by Tony Parsons
There’s Yoda, the wise old teacher who has good advice coming out of his pointy green ears. And then there’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, who combines homespun homilies with some old-fashioned tough love.
And finally there’s Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of the Sith, who is probably more in keeping with the spirit of our time—an absent father, a neglectful dad, a selfish old man who puts his own wishes—in Mr. Vader’s case, a desire to conquer the universe—before any parental responsibility.
My old man was definitely the Obi-Wan Kenobi type. And that’s the kind of father I wanted to be too.
But I fell asleep on the sofa surrounded by the want ads, suspecting that I would always be a lot more like the man in the black hat, a father with not enough patience, not enough time, forever lost to the dark side.
fourteen
“I know there’s been a few problems at home,” the nursery teacher said, making it sound as though the dishwasher was playing up, making it sound as though I could just pick up the Yellow Pages and sort out my life. “And believe me,” she said, “everyone at Canonbury Cubs is sympathetic.”
And it was true. The teachers at Canonbury Cubs always made a big fuss of Pat when I delivered him in the morning. As the blood drained from his face yet again, as his bottom lip started to quiver and those huge blue eyes filled up at the prospect of being taken away from me for another day, they really couldn’t have been kinder.
But ultimately he wasn’t their problem. And no matter how kind they were, they couldn’t mend the cracks that were showing in his life.
Unless it was to be with my fun mad parents, Pat didn’t like being separated from me. There was high drama when we parted at the gate of Canonbury Cubs every morning and then I went home to pace the floor for hours, fretting about how he was doing, while back at the nursery poor old Pat was asking the teachers how long before he could go home and crying all over his finger paintings.
Nursery school wasn’t working. So amid their concerned talk about possibly finding a child psychologist and time healing all wounds, Pat dropped out.
As the other kids started work on their Plasticine worms, I took Pat’s hand and led him out of that rainbow-colored basement for the last time. He cheered up immediately, far too happy and relieved to feel like any kind of misfit. The teachers brightly waved good-bye. The little children looked up briefly and then returned to their innocent chores.
And I imagined my son the nursery school dropout returning to the gates of Canonbury Cubs in ten years’ time, just to sneer and leer and sell them all crack.
***
The job seemed perfect.
The station wanted to build a show around this young Irish comedian who was getting too big to do the clubs but who was not quite big enough to do beer commercials.
He didn’t actually do anything as old-fashioned as tell jokes, but he had wowed them up at the Edinburgh Festival with an act built completely around his relationship with the audience.
Instead of telling gags, he spoke to the crowd, relying on intelligent heckling and his Celtic charm to pull him through. He seemed born to host a talk show. Unlike Marty and every other host, he wouldn’t be dependent on celebrities revealing themselves or members of the public disgracing themselves. He could even write his own scripts. At least that was the theory. They just needed an experienced producer.
“We’re very excited to see you here,” said the woman sitting opposite me. She was the station’s commissioning editor, a small woman in her middle thirties with the power to change your life. The two men in glasses on either side of her—the show’s series producer and the series editor—smiled in agreement. I smiled back at them. I was excited too.
This show was just what I needed to turn my world around. The money was better than anything I ever got working for Marty Mann because now I was coming from another TV show instead of some flyblown outpost of radio. But although it would be a relief not to worry about meeting the mortgage and the payments on my car, this wasn’t about the money.
I had realized how much I missed going to an office every day. I missed the phones, the meetings, the comforting rituals of the working week. I missed having a desk. I even missed the woman who came around with sandwiches and coffee. I was tired of staying at home cooking meals for my son that he couldn’t eat. I was sick of feeling as if life was happening somewhere else. I wanted to go back to work.
“Your record with Marty Mann speaks for itself,” the commissioning editor said. “Not many radio shows can be made to work on television.”
“Well, Marty’s a brilliant broadcaster,” I said. The ungrateful little shitbag. May he rot in hell. “He made it easy for me.”
“You’re very kind to him,” the series editor said.
“Marty’s a great guy,” I said. The treacherous little bastard. “I love him.” My new show’s going to blow you out of the water, Marty. Forget the diet. Forget the personal trainer. You’re going back to local radio, pal.
“We hope that you can have the same relationship with the presenter of this show,” the woman said. “Eamon’s a talented young man, but he is not going to get through a nine-week run without someone of your experience behind him. That’s why we would like to offer you the job.”
I could see the blissful, crowded weeks stretching out ahead of me.
I could imagine the script meetings at the start of the week, the minor triumphs and disasters as guests dropped out and came in, the shooting script coming together, the nerves and screw-ups of studio rehearsal, the lights, cameras, and adrenaline of doing the show, and finally the indescribable relief that it was all over for seven more days. And, always, the perfect excuse to avoid doing anything that I didn’t want to do—I’m too busy at work, I’m too busy at work, I’m too busy at work.
