by Tony Parsons
‘For personal reasons. You told me that, too.’
‘Now I’m going to have another go.’
‘Okay. Sit down, will you?’
She looks around. There’s nowhere to sit. I pull up a couple of chairs either side of a large packing case.
‘The core of English Literature works from a very concrete base. The subject is very specific about the basis of study.’ I tick them off my fingers. ‘One prose work. One work of poetry. One work of drama. And one Shakespeare play. In the end, you need to learn two things to pass this subject. To read and to write.’
‘To read and to write. Okay. Fine. Good. Yes.’
‘That is, you need to understand the text and then demonstrate your understanding of the text. That’s the essence of this subject.’
I know my lines.
This is a speech that I remember from the dark days at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys, although by the time that A Levels came around, most of my students had graduated to the technical college of life.
My door bell rings.
‘Excuse me,’ I say.
‘Oh, that’ll be for me,’ says Jackie Day.
‘What?’
‘I think it’s my daughter.’
Daughter? What daughter?
Together Jackie and I go out of the flat and down to the front door of the house. An enormous great lump of a girl is standing outside. It’s difficult to judge her age. She hides her face behind a curtain of greasy brown hair. Her clothes are as dark and shapeless as Jackie’s are tight and bright.
‘Say hello to Mr Budd,’ says Jackie Day.
The lump says nothing. Behind the unwashed veil of her fringe, a pair of bright-blue eyes swivel briefly towards me and then turn away with shyness or contempt or something.
She has a fistful of magazines in her hand. They feature men in masks and spandex grimacing and grunting and climbing on top of each other. At first I think this awful child has hard-core pornography in her possession. But then I see that the magazines are about some grotesque new kind of wrestling. In a daze, I return to my flat, Jackie and the lump following behind me, Jackie all happy chatter and questions as they come up the stairs, the lump replying with monosyllabic grunts. Although there is no physical resemblance between them, there is no doubt that they are mother and adolescent child.
The lump walks into my new apartment and looks around, clearly unimpressed.
‘This is my girl,’ says Jackie. ‘I hope you don’t mind if she sits quietly in a corner while we work.’
I stare at this woman dressed like she should be standing in an Amsterdam window lit by a single red light, and wonder why I ever allowed her into my life.
‘Why do you think I gave up studying?’ says Jackie, suddenly all defiant.
And I look at her surly, nameless lump of a daughter leafing through a wrestling magazine and think to myself: why do you think I gave up teaching?
twenty-one
When I see Hiroko waiting for me outside Churchill’s, I remember this thing I once read on a problem page about the person who holds the power in any relationship.
The agony uncle reckoned that the person with the power is always the one who cares less. And as Hiroko looks up at me with her open, hopeful smile, I see the wisdom of that agony uncle.
There’s no reason why I should have any power over Hiroko. She is younger than me, smarter than me, prettier than me. She’s also a lot nicer than me. Whichever way you slice it, Hiroko is a far better bet than me.
But Hiroko cares more than I do. So in the end everything else—her looks, her youth, her niceness—doesn’t matter.
‘I haven’t seen much of you, Alfie.’
‘I’ve been really busy.’
‘How’s your grandmother?’
‘Still in hospital. They’re doing tests on her while they drain some fluid off her lungs. But she’s made friends with all the other old girls on her ward.’
‘She’s always so cheerful.’
‘I think she’ll be okay.’
‘Good. Well. Do you want to get some lunch later?’
‘Lunch? Well, I’ve got to see Hamish about something at lunch.’
‘Dinner?’
See, it was okay for her to suggest lunch. That was perfectly reasonable. But going for dinner too made her seem desperate and made me feel cornered. Dinner pushed me to the point of no return.
‘Hiroko, I really think we need to give each other a bit of space right now.’
‘A bit of space?’
She starts crying. Not the kind of tears that are meant to blackmail you. Not the kind of tears that are meant to make you back down, change your mind or offer concessions. Not the kind of tears that are meant to make you give in about dinner. Just tears.
‘You’re a great girl, Hiroko.’
And it’s true. She is a great girl. She has never treated me with anything but sweetness. What’s gone wrong with me? Why can’t I be happy with this woman?
There’s never an agony uncle around when you need one.
The bad news at Churchill’s is that there has been a bit of a sex scandal involving one of the teachers. Lisa Smith has got smoke coming out of her ears, the students are all talking about it and we have even had a couple of uniformed cops on the premises, sniffing around and asking questions, as if the incident is just the tip of a very dirty iceberg.
The good news is that it has absolutely nothing to do with me.
Hamish has been arrested for his conduct in a public lavatory on Highbury Fields. I actually know the place, funnily enough—it’s one of those public toilets where, if you go in for a quick slash, all the guys in there think that you are some kind of sick pervert.
Anyway, Hamish has been arrested for lewd and indecent behaviour because late one night he reached for what he imagined was some willing, perfect stranger and it turned out to be a policeman’s truncheon. Now the poor bastard is watching his world unravel. I take him for a drink at the Eamon de Valera.
