Man and Boy (19 page)

My father had been lying.

He had been to see the doctor. But there had been no appointment that had ended with my old man being told to put his shirt back on, he was as fit as a fiddle, in remarkable condition for a man of his age, but—slap on the back, matey wink from the quack—he might like to think about cutting down on his cigarettes.

The doctor might have told him there was no way of knowing how long he had to live. And he might have said these things can drag out for years. But it is highly unlikely our doctor told my old man that he would live to see his grandson’s wedding day.

The thing that was growing inside my dad had gone too far for all that.

***

My mother called me at work for the first time in my life.

He was in the hospital. The intensive care unit, she said, her voice breaking on those three clinically modern words.

He had been putting away the garden furniture that always sat in our garden until the middle of winter, storing the blue canvas deck chairs and stripy beach umbrella in the garage until next spring, as he did every year, and that’s when he suddenly had no breath, no breath at all, and it was terrifying, absolutely terrifying, she said, and she called for the ambulance but she didn’t think they would get there in time. In time to save him.

“But what is it?” I said, still not understanding, still unable to comprehend that there could be a world without my father in it.

“It’s his lungs,” my mother said, and her voice was a sick, shaken whisper. “A tumor.”

A tumor in his lungs. But she couldn’t say the word, couldn’t name the thing that was stealing the very air that he breathed, and that terrible, dreaded word hung between us on the telephone line, as if it might go away if we didn’t say it.

But she didn’t really have to say the word. Finally I was starting to understand.

***

It was a modern hospital, but in the middle of miles of farmland.

That was the thing about where I grew up, the thing about the suburbs. You could go from fly-blown concrete jungle to open rolling fields in just a short car ride. It was because of these fields—or fields just like them—that my father had brought his family out here a lifetime ago.

My mother was in the waiting room when I arrived. She hugged me and, with a kind of desperate optimism, told me that the doctor had assured her that there was a lot that could be done for my father.

Then she went to get him, the Indian doctor who had given her this wonderful news, and when she came back she stood him before me. He was young enough to still look a little embarrassed at my mother’s belief in his powers.

“This is my son, doctor,” she said. “Please tell him that there’s lots that can be done for my husband, please.”

“I was telling your mother that pain management is very sophisticated these days,” he said.

“Pain management?” I said.

“There’s much that we can do to help your father breathe more easily, to help him sleep better, and to relieve the pain that he has been suffering.”

The doctor told me about the oxygen mask my father was already using. More obliquely, he talked about the benefits of a good night’s sleep and the use of an effective painkiller.

“You mean sleeping pills and morphine?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

There was a lot that could be done, but they were all just things to make my father more comfortable. They were all just controlling the symptoms of what was growing inside him. None of it was going to make him better.

They could force more air into his poor, useless lungs and they could render his exhausted body unconscious for a while and they could pump enough opiates into him to fog his brain and make it blind to the unbearable pain.

There was a lot that could be done.

But there was also nothing that could be done.

My father was dying.

***

We sat by his side, watching him sleep.

He was propped up in his hospital bed, a transparent oxygen mask strapped over his nose and mouth, a day’s worth of stubble on his face, that face that he always liked to keep well-scrubbed and clean shaven.

There was a metal box with a button for calling for help by his side and a plastic sheet beneath him, and these little things clawed at my heart and made me feel like weeping. Already he seemed as helpless as a newborn baby.

He was in a ward with seven other beds containing men—most of them old, but two of them younger than me—who all had the same thing wrong with them.

It might be in different parts of their body and it might be at different stages of development. Some of them might go home and some of them might never go home. But they all had the same thing wrong inside them, that thing that we still couldn’t say, my mother and I.

“He knew, didn’t he?” I said. “He’s known all along, I bet.”

“He must have known from the start,” my mother said. “He went for tests when it all began, when he first started to lose his breath—I made him go—and he told me it was all fine.”

“I never knew,” I said, amazed that my parents could still keep a secret from me. “I never knew he had any tests.”

“We didn’t tell you because there didn’t seem any point in worrying you. You had enough on your plate with Pat. And besides, he was fine. So he said.”

“But he wasn’t fine,” I said bitterly, sounding like a small boy whining,
it’s not fair, it’s not fair
. “He hasn’t been fine for a long time.”

“He would have known from the start,” my mother said, her eyes never leaving his face as she talked to me. “I was talking to one of the nurses and she said there’s this thing called gradual disclosure—they don’t give you the bad news all at once, not unless you make them, not unless you demand to know what’s wrong.”

“And he would have wanted to know,” I said with total certainty. “He would have made them tell him.”

“Yes,” my mother said. “He would have made them tell him.”

“Then why did he keep it a secret for so long?” I said, already knowing the answer. “He must have known that we would find out eventually.”

“He was protecting us,” she said.

My mother took his hands in hers and held them to her cheek, and I looked away, fearing I might unravel at the sight of how much she still loved him.

“Protecting us,” she said.

That’s right, Mom. He was shielding us from the worst this world has to offer, he was sparing his family some of the misery that was ahead, he was protecting us.

He was doing what he had always done.

***

“I’m so sorry about your dad, Harry,” Gina said. “I really am—he always treated me with great kindness.”

“He was mad about you,” I said, nearly adding that it broke his heart when we broke up—but I managed to stop myself in time.

“I’d like to visit him at the hospital,” she said. “If that’s okay with you. And your mom.”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing how to say that it was already clear that he didn’t like visitors, that he found it hard to deal with his own pain without witnessing everybody else’s. But I couldn’t say that to Gina without sounding as though she was being cut off.

“Will Pat see him?”

I took a breath.

