Man and Boy (13 page)

“Are you holding on?” Pat said.

“I’m holding on,” my dad said.

“Could you look after Pat on Saturday night for me?” I said.

“Saturday night?” he said, as if it was a strange request, as though I knew very well that was the night he and my mom liked to go out.

“Yes, I’m going out.”

“Of course,” he said. “We’ll always look after him for you. Something to do with work, is it?”

“Nothing to do with work, Dad. I don’t have any work right now, remember? I’m going out with a girl.” That didn’t sound quite right. “With a woman.” That didn’t sound quite right either.

I thought that it might have stopped him. But he carried on in his half-crouch, supporting Pat’s bike as we made our way through the daisies and the dog crap.

“Who is she?” he said.

“Just a friend. We might go to the movies.”

He finally stopped, rubbing his back as he straightened up to look at me.

“You think that’s appropriate behavior for someone in your position, do you?”

“Going to the movies? I don’t see why not.”

“I’m not talking about going to the pictures. I’m talking about going out with a strange woman just after—” He nodded at the hood of Pat’s windbreaker. “You know.”

“There’s nothing strange about her,” I said. “And we’re only going to the movies. We’re not eloping.”

He shook his head, dumbfounded at what the world was coming to.

“I don’t care what you get up to,” he said. Then he indicated Pat again. “What I care about is him. This girl—is it serious?”

“I don’t know, Dad. Can we get our first date out of the way before we start picking out curtains?”

I was playing the injured innocent. But I knew that if I went out with a woman it would confuse and frighten him. It wasn’t my intention to hurt him. I just wanted to show him that I was thirty years old and that he couldn’t decide when I took my training wheels off.

We had come to a ragged scrap of tarmac in front of an old stage.

“Are you ready?” my father asked Pat.

“Ready,” Pat said, sounding not very ready at all.

“I’m holding you, okay?” my dad said, increasing his pace. “I’m going to keep holding you. Just keep your back straight. And pedal.”

“Okay.”

“Are you holding on?”

“I’m holding on!”

They took off across the tarmac, Pat’s face hidden by the hood of his jacket and my father bent double by his side, like a little elf being chased by a hunchback. Then my dad let go of the bike.

“You holding on, Granddad?”

“I’m holding on!” he cried as Pat left him behind. “Pedal! I’ve got you!”

His little legs pedaled. Bluebell gave a dangerous wobble as Pat splashed through a puddle, but the bike seemed to right itself and gather speed.

“You’re doing it!” my dad shouted. “You’re doing it, Pat!”

He turned to look at me and we both laughed out loud. I ran to my father’s side and he put his arm around my shoulders. He smelled of Old Spice and Old Holborn.

“Look at him go,” my dad said proudly.

The bike reached the edge of the tarmac, bounced once, and skidded onto the grass. Pat was moving a bit slower now, but still pedaling furiously as he made a beeline for the trees.

“Don’t go too far!” I shouted. But he couldn’t hear me. He disappeared into the shadows of some old oak trees, like some hooded creature of the forest returning to his lair.

My father and I looked at each other. We weren’t laughing now. We took off after him, our shoes sliding on the wet grass, calling his name.

Then he was nonchalantly riding toward us out of the trees, the hood of his jacket flown off, hair flying and grinning from ear to ear.

“Look what I can do,” he said proudly, briefly standing up in the Bluebell’s stirrups before skidding to a halt.

“That’s brilliant, Pat,” I said. “But don’t go off like that again, okay? Always stay where we can see you.”

“What’s wrong with Granddad?” he said.

My father was leaning against a tree, clawing at his chest and gasping for air. The blood was drained from his face, and there was something in his eyes I had never seen before. It might have been fear.

“I’ll be fine,” he said.

“Granddad?” Pat said.

“Granddad’s fine,” he said.

After a long, desperate minute, he managed to get some air in his lungs. Still breathing hard, he laughed off the concern of his son and grandson.

