by Tony Parsons
And if she thought that it was barking madness – Gina dragging him around the globe, leaving his friends and school, abandoning his father, and his grandmother, and a life that was finally starting to settle into some kind of routine – then my mum said nothing.
We were at my father’s grave.
Both my mother and my son considered a trip to the cemetery to be an ideal way to spend a Sunday afternoon. They were both big grave visitors. I was less keen. I had seen my dad’s body in the back room of the funeral director’s office, and I had no doubt that the spark that had made him the man he was had flown. I didn’t believe that we would find him in the graveyard of the old church on the hill, that church that looked down on the fields where I had roamed with my air rifle as a boy. My father was somewhere else now. But coming to this place didn’t make me sad any more.
I can’t remember when visiting my father’s grave stopped being sad. It was after the first year or so, when we were all starting to be grateful for his life, rather than shattered by his death. Now the visits didn’t really feel like acts of mourning. They were more practical in nature – to change the flowers, to wipe the headstone clean, to remove the odd cigarette butt or beer can left by some local punk who was trying to be a man.
These visits were also ceremonial. We came here to remember my dad, to state that he still mattered, that he was still loved. We came to this place because otherwise there was nowhere else to go. Only into memory, and into dreams, and all the photos that were starting to fade.
And there was something else.
With the packing for America already begun, I felt the need to bring my boy to his grandfather’s grave today, just as –against all advice – I had felt the need to bring him to see his granddad when the old man was dying in hospital. They worshipped each other, that hard old soldier and that sweet-faced child, and then, as now, I believed I owed it to them both to give them a chance to say goodbye.
Later we went back to my mum’s place and she put on her carpet slippers to kick a ball around with Pat in the back garden.
She seemed to be in high spirits, blasting a plastic football in the rose bush, singing snatches of Dolly Parton, claiming against all the evidence that she was Pele, and it was only when her grandson got bored and mooched off to watch a video that the mask slipped.
‘He’s in a right old pickle,’ she said, shaking her head, furiously cleaning her gleaming sink. ‘My darling boy is in a right old pickle.’
She was right. And her words made me think about how momentous this move would be, how unimaginably huge in my son’s life. Pat leaving London. Pat leaving one half of his parents, his best friend Bernie Cooper, his school, his home, the only life he had ever known. I still couldn’t begin to comprehend how all this could happen.
My mum was right. Pat was in a right old pickle. Her boy was in a right old pickle.
It took me quite a while longer to realise that my mother was talking about me.
We sat in my car outside Gina’s house, both of us reluctant to go inside.
We sat there for ages – Pat fiddling with the radio, trying to find some Kylie Minogue, and me just staring at him – his uncombed hair, his grass-stained clothes, and all his careless beauty.
Eamon reckoned that I would get him back when he grew up. But I knew by then my son would be someone else, and the child I loved so much would be gone forever. So we sat in the car, silenced by all that was about to be lost. Then lights started coming on in Gina’s house, and I knew it was time to go inside.
Usually Pat was handed over like a Cold War hostage at Checkpoint Charlie. I escorted him to the gate, Gina waited at her front door. And the pair of us watched him cross no-man’s-land – the garden path – that marked the gap between one world and another.
Tonight was different. Tonight Gina came out and approached the car. I lowered the window, expecting to get an earful for assaulting her husband or getting back late or ruining her life or something. But she smiled at me with what looked a little like the old warmth.
‘Come inside for a bit, Harry. Don’t look like that. It’s okay. Richard’s playing golf.’
Pat was suddenly excited, Kylie forgotten. ‘Yeah, come inside, Daddy, and you can see my room where I live!’
I had never been inside their home before. Ironic that I should be shown around now that there was a For Sale sign outside. I made half-hearted attempts to cry off, but they both insisted. I admit I was curious. So with my son taking my hand and my ex-wife following me, I was escorted into a real metropolitan home, a temple to urban affluence, lots of light and glass and open space, all polished floors and Asian knick-knacks and tasteful black-and-white photos on the walls.
‘Nice place, Gina.’
‘The mortgage is a killer. That’s one of the reasons…’
Her words trailed off. She knew I wasn’t interested in their financial woes.
You would never guess that a child lived in this house. Where were the toys, the mess, the clutter? Pat took my hand and dragged me up a flight of stairs. Gina followed us, her arms folded across her chest, still smiling.
Pat’s room was the one thing that looked familiar. There were ancient Star Wars toys everywhere – a couple of plastic light sabres, lots of eight-inch action figures, the grubby grey wrecks of the Millennium Falcon and X-Wing fighters that he had played with a few years ago. And there were the books I knew from bedtimes past, books that I had read until he was sleeping – Where the Wild Things Are, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, The Snowman, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and of course all the Star Wars movie tie-ins and picture books. And there were really old toys – a cracked Speak and Spell, a battered stuffed simian who went by the name of George the Monkey, Pat’s one excursion into the comforting world of cuddly toys. There was some new stuff too – a Phantom Menace duvet and pillowcases, books from school, Harry Potter paperbacks on his little desk.
