Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

I turn to leave.

“And Alfie?”

“What?”

“Give her one for the Lech.”

Yumi is sitting by herself in the Eamon de Valera, nursing a mineral water at a corner table.

“He’s not going to bother you anymore,” I tell her.

“Thank you. I buy you drink.”

“That’s okay, Yumi.”

“But I want to.” She goes to the bar and spends half the night counting out her money in loose change. Usually I feel a kind of envy for my students but right now I feel sorry for Yumi. Coming halfway round the world to improve your English and then getting some fat old Englishman like Lenny the Lech offering you oral lessons. She returns with a pint of Guinness clutched in both hands and sets it before me.

“He’s a very bad man,” she says. “All the girls at Churchill’s say so. He wants rub-rub with just anyone. Any student with nice face. And even some ugly ones. If they are large breasted.”

Then she stares at me with these eyes, these moist brown eyes, that make me realize just how lonely I have been.

“Incredible,” I say. “What kind of teacher does a thing like that?”

Y UMI’S ROOM IS AT THE END of a dark corridor in a large, crumbling town house that has spent the last fifty years being chopped up into smaller and smaller flats. As we make our way down the hall you can hear music, voices, laughter, doors slamming, telephones ringing. The cacophony of too many people in too small a space. And having the time of their life. We take off our shoes at her door and go inside.

It’s not much to look at. A bay window dominates the tiny flat, but it overlooks some kind of junkyard piled high with trashed cars. The room’s exhausted carpet looks as though it has been trodden on by an itinerant army of students. The only heating comes from a two-bar electric heater.

It’s a dump. Yet it doesn’t feel like a dump because all over her modest apartment Yumi has decorated the peeling wallpaper with photographs from home. Everywhere you look there are all these Polaroids, snapshots and photo-booth pictures of smiling Japanese girls making V signs. One round-faced, shyly grinning girl seems to feature in many of them.

“Younger sister,” Yumi says.

There is something deeply affecting about Yumi’s attempts to turn this cold, rented little box into some kind of home. Armed with just her memories and a stack of photographs, she has tried to make it her own.

Yumi lights a perfumed candle, turns on the radio to jazz FM and unrolls a futon. The unfurled mattress takes up most of the floor. We stand facing each other for a moment and I realize how nervous I am.

“I haven’t got anything,” I say.

“That’s not true,” she says. “You have good heart. Lovely smile. Nice sense of humor.”

“No, I mean I haven’t, you know, got any condoms.”

“Ah. Okay. I have some. I think.”

“And I haven’t been with anyone,” I say. “Not since my wife, I mean.”

She touches my face.

“That’s okay,” she says. “Whatever happens, everything’s okay.”

It’s what I need to hear. I take it as slowly as I can, and although at first I am overwhelmed by how different she seems to Rose, it is much better than I could ever have hoped. Her body is shockingly young and lithe, and she is a sweet and tender lover, smiling at my excitement, but in a way that doesn’t make me feel bad. Yumi makes me feel nothing but good.

Afterward she hides her face in my chest and laughs, calling me her favorite teacher-her favorite sensei-and hugging me with a strength that surprises me. I laugh too, relieved and pleased, dumbfounded by my good fortune.

Later she sleeps in my arms while I watch the candle burn down until the only light in the little room comes from the glow of the two-bar electric heater. And then, feeling happier than I have in a long time, I start to drift away too.

Just before I slip into sleep I notice the large red suitcase in the corner of the room, as if Yumi has just arrived, or is just about to leave.

I wake up as the first light is creeping into the room. Yumi is sleeping wrapped up around me, that incredible mass of blond hair almost completely covering her face so that only the tip of her nose is visible. I smile to myself. I can’t believe that she’s with me.

I gently disentangle our limbs, slip off of the futon and pull on my Calvins. Quietly letting myself out of the room, I pad down the hallway, looking for the bathroom.

Suddenly he is on top of me. A naked man. The metal studs and rings that pierce his stubbled face glinting with menace in the darkness. His head is shaved. His mouth is above me and wide open, a great black maw that seems about to take a chunk out of my throat.

“Sweet Jesus!” I mutter, leaping backward.

But the man is only yawning. When his mouth has completed the yawn, he smacks his lips, scratches his exposed scrotum for a bit and then blinks at me a couple of times.

“Mind if I use it first, man?” he says in an Australian accent. “Bit of a heavy night.”

Trembling, I lean against the flaking plaster of the hall, trying to stop the pounding of my heart. A toilet flushes and the man emerges from the bathroom, soon disappearing once more into the darkness.

Back inside on the futon, Yumi stirs, warm as toast and smooth as ice cream, as I try to explain the terrible vision I have seen.

“Oh,” she says sleepily. “Roommate.”

We have a perfect weekend. It’s the kind of time that I like best. It seems ordinary and special all at once.

We wake up late and Yumi says she will make us breakfast. But someone-probably the pierced roommate, if you ask me-has stolen her bread from the communal kitchen and the milk that she thought was still okay has gone bad. So after taking a shower together-it seems like a good idea, but we are surprisingly shy with each other-we go to a little café at the end of her street and order full English breakfasts. It takes Yumi ages to work her way through all that fried food.

We spend the afternoon wandering around Camden market. Yumi loves looking at all the second-hand clothes, and seeing her happy makes me happy too.

We hold hands and she gives me little kisses when I am not expecting them. I realize things about her that never really registered at Churchill’s. Her clothes are a little off-beat-today she is wearing some kind of antique dress that looks like it once belonged to Zelda Fitzgerald-and an Asian girl with a mop of dyed blond hair gets a lot of stares. But I am proud to be seen with her. She’s a great girl, funny and smart, and we drink latte in a little café while she tells me about her family back in Osaka.

Her old man was a hotshot salary man at a big corporation who lost his job in the recession. Her mother was a typical Japanese housewife who suddenly found she had to support a family with her secretarial work. Her sister is a brilliant violin player who her parents always preferred because she never dyed her hair or went out with boys who had dyed hair. Yumi says she came to London because life in Japan felt like it was a play, and everybody knew their role. Except her.

And I tell her my story. I want to. I tell her about teaching in London, moving to Hong Kong, meeting Rose. I tell her about losing Rose, about the accident, all of that, and she holds my hand, tears in her brown eyes. I even tell her about my father and his girlfriend.

Then I remember that I have to do some shopping for my nan. I expect Yumi to go home or to go off somewhere, but she tells me she will do the shopping with me. So we find a supermarket and I get my nan’s usual Saturday shop-white bread, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, baked beans, corned beef, spam, bacon, sugar, milk, tea bags, custard creams, chocolate cookies, ginger nuts and a single banana. That single banana always tugs at my heart. It seems to me like more than an old person’s shopping list. It feels like a shopping list from long ago.