One For My Baby

by Tony Parsons

  We grin back, sheepish and flattered, as if it’s our personal charm that has got us in with these young women, and soon they are all over us like a skin allergy, most of them bottle blonde but with the occasional Indian or East Asian or black girl in with the mix. They all order champagne. It is overpriced and cold. Just like the women.

  I see from the menu that a bottle of champagne and an hour upstairs with one of the girls is exactly the same price. Five hundred and fifty guilders. More than £200. The friends of Josh start waving around their credit cards.

  There’s a tall young black woman sitting next to me, her long legs crossed, blowing cigarette smoke into my face and making laboured small talk.

  ‘What hotel you stay at?’ she says, the whore’s equivalent of what’s your star sign?

  I smile politely, and turn to Josh.

  ‘I don’t want to spoil the party,’ I say.

  ‘Then don’t.’

  ‘This is really not for me.’

  ‘Forget about your pathetic teacher’s salary tonight, Alfie,’ Josh sighs, lighting up a cigar, the stone-faced blonde on his arm staring blankly at me. ‘This one’s on me.’ He leans across me, addresses my companion. ‘You’ll give my friend a good time tonight, won’t you, sweetheart?’

  The black girl smiles without humour or warmth, as if she could eat Josh for breakfast, chopped up and sprinkled over her muesli. He doesn’t notice. Or he doesn’t care. He clamps his cigar between his teeth and wraps one arm around me and another round his tombstone-faced tart.

  ‘How can you tell if your wife is dead, Alfie?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The sex is the same but the dishes pile up. How’s Mrs Mop?’

  ‘You know what? You really are a funny guy.’

  ‘Is she—you know—still spending a lot of time down on all fours? Getting her fingers dirty? Going where no normal woman dares go?’

  ‘I wonder why you hate her so much.’

  ‘I don’t hate her, old sport. I don’t even know her.’ He puffs expansively on his cigar. ‘Can’t honestly say I want to. You’re not really bringing her to the wedding, are you?’

  ‘But she’s just like you, Josh.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘All she wants is to change her life. All she wants is to end up somewhere better than where she started out from.’ I raise my beer in salute. ‘The same as you, old sport.’

  Even under the dim lighting of the Victorian drawing room, his face seems to darken. ‘What do you mean, old fucking sport?’

  ‘You changed your life, didn’t you? You put yourself through charm school. You put on airs and graces that you never had. You come on as though you’re Prince Charles. And not just another kid with no dad from some little suburb.’

  He looks as though he could hit me or burst into tears. Or perhaps both.

  ‘Why don’t you get out of my life, Alfie? I don’t even know why I invited you here. God knows, I knew I’d have to pay for you.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, Josh. There’s nothing wrong with what you did.’ And I really mean it. The thing I like most about Josh is the thing that he despises about himself. ‘You wanted to better yourself. To change your life. Just like Jackie.’

  ‘You know I fucked her, don’t you?’

  This makes me laugh out loud. ‘I don’t think so, Josh. When did that happen? When I went to the bathroom at your engagement party? I know you’re a bit quick, but this is ridiculous.’

  He shakes his head impatiently. Our two hardened prostitutes are looking at each other, starting to get a little concerned.

  ‘Not Jackie,’ he says. ‘Rose.’

  For a moment I can’t think. And the moment seems to drag on. I still can’t think. What is he telling me?

  ‘My Rose?’

  ‘Your Rose,’ he snorts. ‘She wasn’t always your Rose, you fucking peasant.’

  ‘Don’t joke about her. I mean it, Josh.’

  ‘I’m not joking, old sport. I’m telling you that I fucked her. Quite a few times. Not that she was very good. Always a bit too keen on the hearts and moonlight, our Rose. Just before you came along with the fucking goo-goo eyes and bunches of flowers and romantic rides on the bloody Star Ferry.’

  ‘You’re a liar.’

