by Tony Parsons
I piled up the dirty plates and headed for the kitchen. You would not think that there was a kitchen on the thirtieth floor of one of Babylon’s shining towers. But apparently they had lunches and dinners in the boardrooms up here. Sometimes these big shots just couldn’t be bothered to make it down to a restaurant. It was another world.
I shouldered my way through the door and then I just stood there, the plates still in my arms, because I had caught my reflection in the window. It was an incredible view of London from up there, one of those views to make you believe that there is nothing more beautiful and romantic in this world than a big city at night. London shone like God’s own jewel box.
But I did not see any of it. Not now. All I saw was myself.
And I got that feeling – the feeling you get when you look down at the city, and it seems to be calling you, and providing all the answers as it tells you to step out the window and just do it, just fall through the air, just jump. That feeling we all get when we look down at the pavement from a great height.
Or is that just me?
I felt the air leaving me. All of it, all at once. Like a man drowning in his own life. Oh bugger, I thought. Just what I need. A panic attack.
Cyd came into the kitchen and stared at me as she picked up a tray of samosas.
‘Harry,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
But I didn’t reply.
I just stood there, the dishes in my arms, looking at the man in the glass, and trying to get my breath under control, and wondering if I was going to have a heart attack. She left, looking concerned. But, slick with sweat and breathless, I did not move.
The man in the glass looked back at me, like a shadow of my former self.
Because of the boy I was a better man, I thought. Because of the boy I was more patient, and less selfish, and a kinder human being. Because of the boy I had grown up. Because of the boy I had learned how to put someone above myself. Because of the boy I had learned how to love.
And then the boy was taken away from me. It had been two months since he had moved in with Gina. Almost two weeks since I had last seen him – his Christmas Day with us, and then back to Gina on Boxing Day.
It was a different life now, and a different way of being a father and a son. It is not the things you do with them that count – the Lee Marvin double bills, the trips to football and the theme parks, all the fun family outings that are so much fun that you never have to actually talk to each other – it is the day-to-day confluence of everyday life that matters, the unadorned fact of living together, that is what makes your souls stick to each other.
And now all that was gone and I wondered where did that leave me? What did that make me? What was the good of me? What was I for? Losing my job hadn’t helped fight this feeling of being lost. But it was not the work thing. I could always find another job. But the boy was irreplaceable. My sense of myself was wrapped up in the boy. My measure of my worth. And with the boy not around, what was I worth? What was the point of me?
I stared at my mirror image for a moment longer and then I felt the stack of dirty dishes slipping from my fingers. No paper plates in here, so the noise was shattering, followed by appalled silence. A ripple of nervous laughter, and then the rest of the hired hands went back to work. It was just a waiter having a nervous breakdown.
I slumped over the sink and after an unknowable stretch of time I felt my wife at my side.
‘That’s one way of doing it,’ Cyd said. ‘Or you could just put them in the dishwasher. That works, too. Come on, let’s get you outside.’
And the bankers or brokers or whatever they were stared at us and moved aside as we walked through them to the lift. Cyd took my hand and smiled as we went down to the ground level, and she kept telling me that it was okay, it was all okay. I wasn’t so sure. There was nowhere really to sit when we reached the lobby so we went outside and stood looking out at the river as we had long ago, as we had on our very first date, when we were just starting out. The river made me feel better. The river and the way she would not let go of my hand.
‘Pat will be all right,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I said, very quickly, almost before it was out of her mouth.
‘It’s just hard,’ she said. She smiled, shrugged. Trying to explain. ‘All of it, I mean. Always. The way we build our lives. Work. Home. Having a career. Raising kids. Doing the lot. Like the song says – caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender.’
‘I know that song,’ I said. ‘That’s a good song.’
‘I mean, our parents and grandparents had it hard, but it was a different kind of hard.’
‘You mean the possibility of nuclear holocaust? The Great Depression? Hitler and Stalin? All that twentieth-century stuff?’
