Men from the Boys

by Tony Parsons

  And he was lovely. Appreciative of the food, keen to help – he had always been quick to clear up the table and cart the empties to the kitchen. In the past it had sometimes made me uncomfortable – if Cyd had been his real mother, would he have always been on such perfect behaviour? But tonight I was grateful for my boy’s good manners.

  Peggy turned off the lights and in the darkness Cyd brought out a chocolate cake with fifteen candles. We all sang, ‘Happy Birthday, dear Pat,’ and after he had blown out the candles – in one go, to wild applause – we all had a slice.

  After dinner Peggy slipped off to do her homework and Pat sat on the floor with Joni. She was showing him some dog game on her Nintendo DS, and every now and again the game gave a very authentic yelp.

  ‘So you’ve got two homes now,’ Joni said, not looking up from her dog game.

  Pat laughed. ‘I’ve got no homes now,’ he said, and smiled when Joni lifted her serious, seven-year-old face to him. ‘Show me how you take Bouncy for a walk,’ he said.

  But it was a school night and after a while Cyd called to Joni to go and brush her teeth.

  ‘Can I stay up late?’ she said, her vampire mouth pleading. ‘As Pat’s here? As it was his birthday some time ago?’

  ‘You are staying up late,’ Cyd said. ‘Clean those teeth and get your pyjamas on.’

  The evening was winding down. Joni reluctantly went off to the bathroom. I went to help Cyd in the kitchen and Pat wandered out to the garden.

  Through the kitchen window I saw the security light come on and illuminate him, all slouching limbs and uncombed hair, looking up at the house as if he was remembering something. Then the light went off and all you could see was his silhouette, lit by moonlight and the orange glow that always hangs over the city.

  I felt almost relaxed. He could come round and eat dinner with us and it was as if nothing had changed. I could hear Peggy’s music filtering down from upstairs. The sound of Joni spitting in the downstairs bathroom. I watched Cyd rinse a pot and when she had finished I took her wet hand and held it against my face.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she smiled. ‘I love seeing him.’

  Then her smile faded. She squinted at the garden. And I saw it too. The faint red glow in Pat’s mouth.

  As if the silhouette in the garden knew that it was being watched, it quickly slipped into the Wendy House. But even inside the little wooden playhouse, you could see the red glow in the darkness as it rose and fell from my son’s lips.

  ‘Does he smoke now?’ Cyd said.

  I shook my head. ‘Not that I know of,’ I said, and I made a move to the garden and then felt her stop me.

  ‘Let me talk to him,’ she said. ‘It will be better coming from me.’

  So I watched her go.

  And I watched her long-limbed shadow cross the garden and enter the Wendy House. And after not very long at all she came back, holding something that emitted a faint red glow in the darkness. She burst through the door and I don’t think I had ever seen her so angry. I recognised that sickly sweet smell immediately. She held up a soggy hand-rolled cigarette, her eyes blazing.

  ‘Mexican weed in the Wendy House!’ she said. ‘Very nice! Smoking Mexican weed in the Wendy House!’

  Then Pat burst into the house, tears streaming down his face and chin trembling. Hardly what you would expect from a hardened user who had turned his sister’s Wendy House into a drug den.

  I said his name but he kept heading for the front door. I went after him. Joni appeared in the door of the bathroom, an electric toothbrush vibrating in her hand. Peggy was on the stairs. I looked back at Cyd. She shook her head, the joint extinguished but still in her hand.

  The front door opened and closed with a bang.

  I called his name again. And then I went after him. I chased him down the street and I could see him ahead of me for a while but then we got to the Holloway Road and I lost him. He must have jumped on a bus or in a cab. I walked the streets until I knew that he was gone, calling his phone again and again even though it always went straight to the answer machine. And then I went back to the house.

  It had been a while. Joni had been packed off to bed. The music had stopped in Peggy’s room. And the only sounds I could hear were the dishwasher and the muted, troubled voice of my wife on the phone. She hung up when she saw me.

  ‘Wrong number,’ she said.

  Liar.

  Thirteen

  Even the parents looked different.

