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