Man and Boy (22 page)

“Not a damn thing,” Batty smiled. “It’s just as confrontational. Unfortunately, it’s far easier to change the law than it is to change human nature.”

He examined the papers on his desk, nodding approvingly.

“The divorce is straightforward enough. And it looks to me like you’re doing a pretty good job with your young son, Mr. Silver. He’s happy at school?”

“Very happy.”

“He sees his mother?”

“She can see him whenever she likes. She knows that.”

“And yet she wants him back,” said Nigel Batty. “She wants residency.”

“That’s right. She wants him to live with her.”

“Is she cohabiting?”

“What?”

“Has your ex-wife got a boyfriend, Mr. Silver? A boyfriend that she lives with?”

“Yes,” I said, grateful to him for downgrading Gina’s relationship with Richard to something as grubby as cohabiting, grateful that the big diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand didn’t mean a damn to Nigel Batty. “She’s living with some guy she met in Tokyo.”

“Let’s get this clear,” he said. “She walked out and left you with your son?”

“Well, more or less. She actually took Pat—our son—with her when she went to her father’s place. But I collected him and brought him home when she went to Japan.”

“So she abandoned the marital home and, to all intents and purposes, left the child in your care,” said Nigel Batty. “And now she’s back in town and decides that she would like to play mother for a while.”

“She says she realizes how much she loves him.”

“We’ll see about that,” said my lawyer.

The weight was falling off him. My father had never been a thin man in his life, but now his cheeks were hollowing and the skin under his neck was starting to hang in loose, unshaven flaps. More and more, he was looking like someone I didn’t recognize.

Even his arms had lost their old beefy strength, and those tattoos proclaiming his loyalty to my mother and the Commandos were looking as faded as photographs from another century.

The flesh was slipping away and his bones were becoming more visible with every visit, pushing up through skin with its waning tan that I realized with a start would probably never see the sun again.

But he was smiling.

Sitting up in bed and smiling. And it was a real smile—not a being brave smile, not a smile that was forced or strained, but a smile of pure delight at the sight of his grandson.

“Hello, darling,” my dad said as Pat walked up to his bed ahead of me, my mother and Uncle Jack. My father held up his right arm, the one where the intravenous drip was hooked to a vein in his wrist. “Look at the state your old granddad’s in.”

Pat had been full of life in Uncle Jack’s car—excited to be awarded the special treat of a day off school, thrilled to be riding in the back of a limo instead of the passenger seat of a vandalized sports car. But now he fell silent, warily approaching the bed and the sight of his grandfather’s gaunt, stubbled face.

“Come here,” my father said, his voice gruff with emotion, holding out his free arm, and Pat climbed up on the bed and silently lay his head on my father’s poor broken chest. They held each other in silence.

My mother shot a look at me. She had been against this visit.

There was no way of knowing if my father would be awake when we arrived. There was a very good chance that the pain could have been so bad that they were pumping him full of opiates while we were looking for a parking space and all Pat would have found was his grandfather lost and unknowing in some morphine fog. Or he could have been struggling for breath, his chest heaving, the oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, and his eyes wet with pain and fear. Or, although she didn’t say it, he could have been dead.

All that was possible, even probable, and in the kitchen of her home my mother became angry and tearful with me at the thought of inflicting any one of those terrible things on Pat.

I had put my arms around her and assured her that it would be all right. And I was wrong. It was not all right—Pat was shocked and dismayed by the sight of his grandfather ravaged by disease, wasting away in a hospital bed in that room for dying men, the kind of dying that you never see on television or in the movies, the kind of dying that is full of agony and drugs and sadness at all that is about to be lost. I had been unprepared for the reality of death, and there was no reason to believe that a five-year-old boy brought up on a diet of
Star Wars
would be any better prepared.

No, it wasn’t all right. But it was necessary. My father and my son needed to see each other. They needed to see that the bond between them still existed and would always exist. The love between them would always be there. They needed to know that the cancer couldn’t kill that.

And I somehow knew—I just knew—that my father wouldn’t be knocked out on narcotics or choking for breath if Pat was there.

There was no rational reason to believe that wouldn’t happen if his grandson was there. It wasn’t logical. Perhaps it was simply foolish. But I believed with all my heart that my dad would protect Pat from the very worst of it. I still believed that there was a part of him that was invincible. I couldn’t stop believing.

“Are you coming home soon?” Pat asked.

“Got to wait and see,” my father said. “See what the doctors say. See if old Granddad gets a bit better. How’s school?”

“Fine.”

“And the bike? How’s old Bluebell?”

“Good.”

“A bit more fun without the training wheels.”

