One for My Baby (32 page)

The band wander among the red-and-white check tablecloths belting out “Volare”, “In Napoli” and “That’s Amore”, and you can hardly hear yourself think. But it’s one of those nights when the niggling little details can’t spoil it for you.

Jackie has got her exam. Her dream is intact.

“What happens now?” I say. Shout, really.

“I’m winding up Dream Machine,” she shouts back. “I figure I’ve spent enough time on my knees. When term starts I’ll find some part-time job that doesn’t get in the way of my studies. Then I’ll get my degree.” She raises her glass of red wine. “And then I’ll live happily ever after.”

“When will I see you again?”

She shakes her head, and at first I think she hasn’t heard me.

But she has heard me all right.

The band approach our table, bow and immediately start banging out an old Dean Martin number, “Return to Me”, although the singer is singing “
Ritorna-me
”. Jackie and I just stare at each other. It’s too loud to talk any more. Then she starts to laugh, just throws back her lovely head and laughs in that way she has, and soon I’m laughing too, but I still want the band to stop.

“Please, boys,” I say. “She’s my student. I’m her teacher. Please respect the sanctity of the student-teacher relationship. Knock it off, okay? Boys?”

But they don’t care. They keep on playing “Return to Me” as if we were lovers. No, not lovers.

It’s more than that. As if we were together.

“WHEN WILL I SEE YOU AGAIN?” I bellow.

But the band has suddenly stopped playing.

And I find I am shouting my head off in a restaurant that is completely silent.

thirty-nine

“Wine, women and weed,” Josh sighs, as we wait for our flight to Amsterdam to start boarding. “Brown cafés. Red lights. Blue movies. One last adventure before I settle down with my beautiful new wife.”

For Josh’s stag party in Amsterdam, we meet at the British Airways check-in desk late on Friday afternoon, Josh and me and around a dozen of his friends from work, all of them still in their suits from a day in the office and jabbering with nervous excitement about spending a night in old Amsterdam.

It is only a forty-minute flight from London to Schiphol Airport and soon we are checked into our hotel and wandering the tree-lined canals with tall town houses reflected in the water, the compact streets full of bicycles, the sickly-sweet smell of hashish and marijuana drifting from the coffee shops.

At first it is all quite sedate. Josh has booked a big table at a good Indonesian restaurant and we eat dinner there. His friends are loud but friendly, not the drooling go-getting morons that I was fearing, and the mood as we head into the night is almost what the Dutch call
gezellig
. Cosy.

But after dinner it starts to go downhill, and it’s not cosy at all.

“Wait until you see this place, Alfie,” Josh tells me as we flag down a few taxis. “Tonight you are going to be fucked blind, old sport.”

“That’s a good thing, is it? Where exactly are we going?” I am starting to get a bad feeling about all this.

“You’ll see,” he laughs.

Our destination is a gabled town house in a quiet street lined with elm trees. Large houseboats are moored on the canal. The only sounds are the bells of distant bicycles. We are a long way from the noise and the girls in windows and the drunken crowds of the red light district. But the two burly men in black tie outside the door of the town house suggest we are not so far away after all.

“Gentlemen,” they say, seeming to take it all in at once – our clothes, our degree of inebriation, our credit card limits. “Welcome.”

We pay 150 guilders just to get through the door. Around fifty quid. The place is enormous. This must have been a family home at one time. Now it is something else. Not a family home at all.

A smooth middle-aged man, also in black tie, gives us a little pep talk about what it will cost us to take one of the girls up to one of the rooms.

“Josh,” I say, tugging at his sleeve. “This isn’t a bar. It’s a knocking shop.”

“Oh, don’t be such a prude,” he tells me. “Don’t worry, Alfie. I’ll pay your way.”

“But I don’t want –”

“Just shut up and enjoy yourself, will you? For my sake if not your own. Give me a break, Alfie. I’m getting married next week. Be happy for me, will you? It’s the most important day of any young man’s life. My stag night.”

We go into what looks like a Victorian drawing room. Lots of chintz. Big drapes over the shuttered windows. Plenty of large, soft sofas where businessmen are talking to young women with extremely short dresses, lots of make-up and faces that look as though they have been carved out of granite.