“Just getting old,” he said. “Too old for a jog in the woods.”

And I thought that’s exactly what it was—old age catching up on a man whose body had endured so much in his youth. All my life those small pieces of shrapnel, jagged and black, had been squeezing out of his tough old body. Every summer we saw that giant starburst of a scar on his side. All that pain and punishment was bound to catch up on him sooner or later.

But I was wrong. It wasn’t the past calling. It was the future.

“Don’t worry about me,” my father told us. “I’m fine. Let’s go home.”

We walked back to his car through the lengthening shadows of that September afternoon, Pat riding his bike ahead of us, my old man humming “You Make Me Feel So Young,” consoled and comforted by his personal Dean Martin, his own private Sinatra.

When you are deep into a relationship that you expect to last forever, it never crosses your mind that one day you will be taking your third shower of the day and getting ready to go out on a date.

Like getting your mom to do your washing or having to borrow money from your dad, you think that all those nervy bathroom rituals are way behind you.

You never dream that there will again come a time when you are as fanatical about your personal hygiene as a fifteen-year-old with a permanent erection. That you will once more find yourself standing in front of the mirror trying to do something with your hair. That you will be brushing teeth that are already perfectly clean. And that you will do all these things so you can sit in the dark for a couple of hours with a member of the opposite sex you have only just met.

It’s scary. Dating is a young person’s game. You get out of practice. You might not be any good at it anymore.

You use a different part of your brain for going out with someone you have just met than you do for going out with someone you are married to. You use different muscles. So perhaps it’s only natural that when you start using those muscles again, they can feel a little stiff.

Two grown-ups going through all those teenage mating rituals—trying to look nice, meeting at the arranged hour, knowing what it is time to do and what should wait a while and what should wait forever. It should be really difficult to get back into all that stuff after you have been with someone for years. But it didn’t feel difficult with Cyd. She made it feel easy.

***

“I know we’re just friends and all, but our choice of movie tonight is really important,” Cyd said.

I tried to look as though I knew what she was talking about.

“A lot of people on a first date try to play safe. They go for a big summer movie. You know, one of those films where New York gets destroyed by aliens or a tidal wave or a big monkey or something. They think that kind of movie guarantees a good time. But a big summer movie is not a good choice.”

“It isn’t?”

She shook her head. “Nobody really has a good time at those movies apart from thirteen-year-old kids in Idaho. It’s the law of diminishing returns. When you’ve seen the Empire State Building blown up once, you don’t need to see it again.”

I was starting to get it. “You think the earth is going to move. But you end up yawning as the aliens zap the White House.”

“If you choose a big summer movie, it shows you have really low expectations,” she said, shooting me a look as I squeezed the MGF through the afternoon traffic clogged up around the Angel. “About everything. It means you think life is essentially just a bucket of stale popcorn and a carton of flat Diet Coke. And that’s the most that anyone can hope for.”

I tried to remember the first film I had seen with Gina. It had been something arty and Japanese at the Barbican. It was about depressed people.

“Art house movies are just as bad,” Cyd said, reading my mind. “It means you are both pretending to be something that you’re probably not.”

“And think of all those couples around the world whose first film was
Titanic
,” I said. “All those budding relationships doomed before they had even really begun. Before they had even left port.”

She gave me a punch on the arm. “This is serious,” she said. “I had a friend back home who got married to a guy who took her to see
The
Fly
on their first date.”

“And later he turned into a bug?”

“As good as,” she said. “He certainly changed. For the worse.”

“So what do you want to see?” I asked her.

“Trust me?” she said.

“I trust you,” I said.

She wanted to see one of those films that they put on television every Christmas, a film that I somehow imagined I had already seen a dozen times. But I don’t think I had ever really seen it at all.

I don’t know why they were showing
It’s A Wonderful Life
down at the NFT on the South Bank. It might have been a Frank Capra season or a James Stewart season. They might have had a restored, digitally enhanced, freshly polished print. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. That was the movie we went to see on our first night together. And in the beginning it seemed like pretty grim stuff.

