One For My Baby Read online

  ‘It’s no good if it’s too important,’ I said to her on the way to the pub. ‘That’s what I’ve learned. If you make it too important, then it ruins everything.’

  Hiroko of the broken heart.

  There was a man back in Tokyo. A man from Hiroko’s office. An older man. Hiroko lived with her parents and the man lived with his wife. Their work brought Hiroko and the man together. He was friendly and charming. She was young and lonely. She liked him a lot. And so they began.

  Hiroko and the man had to go to love hotels, those briefly rented rooms in buildings shaped like ocean liners and castles and space ships. She knew he wasn’t free but she also knew that they really cared for each other. He was funny and kind and he told her that she was beautiful. He made her feel good about herself, as though she could really be the person she had always wanted to be. And he told her that he loved her, he told her that he loved her so very much in one of their two-hour stays in a love hotel. Then he went home to his wife.

  Something happened. Something momentous that makes her eyes fill with tears, something that she will not talk about.

  ‘You got pregnant, didn’t you?’

  A quick bob of the head. Heartbroken assent.

  ‘But you didn’t have the baby.’

  A small shake of the head, her hair falling over her face.

  ‘And pencil dick stayed with his wife.’

  Her voice is not much more than a whisper, but I am struck by how little accent she has. When she doesn’t think about it too much, her spoken English is actually pretty good.

  ‘Of course.’

  I reach out and touch her hand.

  ‘Don’t worry about him, Hiroko. He’s going to have a really unhappy life.’

  She looks at me gratefully and smiles for the first time.

  ‘Promise me that in the future you will steer clear of pencil dicks like that,’ I say.

  ‘Okay,’ she says, laughing and crying all at the same time. ‘I promise.’

  ‘No more pencil dicks?’

  ‘No more—no more pencil dicks.’

  Two drinks and a £10 black cab ride later, Hiroko and I are outside the house of her host family in Hampstead. It’s a hell of a house—a big, detached mansion on one of those wide, tree-lined avenues that they have up there—but not much of a family—just one rich old lady who rents out a room to female students because she gets lonely. Hiroko makes sure that the old lady is tucked up in bed with Tiddles the cat and Radio 4 and then she sneaks me up the stairs to a converted loft where a shaft of moonlight pours through the skylight and onto her single bed.

  And as she showers—they are so clean, these Japanese girls, always jumping in the shower and wearing their pants in bed—I think to myself that there’s another way that Hiroko is different from my other students.

  Most of them are in London looking for fun. Hiroko is here looking for love. Or perhaps she is just escaping from it.

  I know she will never feel the same desperate passion for me that she felt for that second-rate salaryman back in Tokyo. And I know that she will never own my heart in the way that my wife owned my heart. Yet that’s okay. It doesn’t seem sad tonight. In fact, in some way that I can’t quite understand, it feels sort of perfect.

  ‘I’m very exciting,’ she says.

  She means: I’m very excited.

  It is, apparently, an easy mistake to make. I have had a number of students say to me, ‘I’m very boring,’ when what they really mean is, ‘I’m very bored.’ There’s some glitch in the translation from Japanese to English that causes the mistake. But I like it. I like that mistake.

  I’m very exciting, too.

  A panic attack on the tube.

  At first, when I get a twinge in my chest and feel the cold, creeping fear dripping down my back, I think that it’s just another one of my phoney heart attacks.

  But it’s much worse than that.

  I am bumping south on the Northern Line, escaping from Hampstead before Hiroko’s nice old cat lady stirs, before Tiddles alerts her to my presence. I am strap-hanging in a crowded carriage because the rush hour starts just after dawn these days, when without warning my breath starts coming in these short, fast gasps, like a diver who finds himself a long way down and suddenly sucking on the last drops of air in a broken tank.

  Panic.

  Real, terrified, sweating panic. I can’t breathe. It’s not my imagination. I literally can’t breathe. I am horribly and desperately aware of the crush of people around me, the sick yellow light of the carriage, the dead air of the tunnel, the entire weight of the city pressing down on us.

