The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Don’t you miss it? Work, I mean?’

‘Sure I miss it. I used to have quality time with my son – meaning I saw him for five minutes at the start and at the end of each day. Now I have quantity time instead. I didn’t choose that change. That’s just the way it has worked out. But that’s why I can’t produce the show for you.’

‘But you could be the executive producer, couldn’t you? You could come in a few times a week just to oversee the show? You could tell me what I need to do to stop looking like a complete eejit? You could help me play to my strengths, couldn’t you?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

I had never even considered the possibility that there was a compromise between working full-time and not working at all. It had never crossed my mind.

‘Look, I admire what you’re doing with your boy,’ Eamon said. ‘Believe me, you would go down a storm with the mothers of Kilcarney. But I need you. I’m here for really selfish reasons. I’m shitting coloured lights about presenting this show. That’s why I’m dropping bits of hardened wax all over your kitchen floor. And I know you can get me through it without total humiliation. It might even be good.’

I thought about the long mornings and endless afternoons when Pat wasn’t around. And I thought about my most recent meeting with the bank manager, who was impressed by my efforts to look after my son and less impressed by my expanding overdraft.

But most of all I thought about how good Eamon had been with Pat – admiring his light sabre, talking to him about Luke’s home planet, telling me that he was a special kid.

I knew that at this stage of my life – and at all the future stages of my life, come to that – I would like anyone who liked my boy. When you are alone with a child, you want as many people rooting for him as you can get. This young Irish comic with dried wax in his ears seemed to be on our side. And so I found myself on his side, too.

I was ready to work with him on a part-time basis because I was bored and broke. But most of all I was ready to work with him because he thought my son was going to make it.

‘I need to see your act,’ I said. ‘I need to see what you do on stage so I can think about how it could work on the box. Have you got a show reel?’

‘What?’ he said.

Twenty-Two

Whatever the opposite of inscrutable is, that’s what small children are.

Maybe in ten years’ time Pat would be able to hide his feelings behind some blank adolescent mask and the old man – me – wouldn’t have a clue what he was thinking. But he was four going on five and I could tell that the latest phone call from his mother had given him the blues.

‘You okay, Pat?’

He nodded listlessly, and I followed him down to the bathroom where he squirted some children’s toothpaste on his Han Solo toothbrush.

‘How’s Mummy?’

‘She’s all right. She’s got a cold.’

He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t about to cry. His eyes were dry and his mouth was still. But he was down.

‘You want to watch a video?’ I asked him, watching him polish teeth that still looked brand new.

He spat into the sink and shot me a suspicious look.

‘It’s school tomorrow,’ he said.

‘I know it’s school tomorrow. I don’t mean watch the whole film. Just, say, the start of the first film up until the two ’droids get captured. How about that?’

He finished spitting and replaced his brush in the rack.

‘Want to go to bed,’ he said.

So I followed him into his bedroom and tucked him in. He didn’t want a story. But I couldn’t turn out the light knowing that he was depressed.

I knew what he was missing and it wasn’t even what you could call a mother’s love. It was a mother’s indulgence. Someone who would tell him that it didn’t matter if he couldn’t tie his shoes up yet. Someone who would tell him that he was still the centre of the universe when he had just learned what we all learn on our first day of school – that we are not the centre of the universe. I was so desperate for him to make it that I couldn’t be relaxed about him making it. Gina’s indulgence. That’s what he really missed.

‘She’ll be back,’ I said. ‘Your mother. You know that she’ll be back for you, don’t you?’

He nodded. ‘As soon as she’s done her work,’ he said.

‘We’re okay, aren’t we?’ I asked him. ‘You and me – we’re doing okay, aren’t we?’

He stared at me, blinking away the fatigue, trying to understand what I was going on about.

‘We’re managing without Mummy, aren’t we, Pat? You let me wash your hair now. I make you things you like to eat – bacon sandwiches and stuff. And school’s okay, isn’t it? You like school. We’re all right, aren’t we? You and me?’

I felt bad about pushing him like this. But I needed him to tell me that we were doing all right. I needed to know that we were coping.

He gave me a tired smile.

