I almost tell him that I’ve got all the time in the world, but I don’t bother.
Because suddenly I see myself with George in the park, both of us in our black pyjamas, doing a graceful slow-motion waltz as the packed tube trains rumble 100 metres below our slippered feet, and the image just seems ridiculous.
George is right. There are some dances you never learn. That stillness, that peace, that grace. Who am I kidding?
I just don’t have it in me.
sixteen
Hiroko is going back to Japan for Christmas. I meet her at Paddington, under a huge fir tree decorated with brightly coloured boxes that are meant to look like presents, and we catch the Heathrow Express to the airport.
Saying goodbye to her feels strange. I am sad to see her go. At the same time, I am glad to feel something, anything. But – and this is the important bit – not too much.
We embrace at the departure gate and Hiroko waves to me right up until the time she disappears behind the screen before passport control. Then I wander around Terminal 3, reluctant to go home. The airport is awash with real emotion today. Lovers are saying goodbye and being reunited. Families are separating and coming back together. There are lots of hugs and laughter and tears. The departure gate is pretty interesting but the arrivals hall is even better, because you can’t do it in your own time at arrivals. You can’t decide when it’s time to say hello in quite the same way that you can decide it’s time to say goodbye. Hello just happens. The people anxiously waiting for someone don’t know when that face is suddenly going to appear before them, slowly pushing a trolley, smiling through the jet lag, ready for a kiss and a cuddle, ready to begin again.
There’s something else that I notice about the arrivals hall. It is full of young women arriving in the UK to study English. Everywhere you look there is shining black hair, bright brown eyes and Louis Vuitton luggage. They don’t stop coming.
It’s a kind of miracle.
Behind the barrier there are bored drivers and chirpy representatives of two dozen language schools standing with their little signs and placards and notice boards, waiting for the next Jumbo from Osaka or Beijing or Seoul or somewhere else that Christmas doesn’t really matter.
And as I stand among the men and women with their placards – MISS SUZUKI, KIM LEE, GREEN GABLES LANGUAGE SCHOOL, TAE-SOON LEE, MIWAKO HONDA and HIROMI TAKESHI, OXFORD SCHOOL OF ENGLISH, MISS WANG and MISS WANG – I suddenly realise that this city is full of young women learning English.
The Terminal 3 brigade are Asian. At the other terminals, you would no doubt find the Scandinavian regiments, or the Mediterranean battalions. But there are thousands of them, an entire army of them, with fresh reinforcements arriving daily.
For the first time I understand that there’s no reason for me ever to be lonely again.
Some of these young women – laughing, confident, looking forward to their new life – find their drivers or their schools’ representatives immediately. Others struggle to make the connection. They wander in front of the barrier, looking for their name on one of the little hand-held placards. Hopeful but a touch worried. And my heart aches for them.
I watch them for the longest time, these beautiful stragglers in this magnificent brown-eyed invasion, fresh off the plane and looking for a sign.
And somewhere high above me, in the muzak that is pumped around the airport, “Silent Night” segues into “O Come All Ye Faithful”.
As soon as my nan has her front door open, I can smell the gas. I brush past her and quickly go into the kitchen where the smell is even stronger.
“Alfie?”
One of the gas burners on her cooker is turned up to full and unlit. The gas feels so thick it’s like you could reach out and touch it. Coughing like a madman, I turn it off and open up all the windows.
“Nan,” I say, sick and streaming, “you’ve got fo be more careful.”
“I don’t know how that happened,” she says, all flustered. “I was making – I don’t remember.” She blinks at me with her watery blue eyes. “Don’t tell your mum, Alfie. Or your dad.”
I look at her. She has her make-up on. Her eyebrows are two shaky black lines and her lipstick is very slightly off, like a double exposure on a photograph. The sight of her worried face and wonky cosmetics makes me put my arm around her shoulders. Inside her cardigan she feels as small and fragile as a child.
“I promise I won’t tell anybody,” I say, knowing she is worried that my parents already think she is unable to live alone, knowing that her great terror in this world is that she will one day be taken from this place and put in a home. “But please don’t do it again, okay, Nan?”
She beams with relief and I watch her make a cup of tea for the pair of us, muttering to herself, elaborately turning the gas off after the kettle has boiled. I feel for the poor old thing, constantly being assessed for signs that her warm, intelligent, curious mind has finally turned to mush. At the same time the gas has frightened me. I am afraid that one day I will stand outside her flat with the fumes seeping under the door and nobody answering the bell. Then I remember why I am here. Jesus. I’m getting a touch of old timer’s disease myself.
“Where’s your tree, Nan?”
“In the little room, love. In the box with Christmas written on it.”
