Men from the Boys

by Tony Parsons

  So often, only bits and pieces of the family sat down for dinner together. But not tonight. Tonight we were eating together, and Cyd had made spaghetti meatballs, because it always felt like celebration food. So I naturally felt a spike of irritation when the doorbell rang just as I was about to take off my apron.

  Here’s one for the show, I thought, as my family began without me. Reasons to be angry, number ninety-three. Someone ringing your doorbell when you never asked them to.

  There was an old man on my doorstep, eyes bright behind his glasses.

  He was short but too broad in the shoulder to be thought of as small. And immaculate – everything about him was smart, in an old-fashioned, Sunday-best sort of way. He was wearing a shirt and tie with a dark blazer and lighter trousers. Clean-shaven and smelling of things that I thought that they had stopped making years ago. Old Spice and Old Holborn.

  The neatness of this old man – that’s what I noticed most of all. Even at that first moment of seeing him, that was what I saw above everything – that military bearing, tidy and trim and ship-shape to the point of fanaticism.

  As though he was on parade, and he would always be on parade.

  He blinked at me through his glasses.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said, his voice thick with formality and old London, and I wondered what he could possibly be selling that I could conceivably wish to buy. ‘I’m looking for Mr Silver.’

  ‘You found him,’ I said coldly. I could hear my family eating dinner behind me.

  And then the old man laughed at me.

  He took me in – the white Ted Baker shoes that I wore to stave off the black day that I bought a pair of slippers, the frayed black jeans from Boss Homme, the floral Cath Kidston apron – and the cheeky old git looked at me as if I was some kind of transsexual.

  I felt like saying, It’s an apron, not a frilly pink dress. What do you wear when you’re chopping parsley? But he probably never chopped parsley in his life.

  ‘But you’re not Pat Silver,’ he said, bristling slightly, and despite the effort to be polite, I could see he had a temper on him. It happens as you get older. You just get grumpier and grumpier. By the time that Marty Mann is that age, he will probably be on the roof of some public building with a high-velocity rifle.

  ‘Pat’s my son,’ I said, and I could see no connection that this belligerent old hobbit could possibly have to my boy. And then I got it. ‘And my dad,’ I said, as the ship came out of the mist. ‘You’re looking for my father, aren’t you?’ We stared at each other. ‘You better come inside,’ I said.

  ‘Kenneth Grimwood,’ he said, and we shook hands. ‘I was in the same mob as your dad.’

  He called their outfit his mob – the same word I used to describe my family, and I remembered that they were as close as a family, that diminishing band of brothers, those old men who had been Royal Naval Commandos before they were out of their teens.

  ‘We served together,’ Ken Grimwood said, as we came down the hall. My family looked up at us from their pasta, as I wondered – do people do that any more? Talk about serving? These days everyone wants to be served.

  He stared at them and gave no sign of embarrassment, no sense that he even saw them. ‘Your dad and me were in Italy together,’ he said. ‘Sicily. Salerno. Anzio. Monte Cassino.’

  And suddenly I felt a mounting excitement. Because this old man must have been with my father at Elba. Where he won his medal. Where he nearly died.

  I remembered my dad taking his shirt off on summer days on English beaches and in our back garden, and people who did not know him staring with horror at the starburst of scar tissue that completely covered his torso. That was from Elba.

  I wanted to know all about it. So much had been lost, so much that I would never know. Here was my last link to the past.

  ‘And Operation Brassard,’ I said. Oh, I knew all about it. I had read books. I knew everything apart from what had actually happened. What it was like. ‘The raid on Elba. You must have been with him at Elba.’

  But the old man shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t make it as far as Elba,’ he said, and he stared at my youngest daughter. She had a loose front tooth and was working it with her tongue as she stared back at the old man.

  I felt the disappointment flood me. He wasn’t at Elba? Then I would never know.

  Cyd was on her feet and smiling. She came over to us and shook his hand. Introductions were made. She pointed at our children, told him their names.

