Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

But with the shabby white van he has hired sitting outside the house, it feels anticlimactic, like this has all been dragging on for much too long and everybody wants it to be over.

My mother doesn’t even bother disappearing. She doesn’t come into the house while my old man is here, she stays out in the garden with Joyce and her grandchildren. But she doesn’t run away either. She stays in her garden with her friend.

As my father lugs boxes down the stairs I stand in the living room watching my mum and Joyce and Diana and William through the window. I am afraid that Joyce is going to barge into the house and corner my father with one of her impromptu interrogations.

Who is this young woman you live with? How old? Will you marry? Do you want children? Do you think you are a wise man or an old fool? Is this girl just a gold digger? Is it about more than getting your end far away?

But she doesn’t. Joyce just stays out in the back garden with my mother, planting lilies in patio pots, moving shrubs that have outgrown their space, preparing for the new season as the two children gently brush the morning’s fall of snow from evergreen shrubs and conifers.

“January,” Joyce had barked at me. “Busy time of year for garden. Time to get smacking. The early bird is always on time.”

“Catches the worm, Joyce.”

“You know what I mean, mister.”

According to Joyce, it is always a busy time of year for the garden. And I can hear her voice now, surprisingly gentle as she murmurs to my mother, and although I can’t hear her words, I am certain that they are not talking about my father. That feels like some kind of victory.

I turn to watch my dad coming down the stairs with the last of his things. It is a box of old vinyl albums. I can see Four Tops Live! and Stevie Wonder’s I Was Made to Love Her and Gladys Knight and the Pips’ Feelin’ Bluesy.

“Aren’t you getting a little old for all that baby, baby, baby stuff?” I say, nodding at the box of Motown records in his arms, wanting to hurt him.

“I don’t think you’re ever too old for a little bit of joy,” he says. “You believe in a little bit of joy, don’t you, Alfie?”

And I hate him so much not because I can’t understand him, but because I understand him so well. He is my father, he will always be my father, and I am afraid that there is much of him in me.

Our lives feel closer than I care to admit. All those nights in rented rooms with women who keep a suitcase by their bed and talk in their sleep in a language you can’t understand. All that sneaking around, all those little lies, all that settling for something that you know in your heart is only second best.

Yes, I believe in a bit of joy. These days that’s pretty much all I believe in. But I have this fear that, for me and my old man, those rented rooms are the only home we will ever know now, the only home we will ever deserve.

Then he is gone, bumping awkwardly out of the front door, while in the back garden I can hear the laughter of the women.

JACKIE TURNS UP ON OUR DOORSTEP when I am in the park with George. My mum lets her in, gives her a cup of tea and biscuits, tries to make her feel at home. My mother will let anyone into our house. It’s a wonder she hasn’t been murdered by now.

“She’s in the living room,” my mum says. “Nice young girl. Dressed a bit-well-tarty, perhaps.”

“Oh, Mum,” I say, sounding as though I have just broken my Action Man.

“Well, she said she had an essay for you,” my mother says breezily. “I thought she was one of your students.”

“My students are all foreigners, Mum.”

I peer through the crack in the living room door. There she is on the sofa, still dressed for dancing or double pneumonia. Strapless top, minimal skirt, heels that could take someone’s eye out. Sipping her tea, looking at the pictures on the wall, all these arty black-and-white photographs of working men that my old man collected when he started making some money.

I think about making a run for it. But she might start stalking me. Best to get it over with.

“Hi,” I say, coming into the living room.

“Oh, hello.” She smiles, trying to get up, and then deciding against it with the tea and biscuits on her lap. “Look, I’m really sorry to bother you but-”

“It’s okay. But I thought I made it clear that I’m not an English teacher.”

“Oh, you made it clear that you are an English teacher,” she says and laughs, making a little joke of it. “You just don’t want to teach me.” She places her tea and biscuits on the coffee table and picks up a manila envelope by her side. She hands it to me.

“What’s this?”

“An essay. About Othello.”

“Othello?”

“It’s the one about sexual jealousy. One that loved not wisely, but too well. Desdemona, Iago and all that lot.”

“I know the play.”

“Of course. Sorry.”

An essay about Othello? Just what I need in my life.

“Will you read it?”

“Look-”

“Please,” she says. “I’m desperate to go back to school. And I’m serious about this subject.”

“But I don’t-”

“And I was good at it! I was so good at it! Because I loved it! Books made me feel as though-I don’t know-as though I was connected to the world. Magic, it was. Just give me a chance, okay? Before you decide you don’t want to teach me-read my essay.”

I look at her, wondering what an Essex dancing queen could know about loving not wisely but too well.

“I’m really sorry to bother you. Really sorry to come barging in like this. But if you read my essay and decide you still don’t want to teach me, then I promise I’ll leave you alone.”

So I promise to read her essay just to get rid of her. And as I lead her to the door and she says good-bye to my mother, I feel a pang of sympathy for Jackie Day. She just doesn’t understand. Teaching has got nothing to do with it.

“What a nice girl,” my mother says when Jackie has left. “Bit on the thin side. I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s apron. But she speaks English already, doesn’t she? What does she need you for?”

“She doesn’t.”

There’s a new barmaid at the Eamon de Valera. Russian. Short red hair. Starting at Churchill’s when the new term begins, Yumi tells me. I watch the young Russian struggling with pints of Paddy McGinty’s Water and packets of pork scratchings before I introduce myself. She’s going to be one of my Advanced Beginners.

By now these conversations have developed their own internal rhythm. Where you from? How you finding London? Any trouble getting a visa (not applicable to students from the EU or Japan)? Do you miss your mum’s apple strudel/prawn tempura/chicken kiev?

Olga tells me what they all tell me. London is more crowded than she imagined, more expensive than she bargained for. Even the kids with rich parents flinch when they see the price of a room in this town. How much harder must it be for a young woman from a former Communist hell?

I can’t help Olga with her accommodation problem. I’m looking for my own place right now, and I’m also struggling to find somewhere I can afford, although I don’t tell Olga any of that. But this standard complaint about the price tag of everything in London gives me my favorite opening gambit.

“This city’s not cheap,” I say, leaning on the bar. “But there’s lots of great stuff that you can get for free.”

“Really?”

“God, yes. You’ve just got to know where to look. For a start there are the parks. The view of London from the top of Primrose Hill. The royal deer in Richmond Park. Holland Park is full of all these sculptures that you suddenly come across. Walking by the Serpentine-”