‘All that twentieth-century stuff,’ she said. ‘War. The Bomb. Buddy, can you spare a dime? I am not minimising it. But things were simple. For men and women. Nobody thought they had to do it all.’ She put her arm around me, and it was as if there was nobody left in the city but us. ‘It’s hard,’ my wife said. ‘It’s just hard, having it all.’
And I thought – having it all?
I wouldn’t mind having just a bit of it.
Marty held up his hands, anxious to share his vision with the commissioning editor.
‘Whose Tattoo Are You?’ Marty said excitedly. ‘Panel game. I chair two teams of comedians. You know the sort. Smug, edgy comedians who dance on the borderline of good taste. But who desperately need the work.’
The commissioning editor frowned, not really getting it. ‘And they…get tattooed?’
Marty laughed like a maniac. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘They have to identify the owner of a tattoo.’
I cleared my throat. ‘So you would see a close-up shot of a bar code on somebody’s neck,’ I said. ‘Or a butterfly. Or one of those, you know, Chinese symbols.’
‘It could be live!’ Marty said. ‘Doesn’t need to be a photograph! Could be a live feed from the green room!’
‘Put people in masks,’ I suggested.
‘Masks are good!’ Marty said. ‘Those sort of Venetian masks – you know what I mean? The masks they wear in Venice. At the festival. Spooky, sexy masks. Then after some witty exchanges from the two panels we pull back the curtain to reveal…David Beckham. Or Amy Winehouse. Or Cheryl Cole. Or Samantha Cameron. The great thing is – everyone has a tattoo these days.’
The commissioning editor looked doubtful. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘And do you really think you can get Beckham?’
‘Well, Beckham might be a booking too far,’ I said. ‘But all these Premiership footballers have got bar codes and barbed wire and Chinese dragons tattooed somewhere. So if we can’t get Becks, we can at least get someone who wants to be him.’
Marty smiled at me. ‘It’s a gap in the game-show market,’ he said. ‘A yawning chasm.’
The commissioning editor touched his watch. ‘Or perhaps a bottomless abyss,’ he muttered.
‘My So-Called Teeth,’ Marty suggested. ‘I go undercover to investigate why the British have the worst teeth in the world. Posing as a dental hygienist, I infiltrate – ’
‘Don’t like it,’ the man from the BBC said.
I sipped my tea. It had gone cold.
‘Or, or, or – Marty Mann’s Binge Britain,’ Marty said. ‘I go undercover to expose Binge Britain – but I do it while drunk…absolutely rat-faced…while binged out of my brilliant mind…’
The commissioning editor looked as if he was in pain.
‘Or animals,’ Marty said, his voice rising high with panic. ‘How Clean is Your Hamster Cage? Britain’s Most Embarrassing Animals…’
The commissioning editor frowned. ‘What – you mean a dachshund called Darcy who has developed a taste for his own excrement? And an oversexed corgi called Colin?’
‘Exactly!’
‘We did that already,’ said the man from the BBC. ‘And we did Help Me, Anthea, I’m Infested and we
did Dog Borstal and we did My Life as a Pig, where celebrities that only their mothers have ever heard of sleep among pigs, eat like pigs and even learn to converse like pigs.’
‘I remember that show,’ I said. ‘It was pretty good.’
‘So the animal thing,’ said the man from the BBC, ‘has been pretty well covered.’
‘Then – let’s take it to the next level,’ said Marty. ‘The new generation. A talent show – but for dogs. We are talking post-Simon Cowell – broadcasting that has assimilated the lessons the Einstein of light entertainment has taught us. Dogs! Skilful dogs! And rubbish dogs that – you know. We can laugh at it. They can pee on me! I don’t mind! Really! The audience will love it!’ Marty shot a sideways look at me with the eyes of a seal that is cowering under a baseball bat. ‘Monkeys?’
I felt like hugging him. Instead I smiled and nodded. ‘Monkeys,’ I said with slightly more enthusiasm than I felt. ‘Monkeys are good. Monkeys are classic.’
‘Britain’s Monkeys Got Talent,’ Marty said, and the idea immediately evaporated in the thin air of the commissioning editor’s office.