What makes the room seem slightly less like a Victorian drawing room is that there is a bar at one end where a large black man with a shaven head regards us without emotion. During our pep talk at the door we were told that we were entitled to a few free drinks. The drinks are now lined up before us while the young women with faces carved out of granite smile at our little drunken group, casting their bait.

We grin back, sheepish and flattered, as if it’s our personal charm that has got us in with these young women, and soon they are all over us like a skin allergy, most of them bottle blonde but with the occasional Indian or East Asian or black girl in with the mix. They all order champagne. It is overpriced and cold. Just like the women.

I see from the menu that a bottle of champagne and an hour upstairs with one of the girls is exactly the same price. Five hundred and fifty guilders. More than £200. The friends of Josh start waving around their credit cards.

There’s a tall young black woman sitting next to me, her long legs crossed, blowing cigarette smoke into my face and making laboured small talk.

“What hotel you stay at?” she says, the whore’s equivalent of
what’s your star sign?

I smile politely, and turn to Josh.

“I don’t want to spoil the party,” I say.

“Then don’t.”

“This is really not for me.”

“Forget about your pathetic teacher’s salary tonight, Alfie,” Josh sighs, lighting up a cigar, the stone-faced blonde on his arm staring blankly at me. “This one’s on me.” He leans across me, addresses my companion. “You’ll give my friend a good time tonight, won’t you, sweetheart?”

The black girl smiles without humour or warmth, as if she could eat Josh for breakfast, chopped up and sprinkled over her muesli. He doesn’t notice. Or he doesn’t care. He clamps his cigar between his teeth and wraps one arm around me and another round his tombstone-faced tart.

“How can you tell if your wife is dead, Alfie?”

“I don’t know.”

“The sex is the same but the dishes pile up. How’s Mrs Mop?”

“You know what? You really are a funny guy.”

“Is she – you know – still spending a lot of time down on all fours? Getting her fingers dirty? Going where no normal woman dares go?”

“I wonder why you hate her so much.”

“I don’t hate her, old sport. I don’t even know her.” He puffs expansively on his cigar. “Can’t honestly say I want to. You’re not really bringing her to the wedding, are you?”

“But she’s just like you, Josh.”

“I don’t think so.”

“All she wants is to change her life. All she wants is to end up somewhere better than where she started out from.” I raise my beer in salute. “The same as you, old sport.”

Even under the dim lighting of the Victorian drawing room, his face seems to darken. “What do you mean, old fucking sport?”

“You changed your life, didn’t you? You put yourself through charm school. You put on airs and graces that you never had. You come on as though you’re Prince Charles. And not just another kid with no dad from some little suburb.”

He looks as though he could hit me or burst into tears. Or perhaps both.

“Why don’t you get out of my life, Alfie? I don’t even know why I invited you here. God knows, I knew I’d have to pay for you.”

“You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, Josh. There’s nothing wrong with what you did.” And I really mean it. The thing I like most about Josh is the thing that he despises about himself. “You wanted to better yourself. To change your life. Just like Jackie.”

“You know I fucked her, don’t you?”

This makes me laugh out loud. “I don’t think so, Josh. When did that happen? When I went to the bathroom at your engagement party? I know you’re a bit quick, but this is ridiculous.”

He shakes his head impatiently. Our two hardened prostitutes are looking at each other, starting to get a little concerned.

“Not Jackie,” he says. “Rose.”

For a moment I can’t think. And the moment seems to drag on. I still can’t think. What is he telling me?

“My Rose?”

“Your Rose,” he snorts. “She wasn’t always your Rose, you fucking peasant.”

“Don’t joke about her. I mean it, Josh.”

“I’m not joking, old sport. I’m telling you that I fucked her. Quite a few times. Not that she was very good. Always a bit too keen on the hearts and moonlight, our Rose. Just before you came along with the fucking goo-goo eyes and bunches of flowers and romantic rides on the bloody Star Ferry.”

“You’re a liar.”

“I even fucked her on the day you met her. My flat. Mid-Levels. About six o’clock. Then we caught a cab down to Central for a few drinks at the Mandarin. You didn’t know that, did you? Never got around to telling you, did she?” He puffs away at his cigar, it’s tip flaring red in the gloaming of the knocking shop. “Yeah, we were having a little office fling until you arrived. Didn’t last long. A month or so. You did me a favour really, taking her off my hands.”