  ‘You’re having your tea,’ Ken said, and I hadn’t heard that for years. It was a word from my childhood – when your lunch was your dinner and your dinner was your tea.

  Cyd asked him to join us and he took one look at what we were eating and recoiled. For a moment I thought he was going to say something about, ‘Foreign muck,’ which I also had not heard for a while. But instead he looked at Pat – really looked at him – with a sly smile.

  ‘You’re the grandson,’ Ken said. ‘You’re the apple of his eye.’ The old man nodded emphatically. ‘Named after him, you are. He thinks the sun shines out of your arse.’

  A silence settled across the dining room. Not total silence – I realised that Bach’s ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ was playing on the Bose. Joni covered her face with her hands.

  ‘Arse,’ she guffawed. ‘The man said arse.’

  ‘No need for you to repeat it, young lady,’ Cyd snapped, and our daughter looked at her plate of pasta with wry raised eyebrows.

  Ken Grimwood looked at me appraisingly. I was still wearing my Cath Kidston. I quickly pulled it off and tossed it aside. I did not want him to see me in an apron. Even if he wasn’t at Elba.

  ‘Our mob are marching,’ he said, ‘that’s why I’m here.’

  Then I watched in horror as he took out a pack of cigarettes with a death’s head covering most of the packet. Perhaps I imagined it, but I think I heard Cyd’s intake of breath.

  ‘Didn’t have any Old Holborn in your newsagent,’ he told me, as if I was personally to blame. ‘The geezer didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Foreign chap.’

  The children were all staring at him, their dinner forgotten. They had never seen someone taking out a pack of fags in our house – or any house – before. That twenty-pack of Silk Cuts had the exotic danger of an Uzi, or a gram of crack cocaine, or a ton of bootleg plutonium.

  ‘You know,’ Ken said. ‘At the Cenotaph. The eleventh hour of the eleventh month of the eleventh day.’ He stuck a Silk Cut in his mouth. ‘Nearest Sunday, anyway,’ he said, fumbling in his blazer for a light. ‘What did I do with those Swan Vestas?’ he muttered.

  My wife looked at me as if she would tear out my heart and liver if I did not stop him immediately. So I took his arm and gently steered him to the back garden.

  I sat him down at the little table at the back, just beyond the Wendy House. Through the glass I could see my family eating their dinner. Joni was still laughing at the hilarity of someone saying ‘arse’ and thinking they could smoke in our house.

  And I realised that Ken Grimwood talked about my father in the present tense.

  ‘But he died ten years ago,’ I said, afraid he might unravel. ‘More than ten years. Lung cancer.’

  Ken just looked thoughtful. Then he struck a match, lit up and sucked hungrily on his Silk Cut. I had brought a saucer out with me – we hadn’t owned an ashtray since the last century – and I pushed it towards him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Someone should have told you.’

  He took it surprisingly well. Perhaps he had seen enough death – as a young man, as an old man – to vaccinate him against the shock. I had seen a few of them over the years – those old men from my dad’s mob. I remembered their green berets at the funeral of my father, and later my mother, although there were less of them by then. But Ken Grimwood was new to me.

  ‘You lose touch over the years,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘Some of our mob – well, they liked the reunions, the marching, putti
ng on the old medals.’ He considered his Silk Cut and coughed for a bit. ‘That wasn’t for me.’ He looked at me shrewdly. ‘Or your old man.’

  It was true. For most of his life, my father never gave me the impression that he wanted to remember the war. Forgetting seemed like more his thing. It was only towards the end, when the time was running out, that he talked about going back to Elba, and seeing the graves of boys that he had known and loved and lost before they were twenty. But he never got around to it. No time.

  And it turned out that Ken Grimwood’s time was running out too.

  ‘Lung cancer,’ he said casually. ‘Yeah, that’s what I’ve got.’

  He stubbed out his Silk Cut, lit up another and saw me looking at him, and his cigarette, and his fag packet with a skull. ‘You’ve got to go sometime, son,’ he chuckled, dry-eyed and enjoying my shock. ‘I reckon I’ve had a good innings.’