  Trapped. I feel like weeping, screaming, running, but I can do none of these things. I need to be out of this place immediately and there is nowhere to go, there is no end in sight.

  Pure, howling terror. My eyes sting with perspiration and tears. I feel like I am choking, falling, watched. Passengers—all the other calm, unforgiving passengers—glance my way and seem to stare right into my cracked soul. My face crumples and I close my eyes, my legs gone to jelly, the roar of the train deafening, gripping the worn leather strap until my knuckles are white.

  Somehow I make it to the next station. I stumble from the train, up the escalators, burst into the light, the air. Filling my lungs. When I have stopped trembling I start to walk home. It takes a long time. I am miles from home. The streets are crowded with commuters on their way to work and school. I seem to be going in a different direction to everyone else.

  My walk home takes me through Highbury Fields where George Chang is standing in his patch of grass.

  His face seems young and old all at the same time. His head is erect, his back poker-straight. He doesn’t see me. He gives no indication of seeing anything. I stand perfectly still watching his slow-motion dance. His hands move like punches, and yet there is no violence in them. His legs and feet move like kicks and sweeps, but there is no force in them. Every move he makes looks like the softest thing in the world.

  And I realise that I have never in my life seen anyone who looks so totally at peace inside his own skin.

  ‘I want you to teach me,’ I tell George. ‘I want to learn Tai Chi.’

  We are in the new General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen on the Holloway Road. George is eating his breakfast. Chicken wings and fries. You would think that a man like George Chang would avoid fast food joints like General Lee’s, that he would be squatting somewhere with a bowl of steamed rice, but you would be wrong. George says the food in General Lee’s is ‘very simple’. He’s a big fan.

  ‘Teach you Tai Chi,’ he says. The way he says it, it’s neither a question nor an agreement.

  ‘I need to do something, George. I mean it. I feel like everything’s falling to bits.’ I don’t say what I really feel. That I want to be comfortable inside my own body. That I want to be like him. That I am sick and tired of being like myself, so sick and tired that you wouldn’t believe it. ‘I need to be calmer,’ is what I say. ‘Much calmer. Right now I can’t relax. I can’t sleep. Sometimes I can’t even breathe.’

  He sort of shrugs.

  ‘Tai Chi good for relaxation. Stress control. All the problem of modern world. Life very busy.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I say. ‘Life’s very busy, isn’t it? And sometimes I feel so old. Everything aches, George. I’ve got no energy. I feel frightened—really frightened—but I can’t even say what’s wrong. Everything seems to overwhelm me.’

  ‘Still miss wife.’

  ‘That’s right, George. But every little thing that goes wrong feels like a major trauma. Do you know what I mean? I lose my temper. I feel like crying.’ I attempt a little laugh. ‘I’m going crazy here, George. Help me. Please.’

  ‘Tai Chi good for all that. For tension. For tired.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I need.’

  ‘But I can’t teach you.’

  My heart lurches with disappointment. Once I had worked up the nerve to ask him, it had never even crossed m
y mind that he would turn me down. I stare at him munching his chicken wings for a while, waiting for him to offer some further explanation. But the silence just grows. He has apparently said it all.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Take too long time.’

  ‘But I see you teaching people all the time. There’s often someone with you.’

  He smiles down at his chicken wings.

  ‘Always someone different. Different man, different woman. Come for a few mornings. Maybe a little bit longer. Then stop coming. Because western people don’t have patience for Tai Chi.’ He looks at me over a chicken wing. ‘It’s not pill. It’s not drug. Not magic. To be any good for you, for anyone, take a long time. A long time. Western people don’t have time.’

  I almost tell him that I’ve got all the time in the world, but I don’t bother.

  Because suddenly I see myself with George in the park, both of us in our black pyjamas, doing a graceful slow-motion waltz as the packed tube trains rumble 100 metres below our slippered feet, and the image just seems ridiculous.

  George is right. There are some dances you never learn. That stillness, that peace, that grace. Who am I kidding?

