Man and Boy (23 page)

I would never hear his voice again.

I would always hear him.

“Two ducks check into a hotel,” said Eamon. “Best hotel in Kilcarney. Big weekend for the ducks. But—no, listen—they get up to their room and they discover they don’t have any condoms. No problem, says the man duck—I’ll get room service to send some up. Call down to room service. Eventually the boy appears with the condoms. He says—do you want me to put these on your bill, sir? And the duck, he says—do I look like some kind of pervert to you?”

Eamon removed the mike from its stand in complete silence. They were going to put the laughter track on later.

“I feel for that duck,” he said, moving across a stage that seemed somehow brighter than usual, in front of an audience who were noticeably better-looking than normal. “Because there’s no real sex education in Kilcarney. My dad told me that the man goes on top and the woman goes on the bottom. So all through my first serious relationship, my girlfriend and I slept in bunk beds. You see, where I come from, sex is hereditary—if your mom and dad didn’t have it, the chances are that you won’t either.”

He placed the mike back in its stand, grinning into the lights.

“Luckily I’m a good lover now—but that’s only because I practice a lot on my own. Thank you and good night!”

The audience applauded wildly as Eamon skipped to the side of the stage where a beautiful girl with a clipboard and headphones handed him a bottle of beer. Then he seemed to swoon, sinking to one knee, the bottle of beer still in his hand as he half-turned and retched into a sand bucket—a real sand bucket, not a pretend one.

“Cut, cut,” the director said.

I ran onto the set and crouched by Eamon’s side, my arm around his shaking shoulders. Mem stood by my side, wide-eyed with concern and unrecognizable with her clothes on.

“Don’t be afraid, Eamon,” I said. “It’s only a lager commercial”

“I’m not afraid,” he said weakly. “I’m excited.”

***

I wasn’t excited. I was afraid. Very afraid.

My father—my father’s body—was at the undertaker’s. And I was going to see it.

The undertaker had mentioned the possibility of seeing the body—viewing the loved one at rest, he said quietly, proud of this service they offered at no extra charge—and this meeting, this final meeting between my father and me, had assumed impossible proportions in my head.

How would I feel when I saw the man who gave me life lying in his coffin? Would I unravel? Could I stand the sight of my great protector waiting for his grave? I couldn’t stop myself believing that it would be too much, that I would crumple and come apart, that the years would be wiped away and I would be a sobbing child once more.

When I saw him lying there, the brutal fact of his death would be beyond all lingering doubt and disbelief. Could I take it? That’s what I wanted to know. I had learned that fathering a child didn’t make you truly adult. Does a man have to bury his father before he feels truly grown?

My Uncle Jack was waiting for me in his usual seat at the Red Lion. My mother had shaken her head and turned away when I asked her if she wanted to come with me. I didn’t blame her. But I needed to know if I could live with the knowledge that I was alone now.

Not alone, of course. There was still my mother, sleeping with the lights in her bedroom blazing all night long, bewildered to be alone for the first time in a lifetime.

And there was Pat, bouncing between the joy of seeing Gina again to the suffocating grief in our own home.

And there was Cyd—out there somewhere, lost in some other part of the city, sharing her life with some other man.

But with my father gone, there was a part of me that felt alone—at last and forever.

Even when relations between us had been strained, he was always my shield, my guardian, my greatest ally. Even when we bickered and fought, even when I disappointed him or let him down, I was always secure in the knowledge that he would still do anything for me. Now all that was gone.

Uncle Jack stubbed out his roll-up and drained his mineral water. We walked to the undertaker’s, not saying much, although when we went inside and a little bell jingled announcing our arrival, Uncle Jack placed his hand on my shoulder. My uncle wasn’t keen to see his brother’s body. He was doing this for me.

The undertaker was expecting us. He led us into an antechamber that looked like some kind of changing room. There were heavy curtains on both sides, divided up into maybe half a dozen individual compartments. I took a breath and held it as he pulled back one of the little curtains to reveal my father in his coffin.

Except that it wasn’t my father. Not anymore. His face—the only part of him that was visible with the coffin lid opened just a shade—had an expression that I had never seen before. He didn’t look peaceful or as if he were sleeping or any of death’s soothing clichés. His face was empty. More than that—it had nothing to do with him anymore: it was drained of identity as well as all pain and exhaustion. It was like knocking on a door and discovering that nobody was home. More than this—it was as though we had come to the wrong place. The spark that had made my father the man he was had gone. I knew with total certainty that his soul had flown. I had come looking for my father, to see him one last time. But I wouldn’t find him here.

I wanted to see Pat. I wanted to hold my son in my arms and tell him that everything we had both tried so hard to believe was all true.

Usually I stayed inside the house, well back from the window, watching from behind the blinds as the silver Audi snaked down the street, looking for a scrap of parking space. But today I came out when I saw them coming—the now familiar car with the familiar configuration inside.

