Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

Sometimes I see her in the staff room, or the corridor, or a class that is empty of students. Bumping around with her bucket, polishing something in her yellow gloves. For some reason I don’t understand, I never ask Jackie about herself. I always ask her about the young girl in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

It makes me feel good to ask Jackie about the book. It’s like a secret we share.

“How’s Mick?” I say.

“Still dreaming.” She smiles.

My students are not like Jackie. My students dress down. Depending on their personal circumstances, and their country of origin, they are either expensively scruffy or poverty stricken scruffy. Vanessa, for example, wears white or black Versace jeans every day, while Witold always wears the same pair of counterfeit Polish denims with “Levy’s” misspelled on the back. But unless they have a hot date after class, they stick with T-shirts and sneakers, combat trousers or jeans. Except for Hiroko.

Hiroko was an office lady in Tokyo and she still wears the classic OL uniform-pale, neat little matching jacket-and-skirt suits, black high heels and even those flesh-colored tights that OLs seem to favor. I have seen those flesh-colored tights on young female Japanese tourists buying their designer tea bags at Fortnum & Mason-I couldn’t help noticing-but I have never seen them on any of my students.

Apart from Hiroko.

Hiroko is not like Yumi. Hiroko is twenty-three going on fifty. With her dyed blond hair and funky fashion sense, Yumi looks like the maverick, but in fact she is far more typical of the Japanese girls at Churchill’s than Hiroko.

It’s not just Hiroko’s clothes. She is diligent in her work, deferential to her teachers, never speaking unless she is spoken to, and then only in bashful, monosyllabic sentences. She doesn’t actually bow, but when you are speaking to her she gives all these suppliant, encouraging little nods of her head that strike me as pure Japanese, far more so than the legendary bowing. Sometimes I think Hiroko has never really left that office in Tokyo.

Hiroko is having problems with her course. She is one of my Proficiency students and her written work is faultless. But she is having trouble with her spoken English. Hiroko doesn’t like talking. Hiroko hates talking. At first I thought it was because she is cripplingly shy. But it’s far more than shyness. Hiroko has that very Japanese terror of doing something imperfectly. She would much rather not do it at all.

So she sits in my Proficiency class, silent as a mute, hiding her sweet, bespectacled round face behind a long black curtain of hair. It gets so bad that I have to ask her to stay behind after class and she nods her assent, her eyes blinking nervously behind her glasses.

I start off with the good news-she is one of my best students, I can see how hard she works-and then I tell her that she has to start talking more in class or she will flunk her exam on the oral section. In her strained, faltering English-she visibly flinches at every minor mistake she makes-Hiroko asks me if she should drop down a level or two. I tell her that the problem would be exactly the same even if she was with the Advanced Beginners.

“Listen, you just have to get over your hang-up about speaking English,” I say. “Don’t let it become too important, okay? Even native speakers make mistakes. It doesn’t matter if it comes out sounding different from the textbooks. Just open your mouth and give it a go.”

Hiroko looks at me with wide, frightened eyes, furiously nodding in agreement. Where does it come from, this myth that all Asian eyes are mean little slits?

She stares at me with a kind of touching trust, waiting for something else to happen, and so very soon the pair of us are sitting in the Eamon de Valera with Hiroko nursing a spritzer and me sipping a stout. That’s where she tells me all about her broken heart.

“It’s no good if it’s too important,” I said to her on the way to the pub. “That’s what I’ve learned. If you make it too important, then it ruins everything.”

Hiroko of the broken heart.

There was a man back in Tokyo. A man from Hiroko’s office. An older man. Hiroko lived with her parents and the man lived with his wife. Their work brought Hiroko and the man together. He was friendly and charming. She was young and lonely. She liked him a lot. And so they began.

Hiroko and the man had to go to love hotels, those briefly rented rooms in buildings shaped like ocean liners and castles and space ships. She knew he wasn’t free but she also knew that they really cared for each other. He was funny and kind and he told her that she was beautiful. He made her feel good about herself, as though she could really be the person she had always wanted to be. And he told her that he loved her, he told her that he loved her so very much in one of their two-hour stays in a love hotel. Then he went home to his wife.

Something happened. Something momentous that makes her eyes fill with tears, something that she will not talk about.

“You got pregnant, didn’t you?”

A quick bob of the head. Heartbroken assent.

“But you didn’t have the baby.”

A small shake of the head, her hair falling over her face.

“And pencil dick stayed with his wife.”

Her voice is not much more than a whisper, but I am struck by how little accent she has. When she doesn’t think about it too much, her spoken English is actually pretty good.

“Of course.”

I reach out and touch her hand.

“Don’t worry about him, Hiroko. He’s going to have a really unhappy life.”

She looks at me gratefully and smiles for the first time.

“Promise me that in the future you will steer clear of pencil dicks like that,” I say.

“Okay,” she says, laughing and crying all at the same time. “I promise.”

“No more pencil dicks?”

“No more-no more pencil dicks.”

Two drinks and a £10 black cab ride later, Hiroko and I are outside the house of her host family in Hampstead. It’s a hell of a house-a big, detached mansion on one of those wide, tree-lined avenues that they have up there-but not much of a family-just one rich old lady who rents out a room to female students because she gets lonely. Hiroko makes sure that the old lady is tucked up in bed with Tiddles the cat and Radio 4 and then she sneaks me up the stairs to a converted loft where a shaft of moonlight pours through the skylight and onto her single bed.

And as she showers-they are so clean, these Japanese girls, always jumping in the shower and wearing their pants in bed-I think to myself that there’s another way that Hiroko is different from my other students.

Most of them are in London looking for fun. Hiroko is here looking for love. Or perhaps she is just escaping from it.

I know she will never feel the same desperate passion for me that she felt for that second-rate salary man back in Tokyo. And I know that she will never own my heart in the way that my wife owned my heart. Yet that’s okay. It doesn’t seem sad tonight. In fact, in some way that I can’t quite understand, it feels sort of perfect.

“I’m very exciting,” she says.

She means: I’m very excited.

It is, apparently, an easy mistake to make. I have had a number of students say to me, “I’m very boring,” when what they really mean is, “I’m very bored.” There’s some glitch in the translation from Japanese to English that causes the mistake. But I like it. I like that mistake.

I’m very exciting too.

A panic attack on the train.

At first, when I get a twinge in my chest and feel the cold, creeping fear dripping down my back, I think that it’s just another one of my phony heart attacks.

But it’s much worse than that.