by Tony Parsons
Eleven
There was the full-throated rumble of a Harley-Davidson outside our house, and then the immediate sound of footsteps on the stairs. Peggy gave me a quick hug and the motorbike helmet she was carrying pressed against my ribs.
‘He’s here,’ she said, giving me a peck on the cheek, and a smile that looked as though it was trying to hold itself back. ‘My dad’s here.’
‘Have a good time,’ I said, but what I thought was, You can’t compete with blood. Well, you can compete, but you will always lose. Straight sets. TKO. Ten – nil. Take on blood and you do not even make it to a penalty shoot-out.
I went to the window and gazed down at Jim’s face, so familiar from his leading role on the hit TV show, PC Filth: An Unfair Cop. Jim Mason, heroically beautiful in black Belstaff leather from tousled hair to the adorably scuffed toes of his biker boots, sat astride his mighty steed, leathery legs spread wide, smiling at his daughter. And her mother. He had removed his helmet and his face was red and sweaty but still dead gorgeous.
And more than that – instantly recognisable. I mean, I am not one of the millions who tune in to watch his clichéd cop show (alcoholism – check, divorced – check, dead partner – check, long-running feud with a genius serial killer – check) but even I knew every contour of his high-cheekboned face.
And as the three of them stood there – Jim and Peggy in their leathers, Cyd with her arms folded across her chest – I felt a hard lump form in my throat. They looked like a real family.
Cyd and Jim had had a traditional divorce – casual infidelity (his), bitter recriminations (hers) and a growing sense of bafflement (his and hers) that they had ever managed to be in the same room together, let alone have a crack at the marriage game.
And they had fought for their love. They had met in her hometown of Houston, Texas, where Jim was working as a despatch rider and seemed to young, impressionable Cyd as if he was an incredibly glamorous postman.
They married, but when he failed to make the kind of impact on America that he made on the tall, leggy brunette he danced with at the Yucatan Liquor Store, Jim came home to England with his leather tail between his legs and she came with him, facing poverty, rain and the ritual humiliation of immigration officers who refused to believe they were really in love.
But it was the real thing. Until Jim, after an unhappy spell delivering takeaways for the Double Fortune restaurant on the Holloway Road, began having a thing with the manageress, a nubile Kowloon lass. And then one of the waitresses, a native of Kuala Lumpur. And then her younger sister.
‘He’s into the bamboo,’ Cyd told me when explaining why her marriage had broken up.
But now I watched Cyd with Jim and there was clearly a restored affection between them. It was as though they were engaged in a second courtship – the relationship that is formed after you go your separate ways. He was grinning at her, wiping sweat from his forehead in a gesture that was almost shy. She reached out and rubbed his arm. Softly, twice. Blink and you would have missed it. The gesture was so shocking that I almost looked away. But I couldn’t.
Because I could see what was happening.
There was a secret chamber in my wife’s heart that longed for her old life. When she was with the only man that she had ever married. When they had a baby girl that shared their blood. When there was nobody else around – refugees from broken homes, wounded stragglers from the divorce courts dragging their confused, wounded children behind.
I watched them down in the street and I knew.
Cyd – or at least a part of her – wanted a family without any sharp, jagged edges. It did not seem like much to ask for.
And between you and me, I could see the appeal.
There was a rustle by my side and suddenly Joni was there, clambering up on the sofa to look out the window. She took my hand.
‘Looks dangerous,’ Joni said thoughtfully. ‘This motorbike lark.’
We watched Jim and Peggy ride away. Cyd stood in the street until they were out of sight, and when she turned back to the house Joni slammed the palms of her hands against the window.
But Cyd didn’t look up.
‘It was easy in your day,’ I told the old men, not looking them in the eye, but studying the form for the afternoon’s racing at Goodwood. ‘The men and women thing. The parents and children thing. It was all so much easier.’
Singe Rana stared at me with those kind, soulful eyes that revealed absolutely nothing. Ken gave no indication that he had even heard.
‘What do you fancy for the three thirty, me old china?’ he said, narrowing his eyes at his Racing Post. ‘Only Boy?’
