Man and Boy

‘That’s live television, Dad,’ I said with a forced laugh. ‘You never know what’s going to happen.’

The old man grunted.

‘It’s not really my scene,’ he said.

At some point during the nineties, my father had started using the vernacular of the sixties.

His speech was peppered with ‘no ways’ and ‘not my scenes’. No doubt in another thirty years he would be collecting his pension and hobbling about in a zimmer frame while proclaiming that he was ‘sorted’ and ‘mad for it’. But by then the world wouldn’t know what he was going on about.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘there’s no need to worry. Everything’s under control.’

‘Worried? I’m not worried,’ he said.

The silence hummed between us. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know how to bridge the gap between our separate worlds. I didn’t know where to start.

‘I’ll get your mother.’

While he went to get my mum, Pat wandered into the room. He was in his pyjamas, his mass of dirty yellow hair sticking up, those eyes from Tiffany still puffy with sleep. I held out my arms to him, realising with a stab of pain how much I loved him. He walked straight past me and over to the video machine.

‘Pat? Come here, darling.’

He reluctantly came over to me, clutching a tape of Return of the Jedi. I pulled him on to my lap. He had that sweet, musty smell kids have when they have just got up. He yawned wide, as I kissed him on the cheek. His skin was brand new. Freshly minted. The softest thing in the world.

And he still looked like the most beautiful thing in the world to me, like a little blond angel who had dropped off a cloud on his way to the celestial video shop.

Was he really that pretty? Or was that just my parental gene kicking in? Does every child in the world look like that to its parent? I still don’t know.

‘Did you have a nice time at Nanny and Granddad’s house?’ I asked.

He thought about it for a moment.

‘They don’t have any good films,’ he said.

‘What kind of films do they have?’

‘Stupid ones. Just with…pictures.’

‘You mean cartoons?’

‘Yeah. Just pictures. For babies.’

I was indignant.

‘Pat, they’re not for babies. You don’t like Dumbo? The elephant with the big ears? The poor little elephant who everyone makes fun of?’

‘Dumbo’s stupid.’

‘Dumbo’s great! What’s wrong with Dumbo? Jesus Christ, I grew up with Dumbo!’

I was going to give him a lecture about the genius of Walt Disney and the glory of animation and the magic of childhood, but my mum came on the line.

‘Harry? We were so worried. What on earth’s going to happen? Will you lose your job?’

‘Mum, I’m not going to lose my job. What happened last night – that’s what we call good television.’

‘Really, dear? I thought you once told me that it was good television if the guest attacked the host. I didn’t know it worked the other way round.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said, although she had a point. All the talk show punch-ups I could remember involved the presenter getting twatted. And not the other way around. ‘They’re giving me a new contract soon. Don’t worry, Mum – we don’t have to send Pat up a chimney just yet.’

‘And what’s wrong with Gina? She seems so – I don’t know – down.’

‘Gina’s fine,’ I said. ‘What’s Gina got to be down about?’

After I’d hung up, Pat beetled over to the video machine and stuffed in Return of the Jedi. The film began where he had left it – Princess Leia dressed as a slave girl at the feet of Jabba the Hutt. Drool slipped from Jabba’s filthy lips as he considered his nubile concubine. My four-year-old son watched the scene impassively. This couldn’t be good for him, could it?

‘Why don’t we have a game?’ I suggested.

His face brightened.

‘Okay!’

‘What do you want to play?’

‘Star Wars.’

Grinning from ear to ear, he hauled his favourite toy box in from his bedroom and emptied its contents on to the carpet. Out spilled all the things that made George Lucas famous. I sat on the floor with Pat while he carefully manoeuvred Han, Luke, Chewie and the two ’droids around his grey plastic Millennium Falcon.

‘Princess Leia is being held captured on the Death Star,’ Pat said.

‘Captive,’ I said. ‘She’s being held captive.’

‘Being held captured,’ he said. ‘We have to rescue her, Daddy.’

‘Okay.’

I sat playing with my son for a while, something I knew I didn’t do nearly enough. Then after about five or ten minutes I decided I had better get in to work. It was going to be a long day.