We all stood up and shook hands, and they came with me out into the main office where Pat was waiting. He was sitting on a desk being fussed over by a couple of researchers who stroked his hair, touched his cheek, and gazed with wonder into his eyes, shocked and charmed by the sheer dazzling newness of him. You didn’t get many four-year-olds in an office like this.
I had been a bit worried about bringing Pat with me. Apart from the possibility of him refusing to be left outside the interview room, I didn’t want to rub their noses in the fact that I was currently playing the single parent. How could they hire a man who had to lug his family around with him? How could they give a producer’s job to a man who couldn’t even organize a babysitter?
I needn’t have worried. They seemed surprised but touched that I had brought my boy to a job interview. And Pat was at his most charming and talkative, happily filling the researchers in on all the gory details of his parents’ separation.
“Yes, my mommy is in Japan where they drive on the left side of the road like us. She’s going to get me, yes. And I live with my daddy, but at weekends, I sometimes stay with my nan and granddad. My mommy still loves me, but now she only likes my dad.”
His face lit up when he saw me, and he jumped down off the desk, running to my arms and kissing me on the cheek with that fierceness that he had learned from Gina.
And as I held him and all those television people grinned at us and each other, I glimpsed the reality of my new brilliant career—the weekends spent writing a script, the meetings that started early and finished late, the hours and hours in a studio chilled to near freezing point to stop beads of sweat forming on the presenter’s forehead—and I knew that I would not be taking this job.
They liked the single father and son routine when it had a strictly limited run.
But they wouldn’t like it when they saw me leaving at six every night to make Pat’s fish fingers.
They wouldn’t like it at all.
fifteen
I called Gina when Pat was staying overnight with my mom and dad. I had realized that I needed to talk to her. Really talk to her.
Not just shout and whine and threaten. Tell her what was on my mind. Let her know what I was thinking.
“Come home,” I said. “I love you.”
“How can you love someone—really love them—and sleep with someone else?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. But it was easy.”
“Well, forgiving isn’t quite so easy, okay?”
“Christ, you really want to see me crawl, don’t you?”
“It’s not about you, Harry. It’s about me.”
“What about our life together? We have a life together, don’t we? How can you throw all that away because of one mistake?”
“I didn’t throw it away. You did.”
“Don’t you love me anymore?”
“Of course I love you, you stupid bastard. But I’m not in love with you.”
“Wait a minute. You love me but you’re not in love with me?”
“You hurt me too much. And you’ll do it again. And next time you won’t feel quite so much guilt. Next time you’ll be able to justify it to yourself. Then one day you’ll meet someone you really like. Someone you love. And that’s when you’ll leave me.”
“Never.”
“That’s the way it works, Harry. I saw it all with my parents.”
“You love me, but you’re not in love with me? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Love is what’s left when being in love has gone, okay? It’s when you care about someone and you hope they’re happy, but you’re not under any illusions about them. Maybe that kind of love is not exciting and passionate and all those things that fade with time. All those things that you’re so keen on. But in the end it’s the only kind of love that really matters.”
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re going on about,” I said.
“And that’s exactly your problem,” she told me.
“Forget Japan,” I said. “Come home. You’re still my wife, Gina.”
“I’m seeing someone,” she said, and I felt like a hypochondriac who has finally had his terminal disease confirmed.
I wasn’t surprised. I had spent so long being terrified that finally having my worst fears realized brought a kind of bleak relief.
I had been expecting it—dreading it—ever since she had walked out the door. In a way I was glad it had happened, because now I didn’t have to worry about when it was going to happen. And I wasn’t so stupid that I thought I had the right to be outraged. But I still hadn’t worked out what to do with our wedding photographs. What are you meant to do with the wedding photographs after you split up?
“Funny old expression, isn’t it?” I said. “Seeing someone, I mean. It sounds like you’re checking them out. Observing them. Just looking. But that’s exactly what you’re not doing. Just looking, I mean. When you’re seeing someone, well, it’s gone way beyond the just looking stage. How serious is it?”
“I don’t know. How do you tell? He’s married.”
“Fuck me.”
“But it’s not—apparently it hasn’t been good for ages. They’re semi-separated.”
“Is that what he told you? Semi-separated? And you believed him, did you? Semi-separated. That’s a suitably vague way of putting it. I haven’t heard that one before. Semi-separated. That’s very good. That just about covers any eventuality. That should allow him to string both of you along nicely. That allows him to keep the little wife at home making sushi while he sneaks off with you to the nearest love hotel.”
“Oh, Harry. The least you could do is wish me well.”
“Who is he? Some Japanese salary man who gets his kicks by sleeping with Western women? You can’t trust the Japanese, Gina. You think you’re the big expert, but you don’t know them at all. They don’t have the same value system as you and me. The Japanese are a cunning, double-dealing race.”
