Man and Boy (4 page)

Siobhan gave me directions until we pulled up in front of a large white town house that had long ago been converted into flats.

“Well,” I said. “Good night then.”

“Thanks,” she said. “For everything.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Listen, I don’t think I can sleep yet. Not after tonight. Do you want to come in for a drink?”

“A drink might keep me awake,” I said, hating myself for sounding like a pensioner who had to scurry back to the cocoa and incontinence sheets of his sheltered accommodation.

“You sure?” she said, and I was ridiculously flattered that she seemed a bit disappointed. I also knew that she wouldn’t ask again.

Go
home
, a voice inside me said.
Decline
with
a
polite
smile
and
go
home
now
.

And maybe I would have if I hadn’t liked her so much. Maybe I would have if it hadn’t been such a rough night. Maybe I would have if I wasn’t coming up to thirty. Maybe I would have if her legs had been a couple of inches shorter.

“Okay,” I said, far more casually than I felt. “Sounds good.”

She looked at me for just a moment and then we were kissing each other, her hands on the back my neck, tugging at my hair with small, urgent fists. That’s strange, I thought. Gina never does that.

A child can change in a moment. You turn your back for a couple of seconds, and when you look again you find they have already grown into someone else.

I can remember seeing Pat smile for the first time. He was a little fat bald thing, Winston Churchill in a jumpsuit, howling because his first teeth were pushing through, so Gina rubbed some chocolate on his sore gums and he immediately stopped crying and grinned up at us—this big, wide, gummy grin—as if we had just revealed the best secret in the world.

And I can remember him walking for the first time. He was holding himself up by the rail of his little yellow plastic stroller, swaying from side to side as if he was caught in a stiff breeze, as was his custom, when without warning he suddenly took off, his fat little legs sticking out of his disposable diaper and pumping furiously to keep up with the stroller’s spinning blue wheels.

He bombed off out of the room and Gina laughed and said he looked as though he was going to be late for the office again.

But I can’t remember when his games changed. I don’t know when all his toddler’s games of fire engines and Postman Pat videos gave way to his obsession with
Star
Wars
. That was one of the changes that happened when I wasn’t looking.

One minute his head was full of talking animals, the next it was all Death Stars, storm troopers, and light sabers.

If we let him, he would watch the three
Star
Wars
films on video all day and all night. But we didn’t let him—or rather Gina didn’t let him—so when the TV was turned off, he spent hours playing with his collection of
Star Wars
figures and gray plastic spaceships or bouncing on the sofa, brandishing his light saber, muttering scraps of George Lucas storylines to himself.

It seemed like only the day before yesterday when nothing gave him more pleasure than his collection of farmyard animals—or “aminals,” as Pat called them. He would sit in his bubble bath, a little blond angel with suds on his head, parading his cows, sheep, and horses along the side of the tub, mooing and baaing until the water turned cold.

“I’m taking me bath,” he would announce. “I need me aminals.”

Now his aminals were collecting dust in some forgotten corner of his bedroom while he played his endless games of intergalactic good and evil.

They were a lot like the games I could remember from my own childhood. And sometimes Pat’s fantasies of brave knights, evil warlords, and captured princesses sounded like echoes from a past that was long gone, as if he was trying to recover something precious that had already been lost forever.

***

Siobhan slept like someone who was single.

She edged right into the middle of the bed, her freckled limbs thrown out every which way, or she rolled over on her side, taking my share of the duvet with her. I lay there in that strange bed wide awake, clutching a scrap of sheet the size of a handkerchief as the room got light.

It was too soon to feel really bad. Pushed to the back of my mind there was the thought of Gina and all the promises that I had ever made to her—promises from the days when I was trying to persuade her to love me, the promises we made on our wedding day and all the promises of all the days beyond, all that stuff about undying love and never wanting anyone else that I had really meant at the time. And still did, I discovered. Now more than ever, in a funny sort of way.

Later that would all really get to me, and driving home, I would look in the mirror wondering when I had become the kind of man that I used to hate. But now was too soon for all that. I lay there as the night faded away thinking to myself—
well, that seemed to go okay
.

The reason that most men stray is opportunity, and the joy of meaningless sex should never be underestimated. It had been a meaningless, opportunistic coupling. That’s what I had liked most about it.

What I liked least about it was that already I was starting to feel like a traitor.

