Man and Boy (8 page)

“Don’t want to go,” he muttered. “Want to stay home.”

“But you can’t stay home, baby,” I said, about to use the great parental cop-out and tell him that Daddy had to go to work. But of course Daddy didn’t have a job anymore. Daddy could stay in bed all day and still not be late for work.

One of the teachers came to collect him, looking at me meaningfully as she gently took his hand. It wasn’t the first time that he had been reluctant to leave me. In the week since Gina had been gone, he didn’t like to let me out of his sight.

With my dad promising him unimaginable fun and games at the end of the day, we watched Pat go, holding on to the teacher’s hand, his blue eyes swimming in tears, his bottom lip starting to twitch.

He would probably make it to the little classroom without cracking. They might even get his coat off. But by the time the Plasticine worms were unveiled he would lose it, inconsolable, sobbing his heart out while the other kids stared at him or impassively went about their four-year-old business. We wouldn’t have to look at any of that.

“I remember when you were that age,” my dad said as we walked back to the car. “I took you to the park in the week between Christmas and the New Year. Bloody freezing, it was. You had your little sleigh with you. I had to drag you on it all the way from home. And at the park we watched the ducks trying to land on the frozen lake. They just kept coming in to land and—boom! Sliding on their bums across the ice. And you just laughed fit to burst. Laughed and laughed, you did. We must have watched them for hours. Do you remember that?”

“Dad?”

“What?”

“I don’t know if I can do it, Dad.”

“Do what?”

“I don’t know if I can look after Pat alone. I don’t know if I’m up to it. I told Gina I could do it. But I don’t know if I can.”

He turned on me, eyes blazing, and for a moment I thought that he was going to hit me. He had never laid a finger on me in my life. But there’s always a first time.

“Don’t know if you can do it?” he said. “Don’t know if you can do it? You have to do it.”

It was easy for him to say. His youth might have been marred by the efforts of the German army to murder him, but at least in his day a father’s role was set in stone. He always knew exactly what was expected of him.

My dad was a brilliant father and—here’s the killer—he didn’t even have to be there to be a brilliant father. Wait until your father gets home was enough to get me to behave. His name just had to be evoked by my mother and suddenly I understood all I needed to know about being a good boy.
Wait
until
your
father
gets
home
, she told me. And the mere mention of my father was enough to make everything in the universe fall into place.

You didn’t hear that threat so much today. How many women actually say,
Wait
until
your
father
gets
home
now? Not many. Because these days some fathers never come home. And some fathers are home all the time.

But I saw he was right. I might not do it as well as he had—I couldn’t imagine Pat ever looking at me the way I looked at my old man—but I had to do it as well as I could. And I did remember the ducks trying to land on the frozen lake. Of course I remembered the ducks. I remembered them well.

***

Apart from the low wages, unsociable hours, and lack of standard employee benefits such as medical insurance, probably the worst thing about being a waitress is that in the course of her work she has to deal with a lot of creeps.

Like a little apron and a notepad, creeps come with the job. Men who want to talk to her, men who ask her for her number, men who just refuse to leave her alone. Creeps, the lot of them.

Creeps from building sites, creeps from office blocks, creeps in business suits, creeps with their crack displayed above the back of their jeans, creeps of every kind—the ones who think they’re funny, the ones who think they’re God’s gift, the ones who think that just because she brings them the soup of the day, they’ve crossed the dating barrier.

She was serving a table of creeps when I took my seat at the back of the café. One creep—a business creep rather than a building site creep—was leering up at her while his creep friends—all pin stripes, hair gel, and mobile phones—smiled with admiration at his creepy cheek.

“What’s your name?”

She shook her head. “Now why do you need to know my name?”

“I suppose it’s something typically southern, is it? Peggy-Sue? Becky-Lou?”

“It’s certainly not.”

“Billie-Joe? Mary-Beth?”

“Listen, are you going to order or what?”

“What time do you get off?”

“Did you ever date a waitress?”

“No.”

“Waitresses get off late.”

“You like being a waitress? Do you like being a service executive in the catering industry?”

That got a big laugh from all the creeps that thought they looked pretty cool talking about nothing on a cell phone in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m not laughing at you.”

“Long hours, lousy pay. That’s what being a waitress is like. And plenty of assholes. But enough about you.” She tossed the menu on the table. “You think about it for a while.”

