Man and Boy

by Tony Parsons

  Then we joined the laughing throng in their dinner jackets and evening dresses, and went inside to the awards ceremony.

  ***

  “And the best newcomer is…

  The luscious weather girl fumbled with the envelope.

  “…Eamon Fish.”

  Eamon stood up, drunk and grinning, looking more pleased than he would have wanted to with all the cameras watching, and he hugged me with real feeling as he walked past.

  “We did it,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “You did it. Go and get your award.”

  Over his shoulder I saw Marty Mann and Siobhan at another table—Marty in one of those bright waistcoats worn by people who think that wearing black tie is like smoking a pipe or wearing carpet slippers, Siobhan slim and cool in some white diaphanous number.

  She smiled. He gave me the thumbs up. Later, when all the awards had been handed out, they came across to our table.

  Although Marty was a bit drunk and a bit pissed off—there were no awards for him this year—they couldn’t have been more gracious.

  I introduced them to Cyd and to Eamon. If Marty remembered Cyd as the same woman who had once dropped a plate of pasta in his lap, he didn’t show it. He congratulated Eamon on his award. Siobhan congratulated Cyd on her dress.

  And Siobhan didn’t say, “And what do you do?”—she was too smart and sensitive ever to ask that question—so Cyd didn’t have to say, “Oh, I’m a waitress right now,” so Siobhan didn’t have to get embarrassed and neither did Cyd; they could just get on with each other in that easy, seemingly natural way that only women can manage. They began talking to each other about not knowing what to wear at these things and Marty put a conspiratorial arm around my shoulder. His face was far heavier than I remembered it. He had the leaden, vaguely disappointed air of a man who, after years of dreaming, had finally landed his own talk show only to discover that he couldn’t attract anyone who was worth talking to.

  “A word?” he said, crouching down by my side.

  Here it comes, I thought. Now he wants me back. Now he’s seen how well Eamon’s doing, he wants me back on the show.

  “I want you to do me a favor,” Marty said.

  “What’s that, Marty?”

  He leaned closer.

  “I want you to be my best man,” he said.

  Even Marty, I thought.

  Even Marty dreams of getting it right, of finding the one, of discovering the whole world in another human being. Just like everyone else.

  “Hey, Harry,” said Eamon, watching the weather girl cross the room, adjusting his weight as a ridge of high pressure passed through his underpants. “Guess who I’m shagging tonight?”

  Well, perhaps not quite everyone.

  ***

  There were too many lights on in the house. There were lights upstairs. There were lights downstairs. There were lights blazing everywhere at a time when there should have been just one faint glow coming from the living room.

  And there was music pouring out of my home—loud, booming bass lines and those skittering drum machines that sounded like the aural equivalent of a heart attack. New music. Terrible new music blasting from my stereo.

  “What’s going on?” I said, as if we had come to the wrong place, as if there had been some mistake.

  There was someone in the darkness of the small front garden. No, there were a few of them. A boy and a girl necking just outside the open front door. And another boy lurking by the dustbin, being sick all over his Tommy Hilfiger jacket and his YSL trousers.

  I went inside the house while Cyd paid the cab driver.

  It was a party. A teenage party. All over my home, there were youths in Polo gear shagging, drinking, dancing, and being sick. Especially being sick. There was another couple puking their stupid guts up in the back garden.

  In the living room Pat was in his pajamas swaying to the music at one end of the sofa while at the other end Sally was being groped by some fat boy. Pat grinned at me—isn’t this fun?—as I surveyed the damage—lager cans with their contents spilt on the parquet floor and cigarettes stubbed out on their rims, scraps of takeaway pizza smeared on the furniture and God knows what stains on the beds upstairs.

  There were maybe a dozen of them in all. But it felt like the Mongol Hordes had moved in. Worse than that—it was like one of those grotesque commercials for chips or soft drinks or chinos full of young people having the time of their life. Except that they were having the time of their life in my living room.

  “Sally,” I said. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “Harry,” she said, and there were tears of joy in her eyes. “It’s Steve.”

  She indicated the slack-jawed youth on top of her. He squinted at me with his cretinous porky eyes, eyes with nothing behind them but hormonal overload and nine cans of lager.

  “He ditched that old slut Yasmin McGinty,” Sally said. “He’s come back to me. Ain’t it fantastic?”

  “Are you crazy?” I said. “Are you crazy or stupid? Which is it, Sally?”

  “Oh, Harry,” she said, all disappointed. “I thought you would understand. You of all people.”

  The music suddenly died. Cyd stood there with the plug in her hands.

  “Time to clean up this mess,” she told the room. “Get rubbish sacks and cleaning stuff. Try looking under the sink.”

  Steve climbed off Sally, adjusting his monstrous trousers, sneering at the grown-ups who had crashed his party.

  “I’m out of here,” he said, as though he came from Beverly Hills instead of Muswell Hill.

  Cyd moved swiftly across the room and clasped his nose between her thumb and forefinger.

  “You’re out of here when I tell you, elephant boy,” she said, making him yelp as she lifted him up on his toes. “And it won’t be until you clean up this mess. Not until then, got it?”

