One for My Baby (28 page)

But my nan just loved me.

Knowing that I am losing her, I take her hand, the bones and veins more visible than they should be, and I stare anxiously at her face, the face that I have loved for a lifetime. Her eyebrows are drawn on all wrong and wonky, and those uncertain pencil marks chew me up inside.

“Are you okay?” I say, asking her the most stupid question in the world, desperate for reassurance.

“I’m lovely,” she tells me. “And you’re lovely too.”

My nan still thinks I’m lovely. And I wonder if she knows me better than everyone else, or not at all.

thirty-two

He looks like the kind of gardener who should have his own TV show.

He is tanned and fit, casually funky, his sun-bleached hair pulled back in a ponytail and tied with a yellow elastic band. Inside his New Zealand rugby shirt, his body is lean and hardened by all that pruning, or whatever it is he does.

The funky gardener is wearing well. What is he? Fifty? At the very least, despite those space-age trainers and a pair of combat shorts with an impressive number of pockets. But he is well preserved, and has that kind of genial openness that you find in Aussies and Kiwis, or at least the ones who come over here and enjoy showing off about how easy-going they are compared to all us sour-puss Brits.

My mother and Joyce watch him snip quickly and expertly at the rose bushes.

“Spring’s almost here,” says the gardener. “Time to get rid of all your unproductive old stems and clear the way for your lovely new shoots.” He turns and flashes them a wide, white smile, snipping all the while. “Bish, bash, bosh.”

I expect them to set about him with their gardening tools for daring to touch my mum’s roses without permission. But they both seem charmed by the handsome gardener.

“What your age?” Joyce asks him.

“Ha ha!” he says. “Ha ha ha!”

“Good money as gardener?” she demands. “You marry?”

Under that tan he is blushing, which makes me think that beyond the slick charm offensive he must be a decent guy. Bastards don’t blush, do they? My old man isn’t the biggest blusher in the world.

“I notice you’re pruning just above the bud,” my mother says, restoring some order.

“This young lady’s got sharp eyes,” he says, and now it’s my mum who is laughing and going red. The gardener gets serious. “You always prune just above to control the shape of the bush, Mrs Budd.”

“Not Mrs Budd,” Joyce informs him. “She not married any more. Divorce come through. Decree absolute. All finish.”

“Joyce!”

“She single.”

“Well, she’s too good-looking to be single for very long,” the gardener says.

My mother throws her head back and laughs, having the time of her life.

“Yes,” she says, “and too clever to ever get married again.”

“Never say never, Mrs Budd.”

“Sandy,” says my mother.

“Sandy,” says the gardener, savouring it in his mouth. “Sandy.”

It shouldn’t have worked out like this, but it is my mother who looks as though she has been released from some kind of open prison, with time off for good behaviour. And it is my father, the one who made the break for freedom, who looks like the partner who got left, dumped, elbowed.

Now how did that happen?

While my mother has lost weight, done something to her hair and slowly put the pieces of her life back together, finding herself in her garden and in her friendship with Joyce Chang, my father seems to have unravelled before my eyes.

My mother helps Joyce at her allotment, watches what she eats, works in her garden. My father drinks too much, eats rubbish, doesn’t work enough. There’s a sad bloated look about him. For the first time that I can remember, he looks much older than his years.

Living alone in his tiny rented flat, he seems lost between two lives, the old one with my mother as a family man and the new one with Lena as a born-again mister lover-lover. With both my mother and Lena out of his life, he is neither a family man nor mister lover-lover. He is in a twilight zone of takeaway pizzas and rented rooms, living the life of a student although he is almost sixty.

I see him every day at my nan’s flat. I watch him talking to my mum about what they should do. The situation seems to change daily. Phrases that meant nothing to us a while ago – words like housebound and bedridden – are now charged with meaning, coming home to us in all their awful reality.

Can she live here? Should she be moved? What does the doctor think? When will the doctor see her again?

My parents are polite to each other. My father treats my mother with an almost painful formality, as though he is well aware that the manner of his leaving inflicted a terrible wound that will take years to heal. She is far more natural with him, allowing herself to feel frustration or exasperation when they can’t decide if it is too soon to start calling hospices or homes, and then blowing her top – in her own sweet-natured, moderate way – because she feels guilty for even thinking about putting my nan into care.

My old man never lets his guard down that far. It’s only with me that he allows himself to be irritable.