Pat’s blond head in the backseat, looking down at some new trinket he had been given. Gina in the passenger seat, turning to talk to him. And in the driving seat, this unimaginable Richard, the semi-separated man, cool and confident at the wheel, as if ferrying Gina and Pat around town in his Audi was the natural order of things.

I had never spoken to him. I had never even seen him get out of his car when they delivered Pat back to me. He was dark, beefy, and wore glasses—a suit that worked out. Good-looking in a Clark Kent kind of way. There was a tiny parking space just in front of the house, and I watched him expertly reverse the Audi into it, the bastard.

Usually Gina knocked on the door, said hello to me, and quickly kissed Pat good-bye. The handover was done with minimum civility, which was about as much as either of us could muster. Still, we were trying. Not for our sake but the sake of our child. But today I was waiting at the front gate for them. She didn’t seem surprised.

“Hello, Harry.”

“Hi.”

“Look what I’ve got!” Pat said, brandishing his new toy—some scowling plastic space man with an unfeasibly large laser gun—as he brushed past me into the house.

“Sorry about your dad,” Gina said, staying on the other side of the gate.

“Thanks.”

“I’m really sorry. He always treated me with great kindness. He was the gentlest man I ever met.”

“He was mad about you.”

“I was mad about him too.”

“Thanks for Pat’s toy.”

“Richard bought it for him in Hamley’s.”

“Good old Richard.”

She shot me a look.

“I better be going,” she said.

“I thought you didn’t like Pat playing with guns.”

She shook her head and gave a little laugh, one of those laughs that’s meant to indicate that it wasn’t funny at all.

“If you really want to know, I believe that there’s enough violence in this world without encouraging children to think that guns are a form of light entertainment. Okay? But he wanted the gun.”

“I’m not going to give him up, Gina.”

“That’s for the lawyers to decide. And we’re not supposed—”

“I’ve changed my life to look after my son. I took a part-time job. I learned to organize things in the house, stuff that I never even had to think about before. Feeding him, clothing him, getting him to bed. Answering his questions, being there for him when he was sad or frightened.”

“All the things I did more or less alone for years.”

“That’s my point exactly. I taught myself how to care for our child—the way you cared for him. And then you come back and tell me that’s all over.”

“You’ve done a good job over the last few months, Harry. But what do you want? A medal?”

“I don’t need a medal. I haven’t done anything more than I should have done. I know it’s nothing special. But you expect too much of me, Gina. I learned how to be a real father to Pat—I had to, okay? Now you want me to just act as though it never happened. And I can’t do it. How can I do it? Tell me how I can do it.”

“Is there a problem?” Richard said, emerging from the Audi.

So he did have legs after all.

“Get back in the car, Richard,” Gina said.

“Yeah, get back in the car, Richard,” I said.

He got back in the car, blinking behind his glasses.

“You have to decide what you really want, Gina. All of you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m all for men taking responsibility for their children. I’m all for men doing their bit in bringing up their kids. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t expect us to take part in the parenting and then just step aside when you want us to, as if we were just like our dads, as if it was all really woman’s work. Remember that the next time you see your lawyer.”

“And you remember something, Harry.”

“What’s that?”

“I love him too.”

***

Pat was on the floor of his room, tipping a box full of toys onto the floor.

“You have a good time, darling? A good time with Mommy and Richard?”

I sounded ridiculously upbeat, like a game show host when the really big prize is up for grabs, but I was determined to make Pat feel okay about these new arrangements. I didn’t want him to feel that he was betraying me every time he went out to have a good time with his mother and her boyfriend. But I didn’t want him to have too good a time either.

“It was all right,” he said. “Richard and Mommy had a little bit of a fight.”

Wonderful news.

“Why was that, darling?”

“I got some Magnum on the seat of his stupid car. He thought I shouldn’t eat Magnum in the car.”

“But you like Richard.”

“He’s all right.”

I felt a pang of sympathy for this man I had never met. Not much of a pang. Just a little one. But a pang all the same.

The role he had chosen felt like an impossible part to play. If he tried to be a father to Pat then he would surely fail. And if he decided to be just a friend, then that would be a kind of failure too. But at least Richard had a choice.

Who asked Pat if he wanted to be eating a Magnum in the back of that silver Audi?

***

Cyd was working in one of those designer Asian restaurants that were starting to appear all over town, one of those places that sells Thai fish cakes, Japanese soba noodles, and cold Vietnamese spring rolls as if they all came from the same place, as if that entire continent had been turned into one big kitchen for the West. It was bright and white, full of polished wood and gleaming chrome, like an art gallery or a dentist’s office.

From the street, I watched Cyd placing two steaming plates of what looked like Malaysian king prawn curry in front of a pair of young women who smiled their thanks at her.

