These unborn siblings seemed more like an idea that someone had once had, an idea that had been thought about and then quietly put away. But I remember my mother weeping on the stairs, I remember watching her heart break, I remember her weeping as though those children were as real as me.
She loved me. She loved my father. She was very good at it. When we had hard times – when my dad was trying to write his book while still working full time, when I lost Rose – my mum was our rock.
But no matter how much love she gave us, I always felt that she had more to give. I am not saying that’s why she worked as a dinner lady at Nelson Mandela High. But all that unused love is why my mum can look at all those unlovely children and feel a genuine affection for them.
“We’re giving him a birthday party,” she says, putting on her coat. “Don’t tell your nan. Or Lena. Or him.”
“I don’t know, Mum.”
“It will do him good to celebrate his birthday,” she says, and for just a second there I catch a glimpse of the woman who, at fifty-four years of age, still breaks up fights in the playground of Nelson Mandela High.
The work is not going well for my old man.
When the work was going well, the door to his basement study was shut but you could hear music blasting out of his stereo. It was always the old school soul music he played, music that is full of profound melancholy and wild exuberance, music that was the sound of young America thirty years ago.
When the work went well, my dad played all the mating calls of his twenties – the Four Tops, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie Wonder – but now the work is going badly, or not going anywhere at all, there is only silence in his basement room.
Sometimes I see him sitting at his desk, staring at his computer, a pile of fan letters by his side. People are always writing to his publishers to say how much they loved
Oranges For Christmas
, how they laughed and cried, how it reminded them so much of their own family. These letters, passed on by his publishers, should make my father feel good but all this appreciation seems to weigh heavily upon him, seems to make it even more difficult for him to get started on his new book.
My father is rarely at home these days. In the mornings he goes to the gym, pumping his pecs and crunching his abs and toning his buttocks until the sweat blinds him. At night he has endless chores and treats – there are drinks, dinners, launches, awards ceremonies and his wise, witty appearances at the artsy end of radio and television. Those long afternoons are the big problem for him. He stares at his computer screen for a while, Smokey and Stevie and Diana silent inside their CD cases and boxed sets, and then he calls a cab and slips off to the West End.
This is how my father fills his afternoons. He goes around the book shops of Covent Garden and Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street, where he signs many copies of
Oranges For Christmas
. This makes his book easier to sell, so the stores are always pleased to see him, even though he is turning up unannounced and they have other things to do. The young staff fetch him a pile of books and a cup of coffee and my father sets to work.
I saw him once in one of those book shops where they sell records, magazines and designer coffee, one of those new kind of book shops where books are just one of the things they sell. He didn’t see me and I didn’t want to approach him. It would have felt like an intrusion into some private grief.
He looked so lonely.
It is possible that my father does other things in the West End when he escapes from his work and his family and his home. But that’s how I see him, that’s how he is fixed in my mind at this moment – sitting all by himself in the corner of a crowded book shop, a cup of caffe latte growing cold by his side, passing the long, lonesome hours by writing his own name over and over again.
On Friday night some of my students want me to go to the pub with them.
I try to wriggle out of it, telling them that I don’t really drink very much and I don’t really go to pubs, but they seem hurt and disappointed and incredulous.
An Englishman who doesn’t like pubs?
What’s wrong with this guy?
So I tell them that I’ll come along for just a quick one and they say that’s fine, a quick one is good, because most of them have to go to work tonight in whatever bar or burger joint or sushi conveyor belt restaurant pays their rent.
Their local is an Irish pub off Tottenham Court Road called the Eamon de Valera, and although it’s not yet six, the place is already full of young men and women from all around the world and even a few locals knocking back the dark glasses of Guinness, Murphy’s and Coca Cola.
“Irish pub,” Zeng tells me. “Very friendly atmosphere.”
We find an empty corner of the Eamon de Valera and pull two tables together. My students start to get their money out but I tell them that their teacher will buy them a drink. I get in a round of stout and Coke.
There are five of us – me, Zeng, Wit, Gen and Astrud, a Cuban woman, married to a local. But Yumi and Imran are already in the pub, talking at the bar, and they come over to join us. Then Vanessa arrives with Churchill’s other French girl and some young black guy with locks, and soon so many people are joining and leaving our party – Astrud thanks me for her Coke and goes, saying she has to meet her husband – that I can’t tell where it begins and where it ends.
