by Tony Parsons
There’s a second where I think it is going to get worse for us, but then the three of them skulk away, their faces twisted with shock and loathing beneath their baseball caps, Spotty still clutching his shoulder, telling us to watch our fucking backs if we know what’s fucking good for us. But he doesn’t sound very frightening any more.
And I stare at George, realising for the first time that I am not in dance class. We look at each other.
‘How long before I can do that?’
‘Practising hard?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very hard?’
‘Very hard.’
‘About ten years.’
‘Ten years? You’re kidding me.’
‘Okay. Maybe not ten. Maybe more like twenty. But remember—Tai Chi Chuan not about external strength. About internal strength. Not strength in muscles.’ He gently slaps his chest three times. ‘Strength inside.’
Then he gives me a patient smile.
‘Lots to learn,’ he says. ‘Better get started.’
I am expecting the girl from Ipanema. What I get is the girl from Ilford.
Jackie Day is standing on my doorstep.
‘Alfie? Hi. We spoke on the phone? About the ad? To learn English?’
I am thrown. It’s true that we have spoken on the phone. Unfortunately there have only been a handful of callers, perhaps because we are in that dead period between Christmas and the New Year, or perhaps because they can smell an Alfie-sized rat. But Jackie called. She was shocked and delighted to discover that it was her old pal from Oxford Street who was offering English lessons. And I naturally assumed that the char from Churchill’s was enquiring on behalf of somebody else.
I don’t know who. I didn’t even think about it.
Some hot Hungarian fresh off the Jumbo who Jackie met while cleaning at another language school? Some leggy Brazilian who Jackie bumped into doing the lambada in a suburban nightclub? But there’s no hot Hungarian, no Brazilian beauty.
Jackie brushes past me as she comes into the hall and I see that the roots of her blonde hair need some attending to. As usual, she’s all dressed up, as if she has somewhere to go. For some reason she is acting as though this is the place.
Our telephone conversation was short and sweet. Was that really me? Yes, it was really me. Small world! What were my rates like? How flexible were the lessons? I told her that my rates were reasonable, and my flexibility was endless. She thanked me and said she would think about it. But I swear to God I thought she was thinking about it for some foreign friend.
And now we look at each other. Jackie smiles eagerly. If I were a cartoon, a question mark would be hovering above my head.
‘I’m so glad it’s you,’ she laughs. ‘What a coincidence. I can’t believe my luck.’
I show her through to the living room, thinking that eventually all this will be worth the trouble. Be patient, Alfie. Somewhere out in the night the drums are calling and they are doing the lambada.
But it’s still the middle of the afternoon. I’ve only got the run of the house because my mum has taken my nan to the sales in the West End. So I sit on the sofa with Jackie, note her tight little jumper, strappy shoes, the skirt the size of a face towel. I don’t know how she can walk around like that. She dresses for seventies night even when she’s trying to look respectable. She crosses her legs demurely.
‘And who would the lessons be for?’ I ask her.
She looks a little surprised.
‘Sorry, I thought that was clear.’ A pause. ‘They’re for me.’
‘But—why would you want to learn English?’
‘You told me once you taught English Literature? Before you taught English as a foreign language?’
I nod cautiously. It’s true that Jackie knows the details of my glorious teaching career. But I thought she understood that my ad had nothing to do with the subject I taught at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys. I thought she was just getting a few details before she introduced me to her Brazilian pal.
So that I could teach English as a foreign language.
‘Well, that’s what I want,’ she says brightly. ‘Lessons in English Lit. See, I need to get an A Level in English Literature. I mean, I really need it. So that I can go back to college. So that I can re-start my education.’
‘There’s been some mistake,’ I say. ‘My advertisement was for students who want to learn English as a foreign language. Wasn’t that clear? I’m not looking for students who want an A Level in English Literature. Sorry. I honestly thought you were calling for somebody else. Some—I don’t know—Brazilian, possibly.’
