One For My Baby Read online

  ‘Breathe,’ he says.

  ‘What?’ I say, fighting to catch my breath.

  ‘Not breathing properly.’

  ‘Who?’

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

  I stare at him.

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

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

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not old saying. Not wise old Chinese saying. Just common sense.’

  Then he turns away, dismissing me.

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

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

  It’s not easy.

  You see, she was my reason.

  two

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

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

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

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

  My dad was never very fond of the slog of reporting—sitting in the press box at Upton Park, phoning in copy from ring side in the NEC Birmingham—but when he was given space to write about the men and women behind the results and the statistics, when he told you about the brilliant young footballer whose career had suddenly been ended by an ankle injury, or the Olympic hopeful who had just discovered a lump in her breast, his stuff could break your heart. He was a cockle warmer, my dad. He could warm your cockles in just a 1200-word, two-page spread. And when my old man warmed your cockles, your cockles stayed warm for quite a while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  They don’t talk to him any more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  That’s all new.

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

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

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

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

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

  Sometimes it hardly feels like the same country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The money is new, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  What if this is how you are meant to feel?

  There’s a strange man on our front doorstep.

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

  He looks like a supremely fit insect.

  ‘Dad?’

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

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

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

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

  I always thought they were about being with your granddad.

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

  ‘Granddad!’ I would say. ‘It’s Frank!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘New wheels, Dad?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  My dad and I go into the living room where my grandmother is sitting in her favourite chair with a copy of the News of the World on her lap. She appears to be studying a story with the headline ‘Table Dancing Tart Stole My Telly Stud’.

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

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

  I take her hand. I love my nan.

  ‘No luck, Alfie,’ she says. ‘No luck again, love.’

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