by Tony Parsons
‘Thank you for these lovely gifts,’ I say. There is something about Hiroko’s formality that encourages me to be formal too. ‘I will always treasure them.’
She smiles with delight. ‘Welcome,’ she says, with a little nod of her head. And I feel bad that I haven’t even missed her.
We drag her suitcase down to the Bar Italia on Frith Street for a nightcap. And that’s where we see my father.
At first I think I must be hallucinating. For my old man is dressed exactly like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.
White three-piece suit, heavily flared trousers, dark shirt, no tie, stack-heel shoes. In any other part of the country the way he looks would get him arrested. In the middle of Soho he hardly attracts a second glance.
He comes into the Bar Italia, scanning the faces drinking espresso and latte, sweating heavily inside his white disco suit despite the hour and the season. Then he sees me.
‘Alfie,’ he says.
‘This is Hiroko,’ I say.
He shakes her hand.
‘I’m looking for Lena,’ he says. ‘We’ve been to a club in Covent Garden.’
‘Some kind of seventies night?’
‘How did you know? Oh, of course. The clothes.’
I feel that I can’t be too hostile to my father in Hiroko’s presence.
‘She’s not here,’ I tell him. ‘Get separated, did you?’
‘We had an argument.’ He runs a hand through his hair. He’s still a good-looking old bastard. ‘Nothing really. It was stupid.’
‘What happened?’
‘It was the music. It was all over the place. The DJ was playing stuff from the sixties, stuff from the eighties. As though it was all the same. Then he put on “You Can’t Hurry Love”.’ He looks at Hiroko. ‘By the Supremes.’
Hiroko smiles and nods.
‘And Lena said: oh, I love Phil Collins.’ My old man shakes his head at the memory of this sacrilege. ‘And I said: Phil Collins? Phil pigging Collins? This isn’t Phil Collins, sweetheart. This is the original. This is Diana Ross and the girls. This is one of the greatest records ever made. And she said she had only ever heard Phil pigging Collins’s version, and who cares anyway? It’s only a bit of pop music. It’s just a bit of fun. Then I wanted to go home. But she wanted to stay.’ He looks at us like a man in shock. ‘Then she left. Just like that. But she’s not there. She’s not at home.’ My old man scans the Bar Italia. ‘And I don’t know where she is.’ ‘Do you want a cup of coffee or something?’ ‘No, no. Thank you. Better keep searching.’ My father says goodbye to Hiroko and me and goes back out into the Soho night, looking like the ghost of discos past.
After that first day, George and I do not get hassled in the park. It’s strange. We are out there very early on Sunday mornings, when the place still belongs to the creatures of the night. But they leave us alone. They watch for a few minutes. Then they move on.
And it’s because of George. The way he moves, there’s nothing limpid or weak or namby-pamby about Tai Chi. His movements radiate internal strength. The drunks just walk on by.
‘Why did you change your mind about teaching me?’
‘I saw how much you want to learn.’
I read Jackie’s essay. It’s depressingly predictable stuff—talking you through Iago’s scheming, Othello’s rage and Desdemona’s innocence as though she is telling you the plot to Lethal Weapon 4. A tale of sexual jealousy, betrayal and revenge. Starring Mel Gibson. Up against the wall, Iago. This time it’s personal.
Just what you would expect from a high school drop-out. She even produces Rymer’s hoary old quote about one of the morals of the play being ‘a warning to all good wives that they look well to their linen’. Whatever that means.
I feel sorry for Jackie, but it gives me a warm feeling to know that I don’t have to teach this stuff any more.
There’s no cover note with her essay, nowhere to send it back to. Just a business card—Dream Machine: Cleaning the Old-fashioned Way—and a mobile phone number. I could wait until I see her at Churchill’s but I don’t want to leave it that long. I want to get shot of Jackie Day as soon as I can.
I call the mobile and get a recorded message that she is working at the Connell Gallery on Cork Street. That’s not far from Churchill’s. I decide to return the essay in person so that I don’t have to come home and find her camping out in our front garden.
