One for My Baby (22 page)

twenty-three

George teaches me Tai Chi in three stages.

First I learn the movement, carefully attempting to replicate his unhurried grace, although I often feel I must look like a drunk mimicking a ballet dancer. But I am starting to see that every single move has its purpose.

Next I learn to put the breathing to the movement, inhaling and exhaling as instructed, slowly filling my lungs and just as slowly emptying them. It is like learning to breathe again.

And finally and most importantly I learn – what? To relax? To do something without making excessive effort? To be in the moment and only in the moment? I don’t know.

As I try to clear my mind and calm my heart, to forget about the world that is waiting for me beyond this little patch of grass, I am not even sure what he is teaching me.

But it feels as if it has got something to do with letting go.

It is near midnight now and the hospital ward is as dark and silent as it gets, for this place is never completely dark and never totally silent. There is always a kind of twilight because of the lights blazing through the night in the nurses’ office at the entrance to the ward and there are always the sound of distant voices, the creak of trolleys being wheeled across polished floors, the murmur of disturbed sleep, the soft sighs of pain.

When my nan is sleeping, I watch her face for a while and then leave the ward to find my father. He is in the hospital canteen, a half-eaten sandwich and a cold cup of coffee in front of him.

My old man comes to the hospital every day, but he is not good at sitting by his mother’s bedside. He likes to feel that he is doing something useful, so he jumps up and talks to the doctors about my nan’s progress, asking how she is doing, working out when she will be able to go home, or he runs endless errands to the hospital shop to get her the little things she suddenly discovers she needs.

He would rather be off buying her another bottle of orange cordial – she refuses to drink plain water, even when I tell her that it has been filtered through the glacial sands of the French Alps – than sitting by her bed. He can’t just be with her. He doesn’t feel as if he is doing enough.

“Is your grandmother asleep?”

I nod. “I think she’s still getting a lot of pain from that tube in her side. But she doesn’t complain.”

“That generation never does. They don’t know how to whine. That began with my lot.”

“Anyway. They’ve nearly got all the fluid off her lungs. So she’ll be home soon.”

“Yes.”

“And how are you?”

He looks surprised at the question. “I’m all right. A bit tired. You know.”

“You don’t have to come here every day. Mum and I can take care of her. If you’re busy. If you’ve got a lot of work to do.”

He sort of laughs and I know that he is still not writing. “Work’s not the problem it once was. But thanks for the offer, Alfie.”

I am thinking of the night I saw him in the Bar Italia, dressed in his John Travolta drag.

“How’s Lena?”

“I haven’t seen her for a while.”

“You haven’t seen her?”

“She walked out.”

“I thought she was going to be your PA. I thought she was going to be your wife.”

“It didn’t work out as planned.”

“What happened?”

“It wasn’t the same. It can’t be the same, can it? Not the same as when you are stealing the odd hour here and there.” He looks up at me. “The odd night in hotels. Away for the weekend.”

Business trips, I think. All those business trips.

“It’s exciting,” he says. “It’s romantic. But it’s not the same when you’re living together and the boiler is on the blink. When one of you has to put the rubbish out. I couldn’t quite get used to the idea that the girl in those hotel rooms was the same girl who told me that we needed a plumber.”

“But sooner or later we all have trouble with our pipes. And you knew it wouldn’t be the same. Come on. You must have known that.”

“I guess so. I’m old enough to know better, aren’t I?”

“What do you think?”

“It was more of a disappointment for her. She thought she had landed this – I don’t know – this older man. Mature. Sophisticated. A couple of bob in his pocket.”

“The author of
Oranges For Christmas
. Mr Sensitive Bollocks.”

“And then he’s sitting around the house all day staring at his computer screen, and he doesn’t like the same music as her – in fact, he thinks the music she likes sounds like a burglar alarm – and he doesn’t want to go dancing in the kind of clubs where people wear their rings in their belly buttons. Then you don’t seem like an older man. You just seem like an old man.”

“Is she still in the flat?”

