Men from the Boys

by Tony Parsons

  This was the starting point for our show – nothing was as good as it used to be. You know, stuff like pop music, and the human race.

  Whitney’s cut-glass yearning began and Marty gave me a thumbs-up as he whipped off his headphones. He barged open the door. ‘Four minutes thirty-seconds on Whitney,’ I said.

  ‘Great, I can pee slowly,’ he said. ‘What’s next?’

  I consulted my notes. ‘Let’s broaden it out,’ I said. ‘Nonspecific anger. Rap about being angry about everything. Being angry with people who litter. Yet also angry with people who make you recycle. Angry about people who swear in front of children, angry at traffic wardens, angry at drivers who want to kill your kids.’

  ‘Those bastards in Smart cars,’ Marty said, as he kept moving.

  ‘People, really,’ I said, calling after him. ‘Feeling angry at people. Any kind of rudeness, finger wagging or ignorance. And then maybe go to a bit of Spandau Ballet.’

  ‘I can do that,’ he said, and then he was gone.

  ‘Two minutes forty on and we’re back live,’ said Josh, the Oxford graduate who ran our errands – the BBC was full of them, all these Oxbridge double-firsts chasing up wayward mini-cabs – and I could hear the nerves in his voice. But I just nodded. I knew that Marty would be back just as Whitney was disappearing from Kevin Costner’s life forever. We were not new to this.

  Marty and I were back on radio now – a couple of old radio hams who had taken a beating on telly and crawled back to where we had begun. It happens to guys like us. In fact, I have often thought that it is the only thing that happens to guys like us. One day the telly ends. But we were making a go of it. A Clip Round the Ear was doing well – we had that glass ear awarded by our peers to prove it. Ratings were rising for a show that played baby boomer standards and boldly proclaimed that everything was getting worse.

  Music. Manners. Mankind.

  I watched Marty come out of the gents, clumsily fumbling with the buttons on his jeans – I know he was angry about there never being zips on jeans – and saw a couple of guests for the show next door do a double take. Since his golden years as the presenter of late-night, post-pub TV, he had put on a little weight and lost some of that famous carrot-topped thatch. But people still expected him to look as he did when he was interviewing Kurt Cobain.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, and I felt an enormous pang of tenderness for him.

  Being on television is a lot like dying young. You stay fixed in the public imagination as that earlier incarnation. Someone who interviews the young and thin Simon Le Bon – they do not grow old as we grow old. But every TV show comes to an end. And, as Marty was always quick to point out, even the true greats – David Frost, Michael Parkinson, Jonathan Ross – have their wilderness years, the time spent working in Australia or getting rat-faced in the Groucho Club, waiting for the call to come again.

  Marty settled himself in front of the mic, and pulled on his headphones. I didn’t know if Marty – and by extension, his producer: me – would ever get that call. For every great who comes again there are a thousand half-forgotten faces who never do come again. As much as I loved him, I suspected that Marty Mann was more of a Simon Dee than a David Frost.

  ‘You are angry because you know how things should be,’ Marty was saying to his constituency, as he teed up Morrissey. ‘Anger comes with experience, anger comes with wisdom. This is A Clip Round the Ear saying embrace your anger, friends. Love your anger. It is proof that you are alive. And – how about a bit of English seaside melancholia: “Everyday Is Like Sunday”.’

  Then the two hours were up and we gathered our things and got ready to go home. That was a sign of the times. When we worked on The Marty Mann Show – when he was television’s Marty Mann – we always hung around for hours when we were off air, working our way through the wine, beer and cheese and onion crisps in our lavish green-room banquet, coming down off of that incredible rush you only get from live TV – even if you are behind the cameras. When we were doing The Marty Mann Show ten years ago, we could carouse in the green room until the milkman was on his way. But that was telly then and this was Radio Two now.

