One for My Baby (14 page)

fourteen

It’s Monday morning and my students are driving me nuts.

Zeng is nodding off at the back of the class. Imran is staring blankly at a text message on his mobile phone. Astrud and Vanessa are gabbing. Witold is trying to stop crying while Yumi tries to comfort him. Only Gen is looking up at me, waiting for something to happen.

I stand in front of them, waiting for my physical presence to register. Zeng starts snoring.

I clear my throat.

Imran taps a text message into his phone. Astrud and Vanessa burst out laughing. Witold starts weeping, burying his face in his hands. Yumi puts her arm around him. Gen looks away, as if embarrassed for me.

“Right, who’s got that homework for me?” I ask them. “Homework? Anybody?”

By the way they all shift in their seats and avoid eye contact, I can tell that none of them have done it.

Usually I would let it go. But today the lack of homework makes me wonder what I am doing here. And also what they are doing here.

“Can anyone remember what the homework was?”

“Discursive composition,” Yumi says, handing Witold a tissue. “Giving information and your own opinions on something.” We stare at each other. “Very formal style,” she says.

Very formal style? Well, that’s right. But I don’t know if she’s talking about discursive composition. Or us.

“What’s wrong with you, Witold?”

He shakes his wizened Polish head.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing’s wrong?”

“No.”

“Then why are you crying?”

Yumi puts a protective arm around him. “He misses his family –”

Witold starts sobbing harder, his shoulders shaking and his nose all snotty.

“My wife. My children. My mother. So far away. This place is so … hard. Oh, this is a hard place. The Pampas Steak Bar is a hard place.
Hands off the Falklands, Argie. Tell Maradona we are going to chop his hands off, Argie
.”

“You spend ten years trying to get a visa to this place and then you miss your family?”

“Yes.”

“Well, in future be careful what you wish for, Wit. Because you might get it.”

Yumi glares at me. “He has a right to miss his family.”

I glare back at her. “And as your teacher I have a right to be treated with a little respect. That means no nervous breakdowns in class. It means no mobile phones in class. Thank you, Imran. It means you treat this place as somewhere to study rather than a place to get forty winks.”

“Forty winks?” someone says.

“New idiom,” says someone else.

Zeng is still fast asleep. I crouch next to him. His skin is soft and smooth with just a few wispy black hairs on his upper lip. He doesn’t look as though he shaves more than once a month. I put my face close to his ear.

“Would you like fries with that?” I hiss and he awakes with a jolt. Vanessa and Astrud laugh, but stop when they see my face.

“Why did you come to this country, Zeng?”

“A better life,” he gasps, blinking furiously.

“If you want a better life, then try staying awake in class.” I give him a cold smile. “A little less effort in General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen. And a bit more effort at Churchill’s International Language School. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Then I get the little bastards to write a discursive composition. The subject is developments in science and technology and whether these will affect mankind positively or negatively. As they scribble away I wander among them.

“I want to hear both sides of the argument,” I say. “For and against. Negative and positive. Link your points with expressions such as,
some might say … others might argue that … there are, however, some risks such as …
”

Usually they would ask for advice and kid around with me but today they are all too frightened or too angry to ask for my help. And it makes me feel blue to think that they don’t like me any more.

When the bell rings they all get out of there as fast as they can. Apart from Yumi. I am packing my things away when I feel her standing by my desk.

“Don’t take it out on them,” she says.

I don’t look at her.

“I’m sorry, Alfie.”

“Sorry for what? There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

“I had a good time with you,” she says. “But you frightened me.”

“How did I frighten you?”

“The flowers. The flowers frightened me. They made me feel you want – I don’t know. Too much.”

I finish stuffing my books in my bag and zip it closed.

“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her. “That’s the last of the flowers.”

Josh and his new girlfriend are at that stage of their relationship where they want to share their happiness with the rest of the world. I don’t understand why happy couples can’t be happy in private. Why do they need the rest of us to validate their happiness? Is it that they don’t really believe in what they have found? That they suspect it might be a mirage? Why can’t they just fuck off and leave us alone?

Josh and Tamsin – the new girlfriend, who happens to be the client he was so keen to rush back to the last time we met – are having supper at her place. It’s their coming-out ball as an official couple, so I can’t get out of this dinner party, although God knows I have tried. I came up with a couple of really good excuses but Josh kept giving me alternative dates, the cunning bastard. The only way to get out of it would have been to say to him,
oh, just fuck off and die, Josh – I never liked you anyway
. Which does cross my mind. But I can’t say that because Josh is my best friend, the only link to the past that I have left, and I am afraid of losing him.

So that’s how I come to find myself outside a big white terraced house in Notting Hill, holding a bottle of something dry and white, and getting buzzed up to the third floor. I am a little spooked because I saw someone on the tube reading the paperback of
Oranges For Christmas
. That always feels strange to me. Especially when they start laughing at one of my father’s hilarious anecdotes about all that adorable East End poverty and deprivation.

Josh opens the door and lets me into an expensive little box. There are highly polished wooden boards on the floor and black-framed Japanese prints of bony peasants struggling through rainy landscapes on the wall. A rectangular glass table set for six people. The place is as spartan as a morgue.

Josh is not wearing a tie, the sure sign that he is off-duty. He slaps me on the back, a grin splitting his face, very pleased with himself. He’s has that glow about him that everybody gets when they get it bad.

I can smell some kind of lemony fish being grilled. The aroma of food cooking gives the place its only sign of human life. Then a smiling blonde in bare feet comes out of the kitchen, drying her hands and walking towards me.

“Something smells good,” I tell her. “And it’s not me.”

