by Tony Parsons
thirty-five
Zeng and Yumi are outside the entrance to Churchill’s, handing out flyers. They both look a little different today. I suppose they are growing up.
Zeng is in a suit, his usually unkempt hair—‘like a dog bit it,’ the other Chinese students say—now neat and tidy, slicked down for his interview this morning at a nearby college. Yumi has stopped bleaching her hair, gradually reverting to her natural colour for her return to Japan, and the beautiful, glossy blackness is starting to streak her blonde thatch.
‘How did the interview go, Zeng?’
‘Going to do MBA from October. Very useful for doing business in China. But offer dependent on exam results. Need good English to do MBA.’
‘You’ll get a good enough mark to do your MBA.’ I turn to Yumi. ‘And you’ve got a new look too.’
‘Going to work in an office,’ she says. ‘Big company in Tokyo. Can’t have yellow hair. Not in Tokyo office. Not ever again. Blonde no more forever.’
She hands me a leaflet. At first glance it looks exactly like one of our college flyers. The border is still made up of all the flags of the world, the centrepiece is still a clumsy silhouette of Winston Churchill. But in this one Winnie is holding a spliff the size of a Cornetto rather than his usual stogie.
Come to Churchill’s Karaoke
End of term sing-song
Say goodbye to all your friends
Up in the staff room Hamish and Lenny are looking at the same flyer.
‘Bloody karaoke,’ Lenny says. ‘It’s the death of the dancing class. There was a time when the end-of-term do was in a disco.’
‘Nobody under fifty or over ten says disco any more, Lenny,’ I tell him.
‘Bit of dirty dancing under the strobe lights,’ he reminisces, ignoring me. ‘Up close and personal for the slow numbers. Is that an Evian bottle in your pocket or are you just glad to see me? Lovely, mate. Now it’s all karaoke. Standing there like a berk croaking along to Abba numbers. Following the bouncy ball on the autocue. Always some dippy couple tripping along the beach on the little film. Where’s the fun in that, mate?’
‘The interesting thing about karaoke is that it’s popular in countries where expression of emotion is frowned upon,’ Hamish says. ‘China. Japan. All of East Asia, really. Social convention means that they can’t express themselves openly in everyday life. But they can do it in song at karaoke.’
‘Whereas if we want to express ourselves in this country,’ Lenny says, ‘we can just go into a public toilet and pull our trousers down.’
‘You going to this, Alfie?’ Hamish says.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Are you kidding?’ Lenny says. ‘This man is legendary among the student body. They all admire his technique with a hand-held.’
I think I will pass on Churchill’s karaoke, but not for the reasons that Lenny the Lech wants to avoid it. I spent enough time in Hong Kong to have purged myself of the embarrassment factor that makes most of my countrymen squirm in a karaoke bar.
But I suspect that the night will feel like one long goodbye, that it will be an out-of-tune wake for youth and freedom, that we will soon all be blonde no more forever.
I watch my class working on all the tenses that can be used to refer to the future. Present simple, future perfect, present continuous, future perfect continuous. Yumi and Zeng. You go, you meet. Hiroko and Gen. You will have travelled, you will have met. Vanessa and Witold. I am starting. She is going. But not Olga, she has gone, dropped out, disappeared into the city with her boyfriend. Where are you going to go? What are you going to do?
I realise how much I will miss my students. How much I will miss them all.
They are still coming to my lessons, I still see them every day; in fact with the exam coming up fast, they are attending classes more regularly than they ever have, and if they cut back on anything then it is nights at General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen or the Eamon de Valera or the Pampas Steak Bar, but already their talk is turning to their new lives. Their time at Churchill’s International Language School is almost over. Soon they will go and I will stay. I miss them already.
And I wonder if it will always be this way—another year, another set of faces, on and on forever, a series of hellos and goodbyes without end.
You will go, you will meet.
My students are happy. They are talking of going home, of taking degrees here in London, of travelling to faraway lands. They are young and everything is before them, everything is exciting—study and travel and work, nothing is less than a great adventure. But a weight seems to be pushing down on me when I hear them talking about their new lives.
You just get used to someone, and then they leave you.
‘What will it be like?’ I ask Jackie. ‘Your life as a student, I mean. When you’re taking your BA, going to the University of Greenwich, all of that. How do you imagine it?’
She is sitting by the window in my flat, packing up her books to leave. The lesson is over. The exam is not far away. Her books are no longer new. The days are getting longer.
‘Well, I don’t know if I’m going to be a student yet, do I? My place at Greenwich depends on my English result.’
‘Are you kidding? I never saw anyone work as hard as you do. You’ll get your grade. Come on—tell me about life as a student. You must have thought about it.’
She laughs.
‘Only for the last twelve years or so. I don’t know what it will be like. I’ll be a lot older than the other students. I’ve been married, I’ve got a kid. Most of them probably still get their washing done by their mums. And when they go off to their wild parties, I’ll be working. I’ll still have to work, you know.’
‘But you think you’ll be happier?’
