One For My Baby

by Tony Parsons

  ‘No luck, Nan? Never mind.’

  ‘Work on Monday morning, Alfie.’ She smiles, although neither she nor I have to go to work tomorrow. She starts to rip up her lottery ticket. This seems to consume all her strength and she nods off after completing the task.

  Through the tall window at the back of the room I can see my mother in the garden, raking up the fallen leaves. Although she has sometimes seemed out of place in the big new house that was bought with the money from my father’s book, my mother has always loved this garden.

  She looks up at me and smiles, jogging on the spot and puffing out her cheeks. It takes me a few seconds to realise that she is miming a run in the park. I give her the thumbs up and my mum goes back to raking the dead leaves in her garden, smiling quietly to herself. I know she was pleased to see me get out of the house for what she calls ‘a bit of fresh air’.

  The front door slams and a few seconds later a smiling young woman sticks her head around the door. She looks like God’s second attempt at Cameron Diaz—an almost cartoon amalgamation of blonde hair, blue eyes and ski-tanned skin. Lena is our Czech home help. She’s really smart. It’s only when she’s listening to the radio that she seems a bit stupid because she sort of dances around to the music, even if she’s sitting down and eating her bran flakes.

  Lena’s not stupid, though. She’s just young. To be honest, I think she’s got a soft spot for me. One of those irrational crushes that ambush the very young. I might have to tell her, as gently as possible, that I’m not looking for a new relationship. She’s certainly a beautiful girl—she once inspired our paperboy to ride his bike right into a lamppost. There were free pull-outs and colour supplements everywhere. How strange that I’m just not interested. Or perhaps it’s not strange at all.

  The slammed door has woken up my nan and she beams at Lena, who she perhaps believes is some kind of distant relation.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ says Lena in English so good that she sounds like a native speaker. ‘The tube’s awful on Sundays. I’ll start getting lunch ready now.’

  ‘It doesn’t MATTER,’ my nan says very slowly. My grandmother also seems to believe that Lena is either deaf, stupid, unable to speak a word of English or possibly all of the above. She points at me. ‘HIM NOT HUNGRY.’

  ‘So sweet,’ smiles Lena, who speaks five languages and who is studying for an MBA at UCL. ‘I’ll get started on lunch.’

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ says my father.

  ‘Oh, that’s okay.’

  ‘But I want to.’

  They go out to the kitchen and my nan and I watch a new kind of programme where some people are exchanging blows because one of them has discovered that his girlfriend is really a man. I haven’t seen this kind of thing before. Even the rubbish is new.

  From the kitchen I can hear the sound of laughter as my dad and Lena unload the dishwasher.

  I have never in my life seen my father helping with the housework.

  That’s new, too.

  three

  I walk around Chinatown.

  Since coming back to London, that’s what I do all day. I get a tube to the West End and I head for that tiny patch of London where the street names are in both English and Chinese. Then I walk.

  Entering Chinatown by one of its three gates—Wardour Street on the west, Macclesfield Street on the north, Newport Court on the east—I make my way down those loud, busy streets until the place fills my senses, until it reminds me of that other place on the far side of the world.

  In minutes I am back in Hong Kong. There are no spectacular views of skyline and harbour and peak. But many of the sights are the same as when I was in Kowloon or Wanchai.

  Rows of laminated ducks in windows, good-looking girls with glossy hair talking into brightly coloured mobile phones, old men with gold teeth pushing babies with eyes like brown jewels, young mothers with children dressed up to the nines, surly teenage boys with slicked-back hair hanging around outside the games arcade trying to look like Triads, waitresses making their way to work in their monochrome uniforms or mopping the small square of pavement outside their restaurants, steam pouring from a tiny kitchen behind misty plate glass, men in filthy vests delivering boxes of iced fish.

  Chinatown is the one place that I can be happy. It does more than remind me of Hong Kong. It reminds me of when Rose and I were still together.

