I didn’t understand what they were talking about. I didn’t understand the syrupy smiles or the coy allusions. I couldn’t imagine anyone being so desperate that they needed me to look after them. I just didn’t get it.
But later, when I saw my mother weeping without any apparent reason on the stairs of the little house where I grew up, when I saw her heart breaking while my father tried to comfort her, then I started to get it. The cute talk from the overconfident neighbors had abruptly stopped. I wasn’t going to have a brother or sister. My parents were not going to have another child. Not this time. Not now. And, as it turned out, not ever.
I wondered where they were, my unborn little brothers and sisters. Were they in heaven? I tried my best to see them in my mind, my little brothers and sisters, but they were never real children to me, not like the other children at school or in the park, and not like the brothers and sisters of my friends.
These unborn siblings seemed more like an idea that someone had once had, an idea that had been thought about and then quietly put away. But I remember my mother weeping on the stairs, I remember watching her heart break, I remember her weeping as though those children were as real as me.
She loved me. She loved my father. She was very good at it. When we had hard times-when my dad was trying to write his book while still working full-time, when I lost Rose-my mum was our rock.
But no matter how much love she gave us, I always felt that she had more to give. I am not saying that’s why she worked as a dinner lady at Nelson Mandela High. But all that unused love is why my mum can look at all those unlovely children and feel a genuine affection for them.
“We’re giving him a birthday party,” she says, putting on her coat. “Don’t tell your nan. Or Lena. Or him.”
“I don’t know, Mum.”
“It will do him good to celebrate his birthday,” she says, and for just a second there I catch a glimpse of the woman who, at fifty-four years of age, still breaks up fights in the playground of Nelson Mandela High.
The work is not going well for my old man.
When the work was going well, the door to his basement study was shut but you could hear music blasting out of his stereo. It was always the old-school soul music he played, music that is full of profound melancholy and wild exuberance, music that was the sound of young America thirty years ago.
When the work went well, my dad played all the mating calls of his twenties-the Four Tops, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie Wonder-but now the work is going badly, or not going anywhere at all, there is only silence in his basement room.
Sometimes I see him sitting at his desk, staring at his computer, a pile of fan letters by his side. People are always writing to his publishers to say how much they loved Oranges for Christmas, how they laughed and cried, how it reminded them so much of their own family. These letters, passed on by his publishers, should make my father feel good but all this appreciation seems to weigh heavily upon him, seems to make it even more difficult for him to get started on his new book.
My father is rarely at home these days. In the mornings he goes to the gym, pumping his pecs and crunching his abs and toning his buttocks until the sweat blinds him. At night he has endless chores and treats-there are drinks, dinners, launches, awards ceremonies and his wise, witty appearances at the artsy end of radio and television. Those long afternoons are the big problem for him. He stares at his computer screen for a while, Smokey and Stevie and Diana silent inside their CD cases and boxed sets, and then he calls a cab and slips off to the West End.
This is how my father fills his afternoons. He goes around the bookstores of Covent Garden and Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street, where he signs many copies of Oranges for Christmas. This makes his book easier to sell, so the stores are always pleased to see him, even though he is turning up unannounced and they have other things to do. The young staff fetch him a pile of books and a cup of coffee and my father sets to work.
I saw him once in one of those bookstores where they sell records, magazines and designer coffee, one of those new kind of bookstores where books are just one of the things they sell. He didn’t see me and I didn’t want to approach him. It would have felt like an intrusion into some private grief.
He looked so lonely.
It is possible that my father does other things in the West End when he escapes from his work and his family and his home. But that’s how I see him, that’s how he is fixed in my mind at this moment-sitting all by himself in the corner of a crowded bookstore, a cup of caffe latte growing cold by his side, passing the long, lonesome hours by writing his own name over and over again.
On Friday night some of my students want me to go to the pub with them.
I try to wriggle out of it, telling them that I don’t really drink very much and I don’t really go to pubs, but they seem hurt and disappointed and incredulous.
An Englishman who doesn’t like pubs?
What’s wrong with this guy?
So I tell them that I’ll come along for just a quick one and they say that’s fine, a quick one is good, because most of them have to go to work tonight in whatever bar or burger joint or sushi conveyor belt restaurant pays their rent.
Their local is an Irish pub off Tottenham Court Road called the Eamon de Valera, and although it’s not yet six, the place is already full of young men and women from all around the world and even a few locals knocking back the dark glasses of Guinness, Murphy’s and Coca-Cola.
“Irish pub,” Zeng tells me. “Very friendly atmosphere.”
We find an empty corner of the Eamon de Valera and pull two tables together. My students start to get their money out but I tell them that their teacher will buy them a drink. I get in a round of stout and Coke.
There are five of us-me, Zeng, Wit, Gen and Astrud, a Cuban woman, married to a local. But Yumi and Imran are already in the pub, talking at the bar, and they come over to join us. Then Vanessa arrives with Churchill’s other French girl and some young black guy with locks, and soon so many people are joining and leaving our party-Astrud thanks me for her Coke and goes, saying she has to meet her husband-that I can’t tell where it begins and where it ends.
There is something touchingly democratic about our little group. Not just because they come from every corner of the globe, but because you couldn’t imagine these people being friends or even sharing a drink in their home countries. Wit is pushing forty and Yumi is just out of her teens. Wit is permanently broke, sending every spare pound back home to his family, while Vanessa seems to have some kind of private income-all of her shopping bags are from Tiffany and Cartier. Then there is Imran, a handsome young man in Emporio Armani kit, and Zeng, who is wearing odd socks and spectacles mended with Scotch tape. They have nothing in common apart from Churchill’s International Language School. But studying there has created a bond between them and I find myself doing something that I haven’t done for a long time.
I find myself having a good time.
More drinks are ordered. Students shout at each other in fractured English over the sound of The Corrs asking what they can do to make you happy. Zeng is sitting next to me and I take the Guinness he is clutching away from him as he starts to nod off.
“Always sleeping,” Yumi tuts.
“Wah,” Zeng says, shaking himself awake. He smiles apologetically and reclaims his beer. “Sorry, sorry. Last night I did not sleep. My host family were arguing. Now I am very…I am very…fuck.”
Gasps of astonishment around the table. A few snickers of laughter.
“No bad words!” Yumi says.
Zeng looks embarrassed. “Excuse me,” he says, avoiding eye contact with his teacher.