Man and Boy

by Tony Parsons

  “All the things I did more or less alone for years.”

  “That’s my point exactly. I taught myself how to care for our child—the way you cared for him. And then you come back and tell me that’s all over.”

  “You’ve done a good job over the last few months, Harry. But what do you want? A medal?”

  “I don’t need a medal. I haven’t done anything more than I should have done. I know it’s nothing special. But you expect too much of me, Gina. I learned how to be a real father to Pat—I had to, okay? Now you want me to just act as though it never happened. And I can’t do it. How can I do it? Tell me how I can do it.”

  “Is there a problem?” Richard said, emerging from the Audi.

  So he did have legs after all.

  “Get back in the car, Richard,” Gina said.

  “Yeah, get back in the car, Richard,” I said.

  He got back in the car, blinking behind his glasses.

  “You have to decide what you really want, Gina. All of you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m all for men taking responsibility for their children. I’m all for men doing their bit in bringing up their kids. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t expect us to take part in the parenting and then just step aside when you want us to, as if we were just like our dads, as if it was all really woman’s work. Remember that the next time you see your lawyer.”

  “And you remember something, Harry.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I love him too.”

  ***

  Pat was on the floor of his room, tipping a box full of toys onto the floor.

  “You have a good time, darling? A good time with Mommy and Richard?”

  I sounded ridiculously upbeat, like a game show host when the really big prize is up for grabs, but I was determined to make Pat feel okay about these new arrangements. I didn’t want him to feel that he was betraying me every time he went out to have a good time with his mother and her boyfriend. But I didn’t want him to have too good a time either.

  “It was all right,” he said. “Richard and Mommy had a little bit of a fight.”

  Wonderful news.

  “Why was that, darling?”

  “I got some Magnum on the seat of his stupid car. He thought I shouldn’t eat Magnum in the car.”

  “But you like Richard.”

  “He’s all right.”

  I felt a pang of sympathy for this man I had never met. Not much of a pang. Just a little one. But a pang all the same.

  The role he had chosen felt like an impossible part to play. If he tried to be a father to Pat then he would surely fail. And if he decided to be just a friend, then that would be a kind of failure too. But at least Richard had a choice.

  Who asked Pat if he wanted to be eating a Magnum in the back of that silver Audi?

  ***

  Cyd was working in one of those designer Asian restaurants that were starting to appear all over town, one of those places that sells Thai fish cakes, Japanese soba noodles, and cold Vietnamese spring rolls as if they all came from the same place, as if that entire continent had been turned into one big kitchen for the West. It was bright and white, full of polished wood and gleaming chrome, like an art gallery or a dentist’s office.

  From the street, I watched Cyd placing two steaming plates of what looked like Malaysian king prawn curry in front of a pair of young women who smiled their thanks at her.

  Like every other waitress in there, she was wearing a starched white apron, black trousers, and a white shirt. Her hair was cut shorter that I had ever seen it—it was almost boyish now, she had gone from an F. Scott Fitzgerald bob to a Beatle cut in just one trip to the hairdresser’s. I knew it meant something important when a woman chopped off her hair, but I couldn’t remember what.

  She headed toward the back of the place, saying something to the young black guy behind the bar that made him laugh, and disappeared into the kitchen. I took a seat near the front of the restaurant, waiting for her to appear again.

  It was after three and the place was almost empty. Apart from me and the two young women eating their spicy prawns, the only other customers were a table of three well-lunched businessmen, empty bottles of Asahi Super Dry strewn in front of them. A young waitress placed a menu on my table just as Cyd banged back out of the kitchen doors.

  At head height and balanced on the palm of her hand, she was carrying a tray holding three bottles of Japanese beer. She unloaded them in front of the drunken suits, not noticing me, ignoring their red-faced leers, not really aware of any of us.

  “When do you get off?” one of them asked.

  “Don’t you mean how?” she said, turning away as they erupted with laughter, and seeing me at last. She slowly came over to my table.

  “What would you like?”

  “How about spending the rest of our lives together?”

  “That’s off. How about some noodles?”

  “Okay. Have you got the thick kind?”

  “Udon? Sure. We do udon noodles in broth with prawns, fish, shiitake mushrooms, and all that good stuff.”

  “Actually, I’m not that hungry. But this is a coincidence, isn’t it? Running into each other like this.”

  “It certainly is, Harry. How did you know I was working here?”

  “I didn’t. This is the forty-second place that I’ve tried over the last few days.”

  “You really are crazy.”

  “Crazy for you.”

  “Just crazy. How’s your dad?”

  “The funeral’s tomorrow.”

  “God, I’m sorry. Is Pat all right?”

  I took a breath.

  “They were very close. You know that. It’s a big loss for him. I don’t know—he’s dealing with it. Same as my mother. I’ll be glad to get the funeral behind us.”