He shakes his head. “She moved in with some guy from Wimbledon she met at Towering Inferno. On the night I saw you. Christ, she was all over him.”

“What’s Towering Inferno?”

“It’s the seventies night they have at Club Bongo Bongo. You don’t keep up, do you?”

“I’m trying.”

“Don’t bother. It’s exhausting. She says she’s not having sex with this guy. She says he is just giving her a futon in his living room until she gets settled. Until she can find a place of her own.”

“You don’t believe her.”

“There’s no such thing as a free futon.”

For a moment I glimpse the world restored. I see Lena finding true love on that futon in Wimbledon. I imagine my father begging my mother to take him back, and her eventually relenting. And I glimpse a future where my mother is happy in her garden, my father is writing his brilliant, bestselling follow-up to
Oranges For Christmas
in his study and my nan never has to go back into hospital to have her lungs drained.

Then my old man spoils everything.

“I’ll get her back,” he says, and it takes me a few seconds to realise that the mad bastard is not talking about his wife or his mother. “I mean, I ask you – a futon in Wimbledon. She’ll see sense in the end. I know she will. And I just can’t live without her. Does that sound stupid, Alfie?”

No, I think.

That sounds like trouble.

If I have a Tai Chi lesson after work I eat an early dinner with the Changs at the Shanghai Dragon.

The Changs eat around six, after Diana and William have had their daily lesson and before the restaurant is open for business. These children study something almost every day, violin for Diana, piano for William, Wing Chun Kung Fu and Cantonese for both of them. It feels like they are either eating or being educated.

The food the family eats bears little resemblance to the menu of the Shanghai Dragon. It is plainer, fresher, fiercer. Nothing is drowned in sweet and sour sauce, nothing is wasted. Tonight we are eating steamed fish, served whole, the head and tail intact, the fish eyes glistening blankly, with plain boiled rice and lots of vegetables – bean curd, baby corn, bean sprouts, Chinese cabbage and mushrooms.

Our plastic chopsticks clatter and clack as we decimate the fish, our heads dipping to greet the bowls of rice, which is shovelled into our mouths with noisy abandon. The Changs wash down their meal with tea or tap water, although they insist that I drink mineral water, fetched from the Shanghai Dragon’s tiny bar.

“It soon New Year,” Joyce tells me.

“New Year?” We are near the end of January.

“Chinese New Year. Very important for Chinese people. Like Christmas and Easter for westerners. When I little children size, we don’t even think of Christmas. We don’t care for toys. We don’t care about Ken and Barbie going to the disco. Only Chinese New Year.”

“It’s based on the lunar calendar, right? When is it this year?”

Joyce confers with her family in Cantonese.

“New Year’s Eve, February 15th,” she says.

“It’s going to be the Year of the Rabbit,” William tells me in his pure London accent, his mouth full of noodles.

“We have party,” Joyce says. “Here. Shanghai Dragon. You come.”

“Can I bring someone?”

“Bring someone? Of course. Bring everyone. Bring your family.”

My family? That’s easy for Joyce to say.

This simple certainty about family is the thing that I envy most about the Changs. Joyce and George and Harold and Doris and Diana and William all know exactly what their family looks like.

But I am finding it increasingly hard to know where my little broken family begins, and where it ends.

twenty-four

On the day that my nan is discharged from the hospital, I am meant to be giving Jackie Day an English lesson.

When I arrive home from doing my nan’s shopping, a fistful of supermarket bags in my hands, Jackie is already waiting for me on the doorstep, her daughter by her side. The lump silently contemplates me from behind her greasy brown fringe.

“Jackie – sorry I’m late, I tried to call you.”

“My battery’s flat.”

“I had to do some shopping for my grandmother. There’s nothing in her flat. She just got out of hospital a few hours ago.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“But now I’ve got to take this stuff round to her.” I apologetically lift the heavy supermarket bags. A packet of jam tarts falls out and Jackie retrieves them for me. “I’ve got my mum’s car. So I can’t give you a lesson.”

“I’ll take her shopping round for you.”

The lump has spoken. Her voice is surprisingly high-pitched and girlish.

