“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 harbor 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 behavior, 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.
4
J OSH 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 ass, 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. Gaping 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 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 coupe-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 garbage 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 flashy 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.