Man and Boy

To me, of course, my family was on the staid side. All that car-washing, all that peeking from behind net curtains, all the nights spent in front of the television, all the B&B holidays in Devon and Cornwall or a caravan in Frinton. I envied Gina’s exotic background – her mum a former model, her dad a would-be rock star, the pictures in the glossy magazines, even though the pictures were fading now.

But Gina remembered the missed birthdays of her childhood, a father who was always preoccupied with his more recent, more exciting attachments, the promised holidays that never happened, and her mother going to bed alone, growing old alone, getting sick alone, crying alone and finally dying alone. Gina could never be cavalier about an ordinary family. It wasn’t in her.

The first Christmas I took Gina home, I saw her choking up when my mum gave her a little present – just some smelly stuff in a basket from the Body Shop, some soap in the shape of polar bears covered in cling film – and I knew I had her. She looked at those polar bears and she was hooked.

You should never underestimate the power of the nuclear family. These days coming from an unbroken home is like having independent means, or Paul Newman eyes, or a big cock. It’s one of life’s true blessings, given to just a lucky few. And difficult to resist.

But those unbroken homes can lull their children into a false sense of security. When I was growing up, I took it for granted that every marriage would be as stable and everlasting as my mum and dad’s – including my own. My parents made it look easy. But it’s not easy at all.

Gina would probably have washed her hands of Glenn years ago if her mother had lived. But she died of breast cancer just before Gina walked into the radio station and my life, and suddenly she felt the need to salvage the few ragged bits of family she still had left.

So Glenn came to our wedding, and rolled a joint in front of my mum and dad. Then he tried to get off with one of the bridesmaids. Pushing fifty, he seemed to be under the impression that he was nineteen years old and everything was still before him. He wore leather trousers that went creak-creak-creak when he danced. And, oh, how he danced.

Gina had been so upset that Glenn couldn’t manage even the vaguest impersonation of a father that she didn’t want to send him any photographs of Pat when he was born. But I had put my foot down, insisting the man had a right to see pictures of his only grandchild. And I secretly thought that when Glenn saw our beautiful boy, he would be instantly smitten. When he forgot Pat’s birthday for the third year in a row, I realised that I now had reasons of my own to hate the old hippy bastard.

‘Maybe he’s terrified of being a grandfather,’ I said. ‘Freaked out – isn’t that what he’d call it?’

‘Yes, there’s that,’ Gina said. ‘And there’s also the fact that he’s a selfish arsehole who never grew up. Let’s not forget that.’

Unlike Gina’s mother and father, nobody had ever thought my parents were a golden couple. Nobody had ever thought that their union summed up the spirit of an era. My mum’s picture had never appeared in a glossy magazine – although her prize-winning tomatoes had once been prominently featured in the local rag. But my parents had stayed together for a lifetime. And Gina and I were going to do the same.

Since our wedding day, we had friends who had met someone, fallen in love, married, divorced and started to hate their ex-partner’s guts. That would never happen to us. Though our backgrounds were different, they meant we wanted the same thing.

I wanted a marriage that would last forever because that’s what my parents had. Gina wanted a marriage that would last forever because that was exactly what her parents had never had.

‘That’s what is so good about us,’ Gina told me, ‘our dreams match.’

Gina was mad about my parents and the feeling was mutual. They looked at this blonde vision coming up the garden path with their little grandson, and the pair of them seemed to visibly swell with pleasure, smiling shyly behind their reading glasses and geraniums.

None of them could believe their luck. My parents thought they were getting Grace Kelly. Gina thought she was getting the Waltons.

‘I’m going to take Pat to see your mum and dad,’ she said before I went to work. ‘Can I borrow your mobile phone? The battery’s flat on mine.’

I was happy to lend it to her. I can’t stand those things. They make me feel trapped.

A shiver of panic ran through the gallery.

‘The fly’s back!’ the director said. ‘We got the fly!’

There it was on the monitor. The studio fly.

