by Tony Parsons
Bird control and forking borders, I think, watching the pair of them out back.
I’ve got your number, mate.
As late spring slowly gives way to summer, Julian is always complimenting my mum on her knowledge of the garden, her expertise in mulching, her way with the tasks of the season.
It’s true that she does know a lot about plants, flowers and all that stuff. And Julian is very respectful. I’ll give that to him. If my mum is sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea with Joyce or me, Julian will not come into the room without knocking first. We will be sitting at the kitchen table and there will be this shy little knock on a door that’s already open. And then there’s Julian standing in the doorway, his suntanned body bulging out of his black rugby shirt and a dopey expression on his face, staring at my mum.
‘Is this guy coming on to you?’ I demand one day when my mother and I are alone. ‘This guy Julian?’
My mother laughs like a teenager.
‘Julian? Coming on to me? What does that mean? Is it the same as making eyes at someone?’
‘You know exactly what it means, Mum. You know more teen lingo than I ever will. Thanks to Nelson Mandela. And your kids.’
‘Of course he’s not coming on to me. I talk to him for hours. About the garden.’
‘He looks at you.’
‘What?’ She’s enjoying this.
‘As if he fancies you or something.’
And I am both happy and appalled. I am glad that my mother has not shut herself away from the world. But I can’t pretend that I relish the idea of her going out on dates, or of some rugged old Kiwi roughly sinking his fingers into her top soil.
‘Has he asked you out or anything?’
‘Asked me out? You mean, to dinner or the cinema or something like that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not yet.’
‘Not yet? But you think he might? You think he might get around to it?’
‘Well, I don’t know.’
‘But if you say not yet, that implies that it’s going to happen, doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose so, darling.’
‘I’ve seen him looking at you, Mum. Jesus Christ.’ Is that a hoe in his combat trousers or is he just glad to see her? ‘I think he’s definitely going to get around to it.’
My mother reaches across the table and touches my hand. She is not laughing at me any more. She is sort of smiling, very gently.
‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she says. ‘I’m over all that.’
She doesn’t mean that she’s over going out to dinner or going to the cinema. She means she’s over sex, romance, relationships and all that. I’m not so sure.
The older I get, and the more I think about it, the more I realise that we are never over all that.
My father’s little rented flat feels like a place where a man lives alone. There’s no sense of two lives mixed and shared. There are no traces left of Lena.
I go round to see him once a week these days. The flat is a bit small to hang around in, so we usually go around the corner to a little Chinese restaurant where they really know how to cook Peking duck and where the waiters all have these strong London accents.
I look at these kids with their faces from China and their voices from Finchley, and it feels to me that these days the world is just one place.
My father’s flat is not so sad now. I asked him once what had finally gone wrong with him and Lena. He said that she wanted to go out dancing and he wanted to watch the golf on Sky. Now nobody can stop him watching the golf on Sky. It’s not much, being able to watch the golf on Sky, perhaps not what he was hoping, but it must count for something.
He can play his music as loud as he likes. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Diana Ross and the Supremes. There’s nobody left to tell him that he’s out of time. Baby, baby, baby—where did our love go? He still loves all of that.
And he spends hours sorting through the boxes of photographs that we found at my grandmother’s flat.
All those shoe boxes, those cracked and torn photo albums from the forties and fifties with English fishing villages on the front, the ones from the sixties and seventies with drawings of doe-eyed dolly birds on the cover.
Some of the faces in these photographs are still a mystery. Some of them are as familiar as his own face. But those familiar faces have their own special mystery. And he stares at them for a long time, wondering about them, and wondering how he got from those crowded streets in the East End to this quiet place on a green hill in north London. Quiet apart from Smokey Robinson and the Supremes.
He is not writing. He still hasn’t got around to that. But as I watch him surrounded by all those memories of his parents and the house where he grew up, all the bits and pieces of a life that is long gone but somehow sticks with him, a life that will never really leave him, I think that perhaps he will start writing again very soon.
