by Tony Parsons
Outside the hospital her mouth is set in a firm line. I notice how wonky her eyebrows are drawn on today. The gap between her desire to look nice and her inability to do it as well as she once did shreds my heart.
She rubs her side, the side where they drained her lungs, and I remember that we thought it was where the tube had been stuck into her side that was hurting, a wound that wouldn’t heal, but we now know it was always more than that, this pain that comes in great waves and doesn’t let her sleep and takes her from her bed in the middle of the night.
‘I’m going to beat this thing,’ she declares, and I don’t know what to say, because I know it can’t be beaten—can it?—and so anything I say will sound either like surrender or a lie.
We go back to her little white flat and she slips into her old routine. Kettle on, music on, Sinatra singing ‘I’ve Got the World on a String’, the Mirror on the coffee table, turned to the TV page, circles in blue biro around the programmes she wants to watch while the rest of us are off doing something else when we should be with her, making the most of every day, every moment, and these shaky circles around her favourite TV programmes make me feel like crying.
She is singing. I am shaking, scared of what I have to do. I have to call my father, I have to call my mother. But that can wait. Now we sit on the sofa, drinking our hot, sweet tea, listening to Sinatra sing ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’, and my nan holds my hand like she will never let it go.
When I go to the park for the first time in ages, the morning is cold and frosty, the scrubby grass covered in a mist that the weak winter sunlight can’t burn away. He is there, of course, as I knew he would be, and I watch him for a while as he moves under the bare trees with that unhurried power, making what he is doing look like everything—meditation, martial art, physical exercise, breathing lesson and slow, lonely dance. Making every movement special, making every second sacred.
But today George Chang is not alone.
There’s a bunch of young business types in their dry-cleaned running gear politely watching him. There must be ten of them, mostly young men, their soft office bodies pumped up from weight training and contact sports, but there are also a couple of thin women with dyed blonde hair, good-looking but hard as nails. Modern boys and girls. They all look as though they should be going for the burn in a gym, or whatever it is they do in there.
‘Alfie?’
It’s Josh. He looks a little heavier than I remember. And I am accustomed to seeing him in a suit from Hugo Boss or Giorgio Armani or Paul Smith, not a tracksuit from Nike. But it is definitely old Josh.
‘What are you doing here?’ I ask him.
He indicates George.
‘Our company sent us to him.’
‘What for?’
‘Tai Chi is part of our new corporate strategy for stress management. Our firm loses too many person-hours to stress.’
‘Person-hours?’
‘Yes, too many person-hours. Tai Chi is said to reduce stress levels. And it’s also to help us think outside the box.’
‘Think outside the box? What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Change the way we use our imagination. Help us think creatively. Stop us using the same old tired business techniques. Think outside the box, Alfie. At first I thought it was just a load of New Age business bollocks, this year’s half-baked corporate philosophy. But I’ve changed my mind after watching Master Chang.’
Master Chang? George never calls himself Master Chang. Who are these posers and what are they doing in our park?
George demonstrates the opening moves of the form. Then he gets them to do it. Or to try. It’s very basic stuff. He doesn’t even get them to put the breathing with the movement. As Josh and his friends wave their arms about, I take George to one side.
‘You’re not really teaching these idiots, are you?’
He shrugs. ‘New students.’
‘I don’t understand how they got here. I don’t understand how our park is suddenly full of suits talking about thinking outside the box and person-hours. All these suits talking about Tai Chi saving money for some rich company that has probably got too much money in the first place. This is our park.’
‘Their boss comes to Shanghai Dragon. Good client of mine. Lives not far. Big-shot lawyer. Says, George—I want you to teach Tai Chi to some of my people. Hear it good for stress. Will you do it, George? I say, sure, why not?’
‘Why not? Because they’re not going to stick at it, that’s why not. You think they’re going to stick at it? They’ll last five minutes. Next week it will be something else. Yoga. Muay Thai. Morris Dancing. Anything.’
‘How long did you last?’
‘That’s not fair. I’ve had a lot on my plate lately.’
He turns and faces me. ‘Everybody always has a lot on plate. Everybody. Always. Lot on plate. You talk, talk, talk. Talk as though this is part of rat race. One more thing you have to do in busy life. It’s not. Tai Chi is get away from rat race. Understand?’
‘But I liked it when it was just you and me, George.’
‘Things change.’
‘But I don’t like change.’
‘Change part of life.’
‘But I can’t stand it. I like it when things stay the same.’
He shakes his head impatiently. ‘Tai Chi all about change. About coping with change. Don’t you know that yet?’
When Josh and the other off-duty suits have finished waving their arms around, George announces that he is going to show us some pushing hands. I’ve never done pushing hands before, I have never even heard of it, but I try to look like I know what I’m doing when George asks me to help him demonstrate.
‘Pushing hands,’ he says. ‘Called toi sau in China. Not about strength. About feeling. For two peoples. Can be improvise. Can be set moves. About anticipate.’
That’s the introduction. George is not much of a talker. He prefers to show you rather than tell you.