‘Some…Brazilian?’
‘I don’t even know why I said that.’
Her smile fades away.
‘You’re not qualified to teach English to A Level standard?’
‘Well, I am. But that’s not—’
‘I’m thirty-one years old. I was thirty-one on Christmas Day.’
‘Well—happy birthday.’
‘Thank you. Twelve years ago I was doing really well at school. Top of the class. Straight A student. All that. Then I had to drop out.’
This is more than I need to know. I stand up. She remains sitting.
‘I’ve got two A Levels. French and Media Studies. Very good grades.’ She looks at me a little defiantly. ‘I’m not stupid, if that’s what you’re thinking. And I’ve got money. What I need is an English A Level so that I can go back to school.’
‘Well, that’s great, but—’
‘I know the course I want, I know the college I want. If I get that English A Level, I can study for my BA at the University of Greenwich.’
I stare at her.
‘Go to night school,’ I tell her.
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I need a private tutor. I need to be more flexible than night school would let me be.’
‘And why’s that?’
Her pale, pretty face darkens, as though a cloud has suddenly passed over it.
‘Personal reasons.’
I let my voice go all firm and commanding. Playing the teacher. Which is sort of ironic, when you think about it.
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Jackie. I really am. But I’m not teaching anyone A Level English. Not you or anyone else. I’m teaching English as a foreign language. And you don’t need that. Do you?’
She makes no move to get up. I can see how disappointed she is, and I feel a stab of compassion for this over-dressed, under-educated young woman.
I like her. I have always liked her. I just don’t want her for a student.
‘If you take an old man’s advice, Jackie, qualifications are just meaningless pieces of paper.’ Trying to make my voice all jaunty and friendly. ‘They do you no good in the end. Believe me, I know.’
‘That’s easy for you to say. Because you’ve got them. They’re not meaningless bits of paper to me. They’re a way out.’
Vanessa’s sleepy voice drifts down from the top of the stairs. ‘Alfie? Come back to bed. I have to go soon.’
I don’t usually entertain at home. I’m lucky that the sales are on.
Jackie Day stands up. She seems to see me for the first time.
‘What kind of a teacher are you anyway?’
Sometimes I wonder that myself.
On the first day of the new year my father comes round to pick up the last of his stuff. This is it. He is taking the final traces of his existence from this house. It should feel more traumatic than it does.
But with the shabby white van he has hired sitting outside the house, it feels anticlimactic, like this has all been dragging on for much too long and everybody wants it to be over.
My mother doesn’t even bother disappearing. She doesn’t come into the house while my old man is here, she stays out in the garden with Joyce and her grandchildren. But she doesn’t run away either. She stays in her garden with her friend.
As my father lugs boxes down the stairs
I stand in the living room watching my mum and Joyce and Diana and William through the window. I am afraid that Joyce is going to barge into the house and corner my father with one of her impromptu interrogations.
Who is this young woman you live with? How old? Will you marry? Do you want children? Do you think you are a wise man or an old fool? Is this girl just a gold lifter? Is it about more than getting your end far away?
But she doesn’t. Joyce just stays out in the back garden with my mother, planting lilies in patio pots, moving shrubs that have outgrown their space, preparing for the new season as the two children gently brush the morning’s fall of snow from evergreen shrubs and conifers.
‘January,’ Joyce had barked at me. ‘Busy time of year for garden. Time to get smacking. The early bird is always on time.’
‘Catches the worm, Joyce.’
‘You know what I mean, mister.’
According to Joyce, it is always a busy time of year for the garden. And I can hear her voice now, surprisingly gentle as she murmurs to my mother, and although I can’t hear her words, I am certain that they are not talking about my father. That feels like some kind of victory.
I turn to watch my dad coming down the stairs with the last of his things. It is a box of old vinyl albums. I can see Four Tops Live! and Stevie Wonder’s I Was Made to Love Her and Gladys Knight and the Pips’ Feelin’ Bluesy.