“Pat wants to see him,” I said. “But my dad’s just too sick at the moment. If there’s some improvement, maybe. But right now it would upset both of them too much.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Granddad’s sick. Very sick. How do you tell a five-year-old that the grandfather who thinks he’s the greatest thing in the world is dying? How do you do it? I don’t know.”

“We need to talk about Pat,” she said. “I know this isn’t the best time and I’m genuinely sorry for what you’re going through with your dad. But you should know that I want Pat back as soon as possible.”

“You want Pat back?”

“That’s right. We don’t need to have the arguments we had before, okay? I’m not taking him out of the country. I’m back in London. Richard and I are looking at places in the area. Pat wouldn’t even have to change schools.”

“How the hell is old Richard?”

“Fine.”

“Still semi-separated?”

“Permanently separated. His wife is back in the States. And I know it seems fast, but we’ve been talking about getting married.”

“When?”

“As soon as our divorces come through.”

How I laughed.

“Fuck me,” I said. “You’re getting married as soon as your divorces come through? Ain’t love grand?”

Gina and I hadn’t even started talking about the mechanics of divorce. We had talked plenty about splitting up. But we hadn’t discussed the paperwork.

“Please, Harry,” she said, a touch of ice coming into her voice. “Don’t get abusive, okay?”

I shook my head.

“You think you can just come back into our lives and pick up where you left off, Gina? You think that you can have Pat back just because the Asian economic miracle turned out to be not all that miraculous after all?”

“We agreed,” she said, suddenly angrier than I had ever seen her. “You always knew that Pat was going to live with me. If I had stayed in Tokyo or come back here, I always intended to have him with me. What makes you think you’ve got any right to keep him?”

“Because he’s happy with me,” I said. “And because I can do it. I can do it. It wasn’t great at first, but I learned, okay? It got better and now it’s pretty good. And he’s happy where he is. He doesn’t need to be with you and some guy, some fucking guy you picked up in a Roppongi bar.”

Her mouth had a set to it that I didn’t remember from before.

“I love Richard,” she said. “And I want Pat to grow up with me.”

“We don’t own them, you know. We don’t own our children, Gina.”

“You’re right—we don’t own our children. But my lawyer will argue that, all things being equal, a child should be with his mother.”

I got up, tossing a few coins on the table.

“And my lawyer will argue that you and Richard can go fuck yourselves,” I said. “And my lawyer—when I get one—will also argue that a child should be with the parent most capable of bringing him up. That’s me, Gina.”

“I don’t want to hate you, Harry. Don’t teach me to hate you.”

“I don’t want you to hate me. But can’t you see what’s happened? I’ve learned to be a real parent. You can’t just come back and take that away from me.”

“Unbelievable,” she said. “You look after him for a couple of months and you think you can take my place?”

“Four months,” I said. “And I’m not trying to take your place. It’s just that I’ve found a place of my own.”

***

Cyd took one look at me and told me that she was taking me out to dinner. I wasn’t hungry, but I said okay because I was too tired to argue. And also because there was something I had to ask her.

I kissed Pat and left him watching
Pocahontas
with Peggy. Bianca hovered gloomily in the kitchen, chain-chewing Juicy Fruit because she wasn’t allowed to smoke in the flat.

“My car or yours?” Cyd said.

“Mine,” I said, and we drove to a little Indian restaurant between Upper Street and Liverpool Road. The tape holding together the shredded roof of the MGF had dried, cracked and started to come apart, and it flapped like a ship’s sails in a high wind.

The sight of the food repelled me and I halfheartedly pushed some chicken tikka masala around my plate, feeling like everything was slipping out of focus.

“Eat what you like, honey,” she said. “Just what you feel like. But try to eat something, okay?”

I nodded, smiling gratefully at this incredible woman who had lost her dad when she was half my age, and I almost asked her the question then and there, but I thought I would stick to my plan and ask her at the end of the evening. Yes, best to stick to the plan.

“We don’t have to see this film tonight if you don’t feel like it,” she said. “It’s not important. We can skip it and do whatever you feel like. We can just talk. Or we can do nothing. We don’t even have to talk.”

“No, let’s go and see it,” I said, so we drove into Soho to see an Italian film called
Cinema
Paradiso
about a young boy’s friendship with the old projectionist at the local movie house.

Cyd was usually good at choosing movies she knew I would like if I gave them half a chance, films with subtitles and no star names that I wouldn’t have looked at a couple of years ago.

But I found myself cooling toward this one at the end when the gruff old projectionist, now blinded by a fire in the cinema, tells the bambi-eyed young boy, now a teenager, to leave their village and never come back.

And the boy, Toto, goes away and becomes a famous film director and doesn’t come back to his little village for thirty years, on the day that they are burying Alfredo, the old projectionist who taught him to love the cinema and then sent him away.

“But why did Alfredo send the boy away for good?” I asked as we walked through the crowds on Old Compton Street. “Why couldn’t they at least stay in touch? The way he told him to go away, this boy he had known all his life, it seemed cruel.”

“Because Alfredo knew that Toto would never find the things he needed in that little town,” Cyd smiled, happy to talk about it. “He had to break free so that he could learn what Alfredo already knew.
Life
is
not
what
you
see
in
films—life is much harder
.” She took my arm and laughed. “I like it when we talk about this stuff,” she said.

The MGF was in the big parking lot at the end of Gerrard Street, the one behind the fire station on Shaftesbury Avenue, Chinatown’s car park. We got in the car but I didn’t turn on the ignition.

“I want us to live together,” I said. “You and Peggy and me and Pat.”

Those eyes that I loved looked genuinely surprised.

“Live together?”

“Your flat is too small for all of us,” I said. “So what would work best is if you moved in with us. What do you think?”

She gave a confused shake of her gorgeous head.

“You’ve had a really rough time,” she said. “What with your dad. And Gina. You’ve really been through it.”