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

It should be a bumpy ride meeting the man she knew before she knew you. But meeting Jim wasn’t that much of a problem for me. I got off lightly as there was still so much unfinished business between him and Cyd.

He came into the little flat, big and handsome, all gleaming leathers and wide white smile, tickling his daughter until she howled. We shook hands and swapped some small talk about the problems of parking in this neck of the woods. And when Peggy went to collect her things, Cyd was waiting for him, her face as impassive as a clenched fist.

‘How’s Mem?’ she asked.

‘She’s fine. Sends her love.’

‘I’m sure she doesn’t. But thanks anyway. And is her job going well?’

‘Very well, thanks.’

‘Business is booming for strippers, is it?’

‘She’s not a stripper.’

‘She’s not?’

‘She’s a lap dancer.’

‘My apologies.’

Jim looked at me with a what-can-you-do? grin.

‘She always does this,’ he said, as if we had some kind of relationship, as if he could tell me a thing or two.

Peggy came back carrying a child-sized motorbike helmet, smiling from ear to ear, anxious to get going. She kissed her mother and me and took her father’s hand.

From the window we watched Jim carefully place his daughter on the bike and cover her head with the helmet. Sliding behind her, he straddled the machine, kicked it into life and took off down the narrow street. Above the throaty roar of the bike, you could just about hear Peggy squealing with delight.

‘Why do you hate him so much, Cyd?’

She thought about it for a moment.

‘I think it’s because of the way he ended it,’ she said. ‘He was home from work – hurt his leg in another accident, I think he was scraped by a cab, he was always getting scraped by a cab – and he was lying on the sofa when I got back from dropping Peggy off at her nursery school. I bent over him – just to look at his face, because I always liked looking at his face – and he said the name of a girl. Right out loud. The name of this Malaysian girl he was sleeping with. The one he left me for.’

‘He was talking in his sleep?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He was pretending to talk in his sleep. He knew he was going to leave me and Peggy already. But he didn’t have the guts to look me in the eye and tell me. Pretending to talk in his sleep – pretending to say her name while he was sleeping – was the only way he could do it. The only way he could drop the bomb. The only way he could tell me that his bags were packed. And that just seemed so cruel, so gutless – and so typical.’

I had different reasons for hating Jim – some of them noble, some of them pitiful. I hated him because he had hurt Cyd so badly, and I hated him because he was better looking than me. I hated him because I hated any parent who breezed in and out of a kid’s life as though they were a hobby you could pick up and put down when you felt like it. Did I think that Gina was like that? Sometimes, on those odd days when she didn’t phone Pat, and I knew – just knew – that she was somewhere with Richard.

And I hated Jim because I could feel that he still mattered to Cyd – when she had said that thing about always loving his face, I knew it was still there, eating her up. Maybe she didn’t love him, maybe all that had curdled and changed into something else. But he mattered.

I suppose a little piece of my heart should have been grateful. If he had been a loyal, loving husband who knew how to keep his leather trousers on – and if he wasn’t into the bamboo – then Cyd would be with him and not me. But I wasn’t grateful at all.

As soon as he brought Peggy back safely from Pizza Express, I would have been quite happy for him to wrap his bike around a number 73 bus and get his lovely face smeared all over the Essex Road. He had treated Cyd as if she were nothing much at all. And that was reason enough for me to hate his guts.

But when Peggy came back home with a phenomenally useless stuffed toy the size of a refrigerator, and pizza all over her face, I was aware that there was another, far more selfish reason for hating him.

Without ever really trying to match him, I knew that I could never mean as much in Peggy’s life as he did. That’s what hurt most of all. Even if he saw her only when he felt like it, and fucked off somewhere else when he felt like doing that, he would always be her father.

That’s what made her giddy with joy. Not the motorbike. Or the pizza. Or the stupid stuffed toy the size of a fridge. But the fact that this was her dad.

I knew I could live with the reminder of another man’s fuck. I could even love her. And I could compete with a motorbike and a giant stuffed toy and a prettier face than my own.

But you can’t compete with blood.

Twenty-Eight

‘Who do I look like?’ Pat said when the trees in the park were bare and he had to wear his winter coat all the time and Gina had been gone for just over four months.

He tilted his head to stare up at the car’s vanity mirror, looking at his face as if seeing it for the first time, or as if it belonged to someone else.

Who did he look like? People were always telling me – and him – that he looked like me. But I knew that wasn’t quite right. He was a far prettier kid than I had ever been. Even if I had never had all my front teeth knocked out by a dog, he would still have been better looking than me. The truth was, he looked like both of us. He looked like me and he looked like Gina.

