding on to each other. The party swirls around us. There is something in the English middle class that reminds me of the Cantonese. It is a kind of glorious indifference. They truly don’t care about you. It’s not hostility. They just don’t give a monkey’s. And if that doesn’t bother you, it can be quite relaxing to be around them.

Then somebody asks Jackie the standard metropolitan middle-class question, and it all goes out of key.

“And what do you do?”

It’s Jane. The fat girl who has started working out, and who looks pretty good now, and who must be feeling pretty good too with her quiet boyfriend in the glasses behind her, his arms around her newly slim waist as if he is afraid of her getting away. And although I know that it is only the standard question on London nights such as this, it still feels as if the question to Jackie has a certain edge, as if Jane is getting her own back on me for not falling for her over the warm, fancy salad.

“What do I do?” Jackie says, and my heart sinks, because we were having such a good time tonight, and I love to see her trading dumb jokes with Josh and Dan and whispering little comments to me on the proceedings and the people and just quietly enjoying herself. Now Jane has gone and spoiled everything. And I once thought she was nice.

“Yes. What do you do-I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Jackie.”

“Jackie,” Jane says, as though Jackie is an impossibly exotic name that she has never heard before. Which is a distinct possibility, I suppose.

“I’ve got my own company,” Jackie says.

They are impressed. They all want to be a credit to capitalism. They look at Jackie with new eyes. They are thinking-a dot-com start-up? Or a go-getting little PR company working out of one room in Soho? Or possibly something in the fashion game? The dress is rather striking.

“Dream Machine,” Jackie says. “That’s the name of my company.”

“Dream Machine,” says Jane, with a grudging respect. “What kind of line are you in?”

“Well,” says Jackie. “It’s a cleaning service.”

I want to stop her while she is ahead, get her to cash in her chips and leave the table, but the champagne and the polite, interested expressions on all the flushed, well-fed faces around her are encouraging her to go further.

“Dream Machine cleans offices all over the West End of London. We’ve got this line: cleaning the old-fashioned way-on our hands and knees.”

“Money in that,” Josh says. “Good money, I’ll warrant. Get the old bog holes sparkling, mate. Can’t beat it, can you? Key to the executive washroom and all that.”

“Fab!” India says, as though nobody has ever thought of cleaning offices before in the history of the world.

Jackie smiles her happy, beaming smile, very pleased with herself, and I think she’s gotten away with it.

But she hasn’t. Jane is still watching her.

“So you’ve got this-what?-army of Mrs. Mops who go around scrubbing and scouring all over London?”

And I think to myself-I’m so glad I gave you the cold shoulder, you cruel bitch. You were never nice at all. Just overweight and lonely, which is not quite the same as being nice.

“No,” Jackie says. “There’s just me. Sometimes I get a friend in. If there’s extra work. But usually it’s just me.”

“Oh,” Jane says. “You’re Mrs. Mop.”

Then they are all laughing at Jackie, and she can’t do what they all do, she can’t laugh at herself and make it nothing, defuse the lonely moment, take the sting out of the words with the magic trick of just not caring; her life is too hard for her not to take it seriously, to take everything seriously, so she has to stand there going red while Jane and India and Josh and Dan and Jane’s four-eyed boyfriend all cackle with glee.

But then it passes, because I know there is no real harm in these people, except possibly Jane, and soon they are talking about the politics of housework and chore wars and feminism’s response to the fact that somebody has to clean toilets, all these half-chewed scraps of public debate that they have picked up from some Sunday tabloid that they skimmed through a redwine hangover. From here they glide effortlessly into a conversation about how difficult it is to hire someone you can trust to clean your home, but by now Jackie is pulling on my sleeve, her lovely face still burning.

“I want to leave.”

“You can’t leave.”

“Why not?”

“Because then they win.”

“They win anyway. They always win.”

We stay. But the night has gone flat for both of us. She makes half-hearted conversation only with people who approach her first. I retreat with her to a corner and make small talk about the prints on the wall, Tamsin’s ring, any rubbish that comes into my head. Just before we leave, when she goes off to the toilet, Josh pulls me to one side.

“I like her,” he says. “She’s nice.”

“I like her too.”

“But, my dear old Alfie, when are you going to get yourself a proper woman?”

“What does that mean? A proper woman?”

“It’s always-I don’t know-someone inappropriate. Your little harem of foreign girls. Very nice and all that. A different flavor for every day of the week. I’m not knocking it, mate. I’ve been in my fair share of foreign parts too, as you well know. But you cannot be serious, man. Not if you think you can make the hot and spicy stuff last a lifetime. It’s inappropriate. And now Mrs. Mop and her tickling stick.”

“Don’t call her that.”

“Sorry. But, come on, Alfie. When are you going to get real? She’s no Rose, is she?”

“I think Rose would have liked her. I think Rose would have thought she was funny and bright.”

“Oh, she’s horny enough, in an obvious sort of way. She is definitely wise to the rise in your Levis.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“But what’s so admirable about cleaning floors for a living? I mean, just because you’re poor, it doesn’t make you a good person, does it?”

“She’s bringing up a kid alone. A girl. Twelve years old. I think anyone who does that has got some guts.”

“She’s got a child? Then I think you’re the one with guts, Alfie. I wouldn’t go out with someone who was dragging around a reminder of the man that came before me. If you’ll pardon the expression.” He raises his champagne glass in mock salute. “You’re a better man than me.”

“I never doubted it, Josh.”

We laugh, but there is no warmth or humor in our laughter, and I wonder what I am doing in this place, with these people. Is it because I don’t have anywhere else to go? Or do I secretly want to join them, to be able to laugh that easily and chat that mindlessly and care so little about everything under the sun? Perhaps I shouldn’t be so scared of caring. Perhaps that has been my problem.

“What do you call it when a woman is paralyzed from the waist down?” says Dan.

“Marriage,” says Josh, and the room roars as Jackie and I leave the apartment.

She is silent in the back of the black cab on the way to Liverpool Street.

“I thought you were the best-looking woman there,” I say. “And the smartest.”

“Me too. So why do I feel so bad?”

I can’t answer that.

And I watch her back as she walks down the platform and gets on the train for the long ride out into Essex. She doesn’t turn around. But just as I am about to walk away, she sticks her head out of the window and waves, smiling, as if to say: don’t worry, they can’t hurt me for long, it’s going to be okay in the end.

She’s brave. She is. That’s exactly the word. Jackie is a brave woman.

Ah, I think to myself.

That could be her.

34

S OMETIMES I THINK THAT THE DEAD live in dreams. Heaven, the afterlife, the next world, whatever you want to call it-it’s all in our dreams.

After Rose died, I saw her in my dreams. Not often. Only a few times. But those dreams were so real that I will never forget them. They seemed as real as our wedding day, as real as the day we met, as real as the day she died.

And I still don’t know what to make of those dreams-were they just the product of loss and imagination and grief? Or was that really her? They didn’t feel like something that I had made up. They felt far more real than most of the waking days of my life.

In the dream that haunts me most of all, she was walking by this playing field called South Green near the streets where she was a little girl. Everything was exactly as I remembered it-Rose, South Green, the little string of quiet shops on one side of the gently sloping field. What was different was this wall of glass between us. It reached to the sky. It didn’t bother Rose, this wall of glass-or me-it didn’t stop her smiling that same warm, goofy smile. But it kept us apart, that wall of glass, and when I asked her if she could stay, her face crumpled and she started to cry, shaking her head.

She was happy enough. But she couldn’t stay. That made her sad.

And that made me believe that the dead live in our dreams.

Take Frank Sinatra. If you want to visit Sinatra’s grave, you have to go to Palm Springs in California, then you go to the Desert Memorial Park cemetery, and you will find that Frank is buried in Area B-8, lot 151.

I’ve never been. I’m not a big cemetery man. I haven’t even been to Rose’s grave since the funeral. I don’t think it would upset me, being at her graveside, in fact I think I would find it quite soothing, a trip out to that small church on a hill above the suburban neighborhood where she grew up. The reason I don’t go is not that it makes me sad or I can’t be bothered, it’s just that I don’t believe she’s really there, just as I don’t believe that Sinatra-his essence, his spark, the thing that made him the man he was-is in the Desert Memorial Park cemetery in Palm Springs. Sinatra is somewhere else. And so is Rose.

If you want to remember the dead-or rather if you want to see the dead, if you want to meet them, to see them smile, to reassure yourself that they are at peace now-then you have to look inside yourself. That’s where you will find them. That’s where the dead live.

My nan has started to see the dead in her dreams. What is a little bit scary is that sometimes she is awake when she has these dreams. She doesn’t need to sleep to see her remembered dead. They come to her anyway.

To make using the phone a little easier, I buy her this portable job and tap in all her most used numbers. My mum. My dad. Plum. Me. A few of her old ladies. The doctor’s office. And the next day she tells me that her husband has programmed the new phone, and wasn’t that good of him? My granddad, who has been dead for twelve years.

I don’t know what to do. Should I just humor her? Or gently remind her that her husband is long gone? I can’t let it go. I am afraid that she will slip away into madness if she can’t tell the difference between my grandfather and me.

“Nan,” I say. “Do you remember? It was me who put your numbers into the new phone. It wasn’t Granddad, was it?”

She stares at me for a long time. Then a dim light seems to switch on somewhere inside her brain and she shakes her head angrily. But I don’t know if she thinks that it’s her who has got it wrong. Or me.

It is becoming hard for Plum to be around her. My nan chats about brothers who died long ago, she talks about her husband coming to see her, she goes back even further-to her own mother and father, to the daughter who died as a tiny child, my dad’s sister, pneumonia, happened all the time back then, a death that gave a lot of emotional clout to the first chapter of Oranges for Christmas.

My nan talks about the dead as if they are living, as if they are all still around, and Plum is not quite thirteen, her life has just begun, she has no experience of death, and she doesn’t know what to think, what to do. I don’t feel so very different from Plum.