  And we sat there in the twilight until he could not force any more smoke into his dying lungs, and my meatballs had gone stone cold.

  I walked him to the bus stop at the end of our road.

  It took some time. I had not noticed until we were out on the street that he had a slow, strange walk – this laborious, rolling gait. When we finally got there I shook his hand and went back home.

  Cyd was watching the bus stop from the window. She’s a kind person, and I knew she would not approve of me abandoning him on the mean streets of Holloway.

  ‘But you can’t just leave him out there, Harry,’ she said. ‘It’s dangerous.’

  ‘He’s a former Commando,’ I said. ‘If he’s anything like my dad, he’s probably killed dozens of Nazis and he’s probably had bits of old shrapnel worming its way out of his body for the last sixty years. He can catch a bus by himself. He’s only going to the Angel.’

  She started to follow me into the kitchen. And then she stopped. And I heard it too.

  A smack of air, then breaking glass, and then laughter. And again. The crack of air, the breaking glass, and laughter. We went back to the window and saw the two men standing in front of the house across the street.

  No, not men – boys.

  A security light came on – the kind of blinding floodlight that was becoming increasingly popular on our street – and illuminated William Fly and his mate, a spud-faced youth who cackled by his side, every inch the bully’s apprentice.

  Fly lifted his hand, pointing it at the light, and I heard my wife gasp beside me as the air pistol fired.

  The security light went dark in a tinkle of glass and a ripple of laughter.

  They moved on down the street, letting the next security light come on, and I was glad that we had decided against getting one. Fly shot out that light too, and they sauntered on, down to the bus stop where the old man was sitting.

  My wife looked at me, but I just kept staring out the window, willing the bloody bus to come.

  The two boys looked down at the old man.

  He stared at them curiously. They were saying something to him. He shook his head. I saw the air pistol being brandished in the right hand of William Fly.

  Then my wife said my name.

  And we both saw the glint of the blade.

  I was out of the house and running down the street, a diminished number of the security lights coming on as I went past them, and I was almost upon them when I realised that the knife was in the hand of the old man.

  And they were laughing at him.

  And as I watched, Ken Grimwood jammed the blade deep into his left leg.

  As hard as he could, just below the knee, half of the blade disappearing into those neatly pressed trousers and the flesh beneath. And he did not even flinch.

  There was a long moment when we stood and stared at the knife sticking out of the old man’s leg.

  Me. And the boys. And then William Fly and Spud Face were gone, and I was approaching Ken Grimwood as if in a dream.

  Still sitting at the bus stop, still showing no sign of pain, he pulled out his knife and rolled up his trousers.

  His prosthetic leg was pink and hairless – that’s what struck me, the lack of hair – and it was like a photograph of a limb rather than the thing of flesh and blood and nerves that it had replaced.

  And all at once I understood why this old man had not been at Elba with my father.

  Two

  By the time I came down the dishes from last night were clean and drying, and there was tea and juice on the table.

  Pat was shuffling about the kitchen. I could smell toast. I went to pull the newspaper from the letterbox and when I came back he was putting breakfast on the table.

  The girls were still upstairs. Pat was Mister Breakfast. He had been Mister Breakfast since the time he had been old enough to boil a kettle. That was the thing about the pair of us – it worked. And it had always worked.

  The thing that used to get on my nerves was when people said to me, ‘Oh, so you’re his mother as well as his father?’ I could never work that one out.

  I was his father. And if his mother wasn’t around, then I could still only be his father. If you lose your right arm, does your left arm become both your right and left arm? No, it doesn’t. It’s still just your left arm. And you get on with it. Both his mother and his father? Hardly. It took everything I had to pull off being his dad.

  ‘You all right?’ he said, wiping his hands on the dishcloth, looking at me sideways.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘All good.’

  And still I did not mention his mother.

  Joni appeared. At seven, her footsteps were so light that, if she was not rushing somewhere, or talking, or singing, you often did not hear her coming. You turned around and she was just there. She shuffled slowly towards the table, dressed for school but still more asleep than awake.