  We all shivered on the same muddy touchline, the February wind whipping through our winter coats, stamping our feet against the cold as we waited for the teams to appear. But there was no mistaking the parents of the three-grand-a-term UTI kids from the mums and dads of Ramsay Mac. They looked as though it wasn’t just a different education they were buying, but a different life.

  We looked poorer. We looked fatter. We looked pastier – even though we were a far more multi-racial bunch. Our hair was thinner, gone or bleached to the point of wispy no return. Their hair was long and lustrous, falling in magnificent curls and ringlets – especially the dads. We looked not quite mature – there were lurid tattoos, and replica football shirts – especially among the mothers. And there were more of them – the UTI families bred like pampered rabbits, and younger brothers and sisters frolicked at the feet of their affluent parents, a few of them holding babes in arms. You think that we would have that over them – that at least the Ramsay Mac parents would be able to knock out more kids than they could. You would think that at least we could procreate better than them. But, you see, the UTI parents stayed together. And at Ramsay Mac, we came apart. I inhaled deeply, smelling their swimming pool, and I felt the sharp pang of chlorine and envy.

  Their playing fields went on forever, and the cries and shouts of other matches drifted across as the teams made their way to the pitch. UTI in their red-and-black stripes, and Ramsay Mac in all white. Apart from Pat, who sloped roundshouldered near the back of his teammates as if wishing that his limbs were all slightly shorter. He was wearing a bright orange top, black shorts and socks. Plus his Predator boots, newly cleaned. He looked great. I laughed and applauded wildly. Kill these rich spoilt bastards, I thought, sportingly.

  UTI sprinted on to the pitch. They began knocking a few balls about and doing some elaborate stretching. Ramsay Mac were slower, more sullen, trying to act as if this was all slightly beneath them. I recognised a few of them. William Fly was the big striker up front. Spud Face hovered by his side, doing some surprisingly impressive keepy-uppy, his pock-marked face frowning with concentration. As Pat dumped his towel in the back of the goal and tried on his gloves, a small, darkskinned youth held back, dragging deeply on a Marlboro Light. The referee, a huge red-bearded man all in black, turned on him, eyes blazing.

  ‘Put that fag out, Patel!’ he bawled. It was the legendary Ramsay Mac sports teacher. Jones the Psycho, in the flesh.

  The boy ground the cigarette out under the heel of his boot, grinning with embarrassment. The sports teacher glared at him as he joined his teammates. And then I saw her.

  Elizabeth Montgomery and an older UTI lad, maybe as old as eighteen, his arm draped casually around her shoulder, her hand slipped inside his red-and-black blazer.

  ‘Come on, UTI!’ he shouted, but Elizabeth Montgomery turned her back on the field and snuggled up inside his blazer.

  Patel, still coughing a bit from his cigarette, shirt cuffs pulled over his hands to keep warm, peppered shots at Pat’s goal. My boy tipped them over the bar, pushed them round the post, caught them good and solid, wrapping his body around the ball. He was soon covered in mud, sweating hard, his breath making mist in the cold.

  Then it was time to kick off.

  Pat wiped the damp from his brow and crouched low, watching carefully as UTI surged forward. Jones the Psycho’s face was scarlet, keeping up with the action. Elizabeth Montgomery languished inside the red-and-black blazer of her mannish boyfrien
d. Pat had not noticed her.

  UTI’s number nine was the problem – a hefty blond lad with not much skill but plenty of heart. He shrugged off a couple of tackles, heading straight down the middle, until Ramsay Mac’s own number nine – William Fly – brought him down with a sliding tackle from behind. The referee’s whistle peeped in protest. Both of the number nines writhed in agony. When they got up, Jones the Psycho showed Fly a yellow card.

  ‘What, sir?’ Fly said, spreading his hands with outraged innocence. ‘What? What? What?’

  Patel and Spud Face made for a surprisingly nippy pair of wingbacks, sprinting down their respective touchlines and tormenting the UTI defence with crosses that swung teasingly away from the goalkeeper. But William Fly was slow and lumbering, better at sticking his elbow in someone’s face than getting on the end of a cross, and if it wasn’t dropped on his head or his right boot then he floundered and fell, rising to scream abuse at Patel and Spud Face, and beseeching Jones the Psycho for justice.

