Then he is gone and Jackie is helping me to my feet, brushing off the bits of pizza and egg fried rice and takeout curry that have somehow attached themselves to my clothes.
“You asked me what my marriage was like,” she says, indicating Jamie as he strides off down the street with his what-the-bleeding-hell-you-looking-at swagger. “That’s exactly what it was like.”
They talk about people bravely fighting cancer, but in the end the disease inflicts the ultimate cruelty. It doesn’t matter how brave you are. Cancer robs you of yourself.
“This is not me,” my nan says, as I help her to the bathroom. “This is not me.”
She is in pain, terrible pain, and although for so long she has fought this disease with humor and courage, her life is now narrowing down to a sharp edge of unbearable suffering.
She has never been a woman who is prone to self-pity, despair, fear, all the weak, dark thoughts that can make you jump at shadows. But now she clearly feels that it is becoming all too much, that she is fighting a battle that she can only lose, that her humor and bravery and stoicism are all meaningless because there can only be one ending to this thing.
Cancer has kicked the stuffing out of her. Cancer has stolen her sense of self.
I stand outside the bathroom door waiting for her to emerge. There is still so much that my father and I rely on the women to do-my mum, Plum, Joyce, my nan’s old female friends. Even at this late hour, my dad and I never go into the bathroom with her, we never wash her. Even in the midst of the ravages of terminal illness, even with cancer staring us in the face, a kind of modesty prevails. For her sake as well as our own.
But tonight is different. Although she has eaten next to nothing for days, doesn’t even drink more than a sparrow’s sip of the diluted orange cordial that sits on her bedside table, tonight I hear her moaning shortly after I have helped her into bed and turned out the lights and left her. I hear her moaning as though something unthinkable has happened.
She is wailing when I go into the room, really wailing as if she never knew it could be this bad, but it is soon clear from the smell in the little bedroom that it is not the endless pain of the tumor in her side that is causing her distress. The smell in the room is coming from her bed. This has never happened before. How could I not have seen it coming? And how can I deal with it?
There is only one thing to do. I reasure my nan that it doesn’t matter, that this is nothing, although when I pull back the sheets and see that the mess is everywhere-on her nightshirt, the bedclothes, her hands-I am deeply shocked and uncertain if I can cope with this moment, this thing I have to do because there’s no one else here to do it.
It is her distress that helps me to do what I must do, it is her humiliation that somehow both steels me and softens me-“Oh, Alfie, it just slipped out of me, oh, this is so embarrassing, oh, look at me, Alfie”-and I am filled with such an overwhelming love for her that dealing with this thing becomes natural.
Not easy. Never easy. But natural.
I help her gently from her bed, telling her that this is nothing at all for us, for her and me, that we can get through it together, we will get through it together, and I take her to the bathroom where I help her out of her soiled nightshirt and into the bath, and I run the hot water, as all the time she cries with embarrassment and shame, and I see my grandmother naked for the first time, and I get soap and water on a wash-cloth and I softly say all the words of reassurance as I clean her up, as gentle as a mother with her child, just as she once cleaned me.
35
ZENG AND YUMI ARE OUTSIDE THE ENTRANCE to Churchill’s, handing out flyers. They both look a little different today. I suppose they are growing up.
Zeng is in a suit, his usually unkempt hair-“like a dog bit it,” the other Chinese students say-now neat and tidy, slicked down for his interview this morning at a nearby college. Yumi has stopped bleaching her hair, gradually reverting to her natural color for her return to Japan, and the beautiful, glossy blackness is starting to streak her blond thatch.
“How did the interview go, Zeng?”
“Going to do MBA from October. Very useful for doing business in China. But offer dependent on exam results. Need good English to do MBA.”
“You’ll get a good enough mark to do your MBA.” I turn to Yumi. “And you’ve got a new look too.”
“Going to work in an office,” she says. “Big company in Tokyo. Can’t have yellow hair. Not in Tokyo office. Not ever again. Blond no more forever.”
She hands me a leaflet. At first glance it looks exactly like one of our college flyers. The border is still made up of all the flags of the world, the centerpiece is still a clumsy silhouette of Winston Churchill. But in this one Winnie is holding a joint the size of a Cornetto rather than his usual stogie.
Come to Churchill’s Karaoke
End of term sing-song
Say good-bye to all your friends
Up in the staff room Hamish and Lenny are looking at the same flyer.
“Bloody karaoke,” Lenny says. “It’s the death of the dancing class. There was a time when the end-of-term do was in a disco.”
“Nobody under fifty or over ten says disco anymore, Lenny,” I tell him.
“Bit of dirty dancing under the strobe lights,” he reminisces, ignoring me. “Up close and personal for the slow numbers. Is that an Evian bottle in your pocket or are you just glad to see me? Lovely, mate. Now it’s all karaoke. Standing there like a jerk croaking along to Abba numbers. Following the bouncy ball on the teleprompter. Always some dippy couple tripping along the beach on the little film. Where’s the fun in that, mate?”
“The interesting thing about karaoke is that it’s popular in countries where expression of emotion is frowned upon,” Hamish says. “China. Japan. All of East Asia, really. Social convention means that they can’t express themselves openly in everyday life. But they can do it in song at karaoke.”
“Whereas if we want to express ourselves in this country,” Lenny says, “we can just go into a public toilet and pull our trousers down.”
“You going to this, Alfie?” Hamish says.
“I’m not sure.”
“Are you kidding?” Lenny says. “This man is legendary among the student body. They all admire his technique with a hand-held.”
I think I will pass on Churchill’s karaoke, but not for the reasons that Lenny the Lech wants to avoid it. I spent enough time in Hong Kong to have purged myself of the embarrassment factor that makes most of my countrymen squirm in a karaoke bar.
But I suspect that the night will feel like one long good-bye, that it will be an out-of-tune wake for youth and freedom, that we will soon all be blond no more forever.
I watch my class working on all the tenses that can be used to refer to the future. Present simple, future perfect, present continuous, future perfect continuous. Yumi and Zeng. You go, you meet. Hiroko and Gen. You will have traveled, you will have met. Vanessa and Witold. I am starting. She is going. But not Olga, she has gone, dropped out, disappeared into the city with her boyfriend. Where are you going to go? What are you going to do?
I realize how much I will miss my students. How much I will miss them all.
They are still coming to my lessons, I still see them every day; in fact with the exam coming up fast, they are attending classes more regularly than they ever have, and if they cut back on anything then it is nights at General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen or the Eamon de Valera or the Pampas Steak Bar, but already their talk is turning to their new lives. Their time at Churchill’s International Language School is almost over. Soon they will go and I will stay. I miss them already.
And I wonder if it will always be this way-another year, another set of faces, on and on forever, a series of hellos and good-byes without end.