‘Your eyes are like Mummy’s eyes,’ I said.

‘They’re blue.’

‘That’s right. They’re blue. And my eyes are green. But your mouth, that’s like my mouth. We’ve got lovely big mouths. Perfect for kissing, right?’

‘Right,’ he said, not smiling along with me, not taking his eyes from the little rectangular mirror.

‘And your hair – that’s very fair. Like Mummy’s hair.’

‘She had yellow hair.’

‘She still does, baby,’ I said, wincing at that past tense. ‘She still has yellow hair. She’s still got yellow hair. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ he said, flipping up the mirror and staring out of the window. ‘Let’s go.’

And your teeth are like your mother’s – a little bit gappy, a little bit goofy, teeth that give every single smile a rakish air – but your sawn-off snub nose is like mine, although your strong, beautiful chin belongs to your mother and so does your skin – fair skin that loves the sun, fair skin that starts to tan as soon as it stops raining.

Pat didn’t look like me. And he didn’t look like Gina. He looked like both of us.

Even if we had ever wanted to, we couldn’t escape his mother. She was there in his smile and in the colour of his eyes. I was stuck with Gina’s ghost. And so was Pat.

‘I don’t understand what’s going to happen to the kids,’ my father said. ‘The kids like Pat and Peggy. I can’t imagine what growing up with just one parent around is going to do to them.’

He didn’t say it the way he would have said it in the past – angry, contemptuous and with a mocking wonder at what the world was coming to. He didn’t say it with his old loathing for single parents and all the changes they represented. He said it gently, with a small, bewildered shake of his head, as if the future were beyond his imagination.

‘You grew up with two parents around,’ he said. ‘At least you had some idea of what a marriage looked like. What a marriage could be. But they don’t have that, do they? Pat and Peggy and all the rest of them.’

‘No. They don’t.’

‘And I just worry what it’s going to do to them. If divorce is just something that everyone does, then what chance is there for their marriages? And for their children?’

We were on the wooden bench just outside the kitchen door, sitting in the three o’clock twilight watching Pat poke around with his light sabre at the far end of the garden.

‘Everything just seems so…broken up,’ my dad said. ‘Do you know what Peggy said to me? She asked me if I would be her granddad. It’s not her fault, is it? The poor little mite.’

‘No, it’s not her fault,’ I said. ‘It’s never the child’s fault. But maybe growing up with divorce will make them more careful about getting into a marriage. And more determined to make it work when they do.’

‘Do you really think so?’ my father said hopefully.

I nodded, but only because I didn’t have the heart to shake my head. What I really thought was that his generation had faced up to its responsibilities in a way that my lot never could.

His generation had looked after their children, they had lots of early nights, and if they also had their own home and a fortnight in a caravan in Frinton, they had considered themselves lucky.

But my generation had grown up with our own individual little pile of happiness at the top of our shopping list.

That’s why we fucked around, fucked off and fucked up with such alarming regularity.

My generation wanted perfect lives. Why should our children be any different? My dad had learned early on that nobody gets away with a perfect life.

‘Yes, maybe it will be all right,’ my old man said, thinking about it. ‘Because every kid has got two parents, haven’t they? Even a kid from – what do you call it? – a single-parent family. And perhaps Pat and Peggy and the rest of them won’t grow up being like the parent who went away. Perhaps they’ll be like the parent who stayed behind.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, you’re doing a good job with Pat,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘You work hard. You take care of him. He sees all that. So why shouldn’t he be like that with his children?’

I laughed with embarrassment.

‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘I don’t know that I could have coped if your mother – you know.’ His callused right hand rested lightly on my shoulder. He still wasn’t looking at me. ‘You’re doing all right with that boy, Harry.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

Then we heard my mother calling urgently from the living room, and when we ran inside she was standing by the window, pointing at my car.

‘I saw the little bastards,’ said my mum, who never swore. ‘I saw the little bastards do it!’

The MGF’s soft top had been repeatedly slashed with a knife. The ribbons of what was left of the roof had caved into the car, as if something had been dropped on it from a great height.

I stared at my mutilated car. But my father was already out of the front door. Auntie Ethel was on her doorstep.

‘The alley!’ she cried, pointing to the far end of our street, the rough end where there was a small cul-de-sac of council houses, like a ghetto for people who owned souped-up Ford Escorts and West Ham away shirts and didn’t give a toss about roses.

There was an alley at this end of the street that led to a tired little string of shops where you could get your Lottery ticket during the daytime and get your face smashed in after dark. Two youths – the two who had tried to burgle my parents? or two just like them? – were legging it towards the alley. My father was chasing them.