  I just don’t have it in me.

  sixteen

  Hiroko is going back to Japan for Christmas. I meet her at Paddington, under a huge fir tree decorated with brightly coloured boxes that are meant to look like presents, and we catch the Heathrow Express to the airport.

  Saying goodbye to her feels strange. I am sad to see her go. At the same time, I am glad to feel something, anything. But—and this is the important bit—not too much.

  We embrace at the departure gate and Hiroko waves to me right up until the time she disappears behind the screen before passport control. Then I wander around Terminal 3, reluctant to go home. The airport is awash with real emotion today. Lovers are saying goodbye and being reunited. Families are separating and coming back together. There are lots of hugs and laughter and tears. The departure gate is pretty interesting but the arrivals hall is even better, because you can’t do it in your own time at arrivals. You can’t decide when it’s time to say hello in quite the same way that you can decide it’s time to say goodbye. Hello just happens. The people anxiously waiting for someone don’t know when that face is suddenly going to appear before them, slowly pushing a trolley, smiling through the jet lag, ready for a kiss and a cuddle, ready to begin again.

  There’s something else that I notice about the arrivals hall. It is full of young women arriving in the UK to study English. Everywhere you look there is shining black hair, bright brown eyes and Louis Vuitton luggage. They don’t stop coming.

  It’s a kind of miracle.

  Behind the barrier there are bored drivers and chirpy representatives of two dozen language schools standing with their little signs and placards and notice boards, waiting for the next Jumbo from Osaka or Beijing or Seoul or somewhere else that Christmas doesn’t really matter.

  And as I stand among the men and women with their placards—MISS SUZUKI, KIM LEE, GREEN GABLES LANGUAGE SCHOOL, TAE-SOON LEE, MIWAKO HONDA and HIROMI TAKESHI, OXFORD SCHOOL OF ENGLISH, MISS WANG and MISS WANG—I suddenly realise that this city is full of young women learning English.

  The Terminal 3 brigade are Asian. At the other terminals, you would no doubt find the Scandinavian regiments, or the Mediterranean battalions. But there are thousands of them, an entire army of them, with fresh reinforcements arriving daily.

  For the first time I understand that there’s no reason for me ever to be lonely again.

  Some of these young women—laughing, confident, looking forward to their new life—find their drivers or their schools’ representatives immediately. Others struggle to make the connection. They wander in front of the barrier, looking for their name on one of the little hand-held placards. Hopeful but a touch worried. And my heart aches for them.

  I watch them for the longest time, these beautiful stragglers in this magnificent brown-eyed invasion, fresh off the plane and looking for a sign.

  And somewhere high above me, in the muzak that is pumped around the airport, ‘Silent Night’ segues into ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’.

  As soon as my nan has her front door open, I can smell the gas. I brush past her and quickly go into the kitchen where the smell is even stronger.

  ‘Alfie?’

  One of the gas burners on her cooker is turned up to full and unlit. The gas feels so thick it’s like you could reach out and touch it. Coughing like a madman, I turn it off and open up all the windows.

  ‘Nan,’ I say, sick and streaming, ‘you’ve got to be more careful.’

  ‘I don’t know how that happened,’ she says, all flustered. ‘I was making—I don’t remember.’ She blinks at me with her watery blue eyes. ‘Don’t tell your mum, Alfie. Or your dad.’

  I look at her. She has her make-up on. Her eyebrows are two shaky black lines and her lipstick is very slightly off, like a double exposure on a photograph. The sight of her worried face and wonky cosmetics makes me put my arm around her shoulders. Inside her cardigan she feels as small and fragile as a child.

  ‘I promise I won’t tell anybody,’ I say, knowing she is worried that my parents already think she is unable to live alone, knowing that her great terror in this world is that she will one day be taken from this place and put in a home. ‘But please don’t do it again, okay, Nan?’

