Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

The skinhead seems clenched with violence. But the old man is perfectly relaxed, his arms hanging loose by his side. He’s clearly not afraid of the much larger man. The old lady barks something in Cantonese, gesturing at the skinhead.

“Chips only with meal,” the old man says, very quietly.

Then he says nothing.

The two men stare at each other for a long moment. Then the skinhead looks away with a short, contemptuous laugh. Muttering to himself about Chinks and chips and greasy foreign muck, he leaves the Shanghai Dragon, slamming the door behind him. The relief in the place is tangible. We all watch the old man, wondering what has happened.

The kitchen door opens again and another Chinese man, this one much younger and plumper, comes out carrying a stack of silver containers in a plastic bag. He looks at me and Josh and his mouth drops open.

I am almost weeping with pain. Josh is sprawled in one of the plastic chairs, leaning his head back, a bloody handkerchief over his face.

The old lady says something else in Cantonese, not quite so angry now. The old man looks at us for the first time.

“Come,” he tells us.

The old man takes us through a side door next to the steam and clatter of the Shanghai Dragon’s tiny kitchen and up some stairs into a little self-contained flat where a number of Chinese people, big and small, are watching the TV movie about Charles and Diana.

They turn only mildly curious brown eyes our way as the old man leads us into a small bathroom and examines us with cold, expert fingers. My ribs are already turning purple but the old man tells me they are not cracked. But Josh’s nose seems to be growing sideways.

“Broken nose,” the old man says. “Have to go to hospital. But first push back in place.”

“Push what back in place?” Josh says. “You don’t mean my nose, do you?”

“Makes it better later,” the old man says. “Easier to fix for doctors. At hospital.”

Whimpering a bit and going oh-God-oh-God, Josh gingerly straightens his nose. Then the old lady is suddenly in the bathroom with us, almost crying with emotion, angrily ranting in English and Cantonese.

“What do they know?” the old lady says. “Drinking beer. Fighting. Saying dirty words. That’s all they know. These English. For goodness sake. I am at the end of my feather. Eating sweet and sour pork. And chips. Chips and dirty words with everything.”

“Not all English,” the old man says.

The old lady looks at us, not remotely embarrassed.

“I’m talking about bad English, husband,” she mutters. Then she smiles at us. “Want a cup of tea?” she says. “Cup of English tea?”

Her name is Joyce and his name is George. The Changs. He doesn’t say much. She doesn’t stop talking. Joyce is like a force of nature, wreaking havoc on any idiom that stands in her way, taking clichés and making them her very own.

“It’s just a storm in a tea pot…pretending butter wouldn’t melt in his trousers…dead as a yo-yo…I put my feet in it…don’t mince your thoughts…you have hit the nail on the nose…don’t be a silly willy!”

Joyce and George. They are the kind of English names that the Cantonese love to adopt-the names of kings and maiden aunts, the kind of English names that vanished from England decades ago. So far out of fashion that they are in danger of making a comeback.

George patches us up, rubbing Tiger Balm on my sore ribs and gently swabbing most of the dried blood from Josh’s face. Then Joyce, talking all the while, serves us tea and biscuits in the living room.

The room is full of family. There’s George and Joyce themselves and then their son Harold, the plump young man from the kitchen. There’s also Harold’s wife, Doris-another one of those Cantonese names that seems straight from some lost, ancient England-a young woman in glasses who avoids our eyes. And there are Doris and Harold’s two children, a boy of five and a slightly older girl. We are not introduced to the children, although the old people make a continual fuss of them, George placing the girl on his lap and Joyce cuddling the boy as we all drink our tea-green for them, English for us-and we all watch the TV movie about Charles and Diana for a bit until the silence is broken by Joyce.

“What’s wrong with you?” she suddenly demands, sizing me up over the green tea. “Cat got your mouth?”

She is a strange old lady. And yet this flat full of Cantonese seems oddly familiar to me. Is it the way the television dominates the room? The way that three generations seem perfectly at ease with each other? Or is it just the sweet tea and biscuits happily consumed on a crowded, worn-out old sofa?

There’s something about this room that reminds me of a family from long ago, a family that I knew in my childhood, a family that somewhere along the way I have somehow got separated from.

W HAT I LIKE ABOUT TEACHING at Churchill’s International Language School is that my students are definitely not children. They are young men and women, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, although there are quite a few who are older, mature students who only made it to London after the collapse of a bad marriage in Seoul or after too many boring years in an office job in Tokyo or after repeatedly having their visa application turned down by some spiteful little penpusher at the British Embassy in Beijing or Lagos or Warsaw.

I like their optimism, their youth, the way their lives are not yet set in stone. And I admire their nerve, coming halfway around the world to master another language.

So why do they dislike me so much?

Sometimes my students turn up late. Sometimes they do not turn up at all. And if they make it to class, they yawn and stretch and struggle to stay awake.

I finally snap when one of them, a Chinese boy in broken glasses called Zeng, loses his heroic battle against sleep and nods off in the middle of my interesting talk on the present perfect.

“What is it with you lot?” I demand. “You don’t show up half the time. When you do show up you act as though you’ve been heavily sedated. Look at this guy. Dead to the world. Are my lessons really so boring? Come on. Let’s have it.”

They stare at me dumbfounded. One or two of them rub their eyes. Zeng begins to snore.

“Not at all,” says a Japanese girl at the front of the class. She is one of the new kind of Japanese girls-dyed blond hair, heavy makeup and platform boots. She looks like one of the Glitter Band. “We like your lessons.” She glances around at the rest of the class. There are a few nods of assent. “Present perfect? Present perfect continuous?” She smiles at me and I remember her name. Yumi. “Very nice indeed.” She nods.

“Then why don’t you turn up? Why is this guy out for the count? Why is everyone on the verge of total collapse?”

“Please,” says a tall, thin Pole who has to be the same age as me. Witold. It took him about ten years before they ticked his card at the British Embassy in Warsaw. “Zeng is very-how to say?-knackered.”

“He works every night,” says the good-looking Pakistani kid sitting next to Zeng. Imran. He gives Zeng a shake. “Wake up. The teacher is talking to you.”

Zeng grunts, opens his eyes, wonders what planet he is on.

“You work, don’t you, Zeng?” says Yumi.

Zeng nods. “General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen. The one on Leicester Square. Very popular. Very busy.”

“That’s no excuse,” I say. “I don’t care if you’ve got some little part-time job. You should stay awake in my lessons. Falling asleep is rude.”

“Not such a little job,” says Imran.

“Work until three in morning,” says Zeng. “Do you want fries with that? Anything to drink? You want the General’s Happy Meal special? Toilets only for customer use.” He shakes his head. “Wah,” he says.