Like every other waitress in there, she was wearing a starched white apron, black trousers, and a white shirt. Her hair was cut shorter that I had ever seen it—it was almost boyish now, she had gone from an F. Scott Fitzgerald bob to a Beatle cut in just one trip to the hairdresser’s. I knew it meant something important when a woman chopped off her hair, but I couldn’t remember what.

She headed toward the back of the place, saying something to the young black guy behind the bar that made him laugh, and disappeared into the kitchen. I took a seat near the front of the restaurant, waiting for her to appear again.

It was after three and the place was almost empty. Apart from me and the two young women eating their spicy prawns, the only other customers were a table of three well-lunched businessmen, empty bottles of Asahi Super Dry strewn in front of them. A young waitress placed a menu on my table just as Cyd banged back out of the kitchen doors.

At head height and balanced on the palm of her hand, she was carrying a tray holding three bottles of Japanese beer. She unloaded them in front of the drunken suits, not noticing me, ignoring their red-faced leers, not really aware of any of us.

“When do you get off?” one of them asked.

“Don’t you mean how?” she said, turning away as they erupted with laughter, and seeing me at last. She slowly came over to my table.

“What would you like?”

“How about spending the rest of our lives together?”

“That’s off. How about some noodles?”

“Okay. Have you got the thick kind?”

“Udon? Sure. We do udon noodles in broth with prawns, fish, shiitake mushrooms, and all that good stuff.”

“Actually, I’m not that hungry. But this is a coincidence, isn’t it? Running into each other like this.”

“It certainly is, Harry. How did you know I was working here?”

“I didn’t. This is the forty-second place that I’ve tried over the last few days.”

“You really are crazy.”

“Crazy for you.”

“Just crazy. How’s your dad?”

“The funeral’s tomorrow.”

“God, I’m sorry. Is Pat all right?”

I took a breath.

“They were very close. You know that. It’s a big loss for him. I don’t know—he’s dealing with it. Same as my mother. I’ll be glad to get the funeral behind us.”

“After the funeral can be the worst part. Because everybody goes home and life starts to go on again. Except, for you, it doesn’t. Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes.”

“What’s that?”

“You can let me walk you home.”

***

“You’ve got to stop following me around,” she said as we walked through the silent white side streets of Notting Hill. “It’s got to stop.”

“I like your hair.”

She grabbed her hair in her hand.

“It’s no good for you and it’s no good for me,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t look that bad.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I want us to be a family.”

“I thought you hated that kind of family—the kind of family that is full of other people’s children and ex-partners. I thought you wanted an uncomplicated life.”

“I don’t want an uncomplicated life. I want a life with you. And Peggy. And Pat. And maybe a kid of our own.”

“One of those families? With your kid and my kid fighting our kid? You’d hate it. You would really hate it, Harry. You’d last—well, I don’t know how long you’d last.”

“I could never hate my life if it was with you. Listen, there was a tattoo on my dad’s arm, some words written under one of those long, thin Commando knives. And it said—united we conquer. And that’s how I feel about us.”

“You’re getting a tattoo?”

“No.”

“You’re joining the army?”

“What I’m saying is that if we’re together, then everything will be all right. I don’t know what kind of family life it will be—because there have never been families like this before. But I know that it would be better than any other family we could ever have apart. Just think about it, okay?”

“Sure, Harry. I’ll discuss it with my husband over dinner tonight.”

We had stopped outside an old white townhouse that had been chopped up into flats forty years ago.

“This is it, Harry,” she said.

And then Jim was suddenly bursting out of the front door, his arm in a plaster cast and a sling, screaming, “Stay away from my wife, you bastard!” as he smoothly swung round in a full circle and his motorcycle boot exploded in my mouth.

I reeled backward, my gums split and bloody, my legs gone to jelly, and two things were immediately clear.

Jim knew a bit about martial arts. And he had fallen off his bike again.

I bounced off some dustbins and lifted my fists as he came at me, but Cyd had moved between us and he howled with pain as she grabbed his broken arm.

“Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” she shouted at him.

“Watch my fucking arm, will you!” he shouted back at her. But he let her lead him back to the door. He turned to growl at me.

“If ever I see your face again,” he said, “you lose all your teeth.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

I didn’t explain that a friendly dog had pushed me on my face when I was five years old. That wouldn’t have sounded quite so impressive.

He went back inside the house, holding his plaster cast. They must have been living in the ground-floor flat because I could hear what sounded a lot like Peggy crying. Cyd turned to look at me.

“Please leave me alone now, Harry.”

“Just think about what I said,” I slurred through my fat and bloody lips. “Please consider my offer.”

She shook her head and—I know it’s dumb—but I felt that she was starting to really like me.

“You don’t give up, do you?” she said.

“I get it from my father,” I said.

Then she closed the door of the big white house and went back to her life.