Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

I am bumping south on the Northern Line, escaping from Hampstead before Hiroko’s nice old cat lady stirs, before Tiddles alerts her to my presence. I am strap-hanging in a crowded carriage because the rush hour starts just after dawn these days, when without warning my breath starts coming in these short, fast gasps, like a diver who finds himself a long way down and suddenly sucking on the last drops of air in a broken tank.

Panic.

Real, terrified, sweating panic. I can’t breathe. It’s not my imagination. I literally can’t breathe. I am horribly and desperately aware of the crush of people around me, the sick yellow light of the carriage, the dead air of the tunnel, the entire weight of the city pressing down on us.

Trapped. I feel like weeping, screaming, running, but I can do none of these things. I need to be out of this place immediately and there is nowhere to go, there is no end in sight.

Pure, howling terror. My eyes sting with perspiration and tears. I feel like I am choking, falling, watched. Passengers-all the other calm, unforgiving passengers-glance my way and seem to stare right into my cracked soul. My face crumples and I close my eyes, my legs gone to jelly, the roar of the train deafening, gripping the worn leather strap until my knuckles are white.

Somehow I make it to the next station. I stumble from the train, up the escalators, burst into the light, the air. Filling my lungs. When I have stopped trembling I start to walk home. It takes a long time. I am miles from home. The streets are crowded with commuters on their way to work and school. I seem to be going in a different direction from everyone else.

My walk home takes me through Highbury Fields where George Chang is standing in his patch of grass.

His face seems young and old all at the same time. His head is erect, his back poker straight. He doesn’t see me. He gives no indication of seeing anything. I stand perfectly still watching his slow-motion dance. His hands move like punches, and yet there is no violence in them. His legs and feet move like kicks and sweeps, but there is no force in them. Every move he makes looks like the softest thing in the world.

And I realize that I have never in my life seen anyone who looks so totally at peace inside his own skin.

“I want you to teach me,” I tell George. “I want to learn Tai Chi.”

We are in the new General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen on the Holloway Road. George is eating his breakfast. Chicken wings and fries. You would think that a man like George Chang would avoid fast-food joints like General Lee’s, that he would be squatting somewhere with a bowl of steamed rice, but you would be wrong. George says the food in General Lee’s is “very simple.” He’s a big fan.

“Teach you Tai Chi,” he says. The way he says it, it’s neither a question nor an agreement.

“I need to do something, George. I mean it. I feel like everything’s falling to bits.” I don’t say what I really feel. That I want to be comfortable inside my own body. That I want to be like him. That I am sick and tired of being like myself, so sick and tired that you wouldn’t believe it. “I need to be calmer,” is what I say. “Much calmer. Right now I can’t relax. I can’t sleep. Sometimes I can’t even breathe.”

He sort of shrugs.

“Tai Chi good for relaxation. Stress control. All the problem of modern world. Life very busy.”

“That’s right,” I say. “Life’s very busy, isn’t it? And sometimes I feel so old. Everything aches, George. I’ve got no energy. I feel frightened-really frightened-but I can’t even say what’s wrong. Everything seems to overwhelm me.”

“Still miss wife.”

“That’s right, George. But every little thing that goes wrong feels like a major trauma. Do you know what I mean? I lose my temper. I feel like crying.” I attempt a little laugh. “I’m going crazy here, George. Help me. Please.”

“Tai Chi good for all that. For tension. For tired.”

“That’s exactly what I need.”

“But I can’t teach you.”

My heart lurches with disappointment. Once I had worked up the nerve to ask him, it had never even crossed my mind that he would turn me down. I stare at him munching his chicken wings for a while, waiting for him to offer some further explanation. But the silence just grows. He has apparently said it all.

“Why not?”

“Take too long time.”

“But I see you teaching people all the time. There’s often someone with you.”

He smiles down at his chicken wings.

“Always someone different. Different man, different woman. Come for a few mornings. Maybe a little bit longer. Then stop coming. Because Western people don’t have patience for Tai Chi.” He looks at me over a chicken wing. “It’s not pill. It’s not drug. Not magic. To be any good for you, for anyone, take a long time. A long time. Western people don’t have time.”

I almost tell him that I’ve got all the time in the world, but I don’t bother.

Because suddenly I see myself with George in the park, both of us in our black pajamas, doing a graceful slow-motion waltz as the packed tube trains rumble 100 meters below our slippered feet, and the image just seems ridiculous.

George is right. There are some dances you never learn. That stillness, that peace, that grace. Who am I kidding?

I just don’t have it in me.

H IROKO IS GOING BACK TO JAPAN for Christmas. I meet her at Paddington, under a huge fir tree decorated with brightly colored boxes that are meant to look like presents, and we catch the Heathrow Express to the airport.

Saying good-bye to her feels strange. I am sad to see her go. At the same time, I am glad to feel something, anything. But-and this is the important bit-not too much.

We embrace at the departure gate and Hiroko waves to me right up until the time she disappears behind the screen before passport control. Then I wander around Terminal 3, reluctant to go home. The airport is awash with real emotion today. Lovers are saying good-bye and being reunited. Families are separating and coming back together. There are lots of hugs and laughter and tears. The departure gate is pretty interesting but the arrivals hall is even better, because you can’t do it in your own time at arrivals. You can’t decide when it’s time to say hello in quite the same way that you can decide it’s time to say good-bye. Hello just happens. The people anxiously waiting for someone don’t know when that face is suddenly going to appear before them, slowly pushing a luggage trolley, smiling through the jet lag, ready for a kiss and a cuddle, ready to begin again.

There’s something else that I notice about the arrivals hall. It is full of young women arriving in the UK to study English. Everywhere you look there is shining black hair, bright brown eyes and Louis Vuitton luggage. They don’t stop coming.

It’s a kind of miracle.

Behind the barrier there are bored drivers and chirpy representatives of two dozen language schools standing with their little signs and placards and notice boards, waiting for the next Jumbo from Osaka or Beijing or Seoul or somewhere else where Christmas doesn’t really matter.

And as I stand among the men and women with their placards-MISS SUZUKI, KIM LEE, GREEN GABLES LANGUAGE SCHOOL, TAE-SOON LEE, MIWAKO HONDA AND HIROMI TAKESHI, OXFORD SCHOOL OF ENGLISH, MISS WANG AND MISS WANG-I suddenly realize that this city is full of young women learning English.

The Terminal 3 brigade is Asian. At the other terminals, you would no doubt find the Scandinavian regiments, or the Mediterranean battalions. But there are thousands of them, an entire army of them, with fresh reinforcements arriving daily.

For the first time I understand that there’s no reason for me ever to be lonely again.