by Tony Parsons
‘You know what I mean. Just the lack of complication. That’s all. There’s no need to drag up all that old –’
‘No, I can’t say I miss it. And you shouldn’t either. You shouldn’t miss that old life, because it was built on a lie. I like it now, if you really want to know. That’s the difference between you and me. I like it now. I like my life with Richard. To me, these are the good old days. And you should be grateful, Harry.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because Pat has a stepfather who cares about him deeply. Some step-parents are abusive. Some are violent. Many of them are indifferent.’
‘I should be grateful that my son is not being abused? Give me a break, Gina.’
‘You should be grateful that Richard is a wonderful, caring man who wants what’s best for Pat.’
‘Richard tries to change him. He doesn’t need changing. He’s fine the way he is now.’
‘Pat’s not perfect, Harry.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Oh, Harry. We all know that.’
We glared at each other for a few moments and then Gina called for the bill. I knew her well enough not to try to pay it.
We always did this – supported each other, tried to be friends, and then for an encore drove each other nuts. We couldn’t seem to stop ourselves. In the end we maddened each other by picking at old wounds, we turned the closeness between us into an infuriating claustrophobia.
I knew that I had angered her today. And that’s why the news she told me as we were walking back to our cars sounded like an act of supreme cruelty and spite.
‘None of this matters,’ she said. ‘The trouble at school. All that tired old crap we keep dragging around the block. None of it matters any more, Harry.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We’re going to America.’
I just stared at her.
‘I’ve been meaning to tell you. But it wasn’t definite. Not until this week.’
I thought about it for a while. But I didn’t understand. Not yet.
‘How long would you be gone? I’m not saying taking Pat out of school for a couple of weeks is a bad idea. Might do him some good. A break might be what he needs. It’s not as though he’s learning very much right now.’
My ex-wife shook her head. She couldn’t believe that I could be so slow.
‘Come on, Harry.’
And as we stood in that deserted school car park, I finally started to get it. I finally started to understand that my ex-wife could do whatever she liked. What a sucker I had been.
‘Hold on. Tell me you mean a vacation, Gina. Tell me you’re talking about Disneyland and Florida?’
‘I’m talking about leaving London, Harry. And leaving the country. I’m talking about us moving there for good. To live, Harry. Richard and me and Pat. Richard’s contract is ending, and he’s never really settled here –’
‘Richard hasn’t settled here? Richard? What about Pat? What about Pat being allowed to fucking settle?’
‘Would you like to watch your language? He’s seven years old. Children are very adaptable. They get used to anything.’
‘But his school is here. And his grandmother is here. And Bernie Cooper is here.’
‘Who the hell is – oh, little Bernie. God, Harry, he can make some new friends. It’s a work thing, okay? Richard can get a better position in the States.’
‘But your job is here. Look at you, Gina. You finally got your life back. Why would you throw that away?’
‘My job’s not quite what I wanted. I don’t even get to use my Japanese. What’s the point in working for a Japanese company if I don’t even get to use my Japanese? Don’t worry, we’re not talking about a place in the city. From Connecticut the train into Manhattan only takes –’
‘Don’t worry? But when would I see him? What about his grandmother?’
‘You would see him all the time. The school holidays go on for ages. You could come over. London to New York is nothing. What is it? Six hours?’
‘Have you talked to Pat about this? Does he know it’s not going to be a quick tour round Minnie Mouse and then back home?’
‘Not yet.’
I shook my head, trying to get my breathing under control.
‘I can’t believe you’re thinking of dragging him to the other side of the world,’ I said, although that really wasn’t true. I could believe it very easily. I began to see that she had always had this thing inside her, this belief that life would be better at the other end of a long-haul flight.
For years Gina had felt this way – when she was single, after we split up. And she still did. In the past Japan was the Promised Land. Now it was America. It was completely in character, this desire to start again on the other side of the world. Oh, I could believe it too easily.
‘What’s wrong with London? This is where he belongs. His family and friends – Gina, he’s happy here.’
She lifted her hands, palms raised to the heavens, taking it all in – Miss Wilkins, the trouble at school, the impossibility of our son sitting still for an entire lesson, Paris and the broken Eurostar, life in north London.
‘Well, obviously not. It will be a better life over there. For all of us. I don’t want Pat’s childhood to be like mine – always different homes, always different people around. I want his childhood to be like yours, Harry.’ She placed her hand on my arm. ‘You have to trust me. I only want what’s best for the boy.’
I angrily shook her off.
‘You don’t want what’s best for the boy. You don’t even want what’s best for yourself. Or that loser dickhead you married.’
‘Why don’t you watch your mouth?’
‘You just want revenge.’
‘Believe what you want, Harry. It really doesn’t matter to me what you think.’
‘You can’t do this to me, Gina.’
She was suddenly furious. And I saw again that we could never recreate what had once existed between us. We could be polite, affectionate even, concerned about Pat, but the love we had lost was impossible to duplicate now. Because it was all used up. What do they say? Married for years, divorced forever. That was us. Gina and I were divorced forever.
‘You broke the promises – not me, Harry. You fucked around – not me. You were the one who got bored with the marital bed, Harry. Not me.’