And it was far from great. You try too hard with someone new. You try too hard to truly enjoy yourself. Sex with someone new is too much like taking your driving test. Yet when I thought of all the things that could have gone wrong—and all of them seem to involve timing—it was okay.

Thank God, thank God, thank God.

But all the time I was with Siobhan, while half of me thought that this was probably the woman I had been looking for all my life, this pale Irish beauty who would have lovely red-headed children, the other half of me sort of missed my wife.

I missed the easy familiarity that you get with someone who you have been with for years. If I was going to be unfaithful, then I kind of wished it could have been with Gina.

Still, you can get tired of always being the man who pays the mortgage and calls the plumber and can’t put together the self-assembly furniture. You get tired of being that man because in the end you don’t feel like much of a man at all, more of a domestic appliance.

So you go home with some stranger who doesn’t let you have your share of the duvet and end up feeling more tired of yourself than ever. Now what did I do with my trousers?

Daylight was creeping into the room as I got dressed and glimpses of Siobhan’s life floated into view. It was a good flat—the kind of comfortable, ordered flat that I had always wanted but never had. I seemed to go straight from student squalor to domestic disorder.

The only photographs I could see were of Siobhan as a teenager, laughing as she held on to grinning dogs or some sweet-looking old people. Pictures of pets and parents.

There were some Japanese prints on the walls of peasants struggling through a rainy landscape—stuff that Gina would have liked. Shelves neatly stacked with books and CDs revealed a taste for literature that had made it to the movies and a weird mix of rock groups and mellow jazz—Oasis and U2 next to Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and the softer side of Miles.

Looking at her books and records made me like her more. But probably looking at anyone’s books and records will make you feel that way, even if they have lots of rubbish. Because what they like, and what they used to like, reveals things about them that they wouldn’t normally choose to advertise.

I liked it that Siobhan had probably grown out of white rock bands and was now looking for something a bit more cool and sophisticated (it seemed unthinkable that she might have started out on Chet Baker and Miles Davis then later switched to U2 and Oasis).

It showed she was still really young and curious, still discovering what she wanted from the world. Still inventing her life rather than trying to recover it.

It was very much a young single woman’s apartment, the flat of a girl who could please herself. Despite the magazines and clothes that were strewn around, there was none of the real mess and clutter that you get in a place with a child, none of the homely chaos that I was used to. You could make it all the way to the door without stepping on a Han Solo figurine.

But I sort of missed all of that clutter and mess that I knew from my home, just as I already missed being the kind of man who knows how to keep his promises.

***

Gina was crying when I got home.

I sat on the side of the bed, afraid to touch her.

“It was crazy after last night’s show,” I said. “I had to stay at the station.”

“I understand,” she said. “It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s your mom, Harry.”

“What about her?”

“She’s so good with Pat,” Gina choked. “It just comes so easily to her. I’ll never be like her. She’s so patient, so kind. I told her that I sometimes feel like I’m going crazy—at home all day with nobody to talk to but a little boy.” She looked up at me, her eyes brimming. “I don’t think she even understood what I was talking about.”

Thank Christ for that. For a moment there I thought she knew everything.

“You’re the best mother in the world,” I said, taking her in my arms. And I meant it.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “You want me to be. And I want to be, I really do. But just wanting something doesn’t make it true.”

She cried some more, although her sobs had lost that desperate edge. It happened sometimes, this crying, and I never knew what might start it off. To me it always looked as though she was crying about nothing. Not a good mother? I mean, what was all that about? Gina was a brilliant mother. And if she was feeling a bit isolated during the day, she could give me a call at work. My secretary would always take a message. Or there was an answering machine on my cell phone. How could she ever be lonely? I just didn’t get it.

I cuddled her until the tears were gone and then I went downstairs to make us some coffee. There were about a million messages on the machine. The world was going crazy about Marty. But I wasn’t too worried about the newspapers and the station.

I had heard somewhere that a problem at work is like a plane crash that you can walk away from. It’s not like your home life, where you can’t get away from your problems, no matter how far you run.

Every father is a hero to his son. At least when they are too small to know any better.

Pat thinks I can do anything right now. He thinks I can make the world bend to my will—just like Han Solo or Indiana Jones. But I know that one day soon Pat will work out that there are a few differences between Harrison Ford and his old dad. And when he realizes that I don’t actually own a bull whip or a light saber, he will never look at me in quite the same way again.