Pat was disappointed that I was cutting our game short, but he cheered up when I switched his video of Princess Leia as a beautiful slave girl back on. He really liked that bit.

We were all over the papers.

The broadsheets saw the Cliff incident as symptomatic of a medium in terminal decline, desperate for cheap sensation in a world of visual overload and limited attention spans. The tabloids were going barmy about the blood and bad language.

All of them were calling for the head of Marty Mann. I was going to call him from the car, but I remembered that I had lent Gina my mobile phone.

Marty’s company – Mad Mann Productions – had a floor in a building on Notting Hill Gate, a large open-plan office where self-consciously casual young people in their twenties worked on The Marty Mann Show or spent months planning future Mad Mann projects. The office was currently working on a game show for clever people, an alternative travel programme, a scuba diving series that would allow Marty to spend six months in the Maldives, and lots of other ideas which would almost certainly never actually happen.

We called it development. The outside world would call it farting around.

Only Marty and I had offices at Mad Mann. Actually they were more like little private cubbyholes, full of tapes and shooting scripts and a few VCRs. Siobhan was waiting for me in mine.

She had never been in my room before. We sort of blushed at each other. Why is it so easy to talk to someone before you go to bed with them for the first time and then suddenly so difficult?

‘You should have woken me up before you left,’ she said.

‘I was going to,’ I said, ‘but you looked so…’

‘Peaceful?’

‘Knackered.’

She laughed. ‘Well, it was a bad night. The only good thing about it was you.’

‘Listen, Siobhan –’

‘It’s okay, Harry. I know. I’m not going to see you again, am I? Not like last night, I mean. You don’t have to pretend. You don’t have to say anything that isn’t true. I know you’re married.’

‘You’re a great girl, Siobhan. You really are.’

And I meant it.

‘But you love your wife. I know, I know. Don’t worry. I would prefer to hear it now than six months down the line. I would rather get it over with before I start to really like you. At least you’re not like some of them. You didn’t tell me that your wife doesn’t understand you. You didn’t tell me that you’re probably going to break up. You didn’t spend months sneaking out of the house to phone me. You’re not a stinking hypocrite.’

Not a hypocrite? I spent last night with you and I’ll spend tonight with my wife. Surely a hypocrite is exactly what I am?

‘You’re no good at all this, Harry. That’s what I like about you. Believe me, there are not many around like you. I know. The last one – Jesus! I really thought he was going to leave his wife and that we were actually going to get married. That’s how stupid I am.’

‘You’re not stupid,’ I said, putting my arms around her.

We held each other tight, with real feeling. Now we were splitting up, we were getting on brilliantly.

Then she started to get choked up about how difficult it is to find a good man, while I thought to myself – well, that’s a relief. We aren’t going to star in a remake of Fatal Attraction after all.

I knew I was getting off lightly. Siobhan was going to let me go without pouring acid on my MGF or putting our pet rabbit in a pot. Not that we had a rabbit. But after the relief had subsided I was surprised to find that I felt a little hurt. Was it so easy to say goodbye to me?

‘This always happens to me,’ Siobhan laughed, although her eyes were all wet and shining. ‘I always pick the ones who have already been picked. Your wife is a lucky woman. As I believe I said on that message I left you.’

‘What message?’

‘The message on your mobile.’

‘My mobile?’

‘I left a message on your mobile phone,’ Siobhan said, drying her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Didn’t you get it?’

seven

Gina was packing her bags when I got home. Stuffing a suitcase and a weekend bag up in our bedroom, pale-faced and dry-eyed, doing it as quickly as she could, taking only the bare essentials. As if she couldn’t stand to be there any more.

‘Gina?’

She turned and looked at me, and it was as if she were seeing me for the very first time. She seemed almost giddy with contempt and sadness and anger. Especially anger. It scared the shit out of me. She had never looked at me like that before.

She turned again, picking something up from the little table by her side of the bed. An ashtray. No, not an ashtray. We didn’t have any ashtrays. She threw my mobile phone at me.

She had always been a lousy shot – and we had had one or two arguments where things had been thrown – but there wasn’t the room to miss, and it smacked hard against my chest. I picked it up off the floor and a bone just above my heart began to throb.