There is something touchingly democratic about our little group. Not just because they come from every corner of the globe, but because you couldn’t imagine these people being friends or even sharing a drink in their home countries. Wit is pushing forty and Yumi is just out of her teens. Wit is permanently broke, sending every spare pound back home to his family, while Vanessa seems to have some kind of private income – all of her carrier bags are from Tiffany and Cartier. Then there is Imran, a handsome young man in Emporio Armani kit, and Zeng, who is wearing odd socks and spectacles mended with sellotape. They have nothing in common apart from Churchill’s International Language School. But studying there has created a bond between them and I find myself doing something that I haven’t done for a long time.
I find myself having a good time.
More drinks are ordered. Students shout at each other in fractured English over the sound of the Corrs asking what they can do to make you happy. Zeng is sitting next to me and I take the Guinness he is clutching away from him as he starts to nod off.
“Always sleeping,” Yumi tuts.
“Wah,” Zeng says, shaking himself awake. He smiles apologetically and reclaims his beer. “Sorry, sorry. Last night I did not sleep. My host family were arguing. Now I am very … I am very … fuck.”
Gasps of astonishment around the table. A few snickers of laughter.
“No bad words!” Yumi says.
Zeng looks embarrassed. “Excuse me,” he says, avoiding eye contact with his teacher.
“That’s okay,” I tell him. “These words are part of the language you’re studying. A lot of great writers have used the vulgar vernacular. This is interesting. What are you trying to say? That you’re very tired?”
Zeng sighs. “Yes. Last night my host family were arguing about some such thing. They were very drunk.”
“He rents a room from a family who rent the room from someone else,” Yumi says. “Illegal. And with very low people. Uneducated.”
“They are not so bad,” Zeng says. “But now I am very, very … fucking.”
“No,” Wit says. “You are fucked off.”
“That means angry,” I say.
“He is … perhaps … fucked up?” Wit suggests helpfully.
“He could say that. But that implies something other than tiredness. He could just say – I am fucked.”
Zeng chuckles. “Yes, it’s true. I
am
fucked.”
“So many of these bad words in English,” Wit says. “In German, there are many words for
you. Du, dich, dir, Sie, Ihnen, ihr
and
euch
. In English, there’s only one word for
you
. But many bad words.”
“Not so many bad words,” I say. “But lots of different meanings to the bad words.”
“Yes,” Gen says. “Such as –
I do not give a fuck
.”
Yumi gasps. Vanessa titters. Wit stokes his chin in contemplation.
“Means – I do not care,” Gen says loftily.
“Or you could call someone a useless fuck,” I say.
“Means he is not very good at making love?” Yumi says.
“No, no,” I say, blushing furiously. “It just means he’s a useless person.”
“Eskimos have fifty different words for snow,” Wit observes. “The English have fifty different words for fuck.”
“Fuck my old boots,” I say.
Frowns around the table.
“What is this – fuck old boots?” Wit says.
“It’s an expression of surprise,” I explain. “Like fuck a duck.”
“Sex with a … beast?” Zeng says. “Like in yellow films? Love with a duck?”
“We don’t call them yellow films. That’s a Chinese expression. Here we call pornography blue films.”
“Wah!”
“No, fuck a duck’s another exclamation of surprise.”
“Like – fuck all?” Wit asks.
“No, that means – nothing.”
“Fuck all means – nothing?”
“That’s right. You’re thinking of
fuck me
.”
“In the steakhouse where I work,” Wit says, “there were these bad men. Very drunk.”
“Mmm,” Vanessa says. “Very English, no?”
They were unhappy with their bill and called for the manager, Wit continues. “Then they threatened to kick the fuck out of him! And called him fuck face!”
“That’s very bad,” I say.
“What is this expression – to fuck someone’s arse off?” Gen says, as if he’s enquiring about some arcane point of etymology. “Is it sex – how to say? – in the rear? Sex – how to say? – up the Wembley Way? That you are a back door man?”