Our fly was a huge beetle-black creature with wings as big as a wasp’s and a carcass so bloated that it seemed to have an undercarriage. On a close-up of Marty reading his autocue, we watched the fly lazily circle our presenter’s head and then bank off into a long slow climb.

The fly lived somewhere in the dark upper reaches of the studio, up there among the tangle of sockets, cables and lights. The fly only ever put in an appearance during a show, and up in the gallery the old-timers said that it was responding to the heat of the studio lights. But I always thought that the fly was attracted to whatever juice it is that human glands secrete when they are on live television. Our studio fly had a taste for fear.

Apart from the fly’s aerial display, Marty’s interview with Cliff was going well. The young green started off nervously, scratching his stubble, tugging his filthy dreadlocks, stuttering his way through rambling sentences and even committing television’s cardinal sin of staring directly into the camera. But Marty could be surprisingly gentle with nervous guests and, clearly sympathetic to Cliff’s cause, he eventually made the young man relax. It was only when Marty was winding up the interview that it all began to go wrong.

‘I want to thank Cliff for coming in tonight,’ Marty said, unusually solemn, brushing away the studio fly. ‘And I want to thank all his colleagues who are living in trees out at the airport. Because the battle they are fighting is for all of us.’

As the applause swelled, Marty reached out and shook his guest’s hand. Cliff held it. And continued to hold it. Then he reached inside the grubby, vaguely ethnic coat he was wearing and produced a pair of handcuffs. While Marty watched with an uncertain smile, Cliff snapped one metal ring around his own wrist and the other around Marty’s.

‘Free the birds,’ Cliff said quietly. He cleared his throat.

‘What – what is this?’ Marty asked.

‘Free the birds!’ Cliff shouted with growing confidence. ‘Free the birds!’

Marty shook his head. ‘Do you have the key for this thing, you smelly little shit?’

Up in the gloaming of the gallery we watched the scene unfold on the bank of screens shining in the darkness. The director carried on choreographing the five cameras – ‘Stay on Marty, two…give me a close-up of the handcuffs, four…’ – but I had the feeling that you only get when live television is going very wrong, a feeling which somehow combines low-grade nausea, paralysis and terrible fascination, as it sits there in the pit of your stomach.

And suddenly there was the fly, hovering for a few seconds by Cliff’s hair, then executing a perfect landing on the bridge of his nose.

‘Free the birds!’

Marty considered his arm, unable to quite believe that he was really chained to this scruffy young man whose make-up was starting to melt under the lights. Then he picked up the water jug that was on the table between them and, almost as if he were trying to swat the studio fly, smashed it into Cliff’s face. There was an eruption of blood and water. Marty was left holding just the jug’s broken handle.

‘Fuck the birds,’ he said. ‘And bugger the hole in the ozone layer.’

A floor manager appeared on camera, his mouth open with wonder, his headphones dangling around his neck.

Cliff cradled his crushed nose. Someone in the audience started booing. And that’s when I knew we were stuffed. Marty had done the one thing he wasn’t allowed to do on our kind of show. He had lost the audience.

Up in the gallery the telephones all began to ring at once, as if to commemorate my brilliant career going straight down the toilet. Suddenly I was aware of how hard I was sweating.

The studio fly appeared briefly on all the monitors, seemed to perform a victory roll, and then was gone.

‘I’m so stupid,’ Siobhan said hours later in the deserted gallery. ‘It’s all my fault. I should never have booked him. I should have guessed he wanted to use us to do something like this. He always was a selfish little bastard. Why did I do it? Because I was trying to impress everyone. And now look what’s happened.’

‘You’re not stupid,’ I told her. ‘Marty was stupid. It was a good booking. Despite what happened, it’s still a good booking.’

‘But what’s going to happen now?’ she asked, suddenly seeming very young. ‘What will they do to us?’

I shook my head and shrugged. ‘We’ll soon find out.’ I was tired of thinking about it. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

I had sent Marty home, smuggled out of the back of the building into a minicab which was waiting by the freight entrance, telling him to talk to no one. The press would tear him to pieces. We could count on that. I was more worried about what the station would do to him. And us. I knew they needed The Marty Mann Show. But did they need it this badly?

