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

‘Dad?’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know if I can do it, Dad.’

‘Do what?’

‘I don’t know if I can look after Pat alone. I don’t know if I’m up to it. I told Gina I could do it. But I don’t know if I can.’

He turned on me, eyes blazing, and for a moment I thought that he was going to hit me. He had never laid a finger on me in my life. But there’s always a first time.

‘Don’t know if you can do it?’ he said. ‘Don’t know if you can do it? You have to do it.’

It was easy for him to say. His youth might have been marred by the efforts of the German army to murder him, but at least in his day a father’s role was set in stone. He always knew exactly what was expected of him. My dad was a brilliant father and – here’s the killer – he didn’t even have to be there to be a brilliant father. Wait until your father gets home was enough to get me to behave. His name just had to be evoked by my mother and suddenly I understood all I needed to know about being a good boy. Wait until your father gets home, she told me. And the mere mention of my father was enough to make everything in the universe fall into place.

You don’t hear that threat so much today. How many women actually say, Wait until your father gets home now? Not many. Because these days some fathers never come home. And some fathers are home all the time.

But I saw he was right. I might not do it as well as he had – I couldn’t imagine Pat ever looking at me the way I looked at my old man – but I had to do it as well as I could.

And I did remember the ducks trying to land on the frozen lake. Of course I remembered the ducks. I remembered them well.

Apart from the low wages, unsociable hours and lack of standard employee benefits such as medical insurance, probably the worst thing about being a waitress is that in the course of her work she has to deal with a lot of creeps.

Like a little apron and a notepad, creeps come with the job. Men who want to talk to her, men who ask her for her number, men who just refuse to leave her alone. Creeps, the lot of them.

Creeps from building sites, creeps from office blocks, creeps in business suits, creeps with their bum crack displayed above the back of their jeans, creeps of every kind – the ones who think they’re funny, the ones who think they’re God’s gift, the ones who think that just because she brings them the soup of the day, they’re in with a chance.

She was serving a table of creeps when I took my seat at the back of the café. One creep – a business creep rather than a building-site creep – was leering up at her while his creep friends – all pinstripes, hair gel and mobile phones – smiled with admiration at his creepy cheek.

‘What’s your name?’

She shook her head. ‘Now why do you need to know my name?’

‘I suppose it’s something typically southern, is it? Peggy-Sue? Becky-Lou?’

‘It’s certainly not.’

‘Billie-Joe? Mary-Beth?’

‘Listen, are you going to order or what?’

‘What time do you get off?’

‘Did you ever date a waitress?’

‘No.’

‘Waitresses get off late.’

‘You like being a waitress? Do you like being a service executive in the catering industry?’

That got a big laugh from all the creeps who thought they looked pretty cool talking about nothing on a mobile phone in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

‘Don’t laugh at me.’

‘I’m not laughing at you.’

‘Long hours, lousy pay. That’s what being a waitress is like. And plenty of assholes. But enough about you.’ She tossed the menu on the table. ‘You think about it for a while.’

The business creep blushed and grinned, trying to butch it out as she walked away. His creepy friends were laughing, but they were not quite as hearty as before.

She came over to me. And I still didn’t know her name.

‘Where’s your boy today?’

‘He’s at nursery school.’ I held out my hand. ‘Harry Silver.’

She looked at me for a moment and then she smiled. I had never seen a smile like it. Her face lit up the room. It just shone.

‘Cyd Mason,’ she said, shaking my hand. It was a very soft handshake. It’s only men who try to break your bones when you shake their hand. It’s only creeps.

‘Pleased to meet you, Harry.’

‘As in Sid Vicious?’

‘As in Cyd Charisse. You probably never even heard of Cyd Charisse, did you?’

‘She danced with Fred Astaire in Paris in Silk Stockings. She had a haircut like the one you’ve got now. What’s that haircut called?’

‘A China chop.’

‘A China chop, is it? Yeah, Cyd Charisse. I know her. She was probably the most beautiful woman in the world.’

‘That’s Cyd.’ She was impressed. I could tell. ‘My mother was crazy about all those old MGM movies.’