‘I know I’ll be happier. I’ll be doing what I want to do. I’ll be making something of my life. For myself and for my daughter. And it will be interesting. Great writers, great writing, talking about ideas, being around people who care about books, who don’t worry about getting above themselves. I can’t wait.’
I can see her there. I can see her growing into the person she has always wanted to be. I can see her realising that it’s not too late, that she is young enough and smart enough to have another go, another try at getting it right. And she will be good. It’s true she will be ten years older than the other students, but she is more than smart enough to stand out in any company; there will be no cheap jibes about Mrs Mop or cleaning floors, because the rest of them will know all about low-paid casual work, and I can imagine her shining there, really shining, asking good questions, not afraid to put her hand up, waking up the tired teachers, inspiring the good ones, having an essay about Carson McCullers read out in class as all the young boys melt and watch the way her body moves inside her tight clothes. Or perhaps her clothes will be different too.
‘I don’t want to lose touch,’ I say, my face burning.
‘What?’
‘I don’t want you to just drift out of my life.’
‘Drift out of your life?’
‘I want to keep in contact. That’s all. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t see why we can’t stay in touch.’
She places her hand on my arm, and it almost feels like a gesture of pity.
‘We’ll always be friends,’ she tells me, and I know that I have lost her before we have even begun.
My grandmother is too sick to stay in the little white flat. Her home just doesn’t work any more. Not for her. The stairs, the bath, the isolation from the rest of us—it is a home for someone who is old, but not for someone who is dying.
If my family were the Changs, this would be easier. Without talking about it, we would move her into a bedroom above the Shanghai Dragon and there we would care for her. But my little family is scattered all over the city, not really a family at all, my father and my mother and myself, all of us living alone, and there is no obvious place for my grandmother to go. There are too many stairs in my mum’s house, and not
enough space in the rented flats where my dad and I live.
We want to be a family. We really do. But we have left it too late, we have been too distracted by other things. We will never be the Changs now.
‘In China big children take care of old parents,’ I hear Joyce telling my mother. ‘Here, other way round. Old parents still worry about big children. Everything front to back in this country.’
We discuss other options. A home—but my nan is already too ill for a home. A hospice—but we can’t bear to take her to some strange place to die. Not yet. Not if there is some other way.
There is always the hospital, but my nan fears that place more than she fears death, or at least she sees them as interchangeable, so for as long as we have other options she will be spared the hospital bed. Although she seems to eat and drink nothing and although she needs 24-hour care, her doctor is happy to keep her out of the hospital, even now, even this late. But I don’t know if that reflects his compassion for a dying woman’s wishes, or just a lack of hospital beds. It is probably a bit of both.
In the end my mother takes charge, calling a stair-lift company and telling them that they have a job if they can do it immediately.
The stair-lift company must be used to these kind of desperate calls—for who has a stair lift installed unless they are desperate?—and soon a young workman is laying what looks like railway tracks on the staircase of my mother’s home. On top of the railway tracks he fits what looks like an ejector seat, stirring childhood memories of James Bond and pilots bailing out over enemy territory. It seems to be a thing of immense violence, this stair lift, but when the young workman sits in the chair and turns it on, it whirrs into sedate action like the most gentle machine in the world.
And later, when my nan arrives, dressed in her favourite white Marks & Spencer nightdress, the one with tiny red roses all over it, her face pale from all the weeks inside her flat and from the sickness, her body so frail that I fear to touch her, for I am actually afraid that I may break her, we excitedly show her the stair lift, explaining how it will make living here easy, as if she was a child on Christmas Day being given a gift that she is too small to truly appreciate.
My father and I gently help her into the stair lift’s chair and suddenly she seems to pitch forward, weak from the tumour and the lack of food and the weeks without moving, and we both spring forward to catch her. This had never crossed our minds, that she might be too ill to use a stair lift.
Then my mum explains how the stair lift works, how you have to move a little lever to make it go and how it stops as soon as you take your hand off the lever, making it impossible to hurt yourself, at least that’s the theory, and how there’s a little wooden landing newly built at the top of the stairs so that there is not one step to climb, not even one. I do not know how much of this my grandmother takes in. She doesn’t look like one of those happy old women that you see in advertisements for stair lifts, all twinkling eyes and sensible cardigans and false teeth gleaming. My nan looks as though she never guessed that her life could be filled with so much pain, so much discomfort, so much of what she would call a palaver.
But she smiles for our sakes, even now trying to please us, trying to be a good guest, trying not to make a fuss.
‘Lovely,’ she says. Her ultimate compliment.
Lovely.
Then she tentatively pushes the lever of the stair lift and we all laugh out loud, including my nan, laugh out loud with shock and delight as the gentle machine whirrs into life, slowly lifting my nan up the stairs.
There she goes now, looking like a little old angel ascending to heaven in her white M & S nightdress, smiling down on us because this is fun, it really is, and most of all because she doesn’t want us to worry about her, and she really doesn’t want to make a fuss.
thirty-six
This is not me, my nan tells me, again and again. Although I know exactly what she means, I still feel that my grandmother is truly herself in these final hours.
Brave. Selfless. Funny. Concerned about everyone except herself. The old lady I love with all my heart.
