by Tony Parsons
‘What happened to you?’ she says.
‘You’re never knowingly underdressed, are you?’
‘Have you been beaten up?’
My face. She is looking at my face. I touch it and feel the dried flakes of blood by the side of my swollen mouth. I shrug bravely and she lets me into the house, turning on a few lights, offering me tea or coffee. The house is small and tidy, nothing fancy, with little red flowers on the wallpaper.
There’s a photo by the door of Plum as a little girl, smiling in the sunshine of what looks like the English seaside. A lovely little kid. Not overweight, not hiding behind her fringe, not sad at all. What happened?
I look at Jackie. This is the first time I have seen her without make-up. Liberated from all the usual war paint, her face is quite shockingly pretty. We go into the living room. There’s a huge TV set, a terrible orange carpet, more pictures of Plum, some of them with Jackie, young and laughing, and a lot of the kind of mementos that my nan loves—Celtic crosses, Spanish bulls, Mickey Mouse waving a white-gloved paw, a souvenir from Disneyworld.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I just wanted to say—it’s great.’
‘Are you drunk? You’re drunk, aren’t you? I can smell it on you.’
Plum’s voice from the top of the stairs. ‘Mum, who is it?’
‘Go back to sleep,’ Jackie calls up to her.
‘I think it’s great that you want to go to college,’ I tell her. ‘I mean it. Get an education. Change your world. I admire your determination. I really do. I wish I could change my world. My world is just about ready for a change.’
‘That’s it?’
‘What?’
‘That’s what you want to tell me?’
‘And—I like you.’
She laughs, shakes her head, pulls the kimono a little tighter.
‘Oh, you like me, do you?’
I collapse on the sofa. The leather creaks with protest beneath me. I suddenly feel very tired.
‘Yes.’
I realise that it’s true. I like her a lot. The way she is bringing up her daughter alone, the way she works hard at her crappy job, doing things for all the phoneys in Cork Street and Churchill’s that they can’t do themselves, dreaming of going back to college. No, she’s not dreaming. She is making it happen. Cleaning floors and toilets in Cork Street and then writing essays about The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in her spare time. It’s impressive. She has more fight in her than anyone I know. I admire her. The way I haven’t admired anyone since Rose.
So I go to put my arms around her, feeling a great undigested chunk of affection mixed with all that Tsingtao welling up inside me. But she pushes me away.
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ she says, taking a step backwards, tightening the kimono a bit more. ‘I don’t think that would be the greatest idea in the world. Jesus Christ. Do you have to go to bed with all your students? Can’t you just—I don’t know—teach them or something?’
‘Jackie, I didn’t mean—’
‘You’ve got a lot of nerve. I mean it. This is not funny. What made you think you could come here and have sex with me?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘The way you dress?’
‘I should give you a slap. You bloody bastard. You make me so angry.’
‘I don’t want you to be angry with me. I just wanted to see you. I’m sorry. I really am. I’ll go.’
‘Where? You’re not in Islington now. You think you can just step into the street and flag down a black cab? There are no taxis, no trains. Not at this time. You’re in the sticks now, mate.’ She shakes her head, the anger subsiding in the face of my total ignorance. ‘Don’t you know anything at all?’
So she lets me sleep on her sofa. She says the first train to London isn’t until the morning, and although she thinks I deserve to be curled up in the photo booth on Bansted station, she is going to take pity on me.
She goes upstairs and I hear voices. Two women. No—a woman and a girl. Then Jackie comes back down with a pillow and a single duvet. She throws them at me, still shaking her head, but smiling at the same time, as though, now she comes to think about it for five minutes, I am funny-pathetic more than offensive-pathetic. She leaves me to it, still adjusting her kimono.
I make up my little bed on the leather sofa, take off my trousers and climb under the duvet. The only sound I can hear is Jackie cleaning her teeth in the bathroom. It is very quiet out here, there’s none of the city’s constant background noise of sirens, faraway voices and the roaring traffic’s boom.
I find myself nodding off, only waking up with a start when I feel someone looking down at me.
It’s Plum in her stripy pyjamas.
‘Please don’t hurt her,’ she says.
Then she is gone.
In the morning I wake up when I hear the front door close. It’s still dark, but there’s the sound of a bicycle being wheeled down the little drive. I push back the duvet and go to the window. And there’s Plum, wrapped up inside one of those big puffer jackets, a woollen hat jammed down on her head, an orange bag slung around her shoulders, pushing her bike. She sees me, grins and waves. I watch her cycle off down the silent street.
‘She’s got a paper round.’ Jackie is in the doorway, already dressed. ‘I hope she didn’t wake you.’
‘A paper round? You Day girls work really hard, don’t you?’
‘We have to,’ she says, and her smile makes her words softer than they really are. ‘There’s nobody else to do it, is there? Want a cup of coffee?’
I put on my trousers and follow her into the kitchen. My mouth feels dry and sour. Now that the night and the Tsingtao have gone, I am embarrassed to be here.
‘How do you feel?’ she asks me. ‘As bad as you look? Surely not quite as bad as that?’
