twelve
Yumi’s room is at the end of a dark corridor in a large, crumbling town house that has spent the last fifty years being chopped up into smaller and smaller flats. As we make our way down the hall you can hear music, voices, laughter, doors slamming, telephones ringing. The cacophony of too many people in too small a space. And having the time of their life. We take off our shoes at her door and go inside.
It’s not much to look at. A bay window dominates the tiny flat, but it overlooks some kind of junkyard piled high with clapped-out cars. The room’s exhausted carpet looks as though it has been trodden on by an itinerant army of students. The only heating comes from a two-bar electric fire.
It’s a dump. Yet it doesn’t feel like a dump because all over her modest apartment Yumi has decorated the peeling wallpaper with photographs from home. Everywhere you look there are all these Polaroids, snapshots and photo-booth pictures of smiling Japanese girls making V-signs. One round-faced, shyly grinning girl seems to feature in many of them.
“Younger sister,” Yumi says.
There is something deeply affecting about Yumi’s attempts to turn this cold, rented little box into some kind of home. Armed with just her memories and a stack of photographs, she has tried to make it her own.
Yumi lights a perfumed candle, turns on the radio to Jazz FM and unrolls a futon. The unfurled mattress takes up most of the floor. We stand facing each other for a moment and I realise how nervous I am.
“I haven’t got anything,” I say.
“That’s not true,” she says. “You have good heart. Lovely smile. Nice sense of humour.”
“No, I mean I haven’t, you know, got any condoms.”
“Ah. Okay. I have some. I think.”
“And I haven’t been with anyone,” I say. “Not since my wife, I mean.”
She touches my face.
“That’s okay,” she says. “Whatever happens, everything’s okay.”
It’s what I need to hear. I take it as slowly as I can and, although at first I am overwhelmed by how different she seems to Rose, it is much better than I could ever have hoped. Her body is shockingly young and lithe, and she is a sweet and tender lover, smiling at my excitement, but in a way that doesn’t make me feel bad. Yumi makes me feel nothing but good.
Afterwards she hides her face in my chest and laughs, calling me her favourite teacher – she says
sensei
– and hugging me with a strength that surprises me. I laugh too, relieved and pleased, dumbfounded by my good fortune.
Later she sleeps in my arms while I watch the candle burn down until the only light in the little room comes from the glow of the two-bar electric fire. And then, feeling happier than I have in a long time, I start to drift away too.
Just before I slip into sleep I notice the large red suitcase in the corner of the room, as if Yumi has just arrived, or is just about to leave.
I wake up as the first light is creeping into the room. Yumi is sleeping wrapped up around me, that incredible mass of blonde hair almost completely covering her face so that only the tip of her nose is visible. I smile to myself. I can’t believe that she’s with me.
I gently disentangle our limbs, slip out of the futon and pull on my Calvins. Quietly letting myself out of the room, I pad down the hallway, looking for the bathroom.
Suddenly he is on top of me. A naked man. The metal studs and rings that pierce his stubbled face glinting with menace in the darkness. His head is shaved. His mouth is above me and wide open, a great black maw that seems about to take a chunk out of my throat.
“Sweet Jesus!” I mutter, leaping backwards.
But the man is only yawning. When his mouth has completed the yawn, he smacks his lips, scratches his exposed scrotum for a bit and then blinks at me a couple of times.
“Mind if I use it first, man?” he says in an Australian accent. “Bit of a heavy night.”
Trembling, I lean against the flaking plaster of the hall, trying to stop the pounding of my heart. A toilet flushes and the man emerges from the bathroom, soon disappearing once more into the darkness.
Back inside the futon, Yumi stirs, warm as toast and smooth as ice cream, as I try to explain the terrible vision I have seen.
“Oh,” she says sleepily. “Room mate.”
We have a perfect weekend. It’s the kind of time that I like best. It seems ordinary and special all at once.
We wake up late and Yumi says she will make us breakfast. But someone – probably the pierced room mate, if you ask me – has stolen her bread from the communal kitchen and the milk that she thought was still okay has gone off. So after taking a shower together – it seems like a good idea, but we are surprisingly shy with each other – we go to a little café at the end of her street and order full English breakfasts. It takes Yumi ages to work her way through all that fried food.
We spend the afternoon wandering around Camden market. Yumi loves looking at all the second-hand clothes, and seeing her happy makes me happy too.
