There’s a strange man on our front doorstep.
He’s wearing a pointy helmet like the one worn by the Imperial bikers in Return of the Jedi. Really going for that futuristic look, he also has on black goggles, a bright yellow cycling top and black Lycra trousers that passionately embrace his buttocks. Under his pointy helmet a Sony Discman is clamped to his head. He has dragged a bicycle up our garden path and now, as he crouches to look through the letter box, you can see the muscles tighten and stretch in the back of his legs.
He looks like a supremely fit insect.
“Dad?”
“Alfie,” my father says. “Forgot my key again. Give me a hand with this bike, would you?”
As my old man pulls off his pointy helmet and the Discman, I catch a blast of music-a cry of brassy, wailing exuberance over a sinuous bass line that I recognize immediately as “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” by Stevie Wonder.
With his funky bike and buglike demeanor, my father might look as though he listens to all the latest sounds. In fact he still loves all the old sounds. Especially Tamla Motown. Stevie. Smokey. Marvin. Diana. The Four Tops and the Temptations. The “Sound of Young America,” back in the days when both America and my dad were young.
I am more of a Sinatra man. I get it from my granddad. He’s been dead for years, but when I was little he would sit me on his lap in the living room of his big project house in Dagenham, the house that became the setting for Oranges for Christmas, and I would smell his Old Holborn hand-rolled cigarettes and his Old Spice aftershave as we listened to Frank sing sweet nothings on the stereo. It was years before I realized that those songs are all about women. Loving women, wanting women, losing women.
I always thought they were about being with your granddad.
Sometimes my granddad and I would spot Sinatra in one of his old films when they showed them on television. From Here to Eternity, Tony Rome, Some Came Running-all those tough guys with broken hearts who seemed like a perfect complement to the music.
“Granddad!” I would say. “It’s Frank!”
“You’re right,” my granddad would say, putting a tattooed arm around me as we peered at the black-and-white TV set. “It’s Frank.”
I grew up loving Sinatra but hearing him now doesn’t make me dream of Las Vegas or Palm Springs or New York. When I hear Frank, I don’t think of the Rat Pack and Ava Gardner and Dino and Sammy. All the things you are meant to remember.
Hearing Sinatra makes me remember sitting on my grandfather’s lap in a project house in an East End banjo-that’s what they called their cul-de-sac, because it was shaped like a banjo-hearing Sinatra makes me remember the smell of Old Holborn and Old Spice, and hearing Sinatra makes me remember being surrounded by an uncomplicated, unconditional love that I thought would be there forever.
My old man always tried to convert me to Motown. And I like all that ooh-baby-baby stuff-how could anyone dislike it? But as I grew up I felt that there was a big difference between the music my granddad liked and the music my dad liked.
The songs my father played me were about being young. The songs my grandfather played me were about being alive.
I open the door and help my dad get his bicycle into the hall. It is some kind of racing bike, with low-slung handles and a seat the size of a vegetable Samosa. I have never seen it before.
“New wheels, Dad?”
“Thought I’d cycle to the gym. Doesn’t seem much point in driving there. It’s good for me. Gets the old ticker going.”
I shake my head and smile, amazed and touched yet again at this transformation in my father. When I was growing up he was a typical journalist, slowly growing more portly on a diet of irregular meals and regular alcohol. Now, in his late fifties, he’s suddenly turned into Jean-Claude Van Damme.
“You’re really into it, aren’t you? This whole keep-fit routine.”
“You should come with me some time. I mean it, Alfie. You’ve got to start watching that weight. You’re really getting fat.”
Sometimes I think my father has a touch of Tourette’s syndrome.
I’m too embarrassed to tell Jean-Claude about my pathetic shuffle in the park. And I don’t feel like arguing with him. I guess that’s how you know you’re not young any more-you don’t feel the need to challenge your parents on every point of order. But as he wheels his bike down the hall and I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I think: what does it matter anyway? I’m not going out on the make.
My dad and I go into the living room where my grandmother is sitting in her favorite chair with a copy of the News of the World on her lap. She appears to be studying a story with the headline TABLE DANCING TART STOLE MY TELLY STUD.
“Hello, Mum,” says my dad, kissing her on the forehead. “Reading all the scandal, are you?”
“Hello, Nan,” I say, doing the same. We kiss a lot in my family. My grandmother’s skin is soft and dry, like paper that has been left out in the sun. She turns her watery blue eyes on me and slowly shakes her head.
I take her hand. I love my nan.
“No luck, Alfie,” she says. “No luck again, love.”
I see that she is holding a lottery ticket in her hands and checking it against last night’s winning numbers. This is one of the rituals that I go through every week with my grandmother. She is always genuinely amazed that she has failed to win ten million pounds on the lottery. Every Sunday she comes around for lunch and expresses her total astonishment at failing to get six balls. Then I commiserate with her.
“No luck, Nan? Never mind.”
“Work on Monday morning, Alfie.” She smiles, although neither she nor I have to go to work tomorrow. She starts to rip up her lottery ticket. This seems to consume all her strength and she nods off after completing the task.
Through the tall window at the back of the room I can see my mother in the garden, raking up the fallen leaves. Although she has sometimes seemed out of place in the big new house that was bought with the money from my father’s book, my mother has always loved this garden.
She looks up at me and smiles, jogging on the spot and puffing out her cheeks. It takes me a few seconds to realize that she is miming a run in the park. I give her the thumbs up and my mum goes back to raking the dead leaves in her garden, smiling quietly to herself. I know she was pleased to see me get out of the house for what she calls “a bit of fresh air.”
The front door slams and a few seconds later a smiling young woman sticks her head around the door. She looks like God’s second attempt at Cameron Diaz-an almost cartoon amalgamation of blond hair, blue eyes and ski-tanned skin. Lena is our Czech home help. She’s really smart. It’s only when she’s listening to the radio that she seems a bit stupid because she sort of dances around to the music, even if she’s sitting down and eating her bran flakes.
Lena’s not stupid, though. She’s just young. To be honest, I think she’s got a soft spot for me. One of those irrational crushes that ambush the very young. I might have to tell her, as gently as possible, that I’m not looking for a new relationship. She’s certainly a beautiful girl-she once inspired our paperboy to ride his bike right into a lamppost. There were free pull-outs and color supplements everywhere. How strange that I’m just not interested. Or perhaps it’s not strange at all.
The slammed door has woken up my nan and she beams at Lena, who she perhaps believes is some kind of distant relation.
“Sorry I’m late,” says Lena in English so good that she sounds like a native speaker. “The tube’s awful on Sundays. I’ll start getting lunch ready now.”
“It doesn’t MATTER,” my nan says very slowly. My grandmother also seems to believe that Lena is either deaf, stupid, unable to speak a word of English or possibly all of the above. She points at me. “HIM NOT HUNGRY.”
“So sweet,” smiles Lena, who speaks five languages and who is studying for an MBA at UCL. “I’ll get started on lunch.”