  “After the funeral can be the worst part. Because everybody goes home and life starts to go on again. Except, for you, it doesn’t. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You can let me walk you home.”

  ***

  “You’ve got to stop following me around,” she said as we walked through the silent white side streets of Notting Hill. “It’s got to stop.”

  “I like your hair.”

  She grabbed her hair in her hand.

  “It’s no good for you and it’s no good for me,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t look that bad.”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “I want us to be a family.”

  “I thought you hated that kind of family—the kind of family that is full of other people’s children and ex-partners. I thought you wanted an uncomplicated life.”

  “I don’t want an uncomplicated life. I want a life with you. And Peggy. And Pat. And maybe a kid of our own.”

  “One of those families? With your kid and my kid fighting our kid? You’d hate it. You would really hate it, Harry. You’d last—well, I don’t know how long you’d last.”

  “I could never hate my life if it was with you. Listen, there was a tattoo on my dad’s arm, some words written under one of those long, thin Commando knives. And it said—united we conquer. And that’s how I feel about us.”

  “You’re getting a tattoo?”

  “No.”

  “You’re joining the army?”

  “What I’m saying is that if we’re together, then everything will be all right. I don’t know what kind of family life it will be—because there have never been families like this before. But I know that it would be better than any other family we could ever have apart. Just think about it, okay?”

  “Sure, Harry. I’ll discuss it with my husband over dinner tonig
ht.”

  We had stopped outside an old white townhouse that had been chopped up into flats forty years ago.

  “This is it, Harry,” she said.

  And then Jim was suddenly bursting out of the front door, his arm in a plaster cast and a sling, screaming, “Stay away from my wife, you bastard!” as he smoothly swung round in a full circle and his motorcycle boot exploded in my mouth.

  I reeled backward, my gums split and bloody, my legs gone to jelly, and two things were immediately clear.

  Jim knew a bit about martial arts. And he had fallen off his bike again.

  I bounced off some dustbins and lifted my fists as he came at me, but Cyd had moved between us and he howled with pain as she grabbed his broken arm.

  “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” she shouted at him.

  “Watch my fucking arm, will you!” he shouted back at her. But he let her lead him back to the door. He turned to growl at me.

  “If ever I see your face again,” he said, “you lose all your teeth.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  I didn’t explain that a friendly dog had pushed me on my face when I was five years old. That wouldn’t have sounded quite so impressive.

  He went back inside the house, holding his plaster cast. They must have been living in the ground-floor flat because I could hear what sounded a lot like Peggy crying. Cyd turned to look at me.

  “Please leave me alone now, Harry.”

  “Just think about what I said,” I slurred through my fat and bloody lips. “Please consider my offer.”

  She shook her head and—I know it’s dumb—but I felt that she was starting to really like me.

  “You don’t give up, do you?” she said.

  “I get it from my father,” I said.

  Then she closed the door of the big white house and went back to her life.

  thirty-seven

  A mile from our family home, there is a small church on a hill.

  As a boy, wandering where I wasn’t supposed to wander on light summer nights, I had sometimes lurked in the graveyard of this church, drinking cider and peering down the sights of my friend’s .22 air rifle.

  We were not as cocky as we looked. At the slightest sound—the wind in the trees, the rustle of leaves across the cold stone of a grave, some ancient wood creaking inside the church—my friend and I would bolt in panic, terrified that the dead were about to reveal themselves to us. And now my father was going to be buried here.

  I woke to the sound of the paper boy’s bike, the Mirror roughly shoved through the letter box, the low hum of the radio coming from the kitchen. For one moment between sleep and waking, it felt like just another day.

  But after breakfast we donned our bleak uniforms of mourning, my son and I, both awkward in our black ties and white shirts, and we sat on the floor of my old bedroom, thumbing through box after box of photographs, consoling ourselves with images of my father, his grandfather.

  Time ran backward, unraveled. There were bright color pictures of my dad with Pat—opening Christmas presents, riding his Bluebell bike with the training wheels still attached, Pat as an impossibly blond toddler, and as a sleeping baby in the arms of his grinning grandfather.

  And lots of pictures with the colors fading now—my dad and my mom with Gina and me on our wedding day, me as a smirking teenager with my dad, a fit fifty-odd, our arms around each other in our hack garden—proud of his garden, proud of me—and still further back—me as a goofy eleven-year-old with my parents, still young, in the crowd shot of some cousin’s wedding.

  And all the way back to the beginning of memory and beyond—a black-and-white shot of me as a crop-haired child with my dad and the horses on Salisbury Plain, another black-and-white picture of my dad laughing as he lifted me up on some windswept beach, and pictures in shades of gray of him in uniform and my parents on their wedding day.

  No pictures of him as a child or a baby. I knew it was simply because they were too poor to have a camera. But it felt like his life had only begun with our little family.