When my mother has gone I put
The Point of No Return
on the music centre, knowing my nan likes to fall asleep to a bit of music. It’s one of the great underrated Sinatra albums, the last thing Frank recorded for Capitol in September 1961. A lot of Sinatra fans think that
The Point of No Return
was a bit of a throwaway, just a fulfilment of contractual obligations, but there’s some timeless stuff on there. “I’ll Be Seeing You”, “As Time Goes By”, “There Will Never Be Another You”.

All those songs that, when Sinatra sings, somehow make you feel a little less lonely.

“Does it always have to be Frank bloody Sinatra?” my father says. “Christ. I had eighteen years of this stuff when I was growing up.”

“She likes it,” I say.

“I know she likes it. I’m just saying that maybe we could put on something else once in a while. Some soul music or something.”

“She’s eighty-seven,” I tell him, ashamed that we are bickering about music while the woman who is my grandmother and his mother is in the next room being eaten up by cancer. “She hasn’t got any Bee Gees records. Sorry.”

“The Bee Gees are not soul music,” says my old man.

“What are they then?”

“A bunch of buck-toothed wankers.”

“I can tell you’re a writer. You’ve got a real way with words, haven’t you?”

“I’m off duty.”

“You’re always off duty.”

When Plum arrives he drives me home in the SLK and I find myself wishing that I could hate him more than I really do. His life is unhappy, and while I believe that he deserves to be punished for walking out on my mother, I wonder if the sad, undergraduate life he is living is not too much.

Does he really deserve all this? The nights alone in rented rooms, the takeaway pizzas, the collapsing body, the abiding contempt in my heart?

Just for wanting one more go at getting it right?

“Did they know Rose?” Jackie asks me as we are leaving my flat.

I turn to look at her. She is wearing some western designer’s idea of a cheongsam. It’s midnight blue with red piping, very tight-fitting, cut short with a small slit up the side, but she doesn’t look anywhere near as tarty as she usually does. In fact, she looks great.

“Did who know Rose?”

“These people we’re seeing tonight. The people at the party. Did they know your wife?”

“Josh knew her. He worked with her in Hong Kong. He’s another lawyer. Nobody else. Why do you ask?”

“I just want to know if I’m going to be compared to her. To Rose. I want to know if they are all going to be looking at me and saying – oh, she’s no Rose, is she? She’s not like our Rose.”

“Nobody’s going to compare you to Rose, okay?”

“Honest?”

“Honest. She was never their Rose. They never knew her. Only Josh. And he’s not – he doesn’t – oh God. Jackie, shall we just go?”

“How do I look?”

She smoothes the sides of her dress with her hands, and something about the small, insecure gesture tugs at my heart.

“You look – incredible.”

“Really?”

“Really. Incredible is exactly the word. Believe me. I know words. I’m an English teacher. Incredible, adjective. Hard to believe, amazing. You really do.”

Her smile just beams.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I just feel that Rose is this perfect woman and nobody can ever compete with her and nobody can ever be as good as her.”

“Jackie –”

“This perfect woman who never said the wrong thing and always knew exactly what to wear and who always looked beautiful.”

“How do you know what she looked like? How do you know how she dressed?”

“I’ve seen enough pictures of her. In your shrine. Sorry, I mean – your flat.”

“Look, you don’t have to compete with Rose. And nobody’s going to compare you to her.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Apart from me, I think.

But that’s nothing personal.

I’ve done it to every woman I’ve met since Rose died.

I just can’t stop myself.

I look at them all – Yumi, Hiroko, Vanessa, Olga, Jackie, all of them, even the smart ones, even the beautiful ones, even the incredible ones – and I always think the same thing to myself.

That’s not her.

thirty-three

Someone buzzes us up to the third-floor flat of the house in Notting Hill. We can hear the roar of the party behind the closed front door. Laughter, glasses clinking, everyone speaking at once. I go to knock. Jackie stops me.

“Wait, wait.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, Alfie. I mean, I really don’t know. What am I doing here? Why am I here? What’s the point? Really?”

“To meet my friends,” I say. “To have a good time. Okay?”

She shakes her head uncertainly but I go ahead and knock. Nobody answers. I knock louder, longer, and Tamsin opens the door, pretty and friendly, blonde and barefoot, smiling at me as though I have never disgraced myself in this flat, as though I didn’t act like a prize dickhead after one Tsingtao too many, as though I am her best friend in the whole wide world. I do like her. There’s a generosity of spirit about her that disarms me. We kiss cheeks, squeeze arms, and she turns on Jackie with wonder.

