Men from the Boys

by Tony Parsons

  Cyd was by my side.

  ‘Don’t they insure our fridge?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe not any more,’ she said. ‘That’s where I was meant to be fixing lunch. And they’ve gone bust.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘About two hours ago.’

  We watched the workers coming out of their shining glass tower.

  ‘What does it mean?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cyd said. ‘But I think this is just the start.’

  ‘The start of what?’

  ‘The start of everything changing,’ she said. She almost laughed. ‘I don’t think they’ll be needing sashimi for two hundred for a while. Maybe never again.’

  Cyd’s girl was hovering behind her. Cyd wrapped her arms around her and let her cry. I turned back to the TV, trying to put it together. The workers with their belongings in champagne boxes. The trays of unwanted party food in our home. I turned up the volume. Cyd’s girl was crying so hard, I could hardly hear Robert Peston’s incisive analysis.

  ‘I’ll call you, okay?’ Cyd was telling her girl. ‘When something happens.’

  I perched on the edge of the sofa, wanting to understand. I heard the front door gently open and close, and a bit later the sound of my wife cursing our refrigerator.

  It was not big enough today.

  She was at the kitchen table staring out at the Wendy House. I put my hands on her shoulders and she rose to her feet, her eyes closed as she sank against me. I felt the full length of her pressing against me. I brushed my lips against her face and tasted the salt of sweat and tears.

  Then she said three little words against my shoulder, making no attempt to pull away.

  ‘You love it,’ she said.

  I looked at the top of her head. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s the twenty-first century out there but it’s 1958 in here,’ she said, pulling away now, pushing her hair from her face. ‘And you love it,’ she repeated, looking me in the eye now. ‘For me, today is a bloody disaster. For you, today is when the natural order gets restored.’

  We were standing apart now. ‘Don’t say that,’ I said. ‘Don’t think that.’

  She laughed. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s not true.’ I still thought I could win her round. ‘You sit down,’ I said. ‘I’ll make us some tea. The kids will not be home for hours. I’ll do my Barry White voice. You’ll laugh and think I’m nice.’

  ‘The big provider,’ she said. ‘The great protector. The mighty breadwinner. You love it.’

  I shook my head. I held out my arms and, after thinking about it for a moment, she came back to me.

  My phone began to vibrate. It was in the pocket of my jeans, and it gently throbbed between the tops of our thighs. I ignored it. But the phone kept pulsing away, and in the end we could not ignore it. Cyd pulled away with a laugh of derision.

  ‘Attend to your career, big shot,’ she said, and she turned to face a kitchen covered with a mountain range of canapés.

  And a few minutes later, on my way out I passed Cyd, staring into the back of the Food Glorious Food van. It was empty now. We did not speak.

  And the funny thing is, that phone call had nothing to do with my career – not unless my true vocation, my life’s calling, my once and forever full-time job is being a father.

  The front office at Ramsay Mac were calling. They knew that Pat was back living at home and they were phoning to ask why he had not been in school for the past few days. I almost laughed out loud.

  The boy was fifteen.

  So how would I know?

  Pat sat at the dining table in the old man’s overheated living room, puffing thoughtfully at a cigarette as he read the Racing Post.

  My son glanced up at me for a moment when I came in, and then ducked his head down. I could see his long blond hair poking over the top of a front page that said KING GEORGE SPECIAL – AS GOOD AS HE’S EVER BEEN.

  Pat studied the Racing Post with the same lip-chewing focus that he had once brought to Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking. Singe Rana sat opposite him, a bookmaker’s biro in his hand and his eyes fixed on nothing, figuring. Ken and I watched them from the other side of the room.

  ‘He helps me,’ Ken Grimwood told me. ‘Your boy. He helps me a lot.’

  I looked at him and sighed. ‘You mean – doing a bit of shopping? Running errands? That kind of thing?’

  ‘With me bets,’ Ken said. ‘Looking at form.’ He raised his voice with a chuckle. ‘We’ve had a few winners, haven’t we, Pat?’

  A nod of the wheat-coloured mop.

  ‘He’s meant to be in school,’ I said. ‘He’s bunking off.’

