Tony Parsons: One For My Baby

Copyright © 2001 by Tony Parsons

“You must eat the cold porridge,” he told me once.

It’s a Chinese expression. Cantonese, I guess, because although he carried an old-fashioned blue British passport and was happy to call himself an Englishman, he was born in Hong Kong and sometimes you could tell that all the important things he believed were formed long ago and far away. Like the importance of eating the cold porridge.

I stopped what I was doing and stared at him. What was he going on about now?

“Eat the cold porridge.”

The way he explained it, eating the cold porridge means working at something for so long that when you get home there is nothing left to eat but cold porridge.

And I thought-who did he share a flat with out there? Goldilocks and the Three Bears?

That’s how you get good at something, he told me. That’s how you get good at anything. You eat the cold porridge.

You work at it when the others are playing. You work at it when the others are watching television. You work at it when the others are sleeping.

To become the master of something, you must eat the cold porridge, Grasshopper.

Actually he never called me Grasshopper.

But I always felt that he might.

And I tried hard to understand. He was my teacher as well as my friend and I always tried to be a good student. I am trying today. But I can’t help it-somewhere along the line I took eating the cold porridge to mean something else. Something completely different from its Chinese meaning.

Somehow I got it into my thick head that eating the cold porridge means being in a time of suffering. Living through hard days, months and years because you have no choice.

I got the cold porridge of the East muddled up with the bitter pill of the West. Now I can’t tell them apart.

That’s not what he meant at all. He meant giving up comfort and pleasure for a greater good. He meant deferring gratification for some distant goal.

Eating cold porridge now so that you will have something better tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow. Or the day after that. It’s got nothing to do with Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

But I guess the concept of self-sacrifice is easier to grasp if you were born in one of the poorer parts of Kowloon. Where I come from, they don’t really go in for that kind of stuff.

Eating the cold porridge-to me it means enduring something that has to be endured. More than that, it means missing someone. Really missing someone.

The way I miss her.

But she is gone and she is not coming back.

I know that now.

I will never kiss her again. I am never going to wake up beside her again. I am never going to watch her sleeping again.

That perfect moment when she opened her eyes and smiled her slightly goofy smile-a smile that seemed to reveal as much gum as teeth, and a smile that always made me feel as though something inside me was melting-I definitely won’t see that again. There are ten thousand things that we are never going to do together again.

“You’ll meet someone else,” he tells me, with all the patience that my real father could never quite muster. “Give it time. There will be another woman. You’ll get married again. You can have it all. Children and everything.”

He is trying to be kind. He is a good man. Maybe this is what he really thinks.

But I don’t believe a word of it.

I think that you can use up your love. I think you can blow it all on one person. You can love so much, so deeply, that there is nothing left for anyone else.

You could give it all the time in the world, and I would never find someone to fill the gap that she has left.

Because how do you find a substitute for the love of your life?

And why would you want to?

Rose is never coming home again.

Not to me.

Not to anyone.

And perhaps I could learn to live with it if I could resist this ridiculous urge to phone her. Things would be more bearable if I could remember, really remember, that she’s gone and never forget it.

But I can’t help it.

Once a day I go to call her. I have never actually dialed the number, but I have come pretty close. Do you think I need to look that number up? I don’t even have to remember it with my head. My fingers remember.

And I am afraid that one day I will call her old number and somebody else will answer. Some stranger. Then what will happen? Then what will I do?

It can strike at any time, this urge to call her. If I’m happy or sad or worried, I suddenly get this need to talk to her about it. The way we always did when we were-I nearly said lovers, but it was that and much more.

Together. When we were together.

She’s gone and I know she’s gone.

It’s just that sometimes I forget.

That’s all.

So now I know what I must do.

I must eat the cold porridge, and fight this overwhelming urge to reach for the phone.

THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH MY HEART.

It shouldn’t be working like this. It should be doing something else. Something normal. More like everybody else’s heart.

I don’t understand it. I have only been running in the park for ten minutes and my brand-new sneakers have luminous swoosh signs on the side. But already my leg muscles are burning, my breath is coming in these wheezing little gasps and my heart-don’t get me started on my heart. My heart is filling my chest like some giant undigested kebab.

My heart is stabbing me in the back.

My heart is ready to attack me.

It’s Sunday morning, a big blue day in September, and the park is almost empty. Almost, but not quite.

In the patch of grass where they don’t allow ball games, there is an old Chinese man with close-cropped silver hair and skin the color of burnished gold. He has to be around my dad’s age, pushing sixty, but he seems fit and strangely youthful.

He’s wearing a baggy black outfit that makes him look like he is still in his pajamas and he’s very slowly moving his arms and legs to some silent song inside his head.

I used to see this stuff every day when I was living in Hong Kong. The old people in the park, doing their Tai Chi, moving like they had all the time in the world.

The old boy doesn’t look at me as I huff and puff my way toward him. He just stares straight ahead, lost in his slow-motion dance. I feel a sudden jolt of recognition. I have seen that face before. Not his face, but ten thousand faces just like it.

When I lived in Hong Kong I saw that face working on the Star Ferry, saw it driving a cab in Kowloon, saw it looking forlorn at the Happy Valley racecourse. And I saw that face supervising some Bambi-eyed grandchild as she did her homework in the back of a little shop, saw it slurping noodles at a daipaidong food stall, saw it covered in dust, building spanking new skyscrapers on scraps of reclaimed land.

That face is very familiar to me. It’s impassive, self-contained and completely indifferent to my existence. That face stares straight through me. That face doesn’t care if I live or die.

I saw it all the time over there.

It used to drive me nuts.

As I struggle past the old boy, he catches my eye. Then he says something. One word. I don’t know. It sounds like Breed.

And I get a pang of sadness as I think to myself-not much chance of that, pal.

I’m the last of the line.