  There are shops, supermarkets and of course restaurants galore but there are not really any places to stop and watch the world go by. Despite the proximity to the self-consciously Mediterranean street life of Soho, there are no little cafe’s or coffee shops or bars. If you want cappuccino and a quiet half-hour, then you are in the wrong place. That’s not a Cantonese thing. Yet I don’t care.

  It means I keep moving—down the main artery of Gerrard Street, into Wardour Street where the western border of Chinatown shares space with pizza joints and nightclubs, then into dark, narrow Lisle Street, with its smell of roast duck and petrol fumes, then maybe into Little Newport Street where you can see the huge head of a papier-mâche’ Chinese dragon in a martial arts shop called Shaolin Way, as if the dragon is guarding the punch bags and focus pads and cardboard boxes full of black Kung Fu trousers. Finally perhaps, after reaching the book shops and theatres of Charing Cross Road, I’ll double-back on myself into Newport Court where you can buy Chinese magazines, Chinese CDs, Chinese anything you like.

  As I haphazardly patrol the streets of Chinatown, a poem keeps coming back to me, a poem by Kipling that we studied when I was teaching English Literature at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys.

  ‘Mandalay’ is about a discharged British soldier wandering around London after serving ‘somewheres east of Suez’, and as he roams the streets of Bank—is the ex-soldier now a messenger boy in the City? Does he make his living running errands for the ancestors of Josh?—he thinks of the wind in the palm trees and the elephants piling teak and the woman he left behind. Our ex-soldier should not be lonely—he tells us that, in the English drizzle, he steps out with fifty housemaids from ‘Chelsea to the Strand’. But he remembers when ‘dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay’ and he remembers when she was by his side.

  ‘So this is about his bitch, is it, sir?’ one of my smarter, nastier students would enquire to guffaws of laughter from the back of the class. ‘Is it, like, a—what do you call it?—savage incitement of sexual tourism, sir? Not incitement, sir. What’s the word? Indictment, sir? Is it an indictment? Sir?’

  ‘Mandalay’ didn’t mean much to my pale thin charges with their Tommy gear and leering grins. It didn’t, in truth, mean much to me at the time. But now that I am back in London it runs around my head and will not let me go and makes me sick for my lost home, my lost wife.

  For the temple-bells are callin’, and it’s there that I would be—By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.

  I like to get to Chinatown early, before the sauntering tourist crowds with their cameras and their blank looks and their paranoid rucksacks strapped on back to front. I like to arrive while the lorries are still unloading their produce and the old ladies are setting out their stalls and there are groups of men standing around gossiping in Cantonese, men who will later go to work in the restaurants or disappear into the basement gambling joints to play mahjong.

  That’s when I like it best, when it is just the Chinese preparing for the day ahead. That’s when it reminds me most of Hong Kong.

  I always eat my lunch here. Sometimes I eat early, usually dim sum at the New World on Gerrard Place, one of those old-fashioned dim sum restaurants, dying out now, where they still have the girls pushing trolleys loaded with steamed buns and barbecued pork and fried aubergines, the trolleys going slowly round and round the huge red and gold restaurant, and they let you choose straight from the trolleys rather than just giving you a menu the way most dim sum joints do these days.

  Sometimes I eat late, maybe a bowl of noodle soup at one of the smaller re
staurants on Gerrard Street, where they don’t mind if you ask for a table at four in the afternoon.

  You can pretty much eat any time you like in Chinatown. That’s what I have always liked about the Cantonese. They let you get on with your life. They don’t make rules. They just don’t care.

  There’s a lot to be said for not caring.

  In my opinion, not caring is very underrated.

  Ever since my time in Hong Kong, I have been a big fan of afternoon tea, that ritualised fix of sugar and caffeine just when your energy levels are starting to dip. Rose liked it too. She said that afternoon tea was the most indulgent of meals, because it was the one meal that happened when you were meant to be working.

  Rose was always saying things like that—things that had a way of making your feelings understandable. I thought that I just liked stuffing my cake hole with scones and jam in the middle of the afternoon. Rose made me see that what I really liked was escaping from the Double Fortune Language School.

