One for My Baby (31 page)

thirty-seven

When I get back from my grandmother’s cremation, there’s a message from Jackie on my mobile, telling me to call her urgently. It’s examination day. For my students at Churchill’s and for Jackie too. She sounds excited, and I guess it means that she feels a step closer to all of her dreams coming true.

But I am wrong.

“Alfie?”

“You okay? Ready for the exam?”

“I’m not going to take the exam.”

“What? Why not?”

“It’s Plum.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s run away from home.”

The examination hall for A Level English is in a college near King’s Cross.

The place is full of students – nervous students, confident students, students who have already abandoned all hope. And there’s Jackie, older than the rest, frightened for different reasons, for grown-up reasons that have nothing to do with getting qualifications or getting ahead, dressed far too formally for someone who is scheduled to take an A Level this afternoon, waiting for me outside the examination room.

Her paper starts at three. She has just under five minutes. But she is not even thinking about that.

“The school called me. They wanted to know where she was. Then I found the message from her on my mobile. She said she had to get away. She’s gone, Alfie.”

“What about her dad? Friends?”

“She’s not with her dad. And there are no friends. Not now your nan’s gone.”

“I’ll find her, okay?” I look up at the clock. It’s nearly three. “You have to go inside now. You really do. If you don’t, you lose your chance.”

“How can I? How can I think about all of that stupid stuff when my daughter’s missing?”

“She’ll be back. You can’t throw it all away.”

“I don’t care about any of that. The degree, Carson McCullers, poems by sad old men who wouldn’t know love if it took a chunk out of their codpiece. This is all my fault. I don’t know what I’ve been thinking about. I don’t know what I’ve been doing with you. Studying emotions in a dramatic extract and all the rest of that old … what a pathetic waste of time. I should have been thinking about my girl.”

“You do think about your girl. You think about her all the time.”

“What’s wrong with the life we’ve got? What’s wrong with it? That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Stop it, will you? Talking like that doesn’t help her and it doesn’t help you. Go on. Get in there and do your best. I’ll find her. She’ll be fine. I promise.”

“I just want my girl back.”

“You’ll get her back. Just get in there.”

She puts her hands on her hips. “Is there a dog in here? Who do you think you are? Who do you think you’re talking to? You’re not my husband.”

“Go on, Jackie.”

She stares at me as if this is somehow all my fault. Me and my books and my cynical friends. Her eyes are shining and her bottom lip is clenched to stop it trembling. But she starts drifting towards the examination room with all the other students, still watching me with a kind of weepy hostility until the door closes behind her.

Then I walk out into the city, looking for Plum, still dressed for a funeral.

I go to Leicester Square, the gaudy, rancid heart of the West End, and wander around looking at the faces of the children huddling in doorways, hanging out in the park, squatting on the street. Plum’s not there.

So I walk down Charing Cross Road to the Strand, for some reason a favourite area for homeless kids, and cover its length from the railway station to the Savoy. Lots of teenagers with their sleeping bags in doorways. But no Plum.

I head north, up into Covent Garden. Plenty of young kids on the street, but for some reason only a few obviously homeless, dragging their sleeping bags across the piazza, ignoring the jugglers and the buskers and the mime artists who wow the tourists and make everybody else feel like slitting their wrists. And I stare at some dopey git whose big selling point is that he doesn’t move, he never moves an inch, and I realise that Plum could be anywhere. She doesn’t even have to be in London.

My mobile rings. It’s Jackie. I tell her there’s no news, please don’t worry, go back to Bansted and wait for my call.

She wants to help me look for Plum but I persuade her that one of us should be at home, waiting by the phone, in case there’s a call. Reluctantly, she agrees.

Naturally – at least it seems natural to me – I want to know how the exam went. Jackie refuses to talk about it. She gets angry when I press her for information, acting as if all that side of her life – wanting to go back to college, caring about books, wanting a degree, thinking about poems and plays and
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
as though they were the most important things in the world – is the root of all her problems.

As though you can be punished for your dreams.

When the sun goes down, the city changes.

The office workers go home and the party people pour into the streets of Soho, Covent Garden, Oxford Street. And I can’t imagine Plum here, among the designer coffee and the loud laughter and the empty chatter. It’s not her.

So I go to the stations, starting off in the east at Liverpool Street, where the trains from Bansted come in, and gradually move across town. London Bridge, King’s Cross, Euston. All the big mainline stations. Then out west. Paddington, Victoria. There are pitiful little groups of children with their rucksacks and their sleeping bags in every nook and cranny of these giant hangers, but I can’t tell who is homeless and who is waiting to go home. Later, nearing midnight, it becomes more obvious. The ones who are going home watch the notice board for departures, the ones who are not going home stare at nothing, or warily watch the men in the shadows who eye them up, waiting to make their move. But there is no sign of Plum at the stations.