“Yes,” Pat smiled. “But I miss you.”

“I miss you too,” my father said and squeezed him tight, Pat’s blond head pressed against his striped-blue pajamas, the kind of old man’s pajamas that he would never wear at home.

Then he nodded at me.

“Time to go,” I said.

That was my father saying good-bye to his beloved grandson. Propped up in his hospital bed, surrounded by people who loved him and yet ultimately alone. Had we been there for five minutes or an hour? I couldn’t tell. But I knew he wanted us to leave him now.

And so we left my father fumbling with his oxygen mask, hunched and stubbled and looking older than I thought he would ever look, a young nurse chatting breezily at the foot of his bed.

Here, finally, was the worst thing of all. The awful and complete isolation of death, the terrible loneliness of the terminally ill. Nobody warns you about that.

With his breath going and the pain coming, we left him in that overcrowded hospital ward with winter sunlight coming through the big unwashed window and the chipmunk chatter of daytime television in the background. We left him. In the end, it was all we could do.

And as we walked back to the car, Pat fought back the tears, angry—no, furious—at something that he couldn’t name. I tried to comfort him but he wasn’t interested in being comforted.

My son looked like he felt he had been cheated.

***

There was a moving van outside Cyd’s flat.

It wasn’t one of those huge lorries that you can load with the contents of a family’s lifetime, one of those massive trucks that can hold pianos and worn-out furniture that you like too much to throw away and all the accumulated junk of the years. It was from the kind of moving firm that advertises in the back of the listings magazines, perfect for a little family that was traveling light.

I watched two young men in T-shirts edging a child’s single bed into the back of the van. Although Cyd and Peggy lived on the top floor, the men looked as though this was one of their easier jobs.

Peggy appeared in the front door, dragging behind her a stuffed toy the size of a fridge. She looked at me with her solemn brown eyes, not surprised to see me here.

“Look what I’ve got,” I said, holding out a leering male doll in spangly silver trousers and what looked like a lilac tuxedo. It was a sex-change Barbie.

“Disco Ken,” she said, taking him.

“You left him at my house,” I said. “I thought you might want him back.”

“Thank you,” she said, that beautifully behaved little girl.

Then Cyd was behind her, a stack of paperbacks in her arms.

“Look what Harry brought me,” Peggy said. “Disco Ken. I’ve been looking for him.”

Cyd told her to go up to her room and make sure she wasn’t leaving anything behind. Peggy left the stuffed toy the size of a fridge on the pavement and disappeared into the house still clutching Disco Ken.

“How about you?” I said. “You left anything behind?”

“No,” she said. “I think I’ve got just about everything.”

The two moving guys brushed past us on their way back into the house.

“Moving without telling me?” I said. “Some friend you turned out to be.”

“I was going to tell you. It’s just—I don’t know—it’s easier this way. For everybody.”

“I looked for you at the café.”

“I quit.”

“So they told me.”

“We’re moving across town. To Notting Hill.”

“West London?”

“Christ, don’t look so shocked, Harry. I’m an American. Moving from one side of a city to another isn’t quite as traumatic for me as it would be for you. Listen, I’m sorry but I’m really busy. What do you want? I can’t believe that you came here just to bring back Disco Ken.”

“Disco Ken was part of it,” I said. “But also I wanted to tell you that you’re wrong.”

“About what?”

“About us. You’re wrong about us. If we split up, then it’s the end of the world.”

“Oh, Harry.”

“It’s true. I know you don’t believe in the one, the one person for someone in the whole world, but I do. You make me believe it, Cyd. And anyway, it doesn’t matter what we believe. It’s good between us. It works. And I’ve been thinking about it. There’s not one more chance for me to get it right—you’re it, you’re my last chance for happiness, and even if there was another chance I wouldn’t want it. As Olivia Newton John said to John Travolta, you’re the one that I want.”

“Wasn’t it the other way ’round? Didn’t John Travolta say it to Olivia Newton John?”

“Possibly.”

“Harry,” she said. “There’s something you have to know. I’m getting back with Peggy’s dad. Jim and I are going to give it another go.”

I stared at her as the movers carried a sofa bed between us. “Nearly done,” one of them said. They went back inside the house.

“Sorry,” she told me.

“But do you love him?” I said.

“He’s the father of my little girl.”

“But do you love him?”

“Come on, Harry, you’re the one who’s always agonizing about the breakup of the family. You’re the one who is always complaining about how hard it is to compete with blood, about all the messy, broken bits of what you call the lousy modern world. You should be pleased for me. You should wish me well.”

“But you have to love him, Cyd. None of it means a thing if you don’t love him. Do you love him?”