‘It’s so late,’ Siobhan said, as we got into the lift. ‘Where can I get a cab?’

‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

I should have guessed that she would say Camden Town. She just had to be living in one of those old working-class neighbourhoods that had been colonised by the people in black. Actually, she was not that far from our little house by Highbury Corner. We were at opposite ends of the same road. But Siobhan was at the end of the Camden Road where they aspired to Bohemia. I was at the end where they dreamed of suburbia.

‘I can give you a lift,’ I said.

‘What – in your MGF?’

‘Sure.’

‘Great!’

We laughed for the first time in hours – although I couldn’t quite work out why – and took the lift down to the underground carpark where the little red car was standing completely alone. It was late. Almost two. I watched her slide her legs under the dashboard.

‘I’m not going to go on about it,’ she said, ‘but I just want to say you’ve been really sweet about tonight. Thank you for not being angry with me. I appreciate it.’

It was a gracious apology for something that she really didn’t have to apologise for. I looked at her pale Irish face, realising for the first time how much I liked her.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, quickly turning on the ignition to cover my embarrassment. ‘We’re on the same side, aren’t we?’

It was a warm summer night and the city streets were as close to empty as they were ever going to get. Within twenty minutes we were driving past the shuttered flea market, the funky ethnic restaurants and all the second-hand stores with their grotesquely oversized signs – there were giant cowboy boots, colossal rattan chairs and monster slabs of vinyl, all of them looming above the street like the visions caused by some bad drug. Gina and I used to shop around here on Saturday afternoons. It was years ago now.

Siobhan gave me directions until we pulled up in front of a large white town house that had long ago been converted into flats.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘goodnight then.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘for everything.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Listen, I don’t think I can sleep yet. Not after tonight. Do you want to come in for a drink?’

‘A drink might keep me awake,’ I said, hating myself for sounding like a pensioner who had to scurry back to the cocoa and incontinence sheets of his sheltered accommodation.

‘You sure?’ she asked, and I was ridiculously flattered that she seemed a bit disappointed. I also knew that she wouldn’t ask again.

Go home, a voice inside me said. Decline with a polite smile and go home now.

And maybe I would have if I hadn’t liked her so much.

Maybe I would have if it hadn’t been such a rough night.

Maybe I would have if I wasn’t coming up to thirty.

Maybe I would have if her legs had been a couple of inches shorter.

‘Okay,’ I said, far more casually than I felt. ‘Sounds good.’

She looked at me for just a moment, and then we were kissing each other, her hands on the back of my neck, tugging at my hair with small, urgent fists. That’s strange, I thought. Gina never does that.

five

A child can change in a moment. You turn your back for a couple of seconds, and when you look again you find they have already grown into someone else.

I can remember seeing Pat smile properly for the first time. He was a little fat bald thing, Winston Churchill in a Babygro, howling because his first teeth were pushing through, so Gina rubbed some chocolate on his sore gums and he immediately stopped crying and grinned up at us – this big, wide, gummy grin – as if we had just revealed the best secret in the world.

And I can remember him walking for the first time. He was holding himself up by the rail of his little yellow plastic stroller, swaying from side to side as if he were caught in a stiff breeze, as was his custom, when without warning he suddenly took off, his fat little legs sticking out of his disposable nappy and pumping furiously to keep up with the stroller’s spinning blue wheels.

He bombed off out of the room and Gina laughed and said he looked as though he was going to be late for the office again.

But I can’t remember when his games changed. I don’t know when all his toddler’s games of fire engines and Postman Pat videos gave way to his obsession with Star Wars. That was one of the changes which happened when I wasn’t looking.

One minute his head was full of talking animals, the next it was all Death Stars, stormtroopers and light sabres.