Although it’s only a ten-minute walk, Cork Street feels like another city compared to where I work. You can smell the money in the air. I find the Connell Gallery, thinking I will drop her essay off at the reception desk. Then I see her.
She is not dressed for dancing. Her fair hair is pulled back and tied with an elastic band. She is wearing her blue nylon overalls. And she is cleaning the plate-glass window. When she sees me she stares at me for a moment and then steps into the street.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Returning your essay. I didn’t have an address.’
‘I would have picked it up. At Churchill’s. Or your mum’s house. Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘I’ve got my own company,’ she says. ‘Dream Machine. We work all over the West End.’
‘Who’s we?’
‘Me. And sometimes I bring in another girl. If the work’s there.’ A pause. ‘What’s wrong?’
What is wrong with me? I don’t know. It just feels like all at once I understand why she wants to go back to college. Why it means so much to her. This is the first time I have really understood that she is not some student doing a little part-time job. This is how she makes a living. This is what the next thirty years or so will be like for her. This is her future.
‘There’s nothing wrong with cleaning for a living,’ I say, as if I’m thinking aloud. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘No. It’s not a bad job. But I want a better one. And I can get it if I go back to school.’
‘Somebody has to do it. Cleaning, I mean.’
‘Would you?’
People are staring at us. All these art lovers and their well-spoken flunkies squinting at the cleaner and the scruff standing on the pavement of Cork Street.
‘Listen, your essay was okay.’
‘Just okay?’
‘That’s right. It’s full of some teacher’s opinions. Or some critic’s opinion. Not enough of you.’
She smiles at me. ‘You’re good.’
‘What?’
‘You’re a good teacher.’
‘You don’t know me.’
‘I can feel it. You’re a great teacher. You’re so right—there has to be more of me in there. So you’ll do it? You’ll teach me?’
I want to get away from here, away from Cork Street and Dream Machine, away from Desdemona and her dirty laundry.
But I think of George Chang, and how patient he is with me, how he encourages me, how he helps me learn because he thinks it’s the right thing to do.
I don’t know what comes over me.
‘When can you start?’ I find myself saying.
twenty
I ring my nan’s door bell but she doesn’t answer. That’s strange. I know she’s in there. At least, it sounds like she’s in there because I can hear the TV audience elaborately ooh-ing and ahh-ing as the numbers are drawn for the mid-week National Lottery. Is the prospect of ten million pounds why she’s not answering? Or is it something else?
I keep waiting to hear the soft shuffle of slippers on carpet coming slowly towards the door, followed by the scrape of the safety catch and then her smiling face peering around the door, her eyes bright with welcome, happy for some company. It doesn’t happen. There’s no answer to my nan’s door bell.
There’s also no smell of gas, no sign of smoke seeping under the door, no cries for help. But she is eighty-seven, almost eighty-eight, and I feel the panic rising inside me as I put down her shopping and fumble with the key that I hold for emergencies.
This is the way it ha
ppens, I think.
Everybody dies. Everybody leaves you. You turn your back for a moment and they are gone forever.
I burst into the little white flat. The TV is on much too loud. There’s no sign of my nan but I immediately see the unknown man by the mantelpiece, holding a silver-framed photograph in his hand, calculating its worth.
As he half turns, the frame still in his thieving paw, I see that he is more of an overgrown boy than a man. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, but way over six foot tall, a baby face flecked with wisps of facial hair.
I come quickly across the room and throw myself at him, cursing him, knocking him backwards against the mantelpiece, my voice and my body shaking with anger and fear. He drops the silver frame—his booty, the thieving bastard—but he is still on his feet, suddenly over the moment of shock at my surprise attack, and as we grapple with each other I can feel his superior strength, and his own rage and terror.
He swings me sideways, smashing me into the sideboard cabinet with all the holiday souvenirs, making leering leprechauns and smiling Spanish donkeys jiggle and jump behind the dusty glass.