  Ken reached for his tin of Old Holborn, and the flat was silent apart from the sound of that metal box being opened. Then I made a move to get my son but the old man touched my arm.

  ‘Can you blame him?’ Ken said softly. ‘We know why he’s bunking off, don’t we?’ The old man produced his packet of Rizlas. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  I look a breath. ‘I protected him when he was little,’ I said. ‘Then one day I couldn’t.’

  I watched Ken constructing his roll-up. It looked exactly the same as the tiny spliff of Mexican weed that Pat had smoked in the Wendy House.

  ‘What do you want to do about it?’ Ken said.

  I looked at him. ‘Really?’

  He nodded once.

  ‘I want to hurt them,’ I said. ‘Especially – the leader. The big one. William Fly. I want to hurt him the way he’s hurt us. The way he’s hurt Pat.’

  The old man laughed in my face.

  ‘A nice professional person like you?’ he said. ‘And you want to hurt someone?’

  He struck a match and the smell of new tobacco joined the smell of old tobacco that always filled that flat. Pat turned the pages and big green headlines jumped out of the Racing Post. PRICEWISE. TRADING POST. TIPS BOX. TALKING POINT. COME RACING.

  And I looked at Singe Rana and I remembered something that he had said about Italy. How the women smiled at him but the men could not look in his face.

  Ken coughed by my side. That old death rattle cough that I had heard before, as familiar to me as a track from Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers.

  I looked at the old man and he smiled.

  ‘Me too,’ he said. ‘I want to hurt them too.’

  Twenty-one

  I had hated him for years.

  I had told myself that it was because of the way he had treated my wife when she was his wife.

  And I had told myself that it was because he had been a haphazard parent to Peggy, breezing in and out of her life as the mood took him.

  But I saw now that my abiding loathing for Jim Mason was not quite so noble.

  Because most of all I had hated him for loving her when her world was uncomplicated, unbroken and new. For loving her first, and for being loved by her in return – that’s why I hated his guts.

  Because she had loved him in a complete world. She was trying again with me. That’s all. Trying again. She had always been trying again with me. I knew that now.

  But as I watched his face in close-up on the monitor, I was shocked to discover that the old hatred just wasn’t there any more. It would have been good to think that I was all grown-up now, and beyond sexual jealousy and romantic envy. But I suspected it was just that I no longer cared so much. And that felt like the saddest thing in the world.

  ‘Are you watching this, Harry?’ the director said to me.

  I leaned closer. We were in the show’s sound stage, an aircraft hangar of a building containing all the sets we would need for a series. But it all fell away – the cameras, the lights, the hovering make-up girls and continuity editors and the carpenters and the sparks – and all I saw was the monitor before me.

  Jim was playing DCI Steele. He was in an Irish bar – we would dub on the Pogues’ ‘Rainy Night in Soho’ later – and depressed after discovering his ex-wife was going out with a rich lawyer.

  The scen
e didn’t require him to do much – just sit there drinking whisky – iced tea – and looking suicidal.

  But he was shaking.

  The hand that held the pretend whisky was visibly trembling, and it seemed to transmit anxiety to every part of his body.

  The director bridled with irritation.

  ‘What’s with the Method Actor crap?’ he said.

  I said nothing. The camera went in close and I had never seen such panic in a pair of eyes.

  ‘I know he’s supposed to be a recovering alcoholic who’s about to fall off the wagon,’ the director said. ‘But this Stanislavski crap – being in the moment – it’s too much, isn’t it?’

  Jim had not told them about the Parkinson’s. They thought the trembling hand on the iced tea was Jim trying to be Brando.

  And I wondered how long that could last.

  ‘Shoot it,’ I said, and I looked at that handsome face I had loathed for so long. ‘He’s good.’

  We sat in the hotel bar and I watched Jim sip his beer. His hand was steady now. He smacked his lips and deliberately placed his beer on the coaster, smiling at me. He had a beautiful smile.

  ‘It’s not all the time,’ he said. ‘The shakes. Unwanted excitation of muscle, as my doctor calls it. They come and go. Today was the first time that I got it on set.’