I caught a glimpse of her childhood, saw her sitting at the age of ten in front of the TV in some little apartment, the air-con turned up to full blast and her mother getting all choked up as Fred twirled Cyd across the Left Bank. No wonder she had grown up with a warped view of romance. No wonder she had followed some creep to London.

‘Can I tell you about the specials?’ she said.

She was really nice and I felt like talking to her about Houston and MGM musicals and what had happened between her and the man who had brought her to London. Instead I kept my eyes on my pasta and my mouth shut.

Because I didn’t want either of us to start thinking that I was just another creep.

Gina was gone and she was everywhere. The house was full of CDs I would never listen to (sentimental soul music about love lost and found), books I would never read (women struggling to find themselves in a world full of rotten men) and clothes I would never wear (skimpy M&S underwear).

And Japan. Lots of books about Japan. All the classic texts that she had urged me to read – Black Rain, Pink Samurai, Barefoot Gen, Memories of Silk and Straw – and a battered old copy of Snow Country, the one I had actually read, the love story she said I had to read if I was ever going to understand.

Gina’s things, and they chewed up my heart every time I saw them.

They had to go.

I felt bad about throwing it all out, but then if someone leaves you, they really should take their stuff with them. Because every time I saw one of her Luther Vandross records or Margaret Atwood novels or books about Hiroshima, I felt all the choking grief rise up inside me again. And in the end I just couldn’t stand it any more.

Gina, I thought, with her dreams of undying love and hard-won independence, Gina who could happily accommodate Naomi Wolf’s steely, post-feminist thoughts and Whitney Houston’s sweet nothings.

That was my Gina all right.

So I got to work, stuffing everything she had left behind into rubbish sacks. The first one was quickly full – did the woman never throw anything away? – so I went back into the kitchen and got an entire roll of heavy-duty binliners.

When I had finished removing all her paperbacks, the book shelves looked like a mouth full of broken teeth.

Throwing away her clothes was much easier because there was no sorting involved. Soon her side of our wardrobe was empty apart from mothballs and wire coat hangers.

I felt better already.

Starting to sweat hard, I prowled the house mopping up what was left of her presence. There were all the Japanese prints from her single days. A painting she had bought on our holiday to Antigua when Pat was a baby. A pink razor on the edge of the bath. A couple of Gong Li videos. And a photograph of our wedding day with her looking like the most beautiful girl in the world and me grinning like a happy, dopey bastard who never believed he could get so lucky.

All trash now.

Finally, I looked in the laundry basket. Among Pat’s Star Wars pyjamas and my faded Calvins there was the old Gap T-shirt that Gina liked to sleep in. I sat on the bottom of the stairs holding that T-shirt for a while, wondering what she was sleeping in tonight. And then I threw it into the last rubbish sack.

It’s amazing how quickly you can remove the evidence of someone’s life from a house. It takes so long to put your mark on a home, and so little time to wipe it away.

Then I spent another few hours fishing it all out of the rubbish sacks and carefully returning the clothes, the CDs, the books, the prints and everything else to exactly where I had found them.

Because I missed her. I missed her like mad.

And I wanted all her things to be just as she had left them, all ready and waiting for her in case she ever felt like coming back home.

Twelve

A bit of a panic attack in the supermarket.

Nothing serious, nothing serious. Just the sudden realisation that a man like me, whose little family had broken into tiny pieces, was daring to do his shopping at the feeding trough of the happy family. I felt like an impostor.

Being surrounded by all the grotesques of aisle eight should have made me feel better – the women with tattoos, the men with earrings, the little children dressed like adults, the adults dressed like adolescents – but they didn’t.

I was shaking and sweating at the checkout, wanting it to be over with, wanting to be out of there, my breath coming in short, shallow gasps, and by the time the semi-comatose teen on the till handed me my change while idly scratching at his nose ring, I felt on the very edge of screaming or weeping or doing both at once.

I burst out of the supermarket into the open air and just at that moment the bag containing dinner for Pat, the cat and me lost its handle, and my shopping haemorrhaged into the street.