  Downstairs the flowers had started arriving. Pat and I went to the window of my parents’ room at the front of the house and watched the florist unloading them from his van. Soon the cellophane-covered bouquets covered all of the front lawn, and I thought of Princess Diana and the sea of flowers that washed up against the black railings of the royal palaces. It was just another job for the florist, and the first job of the day, but he seemed genuinely moved.

  “I wish I had known this man,” I heard him tell my mother, and I knew that he meant it.

  ***

  We had a laugh when the coffin arrived at the church. It was a desperate laugh, one of those laughs that are there as a dam against tears you are afraid will never stop if they are allowed to start, but a laugh all the same. We were following the coffin into the old church, my mother, my son, and I, but for some reason the four pall bearers stopped at the entrance. Although Pat and I had her between us, our arms around her, my mother kept going, her eyes on the ground. And she only stopped when she smacked her head hard against the end of her husband’s coffin.

  She staggered backward, holding her forehead, looking for blood on her fingertips, and then she looked at me and we both laughed out loud. We were both hearing his voice, that old London voice full of weary affection. “What are you doing, woman?”

  Then we went inside the coolness of the church and it was like stepping into a dream, a dream where everyone you have ever known—relatives, friends of the family, neighbors from the present and the past, men in Royal Naval Commando ties who had met as teenagers and were now seventy—had gathered together for one last time, row upon row of them, some starting to cry at the sight of my father’s coffin.

  The three of us were in the front pew. Once the three of us would have meant my parents and me. Now it was my mother, my son, and I. Their heads were down, staring at the flagstones, the laughter all gone, but I watched the vicar as he began to quote from Isaiah—“They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

  His sermon was about the good soldier who became a man of peace—the warrior who learned to be the loving husband, the kind father, the caring neighbor. And I could tell that he had worked hard at this speech, that he had talked to my mother and my uncles and Auntie Ethel next door who wasn’t really my auntie. But the vicar had never met my father and so he could never really capture him and his life.

  It was only when the old song that my mother had chosen echoed through the crowded church that I had to get a grip of my heart, that I felt the weight of all that we had lost.

  More than the hymns or the sermon or the well-meant platitudes or the faces of all the people he had ever known, it was this old song that got to me. Sinatra’s voice, very young, very pure, lacking all the swagger and cynicism of his later years. It rose and soared around that little church.

  And my mother didn’t move, but I could feel her holding Pat more fiercely, as if she was afraid of being swept to some other place and time, somewhere in the lonely future when she could only sleep with the bedroom lights blazing or somewhere in the lost, unrecoverable past.

  Someday

  When I’m awfully low.

  When the world is cold.

  I will feel a glow

  Just thinking of you.

  And the way you look tonight.

  And I could hear my father’s voice complaining at the choice, his voice full of wonder at this woman he had shared his life with but who never ceased to amaze him.

  “Not early Sinatra, woman! Not all that swooning bobbysoxer stuff he recorded for Columbia! If you’ve got to pick Sinatra, then pick something from one of the Capitol albums of the fifties—‘One for My Baby,’ ‘Angel Eyes,’ ‘In the We
e Small Hours of the Morning’—one of the great saloon songs. But not that early stuff! And what’s wrong with Dean Martin? I always preferred old Dino anyway.”

  It was true. My father’s favorite was Dean Martin. Sinatra, as much as he liked him, was a bit too much of the smooth romantic for my old man. He far preferred Dean Martin’s hard center. But of course the song wasn’t my father’s choice. It was my mother’s. It wasn’t about how he saw himself. It was about how she saw him, knew him, loved him.

  But you’re lovely!

  With your smile so warm

  And your cheek so soft

  There is nothing for me

  But to love you

  Just the way you look tonight.

  The undertaker’s men carried my father’s coffin out of the church—gently, gently—and into the graveyard as we followed, dazed by the rituals of death, to the latest grave in a sloping field of white headstones.

  The freshly dug plot was at the end of a long line of graves, and one day, after this church had seen many more funerals, it would be difficult to find my father’s resting place because it would be in the middle of a forest of white headstones, just one among the many. But not now. Not today. Today my father was the latest arrival in this eternal place. It was easy to find his grave today.

  And there was his headstone—white and new, my father’s epitaph carved in gleaming black on the top half, leaving space for another inscription—for his wife, my mother, Pat’s grandmother—to one day be carved.

  PATRICK WILLIAM ROBERT SILVER, D.S.M., it said, a name from the days when ordinary families gave their children as many names as they could remember, as many names as they could carry, and below the dates of his birth and death, BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER, AND GRANDFATHER.

  The vicar was talking—ashes to ashes, dust to dust, come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world—but all I could hear was a scrap from one of the old songs, a song asking someone to never, ever change.