‘I’ll never forgive you for this,’ she said. ‘Never.’ She nodded at the phone. ‘Why don’t you listen to your messages?’

I pressed the icon on the phone which showed a little envelope. Siobhan’s voice came crackling through, wry and sleepy and completely out of place in our bedroom.

‘It’s always a bad sign if they go before you wake up…but please don’t feel bad about last night…because I don’t…your wife is a lucky woman…and I’m looking forward to working with you…Bye, Harry.’

‘Did you sleep with this girl, Harry?’ Gina asked, then shook her head. ‘What’s wrong with me? Why am I even bothering to ask? Because I want you to tell me that it isn’t true. But of course it’s true.’

I tried to put my arms around her. Not hugging her. Just trying to hold on to her. Trying to calm her down. To stop her getting away. To stop her from leaving me. She shook me off, almost snarling.

‘Some little slut at the office, is she?’ Gina said, still throwing clothes into her suitcase. She wasn’t even looking at the clothes she was packing. She didn’t look as though she thought she was a lucky woman. ‘Some little slut who thinks you can do her a few favours.’

‘She’s actually a really nice girl. You’d like her.’

It was a truly stupid thing to say. I knew it the second the words left my big mouth, but by then it was already too late. Gina came across the bedroom and slapped me hard across the face. I saw her wince with pain, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears. She didn’t really know how to hit someone. Gina wasn’t like that.

‘You think it was romantic or passionate or some such bullshit,’ Gina said. ‘But it’s none of those things. It’s just grubby and sordid and pathetic. Really pathetic. Do you love her?’

‘What?’

‘Are you in love with this girl?’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘If she wants my life, she can have it. All of it. Including you. Especially you, Harry. Because it’s all a lie.’

‘Please, Gina. It was a mistake. A terrible mistake, okay?’ I scrambled for words. ‘It didn’t mean a thing,’ I told her.

She started laughing and crying at the same time. ‘Don’t you understand that makes it worse?’ she said. ‘Don’t you understand anything at all?’

Then she really started to sob, her shoulders all hunched up and shaking, not even trying to wipe away tears that seemed to start somewhere deep inside her chest. I wanted to put my arms around her. But I didn’t dare touch her.

‘You’re just like my father,’ she said, and I knew it was the worst thing in the world she could ever say. ‘Just like him.’

‘Please, Gina,’ I said. ‘Please.’

She shook her head, as if she could no longer understand me, as if I had stopped making any kind of sense.

‘What, Harry? Please? What? You’re like a fucking parrot. Please what?’

‘Please,’ I said, parrot-like. ‘Please don’t stop loving me.’

‘But you must have known,’ she said, slamming shut the suitcase, most of her clothes still unpacked and scattered all over our bed. The other bag was already full. She was almost ready to leave. She was nearly there now. ‘You must have known that this is the one thing I could never forgive,’ she said. ‘You must have known that I can’t love a man who doesn’t love me – and only me. And if you didn’t know that, Harry, then you don’t know me at all.’

I once read somewhere that, in any relationship, the one who cares the least is the one with all the power.

Gina had all the power now. Because she didn’t care at all any more.

I followed her as she dragged her suitcase and bag out into the hall and across to Pat’s bedroom. He was carefully placing Star Wars figures into a little Postman Pat backpack. He smiled up at us.

‘Look what I’m doing,’ he said.

‘Are you ready, Pat?’ Gina asked.

‘Nearly,’ he said.

‘Then let’s go,’ she said, wiping away the tears with her sleeve.

‘Okay,’ Pat said. ‘Guess what?’ He was looking at me now, his beautiful face illuminated by a smile. ‘We’re going on a holiday.’

I let them get as far as the door and then I realised that I couldn’t stand losing them. I just couldn’t stand it. I grabbed the handle of Gina’s bag.

‘Where are you going? Just tell me where you’re going.’

She tugged at the bag, but I refused to let go. So she just left me holding it as she opened the front door and stepped across the threshold.

I followed them out into the street, still holding Gina’s bag, and watched her strap Pat into his child seat. He had sensed that something was very wrong. He wasn’t smiling any more. Suddenly I realised that he was my last chance.