I am off my bar stool and have my hands wrapped around his throat before he can remove the cigar from his mouth.

Then I am shouting at him that he is a liar, even though I know that he is not, and his face is turning red, his eyes burning up at me like the end of his expensive cigar.

Then the large black guy from behind the bar wraps his arms around me and drags me away, expertly lifting me right off the ground, pulling me past the stunned faces of the friends of Josh and the granite-faced girls and the businessmen making small talk with women who have seen thousands exactly like them.

My feet don’t touch the ground until the large black guy dumps me back on the quiet cobbled street outside the tall town house.

I walk back to the hotel and check out, catching a cab to the deserted airport to wait for the first flight home in the morning, knowing that I will never see Josh again, and that he will always be wrong about me.

I don’t hate it that he slept with her.

I hate it that he didn’t love her.

Jackie looks different.

It’s more than the way that Zeng and Yumi looked different. It’s more than growing up. It’s to do with becoming the someone you always planned to be.

No make-up. That’s new. Her hair worn longer, pulled back in a ponytail, the highlights being allowed to grow out. And she is dressed in jeans and a short T-shirt. She looks younger, more casual, less concerned with the image she presents to the world. But still the same woman. I recognise her in an instant. She couldn’t be anyone else.

I am sitting on a wooden bench facing the college. She is one of a crowd of students who come down the stone steps of the building, laughing and talking and toting their books, not a care to call their own, and then Jackie and some thin young guy with long hair peel away from the rest of the pack.

My heart seems to fall away as he puts his arm around her shoulders, as if he has been doing it forever. Then she sees me.

She comes over, the thin young guy with long hair still with his arm around her, looking uncertainly at her face and then at me. Maybe his heart is falling away a little bit too.

“How’s it going?” I ask her.

“It’s going good,” she says. We look at each other for a while, neither of us knowing what to say, and then she turns to the guy. “
J’arriverai plus tard
,” she tells him.

“
D’accord, j’y serai
,” says the guy, reluctant to go. Then she smiles at him and he steps back, knowing that whatever my presence means, nothing between them has changed.

“New boyfriend?” I ask her, trying to keep the bad stuff out of my voice.

“Just a friend.”

“French guy?”

“Can’t keep anything from you, can we? He’s in my class. I didn’t tell you that I switched courses, did I?”

“No, you didn’t tell me anything.”

“I meant to phone. Sorry, Alfie. I’ve been so, so busy.”

“I understand.”

“I’m not doing English any more. I’ve switched to European Studies. It felt right. You know what I mean? It’s a different country. Almost a different century. The world’s getting smaller all the time.”

“How’s Plum?”

“She’s well. Enjoying school more.”

“Still in love with The Slab?”

“I think she’s starting to grow out of all that. They change so fast at that age. I think The Slab might one day go the way of Ken and Barbie. How are things at your end?”

“Pretty good, pretty good. Churchill’s is just the same. I’ve got a whole new crowd of students. Nice kids. And I haven’t even slept with any of them yet.”

“Are you planning to?”

I shake my head. “That’s gone the way of Ken and Barbie, too. It turned out to be a bit of a dead end, all of that. Always seemed to end in the same place.”

“Where was that?”

“Heathrow Airport. But things are good.”

“I’m glad.”

“Well, that’s not strictly true. To be honest, it’s a bit lonely at my end.”

“Lonely?”

“Yeah. I sort of miss you. And Plum. And just the way we were when we saw each other all the time.”

“Oh, Alfie.”

“That’s why I’m here. I don’t want things to change. I know some things have to change. But I don’t want to lose any of that. I don’t want to lose us.”

“You can’t stop life happening to you.”

“I realise that now. I really do. But shouldn’t you hold on to the good things? For as long as you can?”

“Isn’t it a little late for you and me? You can’t ask me to give this up. Not now I’ve got this far. I wouldn’t be happy. And neither would you.”

“I’m not asking you to give anything up. I just want one last chance, Jackie. One last chance to get it right. And I want a family. Some kind of family. It doesn’t have to be the old kind of family, okay? It can be the new kind of family. It can be any kind of family. But I want to try for a family of my own. I think it’s pretty sad if everyone in the world ends up living alone. It’s just too sad.”