  I sighed. ‘But it’s only week three,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to tell them sooner or later.’

  ‘Isn’t that your job?’

  ‘Probably. I guess. What about your agent?’

  ‘She’s not talking. Because as soon as it’s news, my stock plummets. The bastards will write me out, I know they will. Who wants an actor who doesn’t know if he’ll make it to the Christmas special?’ He looked at his strong, steady hands. ‘The way I see it, I’m only really screwed when it gets to my speech.’ Some hardness crept into him, and I had seen it before, in the early days when the wounds from his marriage to Cyd were still fresh. ‘Parkinson’s doesn’t make you stupid. Mental faculties are not affected,’ he said, and I could tell he was quoting his doctor again. He held his beer. ‘They just seem to be affected because you can’t control the muscles of speech.’

  Over his shoulder I saw a middle-aged man and his daughter enter the bar. She was wearing a summer dress. He was in a suit jacket and jeans.

  And then the man leaned into the girl and I knew it wasn’t his daughter.

  The man had to be around my age, although he was fighting it. With the jeans, the store-bought tan and of course with the girl.

  And the girl was Elizabeth Montgomery.

  ‘Don’t they have drugs?’ I asked Jim, tearing my eyes from her. ‘They must have drugs.’

  Jim grinned. ‘Yeah, they have Benztropine, Benzhexol, all that good stuff to reduce muscle spasms. But it’s a degenerative disease. They control symptoms. They’re not a cure.’

  There were no tables. A waiter escorted Elizabeth Montgomery and the man to seats at the bar. The man picked up a cocktail menu and squinted at it. With an embarrassed little smirk, he took out some frameless reading glasses.

  Elizabeth Montgomery got up, kissed him on the cheek and left the bar.

  I looked at the man and I wondered if he had a room here. And I wondered if there was a wife and kids waiting at the end of some gravel drive. And I wondered how he had met Elizabeth Montgomery, and how it worked.

  When she came out of the rest room I was waiting for her. She didn’t look remotely surprised to see me. Maybe she had clocked me when they came in. Or perhaps she was just a very cool customer, that Elizabeth Montgomery.

  ‘Helping you with your homework, is he?’

  She laughed.

  There was one of those little mirrors in her hand. She glanced at it and then back at me.

  ‘I don’t need anyone to help me with my homework,’ she said, and the mirror went into the small bag she was carrying. She didn’t look as though she was planning to spend the night here. Or maybe they had checked in already. Or maybe it was all still undecided, and he would make his play after a few £15 cocktails. I felt sick to my stomach.

  ‘He’s too old for you,’ I said. ‘And what about Pat?’

  Presumably she had thought about Pat already.

  Still, I felt I had to ask.

  ‘Maybe Pat’s too young for me,’ she said, and started back to the bar, her high heels click-clacking on the marble of the hotel lobby. I wanted to stop her but I knew I could not touch her. But she stopped just outside the bar. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I love Pat.’

  ‘Yeah, looks like it. Drinking cocktails with Granddad.’

  ‘Nick’s thirty-five,’ she said.

  ‘Is that what he told you? And the rest,’ I said. ‘What did he tell you about his wife? Let me guess – she doesn’t understand him but they stay together for the sake of the kids.’

  ‘Isn’t that what everyone does?’

  ‘Very funny. Where did you meet him? In a chat room? They always lie about their age. He’s grooming you.’

  She smiled as if she was older than I would ever be. ‘Unfortunately I am way beyond the grooming stage, Harry.’ She looked into the bar. Her decrepit old lover was still squinting at the price of Mohitos through his reading glasses.

  And I saw that she wanted me to understand.

  ‘Pat is the most lovable boy I have ever met,’ she said. ‘He’s sweet and gentle and all those things. But I am seventeen years old and I am just not ready for all that big love stuff. Maybe I never will be. Maybe when I’m old. Twenty-five or something.’

  ‘Don’t do this to him,’ I said, although I knew it was a ridiculous thing to say. The hotel maid was probably placing his-and-her chocolates on their pillows even as we spoke.

