by Tony Parsons
“This is not how a Jedi Knight acts,” I said. “This is how a baby acts.”
“I’m not a baby!” he said. “You are!”
I toweled him down, took him by the hand, and dragged him back to his bedroom, his little legs moving quickly to keep up with me. We glared at each other while I put him in his pajamas.
“Making such a fuss,” I said. “I’m really disappointed in you.”
“I want Mommy.”
“Mommy’s not here.”
“But when will I see her again?” he said, suddenly plaintive. “That’s what I want to know.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know, darling.”
“But what did I do?” he said, and it broke my heart. “I didn’t mean it; I didn’t mean it at all.”
“You didn’t do anything,” I said. “Mommy loves you very much. You’ll see her soon. I promise.”
Then I took him in my arms, smelling the shampoo that I had missed, holding him close for a long time, and wondering how two flawed adults had ever managed to make something so perfect.
***
I read him Where the Wild Things Are until he fell asleep. When I came out of his room there were three messages on the answering machine. All of them were from Gina.
“You’ll never know how much you hurt me. Never. It was supposed to be for life, Harry. Not until one of us got a bit bored. Forever—not until one of us decided that things were getting a bit dull in the old marital bed. It doesn’t work like that. It can never work like that. Do you think I could let you touch me when I know you’ve been touching someone else? Your hands, your mouth…I can’t stand all that. The lying, the sneaking around, the sound of someone crying themselves to sleep every night. I had enough of that when I was growing up. If you think—”
The machine cut her off. It only let you talk for a certain amount of time. There was a beep and then her second message. She was calmer now. Or trying to be.
“I just spoke to Glenn. He told me that you collected Pat. That really wasn’t necessary. He was perfectly happy there. And I know how busy you are at work. But if you are going to look after him until I get back then you need to know that he has his hair washed every Sunday. And don’t let him put sugar on his Coco Pops. He can go to the toilet by himself—you know that already—but sometimes he forgets to lift the lid. Makes sure he cleans his teeth. Don’t let him watch Star Wars videos all the time. If he doesn’t sleep in the afternoon then make sure he’s in bed by no later than—”
Another beep. A final message. Not so calm anymore, the words tumbling out.
“Just tell Pat I love him, okay? Tell him I’ll see him very soon. Take good care of him until then. And don’t ever feel too sorry for yourself, Harry. You’re not Mr. Wonderful. Women all over the world look after children alone. Millions of them do it. Literally millions. What’s so special about you?”
***
Long after I had turned off all the lights, I stayed there watching our boy sleep. And I saw that I had let everyone down.
Gina. My mother and father. Even Marty. I hadn’t been strong enough; I hadn’t loved them enough; I hadn’t been the man they wanted me to be, or the man that I wanted myself to be. In different ways, I had betrayed them all.
I pulled the blanket that Pat had kicked off up to his shoulders, making one final promise that this time I would keep—I would never betray this child.
But there was a distant voice, like someone calling on a bad line from the other side of the world, and it kept on saying—you did, you did, you already did.
eleven
Children live in the moment. The good thing about falling out with them is that they have forgotten all about it the next day. At least that’s what Pat was like at four years old.
“What do you want for breakfast?” I asked him.
He considered me for a moment.
“Green spaghetti.”
“You want spaghetti? For breakfast?”
“Green spaghetti. Yes, please.”
“But—I don’t know how to make green spaghetti. Have you had it before?”
He nodded.
“In the little place across the big road,” he said. “With Mommy.”
We lived on the wrong side of Highbury Corner, next to the Holloway Road rather than Upper Street, the side where there were junk stores rather than antique shops, pubs rather than bars, quiet little cafés instead of trendy restaurants. Some of these cafés were so quiet that they had the air of the morgue but there was a great one right at the end of our street, a place called Trevi where they spoke English at the counter and Italian in the kitchens. The beefy, good-humored men behind the counter greeted Pat by name.
“This is the place,” he said, settling into a table by the window. I watched the waitress come out of the kitchen and approach our table. It was her. She still looked tired.
“What can I get you boys?” she said, smiling at Pat. There was a trace of the south in her voice that I hadn’t noticed when I was with Marty.
“Do you do anything that could be described as green spaghetti?”
“You mean spaghetti pesto? Sure.”
“Isn’t that too hot for you?” I asked Pat.
“Is it green?” he said.
I nodded. “It’s green.”
“That’s what I have.”
“How about you?” she said.
“I’ll have the same,” I said.
“Anything else?”
“Well, I was wondering how many jobs you’ve got.”
She looked at me for the first time.
“Oh, I remember you,” she said. “You were the guy with Marty Mann. The one who told him to give me a break.”
“I thought you didn’t recognize him.”
“I’ve been here for almost a year. Of course I recognized the little dickhead.” She glanced at Pat. “Excuse me.”