  Now the UTI number nine had the ball again and was ploughing through the middle of the Ramsay Mac defence. Past one defender, and then another, with William Fly chasing back and then giving up in the centre circle, puffing and cursing.

  I looked at Pat and he was crouched like a cat, ready to pounce. Patel and Spud Face were clinging to the men they were marking on the wing, looking at each other, waiting for the other one to do something. Then it was too late. UTI’s number nine was through on an open goal, his right foot swinging at the ball, his mouth grimacing, the braces on his teeth gleaming in the pale winter sunlight.

  He shot.

  The ball arced slowly through the air towards the goal. Pat was up on his toes, ready for it, glancing side to side to make sure there was nobody coming in to challenge him.

  Then he saw her.

  His true love inside the blazer of another.

  Her skirt hiked up to new heights.

  Her high heels sinking into the mud of UTI’s impressive playing fields.

  It was just a moment.

  But it was quite long enough for him to take his eyes off the ball and let them settle on the girl. When he looked back the shot was on him, and directly above him and he closed his eyes against the sun, his hands flapping wildly for the ball even as it bounced off the back of his head and dribbled into the goal.

  Pandemonium.

  The parents going mental. UTI jumping on top of their number nine as Patel threw himself to the ground, his fists pounding against the mud. Spud Face ran towards Pat, screaming abuse.

  Pat fumbled among the netting, retrieving the ball. When he fished it out, William Fly was standing in front of him.

  ‘Sick Note,’ he said, as I read his lips. ‘You really are Sick Note, ain’t you, Silver?’

  Pat threw the ball in his face.

  It hit Fly flush on the nose and the blood was already starting to flow as the bigger lad shoved his goalkeeper back into the goal and began to pummel him with fists and boots. Pat cringed under the assault, retreating into the back of his goal and squirming in the netting, like something that had been caught.

  I was on the pitch and running towards the goal. But Jones the Psycho was already there, between them, pushing them apart.

  Then he took out his red card and showed it to both of them. William Fly turned away in disgust, ripping off his white Ramsay Mac shirt and throwing it to the ground, to a chorus of boos. But Pat was tangled up in the netting, trying not to cry as he attempted to free himself. Jones the Psycho seized him by the scruff of his orange jersey and hauled him into the six-yard box.

  ‘Off you go,’ he said. ‘Early bath, Sick Note.’

  And that is when Pat hit him.

  A wild, swinging punch that Jones the Psycho could have easily avoided if he had been looking. But he did not give my son that much credit. So Pat’s tearful haymaker caught Jones the Psycho on the point of the chin just as he was turning away. And he dropped to the ground like a sack of very red potatoes.

  Pat did not cry. I was happy about that. White with shock, he was way beyond crying. He collected his belongings from the back of the net – his Predator water bottle, his Predator beach towel, his spare pair of Predator gloves – and stepped over the prostrate figure of Jones the Psycho.

  He did not look at me as he passed.

  He did not look at anyone.

  But as he brushed past Elizabeth Montgomery and her three-grand-a-term boyfriend, I could have sworn I saw her swoon.

  Fourteen

  I followed my wife.

  It was actually quite difficult. In the films they make it look easy. You just have to be ready to duck inside a doorway or bury your head in a newspaper when your prey turns around, their suspicions momentarily aroused.

  But it wasn’t like that at all.

  Cyd had taken her Food Glorious Food van. I followed in my car, pulling one of Pat’s old beanie hats over my head for a cunning disguise and giving her a five-minute start.

  I thought I would struggle to keep up with her. But that wasn’t the problem. As soon as we hit the Holloway Road, she ground to a halt in the mid-morning traffic jam, while I hovered dangerously close behind. I had to pause at a green light, provoking the wrath of my fellow motorists, to avoid catching up with her.

