Man and Boy

by Tony Parsons

  “I’m not handing him over until it’s the best thing for him. Not you. Him. That’s what I agree to, okay?”

  Silence. And then a different voice.

  “That’s for the lawyers to decide, Harry.”

  “You tell your lawyer—Pat stays with me. You were the one who left. Tell him that.”

  “And you tell your lawyer that you were the one who was fucking around.”

  “I can’t—I don’t have a lawyer.”

  “You should get one, Harry. If the thought of trying to steal my son from me ever crosses your mind, then get a very good lawyer. But you don’t mean it. We both know you can’t look after Pat permanently. You can’t even look after yourself. You just want to hurt me. Look—do you want to talk about it like adults? Or do you want to argue?”

  “I want to argue.”

  There was a sigh.

  “Is Pat there?”

  “No—he’s out having dinner with a few of his fast-set pals. Of course he’s here. He’s four years old. Where do you expect him to be? On a hot date with Naomi Campbell? I told you he’s in the bath. Didn’t I tell you that?”

  “You told me. Can I talk to him?”

  “Sure.”

  “And Harry?”

  “What?”

  “Happy birthday.”

  “That’s tomorrow,” I said angrily. “My birthday is tomorrow.”

  “Where I am it’s almost tomorrow.”

  “I’m not in Japan, Gina. I’m here.”

  “Happy birthday anyway. For tomorrow.”

  “Thanks.”

  I got Pat from the bath, dried him down, and wrapped him in a towel. Then I knelt in front of him.

  “Mommy wants to talk to you,” I said. “She’s on the phone.”

  It was the same every day. There was a jolt of surprise in those blue eyes and then something that could have been either joy or relief. But by the time I gave him the receiver he looked more guarded.

  “Hello?” he whispered.

  I guess I was expecting bitter tears, angry recriminations, torrents of emotion. But Pat was always cool and composed, muttering one-word answers to Gina’s questions until he eventually handed me the phone.

  “I don’t need to talk to Mommy anymore,” he said quietly.

  He walked off to the living room, the towel still wrapped around him like a shawl, leaving a trail of small wet foot prints behind him.

  “I’ll call him again tomorrow,” Gina told me, more upset than I had expected her to be, in fact so unraveled that I felt better than I had for days. “Is that okay, Harry?”

  “Any time is fine,” I said, wanting to ask her how we had got to a place where we threatened each other with lawyers, how two people who had been so close could become a divorce court cliché.

  Was it really all my fault? Or was it just random bad luck, like getting hit by a car or catching cancer? If we had loved each other so much, then why hadn’t it lasted? Was it really impossible for two people to stay together forever in the lousy modern world? And what was all of this going to do to our son?

  I really wanted to know. But I couldn’t ask Gina any of that stuff. We were on opposite sides of the world.

  thirteen

  We were halfway home when my cell phone rang. It was my mother. She was usually a calm, unflappable woman, the still center at the heart of an excitable family. But not today.

  “Harry.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s your dad.”

  God, I thought—he’s dead. On my thirtieth birthday. Even today he has to be the center of attention.

  “What happened?”

  “We were robbed.”

  Christ. Even out there. Even that deep into the suburbs. Nowhere was safe anymore.

  “Is he okay? Are you okay?”

  “Please, Harry…come quick…the police are on their way…please…I can’t talk to him…”

  “Hang on, okay? Hang on, Mom. I’ll be there as quickly as I can.”

  I hung up, swinging the car out into the fast lane and slamming the accelerator to the floor. The MGF surged forward, as if this was the moment it had been built for. On the passenger seat next to me, Pat laughed out loud.

  “Wicked,” he said.

  Now where did he get that from?

  ***

  My mother opened the door in her best dress, all dolled up for her son’s birthday. But her party clothes were undermined by the white, shaken look on her face.

  “It’s awful, Harry. We were burgled. In the living room. Look.”

  She took Pat off to the kitchen, gently deflecting his questions about granddad, and I let myself into the living room, steeling myself for the sight of my father half-dead in a dark puddle of blood. But the old man was standing by the fireplace, his sunburned face creased with pleasure. I had never seen him look happier.

  “Hello, Harry. Happy birthday, son. Have you met our guests?”

  At his feet there were two youths, belly down on the carpet with their hands tied behind their backs.

  At first I thought I recognized them—they had exactly the same washed-out menace that I had seen on the face of Sally’s boyfriend over at Glenn’s place, although they didn’t look quite so menacing now—but I only recognized the type. Expensive cross-trainers, designer denim, hair so slick with gel that it looked as sticky and brittle as the skin of a toffee apple. He had trussed them up with the pair of silk ties that I had bought him last Christmas.

  “Saw them out on the street a bit earlier. Skylarking around, they were. But it turned out to be a bit more than skylarking.”

  Sometimes it felt like my old man was the curator of the English language. As well as his love for outmoded hipster jive, another peculiarity of his speech was his use of expressions from his youth that everyone else had thrown out with their ration books.

  He was always using words like skylarking—his arcane expression for mischief, fooling around, and generally just mucking about—words that had gone out of fashion around the same time as the British Empire.