It was a bigger room than he had slept in when we were living together, and it was also a lot tidier. Either he had changed his laid-back ways or he was living in a far more disciplined household.
‘What do you think of my room, Daddy?’ ‘I think it’s fantastic, darling. I can see that you’ve got all your stuff here.’
‘That’s right. I do.’
Gina touched his hair. ‘Pat, why don’t you go downstairs and watch a video for a bit?’
Our boy looked stunned. ‘Can I? Isn’t it bedtime yet?’
‘This is a special night. Why don’t you go and watch the first film?’ When Gina talked to Pat about the first film, she meant the first Star Wars film. ‘Not all of it – just until the ’droids get taken prisoner, okay?’ That was the old deal, wasn’t it? That was what she always used to say – just until the ’droids get taken prisoner. I had heard that one before. I had even used that one myself. ‘Then brush your teeth and put your pyjamas on. I want to talk to your daddy.’
Pat rushed downstairs, not believing his luck, and Gina smiled at me in our son’s bedroom.
‘Harry,’ she said.
‘Gina,’ I said. She was so thin and pretty. My ex-wife.
‘I just wanted to say something to you.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I don’t know how to put it into words. I guess I just want to tell you – I’m not trying to steal him away from you.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Whatever happens – wherever we are – you’ll always be his father. And nothing will ever change that.’
I said nothing. I didn’t tell her that I was seeing a lawyer in the morning. I didn’t tell her that Pat would be making his way to the departure gate over my dead body. I knew she was trying to be kind. But she wasn’t telling me anything that I didn’t know already.
‘Life can’t always be about the past, Harry. We’re only thinking of the future, Richard and me. The future of our family. That’s what the move is about. I want you to try to understand. We’re just thinking about the future. That’s what a family d
oes, Harry.’ Then she laughed. ‘Can I show you something?’ Suddenly she looked all anxious, as though we were newly introduced strangers, paralysed by politeness. ‘Are you okay for time?’
‘I’ve got all the time in the world, Gina.’
So I followed her from Pat’s bedroom to a room one flight up. It was some kind of small study. There was a blue iMac, filing cabinets, a bookcase. A photo of Pat on the desk, two years old, naked and grinning in a paddling pool. Gina’s room.
She opened a large flat cardboard box and took out a sheaf of photographs. They were all of Pat. There must have been two dozen of them. Eight by ten, black and white, professional quality.
And they were beautiful.
They must have been taken a couple of months ago, when the summer was holding on, because Pat’s hair was still long and shaggy, before he had it cut, and his skin had a light tan. He was bare-chested, happy, glowing with life. He was laughing in most of the photographs, smiling with a shy kind of amusement in the others. They had all been taken on the same sunny afternoon. He was fooling around for the camera in a garden I didn’t recognise. Probably Gina’s garden. The garden of this house.
And these black-and-white pictures of my son took my breath away. Because the photographer had captured him to perfection.
In the pictures Pat kicked up a glistening sheet of water in a paddling pool, he slid across wet grass, almost exploding with delight, he smashed a plastic football into the garden fence, he rocked with laughter. His eyes, his face, his shy limbs – the photographer hadn’t missed a thing. I was stunned that anyone could catch him so absolutely.
‘You take these?’
Gina shook her head. ‘Only this one,’ she said.
And she showed me another picture. Clearly taken on the same day, with the same camera, but not by the same photographer. In the picture Pat was standing still, smiling bashfully at the camera. With him was a young woman – exotic, smiling, one arm draped around my son’s bare shoulders. She looked beautiful. And sexy. And nice. All the things that anyone could ever want.
‘You never met my friend Kazumi, did you?’ Gina said. ‘We shared a flat in Tokyo for a year. She’s in London now. Trying to make it as a photographer. She fell in love with Pat. As you can see.’
And all at once I wanted to meet her. This photographer who looked at my son and saw with total clarity his gentle, laughing spirit. This stranger who saw through the careful, unsmiling mask he had learned to wear. This woman who could see my son with exactly the same eyes as me.
It was suddenly alive in my head, the thought that was the very beginning of betrayal, the most dangerous thought that a married man could ever have.
She is out there. She exists.
I just haven’t met her yet.
eight
I had thought that my lawyer would help me to keep my son. I had assumed he would tell me Gina was planning to break some inviolable law of nature, and that justice wouldn’t allow her to get away with it.
And I was dead wrong.
‘But parents have certain rights. Don’t they?’
‘Depends what you mean by parent,’ said Nigel Batty. ‘There are all kinds of parents, aren’t there? Married parents. Unmarried parents. Adoptive parents, step-parents, foster parents. Define parent, Mr Silver.’
‘You know what I mean, Nigel. Love-and-marriage parent. Sperm-and-egg parent. A birds-and-bees parent. A biological parent. The old-fashioned kind.’
‘Oh, the old-fashioned kind. That kind of parent.’
Nigel Batty was a small, pugnacious man with a reputation for fighting for the rights of husbands and fathers who were being shafted in the divorce courts.