  Broadcasting House was a bit of a dump when it came to post-gig entertainment. The place did not encourage loitering, or hospitality, or lavish entertaining. There wasn’t a sausage roll in sight. You did your gig and then you buggered off. There was nothing there – just a couple of smelly sofas and some tragic vending machines.

  The green room. That was another thing that wasn’t as good as it used to be.

  Gina was waiting for me when I came out of work.

  Standing across the street from Broadcasting House, in the shadow of the Langham Hotel, just where the creamy calm of Portland Place curves down to the cheapo bustle of Oxford Circus.

  She looked more like herself now – or at least I could recognise the woman I had loved. Tall, radiant Gina. Loving someone is a bit like being on TV. A face gets locked in a memory vault, and it is a shock to see it has changed when you were not looking. We both took a step towards each other and there were these long awkward moments as the cars whizzed between us. Then I shouldered my bag and made it across.

  ‘I couldn’t remember if you were live or not,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The show,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know if you recorded it earlier. Or if it really was ten till midnight.’

  I nodded. ‘A bit late for you, isn’t it?’

  ‘My body’s still on Tokyo time,’ she said. ‘Or somewhere between there and here.’ She attempted a smile. ‘I’m not sleeping much.’

  We stared at each other.

  ‘Hello, Harry.’

  ‘Gina.’

  We didn’t kiss. We went for coffee. I knew a Never Too Latte just off Carnaby Street that stayed open until two. She took a seat in the window and I went to the counter and ordered a cappuccino with extra chocolate for her and a double macchiato for myself. Then I had to take it back because she had stopped drinking coffee during her years in Tokyo and only drank tea now.

  ‘How well you know me,’ she said after I had persuaded some Lithuanian girl to exchange a coffee for tea. Was she that sharp when we were together? I don’t think so. She was another one who had got angrier with the years.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Stupid of me not to read your mind.’

  And we took it from there.

  ‘Japan’s over,’ she said. ‘The economy is worse than here.’

  ‘Nowhere is worse than here,’ I said. ‘Ah, Gina. You could have called.’

  ‘Yes, I could have called. I could have phoned home and had to be polite to your second wife.’

  ‘She’s not my second wife,’ I said. ‘She’s my wife.’

  My first wife wasn’t listening.

  ‘Or I could have phoned your PA at work and asked her if you had a window for me next week. I could have done all of that but I didn’t, did I? And why should I?’ She leaned forward and smiled. ‘Because he’s my child just as much as he’s your child.’

  I stared at her, wondering if there ever came a point where that was simply no longer true.

  And I wondered if we had reached that point years ago.

  ‘What’s with the keep-fit routine?’ I said, changing the subject. She was in terrific shape.

  ‘It’s not a routine.’ She flexed her arms self-consciously. ‘I just want to look after myself as I get older.’

  I smiled. ‘I can’t see you on the yoga mat.’

  She didn’t smile back. ‘I had a scare a couple of years back. A health scare. That was something you missed.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Please don’t apologise.’

  ‘Jesus Christ – why can’t you just let me say I’m sorry?’

  ‘And why can’t you just drop dead?’

  We stared at our drinks.

  We had started out with good intentions. Difficult to believe now, I know, but when we divorced back then we w
ere a couple of idealistic young kids. We really thought that we could have a happy break-up. Or at least a divorce that always did the right thing.

  But Gina had blown in and out of our lives. And gradually other things got in the way of good intentions. In my experience it is so easy to push good intentions to the back of the queue – or to have them quietly escorted from the building.

  Gina wanted to be a good mother. I know she did. I know she loved Pat. I never doubted that. But she was always one step from fulfilment, and life got in the way, and everything let her down. Her second husband. Working abroad. And me, of course. Me first and worst of all.

  We sat in silence for a bit.

  ‘Is this the way we are going to do it?’ I said.

  ‘What way?’

  ‘You know what way, Gina.’

  ‘What way do you want to do it? Shall we be nice to each other? First time for everything, I guess.’