I copy George. We face each other in a left bow-and-arrow stance—left leg forward and bent, representing a bow, right leg behind and straight, representing an arrow—and, following his example, I lightly place the back of my left wrist against the back of his left wrist. We are hardly touching.
He closes his eyes and slowly starts pushing his hand towards me. Somehow I know what to do. Staying in contact with his wrist, I turn my waist, rolling the back of my hand over his hand, letting him fully extend his arm, then I slowly push back towards him. He receives my force, goes with it, slowly brushes it aside. Our hands never lose contact.
It goes on. We push and yield and neutralise, push and yield and neutralise, and soon I trust myself enough to close my eyes too, letting go of everything around me, to forget about the suits and Josh and person-hours and thinking outside the box, to forget that we haven’t spoken since I disgraced myself at his dinner party, to forget about hospital waiting rooms where they tell you there’s nothing that can be done, to forget the mist on the bare trees and my swollen lips and my chipped tooth, to just feel the light touch of skin against skin, to embrace the giving and taking, relaxing into the ebb and flow, just feeling what I need to do, and becoming what I need to become.
part three: oranges for christmas
thirty-one
Suddenly the little white flat is too much for my nan. Suddenly it is full of traps to remind you that it’s not the getting old that kills you. It’s the getting sick.
The stairs to her first-floor apartment are all at once too steep. She needs to pause to catch her breath on the little half-landing, gasping for air as if she is drowning, her face raised to the ceiling. The bath is suddenly too high to get into without somebody supporting her, so my mother or Plum or one of my nan’s female neighbours—and all of her neighbours are female—has to be there to help her in and out of the water. And the well-meaning bureaucrats of terminal illness are suddenly all knocking at her front door.
There is a cheerful district nurse who organises a social w
orker, meals on wheels once a day and a scarred metal air tank that stands guard by my nan’s favourite chair.
My nan wants to please the district nurse, just as she always wants to please everyone, but the little white flat is her home and although she knows these people are just trying to be helpful, she does not approve of the commode provided by the social worker (‘I’m not doing my business in that, dear, thanks all the same’), the fetid meals on wheels are left untouched (‘I’ll just have a bit of toast, sweetheart’) and the air tank makes no difference at all to her fits of terrible breathlessness (‘I think it’s empty, love’).
But she carries on. She meets her old female friends for coffee and cake and talk, and the talk, the human connection, the human thing, is the point of those meetings. She comes to my mother’s house for lunch on Sunday, she makes her daily trips to the local shops for the tiny supplies of white bread and ‘a nice bit of ham’ that she seems to live on, plus the river of tea and the biscuit mountain.
When she starts to feel uncertain on her feet, the social worker kindly produces a walking stick. My nan rolls her eyes that it has come to this, and brandishes her walking stick in imitation of a doddery old pensioner, which is pretty funny coming from her at this time.
‘Ooh, I remember the good old days,’ she jeers, waving her walking stick, and we all laugh, even the social worker.
My nan faces cancer in exactly the same way that she has faced life—with good grace, with endless stoicism, with quiet humour.
As she would say herself, she doesn’t like to make a fuss.
Despite the nagging pain in her side from the tumour and despite the desperate battles for breath, for a while life seems to go on in the same old way. There are trips to the shops in the morning, some gentle housework in the afternoon and nights spent watching television, her favoured programmes circled in shaky blue biro in the newspaper’s TV guide, forever tugging at my heart.
But in the middle of all this ordinary life, I become aware that something extraordinary is happening. The people who love my nan show that they are ready to walk though fire for her.
My mother and my father are there, of course, there every day, although rarely at the same time, and there are countless visits from elderly ladies who live in the nearby flats or who know my nan from the old neighbourhood, the old house where my dad grew up, the Oranges For Christmas house, friends from the old life before children grew and husbands died and busy specialists said there was nothing that they could do.
Then there is Plum. Among my parents and the elderly friends, there is this awkward girl who has somehow formed a real bond with my grandmother. Enduring endless hours on trains to and from Bansted, night after night Plum sits with my nan watching the programmes that have been circled in the TV guide and selections from her personal collection of wrestling videos featuring The Slab in all his large-breasted glory.
Plum holds my nan’s hand, strokes her forehead, and brushes her thin, silver hair, as if this old woman is the most precious thing on the planet.
The district nurse and the social worker look in once a week, but I do not know how we would cope if my nan didn’t inspire so much affection in the people whose lives she has touched. If we had to rely on the kindness of the local council, everything would be lost.
Because someone has to be with my nan all the time now. It’s just too dangerous for her to be alone. We realise that she can lose consciousness at any moment. My nan still calls it ‘falling asleep’, but the doctor who comes round says these fainting spells are blackouts caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain.
One night I watch as my nan’s eyes close while she is staring at the news, without her usual running commentary of ‘ridiculous’ and ‘disgusting’.
Her head suddenly drops, her mouth falls open and she pitches forward towards the little fireplace. Before I can move, Plum catches my nan, as Plum has caught her before, and very gently eases her back into her chair.
And after a while it becomes what we think of as normal, an unremarked-upon part of our lives, these blackouts that my nan waves away as nothing that a good night’s sleep couldn’t cure.