“I
love
your dress,” Tamsin says. “Where did you get it? Tian Art? Shanghai Tang?”

“No,” Jackie says. “Basildon.”

There’s a second of silence. Then Tamsin throws back her head and laughs. She thinks Jackie is joking.

“I’ll give you the address if you like,” Jackie says, smiling uncertainly. “It’s near the market. A shop called Suzie Wong. They say Posh Spice went there once. But I don’t believe it.”

“Come in and meet everyone,” Tamsin says, ushering us inside.

The place is packed. Everyone seems to know each other. Champagne flutes are put in our hands, then someone – a woman – gasps with shock at the sight of Tamsin’s engagement ring and she is whisked away to display it. There is something overstated about these people. Every twist and turn in a conversation – about property prices, private schools and, above all, work – is greeted with something approaching awe.

Josh is in the middle of the room braying about Tai Chi.

“Taught by this marvellous little Chinaman. Really knows his onions. Damn good for stress. Encourages you to think outside the box, Tai Chi.”

Josh begins waving his arms around, champagne sloshing from his flute.

“Oh, I know Tai Chi,” says a woman I vaguely recognise. India. From the dinner party. “It’s the exercise tape by that big black man.”

“That’s Tae Bo, darling,” somebody says, and they all have a good chuckle about her adorable mistake.

“Tai Chi, Tae Bo, tie-dyed – it’s all the same to me!” India chortles, her thin little face creasing with laughter.

“They’re so confident,” Jackie whispers. “Even when they say something really, really stupid.”

I recognise Dan, India’s husband, and Jane, the fat, pretty girl from the dinner party, who seems to have lost some weight and gained a man. She nods at me with some coolness. I can’t blame her. Dan stares right through me. It’s not hostility. I think he probably has the memory banks of a tropical fish.

“Old Josh getting married,” says Dan. “How does a woman know when her husband’s dead?”

“The sex is the same but you get to use the remote control,” says Jackie.

“What’s the difference between a girlfriend and a wife?” says Josh.

“Forty-five pounds,” says Jackie.

“What’s the difference between a boyfriend and a husband?” says Josh.

“Forty-five minutes,” says Jackie.

“Bloody funny,” says Dan.

We are having a good time, Jackie and I, knocking back our champagne and sort of holding on to each other. The party swirls around us. There is something in the English middle class that reminds me of the Cantonese. It is a kind of glorious indifference. They truly don’t care about you. It’s not hostility. They just don’t give a monkey’s. And if that doesn’t bother you, it can be quite relaxing to be around them.

Then somebody asks Jackie the standard metropolitan middle-class question, and it all goes out of key.

“And what do you do?”

It’s Jane. The fat girl who has started working out, and who looks pretty good now, and who must be feeling pretty good too with her quiet boyfriend in the glasses behind her, his arms around her newly slim waist as if he is afraid of her getting away. And although I know that it is only the standard question on London nights such as this, it still feels as if the question to Jackie has a certain edge, as if Jane is getting her own back on me for not falling for her over the warm, fancy salad.

“What do I do?” Jackie says, and my heart sinks, because we were having such a good time tonight, and I love to see her trading dumb jokes with Josh and Dan and whispering little comments to me on the proceedings and the people and just quietly enjoying herself. Now Jane has gone and spoilt everything. And I once thought she was nice.

“Yes. What do you do – I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Jackie.”

“Jackie,” Jane says, as though Jackie is an impossibly exotic name that she has never heard before. Which is a distinct possibility, I suppose.

“I’ve got my own company,” Jackie says.

They are impressed. They all want to be a credit to capitalism. They look at Jackie with new eyes. They are thinking – a dot com start-up? Or a go-getting little PR company working out of one room in Soho? Or possibly something in the fashion game? The dress
is
rather striking.

“Dream Machine,” Jackie says. “That’s the name of my company.”

“Dream Machine,” says Jane, with a grudging respect. “What kind of line are you in?”

“Well,” says Jackie. “It’s a cleaning service.”

I want to stop her while she is ahead, get her to cash in her chips and leave the table, but the champagne and the polite, interested expressions on all the flushed, well-fed faces around her are encouraging her to go further.

“Dream Machine cleans offices all over the West End of London. We’ve got this line:
cleaning the old-fashioned way – on our hands and knees
.”

