“Change the way we use our imagination. Help us think creatively. Stop us using the same old tired business techniques. Think outside the box, Alfie. At first I thought it was just a load of New Age business bollocks, this year’s half-baked corporate philosophy. But I’ve changed my mind after watching Master Chang.”
Master Chang? George never calls himself Master Chang. Who are these posers and what are they doing in our park?
George demonstrates the opening moves of the form. Then he gets them to do it. Or to try. It’s very basic stuff. He doesn’t even get them to put the breathing with the movement. As Josh and his friends wave their arms about, I take George to one side.
“You’re not really teaching these idiots, are you?”
He shrugs. “New students.”
“I don’t understand how they got here. I don’t understand how our park is suddenly full of suits talking about thinking outside the box and person-hours. All these suits talking about Tai Chi saving money for some rich company that has probably got too much money in the first place. This is our park.”
“Their boss comes to Shanghai Dragon. Good client of mine. Lives not far. Big-shot lawyer. Says, ‘George-I want you to teach Tai Chi to some of my people. Hear it good for stress. Will you do it, George?’ I say, sure, why not?”
“Why not? Because they’re not going to stick at it, that’s why not. You think they’re going to stick at it? They’ll last five minutes. Next week it will be something else. Yoga. Muay Thai. Morris Dancing. Anything.”
“How long did you last?”
“That’s not fair. I’ve had a lot on my plate lately.”
He turns and faces me. “Everybody always has a lot on plate. Everybody. Always. Lot on plate. You talk, talk, talk. Talk as though this is part of rat race. One more thing you have to do in busy life. It’s not. Tai Chi is get away from rat race. Understand?”
“But I liked it when it was just you and me, George.”
“Things change.”
“But I don’t like change.”
“Change part of life.”
“But I can’t stand it. I like it when things stay the same.”
He shakes his head impatiently. “Tai Chi all about change. About coping with change. Don’t you know that yet?”
When Josh and the other off-duty suits have finished waving their arms around, George announces that he is going to show us some pushing hands. I’ve never done pushing hands before, I have never even heard of it, but I try to look like I know what I’m doing when George asks me to help him demonstrate.
“Pushing hands,” he says. “Called toi sau in China. Not about strength. About feeling. For two peoples. Can be improvise. Can be set moves. About anticipate.”
That’s the introduction. George is not much of a talker. He prefers to show you rather than tell you.
I copy George. We face each other in a left bow-and-arrow stance-left leg forward and bent, representing a bow, right leg behind and straight, representing an arrow-and, following his example, I lightly place the back of my left wrist against the back of his left wrist. We are hardly touching.
He closes his eyes and slowly starts pushing his hand toward me. Somehow I know what to do. Staying in contact with his wrist, I turn my waist, rolling the back of my hand over his hand, letting him fully extend his arm, then I slowly push back toward him. He receives my force, goes with it, slowly brushes it aside. Our hands never lose contact.
It goes on. We push and yield and neutralize, push and yield and neutralize, and soon I trust myself enough to close my eyes too, letting go of everything around me, to forget about the suits and Josh and person-hours and thinking outside the box, to forget that we haven’t spoken since I disgraced myself at his dinner party, to forget about hospital waiting rooms where they tell you there’s nothing that can be done, to forget the mist on the bare trees and my swollen lips and my chipped tooth, to just feel the light touch of skin against skin, to embrace the giving and taking, relaxing into the ebb and flow, just feeling what I need to do, and becoming what I need to become.
Part Three
31
SUDDENLY THE LITTLE WHITE FLAT is too much for my nan. Suddenly it is full of traps to remind you that it’s not the getting old that kills you. It’s the getting sick.
The stairs to her first-floor flat are all at once too steep. She needs to pause to catch her breath on the little half-landing, gasping for air as if she is drowning, her face raised to the ceiling. The bath is suddenly too high to get into without somebody supporting her, so my mother or Plum or one of my nan’s female neighbors-and all of her neighbors are female-has to be there to help her in and out of the water. And the wellmeaning bureaucrats of terminal illness are suddenly all knocking at her front door.
There is a cheerful district nurse who organizes a social worker, meals on wheels once a day and a scarred metal air tank that stands guard by my nan’s favorite chair.
My nan wants to please the district nurse, just as she always wants to please everyone, but the little white flat is her home and although she knows these people are just trying to be helpful, she does not approve of the commode provided by the social worker (“I’m not doing my business in that, dear, thanks all the same”), the fetid meals on wheels are left untouched (“I’ll just have a bit of toast, sweetheart”) and the air tank makes no difference at all to her fits of terrible breathlessness (“I think it’s empty, love”).
But she carries on. She meets her old female friends for coffee and cake and talk, and the talk, the human connection, the human thing, is the point of those meetings. She comes to my mother’s house for lunch on Sunday, she makes her daily trips to the local shops for the tiny supplies of white bread and “a nice bit of ham” that she seems to live on, plus the river of tea and the biscuit mountain.
When she starts to feel uncertain on her feet, the social worker kindly produces a walking stick. My nan rolls her eyes that it has come to this, and brandishes her walking stick in imitation of a doddery old pensioner, which is pretty funny coming from her at this time.
“Ooh, I remember the good old days,” she jeers, waving her walking stick, and we all laugh, even the social worker.
My nan faces cancer in exactly the same way that she has faced life-with good grace, with endless stoicism, with quiet humor.
As she would say herself, she doesn’t like to make a fuss.
Despite the nagging pain in her side from the tumor and despite the desperate battles for breath, for a while life seems to go on in the same old way. There are trips to the shops in the morning, some gentle housework in the afternoon and nights spent watching television, her favored programs circled in shaky blue ballpoint in the newspaper’s TV guide, forever tugging at my heart.
But in the middle of all this ordinary life, I become aware that something extraordinary is happening. The people who love my nan show that they are ready to walk though fire for her.
My mother and my father are there, of course, there every day, although rarely at the same time, and there are countless visits from elderly ladies who live in the nearby flats or who know my nan from the old neighborhood, the old house where my dad grew up, the Oranges for Christmas house, friends from the old life before children grew and husbands died and busy specialists said there was nothing that they could do.
Then there is Plum. Among my parents and the elderly friends, there is this awkward girl who has somehow formed a real bond with my grandmother. Enduring endless hours on trains to and from Bansted, night after night Plum sits with my nan watching the programs that have been circled in the TV guide and selections from her personal collection of wrestling videos featuring The Slab in all his large-breasted glory.