by Tony Parsons
‘Excuse me. I’ve got to get some milk.’
Cat turned away, stepping over a man in dreadlocks who was asleep in the doorway.
‘What did your father expect?’ Olivia said. ‘These men. They get a beautiful girl who is full of life and then expect her to change into some little housewife as soon as she has children. You’ll see one day, Cat.’
Cat bought a pint of semi-skimmed milk from a 24-hour shop with wire-mesh guards on all the windows. Then she waited on the corner until a minicab collected Olivia, and she knew there was no one in the flat except her family.
‘Isn’t she gorgeous?’ Michael said, leaning against a Maserati and watching Ginger through the glass of the front office. ‘All that pale flesh. All those freckles. Do you know what I did once? I tried to count them. Is that crazy or what?’
‘You shouldn’t have asked her to come back to work here,’ Paulo said. ‘It’s all wrong.’
‘Which one of her replacements would you like back? The fat one who forgot to post the VAT form? Or the one with glasses who couldn’t take messages from Italy because they “talk all funny”?’
Paulo shook his head. It was true that the receptionists who had attempted to take Ginger’s place were disastrous for business. But having her back felt like it would end up in a far bigger disaster.
‘What if Naoko finds out she’s back? What if Jessica finds out?’
‘They won’t. My wife’s too busy with Chloe to come to the showroom. And your wife is out on your country estate.’
‘It’s not a country estate. It’s just a big house in the suburbs.’
‘And even if they found out, it’s perfectly innocent. I told you not to worry, Paulo. I’m not having sex with her any more. She is back with her husband and his Saturday night specials. So what’s the problem?’
Michael suddenly smiled, lowering his head, leaning his broad, well-muscled body in close and Paulo felt the raw physical presence of his brother, that old-school rugged charm, the way he had of making you feel that the two of you were separate from the rest of the human race. Paulo could understand why women liked his brother, why they let him get away with murder.
‘It works with Ginger back, doesn’t it?’ Michael said. ‘We get our messages, we get our post delivered.’
‘Let’s just hope she’s back for business not pleasure.’
Michael frowned with irritation. Despite his usual cockiness, Paulo knew that his brother had been badly shaken by Naoko’s discovery of Ginger. Michael had come very close to losing his family, and it had terrified him.
Paulo looked at his brother’s tired face, saw clearly all the exhaustion from the running around and the lying and the never-ending fear of getting caught, followed by the discovery, and the endless tears and the late-night talks and the slamming of the bedroom door when Naoko made him sleep on the couch. Paulo had no trouble believing that his brother’s affair with Ginger was truly behind him. Who had the heart or the stomach to go through all of that again?
Paulo believed that if only his brother could get on the right track, then he could be a good husband, and a great father, and what he had always been as a child. Michael could be loveable again.
‘You can’t have both, Mike,’ Paulo said gently. ‘You’ve got to see that. The family life and the playing around. They don’t go together.’
‘I told you – don’t worry,’ Michael said. ‘I’m not fucking her any more.’
‘If you do,’ Paulo said, ‘then we are all fucked. Have you got those customs forms for that Alfa Romeo? I need them now.’
‘I think they’re in the back office. I’ll have a look.’
Paulo watched his brother’s former girlfriend, if that wasn’t the wrong word, answering the phones in the front office.
He thought that Ginger was still a good-looking woman, but there had probably never been anything momentous about her, nothing about her that made you understand how Michael would be prepared to play Russian roulette with his family. There was nothing about her to make you think that she had the power to turn a man’s world inside out.
Paulo wondered how it could ever be worth it. To build a family – a wife, a child, a home – and then put it all at risk for the excitement of someone new. It was true that Paulo was a different man from his brother, that he had never been the cock artist that Michael had once been, and probably still was in his heart, despite his recent vow of celibacy, and perhaps always would be until his knob withered with the years.
But still – how could any new woman be worth that degree of heartache? How could any new woman make you put your family on the line? Nobody was that good in bed.
Paulo couldn’t explain it, but he felt that more than his brother’s family had been put at risk. Michael’s reckless behaviour somehow seemed to endanger everything they had worked for. And he loved what they had built here. He loved their business. The smell of the cars when he arrived at work in the morning, that glorious scent of leather and oil. The trips to Turin and Milan, then the long drive back through the Alps, across France and then England and home. The clients who loved these beautiful objects as much as he did – and as much as his brother did.
They had no boss, they were making good money, they were living out their boyhood dreams – working for themselves, working with cars. Paulo knew that they were lucky men. But his brother couldn’t see beyond his next erection.
Michael returned with the customs forms.
‘Don’t lose Naoko and Chloe,’ Paulo said to his brother. ‘Ginger’s not worth it. No new woman is worth it.’
‘I told you. I haven’t laid a finger on her since she came back.’
‘And I’m telling you. Love your family the way they deserve. Stop trying to be the little stud you were back in Essex.’
‘You don’t understand, do you?’
‘Explain it to me.’
‘You don’t want to hear it.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Okay – mothers are mothers first and women second,’ Michael said.
Ginger caught his eye and laughed, before returning to her work with a little smile.
