Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

“It’s not insult for you,” says Imran. “London so expensive. He has to work too hard. We all do.”

“I don’t work,” says a young French woman. There are only a couple of French at Churchill’s. She sniffs the air disdainfully. Vanessa. “But the rest of them have to, I suppose.”

“I work in Pampas Steak Bar,” says Witold. “A bad place. Many drunks. Call me bloody Argie. ‘What’s it like to lose a war, Argie? Hands off the Falklands, Argie, okay? Hey, Argie-you like shagging sheep? You keep your filthy hands off those British sheep, Argie.’ I tell them I am Polish and they say they will smash my face in, wherever I come from.”

“Very English, no?” Vanessa says and laughs. “Swear and fight and eat bad food. A good night out for the English.”

“I work in Funky Sushi,” says a Japanese boy called Gen. He’s very shy and hasn’t volunteered any information about himself until now. “You know Funky Sushi? No? Really? It’s one of those-” He chats to Yumi in Japanese for a bit.

“Conveyor belt restaurant,” says Yumi. She makes a circular motion with her hand. “Where the food goes round and round.”

“Conveyor belt,” says Gen. “Considered very low in Japan. Cheap place, for workmen. Driving trucks and so forth. Because sushi not fresh enough when it goes round and round and round. Too old. But here-very fashion. Funky Sushi always busy. Always the kitchen-what do you call it?-mental.”

“We all work,” says Yumi. “I work in bar. The Michael Collins.”

“Irish pub,” says Zeng. “Very good atmosphere. Guinness and The Corrs. I enjoy looking for my craic in an Irish pub.”

Yumi shrugs. “Have to work. London too much money. Worse than Tokyo even. So we get tired from work. Apart from Vanessa.”

“I get tired from my boyfriend,” says Vanessa.

“But we like your lessons,” Yumi says with conviction. She smiles at me, and I realize how pretty she is beyond all the war paint. “It’s-what do you say?-nothing personal.”

She looks down at her desk, then back at me, still smiling, until I am the one who is forced to look away.

When I get home I find Lena crying in the kitchen.

This shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does. Since Oranges for Christmas went through the roof and my parents moved to this big white house, there have been a succession of au pairs and I have seen a few of them crying in this kitchen. There was the Sardinian who missed her mother’s cooking. The Finn who missed her boyfriend. The German who discovered she didn’t like getting out of bed before noon.

My parents treated all of these young women very well. Neither my mum nor my dad had grown up around any kind of hired help so they were far more than friendly to our au pairs. They were almost apologetic. Yet the au pairs still found a reason to cry all over their low-fat yogurt.

I thought Lena was different from the rest. She has that untouchable air about her that only the truly beautiful possess. For those of us who are merely average looking-or in my case, slightly below average-beauty seems like a magic shield. You can’t imagine life ever wounding someone who has that magic shield around them.

But the ordinary looking always overestimate the power of beauty. Just look at Lena. A fat lot of good beauty did her. She has been crying her heart out.

Embarrassed to see me, she starts to dab away her tears with a piece of paper towel. And I’m embarrassed too, especially after I ask a stupid question.

“You all right, Lena?”

“I’m fine,” she lies, wiping her perfect nose with the back of her hand.

“You want a coffee or something?”

She looks at me with wounded eyes.

“Just some milk. There’s some organic left in the fridge. Thank you.”

I bring Lena her glass of organic milk and sit across from her at the kitchen table. I don’t want to get too close. In the presence of beauty, I always feel that I should keep my distance. Even at a time like this.

I watch her taking little bird sips from her milk, her lovely face red with spent emotion, her large blue eyes all puffy from crying. Strands of her blond angel’s hair are damp with snot and tears. She twists the piece of paper towel in her fingers.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, although I sort of know the answer already. An au pair doesn’t cry these kind of desperate tears just because she misses Mutti’s apple strudel.

This is man trouble.

Lena is silent for a while. Then she looks up at the ceiling, her mouth and chin trembling, her eyes suddenly full of tears.

“I just want someone who is going to love me forever,” she says quietly, and I feel a surge of sadness and fear for her.

Forever? There’s one thing wrong with forever. These days it seems to get shorter and shorter. That’s the trouble with forever.

Blink and you miss it.

In the morning my mother waits until my father has gone to the gym and then she tells me that she wants us to give him a birthday party.

My mum is full of smiles and very pleased with this idea, even when I try to talk her out of it.

“He hates parties,” I say. “Especially birthday parties. Especially his own.”

“He’s going to be fifty-eight,” she says, as if that makes all the difference. “And he’s got lots of friends, your dad.”

Sometimes when I am talking to my mother I get the impression that we are having two different conversations. I tell her that he doesn’t want to be reminded of his age. She tells me that he’s going to be fifty-eight and that he has lots of friends. My mum often makes me feel like I’ve missed something.

“Mum, what’s turning fifty-eight got to do with it?” I say. “You think he wants to be reminded that he’s fifty-eight? And he hasn’t got lots of friends. Who are his friends?”

“You know,” she says. “There are the journalists he worked with at the paper. All the sports people he knows. The book people.”

“None of these people are his friends, Mum. They are just people he knows. He doesn’t even like most of them.”

She’s not listening to me. She has made her mind up and she is busy getting ready for work. She already has her uniform on-a short-sleeved gingham dress made of nylon or some other man-made material with a kind of fake apron stitched on to the front. Later she will pull back her hair-still glossy and dark, although I think she might have been coloring it for a few years-and put on a little white pillbox hat.

My mum is a dinner lady at a local school. It’s not the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys, where I taught. She works at Nelson Mandela High, which is co-ed and even tougher. “The girls are as bad as the boys these days,” my mum says. “Worse.” But she refused to give up what she calls “my little job” even when the serious money started to pour in from my dad’s book. That’s why my parents need help with their big house. That’s why Lena’s here. Because my mum wouldn’t give up her little job.

My mum loves Nelson Mandela. She really does. She likes having a laugh with the women she works with in the kitchen. She likes getting out of the house and giving some kind of shape to her day. But what my mum likes best about her job are the children.

I say children, although of course many of them are hulking great baritones who would sell their granny for the price of an ounce of pot. At least that’s how I see them. My mother thinks that there’s no such thing as a bad child.

“My kids,” she calls them. She’s sentimental about the children she feeds even though she has seen the worst of them, even though she has experienced them in all their surly, foulmouthed violence, even though they are obviously not worth getting sentimental about. My mum still calls them “my kids.”