The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys. Tony Parsons
of August, but the little pool had already been abandoned for another year by everyone apart from Pat and his Bluebell.
There was something depressing about the almost permanently empty pool. It was in a desolate part of the park, nowhere near the adventure playground where children screamed with delight, or the little café where mums and dads – but they were mostly mums – drank endless cups of tea.
But the little asphalt strip that surrounded the pool was somewhere for Pat to ride his bike without having to plough through the discarded kebabs, used condoms and dog shit that littered most of the park. And to tell you the truth, it suited me to be away from all those mums.
I could see what they were thinking when we entered the park every morning.
Where’s the mother?
Why isn’t he at work?
Is that really his kid?
And of course I could understand their concern, most of the perverts in this world being the proud owner of a penis. But I was tired of feeling that I should apologise for taking my son to the park. I was tired of feeling like a freak. The empty swimming pool suited me fine.
‘Daddy! Look at me!’
Pat was on the far side of the pool, breathing hard as he paused by the stubby little diving board that poked out over the empty deep end.
I smiled from the bench where I sat with my paper, and as soon as he saw that he had my attention he shot off again – eyes shining, hair flying, his little legs pumping furiously as he tore around the pool on Bluebell.
‘Stay right away from the edge!’
‘I will! I do!’
For the fifth time in five minutes, I read the opening sentence of an article about the collapse of the Japanese economy.
It was a subject that had come to interest me greatly. I felt sorry for the Japanese people because they seemed to be living in a system which had failed them. But mixed with the human sympathy was a kind of relish. I wanted to read about banks closing down, disgraced CEOs bowing and weeping at press conferences, freshly unemployed expatriates heading for Narita airport and the next flight back home. Especially that. But I couldn’t concentrate.
All I could see was Gina and Richard, although I couldn’t see them very well. Gina was starting to slip out of focus. She wasn’t my Gina any more. I couldn’t imagine the place where she lived, the office where she worked, the little noodle joint where she had her lunch every day. I couldn’t picture any of it. And it wasn’t just her new life that was difficult for me to see. I could hardly see her face in my mind any more. But if Gina was a blur, then Richard was a complete blind spot.
Was he younger than me? Richer than me? Better in bed than me? I would have liked to think that Gina was stepping out with an impotent bankrupt on the verge of senility. But I could see that was probably just wishful thinking on my part.
All I knew was that he was married. Yet even that was suspect – what the fuck did semi-separated mean? Was he still living with his wife? Was she American or Japanese? Did they still sleep together? Did they have kids? Was he serious about Gina or just stringing her along? And would I like it more if he saw her as a casual fling or as the love of his life? Which one would hurt me the most?
‘Look at me now!’
The sight made me freeze.
Pat had very carefully edged his bike out on to the diving board. He was balanced above a ten-foot drop to the pockmarked concrete at the bottom of the pool. Either side of Bluebell, his legs were at full stretch as he steadied himself with the toes of his dirty trainers. I hadn’t seen him looking so happy for weeks.
‘Stay right there,’ I called. ‘Don’t move.’
His smile faded when he saw me start running towards him. I should have gone slower. I should have pretended that nothing was wrong. Because when he saw the look on my face, he started trying to back off the diving board. But it was easier to get on than off and the world seemed to slip into slow motion as I saw one of Bluebell’s stabilisers slide off the side of the diving board, spin in the air for a moment, and then Pat’s little feet inside the dirty trainers were off balance and scrambling for something that wasn’t there, and I was watching my boy and his bike falling headfirst into that empty swimming pool.
He was lying under the diving board, the bike on top of him, the blood starting to spread around his mop of yellow hair.
I waited for him to start screaming – just as he had screamed the year before when he was using our bed for a trampoline, bounced right off and smashed his head against the chest of drawers, and just as he had screamed the year before that, when he had overturned his pushchair by standing up in it and trying to turn around to smile at me and Gina, and just as he had screamed on all the other occasions when he had banged his head or fallen flat on his face or grazed his knees.
I wanted to hear him crying out because then I would know that this was just like all the other scrapes of childhood. But Pat was totally silent, and that silence gripped my heart.
His eyes were closed and his pale, pinched face made him look like he was lost in some bad dream. The dark halo of blood around his head kept growing.
‘Oh Pat,’ I said, pulling the bike off him and holding him far more tightly than I should have. ‘Oh God,’ I said, taking my mobile phone out of my jacket with fingers which were sticky from his blood, frantically tapping in the PIN number and hearing the beep-beep-beep sound of a flat battery.
I picked up my son.
I started to run.
You can’t run far with a four-year-old child in your arms. They are already too big, too heavy, too awkward to carry with any speed.
I wanted to get Pat home to the car, but I staggered out of the park knowing that wasn’t going to be quick enough.
I burst into the café where we had eaten green spaghetti, Pat still pale and silent and bleeding in my arms. It was lunch time, and the place was full of office workers in suits stuffing their faces. They stared at us open-mouthed, forks twirled with carbonara suspended in mid-air.
‘Get an ambulance!’
Nobody moved.
Then the kitchen doors flew open and Cyd came through them, a tray piled with food in one hand and her order pad in the other. She looked at us for a moment, flinching at the sight of Pat’s lifeless body, the blood all over my hands and shirt, the blind panic on my face.
Then she expertly slid the tray on to the nearest table and came towards us.
‘It’s my son! Get an ambulance!’
‘It will be quicker if I drive you,’ she said.
There were white lines on the hospital floor that directed you to the casualty department, but before we got anywhere near it we were surrounded by nurses and porters who took Pat from my arms and laid him on a trolley. It was a trolley for an adult, and he looked tiny on it. Just so tiny.
Tears came to my eyes for the first time, and I blinked them away. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t stop looking at him. Your child in a hospital. It’s the worst thing in the world.
They wheeled him deeper into the building, under the sick yellow strip lights of crowded, noisy corridors, asking me questions about his birthday, his medical history, the cause of his head wound.
I tried to tell them about the bike on the diving board above the empty swimming pool, but I don’t know if it made much sense to them. It didn’t make much sense to me.
‘We’ll take care of him,’ a nurse said, and the trolley banged through green swing doors.
I tried to follow them and