‘Or something else,’ I suggested.
‘We were programme makers,’ Marty said. ‘Mad Mann Productions.’ There was defiance in his eyes now. ‘Ever heard of Six Pissed Students in a Flat?’ He tapped his chest. ‘We invented that format. We sold that format all over the world. Six Pissed Norwegian Students in a Flat. Six Pissed Australian Students in a Flat. Six Pissed Poles…That show went around the world!’
‘Reality TV,’ said the man with the power to change our lives, parroting this week’s party line, ‘has peaked.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘there will always be a place on the schedules for cheap programming full of people who are willing to make complete idiots of themselves.’
‘We did one of the first CCTV shows,’ Marty said.
I nodded. ‘You’ve Been Robbed!’
Marty got misty-eyed at the memory. ‘Just edited highlights of crime caught on camera,’ he said. ‘But it was – you know – a savage indictment of our, er, violent society.’
‘But you’re talking about twentieth-century television,’ said the man. ‘You’re talking about ancient history.’
‘No, I’m trying to show you how broad our range is,’ Marty said. ‘You can’t have all your eggs in one chicken, right? We did the irreverent late-night arts show, Art? My Arse! The quiz show, Sorry, I’m a Complete Git. We did Wicked World.’
The man looked interested. ‘Was that the one with Terry Christian and Dani Behr?’
‘You’re thinking of The Word,’ I said. ‘Our one had Eamon Fish and Hermione Gates and Wee Willie Hiscock, the loveable Geordie cook.’
Wee Willie Hiscock clearly did not ring any bells.
‘Don’t you remember us?’ Marty said, begging now, all defiance gone. ‘We won BAFTAs. Back in the day.’
The commissioning editor stood up, and I realised that it was a new day. I stood up too. The meeting was over. Marty remained in his seat.
‘Just give us a job,’ he pleaded. ‘We’re dying here.’
And that was the problem.
They only wanted you when you did not need them.
We came up the steps and when we got to the top the greyhound stadium was spread out before us.
I remembered Thursday nights as a kid, at the dog track out at Southend, collecting armfuls of losing tickets with my cousins while my dad and my uncles studied form, and my mum and my aunts bet on their lucky numbers. Did we really do that on a school night? We must have done. A lot of it was shockingly unchanged. The smells of tobacco and perfume and beer, the accents and the laughter. Hard men in their day-off clothes and pretty women done up to the nines. Aftershave and dog shit. The working class at play.
‘I thought this world was gone,’ I laughed. ‘I thought it went years ago.’
‘No, this world is still here,’ Ken said sharply. ‘It’s you that buggered off, sunshine.’
What was different was that we were here in daylight hours. They called it a BAGS meeting – Bookmakers Afternoon Greyhound Service – and entrance was free, designed to entice the real hard core.
We picked up Singe Rana after his shift as a security guard at the firework factory on the City Road, and I took them to the Badham Cross dog track. There wasn’t a lot else I could do with them.
They did not like restaurants because they did not really eat – even when they had personally selected some greasy café in their own neighbourhood, they only picked at their food like fussy toddlers. They preferred staying in Ken’s flat and grazing on Aloo Chop potato cakes, or Nepalese curries called Mitho Chat and Aloo Dum.
Gurkha food. Lots of potatoes. And spices.
They did not like pubs because Singe Rana did not drink alcohol and Ken could not smoke. They did not like walking. They had no interest in movies. It was all rubbish after Casablanca, according to Ken. Television bored them, apart from the horses on Channel 4.
But they liked gambling.
So I took them to this dog track out on the borders of the East End and Essex that I remembered from my childhood. I thought it might have disappeared around the same time as the New Romantics, but when I Googled Badham Cross Greyhound Stadium it was still there.
In a bar that smelled of fish and chips, Ken removed one of those tiny biros that builders use from behind his ear. He licked the tip of it and bent over his racecard. As always, he was immaculate in his blazer, shirt and tie. I believe he may have slept like that. Singe Rana stared out at the track, and then up at the sky. His bets were placed on form, weather conditions and a meticulously calculated weighing of risk and reward. Ken was more superstitious. He chose his runners on the basis of names, portents, hidden omens. Ken rarely won and Singe Rana won all the time. But the amounts they gambled were so tiny that it did not make much difference.