  ‘I don’t want us to be this way,’ I said. ‘How long are we going to spit poison at each other?’

  ‘I don’t know, Harry. Until we get tired of the taste.’

  ‘I was tired years ago.’

  We sat in silence as if the people we had once been no longer existed. As if there was nothing between us. And it wasn’t true.

  ‘He’s my son too,’ she said.

  ‘Biologically,’ I said.

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘Are you kidding me? Look, Gina – I think it’s great you’re back.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘But I don’t want him hurt.’

  ‘How could he be hurt?’

  ‘I don’t know. New man. New job. New country. You tell me.’

  ‘You don’t break up with your children.’

  ‘I love it when people say that to me. Because it’s just not true. Plenty of people break up with their children, Gina. Mostly, they’re men. But not all of them.’

  ‘Do you want me to draw you a diagram, Harry?’

  ‘Hold on – I’ll get you a pen.’

  I lifted my hand for the waitress. Gina pushed it down. It was the first time we had touched in years and years, and it was like getting an electric shock.

  ‘I broke up with you, Harry – not him. I went off you – not him. I stopped loving you – not him. Sorry to break this to you, Harry.’

  ‘I’ll get over it.’

  ‘But I never stopped loving him. Even when I was busy. Preoccupied. Absent.’ She sipped at her tea and looked at me. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Fine. He’s fine, Gina.’

  ‘He’s so tall. And his face – he has such a lovely face, Harry. He was always a beautiful kid, wasn’t he?’

  I smiled. It was true. He was always the most beautiful boy in the world. I felt myself softening towards her.

  ‘He’s in the Lateral Thinking Club,’ I said, warming up to the theme, happy to talk about the wonder of our son, and we both laughed about that.

  ‘Bright boy,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know what Lateral Thinking is – thinking outside the box? Training the mind to work better?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘He can explain it better than me.’ I had finished my coffee. I wanted to go home to my family. ‘What do you want, Gina?’

  ‘I want my son,’ she said. ‘I want to know him. I want him to know me. I know we – I – have wasted so much time. That’s why I want it now. Before it’s too late.’

  And I thought it would never be too late. There was a Gina-sized hole in Pat’s life, had been for years, but I thought that it could never be too late to fill it. For both of them – I thought that there would always be time to put things right. That’s how dumb I am. Already my mind was turning to the practicalities of shipping Pat around town.

  ‘Where you living, Gina?’

  ‘I’ve got a two-bedroom flat on Old Compton Street,’ she said. ‘Top floor. Plenty of space. Nice light.’ She looked out the window. ‘Five minutes from here.’

  I was amused. ‘Soho?’ I said. ‘That’s an interesting choice. What you trying to do – recapture your youth?’

  Her mouth tightened at that.

  ‘I didn’t have any youth, Harry,’ she said. ‘I was married to you.’

  Then my phone began to vibrate. I took the call as Gina looked away and a woman with a Jamaican accent told me that they had Ken Grimwood at the hospital.

  When he was seven years old my son almost drowned. We were in a quiet corner of Crete called Agios Stephanos – years before the island was claimed by the boys in football shirts – and the last thing we were expecting on our mini-break was death and tragedy. We could get all that at home.

  These were the years after I split up with Gina, and then my dad died and then my mum got sick – and it felt like every time you turned around someone was either walking out or dying. We were not really in Crete for sun, sea and Retsina. We just wanted to catch our breath.

  In my mind I see a windy, rocky beach. And I see Pat – all skinny limbs and tangled blond mop and baggy trunks, splashing out with a float while I settled down with a paperback.

  My son at seven.

  He made me smile, because he was wearing a pair of sunglasses that were way too big for him, purchased at the airport and proudly worn ever since, even at night. He would squint at his moussaka and chips in the Cretan twilight.

  The waves were whipping up, but it did not cross my mind to be worried. He did not go far. But sometimes you do not have to go far to get into more trouble than you can handle. He had settled down on his float, got all dreamy in the sunlight and then he must have drifted. And by the time he noticed, it was more than drifting.