Singe Rana turned his face towards the open door of the bookmakers. A grey drizzle was falling on Essex Road.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Because Only Boy likes the going soft.’
Ken nodded thoughtfully at this sage advice. He tapped the little pen he was holding against the rim of his glasses. I had always thought of those small, child-sized biros as builder’s pens. But I saw now that they were bookmaker’s pens. The builders just nicked them from the bookies.
‘Easier?’ Ken reflected, smiling at his Racing Post. ‘Don’t know about easier. Simpler? I would give you simpler. I would grant you that. All those women stuck in marriages where they were knocked about from their wedding night to their dying day. We didn’t have domestic abuse. We had the wife getting knocked about because the old man was back from the boozer, or there had been a bad day at the races, or the boss had treated him like dirt. Or just because he felt like it. Just because he wanted to remind her of her place – under his boot heel. And all those men – the ones who got married to someone they knocked up at seventeen and still didn’t know fifty years later. The ones who made a bad choice and lived with it because they didn’t know what else to do.’
He looked at me and then up at the TV suspended high above our heads. Horses were being led to the starting line, or whatever they called it. This was all still quite new to me.
‘I can see why you’re sorry you missed it,’ Ken said. ‘Marriages that were a life sentence. Marriages that were like prisons. Children who got knocked about or worse.’
‘But the children,’ I insisted, ‘the children were better off. Even if the adults were trapped and miserable. The kids were the great benefactors of those old families.’
‘Sometimes,’ Ken said. ‘In the good homes. Not in the bad ones. We didn’t have sexual abuse in our day. We had fiddling about. Brothers. Uncles. Dads. Fiddling about, some of them. And nowhere to run. Nowhere to go. No way out until they carted you off in a wooden box.’ He jabbed his baby biro in my face, momentarily lost for words, and I wondered if it had happened to him. His childhood was beyond my imagination. Then suddenly he grinned at me, his false teeth as white as bone.
‘Oh yeah, I remember,’ said Ken Grimwood, nudging Singe Rana as Long Shot appeared on screen, a faint mist rising from his sleek, chestnut-coloured shanks. Ken began to laugh, and the laughter became a cough, and I could hear the fluid clogging his lungs.
‘The good old days,’ he said.
In the film we had somehow found ourselves watching, the seas rose and the cities fell. In a peculiarly photogenic manner.
The dome of the White House was carried off like a pingpong ball. The Eiffel Tower collapsing like a reed breaking in a stream. The Taj Mahal, Big Ben, the Sydney Opera House – all washed away like flecks of dandruff.
And the fires came, burning like the ovens of hell. And the smoke billowed through the canyons of skyscrapers like clouds at the end of the world. And the earth cracked. And the human race perished in their millions. And the rains lashed the ravished earth.
‘They’ve been unlucky with the weather,’ I whispered in the darkness, but Pat did not laugh.
I could feel him stir in the seat beside me, half-heartedly rifling his mega-bucket of sweet popcorn. After a while the glow of his mobile phone appeared in his palm.
‘Why don’t you watch the bloody fi
lm?’ I snapped, still keeping my voice down, although it seemed a spectacularly old-fashioned convention, like giving up your seat on public transport, or opening the door for a woman. All around the cinema there were phones glowing in the dark, and people enjoying their main meal of the day, and engaging in animated conversation. Not even the end of life on Earth could distract them.
‘You know why?’ Pat said, and he glanced at me. ‘Because it’s just – I don’t know – 9/11 porn or something. All these images – people jumping from buildings, the buildings collapsing, clouds of smoke coming down the street – it’s all lifted from the news, innit?’
‘Don’t say innit,’ I said.
‘To give some moron his kicks,’ he continued. ‘To give some popcorn-chomping thicko his cheap thrills. Know what I mean? It makes me sick to my stomach, if you want to know the truth.’
‘But apart from that,’ I said. ‘Do you think it’s quite good?’
‘An instant classic,’ he said with contempt.