She shook her head and laughed. I looked at the face of this familiar stranger. From his mother my son got his Tiffany-blue eyes, his dirty-blond hair, those slightly gappy teeth. She was definitely his mother, and I no longer recognised her.
‘And now you tell me what I can and can’t do, Harry? You’ve got some nerve. I am taking my son out of the country. Start living with it.’
Then she pressed her car key, and the double flash of lights as the central locking came off seemed to glint on her wedding ring.
Not the one she had when she was with me.
The new one.
six
Richard was one of those pumped-up business types that were starting to show up all over town. The bespectacled hunk. The six-pack nerd.
Ten years ago a man like Richard – who does things with other people’s money – would have been all spindly legs and narrow shoulders. But you have to be tough to live in the city these days, or look like you are. I didn’t know what he was doing – a lot of weights, some cardiovascular stuff, maybe a few boxercise classes – but when I barged into the restaurant where he was having lunch with some business colleagues, for once he looked more like Superman than his mild-mannered alter ego.
Richard was the last one to look up at me. The other three saw me coming. Maybe it was my clothes – the kind of jacket that my mum would call a car coat, old chinos and boots. Pretty much standard uniform for a TV producer, although those clothes stood out in a swanky restaurant where they served hearty Tuscan peasant food for executives on six figures a year.
Richard’s companions saw me all right – the young Armani hotshot, the o
lder, silvery geezer and the fat guy – but they were not quite sure what to make of me. I swear that one of them – the fat guy – was about to ask me for another bottle of sparkling mineral water. But when I opened my mouth, he realised I wasn’t there to pour the Perrier.
‘You’re not taking Pat away from me, you bastard,’ I said. ‘Don’t you even think about taking Pat out of the country.’
His dining companions stared from Richard to me and back again, uncertain what to make of this scene. A cuckolded husband? A homosexual love spat? I could see that they didn’t know Richard well enough to get it immediately. So he spelled it out for them, never taking his eyes off me.
‘This gentleman is the father of my stepson,’ Richard explained. ‘The poor little bastard.’
And that’s when I lost it, lurching across the table, scattering bread rolls and little silver dishes of olive oil, which I am almost certain the peasants don’t have in their Tuscan farmhouses. Richard’s dining companions recoiled, half rising from their chairs, shrinking from the trouble, but two waiters were on me before I could reach him. They started pulling me away, one of them trapping my arms to my side in a bear hug, the other trying to get a grip on the collar of my car coat.
‘You leave us alone,’ I said, digging my heels into the sawdust-strewn floorboards, managing to reach out and grab a fistful of linen tablecloth, despite my pinned arms. ‘You just leave my son alone, Richard.’
The waiters were too strong for me. Unlike Richard, I hadn’t spent hours pumping iron and running on the treadmill. I felt all the strength go out of me as they easily pulled me away. But because I still had hold of the tablecloth, I took it with me, and it all came crashing down: the glasses, the plates of robust pasta dishes, the rough-hewn chunks of bread, the little silver dishes of olive oil.
On to the floor and into their laps.
And Richard was on his feet, angry at last, ready to try out his new biceps and eager to punch my lights out, seafood linguini dripping down the front of his trousers.
‘You’re not taking my son away just because you can’t cut it in this city, Richard.’
‘That’s for Gina and me to decide.’
‘I’m his father, you bastard. And I’ll always be his father. You can’t change that.’
‘One question, Harry.’
‘What’s that, dickhead?’
I watched him wipe a prawn from his tomato-stained flies.
‘What the hell did she ever see in you?’
It was Eamon Fish who first told me about the blended family. Which is ironic, because Eamon was the most single man I knew. The sap was still rising in Eamon, but it hadn’t quite reached his head yet.
Although he was a modern boy about town, Eamon was painfully old-fashioned when it came to love, marriage and all of that. Blame it on his Kilcarney background. He had a single man’s view of wedlock, simultaneously wary and romantic. But I’ll say this for Eamon – he was the only one who warned me about what I was walking into.
‘Harry, good man you are,’ he called to me across my wedding reception. ‘I want a word with you.’
I watched him weave his way through the crowd, nodding and smiling as he went, polite and friendly to people who recognised him, grateful to the ones who didn’t. He was holding his champagne flute aloft to prevent spillage, looking even more dishevelled than usual, all shirt tails and floppy fringe and droopy eyelids, but he had those dark Irish good looks that belonged to a young Jack Kennedy, so even in his cups he resembled a rake rather than a slob. He put his arm around me, clinked our glasses.
‘Here’s to you. And your lovely bride. And your – what do they call it? – blended family.’
‘My what?’ I was still laughing.
‘Your blended family. You know. Your blended family.’
‘What’s a blended family?’
‘You know. It’s like The Brady Bunch. When a man and a woman put their old families together to make a new family. You know, Harry. A man living with kids that are not his own. A woman becoming a mammy to children she didn’t give birth to. A blended family. Like The Brady Bunch. And you, Harry. You and The Brady Bunch. God bless you, one and all.’ He put his face next to mine, and pulled me close. ‘Good on you, pal. Here, let’s sit for a minute.’
