by Tony Parsons
“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.
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.
five
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 g
ames 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, n
o matter how far you run.
six
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.”
