by Tony Parsons
Having a laugh and not making a fuss. That was her way. That was her philosophy. A kind of light-hearted stoicism that pulled at my heart, and made me feel like putting my arm around her.
But it was difficult to laugh today. It was difficult to grin and bear it on days like these.
When she came out from seeing the specialist I could tell the news was bad.
She was struggling to understand the diagnosis, trying to understand the language, trying to understand how a hardened piece of flesh could change your world so completely.
She didn’t want to talk about it in the overcrowded waiting room. She didn’t want to talk about it until we were back in my car.
We sat in the hospital’s endless car park. Other cars circled like sharks, looking for a precious parking space. It was a busy day for the hospital. They were probably all busy days.
‘Look – I’ve written it down.’ She showed me a scrap of paper. She had written invasive carcinoma in her shaky hand.
‘What does it mean?’ I said, sort of knowing what it meant, but unable to believe it.
‘Breast cancer,’ said my mum.
Of course, I thought. First one parent and then the other. The most natural thing in the world, as natural as the birth of a child. Then why did it feel like the world was coming apart?
‘The doctor at the breast unit says they don’t know what they’re going to do yet. How to treat it. Nice bloke. Some sort of Mediterranean. Spoke English better than me. They do, don’t they? Gave it to me straight. Says there’s something called staging. It means they have to assess the risk of it spreading. And, you know. How far it’s spread already.’
I was speechless.
‘I met the breast care nurse. She was nice. Lovely girl. Her nose was – what do you call it? Pierced. Specially trained to deal with my kind of case. I’ve got to go back, Harry. I can get the bus. Don’t worry. I know you’re busy.’
I stared at her profile as she looked across at the hospital, I watched that soft, kind face that I had known longer than any other, and saw all the emotions churning inside her.
Shock. Fear. Bewilderment. Anger. Even the darkest kind of amusement.
‘Graham didn’t stick around long, did he? Old Tex. Cowboy Joe from the Rio Southend. Soon buggered off when the music stopped. Your dad would have been here. Your dad would have been here for me, Harry. That man would have walked through fire for me. That’s a marriage, Harry. That’s what a marriage is all about.’
‘There’s lots they can do, isn’t there?’
She was silent, lost in her own thoughts.
‘Mum? I said, there’s plenty they can do, isn’t there?’
‘Oh yes. Oh yes. Lots they can do. I’m going to beat this thing. I mean it, Harry. People live with breast cancer. They do. People live. It’s not like your dad. Can’t fight lung cancer. Can’t fight that. Bloody lung cancer. Bloody cancer. Took your dad. It’s not going to take me. Bloody, bloody cancer. It’s a right…bastard.’ She glanced at me. ‘Excuse my language.’
‘Mum?’
‘What, love?’
‘I’m really proud that you’re my mum.’
She nodded, took my hand and held it. Held it so tight in her own small hand that I could feel that piece of precious metal pressing into my palm, that sliver of gold, burnished by a lifetime.
My mother’s wedding ring.
It fit her perfectly.
My parents met through her brother. The one she threw the knife at and tried to kill. He was always her favourite.
My mum’s brother and my dad went to the same boxing club for boys. This was back when boxing was as popular among schoolboys as football. That’s all changed now, of course, and the only men in television I know who boxed at school all went to Eton.
But this was back when boxing was considered a healthy pastime for growing boys. And after sparring together – my uncle and my father were exactly the same weight and age, both one year older than my mum – my mum’s brother brought my dad home to that house in an East End banjo, which was what they called their little dead-end street, a banjo, because that’s exactly what it was shaped like. And growing up in that banjo, a house full of boys. And one girl.
At seventeen, my dad had already been at work for three years. He was cocky and wild, his pride primed with an explosive temper – after one of his army of cousins had sworn at him, he had tied her to a lamppost and washed her mouth out with soap. There was an anger in him. He would fight anyone. He seemed to enjoy it. Then he saw my mother, just sixteen years old, the spoilt princess of the banjo, and he found his reason to stop fighting and start living.
She taught him to be gentle – her and the unimaginable things he did and saw in the war. He taught her to be strong. Or maybe it was all there already – the roaring boy was more sensitive than he dared to let on. And perhaps she was always harder than she seemed. The reserved sixteen-year-old girl had been toughened up by poverty, life in the banjo and all those brothers.
But they had a deliriously happy marriage. Even up to the day my father died, they were mad about each other. For an entire lifetime, they never really stopped courting.
He sent her red roses, she brought him breakfast in bed. He stared at her, unable to believe his luck. She wrote him poems. Put them in his lunch box. I saw his cards to her – Mother’s Day, birthday, Christmas. His angel, he called her. The love of his life. He seemed like the least romantic man in the world, and she inspired him to write sonnets.
The products of close-knit, crowded communities, they were content in the company of each other. The only real trauma in their union was all those years at the start when a baby just would not come. And later, after I finally arrived, when she suffered a heartbreaking string of miscarriages. One of my clearest memories of childhood is my mum sitting on the floor of our rented flat above a greengrocer’s shop, inconsolable as my father tried to comfort her, his broken-hearted angel, his devastated true love, crying for another lost child.
