Man and Boy (17 page)

It was more than the reminder of another man’s fuck.

If living alone with Pat had taught me anything, it was that being a parent is mostly intuitive—we make it up as we go along. Nobody teaches you how to do it. You learn on the job.

When I was a kid, I thought that my parents had some secret knowledge about how to keep me in line and bring me up right. I thought that there was some great master plan to make me eat my vegetables and go to my room when I was told. But I was wrong. I know now that they were doing what every parent in the world does. Just winging it.

If Pat wanted to watch
Return
of
the
Jedi
at four in the morning or listen to Puff Daddy at midnight, then I didn’t have to think about it—I could just pull the plug and send him back to bed.

And if he was down after a phone call from Gina or because of something that had happened at school, I could take him in my arms and give him a cuddle. When it’s your own flesh and blood, you don’t have to think about doing the right thing. You don’t have to think at all. You just do it.

But I would never have that luxury with Peggy.

***

She was on the sofa, her little bare legs stretched out on the coffee table, watching her favorite Australian soap. I was sitting next to her, trying to shut out the background babble of dysfunctional surfers who didn’t know the true identity of their parents as I read an article about another bank collapsing in Japan. It looked like complete chaos over there.

“What do you mean—you’re not my mother?” somebody said on screen and Peggy began to stir as the theme music began.

Usually she was off and running the moment the Aussies were gone. But now she stayed right where she was, leaning forward across the coffee table and picking up Cyd’s nail polish from among the jumble of magazines and toys. I watched her as she began to unscrew the top of the small glass vial.

“Peggy?”

“What?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t play with that, darling.”

“It’s okay, Harry. Mommy lets me.”

She removed the lid with the small brush on and, very delicately, began painting crimson nail polish over her tiny, almost nonexistent toe nails and, I couldn’t help noticing, all over the tips of her toes.

“Be careful with that stuff, Peggy. It’s not for playing with, okay?”

She shot me a look.

“Mommy lets me do this.”

Globs of bright red nail polish slid down toes the size of a half a matchstick. She soon looked as though she had been treading grapes or wading through an abattoir. She lifted her foot, admiring her handiwork, and a drizzle of red paint plopped onto a copy of
Red
.

With Pat I would have raised my voice or grabbed the nail polish or sent him to his room. With Peggy, I didn’t know what to do. I certainly couldn’t touch her. I certainly couldn’t raise my voice.

“Peggy.”

“What, Harry?”

I really wanted her to do the right thing and not get nail polish all over her feet and the carpet and the coffee table and the magazines. But, far more than all of this, I wanted her to like me. So I sat there watching her small feet turning bright red, making doubtful noises, doing nothing.

Cyd came out of the bathroom wrapped in a white robe, toweling her hair. She saw Peggy daubing her toes with nail polish and sighed.

“How many times have I told you to leave that stuff alone?” she asked, snatching away the nail polish. She lifted Peggy off the ground like a cat plucking up an unruly kitten. “Come on, miss. In the bath.”

“But—”

“Now.”

What made me laugh—or rather what made me want to bury my face in my hands—is that you would never guess that so much of our time was spent dealing with the fallout of the nuclear family. Cyd’s small flat was like a temple to romance.

The walls were covered with posters from films—films that told tales of perfect love, love that might bang its head against a few obstacles now and again, but love that was ultimately without any of the complications of the modern world.

As soon as you came into the flat, there was a framed poster of
Casablanca
in the poky little hallway. There were framed posters of
An
Affair
to
Remember
and
Brief
Encounter
in the slightly less poky living room. And of course there was
Gone
with
the
Wind
in the place of honor right above the bed. Even Peggy had a poster of
Pocahontas
on her wall looking down on all her old Ken and Barbie dolls and Spice Girls merchandise. Everywhere you looked—men smoldering, women melting, and true love conquering.

These posters weren’t stuck up in the way that a student might stick them up—halfhearted and thoughtless and mostly to cover a patch of rising damp or some crumbling plaster. There was far more than blu-tack keeping them up. Placed behind glass and encased in tasteful black frames, they were treated like works of art—which I suppose is what they were.

Cyd had bought those posters from one of those cine-head shops in Soho, taken them to the Frame Factory or somewhere similar and then lugged them all the way home. She had to go out of her way to have those posters of
Gone
with
the
Wind
and the rest up on her walls. The message was clear—this is what we are about in this place.

But it wasn’t what we were about, not really. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman might have had their love affair cut short by the Nazi invasion of Paris, but at least Bogie didn’t have to worry about how he should treat Ingrid’s child from her relationship with Victor Laszlo. And it is open to debate if Rhett Butler would have been quite so keen on Scarlett O’Hara if she had been dragging a kid from a previous romance around Georgia.