I looked at the ruined roof and felt a surge of anger rise up in me. You stupid, spiteful little gits, I thought, furious at what they had done to my car and even more furious for taking my father from his garden.

I started after them, seeing them nervously glance over their shoulders as a murderous voice called after them, threatening to fucking kill them, and I was shocked to discover that the murderous voice seemed to belong to me.

The two yobs disappeared into the alley just as my dad suddenly stopped. At first I thought he had given up, but it was worse than that, because he sank to one knee and clutched his chest, as though he were suffocating.

By the time I caught up with him he was on both knees, holding himself up with one hand pressed flat on the ground. He was making a terrible, unearthly sound, his throat rasping with short, shallow breaths.

I put my arms around him and held him, smelling his Old Holborn and Old Spice, and he gasped for air, choked for air, his lungs fighting with all their might and yet still unable to suck in what they needed. He turned his eyes towards me and I saw the fear in them.

Eventually he managed to retrieve enough air to get shakily to his feet. Still with my arm around him, I led him slowly back to the house. My mother, Pat and Auntie Ethel were all by the front gate. Pat and Auntie Ethel were white with shock. My mother was angry.

‘You must go to the doctor,’ she said, tears streaming down her face. ‘No more excuses.’

‘I will,’ he said meekly, and I knew he wouldn’t try to get out of it. He could never refuse her anything.

‘Aren’t they evil little rotters?’ Auntie Ethel said. ‘It makes your blood boil, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Pat. ‘They’re motherfuckers.’

Black tie, it said on the invitation, and I always felt excited when I had to dig out my dinner jacket, dress shirt and black bow tie – a proper bow tie that you had to spend ages doing yourself, not the pre-tied dicky bow on a bit of elastic as worn by small boys and clowns.

I could remember my old man wearing black tie once a year for his company’s annual dinner and dance at some fancy hotel on Park Lane. There was something about the tailored formality of a tuxedo that suited his stocky, muscular frame. My mum always looked slightly amused by whatever ball gown she had climbed into that year. But my old man was born to wear black tie.

‘Wow,’ said Sally, shyly grinning up at me through a curtain of hair as I came down the stairs. ‘You look just like a bouncer. Outside a, like, really, really cool club.’

‘No,’ Pat said, pointing his index finger at me and cocking his thumb. ‘You look like James Bond. 007. Licensed to shoot all the bad people.’

But as I stood in front of the hall mirror, I knew what I really looked like in a dinner jacket.

More and more, I looked like my father.

Cyd wore a green cheongsam in Chinese silk – high-necked, tight as a second skin, the greatest dress I had ever seen in my life.

She hadn’t done anything to her hair – just pulled it back behind her head in a ponytail, and I liked it that way, because that way I could see her face all the more clearly.

Sometimes we are only aware of how happy we are when the moment has passed. But now and again, if we are very lucky, we are aware of happiness when it is actually happening. And I knew that this was what happiness felt like. Not happiness in dewy-eyed retrospect or in some imagined future but here and now, in a green dress.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said to Cyd as our cab dropped us outside the hotel. I took her hands in mine and we stood there in silence, the rush hour on Park Lane roaring behind us, a frost on Hyde Park glinting beyond the traffic.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked me.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘That’s the point.’

I knew that I would never forget the way she looked that night, I knew that I would never forget the way she looked in her green Chinese dress. And I wanted to do more than enjoy it, I wanted to hold the moment so that I could remember it later, after the night had gone.

‘Okay?’ she said, smiling.

‘Okay.’

Then we joined the laughing throng in their dinner jackets and evening dresses, and went inside to the awards ceremony.

‘And the best newcomer is…’

The luscious weather girl fumbled with the envelope.

‘…Eamon Fish.’

Eamon stood up, drunk and grinning, looking more pleased than he would have wanted to with all the cameras watching, and he hugged me with real feeling as he walked past.

‘We did it,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘you did it. Go and get your award.’

Over his shoulder I saw Marty Mann and Siobhan at another table – Marty in one of those bright waistcoats worn by people who think that wearing black tie is like smoking a pipe or wearing carpet slippers, Siobhan slim and cool in some white diaphanous number.

She smiled. He gave me the thumbs up. Later, when all the awards had been handed out, they came across to our table.

Although Marty was a bit pissed and a bit pissed off – there were no awards for him this year – they couldn’t have been more gracious.

I introduced them to Cyd and to Eamon. If Marty remembered Cyd as the same woman who had once dropped a plate of pasta in his lap, he didn’t show it. He congratulated Eamon on his award. Siobhan congratulated Cyd on her dress.