‘Aren’t you getting a little old for all that baby, baby, baby stuff?’ I say, nodding at the box of Motown records in his arms, wanting to hurt him.
‘I don’t think you’re ever too old for a little bit of joy,’ he says. ‘You believe in a little bit of joy, don’t you, Alfie?’
And I hate him so much not because I can’t understand him, but because I understand him so well. He is my father, he will always be my father, and I am afraid that there is much of him in me.
Our lives feel closer than I care to admit. All those nights in rented rooms with women who keep a suitcase by their bed and talk in their sleep in a language you can’t understand. All that sneaking around, all those little lies, all that settling for something that you know in your heart is only second best.
Yes, I believe in a bit of joy. These days that’s pretty much all I believe in. But I have this fear that, for me and my old man, those rented rooms are the only home we will ever know now, the only home we will ever deserve.
Then he is gone, bumping awkwardly out of the front door, while in the back garden I can hear the laughter of the women.
part two: chips only with meal
nineteen
Jackie turns up on our doorstep when I am in the park with George. My mum lets her in, gives her a cup of tea and biscuits, tries to make her feel at home. My mother will let anyone into our house. It’s a wonder she hasn’t been murdered by now.
‘She’s in the living room,’ my mum says. ‘Nice young girl. Dressed a bit—well—tarty, perhaps.’
‘Oh, Mum,’ I say, sounding as though I have just broken my Action Man.
‘Well, she said she had an essay for you,’ my mother says breezily. ‘I thought she was one of your students.’
‘My students are all foreigners, Mum.’
I peer through the crack in the living room door. There she is on the sofa, still dressed for dancing or double pneumonia. Strapless top, minimal skirt, heels that could take someone’s eye out. Sipping her tea, looking at the pictures on the wall, all these arty black-and-white photographs of working men that my old man collected when he started making some money.
I think about making a run for it. But she might start stalking me. Best to get it over with.
‘Hi,’ I say, coming into the living room.
‘Oh, hello.’ She smiles, trying to get up, and then deciding against it with the tea and biscuits on her lap. ‘Look, I’m really sorry to bother you but—’
‘It’s okay. But I thought I made it clear that I’m not an English teacher.’
‘Oh, you made it clear that you are an English teacher,’ she laughs, making a little joke of it. ‘You just don’t want to teach me.’ She places her tea and biscuits on the coffee table and picks up a manila envelope by her side. She hands it to me.
‘What’s this?’
‘An essay. About Othello.’
‘Othello?’
‘It’s the one about sexual jealously. One that loved not wisely, but too well. Desdemona, Iago and all that lot.’
‘I know the play.’
‘Of course. Sorry.’
An essay about Othello? Just what I need in my life.
‘Will you read it?’
‘Look—’
‘Please,’ she says. ‘I’m desperate to go back to school. And I’m serious about this subject.’
‘But I don’t—’
‘And I was good at it! I was so good at it! Because I loved it! Books made me feel as though—I don’t know—as though I was connected to the world. Magic, it was. Just give me a chance, okay? Before you decide you don’t want to teach me—read my essay.’
I look at her, wondering what an Essex dancing queen could know about loving not wisely but too well.
‘I’m really sorry to bother you. Really sorry to come barging in like this. But if you read my essay and decide you still don’t want to teach me, then I promise I’ll leave you alone.’
So I promise to read her essay just to get rid of her. And as I lead her to the door and she says goodbye to my mother, I feel a pang of sympathy for Jackie Day. She just doesn’t understand. Teaching has got nothing to do with it.
‘What a nice girl,’ my mother says when Jackie has left. ‘Bit on the thin side. I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s apron. But she speaks English already, doesn’t she? What does she need you for?’
‘She doesn’t.’