I had never been around a little girl before, and there was an air of calm about Peggy—and it was definitely calm more than sugar and spice or any of that stuff—that I had never seen in Pat or other small boys. There was a composure about her that you wouldn’t see in a boy of the same age. Maybe all little girls are like that. Maybe it was just Peggy.

What I am saying is—I liked her.

But I didn’t know if I was meant to be her friend or her father, if I was meant to be sweetness and light or firm but fair. None of it felt right. When your partner has got a child, it can never be like the movies. And anyone who can’t see that has watched a few too many MGM musicals.

Cyd came back into the room with Peggy all clean and changed and ready for her big night out at Pizza Express with her father. The little girl climbed on my lap and gave me a kiss. She smelled of soap and shampoo. Her mother ruffled my hair.

“What are you thinking about?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said.

Peggy’s eyes got big and wide with excitement when she heard the sound of a powerful motorbike pulling up in the street.

“Daddy!” she said, scrambling from my lap, and I felt a stab of jealousy that caught me by surprise.

From the window we all watched Jim Mason park the big BMW bike, swinging his legs off as if he was dismounting from a horse. Then he removed his helmet and I saw that Cyd had been right—he was a good-looking bastard, all chiseled jawline and short, thick, wavy hair, like the face on a Roman coin or a male model who likes girls.

I had always kind of hoped that there was going to be something of Glenn about him—a fading pretty boy whose years of breaking hearts had come and gone. But this one looked as though he still ate all his greens.

He waved up at us. We waved back.

Meeting your partner’s ex should be awkward and embarrassing. You know the most intimate details of their life and yet you have never met them. You know they did bad things because you have been told all about them and also because, if they hadn’t done bad things, you would not be with your partner.

It should be a bumpy ride meeting the man she knew before she knew you. But meeting Jim wasn’t that much of a problem for me. I got off lightly as there was still so much unfinished business between him and Cyd.

He came into the little flat, big and handsome, all gleaming leathers and wide white smile, tickling his daughter until she howled. We shook hands and swapped some small talk about the problems of parking in this neck of the woods. And when Peggy went to collect her things, Cyd was waiting for him, her face as impassive as a clenched fist.

“How’s Mem?” she asked.

“She’s fine. Sends her love.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t. But thanks anyway. And is her job going well?”

“Very well, thanks.”

“Business is booming for strippers, is it?”

“She’s not a stripper.”

“She’s not?”

“She’s a lap dancer.”

“My apologies.”

Jim looked at me with a what-can-you-do? grin.

“She always does this,” he said, as if we had some kind of relationship, as if he could tell me a thing or two.

Peggy came back carrying a child-sized motorbike helmet, smiling from ear to ear, anxious to get going. She kissed her mother and me and took her father’s hand.

From the window, we watched Jim carefully place his daughter on the back of his bike and cover her head with the helmet. Then he straddled the machine, kicked it into life, and took off down the narrow street. Above the throaty roar of the bike, you could just about hear Peggy squealing with delight.

“Why do you hate him so much, Cyd?”

She thought about it for a moment.

“I think it’s because of the way he ended it,” she said. “He was home from work—hurt his leg in another accident, I think he was scraped by a cab, he was always getting scraped by a cab—and he was lying on the sofa when I got back from dropping Peggy off at her nursery school. I bent over him—just to look at his face, because I always liked looking at his face—and he said the name of a girl. Right out loud. The name of this Malaysian girl he was sleeping with. The one he left me for.”

“He was talking in his sleep?”

“No,” she said. “He was pretending to talk in his sleep. He knew he was going to leave me and Peggy already. But he didn’t have the guts to look me in the eye and tell me. Pretending to talk in his sleep—pretending to say her name while he was sleeping—was the only way he could do it. The only way he could drop the bomb. The only way he could tell me that his bags were packed. And that just seemed so cruel, so gutless—and so typical.”

I had different reasons for hating Jim—some of them noble, some of them pitiful. I hated him because he had hurt Cyd so badly and I hated him because he was better looking than me.

And I hated him because I hated any parent who breezed in and out of a kid’s life as though they were a hobby you could pick up and put down when you felt like it. Did I think that Gina was like that? Sometimes, on those odd days when she didn’t phone Pat, and I knew—just knew—that she was somewhere with Richard.

And I hated Jim because I could feel that he still mattered to Cyd—when she had said that thing about always loving his face, I knew it was still there, eating her up. Maybe she didn’t love him, maybe all that had curdled and changed into something else. But he mattered.