Because my father has realised that if he is going to carry on, then he is going to have to go right back to the very beginning.
As soon as I get to the edge of the park, I see George.
He is completely alone. There are no posers from the great financial houses of the City rabbiting on about reducing stress and thinking outside the box. No hippies with tofu for brains in bicycle clips and sandals who think they can learn the Tao in two easy lessons. And no me. We have all deserted him. All the big-nosed pinkies with good intentions. He is as alone as the day I first saw him.
In his hand is a double-edged sword, red and white ribbons trailing from its hilt. I stand and watch George Chang practise his weapons form.
He suddenly stands on one leg, passes the sword from one hand to the other behind his back, spins around with impossible speed and grace, brings the sword sweeping down over his head, the red and white ribbons wrapping around his neck for just a second, then drops to his knees, stands again with the sword poised at the throat of an imaginary enemy, and it’s as if his movements are all blurring into one fluid movement and the sword is spinning silver in his hands.
And I wish that Plum could see this. I feel that, in some way I don’t quite understand, George Chang is what she has been looking for all her life.
The Slab made glorious flesh and blood.
When he has finished I approach him. I feel guilty. Perhaps the rest of them can let their Tai Chi lessons fizzle out with a clear conscience, but I feel bad about it.
‘Sorry I haven’t seen you for a while, George. I’ve been so busy. What with the exams and everything.’
He nods curtly, but there is no accusation or resentment in the gesture. It’s as if my disappearance from the park is only what is to be expected from a big-nosed pinky.
And as I watch him putting his sword in its long leather carry-case, because you can’t walk through the streets of north London toting a double-edged sword, I suddenly realise why I wanted to learn Tai Chi from this man. It had little to do with stress management or losing weight or learning to breathe properly. And despite the sense that the act of pushing hands made of my world, my life, my future, it didn’t even have much to do with learning to accept change.
I wanted to be like him.
It was as pure as that.
Calm without being passive. Strong without being aggressive. A family man without being a sofa potato. A decent heart in a healthy body. Those were the lessons that I wanted George Chang to teach me, because I knew I would never learn them from my real father.
‘Busy time for me too,’ he says, as if reading my mind. ‘My son and his wife moving out. Many arrangements to make.’
I can’t believe what I am hearing. If there was one thing I never doubted about the Changs, it was that their little family was unbreakable. And more than anything, I wanted a family just like that. Unbreakable.
‘Harold and Doris are leaving the Shanghai Dragon?’
George nods. ‘My son’s wife think too rough around here. Lots of drunks. Making pee-pee in doorways and
fighting. Lots of lovely houses, big money, but also some rubbish people. Not a good place to raise children, thinks my son’s wife.’ He nods in the vague direction of suburbia. ‘Wants to move out to maybe Muswell Hill or Cricklewood. Open their own restaurant. Nice new schools for Diana and William. Nobody making pee-pee in doorways or threatening to punch you in the cake hole.’
I am stunned. ‘And Harold is going along with all this, is he? Muswell Hill and new schools for the kids? Leaving the Shanghai Dragon? He just agrees to the lot of it, does he?’
‘What can he do? She’s his wife. Has to listen to her. Not in China any more.’
‘But this is so hard for you, George. You and Joyce. Not just because of all the extra work. Not just because you’ll miss the children. It’s your family that’s being broken up.’
‘Families change. My wife and I, we have to understand. My son, his wife, their children—that’s a new family. A family comes apart and then comes together as something else. Muswell Hill—I don’t know. Never been. Hear it’s nice place. I like it here just fine. But maybe it’s a good idea for them. And their family.’
George Chang stares beyond the trees, as if thinking about the clean streets of Muswell Hill and Chinese restaurants where no drunk ever threatens to punch you in the cake hole. A future he can’t quite imagine. Then he turns back to me and smiles.
‘That’s the funny thing about family,’ he says. ‘Even the best family is not set in stone.’