“It freaks me out, Alfie. She talks about them as if they’re real.”

“Maybe they are, Plum. To her. I don’t know.”

So Plum goes off to catch the last train back to the suburbs, back to Bansted, and I sit with my nan, holding her hand until she falls asleep, although by now sleep can come in the middle of the day or not at all, day and night mean less and less.

We play the old songs on the stereo, Sinatra and Dino and little Sammy in all their pomp and glory, so full of life and love those anthems from the fifties, so full of hope and joy, and the ghosts softly gather around my grandmother’s bed, the brothers lost, the husband gone, the dead child, the friends of long ago, her mother and her father, all of them slowly becoming more real than the living.

To my surprise, I find that I am dreading the day when Jackie sits her exam. At first I think it is because she has awakened some long-dormant passion for teaching. But it’s far more than that. What she has awakened in me is the quiet pleasure you feel in the company of someone you know and like and enjoy being around.

We sit there with our books, sometimes talking, sometimes saying nothing, sometimes arguing as though writing and writers are the most important thing in the world, and I realize that I have come to treasure every second in her presence. I remember how much I used to love it. Being together.

Jackie is the best of my students. Her mind is sharp, curious, challenging. She works hard, in class and on her own, and although her job means that her days often start early and finish late, she always gets her homework and course work delivered on time.

But she is the first student I have had since my years at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys to turn up for a lesson with a black eye.

“What happened to you?”

“I walked into something hard and thick.”

“A door?”

“My ex-husband.”

“Jesus Christ, Jackie, you should go to the police.”

“For a domestic? You kidding? The police are not interested in a domestic.”

“It’s not a domestic. How can it be a domestic? You’re not even married anymore.”

“Jamie hasn’t realized that yet. He’s always hanging around. Outside the house. Following me.”

“Does he see Plum?”

“On and off. He’s more interested in who’s sleeping with me than my daughter. Our daughter. I’ve told him that nobody is sleeping with me. He doesn’t believe it.”

“He gave you a black eye because he thinks you’re sleeping with someone?”

She laughs bitterly. “He’s the jealous kind, my ex. Always feels sorry afterward. Says he only did it because he loves me. Because he’s crazy with jealousy. He thinks I should be flattered, he does. Flattered to be battered.”

“Who does he think you’re sleeping with?”

“Well…”

Someone rings my front door bell.

“Don’t answer that,” Jackie tells me.

“It’s not him, is it? He’s followed you here? He’s not jealous. He’s nuts.”

“Really, Alfie.” She seems frightened. I have never seen her frightened before. It infuriates me. I feel so angry with this man. “Don’t let him up here.”

“I’m not letting him up here.”

“Thank God. Just ignore him.”

“I’m going down to see him.”

“Alfie!”

But I am out of my flat and down the flight of stairs where I can see a broad, shadowy figure on the other side of the frosted glass. I throw back the front door and there he is-an athlete who has run to fat, still packing plenty of muscle although it is now larded with the aftereffects of too much junk food and designer beer. He must have been good-looking once-tall, dark, a little dangerous-looking. Handsome if not exactly pretty, back in the days when he was a boy wonder with a ball. But now life has made him bitter and mean. He looks like the worst kind of bouncer, the kind that actually wants you to step out of line.

Jackie’s Jamie.

Before I can open my mouth he has wrapped his hairy fingers around my windpipe and swung me into the street, pushing me backward into a little row of trash cans where I fall flat on my ass, getting stuck in this ridiculous sitting position as Jamie proceeds to whack me around the head with a trash can lid.

The Slab, I think to myself. Didn’t I see someone attack The Slab with a trash can lid? Didn’t No-Neck Toledo assault The Slab with a trash can lid at SuperSlam ’98? What would The Slab do in a situation like this? I can’t remember, for the life of me. So I just sit there, covering my head with my hands, my bum pulsating with pain.

“Stay away from my wife, you fucking bastard!” Jamie is screaming at me in the kind of London accent that you so rarely hear in London these days. “Stop giving her all these ideas about going back to fucking college! You with your books and stuff! You’re giving her all these ideas! And keep your fucking hands off her!”

The trash can lid pounds down on my arms and shoulders with a flat, metallic sound that has my neighbors leaning out of their windows, although they are not so concerned that they do anything more than watch. Jackie is hanging on to Jamie’s back, beating the side of his head with her fists, and I reflect that this is probably hurting him more than me. But I am the one who is being publicly shamed.

“You are so stupid!” Jackie shouts at him. “Teachers don’t sleep with their students!”

That’s not strictly true, of course, but I am touched by her efforts. I don’t know when he would ever have stopped if it wasn’t for Jackie.

“Just stay away from her,” he says, panting for breath. “And stop making her think that she’s something she’s not.”

Then he is gone and Jackie is helping me to my feet, brushing off the bits of pizza and egg fried rice and takeout curry that have somehow attached themselves to my clothes.

“You asked me what my marriage was like,” she says, indicating Jamie as he strides off down the street with his what-the-bleeding-hell-you-looking-at swagger. “That’s exactly what it was like.”

They talk about people bravely fighting cancer, but in the end the disease inflicts the ultimate cruelty. It doesn’t matter how brave you are. Cancer robs you of yourself.

“This is not me,” my nan says, as I help her to the bathroom. “This is not me.”

She is in pain, terrible pain, and although for so long she has fought this disease with humor and courage, her life is now narrowing down to a sharp edge of unbearable suffering.

She has never been a woman who is prone to self-pity, despair, fear, all the weak, dark thoughts that can make you jump at shadows. But now she clearly feels that it is becoming all too much, that she is fighting a battle that she can only lose, that her humor and bravery and stoicism are all meaningless because there can only be one ending to this thing.

Cancer has kicked the stuffing out of her. Cancer has stolen her sense of self.

I stand outside the bathroom door waiting for her to emerge. There is still so much that my father and I rely on the women to do-my mum, Plum, Joyce, my nan’s old female friends. Even at this late hour, my dad and I never go into the bathroom with her, we never wash her. Even in the midst of the ravages of terminal illness, even with cancer staring us in the face, a kind of modesty prevails. For her sake as well as our own.

But tonight is different. Although she has eaten next to nothing for days, doesn’t even drink more than a sparrow’s sip of the diluted orange cordial that sits on her bedside table, tonight I hear her moaning shortly after I have helped her into bed and turned out the lights and left her. I hear her moaning as though something unthinkable has happened.

She is wailing when I go into the room, really wailing as if she never knew it could be this bad, but it is soon clear from the smell in the little bedroom that it is not the endless pain of the tumor in her side that is causing her distress. The smell in the room is coming from her bed. This has never happened before. How could I not have seen it coming? And how can I deal with it?

There is only one thing to do. I reasure my nan that it doesn’t matter, that this is nothing, although when I pull back the sheets and see that the mess is everywhere-on her nightshirt, the bedclothes, her hands-I am deeply shocked and uncertain if I can cope with this moment, this thing I have to do because there’s no one else here to do it.

It is her distress that helps me to do what I must do, it is her humiliation that somehow both steels me and softens me-“Oh, Alfie, it just slipped out of me, oh, this is so embarrassing, oh, look at me, Alfie”-and I am filled with such an overwhelming love for her that dealing with this thing becomes natural.

Not easy. Never easy. But natural.

I help her gently from her bed, telling her that this is nothing at all for us, for her and me, that we can get through it together, we will get through it together, and I take her to the bathroom where I help her out of her soiled nightshirt and into the bath, and I run the hot water, as all the time she cries with embarrassment and shame, and I see my grandmother naked for the first time, and I get soap and water on a wash-cloth and I softly say all the words of reassurance as I clean her up, as gentle as a mother with her child, just as she once cleaned me.

35

ZENG AND YUMI ARE OUTSIDE THE ENTRANCE to Churchill’s, handing out flyers. They both look a little different today. I suppose they are growing up.

Zeng is in a suit, his usually unkempt hair-“like a dog bit it,” the other Chinese students say-now neat and tidy, slicked down for his interview this morning at a nearby college. Yumi has stopped bleaching her hair, gradually reverting to her natural color for her return to Japan, and the beautiful, glossy blackness is starting to streak her blond thatch.

“How did the interview go, Zeng?”

“Going to do MBA from October. Very useful for doing business in China. But offer dependent on exam results. Need good English to do MBA.”

“You’ll get a good enough mark to do your MBA.” I turn to Yumi. “And you’ve got a new look too.”

“Going to work in an office,” she says. “Big company in Tokyo. Can’t have yellow hair. Not in Tokyo office. Not ever again. Blond no more forever.”

She hands me a leaflet. At first glance it looks exactly like one of our college flyers. The border is still made up of all the flags of the world, the centerpiece is still a clumsy silhouette of Winston Churchill. But in this one Winnie is holding a joint the size of a Cornetto rather than his usual stogie.

Come to Churchill’s Karaoke

End of term sing-song

Say good-bye to all your friends

Up in the staff room Hamish and Lenny are looking at the same flyer.

“Bloody karaoke,” Lenny says. “It’s the death of the dancing class. There was a time when the end-of-term do was in a disco.”

“Nobody under fifty or over ten says disco anymore, Lenny,” I tell him.

“Bit of dirty dancing under the strobe lights,” he reminisces, ignoring me. “Up close and personal for the slow numbers. Is that an Evian bottle in your pocket or are you just glad to see me? Lovely, mate. Now it’s all karaoke. Standing there like a jerk croaking along to Abba numbers. Following the bouncy ball on the teleprompter. Always some dippy couple tripping along the beach on the little film. Where’s the fun in that, mate?”

“The interesting thing about karaoke is that it’s popular in countries where expression of emotion is frowned upon,” Hamish says. “China. Japan. All of East Asia, really. Social convention means that they can’t express themselves openly in everyday life. But they can do it in song at karaoke.”

