One For My Baby

by Tony Parsons

  It’s a good flat in a rich, leafy area. But it is very small and it belongs to someone else. The colour of the paint was chosen by someone else. The pictures on the wall were bought to satisfy the taste of some stranger. I try hard but I can’t imagine my father living here. In every way you can think of, this is just not his place. Everything feels rented, as though it could be repossessed at any moment, all snatched back by the rightful owner. The flat, the furniture, the girl. All just borrowed from someone else.

  ‘How long is this going to last?’ I ask him. He is still looking for a kettle. But he can’t find one. ‘Dad? Can we forget the tea? You no longer own a kettle, okay? Start living with it. No kettle. Okay?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘How long are you going to stay here with Lena?’

  ‘Until we can find somewhere better.’

  ‘She’s—what?—twenty-three?’

  ‘Twenty-five,’ says my father. ‘Nearly.’

  ‘Younger than me.’

  ‘She’s very mature for her age.’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  I slump onto the leather sofa. My father hates leather sofas. Or he used to.

  ‘Why couldn’t you have just slept with her?’ I ask, although I am very afraid that he is going to start giving me the details of their Olympian sex life. Please. Anything but that. ‘Isn’t that what’s meant to happen? I can understand why you’re attracted to her. I can even sort of see why she would be attracted by you. An older, successful man. All that. But you’re not meant to set up home together. This is madness, Dad.’

  My old man starts to pace up and down. The flat’s living room is easily the biggest room in the place but it’s still not very big. He takes a few steps and then he has to turn around. He is wringing his hands. I feel a jab of pity for the poor old bastard. He is not cut out for this game. He can’t play it as ruthlessly as it needs to be played.

  ‘These things have a momentum of their own. I tried to keep it under control, I really did. For a while there I felt like the luckiest man alive. I had the perfect wife and the perfect mistress.’

  ‘Your perfect wife wants to throttle you.’

  ‘But it doesn’t last,’ he says, ignoring me. ‘That time doesn’t last. It moves on. You can’t have it all. And you have to decide.’ He turns to me, pleading for understanding. ‘Isn’t that what every man wants? A wife and a lover? We want stability, support, a quiet life. But we also want romance, excitement, passion. Why should it be wrong to want the best of both worlds?’

  ‘Because it’s too much. You want too much. You ruin other people’s lives by wanting too much.’

  ‘I can’t help falling in love. I didn’t plan for it to work out this way, Alfie.’

  ‘Love,’ I say. ‘Give me a break. Don’t call it love.’

  ‘What else should I call it?’ he says, suddenly angry. ‘Look, I’m sorry about your mother, Alfie. I really am. It’s terrible the way she found out. But the heart wants what the heart wants.’

  ‘Dad,’ I say. ‘Listen to me. Lena is a great girl. But she dances when she eats. She still dances when she eats, okay? Haven’t you noticed that? She bops around when she’s listening to the radio, even if she’s eating her breakfast. She’s a child.’

  ‘She looks cute when she does that.’

  ‘Come on. She’s young enough to be your daughter.’

  ‘Age has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘You’d love Lena if she was your age, would you? If she was almost sixty? I don’t believe you. And she wouldn’t want you if you were some kid of twenty-three living on a student loan and working in a burger joint.’

  ‘Twenty-five,’ he says. ‘Nearly.’

  ‘You can work it out with Mum. Apologise. Ask her to forgive you. We all make mistakes. You can’t end a marriage because some au pair wags her tail at you.’

  ‘I can’t do that. I’ve left your mother. And I’ve done it for love. Sorry, Alfie. But I have my principles.’

  I feel like hitting him.

  ‘You’ve insulted love,’ I say, thinking of my mother’s garden. ‘You’ve spat in its face, you ridiculous old man. You have someone in your life who has stuck by you for years, who supported you when you had nothing, and you do this to her. Don’t talk to me about principles, okay? Don’t paint yourself as some kind of romantic hero. You’re not. And you didn’t leave. You ran away.’