My nan loves Christmas. She would put her tree up in mid-August if we didn’t physically restrain her. Although she always spends Christmas Day with my family – and this year she will spend it with my mother and me, which is all that’s left of my family – she still likes to have her own tree, alleging that it’s “nice for Alfie when he comes round”, as if I am just coming up to my fourth birthday.
I can remember the Christmas Days we had with my nan when I was small. She was still in her old house in the East End, the house where my father grew up, the house in
Oranges For Christmas
, the house with a chicken run in the back garden and a stand-up piano in the living room. The place always seemed to be full of my uncles and aunts and cousins, the children playing with their new toys while the adults got merry – big glasses of dark beer for the men, small glasses of something red and sweet for the women – and played brag and poker, or bet on the horses that were racing on television. The old house was constantly filled with people and music, cigarette smoke and laughter. There was a huge tree that looked as though it had come straight from some Norwegian wood.
Now the old house has gone and so has my grandfather and so has my father and my nan lives alone in this small white flat, the belongings of a lifetime shrunk to fit a few bare rooms. The uncles and the aunts are scattered, spending Christmases with their own children and grandchildren, and the real tree has been replaced by a fake silver one that comes in three parts – top half, bottom half and base, like a fake Santa half-heartedly going
ho ho ho
. I find the tree and a collection of fairy lights and assorted decorations in a torn cardboard box marked “Xmass”. My nan watches me with excited eyes as I screw the thing together.
“Lovely,” she says. “That silver looks smashing, doesn’t it, Alfie?”
“It does, Nan.”
As I stretch to put the angel on top of the tree I feel something bad happen to my back. Some muscle seems to go at the base of my spine and I am suddenly hunched up with pain, the angel still in my fist.
And as I sit on the sofa waiting for the pain to pass, and my nan goes off to make another cup of tea, I think I finally understand her passion for her fake tree.
Christmas trees are a bit like relationships. The real thing is certainly more beautiful, but it’s just too much fuss, too much mess.
You can say what you like about fake ones.
But you can’t deny that they are a lot less trouble.
The way I come to sleep with Vanessa is that I find her standing outside the college with Witold handing out new leaflets for the school.
The massed ranks of late Christmas shoppers are not paying them any attention so Vanessa is folding the flyers into little paper planes and throwing them into the crowd. Witold is watching her with an embarrassed grin.
“Study with the best!” she cries, launching a leaflet at a middle-aged businessman.
“Estudia en Churchill’s! Studia alia Churchill’s! Studieren in Churchill’s!”
“
What are you doing, Vanessa?” I ask her, rubbing my back.
“Getting new students!” she laughs.
“Nauka w Churchill’s! Etudiez à Churchill’s!”
“
Well, knock it off,” I smile.
“But nobody’s
interested
,” she says, stamping her foot and giving me one of her sulky pouts. She puts her hands on her hips. “It’s Christmas.”
“Just give them out normally,” I tell her. “Please.”
“What will you do for me? Give me an exam paper in advance?”
“I’ll buy you a drink.” Vanessa is the kind of woman who makes you think that banter is compulsory. “As it’s Christmas. You know. A glass of German wine or something.”
“Anything but German wine.”
“I like German wine,” Witold says.
And so later I find myself in the Eamon de Valera having a drink with Vanessa. She is not herself. She doesn’t dance, or flirt, or shout across the pub to someone. She tells me that she is not going back to France for the holiday – it’s difficult to know where she should go now that her parents are divorced – but staying in London is even worse.
“Why’s that?”
She looks at me for a second.
“Because I will not see my boyfriend,” she says. “He will be with his family.”
Later still I see pictures of the boyfriend in Vanessa’s flat.
It is a good flat in an affluent part of town, nothing like the tiny bedsit that Yumi lives in, or the room in a shared house that Hiroko occupies. Vanessa has her own small but beautiful one-bedroom flat in one of the swankier parts of north London. It must cost well over £1,000 a month and judging by the number of photographs of Vanessa and her boyfriend – this gym-fit forty-year-old, his arm casually circled around Vanessa’s waist, a platinum wedding ring glinting on the third finger of his left hand, a wide white smile on his face – I guess that he is the one paying the direct debits.
“Difficult time of year for him,” Vanessa says, picking up a photograph of the pair of them sitting outside some country pub. “He has to be with his family.” She replaces the picture. “His children. And her. But he doesn’t sleep with her any more. He really doesn’t.”
I go to bed with Vanessa and that cheers her up. Not because of my dazzling sexual technique but because she seems to find it mildly amusing being in bed with me. She’s physically very different from Yumi or Hiroko. Just everything. Her hair, her breasts, her hips, her skin. I find the novelty exciting – I’m very exciting – and I’m about to say rash things, but luckily Vanessa’s small smile stops me from saying anything stupid. I know that she takes tonight very lightly because somebody already owns her heart.
And I understand completely. I’m not offended.