  “Okay, okay!” he bleated, his fake American bravado melting in the face of the real thing.

  I took Pat up to bed, turfing out a couple mating in the bathroom, while Cyd organized the cleaning detail. By the time I had read Pat a story and got him to settle down, Sally and Steve and their spotty friends were meekly cleaning the floors and the tables.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” I asked her.

  “Texas,” she said.

  It turned out that they were quite useless at housework, just as I imagine they will be useless at everything else they attempt in their brainless, designer-labeled lives. Some of them were too sick to be much real use. The rest of them were too stupid.

  Steve squirted almost the entire contents of a bottle of lemon-scented, multisurface liquid cleaner on the floor and then spent an hour trying to remove the suds as it foamed and spumed like a car wash gone mad. Cyd and I ended up doing most of it ourselves.

  We kicked them out just after dawn. I kept Sally behind and stuck her in a mini-cab. She didn’t apologize. She was still angry at me for not understanding that the course of true love sometimes leaves stains on the furniture.

  “I hope you’re satisfied,” she said as she was leaving. “You ruined my chance with Steve, Harry. He’ll probably go back to Yasmin McGinty. That skank.”

  Cyd brought me a cup of coffee when we were finally alone.

  “Don’t you wish you were still young enough to know everything?” she smiled.

  I took her in my arms, feeling the green dress slide under my hands. I kissed her. She kissed me back. Then the telephone rang.

  “Sally,” I said. “Calling to give me another piece of her mind.”

  “She’ll have none left,” Cyd said.

  But it wasn’t Sally. It was Gina, but without the usual little transcontinental blip before she spoke. That’s how I knew immediately that Gina wasn’t in Japan anymore. This was a local call. She was back in town.

  �
�I just realized something,” Gina said. “This is the only telephone number in the whole world that I know by heart.”

  twenty-nine

  I arrived ten minutes early, but Gina was already there, sipping latte at a table for two at the rear of the café. She was a little thinner from all that sashimi and sushi in Shinjuku, and she was wearing clothes I had never seen her in before—some kind of tailored, two-piece business suit. A woman of the working world. She looked up and saw me, and I could tell she was still unmistakably Gina—the slightly goofy smile, the pale blue eyes—but a little bit older and far more serious than I could ever remember. The same woman and yet changed in ways that I couldn’t imagine.

  “Harry,” she said, standing up, and we smiled nervously at each other, wondering if the correct form was to kiss or to shake hands. Neither of them really seemed right. So what we did instead is that I patted her quickly on the arm and she flinched as if she had been given a mild electric shock. That seemed to get us over the awkward moment.

  “You look well,” she said, sitting down, smiling with a politeness that she had never bothered with in the old days.

  And so did she—in her perfect face you could see the girl she had been and the woman she was going to become. Some people grow into their good looks and others grow out of them. And then there are people like Gina, who start turning heads as a child and never stop. But like all the beautiful ones, Gina had always disliked excessive compliments, apparently assuming that they meant her worth was only skin deep. I guessed she still felt the same way.

  “You’re looking well too,” I said, not wanting to overdo it.

  “How’s Pat?”

  “He’s pretty good,” I laughed, and she laughed along with me, waiting for more. Except a waiter came and asked if he could get us anything, so we paused while we ordered another couple of lattes and when he had gone, we talked about our son.

  “A bit bigger now, I bet,” she said.

  “Everyone seems to think he’s really shooting up. Maybe I don’t notice it so much because I see him every day.”

  “Of course,” she said. “But I bet I’ll notice a difference. I mean, I haven’t seen him for a couple of months.”

  “Four months,” I said.

  “Surely it’s not that long,” she said

  “Since the summer. It’s four months, Gina. July to October. Work it out.”

  How could she imagine than it was only a couple of months? It was actually more than four. And it felt like far longer to me.

  “Whatever,” she said, a little testy. “Tell me about Pat. I mean, I speak to him every day—well, most days—but talking on the phone doesn’t give you a sense of how he’s grown.”

  What had changed? I looked around the café, trying to think what was different since Gina had gone away to Japan. And I was struck by the fact that the café hadn’t changed at all.

  It was one of those places that try to bring a touch of the Marais backstreets to the main drags of London—there was a big zinc bar, a blackboard with names of wine scrawled on, a rack of newspapers on big wooden poles, and a scattering of chairs and tables on the pavement outside. They even called their full English breakfast by something French.

  It was a fairly typical café in our neighborhood, and you might walk past it without even looking at it twice. But this place had meaning for us. Gina and I used to come here before Pat was born, back in the days when we were so close that we didn’t even feel the need to talk to one another. And you can’t get closer than that.

  “School’s going okay,” I said. “That’s changed. Nursery became a bit of a nightmare, but he’s made a good friend at school and that’s working well.”

  “Why was nursery a nightmare?” she said, looking all worried.

  “He didn’t like being left. It was just a phase he went through. A phase I thought might last until he was about eighteen.”

  “But he has made friends with a little boy at school?”