‘What about Pat?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you going to think about him?’

‘Did you?’ she said. ‘Did you think about him, Harry?’

She heaved her suitcase into the back of the estate, not bothering to get the other bag back from me. She let me keep it.

‘Where will you stay?’

‘Goodbye, Harry.’

And then she left me. Pat’s face was small and anxious in the back seat. Gina stared straight ahead, her eyes hard and shining. She already looked like someone else. Someone I didn’t know. She turned on the ignition.

I watched the car until it had turned the bend in the street where we lived, and only then was I aware of the curtains that were twitching with curiosity. The neighbours were watching us. With a sinking feeling, I realised that’s the kind of couple we had become.

I carried Gina’s bag back into the house, where the phone was ringing. It was Marty.

‘Can you believe what these fuckers are saying about me in the papers?’ he said. ‘Look at this one – ban mad mann from our telly. And this one – A MANN OF FEW WORDS – ALL OF THEM ****ING OBSCENE. What the fuck are they implying? These people want my job, Harry. My mum is really upset. What are we going to do?’

‘Marty,’ I said. ‘Gina’s left me.’

‘She’s left you? You mean she’s walked out?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What about the kid?’

‘She’s taken Pat with her.’

‘Has she got someone else?’

‘Nothing like that. It was me. I did something stupid.’

Marty chuckled in my ear. ‘Harry, you dirty dog. Anyone I know?’

‘I’m frightened, Marty. I think she might be gone for good.’

‘Don’t worry, Harry. The most she can get is half of everything you own.’

He was wrong there. Gina had already walked out with everything I had ever wanted. She had got the lot.

eight

Barry Twist worked for the station. Over the past year, I had been to dinner at his home, and he had come to dinner at mine. But, the way our world worked, we weren’t exactly friends. I couldn’t tell him about Gina. It felt like I knew a lot of people like that.

Barry had been the first of the television people to take Marty and me out to lunch when we were doing the radio show. He had thought the show would work on television and, more than anyone, he had been responsible for putting us there. Barry had smiled all the way through that first lunch, smiled as though it was an honour to be on the same planet as Marty and me. But he wasn’t smiling now.

‘You’re not a couple of kids dicking about on the radio any more,’ he said. ‘These are big boys’ rules.’ His conversation was full of stuff like ‘big boys’ rules’, as though working in television was a lot like running an undercover SAS unit in South Armagh. ‘We had nine hundred phone calls complaining about the fucking language.’

I wasn’t going to roll over and die just because he was our commissioning editor.

‘Spontaneous TV, Barry, that’s what you pay him for. On this kind of show it’s not what the guests say that makes news. It’s what they do.’

‘We don’t pay him to assault the guests.’ Barry indicated the papers on his desk with a thin little smile. I picked up a fistful of them.

‘Front page of the Mirror and the Sun,’ I said. ‘A two-column story on page one of the Telegraph…Nice colour picture of Marty on page three of The Times…’

‘This is the wrong kind of news,’ Barry said. ‘And you know it. I repeat – this isn’t talk radio any more. You’re not just being listened to by a couple of cranks and their cats. And it’s not as though we’re some crappy little satellite outfit scratching in the dust for viewers. There are advertisers, there are broadcasting authorities, there are viewers’ associations, there is the man upstairs. And please take my word for it, Harry – they are all going fucking ape shit.’

I put the papers back on his desk, my fingers black with print. As nonchalantly as I could manage, I rubbed my hands together. But the print wouldn’t come off.

‘Let me tell you what’s going to happen, Barry. Marty is going to be called every name in the book – and next week we will get our biggest ratings ever. That is what’s going to happen. And they are going to be talking about that last show for years – that’s going to happen too.’

Barry Twist shook his head.

‘It was too much. It’s not just Marty. The man upstairs is getting called every name in the book – and he doesn’t like it. Over the last twelve months The Marty Mann Show has had drunken guests, abusive guests and guests who have tried to remove their clothes. But this is the first time you’ve had a guest who has been beaten up. It’s got to stop. We can’t have a manifestly unstable man going out live on national television.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘No more live shows, Harry. Record the show on the afternoon of transmission. That way, if Marty assaults anyone else – or decides to beat them to death with his ego – we can edit it out.’