“He’s American.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so? That’s even worse.”
“But you wouldn’t like anyone I got involved with, would you, Harry? He could be an Eskimo and you would say—‘Ooh, Eskimos, Gina. Cold hands, cold heart. Steer well clear of Eskimos, Gina.’”
“I just don’t understand why you’ve got this thing about foreigners.”
“Perhaps because I tried loving someone from my own country. And he broke my heart.”
It took me a moment to realize that she was talking about me.
“Does he know you’ve got a kid?”
“Of course he knows. Do you think I would hide that from anyone?”
“And how does he feel about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is he interested in Pat? Is he worried about the boy? Does he care about his well-being? Or does he just want to fuck his mother?”
“If you’re going to talk like that, Harry, I’m going to hang up.”
“How else am I meant to put it?”
“We haven’t talked about the future. We haven’t got that far.”
“Let me know when you get that far.”
“I will. But please don’t use Pat as a way to punish me.”
Is that what I was doing? I couldn’t tell where my genuine concern ended and my genuine jealousy began.
Pat was one of the reasons I wanted to see Gina’s boyfriend dead in a car crash. But I knew he wasn’t the only reason. Maybe he wasn’t even the main reason.
“Just don’t try to poison my son against me,” I said.
“What are you talking about, Harry?”
“Pat tells everyone he meets that you said you love him but you only like me.”
She sighed.
“That’s not what I said. I told him exactly what I’ve just told you. I told him that I still loved you both, but unfortunately and sadly I was no longer in love with you.”
“I still don’t know what that means.”
“It means that I’m glad for the years we spent together. But you hurt me so much that I can never forgive you or trust you again. And I think it means that you’re no longer the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. You’re too much like any other man. Too much like my father.”
“It’s not my fault that your old man walked out on you and your mom.”
“But you were my chance to get over all that. And you messed it up. You left me too.”
“Come on. It was one night, Gina. How many times are we going to have this conversation?”
“Until you understand the way I feel. If you can do it once, you can do it a thousand times. That’s the first law of fucking around. You broke my trust and I just don’t know how to mend it. And that hurts me too, Harry. I wasn’t trying to turn Pat against you. I was just trying to explain the situation to him. How do you explain it?”
“I can’t explain it. Not even to myself.”
“You should try. Because if you don’t understand what happened to us, you’re never going to be happy with anyone.”
“You explain it to me.”
She sighed. You could hear her sighing all the way from Tokyo.
“We had a marriage that I thought was working but you thought was becoming routine. You’re a typical romantic, Harry. A relationship doesn’t measure up to your pathetic and unrealistic fantasy so you smash it up. You ruin everything. And then you’ve got the nerve to act like the injured party.”
“Who’s providing the armchair psychology? Your Yank boyfriend?”
“I’ve discussed what happened with Richard.”
“Richard? Is that his name? Richard. Hah! Jesus Christ.”
“Richard is a perfectly ordinary name. It’s certainly no stranger than Harry.”
“Richard. Rich. Dicky. Dick. Old Richard Dicky-dickhead.”
“Sometimes I look at you and Pat, and I honestly can’t tell which one is the four-year-old.”
“It’s easy. I�
�m the one who can pee without getting anything on the floor.”
“Blame yourself for all this,” she said, just before she hung up. “It happened because you didn’t appreciate what you had.”
That wasn’t true. I was smart enough to know what I had. But too dumb to know how to keep it.
***
Like any couple living under the same roof, we soon developed our daily rituals.
Just after daybreak, Pat would stagger bleary-eyed into my bedroom, asking me if it was time to get up. I would tell him that it was still the middle of the bloody night and he would climb into bed with me, immediately falling asleep in the spot where Gina used to sleep, throwing his arms and legs about in his wild, childish dreams until eventually I would give up trying to get anymore rest and get up.
I would be reading the papers in the kitchen when Pat dragged himself out of bed, and I would immediately hear him sneak into the living room and turn on the video.
Now that Pat was out of nursery school and I was out of a job, we could take our time getting ready. But I was still reluctant to let him do exactly what he wanted to do, and what he wanted to do was watch videos all day long. So I would go and turn the video off and escort him to the kitchen, where he would toy with a bowl of Coco Pops until I gave him his freedom.
After we were washed and dressed, I would take him over the park on his bike. It was called Bluebell, and it still had the training wheels on. Pat and I sometimes discussed removing them and trying to ride it with just two wheels. But it seemed like an impossible leap forward to both of us. Knowing when the time was right to remove a bike’s training wheels was the kind of thing that Gina was good at.
In the afternoons my mother would usually collect Pat and this would give me a chance to do some shopping, clean up the house, worry about money, pace the floor, and imagine Gina moaning with pleasure in the bed of another man.
