One For My Baby Page 6

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she suddenly demands, sizing me up over the green tea. ‘Cat got your mouth?’

  She is a strange old lady. And yet this flat full of Cantonese seems oddly familiar to me. Is it the way the television dominates the room? The way that three generations seem perfectly at ease with each other? Or is it just the sweet tea and biscuits happily consumed on a crowded, worn-out old sofa?

  There’s something about this room that reminds me of a family from long ago, a family that I knew in my childhood, a family that somewhere along the way I have somehow got separated from.

  five

  What I like about teaching at Churchill’s International Language School is that my students are definitely not children. They are young men and women, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, although there are quite a few who are older, mature students who only made it to London after the collapse of a bad marriage in Seoul or after too many boring years in an office job in Tokyo or after repeatedly having their visa application turned down by some spiteful little penpusher at the British Embassy in Beijing or Lagos or Warsaw.

  I like their optimism, their youth, the way their lives are not yet set in stone. And I admire their nerve, coming halfway round the world to master another language.

  So why do they dislike me so much?

  Sometimes my students turn up late. Sometimes they do not turn up at all. And if they make it to class, they yawn and stretch and struggle to stay awake.

  I finally snap when one of them, a Chinese boy in broken glasses called Zeng, loses his heroic battle against sleep and nods off in the middle of my interesting talk on the present perfect.

  ‘What is it with you lot?’ I demand. ‘You don’t show up half the time. When you do show up you act as though you’ve been heavily sedated. Look at this guy. Dead to the world. Are my lessons really so boring? Come on. Let’s have it.’

  They stare at me dumbfounded. One or two of them rub their eyes. Zeng begins to snore.

  ‘Not at all,’ says a Japanese girl at the front of the class. She is one of the new kind of Japanese girls—dyed blonde hair, heavy make-up and platform boots. She looks like one of the Glitter Band. ‘We like your lessons.’ She glances around at the rest of the class. There are a few nods of assent. ‘Present perfect? Present perfect continuous?’ She smiles at me and I remember her name. Yumi. ‘Very nice indeed.’ She nods.

  ‘Then why don’t you turn up? Why is this guy out for the count? Why is everyone on the verge of total collapse?’

  ‘Please,’ says a tall, thin Pole who has to be the same age as me. Witold. It took him about ten years before they ticked his card at the British Embassy in Warsaw. ‘Zeng is very—how to say?—knackered.’

  ‘He works every night,’ says the good-looking Pakistani kid sitting next to Zeng. Imran. He gives Zeng a shake. ‘Wake up. The teacher is talking to you.’

  Zeng grunts, opens his eyes, wonders what planet he is on.

  ‘You work, don’t you, Zeng?’ says Yumi.

  Zeng nods. ‘General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen. The one on Leicester Square. Very popular. Very busy.’

  ‘That’s no excuse,’ I say. ‘I don’t care if you’ve got some little part-time job. You should stay awake in my lessons. Falling asleep is rude.’

  ‘Not such a little job,’ says Imran.

  ‘Work until three in morning,’ says Zeng. ‘Do you want fries with that? Anything to drink? You want the General’s Happy Meal special? Toilets only for customer use.’ He shakes his head. ‘Wah,’ he says.

  ‘It’s not insult for you,’ says Imran. ‘London so expensive. He has to work too hard. We all do.’

  ‘I don’t work,’ says a young French woman. There are only a couple of French at Churchill’s. She sniffs the air disdainfully. Vanessa. ‘But the rest of them have to, I suppose.’

  ‘I work in Pampas Steak Bar,’ says Witold. ‘A bad place. Many drunks. Call me bloody Argie. What’s it like to lose a war, Argie? Hands off the Falklands, Argie, okay? Hey, Argie—you like shagging sheep? You keep your filthy hands off those British sheep, Argie. I tell them I am Polish and they say they will smash my face in, wherever I come from.’

  ‘Very English, no?’ laughs Vanessa. ‘Swear and fight and eat bad food. A good night out for the English.’

  ‘I work in Funky Sushi,’ says a Japanese boy called Gen. He’s very shy and hasn’t volunteered any information about himself until now. ‘You know Funky Sushi? No? Really? It’s one of those—’ He chats to Yumi in Japanese for a bit.

  ‘Conveyor belt restaurant,’ says Yumi. She makes a circular motion with her hand. ‘Where the food goes round and round.’

  ‘Conveyor belt,’ says Gen. ‘Considered very low in Japan. Cheap place, for workmen. Driving trucks and so forth. Because sushi not fresh enough when it goes round and round and round. Too old. But here—very fashion. Funky Sushi always busy. Always the kitchen—what do you call it?—mental.’

  ‘We all work,’ says Yumi. ‘I work in bar. The Michael Collins.’

  ‘Irish pub,’ says Zeng. ‘Very good atmosphere. Guinness and the Corrs. I enjoy looking for my crack in an Irish pub.’

  Yumi shrugs. ‘Have to work. London too much money. Worse than Tokyo even. So we get tired from work. Apart from Vanessa.’

  ‘I get tired from my boyfriend,’ says Vanessa.

