I walk past the doorway to Churchill’s International Language School three times before I find it.
The entrance is between an ancient denim store and a brand-new coffee shop, at the part of Oxford Street where the milling crowds are at their thickest, so small that it is hardly there at all. I drink two heavily sugared cappuccinos and almost buy a pair of Levi’s – unfortunately they don’t have my size – before I finally see the open door.
It is being listlessly guarded by two more of Churchill’s students. They are gabbing away and scratching their piercings – navel for her, nose and eyebrow for him – while offering flyers to the indifferent mob. They don’t look at me as I go past them and up a steep flight of stairs.
Churchill’s International Language School occupies one entire floor of a building that seems to open up the further you go inside, like a secret cave or the magic wardrobe that led to Narnia. It echoes with foreign accents, distant laughter, the sound of a teacher patiently explaining the idiom, “to see the light”.
Churchill’s feels like a far happier place than either the Princess Diana or the Double Fortune. I can smell instant coffee and takeaway chicken teriyaki. The walls are yellow and peeling, but covered with notice boards and bright with posters. Someone is selling a rice cooker because they are going back home. There are messages in English, French, Italian and what looks like Japanese. Rooms to rent, household items for sale, classes offered and sought – all the bits and pieces of student life everywhere, conducted in every language under the sun.
This place doesn’t have the menace of the Princess Diana or the earnestness of the Double Fortune. It’s a young, bustling, friendly place. I feel so comfortable here that I ask at the reception desk if they have any teaching vacancies. After filling in an application form and waiting for twenty minutes, I am sitting opposite Lisa Smith, the principal. She has dyed red hair, combat boots and a pair of those chunky, vaguely ethnic earrings that look far too heavy for human ear lobes. Despite dressing like one of her students, she must be breathing down the neck of her sixtieth birthday. Her manner is business-like, unsmiling, only as polite as she needs to be. She studies my application form.
“The world needs English,” she says. “Our students will go on to look for jobs in tourism, business, information technology. Wherever they work, they can’t do it without good English. English is the global language. The language of the next century.”
“It’s funny,” I say. “I was in Hong Kong the night it was handed back to the Chinese. Everyone was saying that it was finally the end of empire, the end of colonial rule, the end of the western century. All that. But the English language is stronger than ever.”
A thin smile from Principal Smith.
“Oh, our students don’t dream of becoming English, Mr Budd. They harbour no ambitions to become British. They dream of becoming international.”
Becoming international. That sounds good to me. When I went to Hong Kong, my dream was to become a part of something bigger than myself. And I did for a while. I made it. I was bigger than myself. Not because of the bright shining lights but because of a woman.
Rose transformed me. She swapped me for the person I had always wanted to be. Thanks to her, I was on the way to becoming myself. I had even started writing a few small things. Then suddenly it was all over, and everything slipped away from me.
I don’t tell Lisa Smith that teaching has often sickened me. I don’t tell her that I was bored and frustrated teaching the designer-clad old ladies at the Double Fortune, that I was overwhelmed and frightened teaching the designer-clad young thugs at the Princess Diana Comprehensive for Boys.
I am on my best behaviour, asking some questions about pay and working conditions, because I feel that I must.
But I already know that I want to be a part of Churchill’s International Language School, I want to be surrounded by people who still have their dreams intact, I long to be a part of all that distant laughter.
four
Josh comes out of the lift just after six o’clock, all blond and beefy inside his pinstripe suit, turning on the charm for some smitten secretary who is gazing up at him while he twinkles and smiles and pretends to be nice. Josh lets the young woman peel away into the home-going crowds before he approaches me, his smile fading.
“You look awful,” he says. “Want a drink? How about a drop of Mother Murphy’s Water?”
“Have they got Tsingtao?”
“No, they haven’t got bloody Tsingtao. It’s an Irish pub, Alfie. They don’t sell Chinese beer in Irish pubs. God, it’s pointless looking for the craic with you. You couldn’t find the crack in your fat arse, could you?”
Josh is my best friend. I often think that he doesn’t like me very much. Sometimes I believe he rues the day that I was born. When we go out for a drink, a large part of the evening is always spent with Josh insulting me, although he no doubt considers this mindless abuse constructive criticism.
As we walk to Mother Murphy’s, Josh informs me that I have wasted my life. He tells me that no woman will ever want me. And when he hears my good news about Churchill’s International Language School, he makes it clear that he disapproves of my new job, just as he disapproved of my old job.
Yet Josh is the closest thing I have to a real friend. We’ve stayed in touch since Hong Kong, when it would have been the easiest thing in the world to drift from each other’s lives, what with him doing so well in the City and me spending most of my time wandering around Chinatown. But we are closer now than we were in Hong Kong.
There are people who have known me far longer and like me far more. People I knew at college, people I used to teach with at the Princess Diana. But none of them are real friends.