And then my nan comes out of her tiny kitchen carrying a tray containing tea and biscuits.
‘Oh, have you two met?’ she says.
The young man and I are suddenly apart, boxers told to break by the referee, panting at each other on opposite sides of the coffee table. My nan gently places the tea and custard creams between us.
‘I ran out of breath at the bus stop,’ my nan says. ‘I was coming back from having a little look round the shops and it was just suddenly gone. Do you ever get that feeling, Alfie? That breathlessness?’ She smiles affectionately at the young man I have just assaulted. ‘Ken helped me get home.’
‘Ben,’ he says.
‘Len,’ she says. ‘I felt quite peculiar. But Len carried my bag. Helped me get inside. Wasn’t that nice of him, Alfie?’
‘Thank you,’ I say.
The young man looks at me with total, all-consuming hatred.
‘Don’t mention it,’ he says. A quick smile at my nan. He is trembling. ‘I have to go now.’
‘Ken,’ I say. ‘Ben. Please stay and have some tea.’
‘I really must run.’ He is not looking at me any more. ‘I do hope you feel better,’ he says to my nan.
I follow him to the door but he refuses to meet my eyes.
‘I didn’t realise,’ I say as he lets himself out. ‘I thought—’
‘Dickhead,’ he mutters.
It’s true. I am a dickhead. I can’t quite believe that kindness and goodness still exist in this world. I think it’s all a thing of the past. And I can’t even see what’s right in front of my dickhead face.
I go back into the living room where my nan is asleep in her armchair, a lottery ticket in one hand and a custard cream in the other. She has been falling asleep without warning a lot recently. Sometimes she pitches forward and I have to catch her before she does herself some damage.
‘I fall asleep all the time,’ she is always telling me. ‘Just tired, I suppose, love.’
But now I realise that she is not falling asleep at all.
She is blacking out.
‘Soong yi-dien!’ George tells me, time and time again. ‘Soong yi-dien!’
Soong yi-dien. It’s one of the few Cantonese expressions I know. In Hong Kong you would hear it all the time in the little tailor’s shop next to the Double Fortune Language School when customers were complaining that the suit they were being fitted for was too tight.
‘Soong yi-dien!’ they would shout in the face of Mr Wu the tailor. ‘Loosen it up!’
George wants me to loosen it up. He believes that I try too hard. He’s right. My Tai Chi strains for effect. Everything is an effort for me. I make Tai Chi look like manual labour. But George moves the way Sinatra sang, radiating that kind of effortless power, as if all this craft and art is the most natural thing in the world.
‘Soong yi-dien,’ he says. ‘Very important for when we play Tai Chi.’
Play Tai Chi? Surely he means do or practise or learn Tai Chi? Surely he doesn’t mean play?
Although thick with a Cantonese accent, George’s English is very good. He has none of the linguistic tics that his wife has. Sometimes his tenses get a little confused, and he has this habit of dropping the definite article. But you never have trouble understanding him. So I am surprised that he could get his choice of verb so wrong.
‘You don’t mean play Tai Chi, do you, George? I think you mean study Tai Chi or something. Not play.’
He looks at me.
‘No,’ he says. ‘We play Tai Chi. We play. Always, always. Tai Chi not the gym. Not about sweating and getting six pack on belly. Not about working out. When you understand that, then you start to learn. Then you soong yi-dien. Why do westerners always want to strain? Okay, try again.’
So I do.
I spread my feet shoulder width apart, sinking into my horse stance, bending my knees but making sure they don’t extend further than my toes. Neck erect but relaxed. Chin tucked slightly in. Spine straight and lengthened, although without standing to attention. Butt tucked in. Trying to slow and soften my breathing, trying to make it deep but unforced. Relaxing my wrists. Throwing open all my joints.
Trying to feel my dan tien, my energy centre, which I have learned is located two inches down from my navel and two inches inside my body.
It doesn’t feel much like play.
‘You know that saying—no pain, no gain?’ George says.