  “They came in through the French windows, bold as brass. Thought nobody was home. Your mother was doing the shopping for your birthday—she’s got a lovely roast—and I was upstairs getting spruced up.”

  Getting spruced up. That was another one that he was preserving for the archives.

  “They were trying to unplug the video when I walked in. One of them had the cheek to come at me.” He lightly prodded the thinnest, meanest-looking youth with a carpet slipper. “Didn’t you, old chum?”

  “My fucking brother’s going to fucking kill you,” the boy muttered, his voice as harsh in this room where I had been a child as a fart in church. There was a yellow and purple bruise coming up on one of his pimply cheekbones. “He’ll kill you, old man. He’s a gangster.”

  My dad chuckled with genuine amusement.

  “Had to stick one on him.” My father threw a beefy right hook into the air. “Caught him good. Went out like a bloody light. The other one tried to make a run for it, but I just got him by the scruff of the neck.”

  The muscles on my father’s tattooed arms rippled under his short-sleeved shirt as he demonstrated his technique for getting a teenage burglar by the throat. He had my mother’s name in a heart inscribed on one arm, the winged dagger of the Commandos on the other. Both tattoos were blurred with the ages.

  “Got him on the floor. Lucky I was deciding which tie to wear when they appeared. Came in handy, those ties you bought me.”

  “Jesus Christ, Dad, they could have had knives,” I exploded. “The papers are full of have-a-go heroes who get killed for tackling criminals. Why didn’t you just call the police?”

  My dad laughed good-naturedly. This wasn’t going to be one of our arguments. He was enjoying himself too much for that.
<
br />   “No time, Harry. Came downstairs and there they were. Large as life, in my home. That’s a bit naughty, that is.”

  I was angry with him for taking on the two little goons, although I knew he was more than capable of handling them. I also felt the furious relief that comes when you finally find a child who has gone missing. But there was also something else. I was jealous.

  What would I have done if I had found these two yobs—or any of the million like them—in my home? Would I have had the sheer guts and the bloody-minded stupidity to take them on? Or would I have run a mile?

  Whatever I had done, I knew I wouldn’t have done it with the manly certainty of my father. I couldn’t have protected my home and my family in quite the same way that he had protected his home and family. I wasn’t like him. But with all my heart, I wanted to be.

  The police eventually came, pulling up in a blaze of sirens and twirling blue lights. Pat ran outside to meet them, his eyes wide with wonder.

  There were two of them—a fit-looking young cop around my age who regarded my dad’s heroics with a quiet exasperation and an older, heavier officer who immediately struck up a relationship with my old man.

  In truth, my father had never been much a fan of the police—I remember him being stopped for speeding a few times when I was a child and he was invariably lippy, never deferential, never willing to kiss their asses for a quiet life. Whenever he saw a police car screaming through the streets he was always contemptuous. “They’re only going home for their dinner,” he would say.

  But now he sipped hot sweet tea with the older cop, two stolid, real men wondering what the world was coming to as they surveyed the secured yobs at their feet.

  “You can imagine what kind of homes they come from, of course,” said my dad.

  “The mother’s on benefits,” guessed the old policeman. “The father probably buggered off years ago. If he was ever there. So the state has to pay to bring up these little charmers. Which means you and me.”

  “Too true. And don’t think they’re grateful for being supported by the taxpayer. It’s all rights these days, isn’t it? All rights and no responsibilities.”

  “You see them all over these projects. Women with a bunch of screaming kids and no ring on their fingers.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it? You need a license to drive a car. You need a license to own a dog. But anyone can bring a child into the world.”

  I went out into the kitchen with my mom and Pat, wondering why all the decent citizens in the world have it in for single mothers. After all, I thought, the single mother is the parent who stayed.

  ***

  Despite being able to eat a couple of burglars for breakfast, my father wasn’t a violent man. He wasn’t the battle-hardened war veteran of myth and movies. He was the gentlest man I ever met in my life.

  It was true that I had seen him explode a few times when I was growing up. There was a sweet shop where my mother worked part time when I was around Pat’s age, and the creep of a manager wouldn’t let her take a personal call from the hospital when her father, my granddad, was dying of cancer. I watched my dad grab the manager by the throat—the scruff of his neck, he would have called it—and lift him right off the ground. The man thought my father was going to kill him. So did I.

  And there were other occasions—a cocky swimming pool attendant who said the wrong thing when I was wearing a particularly lurid pair of water wings, a motorist who cut him off on our way to the seaside one steaming Bank Holiday Monday. He dealt with them all the way he dealt with the two pockmarked burglars. But he never lifted a finger to me or my mother.

  The war was always there, as undeniable as the jagged little black lumps of shrapnel that spent a lifetime worming their way out of his hard old body. But the real drama of his life—the friends who died before they were old enough to vote, the men he killed, the unimaginable things he saw and did—was over by the time he was out of his teens. Although I always thought of him as a warrior, a Royal Naval Commando with a silver medal on his chest, my dad had been something else for fifty years.

  After the war, he worked on a stall selling fruit and vegetables for five years. Then he married my mother and managed a greengrocer’s shop directly below the flat where my parents lived childless for more than a decade, desperately trying for a baby that just wouldn’t be born.