  ‘I even fucked her on the day you met her. My flat. Mid-Levels. About six o’clock. Then we caught a cab down to Central for a few drinks at the Mandarin. You didn’t know that, did you? Never got around to telling you, did she?’ He puffs away at his cigar, its tip flaring red in the gloaming of the knocking shop. ‘Yeah, we were having a little office fling until you arrived. Didn’t last long. A month or so. You did me a favour really, taking her off my hands.’

  I am off my bar stool and have my hands wrapped around his throat before he can remove the cigar from his mouth.

  Then I am shouting at him that he is a liar, even though I know that he is not, and his face is turning red, his eyes burning up at me like the end of his expensive cigar.

  Then the large black guy from behind the bar wraps his arms around me and drags me away, expertly lifting me right off the ground, pulling me past the stunned faces of the friends of Josh and the granite-faced girls and the businessmen making small talk with women who have seen thousands exactly like them.

  My feet don’t touch the ground until the large black guy dumps me back on the quiet cobbled street outside the tall town house.

  I walk back to the hotel and check out, catching a cab to the deserted airport to wait for the first flight home in the morning, knowing that I will never see Josh again, and that he will always be wrong about me.

  I don’t hate it that he slept with her.

  I hate it that he didn’t love her.

  Jackie looks different.

  It’s more than the way that Zeng and Yumi looked different. It’s more than growing up. It’s to do with becoming the someone you always planned to be.

  No make-up. That’s new. Her hair worn longer, pulled back in a ponytail, the highlights being allowed to grow out. And she is dressed in jeans and a short T-shirt. She looks younger, more casual, less concerned with the image she presents to the world. But still the same woman. I recognise her in an instant. She couldn’t be anyone else.

  I am sitting on a wooden bench facing the college. She is one of a crowd of students who come down the stone steps of the building, laughing and talking and toting their books, not a care to call their own, and then Jackie and some thin young guy with long hair peel away from the rest of the pack.

  My heart seems to fall away as he puts his arm around her shoulders, as if he has been doing it forever. Then she sees me.

  She comes over, the thin young guy with long hair still with his arm around her, looking uncertainly at her face and then at me. Maybe his heart is falling away a little bit too.

  ‘How’s it going?’ I ask her.

  ‘It’s going good,’ she says. We look at each other for a while, neither of us knowing what to say, and then she turns to the guy. ‘J’arriverai plus tard,’ she tells him.

  ‘D’accord, j’y serai,’ says the guy, reluctant to go. Then she smiles at him and he steps back, knowing that whatever my presence means, nothing between them has changed.

  ‘New boyfriend?’ I ask her, trying to keep the bad stuff out of my voice.

  ‘Just a friend.’

  ‘French guy?’

  ‘Can’t keep anything from you, can we? He’s in my class. I didn’t tell you that I switched courses, did I?’

  ‘No, you didn’t tell me anything.’

  ‘I meant to phone. Sorry, Alfie. I’ve been so, so busy.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I’m not doing English any more. I’ve switched to European Studies. It felt right. You know what I mean? It’s a different country. Almost a different century. The world’s getting smaller all the time.’ ‘How’s Plum?’

  ‘She’s well. Enjoying school more.’

  ‘
Still in love with The Slab?’

  ‘I think she’s starting to grow out of all that. They change so fast at that age. I think The Slab might one day go the way of Ken and Barbie. How are things at your end?’

  ‘Pretty good, pretty good. Churchill’s is just the same. I’ve got a whole new crowd of students. Nice kids. And I haven’t even slept with any of them yet.’

  ‘Are you planning to?’

  I shake my head. ‘That’s gone the way of Ken and Barbie, too. It turned out to be a bit of a dead end, all of that. Always seemed to end in the same place.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘Heathrow Airport. But things are good.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘Well, that’s not strictly true. To be honest, it’s a bit lonely at my end.’

  ‘Lonely?’

  ‘Yeah. I sort of miss you. And Plum. And just the way we were when we saw each other all the time.’