  There’s a swanky hotel near Bond Street where they serve afternoon tea. The clientele are all tourists who are seeking a slice of ye olde authentic England in a pot of Earl Grey. Apart from me.

  The room is ringing with a dozen foreign tongues when I walk in with my Evening Standard under my arm. The waiter looks at me as if I have wandered into the wrong place.

  ‘Tea, sir? How many?’

  ‘Tea for one.’

  He brings me a pot of tea and a silver stand that looks like a wedding cake. The layers of the stand are loaded with chunky scones, pots of cream and ruby-red jam, and dainty little sandwiches.

  The waiter is friendly. The tourists are not too noisy. The scones are still warm. The salmon and cucumber sandwiches have all had their crusts cut off. The tea is brewed from leaves not bags.

  Everything is exactly as it should be.

  But it just doesn’t taste the same over here.

  The walk to the tube takes me through the shabby babble of Oxford Street.

  Music that rattles my fillings pours from clothes stores, record shops, coffee bars. Once the cheap, vibrant glamour of this street seemed to be what London was all about. Now I feel out of place among the new music, the tired fashions, the acned mob. Now it just reminds me that I am getting old. Oxford Street has stayed the same while I have changed. I try to move quickly through the crowds but the rush hour has started and progress is slow.

  Near the tube station there are a couple of young foreigners propped up against the wall like bored streetwalkers. They are the funky kind of foreigner, all moody looks and platform boots.

  There’s an Asian girl with dyed blonde hair and a boy from some sunny corner of the Mediterranean with a pencil-thin moustache and razor-sharp sideboards.

  They both have a stack of leaflets that they are listlessly offering to the crowds as they chat to each other in bad English. They give every impression of not giving a toss if they hand out their flyers or throw them in the nearest overflowing bin.

  I take one.

  Learn Good English

  @ Churchill’s International Language School

  The First And Best

  Start Any Monday

  Low Low Prices

  Near Virgin Megastore

  Help With Visas, Work Permits, Accommodation

  Ensuring Excellence!

  The leaflet has a Union Jack border and inside that there’s another border made up of flags from around the world. I see Italy, Japan, China, Brazil and plenty more that I don’t recognise.

  Next to the words Churchill’s International Language School there’s a black silhouette of a bald fat man who is either Alfred Hitchcock or possibly Winston Churchill. The man is flashing two fingers to indicate that you should get lost or possibly that victory is imminent. His mouth is stuffed with an enormous great sausage or possibly a cigar.

  The silhouette has been drawn by someone with the artistic ability of a pigeon. I hate the glib modernity of the ‘@’ symbol. I am stunned that an Oxford Street language school would stoop so low as to pilfer Winston Churchill’s name to give it a touch of fake authority. There’s something about all that cheap cynicism in one place that reminds me why I feel so lost on this street.

  But I find that I can’t throw the leaflet away. There’s something about all those different flags and the generosity in the promises of help and the cheery exclamation mark after the assurance of excellence that lifts my spirits. I don’t know. It looks sort of hopeful.

  We were never very far from the water in Hong Kong.

  From the little cafe’ on Victoria Peak to the tea room of the Peninsula Hotel, every spectacular view that we ever held hands to featured the waterfront. We were always on the Star Ferry, shuttling between our apartments on opposite sides of the harbour. And Rose’s firm had a company boat that they called the junk.

  Calling it a junk conjured up images of one of those quaintly curved wooden ships with orange sails that bob in the Hong Kong harbour of a thousand tourist postcards. Which was probably the idea.

  In fact this junk was a modern, motorised launch that gleamed with chrome and polished wood and was crewed by a smiling Cantonese husband-and-wife team in neat white uniforms. Even as late as the spring of 1997, out on the junk you could kid yourself that the changeover was never going to happen, that nothing was ever going to change, that life would always be this sweet.