“Yes. Okay? I love him. I never stopped loving him. And I want to give it a shot because he’s given up his girlfriend, the Thai stripper, and he promises me that’s all out of his system. The whole bamboo thing.”

“She’s not a stripper. She’s a lap dancer.”

“Whatever,” she said. “But Peggy’s thrilled that we’re giving it another go. So even if you hate me, you should be pleased for her.”

“I don’t hate you. I could never hate you.”

“Then please wish me well.”

“I wish you well,” I said, and I even sort of meant it. She deserved to be happy. So did Peggy. I kissed her quickly on the cheek. “Just don’t tell me I don’t know you, okay?”

I let them get on with their moving. Anything I said now would have sounded empty and selfish, as if they were just weasel words designed to get her to come back to me.

Yet as she prepared to go back to her husband, at last I saw the limits of the nuclear family. Now I realized that dad and mom and the kids is all very well.

But if you don’t love each other, you might as well be shacked up with Disco Ken.

***

“We’ve had a response from the other side,” Nigel Batty said. “Your ex-wife says that she remained faithful to you throughout the duration of your marriage, but that you committed adultery with a colleague from work.”

“Well, that’s true,” I said. “But it was just a one-night stand. I’m not saying it’s nothing, but—”

“She also alleges that your son received a severe head injury while in your care.”

“What does that mean? That sounds like I beat him up or something. He fell, okay? There was an accident in the local park. He fell into an empty swimming pool and split his head open. And maybe I could have done more. Maybe I should have been watching him more closely. Does she honestly believe that hasn’t crossed my mind again and again and again? But at least I was there for him. She was eating tempura with her boyfriend in Tokyo.”

The lawyer peered closely at the papers on his desk.

“And she seems to believe that you’re not exercising proper parental control over what your son watches or listens to.”

“That’s just crazy.”

“He’s allowed to watch violent films unsupervised, she suggests. Videos with adult themes. And she says that on her last access visit she discovered that he had in his possession a music tape containing songs of a profane and adult nature.”

I could feel my face reddening with anger.

“That fucking…fucking….”

I couldn’t find the word. There was no word strong enough.

Nigel Batty laughed out loud, as if I was finally starting to understand.

“Can I see the medal?” I said.

“Of course you can,” my mother said. She went to the cabinet where the stereo sat, and I could hear her shuffling through insurance documents, bank statements, letters, all the paperwork of a lifetime. She came back with a small rectangular box that was colored somewhere beyond claret but not quite black. Inside there was a silver medal, not that clean, resting on purple velvet. My father’s medal.

The medal’s ribbon was blue and white, two broad vertical white stripes with one thin vertical white stripe between them dissecting a blue background. “For Distinguished Service,” it said on the medal, next to the image of the head of the King.

In the top of the box the maker’s name was inscribed on white silk—“By Appointment,” it said above the Royal Warrant, “J.R. Gaunt & Son Ltd., 60 Conduit Street, London.” And I remembered how, as a child, the name of that company—did it still exist? would it be there if I looked for it?—had seemed like another part of the citation.

I gently took it out, as surprised by the weight of my father’s DSM at thirty as I had been as a boy.

“Pat used to love playing with Dad’s medal,” my mother laughed.

“You let Pat play with this?” I said, incredulous.

“He liked pinning it on me,” she smiled. “I had to be Princess Layla at the end of that film.”

“Leia, Mom. She’s Princess Leia.”

It was just past the middle of the night and we were too tired to sit by his hospital bed any longer, but too restless to sleep. So we had a nice cup of tea—still my mother’s answer to everything.

And as she went off to put the kettle on, I held the medal in my fist and thought about how the games I had played as a boy had prepared me to be the man my father had been and the man his father had been before him—a fighting man, a man who kissed some tearful woman good-bye and put on a uniform and went to war.

Looking back on the games we played in the fields and the backstreets of my childhood, they seemed to be more than childish pastimes lauding the manly virtues—they seemed to be preparing us for the next war, for our own Normandy or Dunkirk or Monte Casino.

My generation played games with toy guns—or sticks pretending to be guns, or fingers pretending to be guns, anything could stand in for a gun—and nobody thought that it was unhealthy or distasteful. But the only wars we saw as young men were small wars, tiny wars, television wars, as real and as life-threatening to the noncombatants as a video game.

My generation, the last of the generations of small boys who played with toy guns, was more lucky than it knew. We didn’t have a war waiting for us when we grew up. There were no Germans or Japanese for us to fight. Our wives, that’s who we fought with, this generation of men blessed with peace. And the divorce courts, that’s where we fought our own grubby little wars.