  ‘But we like your lessons,’ Yumi says with conviction. She smiles at me, and I realise how pretty she is beyond all the war paint. ‘It’s—what do you say?—nothing personal.’

  She looks down at her desk, then back at me, still smiling, until I am the one who is forced to look away.

  When I get home I find Lena crying in the kitchen.

  This shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does. Since Oranges For Christmas went through the roof and my parents moved to this big white house, there have been a succession of au pairs and I have seen a few of them crying in this kitchen. There was the Sardinian who missed her mother’s cooking. The Finn who missed her boyfriend. The German who discovered she didn’t like getting out of bed before noon.

  My parents treated all of these young women very well. Neither my mum nor my dad had grown up around any kind of hired help so they were far more than friendly to our au pairs. They were almost apologetic. Yet the au pairs still found a reason to cry all over their low-fat yoghurt.

  I thought Lena was different from the rest. She has that untouchable air about her that only the truly beautiful possess. For those of us who are merely average-looking—or in my case, slightly below average—beauty seems like a magic shield. You can’t imagine life ever wounding someone who has that magic shield around them.

  But the ordinary-looking always overestimate the power of beauty. Just look at Lena. A fat lot of good beauty did her. She has been crying her heart out.

  Embarrassed to see me, she starts to dab away her tears with a piece of kitchen towel. And I’m embarrassed too, especially after I ask a stupid question.

  ‘You all right, Lena?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she lies, wiping her perfect nose with the back of her hand.

  ‘You want a coffee or something?’

  She looks at me with wounded eyes.

  ‘Just some milk. There’s some organic left in the fridge. Thank you.’

  I bring Lena her glass of organic milk and sit across from her at the kitchen table. I don’t want to get too close. In the presence of beauty, I always feel that I should keep my distance. Even at a time like this.

  I watch her taking little bird sips from her milk, her lovely face red with spent emotion, her large blue eyes all puffy from crying. Strands of her blonde angel’s hair are damp with snot and tears. She twists the piece of kitchen towel in her fingers.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask, although I sort of know the answer already. An au pair doesn’t cry these kind of desperate tears just because she misses Mutti’s apple strudel.

  This is man trouble.

  Lena is silent
for a while. Then she looks up at the ceiling, her mouth and chin trembling, her eyes suddenly full of tears.

  ‘I just want someone who is going to love me forever,’ she says quietly, and I feel a surge of sadness and fear for her.

  Forever? There’s one thing wrong with forever. These days it seems to get shorter and shorter. That’s the trouble with forever.

  Blink and you miss it.

  In the morning my mother waits until my father has gone to the gym and then she tells me that she wants us to give him a birthday party.

  My mum is full of smiles and very pleased with this idea, even when I try to talk her out of it.

  ‘He hates parties,’ I say. ‘Especially birthday parties. Especially his own.’

  ‘He’s going to be fifty-eight,’ she says, as if that makes all the difference. ‘And he’s got lots of friends, your dad.’

  Sometimes when I am talking to my mother I get the impression that we are having two different conversations. I tell her that he doesn’t want to be reminded of his age. She tells me that he’s going to be fifty-eight and that he has lots of friends. My mum often makes me feel like I’ve missed something.

  ‘Mum, what’s turning fifty-eight got to do with it?’ I say. ‘You think he wants to be reminded that he’s fifty-eight? And he hasn’t got lots of friends. Who are his friends?’

  ‘You know,’ she says. ‘There are the journalists he worked with at the paper. All the sports people he knows. The book people.’

  ‘None of these people are his friends, Mum. They are just people he knows. He doesn’t even like most of them.’

  She’s not listening to me. She has made her mind up and she is busy getting ready for work. She already has her uniform on—a short-sleeved gingham dress made of nylon or some other man-made material with a kind of fake apron stitched on to the front. Later she will pull back her hair—still glossy and dark, although I think she might have been colouring it for a few years—and put on a little white pill-box hat.

  My mum is a dinner lady at a local school. It’s not the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys, where I taught. She works at the Nelson Mandela High, which is co-ed and even tougher. ‘The girls are as bad as the boys these days,’ my mum says. ‘Worse.’ But she refused to give up what she calls ‘my little job’ even when the serious money started to pour in from my dad’s book. That’s why my parents need help with their big house. That’s why Lena’s here. Because my mum wouldn’t give up her little job.

  My mum loves Nelson Mandela. She really does. She likes having a laugh with the women she works with in the kitchen. She likes getting out of the house and giving some kind of shape to her day. But what my mum likes best about her job are the children.

  I say children, although of course many of them are hulking great baritones who would sell their granny for the price of an ounce of puff. At least that’s how I see them. My mother thinks that there’s no such thing as a bad child.

  ‘My kids,’ she calls them. She’s sentimental about the children she feeds even though she has seen the worst of them, even though she has experienced them in all their surly, foul-mouthed violence, even though they are obviously not worth getting sentimental about. My mum still calls them ‘my kids’.

  She doesn’t let her kids cheek her when they are queuing for their burgers and chips. She doesn’t tolerate bad language in the school canteen. She doesn’t even let the little bastards scrap with each other (better they beat the hell out of each other rather than their poor underpaid teachers, if you ask me).