If we let him, he would watch the three Star Wars films on video all day and all night. But we didn’t let him – or rather Gina didn’t let him – so when the television was turned off, he spent hours playing with his collection of Star Wars figures and grey plastic spaceships, or bouncing on the sofa, brandishing his light sabre, muttering scraps of George Lucas storylines to himself.

It seemed like only the day before yesterday when nothing gave him more pleasure than his collection of farmyard animals – or ‘aminals’, as Pat called them. He would sit in his bubble bath, a little blond angel with suds on his head, parading his cows, sheep and horses along the side of the tub, mooing and baaing until the water turned cold.

‘I’m taking me bath,’ he would announce. ‘I need me aminals.’

Now his aminals were collecting dust in some forgotten corner of his bedroom while he played his endless games of intergalactic good and evil.

They were a lot like the games I could remember from my own childhood. And sometimes Pat’s fantasies of brave knights, evil warlords and captured princesses sounded like echoes from a past that was long gone, as if he were trying to recover something precious that had already been lost forever.

Siobhan slept like someone who was single.

She edged right into the middle of the bed, her freckled limbs thrown out every which way, or she rolled over on her side, taking my share of the duvet with her. I lay there in that strange bed wide awake, clutching a scrap of sheet the size of a handkerchief as the room got light.

It was too soon to feel really bad. Pushed to the back of my mind there was the thought of Gina and all the promises I had ever made to her – promises from the days when I was trying to persuade her to love me, the promises we made on our wedding day, and all the promises of all the days beyond, all that stuff about undying love and never wanting anyone else that I had really meant at the time. And still did, I discovered. Now more than ever, in a funny sort of way.

Later, this would all really get to me, and driving home I would look in the mirror wondering when I had become the kind of man I used to hate. But now was too soon for all that. I lay there as the night faded away thinking to myself – well, that seemed to go okay.

The reason that most men stray is opportunity, and the joy of meaningless sex should never be underestimated. It had been a meaningless, opportunistic coupling. That’s what I had liked most about it.

What I liked least about it was that already I was starting to feel like a traitor.

And it was far from great. You try too hard with someone new. You try too hard to truly enjoy yourself. Sex with someone new is too much like taking your driving test. Yet when I thought of all the things that could have gone wrong – and all of them seemed to involve timing – it was okay.

Thank God, thank God, thank God.

But all the time I was with Siobhan, while half of me thought that this was probably the woman I hadn’t realised I had been looking for all my life, this pale Irish beauty who would have lovely red-headed children, the other half of me sort of missed my wife.

I missed the easy familiarity you get with someone who you have been with for years. If I was going to be unfaithful, then I kind of wished it could have been with Gina.

Still, you can get tired of always being the man who pays the mortgage and calls the plumber and can’t put together the self-assembly furniture. You get tired of being that man because in the end you don’t feel like much of a man at all, more of a domestic appliance.

So you go home with some stranger who doesn’t let you have your share of the duvet and end up feeling more tired of yourself than ever. Now what did I do with my trousers?

Daylight was creeping into the room as I got dressed, and glimpses of Siobhan’s life floated into view. It was a good flat – the kind of comfortable, ordered flat I had always wanted but never had. I seemed to have gone straight from student squalor to domestic disorder.

The only photographs I could see were of Siobhan as a teenager, laughing as she held on to grinning dogs or some sweet-looking old people. Pictures of pets and parents.

There were some Japanese prints on the walls, of peasants struggling through a rainy landscape – stuff Gina would have liked. Shelves neatly stacked with books and CDs revealed a taste for literature that had made it to the movies and a weird mix of rock groups and mellow jazz – Oasis and U2 next to Stan Getz, Chet Baker and the softer side of Miles.

Looking at her books and records made me like her more. But probably looking at anyone’s books and records will make you feel that way, even if they have lots of rubbish. Because what they like, and what they used to like, reveals things about them that they wouldn’t normally choose to advertise.

I liked it that Siobhan had probably grown out of white rock bands and was now looking for something a bit more cool and sophisticated (it seemed unthinkable that she might have started out on Chet Baker and Miles Davis then later switched to U2 and Oasis). It showed she was still really young and curious, still discovering what she wanted from the world. Still inventing her life rather than trying to recover it.