  ‘Don’t you get it?’ Elizabeth Montgomery said. ‘Pat’s just too serious.’

  She went back to the bar. I followed a few seconds later, reeling from a world where they could dump you for caring too much.

  Jim had ordered another round of beers. He pushed one towards me.

  ‘Keep an eye on Peggy for me, will you, Harry?’ he said. ‘Whatever happens. Keep an eye on her.’

  I held his gaze. ‘Always,’ I said.

  Then he had a conspiratorial smile on his handsome face.

  ‘I hated you for so long,’ he confessed.

  They had pushed the furniture back to give them space.

  The old man had two battered old leather pads on his hands, these scarred old mitts that were flat on one side and with a sort of glove on the other, and they made a sound like something cracking when he slapped them together.

  Pat faced him, his long thin arms hanging by his side, his hand inside the huge brown boxing gloves that said, Lonsdale – London – sixteen ounce. They looked beyond old. They looked fossilised.

  ‘This is stupid,’ I said, and they ignored me. This wasn’t what I had in mind at all. I am not sure what I had in mind. But not this wax on, wax off Karate Kid bullshit. This could get him killed.

  Ken held up the pads either side of his head and shuffled forward.

  ‘Double jab,’ he said, and the boy tentatively poked his right hand at one of the pads. ‘Southpaw, see?’ Ken said to me. ‘Leads with his right because he’s left-handed. Double jab,’ he said, and again Pat struck the pads with the force of a medium-sized butterfly. ‘Good,’ Ken said, but it sounded like lavish praise to me. ‘Keep that left tucked up. Elbow in. The hand protects your chin and the arm protects your ribs. Nice and neat. Not like a statue. Not just standing there waiting to be clumped. Movement, movement. On the balls of your feet. Dance, Pat, dance!’

  Then he began coughing and had to sit down.

  I sat down beside him.

  ‘You want to see him dead?’ I said.

  Ken finished coughing and said, ‘Do you?’

  With rising panic, I watched Pat help Ken up from the sofa – not easy in those big gloves – and they took up their positions.

  For a dying man with one leg, Ken was remarkably nimble
on his feet. I glanced at the photo of the young boxer on the mantelpiece. Kid Loco, Ken had called himself. Almost thirty fights when he was in the forces. Undefeated. Never knocked down. He had told me, without pride or self-pity, that he would have turned professional if he had not lost a leg at Monte Cassino.

  And now he shuffled forwards, backwards and sideways, calling out combinations that Pat followed with gentle obedience.

  ‘Double jab – right cross – left hook,’ Ken said, and Pat meekly went through the motions.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘He’s not Kid Loco, okay? And he’s not his grandfather.’

  ‘Typical modern parent,’ Ken sighed. ‘Wants to wrap the kid in cotton wool.’

  ‘Better cotton wool than a coffin,’ I said.

  ‘Dad,’ Pat said quietly, and I looked at him. With the thumb of his glove, he pushed back his hair, longer than it had ever been. ‘I want to, all right?’

  But the violence wasn’t in him. The spite. The malice. The urge to hurt – it just wasn’t there. It was one of the reasons I loved him.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘Double jab,’ Ken said, and Pat hit the pad twice, slightly harder this time. ‘Always the double jab. Like this.’

  Ken threw out his left and the speed amazed me. It was as if he was catching a pair of flies. ‘Everything comes off that double jab,’ he said. ‘Bam-bam, in their face. The rest follows.’

  When we were driving home, I told him about Elizabeth Montgomery. I had to tell him, didn’t I? Maybe not. But she would have told him. Or let him find out.

  ‘I saw your friend,’ I said, my eyes fixed on the road, although I felt his head snap towards me. ‘I saw Elizabeth Montgomery.’

  He was watching and waiting. He was thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  ‘She wasn’t alone,’ I said.

  A beat. ‘The guy from UTI?’ he said, his voice very low. ‘The one with the car?’

  ‘Somebody else. Somebody older. Almost as old as me.’

  Once that could have been his cue for a crack. But, Dad – nobody’s as old as you. Not tonight. He said nothing.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Look, there are so many great women in the world, Pat. I know – ’