The business creep blushed and grinned, trying to tough it out as she walked away. His creepy friends were laughing, but they were not quite as hearty as before.

She came over to me. And I still didn’t know her name.

“Where’s your boy today?”

“He’s at nursery school.” I held out my hand. “Harry Silver.”

She looked at me for a moment and then she smiled. I had never seen a smile like it. Her face lit up the room. It just shone.

“Cyd Mason,” she said, shaking my hand. It was a very soft handshake. It’s only men that try to break your bones when you shake their hand. It’s only creeps. “Pleased to meet you, Harry.”

“As in Sid Vicious?”

“As in Cyd Charisse. You probably never even heard of Cyd Charisse, did you?”

“She danced with Fred Astaire in
Paris
in
Silk
Stockings
. She had a haircut like the one you’ve got now. What’s that haircut called?”

“A China chop.”

“A China chop, is it. Yeah, Cyd Charisse. I know her. She was probably the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“That’s Cyd.” She was impressed. I could tell. “My mother was crazy about all those old MGM movies.”

I caught a glimpse of her childhood, saw her sitting at the age of ten in front of the TV in some little apartment, the air conditioning turned up to full blast and her mother getting all choked up as Fred twirled Cyd across the Left Bank. No wonder she had grown up with a warped view of romance. No wonder she had followed some creep to London.

“Can I tell you about the specials?” she said.

She was really nice and I felt like talking to her about Houston and MGM musicals and what had happened between her and the man who brought her to London. But instead I kept my eyes on my pasta and my mouth shut.

Because I didn’t want either of us to start thinking that I was just another creep.

***

Gina was gone, and she was everywhere. The house was full of CDs I would never listen to (sentimental soul music about love lost and found), books I would never read (women struggling to find themselves in a world full of rotten men), and clothes I would never wear (skimpy Victoria’s Secret underwear).

And Japan. Lots of books about Japan. All the classic texts that she had urged me to read—
Black
Rain
,
Pink
Samurai
,
Barefoot
Gen
,
Memories
of
Silk
and
Straw
—and a battered old copy of
Snow
Country
, the one I had actually read, the love story she said I had to read if I was ever going to understand. Gina’s things, and they chewed up my heart every time I saw them.

They had to go.

I felt bad about throwing it all out, but then if someone leaves you, they really should take their stuff with them. Because every time I saw one of her Luther Vandross records or Margaret Atwood novels or books about Hiroshima, I felt all the choking grief rise up inside me again. And in the end I just couldn’t stand it anymore.

Gina, I thought, with her dreams of undying love and hard-won independence, Gina who could happily accommodate Naomi Wolf’s steely, postfeminist thoughts and Whitney Houston’s sweet nothings.

That was my Gina all right.

So I got to work, stuffing everything that she had left behind into garbage bags. The first one was quickly full—did the woman never throw anything away?—so I went back into the kitchen and got an entire roll of heavy-duty bin liners.

When I had finished removing all her paperbacks, the book shelves looked like a mouth full of broken teeth. Throwing away her clothes was much easier because there was no sorting involved. Soon her side of our wardrobe was empty apart from moth balls and wire coat hangers.

I felt better already.

Starting to sweat hard, I prowled the house mopping up what was left of her presence. There were all the Japanese prints from her single days. A painting she had bought on our holiday to Antigua when Pat was a baby. A pink razor on the edge of the bath. A couple of Gong Li videos. And a photograph of our wedding day with her looking like the most beautiful girl in the world and me grinning like a happy, dopey bastard who never believed he could get so lucky.

All trash now.

Finally I looked in the laundry basket. Among Pat’s
Star Wars
pajamas and my faded Calvins there was the old Gap T-shirt that Gina liked to sleep in. I sat on the bottom of the stairs holding that T-shirt for a while, wondering what she was sleeping in tonight. And then I threw it into the last rubbish sack.

It’s amazing how quickly you can remove the evidence of someone’s life from a house. It takes so long to put your mark on a home, and so little time to wipe it away.

But then I spent another few hours fishing it all out of the garbage and carefully returning the clothes, the records, the books, the prints, and everything else to exactly where I had found them.

Because I missed her. I missed her like mad.

