Man and Boy (3 page)

Gina’s thirtieth birthday had not been completely painless.

Her father called her in the early evening to wish her a happy birthday—which meant she had spent all of the morning and all of the afternoon wondering if the worthless old bastard would call her at all.

Twenty-five years ago, just before Gina had started school, Glenn—as her dad insisted everyone call him, especially his children—walked out the door, dreaming of making it as a rock musician. And although he had been working behind the counter of a guitar shop in Denmark Street for a couple of decades, and all the dreams of glory had receded along with his hippy hairline, he still thought he was some kind of free spirit who could forget birthdays or remember them as the mood took him.

Glenn had never made it as a musician. There had been one band with a modest recording contract and one minor hit single. You might have glimpsed him playing bass on
Top
of
the
Pops
just before Jimmy Carter left the White House.

He was very good-looking when he was younger—Glenn, not Jimmy Carter—a bit of a Robert Plant figure, all blond Viking curls and bare midriff. But I always felt that Glenn’s true career had been building families and then smashing them up.

Gina’s little family had been just the first in a long line of wives and children whom Glenn had abandoned. They were scattered all over the country, the women like Gina’s mother who had been considered such a great beauty back in the sixties and seventies that her smiling face was sometimes featured in glossy magazines, and the children like Gina who had grown up in a single-parent family back when it was still called a broken home.

Glenn breezed in and out of their lives, casually missing birthdays and Christmas and then turning up unexpectedly with some large, inappropriate gift. Even though he was now a middle-aged suburban commuter who worked in a shop, he still liked to think he was Jim bloody Morrison and that the rules that applied to other people didn’t apply to him.

But I can’t complain too much about old Glenn. In a way, he played Cupid to me and Gina. Because what she liked about me most was my family.

It was a small, ordinary family—I’m the only child—and we lived in a pebble-fronted small house that could have been in almost any suburb in England. We were surrounded by houses and people, but you had to walk for half a mile before you could buy a newspaper—surrounded by life yet never escaping the feeling that life was happening somewhere else. That’s the suburbs.

My mom watched the street from behind net curtains (“It’s my street,” she would say, when challenged by my dad and I). My dad fell asleep in front of the TV (“There’s never anything on,” he always moaned). And I kicked a ball about in the back garden, dreaming of extra time at Wembley and trying to avoid my dad’s roses.

How many families are there like that in this country? Probably millions. Yet certainly a lot less than there were. Families like us, we’re practically an endangered species. Gina acted as though me and my mom and dad were the last of the nuclear families, protected wildlife to be cherished and revered and wondered over.

To me, of course, my family was on the staid side. All that car washing, all that peeking from behind net curtains, all the nights spent in front of the TV, all the B&B holidays in Devon and Cornwall or a rented cottage in Frinton. I envied Gina’s exotic background—her mom a former model, her dad a would-be rock star, the pictures in the glossy magazines, even though the pictures were fading now.

But Gina remembered the missed birthdays of her childhood, a father who was always preoccupied with his more recent, more exciting attachments, the promised vacations that never happened, and her mother going to bed alone, growing old alone, getting sick alone, crying alone, and finally dying alone. Gina could never be cavalier about an ordinary family. It wasn’t in her.

The first Christmas I took Gina home, I saw her choking up when my mom gave her a little present—just some smelly stuff in a basket from the Body Shop, some soap in the shape of polar bears covered in saran wrap—and I knew I had her. She looked at those polar bears and she was hooked.

You should never underestimate the power of the nuclear family. These days, coming from an unbroken home is like having independent means, or Paul Newman eyes, or a big cock. It’s one of life’s true blessings, given to just a lucky few. And difficult to resist.

But those unbroken homes can lull their children into a false sense of security. When I was growing up, I took it for granted that every marriage would be as stable and everlasting as my mom and dad’s marriage—including my own. My parents made it look easy. But it’s not easy at all.

Gina would probably have washed her hands of Glenn years ago if her mother had lived. But she died of breast cancer just before Gina walked into the radio station and my life, and suddenly she felt the need to salvage the few ragged bits of family she still had left.

