Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

“Nan,” I say. “Do you remember? It was me who put your numbers into the new phone. It wasn’t Granddad, was it?”

She stares at me for a long time. Then a dim light seems to switch on somewhere inside her brain and she shakes her head angrily. But I don’t know if she thinks that it’s her who has got it wrong. Or me.

It is becoming hard for Plum to be around her. My nan chats about brothers who died long ago, she talks about her husband coming to see her, she goes back even further-to her own mother and father, to the daughter who died as a tiny child, my dad’s sister, pneumonia, happened all the time back then, a death that gave a lot of emotional clout to the first chapter of Oranges for Christmas.

My nan talks about the dead as if they are living, as if they are all still around, and Plum is not quite thirteen, her life has just begun, she has no experience of death, and she doesn’t know what to think, what to do. I don’t feel so very different from Plum.

“It freaks me out, Alfie. She talks about them as if they’re real.”

“Maybe they are, Plum. To her. I don’t know.”

So Plum goes off to catch the last train back to the suburbs, back to Bansted, and I sit with my nan, holding her hand until she falls asleep, although by now sleep can come in the middle of the day or not at all, day and night mean less and less.

We play the old songs on the stereo, Sinatra and Dino and little Sammy in all their pomp and glory, so full of life and love those anthems from the fifties, so full of hope and joy, and the ghosts softly gather around my grandmother’s bed, the brothers lost, the husband gone, the dead child, the friends of long ago, her mother and her father, all of them slowly becoming more real than the living.

To my surprise, I find that I am dreading the day when Jackie sits her exam. At first I think it is because she has awakened some long-dormant passion for teaching. But it’s far more than that. What she has awakened in me is the quiet pleasure you feel in the company of someone you know and like and enjoy being around.

We sit there with our books, sometimes talking, sometimes saying nothing, sometimes arguing as though writing and writers are the most important thing in the world, and I realize that I have come to treasure every second in her presence. I remember how much I used to love it. Being together.

Jackie is the best of my students. Her mind is sharp, curious, challenging. She works hard, in class and on her own, and although her job means that her days often start early and finish late, she always gets her homework and course work delivered on time.

But she is the first student I have had since my years at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys to turn up for a lesson with a black eye.

“What happened to you?”

“I walked into something hard and thick.”

“A door?”

“My ex-husband.”

“Jesus Christ, Jackie, you should go to the police.”

“For a domestic? You kidding? The police are not interested in a domestic.”

“It’s not a domestic. How can it be a domestic? You’re not even married anymore.”

“Jamie hasn’t realized that yet. He’s always hanging around. Outside the house. Following me.”

“Does he see Plum?”

“On and off. He’s more interested in who’s sleeping with me than my daughter. Our daughter. I’ve told him that nobody is sleeping with me. He doesn’t believe it.”

“He gave you a black eye because he thinks you’re sleeping with someone?”

She laughs bitterly. “He’s the jealous kind, my ex. Always feels sorry afterward. Says he only did it because he loves me. Because he’s crazy with jealousy. He thinks I should be flattered, he does. Flattered to be battered.”

“Who does he think you’re sleeping with?”

“Well…”

Someone rings my front door bell.

“Don’t answer that,” Jackie tells me.

“It’s not him, is it? He’s followed you here? He’s not jealous. He’s nuts.”

“Really, Alfie.” She seems frightened. I have never seen her frightened before. It infuriates me. I feel so angry with this man. “Don’t let him up here.”

“I’m not letting him up here.”

“Thank God. Just ignore him.”

“I’m going down to see him.”

“Alfie!”

But I am out of my flat and down the flight of stairs where I can see a broad, shadowy figure on the other side of the frosted glass. I throw back the front door and there he is-an athlete who has run to fat, still packing plenty of muscle although it is now larded with the aftereffects of too much junk food and designer beer. He must have been good-looking once-tall, dark, a little dangerous-looking. Handsome if not exactly pretty, back in the days when he was a boy wonder with a ball. But now life has made him bitter and mean. He looks like the worst kind of bouncer, the kind that actually wants you to step out of line.

Jackie’s Jamie.

Before I can open my mouth he has wrapped his hairy fingers around my windpipe and swung me into the street, pushing me backward into a little row of trash cans where I fall flat on my ass, getting stuck in this ridiculous sitting position as Jamie proceeds to whack me around the head with a trash can lid.

The Slab, I think to myself. Didn’t I see someone attack The Slab with a trash can lid? Didn’t No-Neck Toledo assault The Slab with a trash can lid at SuperSlam ’98? What would The Slab do in a situation like this? I can’t remember, for the life of me. So I just sit there, covering my head with my hands, my bum pulsating with pain.

“Stay away from my wife, you fucking bastard!” Jamie is screaming at me in the kind of London accent that you so rarely hear in London these days. “Stop giving her all these ideas about going back to fucking college! You with your books and stuff! You’re giving her all these ideas! And keep your fucking hands off her!”

The trash can lid pounds down on my arms and shoulders with a flat, metallic sound that has my neighbors leaning out of their windows, although they are not so concerned that they do anything more than watch. Jackie is hanging on to Jamie’s back, beating the side of his head with her fists, and I reflect that this is probably hurting him more than me. But I am the one who is being publicly shamed.

“You are so stupid!” Jackie shouts at him. “Teachers don’t sleep with their students!”

That’s not strictly true, of course, but I am touched by her efforts. I don’t know when he would ever have stopped if it wasn’t for Jackie.

“Just stay away from her,” he says, panting for breath. “And stop making her think that she’s something she’s not.”

Then he is gone and Jackie is helping me to my feet, brushing off the bits of pizza and egg fried rice and takeout curry that have somehow attached themselves to my clothes.

“You asked me what my marriage was like,” she says, indicating Jamie as he strides off down the street with his what-the-bleeding-hell-you-looking-at swagger. “That’s exactly what it was like.”

They talk about people bravely fighting cancer, but in the end the disease inflicts the ultimate cruelty. It doesn’t matter how brave you are. Cancer robs you of yourself.

“This is not me,” my nan says, as I help her to the bathroom. “This is not me.”

She is in pain, terrible pain, and although for so long she has fought this disease with humor and courage, her life is now narrowing down to a sharp edge of unbearable suffering.

She has never been a woman who is prone to self-pity, despair, fear, all the weak, dark thoughts that can make you jump at shadows. But now she clearly feels that it is becoming all too much, that she is fighting a battle that she can only lose, that her humor and bravery and stoicism are all meaningless because there can only be one ending to this thing.