“Alfie,” Tamsin says, kissing me on either cheek. “I know it’s a cliché, but I really have heard so much about you.”

I can understand why Josh is dead keen. There’s an ease about her that I really like, and while Josh is fussing with the dessert that he’s making – doing his enlightened man bit, which is the joke of the century – Tamsin and I sit on the sofa and I tell her about my tube journey here, and how strange I felt seeing someone reading my father’s book.

“Oh, I love that book!” she says. “It’s so warm and funny and real!”

“But the interesting thing,” I tell her, “is that my dad is none of those things. Warm. Funny. Real. He’s not like that at all. He’s more cold, unfunny and fake. In fact, he’s a right –”

Josh sticks a bowl of crisps under my nose.

“Pringle?” he says. “Cheese and onion or barbecue flavour?”

Josh opens a bottle of champagne and Tamsin tells me about her job. As far as I can understand, she does something important for a merchant bank and came to see Josh for advice about a company flotation.

“Our shop has one of the largest corporate finance practices in Europe,” Josh boasts. Tamsin stares up at him adoringly.
My hero
. But I can understand why they are happy and we have a good time until the other guests turn up.

Then the evening starts to go horribly wrong.

First, another couple arrive. It’s one of Josh’s rugby-playing mates from his company and his snooty, stick-thin wife. Dan and India. They breeze in and, as Josh keeps the champagne flowing, they are soon acting as if they own the place.

“And what do you do?” India asks me.

“I teach,” I say, and they both look at me as if I said, “I clean the sewers of the city with a second-hand toothbrush.” Or maybe that’s just my imagination. Or the champagne. But they don’t say anything after I tell them what I do, so while Tamsin and India talk about the celebrity chef who invented tonight’s fish and while Josh and Dan bellow at each other about various areas of commercial law, I sit silently on the sofa, slowly getting completely and utterly stewed. Just when I think I am so drunk that I might curl up and have a little nap, Josh looks at me with a secret smile.

“Guess what I’ve got for you,” he says. He goes to the kitchen, gets something out of the fridge and comes back pouring a foaming, yellow beer into a tall glass. I immediately recognise the silver and green can he is holding.

“Tsingtao,” I say.

“Your favourite,” Josh says.

I am touched. I know this means Josh has gone to great lengths to make me feel comfortable tonight. But the beer on top of the champagne turns out to be not exactly the best idea in the world. In fact, it’s a rotten idea. Soon my eyes start crossing if I don’t make every effort to keep them in focus.

“Alfie’s father wrote that wonderful book,” Tamsin tells India, trying to include me in the evening. “
Oranges For Christmas
.”

“Really?” India says, interested in me for the first time. “
Oranges For Christmas?
God, it’s such a classic, isn’t it? I bought it ages ago. Keep meaning to read it.”

“He’s getting more famous,” I tell them. “My father, I mean. There was a picture of him and his girlfriend at some party the other day. In the
Standard
. They were grinning and trying to pretend they didn’t know their picture was being taken.” I have a swig of my Tsingtao. “He’s getting more famous but, the funny thing is, he doesn’t deserve it. Because he’s not even writing anything. And – I ask you – how’s that meant to make me feel?”

They all stare at me, dumbfounded.

“I wanted to be a writer. I really did. First of all, I was going to write about Hong Kong. About why it’s important. About why it’s touched with magic. Now – well, I don’t know what I would write now. I sort of lost the urge.”

“Why don’t you write about some stupid dickhead who can’t hold his drink and who is not fit to be in civilised company?” says Josh. “You’ve got to write about what you know.”

Then the buzzer goes again and the final guest arrives. A pretty, rather overweight young woman called Jane from Josh’s firm. Mid-thirties. Very friendly. A bit nervous. We are sat next to each other at dinner. I’m not meant to get off with her, am I? Plates are put in front of us containing some kind of fancy salad.

“Warm salad of radicchio, gem and pancetta,” Tamsin says.

“She’s such a genius,” Josh says, and they exchange a little sweet kissy-kiss that provokes an involuntary sneer on my flushed face. Some distant part of me realises I am not being the perfect guest.

“Delicious,” India declares.

“Radicchio, gem and pancetta?” Dan says. “Sounds like a firm of Italian lawyers.”

Everybody roars apart from me. I can feel Jane looking at me, trying to think of something to say.

“Josh told me you were in Hong Kong,” she says pleasantly.

“That’s right.”

“I was in Singapore for two years. I really fell in love with Asia. The food, the people, the culture.”

“Not the same thing,” I tell her.

“Excuse me?”

“Not the same thing. Hong Kong and Singapore. It’s the difference between a rain forest and a golf course. Singapore being the golf course.”

“You don’t like Singapore?” she says, her face crumpling.

“Too sanitised,” I say firmly. “Singapore is nothing like Hong Kong. Didn’t somebody once say that Singapore is Disneyland with the death penalty?”

Jane sadly turns her face to the fancy salad before her.

“When were you ever in Singapore, Alfie?” Josh demands.

“What?” I say, playing for time.

“I said – when exactly were you in Singapore?” He is not smiling at me any more. “I don’t recall you ever going to Singapore. But suddenly you’re the big expert.”

“I’ve never been to Singapore,” I say with an infuriating smugness.

“Then you don’t really know what you’re talking about, do you?” Josh says.

“I know I wouldn’t like it.”

“How do you know that?”

“I wouldn’t like anywhere that they say is like Disneyland with the death penalty.”

“Singapore Sling,” India says. We all look at her as if she is mental. “Fine cocktail,” she adds, spearing a piece of gem lettuce. Then they are all yakking about their favourite cocktails, even poor old Jane perking up a bit as she weighs in with her thoughts on the humble Pina Colada.