Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

“My parents. My teachers. My ex-husband. That bastard. But I thought you were going to be different.” She looks at me carefully. “I don’t know why. I thought I saw something in you. Some spark of decency. Or something.”

I find myself hoping that she’s right. “Jackie-”

“You don’t like the way I dress.”

“The way you dress has got nothing to do with me.”

“I’ve seen you looking at me. Down your nose. The Essex girl. I know.”

“I couldn’t care less how you dress.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something, mister.” Her voice is shaking now. “I think the way I dress is pretty. I think the way I dress is nice. What’s so great about the way you dress? Like some old tramp, you are.”

“I’ve never been much of a snappy dresser.”

“No kidding. You look like you should be sleeping in a doorway. You know what your problem is, Alfie? You think you’re the only person that anything bad ever happened to.”

“That’s not true.”

“I’m sorry your wife died. Rose. I really am. But don’t blame me.”

“I don’t blame you. I don’t blame anybody.”

“You blame the world. I know all about your hard life. You want to hear about my hard life? You want to hear about a man who got me pregnant when I was doing really well at school? The same man who knocked me around every time he got pissed for the next ten rotten years? You want to hear about any of that?”

I don’t say a word. There’s nothing I can say. There are tears of defiance in her eyes.

“I’m going to get this exam, mate. With or without you. I’m going to put it with the two I’ve got already and I’m going to the University of Greenwich to get my BA. It’s not Oxford or Cambridge, you’re right. But that’s my dream. You can sneer at it if you want. It’s still my dream.”

“I’m not sneering.”

“And when I’ve got my degree, my daughter and I are going to have a better life than the one we’ve got at the moment. That’s my plan. If you can’t help me-if going around breaking some poor foreign girl’s heart is more important than that-then I don’t know what you are, but you’re certainly not much of a teacher. And not much of a man.”

We stare at each other for a long time. Behind her, the launch party is in full swing. All those overpaid, overeducated people talking too loudly. And I realize that what she thinks matters to me.

“I wish I could help, Jackie. I really do.”

“But you can. You can make a difference. You don’t believe it, do you? You think the world is out of your control. You can’t imagine the changes you can make in someone’s life. It’s not too late for you, Alfie. You can still be one of the good guys.”

I don’t know what comes over me.

“I’ll see you Tuesday night then,” I say.

Now how did that happen?

G EORGE TEACHES ME TAI CHI in three stages.

First I learn the movement, carefully attempting to replicate his unhurried grace, although I often feel I must look like a drunk mimicking a ballet dancer. But I am starting to see that every single move has its purpose.

Next I learn to put the breathing to the movement, inhaling and exhaling as instructed, slowly filling my lungs and just as slowly emptying them. It is like learning to breathe again.

And finally and most important I learn-what? To relax? To do something without making excessive effort? To be in the moment and only in the moment? I don’t know.

As I try to clear my mind and calm my heart, to forget about the world that is waiting for me beyond this little patch of grass, I am not even sure what he is teaching me.

But it feels as if it has got something to do with letting go.

It is near midnight now and the hospital ward is as dark and silent as it gets, for this place is never completely dark and never totally silent. There is always a kind of twilight because of the lights blazing through the night in the nurses’ office at the entrance to the ward and there are always the sounds of distant voices, the creak of trolleys being wheeled across polished floors, the murmur of disturbed sleep, the soft sighs of pain.

When my nan is sleeping, I watch her face for a while and then leave the ward to find my father. He is in the hospital canteen, a half-eaten sandwich and a cold cup of coffee in front of him.

My old man comes to the hospital every day, but he is not good at sitting by his mother’s bedside. He likes to feel that he is doing something useful, so he jumps up and talks to the doctors about my nan’s progress, asking how she is doing, working out when she will be able to go home, or he runs endless errands to the hospital shop to get her the little things she suddenly discovers she needs.

He would rather be off buying her another bottle of orange cordial-she refuses to drink plain water, even when I tell her that it has been filtered through the glacial sands of the French Alps-than sitting by her bed. He can’t just be with her. He doesn’t feel as if he is doing enough.

“Is your grandmother asleep?”

I nod. “I think she’s still getting a lot of pain from that tube in her side. But she doesn’t complain.”

“That generation never does. They don’t know how to whine. That began with my lot.”

“Anyway. They’ve nearly got all the fluid off her lungs. So she’ll be home soon.”

“Yes.”

“And how are you?”

He looks surprised at the question. “I’m all right. A bit tired. You know.”

“You don’t have to come here every day. Mum and I can take care of her. If you’re busy. If you’ve got a lot of work to do.”

He sort of laughs and I know that he is still not writing. “Work’s not the problem it once was. But thanks for the offer, Alfie.”

I am thinking of the night I saw him in the Bar Italia, dressed in his John Travolta drag.

“How’s Lena?”

“I haven’t seen her for a while.”

“You haven’t seen her?”

“She walked out.”

“I thought she was going to be your PA. I thought she was going to be your wife.”

“It didn’t work out as planned.”

“What happened?”

“It wasn’t the same. It can’t be the same, can it? Not the same as when you are stealing the odd hour here and there.” He looks up at me. “The odd night in hotels. Away for the weekend.”

Business trips, I think. All those business trips.

“It’s exciting,” he says. “It’s romantic. But it’s not the same when you’re living together and the boiler is on the blink. When one of you has to put the rubbish out. I couldn’t quite get used to the idea that the girl in those hotel rooms was the same girl who told me that we needed a plumber.”

“But sooner or later we all have trouble with our pipes. And you knew it wouldn’t be the same. Come on. You must have known that.”

“I guess so. I’m old enough to know better, aren’t I?”

“What do you think?”

“It was more of a disappointment for her. She thought she had landed this-I don’t know-this older man. Mature. Sophisticated. A couple of bob in his pocket.”

“The author of Oranges for Christmas. Mr. Sensitive Bollocks.”

“And then he’s sitting around the house all day staring at his computer screen, and he doesn’t like the same music as her-in fact, he thinks the music she likes sounds like a burglar alarm-and he doesn’t want to go dancing in the kind of clubs where people wear their rings in their belly buttons. Then you don’t seem like an older man. You just seem like an old man.”

“Is she still in the flat?”

He shakes his head. “She moved in with some guy from Wimbledon she met at Towering Inferno. On the night I saw you. Christ, she was all over him.”