I suppose a little piece of my heart should have been grateful. If he had been a loyal, loving husband who knew how to keep his leather trousers on—and if he wasn’t into the bamboo—then Cyd would be with him and not me. But I wasn’t grateful at all.

As soon as he brought Peggy back safely from Pizza Express, I would have been quite happy for him to wrap his bike around a number 73 bus and get his lovely face smeared all over Essex Road. He had treated Cyd as if she was nothing much at all. And that was reason enough for me to hate his guts.

But when Peggy came back home with a phenomenally useless stuffed toy the size of a refrigerator and pizza all over her face, I was aware that there was another far more selfish reason for hating him.

Without ever really trying to match him, I knew that I could never mean as much in Peggy’s life as he did. That’s what hurt most of all. Even if he saw her only when he felt like it and fucked off somewhere else when he felt like doing that, he would always be her father.

That’s what made her giddy with joy. Not the motorbike. Or the pizza. Or the stupid stuffed toy the size of a fridge. But the fact that this was her dad.

I knew I could live with the reminder of another man’s fuck. I could even love her. And I could compete with a motorbike and a stuffed toy the size of a fridge and a prettier face than my own.

But you can’t compete with blood.

Just when I had come to believe that there was nothing good between us anymore, Gina proved me wrong.

Because there was Pat. And there would always be Pat.

One night she called when Pat was sleeping over at my parents’ house. It threw both of us. Instead of grunting a greeting and then fetching Pat to talk to his mother, I was reduced to mouthing some stilted pleasantries. It wasn’t easy. I could sense that Gina felt it too. We had meant far too much to each other to ever be very good at small talk.

But our strained conversation—about London, about Tokyo, about nothing—only lasted for a few awkward moments because there was always one subject we could talk about.

“You would be so proud of him, Gina,” I said to her. “He’s doing so well at school. Everybody loves him.”

“Well, he’s a lovable little boy.”

“He’s got a friend he’s crazy about.”

“You do realize you can’t keep him, don’t you, Harry?”

“I love watching them together. You remember what it’s like to find your first best friend.”

“Did you hear me, Harry?”

“What?”

“You’re doing a great job. I mean it. But this isn’t forever.”

“What are you talking about? What isn’t forever?”

“Pat living with you. We agreed before I left. It’s a temporary thing. You looking after Pat, I mean. It was always just until I got settled.”

“What about Pat being settled? Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“Harry, I don’t want to fight. I’m glad it’s working out for you and Pat. Of course I am. But you’ve always known that he would be growing up with me.”

“I don’t want to fight either. But you can’t put a time limit on us, Gina. It’s not fair.”

“A child should be with his mother, Harry. I thought you believed that too.”

“Once upon a time,” I said. “Now I don’t know what I believe.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter very much what you believe,” she said, her voice getting harder. “Do you honestly believe that I would ever let you take my boy away from me? Do you think I would ever allow that to happen? If you do, you don’t know me at all.”

“He’s happy with me.”

“He will be far happier when he’s back with his mother.”

“When’s that going to be? When you’re settled? You’re never going to be settled, Gina. That’s the trouble with our generation. We don’t know how to settle. Well, I’m trying to settle, okay? For our son. I’m trying to do something right for the first time in my stupid, messed-up life. And I’m not going to let you spoil it for me. Or for Pat.”

“I love him, Harry. Please don’t try to take him away from me. I’m begging you.”

“You love him, do you? You walk out. You leave him with me. You find some other fucking guy. And you think that loving Pat makes everything right?”

“It will,” she said.

***

“Who do I look like?” Pat said when the trees in the park were bare and he had to wear his winter coat all the time and Gina had been gone for just over four months. He tilted his head to stare up at the car’s vanity mirror, looking at his face as if seeing it for the first time, or as if it belonged to someone else.

Who did he look like? People were always telling me—and him—that he looked like me. But I knew that wasn’t quite right. He was a far prettier kid than I had ever been. Even if I had never had all my front teeth knocked out by a dog, he would still have been better looking than me. The truth was, he looked like both of us. He looked like me and he looked like Gina.

“Your eyes are like Mommy’s eyes,” I said.

“They’re blue,” he said.

“That’s right. They’re blue. And my eyes are green. But your mouth, that’s like my mouth. We’ve got lovely big mouths. Perfect for kissing, right?”

“Right,” he said, not smiling along with me, not taking his eyes from the little rectangular mirror.

“And your hair—that’s very fair. Like Mommy’s hair.”