“No, it’s got nothing to do with that. It just means sex that’s done with a degree of enthusiasm. You see?” I tell them. “The great thing about English – the reason you are studying English rather than Chinese or Spanish or French – is that it’s an endlessly flexible language.”
“But English is a strange language,” Wit insists. “What is this funny book – Roger’s Thesaurus?”
“Roget’s Thesaurus,” I say.
“Yes, yes. It’s not a dictionary. It’s a book of synonyms, yes? No book like that exists in my country.”
“I think a book like Roget’s Thesaurus is unique to English. That’s why so many English words find their way into other languages. You can do what you like with it.”
“Excuse me, please,” Zeng says, getting up to go. “I must fuck off.”
“He is leaving!” Gen says triumphantly. “
Zeng
has to leave for General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen.”
“He must fuck off to work,” Wit enunciates carefully, like a professor of phonetics concluding a particularly tricky tutorial. “Or the fuckers will give him the fucking sack.”
And soon more of them are slipping away. Gen to the kitchen of a conveyor belt sushi restaurant on Brewer Street, Wit to that grim old-fashioned red-plush steakhouse on Shaftesbury Avenue where the bad men go, Vanessa to some smitten English boy at the bar who is going to take her dancing.
Soon there’s only Yumi and me at our table in the Eamon de Valera and I’m finally speechless as I feel the effects of two pints of Guinness and her shining brown eyes.
“I like you, you’re nice,” she says.
Fucking hell.
six
My grandmother is telling some big shot from the BBC that she is eighty-seven and still has all her own teeth. My mother looks wonderful in a long red dress, her hair piled on top of her head, and she seems very happy as she smiles and moves among the guests, checking that everyone is okay.
I am hovering on the edge of the evening, trying to overcome the quiet panic that I always feel at parties, fighting the fear that there will be no one for me to talk to. But after a while even I start to relax. It feels like a special night.
It’s true that the guests are a very mixed bunch. The guffawing sports journalists with their Liverpool and Estuary and Irish accents seem to belong at a different gathering to the garrulous, well-spoken girls from television. The authors with their acres of corduroy and denim seem strangely subdued next to the leering late-night DJs with their big cigars. My nan, as frail as a sparrow in her floral party dress, seems to come from a different century from the man in Armani from the BBC.
But it is surprising how well people from different worlds can get on when there is goodwill in the air and expensive alcohol in their bloodstreams and good sushi being offered around. And there is real affection for my father in this room.
I told my mother that he had no real friends, but I was wrong. I feel that these people are all genuinely proud to know my dad. I sense that they admire and like him. They are honoured to be here and excited about surprising him on his birthday. I feel proud of him, glad that he’s my father.
They have come from the four corners of the city to celebrate my father’s birthday. There are brash, beefy men who knew him from his years on the sports pages of national newspapers. There are youthful middle-aged men in coloured spectacles, and loud girls in combat boots who know him from his appearances on their radio and television shows. There are people from his publishing house, sympathetic critics, important booksellers, talk show hosts, fellow writers, all these friends, colleagues and allies who have aided and abetted my dad’s brilliant career.
The party is around our indoor swimming pool. We are in here because it is the only room in the house big enough to hide almost a hundred people. They are milling around the pool, taking drinks and satay and tamaki rolls from the waiters, making jokes about going for a dip. But this is a good place for a celebration.
The bright fluorescent lights make the party feel like it’s being held in some kind of giant spotlight. The swimming pool shimmers turquoise and gold, the light catching the silver trays of the white-suited caterers as they move among guests holding twinkling flutes of champagne. A special night for a special man.
“He’s coming!” my mother announces and the main lights go out. But the room is still not quite dark because there are spotlights in the swimming pool, shimmering under water like yellow ghosts. Someone hits another switch and the room is suddenly pitch black.
Guests giggle and murmur in the darkness as we listen to my father’s Mercedes purring on the street. After a while the engine dies and soon there is the sound of his key in the door. There are another couple of self-conscious laughs which are urgently shushed. We wait for my father in complete darkness and total silence. Nothing happens. We wait some more. Still nothing happens. Nobody speaks. And then the door to the pool room finally opens.