* * *
Churchill’s karaoke is in a small rented room in the back of a Japanese restaurant in Soho.
My students all pile into this tiny box with no windows as the man who runs the restaurant, who is not Japanese but Cantonese, hooks up the karaoke machine. The Chinese and Japanese students devour the song menus, Yumi and Hiroko and Gen and Zeng, looking for the songs they want to sing, while the rest of us, Witold and Vanessa and Astrud and Imran, Hamish and Lenny and myself, order drinks and wonder how we can get through this thing as painlessly as possible. We glance at the song menu. We are in a universe where Take That are considered golden oldies.
Yumi and Hiroko and Gen are delighted with the menu, because it is full of Japanese favourites, but Zeng is bitterly disappointed that there are no Chinese standards, even though the owner is Cantonese. He sees this as a national humiliation, on a par with the Opium War, but cheers up after a while and sings a spirited version of ‘Do It To Me One More Time’, which we all agree is better than Britney’s original.
The Japanese, that exquisitely reserved tribe, sing without any shyness at all, and I see that Hamish is right: karaoke is an outlet for emotion in a society where emotions are not encouraged to spill out all over the place, a society on the other side of the planet where they still expect their people to maintain a stiff upper lip.
Yumi has a sweet strong voice, and although Hiroko doesn’t sing so well, she puts a lot of emotion into it and is reluctant to relinquish the microphone. In the end it has to be prised out of her hands. Yumi and Hiroko both sing the same sweet song, ‘Can You Celebrate?’ by Namie Amuro.
‘Japanese Madonna,’ Yumi tells me.
‘Very popular for wedding,’ says Hiroko.
Those of us who are not Japanese or Chinese can’t match that East Asian total lack of inhibition at the mike, but after an ensemble version of Abba’s ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ we loosen up a little. Lenny does a spirited if grotesque version of Rod Stewart’s ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ and Hamish performs such a moving version of Bronski Beat’s ‘Small-town Boy’ that even Lenny the Lech listens in respectful silence. Then it is my turn.
I usually stick to Elvis at the karaoke. With Elvis, you can sink into this mock-trembling baritone and warble your way through ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love With You’ or ‘Always On My Mind’ or ‘Love Me Tender’ without feeling like a complete tonker. Elvis is easy.
But today I go for a touch of Sinatra, the one where the guy is in a bar that is just about to close, and he has a story that he desperately needs to share. ‘One For My Baby’.
You’d never know it
But, buddy, I’m a kind of poet.
It’s a line that always reminds me of my dream, that dream I had in some other lifetime to try to make my small mark upon this world. To do what my father had done before me. To be a writer. Long ago and far away, that was my dream.
No, I think to myself, looking at all the shining faces of my students. That wasn’t a dream.
That was a plan.
Jackie sails through her exam. Grade A. She has her place at university. And I am proud of her and sad all at the same time. She doesn’t need me any more.
She wants to take me out to dinner to celebrate, and I tell her that I’ll buy her dinner at the Shanghai Dragon. But she says that this one is on her and she wants to go somewhere in the centre of town, this little Italian restaurant in Covent Garden, where she has heard they have live music. When we get there the live music turns out to be a problem. There’s only an accordion, two guitars and a middle-aged singer, but they perform with the volume turned up to eleven.
The band wander among the red-and-white check tablecloths belting out ‘Volare’, ‘In Napoli’ and ‘That’s Amore’, and you can hardly hear yourself think. But it’s one of those nights when the niggling little details can’t spoil it for you.
Jackie has got her exam. Her dream is intact.
‘What happens now?’ I say. Shout, really.
‘I’m winding up Dream Machine,’ she shouts back. ‘I figure I’ve spent enough time on my knees. When term starts I’ll find some part-time job that doesn’t get in the way of my studies. Then I’ll get my degree.’ She raises her glass of red wine. ‘And then I’ll live happily ever after.’
‘When will I see you again?’