“Whereas if we want to express ourselves in this country,” Lenny says, “we can just go into a public toilet and pull our trousers down.”

“You going to this, Alfie?” Hamish says.

“I’m not sure.”

“Are you kidding?” Lenny says. “This man is legendary among the student body. They all admire his technique with a hand-held.”

I think I will pass on Churchill’s karaoke, but not for the reasons that Lenny the Lech wants to avoid it. I spent enough time in Hong Kong to have purged myself of the embarrassment factor that makes most of my countrymen squirm in a karaoke bar.

But I suspect that the night will feel like one long good-bye, that it will be an out-of-tune wake for youth and freedom, that we will soon all be blond no more forever.

I watch my class working on all the tenses that can be used to refer to the future. Present simple, future perfect, present continuous, future perfect continuous. Yumi and Zeng. You go, you meet. Hiroko and Gen. You will have traveled, you will have met. Vanessa and Witold. I am starting. She is going. But not Olga, she has gone, dropped out, disappeared into the city with her boyfriend. Where are you going to go? What are you going to do?

I realize how much I will miss my students. How much I will miss them all.

They are still coming to my lessons, I still see them every day; in fact with the exam coming up fast, they are attending classes more regularly than they ever have, and if they cut back on anything then it is nights at General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen or the Eamon de Valera or the Pampas Steak Bar, but already their talk is turning to their new lives. Their time at Churchill’s International Language School is almost over. Soon they will go and I will stay. I miss them already.

And I wonder if it will always be this way-another year, another set of faces, on and on forever, a series of hellos and good-byes without end.

You will go, you will meet.

My students are happy. They are talking of going home, of taking degrees here in London, of traveling to faraway lands. They are young and everything is before them, everything is exciting-study and travel and work, nothing is less than a great adventure. But a weight seems to be pushing down on me when I hear them talking about their new lives.

You just get used to someone, and then they leave you.

“What will it be like?” I ask Jackie. “Your life as a student, I mean. When you’re taking your BA, going to the University of Greenwich, all of that. How do you imagine it?”

She is sitting by the window in my flat, packing up her books to leave. The lesson is over. The exam is not far away. Her books are no longer new. The days are getting longer.

“Well, I don’t know if I’m going to be a student yet, do I? My place at Greenwich depends on my English result.”

“Are you kidding? I never saw anyone work as hard as you do. You’ll get your grade. Come on-tell me about life as a student. You must have thought about it.”

She laughs.

“Only for the last twelve years or so. I don’t know what it will be like. I’ll be a lot older than the other students. I’ve been married, I’ve got a kid. Most of them probably still get their washing done by their mums. And when they go off to their wild parties, I’ll be working. I’ll still have to work, you know.”

“But you think you’ll be happier?”

“I know I’ll be happier. I’ll be doing what I want to do. I’ll be making something of my life. For myself and for my daughter. And it will be interesting. Great writers, great writing, talking about ideas, being around people who care about books, who don’t worry about getting above themselves. I can’t wait.”

I can see her there. I can see her growing into the person she has always wanted to be. I can see her realizing that it’s not too late, that she is young enough and smart enough to have another go, another try at getting it right. And she will be good. It’s true she will be ten years older than the other students, but she is more than smart enough to stand out in any company; there will be no cheap jibes about Mrs. Mop or cleaning floors, because the rest of them will know all about low-paid casual work, and I can imagine her shining there, really shining, asking good questions, not afraid to put her hand up, waking up the tired teachers, inspiring the good ones, having an essay about Carson McCullers read out in class as all the young boys melt and watch the way her body moves inside her tight clothes. Or perhaps her clothes will be different too.

“I don’t want to lose touch,” I say, my face burning.

“What?”

“I don’t want you to just drift out of my life.”

“Drift out of your life?”

“I want to keep in contact. That’s all. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t see why we can’t stay in touch.”

She places her hand on my arm, and it almost feels like a gesture of pity.

“We’ll always be friends,” she tells me, and I know that I have lost her before we have even begun.

My grandmother is too sick to stay in the little white flat. Her home just doesn’t work anymore. Not for her. The stairs, the bath, the isolation from the rest of us-it is a home for someone who is old, but not for someone who is dying.

If my family were the Changs, this would be easier. Without talking about it, we would move her into a bedroom above the Shanghai Dragon and there we would care for her. But my little family is scattered all over the city, not really a family at all, my father and my mother and myself, all of us living alone, and there is no obvious place for my grandmother to go. There are too many stairs in my mum’s house, and not enough space in the rented flats where my dad and I live.

We want to be a family. We really do. But we have left it too late, we have been too distracted by other things. We will never be the Changs now.

“In China big children take care of old parents,” I hear Joyce telling my mother. “Here, other way round. Old parents still worry about big children. Everything front to back in this country.”

We discuss other options. A home-but my nan is already too ill for a home. A hospice-but we can’t bear to take her to some strange place to die. Not yet. Not if there is some other way.

There is always the hospital, but my nan fears that place more than she fears death, or at least she sees them as interchangeable, so for as long as we have other options she will be spared the hospital bed. Although she seems to eat and drink nothing and although she needs twenty-four-hour care, her doctor is happy to keep her out of the hospital, even now, even this late. But I don’t know if that reflects his compassion for a dying woman’s wishes, or just a lack of hospital beds. It is probably a bit of both.

In the end my mother takes charge, calling a stair-lift company and telling them that they have a job if they can do it immediately.

The stair-lift company must be used to these kinds of desperate calls-for who has a stair lift installed unless they are desperate?-and soon a young workman is laying what looks like railway tracks on the staircase of my mother’s home. On top of the railway tracks he fits what looks like an ejector seat, stirring childhood memories of James Bond and pilots bailing out over enemy territory. It seems to be a thing of immense violence, this stair lift, but when the young workman sits in the chair and turns it on, it whirrs into sedate action like the most gentle machine in the world.

And later, when my nan arrives, dressed in her favorite white Marks & Spencer nightdress, the one with tiny red roses all over it, her face pale from all the weeks inside her flat and from the sickness, her body so frail that I fear to touch her, for I am actually afraid that I may break her, we excitedly show her the stair lift, explaining how it will make living here easy, as if she was a child on Christmas Day being given a gift that she is too small to truly appreciate.

My father and I gently help her into the stair lift’s chair and suddenly she seems to pitch forward, weak from the tumor and the lack of food and the weeks without moving, and we both spring forward to catch her. This had never crossed our minds, that she might be too ill to use a stair lift.

Then my mum explains how the stair lift works, how you have to move a little lever to make it go and how it stops as soon as you take your hand off the lever, making it impossible to hurt yourself, at least that’s the theory, and how there’s a little wooden landing newly built at the top of the stairs so that there is not one step to climb, not even one. I do not know how much of this my grandmother takes in. She doesn’t look like one of those happy old women that you see in advertisements for stair lifts, all twinkling eyes and sensible cardigans and false teeth gleaming. My nan looks as though she never guessed that her life could be filled with so much pain, so much discomfort, so much of what she would call aggravation.

But she smiles for our sakes, even now trying to please us, trying to be a good guest, trying not to make a fuss.

“Lovely,” she says. Her ultimate compliment.

Lovely.

Then she tentatively pushes the lever of the stair lift and we all laugh out loud, including my nan, laugh out loud with shock and delight as the gentle machine whirrs into life, slowly lifting my nan up the stairs.

There she goes now, looking like a little old angel ascending to heaven in her white Marks & Spencer nightdress, smiling down on us because this is fun, it really is, and most of all because she doesn’t want us to worry about her, and she really doesn’t want to make a fuss.

36

T his is not me, my nan tells me, again and again. Although I know exactly what she means, I still feel that my grandmother is truly herself in these final hours.

Brave. Selfless. Funny. Concerned about everyone except herself. The old lady I love with all my heart.

“What happened to that girl?”

“What girl, Nan?”

“That nice girl.”

She makes me smile. “Oh, that nice girl.” I think she means Rose. “Rose-she passed away, remember?”

She shakes her head impatiently. “Not Rose. I know about Rose. And not the Japanese one. I know she gave you the elbow. I mean the one with the daughter. The daughter with lovely eyes.”

“Jackie?”

“Jackie. You want to hold on to her. She’s a good one.”

“You’re right, Nan. She’s a good one.”

“I want to see you settled, Alfie. I want to see you settled.”

You think that you will watch someone die with something like horror, then you watch them die with nothing but love. Because somehow the horror passes, all the black feelings caused by the thousand unspeakable indignities of cancer, or at least you learn to exist with it all. But the love remains, and it overwhelms the fear and sadness and loss, that terrible sense of loss that is worse than everything.

Day and night mean nothing now so we take shifts. I take over from my father around two in the morning. It must be like this when you have a baby-blinking back the sleep in the middle of the night, struggling to stay awake as you perform your various duties. It would have been something like this for Rose and me, if we had been lucky enough to have our baby son or daughter. Except this is the other end of the story.

I do not believe that my nan is going to die tonight. It’s too soon. It will surely go on for a while yet. She doesn’t seem to be in enough pain. The pain in her side, that unimaginable pain from the tumor, appears to be easing. She is taking no medication. Her mind is clear. She looks peaceful.

Her hair on the pillow is silver streaked with gold, the result of a quick dye job that my mother gave her to lift her spirits. Her eyebrows are not crooked because my mum has drawn them on. She breathes out, closes her eyes.

I sit in a chair by the side of her bed, dozing off although I am trying not to, slipping in and out of an exhausted sleep.

And then her voice pulls me back.

“Mum and Dad,” she says.

“You want-should I get them?”

“My mum and dad.”

“Nan?”

“They’re here.”

“Are you okay? Do you want-”

“Alfie?”

“Here I am.”

“Hold my hand, Alfie.”

“I’ve got it.”