‘Yes, we’re all right, Daddy,’ he said, and I kissed him goodnight, hugging him gratefully.

That’s the worst thing about splitting up, I thought as I turned out his light. It makes children hide their hearts. It teaches them how to move between separate worlds. It turns them all into little diplomats. That’s the biggest tragedy of all. Divorce turns every kid into half a pint of semi-skimmed Henry Kissinger.

‘I come from a little town called Kilcarney,’ said Eamon Fish, removing the mike from its stand and gently tapping the transparent hearing device in his left ear. ‘A quiet little town called Kilcarney where the girls are legendary.’

I was watching him on a monitor, sitting in the front row of the small studio audience that was facing the backsides of five cameramen. Although we were surrounded by all the usual paraphernalia of the television studio – lights burning in the rigging, cables snaking across the floor, the shadows beyond the cameras teeming with people whose jobs ranged from floor manager to working the autocue to pouring water, all of them wearing what we called ‘blacks’ – the director was shooting Eamon’s act to make it look more like a stand-up routine than just another late-night chat show. There were already too many talk shows that looked like boot sale David Lettermans. But what would really make it different was the host.

‘For those of you who have never been to that beautiful part of my country, you should know that Kilcarney has largely been untouched by the modern world. There are, for example, no vibrators in Kilcarney.’ The audience tittered. ‘It’s true. The priests had them all removed. Because Kilcarney girls kept chipping their teeth.’

There was laughter from the audience, laughter which grew slightly nervous as Eamon ambled off the small stage and slowly came closer to us.

‘I mean, I’m not saying Kilcarney girls are stupid,’ he said. ‘But why does a Kilcarney girl always wash her hair in her mother’s sink? Because that’s where you wash vegetables.’

The laughter grew louder. None of the studio audience – the usual collection of the bored and the curious on the lam for a couple of hours of free fun – had ever seen this Eamon Fish before. But now they felt he was harmless. Then he turned on them.

‘Actually, I’m making all this up,’ he said. ‘It’s all bollocks. Kilcarney girls have the best exam results in western Europe. In fact, the average Kilcarney girl has more A levels than the average Englishman has tattoos. It’s not true that the only difference between a Kilcarney girl and a mosquito is that a mosquito stops sucking if you hit it on the head. It’s not true that Kilcarney girls only get fifteen minutes for lunch because any longer than that and you have to retrain them. It’s not true that what Kilcarney girls and bottled Guinness have in common is that both of them are empty from the neck up. None of it is true.’

Eamon sighed, ran his free hand through his thick mop of black hair and sat down on the side of the stage.

‘What is true is that even in this Guardian-reading, muesli-munching, politically correct age we seem to need someone to hate. Once it was the thick Irishman and the ball-breaking mother-in-law. Now it’s blonde girls. Essex girls. Kilcarney girls.’

He shook his sleepy head.

‘Now we all know in our hearts that geographical location and hair colour have got bugger all to do with sexual morality or intelligence. So why do we need a group of people who we can sneer at? What fundamental need in our pathetic souls does it fulfil? When we laugh about the blonde Kilcarney girl from Essex who turns off the light after sex by closing the car door, what’s in it for us?’

It was only the pilot show, but I could already tell that Eamon was going to do it. After removing all the dried wax from his ears, he had crashed through the fear barrier and was learning how to be himself with five cameras watching. Fish was fine. I was more worried about the studio audience.

They had come in expecting to have their funny bones tickled, and had discovered that they were expected to defend their prejudices. They felt cheated, not good. It was a problem that we were always going to have with Eamon’s show. As I saw it, the only way to solve this dilemma was to get them all pissed.

At our first production meeting after the pilot I told the AP to open a few bottles and cans and serve them to the audience while they were waiting in line to come into the studio. Everybody looked at me as if I were a genius.

That’s what I love about television. You recommend opening a few cans of lager and they act as though you just painted the Sistine Chapel.

‘So, it’s a better job than the last one but they pay you less money,’ my father said. ‘How do they work that out then?’

‘Because I don’t work all week,’ I told him yet again.

