Man and Wife. Tony Parsons
is there when my son eats his breakfast (Coco Pops, right? See, Pat, I still remember the Coco Pops). Richard is there when my boy plays quietly with his Star Wars toys (playing quietly because Richard is more of a Harry Potter man, not so big on light sabres and Death Stars and Jedi Knights).
And Richard is there at night sharing a bed with the mother of my son.
Let’s not forget that bit.
‘So how’s it going?’
I asked my son the same question every Sunday as we took our places in the burger bar, our Happy Meals between us, among all the dads and little boys and girls just like us. You know. The weekend families.
‘Good,’ he said.
That was all. Good? Just good? And it’s funny, and a little bit sad, because when he was smaller, you couldn’t stop him talking, he was full of questions.
How do I know when to wake up? Where do I go when I am asleep? How do I grow up? Why doesn’t the sky stop? You’re not going to die, are you? Obviously we’re not going to die, right? And is a Death Star bigger than the moon?
You couldn’t shut him up in the old days.
‘School’s okay? You get on with everyone in your class? You’re feeling all right about things, darling?’
I never asked him about Richard.
‘Good,’ he repeated, poker-faced, drawing an impenetrable veil over his life with one little word. He picked up his burger in both hands, like a baby squirrel with a taste for junk food. And I watched him, realising that he was wearing clothes that I had never seen before. What family day out were they from? Why hadn’t I noticed them before? So many questions that I couldn’t even bring myself to ask him.
‘You like your teacher?’
He nodded, biting off more Happy Meal than he could possibly chew, and making further comment impossible. We went through this routine every weekend. We had been doing it for two years, ever since he went to live with his mother.
I asked him about school, friends and home.
He gave me his name, rank and serial number.
He was still recognisably the sweet-natured child with dirty-blond hair who once rode a bike called Bluebell. The same boy who was so cute at two years of age that people stopped to stare at him in the street, who insisted his name was Luke Skywalker when he was three, who tried to be very brave when his mother left me when he was four and everything began to fall apart.
Still my Pat.
But he didn’t open his heart to me any more – what frightened him, the things that made him happy, the stuff of his dreams, the parts of the world that puzzled him – why doesn’t the sky stop? – in the same way he did when he was small.
So much changes when they start school. Everything, in fact. You lose them then and you never really get them back. But it was more than school.
There was a distance between us that I couldn’t seem to bridge, no matter how hard I tried. There were walls dividing us, and they were the walls of his new home. Not so new now. Another few years and he would have spent most of his life living away from me.
‘What’s your Happy Meal taste like, Pat?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘You ever have a Happy Meal?’
‘I’ve got one right here.’
‘Well, that’s exactly what it tastes like.’
My son at seven years old. Sometimes I got on his nerves. I could tell.
We still had a good time together. When I gave up my inept interrogations, we had fun. The way we always had. Pat was a pleasure to be around – easy-going, sunny-natured, game for a laugh. But it was different now that our time together was rationed. This time together had a sheen of desperation because I couldn’t stand to see him disappointed or sad. Any minor unhappiness, no matter how temporary, gnawed at me in a way that it really hadn’t when we still shared a home.
These Sundays were the high point of my week. Although things were going well for me at work now, nothing was as good as this day, this whole glorious day, that I got to spend with my boy.
We didn’t do anything special, just the same things we had always done, bouncing merrily between food and football, park and pictures, games arcade and shopping mall. Happily frittering away the hours.
But it felt different from when we lived together because now, at the end of all these ordinary, perfect days, we had to say goodbye.
The clock was always running.
There was a time in our lives, in that brief period when I was looking after him alone, when his mother was in Japan, trying to reclaim the life she had given up for me, when I felt Pat and I were unique.
I stood at the gates of his primary school, separate from all the mothers waiting for their children, and I felt that there was nobody like us in the world. I couldn’t feel like that any more. The world was full of people like us. Even McDonald’s was full of people like us.
On Sundays the burger bar was always packed with one-day dads making stilted small talk with their children, these wary kids who came in all sizes, from lovely little nippers to pierced, surly teens, all those fathers making the best of it, looking from their child or children to their watch, trying to make up for all the lost time and never quite succeeding.
We avoided eye contact, me and all the other one-day dads. But there was a kind of shy fraternity that existed between us. When there were unpleasant scenes – tears or raised voices, the Egg McMuffin abruptly and angrily abandoned, an overwrought demand to get Mummy on the mobile phone immediately – we felt for each other, me and all the other Sunday dads.
As Pat and I lapsed into silence, I noticed that there was one of them at the next table being tortured by his daughter, a saucer-eyed ten-year-old in an Alice band.
‘Je suis végétarienne,’ said the little girl, pushing away her untouched Big Mac.
Her father’s mouth dropped open.
‘How can you possibly be vegetarian, Louise? You weren’t a vegetarian last week. You had that hot dog before The Lion King, remember?’
‘Je ne mange pas de viande,’ insisted the little girl. ‘Je ne mange pas de boeuf.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said her father. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’ve turned vegetarian? Why didn’t your mother?’
Poor bastard, I thought, and I saw the man’s love life flash before my eyes.
Probably a corporate romance, the woman in from the Paris office, trailing clouds of charm, Chanel and an accent that would make any grown man melt. Then a whirlwind courtship, seeing the sights of two cities, the time of moonlight and Interflora, an early pregnancy, probably unplanned, and then the woman buying a one-way ticket back to the old country when the sex wore off.
‘Je suis allergique aux Happy Meals,’ said the girl.
Pat had stopped eating. His mouth hung open with wonder. He was clearly impressed by the girl at the next table. Everything bigger children said or did impressed him. But this was something new. This was possibly the first time he had seen a bigger child speaking a foreign language outside the movies or TV.
‘Japanese?’ he whispered to me. He assumed all foreign languages were Japanese. His mother was fluent.
‘French,’ I whispered back.
He smiled at the little girl in the Alice band. She stared straight through him.
‘Why is she talking French then?’ he asked me, suddenly perking up. And it was just like the old days – Pat bringing me one of life’s little puzzles to unravel. I leapt upon it with gratitude.
‘That little girl is French,’