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 blond 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 off 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 backward.
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 on 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. “Roommate.”
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 roommate, if you ask me-has stolen her bread from the communal kitchen and the milk that she thought was still okay has gone bad. 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 realize 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 blond 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 cookies, 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 fertilizer, 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.
13
S ATURDAY 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.