One for My Baby Read Online Free PDF

nobody from the Balkans. Now these thin men and boys swarm around the stalled traffic in front of King’s Cross Station, squirting windscreens and scraping away the grime, even when you ask them not to. The refugees point at their mouths, a gesture that looks vaguely obscene. But they are just saying that they are hungry.
    That’s all new.
    And it’s not just the refugees on the Euston Road.
    Terry Wogan is playing REM on Radio 2. Princess Diana is rarely mentioned. And perhaps most shocking of all, my father has started going to a gym.
    All these things seem incredible to me. I thought Wogan only played middle of the road music – but then perhaps REM became MOR while my back was turned. I believed that Diana would be as visible in death as she was in life. And I thought that my dad was the last person in the world who would ever start fretting about his love handles.
    The old place looks pretty much the same – frighteningly like its old self, in fact – but everywhere there are clues that things are secretly different.
    Michael Stipe is suddenly whining among the easy listening. Diana is a part of history. And my old man has jacked in the takeaway chicken tikka mosalla and is talking about the benefits of a full cardiovascular workout.
    Sometimes it hardly feels like the same country.
     
    I am currently living with my parents. Thirty-four and still at home – it’s not great. But it’s not the house where I grew up – that would just be too sad – so living with them doesn’t feel as though I’ve completely regressed to childhood. At least, not until my mum hands me my pyjamas, all neatly washed and ironed.
    It’s just a temporary thing. As soon as I get my life back together, as soon as I get a job, I’m going to find myself a flat. Somewhere close to work. I want it to look exactly like the apartment that Rose and I had in Hong Kong. We had a good place. I was happy there.
    And I know I should be trying to move on. I know that I should be trying to put my time with Rose behind me. I know all of that.
    But if you believe that you can recognise someone you have never met before, if you believe that there is just one person in the world for you, if you believe that there’s only one other human being out there who you can love, truly love, for a lifetime – and I believe all of these things – then it follows that there’s no point in pretending that tomorrow is another day and all that crap.
    Because I’ve had my chance.
     
    They’ve got this huge house now, my mum and dad. One of those tall white houses in Islington that looks big from the front and then goes on forever once you get inside. They’ve even got a swimming pool. It wasn’t always this way.
    When I was growing up and my old man was still a sportswriter, we lived in a tatty Victorian terrace in a part of town that gentrification never quite reached. After Oranges For Christmas became a bestseller, everything changed.
    The money is new, too.
    Now my dad is trying to write the follow-up to Oranges For Christmas , about how his family were horribly poor but deliriously happy in the immediate aftermath of World War II. It’s going to be a heart-warming look at the good old days of bomb sites, banana rationing and teeming slums. I don’t know how it’s going. He seems to spend most of his time down the gym.
    I know my old man is worried about me. And so is my mum. That’s why I’ve got to get out of their big, beautiful home. Soon.
    My parents only want the best for me, but they are always having a go at me for not getting over Rose, for not getting her out of my system, for not getting on with my life.
    I love my parents but they drive me crazy. They look exasperated when I tell them that I am in no hurry to get on with what feels like a diminished life. Sometimes my dad says, “Suit yourself, chum,” and slams the door when he goes out. Sometimes my mum cries and says, “Oh, Alfie.”
    My mum and dad act as though I am a nut job for