‘I feel like I’m in danger of losing everything,’ he says. ‘My family, my flat, my sanity. Just for a quick wank. It hardly seems fair. It hardly seems like justice.’
‘How’s old Smith taking it?’
‘She says she will have to see if the police are going to press charges. I’m not so worried about her. I can always get another job as badly paid as this one. I’m more worried about my parents. And my partner. It’s his flat we live in. If he cuts up rough…I don’t know what will happen.’
‘Wait a minute. Your partner knows you don’t go over to Highbury Fields at midnight for a game of tennis. Or what?’
‘I told him I’d given it up. The cottaging thing. It upsets him.’
‘Ah.’
‘My mum and dad will be even worse. They’ll go crazy. Especially my father. Christ. He was in the Govan shipyards for forty years. When he finds out I’m what he calls “bent,” he’ll never speak to me again.’
‘Hold on. Your parents don’t know you’re gay? Your parents don’t know? Jesus, Hamish.’
‘I come from the East End of Glasgow. We haven’t quite caught up with London. Not that there’s much difference between Glasgow and London, in the final analysis. You come to this city thinking it’s going to be so totally free and easy. Then you find out that in its own sweet way, this place is as repressed as anywhere.’
I feel sorry for Hamish, so I don’t tell him what I’m thinking. Which is: how can you have a private life when you take it into a public toilet?
And he’s wrong about London. There are some bad things about my city, but the best thing is that you can be anything you like here, anything at all. As long as you keep it away from the policeman’s torch, of course.
But you are free to invent your own life, I think to myself, watching Olga struggling to pull a pint at the other end of the bar.
You just have to be a bit discreet.
Sometimes I think that love is a case of mistaken identity.
&nb
sp; It’s like Hiroko and me. She sees someone else when she looks at me—someone decent and good, someone she wants me to be. An English gentleman. David Niven. Alec Guinness. Hugh Grant. Someone I’m not and could never be.
Or it’s like Hamish and his partner. Hamish’s boyfriend probably likes to believe that Hamish really wants a serious, monogamous relationship. That he wants to go shopping in Habitat on Saturdays and give small, stylish dinner parties and sit around listening to Broadway musicals on CD and be faithful to only one partner. But that’s just another case of mistaken identity.
What Hamish wants is to go to public places and have sex with people whose names he will never know. That means more to him than anything. His partner just can’t see it. His partner doesn’t want to see it.
Does that still count? Is that still real? When you don’t know the other person at all?
For as long as I can remember, my nan has had a profound loathing of doctors. She always seemed to believe that she was locked in a never-ending battle for her freedom with the medical profession. My nan wanted to stay in her home. The doctors—‘the quacks’, my nan called them, even the ones she liked—wanted to steal her away and lock her up in a hospital where she would be left to die.
But now she is actually in a hospital bed, my nan is showing signs of going over to the other side. She thinks her doctors deserve a raise, believes her nurses should be on television.
‘They’re as pretty as weather girls,’ says my nan. High praise indeed.
As my mother, Joyce Chang and I sit around her bed, my nan regales us with stories about the characters she has met in here. The nurse who ‘should be a model, she’s that lovely’. The old woman—younger than her—in the next bed who (this whispered) is ‘not right in the head, the poor old thing’. The Indian doctor who has told her that she will soon be ‘fit as a fiddle’. The orderly who is a flirt, the nurse who is a miserable cow, the elderly patient in the bed opposite who is her friend, who she has a right laugh with, who she will see for tea when they are finally set free. My nan doesn’t stop talking. She seems almost giddy with exuberance. Are they slipping something into her cream of tomato soup?
She seems happier than she has been for a long time, despite the squat, ugly machine on the floor by her bed that has a long thin tube rising out of it, slipping under the white gown that makes her look like an ancient angel, the tube piercing her side under that white gown, burrowing deep into her body, slowly draining the build-up of fluid from her clogged, breathless lungs.
One of her lungs showed up completely white on the X-ray, it was so full of fluids that should not have been there. The doctors gathered around, staring at it with awe. They were amazed she had kept breathing with all that stuff inside her.
But she seems happy, despite the humming of that ugly machine on the floor, despite the fluid being sucked out of her, despite the pain she must be in with that tube in her side. Night and day, the tube stays inside her. It will stay inside her until the fluid has all been drained. But my nan doesn’t stop smiling. How does she do it?
I know that my nan is a brave and tough old woman. But her sunny mood is more than courage, although she has plenty of that. Perhaps being in a hospital bed is not quite as bad as she thought it was going to be. Because she knows that, unlike her husband, my grandfather, she is not going to die in here. Not this time. Not yet.
She suddenly stops talking and we all turn to look at my dad standing awkwardly at the foot of the bed. He is carrying flowers and a box of Maltesers.
‘Hello, Ma,’ he says, coming forward to kiss her cheek.
‘Mike,’ she says. ‘My Mike.’
I am afraid that Joyce is going to start grilling my father about his sex life with Lena, but she remains stereotypically inscrutable, possibly for the first time in her life. She just takes my nan’s hand and tells her that she will soon be ‘as right as raindrops’.