We were in their back garden, supposedly kicking a ball around with Pat, although he had retreated to the far end of the garden with his light sabre and dreams of conquering intergalactic evil. So that left me and two pensioners kicking a plastic football around between us in the autumn-tinged sunlight.

It was turning cold, but we were reluctant to go back inside. It was late September. The year was running out. There wouldn’t be too many more Sunday afternoons like this one.

‘If it really is a better job then they should cough up the readies,’ said my dad, the international businessman, gently side-footing the ball to his wife. ‘All these TV companies are loaded.’

‘Not the ones Harry works for,’ my mum said, thinking she was being loyal, and trapping the ball under the sole of her carpet slipper.

‘I go in for a couple of production meetings and I’m there when we record the show,’ I said. ‘And that’s it. I’m not in the office all day, every day. I don’t give them my life. I just go in twice a week and act like a big shot, bossing everyone around and coming up with brilliant ideas. Then I go home.’

‘Home to Pat,’ said my mum, knocking the ball to me. ‘Your grandson.’

‘I know who my grandson is,’ my old man said irritably.

‘Some people executive produce a whole bunch of shows,’ I said. ‘But I’m just going to do this one. I’ve worked it out. It’s going to bring in less than we had before, but it will be enough.’

‘This way he gets to pay his bills but he’s there when Pat comes home from school,’ my mum said.

My dad wasn’t convinced.

He wanted me to have everything that life has to offer – the career and the kids, the family and the salary, the happy hearth and the fat pay cheque. He wanted me to have it all. But nobody gets away with having it all.

‘Bobby Charlton,’ he said, swinging a foot at the plastic football. It shot off his toe and into the rose bushes. ‘Bugger,’ he said. ‘I’ll get it.’

My mum and I watched him wander down to the end of the garden to retrieve the ball. He took the opportunity to put his arm around Pat and ask him what he was doing. Pat chattered away excitedly, his smooth round face turned up towards his grandfather, and my old man grinned down at him with eternal tenderness.

‘Is he all right?’ I asked my mum. ‘He had a funny turn in the park the other day.’

‘Fighting for his breath, was he?’ she asked, not taking her eyes from him. And not surprised.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Fighting for his breath.’

‘I’m trying to get him to go to the doctor,’ she said. ‘Or the quack, as your dad calls him.’

We smiled at each other in the encircling darkness.

‘He must be the last person in the world who calls doctors quacks,’ I said.

‘“I’m not going to no quack,”’ my mum said. It was a pretty good impersonation of all the bad-tempered certainty my father was capable of summoning up. ‘“I don’t want no sawbones messing about with me.”’

We laughed out loud, loving his old-fashioned distrust of anyone with any kind of authority, from the lowliest traffic warden to the most revered members of the medical profession, both of us taking comfort from the fact that my father was exactly the same as he always had been, even if we feared that might no longer be true.

He came back from the end of the garden with the ball and his grandson, asking us what was so funny.

‘You are,’ my mum said, taking his arm, and we all went back inside my father’s house.

I didn’t want it all. All I wanted was one more chance. One more chance to have a unified life, a life without broken bits and jagged edges. One more shot at happiness.

I didn’t care how long it took before Gina came back from Tokyo. I was happy with Pat. And I wasn’t looking for a brilliant career. All I wanted from work was a way to pay the mortgage.

But I wasn’t ready to grow old and cold, hating women and the world because of what had happened to me. I didn’t want to be fat, bald and forty, boring my teenage son to tears about all the sacrifices I had made for him. I wanted some more life. One more chance to get it right. That’s what I wanted. That didn’t seem like much to ask. Just one more chance.

Then the next day, Gina’s dad came round to our place with his daughter Sally, the sulky teenage girl on the sofa, one of the many kids that Glenn had begat and abandoned as he moved on to sexier pastures, and it crossed my mind that what has truly messed up the lousy modern world is all the people who always want one more chance.

Twenty-Three

Glenn was dressed in his winter plumage – a ratty Afghan coat draped over a shiny blue tank top that revealed the hairs on his scrawny chest, and hipsters so tight that they made a mountain out of his molehill. He was so far out of fashion that he had just come back in style.

