Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

So I do.

I spread my feet shoulder width apart, sinking into my horse stance, bending my knees but making sure they don’t extend farther than my toes. Neck erect but relaxed. Chin tucked slightly in. Spine straight and lengthened, although without standing to attention. Butt tucked in. Trying to slow and soften my breathing, trying to make it deep but unforced. Relaxing my wrists. Throwing open all my joints. Trying to feel my dan tien, my energy center, which I have learned is located two inches down from my navel and two inches inside my body.

It doesn’t feel much like play.

“You know that saying-no pain, no gain?” George says.

“Sure.”

“It’s rubbish.”

“I’m not early, am I?” says Jackie Day. “If I’m early I can-”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Come in.”

She comes into my new flat, staring at all the unpacked boxes.

I have finally found a place of my own. A one-bedroom flat in a Victorian house full of music students. You can distantly hear them scratching away at cellos and violins, but because they are so good it is more calming than annoying. It is a nice place. But with my nan going into hospital for tests and the new term starting at Churchill’s, I haven’t had time to unpack yet. Apart from a few essentials.

Pictures of Rose.

Some classic Sinatra.

Electric kettle.

I go into the photo-booth-sized kitchen to make instant coffee while Jackie wanders around looking for somewhere to sit down.

“I love this old-fashioned music,” she calls to me, as Frank finishes “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” and begins his timeless rendition of “Taking a Chance on Love.” “What CD is this?”

“It’s Swing Easy, which actually incorporates the vinyl album of that name with the entire contents of the LP that was originally released as Songs for Young Lovers.” I listen for a bit. “I like it too. It’s one of my favorites.”

“And is it Harry Connick Junior?”

I almost drop the kettle.

“Harry Connick Junior? Is this Harry Connick Junior? This is Sinatra. Frank Sinatra.”

“Oh. He sounds a bit like Harry Connick Junior, doesn’t he?”

I say nothing. When I come out of the kitchen she is looking at all the pictures of Rose.

Rose on her firm’s junk in Hong Kong. On our wedding day. At a New Year’s Eve party on Victoria Peak. On Changeover Day.

And-it’s my favorite picture of her-a blowup of her passport photograph, Rose looking straight at the camera, impossibly young and serious and beautiful, her hair longer than I ever saw it, although the picture was taken shortly before we met.

I always thought Rose was the only person in the world who ever looked good in a passport photo.

“Your girlfriend?” Jackie Day says with a little smile. “This is not the girl I saw at your parents’ place.”

It takes me a second to realize she’s talking about Vanessa.

“That was just a friend. This is my wife. Her name is Rose.”

“Oh.”

I can almost hear her brain ticking over. And I think: why do I always have to have this conversation? Why can’t they just leave us alone?

“Are you divorced?”

“My wife died,” I say, taking the photograph from her and giving her a cup of instant coffee in exchange. I carefully place the picture back on top of a packing case. “She died in a diving accident.”

“A driving accident?”

“A diving accident. When we were living in Hong Kong.”

“God.” She stares at Rose’s picture. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“How terrible for you.” She looks at all the photographs-I suppose it’s a sort of shrine-with real pain on her face. “And for her. How old was she? How old was Rose?”

“She was twenty-six. Almost twenty-seven.”

“You poor man. That poor woman. That poor girl. Oh, I am so, so sorry.”

There are tears shining in her eyes and I look at her, really wishing that I could feel some genuine gratitude for this sympathy.

But it’s difficult to take her show of compassion seriously when under her leather coat she is dressed for another night picking up strange men at the Basildon Mecca. French Connection T-shirt, pastel-colored miniskirt, high heels that leave little dents in the wooden floor of my new flat. I wonder what we are doing here. Then I remember.

“You want to study A Level English Literature.”

Her pretty, painted face brightens.

“If I can just get this one subject, I can go back to school. Put it with the two I’ve got already. French and Media Studies. I told you. Go to the University of Greenwich. Get my BA. Get a good job. Stop cleaning the floors of art galleries in Cork Street and language schools on Oxford Street.”

“Why does it have to be the University of Greenwich? It’s not exactly Oxford or Cambridge, is it?”

“Because that’s my plan,” she says. “You’ve got to have a plan. I’ve got an acceptance letter and everything. I was doing so well at school. I really was. But then I had to give it all up.”

“For personal reasons. You told me that too.”

“Now I’m going to have another go.”

“Okay. Sit down, will you?”

She looks around. There’s nowhere to sit. I pull up a couple of chairs either side of a large packing case.

“The core of English Literature works from a very concrete base. The subject is very specific about the basis of study.” I tick them off my fingers. “One prose work. One work of poetry. One work of drama. And one Shakespeare play. In the end, you need to learn two things to pass this subject. To read and to write.”

“To read and to write. Okay. Fine. Good. Yes.”

“That is, you need to understand the text and then demonstrate your understanding of the text. That’s the essence of this subject.”

I know my lines.

This is a speech that I remember from the dark days at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys, although by the time that A Levels came around, most of my students had graduated to the technical college of life.

My door bell rings.

“Excuse me,” I say.

“Oh, that’ll be for me,” says Jackie Day.

“What?”

“I think it’s my daughter.”

Daughter? What daughter?

Together Jackie and I go out of the flat and down to the front door of the house. An enormous great lump of a girl is standing outside. It’s difficult to judge her age. She hides her face behind a curtain of greasy brown hair. Her clothes are as dark and shapeless as Jackie’s are tight and bright.

“Say hello to Mr. Budd,” says Jackie Day.

The lump says nothing. Behind the unwashed veil of her fringe, a pair of bright-blue eyes swivel briefly toward me and then turn away with shyness or contempt or something.

She has a fistful of magazines in her hand. They feature men in masks and spandex grimacing and grunting and climbing on top of each other. At first I think this awful child has hard-core pornography in her possession. But then I see that the magazines are about some grotesque new kind of wrestling. In a daze, I return to my flat, Jackie and the lump following behind me, Jackie all happy chatter and questions as they come up the stairs, the lump replying with monosyllabic grunts. Although there is no physical resemblance between them, there is no doubt that they are mother and adolescent child.

The lump walks into my new apartment and looks around, clearly unimpressed.

“This is my girl,” says Jackie. “I hope you don’t mind if she sits quietly in a corner while we work.”

I stare at this woman dressed like she should be standing in an Amsterdam window lit by a single red light, and wonder why I ever allowed her into my life.

“Why do you think I gave up studying?” says Jackie, suddenly all defiant.