We hold hands and she gives me little kisses when I am not expecting them. I realise things about her that never really registered at Churchill’s. Her clothes are a little off-beat – today she is wearing some kind of antique dress that looks like it once belonged to Zelda Fitzgerald – and an Asian girl with a mop of dyed blonde hair gets a lot of stares. But I am proud to be seen with her. She’s a great girl, funny and smart, and we drink latte in a little café while she tells me about her family back in Osaka.
Her old man was a hotshot salary man at a big corporation who lost his job in the recession. Her mother was a typical Japanese housewife who suddenly found she had to support a family with her secretarial work. Her sister is a brilliant violin player who her parents always preferred because she never dyed her hair or went out with boys who had dyed hair. Yumi says she came to London because life in Japan felt like it was a play, and everybody knew their role. Except her.
And I tell her my story. I want to. I tell her about teaching in London, moving to Hong Kong, meeting Rose. I tell her about losing Rose, about the accident, all of that, and she holds my hand, tears in her brown eyes. I even tell her about my father and his girlfriend.
Then I remember that I have to do some shopping for my nan. I expect Yumi to go home or to go off somewhere, but she tells me she will do the shopping with me. So we find a supermarket and I get my nan’s usual Saturday shop – white bread, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, baked beans, corned beef, spam, bacon, sugar, milk, tea bags, custard creams, chocolate digestives, ginger nuts and a single banana. That single banana always tugs at my heart. It seems to me like more than an old person’s shopping list. It feels like a shopping list from long ago.
My nan, always delighted to see new faces, welcomes Yumi with open arms. With Sinatra’s
A Swingin’ Affair!
in the background – for me, Frank’s finest album, although of course traditionalists would always nominate
Songs For Swingin’ Lovers!
– they sit chatting while I unpack the shopping.
Yumi tells my nan that she really has to see the temples of Kyoto and the snow on Mount Fuji and the cherry blossoms of a Japanese spring. My nan agrees that all these things will go straight to the top of her agenda.
“Lovely teeth,” says my nan when Yumi goes to the bathroom. “Must be all that rice. Where did you say she’s from again, dear? Is it China?”
“Japan, Nan.”
“Everybody speaks English these days,” says my grandmother.
Yumi is a gracious guest, gamely eating the ginger nuts she is plied with by my nan and tapping her foot along to
A Swingin’ Affair!
“Ah,” she says. “Old music”
“Like a bit of Sinatra, do you, sweetheart?” asks my nan.
These casual endearments are one of the loveliest things about my grandmother. Even total strangers get called the sweetest names under the sun. Sweetheart and dear, darling and love. My Nan says these words to everyone she meets.
In Yumi’s case, it feels like only what she deserves.
As the year starts to run out, my mother goes back into her garden.
I would have thought that the garden was dead in November, but my mother happily tells me that there’s lots to do.
“You don’t know a thing about gardens, do you?” she laughs. “At this time of year you have to finish planting your tulips and all your other spring bulbs. You have to clean and store all your flower pots and seed trays. And you have to get ready for your roses. Remove the weeds, add lots of compost and fertiliser, plant your roses.” My mother smiles at me. “Do you know how much work that is, getting ready for your roses?”
Sometimes I come home and find she’s not alone out there. I can hear smatterings of Cantonese mixed up with the English and I know that Joyce Chang and her grandchildren are in the garden with my mother, Joyce and my mum side by side on their hands and knees, laughing about something as they sink their fingers into the dirt while William and Diana solemnly sweep up the last of the dead leaves with brooms that are bigger than they are.
“Good time to make ground for new vegetable plot,” Joyce tells me. “How’s the job?”
“What?”
“How’s new teaching job? Good money? Teachers treated very badly in this country. No respect for teachers here. In China, teacher equal to father.”
I look at my mother accusingly but she is busy with her soil. How much is she telling this woman?
“It’s going okay, thanks.”
“Teaching not well paid but steady,” Joyce informs me. “World always need teachers. Hard work, though. Teaching not money for old string.” She digs her gnarled hands into the dirt. “Have to help mother.”
Is she talking about me or her or both of us?
“November,” Joyce says. “Best month for vegetable plot.”
“Joyce is going to help me make a vegetable garden,” my mum says. “Isn’t that wonderful, darling?”
My mother does something that I would have bet was impossible with my old man gone. She carries on getting ready for the roses. And I know she wants the same for me.
“I’m glad to see you getting out a bit more, darling,” my mum tells me.
Joyce nods agreement, fixing me with her shrewd, beady stare. “Need to put your hair down. Not too old in the tooth.”