He smiled at her.
“I don’t get to watch much TV—you don’t in this job—but his ugly mug is always in the papers. Doing not very much, far as I can see. Funny enough, you were my last customers. Paul didn’t like my style.”
“Yeah, well. If it’s any consolation, I lost my job around the same time as you.”
“Yeah? And you didn’t even get to drop a plate of pasta on Marty’s shriveled little—” She looked quickly at Pat. “Head. Anyway. He deserved it.”
“He sure did. But I’m sorry you lost your job.”
“No big deal. A girl can always get another job as a waitress, right?”
She looked up from her pad. Her eyes were so far apart that I had trouble looking at them both at the same time. They were brown. Huge. She turned them on Pat.
“Having lunch with your dad? Where’s your mom today?”
Pat glanced at me anxiously.
“His mother’s in Tokyo,” I said.
“That’s Japan,” Pat said. “They drive on the same side of the road as us. But when it’s nighttime there, it’s daytime here.”
She looked at me with those wide-set brown eyes and I thought that somehow she knew that our little family was all broken and scattered. Which was absurd. How could she have possibly known?
“She’s coming back soon,” Pat said.
I put my arm around him.
“That’s right,” I said. “But it’s just us for a while.”
“That’s unusual, isn’t it?” the waitress said. “I mean—you looking after your boy. Not many men do that.”
“I guess it happens,” I said.
“I guess it does,” she said.
I could see that she liked me a little bit now that she knew I was taking care of Pat. But of course she didn’t know me. She didn’t know me at all. And she had me all wrong.
She saw a man alone with a child and she thought that somehow t
hat must make me better than other men—more kindhearted, more compassionate, less likely to let a woman down. The new, improved male of the species, biologically programmed for child caring duties. As if I had planned for my life to work out this way.
“How about you?” I said. “What brought you to London from—where?”
“Houston,” she said. “Houston, Texas. Well, what brought me was my partner. Ex-partner. This is where he’s from.”
“That’s a long way to come for some guy, isn’t it?”
She seemed genuinely surprised.
“Do you think so? I always thought that, if you really love someone, you’ll follow them anywhere.”
So she was the romantic kind.
Under that tough, touch-me-again-buster-and-you’ll-get-linguini-in-your-lap exterior, she was one of those women who was willing to turn her world inside out for some man who almost certainly didn’t deserve it.
Maybe my wife was right. The romantic ones are the worst.
***
Gina came home late the next day.
Pat was playing on the floor with his toys while I tried to reach Marty on his mobile. Neither of us reacted to the diesel rumble of a black cab pulling up outside. But we looked at each other as we heard the rusty clank of our little gate, then a key turning in the front door and finally the sound of her footsteps in the hall. Pat turned his face to the door.
“Mommy?”
“Pat?”
And suddenly there she was, smiling down at our son, bleary from the twelve-hour flight from Narita and lugging an old suitcase that still had a scarred sticker from our distant holiday in Antigua.
Pat flew into her arms and she held him so tight that he disappeared inside the folds of her light summer coat, all of him gone apart from the top of his head and a tuft of hair that was exactly the same shade of blond as his mother’s. Their faces were so close that you couldn’t see where Gina ended and Pat began.
And I watched them feeling something better than happy. I was sort of glowing inside, believing that my world had been restored. But then she looked at me—not cold, not angry, just from a great distance, as though she was still somewhere far away and always would be—and my spirits sank.
She hadn’t come back for me.
She had come back for Pat.
“You all right?” I said.
“Bit tired,” she said. “It’s a long flight. And you get back the same day you leave. So the day never seems to end.”
“You should have told us you were coming. We would have met you at the airport.”
“That’s okay,” she said, holding Pat out to inspect him.
And I could see that she had come back because she thought I couldn’t do it. She thought I wasn’t up to looking after our child alone while she was away. She thought that I wasn’t a real parent, not the way that she was a real parent.
Still holding Pat, her eyes took in the squalid ravages of the living room, a room that seemed to confirm that even her own lousy father was a better prospect than me.
There were toys everywhere. A video of The Lion King playing unwatched on TV. Two takeaway pizza boxes—one large, one small—from Mister Milano squatting on the floor. And Pat’s pants from yesterday sitting on the coffee table like a soiled doily.
“Goodness, look at your dirty hair,” Gina said brightly. “Shall we give it a good old wash?”
“Okay!” Pat said, as though it was an invitation to Disneyland.
They went off to the bathroom and I made a start on clearing up the room, listening to the sound of running water mixing with their laughter.