‘Hello, Harry man,’ he said, clasping my hand in some obscure power-to-the-people shake that thirty years ago probably signalled the revolution was about to commence. ‘How you doing? Is the little dude around? All well? Sweet, sweet.’

There was a time when I wanted my old man to be more like Gina’s dad. A time when I wished my father had appeared in glossy magazines in his youth, grinned on Top of the Pops once or twice in the early seventies and shown some interest in the world beyond the rose bushes at the end of his garden. But as I looked at Glenn’s wizened old bollocks sticking up through his tight trousers, it seemed like a long time ago.

Glenn’s youngest daughter was lurking behind him. At first I thought that Sally was in a bad mood. She came into the house all surly, avoiding eye contact by taking a great interest in the carpet, letting her stringy brown hair – longer than I remembered it – fall over her pale face as if she wanted to hide from the world and everything in it. But she wasn’t really in a bad mood at all. She was fifteen years old. That was the problem.

I took them into the kitchen, depressed at the sight of two of Gina’s relatives turning up out of the blue and wondering how soon I could get shot of them. But I softened when Sally’s face lit up – really lit up – when Pat padded into the room with Peggy. Perhaps she was human after all.

‘Hi Pat!’ she beamed. ‘How you doing?’

‘Fine,’ he said, giving no sign that he remembered his mother’s half-sister. What was she to him? Half an aunt? A step-cousin? These days we have relatives we haven’t even invented names for yet.

‘I made you a tape,’ she said, fumbling in her rucksack and eventually producing a cassette without its case. ‘You like music, don’t you?’

Pat stared at the tape blankly. The only music I could remember him liking was the theme from Star Wars.

‘He likes music, doesn’t he?’ she asked me.

‘Loves it,’ I said. ‘What do you say, Pat?’

‘Thank you,’ he said. He took the tape and disappeared with Peggy.

‘I remembered how much he liked hip-hop when we were all staying at my dad’s place,’ she said. ‘There’s just a few of the classics on there. Coolio. Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Tupac. Doctor Dre. Stuff like that. Things that a little kid might like.’

‘That’s really kind of you,’ I said.

They sipped their drinks in silence – herbal tea for Glenn, regular Coke for Sally – and I felt a stab of resentment at these reminders of Gina’s existence. What were they doing here? What did either of these people have to do with my life? Why didn’t they just fuck off?

Then Pat or Peggy must have stuffed Sally’s tape into the stereo because suddenly an angry black voice was booming above a murderous bass line in the living room.

‘You fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you – so that would be a dumb fucking, mother-fucking thing to fucking do.’

‘That’s lovely,’ I said to Sally. ‘He’ll treasure it. So – you visiting your dad again?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m living there now,’ she said, shooting her old man a look from under her ratty fringe.

‘A few problems back home,’ Glenn said. ‘With my exlady. And her new partner.’

‘Old hippies,’ Sally sneered. ‘Old hippies who can’t stand the thought of anybody else having fun.’

‘Heavy scene with the new guy,’ Glenn said. ‘Bit of a disciplinarian.’

‘That moron,’ Sally added.

‘And how’s your boyfriend?’ I asked, remembering the ape-boy smirking on the sofa.

‘Steve?’ she said, and I thought I saw the sting of tears in her eyes. ‘Packed me in, didn’t he? The fat pig. For Yasmin McGinty. That old slapper.’

‘But we spoke to Gina the other night,’ Glenn said, his foggy brain finally getting down to business. ‘And we promised that we would look in on you and Pat if we were in the neighbourhood.’

Now I understood what they were doing here. No doubt they were responding to Gina’s prompting. But in their own ham-fisted way, they were trying to help.

‘Heard you’ve got a new gig,’ Glenn said. ‘Just wanted to say that the boy’s welcome to crash with us any time.’

‘Thanks, Glenn. I appreciate the offer.’

‘And if you ever need a babysitter, just give me a call,’ Sally said, hiding behind her hair and staring at a point somewhere beyond my shoulder.

It was really sweet of her. And I knew I needed a bit of extra cover with Pat now that I was working part-time. But Jesus Christ. I wasn’t that desperate.