So Glenn came to our wedding and rolled a joint in front of my mom and dad. Then he tried to get off with one of the bridesmaids. Pushing fifty, he seemed to be under the impression that he was nineteen years old and everything was still before him. He wore leather trousers that went creak-creak-creak when he danced. And, oh, how he danced.

Gina had been so upset that Glenn couldn’t manage even the vaguest impersonation of a father that she didn’t want to send him any photographs of Pat when he was born.

I had to put my foot down, insisting the man had a right to see pictures of his only grandchild. And I secretly thought that when Glenn saw our beautiful boy, he would be instantly smitten. But when he forgot Pat’s birthday for the third year in a row, I realized that I now had reasons of my own to hate the old hippy bastard.

“Maybe he’s terrified of being a grandfather,” I said. “Freaked out—isn’t that what he’d call it?”

“Yes, there’s that,” Gina said. “And there’s also the fact that he’s a selfish asshole who never grew up. Let’s not forget that.”

Unlike Gina’s mother and father, nobody had ever thought my parents were a golden couple. Nobody ever thought that their union summed up the spirit of an era. My mom’s picture had never appeared in a glossy magazine—although her prize-winning tomatoes had once been prominently featured in the local rag. But my parents had stayed together for a lifetime. And Gina and I were going to do the same.

We had friends who had met someone, fallen in love, married, divorced, and started to hate their ex-partner’s guts all since our wedding day. That would never happen to us. Though our backgrounds were different, they meant we wanted the same thing.

I wanted a marriage that would last forever because that’s what my parents had. Gina wanted a marriage that would last forever because that was exactly what her parents had never had.

“That’s what is so good about us,” Gina told me. “Our dreams match.”

Gina was mad about my parents and the feeling was mutual. They looked at this blond vision coming up the garden path with their little grandson and the pair of them seemed to visibly swell with pleasure, smiling shyly behind their reading glasses and geraniums.

None of them could believe their luck. My parents thought they were getting Grace Kelly. Gina thought she was getting the Waltons.

“I’m going to take Pat to see your mom and dad,” she said before I went to work. “Can I borrow your mobile phone? The battery’s flat on mine.”

I was happy to lend it to her. I can’t stand those things.

They make me feel trapped.

***

A shiver of panic ran through the gallery. “The fly’s back!” the director said. “We got the fly!” There it was on the monitor. The studio fly. Our fly was a huge beetle-black creature with wings as big as a wasp’s and a carcass so bloated that it seemed to have an undercarriage. On a close-up of Marty reading his teleprompter, we watched the fly lazily circle our presenter’s head and then hank off into a long slow climb.

The fly lived somewhere in the dark upper reaches of the studio, up there among the tangle of sockets, cables, and lights. The fly only ever put in an appearance during a show, and up in the gallery the old-timers said that it was responding to the heat of the studio lights. But I always thought that the fly was attracted to whatever juice it is that human glands secrete when they are on live television. Our studio fly had a taste for fear.

Apart from the fly’s aerial display, Marty’s interview with Cliff went well. The young green started off nervously, scratching his stubble, tugging his filthy dreadlocks, stuttering his way through rambling sentences and even committing television’s cardinal sin of staring directly into the camera. But Marty could be surprisingly gentle with nervous guests and, clearly sympathetic to Cliff’s cause, he eventually made the young man relax. It was only when Marty was winding up the interview that it all began to go wrong.

“I want to thank Cliff for coming in tonight,” Marty said, unusually solemn, brushing away the studio fly. “And I want to thank all his colleagues who are living in trees out at the airport. Because the battle they are fighting is for all of us.”

As the applause swelled, Marty reached out and shook his guest’s hand. Cliff held it. And continued to hold it.

Then he reached inside the grubby, vaguely ethnic coat he was wearing and produced a pair of handcuffs. While Marty watched with an uncertain smile, Cliff snapped one metal ring around his wrist and the other around the wrist of Marty Mann.

“Free the birds,” Cliff said quietly. He cleared his throat.