  He stops pacing.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alfie. But I think I’ve done the right thing.’

  ‘Oh, you think you did the right thing, do you? You think that getting caught with your swimming trunks around your ankles in front of absolutely everyone you know was a smart move, do you? Well, Dad, that’s open to debate.’

  ‘Leaving. I did the right thing by leaving.’ He gives me a strange look. ‘Did you know that your mother was expecting you when we got married?’

  ‘I worked it out. It didn’t take a mathematical genius. There’s five months between your wedding and the day I was born.’

  ‘She was pregnant. That’s why we got married. I loved her and everything. But we got married because—that’s what you did back then. It’s not like now. And do you know what they all told me? My family, my friends, my in-laws? They all told me: you’ve had your fun. And I said nothing. But I always thought: that was it? That was my fun?’

  ‘You think the party’s just beginning, do you?’

  ‘Look, I want to live with the person I want to sleep with. Is that so wrong? You’re a man. You should try to understand. They say that if you want to stay with them you don’t want to fuck them and if you want to fuck them then you don’t want to stay with them. But I know now that’s not true. Because I want it all from Lena.’

  ‘But it’s not real. You’ve been listening to too many old records. This is not a Smokey Robinson song, Dad. This is real life.’

  My father looks at me with something approaching pity.

  ‘Don’t tell me about real life, Alfie,’ he says quietly, and I know exactly what he is about to say next so I get up to go. I try to leave quickly because I don’t want to hear it, I am heading towards the door of his rented flat before he can even get the words out.

  ‘You’re still in love with someone who’s dead,’ my father tells me.

  Love didn’t make me a better person. Just the opposite. Love made me indifferent to the rest of the world. Love narrowed my horizons down to a pair of blue eyes, to a goofy smile, to one young woman.

  Shortly after Rose and I had begun, I was on a plane flying back to Hong Kong. I had just spent a week with my parents, my first trip home since leaving London, a trip that had been arranged long before I met Rose. It was too late to cancel so I went to see my mother and father and grandmother but there was no pleasure in it for me; my heart was somewhere else. I wanted to get it over with, to get out of London, to get back to Hong Kong, to get back to her, to get back to Rose.

  But there was a problem on the plane. A serious problem. A man—this middle-aged executive sitting across the aisle from me—suddenly became short of breath. He gasped for air, he made strange croaking noises, he looked like he was choking to death. At first I assumed that he had overdone the complimentary drinks. But then, as the stewardesses crouched by his side and the pilot asked if there was a doctor on board, it soon became clear that he was sick, very sick.

  They laid him in the aisle, stretched out on the floor, right beside me, close enough to touch his terrified face, and two young doctors knelt by his side, pulling his shirt open, talking to him like priests beside a death bed.

  We couldn’t fly to Hong Kong. The man needed a hospital and so our flight diverted to Copenhagen where a medical crew was waiting to take him off the plane. And all the passengers were very understanding about the diversion, of course they were, even when they learned that we would have to wait for hours at Copenhagen Airport until we could get another crew. Our pilot explained that our crew c
ould no longer take us to Hong Kong because, with the diversion, they would exceed their permitted hours in the air. So we had to wait. For hours.

  Everybody was very understanding. Everybody except me.

  I hated that sick man. I didn’t want to divert to Copenhagen so that he could get medical treatment. I wanted the pilot to stick him in with the suitcases and let him take his chances. It was worse than indifference. I felt a rage towards him that I could hardly contain. I didn’t care if he lived or died. It meant nothing to me. I just wanted him out of the way so that I could get back to Hong Kong, back to my girl, back to my life, back to the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  That’s what love did to me.

  Love messed up my heart.

  seven

  Rose was beautiful in the water. She had been diving for years, long before she came out to Hong Kong, and she had that still, weightless quality that separates good divers from the rest of us.