  I finally came along, when it must have seemed as though I never would, and from the day we moved out of our little flat above the shop until the day that he retired, my father was a produce manager for a chain of supermarkets, traveling to stores across Kent and Essex and East Anglia to make sure the fruit and vegetables on sale were up to his demanding standards.

  So he wasn’t a warrior to the world. But he was to me. And he quite literally wouldn’t hurt a fly. Perhaps it was because he had seen enough blood and gore to last forever, but if anything flew or crawled or crept from his well-tended garden into our small suburban home, my father would forbid my mother and me from touching it.

  He would crouch beside some broken butterfly or wandering ant—or wasp or fly or mouse, no creature was too lowly or too filthy for him to rescue—scoop it up in his hands or a matchbox or a jam jar, and escort it to the back door, gently releasing it back into the wild while my mom and I mocked him and sang the chorus of, “Born Free.”

  But although we laughed at him, my childish heart reeled with admiration.

  My father was a strong man who had learned to be gentle, a man who had seen enough of death to fully appreciate life. And I couldn’t compete, I just couldn’t compete.

  ***

  Pat wouldn’t eat his dinner. Maybe it was the call from his mother. Maybe it was the attempted burglary. But I don’t think so. I think it was just my lousy cooking.

  I had started to worry about his diet. Just how much nutrition was there in the takeaway pizzas and microwave meals that I fed him on? Not much. The only time he was getting anything that remotely resembled healthy food was when we went to my parents or we ate out. So one night I tried boiling up a few vegetables and slipping them into his microwaved pasta.

  “Yuck,” he said, examining an orange blob on the end of his spoon. “What’s that?”

  “That’s called a carrot, Pat. You must remember carrots. They’re good for you. Come on. Eat it all up.”

  He pushed his plate away with a look of disgust.

  “Not hungry,” he said, attempting to get down from the kitchen table.

  “Hold it,” I said. “You’re not going anywhere until you’ve eaten your dinner.”

  “I don’t want any dinner.” He looked at the orange blob swimming in bubbling gruel. “This tastes yuck.”

  “Eat your dinner.”

  “No.”

  “Please eat your dinner.”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to eat your dinner or not?”

  “No.”

  “Then go to bed.”

  “But it’s early!”

  “That’s right—it’s dinner time. And if you don’t want any dinner then you can go to bed.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Life’s not fair! Go to bed!”

  “I hate you, Daddy!”

  “You don’t hate me! You hate my cooking! Go and put your pajamas on!”

  When he had flounced out of the kitchen I snatched up his plate of microwaved crap with added overboiled vegetables and tossed it all in the bin. Then I held the plate under the hot tap until the water burned my hands. I didn’t really blame him for not eating it. It probably wasn’t edible.

  When I went into Pat’s bedroom he was lying on his bed, fully clothed, quietly sobbing. I sat him up, dried his eyes, and helped him into his pajamas. He was dog tired—eyes half-closed, mouth all puffy, head nodding like a little dashboard dog—so an early night wouldn’t do him any harm. But I didn’t want him t
o fall asleep hating my guts.

  “I know I’m not a very good cook, Pat. Not like Granny or Mommy. But I’m going to try harder, okay?”

  “Daddies can’t cook.”

  “That’s not true at all.”

  “You can’t cook.”

  “Well, that’s true. This daddy can’t cook. But there are lots of men who are great cooks—famous chefs in fancy restaurants. And ordinary men too. Men who live alone. Daddies with little boys and girls. I’m going to try to be like them, okay? I’m going to try to cook you good things that you enjoy. Okay, darling?”

  He turned his head away, sniffing with disbelief at something so outrageously unlikely. I knew how he felt. I couldn’t believe it either. I suspected we were both going to have to develop a profound love for sandwiches.

  I took him to the bathroom to brush his teeth, and when we came back I managed to get a reluctant goodnight kiss out of him. But he wasn’t really interested in making up. Telling myself that he would have forgotten all about my rotten carrots by the morning, I tucked him in and turned out his light.

  I went back to the living room and flopped on the sofa, telling myself that I needed to get back to work. A bank statement had arrived that morning. I didn’t have the heart to open it.

  They had sacked me the modern way—by letting my contract run out and giving me just one month’s salary. It was already gone. So I needed to get back to work because we were desperate for money. But I also needed to get back to work because it was the only thing in this world that I was any good at.

  I picked up a trade paper and turned to the classifieds, circling production jobs in radio and TV that looked promising. But after a few minutes of half-hearted job hunting, I lay the paper to one side, rubbing my eyes. I was too tired to think about it right now.

  The Empire Strikes Back was still running on the video—a battle between the forces of good and evil in the snow of some faraway planet. Even though this stuff was a constant background noise in our lives and sometimes made me feel like I was losing my mind, I was just too exhausted to turn it off.

  The action switched from the frozen wasteland to some dark, bubbling swamp where the wise old master was lecturing Luke Skywalker on his destiny. And I suddenly realized how many father figures Luke has, father figures who seem to cover the waterfront of parental possibilities.