“What—what is this?” Marty said.

“Free the birds!” Cliff shouted with growing confidence. “Free the birds!”

Marty shook his head.

“Do you have the key for this thing, you smelly little shit?”

Up in the gloaming of the gallery we watched the scene unfold on the bank of screens shining in the darkness. The director carried on choreographing the five cameras—“Stay on Marty, two…give me a close up of the handcuffs, four…”—but I had the feeling that you only get when live television is going very wrong, a feeling that somehow combines low-grade nausea, paralysis, and terrible fascination, as it sits there in the pit of your stomach.

And suddenly there was the fly, hovering for a few seconds by Cliff’s hair and then executing a perfect landing on the bridge of his nose.

“Free the birds!”

Marty considered his arm, unable to quite believe that he was really chained to this scruffy young man whose makeup was starting to melt under the lights. Then he picked up the water jug that was on the table between them and, almost as if he was trying to swat the studio fly, smashed it into Cliff’s face. There was an eruption of blood and water. Marty was left holding just the jug’s broken handle.

“Fuck the birds,” he said. “And bugger the hole in the ozone layer.”

A floor manager appeared on camera, his mouth open with wonder, his headphones dangling around his neck. Cliff cradled his crushed nose. Someone in the audience started booing. And that’s when I knew we were stuffed.

Marty had done the one thing that he wasn’t allowed to do on our kind of show. He had lost the audience.

Up in the gallery, the telephones all began to ring at once, as if in commemoration of my brilliant career going straight down the toilet. Suddenly I was aware how hard I was sweating.

The studio fly appeared briefly on all the monitors, seemed to perform a victory roll and then was gone.

***

“I’m so stupid,” Siobhan said hours later in the deserted gallery. “It’s all my fault. I should never have booked him. I should have guessed he wanted to use us to do something like this. He always was a selfish little bastard. Why did I do it? Because I was trying to impress everyone. And now look what’s happened.”

“You’re not stupid,” I told her. “Marty was stupid. It was a good booking. Despite what happened, it’s still a good booking.”

“What’s going to happen?” she said, suddenly seeming very young. “What will they do to us?”

I shook my head and shrugged. “We’ll soon find out.” I was tired of thinking about it. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

I had sent Marty home, smuggled out the back of the building in a mini-cab waiting by the freight entrance, telling him to talk to no one. The press would tear him to pieces. We could count on that. I was more worried about what the station would do to him. And us. I knew they needed
The
Marty
Mann
Show
. But did they need it this badly?

“It’s so late,” Siobhan said in the elevator. “Where can I get a cab?”

“Where do you live?” I asked.

I should have guessed that she was in Camden Town.

She had to be in one of those old working-class neighborhoods that had been colonized by the people in black. Actually, she was not that far from our little house by Highbury Corner. We were at opposite ends of the same road. But Siobhan was at the end of the Camden Road where they aspired to bohemia. I was at the end where they dreamed of suburbia.

“I can give you a lift,” I said.

“What—in your MGF?”

“Sure.”

“Great!”

We laughed for the first time in hours—although I couldn’t quite work out why—and took the lift down to the underground car park where the little red car was standing completely alone. It was late. Almost two. I watched her slide her legs under the dashboard.

“I’m not going to go on about it,” she said. “But I just want to say you’ve been really sweet about tonight. Thank you for not being angry with me. I appreciate it.”

It was a gracious apology for something that she really didn’t have to apologize for. I looked at her pale Irish face, realizing for the first time how much I liked her.

“Don’t be silly,” I said, quickly turning on the ignition to cover my embarrassment. “We’re on the same side, aren’t we?”

It was a warm summer night and the city streets were as close to empty as they were ever going to get. Within twenty minutes, we were driving past the shuttered flea market, the funky ethnic restaurants, and all the secondhand stores with their grotesquely oversized signs—there were giant cowboy boots, colossal rattan chairs, and monster slabs of vinyl, all of them looming above the street like the visions caused by some bad drug. Gina and I used to shop around here on Saturday afternoons. It was years ago now.