My first look at married life.
When I became a parent, I found myself imitating them, trying to strike their balance between being strict and being gentle. They seemed like perfect parents to me. Loving and tough.
My father never lifted a finger to either of us – he reserved his violence for strangers who were dumb enough to cross him. My mum was not averse to aiming a shoe at me – at least it wasn’t a knife – when I drove her to distraction with my daydreaming and solitary games, the comforts of the only child that frequently prevented me from coming when I was called. But she had waited too long for a baby to ever be mad at me for long.
‘Wait until your father gets home,’ she would tell me, and it was her ultimate threat.
It never frightened me, though. Because I knew they loved me, and I knew that it was a love that was unconditional and everlasting, a love that was built to last a lifetime and beyond.
No, what frightened me as a child was the thought of losing my mother. Small, curly-haired, five foot and a bit, she would disappear up to the row of shops near our home on black, blustery winter evenings, the kind of November and December nights that we no longer seem to get, off to buy something for our tea. Those were the years when it snowed in winter and, in my memory at least, the streets were shrouded in the fog of countless open fires. She would be on an errand for mince, pork chops or baked beans, or on Fridays fish and chips wrapped in newspaper – the menu of my childhood.
And I would be anxious, unbearably anxious for the return of this woman, my mum, who had just nipped down the shops. Still in my school uniform of grey flannel trousers, grey shirt and stripy tie, that old man’s drag they made us wear, I would stand on the back of the sofa and press my face against a window streaming with condensation, scanning the dark, empty streets.
Searching for the irreplaceable sight of my mother, and tortured by the thought that she was never coming home again.
Cyd and I took my mum to a show.
My father had always
taken my mother to shows. Every six months or so they would put on their best clothes and head for the bright lights of London. For two people who spent most evenings in front of the television set, they were connoisseurs of musical theatre.
When the film versions of Oklahoma!, West Side Story or My Fair Lady came on TV, they would both sing along, word perfect. My mum would also dance – she did a particularly good imitation of the cool-daddy-o ballet of the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story. For my mum, musicals were not a passive experience. She had been going to the West End for fifty years, and there were few tunes being banged out nightly on Shaftesbury Avenue, the Strand and Haymarket that she didn’t know better than the people singing them.
Now she decided she wanted to catch Les Misérables again.
‘I love that one,’ she told Cyd. ‘I like the little girl. And I like the prostitutes. And I like it when all the students get shot. It’s very sad and there are some lovely melodies in it.’
She wore a white two-piece suit from Bloomingdale’s that I had brought her back from a trip to New York. She looked lovely but frail, and older, far older, than I had ever thought she would be.
Cyd took her hand when we picked her up, and never let it go as we made our way to the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus. Cyd held her hand on the drive into town, held it as we made our way through the teeming early-evening crowds, my mum looking too easily broken for the city, too delicate to be surrounded by all the traffic and bustle and hordes.
The audience inside the Palace was the usual mixture of foreign tourists, coach trips in from the suburbs and locals on a big night out. Directly in front of us there was a young man in a pinstripe suit, some well-scrubbed junior hotshot from the City, with what looked like his mother on one side and his grandmother on the other side. I didn’t like him from the start.
He made a big deal about turning round and shaking his head just because my mum clipped him around the ear a few times with her coat as she was struggling to take it off. Then he tutted elaborately when she whistled through the overture. And then, when the show began, he kept on loudly clearing his throat when my mum sang along to Fantine’s big dying number, ‘I Dreamed a Dream’. Finally, as my mum joined in for the cast’s stirring rendition of ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’, he turned around angrily.
‘Will you please shut up?’ he hissed.
‘Leave her alone, pal,’ said Cyd, and I loved her for it. ‘We’ve paid for our tickets too.’
‘We can’t enjoy the show if she acts like she’s part of the chorus!’
‘Who’s she?’ I demanded.
Behind us people started going, ‘Ssssh!’ Bald and permed heads were turning. Well-fed faces creased with irritation.
‘Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men?’ sang my mum, happily oblivious. ‘It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!’
The young suit’s posh old granny stuck her oar in. ‘We’ve paid for our seats, too, you know.’
‘We can’t concentrate on the performance,’ whined her frumpy daughter.
‘You don’t need to concentrate, lady,’ said Cyd. ‘You just need to lie back and enjoy it. You know how to lie back and enjoy it, don’t you?’
‘Well, really!’
‘I’m getting help,’ said her son, and went off to find a young woman with a torch.
Then they threw us out.
They were very nice about it. Told us that if we couldn’t silence my mum then the management reserved the right to ask us to leave. And there was no way of shutting up my mum when we still had the deaths of Valjean, Javert, Eponine and all those nice students to look forward to.
So we went. My wife and my mother and me. Laughing about it already, as though getting thrown out of a musical was actually much more fun than watching one. Making our way through the funky crowds to the Bar Italia where my mum was promised a lovely cup of tea.
The three of us, my wife and my mother and me, arm in arm in the streets of Soho.
Singing ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’ at the top of our voices.
seventeen
I met my son at the airport.