‘What does it take to get you?’ Michael said. ‘What does it take to get any man?’
‘I don’t know,’ Paulo said. It wasn’t the kind of thing he thought about.
‘It takes the legs, the breasts, the flesh.’
‘Are you talking about choosing a woman here?’ Paulo said. ‘Or choosing a chicken? Because you sound like you’re in the poultry department.’
‘Come on. Why were you attracted to Jessica? Because she’s a babe! Jessica’s a babe!’
Paulo felt his heart swell with pride. It was true. Jessica was the babe of babes.
‘Her car broke down,’ Michael said. ‘You were in your cab. You looked at her and you fancied her. Come on – admit it.’ Michael lightly punched his brother’s arm, and they both laughed. ‘That’s how it works. That’s how it always works. If she had weighed a ton, you wouldn’t have even slowed down.’
Paulo couldn’t help himself. He was happy to hear that his brother thought Jessica was a babe. After all, Michael was so much more experienced with women.
‘We agree what it takes to get you,’ Michael said. ‘But what does it take to keep you? The baby. And the love for the baby – this big love, the biggest, the love of your life. You can’t imagine how big that love is, Paulo, you can’t guess at the love inside you that pours out when you have a child. That’s why you stay.’ Michael shook his head. ‘It’s so easy to walk away when there’s no baby. You just go. There’s no anchor, no ball and chain. But then there’s a baby, and it’s impossible.’
‘People do it. Plenty of men do it.’ He thought of Jessica’s mother, could see her smoking a cigarette in an expensive St John’s Wood apartment where there were no children to spoil the carpet, or fill the silence, or remind you of the passing years. Jessica had only taken him there once, when they were just back from their honeymoon. It was enough. ‘An
d women too.’
‘I know they do,’ Michael said quietly. ‘But I don’t know how. I’m never going to leave Naoko and the baby. They’re going to have to leave me.’
Perhaps it would have been different if Ginger had had her baby. Then Naoko and Chloe would have had to compete for Michael’s heart with Ginger and her baby. But Ginger didn’t have her baby after all.
A false alarm, Michael had said.
No, thought Paulo. Not a false alarm. Wishful thinking.
‘She’s not as pretty as Naoko,’ Paulo said.
‘This is true,’ Michael said.
‘And she’s not as smart. And she’s a lot older.’
‘Can’t argue with that.’
‘Then – why did it ever happen? How could it happen? I don’t get it.’
But his brother didn’t have to think about it.
‘She’s dirtier. And isn’t that what men really like? When you get right down to it. Isn’t that what gets the pleasure trigger going?’
‘The pleasure trigger?’
‘We want women to be dirty – but we don’t want the mother of our children to be dirty. Look – I don’t make the rules, okay? Ginger – I take one look at her, and I want to make like Father Christmas.’
Paulo looked confused.
‘To empty my sacks,’ said Michael.
‘But it’s not fair, is it? It’s not fair on your wife. She deserves better. Look how much you hurt her, look at the pain you caused.’
‘Yes,’ Michael said, avoiding his brother’s eyes. ‘She deserves a lot better. And that’s why I go home when we finish work. That’s why I don’t go to the Hilton for a couple of hours. I walk the line, because I have a wife and child. But home’s not quite the same these days. Naoko still doesn’t want to sleep with me. Not after – you know. We have separate bedrooms. I’m in the guest room. She’s with the baby in our old room.’
‘That’s sad.’
‘She’ll come around eventually,’ said Michael. ‘When I’ve suffered enough. Look, I love Naoko – in my way. Oh, it’s different from when I first met her. It’s different from when she was a young student and I had never been out with an Asian girl and she was so different from all the rest of them and we couldn’t get enough of each other. It’s another kind of love now. And I am not sure it’s any worse than millions of other marriages. I love her the way a lot of men love their wife, the way a lot of men love the mother of their children. I love her like a sister.’ Michael looked at his brother. ‘And maybe that is a bit sad. Because who wants to fuck their sister?’
‘Jessica’s not like my sister.’
‘Give it time. This is what we are all afraid to admit, even to ourselves. If you want to fuck them, then you don’t want a baby with them. And if you want a baby with them, then you don’t want to fuck them.’
Then maybe Jessica and I are better off alone, Paulo thought.
He never wanted to be like his brother and all those other unhappily married men – grimly serving out their life sentences like cynical old lags.
Paulo believed in romance. He believed that love could last a lifetime. He still believed that he could have it all with Jessica. He believed in Jessica and himself as a couple, despite all that aching longing for something they had never had, despite the sadness, and the secret tears behind closed doors, and the hurt that chewed them up alive when his mother yet again smiled and yet again asked them when they were going to start a family – as though the pair of them were currently just a cheap impersonation of a family.
But if we never have a child, he told himself, then maybe nothing will ever come between us. Maybe nothing will ever kill our love, or ever force us into separate bedrooms.
Yet he couldn’t believe it. Because he knew that Jessica would never be happy without a child. Paulo suddenly realised he had to find Jessica her baby. Their baby.
If he had to search the whole wide world.