I shake my head. “You mean
let
my hair down. And I’m not too
long
in the tooth.”
“You know exactly what I mean, mister.”
That’s true enough.
thirteen
Saturday night we go dancing. I try to get out of it, but Yumi insists that Saturday night is for dancing, so we go to this little club in Soho where the music is not as bad as I expect it to be and where the atmosphere is not as fashionable as I fear it will be. And it’s great. It’s not like when I was twenty. Nobody is trying to look cool or tough. Nobody cares what you dress like or dance like. So we just leap about and bounce around and have a laugh, and soon Yumi is trying to sit down and rehydrate with a little bottle of Evian while I want to keep on dancing.
Late at night we go to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant on Brewer Street. You sit at a long round bar, small plates of sushi trundle past your eyes and you help yourself to whatever takes your fancy. It turns out to be the place where Gen works and he comes over to say hello. For some reason he doesn’t seem surprised to see Yumi with me.
Then Gen goes back to work and Yumi tells me that Japanese people do not usually like these kind of places because the fish is not as fresh as when it’s made to order. But it tastes pretty good to me, and we demolish a pile of different-coloured plates bearing two pieces of tuna, salmon, eel, egg or prawn.
Back at her flat we make love – slowly, sleepily, relaxed with each other now – and when we wake up around noon the next day, we take a walk to the very top of Primrose Hill where it’s one of those shining winter days and we can see the whole of London spread out before us.
“So beautiful,” Yumi says.
“Yes,” I say, looking at her face. “So beautiful.”
Monday morning, after my mother has gone off to dish up the burgers, beans and tacos at Nelson Mandela High, my father comes to the house.
I am sort of glad to see him. I miss him. Just miss having him around. Miss the way it used to be. But I can see that his timing is an act of supreme cowardice and that makes me despise him. I sit on the stairs as he fills a couple of suitcases. Files, books, clothes. Videos, documents, stacks of CDs.
Taking them, leaving us.
The CD on top of a pile waiting to be packed is called
Dancing in the Street – 43 Motown Dance Classics
, a window to a world of youth and optimism and perfect grooves that seems out of place and out of time.
“So how’s the new book coming along?” I ask him. “Getting it done, are you?”
He doesn’t look at me, just carries on trying to close a Samsonite that is far too full. He’s going to struggle to get that into the SLK’s boot. I don’t offer to help him.
“The book will be fine.”
“Good stuff.”
“You think this is easy for me. But it’s not. I miss my home. You can’t imagine how much I miss it.”
“What about us?”
“What do you think? Of course I miss you. Both of you.”
“What I don’t understand is how you explain it to yourself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Leaving, I mean. You inflict all this pain on Mum, and I don’t understand how you live with it. You must justify it to yourself. But I don’t know how.”
“Lena’s a special girl. Hardly a girl. A special young woman.”
“But what if she’s not, Dad? What if she’s just another girl who happens to be really pretty? Does that mean you got it wrong? That all of this was a mistake? Will it still be worth it?”
“She’s far more than a pretty face. Do you really think that I would turn my world upside down for a pretty face?”
“Absolutely.”
“Anyway,” he says, getting the Samsonite to shut at last. “It was a relief to finally get it out in the open.”
“Your nasty little knob?”
“My relationship with Lena. I was sick of sneaking around. It couldn’t have gone on like that forever.”
“So Lena is – what? – your mistress?”
“God. No. Lena is certainly not my mistress.”
“But you must give her money? You slip her a few quid, don’t you?”
“Well, yes. Not that it’s got anything to do with you.”
“For exclusive rights.”
“That’s not the reason.”
“You slip her money for exclusive rights. If that’s not a mistress, then what is? And you see her when you can, right?”
“Not any more.” He looks at me for the first time with a bit of defiance. “Now I see her all the time. When I want.”
My old man has nearly finished packing. There are lots more of his possessions here. Wardrobes full of suits. A study full of books. Enough sports equipment to stock a small gym. But this is just a quick raid to grab the bare essentials. Today is not the final reckoning. Right now he just wants clean underwear and his Diana Ross compilations.
“How did it work?” I ask him. “How did you get away with it? You must have lied through your teeth. You must have been pretending to do one thing when what you were really doing was Lena.”
“Would you like to watch your mouth?”
“Didn’t that make you feel a bit grubby? Lying like that?”
“I didn’t enjoy it.”
“But you didn’t hate it so much that you stopped doing it.”
“I guess not.”