“You’re a good boy.” Her chest lifts and she slowly exhales, seeming to let go of the fear, the pain, the longing to stay. “You’re trying your best, aren’t you? I can see that.”

“Nan? Can I get you anything?”

“I don’t need anything. But thank you, love.”

I can’t tell if she is sleeping or not. A light seems to be creeping into the room. It’s not night any more. The impenetrable blackness is fading away. But how can it be over so soon?

“I love you, Nan,” I say, my voice choking up, my eyes suddenly filling. “I love you so much.”

Why didn’t I say this to her earlier? Why did I leave it so long? Why haven’t I been telling her this all my life?

All those days when I had other things to do. All those times when I had somewhere else to go. And I could have been with her.

Thanking her for loving me.

“It doesn’t hurt now,” she says, her voice soft and calm.

“That’s good.”

“Just stay with me.”

“I’m here, Nan.”

“Stay with me, love.”

The school is not so different from the one where I taught, the packs of boys pouring out of the gates instantly identifiable as the toughs or their natural prey, with the great mass in between acting harder than they really are, laughing and taking swipes at each other with their battered backpacks, swaggering with a cockiness that begs to be seen as confidence.

What makes this school different from the Princess Diana is that there are girls here. Their presence changes the atmosphere, charges the air. Some of the girls look like children still, but others are more like grown women, women who are young enough to get away with long hair and short skirts, women who are aware of their power over the roaring, unformed boys who swarm around them. They pass me by at the gates, these girls, some of them raising an eyebrow and smirking, evaluating me and dismissing me in an instant. Then I see her. She is not part of any pack.

“Plum?”

Her face reddens.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’ve got my car. I’ll drive you home.”

She walks with me to my car, ignoring the jeers of who’s-your-boyfriend, Plumpster? and I-don’t-fancy-your-one-much, Plumpster. When we get in the car, I make no move to turn on the ignition.

“Why are you here?”

“I wanted to tell you in person.”

“Tell me what?”

“My nan died.”

“She died?”

“Early this morning. I didn’t want to tell you on the phone. I know she meant a lot to you. And you meant a lot to her.”

Plum stares straight ahead, saying nothing. I grope for all the usual consolations.

“She was in a lot of pain toward the end. So we can be glad she doesn’t have to suffer anymore. She’s at peace now.”

Plum says nothing.

“And it was a long life, Plum. One day we will learn to be grateful for her life. Not sad about her death.”

“She was the one person…”

“Plum? Are you-”

“The one person who I could be myself with. I know my mum wants me to be prettier. Lose weight. Do something about my hair. All that. And my dad wants me to be stronger. Tougher. Harder. Not get pushed around. Stand up for myself. All that.” She shakes her head. “And the kids at school all want me to just crawl away and die. Just crawl away and die, Plumpster. But she was the one person who just accepted me. Who didn’t care.” She laughs. “Who actually seemed to quite like me.”

“Your mother loves you. Come on, Plum. You know she does.”

“But loving someone’s not the same as liking them, is it? It’s not the same as just accepting them for what they are. Love’s all right, I guess. I don’t know too much about all that. I’ll settle for just being liked.”

There’s a lot to do.

It’s good that there is a lot to do.

Because my grandmother died at home, the police had to come to the house. They were there after the ambulance men, who were not needed because it was too late, and the doctor, who officially confirmed that she was dead, but they came before the undertaker and his assistant, who gently invited us to wait in the living room while they wrapped my grandmother’s body and removed it from the house. It seems strange that my nan, after spending so many years living alone in her little white flat, should suddenly provoke this house full of people.

My father and I are spending more time together than we have for years. We register the death together, sitting silently in a waiting room full of happy couples there to register the birth of their babies. Then we go to the undertakers, or the funeral directors as they call themselves these days, and choose the coffin, decide on the number of cars, make arrangements for the funeral.

It’s still not done. We go to a florist and order our wreath, choosing a big one from my parents and me rather than three little ones-red roses, my nan’s favorite. Then we have to talk to the vicar who will conduct the funeral service and he is cold and sniffy because my nan only went to church for weddings, because she was an old girl who didn’t see much point in the church unless it was for a celebration, unless it offered a chance to look and marvel at some young bride in her white dress.

Finally we go to her little white flat. And although we have been gently led through the bureaucracy of death-everyone, apart from the vicar, kind and understanding, taking our credit cards with what looks like a genuinely sympathetic expression, telling us where we need to go next, pointing us to the next stop along the chain-there are no guidelines for what we should do in my grandmother’s home.

Within these white walls there is the evidence of a lifetime. Clothes, photographs, records, souvenirs brought back for her from Spain and Greece and Ireland and Hong Kong. My father and I stare at it all helplessly, unable to decide if these things are treasure to be cherished forever or rubbish to be left out for the trashmen.

Her things.

I want to keep them all, but I know that’s absurd, impossible. The clothes can go to Oxfam. Perhaps some of the furniture. We decide that I will keep the records, my father can have the photographs, but even that is not simple.

My dad opens an album of ancient black-and-white photographs from before he was born, and although he sees the faces of his mother and his father and his aunts and uncles, their grown-up faces shining through the smiles of when they were children, many of the people in the album are complete strangers to him, people he never met, with names he will never know. Not now.

My grandmother’s memories. Nobody else’s.

It’s too soon to think about Oxfam, too soon to think about throwing anything away. Some other day, perhaps.

For now, I choose one thing to remind me of my nan. It sums her up for me.

It is a bottle of lurid red nail polish called Temptation. On the bottle there is an admonition, a piece of advice, a philosophy. Nail him, it says. I think of my nan painting on her Temptation nail polish well into her eighties, and I smile for the first time all day.

Lovely. She was lovely.

Despite the unknown faces, my father seems haunted by the photographs. And there are many. Albums featuring cartoons of seventies’ platform-booted babes on the cover. Shoe boxes full of fading color pictures. Photo books with sleepy English fishing villages on the cover and black-and-white pictures from the forties and fifties inside. Ancient black-and-white photographs, yellow with age, behind heavy slabs of glass, and what seems like chain mail on the back for hanging them up. Countless photos still in the envelopes they were in when they came back from the drugstore.

All those weddings, Bank Holidays, Christmases, birthdays, Sunday afternoons. All those lives.

My father finds a scrapbook. It’s a scrapbook about him and his career, his success. It begins with his early stories as a young sportswriter and goes all the way up to Oranges for Christmas, when he became the story.

My father looks touched, humbled. No, he looks lost. It is clear he never knew this scrapbook existed, never knew that his mother was so proud of him. He seems-I don’t know what it is. Ashamed, perhaps. Or alone. Yes, that’s it. My father seems alone.

And I can see that you are never truly alone in this world until both of your parents are dead.

37

W HEN I GET BACK from my grandmother’s cremation, there’s a message from Jackie on my mobile, telling me to call her urgently. It’s examination day. For my students at Churchill’s and for Jackie too. She sounds excited, and I guess it means that she feels a step closer to all of her dreams coming true.

But I am wrong.

“Alfie?”

“You okay? Ready for the exam?”

“I’m not going to take the exam.”

“What? Why not?”

“It’s Plum.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s run away from home.”

The examination hall for A Level English is in a college near King’s Cross.

The place is full of students-nervous students, confident students, students who have already abandoned all hope. And there’s Jackie, older than the rest, frightened for different reasons, for grown-up reasons that have nothing to do with getting qualifications or getting ahead, dressed far too formally for someone who is scheduled to take an A Level this afternoon, waiting for me outside the examination room.

Her paper starts at three. She has just under five minutes. But she is not even thinking about that.

“The school called me. They wanted to know where she was. Then I found the message from her on my mobile. She said she had to get away. She’s gone, Alfie.”

“What about her dad? Friends?”

“She’s not with her dad. And there are no friends. Not now your nan’s gone.”

“I’ll find her, okay?” I look up at the clock. It’s nearly three. “You have to go inside now. You really do. If you don’t, you lose your chance.”

“How can I? How can I think about all of that stupid stuff when my daughter’s missing?”

“She’ll be back. You can’t throw it all away.”

“I don’t care about any of that. The degree, Carson McCullers, poems by sad old men who wouldn’t know love if it took a chunk out of their codpiece. This is all my fault. I don’t know what I’ve been thinking about. I don’t know what I’ve been doing with you. Studying emotions in a dramatic extract and all the rest of that old…what a pathetic waste of time. I should have been thinking about my girl.”

“You do think about your girl. You think about her all the time.”

“What’s wrong with the life we’ve got? What’s wrong with it? That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Stop it, will you? Talking like that doesn’t help her and it doesn’t help you. Go on. Get in there and do your best. I’ll find her. She’ll be fine. I promise.”

“I just want my girl back.”

“You’ll get her back. Just get in there.”

She puts her hands on her hips. “Is there a dog in here? Who do you think you are? Who do you think you’re talking to? You’re not my husband.”

“Go on, Jackie.”

She stares at me as if this is somehow all my fault. Me and my books and my cynical friends. Her eyes are shining and her bottom lip is clenched to stop it trembling. But she starts drifting toward the examination room with all the other students, still watching me with a kind of weepy hostility until the door closes behind her.

Then I walk out into the city, looking for Plum, still dressed for a funeral.

I go to Leicester Square, the gaudy, rancid heart of the West End, and wander around looking at the faces of the children huddling in doorways, hanging out in the park, squatting on the street. Plum’s not there.

So I walk down Charing Cross Road to the Strand, for some reason a favorite area for homeless kids, and cover its length from the railway station to the Savoy. Lots of teenagers with their sleeping bags in doorways. But no Plum.

I head north, up into Covent Garden. Plenty of young kids on the street, but for some reason only a few obviously homeless, dragging their sleeping bags across the piazza, ignoring the jugglers and the streetbands and the mime artists who wow the tourists and make everybody else feel like slitting their wrists. And I stare at some dopey git whose big selling point is that he doesn’t move, he never moves an inch, and I realize that Plum could be anywhere. She doesn’t even have to be in London.