And I wanted all her things to be just as she had left them, all ready and waiting for her in case she ever felt like coming back home.

A bit of a panic attack in the supermarket.

Nothing serious, nothing serious. Just the sudden realization that a man like me, whose little family had broken into tiny pieces, was daring to do his shopping at the feeding trough of the happy family. I felt like an impostor.

Being surrounded by all the grotesques of aisle 8 should have made me feel better—the women with tattoos, the men with earrings, the little children dressed like adults, the adults dressed like adolescents—but they didn’t.

I was shaking and sweating at the checkout, wanting it to be over with, wanting to be out of there, my breath coming in short, shallow gasps, and by the time the semi-comatose teen behind the counter handed me my change while idly scratching at his nose ring, I felt on the very edge of screaming or weeping or doing it all at once.

I burst out of the supermarket into the open air and, just at that moment, the bag containing dinner for Pat, the cat, and me lost its handle and my shopping hemorrhaged into the street.

Gina’s supermarket bags never broke. We had done our weekly shopping together every Saturday for seven years, and I never once saw a carrier bag that she had loaded spring a leak. But maybe Gina didn’t buy as many microwave meals as me. They weigh a ton, those things.

Suddenly there were cat tins and ready-in-one-minute meals everywhere, under the wheels of shopping carts, at the feet of a homeless young man selling the
Big
Issue
and skittering toward the road. I was on my hands and knees picking up a box that promised, “A Taste of Tuscany” when they saw me.

“Harry?”

It was Marty. And there was a girl with him. Siobhan. Marty and Siobhan. Holding hands!

The shock of seeing them together canceled out any embarrassment I felt at being caught with my shopping scattered all over the pavement. But only for a moment. Then my face started burning, burning, burning.

It had been a while since I had seen them, although not that long. I had been out for just over a month. But my producer’s mind didn’t actually think in terms of weeks and months. Five shows, I thought. They have done five shows without me.

They looked good. Even Marty, the ugly little creep. They were both wearing dark glasses and white trousers. Siobhan was carrying a supermarket bag containing a French loaf and a bottle of something dry, white, and expensive. There might even have been a sliver of pâté in there too. But their bag wasn’t about to break. Two confident professionals doing a little light shopping before returning to their glamorous, high-powered careers, they didn’t look like the kind of people who had to worry about stocking up on cat food.

“Here, let me help you,” Siobhan said, bending down to catch a can of beef and heart Whiskers as it rolled toward the gutter.

Marty had the decency to look a little ashamed, but Siobhan seemed glad to see me, if a bit surprised to find me groveling around on the pavement picking up cans of cat food, toilet rolls, and microwave dinners rather than picking up an Oscar.

“So—what are you doing these days?” she said.

“Oh—you know,” I said.

Pacing up and down my living room for hours every day—“Like a caged tiger,” my mom reckoned—after I dropped Pat off at nursery school, worried sick about how he was doing, worried sick that he might be crying again. And waiting for Gina to phone at four o’clock sharp every afternoon—midnight on her side of the world—although I always handed the receiver straight to Pat, because I knew that he was the only reason she was calling.

And what else? Talking to myself. Drinking too much, not eating enough, wondering how my life ever got so fucked up. That’s what I’m doing these days.

“Still considering my options,” I said. “How’s the show?”

“Better than ever,” Marty said. A bit defiant.

“Good,” Siobhan said, pleased but neutral, as though she didn’t think the old show’s fate would really concern a hot shot such as myself. “Ratings are slightly up.”

I felt like puking.

“That’s great,” I smiled.

“Well—we better move,” Marty said. It wasn’t just me. A few shoppers had started to smirk and point. Was it really him?

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “Got to run. Things to do.”

Siobhan grabbed me and planted a quick kiss on my cheek. It made me wish that I had shaved today. Or yesterday. Or the day before.

“See you around, Harry,” Marty said.

He held out his hand. No hard feelings. I went to shake it but he was holding a can of cat food. I took it from him.

“See you, Marty.”

Fucking bastards.

Fucking bastards the lot of you.

***

The phone rang when I was in the middle of bathing Pat. I left him in the tub—he could happily stay in there for hours, he was like a little fish—and went down the hall, picking up the phone with wet hands, expecting my mom. But there was a little transcontinental blip as the connection was made and suddenly Gina was in my ear.