I had seen the scars on my father’s body enough times to know that war was not a John Wayne movie. But the men who survived—and who came home in more or less one piece—found someone to love for a lifetime. Which was better? War and a perfect love? Or peace and love that came in installments of five, six, or seven years? Who was really the lucky man? My father or me?

“You liked this girl, didn’t you?” my mom said, coming back into the room with a steaming mug in each hand. “This woman, I mean. Cyd. You liked her a lot.”

I nodded.

“I wish we could have held it together. Like you and Dad did. It seems impossible these days.”

“You’re too sentimental about the past,” she said, not unkindly. “You think it was all brown ale and red roses. But it was harder than that.”

“But you and Dad were happy.”

“Yes, we were,” she said, her eyes drifting away to some place I couldn’t follow her. “We were happy.”

And I thought—I was happy too.

When I thought of my childhood, I thought of some sunbaked August—right at the start of the month, when the long, six-week holiday was still stretching gloriously out ahead of me, and I knew there would be car rides to country pubs where my dad and my uncles would play darts and bring lemonade and chips out to me and my cousins playing on the grass, our mothers laughing over Babychams at wooden tables, as separated from the men as Muslims.

Or it was some other holiday—Christmas, late at night with my uncles and aunts smoking and drinking in a card game, with soccer on Boxing Day at a misty Upton Park for the men and the boys.

Or it would be a Bank Holiday run to the coast with huge pink clouds of candy floss on a stick and the smell of the sea and frying onions, or to the dog track where my mom always bet on the number six dog because she liked the colors, she liked the way the red number looked against the black and white stripes.

I was grateful for that suburban childhood—for those memories of car rides and modest gambling and day trips, it seemed like a childhood crowded with life and love, a good time to be growing up, when Miss World was on the box and my mom and my aunts wore miniskirts.

And although my son’s childhood had more material things, it also had the numbing bankruptcy of divorce.

With all the diplomatic skills and emotional armor that a five-year-old could muster, he now ricocheted between his mother and her boyfriend and his father and his badly bruised heart. A video recorder and the passenger seat of a flash car seemed like small compensation for all that.

It felt to me that Gina and I—and the million couples just like us—hadn’t left much of an inheritance for the next generation.

“It worked between us because we made it work,” my mother said. “Because we wanted it to work. Because—even when we didn’t have money, even when we couldn’t have a baby—we didn’t chuck in the towel. You have to fight for your happy ending, Harry. It doesn’t just drop in your lap.”

“You think I didn’t fight for my happy ending? You think I haven’t got enough fight in me? Not like Dad?”

I was curious to know what she believed. There was a time, when I was young and cocky, when I felt that my parents knew nothing of life beyond their well-tended garden and their over-heated living room. But I didn’t feel that way about them anymore.

“I think you’ve got a lot of fight in you, Harry. But you beat yourself up sometimes. You can’t be the same man your father was—it’s a different world. A different century. You have to fight different battles and not expect anyone to pin a medal on your chest. Looking after a child alone—you think your father could have done that? I love him more than my life, but that would have been beyond him. You have to be strong in a different way. You have to be a different kind of tough guy.”

I put the medal back in its box and the telephone rang.

My mother’s eyes flicked to the clock and back to me, full of tears. It was just after four in the morning and this could only be my Uncle Jack calling from the hospital.

We both knew.

We held each other tight, the phone still ringing in the hall. Ringing and ringing.

“We should have been there with him,” my mother said as she would say so many times in the days and weeks and years to come. “We should have been there.”

Here’s what a happy ending looks like, I thought bitterly.

You spend your life with someone and then, if they go before you, you feel as though you have lost all your limbs.

At least my generation—the fuck-around, fuck-up, and fuck-off generation—would be spared the knowledge of exactly what that particular amputation feels like. Assuming that we don’t have any happy endings of our own.

I picked up the telephone and my Uncle Jack told me that my father had died.

***

In the morning I went up to see Pat as soon as I heard his footsteps padding across the floor to the box of toys that my parents always kept for him in their second bedroom, the room where he always slept when he was here, the room that had once been mine. He looked up at me from the toy box, a
Star Wars
figure in each hand, his eyes still puffy with sleep. I picked him up, kissed his sweet face, and sat down on the bed with him on my lap.

“Pat, your grandfather died in the night.”

He blinked at me with those blue eyes.

“Granddad had been ill for a long time and now he doesn’t have to suffer anymore,” I said. “Now he’s at peace. We can be happy about that, can’t we? He’s not in pain anymore. He will never feel any more pain again.”

“Where is he now?”

This threw me.

“Well, his body is at the hospital. Later it will be buried.”