There’s a new barmaid at the Eamon de Valera. Russian. Short red hair. Starting at Churchill’s when the new term begins, Yumi tells me. I watch the young Russian struggling with pints of Paddy McGinty’s Water and packets of pork scratchings before I introduce myself. She’s going to be one of my Advanced Beginners.
By now these conversations have developed their own internal rhythm. Where you from? How you finding London? Any trouble getting a visa (not applicable to students from the EU or Japan)? Do you miss your mum’s apple strudel/prawn tempura/chicken kiev?
Olga tells me what they all tell me. London is more crowded than she imagined, more expensive than she bargained for. Even the kids with rich parents flinch when they see the price of a room in this town. How much harder must it be for a young woman from a former Communist hell?
I can’t help Olga with her accommodation problem. I’m looking for my own place right now, and I’m also struggling to find somewhere I can afford, although I don’t tell Olga any of that. But this standard complaint about the price tag of everything in London gives me my favourite opening gambit.
‘This city’s not cheap,’ I say, leaning on the bar. ‘But there’s lots of great stuff that you can get for free.’
‘Really?’
‘God, yes. You’ve just got to know where to look. For a start there are the parks. The view of London from the top of Primrose Hill. The royal deer in Richmond Park. Holland Park is full of all these sculptures that you suddenly come across. Walking by the Serpentine—’
‘The Serpentine?’
‘That’s a lake—in Hyde Park, where there are these wide, sandy paths where people ride horses. Next door to Kensington Gardens.’
‘Where Diana lived?’
‘That’s the one. She lived in Kensington Palace. That’s a fantastic building. People still put flowers on the gates. Then there’s St James’s Park by Buckingham Palace—beautiful. And Kenwood House by Hampstead Heath. It’s this gorgeous house full of Rembrandts and Turners and in the summer they have these classical concerts. Mozart drifting across the lake as the sun goes down over Hampstead Heath…’
‘Two pints, love,’ calls a voice from down the other end of the bar
. ‘When Mozart gives you a moment.’
I change the tempo when she comes back.
‘You shouldn’t miss the Columbia Road flower market. Or the piazzas at the British Library.’
‘I love pizza.’
‘You can watch a trial at the Old Bailey. You should see Prime Minister’s question time at the Houses of Parliament. The markets at Brick Lane and Portobello Road. The meat market at Smithfield. The Picassos and Van Goghs at the National Gallery…’
I make it sound wonderful. And it is wonderful. That’s the beauty of it. I’m not lying to her. It’s all true. You can get anything you like in this city. And you can get it for free. You just have to know where to look.
She goes off to pull a few pints of O’Grady’s bath water and when she comes back I tell her about the Harrods food hall and how there are always people giving away top-of-the-range nosh. She gets very animated, and at first I think she must really have been on a rotten diet back home, but it turns out she’s just excited about the prospect of bumping into Dodi Fayed’s dad. I tell her about the music at the Notting Hill carnival, the fountains at Somerset House, the way the Embankment of the Thames looks at night.
It’s all going great. It’s only when they ring for last orders that I realise I was meant to have gone to the airport hours ago, to meet Hiroko’s flight from Japan.
The arrival gate is deserted now, but Hiroko is still waiting for me at the meeting point.
It seems very Japanese the way she has stuck it out, a combination of stoicism and optimism. And here I come, ridiculously late, running across the empty hall to hug her, full of shame and relief, wishing she had someone to meet her who was much nicer than me.
She is exhausted after the flight from Narita, but we decide to go into town and have something to eat. We jump on the Heathrow Express and soon we are in a little noodle restaurant in Little Newport Street.
Hiroko is really starting to fade now. Behind her glasses her eyes are puffy from lack of sleep. But she has some presents she wants to give me. Two pairs of chopsticks, one large pair for a man and one smaller pair for a woman, thirty years of feminism apparently not yet reaching the Japanese chopsticks industry. Then she gives me a sake set—two small cups and a pot. And a bottle of Calvin Klein’s Escape from duty free.