I almost tell him that I’ve got all the time in the world, but I don’t bother.
Because suddenly I see myself with George in the park, both of us in our black pajamas, doing a graceful slow-motion waltz as the packed tube trains rumble 100 meters below our slippered feet, and the image just seems ridiculous.
George is right. There are some dances you never learn. That stillness, that peace, that grace. Who am I kidding?
I just don’t have it in me.
16
H IROKO IS GOING BACK TO JAPAN for Christmas. I meet her at Paddington, under a huge fir tree decorated with brightly colored boxes that are meant to look like presents, and we catch the Heathrow Express to the airport.
Saying good-bye to her feels strange. I am sad to see her go. At the same time, I am glad to feel something, anything. But-and this is the important bit-not too much.
We embrace at the departure gate and Hiroko waves to me right up until the time she disappears behind the screen before passport control. Then I wander around Terminal 3, reluctant to go home. The airport is awash with real emotion today. Lovers are saying good-bye and being reunited. Families are separating and coming back together. There are lots of hugs and laughter and tears. The departure gate is pretty interesting but the arrivals hall is even better, because you can’t do it in your own time at arrivals. You can’t decide when it’s time to say hello in quite the same way that you can decide it’s time to say good-bye. Hello just happens. The people anxiously waiting for someone don’t know when that face is suddenly going to appear before them, slowly pushing a luggage trolley, smiling through the jet lag, ready for a kiss and a cuddle, ready to begin again.
There’s something else that I notice about the arrivals hall. It is full of young women arriving in the UK to study English. Everywhere you look there is shining black hair, bright brown eyes and Louis Vuitton luggage. They don’t stop coming.
It’s a kind of miracle.
Behind the barrier there are bored drivers and chirpy representatives of two dozen language schools standing with their little signs and placards and notice boards, waiting for the next Jumbo from Osaka or Beijing or Seoul or somewhere else where Christmas doesn’t really matter.
And as I stand among the men and women with their placards-MISS SUZUKI, KIM LEE, GREEN GABLES LANGUAGE SCHOOL, TAE-SOON LEE, MIWAKO HONDA AND HIROMI TAKESHI, OXFORD SCHOOL OF ENGLISH, MISS WANG AND MISS WANG-I suddenly realize that this city is full of young women learning English.
The Terminal 3 brigade is Asian. At the other terminals, you would no doubt find the Scandinavian regiments, or the Mediterranean battalions. But there are thousands of them, an entire army of them, with fresh reinforcements arriving daily.
For the first time I understand that there’s no reason for me ever to be lonely again.
Some of these young women-laughing, confident, looking forward to their new life-find their drivers or their schools’ representatives immediately. Others struggle to make the connection. They wander in front of the barrier, looking for their name on one of the little hand-held placards. Hopeful but a touch worried. And my heart aches for them.
I watch them for the longest time, these beautiful stragglers in this magnificent brown-eyed invasion, fresh off the plane and looking for a sign.
And somewhere high above me, in the Muzak that is pumped around the airport, “Silent Night” segues into “O Come All Ye Faithful.”
As soon as my nan has her front door open, I can smell the gas. I brush past her and quickly go into the kitchen where the smell is even stronger.
“Alfie?”
One of the gas burners on her cooker is turned up to full and unlit. The gas feels so thick it’s like you could reach out and touch it. Coughing like a madman, I turn it off and open up all the windows.
“Nan,” I say, sick and eyes streaming, “you’ve got to be more careful.”
“I don’t know how that happened,” she says, all flustered. “I was making-I don’t remember.” She blinks at me with her watery blue eyes. “Don’t tell your mum, Alfie. Or your dad.”
I look at her. She has her makeup on. Her eyebrows are two shaky black lines and her lipstick is very slightly off, like a double exposure on a photograph. The sight of her worried face and erratic cosmetics makes me put my arm around her shoulders. Inside her cardigan she feels as small and fragile as a child.
“I promise I won’t tell anybody,” I say, knowing she is worried that my parents already think she is unable to live alone, knowing that her great terror in this world is that she will one day be taken from this place and put in a home. “But please don’t do it again, okay, Nan?”
She beams with relief and I watch her make a cup of tea for the pair of us, muttering to herself, elaborately turning the gas off after the kettle has boiled. I feel for the poor old thing, constantly being assessed for signs that her warm, intelligent, curious mind has finally turned to mush. At the same time the gas has frightened me. I am afraid that one day I will stand outside her flat with the fumes seeping under the door and nobody answering the bell. Then I remember why I am here. Jesus. I’m getting a touch of old timer’s disease myself.
“Where’s your tree, Nan?”
“In the little room, love. In the box with Christmas written on it.”
My nan loves Christmas. She would put her tree up in mid-August if we didn’t physically restrain her. Although she always spends Christmas Day with my family-and this year she will spend it with my mother and me, which is all that’s left of my family-she still likes to have her own tree, alleging that it’s “nice for Alfie when he comes round,” as if I am just coming up to my fourth birthday.
I can remember the Christmas Days we had with my nan when I was small. She was still in her old house in the East End, the house where my father grew up, the house in Oranges for Christmas, the house with a chicken run in the back garden and a stand-up piano in the living room. The place always seemed to be full of my uncles and aunts and cousins, the children playing with their new toys while the adults got merry-big glasses of dark beer for the men, small glasses of something red and sweet for the women-and played brag and poker, or bet on the horses that were racing on television. The old house was constantly filled with people and music, cigarette smoke and laughter. There was a huge tree that looked as though it had come straight from some Norwegian wood.
Now the old house has gone and so has my grandfather and so has my father and my nan lives alone in this small white flat, the belongings of a lifetime shrunk to fit a few bare rooms. The uncles and the aunts are scattered, spending Christmases with their own children and grandchildren, and the real tree has been replaced by a fake silver one that comes in three parts-top half, bottom half and base, like a fake Santa half-heartedly going ho ho ho. I find the tree and a collection of fairy lights and assorted decorations in a torn cardboard box marked “Xmass.” My nan watches me with excited eyes as I screw the thing together.
“Lovely,” she says. “That silver looks smashing, doesn’t it, Alfie?”
“It does, Nan.”
As I stretch to put the angel on top of the tree I feel something bad happen to my back. Some muscle seems to go at the base of my spine and I am suddenly hunched up with pain, the angel still in my fist.
And as I sit on the sofa waiting for the pain to pass, and my nan goes off to make another cup of tea, I think I finally understand her passion for her fake tree.
Christmas trees are a bit like relationships. The real thing is certainly more beautiful, but it’s just too much fuss, too much mess.