Man and Boy

by Tony Parsons

  We were on the edge of the open grave, at the front of a large crowd of mourners. Some of them I didn’t know. Some of them I had known all my life. And yet the faces that I knew were changed—I remembered laughing uncles and good-looking aunts in their middle years, the good years of new cars and bright clothes and summer days on the coast, their children growing or perhaps already grown.

  Now these faces that I knew were older than I had ever expected them to be, and the confidence of their thirties and forties had somehow slipped away with the years. They had come to see my father buried, the first of their generation to go, and their own deaths must have suddenly seemed very real. They wept for him and also for themselves.

  In the distance I could see the fields where I had roamed as a boy, dark brown in midwinter and as rectangular as playing fields, bordered by scrawny bare trees.

  Did children still play on that ragged farmland? Somehow it seemed unlikely. But I remembered every brilliant stream, every muddy ditch, the stagnant pond inside the thick spinney, and all the farmers who chased us away, me and my friends, those city children with suburban lives.

  Up here there was no sign of the housing developments and shopping centers that were very close by. Up here all you could see were fields. Up here this place felt like real country.

  This was why my father had escaped the city. Those fields where I played as a boy—that was what my dad had dreamed of, and now he was going to be buried among them.

  There was crying all around now—louder, uncontrolled, more stung with grief—and I looked up and saw the tears on faces that I loved. My dad’s brothers. Our neighbors. My mother and my son.

  But I stood there dry-eyed as I watched them lower my father’s coffin into the freshly dug grave, one arm wrapped tight around my mother who had her own arms around her sobbing grandson, and my free hand stuffed deep into the pocket of my black suit, my fist holding my father’s silver medal as if I would never let it go.

  thirty-eight

  “The world is changing,” said Nigel Batty. “It’s not the seventies anymore. This isn’t Kramer vs. Kramer. In residency disputes, the law still favors the mother—and it always will. But there’s a growing awareness that not every lousy parent is a man.”

  “I hate the thought of my son growing up around some other guy,” I said, more to myself than my lawyer. “I hate the thought of him being in the same house as someone who hasn’t really got any interest in him at all. Someone who’s only interested in his mother.”

  “That’s not going to happen. No matter what she says—she left both of you. And you did a good job while your son was in your care. No matter what she tells her lawyer.”

  “I can’t believe she’s making me out to be negligent. If she kept it clean, I could respect her. But this—it makes my blood boil, you know what I mean, Nigel?”

  “I know.”

  My lawyer was no longer Mr. Batty to me. Now he was Nigel. Now he had told me his story.

  Seven years ago he had married a French woman he met while she was working for a barrister in London. They settled here and had twin daughters within a year of their wedding. But when their marriage came apart two years ago, his wife—soon to be ex-wife—decided she wanted to return to France. And with the Court of Appeal’s approval, she had received permission to take their daughters out of the country. Nigel Batty hadn’t seen them since.

  “So my children end up losing one parent and no doubt loathing the other one,” he said. “Thanks to some dumb fuck of a judge who thinks that the mother is the only parent who counts. And there’s nothing special about me—plenty of fathers lose contact with their children, because the women they married want to punish them.”

  I made sympathetic noises. It was late in the evening and the cleaning staff was shuffling around his empty office in the West End. He sat on his desk and stared down at the traffic clogged up on Hanover Square.

  “My children would certainly be better off with two parents. But working that one out—the impossible task of letting them keep both parents—that would have taken a degree of compromise. And residency disputes are not about compromise. And they are not about what’s best for the children. They should be, but they’re not. They are invariably about what the mother decides she wants.”

  He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

  “Although the law tries to take the sting out of a residence order, it has to end in victory for one parent and defeat for the other. It has to. The one who loses is usually the man. But—and this is what has changed over the last twenty years—not always. And we can win this one. We deserve to win this one.”

  “But she does loves him.”

  “What?”

  “Gina loves Pat. I know that she loves him.”

  Nigel shuffled some papers on his desk, almost embarrassed on my behalf.

  “I’m not sure that’s really relevant here, is it?” he said.

  ***

  I watched them from the window. Gina emerged from the Audi’s passenger seat and let Pat out of the backseat—he had told me that Richard had fitted a child lock—and then, crouching on the pavement so that they were the same height, she wrapped her arms around him, burying his blond head against her neck, grasping her last few seconds with him before she gave him back to me.

  Gina lingered by the car door—we couldn’t talk anymore, but she would wait until she saw me before she got in—and as I watched Pat run up the little path to our door, his eyes shining, I knew that he deserved to be loved as much as any child in this world is loved.

  ***

  Later he was playing on the floor of his room with his Star Wars toys.

  “Pat?”

  “Yes?”

  “You know Mommy and I don’t get on very well right now?”

  “You don’t talk to each other.”

  “That’s because we’re having an argument at the moment.”

