Tony Parsons: One For My Baby

“What can he do? She’s his wife. Has to listen to her. Not in China anymore.”

“But this is so hard for you, George. You and Joyce. Not just because of all the extra work. Not just because you’ll miss the children. It’s your family that’s being broken up.”

“Families change. My wife and I, we have to understand. My son, his wife, their children-that’s a new family. A family comes apart and then comes together as something else. Muswell Hill-I don’t know. Never been. Hear it’s nice place. I like it here just fine. But maybe it’s a good idea for them. And their family.”

George Chang stares beyond the trees, as if thinking about the clean streets of Muswell Hill and Chinese restaurants where no drunk ever threatens to punch you in the cake hole. A future he can’t quite imagine. Then he turns back to me and smiles.

“That’s the funny thing about family,” he says. “Even the best family is not set in stone.”

Churchill’s karaoke is in a small rented room in the back of a Japanese restaurant in Soho.

My students all pile into this tiny box with no windows as the man who runs the restaurant, who is not Japanese but Cantonese, hooks up the karaoke machine. The Chinese and Japanese students devour the song menus, Yumi and Hiroko and Gen and Zeng, looking for the songs they want to sing, while the rest of us, Witold and Vanessa and Astrud and Imran, Hamish and Lenny and myself, order drinks and wonder how we can get through this thing as painlessly as possible. We glance at the song menu. We are in a universe where Take That are considered golden oldies.

Yumi and Hiroko and Gen are delighted with the menu, because it is full of Japanese favorites, but Zeng is bitterly disappointed that there are no Chinese standards, even though the owner is Cantonese. He sees this as a national humiliation, on a par with the Opium War, but cheers up after a while and sings a spirited version of “Do It to Me One More Time,” which we all agree is better than Britney’s original.

The Japanese, that exquisitely reserved tribe, sing without any shyness at all, and I see that Hamish is right: karaoke is an outlet for emotion in a society where emotions are not encouraged to spill out all over the place, a society on the other side of the planet where they still expect their people to maintain a stiff upper lip.

Yumi has a sweet strong voice, and although Hiroko doesn’t sing so well, she puts a lot of emotion into it and is reluctant to relinquish the microphone. In the end it has to be pried out of her hands. Yumi and Hiroko both sing the same sweet song, “Can You Celebrate?” by Namie Amuro.

“Japanese Madonna,” Yumi tells me.

“Very popular for wedding,” says Hiroko.

Those of us who are not Japanese or Chinese can’t match that East Asian total lack of inhibition at the mike, but after an ensemble version of Abba’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You” we loosen up a little. Lenny does a spirited if grotesque version of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” and Hamish performs such a moving version of Bronski Beat’s “Small-town Boy” that even Lenny the Lech listens in respectful silence. Then it is my turn.

I usually stick to Elvis at the karaoke. With Elvis, you can sink into this mock-trembling baritone and warble your way through “Can’t Help Falling in Love” or “Always on My Mind” or “Love Me Tender” without feeling like a complete idiot. Elvis is easy.

But today I go for a touch of Sinatra, the one where the guy is in a bar that is just about to close, and he has a story that he desperately needs to share. “One for My Baby.”

You’d never know it

But, buddy, I’m a kind of poet.

It’s a line that always reminds me of my dream, that dream I had in some other lifetime to try to make my small mark upon this world. To do what my father had done before me. To be a writer. Long ago and far away, that was my dream.

No, I think to myself, looking at all the shining faces of my students. That wasn’t a dream.

That was a plan.

Jackie sails through her exam. Grade A. She has her place at a university. And I am proud of her and sad all at the same time. She doesn’t need me anymore.

She wants to take me out to dinner to celebrate, and I tell her that I’ll buy her dinner at the Shanghai Dragon. But she says that this one is on her and she wants to go somewhere in the center of town, this little Italian restaurant in Covent Garden, where she has heard they have live music. When we get there the live music turns out to be a problem. There’s only an accordion, two guitars and a middle-aged singer, but they perform with the volume turned up to eleven.

The band wanders among the red-and-white-check tablecloths belting out “Volare,” “In Napoli” and “That’s Amore,” and you can hardly hear yourself think. But it’s one of those nights when the niggling little details can’t spoil it for you.

Jackie has gotten her exam. Her dream is intact.

“What happens now?” I say. Shout, really.

“I’m winding up Dream Machine,” she shouts back. “I figure I’ve spent enough time on my knees. When term starts I’ll find some part-time job that doesn’t get in the way of my studies. Then I’ll get my degree.” She raises her glass of red wine. “And then I’ll live happily ever after.”

“When will I see you again?”

She shakes her head, and at first I think she hasn’t heard me.

But she has heard me all right.

The band approaches our table, bows and immediately starts banging out an old Dean Martin number, “Return to Me,” although the singer is singing “Ritorna-me.” Jackie and I just stare at each other. It’s too loud to talk anymore. Then she starts to laugh, just throws back her lovely head and laughs in that way she has, and soon I’m laughing too, but I still want the band to stop.

“Please, boys,” I say. “She’s my student. I’m her teacher. Please respect the sanctity of the student-teacher relationship. Knock it off, okay? Boys?”

But they don’t care. They keep on playing “Return to Me” as if we were lovers. No, not lovers.

It’s more than that. As if we were together.

“WHEN WILL I SEE YOU AGAIN?” I bellow.

But the band has suddenly stopped playing.

And I find I am shouting my head off in a restaurant that is completely silent.

“W INE, WOMEN AND WEED,” Josh sighs, as we wait for our flight to Amsterdam to start boarding. “Hash cafés. Red lights. Blue movies. One last adventure before I settle down with my beautiful new wife.”

For Josh’s stag party in Amsterdam, we meet at the British Airways check-in desk late on Friday afternoon, Josh and me and around a dozen of his friends from work, all of them still in their suits from a day in the office and jabbering with nervous excitement about spending a night in old Amsterdam.

It is only a forty-minute flight from London to Schiphol Airport and soon we are checked into our hotel and wandering the tree-lined canals with tall town houses reflected in the water, the compact streets full of bicycles, the sickly sweet smell of hashish and marijuana drifting from the coffee shops.

At first it is all quite sedate. Josh has booked a big table at a good Indonesian restaurant and we eat dinner there. His friends are loud but friendly, not the drooling go-getting morons that I was fearing, and the mood as we head into the night is almost what the Dutch call gezellig. Cosy.

But after dinner it starts to go downhill, and it’s not cosy at all.

“Wait until you see this place, Alfie,” Josh tells me as we flag down a few taxis. “Tonight you are going to be fucked blind, old sport.”

“That’s a good thing, is it? Where exactly are we going?” I am starting to get a bad feeling about all this.