One for My Baby (15 page)

“I like a Long, Slow Screw Up Against the Wall,” Dan says, predictably enough, and they all hee-haw their stupid laughter.

“I bet you do, mate, I bet you do!” cackles Josh.

“How about you, Alfie?” Tamsin asks me pleasantly, still trying to include me in the evening, acting as though she knows it’s a meaningless question but it’s just a bit of harmless fun. How did Josh ever get a woman like her? Isn’t she much too good for him? “What’s your favourite cocktail?”

“Not much of a cocktail man,” I say lightly, as if this conversation is beneath me, draining my beer. “Not much of a drinker really.”

“Clearly,” Josh says.

I examine the empty glass in my hand as if I am secretly some kind of expert.

“But I do like a Tsingtao. Reminds me of home.”

“Home?” Jane says. “Do you mean Hong Kong?”

But India has a question of her own.

“Why are you wearing a wedding ring?” she says, looking at the hand that holds my Tsingtao, and everything around the table seems to get all silent.

“What?”

“Why are you wearing a wedding ring?” she asks again. “You’re not married, are you?”

I set down my glass and look at the ring around the third finger of my left hand as if I am seeing it for the first time.

“Used to be,” I say.

“And you still wear your ring? Ah. That’s sweet.”

“Lot of divorce about these days,” Dan says philosophically. “Rotten for the kids. Still, probably better than if the parents stay together and, you know, don’t get along.”

“I didn’t get divorced,” I say.

“No,” Josh says. “He didn’t get divorced. His wife died, didn’t she, Alfie? She was a beautiful girl and then she died. While scuba diving. And that means we all have to feel sorry for you, doesn’t it? Poor little Alfie and his dead wife. The rest of us are meant to apologise for going on living.”

“Josh,” says Tamsin.

“Well, I’m sick of it.”

Suddenly Josh and I are standing up. If there wasn’t a glass table and half a dozen fancy salads between us, I swear we would be exchanging punches.

“I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, Josh. That’s not necessary. But it would be nice if you would leave me alone.”

“Perhaps I will in future.”

“Perhaps you should.”

I bow stiffly to Tamsin and leave the table. Josh follows me, getting more angry by the second. He’s not going to let me go that easily.

“Your wife’s dead and that’s your excuse for coming in here and acting like a complete arsehole, is it? Is that your excuse, Alfie?”

But I don’t answer him as I make my way to the door. I think to myself – no, that’s not my excuse.

That’s my reason.

fifteen

There is nothing casual about Jackie.

Every morning she arrives for work dressed for a date with Rod Stewart. Her heels are high and her skirts are short, but there is a curious formality about her. She looks as though she has spent a long time deciding what to wear. She looks as though putting on her make-up took about as long as minor heart surgery. But her provocative clothes are like a uniform, or a shield, or a glossy shell. It’s a very self-conscious sexiness. As if she looks that way not to advertise something, but to protect it.

Even when she has changed into her cleaning kit, Jackie is still as formal as a flight attendant or a policewoman. It’s got something to do with the highlights in her hair, the mascara that is just a touch too heavy. She spends far too long trying to make herself look good. She looks good already.

Sometimes I see her in the staff room, or the corridor, or a class that is empty of students. Bumping around with her bucket, polishing something in her yellow gloves. For some reason I don’t understand, I never ask Jackie about herself. I always ask her about the young girl in
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
.

It makes me feel good to ask Jackie about the book. It’s like a secret we share.

“How’s Mick?” I say.

“Still dreaming.” She smiles.

My students are not like Jackie. My students dress down, depending on their personal circumstances, and their country of origin, they are either expensively scruffy or poverty-stricken scruffy. Vanessa, for example, wears white or black Versace jeans every day, while Witold always wears the same pair of counterfeit Polish denims with “Levy’s” misspelt on the back. But unless they have a hot date after class, they stick with T-shirts and trainers, combat trousers or jeans. Except for Hiroko.

Hiroko was an office lady in Tokyo and she still wears the classic OL uniform – pale, neat little matching jacket-and-skirt suits, black high heels and even those flesh-coloured tights that OLs seem to favour. I have seen those flesh-coloured tights on young female Japanese tourists buying their designer tea bags at Fortnum & Mason – I couldn’t help noticing – but I have never seen them on any of my students.

Apart from Hiroko.

Hiroko is not like Yumi. Hiroko is twenty-three going on fifty. With her dyed blonde hair and funky fashion sense, Yumi looks like the maverick, but in fact she is far more typical of the Japanese girls at Churchill’s than Hiroko.