  My mother has been known to put down her ladle—or whatever it is she dishes out the gruel with—stride into the playground and break up a fight. I have told her dozens of times that she is barking mad, that she could get seriously hurt. She doesn’t listen to me. She’s only five foot two, my mum, but she’s tough. And very stubborn.

  She has worked at the Nelson Mandela for almost twenty years, back in the days when it was still the Clement Attlee Grammar School. This means that there are men and women on the verge of middle age who remember her from their own years at the school. You might be walking down the street with my mother when some beer monster will suddenly come up to her and say, ‘Hello, Mrs Budd, remember me?’

  ‘Used to be one of my kids,’ my mum will say.

  I don’t understand how she can feel the way she does about these children. I guess it’s because she has a lot of love to give. Far more than my father and myself ever really needed from her.

  When I was growing up, my mother had a series of miscarriages. It’s not something we talked about at the time. And it’s not something we talked about later. But I clearly remember being a bystander to my parents’ loss.

  I don’t know how many times it happened. More than once. I can remember that there were these times in my childhood where there was a lot of talk about me having a little sister or brother. Not from my parents—I guess after the first miscarriage you are too wary to count on anything—but I remember aunts and female neighbours smiling down at me, talking about how soon there was going to be someone that I would have to look after.

  I didn’t understand what they were talking about. I didn’t understand the syrupy smiles or the coy allusions. I couldn’t imagine anyone being so desperate that they needed me to look after them. I just didn’t get it.

  But later, when I saw my mother weeping without any apparent reason on the stairs of the little house where I grew up, when I saw her heart breaking while my father tried to comfort her, then I started to get it. The cute talk from the over-confident neighbours had abruptly stopped. I wasn’t going to have a brother or sister. My parents were not going to have another child. Not this time. Not now. And, as it turned out, not ever.

  I wondered where they were, my unborn little brothers and sisters. Were they in heaven? I tried my best to see them in my mind, my little brothers and sisters, but they were never real children to me, not like the other children at school or in the park, and not like the brothers and sisters of my friends.

  These unborn siblings seemed more like an idea that someone had once had, an idea that had been thought about and then quietly put away. But I remember my mother weeping on the stairs, I remember watching her heart break, I remember her weeping as though those children were as real as me.

  She loved me. She loved my father. She was very good at it. When we had hard times—when my dad was trying to write his book while still working full time, when I lost Rose—my mum was our rock.

  But no matter how much love she gave us, I always felt that she had more to give. I am not saying that’s why she worked as a dinner lady at Nelson Mandela High. But all that unused love is why my mum can look at all those unlovely children and feel a genuine affection for them.

  ‘We’re giving him a birthday party,’ she says, putting on her coat. ‘Don’t tell your nan. Or Lena. Or him.’

  ‘I don’t know, Mum.’

  ‘It will do him good to celebrate his birthday,’ she says, and for just a second there I catch a glimpse of the woman who, at fifty-four years of age, still breaks up fights in the playground of Nelson Mandela High.

  The work is not going well for my old man.

  When the work was going well, the door to his basement study was shut but you could hear music blasting out of his stereo. It was always the old school soul music he played, music that is full of profound melancholy and wild exuberance, music that was the sound of young America thirty years ago.

  When the work went well, my dad played all the mating calls of his twenties—the Four Tops, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie Wonder—but now the work is going badly, or not going anywhere at all, there is only silence in his basement room.

  Sometimes I see him sitting at his desk, staring at his computer, a pile of fan letters by his side. People are always writing to his publishers to say how much they loved Oranges For Christmas, how they laughed and cried, how it reminded them so much of thei
r own family. These letters, passed on by his publishers, should make my father feel good but all this appreciation seems to weigh heavily upon him, seems to make it even more difficult for him to get started on his new book.

  My father is rarely at home these days. In the mornings he goes to the gym, pumping his pecs and crunching his abs and toning his buttocks until the sweat blinds him. At night he has endless chores and treats—there are drinks, dinners, launches, awards ceremonies and his wise, witty appearances at the artsy end of radio and television. Those long afternoons are the big problem for him. He stares at his computer screen for a while, Smokey and Stevie and Diana silent inside their CD cases and boxed sets, and then he calls a cab and slips off to the West End.

  This is how my father fills his afternoons. He goes around the book shops of Covent Garden and Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street, where he signs many copies of Oranges For Christmas. This makes his book easier to sell, so the stores are always pleased to see him, even though he is turning up unannounced and they have other things to do. The young staff fetch him a pile of books and a cup of coffee and my father sets to work.

  I saw him once in one of those book shops where they sell records, magazines and designer coffee, one of those new kind of book shops where books are just one of the things they sell. He didn’t see me and I didn’t want to approach him. It would have felt like an intrusion into some private grief.

  He looked so lonely.

  It is possible that my father does other things in the West End when he escapes from his work and his family and his home. But that’s how I see him, that’s how he is fixed in my mind at this moment—sitting all by himself in the corner of a crowded book shop, a cup of caffe latte growing cold by his side, passing the long, lonesome hours by writing his own name over and over again.