“Do you want a cup of coffee or something?”
“No, no. Thank you. Better keep searching.”
My father says good-bye to Hiroko and me and goes back out into the Soho night, looking like the ghost of discos past.
After that first day, George and I do not get hassled in the park. It’s strange. We are out there very early on Sunday mornings when the place still belongs to the creatures of the night. But they leave us alone. They watch for a few minutes. Then they move on.
And it’s because of George. The way he moves, there’s nothing limpid or weak or namby-pamby about Tai Chi. His movements radiate internal strength. The drunks just walk on by.
“Why did you change your mind about teaching me?”
“I saw how much you want to learn.”
I read Jackie’s essay. It’s depressingly predictable stuff-talking you through Iago’s scheming, Othello’s rage and Desdemona’s innocence as though she is telling you the plot to Lethal Weapon 4. A tale of sexual jealousy, betrayal and revenge. Starring Mel Gibson. Up against the wall, Iago. This time it’s personal.
Just what you would expect from a high school dropout. She even produces Rymer’s hoary old quote about one of the morals of the play being “a warning to all good wives that they look well to their linen.” Whatever that means.
I feel sorry for Jackie, but it gives me a warm feeling to know that I don’t have to teach this stuff anymore.
There’s no cover note with her essay, nowhere to send it back to. Just a business card-DREAM MACHINE: CLEANING THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY-and a mobile phone number. I could wait until I see her at Churchill’s but I don’t want to leave it that long. I want to get rid of Jackie Day as soon as I can.
I call the mobile and get a recorded message that she is working at the Connell Gallery on Cork Street. That’s not far from Churchill’s. I decide to return the essay in person so that I don’t have to come home and find her camping out in our front garden.
Although it’s only a ten-minute walk, Cork Street feels like another city compared to where I work. You can smell the money in the air. I find the Connell Gallery, thinking I will drop her essay off at the reception desk. Then I see her.
She is not dressed for dancing. Her fair hair is pulled back and tied with an elastic band. She is wearing her blue nylon overalls. And she is cleaning the plate-glass window. When she sees me she stares at me for a moment and then steps into the street.
“What are you doing here?”
“Returning your essay. I didn’t have an address.”
“I would have picked it up. At Churchill’s. Or your mum’s house. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“I’ve got my own company,” she says. “Dream Machine. We work all over the West End.”
“Who’s we?”
“Me. And sometimes I bring in another girl. If the work’s there.” A pause. “What’s wrong?”
What is wrong with me? I don’t know. It just feels like all at once I understand why she wants to go back to college. Why it means so much to her. This is the first time I have really understood that she is not some student doing a little part-time job. This is how she makes a living. This is what the next thirty years or so will be like for her. This is her future.
“There’s nothing wrong with cleaning for a living,” I say, as if I’m thinking aloud. “Nothing at all.”
“No. It’s not a bad job. But I want a better one. And I can get it if I go back to school.”
“Somebody has to do it. Cleaning, I mean.”
“Would you?”
People are staring at us. All these art lovers and their well-spoken flunkies squinting at the cleaner and the bum standing on the pavement of Cork Street.
“Listen, your essay was okay.”
“Just okay?”
“That’s right. It’s full of some teacher’s opinions. Or some critic’s opinion. Not enough of you.”
She smiles at me. “You’re good.”
“What?”
“You’re a good teacher.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I can feel it. You’re a great teacher. You’re so right-there has to be more of me in there. So you’ll do it? You’ll teach me?”
I want to get away from here, away from Cork Street and Dream Machine, away from Desdemona and her dirty laundry.
But I think of George Chang, and how patient he is with me, how he encourages me, how he helps me learn because he thinks it’s the right thing to do.
I don’t know what comes over me.
“When can you start?” I find myself saying.
20
I RING MY NAN’S DOOR BELL but she doesn’t answer. That’s strange. I know she’s in there. At least, it sounds like she’s in there because I can hear the TV audience elaborately ooh-ing and ahh-ing as the numbers are drawn for the midweek National Lottery. Is the prospect of ten million pounds why she’s not answering? Or is it something else?
I keep waiting to hear the soft shuffle of slippers on carpet coming slowly toward the door, followed by the scrape of the safety catch and then her smiling face peering around the door, her eyes bright with welcome, happy for some company. It doesn’t happen. There’s no answer to my nan’s door bell.
There’s also no smell of gas, no sign of smoke seeping under the door, no cries for help. But she is eighty-seven, almost eighty-eight, and I feel the panic rising inside me as I put down her shopping and fumble with the key that I hold for emergencies.
This is the way it happens, I think.
Everybody dies. Everybody leaves you. You turn your back for a moment and they are gone forever.
I burst into the little white flat. The TV is on much too loud. There’s no sign of my nan but I immediately see the unknown man by the mantelpiece, holding a silver-framed photograph in his hand, calculating its worth.
As he half turns, the frame still in his thieving paw, I see that he is more of an overgrown boy than a man. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, but way over six foot tall, a baby face flecked with wisps of facial hair.
I come quickly across the room and throw myself at him, cursing him, knocking him backward against the mantelpiece, my voice and my body shaking with anger and fear. He drops the silver frame-his booty, the thieving bastard-but he is still on his feet, suddenly over the moment of shock at my surprise attack, and as we grapple with each other I can feel his superior strength, and his own rage and terror.
He swings me sideways, smashing me into the sideboard cabinet with all the holiday souvenirs, making leering leprechauns and smiling Spanish donkeys jiggle and jump behind the dusty glass.
And then my nan comes out of her tiny kitchen carrying a tray containing tea and biscuits.
“Oh, have you two met?” she says.
The young man and I are suddenly apart, boxers told to break by the referee, panting at each other on opposite sides of the coffee table. My nan gently places the tea and custard creams between us.
“I ran out of breath at the bus stop,” my nan says. “I was coming back from having a little look round the shops and it was just suddenly gone. Do you ever get that feeling, Alfie? That breathlessness?” She smiles affectionately at the young man I have just assaulted. “Ken helped me get home.”
“Ben,” he says.
“Len,” she says. “I felt quite peculiar. But Len carried my bag. Helped me get inside. Wasn’t that nice of him, Alfie?”