  She beams with relief and I watch her make a cup of tea for the pair of us, muttering to herself, elaborately turning the gas off after the kettle has boiled. I feel for the poor old thing, constantly being assessed for signs that her warm, intelligent, curious mind has finally turned to mush. At the same time the gas has frightened me. I am afraid that one day I will stand outside her flat with the fumes seeping under the door and nobody answering the bell. Then I remember why I am here. Jesus. I’m getting a touch of old timer’s disease myself.

  ‘Where’s your tree, Nan?’

  ‘In the little room, love. In the box with Christmas written on it.’

  My nan loves Christmas. She would put her tree up in mid-August if we didn’t physically restrain her. Although she always spends Christmas Day with my family—and this year she will spend it with my mother and me, which is all that’s left of my family—she still likes to have her own tree, alleging that it’s ‘nice for Alfie when he comes round’, as if I am just coming up to my fourth birthday.

  I can remember the Christmas Days we had with my nan when I was small. She was still in her old house in the East End, the house where my father grew up, the house in Oranges For Christmas, the house with a chicken run in the back garden and a stand-up piano in the living room. The place always seemed to be full of my uncles and aunts and cousins, the children playing with their new toys while the adults got merry—big glasses of dark beer for the men, small glasses of something red and sweet for the women—and played brag and poker, or bet on the horses that were racing on television. The old house was constantly filled with people and music, cigarette smoke and laughter. There was a huge tree that looked as though it had come straight from some Norwegian wood.

  Now the old house has gone and so has my grandfather and so has my father and my nan lives alone in this small white flat, the belongings of a lifetime shrunk to fit a few bare rooms. The uncles and the aunts are scattered, spending Christmases with their own children and grandchildren, and the real tree has been replaced by a fake silver one that comes in three parts—top half, bottom half and base, like a fake Santa half-heartedly going ho ho ho. I find the tree and a collection of fairy lights and assorted decorations in a torn cardboard box marked ‘Xmass’. My nan watches me with excited eyes as I screw the thing together.

  ‘Lovely,’ she says. ‘That silver looks smashing, doesn’t it, Alfie?’

  ‘It does, Nan.’

  As I stretch to put the angel on top of the tree I feel something bad happen to my back. Some muscle seems to go at the base of my spine and I am suddenly hunched up with
pain, the angel still in my fist.

  And as I sit on the sofa waiting for the pain to pass, and my nan goes off to make another cup of tea, I think I finally understand her passion for her fake tree.

  Christmas trees are a bit like relationships. The real thing is certainly more beautiful, but it’s just too much fuss, too much mess.

  You can say what you like about fake ones.

  But you can’t deny that they are a lot less trouble.

  The way I come to sleep with Vanessa is that I find her standing outside the college with Witold handing out new leaflets for the school.

  The massed ranks of late Christmas shoppers are not paying them any attention so Vanessa is folding the flyers into little paper planes and throwing them into the crowd. Witold is watching her with an embarrassed grin.

  ‘Study with the best!’ she cries, launching a leaflet at a middle-aged businessman. ‘Estudia en Churchill’s! Studia alla Churchill’s! Studieren in Churchill’s!’

  ‘What are you doing, Vanessa?’ I ask her, rubbing my back.

  ‘Getting new students!’ she laughs. ‘Nauka w Churchill’s! Etudiez à Churchill’s!’

  ‘Well, knock it off,’ I smile.

  ‘But nobody’s interested,’ she says, stamping her foot and giving me one of her sulky pouts. She puts her hands on her hips. ‘It’s Christmas.’

  ‘Just give them out normally,’ I tell her. ‘Please.’

  ‘What will you do for me? Give me an exam paper in advance?’

  ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’ Vanessa is the kind of woman who makes you think that banter is compulsory. ‘As it’s Christmas. You know. A glass of German wine or something.’

  ‘Anything but German wine.’

  ‘I like German wine,’ Witold says.

  And so later I find myself in the Eamon de Valera having a drink with Vanessa. She is not herself. She doesn’t dance, or flirt, or shout across the pub to someone. She tells me that she is not going back to France for the holiday—it’s difficult to know where she should go now that her parents are divorced—but staying in London is even worse.