Man and Boy (12 page)

part two

the ding-dong man

Pat started school.

The uniform he had to wear should have made him look grown-up. The gray V-necked sweater, the white shirt, and the yellow tie should have made him look like a little man. But they didn’t.

The formality of his school clothes only underlined the shocking newness of him. Approaching his fifth birthday, he wasn’t even young yet. He was still brand new. Even though he was dressed more grown-up than me.

And as I helped him get ready for his first day at school, I was startled to realize just how much I loved his face. When he was a baby, I couldn’t tell if he was really beautiful or if that was just my parental software kicking in. But now I could see the truth.

With those light blue eyes, his long yellow hair, and the way his slow, shy smile could spread right across his impossibly smooth face, he really was a beautiful boy. And now I had to let my beautiful boy go out into the world. At least until 3:30 p.m. For both of us, it felt like a lifetime.

He wasn’t smiling now. At breakfast he was pale and silent in his adult clothing, struggling to stop his chin trembling and his bottom lip sticking out, while over the Coco Pops I kept up a running commentary about the best days of your life.

The Coco Pops were interrupted by a call from Gina. I knew it must have been difficult for her to phone—the working day was still going strong where she was—but I also knew that she wouldn’t miss Pat’s big day. I watched him talking to his mother, uncomfortable in his shirt and tie, a baby suddenly forced to impersonate a man. Then it was time to go.

***

As we drove closer to the school I was seized by a moment of panic. There were children everywhere, swarms of them all in exactly the same clothes as Pat, all heading in the same direction as us. I could lose him in here. I could lose him forever.

We pulled up some way from the school gates. There were cars double-parked and triple-parked everywhere. Tiny girls with Leonardo DiCaprio lunch boxes scrambled out of sport-utility vehicles the size of a Panzer tank. Bigger boys with Arsenal and Manchester United backpacks climbed out of old station wagons. The noise from that three-foot-high tribe was unbelievable.

I took Pat’s clammy hand and we joined the throng. I could see a collection of small, bewildered new kids and their nervous parents milling about in the playground. We were just going through the gates to join them when I noticed one of Pat’s brand-new black leather shoes’ laces were undone.

“Let me get your shoelace for you, Pat,” I said, kneeling down to tie it, realizing that this was the first day in his life he had ever been out of sneakers.

Two bigger boys rolled past, arm in arm. They leered at us. Pat smiled at them shyly.

“He can’t even do his shoes up,” one of them snorted.

“No,” Pat said, “but I can tell the time.”

They collapsed in guffaws of laughter, holding each other up for support, and reeled away, repeating what Pat had said with disbelief.

“But I can tell the time, can’t I?” Pat said, thinking they doubted his word, his eyes blinking furiously as he seriously considered bursting into tears.

“You can tell the time brilliantly,” I said, unable to really believe that I was actually going to turn my son loose among all the cynicism and spite of the lousy modern world. We went into the playground.

A lot of the children starting school had both parents with them. But I wasn’t the only lone parent. I wasn’t even the only man.

There was another solo father, maybe ten years older than me, a worn-out business type accompanying a composed little girl with a backpack bearing the grinning mugs of some boy band I had never heard of. We exchanged a quick look and then he avoided my eyes, as if what I had might be catching. I suppose his wife could have been at work. I suppose she could have been anywhere.

The kindly headmistress came and led us into the assembly hall. She gave us a brief, breezy pep talk and then the children were all assigned to their individual classrooms.

Pat got Miss Waterhouse, and with a handful of other parents and new kids we were marched off to her class by one of the trusted older children who were acting as guides. Our guide was a boy around eight years old. Pat stared up at him, dumbstruck with admiration.

In Miss Waterhouse’s class a flock of five-year-olds were sitting cross-legged on the floor, patiently waiting for a story from their teacher, a young woman with the hysterical good humor of a game show host.

“Welcome everyone!” Miss Waterhouse said. “You’re just in time for our morning story. But first it’s time for everyone to say good-bye to their mommy.” She beamed at me.

“And daddy.”

It was time to leave him. And although there had been a few emotional good-byes before he dropped out of nursery school, this time felt a bit different. This time it felt like I was being left.