I got up and started working my way down the aisle. There was a time when this would have caused mild outrage among my fellow cinemagoers. Like talking too loud in a library. This shower did not even lower their kebabs.
I stood outside, looking out at Leicester Square, waiting to see if Pat would join me. We had never walked out of a picture before.
And we had always had the movies. When Gina left, back when Pat was four, his Star Wars obsession turned into something else. Something more. Another world he could retreat into when the real one was too much. There were the toys – eight-inch Han Solos and Luke Skywalkers and Darth Vaders, battle-grey models of the Millennium Falcon and X-wing fighters, and plastic light sabres that were dented forever if you stood on them.
But above all there were the films, which he would watch on video until he was dragged away, and which we went to see in double and even triple bills. Once a year you could catch the entire trilogy in some mad corner of the West End. Star Wars. The Empire Strikes Back. Return of the Jedi. And at an age when other fathers were taking their sons to the football or fishing – other pastimes where there is not much call for conversation – Pat was building up an enormous capacity to spend hours sitting in the darkness, sustained by Fanta and milk-chocolate-coated raisins and some $100-million fantasy. The cinema had been our thing. And now, it felt like it was all coming to an end.
Then he was there by my side, both of us embarrassed, anxious to avoid a fight. Because what exactly would we be fighting about? A distant voice told me that we should be laughing about this end-of-days, Book of Revelations rubbish. But neither of us was smiling.
‘Chinatown?’ I said.
He grimaced. ‘Not really hungry,’ he said, his hair over his eyes. He looked at his wrist. He was not wearing a watch. ‘School night. Getting late.’
I nodded, as if all things were settled.
‘Then home,’ I said, and the word tasted toxic in my mouth.
Gina opened the door.
She smiled and hugged him and kissed him even as he was brushing past her. He did not say goodbye. She transferred her smile to me as she half-closed the front door, obscuring my view.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ I said.
The smile faded. I could hear him banging about in the kitchen. It sounded like he was getting something to eat. So the not-really-hungry thing was a big fat fib for a start. He just did not want to go to Chinatown. He did not want to be with me.
‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ she said, and there was sudden frost in her voice. Oh I remember you, I thought. ‘Pat’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’s settled in very well. He’s become great friends with Peter.’
‘Peter? Peter? Who the fucking fuck is Peter?’
‘Can you watch your language? Peter is my boyfriend.’
I sighed. ‘Funny, isn’t it? Someone in their forties having a boyfriend. And are you and Peter dating? Or are you just going steady? Do you neck – or do you just make out? How’s the heavy petting going? Jesus Christ, Gina – come up with some new terms. You’re not a teenager.’
She erupted. ‘Even now!’ she said. ‘It never ends with you, does it?’
‘It ends, it ends,’ I said, suddenly afraid the door would slam in my face before I had the chance to tell her what I had realised in the sad, silent walk back to Soho. But she had something to tell me first.
‘Do you know what your trouble is, Harry?’
‘Enlighten me.’
She stepped outside the door, not wanting Pat to hear. I gave her credit for that. It would probably not have occurred to me.
‘It’s straightforward when there’s just one parent,’ she said, lowering her voice but spitting out every word. ‘For all your Olympic-standard hand-wringing.’ She did an imitation of my voice that sounded nothing like me. ‘Oh, poor little me. Oh, poor little Pat.’
‘Olympic-standard hand-wringing,’ I said. ‘I like that, Gina. That’s good. I’m going to write that down.’
‘So glad you approve, Harry. I live to make you happy.’ She took a half-step beyond her door. ‘But for all the self-pity, Harry, you actually loved it when it was just you. It’s simpler when there’s just one parent. You can play the Great Dictator. What you say goes. The single parent is God.’
‘Yeah, single parents,’ I said. ‘What a bunch of selfish bastards.’
‘Goodnight, Harry.’
She stepped back inside and began to close the door. I stuck my foot in it, like some psycho door-to-door salesman. Gina looked at it and laughed with disbelief.
‘I don’t want to fight, Gina,’ I said, and I searched for the words. I knew how I felt but I had trouble turning it into words. That seemed to happen all the time these days. ‘I just – I don’t want his life to be about us.’
