Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

And I look at her surly, nameless lump of a daughter leafing through a wrestling magazine and think to myself: why do you think I gave up teaching?

W HEN I SEE HIROKO waiting for me outside Churchill’s, I remember this thing I once read in an advice-to-the-lovelorn column about the person who holds the power in any relationship.

The sob sister reckoned that the person with the power is always the one who cares less. And as Hiroko looks up at me with her open, hopeful smile, I see the wisdom of that sob sister.

There’s no reason why I should have any power over Hiroko. She is younger than me, smarter than me, prettier than me. She’s also a lot nicer than me. Whichever way you slice it, Hiroko is a far better bet than me.

But Hiroko cares more than I do. So in the end everything else-her looks, her youth, her niceness-doesn’t matter.

“I haven’t seen much of you, Alfie.”

“I’ve been really busy.”

“How’s your grandmother?”

“Still in the hospital. They’re doing tests on her while they drain some fluid off her lungs. But she’s made friends with all the other old girls on her ward.”

“She’s always so cheerful.”

“I think she’ll be okay.”

“Good. Well. Do you want to get some lunch later?”

“Lunch? Well, I’ve got to see Hamish about something at lunch.”

“Dinner?”

See, it was okay for her to suggest lunch. That was perfectly reasonable. But going for dinner too made her seem desperate and made me feel cornered. Dinner pushed me to the point of no return.

“Hiroko, I really think we need to give each other a bit of space right now.”

“A bit of space?”

She starts crying. Not the kind of tears that are meant to blackmail you. Not the kind of tears that are meant to make you back down, change your mind or offer concessions. Not the kind of tears that are meant to make you give in about dinner. Just tears.

“You’re a great girl, Hiroko.”

And it’s true. She is a great girl. She has never treated me with anything but sweetness. What’s gone wrong with me? Why can’t I be happy with this woman?

There’s never an agony uncle around when you need one.

The bad news at Churchill’s is that there has been a bit of a sex scandal involving one of the teachers. Lisa Smith has got smoke coming out of her ears, the students are all talking about it and we have even had a couple of uniformed cops on the premises, sniffing around and asking questions, as if the incident is just the tip of a very dirty iceberg.

The good news is that it has absolutely nothing to do with me.

Hamish has been arrested for his conduct in a public lavatory on Highbury Fields. I actually know the place, funnily enough-it’s one of those public toilets where, if you go in for a quick pee, all the guys in there think that you are some kind of sick pervert.

Anyway, Hamish has been arrested for lewd and indecent behavior because late one night he reached for what he imagined was some willing, perfect stranger and it turned out to be a policeman’s nightstick. Now the poor bastard is watching his world unravel. I take him for a drink at the Eamon de Valera.

“I feel like I’m in danger of losing everything,” he says. “My family, my flat, my sanity. Just for a quick jerk-off. It hardly seems fair. It hardly seems like justice.”

“How’s old Smith taking it?”

“She says she will have to see if the police are going to press charges. I’m not so worried about her. I can always get another job as badly paid as this one. I’m more worried about my parents. And my partner. It’s his flat we live in. If he gets rough…I don’t know what will happen.”

“Wait a minute. Your partner knows you don’t go over to Highbury Fields at midnight for a game of tennis. Or what?”

“I told him I’d given it up. The cruising thing. It upsets him.”

“Ah.”

“My mum and dad will be even worse. They’ll go crazy. Especially my father. Christ. He was in the Govan shipyards for forty years. When he finds out I’m what he calls ‘bent,’ he’ll never speak to me again.”

“Hold on. Your parents don’t know you’re gay? Your parents don’t know? Jesus, Hamish.”

“I come from the East End of Glasgow. We haven’t quite caught up with London. Not that there’s much difference between Glasgow and London, in the final analysis. You come to this city thinking it’s going to be so totally free and easy. Then you find out that in its own sweet way, this place is as repressed as anywhere.”

I feel sorry for Hamish, so I don’t tell him what I’m thinking. Which is: how can you have a private life when you take it into a public toilet?

And he’s wrong about London. There are some bad things about my city, but the best thing is that you can be anything you like here, anything at all. As long as you keep it away from the policeman’s flashlight, of course.

But you are free to invent your own life, I think to myself, watching Olga struggling to pull a pint at the other end of the bar.

You just have to be a bit discreet.

Sometimes I think that love is a case of mistaken identity.

It’s like Hiroko and me. She sees someone else when she looks at me-someone decent and good, someone she wants me to be. An English gentleman. David Niven. Alec Guinness. Hugh Grant. Someone I’m not and could never be.

Or it’s like Hamish and his partner. Hamish’s boyfriend probably likes to believe that Hamish really wants a serious, monogamous relationship. That he wants to go shopping in Habitat on Saturdays and give small, stylish dinner parties and sit around listening to Broadway musicals on CD and be faithful to only one partner. But that’s just another case of mistaken identity.

What Hamish wants is to go to public places and have sex with people whose names he will never know. That means more to him than anything. His partner just can’t see it. His partner doesn’t want to see it.

Does that still count? Is that still real? When you don’t know the other person at all?

For as long as I can remember, my nan has had a profound loathing of doctors. She always seemed to believe that she was locked in a never-ending battle for her freedom with the medical profession. My nan wanted to stay in her home. The doctors-“the quacks,” my nan called them, even the ones she liked-wanted to steal her away and lock her up in a hospital where she would be left to die.

But now she is actually in a hospital bed, my nan is showing signs of going over to the other side. She thinks her doctors deserve a raise, believes her nurses should be on television.

“They’re as pretty as weather girls,” says my nan. High praise indeed.

As my mother, Joyce Chang and I sit around her bed, my nan regales us with stories about the characters she has met in here. The nurse who “should be a model, she’s that lovely.” The old woman-younger than her-in the next bed who (this whispered) is “not right in the head, the poor old thing.” The Indian doctor who has told her that she will soon be “fit as a fiddle.” The orderly who is a flirt, the nurse who is a miserable cow, the elderly patient in the bed opposite who is her friend, who she has a right laugh with, who she will see for tea when they are finally set free. My nan doesn’t stop talking. She seems almost giddy with exuberance. Are they slipping something into her cream of tomato soup?

She seems happier than she has been for a long time, despite the squat, ugly machine on the floor by her bed that has a long thin tube rising out of it, slipping under the white gown that makes her look like an ancient angel, the tube piercing her side under that white gown, burrowing deep into her body, slowly draining the buildup of fluid from her clogged, breathless lungs.