  We looked like two different creatures when we were underwater. I was always a nervous wreck, struggling to maintain neutral buoyancy, constantly fiddling with the air in my BCD jacket, letting a little out as I started drifting to the surface, letting a little in as I began to sink, never getting it right for very long.

  Rose just hung there, floating in space, doing it all with her breathing, doing it all with minor adjustments to the air in her lungs, remaining weightless with what seemed like little more than sighs.

  I was never happy with my equipment, forever clearing my mask of water, nervously checking my air gauge to see exactly how much was left—I was a glutton for air, always having to return to the surface long before anyone else—and adjusting my tank as its heavy weight seemed to shift and slide on my back.

  I just didn’t look happy underwater. Like all good divers, Rose looked as though there was nowhere else she would rather be.

  She had learned to dive at home. She had got her PADI card in freezing dark waters off the south coast of England and in a flooded quarry in the Midlands. She had done it the hard way. So the dive sites of Asia—warm blue waters, endless coral reefs, so much marine life that sometimes the fish blotted out the sky—seemed like the next best thing to paradise.

  I learned to dive because of Rose. I had a crash course on our honeymoon in Puerto Galera in the Philippines, getting used to breathing underwater in the hotel swimming pool with a local instructor and a couple of twelve-year-old Taiwanese, learning the theory in some little classroom behind the resort’s dive shop and finally being taken out into open water for the real thing. Rose was as excited as me when I got my PADI card. Maybe more.

  And we had some good times. Once, on a weekend trip to Cebu in the Philippines, I sucked up most of my air in a ridiculously short amount of time and got sent up by the dive master. I had to make a safety stop for three minutes at a depth of five metres to let the excess nitrogen seep out of my body. Although her tank still had plenty of air, Rose came up with me and those few minutes making that safety stop were the best diving that I ever had. We hung there together in the shallow waters where the light was dazzling, the coral reef shining like a treasure chest, watching a school of angel fish swarm around us as our bubbles of air mixed together and rose lazily to the surface.

  But diving was just one of the many things that Rose did far more easily than me. She was comfortable at parties and meeting new people and floating weightless 15 metres below the surface of the South China Sea. But no matter how much I tried—and I tried hard because I wanted to please her more than anything in the world—I really couldn’t be. It just wasn’t in me. That was the difference between us underwater and, now I come to think of it, everywhere else.

  I swam.

  She flew.

  It felt wrong from the start.

  On Friday night the weather had been still and clear, typical of this part of the Philippines in late spring, but by the time we were walking down to the beach on Saturday morning, the blue skies were turning to gun-metal grey and the waves out at sea were showing flecks of white foam.

  We were already in our wet suits. I was carrying a big yellow dive bag containing our masks, snorkels and fins. We would rent the rest of our kit from the dive shop. I watched Rose squinting up at the sky.

  ‘We could just chill out at the hotel,’ I said. ‘The weather doesn’t look great.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Ramon won’t take us out if there’s any problem.’

  Ramon was the dive instructor of the resort, a stocky Filipino in his early forties, who watched over his dives with calm authority. A lot of dive sites in the Philippines have notoriously unpredictable currents, which means you can see some beautiful coral growth. But tricky currents also mean you need an experienced guide to take you out. We had spent a few weekends at this resort and Ramon had always led our dives and had taken good care of us. But when we arrived at the dive shop, Ramon wasn’t there.

  In his place there was a skinny kid, no older than twenty, unusually tall for a Filipino, his worn and ragged wet suit pulled off his brown, bony shoulders. He was laughing with a pair of European tourists, a couple of tall blonde girls in bathing suits who looked so healthy and milk-fed that they could only be Scandinavian.

  ‘Where’s Ramon?’ I said.

  ‘Ramon sick,’ he said, glancing at me for just a second before turning his attention back to the blondes. ‘I take the dive today.’