  ‘Dad!’

  You know your child’s voice. Even on a crowded beach, with small children shouting and calling out on all sides, you know it instantly.

  He was trying to stand up, although you couldn’t really stand up on that float, and he kept sinking to one knee as it threatened to pitch him into the sea. And he was scared. Face pale with fear behind those oversized sunglasses. Calling for me.

  And I was on my feet and running, my heart a hammer as I ran to the water, suddenly aware of the speed of the clouds, suddenly noticing the swell of the waves, suddenly remembering that it can all fall apart at any moment.

  He was a good swimmer. Even at seven. Maybe that’s why it happened, why I was too relaxed about letting him go out with a float. But suddenly it wasn’t enough that he could rescue a plastic brick while wearing his pyjamas.

  I crashed through waves that seemed to be at once taking Pat out to open sea and smashing me back to the shore, switching between breaststroke and crawl and back again, getting a sickening gutful of water every time I called his name.

  Finally I got to him. One hand on a corner of the float, another wrapped tight round a skinny limb. It was like trying to hold a fish.

  And that was when he went into the water.

  Flailing white limbs in the foggy depths. Silence, apart from the rushing sound in my ears. And then one of my arms wrapped around his waist as I kicked for the surface. The float was above our heads and somehow I got him on it and I made him lie flat on his belly, while I lumbered back to the beach, telling him that everything was all right. He clung on, somehow still wearing those oversized sunglasses and too numb to cry.

  Then finally we were on the beach.

  How bad was it? The parental mind has this endless ability to vault to the absolute worst-case scenario. No trouble at all. A parent panics not because of what is happening but because of what might.

  But this was bad enough for everyone on the beach to put down their suntan lotion and copies of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and stare at us even when it was clear that nobody was going to die, even as we staggered off to our shared hotel room, both salty with tears and regurgitated Aegean. Bad enough for me to remember for the rest of my life.

  And what I remember most is the feeling of trying to reach my son as the sea and the wind and tide combined to push me back to the sh
ore while they tried to carry Pat out to the open sea. That’s what I remember the most. Because sometimes it felt like that was the story of us, the story of me and my boy. Trying to reach each other, wanting to reach each other, but forever kept apart by forces that were bigger than both of us.

  And the funny thing about calling your child’s name is that it doesn’t do a blind bit of good.

  But you do it anyway.

  Ken Grimwood sat propped up in his hospital bed in a robe that enveloped his small body like a circus tent, and when he grinned at me he was gummy as a newborn baby. On the bedside table, his false teeth sat in a glass of water.

  ‘They found him at the bus depot,’ a Filipina nurse told me. ‘He was unconscious. He couldn’t breathe. And he had a cigarette in his hand. We found this in his pocket.’

  She handed me a BBC business card with my name on, as if I might want it back. And I remembered giving it to him before he left my house only because I wanted to get rid of him. And here he was, bounced back into my life because he had my card.

  ‘I hardly know him,’ I said, keeping my voice down. ‘He’s not actually anything to do with me.’

  Ken laughed and we watched him produce a tin of Old Holborn and a packet of Rizlas from somewhere inside his giant robe. He must have been the only person left who wasn’t using roll-ups to smoke illegal substances. He flashed his toothless grin and as the nurse advanced towards him he stuck his smoking paraphernalia under the sheet.

  ‘Just pulling your leg, sweetheart,’ he said.

  She took his blood pressure, shaking her head.

  But when she left he produced his baccy tin and his papers. He winked at me slyly.

  I walked down to the nurses’ station. The Filipina was there with a large Jamaican duty nurse. They looked at me as if I had done something wrong.

  ‘Your father is a very sick man,’ the duty nurse said. ‘There’s fluid on his lungs and I don’t know how much longer he can breathe unaided, okay? And of course you are aware that the cancer is at an advanced stage.’