‘Lonesome Traveller,’ Ken said, watching the dogs as they were paraded past. ‘Number five. Look at him.’
Number five was sniffing the air, but apart from that he looked exactly like the other greyhounds. They were built more like missiles than dogs.
Singe Rana shook his head. ‘The going is too soft for Lonesome Traveller,’ he said. ‘He likes the ground to be hard. But there was morning rain.’
‘He smells the blood,’ Ken insisted. He turned to me. ‘Some of them train with real rabbits, see. Makes them run a lot faster, because a real rabbit tastes a bit better than a metal rabbit. When they’ve trained with real rabbits, we say they can smell the blood.’
Again Singe Rana shook his head. ‘Not that one,’ he said. ‘Not after the morning rain.’
‘I came here with your dad once,’ Ken told me. ‘Before you were born. We bumped into Alf Ramsay. Before he was Sir Alf Ramsay. You heard of him, have you?’
I was slightly offended. ‘Manager of the England team that won the World Cup in 1966,’ I said. ‘I know my dad was at school with him.’
Ken nodded. ‘Alf had started to change his accent. What do you call it? Evolution lessons. He was very keen on his evolution lessons, old Alf. So he could natter like the toffs.’ Ken chuckled at the memory. ‘Your dad thought that was priceless.’
I thought of my father in this place. How old would he have been? Younger than I was now. A metallic parody of a rabbit rattled past. A cry went up as the dogs burst from their traps.
‘I never told him I loved him,’ I said.
Ken looked askance. ‘Alf Ramsay?’
‘My dad,’ I said. ‘Apart from the once. At the end. In the hospital. When I knew he was dying. I told him then. But I only ever told him the once. And I regret that.’
Ken Grimwood grimaced, straightening up inside his blazer. He looked a little nauseous.
‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Your father wasn’t the kind that needed a hug. He wouldn’t have thanked you for slobbering all over him every second of the day.’
Voices were raised. The metallic rabbit came rattling pas
t, followed by the soft thunder of the greyhounds after it. Number five, Lonesome Traveller, was nowhere to be seen. Ken began ripping his betting slip into tiny shreds. Singe Rana laughed. The dog at the front of the pack wore black and white stripes with a red number six.
‘Six!’ cried Singe Rana, bouncing up and down. ‘Come on, you number six!’
Ken Grimwood sniffed, not looking at me.
‘You told him you loved him once,’ he said, his builder’s biro flitting across his betting slip, ready for the next race. ‘And for a man like your dad, believe me – once is plenty.’
There was a pack of them, methodically destroying the bus stop.
Hooded and beanie-capped in deference to the CCTV cameras on every corner, but beyond that quite brazen as they skimmed lumps of concrete through the panes of glass. It smashed like an explosion of diamonds under the yellow streetlights, and they whooped with pure joy.
I had dropped Ken and Singe Rana off at Nelson Mansions, and I was glad they were not with me. That was one good thing. They would have done something stupid. Like trying to stop them.
They seemed to be multiplying before my eyes. They were spilling out into the road, ducking and shrieking with delight as the glass sprayed around them. I put my foot on the brake, and I could feel my breathing. I wanted to turn around and find another way. But it was too late. My headlights caught them, trapped them in the accusing glare. And, as if they had one mind among them, they turned to look at me. And then I saw him.
In the middle of the pack.
A thick wedge of blond hair sticking out from his beanie cap.
A lump of concrete the size of a pizza in his hands.
He bit his bottom lip as he tossed the concrete through the last of the glass. Then they were gone. Back into the warren of flats. And I sat there with a million diamonds in my headlights, thinking, It was a boy who looked just like him. That’s all. A white kid in his mid-teens with long fair hair and a face that was young for his age.
There must be a million kids who look like that.