Cyd loved London the way only a foreigner could love it.

She saw past the stalled traffic, the dead pubs, the congealed poverty of the council estates. She looked beyond the frightened pensioners, the girls who looked like women, the women who looked like men, the men who looked like psychos. She saw beyond all of that. She told me the city was beautiful.

‘At night,’ Cyd said. ‘And from the air. And walking across the royal parks. It’s so green – the only city I ever saw that is greener than Houston.’

‘Houston’s green?’ I said. ‘I thought it was some dusty prairie town.’

‘Yeah, but that’s because you’re a dumb limey. Houston is green, mister. But not as green as here. You can walk right across the centre of town through the three royal parks – St James’s, Green Park, Hyde Park – and your shoes never touch anything but green, green grass. Do you know how far that is?’

‘A mile or so,’ I guessed.

‘It’s four miles,’ she said. ‘Four miles of flowers, trees and green. And people riding horses! In the heart of one of the biggest cities on the planet!’

‘And the lake,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget the lake.’

We were in a café up on the first floor of a huge white building from the thirties on Portland Place – the Royal Institute of British Architects, right across the street from the Chinese embassy, a monumental oasis of beauty and calm that I never knew existed until she took me there.

‘I love the lake,’ she said. ‘I love the Serpentine. Can we still hire a rowing boat at this time of the year? Is it too late?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. It was the last week in September. ‘We might be able to get a boat for a few more days. You want to try?’

Those wide-set brown eyes got even bigger.

‘You mean now?’

‘Why not?’

She looked at her watch.

‘Because I’ve got to get to work,’ she smiled. ‘Sorry. I would have loved it.’

‘Then how about tomorrow? First thing. Before the crowds get there. We’ll get an early start. I’ll meet you at your place after breakfast.’

I still hadn’t seen her flat.

‘Or I could come to your place after I get through at work tonight,’ she said.

‘Tonight?’

‘That way we would really be sure of getting an early start.’

‘You’ll come to my place after work?’

‘Yes.’ She looked down at the clouds in her coffee and then back at me. ‘Would that be okay?’

‘That would be good,’ I said. ‘That would be great.’

Maybe the thing with Cyd had started off as some dumb infatuation when I was still reeling from Gina leaving me. But after we slept together for the first time it really wasn’t like that any more. Because Cyd’s mouth fit mine in a way that no other mouth ever had – not even Gina’s mouth.

I’m not kidding – Cyd’s mouth was a perfect fit. Not too hard, not too soft, not too dry, not too wet, not too much tongue and not too little. Just perfect.

I had kissed her before of course, but this was different. Now when we kissed, I wanted it to go on forever. Our mouths could have been made for each other. And how often can you say that? How often do you find someone whose mouth is a perfect fit for your mouth? I’ll tell you exactly – once. That’s how many times.

There’re a lot of nice people in the world, a million people who you could fall in love with. But there’s only one person out there whose mouth is a perfect fit.

And despite everything that happened later, I still believe that. I really do.

In the early hours I watched her while she was sleeping, loving it that she was on my side of the bed, happy that she knew so little about my old life that she hadn’t automatically taken Gina’s side.

I drifted off knowing that we had begun, and it was up to the two of us what side of the bed we slept on.

And then she woke up screaming.

It was only Pat.

Probably disturbed by drunks staggering home at the fag-end of a Saturday night, he had stumbled out of his bed and crawled into mine, never really waking, not even when he threw a leg over Cyd’s waist and she woke up as if someone was kicking in the window.

She turned towards me, hiding her face in her hands.

‘Oh God – I thought – I don’t know what I thought. I could see you. But I could feel someone else.’

I put my arm around her shoulders, trying to comfort her. Pat was out cold on her side of the bed, his mouth open, his arms above his head, his smooth round face turned away from us, but one leg still draped over Cyd.

‘I’m all right, I’m all right,’ she said, gently removing Pat’s leg. She slid over me and got out of bed, not sounding all right at all.

I thought she was going to the bathroom. But when she didn’t come back after five minutes, I went looking for her. She was sitting at the kitchen table wearing a shirt of mine that she must have found in the laundry basket.