It was very much a young single woman’s apartment, the flat of a girl who could please herself. Despite the magazines and clothes that were strewn around, there was none of the real mess and clutter that you get in a place with a child, none of the homely chaos I was used to. You could make it all the way to the door without stepping on a Han Solo figurine.

But I sort of missed all of the clutter and mess that I knew from my home, just as I already missed being the kind of man who knows how to keep his promises.

Gina was crying when I got home.

I sat on the side of the bed, afraid to touch her.

‘It was crazy after last night’s show,’ I said. ‘I had to stay at the station.’

‘I understand,’ she said. ‘It’s not that.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘It’s your mum, Harry.’

‘What about her?’

‘She’s so good with Pat,’ Gina choked. ‘It just comes so easily to her. I’ll never be like her. She’s so patient, so kind. I told her that I sometimes feel like I’m going crazy – at home all day with nobody to talk to but a little boy. And when he’s at his nursery school, it’s even worse.’ She looked up at me, her eyes brimming. ‘I don’t think she even understood what I was talking about.’

Thank Christ for that. For a moment there I thought she knew everything.

‘You’re the best mother in the world,’ I said, taking her in my arms. And I meant it.

‘No, I’m not,’ she said. ‘You want me to be. And I want to be, I really do. But just wanting something doesn’t make it true.’

She cried some more, although her sobs had lost that desperate edge. It happened sometimes, this crying, and I never knew what might start it off. To me it always looked as though she was crying about nothing. Not a good mother? I mean, what was all that about? Gina was a brilliant mother. And if she was feeling a bit isolated during the day, she could give me a call at work. My secretary would always take a message. Or there was an answering machine on my mobile. How could she ever be lonely? I just didn’t get it.

I cuddled her until the tears were gone and then I went downstairs to make us some coffee. There were about a million messages on the machine. The world was going crazy about Marty. But I wasn’t too worried about the newspapers and the station.

I had heard somewhere that a problem at work is like a plane crash that you can walk away from. It’s not like your home life, where you can’t get away from your problems, no matter how far you run.

six

Every father is a hero to his son. At least when they are too small to know any better.

Pat thinks I can do anything right now. He thinks I can make the world bend to my will – just like Han Solo or Indiana Jones. I know that one day soon Pat will work out that there are a few differences between Harrison Ford and his old dad. And when he realises that I don’t actually own a bullwhip or a light sabre, he will never look at me in quite the same way again.

But before they grow out of it, all sons think their dad is a hero. It was a bit different with me and my dad. Because my father really was a hero. He had a medal to prove it and everything.

If your saw him in his garden or in his car, you would think he was just another suburban dad. Yet in a drawer of the living room of the pebble-dashed semi where I grew up there was a Distinguished Service Medal that he had won during the war. I spent my childhood pretending to be a hero. My dad was the real thing.

The DSM – that’s important. Only the Victoria Cross is higher, and usually you have to die before they give you that. If you saw my dad in a pub or on the street you would think you knew all about him, just by looking at his corny jumper or his balding head or his family saloon or his choice of newspaper. You would think that you knew him. And you would be dead wrong.

I picked up the phone. I could ignore all the messages from the station and the papers. But I had to call my parents.

My old man answered the phone. That was unusual. He couldn’t stand the phone. He would only pick it up if my mum was nowhere near it, or if he happened to be passing on his way from Gardener’s World to the garden.

‘Dad? It’s me.’

‘I’ll get your mother.’

He was gruff and formal on the phone, as if he had never got used to using one. As if we had never met. As if I were trying to sell him something he didn’t want.

‘Dad? Did you see the show last night?’

I knew he had seen it. They always watched my show.

There was a pause.

‘Quite a performance,’ my father said.

I knew he would have hated it all – the swearing, the violence, the politics. I could even hear him bitching about the commercials. But I wanted him to tell me that it didn’t matter. That I was forgiven.