The staff room of Churchill’s International Language School is empty. It’s still early. There are a couple of students sneaking a spliff down on Oxford Street but nobody is upstairs yet. I dump my shoulder bag on top of the coffee table, and a yellow flyer is lifted up by a gust of wind. The flyer is not one of ours. I pick it up and read it.
Dream Machine.
Cleaning your work place the old-fashioned way—on hands and knees
There’s a line drawing of what looks like a fifties housewife with a feather duster, both sexy and domestic, like Samantha in Bewitched, and below that there are two telephone numbers. One is an out-of-town number, the other for a mobile. I recognise both of them.
I can hear the sound of her vacuum cleaner across the corridor in Lisa Smith’s room. She’s in there, giving the tatty green carpet what she would call a good going over.
‘What’s this meant to be?’ I say, waving the flyer.
Jackie smiles brightly. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Business is booming. I’ve been putting flyers all over West One. I thought I’d drop a few around here. Even though I’ve got the job already.’
She seems very happy. God knows why.
‘Dream Machine,’ I snort. ‘You mean you. Dream machine—that’s you.’
Her face falls. ‘What’s the problem? Even if I get some extra work, it’s not going to interfere with our class. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Why should I mind?’
‘I don’t know. But you do mind. I can tell. What’s wrong?’
What’s wrong? I can’t say what’s wrong.
I know I don’t like her working in Churchill’s, cleaning our rooms the old-fashioned way, on her hands and knees. I don’t want the teachers and the students staring straight through her, as though she is nothing. And yet I don’t want her working for the toffee-nosed snobs in Cork Street or—now I come to think about it—anybody anywhere else. I don’t know what I want. Something more worthy of her than this. I know I don’t want her here. Not any more.
‘The whole cleaning thing. I don’t know. It’s getting me down.’
She has a laugh at that. ‘Getting you down? What’s it got to do with you? And if it doesn’t get me down, why should it bother you? I thought there was nothing wrong with cleaning.’
‘There’s not.’
‘I thought there was dignity in labour.’
‘I didn’t say that. Come on. I didn’t say anything about dignity in labour.’
‘You told me there was nothing to be ashamed of in doing what I do.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And yet you are ashamed.’
‘I’m not. I just want something better for you. Better than cleaning a toilet that Lenny the Lech has recently taken a leak in. Why should I be ashamed?’
‘I don’t know. But you are.’
‘That’s ridiculous. I just don’t see why you have to do it here. The place where I work.’
‘I have to do it wherever I can. I have to make a living. To pay my bills. Dead simple. I can’t rely on any man to keep me, can I?’
‘Is that you, Alfie?’
Vanessa is in the doorway. She stares at Jackie. Jackie stares back. I don’t know if they recognise each other from that first day at my mother’s house. I can’t tell.
‘Pardon,’ Vanessa says.
‘Come in,’ Jackie says. ‘You’re not disturbing us.’
There’s only a few years’ difference in their age but they seem like different generations, Jackie in her blue nylon coat, Vanessa in some little red-and-black number from Agneès B. They look as though they come from different worlds, different lives. And I guess they do.
‘I’m looking for Hamish,’ Vanessa says. ‘He has some notes for me.’
‘Hamish is not in yet.’
‘Okay.’
She looks back at Jack
ie, as if trying to place her.
‘Je crois qu’on se connaît?’ Jackie says, and I am dumbfounded until I remember that her two A Levels are in Media Studies and French.
‘Non,’ Vanessa says. ‘I don’t think we have met.’
Jackie smiles. But she looks as though she wants to argue about something. ‘Pourquoi pas?’
Vanessa hovers uncertainly in the doorway. ‘I go now, Alfie.’
‘See you later, Vanessa.’
‘C’était sympa de faire ta connaissance,’ Jackie laughs. ‘Ne m’oublie pas!’
‘Leave her alone,’ I tell Jackie when Vanessa has gone. ‘She hasn’t done anything to you.’
‘Want a bet? She was looking down her nose at me.’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘Because I’m cleaning up after her and all the little snot-nosed bitches like her.’
‘I’m so glad you’re not bitter.’
‘I’m entitled to be a little bitter. So would you be if you saw the world from down on your hands and knees.’
‘I thought you boasted about that. In your stupid flyer.’
She shakes her head. ‘It’s funny how dirt seems to stick to the people who clean it up. Rather than the people who make it.’
She picks up her light little modern vacuum cleaner and heads for the door.
‘But I’ll tell you something for nothing. I’m not ashamed of myself. I don’t feel the need to apologise for making a living any way I can. I thought you’d be pleased about the flyers. I thought you’d be happy that I’m trying to drum up a little extra work to pay my way through college. How naive of me.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Forget it.’
‘The flyer caught me off guard. I don’t know. You’ll be an undergraduate soon. That’s how I think of you.’
This is meant to placate her. It doesn’t.
‘No problem. I’ll try to be gone by the time you arrive in the morning. You and all your hot little students. Then you can all pretend that the place was cleaned by magic.’