The special effects were from the steam age. Up in a starry sky that was clearly just a painted sheet of cardboard with a torch behind it, some angels—or rather, heavenly beings represented by pinpricks in the cardboard—were discussing George Bailey, pillar of his community, and his date with destiny.

As the action switched to a small American town and their merry little Christmas, I found myself yearning for aliens or a tidal wave or a big monkey to come along and destroy the lot. If Cyd’s theory about the omens of your first film were true, then we would be lucky to last the evening. Then gradually, as all of James Stewart’s hopes and dreams began to recede, I found myself drawn into this story of a man who had lost sight of why he was alive.

The film was far tougher than I remembered it when it had been flickering in black and white in the background of my multicolored childhood, sandwiched between
Top
of
the
Pops
and my mom’s turkey sandwiches.

As his world starts to unravel, James Stewart abuses one of his children’s teachers on the phone and gets punched out by her husband in a bar. He bitterly resents the loving wife for whom he gave up his dreams of traveling the world. Most shocking of all, he is rotten to his children—an irritable, bad-tempered bully. But you know that it’s not because he doesn’t love them enough. It’s because he loves them so much.

In the darkness, Cyd reached over and squeezed my hand.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything works out all right in the end.”

***

It was still light when we came out of the film, but only just. We bought slices of pizza in the NFT café and ate them at those long wooden tables outside where you have to share with other people and you feel like a student.

The NFT is in an ugly building in a beautiful part of town. It’s inside a dumb concrete sixties block plonked down just where the Thames curls south as it passes under the shadow of Waterloo Bridge, and it faces right across the river from the lights of the Victoria embankment and St. Paul’s. That’s where Cyd told me that she had grown up in a home full of women and movies.

“The first film my parents saw together was
Gone
with
the
Wind
,” she said. “And after my dad died, my mom saw it sixteen times alone. She would have seen it more often. But she was trying to ration herself.”

Cyd was the youngest of four sisters. Her mother worked as a nurse at the Texas Medical Center—“Where big shots go to get their hearts fixed,” she said—and her father drove trucks out in the oil fields.

“Houston is an oil town,” she said. “When oil prices are high, life is sweet. And when oil prices fall through the floor, we tighten our belts. But for better or worse, for richer or poorer, Houston is always an oil town.”

The way she told it, her parents never came off their honeymoon. Even when they had four teenage daughters, they would still hold hands in public and give each other a single flower and leave love notes in lunch boxes.

“When I was twelve, it embarrassed me,” Cyd said. “Now I love it that they were that much in love. I know what you’re thinking—maybe they were never really like that and I just like to remember them that way. Maybe they got on each other’s nerves and snapped at each other. But I know what I saw. They were mad about each other. They chose right.”

Then one Sunday she was with her friends in the Dairy Queen at the Galleria shopping mall when her oldest sister came to find her to tell her that their father had died of a heart attack.

“My mom didn’t grow old overnight,” Cyd said. “It wasn’t like that at all. She just sort of retreated into the past.

“Maybe she figured that the best was over. She still went to work. She still cooked our meals. But now she watched a lot of old movies. And some of her video collection must have rubbed off on me. Because when I met the guy I came to England for, I thought he was Rhett Butler.”

I am never comfortable when the conversation turns to someone’s old partners. All those hopes that came to nothing, all those wounds that haven’t healed, all the bitterness and disappointment of seeing your love get left out for the dustbin men—it seems to take the shine off the whole evening. And she could feel it too. She changed the subject, veering away from her sad story by playing chirpy tourist guide.

“Did you know that ‘Houston’ was the first word spoken on the moon?” she said. “That’s a fact. Neil Armstrong said to Mission Control—
Houston, Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed.
”

“Until I met you, I never really thought about Houston,” I said. “It’s not one of those American cities you can see in your head.”