***
“I’ve been offered a job,” she told me in the park. “It’s a big job. As a translator for an American bank. Well, more of an interpreter, really. My written Japanese is too rusty for translating documents. But my spoken Japanese is more than good enough for interpreting. I would be sitting in on meetings, liasing with clients, all that. The girl who’s been doing the job—she’s really nice, a Japanese American, I met her—is leaving to have a baby. The job’s mine if I want it. But they need to know now.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “This job’s in Tokyo?”
She looked away from Pat’s careful negotiation of the lower reaches climbing frame.
“Of course it’s in Tokyo,” she said sharply. Her eyes returned to our boy on the climbing frame. “What do you think I’ve been doing out there?”
To be honest, I thought she was having a break. Seeing a few old Japanese and expatriate friends from her year out, shooting about on the bullet train, taking in a few temples in Kyoto, just getting away from it all for a while.
I had forgotten that she wanted her life back.
That’s what she had been doing after moving into her father’s flat—making a few international calls, reviving some old contacts, seeing if she still had an option on all the things that she had given up for me.
I knew her well enough to realize that she was dead serious about this job. But I still couldn’t quite believe it.
“You’re really going to take a job in Japan, Gina?”
“I should have done it years ago.”
“For how long? Forever?”
“The contract is for a year. After that, well, we’ll see.”
“What about Pat?”
“Well, Pat comes with me. Obviously.”
“Pat goes with you? To Tokyo?”
“Of course. I’m not going to leave him here, am I?”
“But you can’t just uproot him,” I said, trying to keep the note of hysteria out of my voice. “Where are you going to live?”
“The bank will sort that out.”
“What’s he going to eat?”
“The same things he eats here. Nobody’s going to make him have miso soup for breakfast. You can get Coco Pops in Japan. You don’t have to worry about us, Harry.”
“I am worried. This is serious, Gina. Who’s going to look after him when you’re working? What about all his stuff?”
“His stuff?”
“His bike, his toys, his videos. All his stuff.”
“We’ll ship it over. How hard can it be to crate up a four-year-old’s possessions?”
“What about his grandparents? You going to crate them up and ship them out? What about his friends at the nursery? What about me?”
“You can’t stand the thought of me having a life without you, can you? You really can’t stand it.”
“It’s not that. If this is really what you want, then I hope it works out for you. And I know that you can do it. But Pat’s life is here.”
“Pat’s life is with me,” she said, a touch of steel in her voice. Yet I could tell that I was getting through to her.
“Leave him with me,” I said. Pleaded, really. “Just until you get settled, okay? A few weeks, a couple of months, whatever it takes. Just until you’re on top of the job and you’ve found somewhere to live. Let him stay with me until then.”
She watched me carefully, as if I was making sense but still couldn’t be trusted.
“I’m not trying to take him away from you, Gina. I know I could never do that. But I can’t stand the thought of him being looked after by some stranger in some little flat while you’re at the office trying to make a go of your new job. And I know you can’t stand it either.”
She watched our boy slowly clamber to the top of the climbing frame. He carefully turned so that he could grin at us.
“I have to take this chance,” she said. “I have to know if I can do it. It’s now or not at all.”
“I understand.”
“I’d call him every day, of course. And send for him as soon as I can. Maybe you can bring him out.”
“That sounds good.”
“I love Pat. I love my son.”
“I know
you do.”
“You really think you can look after him by yourself for a while, do you?”
“I can manage it. I can.” We looked at each other for a long time. “Just until you’re settled.”
***
We took Pat home and put him to bed. Happy and tired, he was soon asleep, lost in dreams that he wouldn’t remember in the morning. Gina chewed her bottom lip.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take good care of him.”
“Just until I’m settled.”
“Just until you’re settled.”
“I’ll be back for him,” Gina said, more to herself than to me.
And eventually she did come back for him. But things were a bit different by then.
By the time Gina came back for Pat there wouldn’t be yesterday’s pants on the coffee table and Mister Milano pizza boxes on the floor. By the time she came back for our boy, I would be something like a real parent too.
That’s where Gina got it wrong. She thought that she could change but that I would always remain the same.
***
The way my parents dealt with Gina going away, they tried to turn Pat’s life into a party.
Overnight their nonnegotiable “one Coke a day” rule was abolished. Suddenly when Pat and I turned up at their house, there were gifts waiting for him, such as a special edition Return of the Jedi (“New Scenes, New Sounds, New Special Effects”). More and more they wanted him to stay over with them, no doubt hoping to replace my gloomy face and moody silences with their canned laughter, laughter so strained that it made me feel like weeping.
And now one of them always wanted to accompany us to the gates of Pat’s nursery school. It was a long drive for them—reaching us took at least an hour going counterclockwise around the M25 in the rush hour—but they were willing to do it day after day.
“As a special treat,” my dad said, groaning as he folded his old legs into my low-slung car.
I knew what they were doing and I loved them for it. They were trying to stop their grandson from crying. Because they were afraid that if he started crying, then he would never stop.