Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

“You kept your baby. And it-she-messed up everything.”

She shakes her head. “No, it didn’t. Not really. It just put things on hold for a while. I’m going back to college, aren’t I? Thanks to you.”

“You never regretted it? Having the baby?”

“I can’t imagine a world without my girl in it.”

“She’s lucky to have a mum like you.”

“And she’s unlucky to have a dad like her dad. So I guess it all evens out in the end.”

“What’s wrong with her dad?”

“Jamie? There’s not a lot wrong with him when he’s sober. When he’s had a few, things happen. Usually to me. But he started on Plum, so we left. Two years ago. Got this place. I didn’t recognize him by then.”

“You must have liked him once.”

“You kidding? I was nuts about him. My Jamie. Tall, dark, built like a brick house. He was a good little footballer. Midfield. A good engine, as they say. Very fit. Had a chance of turning professional. Trials with West Ham. Then he did his knee in. The left one. So now he works as a security guard. And gets pissed. And knocks around his new partner. But not me. Not anymore. And not my daughter.”

“Why did you leave it for so long? I don’t mean leaving your husband, leaving Jamie. The education thing. Why wait? If it was so important to you, why didn’t you do it years ago?”

“Jamie didn’t want me to. I think he was a bit jealous. He didn’t want my dream to come true when his dream didn’t. Men are very competitive, aren’t they? Another word for simple. My ex-husband wants the world to have a bad knee.”

“Well, we’ll get you through your exam.” I raise my coffee cup in salute. “And I hope it makes you happy.”

She raises her own cup. “You think it won’t. You think I’m expecting some student paradise that doesn’t really exist. Beautiful young people sitting around talking about The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. And you don’t think it’s like that. You think it’s all a waste of time. Qualifications. Education. Getting my exams, as my old mum would have said. But it wasn’t a waste of time for Rose, was it?”

“Rose?”

“She came from out here, didn’t she?”

“Not far away.”

“If she hadn’t got an education, you would never have met her. If she hadn’t gone to university and become a lawyer and gone to Hong Kong, you would never have known her. If she had had a baby at eighteen with someone else-don’t look at me like that-then what would your life have been like?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without knowing her.”

“You were mad about her, weren’t you?”

“I still am. But what can you do? I loved and lost. I’ve had my turn.”

“Your turn?”

“My turn at-come on, you know. Love. Romance. Relationships. All that stuff.”

She shakes her head. “Well, I don’t think I’ve had my turn. Not after Jamie. Are you kidding? I reckon I deserve a second turn after that lot. I reckon everyone deserves a second go at being happy. Even you, Alfie. You should have a little more faith.”

“A little more faith?”

“That’s right. A little more faith. Don’t be like my ex-husband. Don’t sit around wishing that everyone had a bad knee.”

“I just think you get one chance-one real chance-then it’s gone forever. I don’t think that you can go around starting over again and again. That’s not the real thing, is it? How can it be the real thing if it comes along every few years or so? That makes a mockery of the real thing.”

“Maybe. But come on. What else are you going to do with the rest of your life? You don’t have to stick with your students just because you know they’re going home one day. You don’t have to stick with young women who can’t really hurt you.”

“Is that what you think I do?”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You’re not very smart for a teacher, are you?”

“I’m one of the stupid teachers.”

“Yeah, it shows.”

I watch Jackie washing up our cups in the sink and I think: perhaps she’s right. I don’t want to be like someone’s bitter ex-husband.

I should have a little more faith.

A BABY IS LOOKING AT ME.

The baby is as bald and round as a billiard ball, a half-pint-sized Winston Churchill in a pink bodysuit, a thin stream of drool coming from the corner of its pouty little mouth. The baby looks brand new. Everything about it-her? How do you tell? Just by the color of the bodysuit?-looks freshly minted.

The baby is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. And it is watching me. Because it knows. The baby can tell.

Those huge blue eyes follow me as I move slowly toward the hospital’s reception desk. I stop and stare back at the beautiful baby, overwhelmed by its perception.

The baby can see into my heart. The baby can read my mind. The baby knows the terrible thing I have done, the unspeakable act I put on my credit card.

The baby can’t believe it.

I can’t believe it myself.

The baby is surrounded by happy, laughing adults, parents and siblings and grandparents by the look of them, people happy to see the baby, meet it for the first time perhaps, but the baby ignores them all and just kicks its limbs as if it is testing them for the first time; the baby does nothing but lie there and flex its new little arms and legs and watch me, watch me with this terrible accusation.

“You all right, love?”

I nod uncertainly, tearing myself away from the baby, taking my nan’s arm.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about today,” she says.

I reassure her that this is just a checkup, that she has been through the worst, that the fluid is off her lungs and this appointment will soon be over and she will be free. And I truly believe it. But it doesn’t work out like that.

First we are directed to a small waiting area that is so crowded we have to stand. Most of the people here are old and frail, but not all of them; there are young people with no luck who have ended up here fifty years before their time, and it is one of these unlucky young people, a dangerously overweight woman, who gets up to offer my nan her seat.

What everyone waiting here shares is a kind of gentle cynicism. They deal with the indignity and anxiety of this place with little jokes, knowing smiles and endless patience. We are in this thing together, they seem to say, and I feel a rush of love for these people. It is no surprise that my nan acts as though she knows them. They remind me of everyone I grew up with.

Eventually we see the specialist, a doctor whose name my nan has difficulty with, so she always calls him “that nice Indian gentleman,” although I have no idea if he is really an Indian; his name could just as easily be from some other part of the world, and he is a good man, I like him a lot too, so we don’t even complain or roll our eyes or sigh when he immediately tells my nan that he would like her to go and have an X-ray and get a blood test and then come back to him later.

More waiting. More standing room only. Another little ticket that you hold on to until your number appears after a wait that seems never ending.

The blood test is easy enough. I go into the little room with my nan, watch her roll up the sleeve of her blue Marks & Spencer sweater and stare at the needle with a childlike curiosity as the nurse slips it into her pale, papery skin. The nurse sticks a Band-Aid on top of the bubbling pinprick of blood and we are out of there.

I can’t accompany my nan into the X-ray department. People have to get undressed in there, my nan has to get undressed, and so of course I stay in the waiting room while she goes inside to get changed. But the terrible thing is she gets a little confused after she undresses for the X-ray, and I can see her standing in the middle of the corridor of the X-ray department in her hospital smock, and what really does me in is that she hasn’t fastened her smock at the back, she has left it open, so the world can see her poor old back and legs, those bones so delicate they always remind me of a baby bird, and I want to protect her, I want to do up her smock and find out where she needs to go, but I can’t, I am not allowed in there, and she wouldn’t want me in there, wouldn’t want me to see her not coping, with half her clothes off, so she just stands there half-naked in the X-ray department, looking around, her face frowning with confusion, when all she wants is to be at home with Frank Sinatra and the National Lottery and a nice cup of tea, not much to ask for, until a friendly nurse with a loud, cheerful voice sees her and points her in the right direction.