One For My Baby Read online

  ‘How’s Mick?’ I ask her. ‘Still got her dreams?’

  ‘Hello,’ she says, not looking up.

  Lenny the Lech walks in. Lenny is one of those short, fat men who swaggers around as though he is some kind of tall, thin catch. Like me, Lenny is a former teacher who went out to sell English by the pound in Asia—Manila and Bangkok in Lenny’s case. Something about him spoilt out there. He has that soft, bloated look that Europeans often get when they stay too long in the tropics—or when they stay too long in tropical bars. Lenny got laid a lot more in Asia then he ever did at home and now he looks at women the way that a farmer sizes up his cows. At Churchill’s his lechery is legendary.

  ‘Have you seen that new little Polish number in the Advanced Beginners?’ he asks me, rolling his eyes. ‘I wouldn’t mind showing her a bit of solidarity. What do you reckon, Alfie? I wouldn’t mind letting that comrade get her hot little hands on my means of production.’

  ‘I don’t think the Poles are Communists any more, Lenny.’

  ‘She’s a little red minx, that’s what she is,’ says Lenny the Lech. Then he notices Jackie. ‘Ah, our resident Essex girl. Top of the morning to you, my girl.’ He goes over to her and puts a proprietorial arm around her shoulders. ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one, darling. Why do Essex girls hate vibrators? Give up? Because—’

  Suddenly Jackie is on her feet, her eyes blazing, accidentally kicking her bucket.

  ‘Because they chip our teeth,’ she says. ‘Heard that one already, Lenny. Bit obvious, that one. What else would an Essex girl do with a vibrator but suck on it—right, Lenny? You’re going to have to do better than that.’

  ‘Steady on,’ says Lenny. ‘It’s just a joke.’

  ‘And I’ve heard them all,’ she says. ‘Why does an Essex girl wash her hair in the kitchen sink? Because that’s where you wash vegetables. What do Essex girls and beer bottles have in common? Come on, Lenny, come on.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Lenny, practically scratching his fat head.

  ‘Both empty from the neck up.’

  ‘Now that’s funny,’ chuckles Lenny.

  But Jackie is not smiling. ‘Think so? Then you’ll like this one. What do a blonde Essex girl and a plane have in common?’

  ‘They both have a black box,’ says Lenny. ‘I know that one.’

  ‘You do? But I bet you don’t know as many as me. I’ve heard the lot, Lenny. What’s the difference between an Essex girl and a mosquito? A mosquito stops sucking if you hit it on the head. Why do Essex girls wear pants? To keep their ankles warm. How do you make an Essex girl’s eyes sparkle? Shine a torch in her ear.’

  Lenny smiles, but it is starting to look a little strained. Jackie is standing in front of him, holding her copy of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in one of her yellow-gloved hands, trying to stop her voice from shaking.

  ‘I know all the jokes. And you know what, Lenny? I’m not laughing.’

  ‘Keep your hair on, darling,’ Lenny says, quite offended. ‘It’s nothing personal.’

  ‘I know it’s nothing personal, Lenny. And I even know it’s nothing to do with Essex girls. I know that a man like you thinks all women are stupid whores.’

  ‘I love women!’ protests Lenny. He turns to me. ‘If I can say that without sounding like Julio Iglesias.’

  ‘I don’t think you can,’ I say.

  ‘From what I hear around this place,’ says Jackie Day, ‘only one person in this room is a dumb tart. But do you know what, Lenny? It’s certainly not me.’

  She slips her book inside her nylon coat and picks up her bucket. Then she walks out without saying another word.

  ‘Some people just can’t take a joke,’ says Lenny the Lech.

  Lena is waiting at the end of our street.

  There’s an old brown pub on the corner and grinning men with pints in their fists are looking out of the stained windows at her, leering and evaluating and scratching bellies that are displayed like prize marrows.

  ‘Alfie.’

  I walk straight past her.

  ‘You used to like me.’

  I look at her, this young woman who has bewitched my father, made him move to a rented flat, encouraged him to search for his youth on a rowing machine, made him drop his swimming trunks in a public place, and I try hard to find her ridiculous. It’s difficult. She has got the blonde hair and legs that go on like a river, but I know she is no bimbo. I know that she is smart. Although how smart can she be if she has shacked up with my old man?