There are shadows in the doorway, the soft ruffle of clothes, something like a sigh. We hear him step into the darkened room and wait for him to turn on the lights. But he doesn’t. Instead there’s the sound of creaking wood. He’s on the diving board! He’s going for a swim! All around me I can feel the laughter being stifled, the tension mounting.
Suddenly the lights come on and the room is full of grinning people and far too bright.
“Surprise!” someone shouts, and then the laughter abruptly dies in our throats.
My father is standing naked on the diving board, his disbelieving eyes slowly taking in the presence of everyone he knows. His eyes stop on my mother’s face for a short horrible moment, and then he looks away in shame.
Lena is kneeling in front of him, fully clothed, her golden head bobbing up and down to some inner rhythm. She is making the diving board squeak.
But I’m the one she fancies
, I think.
That should be me! It’s not fair!
Then my father rests a hand on the back of her head. She stops moving, slowly opening her eyes, looking up at him.
The noise my mother makes is not a scream. It’s not quite as formed as that, not so clear in its meaning. The noise my mother makes is more of a howl that somehow manages to contain disbelief, humiliation and a shame she doesn’t deserve.
The party is paralysed for a few seconds. Then my mother turns and pushes her way through the guests, barging aside a waiter, who loses his balance, seems to regain it for a second and then starts toppling towards the pool. A silver tray carrying half a dozen champagne flutes slips away from the palm of his hand and lands with a crash of metal and glass as he hits the water.
“Does this mean the party’s over?” says my nan.
My parents were always Mike and Sandy. Never Sandy and Mike. Always Mike and Sandy. Always and forever, my father had top billing.
They seem like old-fashioned names to me, Mike and Sandy, names from an England that no longer exists, the England that was there when my parents and their friends and neighbours and my aunts and uncles were young.
It was an England of country pubs, dinner dances and trips to the seaside on Bank Holiday Monday. A land of small pleasures, quietly savoured – card schools (men and women) on Christmas night, football (men and boys) on Boxing Day, a trip to the local for a game of darts and a couple of pints (men only) when we had “guests”.
That land was a cold, insular place with real winters, where every foreign holiday to Greece or Spain felt like the trip of a lifetime. The Beatles had come and gone and left behind a kingdom where suburban grown-ups smoked for the same reason that they wore paisley shirts and miniskirts, the same reason they nervously went to Italian and Indian restaurants – because they thought it made them look both young and sophisticated. The England of my childhood, that innocent place that yearned to be grown-up. Mike and Sandy’s country.
Mike and Sandy. They are friendly names, approachable names, sociably abbreviated, the name of a respectable married couple who know how to have a laugh. Within reason.
Mike and Sandy. They are not their given names, of course. My father was Michael and my mother was Sandra. But somewhere in the sixties and seventies, when the clothes and the television sets and the expectations were going from black and white to colour, when the austerity that had clung to the country like acne for twenty-odd years was finally clearing up, the names of the young – and the not quite so young, the new mothers and fathers – were becoming brighter and breezier too.
Mike and Sandy. The name of a married couple who were at home in a country where nobody ever left, nobody got divorced, nobody ever died and every family lasted forever.
He somehow gets his clothes on and escapes with Lena – or maybe he doesn’t get his clothes on, maybe he just hops bollock-naked into his flash car and drives away – but as the caterers fish the waiter from the pool we hear the Mercedes pulling away with a frightened shriek of rubber, as if he can’t get out of our lives fast enough.
The next morning I wander through the silent house, looking at all the top-of-the-range detritus of his life, all those things he values so much, and I wonder why my mother doesn’t trash the lot. It wouldn’t settle the score. But it might make her feel better.
My mother could obliterate every trace of his rotten life. I wouldn’t blame her. In fact I would be very happy to help her.
But she doesn’t touch any of his things.
Instead, when she finally emerges from her bedroom the next morning, pale-faced and red-eyed, still wearing her beautiful party dress, insisting that she is all right, adamant that she doesn’t want anything to eat or drink, my mother goes out to the garden she loves and sets about destroying it.
At the end of the garden there is a trellis where honeysuckle grows and smells sweet on summer mornings. My mother does her best to rip that down with her bare hands but she can’t quite manage it, she can only pull down half of it and leaves the rest smashed but still attached to the wall.
