One for My Baby Read Online Free PDF Page B

not getting over Rose.
    I feel like asking them – but what if I’m not a nut job at all?
    What if this is how you are meant to feel?
     
    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 recognise immediately as “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” by Stevie Wonder.
    With his funky bike and bug-like demeanour, 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 council house in Dagenham, the house that became the setting for Oranges For Christmas , and I would smell his Old Holborn roll-ups and his Old Spice aftershave as we listened to Frank sing sweet nothings on the music centre. It was years before I realised 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 council 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,