My mother and my father seem more like brother and sister than husband and wife. They seem like two people who have a history together, but that’s all. There appears to be no hatred between them, and no overwhelming affection either. They are polite, business-like, discussing doctors’ opinions and what my nan will need while she is in here. Only their avoidance of eye contact gives any clue that they both have a divorce lawyer.
And for the first time I feel sorry for my father. He hasn’t shaved today. His hair needs cutting. He has lost some weight, but not in any gym.
He has everything he wanted, but he doesn’t seem happy. Suddenly he seems to be getting old.
And he looks—what do you call it?
Only human.
Jackie Day’s first homework assignment was to write a critical appreciation of two poems: W B Yeats’s ‘When You Are Old and Grey and Full of Sleep’ and Colonel Lovelace’s ‘To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars’.
I read her essay—neat, spidery handwriting—while she sits on the other side of the table, biting her painted fingernails.
Over by the window, the lump—does she have a name? have I already been told it?—is taking up most of the sofa and reading one of her disgusting magazines. The glossy cover features two sweaty, fat men rolling around on top of one another in spandex underpants. I wonder why her mother allows her to read this trash. I say nothing. Somewhere in the house, a cello is practising scales. Outside the rain is falling.
‘This is okay,’ I say, placing the essay on the table.
Jackie looks disappointed.
‘Only okay?’
‘Well, you weren’t asked to review them. You’re not Barry Norman. You were asked to write a critical appreciation.’
‘That’s what I did.’
‘No, you didn’t. You stated a preference. You clearly liked the Yeats poem. And disliked the other one. The Lovelace.’
‘I thought I had to put myself into my writing. That’s what you said. Put yourself into your writing.’
‘Well, you do have to put yourself in there. But you weren’t asked to state a preference. Nobody cares which one you prefer. It’s not a beauty contest.’
‘But the Yeats is so good. Isn’t it? It’s about growing old with someone. It’s about loving someone for a lifetime and still loving them even when they are old and worn out.’
‘I know what it’s about.’
She closes her eyes. ‘How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true: But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.’ She opens her eyes. They shine with excitement. ‘That’s so great. One man loved the pilgrim soul in you. I love that.’
‘You write very well about it. But you’re too dismissive of the Lovelace. In an exam, that will cost you marks.’
‘This Lovelace bloke—what does he know about it? “To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars” is all about putting things before love. Above love. Honour. Country. All that stuff.’ She snorts contemptuously and puts on a ridiculous, high-pitched upper-class voice. ‘I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more. What a load of old guff. What a toss pot.’
‘It’s one of the most famous love poems in the English language. I think you’d probably lose marks for calling Lovelace a toss pot.’
‘Mum?’
It’s the lump.
The lump has spoken.
It lives.
‘What is it, darling?’
‘There’s a lady outside. Standing in the rain. She’s been there ever since we came in.’
Jackie and I go over to the window.
A young woman is standing under a lamppost on the other side of the street. The hood of her parka is pulled up and she is hiding under a Burberry umbrella that looks on the verge of collapse. Although I can’t see her face, I recognise the beige tartan of the umbrella, recognise the parka, recognise the waves of shiny black hair pouring out from the hood.
Hiroko.
She is holding a bunch of flowers. Perhaps they are for my nan. That’s just the kind of thin
g that she would do. That small, thoughtful gesture is typical Hiroko. She has a good heart.
‘Why do you live like this?’ Jackie asks me.
For a moment I can’t speak.
‘Live like what? Jesus. I can’t believe I’m hearing this. What did you say?’
‘Why do you hurt these girls?’
Jackie Day and her fat daughter are staring at me. My cheeks are burning.
‘I don’t hurt anyone.’
‘Oh, but you do,’ Jackie Day tells me. ‘You do.’
twenty-two
The faces are always changing at Churchill’s.
New students are constantly arriving at the school, eager and bewildered, no matter if the part of the world they come from is dirt poor and developing, or affluent and over-developed, while the old students all eventually go back home, transfer to some other college, get married to some love-struck local, get deported for working without a permit or simply disappear into the life of the city.
But many faces remain the same.
I have all of my Advanced Beginners in class today.
There’s Hiroko and Gen, both of them peering up at me through their shimmering, iridescent hair. Imran, looking sleek and quietly studious next to Yumi, her face of delicate Japanese beauty framed by what looks like a cheap blonde halo: Kyoto goes to Hollywood.
There’s Zeng and Witold, both fighting off the exhaustion of long hours slaving in General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen and the Pampas Steak Bar. Astrud, who is either piling on the pounds or in the early stages of pregnancy. Olga, sitting right up front, chewing her pen, struggling to keep up with the rest of the class. And finally Vanessa, inspecting her immaculate fingernails as I rabbit on about past perfect forms.
Vanessa has her back to the door so she doesn’t see the man whose face suddenly appears in its little window, scanning the room. He is a good-looking forty-year-old, but seems a bit battered, as though something very bad has happened to him quite recently.
There’s a red mark on his cheek and one arm of his glasses is missing. There’s something wrong with the way his shirt is buttoned. He has made a quick escape from somewhere.