  He silently smacked Luke Skywalker against the side of the Millennium Falcon. I sat down on the floor next to him. He kept smacking Luke.

  “We both love you very much. You know that, don’t you?”

  He didn’t speak.

  “Pat?”

  “I guess.”

  “And we both want you to live with us. Where would you prefer to live? With me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Or with Mommy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It can’t be both of us. You understand that, don’t you? It can’t be both. Not anymore.”

  He came to my arms and I cuddled him.

  “It’s difficult, isn’t it, darling?”

  “It’s difficult.”

  “But that’s what the argument is about. I want you to stay here. And Mommy wants you to stay with her. Her and Richard.”

  “Yeah, but what about my stuff?”

  “What?”

  “All my stuff. All my stuff is here. What if I went over there to live—what about my stuff?”

  “That wouldn’t be a problem, darling. We could move your things. You don’t have to worry about that. The important thing is where you live. And I want you to stay here.”

  He looked up at me. They were Gina’s eyes.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the right thing for you,” I said, and even as the words were forming, I wondered if that was really true.

  I had changed over the last six months, my months of bringing up Pat alone. The show with Eamon was just a way to pay the mortgage, not the way to prove my worth to myself and everyone else. Work was no longer the center of my universe. The center of my universe was my boy.

  When I felt pride or fear or wonder or anything that reminded me that I was alive, it wasn’t because of anything that happened at the studio. It was because Pat had learned to tie his laces or because he had been bullied at school or because he
said something or did something which just stunned me with love, something that reminded me that my son was the most beautiful boy in the world. If he went away then I would feel that I had lost everything. “I just want what’s best for you,” I said, wondering for the first time if I really wanted what was best for him or what was best for me.

  ***

  “Your dad and I saw her at the Palladium when she was eighteen years old,” my mother said. “They called her—the Girl from Tiger Bay.” Her blue eyes got wide with excitement—why had I never noticed how blue they were in the past? In the gloaming of the Albert Hall, my mother’s eyes shone like something in the window of Tiffany.

  Although they had always spent most of their evenings at home, my parents always took in a show every six months or so—Tony Bennett at the Royal Festival Hall, a revival of Oklahoma! or Guys and Dolls in the West End—and so now I was taking my mother to a show at the Albert Hall. Her personal all-time favorite—the girl from Tiger Bay.

  “Shirley Bassey!” my mother said.

  I had been dragged to a few Shirley Bassey shows before I was old enough to protest. But when I was growing up, her audience hadn’t been anywhere near as mixed as the crowd that confronted us inside Albert Hall.

  Impossibly handsome young men with little Uzbek caps and plucked eyebrows looked for their seats along with stolid elderly couples, the men country-club formal in blazers, the women with that peculiarly frozen Maggie Thatcher hairdo that my mother’s generation sport on a night out.

  “I never realized that old Shirley was so big with the gay crowd,” I said. “I guess it makes sense—the boys love that combination of showbiz glitz and personal tragedy. She’s our Judy Garland.”

  “The gay crowd?” my mom said, bewildered. “What gay crowd?”

  I gestured at the young men in Versace and Prada who stood out so obviously against the wool and polyester of the suburban set.

  “All around you, Mom.”

  As if on cue, the boy next to my mother—a male model type who was simply too good-looking to be heterosexual—stood up and squealed with excitement as the orchestra struck up the opening chords to “Diamonds Are Forever.”

  “We love you, Shirley! You’re fabulous!”

  “Well, he’s not gay,” my mom whispered in my ear, totally serious.

  I laughed and put my arm around her, kissing her on the cheek. She leaned forward excitedly as Shirley Bassey appeared at the top of the stage stairs—her evening dress sparkling with what looked like fairy lights, her hands tossed extravagantly in the air.

  “How did you do it, Mom?”

  “How did I do what?”

  “How did you manage to carry on after losing Dad? I mean, you were with him all your life. I can’t imagine what it must be like to try to fill a gap that big.”

  “Well, you don’t get over it, of course. You can never get over it. I miss him. I’m lonely. Sometimes I’m frightened. And I still have to sleep with the light on.”

  She looked at me. Shirley Bassey was prowling the front of the stage to thunderous applause and showers of bouquets. Yes, she was definitely our Judy Garland.

  “But you have to learn to let go,” my mother said. “That’s part of it, isn’t it?”

  “Part of what?”

  “Part of what it means to love someone. To really love someone. If you love someone then you don’t just see them as an extension of yourself. You don’t just love them for what’s in it for you.”

  My mother turned back to the stage. In the darkness of the Albert Hall I could see that her blue eyes were shining with tears.

  “Love means knowing when to let go,” she told me.

  thirty-nine

  “You’re crazy,” Nigel Batty said. “You’re going to voluntarily give up your child? You’re going to just hand him over to your ex-wife when we could fucking beat her? She’s going to love this—you know that, don’t you?”