“She had yellow hair.”

“She still does, baby,” I said, wincing at that past tense. “She still has yellow hair. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, flipping up the mirror and staring out the window. “Let’s go.”

And your teeth are like your mother’s—a little bit gappy, a little bit goofy, teeth that give every single smile a rakish air—but your sawn-off snub nose is like mine although your strong, beautiful chin belongs to your mother and so does your skin—fair skin that loves the sun, fair skin that starts to tan as soon as it stops raining.

Even if we had ever wanted to, we couldn’t escape his mother. She was there in his smile and in the color of his eyes. I was stuck with Gina’s ghost. And so was Pat.

***

“I don’t understand what’s going to happen to the kids,” my father said. “The kids like Pat and Peggy. I can’t imagine what growing up with just one parent around is going to do to them.”

He didn’t say it the way he would have said it in the past—angry, contemptuous, and with a mocking wonder at what the world was coming to. He didn’t say it with his old loathing for single parents and all the changes they represented. He said it gently, with a small, bewildered shake of his head, as if the future was beyond his imagination.

“You grew up with two parents around,” he said. “At least you had some idea of what a marriage looked like. What a marriage could be. But they don’t have that, do they? Pat and Peggy and all the rest of them.”

“No. They don’t.”

“And I just worry what it’s going to do to them. If divorce is just something that everyone does, then what chance is there for their marriages? And for their children?”

We were on the wooden bench just outside the kitchen door, sitting in the three o’clock twilight watching Pat poke around with his light saber at the far end of the garden.

“Everything just seems so…broken up,” my dad said. “Do you know what Peggy said to me? She asked me if I would be her granddad. It’s not her fault, is it? The poor little mite.”

“No, it’s not her fault,” I said. “It’s never the child’s fault. But maybe growing up with divorce will make them more careful about getting into a marriage. And more determined to make it work when they do.”

“Do you really think so?” my father said hopefully.

I nodded, but only because I didn’t have the heart to shake my head. What I really thought was that his generation had faced up to its responsibilities in a way that my lot never could.

His generation looked after their children, they got lots of early nights and if they also got their own home and a fortnight in a cottage in Frinton, they considered themselves lucky.

But my generation had grown up with our own individual little pile of happiness at the top of our shopping list.

That’s why we fucked around, fucked off, and fucked up with such alarming regularity.

My generation wanted perfect lives. Why should our children be any different? But my dad had learned early on that nobody gets away with a perfect life.

“Yes, maybe it will be all right,” my old man said, thinking about it. “Because every kid has got two parents, haven’t they? Even a kid from—what you call it?—a single-parent family. And perhaps Pat and Peggy and the rest of them won’t grow up being like the parent who went away. Perhaps they’ll be like the parent who stayed behind.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you’re doing a good job with Pat,” he said, not looking at me. “You work hard. You take care of him. He sees all that. So why shouldn’t he be like that with his children?”

I laughed with embarrassment.

“I mean it,” he said. “I don’t know that I could have coped if your mother—you know.” His calloused right hand rested lightly on my shoulder. He still wasn’t looking at me. “You’ve done all right with that boy, Harry.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks, Dad.”

Then we heard my mother calling from the living room, and when we ran inside, she was standing by the window, pointing at my car.

“I saw the little bastards,” said my mom, who never swore. “I saw the little bastards do it!”

The MGF’s soft top had been repeatedly slashed with a knife. The ribbons of what was left of the roof had caved into the car, as if something had been dropped on it from a great height.

I stared at my mutilated car. But my father was already out of the front door. Auntie Ethel was on her doorstep.

“The alley!” she cried, pointing to the far end of our street, the rough end where there was a small cul-de-sac of government-funded houses, like a ghetto for people who owned souped-up Ford Escorts and West Ham away shirts and didn’t give a toss about roses.

There was an alley at this end of the street that led to a tired little string of shops where you could get your Lottery ticket during the daytime and get your face smashed in after dark. Two youths—the two who tried to burgle my parents? or two just like them?—were running toward the alley. My father was chasing them.

I looked at the ruined roof and felt a surge of anger rise up in me. You stupid, spiteful little bastards, I thought, furious at what they had done to my car and even more furious for taking my father from his garden.

I started after them, seeing them nervously glance over their shoulders as a murderous voice called after them, threatening to fucking kill them, and I was shocked to discover that the murderous voice seemed to belong to me.

The two yobs disappeared into the alley just as my dad suddenly stopped. At first I thought he had given up, but it was worse than that, because he sank to one knee and clutched his chest, as though he was suffocating.

