Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

Someone was with me. A woman. A middle-aged Filipina. She held my hand and stroked my face and told me in good English that I was very sick but that everything was going to be all right. She promised to stay with me.

The chamber smelled damp and musty. It was all blackness. And I wondered how you know when you are dead, if it is possible to get it wrong, if you could mistake death for something else. I remember I kept thinking that perhaps I was dead already. Then after a stretch of time that couldn’t be measured, there were shadows in the chamber and a numb sensation in my legs.

The woman holding my hand told me that I was doing fine but I needed a special injection to stop the bubble at the base of my brain from swelling. A steroid injection. The woman laughed nervously and told me that she had only ever injected oranges before. There were people looking through the little portholes of the recompression chamber, telling her what to do, excited voices speaking in Tagalog, although all Tagalog sounds excited to me.

Frankly, the needle in the hands of the woman who had only injected oranges seemed like the least of my problems. And after all the nerves and anticipation and excited voices, her injection was next to nothing, like a bee sting given to a man who had just had the living daylights kicked out of him.

I remember she stayed awake with me. She constantly reassured me, and I felt like crying at her kindness. My vision slowly began to clear, my eyes sticky and sore, and she was revealed to me as a small woman about my mother’s age.

For the last ten hours in the chamber we were on special oxygen masks, and she squeezed my hand every time I had to take a breath. That’s what she had to do, that woman who saved my life. She had to keep reminding me to take another breath.

We were in that recompression chamber for two days and two nights, the sickness slowly seeping out of me. But sometimes I feel they didn’t get it all out. Sometimes I think sickness came into me that day. And it will be there for as long as I am.

It’s strange the way the loss of one person can leave such a giant hole in the middle of your life. It’s not as if the hole they leave behind feels like the size of another human being.

It feels more like the size of a world.

I should be going out more. I really should. Not all the time, of course. It’s far too soon to be going out all the time. It will always be too soon for that. But I should be going out once in a while.

One thousand years from today, I will be ready to go clubbing. I’ll put it in my diary. A man has his needs, you know. And a woman too no doubt.

But when I don’t see Josh, and I don’t see Josh all that often, I usually spend my nights in my room, listening to Sinatra on my mini stereo system, usually one of the great Capitol albums of the fifties, but sometimes a Reprise record from the sixties or seventies-not so good, of course, but not so familiar either.

What is it about this music? I like the upbeat stuff, songs like “Come Fly with Me” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” albums like A Swingin’ Affair! and Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! But what I like best are the songs about love breaking down. “In the Wee Small Hours,” “Angel Eyes,” “One for My Baby,” “Night and Day,” “My Funny Valentine” and all the rest.

Listening to Sinatra makes me feel as though I am not the only person in the universe who ever woke up to find themselves in some place that they never imagined. Listening to Sinatra makes me feel that I am not so alone. Listening to Sinatra makes me feel more human.

Frank recorded entire albums-Where Are You?, No One Cares, Only the Lonely-about missing some woman. The hippies think they invented concept albums in the sixties, but Frank Sinatra was doing it in the fifties. Sinatra will talk to you about it all night long, if you need him to. And I need him to.

I need this music the way normal men need food and football. Sinatra seems to point a way forward, to encourage me to get on with my life. When Sinatra sings of love dissolving, there is always the consolation of love to come. Love is like a bus in these songs. There’s always another one along in a minute.

But I know that’s not how it was in Sinatra’s heart. I have read all the classic texts, and I know that Sinatra never got over Ava Gardner. She was the woman who owned his heart. She was the one whose photograph he tore up, threw away and then stuck back together with Scotch tape. If Sinatra never got over Ava, then why should I get over Rose?

The music is an endless source of comfort, though. Sinatra makes missing someone sound noble, heroic, universal. He makes suffering sound as though it has some kind of point to it. And in the real world, it doesn’t. It just hurts like hell.

And there’s something else. As Sinatra mourns love, celebrates love, anticipates love, I can almost smell the manly cocktail of Old Holborn and Old Spice when my grandfather sat me on his lap, back when the world was young and everything was ahead and it felt as though everybody that I ever loved would live forever.

The way my mother deals with my father going away is to carry on as normal. She gets up in the morning, she goes to work in the kitchens of Nelson Mandela High, she comes home with an affectionate smile and stories of her kids. She even starts to take an interest in her garden-or at least she busies herself clearing up the mess she made when the old bastard walked out. This is how my mum reacts to a crisis.

It’s not that she ignores it. She just refuses to look it in the eye.

I go to work, wander the streets of Chinatown, listen to Sinatra in my room. And all the while I fantasize that one day my father will be there, bearing flowers and full of apologies, on his knees before my mother, begging for forgiveness. It doesn’t happen.

I don’t see how he can build a life with Lena on such flimsy foundations. I can’t imagine how they can form a lasting union when they don’t even own a kettle. I am convinced that one morning he will see her dancing in her chair as she eats her high-bran breakfast, and it will drive him nuts.

But I start to realize that even if their love nest does get repossessed, that doesn’t mean that my old man is ever coming back home.

There are phone calls between my parents. I make no attempt to listen because there are things that happen between your mother and father that you want to keep your distance from. The pattern is always the same. He calls her. There are long silences while he-I don’t know. Pleads for understanding? Asks when he can pick up his Stevie Wonder records? Asks if he can borrow a kettle? I don’t know what she tells him, but I can hear that she tries to keep the bitterness and hurt and anger out of her voice.

It’s impossible.

She likes to act as though nothing that my father does surprises her, that she knows him so well, that all this upheaval is only what she would expect from the man she has been married to for half a lifetime. It’s not true.

His new life in some other part of the city is beyond her imagination. She doesn’t understand how he got there, why this happened, when the world-sized hole in her life started to form.

When she comes off the phone she is smiling-a smile that is there for her protection, a smile as rigid as a bulletproof vest.

My mother and I have an early dinner at the Shanghai Dragon.

This is not a normal night out for us. Apart from the summer holidays of my childhood-bed-and-breakfasts in the seaside towns of southern England when I was small, the tourist canteens in the hotels of Greece and Spain when I was bit bigger-we have not spent a lot of time together in restaurants. Surprisingly for a woman who gets so much pleasure from feeding one thousand brats every day of the school year, my mother prefers “my own cooking, in my own house.”