“Thank you,” I say.
The young man looks at me with total, all-consuming hatred.
“Don’t mention it,” he says. A quick smile at my nan. He is trembling. “I have to go now.”
“Ken,” I say. “Ben. Please stay and have some tea.”
“I really must run.” He is not looking at me any more. “I do hope you feel better,” he says to my nan.
I follow him to the door but he refuses to meet my eyes.
“I didn’t realize,” I say as he lets himself out. “I thought-”
“Dickhead,” he mutters.
It’s true. I am a dickhead. I can’t quite believe that kindness and goodness still exist in this world. I think it’s all a thing of the past. And I can’t even see what’s right in front of my dickhead face.
I go back into the living room where my nan is asleep in her armchair, a lottery ticket in one hand and a custard cream in the other. She has been falling asleep without warning a lot recently. Sometimes she pitches forward and I have to catch her before she does herself some damage.
“I fall asleep all the time,” she is always telling me. “Just tired, I suppose, love.”
But now I realize that she is not falling asleep at all.
She is blacking out.
“Soong yi-dien!” George tells me, time and time again. “Soong yi-dien!”
Soong yi-dien. It’s one of the few Cantonese expressions I know. In Hong Kong you would hear it all the time in the little tailor’s shop next to the Double Fortune Language School when customers were complaining that the suit they were being fitted for was too tight.
“Soong yi-dien!” they would shout in the face of Mr. Wu the tailor. “Loosen it up!”
George wants me to loosen it up. He believes that I try too hard. He’s right. My Tai Chi strains for effect. Everything is an effort for me. I make Tai Chi look like manual labor. But George moves the way Sinatra sang, radiating that kind of effortless power, as if all this craft and art is the most natural thing in the world.
“Soong yi-dien,” he says. “Very important for when we play Tai Chi.”
Play Tai Chi? Surely he means do or practice or learn Tai Chi? Surely he doesn’t mean play?
Although thick with a Cantonese accent, George’s English is very good. He has none of the linguistic tics that his wife has. Sometimes his tenses get a little confused, and he has this habit of dropping the definite article. But you never have trouble understanding him. So I am surprised that he could get his choice of verb so wrong.
“You don’t mean play Tai Chi, do you, George? I think you mean study Tai Chi or something. Not play.”
He looks at me.
“No,” he says. “We play Tai Chi. We play. Always, always. Tai Chi not the gym. Not about sweating and getting six-pack on belly. Not about working out. When you understand that, then you start to learn. Then you soong yi-dien. Why do Westerners always want to strain? Okay, try again.”
So I do.
I spread my feet shoulder width apart, sinking into my horse stance, bending my knees but making sure they don’t extend farther than my toes. Neck erect but relaxed. Chin tucked slightly in. Spine straight and lengthened, although without standing to attention. Butt tucked in. Trying to slow and soften my breathing, trying to make it deep but unforced. Relaxing my wrists. Throwing open all my joints. Trying to feel my dan tien, my energy center, which I have learned is located two inches down from my navel and two inches inside my body.
It doesn’t feel much like play.
“You know that saying-no pain, no gain?” George says.
“Sure.”
“It’s rubbish.”
“I’m not early, am I?” says Jackie Day. “If I’m early I can-”
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Come in.”
She comes into my new flat, staring at all the unpacked boxes.
I have finally found a place of my own. A one-bedroom flat in a Victorian house full of music students. You can distantly hear them scratching away at cellos and violins, but because they are so good it is more calming than annoying. It is a nice place. But with my nan going into hospital for tests and the new term starting at Churchill’s, I haven’t had time to unpack yet. Apart from a few essentials.
Pictures of Rose.
Some classic Sinatra.
Electric kettle.
I go into the photo-booth-sized kitchen to make instant coffee while Jackie wanders around looking for somewhere to sit down.
“I love this old-fashioned music,” she calls to me, as Frank finishes “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” and begins his timeless rendition of “Taking a Chance on Love.” “What CD is this?”
“It’s Swing Easy, which actually incorporates the vinyl album of that name with the entire contents of the LP that was originally released as Songs for Young Lovers.” I listen for a bit. “I like it too. It’s one of my favorites.”
“And is it Harry Connick Junior?”
I almost drop the kettle.
“Harry Connick Junior? Is this Harry Connick Junior? This is Sinatra. Frank Sinatra.”
“Oh. He sounds a bit like Harry Connick Junior, doesn’t he?”
I say nothing. When I come out of the kitchen she is looking at all the pictures of Rose.
Rose on her firm’s junk in Hong Kong. On our wedding day. At a New Year’s Eve party on Victoria Peak. On Changeover Day.
And-it’s my favorite picture of her-a blowup of her passport photograph, Rose looking straight at the camera, impossibly young and serious and beautiful, her hair longer than I ever saw it, although the picture was taken shortly before we met.
I always thought Rose was the only person in the world who ever looked good in a passport photo.
“Your girlfriend?” Jackie Day says with a little smile. “This is not the girl I saw at your parents’ place.”
It takes me a second to realize she’s talking about Vanessa.
“That was just a friend. This is my wife. Her name is Rose.”
“Oh.”
I can almost hear her brain ticking over. And I think: why do I always have to have this conversation? Why can’t they just leave us alone?
“Are you divorced?”
“My wife died,” I say, taking the photograph from her and giving her a cup of instant coffee in exchange. I carefully place the picture back on top of a packing case. “She died in a diving accident.”
“A driving accident?”
“A diving accident. When we were living in Hong Kong.”
“God.” She stares at Rose’s picture. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“How terrible for you.” She looks at all the photographs-I suppose it’s a sort of shrine-with real pain on her face. “And for her. How old was she? How old was Rose?”
“She was twenty-six. Almost twenty-seven.”
“You poor man. That poor woman. That poor girl. Oh, I am so, so sorry.”
There are tears shining in her eyes and I look at her, really wishing that I could feel some genuine gratitude for this sympathy.
But it’s difficult to take her show of compassion seriously when under her leather coat she is dressed for another night picking up strange men at the Basildon Mecca. French Connection T-shirt, pastel-colored miniskirt, high heels that leave little dents in the wooden floor of my new flat. I wonder what we are doing here. Then I remember.
“You want to study A Level English Literature.”
Her pretty, painted face brightens.
“If I can just get this one subject, I can go back to school. Put it with the two I’ve got already. French and Media Studies. I told you. Go to the University of Greenwich. Get my BA. Get a good job. Stop cleaning the floors of art galleries in Cork Street and language schools on Oxford Street.”
“Why does it have to be the University of Greenwich? It’s not exactly Oxford or Cambridge, is it?”
“Because that’s my plan,” she says. “You’ve got to have a plan. I’ve got an acceptance letter and everything. I was doing so well at school. I really was. But then I had to give it all up.”