  Lena is not ridiculous. It’s the situation that’s ridiculous. It’s my father who is absurd.

  ‘I still like you,’ I say.

  ‘You just don’t like the thought of anyone having sex with your father. Except your mother.’

  ‘Not even my mother, now you come to mention it.’

  We smile at each other.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you, Lena. It’s hard to think of you as a friend of the family. My family is in pieces.’

  I look at her, trying to imagine how my father sees her. I can understand how he could fall for the face, the legs, the body. I can understand how exciting she must be after half a lifetime of marriage. But surely he can see that wanting her is being greedy?

  ‘You should understand, Alfie. If you love someone, you want to be with them.’

  ‘My father doesn’t know the first thing about love.’

  ‘Why are you like this? I know you feel sorry for your mother. But it’s more than that.’

  ‘Because he wants too much. Too much life. He’s had his life. He should accept that.’

  ‘You can’t want too much life.’

  ‘You can, Lena. You can be a glutton for life, just like you can be a glutton for food or drink or drugs. If this thing with you is more than just a fling, if my dad really wants to start again, if it’s serious, then he wants more than he deserves.’

  She asks me if I want a coffee and I agree to go across the road with her to the little Italian cafe’ called Trevi, just to get her off the street. It’s not the grinning fat men in the old brown pub that bother me. It’s the thought that my mother might come round the corner at any moment.

  ‘I just don’t understand what’s in it for you,’ I say when we have ordered our cappuccino. ‘You haven’t got any visa problems, have you? There are no problems staying in the country, are there?’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Why not? I don’t get it. Even if you want an older man, you don’t have to go for my dad. I mean, there’s old and there’s ready for the knacker’s yard. There’s old and there’s Jurassic Park.’

  ‘He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. He’s wise. He’s kind. He’s lived.’

  ‘I’ll say.’

  ‘He knows things. He’s seen life. And I love his book. Oranges For Christmas. It’s just like him. Full of tenderness and heart.’

  ‘What about my mother? What happens to her? Is she just meant to crawl into the corner? Where’s the tenderness and heart for her?’

  ‘I’m sorry for your mother. I really am. She was always very good to me. But these things happen. You know that. When two people fall in love, someone else often gets hurt.’

  ‘It can never work. He’s an old man. You’re a student.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘He’s not an old man any more?’

  ‘I’m not a student any more. I’m not going to do my MBA. What’s the point?’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I dropped out of college. I’m going to be Mike’s PA.’

  ‘Mike doesn’t need a PA.’

  ‘He does, Alfie. There are always people calling him up and asking him to write things. To do events. To appear on TV or radio.’

  ‘What he needs is an answer machine.’

  ‘He needs someone to protect him from the outside world. He can’t concentrate. I can help him. He can take care of the writing. I’ll deal with everything else. That’s more worthwhile than a
ny degree. And it will give us a chance to be together all the time.’

  ‘Sounds like a nightmare.’

  ‘You should be happy for us, Alfie. He needs me. And I need him.’

  ‘You both need your heads examined. Especially you.’

  ‘Older people can be amazing, Alfie. We saw your grandmother. We took her some of those chocolates she likes. With the old-fashioned soldiers and the ladies on the box. Something street.’

  ‘Quality Street. She said that you ate all the soft ones.’

  ‘I don’t blame you for being angry at me.’

  ‘I’m not angry at you. I feel sorry for you. I’m angry at my father. You’re silly. He’s a cruel, stupid coward.’

  ‘Oh, Alfie. He’s a wonderful man.’

  I shake my head. ‘He’s only doing this—setting up home with you—because he was forced into it.’

  ‘It would have happened anyway.’

  ‘That’s not what married men do. Married men stay. They stay in their homes for as long as they can.’ Under the table, I touch the ring I still wear. ‘They stay until they are forced out.’

  I get a complaint about Lenny the Lech from one of my students. Yumi, the Japanese girl with all the blonde hair, stays behind after class and tells me he has been pestering her.