Later she has a little cry into the pillow and I can hold her without saying, “What’s wrong, darling, what’s wrong?” because I know for certain that it has absolutely nothing to do with me.
I lie awake in the darkness of a strange bed and I think about Yumi. About Hiroko. About Vanessa. About waiting in the arrivals hall at Heathrow. About how I have realised that I need never be lonely again.
And I know why I am attracted to the girls in the arrivals hall. It’s not because, as a nut doctor might suggest, a permanent attachment is unlikely.
It’s because they are all a long way from home.
Even if they have many friends here, even if they are happy in this city, they have their lonely hours. They don’t have someone who is always there. They don’t have to rush home to anyone.
They are all ultimately alone.
It’s funny. They sort of remind me of me.
seventeen
I am true to my wife. Even in these other beds, with these women who sometimes talk in their sleep in a language I do not understand, I am always true to my wife.
Because nobody else touches me. Nobody even comes close.
And I come to see that as a kind of blessing. To love without loving – it’s not so bad once you get used to it. To be that far beyond harm, where nothing can hurt you and nothing can be taken away from you – is that really such a bad place to be? There’s a lot to be said for the meaningless relationship. The meaningless relationship is hugely underrated.
There are no little lies told in these trysts, these transactions. The rented rooms we meet in are not cold places. Far from it. There’s no contempt, no boredom, no constant searching for an exit sign. We are there because we want to be there. The death by a thousand cuts that you get in most marriages – there’s none of that.
And who is to say that these relationships are meaningless?
I like you – you’re nice.
Is that really so meaningless?
Or is that all the meaning you need?
Things start to go wrong when Vanessa gives me an apple.
There’s a knock on the staff room door and Hamish gets it. When he turns to look at me – his impressively plucked eyebrows lifting wryly above his handsome face – I see Vanessa’s smiling blonde head over his shoulder. She has a shiny red apple in her fist. Bringing me an apple is a very Vanessa thing to do.
Both genuinely affectionate and mildly mocking.
“An apple for my teacher.”
“Sweet.”
Then she softly places a kiss on my lips – still acting as if it’s all a joke which it is to her – and just at that moment Lisa Smith comes up the stairs and sees us. Vanessa turns away laughing, oblivious of the principal’s dirty looks. Or perhaps she just doesn’t care. But Lisa glares at me for a few long seconds as if she wishes I were dead by the side of the road. She goes into her office on the other side of the corridor.
Back in the staff room Hamish and Lenny are both looking at me. Hamish mumbles something to me but I am not quite sure if it’s, “You should watch that, mate” – meaning Vanessa – or “You should wash that, mate” – meaning the apple.
Lenny, once he gets over his initial shock, is more forthright.
“Vanessa? You haven’t got a multiple-entry visa there, have you, mate? You’re not going full speed up the newly opened Euro tunnel, are you?”
Before I can lie to him the phone rings and Lisa Smith tells Hamish that she wants to see me in her office. Now.
“Jesus,” says Lenny. “She’s going to have your bollocks for ethnic earrings, mate.”
Lenny lifts his eyebrows and smirks. There is a hideous admiration in his eyes.
I’m not like Lenny the Lech,
I tell myself.
I’m not.
“I don’t understand, Lenny. You get away with murder. And I get lifted. Why haven’t you ever been dropped in it?”
“Why? Because I’ve never shagged any of the students, mate.”
“What?”
“It’s all talk with me, mate. Dirty talk, I’ll grant you. Filthy talk, even. But I wouldn’t actually put my barnacle-encrusted old todger anywhere near this lot. Are you kidding? In the current climate, it’s more than my knob’s worth.”
“Never?”
“Not once. Well, there was a cute little Croat who let me put my hand inside her Wonderbra at last year’s Christmas party. But that modest handful is the only penetration there has ever been.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“It’s true, mate. Besides, what would all these hot young things want with a fat old cunt like me? Go on, off you go.”
So it’s true. I’m nothing like Lenny the Lech. I’m much worse.
As I leave the staff room, I hear the clank of a bucket at the other end of the corridor. There she is, going about her work – a thin, blonde figure in a blue nylon coat, her copy of
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
stuffed in a torn pocket, mopping the floor in a pair of mules that were designed for dancing. No flat shoes this morning for Jackie Day.
And I can’t tell if she is staring into space or looking right through me.
“It’s sexual imperialism,” Lisa Smith says. “That’s what it is. That’s all it is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, my face burning, my back aching.
“Oh, I think you do,” she retorts. “Yumi. Hiroko. Now Vanessa. I saw her give you that Golden Delicious.”
I’m shocked. I was caught red-handed with Vanessa. But how does she know about Yumi? How does she know about Hiroko?
“Do you think our students don’t talk?” she says, answering my question, and I think: Vanessa. Vanessa and her big, mocking mouth. “And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ve insulted this college. Please don’t insult my intelligence.”