We found a quiet table in the corner and Eamon immediately produced a small cellophane bag from out of a jacket that was still sporting a beat-up carnation. This was new. The Charles was new. When I first met him, he had never taken anything stronger than draught Guinness and a packet of pork scratchings.
I looked anxiously around the room as Eamon carefully tipped a mound of white powder on to the back of our wedding invitation and began chopping out chunky white lines with his black Am Ex.
‘Jesus, Eamon. Not in here. You can’t take this stuff when there are kids around. At least take it to the toilets. This is not the time or the place.’ Then I came out with one of my father’s lines, almost as though the old man was speaking through me. ‘Moderation in all things, Eamon.’
That gave him a chuckle. He started rolling up a ten-pound note.
‘Moderation? You’re – what? Thirty-three now? Thirty-two? You’re already on your second marriage. You’ve got a son who doesn’t live with you and a stepdaughter who does. So don’t lecture me about moderation, Harry. There’s nothing moderate about you.’
‘There are children around. And my mum. And my Auntie Ethel.’
‘Your Auntie Ethel doesn’t mind, Harry.’ The chopped white lines were deftly hoovered up his nose. ‘She was the one who sold it to me.’ He held out the rolled-up, slightly damp tenner to me. I shook my head and he put his drugs away. ‘Anyway – congratulations to you, mate.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Just don’t ruin it this time.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Keep your head out of the clouds and your dick in your trousers.’
‘Oh yes, that’s one of the traditional wedding vows, isn’t it? Church of England, I believe.’
‘I mean it. Don’t get restless when the fever wears off. Don’t start thinking about the grass being greener next door, because it’s not. Remember that your knob is attached to you, rather than the other way round.’
We watched Cyd coming towards us across the crowded room. She was smiling, and I don’t think I’d ever seen her looking lovelier than at that moment.
‘And don’t forget how you feel today,’ Eamon said. ‘That above all. I know what you are like, because all men are the same. We forget what’s in our hearts.’
But I wasn’t listening to him any more. I thought that the day I needed marital advice from a coked-up comedian would be a black day indeed. I got up to talk to my wife.
‘You look happy,’ she said.
‘I’m better than happy.’
‘Wow. Better than happy. Then I hope I don’t disappoint you.’
‘You could never disappoint me. As long as you do one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Dance with me.’
‘You’re easy to please.’
So I took her in my arms, feeling that long, slim body in her wedding dress, and as Ella Fitzgerald sang ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’ we moved in perfect harmony and, although there were friends and family all around, for as long as the music played my wife’s face was all I could see.
The police finally let me go.
Richard and the restaurant both decided not to press charges. So I drove home, thinking about all the things that Cyd and I had talked about before we were married. We had spent hours discussing all the big stuff. It was what our relationship was built on. That and our desire to fuck the arse off each other, of course.
We talked about our parents, those old-fashioned husbands and wives who married young, stayed together all their lives and were parted by death too soon. We talked about our parents, not simply because we loved them, but because that was the kind of marriage we intended to have.
A
nd we talked about our own wrecked relationships – hers worn down by Jim’s constant tom-catting, mine blown up by a stupid one-night stand that crawled into the daylight. And we talked about our children, the lives we wanted for them, and our fears that the divorces would leave scars that lasted for a lifetime.
We talked about how my son would fit into our new family, how we would make him feel like a full member, even though he lived with his mother, even if he was only visiting. And we talked about my relationship with Peggy, how I was going to be some kind of father to her, even though she had a dad of her own. When we looked at our lives it sometimes all seemed convoluted and scary, but we thought that being crazy about each other would be enough to get us through. And it was, for a while. Because we loved each other. Because we could talk about anything. Almost anything.
The only thing we kind of edged around was having a child of our own. The baby subject – the biggest subject of all – was put on hold. We blamed work. What else does anyone ever blame?
‘I just want to get Food Glorious Food up and running before we start trying for a baby,’ Cyd had said. ‘It’s really important to me, Harry. Please try to understand.’
Cyd’s company was named after the Lionel Bart song from Oliver! Serving sushi, baked ziti, spring rolls, chicken satay and mini-pizzas all over the West End and the City.
‘But you never know with a baby,’ I said. ‘Sometimes people try for a baby and it takes time. My parents waited years for me.’
‘And you were worth waiting for. And our baby will be worth waiting for. She’ll be a beautiful baby.’
‘Might be another boy.’
‘Then he will be a beautiful baby. But this isn’t the time. Look, I want a child as much as you do.’
I wondered if that was true.
‘Just not now. Just let me get this thing off the ground. One day, okay? Definitely one day. There are things I want to happen first.’
Food Glorious Food was good, and growing really fast. Launches, openings and promotions were all asking Food Glorious Food to feed the faces of their partygoers. It took up a lot of Cyd’s time, but this was something she had always dreamed of doing. Her own business. So she rushed from fashionable new hotel to first night, while I queued for condoms in Boots like a teenager from the dawn of time. Anything else, sir? Well, yes – I’d quite like a baby, now you come to mention it. Got any in stock?
