“For personal reasons. You told me that too.”
“Now I’m going to have another go.”
“Okay. Sit down, will you?”
She looks around. There’s nowhere to sit. I pull up a couple of chairs either side of a large packing case.
“The core of English Literature works from a very concrete base. The subject is very specific about the basis of study.” I tick them off my fingers. “One prose work. One work of poetry. One work of drama. And one Shakespeare play. In the end, you need to learn two things to pass this subject. To read and to write.”
“To read and to write. Okay. Fine. Good. Yes.”
“That is, you need to understand the text and then demonstrate your understanding of the text. That’s the essence of this subject.”
I know my lines.
This is a speech that I remember from the dark days at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys, although by the time that A Levels came around, most of my students had graduated to the technical college of life.
My door bell rings.
“Excuse me,” I say.
“Oh, that’ll be for me,” says Jackie Day.
“What?”
“I think it’s my daughter.”
Daughter? What daughter?
Together Jackie and I go out of the flat and down to the front door of the house. An enormous great lump of a girl is standing outside. It’s difficult to judge her age. She hides her face behind a curtain of greasy brown hair. Her clothes are as dark and shapeless as Jackie’s are tight and bright.
“Say hello to Mr. Budd,” says Jackie Day.
The lump says nothing. Behind the unwashed veil of her fringe, a pair of bright-blue eyes swivel briefly toward me and then turn away with shyness or contempt or something.
She has a fistful of magazines in her hand. They feature men in masks and spandex grimacing and grunting and climbing on top of each other. At first I think this awful child has hard-core pornography in her possession. But then I see that the magazines are about some grotesque new kind of wrestling. In a daze, I return to my flat, Jackie and the lump following behind me, Jackie all happy chatter and questions as they come up the stairs, the lump replying with monosyllabic grunts. Although there is no physical resemblance between them, there is no doubt that they are mother and adolescent child.
The lump walks into my new apartment and looks around, clearly unimpressed.
“This is my girl,” says Jackie. “I hope you don’t mind if she sits quietly in a corner while we work.”
I stare at this woman dressed like she should be standing in an Amsterdam window lit by a single red light, and wonder why I ever allowed her into my life.
“Why do you think I gave up studying?” says Jackie, suddenly all defiant.
And I look at her surly, nameless lump of a daughter leafing through a wrestling magazine and think to myself: why do you think I gave up teaching?
21
W HEN I SEE HIROKO waiting for me outside Churchill’s, I remember this thing I once read in an advice-to-the-lovelorn column about the person who holds the power in any relationship.
The sob sister reckoned that the person with the power is always the one who cares less. And as Hiroko looks up at me with her open, hopeful smile, I see the wisdom of that sob sister.
There’s no reason why I should have any power over Hiroko. She is younger than me, smarter than me, prettier than me. She’s also a lot nicer than me. Whichever way you slice it, Hiroko is a far better bet than me.
But Hiroko cares more than I do. So in the end everything else-her looks, her youth, her niceness-doesn’t matter.
“I haven’t seen much of you, Alfie.”
“I’ve been really busy.”
“How’s your grandmother?”
“Still in the hospital. They’re doing tests on her while they drain some fluid off her lungs. But she’s made friends with all the other old girls on her ward.”
“She’s always so cheerful.”
“I think she’ll be okay.”
“Good. Well. Do you want to get some lunch later?”
“Lunch? Well, I’ve got to see Hamish about something at lunch.”
“Dinner?”
See, it was okay for her to suggest lunch. That was perfectly reasonable. But going for dinner too made her seem desperate and made me feel cornered. Dinner pushed me to the point of no return.
“Hiroko, I really think we need to give each other a bit of space right now.”
“A bit of space?”
She starts crying. Not the kind of tears that are meant to blackmail you. Not the kind of tears that are meant to make you back down, change your mind or offer concessions. Not the kind of tears that are meant to make you give in about dinner. Just tears.
“You’re a great girl, Hiroko.”
And it’s true. She is a great girl. She has never treated me with anything but sweetness. What’s gone wrong with me? Why can’t I be happy with this woman?
There’s never an agony uncle around when you need one.
The bad news at Churchill’s is that there has been a bit of a sex scandal involving one of the teachers. Lisa Smith has got smoke coming out of her ears, the students are all talking about it and we have even had a couple of uniformed cops on the premises, sniffing around and asking questions, as if the incident is just the tip of a very dirty iceberg.
The good news is that it has absolutely nothing to do with me.
Hamish has been arrested for his conduct in a public lavatory on Highbury Fields. I actually know the place, funnily enough-it’s one of those public toilets where, if you go in for a quick pee, all the guys in there think that you are some kind of sick pervert.
Anyway, Hamish has been arrested for lewd and indecent behavior because late one night he reached for what he imagined was some willing, perfect stranger and it turned out to be a policeman’s nightstick. Now the poor bastard is watching his world unravel. I take him for a drink at the Eamon de Valera.
“I feel like I’m in danger of losing everything,” he says. “My family, my flat, my sanity. Just for a quick jerk-off. It hardly seems fair. It hardly seems like justice.”
“How’s old Smith taking it?”
“She says she will have to see if the police are going to press charges. I’m not so worried about her. I can always get another job as badly paid as this one. I’m more worried about my parents. And my partner. It’s his flat we live in. If he gets rough…I don’t know what will happen.”
“Wait a minute. Your partner knows you don’t go over to Highbury Fields at midnight for a game of tennis. Or what?”
“I told him I’d given it up. The cruising thing. It upsets him.”
“Ah.”
“My mum and dad will be even worse. They’ll go crazy. Especially my father. Christ. He was in the Govan shipyards for forty years. When he finds out I’m what he calls ‘bent,’ he’ll never speak to me again.”
“Hold on. Your parents don’t know you’re gay? Your parents don’t know? Jesus, Hamish.”
“I come from the East End of Glasgow. We haven’t quite caught up with London. Not that there’s much difference between Glasgow and London, in the final analysis. You come to this city thinking it’s going to be so totally free and easy. Then you find out that in its own sweet way, this place is as repressed as anywhere.”
I feel sorry for Hamish, so I don’t tell him what I’m thinking. Which is: how can you have a private life when you take it into a public toilet?
And he’s wrong about London. There are some bad things about my city, but the best thing is that you can be anything you like here, anything at all. As long as you keep it away from the policeman’s flashlight, of course.
But you are free to invent your own life, I think to myself, watching Olga struggling to pull a pint at the other end of the bar.
You just have to be a bit discreet.