‘Sure.’
‘It’s rubbish.’
‘I’m not early, am I?’ says Jackie Day. ‘If I’m early I can—’
‘It’s okay,’ I tell her. ‘Come in.’
She comes into my new flat, staring at all the unpacked boxes.
I have finally found a place of my own. A one-bedroom flat in a Victorian house full of music students. You can distantly hear them scratching away at cellos and violins, but because they are so good it is more calming than annoying. It is a nice place. But with my nan going into hospital for tests and the new term starting at Churchill’s, I haven’t had time to unpack yet. Apart from a few essentials.
Pictures of Rose.
Some classic Sinatra.
Electric kettle.
I go into the photo-booth-sized kitchen to make instant coffee while Jackie wanders around looking for somewhere to sit down.
‘I love this old-fashioned music,’ she calls to me, as Frank finishes ‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams’ and begins his timeless rendition of ‘Taking a Chance on Love’. ‘What CD is this?’
‘It’s Swing Easy, which actually incorporates the vinyl album of that name with the entire contents of the LP that was originally released as Songs for Young Lovers.’ I listen for a bit. ‘I like it, too. It’s one of my favourites.’
‘And is it Harry Connick Junior?’
I almost drop the kettle.
‘Harry Connick Junior? Is this Harry Connick Junior? This is Sinatra. Frank Sinatra.’
‘Oh. He sounds a bit like Harry Connick Junior, doesn’t he?’
I say nothing. When I come out of the kitchen she is looking at all the pictures of Rose.
Rose on her firm’s junk in Hong Kong. On our wedding day. At a New Year’s Eve party on Victoria Peak. On Changeover Day.
And—it’s my favourite picture of her—a blow-up of her passport photograph, Rose looking straight at the camera, impossibly young and serious and beautiful, her hair longer than I ever saw it, although the picture was taken shortly before we met.
I always thought Rose was the only person in the world who ever looked good in a passport photo.
‘Your girlfriend?’ Jackie Day says with a little smile. ‘This is not the girl I saw at your parents’ place.’
It takes me a second to realise she’s talking about Vanessa.
‘That was just a friend. This is my wife. Her name is Rose.’
‘Oh.’
I can almost hear
her brain ticking over. And I think: why do I always have to have this conversation? Why can’t they just leave us alone?
‘Are you divorced?’
‘My wife died,’ I say, taking the photograph from her and giving her a cup of instant coffee in exchange. I carefully place the picture back on top of a packing case. ‘She died in a diving accident.’
‘A driving accident?’
‘A diving accident. When we were living in Hong Kong.’
‘God.’ She stares at Rose’s picture. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Thanks.’
‘How terrible for you.’ She looks at all the photographs—I suppose it’s a sort of shrine—with real pain on her face. ‘And for her. How old was she? How old was Rose?’
‘She was twenty-six. Almost twenty-seven.’
‘You poor man. That poor woman. That poor girl. Oh, I am so, so sorry.’
There are tears shining in her eyes and I look at her, really wishing that I could feel some genuine gratitude for this sympathy.
But it’s difficult to take her show of compassion seriously when under her leather coat she is dressed for another night picking up strange men at the Basildon Mecca. French Connection T-shirt, pastel-coloured miniskirt, high heels that leave little dents in the wooden floor of my new flat. I wonder what we are doing here. Then I remember.
‘You want to study A Level English Literature.’
Her pretty, painted face brightens.
‘If I can just get this one subject, I can go back to school. Put it with the two I’ve got already. French and Media Studies. I told you. Go to the University of Greenwich. Get my BA. Get a good job. Stop cleaning the floors of art galleries in Cork Street and language schools on Oxford Street.’
‘Why does it have to be the University of Greenwich? It’s not exactly Oxford or Cambridge, is it?’
‘Because that’s my plan,’ she says. ‘You’ve got to have a plan. I’ve got an acceptance letter and everything. I was doing so well at school. I really was. But then I had to give it all up.’