I am about to call Jackie when I realise that I have missed St Pancras, that Victorian Christmas cake of a station next to Euston.

There’s no real reason why she should be at St Pancras, apart from the fact that its spires and turrets and lancet windows make it look like something out of a fairy tale, a place where everything works out all right in the end. There’s no real reason why she should be at St Pancras apart from the fact that it’s so different from all the rest.

Just like Plum.

St Pancras is smaller than the other stations, less inhuman and modern, more the size of a railway station out in the far-flung suburbs in places like Bansted than those soulless, secular cathedrals you get in the city. But she’s not here, of course. It’s getting very late now and people are running for the last trains. I am about to call it a day, phone Jackie, tell her to call the police, when I see the photo booth.

Next to a filthy pair of trainers, there’s a book. It’s the book I gave Plum.
Smell the Fear, He-Bitch
by The Slab. I knock on the side of the photo booth and pull back the curtain. There she is, sound asleep, her hair falling in her face. I say her name and she wakes up.

“Why are you dressed like that?”

“Because of my nan.”

“Oh.”

“Your mum’s really worried about you.”

“I couldn’t stand it any more. It was too much. It would be too much for anyone.”

“Sadie and Mick. And their little gang.”

“It got worse after you came to the school.”

“I’m sorry, Plum.”

“They kept going on at me. About my old boyfriend. My old, old boyfriend. They said:
where did you meet him, Plumpster? Meals on wheels?
I told them you’re a teacher and they had a right old laugh about that. Mick said you looked like a teacher who had lost all his faculties.”

“That bastard Mick. I’m not so old.”

“I know. You’re only middle-aged.”

“Thanks, Plum. Thanks a million.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’m sorry if I made it harder for you. I never meant to.”

“I know that. You just wanted to tell me about your nan. I’m glad you did. It’s not your fault. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been something else. Any excuse. There’s always some excuse for that lot.”

“So where are you going?”

She shrugs, pushes the hair from her face, and peers out at the departures board as though she actually has a ticket in her pocket.

“I don’t know. Anywhere’s better than Bansted.”

“I’m not so sure about that, you know. You’re loved out there. It’s your home. And it’s not so easy to find another one. Take it from me. Shall we go home? Back to your mum?”

She shrugs, pouts, pushes her fringe in front of her face.

“I like it here.”

“You like this photo booth?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a comfortable photo booth, is it?”

“It’s all right.”

“Really?”

“As photo booths go. Nothing special. Stop going on at me.”

I pick up her book. “Still a fan of The Slab, are you?”

“’Course.”

“I’m starting to warm to him myself. He’s not such a bad role model for a growing girl.” I flick through
Smell the Fear, He-Bitch
, nodding sagely. “Do you like what The Slab has to say about doing the human thing?”

“It’s okay, I guess. But I’m more of a fan of the way he elbow-smashes bad people in the cake hole.”

“Right, right. Well, what would The Slab do at a time like this?”

“How do you mean?”

“If he was getting picked on. What would The old Slab do? Would he run away and sleep in a photo booth? Or would he stand and face the creeps who are bullying him?”

“Come on. I’m not The Slab, am I? I’m just a fat loser. He’s more like a superman. That’s what makes him special.”

“I think you’re tougher than he is, myself. I think you are stronger, better, braver.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You’ve put up with a lot of crap in your life. Your parents breaking up. All the trouble between them after the split. Your mum working so hard to support the pair of you. Mick and Sadie and the little creeps who follow them around. You couldn’t have got through all that if you were a coward. And I think you’ve got more guts than Mick and Sadie put together. All bullies are cowards. I reckon you’re a lot nicer too.”

“Nice doesn’t get you very far. Nice gets walked all over. Nice gets you a smack in the chops.”

“I don’t know. Look at my grandmother. We didn’t love her because she could beat up all the other pensioners, did we? Because she could elbow-smash her way to the front at the bus stop? That wasn’t why we loved her, was it?”

“I guess not. So how was the – what do you call it? – burial?”

“Cremation. It was okay. As good as it could be. Lots of people. Faces I hadn’t seen for years. Like a dream, really, all those faces I remembered gathered in one place. And people I didn’t know. Neighbours, friends. So many friends, she had, Plum. There was so much real affection for her. Love, even. She inspired a lot of love. And there were flowers everywhere. And ‘Abide With Me’. Her favourite hymn. And ‘One For My Baby’. By Sinatra.”