But before they grow out of it, all sons think their dad is a hero. It was a bit different with me and my dad. Because my father really was a hero. He had a medal to prove it and everything.

If you saw him in his garden or in his car, you would think he was just another suburban dad. But in a drawer of the living room of the house where I grew up there was a Distinguished Service Medal that he had won during the war. I spent my childhood pretending to be a hero. My dad was the real thing.

The DSM—that’s important. Only the Victoria Cross is higher, and usually you have to die before they give you that. If you saw my dad in a pub or on the street, you would think you knew all about him, just by looking at his corny clothes or his balding head or his family saloon or his choice of newspaper. You would think that you knew him. And you would be dead wrong.

I picked up the phone. I could ignore all the messages from the station and the papers. But I had to call my parents.

My old man answered the phone. That was unusual. He couldn’t stand the phone. He would only pick it up if my mom was nowhere near it or if he happened to be passing on his way from Gardener’s World to the garden.

“Dad? It’s me.”

“I’ll get your mother.”

He was gruff and formal on the phone, as if he had never got used to using one. As if we had never met. As if I was trying to sell him something he didn’t want.

“Dad? Did you see the show last night?”

I knew he had seen it. They always watched my show.

There was a pause.

“Quite a performance,” my father said.

I knew he would have hated it all—the swearing, the violence, the politics. I could even hear him bitching about the commercials. But I wanted him to tell me that it didn’t matter. That I was forgiven.

“That’s live television, Dad,” I said with a forced laugh. “You never know what’s going to happen.”

The old man grunted.

“It’s not really my scene,” he said.

At some point in the nineties, my father had started using the vernacular of the sixties.

His speech was peppered with “no ways” and “not my scenes.” No doubt in another thirty years he would be collecting his pension and hobbling about in a walker while proclaiming that he was “cool.” But by then the world wouldn’t know what he was going on about.

“Anyway,” I said. “There’s no need to worry. Everything’s under control.”

“Worried? I’m not worried,” he said.

The silence hummed between us. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know how to bridge the gap between our separate worlds. I didn’t know where to start.

“I’ll get your mother.”

While he went to get my mom, Pat wandered into the room. He was in his pajamas, his mass of dirty yellow hair sticking up, those eyes from Tiffany still puffy with sleep. I held out my arms to him, realizing with a stab of pain how much I loved him. He walked straight past me and over to the video machine.

“Pat? Come here, darling.”

He reluctantly came over to me, clutching a tape of
Return
of
the
Jedi
. I pulled him onto my lap. He had that sweet, musty smell that kids have when they have just got up. He yawned wide as I kissed him on the cheek. His skin was brand new. Freshly minted. The softest thing in the world.

And he still looked like the most beautiful thing in the world to me, like a little blond angel who had dropped off a cloud on his way to the celestial video shop.

Was he really that pretty? Or was that just my parental gene kicking in? Does every child in the world look like that to his parent? I still don’t know.

“Did you have a nice time at Nanny and Granddad’s house?” I said.

He thought about it for a moment.

“They don’t have any good films,” he said.

“What kind of films do they have?”

“Stupid ones. Just with…pictures.”

“You mean cartoons?”

“Yeah. Just pictures. For babies.”

I was indignant.

“Pat, they’re not for babies. You don’t like Dumbo? The elephant with the big ears? The poor little elephant who everyone makes fun of?”

“Dumbo’s stupid.”

“Dumbo’s great! What’s wrong with Dumbo? Jesus Christ, I grew up with Dumbo!”

I was going to give him a lecture about the genius of Walt Disney and the glory of animation and the magic of childhood, but my mom came on the line.

“Harry? We were so worried. What on earth’s going to happen? Will you lose your job?”

“Mom, I’m not going to lose my job. What happened last night—that’s what we call good television.”

“Really, dear? I thought you once told me that it was good television if the guest attacked the host. I didn’t know it worked the other way ’round.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said, although she had a point. All the talk show punch-ups I could remember involved the presenter getting twatted. And not the other way around. “They’re giving me a new contract soon. Don’t worry, Mom—we don’t have to send Pat up a chimney just yet.”

“And what’s wrong with Gina? She seems so—I don’t know—down.”

“Gina’s fine,” I said. “What’s Gina got to be down about?”

