Tony Parsons: One For My Baby

“Is this guy coming on to you?” I demand one day when my mother and I are alone. “This guy Julian?”

My mother laughs like a teenager.

“Julian? Coming on to me? What does that mean? Is it the same as making eyes at someone?”

“You know exactly what it means, Mum. You know more teen lingo than I ever will. Thanks to Nelson Mandela. And your kids.”

“Of course he’s not coming on to me. I talk to him for hours. About the garden.”

“He looks at you.”

“What?” She’s enjoying this.

“As if he fancies you or something.”

And I am both happy and appalled. I am glad that my mother has not shut herself away from the world. But I can’t pretend that I relish the idea of her going out on dates, or of some rugged old Kiwi roughly sinking his fingers into her top soil.

“Has he asked you out or anything?”

“Asked me out? You mean, to dinner or the cinema or something like that?”

“Yes.”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet? But you think he might? You think he might get around to it?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“But if you say not yet, that implies that it’s going to happen, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so, darling.”

“I’ve seen him looking at you, Mum. Jesus Christ.” Is that a hoe in his combat trousers or is he just glad to see her? “I think he’s definitely going to get around to it.”

My mother reaches across the table and touches my hand. She is not laughing at me anymore. She is sort of smiling, very gently.

“Don’t worry, darling,” she says. “I’m over all that.”

She doesn’t mean that she’s over going out to dinner or going to the cinema. She means she’s over sex, romance, relationships and all that. I’m not so sure.

The older I get, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that we are never over all that.

My father’s little rented flat feels like a place where a man lives alone. There’s no sense of two lives mixed and shared. There are no traces left of Lena.

I go around to see him once a week these days. The flat is a bit small to hang out in, so we usually go around the corner to a little Chinese restaurant where they really know how to cook Peking duck and where the waiters all have these strong London accents.

I look at these kids with their faces from China and their voices from Finchley, and it feels to me that these days the world is just one place.

My father’s flat is not so sad now. I asked him once what had finally gone wrong with him and Lena. He said that she wanted to go out dancing and he wanted to watch the golf on Sky. Now nobody can stop him watching the golf on Sky. It’s not much, being able to watch the golf on Sky, perhaps not what he was hoping, but it must count for something.

He can play his music as loud as he likes. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Diana Ross and the Supremes. There’s nobody left to tell him that he’s out of time. “Baby, baby, baby-where did our love go?” He still loves all of that.

And he spends hours sorting through the boxes of photographs that we found at my grandmother’s flat.

All those shoe boxes, those cracked and torn photo albums from the forties and fifties with English fishing villages on the front, the ones from the sixties and seventies with drawings of platform-booted babes on the cover.

Some of the faces in these photographs are still a mystery. Some of them are as familiar as his own face. But those familiar faces have their own special mystery. And he stares at them for a long time, wondering about them, and wondering how he got from those crowded streets in the East End to this quiet place on a green hill in north London. Quiet apart from Smokey Robinson and the Supremes.

He is not writing. He still hasn’t got around to that. But as I watch him surrounded by all those memories of his parents and the house where he grew up, all the bits and pieces of a life that is long gone but somehow sticks with him, a life that will never really leave him, I think that perhaps he will start writing again very soon.

Because my father has realized that if he is going to carry on, then he is going to have to go right back to the very beginning.

As soon as I get to the edge of the park, I see George.

He is completely alone. There are no posers from the great financial houses of the city rambling on about reducing stress and thinking outside the box. No hippies with tofu for brains in bicycle clips and sandals who think they can learn the Tao in two easy lessons. And no me. We have all deserted him. All the big-nosed pinkies with good intentions. He is as alone as the day I first saw him.

In his hand is a double-edged sword, red and white ribbons trailing from its hilt. I stand and watch George Chang practice his weapons form.

He suddenly stands on one leg, passes the sword from one hand to the other behind his back, spins around with impossible speed and grace, brings the sword sweeping down over his head, the red and white ribbons wrapping around his neck for just a second, then drops to his knees, stands again with the sword poised at the throat of an imaginary enemy, and it’s as if his movements are all blurring into one fluid movement and the sword is spinning silver in his hands.

And I wish that Plum could see this. I feel that, in some way I don’t quite understand, George Chang is what she has been looking for all her life.

The Slab made glorious flesh and blood.

When he has finished I approach him. I feel guilty. Perhaps the rest of them can let their Tai Chi lessons fizzle out with a clear conscience, but I feel bad about it.

“Sorry I haven’t seen you for a while, George. I’ve been so busy. What with the exams and everything.”

He nods curtly, but there is no accusation or resentment in the gesture. It’s as if my disappearance from the park is only what is to be expected from a big-nosed pinky.

And as I watch him putting his sword in its long leather carry-case, because you can’t walk through the streets of north London toting a double-edged sword, I suddenly realize why I wanted to learn Tai Chi from this man. It had little to do with stress management or losing weight or learning to breathe properly. And despite the sense that the act of pushing hands made of my world, my life, my future, it didn’t even have much to do with learning to accept change.

I wanted to be like him.

It was as pure as that.

Calm without being passive. Strong without being aggressive. A family man without being a couch potato. A decent heart in a healthy body. Those were the lessons that I wanted George Chang to teach me, because I knew I would never learn them from my real father.

“Busy time for me too,” he says, as if reading my mind. “My son and his wife moving out. Many arrangements to make.”

I can’t believe what I am hearing. If there was one thing I never doubted about the Changs, it was that their little family was unbreakable. And more than anything, I wanted a family just like that. Unbreakable.

“Harold and Doris are leaving the Shanghai Dragon?”

George nods. “My son’s wife think too rough around here. Lots of drunks. Making pee-pee in doorways and fighting. Lots of lovely houses, big money, but also some rubbish people. Not a good place to raise children, thinks my son’s wife.” He nods in the vague direction of suburbia. “Wants to move out to maybe Muswell Hill or Cricklewood. Open their own restaurant. Nice new schools for Diana and William. Nobody making pee-pee in doorways or threatening to punch you in the cake hole.”

I am stunned. “And Harold is going along with all this, is he? Muswell Hill and new schools for the kids? Leaving the Shanghai Dragon? He just agrees to the lot of it, does he?”