Gina’s supermarket bags never broke. We had done our weekly shop together every Saturday for seven years, and I never once saw a carrier bag that she had loaded spring a leak. But maybe Gina didn’t buy as many microwave meals as me. They weigh a ton, those things.

Suddenly there were cat tins and ready-in-one-minute meals everywhere, under the wheels of shopping trolleys, at the feet of a young man selling the Big Issue and skittering towards the road. I was on my hands and knees picking up a box that promised, ‘A Taste Of Tuscany’ when they saw me.

‘Harry?’

It was Marty. And there was a girl with him. Siobhan.

Marty and Siobhan. Holding hands!

The shock of seeing them together cancelled out any embarrassment I felt at being caught with my shopping scattered all over the pavement. But only for a moment. Then my face started burning, burning, burning.

It had been a while since I had seen them, although not that long. I had been out for just over a month. But my producer’s mind didn’t actually think in terms of weeks and months. Five shows, I thought. They have done five shows without me.

They looked good. Even Marty, the ugly little git. They were both wearing dark glasses and white trousers. Siobhan was carrying a supermarket bag containing a French loaf and a bottle of something dry, white and expensive. There might even have been a sliver of paté in there, too. But their bag wasn’t about to break. Two confident professionals doing a little light shopping before returning to their glamorous, high-powered careers, they didn’t look like the kind of people who had to worry about stocking up on cat food.

‘Here, let me help you,’ Siobhan said, bending down to catch a can of beef and heart Whiskas as it rolled towards the gutter.

Marty had the decency to look a little ashamed, but Siobhan seemed glad to see me, if a bit surprised to find me grovelling around on the pavement picking up cans of cat food, toilet rolls and microwave dinners, rather than picking up a BAFTA.

‘So – what are you doing these days?’ she asked.

‘Oh – you know,’ I said.

Pacing up and down my living room for hours every day – ‘Like a caged tiger’, my mum reckoned – after I dropped Pat off at nursery school, worried sick about how he was doing, worried sick that he might be crying again. And waiting for Gina to phone at four o’clock sharp every afternoon – midnight on her side of the world – although I always handed the receiver straight to Pat, because I knew that he was the only reason she was calling.

And what else? Talking to myself. Drinking too much, not eating enough, wondering how my life ever got so fucked up. That’s what I’m doing these days.

‘Still considering my options,’ I said. ‘How’s the show?’

‘Better than ever,’ Marty said. A bit defiant.

‘Good,’ Siobhan said, pleased but neutral, as though she didn’t think the old show’s fate would really concern a hotshot such as myself. ‘Ratings are slightly up.’

I felt like puking.

‘That’s great,’ I smiled.

‘Well – we’d better move,’ Marty said. It wasn’t just me. A few shoppers had started to smirk and point. Was it really him?

‘Yeah, me too,’ I said. ‘Got to run. Things to do.’

Siobhan grabbed me and planted a quick kiss on my cheek. It made me wish that I had shaved today. Or yesterday. Or the day before.

‘See you around, Harry,’ Marty said.

He held out his hand. No hard feelings. I went to shake it, but he was holding a can of cat food. I took it from him.

‘See you, Marty.’

Fucking bastards.

Fucking bastards the lot of you.

* * *

The phone rang when I was in the middle of bathing Pat. I left him in the tub – he could happily stay in there for hours, he was like a little fish – and went down the hall, picking up the phone with wet hands, expecting my mum. But there was a little transcontinental blip as the connection was made and suddenly Gina was in my ear.

‘It’s me,’ she said.

I looked at my watch – it was only twenty to four. She was early today.

‘He’s in the bath.’

‘Leave him. I’ll call back at the usual time. I just thought he might be around. How is he?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Fine, fine, fine. You’re still there, are you?’

‘Yes. I’m still here.’

‘How’s it going?’

I could hear her taking a breath. Gina taking a breath on the other side of the world.

‘It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be,’ she said. ‘The economy is all screwed up. I mean, really screwed up. My company’s laying off locals, so there’s not much job security for a gaijin whose Japanese is a bit rustier than she thought. But the work’s okay. Nothing I can’t handle. The people are kind. It’s everything else. Especially living in a place about the size of our kitchen.’ She took another breath. ‘It’s not easy for me, Harry. Don’t think I’m having the time of my life.’