‘As live? You want us to go as live? Marty will never stand for it.’

‘Make him stand for it, Harry. You’re his producer – do some producing. Doesn’t your contract come up for renewal soon?’

I knew they couldn’t drop Marty. He was already too big for that. But for the first time I understood that it wasn’t Marty’s hide that was on the line.

It was mine.

Despite all his games of death and destruction, Pat was a very loving child. He was always hugging and kissing people, even total strangers – I had once seen him embracing the old geezer who cleaned our street – in a way that was no longer permissible, or even wise, in the lousy modern world.

But Pat didn’t know or care about any of that. He was four years old and he was full of love. And when he saw me on the doorstep of his other grandfather’s home he went crazy, holding my face in his hands and kissing me on the lips.

‘Daddy! Are you staying with us? Staying with us on our – on our – on our holiday at granddad Glenn’s?’

I found them the day after they left. It wasn’t difficult. I made a few phone calls to Gina’s friends from college, the ones who had turned up for her thirtieth birthday party, but it had been years since she had been really close to any of them. She had let them drift out of her life, kidding herself that she could get everything she needed from me and Pat. That’s the trouble with a relationship as close as ours – when it comes undone, you’re left with no one.

It didn’t take me long to work out that Gina had been so desperate for somewhere to stay that she had gone home to her father, who was currently between marriages.

Glenn lived in a small flat right on the edge of the A to Z, among golf clubs and green belts, a neighbourhood that he must have thought looked a bit like Woodstock when he first moved in. But instead of jamming with Dylan and The Band, every day Glenn took the commuter train to his guitar shop in Denmark Street. He was home when I knocked on his door, greeting me with what seemed like real warmth as I stood holding my son.

‘Harry, how are you doing, man? Sorry about your troubles.’

In his early fifties now, what was left of Glenn’s hair was carefully arranged to approximate the Viking feather cut of his prime. He was still snake-hip thin, and still wore clothes that would have looked appropriate on a Jimi Hendrix roadie. And he was still good-looking, in a faded old roué kind of way. But he must have looked pretty funky walking down the King’s Road in 1975.

For all his faults – the missed birthdays, the forgotten promises, the fact that he tended to fuck off and leave his wife and kids every few years – Glenn wasn’t really an evil man. He had a friendly, easy charm about him, flashes of which I could see in Gina. Glenn’s fatal flaw was that he had never been able to see further than the end of his own gratification. Yet all the wounds he inflicted were unintentional. He wasn’t a cruel man, not unless weakness is another kind of cruelty.

‘Looking for Gina?’ he said, putting an arm around me. ‘She’s inside.’

Inside Glenn’s modest flat, The Verve were booming from the speakers. He wasn’t one of those classic rock freaks with a copy of Mojo and his gramophone needle stuck forever on the music of his youth. Glenn’s devotion to the cause was so great that he always liked to keep up with the big new bands. I didn’t know how he managed it.

Gina came out of the little guest room, serious and pale. Very pale. I felt like kissing her. But I didn’t.

‘Hello, Harry.’

‘Can we talk?’

‘Of course. There’s a park nearby.’

We took Pat. Glenn pointed out that, for all the surrounding greenery, the park was actually a fair distance away, past a sad little string of shops and endless big posh houses. So I suggested we took the MGF. Pat almost squealed with delight. Although she wasn’t a four-year-old boy, I hoped Gina might also be impressed – from the moment I had seen that car I knew I wanted to drive around with some special person by my side. Now I saw with terrible clarity that the special person had always been Gina. But she didn’t say anything until we arrived at the park.

‘No need to worry about recapturing your youth, Harry,’ she said, swinging her legs out of my new car. ‘You never really lost it.’

Pat skipped on ahead of us, brandishing his light sabre and howling. When he arrived at the climbing frame he stood there in silence, shyly watching two bigger boys clamber around on the higher part of the frame. He was always full of admiration for bigger boys. Gina and I watched our son watching them.

‘I miss you like crazy,’ I said. ‘Please come home.’

‘No,’ she said.