It’s not just Hiroko’s clothes. She is diligent in her work, deferential to her teachers, never speaking unless she is spoken to, and then only in bashful, monosyllabic sentences. She doesn’t actually bow, but when you are speaking to her she gives all these suppliant, encouraging little nods of her head that strike me as pure Japanese, far more so than the legendary bowing. Sometimes I think Hiroko has never really left that office in Tokyo.

Hiroko is having problems with her course. She is one of my Proficiency students and her written work is faultless. But she is having trouble with her spoken English. Hiroko doesn’t like talking. Hiroko hates talking. At first I thought it was because she is cripplingly shy. But it’s far more than shyness. Hiroko has that very Japanese terror of doing something imperfectly. She would much rather not do it at all.

So she sits in my Proficiency class, silent as a mute, hiding her sweet, bespectacled round face behind a long black curtain of hair. It gets so bad that I have to ask her to stay behind after class and she nods her assent, her eyes blinking nervously behind her glasses.

I start off with the good news – she is one of my best students, I can see how hard she works – and then I tell her that she has to start talking more in class or she will flunk her exam on the oral section. In her strained, faltering English – she visibly flinches at every minor mistake she makes – Hiroko asks me if she should drop down a level or two. I tell her that the problem would be exactly the same even if she was with the Advanced Beginners.

“Listen, you just have to get over your hang-up about speaking English,” I say. “Don’t let it become too important, okay? Even native speakers make mistakes. It doesn’t matter if it comes out sounding different from the textbooks. Just open your mouth and give it a go.”

Hiroko looks at me with wide, frightened eyes, furiously nodding in agreement. Where does it come from, this myth that all Asian eyes are mean little slits?

She stares at me with a kind of touching trust, waiting for something else to happen, and so very soon the pair of us are sitting in the Eamon de Valera with Hiroko nursing a spritzer and me sipping a stout. That’s where she tells me all about her broken heart.

“It’s no good if it’s too important,” I said to her on the way to the pub. “That’s what I’ve learned. If you make it too important, then it ruins everything.”

Hiroko of the broken heart.

There was a man back in Tokyo. A man from Hiroko’s office. An older man. Hiroko lived with her parents and the man lived with his wife. Their work brought Hiroko and the man together. He was friendly and charming. She was young and lonely. She liked him a lot. And so they began.

Hiroko and the man had to go to love hotels, those briefly rented rooms in buildings shaped like ocean liners and castles and space ships. She knew he wasn’t free but she also knew that they really cared for each other. He was funny and kind and he told her that she was beautiful. He made her feel good about herself, as though she could really be the person she had always wanted to be. And he told her that he loved her, he told her that he loved her so very much in one of their two-hour stays in a love hotel. Then he went home to his wife.

Something happened. Something momentous that makes her eyes fill with tears, something that she will not talk about.

“You got pregnant, didn’t you?”

A quick bob of the head. Heartbroken assent.

“But you didn’t have the baby.”

A small shake of the head, her hair falling over her face.

“And pencil dick stayed with his wife.”

Her voice is not much more than a whisper, but I am struck by how little accent she has. When she doesn’t think about it too much, her spoken English is actually pretty good.

“Of course.”

I reach out and touch her hand.

“Don’t worry about him, Hiroko. He’s going to have a really unhappy life.”

She looks at me gratefully and smiles for the first time.

“Promise me that in the future you will steer clear of pencil dicks like that,” I say.

“Okay,” she says, laughing and crying all at the same time. “I promise.”

“No more pencil dicks?”

“No more – no more pencil dicks.”

Two drinks and a £10 black cab ride later, Hiroko and I are outside the house of her host family in Hampstead. It’s a hell of a house – a big, detached mansion on one of those wide, tree-lined avenues that they have up there – but not much of a family – just one rich old lady who rents out a room to female students because she gets lonely. Hiroko makes sure that the old lady is tucked up in bed with Tiddles the cat and Radio 4 and then she sneaks me up the stairs to a converted loft where a shaft of moonlight pours through the skylight and onto her single bed.

And as she showers – they are so clean, these Japanese girls, always jumping in the shower and wearing their pants in bed – I think to myself that there’s another way that Hiroko is different from my other students.

Most of them are in London looking for fun. Hiroko is here looking for love. Or perhaps she is just escaping from it.

I know she will never feel the same desperate passion for me that she felt for that second-rate salary man back in Tokyo. And I know that she will never own my heart in the way that my wife owned my heart. Yet that’s okay. It doesn’t seem sad tonight. In fact, in some way that I can’t quite understand, it feels sort of perfect.

“I’m very exciting,” she says.

She means:
I’m very excited
.

