One for my Baby [antikvár]

Eat the Cold Porridge 'You must eat the cold porridge,' he told me once. It's a Chinese expression. Cantonese, I guess, because although he carried an old-fashioned blue British passport and was happy to call himself an Englishman, he was horn in Hong Kong and sometimes you could tell that all the important things he believed were formed long ago and far away. Like the importance of eating the cold porridge. I stopped what I was doing and stared at him. What was he going on about now? 'Eat the cold porridge.' The way he explained it, eating the cold porridge means working at something for so long that when you get home there is nothing left to eat hut cold porridge. And I thought - who did he share a flat with out there? Goldilocks and the Three Bears? That's how you get good at something, he told me. That's how you get good at anything. You eat the cold porridge. You work at it when the others are playing. You work at it when the others are watching television. You work at it when the others are sleeping. To become the master of something, you must eat the cold porridge, Grasshopper. Actually he never called me Grasshopper. r one 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 trainers 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 colour 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 pyjamas 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 7