Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

I like you, you’re nice.

Where’s the harm in that?

When the pain in my back gets so bad that the painkillers no longer have any effect, I go to see my doctor. At first he looks at me as though it’s another psychosomatic thing, like my heart feeling as if it’s an undigested kebab, but when I tell him about the angel on top of my nan’s Christmas tree, he gets me to take my shirt off and gives me a full examination.

Then he tells me there’s nothing that he can do.

“Tricky thing, the lower back,” he says.

I bump into George Chang on my way home. He is coming out of General Lee’s with takeout, on his way back to the Shanghai Dragon to help with the lunch trade. He looks at my face and asks me what’s wrong.

“Done my back in,” I tell him. “Putting up my nan’s Christmas tree.”

He tells me to come to the restaurant with him. I say that I’ve got to get back to work, but he does this thing that I’ve noticed his wife does all the time. He just acts as though I haven’t spoken. When we are inside the Shanghai Dragon, he tells me to stand perfectly still. He places his hands at the base of my spine. He is not quite touching me, but-and this is strange-I can definitely feel the warmth of his palms. He is not touching me, but I can feel the heat of his hands. It’s like standing next to a quiet fire. How do you explain that?

Then he tells me to lean slightly forward and very gently pummel my lower back with the back of my hands. I do what he tells me. And then I look at him. Because something inexplicable has happened.

The pain in my back is going away.

“What happened there?”

He just smiles.

“How did you do that?”

“Keep doing that exercise.” He leans forward and lightly paddles his back. “Do it every day for a few minutes. Not too hard, okay?”

“What-what was that? George?”

“Very simple Chi Kung exercise.”

“What’s Chi Kung? You mean chi as in Tai Chi? Is it the same thing?”

“Any kind of exercise with the chi is Chi Kung. Okay? For keeping healthy. For curing sickness. For martial arts. For enlightenment.”

“Enlightenment?”

“That’s all Chi Kung. You remember chi. You told me you don’t got any chi. Remember?”

I feel foolish. “I remember.”

“Does it feel bit better?”

“It feels a lot better.”

“You think maybe you got some chi after all?”

He is laughing at me.

“I guess I have.”

“Then maybe you should come to the park on Sunday morning.”

“You’re going to teach me?”

He sort of grunts. “I’ll teach you.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“Sunday morning. Don’t be late.”

This year my family teaches me the true meaning of Christmas-surviving the thing.

But the long hours between the Christmas pudding and the blockbuster movies and my old man’s sheepish arrival with his last-minute booty from Body Shop give me a chance to do some thinking.

With the sex police patroling the corridors of Churchill’s International Language School, I figure that it is going to be difficult to meet new faces at work.

So I decide to go private. I place an ad in the back of a listings magazine, in the Personal Services section, which comes just after Introduction Agencies and just before Lonely Hearts.

Need Good English?

Fully qualified English teacher seeks private students.

We can help each other.

Then I put on Sinatra singing “My Funny Valentine” and I wait.

I T FEELS GOOD to be starting something new on such a beautiful day.

There’s a light frost glinting on the park’s stubby grass, but above our heads the usual flat gray shroud has been replaced by an endless blue sky and sunlight that is more dazzling than high noon in August. Although our breath is coming out as chilled steam, George and I are squinting our eyes in the light. We face each other.

“Tai Chi Chuan,” he says. “Means-the supreme ultimate fist.”

“Sounds violent,” I say.

He ignores me.

“Everything relaxed. All moves soft. All things relaxed. But all moves have martial application. Understand?”

“Not really.”

“Western people think-Tai Chi Chuan very beautiful. Very gentle. Yes?”

“Right.”

“But Tai Chi Chuan is self-defense system. Every move has a reason. Not just for show.” His hands glide through the air. “Block. Punch. Strike. Hold. Kick. But flowing. Always flowing. And always very soft. Understand?”

I nod.

“Tai Chi Chuan good for health. Stress. Circulation. Modern world. But Tai Chi Chuan not the weakest martial art in the world.” His dark eyes gleam. “Strongest.”

“Okay.”

“This Chen style.”

“What style?”

“Chen style. Many style from different family. Yang style. Wu style. This Chen style.”

I am not quite following every word of this. How can something so soft also be hard? How can something so gentle be a kind of boxing?

George steps away from me. He is wearing his usual black Mandarin suit and soft, flat-bottomed shoes. I am in a tracksuit with the helpful reminder of JUST DO IT inscribed down one leg. He moves his feet about shoulder-width apart, standing with his weight evenly distributed and his arms hanging by his side. His breathing is deep and even. His weight seems to sink into the ground. He looks both completely relaxed and yet somehow immovable.

“Stand like a mountain between heaven and earth,” he says.

Stand like a mountain between heaven and earth? No problem, Yoda. This kind of talk should embarrass me. But I find that if I make a big effort, it doesn’t. I try to stand like George. I close my eyes, seriously thinking about my breathing for the first time in my life.

“Open your joints,” George tells me. “Let your body relax. Sink your weight to the center of the earth. And keep breathing. Always keep breathing.”

Like diving, I think to myself. That’s the first thing they teach you when you learn to scuba dive. You must always keep breathing.

Then I hear the laughter behind us.

“Look at this pair of buttheads. Fuck me. It’s Come Dancing for fags.”

There are three of them. Saturday-night stragglers, foaming brown bottles in their fists, their faces as pale as curdled milk. Although they can’t be older than about twenty, they already have the telltale swelling stomachs of committed boozers. Yet they are all wearing vaguely sporty clothes-sneakers, hooded running tops, baseball caps. Sort of funny, when you think about it.

But I feel a sudden rage inside me. These morons-dressed for sports day, built for happy hour-remind me of all the morons just like them that I taught at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys. Maybe that’s why, when I open my mouth, I sound just like a teacher on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“Haven’t you lot got somewhere to go? Go on, piss off out of it. And take those stupid expressions off your faces.”

Those faces darken, tighten, harden. They glance at each other and then all at once they are coming toward me, the bottles in their hands, their teeth bared like nicotine-stained fangs.

George steps in front of them.

“Please,” he says. “No trouble.”

The biggest one, his podgy face scarred by the livid souvenirs of acne, stops and smiles at his mates.

“No trouble at all.”

Then he goes to put his meaty hands on George’s chest, but as Zit-face attempts to grab George, the older man sort of goes with him, transferring his weight to his back foot as he intercepts Zit-face’s hands by simply lifting his arms. Those meaty paws do not touch George. And suddenly Zit-face is pitching forward, grasping nothing, completely off balance. Lightly holding Zit-face’s arms, George seems to twist his waist and casually tosses the youth to the ground. It is far too gentle to be called a throw. It is more as if Zit-face is a big insect with rather bad skin and George is gently swatting him aside.