When I had first met him, when he had acted for me during my divorce from Gina, and our subsequent scrap over where Pat would live, Nigel’s beady eyes had been hidden behind milk-bottle glasses. Laser vision had corrected his myopia and dispensed with the spectacles. But he still squinted out at the world from force of habit, and it made him seem distrustful and wary and hostile, looking for trouble.
I had never really let him off the leash with Gina. He had wanted to make her look like the Whore of Babylon, destroy her in court, and I just didn’t have the heart for it. Whatever had happened between us, Gina didn’t deserve that kind of fight. And neither did my son.
I had thrown in the towel in the fight for custody, believing that it was the best thing for Pat. I had tried to do the decent thing. And now I felt like the biggest sucker of all time.
Batty had his own reasons for being fanatical about the rights of men. In his past there was an international marriage, twin daughters and a messy divorce. I knew that he never saw his daughters. But for some reason I imagined that he could make it all work out differently for me.
‘My wife can’t do this, can she? She can’t just take my son to live in another country. I mean – can she?’
‘Is the residential parent preventing contact?’
‘Speak English, Nigel, will you?’
He sighed.
‘If this move takes place, will your ex-wife stop you from seeing your child?’
‘It’s the Atlantic Ocean that will stop me seeing my son.’
‘But your ex-wife is not intending to deny you access to your child?’
‘She’s denying me access by moving to another country.’
‘I see.’
‘Look – what can we do? How can we stop her? I don’t care what it takes, Nigel. I don’t care what you have to say or do. It’s all fine.’
‘I hate to say I told you so. But you were the one who wanted to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules.’
‘Bottom line, Nigel – can she just take my boy out of the country?’
‘Bottom line? Not without your consent.’
‘My consent?’
He nodded. ‘If she takes your son out of the country without your consent, then she is doing something very naughty.’ He smiled nastily. ‘We call it abduction.’
‘She needs my okay?’
‘Exactly.’
‘But that’s great news! Isn’t it? That’s terrific news, Nigel. And what can she do if I don’t give my consent?’
‘She would have to make an application to court for leave to remove the child permanently from jurisdiction.’
‘So just by withholding consent, I can’t be sure I’d stop her?’
‘If you wanted to deny consent, and she wanted to fight, then the court would decide. That’s what it comes down to. Would it be difficult for you to visit your child if the move went ahead?’
‘Well, it’s Connecticut. I can’t nip round on a Sunday afternoon, can I?’
‘No, but her side would no doubt argue that there are plenty of cheap flights from London to the East Coast. And you’re in gainful employment, as I recall.’ He glanced at his notes. ‘Television producer. Of course. That must be interesting. Anything that I might have seen?’
‘I started out on The Marty Mann Show. Now I do Fish on Friday.’
‘Ah, excellent. Why do Kilcarney girls close their eyes during sex?’ Little Woody Allen cough. He did it very well. ‘Because they hate to see a man enjoying himself. Most amusing.’
Which reminded me that Barry Twist, the show’s commissioning editor, had been leaving messages for me to call him all week. The station was suddenly worried about Eamon just as I had other things to worry about. But for the first time it really dawned on me what Marty meant about not keeping all your eggs in one chicken. If Eamon went down, I would go with him.
‘If this move to America goes ahead, is your ex-wife denying you reasonable access?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Would you ever see your son again?’
‘Well, she says I could come over. And see him in the holidays. Or he could come back here. But it’s not the same, is it? It’s not the same as being in London together. It’s not the same as having a life together.’ I shook my head. ‘I can feel him…slipping away.’
&nb
sp; ‘I know the feeling.’
‘I don’t know how we can explain it to him. Moving to America, I mean.’
‘Oh, you can sell a seven-year-old anything. The question is – why should you? Listen, Mr Silver. We can make her seek permission to take the child out of the country. Convince the court that your child would be at risk in some way if the move goes ahead. Letting it go to court would be time-consuming, traumatic and expensive though. I have to warn you – it would also be unpredictable.’
I made an effort not to look at the photograph of two smiling small girls on his desk. Because I knew that Nigel Batty had fought exactly this same fight and lost.
‘What happened to me wouldn’t necessarily happen to you,’ he said, reading my mind. ‘Your wife would need to give details of the proposed arrangements for your child. Accommodation, education, health, maintenance, childcare, contact. Then the court would decide if it needed to exercise any of its powers.’
‘What are the chances?’
I could hear him breathing in the silence.
‘Not good. There’s something called the maternal preference factor. Do you understand that term?’
‘No.’
‘It means that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the father gets fucked.’
‘But that’s not fair.’
‘Post-divorce parenting is almost always the prerogative of the mother. The law is meant to care about the welfare of the child. In reality, the law cares about the wishes of the mother. Spot the difference? Not the welfare of the child, but the wishes of the mother. If your ex-wife can convince the court that she has no intention of denying you contact, and that your child’s wellbeing would not suffer because of the change of residence, then she can pretty much take your child where she wants. And if I may get personal for a moment – that is exactly what happened to me.’
He picked up the photograph on his desk, studied it for a moment, and then placed it down again, now facing me. I saw two smiling children, lost forever to their father.