  “I’m not doing this for her,” I said. “I’m doing it for him.”

  “You know how many men would love to be in your position? You know how many men I see in this office—grown men fucking weeping, Harry—who would give everything they’ve got to keep their children? Who would give their right nut? And you’re just walking away from him.”

  “No, I’m not walking away from him. I’m not giving up. But I know how much he loves to be with Gina, although he tries not to show it because he thinks it will hurt me or betray me or something. And either they make some kind of connection again or she’s going to become someone he just sees at weekends. I can see it happening already.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “I know you’re disappointed, Nigel. But I’m just thinking of my boy.”

  “You think she thought of him when she walked out? You think she thought of him when she was in the cab to Heathrow?”

  “I don’t know. I just think that a child needs two parents. Even a kid whose parents are divorced. Especially a kid whose parents are divorced. I’m doing what I can to make that happen.”

  “What about the guy she lives with? This Richard? You don’t know anything about him. You’re happy to turn your son over to him?”

  “I’m not turning Pat over to anyone. He’s my son, and he will always be my son. I’m his father, and I will always be his father. But I have to assume that Gina hasn’t got completely lousy taste in men.”

  “She seems to go for fucking fruitcakes, if you ask me. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? You’re going to become one of those weekend dads—sitting in Pizza Express on a Sunday afternoon trying to think of something to say to this stranger who used to be your kid.”

  “Pat and I will never be like that.”

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  “I’m not saying it’s what I would have wanted. But don’t you see? We fuck up our lives again and again, and it’s always our children who pick up the bill. We move on to new relationships, always starting over, always thinking we’ve got another chance to get it right, and it’s the kids from all these broken marriages that pay the price. They—my son, your daughters, all the millions like them—are carrying around wounds that are going to last a lifetime. It has to stop.” I shrugged helplessly, knowing that he was disgusted with me. “I don’t know, Nigel. I’m just trying to be a good father.”

  “By giving up your son.”

  “It feels like the least I can do.”

  ***

  “The way it’s going to work,” I told Pat, “is that you can leave as much of your stuff at our house as you want. Your room will always be your room. Nobody is ever going to touch it. And you can come back whenever you want. For a day, for a night, or forever.”

  “Forever?” Pat said, pushing Bluebell by my side. His voice was very small.

  “You’re going to live with your mother. But nobody’s going to make you live there. We are both going to look after you. And we both want you to be happy.”

  “You’re not arguing anymore?”

  “We’re trying to stop arguing. Because we both love you very much and we both want what’s best for you. I’m not saying that we will never argue again. But we’re trying, okay?”

  “Do you love each other again?”

  “No, darling. That time of our life is gone. But we both love you.”

  “Where will I sleep at Mommy’s place?”

  “She’s preparing a room for you. And it’s going to be great—you can spread out your Star Wars toys all over the floor, turn on a bit of hip-hop, drive all the neighbors crazy.”

  “And nobody’s allowed to touch my old room?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Not even you?”

  “Not even me.”

  We were at the park now. The asphalt road winding around the lake spread out before us. This was where he loved to ride Bluebell, taking off at suc
h a speed that the swans rose up from the water’s edge when they saw him coming. But Pat made no move to get on his bike.

  “I like it now,” he said, and it tore me up. “I like it the way it is.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I like to make you breakfast in the morning. And I like to see you with all your toys spread out on the floor in the afternoon. And I like it when we get Chinese takeout or a pizza and watch a film together on the sofa. And going to the park together. I like all that stuff.”

  “Me too. I like it too.”

  “And we’re still going to do all of that, okay? Nobody can stop us. That’s never going to end. Not until you’re a very big boy who wants to go off with his friends and leave his old dad alone.”

  “That’s going to be never.”

  “But give it a good try, okay? Living with Mommy, I mean. Because she loves you very much and I know that you love her too. That’s good. I’m glad. I’m glad that you love each other. And although it makes me sad to see you go, it’s not the end of anything. You can come back whenever you want. So try to be happy with Mommy. Okay?

  “Okay.”

  “And Pat?”

  “What?”

  “I’m proud that you’re my son.”

  He dropped his bike and came to my arms, pressing his face against me, overwhelming me with what felt like the very essence of him. He filled my senses—his unruly mop of blond hair, his impossibly smooth skin, that Pat smell of dirt and sugar. My beautiful son, I thought, tasting the salt of our tears.

  There was more that I wanted to say but I couldn’t find the words. It’s not perfect, I wanted to say. It will never be perfect. I’m not so dumb that I don’t know that. But given the way that things have turned out, it’s probably the best we can do. It’s not perfect. Because the only perfect thing in my life has always been you.

  My beautiful boy.

  My beautiful boy.

  My beautiful boy.

  ***

  Gina took Pat into his new bedroom and I stood there in the middle of their flat with a box of Star Wars toys in my arms, feeling as lost as I had ever felt in my life.