“What?”

“I’ll take it. If you tell me where she lives. I’ll get the bus.”

I think about it for a moment. Why not? She wouldn’t do in my grandmother for her jam tarts. Would she?

“Would you?” I say.

“Sure. Haven’t got anything better to do, have I? And you don’t exactly need me here, do you?”

“That’s really sweet of you, darling,” says Jackie.

“It’s not far,” I say. “I’ll give you the address and get you a taxi.”

“I can get the bus.”

“I’ll get you a cab.”

I realise, to my shame, that I do not even know this child’s name. Jackie saves me.

“Thanks, Plum,” she says.

Plum?

“Yes,” I say. “Thank you, Plum.”

She shuffles her feet, stares at the ground through her protective fringe, doesn’t know what to do with her hands.

“No problemo,” mutters Plum.

When we have called a taxi and Plum has been packed off with my nan’s address and provisions, I make a cup of tea.

“So,” I say. “You named your daughter after a fruit?”

“Don’t make fun of her.” But she doesn’t say it angrily. She says it almost gently, as if I am too stupid to know any better. “She gets enough of that at school. People making fun of her, I mean.”

“She gets bullied?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.” I manage to stop myself saying – she’s a big girl, I wouldn’t fancy meeting her up a dark alley. But I rephrase the statement in my head. “She looks like she can stand up for herself.”

“She’s a lamb,” Jackie says, and I am touched by the undisguised and unembarrassed affection in her words. “I know she’s a bit overweight, but she’s as soft as they come. And kids can be cruel, can’t they?”

“They certainly can.”

“They pick on anyone that’s a bit different.”

“They certainly do.”

“And for your information, I didn’t name my daughter after a fruit.”

“No?”

“No. I was in my doctor’s waiting room when I was pregnant and I picked up this glossy magazine. You know the kind of thing. Full of glamorous parties and famous people inviting you into their lovely homes.”

I know the kind of thing.

“And there was this sort of society page. Full of beautiful people having a rare old time. Not that all of them were beautiful. Under their suntans, you could tell that some of them were – what’s the word?”

“Ugly?”

“Yes, ugly. Especially the men, who tended to be a lot older than the women. But even though they weren’t all beautiful, they all looked happy. You know what I mean?”

“I guess so.”

“And there were these two girls. Now they really were beautiful. Models, they must have been. Or actresses or something. Or the daughters of rich men. They looked like sisters, but they weren’t. Blonde, tall, tanned. Wearing dresses that were like little slips. The kind of dress that looks like you could sleep in it. They were smiling. White teeth. Leggy. What do you call those special glasses for champagne? The long, thin ones?”

“Flutes.”

“Flutes. They both had these flutes of champagne in their hands. I mean, I guess it wasn’t Spanish cava or Asti Spumante, right? They had their arms around each other. These long, thin, brown arms. And what I thought about them was – they looked as though nothing bad had ever happened to them in their lives. Nothing bad. Ever. And the funny thing is, they were both called Plum.”

Jackie sips her tea.

“It’s a pretty name for a girl.”

“Do you think so?”

“I do.”

“My husband – although he wasn’t my husband then – always thought it was … stupid. No, not stupid. Pretentious. They don’t like that where I come from. They don’t like you getting above yourself. My husband was typical.
You’re too clever by half, Jack. Too clever for your own good, Jack
. I mean, as though being stupid was something to be proud of. But I went ahead and called her Plum anyway, went to the registrar of births, marriages and deaths by myself and had Plum put on the certificate. Stuff him, I thought. Stuff Jamie. If it wasn’t for Jamie, I wouldn’t have been in that doctor’s waiting room in the first place. And I would never have seen that magazine with the Plum girls.”

“You mean you were seeing the doctor because you were pregnant?”

“No,” says Jackie. “I was seeing the doctor because Jamie had just broken two of my ribs.”

When we have finished our lesson, we drive round to my nan’s place. Plum answers the door. She is smiling.

“We’re watching the wrestling,” she says.