My mobile rings. It’s Jackie. I tell her there’s no news, please don’t worry, go back to Bansted and wait for my call.

She wants to help me look for Plum but I persuade her that one of us should be at home, waiting by the phone, in case there’s a call. Reluctantly, she agrees.

Naturally-at least it seems natural to me-I want to know how the exam went. Jackie refuses to talk about it. She gets angry when I press her for information, acting as if all that side of her life-wanting to go back to college, caring about books, wanting a degree, thinking about poems and plays and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter as though they were the most important things in the world-is the root of all her problems.

As though you can be punished for your dreams.

When the sun goes down, the city changes.

The office workers go home and the party people pour into the streets of Soho, Covent Garden, Oxford Street. And I can’t imagine Plum here, among the designer coffee and the loud laughter and the empty chatter. It’s not her.

So I go to the stations, starting off in the east at Liverpool Street, where the trains from Bansted come in, and gradually move across town. London Bridge, King’s Cross, Euston. All the big mainline stations. Then out west. Paddington, Victoria. There are pitiful little groups of children with their backpacks and their sleeping bags in every nook and cranny of these giant stations, but I can’t tell who is homeless and who is waiting to go home. Later, nearing midnight, it becomes more obvious. The ones who are going home watch the notice board for departures, the ones who are not going home stare at nothing, or warily watch the men in the shadows who eye them up, waiting to make their move. But there is no sign of Plum at the stations.

I am about to call Jackie when I realize that I have missed Saint Pancras, that Victorian Christmas cake of a station next to Euston.

There’s no real reason why she should be at Saint Pancras, apart from the fact that its spires and turrets and lancet windows make it look like something out of a fairy tale, a place where everything works out all right in the end. There’s no real reason why she should be at Saint Pancras apart from the fact that it’s so different from all the rest.

Just like Plum.

Saint Pancras is smaller than the other stations, less inhuman and modern, more the size of a railway station out in the farflung suburbs in places like Bansted than those soulless, secular cathedrals you get in the city. But she’s not here, of course. It’s getting very late now and people are running for the last trains. I am about to call it a day, phone Jackie, tell her to call the police, when I see the photo booth.

Next to a filthy pair of sneakers, there’s a book. It’s the book I gave Plum. Smell the Fear, He-Bitch by The Slab. I knock on the side of the photo booth and pull back the curtain. There she is, sound asleep, her hair falling in her face. I say her name and she wakes up.

“Why are you dressed like that?”

“Because of my nan.”

“Oh.”

“Your mum’s really worried about you.”

“I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was too much. It would be too much for anyone.”

“Sadie and Mick. And their little gang.”

“It got worse after you came to the school.”

“I’m sorry, Plum.”

“They kept going on at me. About my old boyfriend. My old, old boyfriend. They said: ‘Where did you meet him, Plumpster? Meals on wheels?’ I told them you’re a teacher and they had a right old laugh about that. Mick said you looked like a teacher who had lost all his faculties.”

“That bastard Mick. I’m not so old.”

“I know. You’re only middle-aged.”

“Thanks, Plum. Thanks a million.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’m sorry if I made it harder for you. I never meant to.”

“I know that. You just wanted to tell me about your nan. I’m glad you did. It’s not your fault. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been something else. Any excuse. There’s always some excuse for that lot.”

“So where are you going?”

She shrugs, pushes the hair from her face, and peers out at the departures board as though she actually has a ticket in her pocket.

“I don’t know. Anywhere’s better than Bansted.”

“I’m not so sure about that, you know. You’re loved out there. It’s your home. And it’s not so easy to find another one. Take it from me. Shall we go home? Back to your mum?”

She shrugs, pouts, pushes her fringe in front of her face.

“I like it here.”

“You like this photo booth?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a comfortable photo booth, is it?”

“It’s all right.”

“Really?”

“As photo booths go. Nothing special. Stop going on at me.”

I pick up her book. “Still a fan of The Slab, are you?”

“ ’Course.”

“I’m starting to warm to him myself. He’s not such a bad role model for a growing girl.” I flick through Smell the Fear, He-Bitch, nodding sagely. “Do you like what The Slab has to say about doing the human thing?”

“It’s okay, I guess. But I’m more of a fan of the way he elbow-smashes bad people in the cake hole.”

“Right, right. Well, what would The Slab do at a time like this?”

“How do you mean?”

“If he was getting picked on. What would the old Slab do? Would he run away and sleep in a photo booth? Or would he stand and face the creeps who are bullying him?”

“Come on. I’m not The Slab, am I? I’m just a fat loser. He’s more like a superman. That’s what makes him special.”

“I think you’re tougher than he is, myself. I think you are stronger, better, braver.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You’ve put up with a lot of crap in your life. Your parents breaking up. All the trouble between them after the split. Your mum working so hard to support the pair of you. Mick and Sadie and the little creeps who follow them around. You couldn’t have gotten through all that if you were a coward. And I think you’ve got more guts than Mick and Sadie put together. All bullies are cowards. I reckon you’re a lot nicer too.”

“Nice doesn’t get you very far. Nice gets walked all over. Nice gets you a smack in the chops.”

“I don’t know. Look at my grandmother. We didn’t love her because she could beat up all the other pensioners, did we? Because she could elbow-smash her way to the front at the bus stop? That wasn’t why we loved her, was it?”

“I guess not. So how was the-what do you call it?-burial?”

“Cremation. It was okay. As good as it could be. Lots of people. Faces I hadn’t seen for years. Like a dream, really, all those faces I remembered gathered in one place. And people I didn’t know. Neighbors, friends. So many friends, she had, Plum. There was so much real affection for her. Love, even. She inspired a lot of love. And there were flowers everywhere. And ‘Abide with Me.’ Her favorite hymn. And ‘One for My Baby.’ By Sinatra.”

“It’s so depressing, all that old music.”

“What do you expect at a funeral? I’m horny, horny, horny tonight? It worked. You should have been there. You would have seen.”

“I don’t like funerals.”

“It’s a way of saying good-bye.”

“I don’t like good-byes.”

“Nobody does. But that’s life. A series of hellos and good-byes.” I think of pushing hands in the park with George Chang, of learning to move with the changes that are heading your way, like them or not, of finding the courage to become what you need to become. “Look, Plum, you think you’re the only person who ever felt the way you’re feeling now. But plenty of people do. It’s much more normal to be afraid and lonely and sad than it is to be like Mick or Sadie. Or The Slab. You’re not the freak. They are. I know it seems like these days are never going to end. But they will.” I brush her hair back from her face and see the tears. “What’s wrong, Plum? What is it?”

“I miss her. I miss your nan.”

“I miss her too. And you were great with her. You really made her life better. The way you took care of her-not many people of your age could have done that. Not many people of my age. You can be proud of that.”

“I only did it because I liked her. She was funny.” Plum smiles for the first time. “This little old lady who liked sports-entertainment wrestling. She was cool.”

“She liked you too. She saw you in a way that Mick and Sadie and these other creeps never will. She saw you the way you really are.”

“Is that really what you think? Or are you just trying to get me out of this photo booth?”

“That’s really what I think. Listen, shall we go home to your mum?”

“Can we sit here for just a little bit? Just sit here quietly?”

“As long as you like, Plum.”

38

T HIS NEW ZEALAND GARDENER seems to have taken a shine to my mother. Between you and me, I wonder what Julian-what kind of name is that for a Kiwi who is certainly no fruit?-really has on his mind when he talks to her about bird control and forking borders.

Bird control and forking borders, I think, watching the pair of them out back.

I’ve got your number, mate.

As late spring slowly gives way to summer, Julian is always complimenting my mum on her knowledge of the garden, her expertise in mulching, her way with the tasks of the season.

It’s true that she does know a lot about plants, flowers and all that stuff. And Julian is very respectful. I’ll give that to him. If my mum is sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea with Joyce or me, Julian will not come into the room without knocking first. We will be sitting at the kitchen table and there will be this shy little knock on a door that’s already open. And then there’s Julian standing in the doorway, his suntanned body bulging out of his black rugby shirt and a dopey expression on his face, staring at my mum.

“Is this guy coming on to you?” I demand one day when my mother and I are alone. “This guy Julian?”

My mother laughs like a teenager.

“Julian? Coming on to me? What does that mean? Is it the same as making eyes at someone?”

“You know exactly what it means, Mum. You know more teen lingo than I ever will. Thanks to Nelson Mandela. And your kids.”

“Of course he’s not coming on to me. I talk to him for hours. About the garden.”

“He looks at you.”

“What?” She’s enjoying this.

“As if he fancies you or something.”

And I am both happy and appalled. I am glad that my mother has not shut herself away from the world. But I can’t pretend that I relish the idea of her going out on dates, or of some rugged old Kiwi roughly sinking his fingers into her top soil.

“Has he asked you out or anything?”

“Asked me out? You mean, to dinner or the cinema or something like that?”

“Yes.”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet? But you think he might? You think he might get around to it?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“But if you say not yet, that implies that it’s going to happen, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so, darling.”

“I’ve seen him looking at you, Mum. Jesus Christ.” Is that a hoe in his combat trousers or is he just glad to see her? “I think he’s definitely going to get around to it.”

My mother reaches across the table and touches my hand. She is not laughing at me anymore. She is sort of smiling, very gently.

“Don’t worry, darling,” she says. “I’m over all that.”

She doesn’t mean that she’s over going out to dinner or going to the cinema. She means she’s over sex, romance, relationships and all that. I’m not so sure.

The older I get, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that we are never over all that.

My father’s little rented flat feels like a place where a man lives alone. There’s no sense of two lives mixed and shared. There are no traces left of Lena.