  The junk was meant to be for corporate hospitality, but if it wasn’t being used for entertaining taipan clients from London or Shanghai or Tokyo, then the staff from Rose’s shop could take it out and spend a day cruising around the hundreds of tiny islands that make up Hong Kong.

  Usually it was taken out by parties of gweilo male lawyers courting Asian girls who worked as flight attendants for Cathay Pacific. Rose and I, already at the stage where you believe that the two of you need nobody else, always went out with just the crew.

  The last time we took the junk out we sailed to a little island with no name where an old man in flip-flops served us cold beer and spicy prawns in a restaurant that was little more than a shack. I remember a wooden pier, half-wild dogs roaming the beach and a silence that was disturbed only by the murmur of our voices and the sound of the sea.

  On our way back I nodded off on deck, my belly full of Tsingtao and what was surely the best seafood in the world.

  I don’t know how long I was sleeping but the sun had changed position by the time I awoke. It was very hot now. The deck was burning through the beach towel that I was lying on. I heard the distant caw of gulls, the soft hiss of waves on the shore, the boat creaking beneath me with the swell of the South China Sea.

  And then suddenly Rose was standing directly above me, smiling, the features of her face hidden by the dazzle of the late-afternoon sun.

  I squinted up at her, shading my eyes. The sun glared down and I couldn’t really see her, just the dark shape of her, moving in and out of the blinding light. Still looking at her through scrunched-up eyes, I made a move to rise.

  She held up her hand.

  ‘Stay right where you are,’ she said.

  Putting her feet either side of me, she carefully adjusted her stance so that her head completely blotted out the sun. It burned around her like the rim of a total eclipse. Her shadow fell across me, allowed me to see.

  I uncovered my eyes, blinking away tears. Her face was clear now. She was smiling in the shade, this shade of her own making.

  Rose filled the sky.

  ‘Can you see me now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Good.’

  For a long moment we were motionless. It was as if she wanted to brand her face on my memory, as if she wanted me to keep this moment forever, as if she wanted to make sure that she would stay in my bones.

  Then she moved away.

  ‘You should put something on,’ she said. ‘You’re going to get burned out here.’

  I walk past the doorway to Churchi
ll’s International Language School three times before I find it.

  The entrance is between an ancient denim store and a brand-new coffee shop, at the part of Oxford Street where the milling crowds are at their thickest, so small that it is hardly there at all. I drink two heavily sugared cappuccinos and almost buy a pair of Levi’s—unfortunately they don’t have my size—before I finally see the open door.

  It is being listlessly guarded by two more of Churchill’s students. They are gabbing away and scratching their piercings—navel for her, nose and eyebrow for him—while offering flyers to the indifferent mob. They don’t look at me as I go past them and up a steep flight of stairs.

  Churchill’s International Language School occupies one entire floor of a building that seems to open up the further you go inside, like a secret cave or the magic wardrobe that led to Narnia. It echoes with foreign accents, distant laughter, the sound of a teacher patiently explaining the idiom, ‘to see the light’.

  Churchill’s feels like a far happier place than either the Princess Diana or the Double Fortune. I can smell instant coffee and takeaway chicken teriyaki. The walls are yellow and peeling, but covered with notice boards and bright with posters. Someone is selling a rice cooker because they are going back home. There are messages in English, French, Italian and what looks like Japanese. Rooms to rent, household items for sale, classes offered and sought—all the bits and pieces of student life everywhere, conducted in every language under the sun.

  This place doesn’t have the menace of the Princess Diana or the earnestness of the Double Fortune. It’s a young, bustling, friendly place. I feel so comfortable here that I ask at the reception desk if they have any teaching vacancies. After filling in an application form and waiting for twenty minutes, I am sitting opposite Lisa Smith, the principal. She has dyed red hair, combat boots and a pair of those chunky, vaguely ethnic earrings that look far too heavy for human ear lobes. Despite dressing like one of her students, she must be breathing down the neck of her sixtieth birthday. Her manner is business-like, unsmiling, only as polite as she needs to be. She studies my application form.