Siobhan didn’t say – And what do you do?, she was too smart and sensitive ever to ask that question, so Cyd didn’t have to say – Oh, I’m a waitress right now, so Siobhan didn’t have to get embarrassed and neither did Cyd, they could just get on with each other in that easy, seemingly natural way that only women can manage.

They began talking to each other about not knowing what to wear at these things, and Marty put a conspiratorial arm around my shoulder. His face was far heavier than I remembered it. He had the leaden, vaguely disappointed air of a man who, after years of dreaming, had finally landed his own talk show only to discover that he couldn’t attract anyone who was worth talking to.

‘A word?’ he said, crouching down by my side.

Here it comes, I thought. Now he wants me back. Now he’s seen how well Eamon’s doing, he wants me back on the show.

‘I want you to do me a favour,’ Marty said.

‘What’s that, Marty?’

He leaned closer.

‘I want you to be my best man,’ he said.

Even Marty, I thought.

Even Marty dreams of getting it right, of finding the one, of discovering the whole world in another human being. Just like everyone else.

‘Hey, Harry,’ said Eamon, watching the weather girl cross the room, adjusting his weight as a ridge of high pressure passed through his underpants. ‘Guess who I’m shagging tonight?’

Well, perhaps not quite everyone.

* * *

There were too many lights on in the house. There were lights upstairs. There were lights downstairs. There were lights blazing everywhere at a time when there should have been just one faint glow coming from the living room.

And there was music pouring out of my home – loud, booming bass lines and those skittering drum machines that sounded like the aural equivalent of a heart attack. New music. Terrible new music blasting from my stereo.

‘What’s going on?’ I said, as if we had come to the wrong place, as if there had been some mistake.

There was someone in the darkness of the small front garden. No, there were a few of them. A boy and a girl necking just outside the open front door. And another boy lurking by the dustbin, being sick all over his Tommy Hilfiger anorak and his YSL trousers.

I went inside the house while Cyd paid the cab driver.

It was a party. A teenage party. All over my home there were youths in Polo gear snogging, shagging, drinking, dancing and being sick. Especially being sick. There was another couple puking their stupid guts up in the back garden.

In the living room Pat was in his pyjamas swaying to the music at one end of the sofa, while at the other end Sally was being groped by some fat boy. Pat grinned at me – isn’t this fun? – as I surveyed the damage – lager cans with their contents spilled on the parquet floor and cigarettes stubbed out on their rims, scraps of takeaway pizza smeared on the furniture and God knows what stains on the beds upstairs.

There were maybe a dozen of them in all. But it felt like the Mongol Hordes had moved in. Worse than that – it was like one of those grotesque commercials for crisps or soft drinks or chinos, full of young people having the time of their life. Except that they were having the time of their life in my living room.

‘Sally,’ I said, ‘what the fuck is going on?’

‘Harry,’ she said, and there were tears of joy in her eyes. ‘It’s Steve.’

She indicated the slack-jawed youth on top of her. He squinted at me with his cretinous porky eyes, eyes with nothing behind them but hormonal overload and nine cans of lager.

‘He packed it that old slapper Yasmin McGinty,’ Sally said. ‘He’s come back to me. Ain’t it fantastic?’

‘Are you crazy?’ I said. ‘Are you crazy or stupid? Which is it, Sally?’

‘Oh, Harry,’ she said, all disappointed. ‘I thought you would understand. You of all people.’

The music suddenly died. Cyd stood there with the plug in her hands.

‘Time to clean up this mess,’ she told the room. ‘Get rubbish sacks and cleaning stuff. Try looking under the sink.’

Steve climbed off Sally, adjusting his monstrous trousers, sneering at the grown-ups who had crashed his party.

‘I’m out of here,’ he said, as though he came from Beverly Hills instead of Muswell Hill.

Cyd moved swiftly across the room and clasped his nose between her thumb and forefinger.

‘You’re out of here when I tell you, elephant boy,’ she said, making him yelp as she lifted him up on his toes. ‘And it won’t be until you clean up this mess. Not until then, got it?’

‘Okay, okay!’ he bleated, his fake American bravado melting in the face of the real thing.

I took Pat up to bed, turfing out a couple mating in the bathroom, while Cyd organised the cleaning detail. By the time I had read Pat a story and got him to settle down, Sally and Steve and their spotty friends were meekly cleaning the floors and the tables.

‘Where did you learn to do that?’ I asked Cyd.

‘Texas,’ she said.

It turned out that they were quite useless at housework, just as I imagine they will be useless at everything else they attempt in their brainless, designer-labelled lives.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.