I go around to see him once a week these days. The flat is a bit small to hang out in, so we usually go around the corner to a little Chinese restaurant where they really know how to cook Peking duck and where the waiters all have these strong London accents.

I look at these kids with their faces from China and their voices from Finchley, and it feels to me that these days the world is just one place.

My father’s flat is not so sad now. I asked him once what had finally gone wrong with him and Lena. He said that she wanted to go out dancing and he wanted to watch the golf on Sky. Now nobody can stop him watching the golf on Sky. It’s not much, being able to watch the golf on Sky, perhaps not what he was hoping, but it must count for something.

He can play his music as loud as he likes. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Diana Ross and the Supremes. There’s nobody left to tell him that he’s out of time. “Baby, baby, baby-where did our love go?” He still loves all of that.

And he spends hours sorting through the boxes of photographs that we found at my grandmother’s flat.

All those shoe boxes, those cracked and torn photo albums from the forties and fifties with English fishing villages on the front, the ones from the sixties and seventies with drawings of platform-booted babes on the cover.

Some of the faces in these photographs are still a mystery. Some of them are as familiar as his own face. But those familiar faces have their own special mystery. And he stares at them for a long time, wondering about them, and wondering how he got from those crowded streets in the East End to this quiet place on a green hill in north London. Quiet apart from Smokey Robinson and the Supremes.

He is not writing. He still hasn’t got around to that. But as I watch him surrounded by all those memories of his parents and the house where he grew up, all the bits and pieces of a life that is long gone but somehow sticks with him, a life that will never really leave him, I think that perhaps he will start writing again very soon.

Because my father has realized that if he is going to carry on, then he is going to have to go right back to the very beginning.

As soon as I get to the edge of the park, I see George.

He is completely alone. There are no posers from the great financial houses of the city rambling on about reducing stress and thinking outside the box. No hippies with tofu for brains in bicycle clips and sandals who think they can learn the Tao in two easy lessons. And no me. We have all deserted him. All the big-nosed pinkies with good intentions. He is as alone as the day I first saw him.

In his hand is a double-edged sword, red and white ribbons trailing from its hilt. I stand and watch George Chang practice his weapons form.

He suddenly stands on one leg, passes the sword from one hand to the other behind his back, spins around with impossible speed and grace, brings the sword sweeping down over his head, the red and white ribbons wrapping around his neck for just a second, then drops to his knees, stands again with the sword poised at the throat of an imaginary enemy, and it’s as if his movements are all blurring into one fluid movement and the sword is spinning silver in his hands.

And I wish that Plum could see this. I feel that, in some way I don’t quite understand, George Chang is what she has been looking for all her life.

The Slab made glorious flesh and blood.

When he has finished I approach him. I feel guilty. Perhaps the rest of them can let their Tai Chi lessons fizzle out with a clear conscience, but I feel bad about it.

“Sorry I haven’t seen you for a while, George. I’ve been so busy. What with the exams and everything.”

He nods curtly, but there is no accusation or resentment in the gesture. It’s as if my disappearance from the park is only what is to be expected from a big-nosed pinky.

And as I watch him putting his sword in its long leather carry-case, because you can’t walk through the streets of north London toting a double-edged sword, I suddenly realize why I wanted to learn Tai Chi from this man. It had little to do with stress management or losing weight or learning to breathe properly. And despite the sense that the act of pushing hands made of my world, my life, my future, it didn’t even have much to do with learning to accept change.

I wanted to be like him.

It was as pure as that.

Calm without being passive. Strong without being aggressive. A family man without being a couch potato. A decent heart in a healthy body. Those were the lessons that I wanted George Chang to teach me, because I knew I would never learn them from my real father.

“Busy time for me too,” he says, as if reading my mind. “My son and his wife moving out. Many arrangements to make.”

I can’t believe what I am hearing. If there was one thing I never doubted about the Changs, it was that their little family was unbreakable. And more than anything, I wanted a family just like that. Unbreakable.

“Harold and Doris are leaving the Shanghai Dragon?”

George nods. “My son’s wife think too rough around here. Lots of drunks. Making pee-pee in doorways and fighting. Lots of lovely houses, big money, but also some rubbish people. Not a good place to raise children, thinks my son’s wife.” He nods in the vague direction of suburbia. “Wants to move out to maybe Muswell Hill or Cricklewood. Open their own restaurant. Nice new schools for Diana and William. Nobody making pee-pee in doorways or threatening to punch you in the cake hole.”

I am stunned. “And Harold is going along with all this, is he? Muswell Hill and new schools for the kids? Leaving the Shanghai Dragon? He just agrees to the lot of it, does he?”

“What can he do? She’s his wife. Has to listen to her. Not in China anymore.”

“But this is so hard for you, George. You and Joyce. Not just because of all the extra work. Not just because you’ll miss the children. It’s your family that’s being broken up.”

“Families change. My wife and I, we have to understand. My son, his wife, their children-that’s a new family. A family comes apart and then comes together as something else. Muswell Hill-I don’t know. Never been. Hear it’s nice place. I like it here just fine. But maybe it’s a good idea for them. And their family.”

George Chang stares beyond the trees, as if thinking about the clean streets of Muswell Hill and Chinese restaurants where no drunk ever threatens to punch you in the cake hole. A future he can’t quite imagine. Then he turns back to me and smiles.

“That’s the funny thing about family,” he says. “Even the best family is not set in stone.”

Churchill’s karaoke is in a small rented room in the back of a Japanese restaurant in Soho.

My students all pile into this tiny box with no windows as the man who runs the restaurant, who is not Japanese but Cantonese, hooks up the karaoke machine. The Chinese and Japanese students devour the song menus, Yumi and Hiroko and Gen and Zeng, looking for the songs they want to sing, while the rest of us, Witold and Vanessa and Astrud and Imran, Hamish and Lenny and myself, order drinks and wonder how we can get through this thing as painlessly as possible. We glance at the song menu. We are in a universe where Take That are considered golden oldies.

Yumi and Hiroko and Gen are delighted with the menu, because it is full of Japanese favorites, but Zeng is bitterly disappointed that there are no Chinese standards, even though the owner is Cantonese. He sees this as a national humiliation, on a par with the Opium War, but cheers up after a while and sings a spirited version of “Do It to Me One More Time,” which we all agree is better than Britney’s original.

The Japanese, that exquisitely reserved tribe, sing without any shyness at all, and I see that Hamish is right: karaoke is an outlet for emotion in a society where emotions are not encouraged to spill out all over the place, a society on the other side of the planet where they still expect their people to maintain a stiff upper lip.

Yumi has a sweet strong voice, and although Hiroko doesn’t sing so well, she puts a lot of emotion into it and is reluctant to relinquish the microphone. In the end it has to be pried out of her hands. Yumi and Hiroko both sing the same sweet song, “Can You Celebrate?” by Namie Amuro.

“Japanese Madonna,” Yumi tells me.

“Very popular for wedding,” says Hiroko.

Those of us who are not Japanese or Chinese can’t match that East Asian total lack of inhibition at the mike, but after an ensemble version of Abba’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You” we loosen up a little. Lenny does a spirited if grotesque version of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” and Hamish performs such a moving version of Bronski Beat’s “Small-town Boy” that even Lenny the Lech listens in respectful silence. Then it is my turn.

I usually stick to Elvis at the karaoke. With Elvis, you can sink into this mock-trembling baritone and warble your way through “Can’t Help Falling in Love” or “Always on My Mind” or “Love Me Tender” without feeling like a complete idiot. Elvis is easy.

But today I go for a touch of Sinatra, the one where the guy is in a bar that is just about to close, and he has a story that he desperately needs to share. “One for My Baby.”

You’d never know it

But, buddy, I’m a kind of poet.

It’s a line that always reminds me of my dream, that dream I had in some other lifetime to try to make my small mark upon this world. To do what my father had done before me. To be a writer. Long ago and far away, that was my dream.

No, I think to myself, looking at all the shining faces of my students. That wasn’t a dream.

That was a plan.

Jackie sails through her exam. Grade A. She has her place at a university. And I am proud of her and sad all at the same time. She doesn’t need me anymore.

She wants to take me out to dinner to celebrate, and I tell her that I’ll buy her dinner at the Shanghai Dragon. But she says that this one is on her and she wants to go somewhere in the center of town, this little Italian restaurant in Covent Garden, where she has heard they have live music. When we get there the live music turns out to be a problem. There’s only an accordion, two guitars and a middle-aged singer, but they perform with the volume turned up to eleven.

The band wanders among the red-and-white-check tablecloths belting out “Volare,” “In Napoli” and “That’s Amore,” and you can hardly hear yourself think. But it’s one of those nights when the niggling little details can’t spoil it for you.

Jackie has gotten her exam. Her dream is intact.

“What happens now?” I say. Shout, really.

“I’m winding up Dream Machine,” she shouts back. “I figure I’ve spent enough time on my knees. When term starts I’ll find some part-time job that doesn’t get in the way of my studies. Then I’ll get my degree.” She raises her glass of red wine. “And then I’ll live happily ever after.”

“When will I see you again?”

She shakes her head, and at first I think she hasn’t heard me.

But she has heard me all right.

The band approaches our table, bows and immediately starts banging out an old Dean Martin number, “Return to Me,” although the singer is singing “Ritorna-me.” Jackie and I just stare at each other. It’s too loud to talk anymore. Then she starts to laugh, just throws back her lovely head and laughs in that way she has, and soon I’m laughing too, but I still want the band to stop.

“Please, boys,” I say. “She’s my student. I’m her teacher. Please respect the sanctity of the student-teacher relationship. Knock it off, okay? Boys?”

But they don’t care. They keep on playing “Return to Me” as if we were lovers. No, not lovers.

It’s more than that. As if we were together.

“WHEN WILL I SEE YOU AGAIN?” I bellow.

But the band has suddenly stopped playing.

And I find I am shouting my head off in a restaurant that is completely silent.