There are terracotta pots containing new bulbs that she hurls against the garden wall, leaving behind shell bursts of exploded dirt. She hacks at her flower beds with rake and trowel and fingers, aborting all the spring bulbs that she recently planted with such endless care.
By the time I reach her she is tearing her hands to pieces by pulling up the rose bushes. I put my arm around her and hold her tight, determined not to let her go until she has stopped trembling. But she doesn’t stop trembling. Her body shakes with shock and grief and rage and I can’t do anything to stop it. She keeps shaking long after I have taken her back into the empty house and drawn all the blinds and tried to shut out the world.
And now I can sort of understand how it works, I can see how the world turns around and the child becomes the parent, the protected becomes the protector.
“Don’t cry,” I tell her, just as she told me after I had lost my first playground fight. “Don’t cry now.”
But I can’t stop her. Because she’s not just crying for herself. She’s crying for Mike and Sandy.
You have to be a cold, hard man to walk out on a family and my father is not a cold, hard man.
Weak, perhaps. Selfish, definitely. Stupid, without question. But he is not cold and hard. At least, he is not cold and hard enough to do what he has just done – to amputate a family from his life – with ease. When I turn up at the doorstep of his rented flat, he looks torn. Torn between a life that is not quite over and another life that hasn’t quite begun.
“How’s your mother?”
“Take a wild guess. How do you think she is?”
“You’re too young to understand,” he tells me defensively, letting me inside.
Lena is not around. But there are the clothes of a young woman drying on a radiator.
“Understand what? That you felt the need for a bit on the side? That you thought you could play away and not get caught? That you’re an old man who’s desperate to recapture his youth? Understand what exactly?”
“To understand what can go wrong with a marriage. Even a good marriage. The passion wears off. It just does, Alfie. And then you have to decide if you can live without it. Or not. Do you want a cup of tea? I think we’ve got a kettle here somewhere.”
It’s a good flat in a rich, leafy area. But it is very small and it belongs to someone else. The colour of the paint was chosen by someone else. The pictures on the wall were bought to satisfy the taste of some stranger. I try hard but I can’t imagine my father living here. In every way you can think of, this is just not his place. Everything feels rented, as though it could be repossessed at any moment, all snatched back by the rightful owner. The flat, the furniture, the girl. All just borrowed from someone else.
“How long is this going to last?” I ask him. He is still looking for a kettle. But he can’t find one. “Dad? Can we forget the tea? You no longer own a kettle, okay? Start living with it. No kettle. Okay?”
“What are you talking about?”
“How long are you going to stay here with Lena?”
“Until we can find somewhere better.”
“She’s – what? – twenty-three?”
“Twenty-five,” says my father. “Nearly.”
“Younger than me.”
“She’s very mature for her age.”
“I bet.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I slump onto the leather sofa. My father hates leather sofas. Or he used to.
“Why couldn’t you have just slept with her?” I ask, although I am very afraid that he is going to start giving me the details of their Olympian sex life. Please. Anything but that. “Isn’t that what’s meant to happen? I can understand why you’re attracted to her. I can even sort of see why she would be attracted by you. An older, successful man. All that. But you’re not meant to set up home together. This is madness, Dad.”
My old man starts to pace up and down. The flat’s living room is easily the biggest room in the place but it’s still not very big. He takes a few steps and then he has to turn around. He is wringing his hands. I feel a jab of pity for the poor old bastard. He is not cut out for this game. He can’t play it as ruthlessly as it needs to be played.
“These things have a momentum of their own. I tried to keep it under control, I really did. For a while there I felt like the luckiest man alive. I had the perfect wife and the perfect mistress.”
“Your perfect wife wants to throttle you.”
“But it doesn’t last,” he says, ignoring me. “That time doesn’t last. It moves on. You can’t have it all. And you have to decide.” He turns to me, pleading for understanding. “Isn’t that what every man wants? A wife and a lover? We want stability, support, a quiet life. But we also want romance, excitement, passion. Why should it be wrong to want the best of both worlds?”
“Because it’s too much. You want too much. You ruin other people’s lives by wanting too much.”