Inside her white flat, my nan is propped up on the sofa. There are pillows behind her back and a duvet over her legs. She is staring with enchanted delight at the television where two fat men in luridly coloured latex are screaming at each other. One of the men has a shaven head, the other has Pre-Raphaelite locks that tumble to his meaty shoulders.

“Oh, it’s The Slab,” says Jackie, as the screen fills with the image of a bald madman. “Your favourite, darling.” She turns to me. “The Slab is Plum’s favourite.”

“The Slab rocks,” says Plum. “The Slab kicks butt. Big time.” She sort of snarls at me through her fringe. “Your ass belongs to The Slab. He will bring you down. He will nail your worthless hide to the Tree of Woe, mother.”

“Language, darling,” says Jackie.

“Hasn’t she got lovely eyes?” says my nan.

We all stare at her. She’s talking about Plum.

“Me?” says Plum, blushing with disbelief. “Lovely eyes?”

“Have you ever seen this programme, Alfie?” my nan asks me, as if I have been deliberately keeping its existence from her. “They’re having a right old punch-up.”

“But it’s all fake, isn’t it?” I sniff.

“It’s
not
,” says my nan. “Go on, mate – give him one in the cake hole.”

“Nice Greco-Roman style counter!” says Plum, shaking her fist. “Elbow strike to the face. Knee to the gut. Headlock takedown.”

“But it’s not
sport
, is it?” I say. “Not real sport.”

“It’s sports-entertainment,” says Plum, not taking her eyes from the screen. “Sports-entertainment, they call it.”

“Who’s The Slab fighting, darling?” Jackie asks. Thirty minutes ago she had been asking me about the dialogue of Carson McCullers in the same quietly inquisitive tone.

“Billy Cowboy. He sucks. Big time. His ass belongs to The Slab.”

For several minutes we watch the ludicrous waltz being played out on what I assume is some godforsaken satellite station. In normal circumstances I might have taken control of the situation and turned over to
Newsnight
. But I am grateful to Plum for bringing my nan her shopping, and I am glad to see my nan looking so happy after her ordeal in hospital. So we watch the pumped-up, buck-naked brutes beating each other up for our entertainment – or pretending to.

The bald wrestler – Plum’s hero, The Slab – appears to have the upper hand. He advances across the ring beating back the long hair – Billy Cowboy, apparently – with a series of forearm smashes that may or may not have connected. Billy Cowboy is soon flat on his back, his overdeveloped body glistening with sweat and baby oil.

“Your cold, candy ass is mine, he-bitch!” The Slab howls at the prostrate Billy Cowboy. “Your giblets belong to the buzzards!” He jabs a furious finger at his rival’s lifeless body. “Know your damn place and zip your damn lip! He-bitch!”

The Slab turns his back on Billy Cowboy to climb the ropes and lecture the crowd, who all appear to be grotesquely overweight children dressed for their yearly trip to the gym.

The referee turns away to consult with a judge at the ringside, and that’s when Billy Cowboy leaps to his feet, the fringes on his boots dancing with excitement, as one of his henchmen pushes a large silver dustbin under the ropes.

“Oh yeah,” I say. “As if they would just happen to have a dustbin in their corner. For those moments when what you really need is a dustbin.”

“Ssshhh!” says my nan.

“Bow down before your master, he-bitch!” The Slab is shouting. “Smell the fear and pass the beer! For The Slab is back in town! Come with me to the Tree of Woe!”

Despite the ten thousand voices bawling at The Slab to turn round, Billy Cowboy manages to creep up behind him and brings the large silver dustbin crashing down on his back. The Slab falls from the ropes like a dead bird and for the first time I believe that someone could get slightly hurt out there.

“What’s wrong with the referee?” I demand. “How did he miss that?”

“Come on,” says Plum. “If the referee saw everything, that wouldn’t be true to life, would it?”

Plum and my nan stare at me, amazed that I still don’t get it.

Then the pair of them turn back to the TV screen, as if what is being played out before them is neither sport nor entertainment, but all the injustice of the world.