‘Sorry. It was a dumb idea to come here. But I didn’t come all the way out here just to sleep with you. I wouldn’t do that.’
‘You’re a smooth talker, aren’t you?’
‘I just felt like talking to someone. Something happened. Something bad.’
She hands me a cup of coffee. ‘Want to talk about it now?’
‘I don’t know how.’
‘Want to give me a clue?’
‘It was a girl. At my college.’
‘Ah, one of your students. Of course.’
‘She had an abortion.’
Then she is not laughing any more. ‘That must have been a hard thing to go through.’
‘It was the worst. The worst thing.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Not very old. Early twenties.’
‘I was seventeen. When I fell with Plum.’ Fell with. Sometimes she uses the expressions of my mother and my grandmother. ‘Not that I thought about an abortion.’
‘You didn’t even think about it?’
‘I’m a Catholic. I believe that all life is sacred.’
‘That’s a good thing to believe. If you’re going to believe in anything.’
‘But having a baby changed my life. I left school. Didn’t go to university. Didn’t get my degree. Couldn’t get a good job. Stayed in Bansted. Not that Bansted is such a bad place.’
‘You kept your baby. And it—she—messed up everything.’
She shakes her head. ‘No, it didn’t. Not really. It just put things on hold for a while. I’m going back to college, aren’t I? Thanks to you.’
‘You never regretted it? Having the baby?’
‘I can’t imagine a world without my girl in it.’
‘She’s lucky to have a mum like you.’
‘And she’s unlucky to have a dad like her dad. So I guess it all evens out in the end.’
‘What’s wrong with her dad?’
‘Jamie? There’s not a lot wrong with him when he’s sober. When he’s had a few, things happen. Usually to me. But he started on Plum, so we left. Two years ago. Got this place. I didn’t recognise him by then.’
‘You must have liked him
once.’
‘You kidding? I was nuts about him. My Jamie. Tall, dark, built like a brick house. He was a good little footballer. Midfield. A good engine, as they say. Very fit. Had a chance of turning professional. Trials with West Ham. Then he did his knee in. The left one. So now he works as a security guard. And gets pissed. And knocks around his new partner. But not me. Not any more. And not my daughter.’
‘Why did you leave it for so long? I don’t mean leaving your husband, leaving Jamie. The education thing. Why wait? If it was so important to you, why didn’t you do it years ago?’
‘Jamie didn’t want me to. I think he was a bit jealous. He didn’t want my dream to come true when his dream didn’t. Men are very competitive, aren’t they? Another word for simple. My ex-husband wants the world to have a bad knee.’
‘Well, we’ll get you through your exam.’ I raise my coffee cup in salute. ‘And I hope it makes you happy.’
She raises her own cup. ‘You think it won’t. You think I’m expecting some student paradise that doesn’t really exist. Beautiful young people sitting around talking about The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. And you don’t think it’s like that. You think it’s all a waste of time. Qualifications. Education. Getting my exams, as my old mum would have said. But it wasn’t a waste of time for Rose, was it?’
‘Rose?’
‘She came from out here, didn’t she?’
‘Not far away.’
‘If she hadn’t got an education, you would never have met her. If she hadn’t gone to university and become a lawyer and gone to Hong Kong, you would never have known her. If she had had a baby at eighteen with someone else—don’t look at me like that—then what would your life have been like?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without knowing her.’
‘You were mad about her, weren’t you?’
‘I still am. But what can you do? I loved and lost. I’ve had my turn.’
‘Your turn?’
‘My turn at—come on, you know. Love. Romance. Relationships. All that stuff.’
She shakes her head. ‘Well, I don’t think I’ve had my turn. Not after Jamie. Are you kidding? I reckon I deserve a second turn after that lot. I reckon everyone deserves a second go at being happy. Even you, Alfie. You should have a little more faith.’
‘A little more faith?’
‘That’s right. A little more faith. Don’t be like my ex-husband. Don’t sit around wishing that everyone had a bad knee.’
‘I just think you get one chance—one real chance—then it’s gone forever. I don’t think that you can go around starting over again and again. That’s not the real thing, is it? How can it be the real thing if it comes along every few years or so? That makes a mockery of the real thing.’
‘Maybe. But come on. What else are you going to do with the rest of your life? You don’t have to stick with your students just because you know they’re going home one day. You don’t have to stick with young women who can’t really hurt you.’
‘Is that what you think I do?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know? You’re not very smart for a teacher, are you?’
‘I’m one of the stupid teachers.’
‘Yeah, it shows.’
I watch Jackie washing up our cups in the sink and I think: perhaps she’s right. I don’t want to be like someone’s bitter ex-husband.
I should have a little more faith.
thirty
A baby is looking at me.
The baby is as bald and round as a billiard ball, a half-pint-sized Winston Churchill in a pink Babygro, a thin stream of drool coming from the corner of its pouty little mouth. The baby looks brand new. Everything about it—her? How do you tell? Just by the colour of the Babygro?—looks freshly minted.
The baby is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. And it is watching me. Because it knows. The baby can tell.
Those huge blue eyes follow me as I move slowly toward the hospital’s reception desk. I stop and stare back at the beautiful baby, overwhelmed by its perception.