It’s not their fault. It’s mine. Somehow I have let them all wander off. I do not return their phone calls. I make lame excuses when I receive their invitations to dinner. I do not make the effort, the endless effort, that you need to keep a friendship alive. These are good people. But the truth is that I just don’t care enough for the continual contact that friendship demands.
I have seen a few of them since coming back to London, for drinks or coffee, and it always seems quietly futile. The only person I really look forward to seeing is Josh. He is my last link to Hong Kong, my one way back to the life I shared with Rose. If I let Josh slip away, then it would really feel as though Hong Kong was over. And I don’t want Hong Kong to be over.
“You were always a tourist,” Josh tells me in an Irish bar full of Englishmen in business suits. “Sentimental about the locals. Gawping at the view. Treating the world like it’s one big Disneyland. Buying little knick-knacks to put on the mantelpiece back home. You and Rose. What a pair of tourists.”
Why did Josh call me up and ask me out for a drink? Why doesn’t he spend his time with other hotshot young lawyers? Because it works both ways. Because I am Josh’s last remaining link to his own happy past.
Josh is working in the City now. Making a lot of money, doing well, soon to be made a partner. He says he doesn’t miss his life in Hong Kong. But I think he secretly yearns for the sense of endless possibility that every expatriate experiences, the feeling that your life has somehow opened up, that you are finally free to become exactly who you want to be. You lose all of that when you come back home. You discover that you are suddenly your old self again.
I think that Josh feels robbed. In Hong Kong he was considered to be what he presents himself as being – a cool, confident son of privilege, educated at schools that cost £15,000 a year, arrogant, to the manor born.
But that’s not the truth. And back in London, some people see right through him.
There was a bit of money in Josh’s distant past. His father was an underwriter at Lloyd’s and for the first ten years of Josh’s life there were private schools, tennis lessons and a big detached house in the suburbs. But that way of life started to recede when his father had a stroke.
From the age of twelve, Josh went to a comprehensive school in the Home Counties where he was tormented in the playground because he spoke like Prince Charles. His father lost his job. Josh lost his future. And all the insurance policies in the world can’t give you back your future. By the time he became a teenager, all Josh had left was his name, his accent and his act. It’s a good act. It fools me – even now – and many others.
But there are people in Josh’s firm who really did go to Eton and Harrow and Westminster, pampered veterans of Barbados and Gstaad, who come from families where the money never ran out, where the father did not have a stroke at forty.
These people look at Josh and they smile. He doesn’t fool them for a minute.
It’s strange. Josh pretends that everything he has – the law degree, the fashionably empty loft in Clerkenwell, the brand-new BMW coupé – came easily to him. The truth is much more impressive. I know that none of it came easily and I think he resents that about me, I think that’s why he never fails to abuse me. But there’s something we will always have connecting us, something that other people will never understand.
“Hong Kong,” he says. “How can you miss Hong Kong? All those weddings and funerals in a language you don’t understand. The shore line changing every time you look at it. All those mobile phones going off at the movies. Checking your seafood for hepatitis B. Nobody smiling at you unless she’s a Filipina. The obsessions with money, sex and shopping. In that order. And the other obsessions with typhoons, canto-pop and Louis Vuitton. Weather so humid that your shoes grow leaves. Air conditioning so cold that you get hypothermia in the supermarket. People throwing their rubbish from the eighteenth floor of their buildings. Including fridges.”
“You miss it, too, don’t you?”
Josh nods. “Breaks my bloody heart,” he says. “I remember the first time I ever had sex in Hong Kong. Think I’ve still got the receipt somewhere.”
Josh likes me. He tries to hide it, but he does. Sometimes I think he envies me. It’s true that I don’t have a career, or money, or a flash car, or any of the things that you are supposed to want. But I also don’t have a boss, a suit and tie I have to wear, a position to protect. There’s no lucrative partnership that I want. And there’s nothing that anyone can take away from me. Not now.
Yet there has always been an edge to my relationship with Josh. His hostility is not just a cover because he likes me so much. I think Josh believes that I stole Rose away from him just when he was ready to make his move.
Personally I don’t believe you can steal one human being from another. You can’t steal people, despite what Josh thinks. People are funny.
They just slip away.
When we can’t drink any more, we walk the entire length of the City Road and Upper Street looking for a black cab.
We get to the far side of Highbury Corner, where affluence and fashion abruptly give way to poverty and function, and we still haven’t found a taxi. There’s a dirty yellow light revolving among a tired row of shops.
“You get a minicab,” I tell Josh. “I can walk home from here.”
“Something to eat first,” he says. “Got to line the old stomach.”
Although we have left the bright lights behind, I know there are some really good places to eat around here. On one side of the Holloway Road there’s Trevi, a little Anglo-Italian café, and on the other side there’s Bu-San, one of the city’s oldest Korean restaurants. But Trevi is closed and Bu-San is full.
“What about that place?” Josh says. “Looks like a dump but I’m desperate.”