“It’s not like here,” she said. “If it’s got a second coat of paint, it’s an antique. We have these drinking joints by the side of the road called ice houses where all the women look like they just stepped out of a Hank Williams song. But if you’re young you go to the Yucatan Liquor Store on a Saturday night where the girls try to look like Pamela Anderson and the boys can’t help looking like Meatloaf.”

“It sounds a bit like Essex,” I said. “So where did you meet this English guy?”

“At the Yucatan Liquor Store. On a Saturday night. He asked me if I wanted a drink and I said no. Then he asked me if I wanted to dance and I said yes. He was working in Houston as a dispatch rider. That’s what he does. He delivers stuff on a motorbike. Sort of a glamorous postman. Naturally, I was impressed.”

“And he didn’t turn out to be Rhett Butler after all?”

“Well, you know,” she said. “Not even Clark Gable turned out to be Rhett Butler, did he?”

“But you came to London with him?”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you stay over there? Did they kick him out?”

“Oh, no. We were married. He had his Green Card. Did you know a Green Card is really pink?”

I shook my head.

“It surprised us too. We had to go through those interviews with immigration officials who make sure you’re really in love. We showed them our wedding album and it wasn’t a problem. We could have stayed there forever.” She thought about it. “I think he felt like he should be doing more with his life. America can make you feel like a bit of a failure. So we came here.”

“And what went wrong?”

“Everything.” She looked at me. “He was into the bamboo. Do you know what that means?”

I shook my head. “Is it some drug thing?”

“No. Well, in a way. It means he liked Asian girls. And still does. And always will.”

“Asian girls?”

“You know—Korean girls. Chinese. Japanese. Philippinas. He wasn’t that fussy—which is a bit insulting to Asian women, as they can look as different to each other as a Swede and a Turk. But he genuinely didn’t care, as long as they were Asian. The night we met, he was at the Yucatan with a little Vietnamese girl. We have a lot of Vietnamese in Houston.”

“Asian? You mean Orientals.”

“You can’t say Orientals anymore. It’s considered insulting—like Negro or stewardess. You have to say African-American and flight attendant. And Asian instead of Oriental.”

“To me, Asian sounds like Indian.”

“Sorry, mister. That’s what you have to say.”

“What did he like about them?”

“Maybe he liked the fact that they didn’t look like him. That they looked like something completely different. I can understand that. Heterosexuality—it’s all about being attracted to someone that doesn’t look like you, isn’t it?”

“So if he liked Asian girls—if this guy who wasn’t Rhett Butler was into the bamboo—why did he like you?”

“Search me. I think I was an aberration. A working holiday. I don’t know.”

She brushed her black bell of hair from her forehead and stared at me with those wide-set brown eyes. Now that she mentioned it, I could see how someone who was into the bamboo could fall for her. In a certain light.

“We were together for two years,” she said. “One year back home and another year over here. Then he reverted to type. Or I found out that he had reverted to type. With a Malaysian student who he met in a park. He showed her London—and a few other things. He wasn’t a bad guy. He’s still not a bad guy. I just chose wrong. What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, what happened to your marriage?”

I tried to figure out what had happened to Gina and me. I knew that it had something to do with getting older and taking something for granted and feeling that life was slipping away. James Stewart could have explained it to me.

“I don’t really know what happened,” I said. “I lost my moorings there for a while.”

“Oh, I see,” Cyd said. “You mean you fancied a quick fuck?”

“It was more than that,” I said. “Although that was a part of it. But I just—I don’t know how to explain. I sort of let the light go out.”

She stared at me for a moment and then she nodded.

“Let’s go and look at the lights,” she said.

It was dark now. On the other side of the river you could see the illuminations running all the way along the embankment like a string of pearls. In the morning you would be looking across at gray office blocks and another traffic jam and the city scuttling to pay the rent. But tonight it was beautiful.

“Looks like Christmas,” she said, taking my arm.

It did. And it felt like Christmas too.

“I’m going to take a chance on you,” she told me.