He was starting school and by the time he graduated, he would be a man and I would be middle-aged. Those long days of watching
Star Wars
videos at home while life went on somewhere else were over. Those days had seemed empty and frustrating at the time, but I missed them already. My baby was joining the world.

Miss Waterhouse asked for volunteers to look after the new boys and girls. A forest of hands shot up and the teacher chose the chaperones. Suddenly, a solemn, exceptionally pretty little girl was standing next to us.

“I’m Peggy,” she told Pat. “And I’m going to take care of you.”

The little girl took his hand and led him into the classroom.

He didn’t even notice me leaving.

***

I can remember sleeping on the backseat of my father’s car. We were driving away from the city, coming back from nights out—the yearly visit to the London Palladium to see a pantomime, the weekly visits to see my grandmother—and I would watch the yellow lamps of East End streets and Essex A-roads blurring high above my dreaming head.

I would stretch out on the backseat of my dad’s car—“You don’t have to sleep, just rest your eyes,” my mother would tell me—and soon I would be rocked off to sleep by the motion of the car and the murmur of my parents’ voices.

The next thing I knew I would be in my father’s arms, the car up our drive, the engine still running as he lifted me from the backseat, swaddled in the tartan blanket that he kept in the car for our trips to the seaside and relatives and the London Palladium.

These days it takes next to nothing to wake me. A drunk staggering home, a car door slamming, a false alarm miles away—they are all enough to snap me out of sleep and leave me staring at the ceiling for hours. But when I was a child sleeping on the backseat of my dad’s car, nothing could wake me up. I hardly stirred from my dreams when we arrived home and I was carried up the stairs to bed wrapped up in that tartan blanket and my father’s arms.

I wanted Pat to have memories like that. I wanted Pat to feel as secure as that. But with Gina gone and our old VW sold to pay the mortgage, these days Pat was by my side in the passenger seat of the MGF, struggling and fighting against sleep even when we were coming back from my parents and there was an hour’s worth of empty motorway ahead of us.

I wanted my son to have car rides like the car rides that I had known as a child. But we were traveling light.

***

Cyd called toward the end of the long morning.

“How did it go?” she said.

She sounded genuinely anxious. That made me like her even more.

“It was a bit fraught,” I said. “The chin wobbled when it was time to say good-bye. There were a few tears in the eyes. But that was me, of course. Pat was absolutely fine.”

She laughed, and in my mind’s eye I could see her smile lighting up the place where she worked, making it somewhere special.

“I can make you laugh,” I said.

“Yes, but now I’ve got to get to work,” she said. “Because you can’t pay my bills.” That was true enough. I couldn’t even pay my own bills.

***

My father came with me to meet Pat at the end of his first day at school.

“A special treat,” my dad said, parking his Toyota right outside the school gates. But he didn’t say if it was a special treat for Pat or a special treat for me.

As the children came swarming out of the gates at 3:30, I saw that there was never a possibility of losing him in the crowd. Even among hundreds of children dressed more or less the same, you can still spot your own child a mile off.

He was with Peggy, the little girl who was going to take care of him. She stared up at me with eyes that seemed strangely familiar.

“Did you enjoy it?” I asked him, afraid that he was going to threaten to hold his breath if he ever had to go back.

“Guess what?” Pat said. “The teachers have all got the same first name. They’re all called Miss.”

My old man picked him up and kissed him. I wondered how long it would be before Pat would start squirming under our kisses. Then he kissed my dad on the face—one of those hard, fierce kisses he had learned from Gina—and I saw we still had a while.

“We’ve got your bike in the back of Granddad’s car,” my dad said. “We can go to the park on the way home.”

“Can Peggy come?” Pat said.

I looked down at the solemn-eyed child.

“Of course she can,” I said. “But we have to ask Peggy’s mommy or daddy first.”

“My mom’s at work,” Peggy told me. “So’s my dad.”

“Then who meets you?”

“Bianca,” she said. “My babysitter. Although I’m not a baby anymore.”