“It’s me,” she said.

I looked at my watch—it was only twenty to four. She was early today.

“He’s in the bath.”

“Leave him. I’ll call back at the usual time. I just thought he might be around. How is he?”

“Fine,” I said. “Fine, fine, fine. You’re still there, are you?”

“Yes. I’m still here.”

“How’s it going?”

I could hear her taking a breath. Gina taking a breath on the other side of the world.

“It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be,” she said. “The economy is all screwed up. I mean, really screwed up. My company’s laying off locals so there’s not much job security for a
gaijin
whose Japanese is a bit rustier than she thought. But the work’s okay. Nothing I can’t handle. The people are kind. It’s everything else. Especially living in a place about the size of our kitchen.” She took another breath. “It’s not easy for me, Harry. Don’t think I’m having the time of my life.”

“So when are you coming home?”

“Who said I was coming home?”

“Come on, Gina. Forget all that stuff about finding yourself. This is all about punishing me.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing coming out here. But a few words from you and suddenly I know I did.”

“So you’re staying out there, are you? In your flat the size of our kitchen?”

“I’ll be back. But just to collect Pat. To bring him out here. I really want to make a go of it, Harry. I hope you can understand.”

“You’re kidding, Gina. Pat out there? I can’t even get him to eat beans on toast. I can just see him tucking into a plate of sprats on rice. And where’s he going to live? In your flat the size of our kitchen?”

“Christ, I wish I’d never mentioned the size of the bloody flat. I just can’t talk to you anymore.”

“Pat stays with me, okay?”

“For now,” she said. “That’s what we agreed.”

“I’m not handing him over until it’s the best thing for him. Not you. Him. That’s what I agree to, okay?”

Silence. And then a different voice.

“That’s for the lawyers to decide, Harry.”

“You tell your lawyer—Pat stays with me. You were the one who left. Tell him that.”

“And you tell your lawyer that you were the one who was fucking around.”

“I can’t—I don’t have a lawyer.”

“You should get one, Harry. If the thought of trying to steal my son from me ever crosses your mind, then get a very good lawyer. But you don’t mean it. We both know you can’t look after Pat permanently. You can’t even look after yourself. You just want to hurt me. Look—do you want to talk about it like adults? Or do you want to argue?”

“I want to argue.”

There was a sigh.

“Is Pat there?”

“No—he’s out having dinner with a few of his fast-set pals. Of course he’s here. He’s four years old. Where do you expect him to be? On a hot date with Naomi Campbell? I told you he’s in the bath. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“You told me. Can I talk to him?”

“Sure.”

“And Harry?”

“What?”

“Happy birthday.”

“That’s
tomorrow
,” I said angrily. “My birthday is
tomorrow
.”

“Where I am it’s almost tomorrow.”

“I’m not in Japan, Gina. I’m here.”

“Happy birthday anyway. For tomorrow.”

“Thanks.”

I got Pat from the bath, dried him down, and wrapped him in a towel. Then I knelt in front of him.

“Mommy wants to talk to you,” I said. “She’s on the phone.”

It was the same every day. There was a jolt of surprise in those blue eyes and then something that could have been either joy or relief. But by the time I gave him the receiver he looked more guarded.

“Hello?” he whispered.

I guess I was expecting bitter tears, angry recriminations, torrents of emotion. But Pat was always cool and composed, muttering one-word answers to Gina’s questions until he eventually handed me the phone.

“I don’t need to talk to Mommy anymore,” he said quietly.

He walked off to the living room, the towel still wrapped around him like a shawl, leaving a trail of small wet foot prints behind him.

“I’ll call him again tomorrow,” Gina told me, more upset than I had expected her to be, in fact so unraveled that I felt better than I had for days. “Is that okay, Harry?”

“Any time is fine,” I said, wanting to ask her how we had got to a place where we threatened each other with lawyers, how two people who had been so close could become a divorce court cliché.

Was it really all my fault? Or was it just random bad luck, like getting hit by a car or catching cancer? If we had loved each other so much, then why hadn’t it lasted? Was it really impossible for two people to stay together forever in the lousy modern world? And what was all of this going to do to our son?

I really wanted to know. But I couldn’t ask Gina any of that stuff. We were on opposite sides of the world.