He’s indicating a Chinese restaurant that is sandwiched between a dry-cleaner’s and a kebab shop. It’s called the Shanghai Dragon and it is not much to look at. There’s a line of smoked windows decorated with ancient takeaway menus, curling reviews from local rags and listings mags, and some big red Chinese characters that are probably the name of the joint. There’s a tiny sign in the window. “No dogs,” it says.
On the main door, a single rectangular slab of yet more smoked glass, there’s a leering golden dragon who has seen better days. But beyond all the darkened windows and dog-eared menus, you can see heads moving about inside. The place is busy. A good sign. We go inside.
The Shanghai Dragon is nothing fancy. The interior has the shagged-out minimalism of a minicab firm at midnight. It’s an L-shaped room with a large section for diners and a smaller area for takeaway customers. In the restaurant section there are just a few courting couples left now, lingering over the coffee and mint chocolates. The takeaway area is more crowded with people who have just come out of the local pubs. There are a few stray tables and chairs in this section but all of them are occupied. Suspended from the ceiling, there’s a large television set showing some TV movie about Charles and Diana.
At the angle of the L-shaped room, an old Chinese lady is leaning on the counter of a bar the size of a telephone booth and taking orders, which she scratches on her pad in Chinese characters. There’s a cup of green tea in front of her.
You can smell the kitchen beyond a tatty door at the end of the takeaway section. Garlic and spring onion, frying beef and black bean sauce, noodles and rice. I look at Josh and I can tell he thinks it, too. This smells like a good place. We study the menu.
“Next!” the old lady says.
A man with a shaven head and khaki shorts lumbers up to the counter. He is dressed like a young man although he is not young at all. He looks like a forty-year-old skinhead who is on his summer holiday, a style that is quite popular in these parts. His belly resembles a bucket of brewer’s slop that is being poured into the gutter. He stinks of drink.
“Bag of chips,” he says.
“Chips only with meal,” says the old lady.
The man’s face darkens.
“Just give us a fucking bag of chips, you monkey.”
The old lady’s bright brown eyes show no fear.
“No dirty words! Chips only with meal!” She taps a menu with her biro. “Says so here. You want chips, you order meal. For goodness sake. I wasn’t born tomorrow.”
“I don’t want a fucking meal,” the man growls.
“No dirty words!”
“I just want a bag of chips.”
“Chips only with meal,” the old lady says in conclusion, and then looks over the man’s shoulder. “Don’t blame me if you got out of bed the wrong way. Next!”
The other customers are all waiting for their takeaways. That means we are next. I step up to the counter and start to give our order. The man with the shaven head puts a meaty hand on my chest and propels me backwards.
“Give us a bag of fucking chips, you old cow,” he says.
“Who the
hell
do you think you are?” Josh says.
The middle-aged skinhead turns and brings his forehead smashing down onto Josh’s nose. My friend reels backwards with shock and pain. Already there’s a Jackson Pollock-style splatter of blood across his white shirt and silk tie.
“And you can wait your turn, Lord Snooty.”
The skinhead grabs a fistful of the old lady’s jumper. She seems very small. For the first time she starts to look afraid.
I put a restraining hand on the old skinhead’s shoulder. He turns and – very quickly, very hard – hits me three times in the ribs. As I clutch my sides, good for nothing, I think to myself that he has either done a bit of boxing or watched an awful lot of it on satellite television. I also think to myself –
ouch!
No, really –
ouch!
“I don’t want any greasy foreign muck,” says the skinhead in a tone of voice that contrives to combine fury with extreme reasonableness. “I don’t want any of your sweet and sour crap. Just … give … me … a … bag … of … fucking … chips.”
“Chips only with meal!” the old lady cries, and the door to the kitchen opens as the skinhead pulls her towards him.
A cook is standing in the doorway. He is about sixty and wearing a white chefs apron that is stained and frayed. His head is also shaved. For a second I can’t remember where I know him from.
And then I get it. He’s the old man in the park who I saw doing his slow-motion dance. The one who told me to keep breathing. The Tai Chi guy.
The skinhead lets go of the old lady as the old man comes towards him. The two men look at each other. The skinhead squares up for a fight, his fleshy fists half raised, but the old man simply faces him, doing nothing, waiting.
The skinhead seems clenched with violence. But the old man is perfectly relaxed, his arms hanging loose by his side. He’s clearly not afraid of the much larger man. The old lady barks something in Cantonese, gesturing at the skinhead.
“Chips only with meal,” the old man says, very quietly.
Then he says nothing.
The two men stare at each other for a long moment. Then the skinhead looks away with a short, contemptuous laugh. Muttering to himself about Chinks and chips and greasy foreign muck, he leaves the Shanghai Dragon, slamming the door behind him. The relief in the place is tangible. We all watch the old man, wondering what has happened.
The kitchen door opens again and another Chinese man, this one much younger and plumper, comes out carrying a stack of silver containers in a plastic bag. He looks at me and Josh and his mouth drops open.
I am almost weeping with pain. Josh is sprawled in one of the plastic chairs, leaning his head back, a bloody handkerchief over his face.