Something happened. Something momentous that makes her eyes fill with tears, something that she will not talk about.
“You got pregnant, didn’t you?”
A quick bob of the head. Heartbroken assent.
“But you didn’t have the baby.”
A small shake of the head, her hair falling over her face.
“And pencil dick stayed with his wife.”
Her voice is not much more than a whisper, but I am struck by how little accent she has. When she doesn’t think about it too much, her spoken English is actually pretty good.
“Of course.”
I reach out and touch her hand.
“Don’t worry about him, Hiroko. He’s going to have a really unhappy life.”
She looks at me gratefully and smiles for the first time.
“Promise me that in the future you will steer clear of pencil dicks like that,” I say.
“Okay,” she says, laughing and crying all at the same time. “I promise.”
“No more pencil dicks?”
“No more-no more pencil dicks.”
Two drinks and a £10 black cab ride later, Hiroko and I are outside the house of her host family in Hampstead. It’s a hell of a house-a big, detached mansion on one of those wide, tree-lined avenues that they have up there-but not much of a family-just one rich old lady who rents out a room to female students because she gets lonely. Hiroko makes sure that the old lady is tucked up in bed with Tiddles the cat and Radio 4 and then she sneaks me up the stairs to a converted loft where a shaft of moonlight pours through the skylight and onto her single bed.
And as she showers-they are so clean, these Japanese girls, always jumping in the shower and wearing their pants in bed-I think to myself that there’s another way that Hiroko is different from my other students.
Most of them are in London looking for fun. Hiroko is here looking for love. Or perhaps she is just escaping from it.
I know she will never feel the same desperate passion for me that she felt for that second-rate salary man back in Tokyo. And I know that she will never own my heart in the way that my wife owned my heart. Yet that’s okay. It doesn’t seem sad tonight. In fact, in some way that I can’t quite understand, it feels sort of perfect.
“I’m very exciting,” she says.
She means: I’m very excited.
It is, apparently, an easy mistake to make. I have had a number of students say to me, “I’m very boring,” when what they really mean is, “I’m very bored.” There’s some glitch in the translation from Japanese to English that causes the mistake. But I like it. I like that mistake.
I’m very exciting too.
A panic attack on the train.
At first, when I get a twinge in my chest and feel the cold, creeping fear dripping down my back, I think that it’s just another one of my phony heart attacks.
But it’s much worse than that.
I am bumping south on the Northern Line, escaping from Hampstead before Hiroko’s nice old cat lady stirs, before Tiddles alerts her to my presence. I am strap-hanging in a crowded carriage because the rush hour starts just after dawn these days, when without warning my breath starts coming in these short, fast gasps, like a diver who finds himself a long way down and suddenly sucking on the last drops of air in a broken tank.
Panic.
Real, terrified, sweating panic. I can’t breathe. It’s not my imagination. I literally can’t breathe. I am horribly and desperately aware of the crush of people around me, the sick yellow light of the carriage, the dead air of the tunnel, the entire weight of the city pressing down on us.
Trapped. I feel like weeping, screaming, running, but I can do none of these things. I need to be out of this place immediately and there is nowhere to go, there is no end in sight.
Pure, howling terror. My eyes sting with perspiration and tears. I feel like I am choking, falling, watched. Passengers-all the other calm, unforgiving passengers-glance my way and seem to stare right into my cracked soul. My face crumples and I close my eyes, my legs gone to jelly, the roar of the train deafening, gripping the worn leather strap until my knuckles are white.
Somehow I make it to the next station. I stumble from the train, up the escalators, burst into the light, the air. Filling my lungs. When I have stopped trembling I start to walk home. It takes a long time. I am miles from home. The streets are crowded with commuters on their way to work and school. I seem to be going in a different direction from everyone else.
My walk home takes me through Highbury Fields where George Chang is standing in his patch of grass.
His face seems young and old all at the same time. His head is erect, his back poker straight. He doesn’t see me. He gives no indication of seeing anything. I stand perfectly still watching his slow-motion dance. His hands move like punches, and yet there is no violence in them. His legs and feet move like kicks and sweeps, but there is no force in them. Every move he makes looks like the softest thing in the world.
And I realize that I have never in my life seen anyone who looks so totally at peace inside his own skin.
“I want you to teach me,” I tell George. “I want to learn Tai Chi.”
We are in the new General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen on the Holloway Road. George is eating his breakfast. Chicken wings and fries. You would think that a man like George Chang would avoid fast-food joints like General Lee’s, that he would be squatting somewhere with a bowl of steamed rice, but you would be wrong. George says the food in General Lee’s is “very simple.” He’s a big fan.
“Teach you Tai Chi,” he says. The way he says it, it’s neither a question nor an agreement.
“I need to do something, George. I mean it. I feel like everything’s falling to bits.” I don’t say what I really feel. That I want to be comfortable inside my own body. That I want to be like him. That I am sick and tired of being like myself, so sick and tired that you wouldn’t believe it. “I need to be calmer,” is what I say. “Much calmer. Right now I can’t relax. I can’t sleep. Sometimes I can’t even breathe.”
He sort of shrugs.
“Tai Chi good for relaxation. Stress control. All the problem of modern world. Life very busy.”
“That’s right,” I say. “Life’s very busy, isn’t it? And sometimes I feel so old. Everything aches, George. I’ve got no energy. I feel frightened-really frightened-but I can’t even say what’s wrong. Everything seems to overwhelm me.”
“Still miss wife.”
“That’s right, George. But every little thing that goes wrong feels like a major trauma. Do you know what I mean? I lose my temper. I feel like crying.” I attempt a little laugh. “I’m going crazy here, George. Help me. Please.”
“Tai Chi good for all that. For tension. For tired.”
“That’s exactly what I need.”
“But I can’t teach you.”
My heart lurches with disappointment. Once I had worked up the nerve to ask him, it had never even crossed my mind that he would turn me down. I stare at him munching his chicken wings for a while, waiting for him to offer some further explanation. But the silence just grows. He has apparently said it all.
“Why not?”
“Take too long time.”
“But I see you teaching people all the time. There’s often someone with you.”
He smiles down at his chicken wings.
“Always someone different. Different man, different woman. Come for a few mornings. Maybe a little bit longer. Then stop coming. Because Western people don’t have patience for Tai Chi.” He looks at me over a chicken wing. “It’s not pill. It’s not drug. Not magic. To be any good for you, for anyone, take a long time. A long time. Western people don’t have time.”