‘So when are you coming home?’

‘Who said I was coming home?’

‘Come on, Gina. Forget all that stuff about finding yourself. This is all about punishing me.’

‘Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing coming out here. But a few words from you and suddenly I know I did the right thing.’

‘So you’re staying out there, are you? In your flat the size of our kitchen?’

‘I’ll be back. But just to collect Pat. To bring him out here. I really want to make a go of it, Harry. I hope you can understand.’

‘You’re kidding, Gina. Pat out there? I can’t even get him to eat beans on toast. I can just see him tucking into a plate of sprats on rice. And where’s he going to live? In a flat the size of our kitchen?’

‘Christ, I wish I’d never mentioned the size of the bloody flat. I just can’t talk to you any more.’

‘Pat stays with me, okay?’

‘For now,’ she said. ‘That’s what we agreed.’

‘I’m not handing him over until it’s the best thing for him. Not you. Him. That’s what I agree to, okay?’

Silence. And then a different voice.

‘That’s for the lawyers to decide, Harry.’

‘You tell your lawyer – Pat stays with me. You were the one who left. Tell him that.’

‘And you tell your lawyer that you were the one who was fucking around!’

‘I can’t – I don’t have a lawyer.’

‘You should get one, Harry. If the thought of trying to steal my son from me ever crosses your mind, then get a very good lawyer. But you don’t mean it. We both know you can’t look after Pat permanently. You can’t even look after yourself. You just want to hurt me. Look – do you want to talk about it like adults? Or do you want to argue?’

‘I want to argue.’

There was a sigh.

‘Is Pat there?’

‘No – he’s out having dinner with a few of his fast-set pals. Of course he’s here. He’s four years old. Where do you expect him to be? On a hot date with Naomi Campbell? I told you he’s in the bath. Didn’t I tell you that?’

‘You told me. Can I talk to him?’

‘Sure.’

‘And Harry?’

‘What?’

‘Happy birthday.’

‘That’s tomorrow,’ I said angrily. ‘My birthday is tomorrow.’

‘Where I am it’s almost tomorrow.’

‘I’m not in Japan, Gina. I’m here.’

‘Happy birthday anyway. For tomorrow.’

‘Thanks.’

I got Pat from the bath, dried him down and wrapped him in a towel. Then I knelt in front of him.

‘Mummy wants to talk to you,’ I said. ‘She’s on the phone.’

It was the same every day. There was a jolt of surprise in those blue eyes and then something that could have been either joy or relief. By the time I gave him the receiver he looked more guarded.

‘Hello?’ he whispered.

I guess I was expecting bitter tears, angry recriminations, torrents of emotion. But Pat was always cool and composed, muttering one-word answers to Gina’s questions until he eventually handed me the phone.

‘I don’t need to talk to Mummy any more,’ he said quietly.

He walked off to the living room, the towel still wrapped around him like a shawl, leaving a trail of small wet footprints behind him.

‘I’ll call him again tomorrow,’ Gina told me, more upset than I had expected her to be, in fact so unravelled that I felt better than I had for days. ‘Is that okay, Harry?’

‘Any time is fine,’ I said, wanting to ask her how we had got to a place where we threatened each other with lawyers, how two people who had been so close could become a divorce-court cliché.

Was it really all my fault? Or was it just random bad luck, like getting hit by a car or catching cancer? If we had loved each other so much, then why hadn’t it lasted? Was it really impossible for two people to stay together forever in the lousy modern world? And what was all of this going to do to our son?

I really wanted to know. But I couldn’t ask Gina any of that stuff. We were on opposite sides of the world.

Thirteen

We were halfway to my parents’ house when my mobile rang. It was my mother. She was usually a calm, unflappable woman, the still centre at the heart of the family. But not today.

‘Harry!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s your dad.’

God, I thought – he’s dead. On my thirtieth birthday. Even today he has to be the centre of attention.

‘What happened?’

‘We were burgled.’

Christ. Even out there. Even that deep into the suburbs. Nowhere was safe any more.

‘Is he okay? Are you okay?’