She waited. I took my foot away. It actually hurt quite a bit.
‘I want Pat to have his own life,’ I said. ‘I don’t want his life to be about his mother or his father or what happened between them. Our divorce. All the rest of that mess. We have to let him have his own life, Gina. We owe him that much.’
She smiled and drew back and then I was staring at the closed door. I could hear her double-locking it, and then her footsteps as she went inside. And she didn’t get it. Or perhaps the thought was too unbearable to contemplate.
That Pat’s life would be forever shaped by our failure, stamped on his heart for the rest of his life, as indelible as a teardrop tattoo.
Twelve
I began to fear the postman’s step.
It turned my guts to clay. That heavy-footed shuffle down our garden path, the metallic clack of the letterbox, and then there they were, my problem now, the red bills in brown envelopes, sitting among the restaurant menus and junk mail, as conspicuous as a rash. Symptoms of a sudden outbreak of poverty.
But worst of all was the white envelope containing a letter from the mortgage company. And the language – so stilted, so tired, the mechanical response of a database that had seen losers like me many times before.
If you are encountering difficulties in paying your mortgage…
Cyd came down the stairs, watching me, and I quickly folded the letter.
‘Harry,’ she said. ‘We need to talk about money.’
I laughed and took her in my arms. ‘No, we don’t,’ I said. ‘Because something will turn up. Something always turns up.’
She slipped her arms around my waist. She laid her head on my shoulder. But she wasn’t smiling.
‘It’s not the way it was before,’ she said. ‘I can feel it in the City. Something is coming. You can’t just walk into a job. A man your age…’
Oh, that was low. I let her go. Now neither of us was smiling.
The phone in my pocket began to vibrate and I took it out. Usually any call on my mobile caused a frisson of irritation – good item for A Clip Round the Ear, I thought, momentarily forgetting that our little show was history – but now I flipped it open with gratitude, because it meant I did not have
to think about money.
UNKNOWN CALLER, my phone told me, and it wasn’t kidding.
‘You don’t know me,’ said a cool, middle-class male voice. ‘But my name is Peter Groves. I am the, uh, boyfriend of Gina.’
Cyd was watching me. I headed down the hall.
‘Hello?’ I said.
It creeped me out. All of it. The fact that this guy could just pick up the phone and call me in my home. The fact that he could refer to himself as Gina’s boyfriend without any apparent shame or embarrassment. The fact that he must have met my son by now. The boyfriend had probably spent the night with the girlfriend – with the son asleep in the room next door. What did the boyfriend and the girlfriend call that? A sleepover? A playdate?
‘My name – ’
‘Yeah, I got that bit,’ I said, heading out to the garden. I dipped my head under the eaves of the Wendy House. I wanted to keep this conversation out of my home. ‘What do you want?’ I said.
‘What do I want?’ He seemed taken aback. ‘Well, if it is possible, I would like to meet you. To talk. To discuss where we are and how we may resolve any issues.’
This was another language to me. One I didn’t speak. I felt the blood rising. My mouth was dry. I realised that this calm, reasonable man filled me with a murderous rage.
‘I don’t want to meet,’ I said, and it came out a bit more sulky than I would have liked. Cyd was at the kitchen door, watching me with concern. Her arms were folded across her chest. That gesture always tugged at my heart a bit, to tell you the truth. It was as if she was trying to protect herself.
I could hear him sighing. I loved that. The sound of him sighing in my earhole.
‘I think it would be beneficial for Gina,’ he said – the voice of reason. ‘And for her son, too.’
Her son. Not Pat. Not your son. Everything this guy said annoyed the hell out of me. But I knew that I would meet him. I knew I had to.
‘Okay,’ I said, and I thought of a dozen cafés that I knew around my old place of work. Just north of Oxford Street, the great civilised sweep of Marylebone from Portland Place to Baker Street. The area was full of them, and I suddenly missed being in gainful employment more than ever. I named a café on Marylebone High Street and a day and a time.