By the time I caught up with him he was on both knees, holding himself up with one hand pressed flat on the ground. He was making a terrible, unearthly sound, his throat rasping with short, shallow breaths.

I put my arms around him and held him, smelling his Old Holborn and Old Spice, and he gasped for air, his lungs fighting with all their might and yet still unable to suck in what they needed. He turned his eyes toward me and I saw the fear in them.

Eventually he managed to retrieve enough air to shakily get to his feet. Still with my arm around him, I led him slowly back to the house. My mother, Pat, and Auntie Ethel were all by the front gate. Pat and Auntie Ethel were white with shock. But my mother was angry.

“You must go to the doctor,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “No more excuses.”

“I will,” he said meekly, and I knew he wouldn’t try to get out of it. He could never refuse her anything.

“Aren’t they evil little rotters?” Auntie Ethel said. “It makes your blood boil, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Pat. “They’re motherfuckers.”

***

Black tie, it said on the invitation, and I always felt excited when I had to dig out my dinner jacket, dress shirt, and black bow tie—a proper bow tie that you had to spend ages doing yourself, not the pre-tied dicky bow on a bit of elastic as worn by small boys and clowns.

I could remember my old man wearing black tie once a year for his company’s annual dinner and dance at some fancy hotel on Park Lane. There was something about the tailored formality of a tuxedo that suited his stocky, muscular frame. My mom always looked slightly amused by whatever ball gown she had climbed into that year. But my old man was born to wear black tie.

“Wow,” said Sally, shyly grinning up at me through a curtain of hair as I came down the stairs. “You look just like a bouncer. Outside a, like, really, really cool club.”

“No,” Pat said, pointing his index finger at me and cocking his thumb. “You look like James Bond. 007. Licensed to shoot all the bad people.”

But as I stood in front of the hall mirror, I knew what I really looked like in a dinner jacket.

More and more, I looked like my father.

***

Cyd wore a green cheongsam in Chinese silk—high-necked, tight as a second skin, the greatest dress that I had ever seen in my life.

She hadn’t done anything to her hair—just pulled it back behind her head in a ponytail and I liked it that way, because that way I could see her face all the more clearly.

Sometimes we are only aware of how happy we were when the moment has passed. But now and again, if we are very lucky, we are aware of happiness when it is actually happening. And I knew that this is what happiness felt like. Not happiness in dewy-eyed retrospect or in some imagined future, but here and now, in a green dress.

“Wait a minute,” I said to Cyd as our cab dropped us outside the hotel. I took her hands in mine and we stood there in silence, the rush hour on Park Lane roaring behind us, a frost on Hyde Park glinting beyond the traffic.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. “That’s the point.”

I knew that I would never forget the way she looked that night in her green Chinese dress. And I wanted to do more than enjoy it; I wanted to hold the moment so that I could remember it later, after the night had gone.

“Okay?” she said, smiling.

“Okay,” I said.

Then we joined the laughing throng in their dinner jackets and evening dresses, and went inside to the awards ceremony.

***

“And the best newcomer is…

The luscious weather girl fumbled with the envelope.

“…Eamon Fish.”

Eamon stood up, drunk and grinning, looking more pleased than he would have wanted to with all the cameras watching, and he hugged me with real feeling as he walked past.

“We did it,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You did it. Go and get your award.”

Over his shoulder I saw Marty Mann and Siobhan at another table—Marty in one of those bright waistcoats worn by people who think that wearing black tie is like smoking a pipe or wearing carpet slippers, Siobhan slim and cool in some white diaphanous number.

She smiled. He gave me the thumbs up. Later, when all the awards had been handed out, they came across to our table.

Although Marty was a bit drunk and a bit pissed off—there were no awards for him this year—they couldn’t have been more gracious.

I introduced them to Cyd and to Eamon. If Marty remembered Cyd as the same woman who had once dropped a plate of pasta in his lap, he didn’t show it. He congratulated Eamon on his award. Siobhan congratulated Cyd on her dress.

And Siobhan didn’t say, “And what do you do?”—she was too smart and sensitive ever to ask that question—so Cyd didn’t have to say, “Oh, I’m a waitress right now,” so Siobhan didn’t have to get embarrassed and neither did Cyd; they could just get on with each other in that easy, seemingly natural way that only women can manage. They began talking to each other about not knowing what to wear at these things and Marty put a conspiratorial arm around my shoulder. His face was far heavier than I remembered it. He had the leaden, vaguely disappointed air of a man who, after years of dreaming, had finally landed his own talk show only to discover that he couldn’t attract anyone who was worth talking to.