“And she never knew. Mum, I mean. Never even suspected. Ignorance is certainly bliss, isn’t it? Or at least it’s very underrated.”
“I really must go.”
“Mum trusted you, you bastard. That’s why you got away with it for so long. Not because you’re clever. Because she trusted you. Because she’s kind and good. And you probably think that you’re a decent guy, don’t you? Is Mum just supposed to crawl away and die now? Is that what she’s supposed to do?”
“Christ! You’re making more of a fuss than her.”
He tries to leave. I step in front of him.
“Look, I’m not a kid, okay?”
“Then stop acting like one.”
“I can understand how you would want to go to bed with Lena. I can even understand how you might want to do it more than once.”
“Thank you so much for your understanding.”
“What I don’t understand is how you could be so cruel.”
“I’m not trying to be cruel. I’m just trying to get on with my life. Didn’t you ever feel like that, Alfie? Like just getting on with your life?” He shakes his head. “No. Probably not.”
And there’s something else that I don’t understand. What happens to all the old photographs? All the old photographs in their albums and the shoe boxes and drawers – where do they go now?
My father is not going to take them with him. He’s not going to sit around in his rented love nest looking at all the old photographs with Lena. She doesn’t want to see pictures of me and my mum and my dad at the seaside, in the garden of the house where I grew up, grinning in our party hats at all those lost Christmases.
Lena’s not interested in all that stuff. And neither is my father. Not any more. He doesn’t want reminders of his old life. He wants to get on with his new life.
And the old photographs are not much good to my mother. She doesn’t want to see them any more. That’s what I resent most. My father’s actions haven’t just contaminated the present. They have reached back across the years, making our happiness seem misplaced, our innocence seem foolish, all that was good seem second-rate.
Our party hats at Christmas, our smiling faces in the back garden, looking happy and proud in our best clothes at some cousin’s wedding – how wrong it all seems now. The old photographs are all ruined.
My father hasn’t just messed up the present. He has messed up the past.
I buy her some flowers on the way to work. Nothing too flashy. I don’t want to overdo it. Just a bunch of yellow tulips for when we get a moment.
But it’s strange. Yumi doesn’t act differently. That is, she is just the same as she always was – making jokes and cheeky comments in her Advanced Beginners class, but always working hard, getting the job done, being a good, conscientious student. Same as always. As if nothing has happened. As if the world hasn’t been changed. At lunch time she picks up her books to leave.
“Can we talk?” I ask her, producing the tulips from under my desk.
“Later,” she says, not looking at the flowers.
My heart sinks, but she kisses me quickly on the cheek, slightly crushing my tulips. And my heart soars.
But at the end of the day I take my flowers to the Eamon de Valera and as I stand in the doorway I see that Yumi is at the bar with Imran. I move towards them but then I stop, because Imran has one hand wrapped around her tiny waist while his other hand is giving her small tush a familiar pat.
She kisses him on the mouth, and then rubs her head against his shoulder, like a little cat that hasn’t got the cream, but expects to get it some time soon. Like she did with me. I quickly turn and walk out of the pub, holding the flowers so tight that I can feel the stems breaking in my fist.
Then Gen is by my side, looking at me with concern.
“She likes him,” he says simply.
“I don’t care.”
Gen shrugs. “She likes him long time. Since he began at this college.” He stares at me, searching for something else to say. “Sorry.”
“Thanks, Gen.”
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Come back inside,
sensei
. Have Guinness. Listen to the Corrs.”
“Some other night.”
“Good night then,
sensei
.”
“Good night, Gen.”
You’re so stupid, I tell myself, stuffing the flowers in the nearest rubbish bin. But for a few sweet moments there – dancing in that little club, Sunday morning on Primrose Hill, making love while her red suitcase stood guard – I honestly thought that I heard tomorrow calling.
Whoops, wrong number.
I see her. Rose, I mean. See her on a London street, see her in a place where she could never possibly be.
I am in a cab coming back from the West End. And suddenly there’s Rose – not a woman who looks like Rose. But Rose herself – the same face, the same patient expression she always wore when she was waiting for something. The clothes are different but she is the same girl. And although I know it could not possibly be her, for a long, dizzy minute, I cannot help believing.
She is waiting at a bus stop. I have to restrain myself from shouting at the taxi driver to stop and rushing to her side. I know that if I approach this woman, Rose will disappear to be replaced by some imperfect stranger. It isn’t Rose. She has gone and I will never see her again. At least not in this world.
Me get in touch with the dead?
That’s a joke.
I can’t even get in touch with the living.