“It’s so depressing, all that old music”

“What do you expect at a funeral?
I’m horny, horny, horny tonight?
It worked. You should have been there. You would have seen.”

“I don’t like funerals.”

“It’s a way of saying goodbye.”

“I don’t like goodbyes.”

“Nobody does. But that’s life. A series of hellos and goodbyes.” I think of pushing hands in the park with George Chang, of learning to move with the changes that are heading your way, like them or not, of finding the courage to become what you need to become. “Look, Plum, you think you’re the only person who ever felt the way you’re feeling now. But plenty of people do. It’s much more normal to be afraid and lonely and sad than it is to be like Mick or Sadie. Or The Slab. You’re not the freak. They are. I know it seems like these days are never going to end. But they will.” I brush her hair back from her face and see the tears. “What’s wrong, Plum? What is it?”

“I miss her. I miss your nan.”

“I miss her too. And you were great with her. You really made her life better. The way you took care of her – not many people of your age could have done that. Not many people of my age. You can be proud of that.”

“I only did it because I liked her. She was funny.” Plum smiles for the first time. “This little old lady who liked sports-entertainment wrestling. She was cool.”

“She liked you too. She saw you in a way that Mick and Sadie and these other creeps never will. She saw you the way you really are.”

“Is that really what you think? Or are you just trying to get me out of this photo booth?”

“That’s really what I think. Listen, shall we go home to your mum?”

“Can we sit here for just a little bit? Just sit here quietly?”

“As long as you like, Plum.”

thirty-eight

This New Zealand gardener seems to have taken a shine to my mother. Between you and me, I wonder what Julian – what kind of name is that for a Kiwi who is certainly no fruit? – really has on his mind when he talks to her about bird control and forking borders.

Bird control and forking borders, I think, watching the pair of them out back.

I’ve got your number, mate.

As late spring slowly gives way to summer, Julian is always complimenting my mum on her knowledge of the garden, her expertise in mulching, her way with the tasks of the season.

It’s true that she does know a lot about plants, flowers and all that stuff. And Julian is very respectful. I’ll give that to him. If my mum is sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea with Joyce or me, Julian will not come into the room without knocking first. We will be sitting at the kitchen table and there will be this shy little knock on a door that’s already open. And then there’s Julian standing in the doorway, his suntanned body bulging out of his black rugby shirt and a dopey expression on his face, staring at my mum.

“Is this guy coming on to you?” I demand one day when my mother and I are alone. “This guy Julian?”

My mother laughs like a teenager.

“Julian? Coming on to me? What does that mean? Is it the same as making eyes at someone?”

“You know exactly what it means, Mum. You know more teen lingo than I ever will. Thanks to Nelson Mandela. And your kids.”

“Of course he’s not coming on to me. I talk to him for hours. About the garden.”

“He looks at you.”

“What?” She’s enjoying this.

“As if he
fancies
you or something.”

And I am both happy and appalled. I am glad that my mother has not shut herself away from the world. But I can’t pretend that I relish the idea of her going out on dates, or of some rugged old Kiwi roughly sinking his fingers into her top soil.

“Has he asked you out or anything?”

“Asked me out? You mean, to dinner or the cinema or something like that?”

“Yes.”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet? But you think he might? You think he might get around to it?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“But if you say
not yet
, that implies that it’s going to happen, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so, darling.”

“I’ve seen him looking at you, Mum. Jesus Christ.” Is that a hoe in his combat trousers or is he just glad to see her? “I think he’s definitely going to get around to it.”

My mother reaches across the table and touches my hand. She is not laughing at me any more. She is sort of smiling, very gently.

“Don’t worry, darling,” she says. “I’m over all that.”

She doesn’t mean that she’s over going out to dinner or going to the cinema. She means she’s over sex, romance, relationships and all that. I’m not so sure.

The older I get, and the more I think about it, the more I realise that we are never over all that.

My father’s little rented flat feels like a place where a man lives alone. There’s no sense of two lives mixed and shared. There are no traces left of Lena.

I go round to see him once a week these days. The flat is a bit small to hang around in, so we usually go around the corner to a little Chinese restaurant where they really know how to cook Peking duck and where the waiters all have these strong London accents.

I look at these kids with their faces from China and their voices from Finchley, and it feels to me that these days the world is just one place.