I realized that I knew nothing about the bureaucracy of death.

When would they collect his body from the hospital? Where would they keep it before his funeral? And who exactly were
they?

“We’re sad now,” I said. “But one day we will be grateful for Granddad’s life. We will realize that we were lucky—I was lucky to have him as my father, and you were lucky to have him as your grandfather. We were both very lucky. But we can’t feel lucky today. It’s too soon.”

Pat nodded, very businesslike.

“He’s still at the hospital?”

“His body is at the hospital. But his spirit has gone.”

“What’s his spirit?”

“That’s the spark of life that made Granddad the man he was.”

“Where’s it gone?”

I took a breath.

“Some people think the spirit goes to heaven and lives forever. Some people think that it just disappears and then you sleep forever.”

“What do you believe?

“I think that the spirit lives on,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s in heaven or if it’s somewhere else, some other place that I don’t know anything about. But it doesn’t just die. It lives on. Even if it’s only in the hearts of the people we love.”

“That’s what I believe too,” said my son.

***

With the slashed roof of the MGF cracking like a torn sail in a stiff gale, I drove slowly down the high street of the little town where I had grown up, not recognizing the place.

Everywhere the shops and small cafés that I had known had become real estate offices or the outlets of some big chain. No wonder the English have become so desperate to wave the Flag of St. George, to remind ourselves that our roots are just as deep and defined as those of the Irish or the Scots. This was my hometown. But it could have been anywhere.

I didn’t see a thing I recognized until I found my Uncle Jack in the back corner of the old Red Lion, this pub seemingly the one part of the high street that was protected by an unofficial preservation order. He was in a fog of smoke, cigarette cupped in his palm, drinking a mineral water under the oak beams and horse brass.

“Sorry about your dad, Harry.”

“Thanks, Uncle Jack.”

“You want one of these? Or shall we just do it?”

“Let’s just do it.”

My Uncle Jack was at my side as I dealt with the bureaucracy of death. I was still numb from lack of sleep and the shock of knowing that my father was no longer in the world. But my Uncle Jack’s craggy, chain-smoking presence made it a lot easier for me.

We drove to the hospital in the MGF and collected a pitiful little bag containing my father’s belongings from the front office.

His wallet with his picture of his grandson inside, his reading glasses, his false teeth.

This was all that was left of him, handed over to me without sentiment or condolences. Why should they be sad for him? Or for me? They never knew my father. We moved on down the chain.

For some obscure administrative reason, we had to register the death in a small town that I had never been to before, although with its Burger King and Body Shop and real estate offices, it looked depressingly familiar.

Part of the great procession of living and dying, we were behind a young couple registering their baby’s birth and ahead of an old woman registering the death of her husband. And I wondered why Nigel Batty complained about men dying before their partners. What a relief to not have to visit this place, what a relief to not be condemned to living on alone.

Finally we went back to my hometown to see the undertaker. Like the pub, this was another place that had never changed in my memory—getting drunk and dropping dead, the two great perennials of the English high street.

With its gloomy window display of white headstones displayed against acres of black silk, it had always looked closed when I was growing up, this boutique for the bereaved, and it looked closed now. When I was a child just discovering that I wasn’t going to live forever, I used to walk quickly past this place. Now I went inside.

And it was fine. Uncle Jack lightly rested a hand on my shoulder and I talked calmly to the undertaker about the funeral arrangements, as if this happened to me every day. With the death certificate between us, it seemed perfectly natural to be talking to this somber old man in black about my father’s burial. The only truly strange moment was when, almost apologetically, the undertaker produced a glossy brochure. I had to choose my father’s coffin.

It was a brochure like any other—tastefully shot, beautifully presented—and the undertaker gently led me through it, starting with the cheapest, most simple pine numbers going right up to the top of the range model, a large hardwood coffin lined with red satiny material and adorned with big brass handles.

My first instinct was to go for the most expensive one—let’s push the boat out, nothing’s too good for my old man. But my second instinct was that the top of the range coffin was just a touch too elaborate for my dad to sleep in for all eternity.

I hesitated and told the undertaker that we would go for the second most expensive coffin. And when Uncle Jack and I were back on the street, I was pleased with my choice.

“Your old man would have had a fit at that posh coffin,” my Uncle Jack grinned.

“The most expensive one?” I smiled. “Yeah, I thought that was a bit much.”

“Gold handles and a red velvet lining!” chuckled Uncle Jack. “It looked more like a French knocking shop than a coffin!”

“Talk about turning in your grave,” I laughed. “I know what he would have said if we’d gone for that one—who do you think I am? Bloody Napoleon?”

I could hear his voice.