“Okay,” I say. “But I honestly don’t feel that I’ve done anything wrong.”
Lisa Smith is dumbfounded.
“You don’t think you’ve done anything wrong?”
“No.”
“Can’t you see that we are in a position of trust?” she asks me, crossing her legs and impatiently tapping a combat boot against the side of her desk. “Can’t you see that you’re exploiting your position?”
I never saw it as exploitation. I felt that we were always sort of equal. I know I’m their teacher and they are my students, but it’s not as though they are children. They are grown women. Most of them are more mature than me. And yet they are young. They are gloriously young, with all their lives stretching out before them. True, I’m the guy with the piece of chalk, but they have time on their side, they have years to burn. I always felt that gave us parity, that their youth levelled it up. Youth has its own kind of power, its own special status. But I can’t say any of this to the principal.
“They’re all old enough to know what they’re doing,” is what I say. “I’m not cradle snatching.”
“You’re their teacher. You’re in a position of responsibility. And you have abused that position in the worst possible way.”
At first I think that she is going to sack me then and there. But her face softens.
“I know you think that I’m some kind of old battle-axe who can’t stand to see anyone having a good time,” she says.
“Not at all, not at all.”
That’s exactly what I think.
“I understand the temptations of the flesh. I was at the Isle of Wight for Dylan. I spent a weekend at Greenham Common. I know what happens when people get thrown together. But I can’t condone sexual relations between my staff and my students. Do it again and you’re out. Is that understood?”
“Absolutely.”
Even as I am nodding, I am thinking to myself: you can’t stop me. This city is full of young women looking for friendship, romance and a little help with the native tongue. Even as I am being given my final warning, I am telling myself that it is going to be all right, that I need never be lonely, that I am doing nothing wrong.
I like you, you’re nice.
Where’s the harm in that?
When the pain in my back gets so bad that the painkillers no longer have any effect, I go to see my doctor. At first he looks at me as though it’s another psychosomatic thing, like my heart feeling as if it’s an undigested kebab, but when I tell him about the angel on top of my nan’s Christmas tree, he gets me to take my shirt off and gives me a full examination.
Then he tells me there’s nothing that he can do.
“Tricky thing, the lower back,” he says.
I bump into George Chang on my way home. He is coming out of General Lee’s with a takeaway, on his way back to the Shanghai Dragon to help with the lunch trade. He looks at my face and asks me what’s wrong.
“Done my back in,” I tell him. “Putting up my nan’s Christmas tree.”
He tells me to come to the restaurant with him. I say that I’ve got to get back to work, but he does this thing that I’ve noticed his wife does all the time. He just acts as though I haven’t spoken. When we are inside the Shanghai Dragon, he tells me to stand perfectly still. He places his hands at the base of my spine. He is not quite touching me, but – and this is strange – I can definitely feel the warmth of his palms. He is not touching me, but I can feel the heat of his hands. It’s like standing next to a quiet fire. How do you explain that?
Then he tells me to lean slightly forward and very gently pummel my lower back with the back of my hands. I do what he tells me. And then I look at him. Because something inexplicable has happened.
The pain in my back is going away.
“What happened there?”
He just smiles.
“How did you do that?”
“Keep doing that exercise.” He leans forward and lightly paddles his back. “Do it every day for a few minutes. Not too hard, okay?”
“What – what was that? George?”
“Very simple Chi Kung exercise.”
“What’s Chi Kung? You mean chi as in Tai Chi? Is it the same thing?”
“Any kind of exercise with the chi is Chi Kung. Okay? For keeping healthy. For curing sickness. For martial arts. For enlightenment.”
“Enlightenment?”
“That’s all Chi Kung. You remember chi. You told me you don’t got any chi. Remember?”
I feel foolish. “I remember.”
“Does it feel bit better?”
“It feels a lot better.”
“You think maybe you got some chi after all?”
He is laughing at me.
“I guess I have.”
“Then maybe you should come to the park on Sunday morning.”
“You’re going to teach me?”
He sort of grunts. “I’ll teach you.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“Sunday morning. Don’t be late.”
This year my family teaches me the true meaning of Christmas – surviving the thing.
But the longueurs between the Christmas pud and the blockbuster movies and my old man’s sheepish arrival with his last-minute booty from Body Shop give me a chance to do some thinking.
With the sex police patrolling the corridors of Churchill’s International Language School, I figure that it is going to be difficult to meet new faces at work.
So I decide to go private. I place an ad in the back of a listings magazine, in the Personal Services section, which comes just after Introduction Agencies and just before Lonely Hearts.
Need Good English?
Fully qualified English teacher seeks private students.
We can help each other.
Then I put on Sinatra singing “My Funny Valentine” and I wait.