  “A little girl,” I said, and it seemed so strange to be talking about Cyd’s daughter to her. “Peggy.”

  “Peggy,” Gina said, trying it out.

  “She’s got an English dad,” I said. “And an American mom. From Houston.”

  “And is he still crazy about Star Wars?” she smiled. Gina wasn’t very interested in Peggy. “Is it still Luke Skywalker and Han Solo around the clock?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That hasn’t changed. But he’s started to like other stuff too.”

  “Other stuff?”

  “Well, he likes music,” I laughed. “He likes gangster rap. You know, where they are always boasting about how they are going to shoot you in the head with their piece.”

  Her face darkened.

  “He likes listening to this music, does he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you just let him, do you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I just let him.” I was a bit pissed off—she was acting as if I hadn’t thought about this, as if I was letting him watch snuff movies or something. “It’s just something he’s going through. It probably makes him feel tougher than he really is. Pat is a very sweet, gentle little kid, Gina. It doesn’t do any harm. I can’t see him getting involved in a drive-by shooting. He’s in bed every night by nine.”

  I could tell she didn’t want to argue with me.

  “What else?”

  “He lets me wash his hair. He washes himself in the bath. He never makes a fuss about going to bed. He can tie his own shoes. He can tell the time. And he’s started reading.”

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much Pat had grown over the last few months. Gina smiled with what looked like a combination of pride and regret. I was embarrassed for her. She had missed all that.

  “He sounds like a real little man,” she said.

  “You should see him in his tie.”

  “He wears a tie?”

  “To school. They brought in a uniform because some of the kids were turning up in Polo gear and all that designer stuff. They thought it was unhealthy. So he has to wear a shirt and tie.”

  “It must make him look really old.”

  It didn’t make him look old—dressing him up like a salary man actually made him look younger than ever. But I didn’t feel like explaining all that to Gina.

  “But what about you?” I said. “How long are you in town for?”

  “Oh, permanently,” she said. “Japan’s over. For me and for everyone else. The days when some big-nosed pinky could go out East for adventure and a six-figure salary are gone. There’s not much call for a translator when companies are going belly up. I got out before they threw me out.” She smiled brightly. “So here I am,” she said. “And, naturally, I want Pat.”

  She wanted Pat? Did she mean she wanted to see him? To take him to the zoo and buy him a stuffed toy the size of a refrigerator? What did she mean?

  “So you’re not planning to live in Japan?”

  “You were right, Harry. Even if the bubble hadn’t burst, it would never have worked with Pat and me in an apartment the size of our guest room. I want to see him,” she said. “As soon as possible.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m picking him up from my mom and dad this afternoon. You can wait for him at home.”

  “No,” she said. “Not at home. If it’s okay with you, I’ll meet you in the park.”

  Stupid of me to suggest meeting at home. Because of course it wasn’t Gina’s home anymore. And as I looked at the flashy new engagement ring where her simple little wedding band used to be, I suddenly realized that I had missed the really big change in our lives since the summer.

  Pat lived with me now.

  ***

  My Uncle Jack was at my parents’ place.

  Unlike Auntie Ethel from next door, Uncle Jack was my real uncle—my dad’s brother, a da
pper, wiry man who smoked his cigarettes by cupping them in the palm of his hand, as if protecting them from a fierce wind, even when he was in your living room dipping a ginger biscuit into his tea.

  Uncle Jack was always in a suit and tie with some highly polished luxury car parked outside. And on the passenger seat of the Beemer or big Mercedes or whatever it was, his chauffeur’s hat would be resting.

  Uncle Jack was a driver, ferrying businessmen back and forth between their homes and offices to all the London airports. He seemed to spend more of his time waiting than driving, and I always pictured him hanging around the arrivals gate at Gatwick or Heathrow, cigarette cupped in hand, reading the Racing Post.

  Uncle Jack was a gambler, like all my dad’s side of the family, and as he grinned at me coming up the drive, it seemed to me that all my memories of him revolved around betting of one kind or another.

  There were the card schools at our house every Boxing Day. There were trips to the dog tracks at Southend and Romford, where my cousins and I would collect the big pink betting slips that had been discarded by all the unlucky punters. Even further back, when Grandmother was still alive, I could remember the bookie coming ’round her house in the East End to collect her tiny but daily bet on the horses. When did bookies stop making house calls to little old ladies?

  There was another brother, the youngest, Bill, who had moved to Australia in the late seventies, but in my mind the three Silver brothers were together still—knocking back the Scotch at Christmas and the brown ale at weddings, dancing the old dances with wives with whom they fell in love as teenagers, playing poker into the early hours at Christmas with Tony Bennett singing “Stranger In Paradise” on the record player.

  This was my father’s family—a family of men, shrewd, tough Londoners who were sentimental about children and their suburban gardens, men whose old photographs invariably showed them in uniform, gamblers and drinkers—although neither to the degree where they were ever more than light relief—men who loved their families and looked on work as merely an unpleasant chore undertaken to support those families, men who prided themselves on knowing how the world worked. I knew that Uncle Jack was here for a reason.