  She yawned widely. ‘I don’t want to eat anything today,’ she said.

  ‘You have to eat something,’ I said.

  She cocked a leg and hauled herself up on her chair, like a cowboy getting on his horse.

  ‘But look,’ she said.

  She opened her mouth and as Pat and I bent to peer inside, she began to manoeuvre one of her front teeth with her tongue. It was so loose that she could get it horizontal.

  She closed her mouth. Her eyes shone with tears. Her chin wobbled.

  Pat went off to the kitchen and I sat down at the table. ‘Joni,’ I said, but she held up her hands, cutting me off, pleading for understanding.

  ‘Cereal hurts my gums,’ she said, waving her hands. ‘Not just Cookie Crisps. All of them.’

  I touched her arm. Upstairs I could hear Cyd and Peggy laughing outside the bathroom door. I groped for the correct parental soundbite.

  ‘Breakfast is, er, the most important meal of the morning,’ I reminded her, but my daughter looked away with frosty contempt, furiously worrying at her wonky tooth with the tip of her tongue.

  ‘There you go,’ Pat said.

  He placed a sandwich in front of Joni. Two slices of lightly toasted white bread with the crusts removed, the chemical yellow of processed cheese sticking out of the sides like a toxic spill. Cut into triangles.

  Her favourite.

  Pat returned to the kitchen. I picked up the newspaper. Joni lifted the sandwich in both hands and began to eat.

  Here’s a good one for the Lateral Thinking Club – if a marriage produces a great child, then can that marriage ever be said to have failed?

  If the marriage produces some girl or boy who just by existing makes this world a better place, then has that marriage failed just because Mum and Dad have split up? Is the only criterion of a successful marriage staying together? Is that really all it takes? Hanging in there? Butching it out?

  Does my friend Marty Mann have a successful marriage because it has lasted for years? Does it matter that he likes his Latvian lap dancers two at a time before going home to his wife? Has he got a successful marriage because it remained untouched by the divorce courts?

  If a woman and a man ab
andon their wedding vows and run eagerly through all the usual hateful clichés – saying hurtful things, sleeping with other people, cutting up clothes, running off with the milkman – then is that a failed marriage?

  Well, obviously. It’s a bloody disaster.

  But still – I could not bring myself to call my union with my first wife a failed marriage. Despite everything. Despite crossing the border between love and hate and then going so far into alien territory that we could not even recognise each other.

  Gina and I were young and in love. And then we were young and stupid, and getting everything wrong.

  First me. Then both of us.

  But a failed marriage? Never.

  Not while there was the boy.

  As the record came to an end, I looked at Marty’s eyes through the studio’s glass wall.

  ‘Line two,’ I said into the microphone, ‘Chris from Croydon.’ Marty’s fingers flew across the board, as natural as a fish in water, and the light on the mic in front of him went red.

  Marty adjusted himself in his chair, and leaned into the mic as if he might snog it.

  ‘You’re with Marty Mann’s Clip Round the Ear live here on BBC Radio Two,’ Marty said, half-smiling. ‘Enjoying good sounds in bad times. Mmmm, I’m enjoying this ginger nut. Chris from Croydon – what’s on your mind, mate?’

  ‘I can’t go to the pictures any more, Marty. I just get too angry – angry at the sound of some dopey kid munching his lunch, and angry at the silly little gits – can I say gits? – who think they will disappear into a puff of smoke if they turn their Nokias off for ninety minutes, and angry at the yak-yak-yak of gibbering idiots – ’

  ‘Know what you mean, mate,’ Marty said, cutting him off. ‘They should be shot.’

  ‘Whitney Houston,’ I said, leaning forward. ‘“I Will Always Love You”.’

  ‘And now a song written by the great Dolly Parton,’ Marty said. He knew music. He was from that generation that had music at the centre of its universe. This wasn’t just a hit song from a Kevin Costner film to him. ‘Before all music started sounding like it was made from monosodium glutamate.’