Thirteen
London. Bloody London. Christ, he had forgotten how cold this place could be. And wasn’t this what the Poms called summer?
As Kirk walked through the West End in search of a job and a girl – any job would do, but only one particular girl – the wind whipped down Oxford Street and chilled him to the bone.
But the worst of it wasn’t the cold or the clogged traffic or the psychotic cyclists or the kebab vomit or the urban foxes that howled outside the window of his tiny studio flat as they scavenged for discarded fast food.
It was those flat white London skies that sapped his spirit, it was that deathly light – like early closing day at the mortuary. It was the light that made Kirk feel like running back to Manila, or all the way back to Sydney.
Yet like many men who had treated commitment as their own private Kryptonite, he dreamed of an end to the running. That’s why he had come back. To find the girl and to put an end to the running. It had to end sometime, didn’t it? That life of fun and travel and fucking around? Because how could it go on for ever?
Kirk had always had a cold dread of family life. Not because he was one of those sad bastards whose parents had split up. But because he was one of those sad bastards whose parents had stayed together.
He loved his mother and father, but only individually. Together, as a married couple, they were a disaster. He loved them – but separately. Under the same roof, he couldn’t stand the sight of them, the sound of them, the smell of what his father called ‘Scottish knockout drops’.
There had been times in his childhood when he felt he would never escape. From his father’s drinking. From his mother’s anger. The one endlessly feeding off the other, on and on, year after year, the drinking and the anger getting worse as the decades slipped by.
Why did his father drink? Because his mother was angry. Why was his mother angry? Because his father drank.
This is what he remembered, this is what he had always run from, this is why he had left the girl in Australia, why he had fled to the beaches and the bars of the Philippines. It was only during that brief period in London that he felt he had glimpsed the possibility of another life. A life so different from the married hell of his parents.
His father was this borderline alcoholic, a man who was actually a sweet enough guy when he wasn’t in his cups, a sober taxi driver by trade, a kind and attentive father who only drank to sink some nagging, unnameable disappointment in his life. And his mother was this housewife on a hair-trigger, all fixed smiles and brittle charm at the supermarket or the school gates, but flying off the handle at the dinner table, screaming in the kitchen, throwing anything to hand. But Kirk couldn’t help loving her – she could be affectionate and gentle when her husband was at work or comatose from the Scottish knockout drops. His mother could be a very loving person. Especially if you were a dog.
His parents should have split up when Kirk was grown and gone, teaching both locals and tourists how to scuba dive by the time he was sixteen. But his parents stayed together, and it made you believe in the sanctity of divorce.
Kirk looked at the restaurant matchbox in his hand, the place where he was told there might be work. Mamma-san.
That was a funny name for a restaurant. Maybe they thought they were being authentically Asian – putting together the Anglo colloquialism with the Japanese honorific san, maybe they thought it meant respected mother. And perhaps it did in this neighbourhood.
But in the bars of Asia, it meant something very different. Over there, the mamma-san was the old woman who helped you to find your girl for the night. Or an hour or two. Or a quick fifteen minutes in some blacked-out VIP room. The mamma-sans, who were mostly like a cross between your dear old granny and a hardened pimp, had taught Kirk that he wasn’t paying the bar girls for sex. He was paying them to go away when it was all over.
Now he believed that he had had his fill of recreational sex, and commercial sex, and sex with scuba-diving tourists that you didn’t want to talk to the moment you surfaced. Now he truly believed he might finally be read
y to settle down with this incredible girl at the party – this Dr Megan Jewell.
It was true that he sometimes found it hard to remember her face. They had both been pretty drunk. But he remembered enough. Something about her – and how can you ever explain it? – had got deep in his bones, and even when he was on the other side of the world, even when he was in bed with other women, even when he was paying for sex, Megan just wouldn’t go away. You could never explain that feeling, but you couldn’t mistake it for anything else. He thought of it as love.
He liked it that she was a doctor. Loved it, in fact. He found it impressive, and sexy. He knew that was dopey, but he couldn’t help himself. This hot young woman who dealt in matters of life and death – it gave her an authority that the other women he had known just didn’t have. And unlike everyone else at that party, she had not treated him like some dumb beach bum with sand for brains.
He really thought she might be the one. But in some secret chamber of his heart he suspected that he only felt that way because he had never had the chance to fuck her out of his system, and because he knew it would be almost impossible to find her again in a city of ten million souls.
Kirk asked himself the question that all men must ask when they have had lovers beyond the counting.
When he got what he wanted, would he ever want it again?
The women Rory saw were younger than him.
A lot younger. He hadn’t planned it that way, but that’s what was on the market, that’s what was available. All these women who were young enough to be his – well, girlfriend.
He couldn’t imagine what the women his own age – forty-nine and three quarters – were doing with their evenings while he was out on a date. Following around their teenage children, maybe, telling them they couldn’t go out dressed like that. Thinking about the rotten men who had fucked up their lives, possibly. Perhaps they were relieved to finally be beyond all the horrors and humiliations of the mating game. And maybe they were happy at last – happier than he could ever be. Whatever they were doing, it was a different world, a parallel universe that he could never be a part of.