  ‘Oh, Alfie.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here. I don’t want things to change. I know some things have to change. But I don’t want to lose any of that. I don’t want to lose us.’

  ‘You can’t stop life happening to you.’

  ‘I realise that now. I really do. But shouldn’t you hold on to the good things? For as long as you can?’

  ‘Isn’t it a little late for you and me? You can’t ask me to give this up. Not now I’ve got this far. I wouldn’t be happy. And neither would you.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to give anything up. I just want one last chance, Jackie. One last chance to get it right. And I want a family. Some kind of family. It doesn’t have to be the old kind of family, okay? It can be the new kind of family. It can be any kind of family. But I want to try for a family of my own. I think it’s pretty sad if everyone in the world ends up living alone. It’s just too sad.’

  ‘What about Rose? You suddenly forget about her?’

  ‘I’ll never forget her. And I’ll never stop loving her. I’ve learned that you can honour the past and you can remember the past. You can even love it. But you can’t live in it.’

  ‘So you’re here to claim your future?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But it doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘It doesn’t?’

  ‘No. You might be ready to get serious, but I’m not. If you really care about someone, you let them follow their dreams. And then maybe one day they come back to you. If it’s real. If it means anything.’

  ‘So you think you might come back to me?’

  ‘We were never really together, were we?’

  ‘Do you think—when you’ve got your degree and you’ve met lots of interesting people and you’ve made friends with some hot young French guys—that you might miss me a little bit?’

  ‘I miss you already.’

  ‘Then what’s the problem?’

  ‘I don’t know. Bad timing.’

  ‘That’s it? Just bad timing?’

  ‘I’ve got to go, Alfie.’

  And she does. I watch her disappear into the crowd of students, all those shining young faces looking forward to the future as though it is their personal property.

  She doesn’t even look back.

  But I don’t feel bad. It’s strange. My heart seems to weigh nothing at all. I feel something like my old self.

  Because I know that even if I never see her again in my life, Jackie has returned to me something that I believed was lost forever.

  She has given me back my faith.

  And you’ve got to have a little faith, haven’t you?

  forty

  Just over a year later I drop a couple of Hong Kong dollars in a scarred metal slot and pass through the turnstile, joining the crowds waiting for the Star Ferry.

  The original cast are all present, if slightly altered in ways that I can’t quite define. There are the young Chinese businessmen of Central in their white shirts and dark ties, speaking Cantonese into tiny mobile phones. The office girls with their shining black hair and miniskirts and Prada bags. The old men with their racing papers, frowning as they check the form at Sha Tin and Happy Valley. And me.

  Hong Kong has changed, too. Not the way it looks, although the way Hong Kong looks is forever changing as land is reclaimed and buildings are demolished and new skyscrapers are raised. It’s something in the tropical air. This place just doesn’t feel British any more. Hong Kong is a Chinese city now. Brash, confident, unsentimental about the past. It’s not my inheritance any longer. If it ever really was.

  Yet I love it still. Even if it is not mine to love, I love it. I can’t help it.

  I go upstairs to the cavernous waiting area and watch the old green-and-white Star Ferry that I am about to catch chunking into the harbour at Tsim Sha Tsui, and I see the soaring steel-and-glass skyline of Central in the distance, the green hills beyond and Victoria Peak looming above it all.

  As I walk onto the Star Ferry I get that old feeling—the excitement and sadness mixed. That old feeling of belonging and knowing in your heart that you will never belong.

  Soon they are about to pull up the gangway, and I get a feeling of mild panic. I know it’s stupid but I wait to see if Rose will make it to the Star Ferry just in time, if she will come running up the gangway just before they raise it, and I know that she will be breathless and beautiful, carrying her large box of legal documents to an office somewhere in Alexandra House.

  But of course Rose doesn’t appear at the last minute. That’s not going to happen. They pull up the gangway without Rose appearing, and I know—know with total certainty for the first time—that I must make the rest of my journey without her.