The baby can see into my heart. The baby can read my mind. The baby knows the terrible thing I have done, the unspeakable act I put on my credit card.
The baby can’t believe it.
I can’t believe it myself.
The baby is surrounded by happy, laughing adults, parents and siblings and grandparents by the look of them, people happy to see the baby, meet it for the first time perhaps, but the baby ignores them all and just kicks its limbs as if it is testing them for the first time; the baby does nothing but lie there and flex its new little arms and legs and watch me, watch me with this terrible accusation.
‘You all right, love?’
I nod uncertainly, tearing myself away from the baby, taking my nan’s arm.
‘I’ve got a bad feeling about today,’ she says.
I reassure her that this is just a check-up, that she has been through the worst, that the fluid is off her lungs and this appointment will soon be over and she will be free. And I truly believe it. But it doesn’t work out like that.
First we are directed to a small waiting area that is so crowded we have to stand. Most of the people here are old and frail, but not all of them; there are young people with no luck who have ended up here fifty years before their time, and it is one of these unlucky young people, a dangerously overweight woman, who gets up to offer my nan her seat.
What everyone waiting here shares is a kind of gentle cynicism. They deal with the indignity and anxiety of this place with little jokes, knowing smiles and endless patience. We are in this thing together, they seem to say, and I feel a rush of love for these people. It is no surprise that my nan acts as though she knows them. They remind me of everyone I grew up with.
Eventually we see the specialist, a doctor whose name my nan has difficulty with, so she always calls him ‘that nice Indian gentleman’, although I have no idea if he is really an Indian; his name could just as easily be from some other part of the world, and he is a good man, I like him a lot too, so we don’t even complain or roll our eyes or sigh when he immediately tells my nan that he would like her to go and have an X-ray and get a blood test and then come back to him later.
More waiting. More standing room only. Another little ticket that you hold on to until your number appears after a wait that seems never-ending.
The blood test is easy enough. I go into the little room with my nan, watch her roll up the sleeve of her blue Marks & Spencer jumper and stare at the needle with a child-like curiosity as the nurse slips it into her pale, papery skin. The nurse sticks a plaster on top of the bubbling pinprick of blood and we are out of there.
I can’t accompany my nan into the X-ray department. People have to get undressed in there, my nan has to get undressed, and so of course I stay in the waiting room while she goes inside to get changed. But the terrible thing is she gets a little confused after she undresses for the X-ray, and I can see her standing in the middle of the corridor of the X-ray department in her hospital smock, and what really does me in is that she hasn’t fastened her smock at the back, she has left it open, so the world can see her poor old back and legs, those bones so delicate they always remind me of a baby bird, and I want to protect her, I want to do up her smock and find out where she needs to go, but I can’t, I am not allowed in there, and she wouldn’t want me in there, wouldn’t want me to see her not coping, with half her clothes off, so she just stands there half-naked in the X-ray department, looking around, her face frowning with confusion, when all she wants is to be at home with Frank Sinatra and the National Lottery and a nice cup of tea, not much to ask for, until a friendly nurse with a loud, cheerful voice sees her and points her in the right direction.
Then we go to see the nice Indian doctor that my nan likes so much, and he tells her—so matter of fact that I will remember it forever—that she i
s dying.
‘We’ve had a look at the result of your biopsy, Mrs Budd, and I have to tell you that we have found a tumour in the lining of your lung. And, as I would expect in someone of your age, the tumour is malignant.’
They have known this for how long? Hours? Days? Weeks? Certainly before we arrived today, before the hearty good mornings and my nan wandering the X-ray department with her hospital smock undone.
But it is news to us.
Tumour. Malignant. Nobody says the word. And I feel ashamed that nobody in my family—not me, not my mother, not my father—has had the courage to say the word since all this began. We assumed—we were so sure—that the word would go away if we never said it. And here it is, still not being said out loud, but growing in the lining of my grandmother’s lung.
They didn’t know, the doctor says, absolving my family of cowardice at not saying the word. They couldn’t know until the fluid was drained from her lungs and the biopsy had been performed. And he really is a good man, but he does not burst into tears or allow his voice to tremble with emotion when he tells my nan that there is nothing that can be done, no chemo, no surgery, no miracle cure, and that the tumour in the lining of her lung is secondary, meaning that the source of this thing, this terrible thing, is somewhere else, could be anywhere else in her poor old body, and they just don’t know.
It is not the first time that the doctor has given this speech. Perhaps not even the first time today.
More undressing, more examination. When the doctor and I are alone, and my nan is chatting happily to the young nurse on the other side of the screen, I ask him the obvious question.
‘How long has she got?’
‘In a patient of your grandmother’s age—probably a few months. Perhaps even until the summer.’
He talks about the medical term for what my nan has, the technical word for this pleural tumour—it’s called mesothelioma—and I get him to write it down, mesothelioma, thinking how you should know how to spell the thing that is going to kill you.
When my nan is examined and dressed, she thanks the doctor. She really likes him. She is a woman of courage and manners, and I feel ashamed again, wondering how I will carry myself when this day comes for me.