39

“W INE, WOMEN AND WEED,” Josh sighs, as we wait for our flight to Amsterdam to start boarding. “Hash cafés. Red lights. Blue movies. One last adventure before I settle down with my beautiful new wife.”

For Josh’s stag party in Amsterdam, we meet at the British Airways check-in desk late on Friday afternoon, Josh and me and around a dozen of his friends from work, all of them still in their suits from a day in the office and jabbering with nervous excitement about spending a night in old Amsterdam.

It is only a forty-minute flight from London to Schiphol Airport and soon we are checked into our hotel and wandering the tree-lined canals with tall town houses reflected in the water, the compact streets full of bicycles, the sickly sweet smell of hashish and marijuana drifting from the coffee shops.

At first it is all quite sedate. Josh has booked a big table at a good Indonesian restaurant and we eat dinner there. His friends are loud but friendly, not the drooling go-getting morons that I was fearing, and the mood as we head into the night is almost what the Dutch call gezellig. Cosy.

But after dinner it starts to go downhill, and it’s not cosy at all.

“Wait until you see this place, Alfie,” Josh tells me as we flag down a few taxis. “Tonight you are going to be fucked blind, old sport.”

“That’s a good thing, is it? Where exactly are we going?” I am starting to get a bad feeling about all this.

“You’ll see,” he laughs.

Our destination is a gabled town house in a quiet street lined with elm trees. Large houseboats are moored on the canal. The only sounds are the bells of distant bicycles. We are a long way from the noise and the girls in windows and the drunken crowds of the red-light district. But the two burly men in black tie outside the door of the town house suggest we are not so far away after all.

“Gentlemen,” they say, seeming to take it all in at once-our clothes, our degree of inebriation, our credit card limits. “Welcome.”

We pay 150 guilders just to get through the door. Around fifty quid. The place is enormous. This must have been a family home at one time. Now it is something else. Not a family home at all.

A smooth middle-aged man, also in black tie, gives us a little pep talk about what it will cost us to take one of the girls up to one of the rooms.

“Josh,” I say, tugging at his sleeve. “This isn’t a bar. It’s a knocking shop.”

“Oh, don’t be such a prude,” he tells me. “Don’t worry, Alfie. I’ll pay your way.”

“But I don’t want-”

“Just shut up and enjoy yourself, will you? For my sake if not your own. Give me a break, Alfie. I’m getting married next week. Be happy for me, will you? It’s the most important day of any young man’s life. My stag night.”

We go into what looks like a Victorian drawing room. Lots of chintz. Big drapes over the shuttered windows. Plenty of large, soft sofas where businessmen are talking to young women with extremely short dresses, lots of makeup and faces that look as though they have been carved out of granite.

What makes the room seem slightly less like a Victorian drawing room is that there is a bar at one end where a large black man with a shaven head regards us without emotion. During our pep talk at the door we were told that we were entitled to a few free drinks. The drinks are now lined up before us while the young women with faces carved out of granite smile at our little drunken group, casting their bait.

We grin back, sheepish and flattered, as if it’s our personal charm that has gotten us in with these young women, and soon they are all over us like a skin allergy, most of them bottle blond but with the occasional Indian or East Asian or black girl in with the mix. They all order champagne. It is overpriced and cold. Just like the women.

I see from the menu that a bottle of champagne and an hour upstairs with one of the girls is exactly the same price. Five hundred and fifty guilders. More than £200. The friends of Josh start waving around their credit cards.

There’s a tall young black woman sitting next to me, her long legs crossed, blowing cigarette smoke into my face and making labored small talk.

“What hotel you stay at?” she says, the whore’s equivalent of what’s your star sign?

I smile politely, and turn to Josh.

“I don’t want to spoil the party,” I say.

“Then don’t.”

“This is really not for me.”

“Forget about your pathetic teacher’s salary tonight, Alfie,” Josh says and sighs, lighting up a cigar, the stone-faced blonde on his arm staring blankly at me. “This one’s on me.” He leans across me, addresses my companion. “You’ll give my friend a good time tonight, won’t you, sweetheart?”

The black girl smiles without humor or warmth, as if she could eat Josh for breakfast, chopped up and sprinkled over her muesli. He doesn’t notice. Or he doesn’t care. He clamps his cigar between his teeth and wraps one arm around me and another round his tombstone-faced tart.

“How can you tell if your wife is dead, Alfie?”

“I don’t know.”

“The sex is the same but the dishes pile up. How’s Mrs. Mop?”

“You know what? You really are a funny guy.”

“Is she-you know-still spending a lot of time down on all fours? Getting her fingers dirty? Going where no normal woman dares go?”

“I wonder why you hate her so much.”

“I don’t hate her, old sport. I don’t even know her.” He puffs expansively on his cigar. “Can’t honestly say I want to. You’re not really bringing her to the wedding, are you?”

“But she’s just like you, Josh.”

“I don’t think so.”

“All she wants is to change her life. All she wants is to end up somewhere better than where she started out from.” I raise my beer in salute. “The same as you, old sport.”

Even under the dim lighting of the Victorian drawing room, his face seems to darken. “What do you mean, old fucking sport?”

“You changed your life, didn’t you? You put yourself through charm school. You put on airs and graces that you never had. You come on as though you’re Prince Charles. And not just another kid with no dad from some little suburb.”

He looks as though he could hit me or burst into tears. Or perhaps both.

“Why don’t you get out of my life, Alfie? I don’t even know why I invited you here. God knows, I knew I’d have to pay for you.”

“You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, Josh. There’s nothing wrong with what you did.” And I really mean it. The thing I like most about Josh is the thing that he despises about himself. “You wanted to better yourself. To change your life. Just like Jackie.”

“You know I fucked her, don’t you?”

This makes me laugh out loud. “I don’t think so, Josh. When did that happen? When I went to the bathroom at your engagement party? I know you’re a bit quick, but this is ridiculous.”

He shakes his head impatiently. Our two hardened prostitutes are looking at each other, starting to get a little concerned.

“Not Jackie,” he says. “Rose.”

For a moment I can’t think. And the moment seems to drag on. I still can’t think. What is he telling me?

“My Rose?”

“Your Rose,” he snorts. “She wasn’t always your Rose, you fucking peasant.”

“Don’t joke about her. I mean it, Josh.”

“I’m not joking, old sport. I’m telling you that I fucked her. Quite a few times. Not that she was very good. Always a bit too keen on the hearts and moonlight, our Rose. Just before you came along with the fucking goo-goo eyes and bunches of flowers and romantic rides on the bloody Star Ferry.”

“You’re a liar.”

“I even fucked her on the day you met her. My flat. Mid-Levels. About six o’clock. Then we caught a cab down to Central for a few drinks at the Mandarin. You didn’t know that, did you? Never got around to telling you, did she?” He puffs away at his cigar, its tip flaring red in the gloaming of the knocking shop. “Yeah, we were having a little office fling until you arrived. Didn’t last long. A month or so. You did me a favor really, taking her off my hands.”

I am off my bar stool and have my hands wrapped around his throat before he can remove the cigar from his mouth.

Then I am shouting at him that he is a liar, even though I know that he is not, and his face is turning red, his eyes burning up at me like the end of his expensive cigar.

Then the large black guy from behind the bar wraps his arms around me and drags me away, expertly lifting me right off the ground, pulling me past the stunned faces of the friends of Josh and the granite-faced girls and the businessmen making small talk with women who have seen thousands exactly like them.

My feet don’t touch the ground until the large black guy dumps me back on the quiet cobbled street outside the tall town house.

I walk back to the hotel and check out, catching a cab to the deserted airport to wait for the first flight home in the morning, knowing that I will never see Josh again, and that he will always be wrong about me.

I don’t hate it that he slept with her.

I hate it that he didn’t love her.

Jackie looks different.

It’s more than the way that Zeng and Yumi looked different. It’s more than growing up. It’s to do with becoming the someone you always planned to be.

No makeup. That’s new. Her hair worn longer, pulled back in a ponytail, the highlights being allowed to grow out. And she is dressed in jeans and a short T-shirt. She looks younger, more casual, less concerned with the image she presents to the world. But still the same woman. I recognize her in an instant. She couldn’t be anyone else.

I am sitting on a wooden bench facing the college. She is one of a crowd of students who come down the stone steps of the building, laughing and talking and toting their books, not a care to call their own, and then Jackie and some thin young guy with long hair peel away from the rest of the pack.

My heart seems to fall away as he puts his arm around her shoulders, as if he has been doing it forever. Then she sees me.

She comes over, the thin young guy with long hair still with his arm around her, looking uncertainly at her face and then at me. Maybe his heart is falling away a little bit too.

“How’s it going?” I ask her.

“It’s going good,” she says. We look at each other for a while, neither of us knowing what to say, and then she turns to the guy.

“J’arriverai plus tard,” she tells him.

“D’accord, j’y serai,” says the guy, reluctant to go. Then she smiles at him and he steps back, knowing that whatever my presence means, nothing between them has changed.

“New boyfriend?” I ask her, trying to keep the bad stuff out of my voice.

“Just a friend.”

“French guy?”

“Can’t keep anything from you, can we? He’s in my class. I didn’t tell you that I switched courses, did I?”

“No, you didn’t tell me anything.”

“I meant to phone. Sorry, Alfie. I’ve been so, so busy.”

“I understand.”

“I’m not doing English anymore. I’ve switched to European Studies. It felt right. You know what I mean? It’s a different country. Almost a different century. The world’s getting smaller all the time.”

“How’s Plum?”

“She’s well. Enjoying school more.”

“Still in love with The Slab?”

“I think she’s starting to grow out of all that. They change so fast at that age. I think The Slab might one day go the way of Ken and Barbie. How are things at your end?”

“Pretty good, pretty good. Churchill’s is just the same. I’ve got a whole new crowd of students. Nice kids. And I haven’t even slept with any of them yet.”