“Money in that,” Josh says. “Good money, I’ll warrant. Get the old bog holes sparkling, mate. Can’t beat it, can you? Key to the executive washroom and all that.”

“Fab!” India says, as though nobody has ever thought of cleaning offices before in the history of the world.

Jackie smiles her happy, beaming smile, very pleased with herself, and I think she’s got away with it.

But she hasn’t. Jane is still watching her.

“So you’ve got this – what? – army of Mrs Mops who go around scrubbing and scouring all over London?”

And I think to myself – I’m so glad I gave you the cold shoulder, you cruel bitch. You were never nice at all. Just overweight and lonely, which is not quite the same as being nice.

“No,” Jackie says. “There’s just me. Sometimes I get a friend in. If there’s extra work. But usually it’s just me.”

“Oh,” Jane says. “
You’re
Mrs Mop.”

Then they are all laughing at Jackie, and she can’t do what they all do, she can’t laugh at herself and make it nothing, defuse the lonely moment, take the sting out of the words with the magic trick of just not caring; her life is too hard for her not to take it seriously, to take everything seriously, so she has to stand there going red while Jane and India and Josh and Dan and Jane’s four-eyed boyfriend all cackle with glee.

But then it passes, because I know there is no real harm in these people, except possibly Jane, and soon they are talking about the politics of housework and chore wars and feminism’s response to the fact that somebody has to clean toilets, all these half-chewed scraps of public debate that they have picked up from some Sunday broadsheet that they skimmed through a red wine hangover. From here they glide effortlessly into a conversation about how difficult it is to hire someone you can trust to clean your home, but by now Jackie is pulling on my sleeve, her lovely face still burning.

“I want to leave.”

“You can’t leave.”

“Why not?”

“Because then they win.”

“They win anyway. They always win.”

We stay. But the night has gone flat for both of us. She makes half-hearted conversation only with people who approach her first. I retreat with her to a corner, and make small talk about the prints on the wall, Tamsin’s ring, any rubbish that comes into my head. Just before we leave, when she goes off to the toilet, Josh pulls me to one side.

“I like her,” he says. “She’s nice.”

“I like her too.”

“But, my dear old Alfie, when are you going to get yourself a proper woman?”

“What does that mean? A proper woman?”

“It’s always – I don’t know – someone
inappropriate
. Your little harem of foreign girls. Very nice and all that. A different flavour for every day of the week. I’m not knocking it, mate. I’ve been in my fair share of foreign parts too, as you well know. But you cannot be serious, man. Not if you think you can make the hot and spicy stuff last a lifetime. It’s
inappropriate
. And now Mrs Mop and her tickling stick.”

“Don’t call her that.”

“Sorry. But, come on, Alfie. When are you going to get real? She’s no Rose, is she?”

“I think Rose would have liked her. I think Rose would have thought she was funny and bright.”

“Oh, she’s horny enough, in an obvious sort of way. Looks like she goes like the bloody clappers.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“But what’s so admirable about cleaning floors for a living? I mean, just because you’re poor, it doesn’t make you a good person, does it?”

“She’s bringing up a kid alone. A girl. Twelve years old. I think anyone who does that has got some guts.”

“She’s got a child? Then I think you’re the one with guts, Alfie. I wouldn’t go out with someone who was dragging around a reminder of the man that came before me. If you’ll pardon the expression.” He raises his champagne glass in mock salute. “You’re a better man than me.”

“I never doubted it, Josh.”

We laugh, but there is no warmth or humour in our laughter, and I wonder what I am doing in this place, with these people. Is it because I don’t have anywhere else to go? Or do I secretly want to join them, to be able to laugh that easily and chat that mindlessly and care so little about everything under the sun? Perhaps I shouldn’t be so scared of caring. Perhaps that has been my problem.

“What do you call it when a woman is paralysed from the waist down?” says Dan.

“Marriage,” says Josh, and the room roars as Jackie and I leave the flat.

She is silent in the back of the black cab on the way to Liverpool Street.

“I thought you were the best-looking woman there,” I say. “And the smartest.”

“Me too. So why do I feel so bad?”

I can’t answer that.

And I watch her back as she walks down the platform and gets on the train for the long ride out into Essex. She doesn’t turn around. But just as I am about to walk away, she sticks her head out of the window and waves, smiling, as if to say: don’t worry, they can’t hurt me for long, it’s going to be okay in the end.

She’s brave. She is. That’s exactly the word. Jackie is a brave woman.

Ah, I think to myself.

That could be her.