He came through the arrival gate holding the hand of a young British Airways stewardess. There was some sort of identification tag around his neck, as worn by child evacuees in old black-and-white wars, or Paddington Bear.
Please look after this child.
‘Pat! Over here! Pat!’
The stewardess spotted me before he did. He was chatting away to her, his face pale and serious, and then he saw me through the legs of all those arriving tourists and business types. He broke away from the BA girl and ran to my arms, and I was on my knees, holding him tight and kissing his mop of blond hair.
‘Let me look at you, darling.’
He grinned and yawned, and I saw that the gummy gap that had existed at the front of his mouth had changed. There were now two uneven fragments of pure white bone pushing through. The teeth that would have to last him a lifetime.
There were other changes. He was taller, and his hair was maybe slightly darker, and I didn’t recognise any of his clothes.
‘Are you all right? How was the flight? It’s so good to see you, darling!’
‘You can’t sleep on planes because they keep coming round making you try to eat things,’ he reflected, blinking his tired blue eyes. ‘You have to choose between fish and chicken.’
‘He’s a little bit jet-lagged, aren’t you, Pat?’ said the BA girl. Then she gave me a dazzling white smile. ‘He’s such a lovely boy.’
It was true. He was a lovely boy. Smart, funny and beautiful. And independent and brave – flying across the Atlantic all by himself. A terrific kid.
My son, when he was seven years old.
We thanked the girl from BA and caught a cab back into town. My heart felt lighter than it had in months.
‘Everything okay in Connecticut?’
‘Fine.’
‘You like your new school? Making friends?’
‘Good.’
‘Mummy all right?’
‘She’s okay.’ He paused, frowning at the slow-moving traffic heading for the motorway. ‘But she argues with Richard. They had a little bit of a row about Britney.’
So that was the trouble with Gina. For a moment I wondered who Britney was – some hot little babysitter? Or some cute secretary looking for love? But Britney couldn’t be a secretary. Richard didn’t have a job. It had all fallen through at Bridle-Worthington. So who was this mystery woman?
‘Britney was sick in the living room,’ Pat said. ‘Richard was very angry. Then Britney wet the Indian rug and had to have an operation and Richard said it was disgusting the way Britney kept biting at the stitches.’
I was thinking that Britney must be one hell of a babysitter, and then I remembered. Of course. My son had a dog now.
A slow smile spread across Pat’s face.
‘Guess what? At dinner he sits right by the table and licks his, you know, willie.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘Richard or Britney?’ My son thought about it for a moment.
‘You must be joking,’ he said.
‘Come here, you.’
Then he slid across the seat and climbed on to my lap. I could smell that old Pat smell of sugar and dirt, sense his exhaustion. Within minutes he was fast asleep.
The cab driver had pictures of three small children on his dashboard. He looked at us in his rear-view mirror and smiled.
‘You two boys come far?’ he said.
I held my son close.
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘We’ve come a very long way.’
Cyd had hung balloons on the front door, and it filled me with gratitude and love.
She was waiting for us as I paid the driver, wreathed in smiles. As I dragged Pat’s suitcase up our garden path she crouched down and threw her arms around him and I felt like we were becoming a real family at last.
Peggy was in the living r
oom watching a Lucy Doll video. It was a film that Peggy and I had watched before, an animated double bill featuring a cheapo cartoon version of ‘Lucy Doll Rock and Roll and her blank-faced band getting stranded in a fifties time warp.
Lucy Doll Rock and Roll and her friends can’t wait to join the hep teens down at the soda shop for a bebopping, finger-licking good time,’ said Peggy. ‘Strap yourself in for action, because the countdown to fun has begun!’
Pat smiled shyly at his oldest friend.
‘Hello, Pat,’ Peggy said with the brisk formality of minor royalty. ‘So how’s America?’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a dog. His name’s Britney. He’s not allowed in the house because he licks his willie right in front of everybody.’
‘Sorry to disappoint you, Pat,’ sniffed Peggy. ‘But he can’t be a boy dog if his name is Britney. Because Britney is a girl’s name, stupid.’
Pat looked up at me for support. ‘Britney is a boy dog, isn’t he?’
I thought of Britney licking his enormous great penis at the dinner table.
‘I would say so, darling.’
‘Do you want to watch Lucy Doll’s American Graffiti with me?’ said Peggy. ‘Lucy Doll Rock and Roll magically comes to life in this stunning adaptation of the much loved classic.’
Cyd and I smiled at each other. She gave my arm a little squeeze. She knew how much this meant to me.
Pat considered the vision in pink doing a Chuck Berry duck-walk across the TV screen.
‘Lucy Doll sucks,’ he said.
‘Pat,’ I said.
‘Lucy Doll sucks big time.’
‘Pat.’
‘Lucy Doll can kiss my royal ass.’
‘Pat, I’m warning you.’
‘Lucy Doll can go fuck herself.’
And it sort of went downhill from there.
I had never seen my mother so happy in my life.
This was more than happiness. Seeing her grandson again provoked a kind of ecstasy, a kind of delirious abandon. My mum lost herself in her grandson.