“Are you planning to?”

I shake my head. “That’s gone the way of Ken and Barbie too. It turned out to be a bit of a dead end, all of that. Always seemed to end in the same place.”

“Where was that?”

“Heathrow Airport. But things are good.”

“I’m glad.”

“Well, that’s not strictly true. To be honest, it’s a bit lonely at my end.”

“Lonely?”

“Yeah. I sort of miss you. And Plum. And just the way we were when we saw each other all the time.”

“Oh, Alfie.”

“That’s why I’m here. I don’t want things to change. I know some things have to change. But I don’t want to lose any of that. I don’t want to lose us.”

“You can’t stop life happening to you.”

“I realize that now. I really do. But shouldn’t you hold on to the good things? For as long as you can?”

“Isn’t it a little late for you and me? You can’t ask me to give this up. Not now that I’ve gotten this far. I wouldn’t be happy. And neither would you.”

“I’m not asking you to give anything up. I just want one last chance, Jackie. One last chance to get it right. And I want a family. Some kind of family. It doesn’t have to be the old kind of family, okay? It can be the new kind of family. It can be any kind of family. But I want to try for a family of my own. I think it’s pretty sad if everyone in the world ends up living alone. It’s just too sad.”

“What about Rose? You suddenly forget about her?”

“I’ll never forget her. And I’ll never stop loving her. I’ve learned that you can honor the past and you can remember the past. You can even love it. But you can’t live in it.”

“So you’re here to claim your future?”

“That’s right.”

“But it doesn’t work like that.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No. You might be ready to get serious, but I’m not. If you really care about someone, you let them follow their dreams. And then maybe one day they come back to you. If it’s real. If it means anything.”

“So you think you might come back to me?”

“We were never really together, were we?”

“Do you think-when you’ve got your degree and you’ve met lots of interesting people and you’ve made friends with some hot young French guys-that you might miss me a little bit?”

“I miss you already.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know. Bad timing.”

“That’s it? Just bad timing?”

“I’ve got to go, Alfie.”

And she does. I watch her disappear into the crowd of students, all those shining young faces looking forward to the future as though it is their personal property.

She doesn’t even look back.

But I don’t feel bad. It’s strange. My heart seems to weigh nothing at all. I feel something like my old self.

Because I know that even if I never see her again in my life, Jackie has returned to me something that I believed was lost forever.

She has given me back my faith.

And you’ve got to have a little faith, haven’t you?

40

JUST OVER A YEAR LATER I drop a couple of Hong Kong dollars in a scarred metal slot and pass through the turnstile, joining the crowds waiting for the Star Ferry.

The original cast are all present, if slightly altered in ways that I can’t quite define. There are the young Chinese businessmen of Central in their white shirts and dark ties, speaking Cantonese into tiny mobile phones. The office girls with their shining black hair and miniskirts and Prada bags. The old men with their racing papers, frowning as they check the form at Sha Tin and Happy Valley. And me.

Hong Kong has changed too. Not the way it looks, although the way Hong Kong looks is forever changing as land is reclaimed and buildings are demolished and new skyscrapers are raised. It’s something in the tropical air. This place just doesn’t feel British any more. Hong Kong is a Chinese city now. Brash, confident, unsentimental about the past. It’s not my inheritance any longer. If it ever really was.

Yet I love it still. Even if it is not mine to love, I love it. I can’t help it.

I go upstairs to the cavernous waiting area and watch the old green-and-white Star Ferry that I am about to catch chunking into the harbor at Tsim Sha Tsui, and I see the soaring steel-and-glass skyline of Central in the distance, the green hills beyond and Victoria Peak looming above it all.

As I walk onto the Star Ferry I get that old feeling-the excitement and sadness mixed. That old feeling of belonging and knowing in your heart that you will never belong.

Soon they are about to pull up the gangway, and I get a feeling of mild panic. I know it’s stupid but I wait to see if Rose will make it to the Star Ferry just in time, if she will come running up the gangway just before they raise it, and I know that she will be breathless and beautiful, carrying her large box of legal documents to an office somewhere in Alexandra House.

But of course Rose doesn’t appear at the last minute. That’s not going to happen. They pull up the gangway without Rose appearing, and I know-know with total certainty for the first time-that I must make the rest of my journey without her.

And then I see her. The young woman in her two-piece business suit. She is just about holding on to a large cardboard box, desperately balancing it on one thigh, trying not to drop it in the middle of the crowded Star Ferry. She is bending forward slightly as she wrestles with the box, her black hair tumbling over her face. I stand up, and for just a moment, it feels like I am addressing a ghost.

“Excuse me? Miss?”

It is only when she looks up at me that I see she is Chinese. And very real. Young, around twenty-five or so, although by now I have known enough Asian women to be aware that their ages are often impossible to guess.

“Do you want to sit down?”

For a second or two she stares at me through her gold-rimmed glasses and then she suddenly smiles, concluding that I am quite harmless.

“Thank you,” she says, the accent West Coast American. Educated in the States? Possibly. Although she could have gotten that accent without ever going farther west than Kowloon.

She sits beside me. There’s room for both of us if I shuffle up a bit and she perches right on the edge of the aisle seat with the big cardboard box resting across our knees. It is full of documents, files, ledgers.

“You a lawyer?”

“No,” she says, still smiling. “I’m an accountant. Well-training. How about you? Tourist?”

“No. I’m a writer.”

“Really?”

“Well-trying.”

“Trying?”

“I want to write a story about this place. Sell it-I don’t know-somewhere. But I know this is the place I want to write about.”

She smiles with what looks more like civic pride than politeness.

“So you like Hong Kong?”

“There’s nowhere like it in the world. There’s never been anywhere like it. There never will be again. It’s where all the world meets, isn’t it? This is where it all gets mixed up.”

“Your first time here?”

“Oh, I’ve been here before. But it feels like a long time ago now.”

Two old Cantonese sailors, stick-thin and impassive, unchanging through the ages, untie the ropes holding us to Kowloon, the tip of the Chinese mainland, and the Star Ferry pulls out into the harbor.

Seven minutes. That’s all it takes to get from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island on the Star Ferry. Seven minutes. It always makes me feel a little anxious, that perfect ride, because it is over so quickly. Just seven minutes. There’s hardly time to take it all in.

I suppose you just have to make the most of it. Enjoy it while you can.

“Who do you usually write for?” the girl asks me.

“Me? Nobody. Well, myself, I guess. I haven’t sold anything yet. And nobody’s asked me to write about Hong Kong. It’s just something I feel I have to do. You ever get that feeling?”

She laughs. “All the time.”

“You’ve got to have a little faith, haven’t you?”

“Oh yes. You’ve got to have a little faith.”

We fall silent and I turn my face to the open window, the fierce tropical heat cooled by the breeze of open water, and I watch the traffic in Hong Kong harbor. The old Chinese junks with their barefoot sailors. A cruise ship as big as a small town. Tugs, dredgers, the police in their motor launches, the newer ferries, painted in louder colors than the low-key white-and-green livery of the Star Ferries.

The Star Ferries feel as though they are part of old Hong Kong, like statues of Queen Victoria and expatriates drinking cocktails on the roof of the China Club and Sunday afternoons spent cruising on the company junk. That lost place, my old Hong Kong, that’s where the Star Ferry seems to belong.

But maybe that’s wrong, because you can still see them shuttling between Kowloon and Hong Kong, bustling between rest and work, between the past and the future; they are still out there, all the green-and-white sister ships of this one, Day Star and Morning Star and Shining Star and all the rest of them, all the dancing stars of Hong Kong. Still out there.

And I think of my nan, and the souvenirs she kept of other people’s holidays, and George Chang, moving by himself on the other side of the world to the silent song inside his head, and my father living alone in his rented flat, going right back to the start. And I think of my mother with the new man in her life, the Kiwi who is definitely no fruit, and Jackie and the French boy who wanted to marry her, and I think of Plum learning to be happy inside her own skin, that lesson we all spend a lifetime learning.

And as I watch that heartbreaking Hong Kong skyline of glass, silver and gold, I think of my lost wife and the time that will never come again, and that’s when I have to turn away from the girl beside me, so that she will not see what is written all over my face.

It’s funny. You love something and then one day it’s suddenly gone or changed or lost forever. But somehow that doesn’t stop your love. Maybe that’s how you know it’s the real thing. When it doesn’t come with conditions and get-out clauses, when it doesn’t have a best-by date. When you just give your love and never stop giving it and know that you never will. That’s when it is real. That’s when they can never touch it or spoil it or take it away from you.

All too soon we are at the other side. It goes so fast, this brief ride. A short, sweet journey that is always over too soon. The girl gets up to leave. We smile at each other and I wonder what she is doing tonight. I know that there will be some handsome young man waiting for her somewhere in this town, and I am happy for her.

“Good luck with the writing,” she says. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

The girl hefts her big cardboard box in her thin arms, gives me one final smile, and soon she is lost among the impatient throng.

I turn my face to the open window once more. And suddenly I see the two of them moving through the lunchtime crowds of Central. Jackie and Plum.

They are loaded down with their shopping bags, cameras swinging around their necks, laughing together about something.

I smile to myself. When you see them at moments like this, unaware that they are being watched, they always look closer than sisters, and more than mother and daughter. They look like best friends.

There they are now, Jackie and Plum, making their way to meet me where the Star Ferry docks on the other side. They haven’t seen me yet. But they will soon. And as I watch their faces move through that great lonely crowd of people who I will never know, as I watch Jackie and Plum until they disappear into the ferry terminal where we have arranged to meet, I wonder how I ever believed that you can have too much love in your life.

Then the Star Ferry is rolling beneath my feet as it is secured to Hong Kong Island, so I join the crowds waiting for the gangway to be lowered, all of us eager to be on our way now, and I can feel a sense of silent anticipation in the air, like someone finally turning for home, or a baby waiting to be born.