One for My Baby : A Novel

by Tony Parsons

• ISBN13: 9780743456647
• ISBN10: 0743456645
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-03-23
• Publisher: Atria

Summary

How many times can we love -- truly love -- in the course of one lifetime?Alfie Budd found the perfect woman. Then he lost her. And he doesn't believe you get a second chance at love.Returning to London after a brief, idyllic marriage overseas, Alfie Budd finds his world collapsing around him -- his parents' marriage, his grand-mother's health, his own ambitions for his career. If only he could pick up the phone and call his beloved Rose, the wife he lost. But Rose is gone forever. Believing his chance for love has passed, Alfie takes comfort in a string of fleeting affairs while he teaches at Churchill's Language School. But then Alfie meets two people who help him to start putting his broken heart back together. One is George Chang, the old Chinese man he sees practicing Tai Chi in the park every morning. Surrounded by his strong, loving family, George Chang teaches Alfie more than Tai Chi. The other is Jackie Day, a single mother who needs Alfie's help in completing her education so she can go back to college. But what happens when the teacher starts falling for his student?Can Alfie give up meaningless sex for a mean-ingful relationship? Will he ever have a family life like the Changs'? And how much room in our hearts do we really have for love?Like his runaway bestseller, Man and Boy, Tony Parsons's new novel is full of laughter and tears, biting social comment and overwhelming emotion. It is a book about love, family, sex, Tai Chi and the human heart.

Excerpts

Chapter 1 There's something wrong with my heart.It shouldn't be working like this. It should be doing something else. Something normal. More like everybody else's heart.I don't understand it. I have only been running in the park for ten minutes and my brand-new sneakers have luminous swoosh signs on the side. But already my leg muscles are burning, my breath is coming in these wheezing little gasps and my heart -- don't get me started on my heart. My heart is filling my chest like some giant undigested kebab.My heart is stabbing me in the back.My heart is ready to attack me.It's Sunday morning, a big blue day in September, and the park is almost empty. Almost, but not quite.In the patch of grass where they don't allow ball games, there is an old Chinese man with close-cropped silver hair and skin the color of burnished gold. He has to be around my dad's age, pushing sixty, but he seems fit and strangely youthful.He's wearing a baggy black outfit that makes him look like he is still in his pajamas and he's very slowly moving his arms and legs to some silent song inside his head.I used to see this stuff every day when I was living in Hong Kong. The old people in the park, doing their Tai Chi, moving like they had all the time in the world.The old boy doesn't look at me as I huff and puff my way toward him. He just stares straight ahead, lost in his slow-motion dance. I feel a sudden jolt of recognition. I have seen that face before. Not his face, but ten thousand faces just like it.When I lived in Hong Kong I saw that face working on the Star Ferry, saw it driving a cab in Kowloon, saw it looking forlorn at the Happy Valley racecourse. And I saw that face supervising some Bambi-eyed grandchild as she did her homework in the back of a little shop, saw it slurping noodles at a daipaidong food stall, saw it covered in dust, building spanking new skyscrapers on scraps of reclaimed land.That face is very familiar to me. It's impassive, self-contained and completely indifferent to my existence. That face stares straight through me. That face doesn't care if I live or die.I saw it all the time over there.It used to drive me nuts.As I struggle past the old boy, he catches my eye. Then he says something. One word. I don't know. It sounds like Breed.And I get a pang of sadness as I think to myself -- not much chance of that, pal.I'm the last of the line.Hong Kong made us feel special.We looked down on the glittering heart of Central and we felt like the heirs to something epic and heroic and grand.We stared at all those lights, all that money, all those people living in a little outpost of Britain set in the South China Sea, and we felt special in a way that we had never felt special in London and Liverpool and Edinburgh.We had no right to feel special, of course. We hadn't built Hong Kong. Most of us hadn't even arrived until just before it was time to hand it back to the Chinese. But you couldn't help feeling special in that bright shining place.There were expats who really were a bit special, hotshots in lightweight Armani suits working in Central who would one day go home covered in glory with a seven-figure bank balance. But I wasn't one of them. Nowhere near it.I was teaching English at the Double Fortune Language School to rich, glossy Chinese ladies who wanted to be able to talk to round-eye waiters in their native tongue. Waiter, there's a fly in my shark's fin soup. This is outrageous. These noodles are cold. Where is the manager? Do you take American Express? We conjugated a lot of service-related verbs because by 1996, the year I arrived in Hong Kong, there were a lot of white boys waiting on tables.I was a little different from my colleagues. It seemed like all the other teachers at the Double Fortune Language School -- our motto: "English without tears in just two years" -- had a reason to be in Hong