  She was seeing ‘a friend’, she’d said, a wonderfully vague appointment. Perhaps she did not want to lie to my face. Perhaps that is what they all say.

  I was hanging back, beanie hat pulled down, watching the back of her car, and watching the back of her head too – her hair worn up, her neck showing – and I marvelled at that curiously upright gait she had, and I felt this numb ache inside me just looking at her, and ducked my head every time she glanced in the rear-view mirror.

  And I did not want it to be true.

  Oh, Cyd, I thought, I love you so much, but then I had to pay attention when I was nearly sideswiped by a bendy bus turning off for Kentish Town.

  Then I lost her.

  At the great screaming hub of Archway, she put her foot down on a yellow light – that naughty girl – and I had to pull up, although a flock of cyclists blithely kept going, shaking their fists and screaming their murderous curses at motorists with the right of way.

  The traffic was clearer beyond the junction, and the road rose with Cyd as she climbed the hill towards London’s leafy highlands.

  And then she was gone.

  But it did not matter, because here was one more thing that was different from the films.

  I knew exactly where she was going.

  It was one of those big white houses in Belsize Park. Nice neighbourhood. Nice architecture. Nice life.

  The street was quiet and calm and rich. Far too affluent to tolerate a man in a black beanie hat lurking in the shadows of its sturdy trees. So I took to driving around the block. Even that was risky – a young dog-walker with half a dozen pampered mutts on a lead paused to watch me going round in circles for the third time. But when I went round again the dog-walker was gone, and there was just me and the house where Jim Mason lived, and the terrible knowledge that Cyd was in there with him. I parked in a residents-only bay down the street. And after an hour, the front door opened.

  I was stretching my legs under one of those old trees and I watched them come out. Cyd first, her arms folded across her chest in that way she had when the world needed to be kept at bay. And then him, then Jim, his handsome head down, all serious. No sign of Liberty, his nurse from Manila.

  So no surprise there then.

  And so the world turns.

  On the top step Cyd turned to look at him. I held my breath, waiting for them to kiss, but instead they embraced – or rather, they held on to each other, as if each was preventing the other one from falling. Somehow that was worse.

  I don’t know what happened after that because I didn’t stick around to find out. I got in the car, did a three-point turn and went back the way I had come, heading downhill to London’s lowlands, the great black hole of betrayal
in my chest, sticking two fingers up at all the crazed cyclists, and my eyes half-blinded by the tears.

  The three of us sat outside the headmaster’s office, a family once again.

  Gina and Pat and I – when was the last time we had sat together like this? It was beyond memory, it was another lifetime. Some family dinner, before the fall? But no – because those three people no longer existed. The young husband and father. His tall, radiant wife. Proud parents of their moptopped little Star Wars-barmy boy. Where were they today? They were not outside the head’s office.

  School sounds, school smells. Laughter and threats. Food and chlorine. Pat slumped low and unmoving in his chair, as if trying to disappear, as if he was a boy in a coma, the only sign of life the occasional flickering of his gaze as some giant child ambled by – the boys mean and hard-looking, quick to take offence, the girls with their skirts hiked up, wearing their sexual power like a prefect’s badge. And they looked at the boy humiliated by sitting with dear old mum and dad, but I could not tell if their gaze meant everything, or nothing.

  Gina was impassive, strangely calm considering the circumstances. All charm with the head’s secretary when we were told that we had to wait, Mr Whitehead was running late, Gina all smiley understanding, not remotely defensive or surly, every inch the good parent.

  And as we bided our time, waiting to be summoned into the head’s office, I felt strangely elated – this wild, mad joy welling up inside me.

  I thought it was because Pat was fighting back. But perhaps it was something else. Perhaps it was just sitting there with my son and his mother, and a glimpse at the old comforting symmetry of our long-lost family, like a dead loved one met again in a dream.

  ‘Mr Whitehead will see you now,’ we were told, the old secretary’s rheumy eyes staring at us over the top of her reading glasses, seeing right through us, but Gina was all smiles and thanks, gently indicating that Pat should snap out of his coma, and that I should get to my feet, and that we should both follow her into the headmaster’s office.