She shakes her head, and at first I think she hasn’t heard me.
But she has heard me all right.
The band approach our table, bow and immediately start banging out an old Dean Martin number, ‘Return to Me’, although the singer is singing ‘Ritorna-me’. Jackie and I just stare at each other. It’s too loud to talk any more. Then she starts to laugh, just throws back her lovely head and laughs in that way she has, and soon I’m laughing too, but I still want the band to stop.
‘Please, boys,’ I say. ‘She’s my student. I’m her teacher. Please respect the sanctity of the student—teacher relationship. Knock it off, okay? Boys?’
But they don’t care. They keep on playing ‘Return to Me’ as if we were lovers. No, not lovers.
It’s more than that. As if we were together.
‘WHEN WILL I SEE YOU AGAIN?’ I bellow.
But the band has suddenly stopped playing.
And I find I am shouting my head off in a restaurant that is completely silent.
thirty-nine
‘Wine, women and weed,’ Josh sighs, as we wait for our flight to Amsterdam to start boarding. ‘Brown cafe’s. Red lights. Blue movies. One last adventure before I settle down with my beautiful new wife.’
For Josh’s stag party in Amsterdam, we meet at the British Airways check-in desk late on Friday afternoon, Josh and me and around a dozen of his friends from work, all of them still in their suits from a day in the office and jabbering with nervous excitement about spending a night in old Amsterdam.
It is only a forty-minute flight from London to Schiphol Airport and soon we are checked into our hotel and wandering the tree-lined canals with tall town houses reflected in the water, the compact streets full of bicycles, the sickly-sweet smell of hashish and marijuana drifting from the coffee shops.
At first it is all quite sedate. Josh has booked a big table at a good Indonesian restaurant and we eat dinner there. His friends are loud but friendly, not the drooling go-getting morons that I was fearing, and the mood as we head into the night is almost what the Dutch call gezellig. Cosy.
But after dinner it starts to go downhill, and it’s not cosy at all.
‘Wait until y
ou see this place, Alfie,’ Josh tells me as we flag down a few taxis. ‘Tonight you are going to be fucked blind, old sport.’
‘That’s a good thing, is it? Where exactly are we going?’ I am starting to get a bad feeling about all this.
‘You’ll see,’ he laughs.
Our destination is a gabled town house in a quiet street lined with elm trees. Large houseboats are moored on the canal. The only sounds are the bells of distant bicycles. We are a long way from the noise and the girls in windows and the drunken crowds of the red light district. But the two burly men in black tie outside the door of the town house suggest we are not so far away after all.
‘Gentlemen,’ they say, seeming to take it all in at once—our clothes, our degree of inebriation, our credit card limits. ‘Welcome.’
We pay 150 guilders just to get through the door. Around fifty quid. The place is enormous. This must have been a family home at one time. Now it is something else. Not a family home at all.
A smooth middle-aged man, also in black tie, gives us a little pep talk about what it will cost us to take one of the girls up to one of the rooms.
‘Josh,’ I say, tugging at his sleeve. ‘This isn’t a bar. It’s a knocking shop.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a prude,’ he tells me. ‘Don’t worry, Alfie. I’ll pay your way.’
‘But I don’t want—’
‘Just shut up and enjoy yourself, will you? For my sake if not your own. Give me a break, Alfie. I’m getting married next week. Be happy for me, will you? It’s the most important day of any young man’s life. My stag night.’
We go into what looks like a Victorian drawing room. Lots of chintz. Big drapes over the shuttered windows. Plenty of large, soft sofas where businessmen are talking to young women with extremely short dresses, lots of make-up and faces that look as though they have been carved out of granite.
What makes the room seem slightly less like a Victorian drawing room is that there is a bar at one end where a large black man with a shaven head regards us without emotion. During our pep talk at the door we were told that we were entitled to a few free drinks. The drinks are now lined up before us while the young women with faces carved out of granite smile at our little drunken group, casting their bait.