Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

“No,” Jackie says. “There’s just me. Sometimes I get a friend in. If there’s extra work. But usually it’s just me.”

“Oh,” Jane says. “You’re Mrs. Mop.”

Then they are all laughing at Jackie, and she can’t do what they all do, she can’t laugh at herself and make it nothing, defuse the lonely moment, take the sting out of the words with the magic trick of just not caring; her life is too hard for her not to take it seriously, to take everything seriously, so she has to stand there going red while Jane and India and Josh and Dan and Jane’s four-eyed boyfriend all cackle with glee.

But then it passes, because I know there is no real harm in these people, except possibly Jane, and soon they are talking about the politics of housework and chore wars and feminism’s response to the fact that somebody has to clean toilets, all these half-chewed scraps of public debate that they have picked up from some Sunday tabloid that they skimmed through a redwine hangover. From here they glide effortlessly into a conversation about how difficult it is to hire someone you can trust to clean your home, but by now Jackie is pulling on my sleeve, her lovely face still burning.

“I want to leave.”

“You can’t leave.”

“Why not?”

“Because then they win.”

“They win anyway. They always win.”

We stay. But the night has gone flat for both of us. She makes half-hearted conversation only with people who approach her first. I retreat with her to a corner and make small talk about the prints on the wall, Tamsin’s ring, any rubbish that comes into my head. Just before we leave, when she goes off to the toilet, Josh pulls me to one side.

“I like her,” he says. “She’s nice.”

“I like her too.”

“But, my dear old Alfie, when are you going to get yourself a proper woman?”

“What does that mean? A proper woman?”

“It’s always-I don’t know-someone inappropriate. Your little harem of foreign girls. Very nice and all that. A different flavor for every day of the week. I’m not knocking it, mate. I’ve been in my fair share of foreign parts too, as you well know. But you cannot be serious, man. Not if you think you can make the hot and spicy stuff last a lifetime. It’s inappropriate. And now Mrs. Mop and her tickling stick.”

“Don’t call her that.”

“Sorry. But, come on, Alfie. When are you going to get real? She’s no Rose, is she?”

“I think Rose would have liked her. I think Rose would have thought she was funny and bright.”

“Oh, she’s horny enough, in an obvious sort of way. She is definitely wise to the rise in your Levis.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“But what’s so admirable about cleaning floors for a living? I mean, just because you’re poor, it doesn’t make you a good person, does it?”

“She’s bringing up a kid alone. A girl. Twelve years old. I think anyone who does that has got some guts.”

“She’s got a child? Then I think you’re the one with guts, Alfie. I wouldn’t go out with someone who was dragging around a reminder of the man that came before me. If you’ll pardon the expression.” He raises his champagne glass in mock salute. “You’re a better man than me.”

“I never doubted it, Josh.”

We laugh, but there is no warmth or humor in our laughter, and I wonder what I am doing in this place, with these people. Is it because I don’t have anywhere else to go? Or do I secretly want to join them, to be able to laugh that easily and chat that mindlessly and care so little about everything under the sun? Perhaps I shouldn’t be so scared of caring. Perhaps that has been my problem.

“What do you call it when a woman is paralyzed from the waist down?” says Dan.

“Marriage,” says Josh, and the room roars as Jackie and I leave the apartment.

She is silent in the back of the black cab on the way to Liverpool Street.

“I thought you were the best-looking woman there,” I say. “And the smartest.”

“Me too. So why do I feel so bad?”

I can’t answer that.

And I watch her back as she walks down the platform and gets on the train for the long ride out into Essex. She doesn’t turn around. But just as I am about to walk away, she sticks her head out of the window and waves, smiling, as if to say: don’t worry, they can’t hurt me for long, it’s going to be okay in the end.

She’s brave. She is. That’s exactly the word. Jackie is a brave woman.

Ah, I think to myself.

That could be her.

S OMETIMES I THINK THAT THE DEAD live in dreams. Heaven, the afterlife, the next world, whatever you want to call it-it’s all in our dreams.

After Rose died, I saw her in my dreams. Not often. Only a few times. But those dreams were so real that I will never forget them. They seemed as real as our wedding day, as real as the day we met, as real as the day she died.

And I still don’t know what to make of those dreams-were they just the product of loss and imagination and grief? Or was that really her? They didn’t feel like something that I had made up. They felt far more real than most of the waking days of my life.

In the dream that haunts me most of all, she was walking by this playing field called South Green near the streets where she was a little girl. Everything was exactly as I remembered it-Rose, South Green, the little string of quiet shops on one side of the gently sloping field. What was different was this wall of glass between us. It reached to the sky. It didn’t bother Rose, this wall of glass-or me-it didn’t stop her smiling that same warm, goofy smile. But it kept us apart, that wall of glass, and when I asked her if she could stay, her face crumpled and she started to cry, shaking her head.

She was happy enough. But she couldn’t stay. That made her sad.

And that made me believe that the dead live in our dreams.

Take Frank Sinatra. If you want to visit Sinatra’s grave, you have to go to Palm Springs in California, then you go to the Desert Memorial Park cemetery, and you will find that Frank is buried in Area B-8, lot 151.

I’ve never been. I’m not a big cemetery man. I haven’t even been to Rose’s grave since the funeral. I don’t think it would upset me, being at her graveside, in fact I think I would find it quite soothing, a trip out to that small church on a hill above the suburban neighborhood where she grew up. The reason I don’t go is not that it makes me sad or I can’t be bothered, it’s just that I don’t believe she’s really there, just as I don’t believe that Sinatra-his essence, his spark, the thing that made him the man he was-is in the Desert Memorial Park cemetery in Palm Springs. Sinatra is somewhere else. And so is Rose.

If you want to remember the dead-or rather if you want to see the dead, if you want to meet them, to see them smile, to reassure yourself that they are at peace now-then you have to look inside yourself. That’s where you will find them. That’s where the dead live.

My nan has started to see the dead in her dreams. What is a little bit scary is that sometimes she is awake when she has these dreams. She doesn’t need to sleep to see her remembered dead. They come to her anyway.

To make using the phone a little easier, I buy her this portable job and tap in all her most used numbers. My mum. My dad. Plum. Me. A few of her old ladies. The doctor’s office. And the next day she tells me that her husband has programmed the new phone, and wasn’t that good of him? My granddad, who has been dead for twelve years.

I don’t know what to do. Should I just humor her? Or gently remind her that her husband is long gone? I can’t let it go. I am afraid that she will slip away into madness if she can’t tell the difference between my grandfather and me.