‘Please, Harry…come quick…the police are on their way…please…I can’t talk to him…’

‘Hang on, okay? Hang on, Mum. I’ll be there as quickly as I can.’

I hung up, swinging the car out into the fast lane and slamming the accelerator to the floor. The MGF surged forward, as if this were the moment it had been built for.

On the passenger seat next to me, Pat laughed out loud.

‘Wicked,’ he said.

Now where did he get that from?

My mother opened the door in her best dress, all dolled up for her son’s birthday. But her party clothes were undermined by the white, shaken look on her face.

‘It’s awful, Harry. We were burgled. In the living room. Look.’

She took Pat off to the kitchen, gently deflecting his questions about his granddad, and I let myself into the living room, steeling myself for the sight of my father half-dead in a dark puddle of blood. But the old man was standing by the fireplace, his sunburned face creased with pleasure. I had never seen him look happier.

‘Hello, Harry. Happy birthday, son. Have you met our guests?’

At his feet were two youths, belly down on the carpet with their hands tied behind their backs.

At first I thought I recognised them – they had exactly the same washed-out menace that I had seen on the face of Sally’s boyfriend over at Glenn’s place, although they didn’t look quite so menacing now – but I only recognised the type. Expensive trainers, designer denim, hair so slick with gel that it looked as sticky and brittle as the skin of a toffee apple. My dad had trussed them up with the pair of silk ties I had bought him last Christmas.

‘Saw them out on the street a bit earlier. Skylarking around, they were. But it turned out to be a bit more than skylarking.’

Sometimes it felt like my old man was the curator of the English language. As well as his love for outmoded hipster jive, another peculiarity of his speech was his use of expressions from his youth that everyone else had thrown out with their ration books.

He was always using words like skylarking – his arcane expression for mischief, fooling around and generally just mucking about – words that had gone out of fashion around the same time as the British Empire.

‘They came in through the French windows, bold as brass. Thought nobody was home. Your mother was doing the shopping for your birthday – she’s got a lovely roast – and I was upstairs getting spruced up.’

Getting spruced up. That was another one he was preserving for the archives.

‘They were trying to unplug the video when I walked in. One of them had the cheek to come at me.’ He lightly prodded the thinnest, meanest looking youth with a carpet slipper. ‘Didn’t you, old chum?’

‘My fucking brother’s going to fucking kill you,’ the boy muttered, his voice as harsh in this room where I had been a child as a fart in church. There was a yellow and purple bruise coming up on one of his pimply cheekbones. ‘He’ll kill you, old man. He’s a gangster.’

My dad chuckled with genuine amusement.

‘Had to stick one on him.’ My father threw a beefy right hook into the air. ‘Caught him good. Went out like a bloody light. The other one tried to make a run for it, but I just got him by the scruff of the neck.’

The muscles on my father’s tattooed arms rippled under his short-sleeved shirt as he demonstrated his technique for getting a teenage burglar by the throat. He had my mother’s name in a heart inscribed on one arm, the winged dagger of the Commandos on the other. Both tattoos were blurred with the ages.

‘Got him on the floor. Lucky I was deciding which tie to wear when they appeared. Came in handy, those ties you gave me.’

‘Jesus Christ, Dad, they could have had knives!’ I exploded. ‘The papers are full of have-a-go heroes who get killed for tackling criminals. Why didn’t you just call the law?’

My dad laughed good-naturedly. This wasn’t going to be one of our arguments. He was enjoying himself too much for that.

‘No time, Harry. Came downstairs and there they were. Large as life, in my home. That’s a bit naughty, that is.’

I was angry with him for taking on the two little goons, although I knew he was more than capable of handling them. I also felt the furious relief that comes when you finally find a child who has gone missing. But there was also something else. I was jealous.

What would I have done if I had found these two yobs – or any of the million like them – in my home? Would I have had the sheer guts and the bloody-minded stupidity to take them on? Or would I have run a mile?

Whatever I would have done, I knew I wouldn’t have done it with the manly certainty of my father. I couldn’t have protected my home and my family in quite the same way that he had protected his home and family. I wasn’t like him. But with all my heart, I wanted to be.