My father’s flat is not so sad now. I asked him once what had finally gone wrong with him and Lena. He said that she wanted to go out dancing and he wanted to watch the golf on Sky. Now nobody can stop him watching the golf on Sky. It’s not much, being able to watch the golf on Sky, perhaps not what he was hoping, but it must count for something.

He can play his music as loud as he likes. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Diana Ross and the Supremes. There’s nobody left to tell him that he’s out of time. Baby, baby, baby – where did our love go? He still loves all of that.

And he spends hours sorting through the boxes of photographs that we found at my grandmother’s flat.

All those shoe boxes, those cracked and torn photo albums from the forties and fifties with English fishing villages on the front, the ones from the sixties and seventies with drawings of doe-eyed dolly birds on the cover.

Some of the faces in these photographs are still a mystery. Some of them are as familiar as his own face. But those familiar faces have their own special mystery. And he stares at them for a long time, wondering about them, and wondering how he got from those crowded streets in the East End to this quiet place on a green hill in north London. Quiet apart from Smokey Robinson and the Supremes.

He is not writing. He still hasn’t got around to that. But as I watch him surrounded by all those memories of his parents and the house where he grew up, all the bits and pieces of a life that is long gone but somehow sticks with him, a life that will never really leave him, I think that perhaps he will start writing again very soon.

Because my father has realised that if he is going to carry on, then he is going to have to go right back to the very beginning.

As soon as I get to the edge of the park, I see George.

He is completely alone. There are no posers from the great financial houses of the City rabbiting on about reducing stress and thinking outside the box. No hippies with tofu for brains in bicycle clips and sandals who think they can learn the Tao in two easy lessons. And no me. We have all deserted him. All the big-nosed pinkies with good intentions. He is as alone as the day I first saw him.

In his hand is a double-edged sword, red and white ribbons trailing from its hilt. I stand and watch George Chang practise his weapons form.

He suddenly stands on one leg, passes the sword from one hand to the other behind his back, spins around with impossible speed and grace, brings the sword sweeping down over his head, the red and white ribbons wrapping around his neck for just a second, then drops to his knees, stands again with the sword poised at the throat of an imaginary enemy, and it’s as if his movements are all blurring into one fluid movement and the sword is spinning silver in his hands.

And I wish that Plum could see this. I feel that, in some way I don’t quite understand, George Chang is what she has been looking for all her life.

The Slab made glorious flesh and blood.

When he has finished I approach him. I feel guilty. Perhaps the rest of them can let their Tai Chi lessons fizzle out with a clear conscience, but I feel bad about it.

“Sorry I haven’t seen you for a while, George. I’ve been so busy. What with the exams and everything.”

He nods curtly, but there is no accusation or resentment in the gesture. It’s as if my disappearance from the park is only what is to be expected from a big-nosed pinky.

And as I watch him putting his sword in its long leather carry-case, because you can’t walk through the streets of north London toting a double-edged sword, I suddenly realise why I wanted to learn Tai Chi from this man. It had little to do with stress management or losing weight or learning to breathe properly. And despite the sense that the act of pushing hands made of my world, my life, my future, it didn’t even have much to do with learning to accept change.

I wanted to be like him.

It was as pure as that.

Calm without being passive. Strong without being aggressive. A family man without being a sofa potato. A decent heart in a healthy body. Those were the lessons that I wanted George Chang to teach me, because I knew I would never learn them from my real father.

“Busy time for me too,” he says, as if reading my mind. “My son and his wife moving out. Many arrangements to make.”

I can’t believe what I am hearing. If there was one thing I never doubted about the Changs, it was that their little family was unbreakable. And more than anything, I wanted a family just like that. Unbreakable.

“Harold and Doris are leaving the Shanghai Dragon?”

George nods. “My son’s wife think too rough around here. Lots of drunks. Making pee-pee in doorways and fighting. Lots of lovely houses, big money, but also some rubbish people. Not a good place to raise children, thinks my son’s wife.” He nods in the vague direction of suburbia. “Wants to move out to maybe Muswell Hill or Cricklewood. Open their own restaurant. Nice new schools for Diana and William. Nobody making pee-pee in doorways or threatening to punch you in the cake hole.”

I am stunned. “And Harold is going along with all this, is he? Muswell Hill and new schools for the kids? Leaving the Shanghai Dragon? He just agrees to the lot of it, does he?”

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

“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 favourites, 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 prised 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 With You” or “Always On My Mind” or “Love Me Tender” without feeling like a complete tonker. 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 university. And I am proud of her and sad all at the same time. She doesn’t need me any more.

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 centre 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.