  I looked at Rose for a moment. She just shrugged and smiled. She really wanted to dive that day. So we joined the other divers next to a row of battered scuba tanks and started putting our equipment together as the little dive boat came into the bay and chugged towards the beach, its bow lifting and falling with the waves.

  I selected a tank, BCD and regulator, strapped the BCD to the tank, made sure it was good and tight, then attached the regulator to the tank. The four black hoses of the regulator snaked around my feet like half an octopus.

  Two of the regulator’s hoses had mouthpieces—a black one for me and a bright yellow one for anyone who might need it—another hose ended with gauges monitoring air supply and depth, and the final hose had a metal clip that I attached to the BCD. There was a little hose on my BCD so that I could regulate my buoyancy by inflating or deflating it. Finally I turned on the tank’s valve and, as it hissed into life, checked the air supply.

  The gauge read 210 bar. A full tank. Everything was as it should be. Except somehow it wasn’t as it should be at all.

  What I liked about Ramon was that he was always there while we were putting our equipment together. He would advise us about the amount of weights we needed, he would check our kit was up to scratch, he would make sure our checks were done properly. I needed all that.

  Ramon always gave me the impression that nothing was more important to him than safety. But as the rising wind whipped off the sea, I thought that this skinny kid acted as though nothing was more important to him than large Norwegian breasts.

  I stood at the stern of the boat, feeling it pitch and fall beneath my feet, taking a part of my stomach with it every time it fell. The fins that I was wearing made it easier for me to keep my balance but harder for me to move. I stood there staring at the heads bobbing up and down in the choppy sea. They looked so fragile.

  Everyone else was in the water. The skinny dive master. The Norwegian girls. A young Japanese couple. A rubbery old German who looked as though he had spent his life under the tropical sun. And Rose, her face half-hidden behind her mask but lifted towards me. They were all waiting for me.

  It was raining hard now. The coast wasn’t far away—we had reached the dive site in less than twenty minutes—but it was completely hidden behind a mist that seemed to be growing thicker by the second. Black clouds rumbled and rolled above the dive boat. There was a clap of thunder overhead, a jagged slash of lightning on the horizon. The rain seemed to be coming in sideways. I placed one hand on my mask and another on my tank and stepped off the side of the boat.

  I hit the
water, went under for an instant and was suddenly on the surface. The waves were even rougher than they looked from the boat and I took in a mouthful of water, managing to gag most of it up.

  My mask was already getting misty. I should have spat on the glass and cleaned it with sea water, as that always prevented it steaming up, but it felt like there hadn’t been enough time. The skinny dive master had taken us all up to the bow to talk through the dive plan and next thing after that we were getting into the water. I pulled off my mask, hawked on the glass and dipped it under the water, rubbing hard.

  Rose was finning to my side. ‘You okay?’

  ‘I miss Ramon,’ I said, tasting the salt and bile.

  ‘Me too. I think we’re off.’

  I pulled on my mask and saw that the rest of them were already going down. I quickly stuffed in the mouthpiece of my regulator and faced Rose. She made a thumbs-down gesture, meaning going down, and I returned the signal. I released a few puffs of air from my jacket and exhaled, immediately starting to sink feet first below the waves.

  I was aware of the hull of the boat, other divers nearby, the dive master floating weightless far below us. And that’s when I felt the excruciating pain in the bridge of my nose. I was going down too fast, the pressure on the air space in my sinuses was causing a squeeze.

  Rose was beside me, making a soothing gesture with her hands, slowly waving them in front of her chest—take it easy, take it easy. I nodded, went up a metre and the squeeze immediately cleared.

  With one hand I made my thumb and index finger into a circle—I’m okay—and with the other I pinched my nose, gently blowing through it as I once more tried to go down. This time it worked and I slowly began to sink without my nose feeling as though it was in a vice.

  Visibility was poor. I was used to seeing these waters flooded with sunlight and marine life, but today the sea was murky and dark, with only a few fish swimming through the gloom, bright splashes of colour in the enveloping darkness. Then I realised that Rose and I were alone.