  ‘In the corridor he tries to touch me. He always says—come for a drink, baby. Let me give you extra lessons, baby. Oral lessons, baby. Ha ha ha.’ She shakes her head. ‘I don’t want those kind of lessons from Lenny the Lech. He’s not even my teacher. You are.’

  ‘Can’t you tell him you’re not interested?’

  ‘He doesn’t listen.’

  Her eyes well up with tears and I pat her arm.

  ‘I’ll have a word with him, okay?’

  During morning break I find Lenny in the staff room. He is drinking instant coffee with Hamish, a fit-looking thirty-year-old down from Glasgow who is far too good-looking to be heterosexual.

  ‘So basically you came to London because you’re a bum bandit?’ Lenny is saying.

  ‘You could put it like that,’ says Hamish. ‘I came here because it’s the best place to pursue a discreetly gay lifestyle.’

  ‘And does a discreetly gay lifestyle mean you have a committed relationship with one partner? Or that you get wanked off on Hampstead Heath every night by a succession of anonymous strangers?’

  ‘Can I have a word, Lenny?’ I say.

  I take him to one side. He puts his arm around me. Lenny is a very tactile man. But it’s more than that. I think he actually likes me. Because I have also taught in Asia, he is under the illusion that we are the same kind of guy.

  ‘What is it, my old mate?’

  ‘It’s a bit embarrassing, Lenny. One of my students has had a word with me. About you. Yumi.’

  ‘The little Jap model? Miss Toyota, 1998? Not very big but you can bet she goes like the clappers?’

  ‘Yumi. The girl with all the hair. The thing is, Lenny, she says you’re misreading the signals.’

  ‘Misreading the signals?’

  ‘How can I put it? She’s not interested in you, Lenny.’ Lenny’s monstrous sweating head is corrugated with a frown. ‘God knows why not, Len, but there you go. Women, eh? It’s just not going to happen, mate.’

  ‘I’m sorry, mate,’ Lenny says. ‘I really am. I had no idea little Yumi was spoken for.’

  ‘No, it’s not—’

  ‘There’s plenty more fish in the sea.’ He chortles in that Lenny the Lech way. ‘I’ll cast my enormous hook elsewhere.’ He slaps me on the back. ‘No problemo.’

  I turn to leave.

  ‘And Alfie?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Give her one for the Lech.’

  Yumi is sitting by herself in the Eamon de Valera, nursing a mineral water at a corner table.

  ‘He’s not going to bother you any more,’ I tell her.

  ‘Thank you. I buy you drink.’

  ‘That’s okay, Yumi.’

  ‘But I want to.’ She goes to the bar and spends half the night counting out her money in loose change. Usually I feel a kind of envy for my students but right now I feel sorry for Yumi. Coming halfway round the world to improve your English and then getting some fat old Englishman like Lenny the Lech offering you oral lessons. She returns with a pint of Guinness clutched in both hands and sets it before me.

  ‘He’s a very bad man,’ she says. ‘All the girls at Churchill’s say so. He wants rub-rub with just anyone. Any student with nice face. And even some ugly ones. If they are large-breasted.’

  Then she stares at me with these eyes, these moist brown eyes, that make me realise just how lonely I have been.

  ‘Incredible,’ I say. ‘What kind of teacher does a thing like that?’

  twelve

  Yumi’s room is at the end of a dark corridor in a large, crumbling town house that has spent the last fifty years being chopped up into smaller and smaller flats. As we make our way down the hall you can hear music, voices, laughter, doors slamming, telephones ringing. The cacophony of too many people in too small a space. And having the time of their life. We take off our shoes at her door and go inside.

  It’s not much to look at. A bay window dominates the tiny flat, but it overlooks some kind of junkyard piled high with clapped-out cars. The room’s exhausted carpet looks as though it has been trodden on by an itinerant army of students. The only heating comes from a two-bar electric fire.

  It’s a dump. Yet it doesn’t feel like a dump because all over her modest apartment Yumi has decorated the peeling wallpaper with photographs from home. Everywhere you look there are all these Polaroids, snapshots and photo-booth pictures of smiling Japanese girls making V-signs. One round-faced, shyly grinning girl seems to feature in many of them.