‘What happened to that girl?’
‘What girl, Nan?’
‘That nice girl.’
She makes me smile. ‘Oh, that nice girl.’ I think she means Rose. ‘Rose—she passed away, remember?’
She shakes her head impatiently. ‘Not Rose. I know about Rose. And not the Japanese one. I know she gave you the elbow. I mean the one with the daughter. The daughter with lovely eyes.’
‘Jackie?’
‘Jackie. You want to hold on to her. She’s a good one.’
‘You’re right, Nan. She’s a good one.’
‘I want to see you settled, Alfie. I want to see you settled.’
You think that you will watch someone die with something like horror, then you watch them die with nothing but love. Because somehow the horror passes, all the black feelings caused by the thousand unspeakable indignities of cancer, or at least you learn to exist with it all. But the love remains, and it overwhelms the fear and sadness and loss, that terrible sense of loss that is worse than everything.
Day and night mean nothing now so we take shifts. I take over from my father around two in the morning. It must be like this when you have a baby—blinking back the sleep in the middle of the night, struggling to stay awake as you perform your various duties. It would have been something like this for Rose and me, if we had been lucky enough to have our baby son or daughter. Except this is the other end of the story.
I do not believe that my nan is going to die tonight. It’s too soon. It will surely go on for a while yet. She doesn’t seem to be in enough pain. The pain in her side, that unimaginable pain from the tumour, appears to be easing. She is taking no medication. Her mind is clear. She looks peaceful.
Her hair on the pillow is silver streaked with gold, the result of a quick dye job that my mother gave her to lift her spirits. Her eyebrows are not wonky because my mum has drawn them on. She breathes out, closes her eyes.
I sit in a chair by the side of her bed, dozing off although I am trying not to, slipping in and out of an exhausted sleep.
And then her voice pulls me back.
‘Mum and Dad,’ she says.
‘You want—should I get them?’
‘My mum and dad.’
‘Nan?’
‘They’re here.’
‘Are you okay? Do you want—’
‘Alfie?’
‘Here I am.’
‘Hold my hand, Alfie.’
‘I’ve got it.’
‘You’re a good boy.’ Her chest lifts and she slowly exhales, seeming to let go of the fear, the pain, the longing to stay. ‘You’re trying your best, aren’t you? I can see that.’
‘Nan? Can I get you anything?’
‘I don’t need anything. But thank you, love.’
I can’t tell if she is sleeping or not. A light seems to be creeping into the room. It’s not night any more. The impenetrable blackness is fading away. But how can it be over so soon?
‘I love you, Nan,’ I say, my voice choking up, my eyes suddenly filling. ‘I love you so much.’
Why didn’t I say this to her earlier? Why did I leave it so long? Why haven’t I been telling her this all my life?
All those days when I had other things to do. All those times when I had somewhere else to go. And I could have been with her.
Thanking her for loving me.
‘It doesn’t hurt now,’ she says, her voice soft and calm.
‘That’s good.’
‘Just stay with me.’
‘I’m here, Nan.’
‘Stay with me, love.’
The school is not so different from the one where I taught, the packs of boys pouring out of the gates instantly identifiable as the toughs or their natural prey, with the great mass in between acting harder than they really are, laughing and taking swipes at each other with their battered kit bags, swaggering with a cockiness that b
egs to be seen as confidence.
What makes this school different from the Princess Diana is that there are girls here. Their presence changes the atmosphere, charges the air. Some of the girls look like children still, but others are more like grown women, women who are young enough to get away with long hair and short skirts, women who are aware of their power over the roaring, unformed boys who swarm around them. They pass me by at the gates, these girls, some of them raising an eyebrow and smirking, evaluating me and dismissing me in an instant. Then I see her. She is not part of any pack.
‘Plum?’
Her face reddens.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve got my car. I’ll drive you home.’
She walks with me to my car, ignoring the jeers of who’s-your-boyfriend, Plumpster? and I-don’t-fancy-your-one-much, Plumpster. When we get in the car, I make no move to turn on the ignition.
‘Why are you here?’
‘I wanted to tell you in person.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘My nan died.’
‘She died?’
‘Early this morning. I didn’t want to tell you on the phone. I know she meant a lot to you. And you meant a lot to her.’
Plum stares straight ahead, saying nothing. I grope for all the usual consolations.
‘She was in a lot of pain towards the end. So we can be glad she doesn’t have to suffer any more. She’s at peace now.’
Plum says nothing.
‘And it was a long life, Plum. One day we will learn to be grateful for her life. Not sad about her death.’
‘She was the one person…’
‘Plum? Are you—’
‘The one person who I could be myself with. I know my mum wants me to be prettier. Lose weight. Do something about my hair. All that. And my dad wants me to be stronger. Tougher. Harder. Not get pushed around. Stand up for myself. All that.’ She shakes her head. ‘And the kids at school all want me to just crawl away and die. Just crawl away and die, Plumpster. But she was the one person who just accepted me. Who didn’t care.’ She laughs. ‘Who actually seemed to quite like me.’