It is, apparently, an easy mistake to make. I have had a number of students say to me, “I’m very boring,” when what they really mean is, “I’m very bored.” There’s some glitch in the translation from Japanese to English that causes the mistake. But I like it. I like that mistake.

I’m very exciting, too.

A panic attack on the tube.

At first, when I get a twinge in my chest and feel the cold, creeping fear dripping down my back, I think that it’s just another one of my phoney heart attacks.

But it’s much worse than that.

I am bumping south on the Northern Line, escaping from Hampstead before Hiroko’s nice old cat lady stirs, before Tiddles alerts her to my presence. I am strap-hanging in a crowded carriage because the rush hour starts just after dawn these days, when without warning my breath starts coming in these short, fast gasps, like a diver who finds himself a long way down and suddenly sucking on the last drops of air in a broken tank.

Panic.

Real, terrified, sweating panic. I can’t breathe. It’s not my imagination. I literally can’t breathe. I am horribly and desperately aware of the crush of people around me, the sick yellow light of the carriage, the dead air of the tunnel, the entire weight of the city pressing down on us.

Trapped. I feel like weeping, screaming, running, but I can do none of these things. I need to be out of this place immediately and there is nowhere to go, there is no end in sight.

Pure, howling terror. My eyes sting with perspiration and tears. I feel like I am choking, falling, watched. Passengers – all the other calm, unforgiving passengers – glance my way and seem to stare right into my cracked soul. My face crumples and I close my eyes, my legs gone to jelly, the roar of the train deafening, gripping the worn leather strap until my knuckles are white.

Somehow I make it to the next station. I stumble from the train, up the escalators, burst into the light, the air. Filling my lungs. When I have stopped trembling I start to walk home. It takes a long time. I am miles from home. The streets are crowded with commuters on their way to work and school. I seem to be going in a different direction to everyone else.

My walk home takes me through Highbury Fields where George Chang is standing in his patch of grass.

His face seems young and old all at the same time. His head is erect, his back poker-straight. He doesn’t see me. He gives no indication of seeing anything. I stand perfectly still watching his slow-motion dance. His hands move like punches, and yet there is no violence in them. His legs and feet move like kicks and sweeps, but there is no force in them. Every move he makes looks like the softest thing in the world.

And I realise that I have never in my life seen anyone who looks so totally at peace inside his own skin.

“I want you to teach me,” I tell George. “I want to learn Tai Chi.” We are in the new General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen on the Holloway Road. George is eating his breakfast. Chicken wings and fries. You would think that a man like George Chang would avoid fast food joints like General Lee’s, that he would be squatting somewhere with a bowl of steamed rice, but you would be wrong. George says the food in General Lee’s is “very simple”. He’s a big fan.

“Teach you Tai Chi,” he says. The way he says it, it’s neither a question nor an agreement.

“I need to do something, George. I mean it. I feel like everything’s falling to bits.” I don’t say what I really feel. That I want to he comfortable inside my own body. That I want to be like him. That I am sick and tired of being like myself, so sick and tired that you wouldn’t believe it. “I need to be calmer,” is what I say. “Much calmer. Right now I can’t relax. I can’t sleep. Sometimes I can’t even breathe.”

He sort of shrugs.

“Tai Chi good for relaxation. Stress control. All the problem of modern world. Life very busy.”

“That’s right,” I say. “Life’s very busy, isn’t it? And sometimes I feel so old. Everything aches, George. I’ve got no energy. I feel frightened – really frightened – but I can’t even say what’s wrong. Everything seems to overwhelm me.”

“Still miss wife.”

“That’s right, George. But every little thing that goes wrong feels like a major trauma. Do you know what I mean? I lose my temper. I feel like crying.” I attempt a little laugh. “I’m going crazy here, George. Help me. Please.”

“Tai Chi good for all that. For tension. For tired.”

“That’s exactly what I need.”

“But I can’t teach you.”

My heart lurches with disappointment. Once I had worked up the nerve to ask him, it had never even crossed my mind that he would turn me down. I stare at him munching his chicken wings for a while, waiting for him to offer some further explanation. But the silence just grows. He has apparently said it all.

“Why not?”

“Take too long time.”

“But I see you teaching people all the time. There’s often someone with you.”

He smiles down at his chicken wings.

“Always someone
different
. Different man, different woman. Come for a few mornings. Maybe a little bit longer. Then stop coming. Because western people don’t have patience for Tai Chi.” He looks at me over a chicken wing. “It’s not pill. It’s not drug. Not magic. To be any good for you, for anyone, take a long time. A
long
time. Western people don’t have time.”