Peggy looked around her, gazing up at the herd of adults meeting children until she saw the face she was looking for. A girl in her late teens was pushing through the crowds, sucking on a cigarette and searching for her charge.

“That’s Bianca,” Peggy said.

“Come on, Peggy,” the girl said, offering her hand. “Let’s go.”

Pat and Peggy stared at each other.

“We’re off to the park for an hour or so,” I told Bianca. “Peggy’s welcome to come with us. And you too, of course.”

The babysitter curtly shook her head.

“We’ve got to go,” she said.

“See you tomorrow then,” Peggy told Pat.

“Yes,” he said.

Peggy smiled at him as Bianca dragged her off through the thinning crowd.

“I’ll see her tomorrow,” Pat said. “At my school.”

There was dirt on his hands, paint on his face, and a piece of what looked like egg sandwich by his mouth. But he was fine. School was going to be okay.

***

Another difference between me and my old man. After Pat fell into the empty swimming pool, I would have been quite happy to never set eyes on his bicycle again. But during one of those endless hours at the hospital, my dad drove to the park and recovered Bluebell.

The bike was exactly where we had left it, on its side at the empty deep end, undamaged apart from a bent handlebar. I would have cheerfully stuck it in the nearest Dumpster. My dad wanted Pat to ride it again. I didn’t argue with him. I thought I would leave Pat to do that.

Yet when my father took Bluebell from the trunk of his car, my son seemed happy to see it.

“I’ve straightened the handlebar,” my dad told us. “It needs a lick of paint, that’s all. Shouldn’t take a minute. I can do it for you, if you like.”

My dad knew that I hadn’t held a paint brush since I had dropped out of high school art class.

“I can do it,” I said sullenly. “Put your coat on, Pat.”

It was September and the first cold snap of autumn was in the air. I helped Pat into his windbreaker, pulling up the hood, watching the smile spread across his face at the sight of his bike.

“One more thing,” my father said, producing a small silver wrench from his car coat. “I think it’s time that a big boy like Pat took the training wheels off his bike.”

This was my old man at seventy—tough, kind, confident, grinning at his grandson with boundless tenderness. And yet I found myself railing against his genius for home improvement, his manly efficiency, his absolute certainty that he could bend the world to his will. And I was sick of the sight of that bike.

“Jesus, Dad,” I said. “He just fell off the bloody thing five minutes ago. Now you want him to start doing wheelies.”

“You always exaggerate,” my father said. “Just like your mother. I don’t want the lad to do wheelies—whatever wheelies might be. I just want him to have a crack at riding without his training wheels. It will do him good.”

My father got down on his haunches and began to remove the little training wheels from Bluebell. Seeing him at work with a wrench made me feel that I had spent my life watching him do odd jobs, first in his home and later at mine. When the lights went on the blink or the rain started coming through the ceiling, Gina and I didn’t reach for the Yellow Pages. We called my dad.

The burst boiler, the worn-out guttering, the hole in the roof—no task was too big or too difficult for his immaculately kept tool box. He loved Gina’s praise when the job was completed—she always laid it on a bit thick—but he would have done it anyway. My father was what my mother would call “good around the house.” I was exactly the opposite. I was what I would call “fucking useless around the house.”

Now I watched Pat’s face bleaching with fear as my dad finished removing training wheels from his bike. For a moment I was about to erupt, but then I kept it in.

Because if I started, then I knew all the struggles of thirty years would come pouring out—my laziness against my father’s can-do capability, my timidity against my old man’s machismo, my desire for a quiet life against my dad’s determination to get his own way.

I didn’t want all that to come pouring out in front of Pat. Not today. Not any day. So I looked on in silence as my dad helped my son onto his bike.

“Just a little try,” my dad said soothingly. “If you don’t like it, we can stop. We can stop straightaway. Okay, baby?”

“Okay, Granddad.”

My father seized hold of the bike’s handlebars with one hand and its seat with the other. Pat clung on to both handlebars for dear life, his already scuffed school shoes trailing reluctantly on the pedals as Bluebell’s wheels rolled round and round. With me bringing up the sulky rear, we wobbled past the swings and slides and across an empty patch of grass.