After I’d hung up, Pat beetled over to the video machine and stuffed in
Return
of
the
Jedi
. The film began where he had left it—Princess Leia dressed as a slave girl at the feet of Jabba the Hutt. Drool slipped from Jabba’s filthy lips as he considered his nubile concubine. My four-year-old son watched the scene impassively. This couldn’t be good for him, could it?

“Why don’t we have a game?” I suggested.

His face brightened.

“Okay!”

“What do you want to play?”

“
Star Wars
.”

Grinning from ear to ear, he hauled his favorite toy box in from his bedroom and emptied its contents on the carpet. Out spilled all the things that made George Lucas famous. I sat on the floor with Pat while he carefully maneuvered Han, Luke, Chewie, and the two ’droids around his gray plastic Millennium Falcon.

“Princess Leia is being held captured on the Death Star,” Pat said.

“Captive,” I said. “She’s being held captive.”

“Being held captured,” he said. “We have to rescue her, Daddy.”

“Okay.”

I sat playing with my son for a while, something I knew I didn’t do nearly enough. Then after about five or ten minutes I decided I had better get in to work. It was going to be a long day.

Pat was disappointed that I was cutting our game short, but he cheered up when I switched his video of Princess Leia as a beautiful slave girl back on. He really liked that bit.

***

We were all over the papers.

They saw the Cliff incident as symptomatic of a medium in terminal decline, desperate for cheap sensation in a world of visual overload and limited attention spans. The tabloids were going crazy about the blood and bad language.

All of them were calling for the head of Marty Mann. I was going to call him from the car, but I remembered that I had lent Gina my mobile phone. I hate those things.

Marty’s company—Mad Mann Productions—had a floor in a building on Notting Hill Gate, a large open-plan office where self-consciously casual young people in their twenties worked on
The
Marty
Mann
Show
or spent months planning future Marty Mann projects. The office was currently working on a game show for clever people, an alternative travel program, a scuba diving series that would allow Marty to spend six months in the Maldives, and lots of other ideas that would almost certainly never actually happen.

We called it development. The outside world would call it farting around.

Only me and Marty had offices at Mad Mann. Actually they were more like little private cubby holes, full of tapes and shooting scripts and a few VCRs. Siobhan was waiting for me in mine.

She had never been in my room before. We sort of blushed at each other. Why is it so easy to talk to someone before you go to bed with them for the first time and then suddenly so difficult?

“You should have woken me up before you left,” she said.

“I was going to,” I said. “But you looked so…”

“Peaceful?”

“Knackered.”

She laughed. “Well, it was a bad night. The only good thing about it was you.”

“Listen, Siobhan—”

“It’s okay, Harry. I know. I’m not going to see you again, am I? Not like last night, I mean. You don’t have to pretend. You don’t have to say anything that isn’t true. I know you’re married.”

“You’re a great girl, Siobhan. You really are.”

And I meant it.

“But you love your wife. I know, I know. Don’t worry. I would prefer to hear it now than six months down the line. I would rather get it over with before I really start to like you. At least you’re not like some of them. You didn’t tell me that your wife doesn’t understand you. You didn’t tell me that you’re probably going to break up. You didn’t spend months sneaking out of the house to phone me. You’re not a stinking hypocrite.”

Not a hypocrite? I spent last night with you and I’ll spend tonight with my wife. Surely a hypocrite is exactly what I am.

“You’re no good at all this, Harry. That’s what I like about you. Believe me, there are not many around like you. I know. The last one—Jesus. I really thought he was going to leave his wife and we were actually going to get married. That’s how stupid I am.”

“You’re not stupid,” I said, putting my arms around her. We held each other tight, with real feeling. Now that we were splitting up we were getting on brilliantly.

Then she started to get choked up about how difficult it is to find a good man while I thought to myself—well, that’s a relief. We aren’t going to star in a remake of
Fatal
Attraction
after all.

I knew I was getting off lightly. Siobhan was going to let me go without pouring acid on my MGF or putting our pet rabbit in a pot. Not that we had a rabbit. But after the relief had subsided I was surprised to find that I felt a little hurt. Was it so easy to say good-bye to me?

“This always happens to me,” Siobhan laughed, although her eyes were all wet and shining. “I always pick the ones that have already been picked. Your wife is a lucky woman. As I believe I said on that message I left you.”

“What message?”

“The message on your cell phone.”

“My cell phone?”

“I left a message on your phone,” Siobhan said, drying her eyes with the back of her hand. “Didn’t you get it?”