  ‘Younger sister,’ Yumi says.

  There is something deeply affecting about Yumi’s attempts to turn this cold, rented little box into some kind of home. Armed with just her memories and a stack of photographs, she has tried to make it her own.

  Yumi lights a perfumed candle, turns on the radio to Jazz FM and unrolls a futon. The unfurled mattress takes up most of the floor. We stand facing each other for a moment and I realise how nervous I am.

  ‘I haven’t got anything,’ I say.

  ‘That’s not true,’ she says. ‘You have good heart. Lovely smile. Nice sense of humour.’

  ‘No, I mean I haven’t, you know, got any condoms.’

  ‘Ah. Okay. I have some. I think.’

  ‘And I haven’t been with anyone,’ I say. ‘Not since my wife, I mean.’

  She touches my face.

  ‘That’s okay,’ she says. ‘Whatever happens, everything’s okay.’

  It’s what I need to hear. I take it as slowly as I can and, although at first I am overwhelmed by how different she seems to Rose, it is much better than I could ever have hoped. Her body is shockingly young and lithe, and she is a sweet and tender lover, smiling at my excitement, but in a way that doesn’t make me feel bad. Yumi makes me feel nothing but good.

  Afterwards she hides her face in my chest and laughs, calling me her favourite teacher—she says sensei—and hugging me with a strength that surprises me. I laugh too, relieved and pleased, dumbfounded by my good fortune.

  Later she sleeps in my arms while I watch the candle burn down until the only light in the little room comes from the glow of the two-bar electric fire. And then, feeling happier than I have in a long time, I start to drift away too.

  Just before I slip into sleep I notice the large red suitcase in the corner of the room, as if Yumi has just arrived, or is just about to leave.

  * * *

  I wake up as the first light is creeping into the room. Yumi is sleeping wrapped up around me, that incredible mass of blonde hair almost completely covering her face so that only the tip of her nose is visible. I smile to myself. I can’t believe that she’s with me.

  I gently disentangle our limbs, slip out of the futon and pull on m
y Calvins. Quietly letting myself out of the room, I pad down the hallway, looking for the bathroom.

  Suddenly he is on top of me. A naked man. The metal studs and rings that pierce his stubbled face glinting with menace in the darkness. His head is shaved. His mouth is above me and wide open, a great black maw that seems about to take a chunk out of my throat.

  ‘Sweet Jesus!’ I mutter, leaping backwards.

  But the man is only yawning. When his mouth has completed the yawn, he smacks his lips, scratches his exposed scrotum for a bit and then blinks at me a couple of times.

  ‘Mind if I use it first, man?’ he says in an Australian accent. ‘Bit of a heavy night.’

  Trembling, I lean against the flaking plaster of the hall, trying to stop the pounding of my heart. A toilet flushes and the man emerges from the bathroom, soon disappearing once more into the darkness.

  Back inside the futon, Yumi stirs, warm as toast and smooth as ice cream, as I try to explain the terrible vision I have seen.

  ‘Oh,’ she says sleepily. ‘Room mate.’

  We have a perfect weekend. It’s the kind of time that I like best. It seems ordinary and special all at once.

  We wake up late and Yumi says she will make us breakfast. But someone—probably the pierced room mate, if you ask me—has stolen her bread from the communal kitchen and the milk that she thought was still okay has gone off. So after taking a shower together—it seems like a good idea, but we are surprisingly shy with each other—we go to a little cafe’ at the end of her street and order full English breakfasts. It takes Yumi ages to work her way through all that fried food.

  We spend the afternoon wandering around Camden market. Yumi loves looking at all the second-hand clothes, and seeing her happy makes me happy too.

  We hold hands and she gives me little kisses when I am not expecting them. I realise things about her that never really registered at Churchill’s. Her clothes are a little off-beat—today she is wearing some kind of antique dress that looks like it once belonged to Zelda Fitzgerald—and an Asian girl with a mop of dyed blonde hair gets a lot of stares. But I am proud to be seen with her. She’s a great girl, funny and smart, and we drink latte in a little cafe’ while she tells me about her family back in Osaka.