Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

“What are you doing here?”

“Returning your essay. I didn’t have an address.”

“I would have picked it up. At Churchill’s. Or your mum’s house. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“I’ve got my own company,” she says. “Dream Machine. We work all over the West End.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me. And sometimes I bring in another girl. If the work’s there.” A pause. “What’s wrong?”

What is wrong with me? I don’t know. It just feels like all at once I understand why she wants to go back to college. Why it means so much to her. This is the first time I have really understood that she is not some student doing a little part-time job. This is how she makes a living. This is what the next thirty years or so will be like for her. This is her future.

“There’s nothing wrong with cleaning for a living,” I say, as if I’m thinking aloud. “Nothing at all.”

“No. It’s not a bad job. But I want a better one. And I can get it if I go back to school.”

“Somebody has to do it. Cleaning, I mean.”

“Would you?”

People are staring at us. All these art lovers and their well-spoken flunkies squinting at the cleaner and the bum standing on the pavement of Cork Street.

“Listen, your essay was okay.”

“Just okay?”

“That’s right. It’s full of some teacher’s opinions. Or some critic’s opinion. Not enough of you.”

She smiles at me. “You’re good.”

“What?”

“You’re a good teacher.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I can feel it. You’re a great teacher. You’re so right-there has to be more of me in there. So you’ll do it? You’ll teach me?”

I want to get away from here, away from Cork Street and Dream Machine, away from Desdemona and her dirty laundry.

But I think of George Chang, and how patient he is with me, how he encourages me, how he helps me learn because he thinks it’s the right thing to do.

I don’t know what comes over me.

“When can you start?” I find myself saying.

I RING MY NAN’S DOOR BELL but she doesn’t answer. That’s strange. I know she’s in there. At least, it sounds like she’s in there because I can hear the TV audience elaborately ooh-ing and ahh-ing as the numbers are drawn for the midweek National Lottery. Is the prospect of ten million pounds why she’s not answering? Or is it something else?

I keep waiting to hear the soft shuffle of slippers on carpet coming slowly toward the door, followed by the scrape of the safety catch and then her smiling face peering around the door, her eyes bright with welcome, happy for some company. It doesn’t happen. There’s no answer to my nan’s door bell.

There’s also no smell of gas, no sign of smoke seeping under the door, no cries for help. But she is eighty-seven, almost eighty-eight, and I feel the panic rising inside me as I put down her shopping and fumble with the key that I hold for emergencies.

This is the way it happens, I think.

Everybody dies. Everybody leaves you. You turn your back for a moment and they are gone forever.

I burst into the little white flat. The TV is on much too loud. There’s no sign of my nan but I immediately see the unknown man by the mantelpiece, holding a silver-framed photograph in his hand, calculating its worth.

As he half turns, the frame still in his thieving paw, I see that he is more of an overgrown boy than a man. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, but way over six foot tall, a baby face flecked with wisps of facial hair.

I come quickly across the room and throw myself at him, cursing him, knocking him backward against the mantelpiece, my voice and my body shaking with anger and fear. He drops the silver frame-his booty, the thieving bastard-but he is still on his feet, suddenly over the moment of shock at my surprise attack, and as we grapple with each other I can feel his superior strength, and his own rage and terror.

He swings me sideways, smashing me into the sideboard cabinet with all the holiday souvenirs, making leering leprechauns and smiling Spanish donkeys jiggle and jump behind the dusty glass.

And then my nan comes out of her tiny kitchen carrying a tray containing tea and biscuits.

“Oh, have you two met?” she says.

The young man and I are suddenly apart, boxers told to break by the referee, panting at each other on opposite sides of the coffee table. My nan gently places the tea and custard creams between us.

“I ran out of breath at the bus stop,” my nan says. “I was coming back from having a little look round the shops and it was just suddenly gone. Do you ever get that feeling, Alfie? That breathlessness?” She smiles affectionately at the young man I have just assaulted. “Ken helped me get home.”

“Ben,” he says.

“Len,” she says. “I felt quite peculiar. But Len carried my bag. Helped me get inside. Wasn’t that nice of him, Alfie?”

“Thank you,” I say.

The young man looks at me with total, all-consuming hatred.

“Don’t mention it,” he says. A quick smile at my nan. He is trembling. “I have to go now.”

“Ken,” I say. “Ben. Please stay and have some tea.”

“I really must run.” He is not looking at me any more. “I do hope you feel better,” he says to my nan.

I follow him to the door but he refuses to meet my eyes.

“I didn’t realize,” I say as he lets himself out. “I thought-”

“Dickhead,” he mutters.

It’s true. I am a dickhead. I can’t quite believe that kindness and goodness still exist in this world. I think it’s all a thing of the past. And I can’t even see what’s right in front of my dickhead face.

I go back into the living room where my nan is asleep in her armchair, a lottery ticket in one hand and a custard cream in the other. She has been falling asleep without warning a lot recently. Sometimes she pitches forward and I have to catch her before she does herself some damage.

“I fall asleep all the time,” she is always telling me. “Just tired, I suppose, love.”

But now I realize that she is not falling asleep at all.

She is blacking out.

“Soong yi-dien!” George tells me, time and time again. “Soong yi-dien!”

Soong yi-dien. It’s one of the few Cantonese expressions I know. In Hong Kong you would hear it all the time in the little tailor’s shop next to the Double Fortune Language School when customers were complaining that the suit they were being fitted for was too tight.

“Soong yi-dien!” they would shout in the face of Mr. Wu the tailor. “Loosen it up!”

George wants me to loosen it up. He believes that I try too hard. He’s right. My Tai Chi strains for effect. Everything is an effort for me. I make Tai Chi look like manual labor. But George moves the way Sinatra sang, radiating that kind of effortless power, as if all this craft and art is the most natural thing in the world.

“Soong yi-dien,” he says. “Very important for when we play Tai Chi.”

Play Tai Chi? Surely he means do or practice or learn Tai Chi? Surely he doesn’t mean play?

Although thick with a Cantonese accent, George’s English is very good. He has none of the linguistic tics that his wife has. Sometimes his tenses get a little confused, and he has this habit of dropping the definite article. But you never have trouble understanding him. So I am surprised that he could get his choice of verb so wrong.

“You don’t mean play Tai Chi, do you, George? I think you mean study Tai Chi or something. Not play.”

He looks at me.

“No,” he says. “We play Tai Chi. We play. Always, always. Tai Chi not the gym. Not about sweating and getting six-pack on belly. Not about working out. When you understand that, then you start to learn. Then you soong yi-dien. Why do Westerners always want to strain? Okay, try again.”