  And then I see her. The young woman in her two-piece business suit. She is just about holding on to a large cardboard box, desperately balancing it on one thigh, trying not to drop it in the middle of the crowded Star Ferry. She is bending forward slightly as she wrestles with the box, her black hair tumbling over her face. I stand up, and for just a moment, it feels like I am addressing a ghost.

  ‘Excuse me? Miss?’

  It is only when she looks up at me that I see she is Chinese. And very real. Young, around twenty-five or so, although by now I have known enough Asian women to be aware that their ages are often impossible to guess.

  ‘Do you want to sit down?’

  For a second or two she stares at me through her gold-rimmed glasses and then she suddenly smiles, concluding that I am quite harmless.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, the accent West Coast American.

  Educated in the States? Possibly. Although she could have got that accent without ever going further west than Kowloon.

  She sits beside me. There’s room for both of us if I shuffle up a bit and she perches right on the edge of the aisle seat with the big cardboard box resting across our knees. It is full of documents, files, ledgers.

  ‘You a lawyer?’

  ‘No,’ she says, still smiling. ‘I’m an accountant. Well—training. How about you? Tourist?’

  ‘No. I’m a writer.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well—trying.’

  ‘Trying?’

  ‘I want to write a story about this place. Sell it—I don’t know—somewhere. But I know this is the place I want to write about.’

  She smiles with what looks more like civic pride than politeness.

  ‘So you like Hong Kong?’

  ‘There’s nowhere like it in the world. There’s never been anywhere like it. There never will be again. It’s where all the world meets, isn’t it? This is where it all gets mixed up.’

  ‘Your first time here?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been here before. But it feels like a long time ago now.’

  Two old Cantonese sailors, stick-thin and impassive, unchanging through the ages, untie the ropes holding us to Kowloon, the tip of the Chinese mainland, and the Star Ferry pulls out into the harbour.

  Seven minutes. That’s all it takes to get from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island on the St
ar Ferry. Seven minutes. It always makes me feel a little anxious, that perfect ride, because it is over so quickly. Just seven minutes. There’s hardly time to take it all in.

  I suppose you just have to make the most of it. Enjoy it while you can.

  ‘Who do you usually write for?’ the girl asks me.

  ‘Me? Nobody. Well, myself, I guess. I haven’t sold anything yet. And nobody’s asked me to write about Hong Kong. It’s just something I feel I have to do. You ever get that feeling?’

  She laughs. ‘All the time.’

  ‘You’ve got to have a little faith, haven’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes. You’ve got to have a little faith.’

  We fall silent and I turn my face to the open window, the fierce tropical heat cooled by the breeze of open water, and I watch the traffic in Hong Kong harbour. The old Chinese junks with their barefoot sailors. A cruise ship as big as a small town. Tugs, dredgers, the police in their motor launches, the newer ferries, painted in louder colours than the low-key white-and-green livery of the Star Ferries.

  The Star Ferries feel as though they are part of old Hong Kong, like statues of Queen Victoria and expatriates drinking cocktails on the roof of the China Club and Sunday afternoons spent cruising on the company junk. That lost place, my old Hong Kong, that’s where the Star Ferry seems to belong.

  But maybe that’s wrong, because you can still see them shuttling between Kowloon and Hong Kong, bustling between rest and work, between the past and the future; they are still out there, all the green and white sister ships of this one, Day Star and Morning Star and Shining Star and all the rest of them, all the dancing stars of Hong Kong. Still out there.

  And I think of my nan, and the souvenirs she kept of other people’s holidays, and George Chang, moving by himself on the other side of the world to the silent song inside his head, and my father living alone in his rented flat, going right back to the start. And I think of my mother with the new man in her life, the Kiwi who is definitely no fruit, and Jackie and the French boy who wanted to marry her, and I think of Plum learning to be happy inside her own skin, that lesson we all spend a lifetime learning.