Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

Some of these young women-laughing, confident, looking forward to their new life-find their drivers or their schools’ representatives immediately. Others struggle to make the connection. They wander in front of the barrier, looking for their name on one of the little hand-held placards. Hopeful but a touch worried. And my heart aches for them.

I watch them for the longest time, these beautiful stragglers in this magnificent brown-eyed invasion, fresh off the plane and looking for a sign.

And somewhere high above me, in the Muzak that is pumped around the airport, “Silent Night” segues into “O Come All Ye Faithful.”

As soon as my nan has her front door open, I can smell the gas. I brush past her and quickly go into the kitchen where the smell is even stronger.

“Alfie?”

One of the gas burners on her cooker is turned up to full and unlit. The gas feels so thick it’s like you could reach out and touch it. Coughing like a madman, I turn it off and open up all the windows.

“Nan,” I say, sick and eyes streaming, “you’ve got to be more careful.”

“I don’t know how that happened,” she says, all flustered. “I was making-I don’t remember.” She blinks at me with her watery blue eyes. “Don’t tell your mum, Alfie. Or your dad.”

I look at her. She has her makeup on. Her eyebrows are two shaky black lines and her lipstick is very slightly off, like a double exposure on a photograph. The sight of her worried face and erratic cosmetics makes me put my arm around her shoulders. Inside her cardigan she feels as small and fragile as a child.

“I promise I won’t tell anybody,” I say, knowing she is worried that my parents already think she is unable to live alone, knowing that her great terror in this world is that she will one day be taken from this place and put in a home. “But please don’t do it again, okay, Nan?”

She beams with relief and I watch her make a cup of tea for the pair of us, muttering to herself, elaborately turning the gas off after the kettle has boiled. I feel for the poor old thing, constantly being assessed for signs that her warm, intelligent, curious mind has finally turned to mush. At the same time the gas has frightened me. I am afraid that one day I will stand outside her flat with the fumes seeping under the door and nobody answering the bell. Then I remember why I am here. Jesus. I’m getting a touch of old timer’s disease myself.

“Where’s your tree, Nan?”

“In the little room, love. In the box with Christmas written on it.”

My nan loves Christmas. She would put her tree up in mid-August if we didn’t physically restrain her. Although she always spends Christmas Day with my family-and this year she will spend it with my mother and me, which is all that’s left of my family-she still likes to have her own tree, alleging that it’s “nice for Alfie when he comes round,” as if I am just coming up to my fourth birthday.

I can remember the Christmas Days we had with my nan when I was small. She was still in her old house in the East End, the house where my father grew up, the house in Oranges for Christmas, the house with a chicken run in the back garden and a stand-up piano in the living room. The place always seemed to be full of my uncles and aunts and cousins, the children playing with their new toys while the adults got merry-big glasses of dark beer for the men, small glasses of something red and sweet for the women-and played brag and poker, or bet on the horses that were racing on television. The old house was constantly filled with people and music, cigarette smoke and laughter. There was a huge tree that looked as though it had come straight from some Norwegian wood.

Now the old house has gone and so has my grandfather and so has my father and my nan lives alone in this small white flat, the belongings of a lifetime shrunk to fit a few bare rooms. The uncles and the aunts are scattered, spending Christmases with their own children and grandchildren, and the real tree has been replaced by a fake silver one that comes in three parts-top half, bottom half and base, like a fake Santa half-heartedly going ho ho ho. I find the tree and a collection of fairy lights and assorted decorations in a torn cardboard box marked “Xmass.” My nan watches me with excited eyes as I screw the thing together.

“Lovely,” she says. “That silver looks smashing, doesn’t it, Alfie?”

“It does, Nan.”

As I stretch to put the angel on top of the tree I feel something bad happen to my back. Some muscle seems to go at the base of my spine and I am suddenly hunched up with pain, the angel still in my fist.

And as I sit on the sofa waiting for the pain to pass, and my nan goes off to make another cup of tea, I think I finally understand her passion for her fake tree.

Christmas trees are a bit like relationships. The real thing is certainly more beautiful, but it’s just too much fuss, too much mess.

You can say what you like about fake ones.

But you can’t deny that they are a lot less trouble.

The way I come to sleep with Vanessa is that I find her standing outside the college with Witold handing out new leaflets for the school.

The massed ranks of late Christmas shoppers are not paying them any attention so Vanessa is folding the flyers into little paper planes and throwing them into the crowd. Witold is watching her with an embarrassed grin.

“Study with the best!” she cries, launching a leaflet at a middle-aged businessman. “Estudia en Churchill’s! Studia alla Churchill’s! Studieren in Churchill’s!”

“What are you doing, Vanessa?” I ask her, rubbing my back.

“Getting new students!” she laughs. “Nauka w Churchill’s! Etudiez à Churchill’s!”

“Well, knock it off,” I smile.

“But nobody’s interested,” she says, stamping her foot and giving me one of her sulky pouts. She puts her hands on her hips. “It’s Christmas.”

“Just give them out normally,” I tell her. “Please.”

“What will you do for me? Give me an exam paper in advance?”

“I’ll buy you a drink.” Vanessa is the kind of woman who makes you think that banter is compulsory. “As it’s Christmas. You know. A glass of German wine or something.”

“Anything but German wine.”

“I like German wine,” Witold says.

And so later I find myself in the Eamon de Valera having a drink with Vanessa. She is not herself. She doesn’t dance, or flirt, or shout across the pub to someone. She tells me that she is not going back to France for the holiday-it’s difficult to know where she should go now that her parents are divorced-but staying in London is even worse.

“Why’s that?”

She looks at me for a second.

“Because I will not see my boyfriend,” she says. “He will be with his family.”

Later still I see pictures of the boyfriend in Vanessa’s flat.

It is a good flat in an affluent part of town, nothing like the tiny bedsit that Yumi lives in, or the room in a shared house that Hiroko occupies. Vanessa has her own small but beautiful one-bedroom flat in one of the swankier parts of north London. It must cost well over £1,000 a month and judging by the number of photographs of Vanessa and her boyfriend-this gym-fit forty-year-old, his arm casually circled around Vanessa’s waist, a platinum wedding ring glinting on the third finger of his left hand, a wide white smile on his face-I guess that he is the one paying the bills.

“Difficult time of year for him,” Vanessa says, picking up a photograph of the pair of them sitting outside some country pub. “He has to be with his family.” She replaces the picture. “His children. And her. But he doesn’t sleep with her anymore. He really doesn’t.”

I go to bed with Vanessa and that cheers her up. Not because of my dazzling sexual technique but because she seems to find it mildly amusing being in bed with me. She’s physically very different from Yumi or Hiroko. Just everything. Her hair, her breasts, her hips, her skin. I find the novelty exciting-I’m very exciting-and I’m about to say rash things, but luckily Vanessa’s small smile stops me from saying anything stupid. I know that she takes tonight very lightly because somebody already owns her heart.