Man and Boy

by Tony Parsons

  Now I could understand how he must have felt watching his five-year-old son being put out with gas so that the doctors could remove bits of broken teeth from his gums and tongue.

  He would have had that feeling of helpless terror that only the parent of a sick or injured child can understand. I knew exactly how he must have felt—like life was holding him hostage. Was it really possible that I was starting to see the world with his eyes?

  He was standing outside the main entrance to the hospital, smoking one of his roll-up cigarettes. He must have been the only surviving Rizla customer in the world who didn’t smoke dope.

  He looked up at me, holding his breath.

  “He’s going to be fine,” I said.

  He released a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “It’s not—what they call it?—a compressed fracture?”

  “It’s not fractured. They’ve given him twelve stitches and he’ll have a scar but that’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Thank Christ for that,” he said. He took a tug on his roll-up. “And how about you?”

  “Me? I’m fine, Dad.”

  “Do you need anything?”

  “A good night’s kip would be nice.”

  When I was with my father, I sometimes found myself talking his language. He was the only person in the country who still referred to sleep as kip.

  “I mean, are you all right for money? Your mom told me you’re not going to take this job.”

  “I can’t. The hours are too long. I’d never be home.” I looked across the almost empty car park to where the night sky was streaked with light. Somewhere birds were singing. It wasn’t late anymore. It was early. “But something will turn up.”

  He took out his wallet, peeled off a few bills, and handed them to me.

  “What’s this for?” I said.

  “Until something turns up.”

  “That’s okay. I appreciate the offer, Dad, but something really will turn up.”

  “I know it will. People always want to watch television, don’t they? I’m sure you’ll get something soon. This is for you and Pat until then.”

  My dad, the media expert. All he knew about television was that these days they didn’t put on anything as funny as Fawlty Towers or Benny Hill. But I took the bills he offered me.

  There was a time when taking money from him would have made me angry—angry at myself for still needing him and his help at my age, and even angrier at him for always relishing his role as my savior.

  But now I could see that he was just sort of trying to show me that he was on my side.

  “I’ll pay this back,” I said.

  “No rush,” said my father.

  ***

  Gina wanted to get on the next plane home, but I talked her out of it. Because by the time I finally reached her late the next day, getting on the next plane home didn’t matter quite so much.

  She had missed those awful minutes rushing Pat to the emergency room. She had missed the endless hours drinking tea we didn’t want while waiting to learn if his tests were clear. And she had missed the day when he sat up with his head covered in bandages, clutching his light saber in a bed next to the little girl who had lost all her hair because of the treatment she was receiving.

  Gina had missed all that, she had missed all that through no fault of her own. Personally, I blamed that fucking bastard Richard.

  But by the time I reached Gina, we knew that Pat was going to be all right. Now I didn’t want her to come home.

  I told myself that it was because I didn’t want her to hold Pat and tell him everything was going to be fine and then leave again. But I knew it was not quite as noble as that. Where the fuck was Gina when we needed her?

  “I can be there tomorrow,” she said. “This job can wait.”

  “There’s no need,” I said, dead calm. “It was just a knock. A bad knock. But he’s going to be okay.”

  “I’ll be coming home soon anyway. I’m not quite sure when—”

  “Don’t change your plans,” I said.

  Listen to us—as formal as two people feeling their way at a dull dinner party. Once we could talk all night, once we could talk about anything. Now we sound like two strangers who have never been properly introduced. Listen to us, Gina.

  ***

  Cyd was standing on my doorstep holding a takeout container.

  “Is this a bad time?”

  “No, it’s not a bad time. Come in.”

  She came into my home, handing me the container.

  “For Pat. Spaghetti pesto.”

  “Green spaghetti. His favorite. Thank you.”

  “You just need to put it in the microwave. Can you do that?”

  “Are you kidding? Even I know how to use a microwave. One minute or two?”

  “One ought to do it. Is he awake?”

  “He’s watching some TV. Just for a change.”

  Pat was sprawled all over the sofa, still in his Star Wars pajamas, watching the director’s cut of Return of the Jedi. The rule book had been thrown out of the window since he had come home from the hospital.

  “Hi Pat,” Cyd said, crouching down beside him and stroking his hair, carefully avoiding the large plaster that now covered one side of his forehead. “How’s your poor old head?”

  “It’s fine. My stitches are a bit itchy.”

  “I bet they are.”

  “But—guess what? They don’t have to be taken out. My stitches.”

  “No?”

  “No, they just fade away,” Pat said, looking to me for confirmation.

  “That’s right,” I said. “They dissolve. They’re the new kind of stitches, aren’t they?”

  “The new kind,” Pat nodded, turning his attention back to Princess Leia dressed as a scantily clad concubine in the court of Jabba the Hutt.

  “That’s some outfit she’s got on,” Cyd said.

  “Yes, it is,” agreed Pat. “She’s a slave girl.”

  “Goodness.”

  They watched Princess Leia squirming on the end of her chain for a few moments.

  “Well, I’m going to leave you to get better,” Cyd said.

  “Okay,” Pat said.

  “Cyd brought you some dinner,” I said. “Green spaghetti. What do you say?”

  “Thank you,” he said, giving her his most charming, David Niven-like smile.

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  I walked her to the door and I realized that something inside me felt like it was singing. I didn’t want her to go.

  “Thanks for coming ’round,” I said. “It’s made my day.”

  She turned and looked at me with those wide-set brown eyes.

  “I mean it,” I said. This is the best thing that’s happened to me all day. Definitely.”

  “But I don’t understand,” she said.

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “Why do you like me? You don’t even know me.”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  So I told her.

  “I like you because you’re strong, but you’re not hard. I like it that you don’t take crap from men, but you still left your country for a man because you thought he was the one for you.”

  “Biggest mistake of my life.”

  “Maybe. But I like it that you’re so romantic from watching all those MGM musicals as a little girl.”

  She laughed, shaking her head.

  “You see right through men, but you still want to find a man to share your life with,” I said.

  “Says who?”

  “And I like the way your entire face lights up when you smile. I like your eyes. I like your legs. I like the way you know how to talk to a
four-year-old kid. I like the way you were there when I needed someone. Everyone else just stood and stared. You were kind. And you didn’t have to be kind.”

  “Anything else?”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “I’m not beautiful at all.”

  “You’re beautiful and brave and I’m jealous of every man who ever went out with you. Now and again I walk in front of the place where you work in the hope of bumping into you.”

  “You miss your wife,” she said. “You really miss her.”

  “That’s true,” I conceded. “But it’s also true that you blow me away.”

  “Boy,” she said, shaking her head. “But you still don’t know me.”

  She didn’t say it the way she had said it before. Now she said it gently, kindly, as if it wasn’t my fault that I didn’t know her.

  And she moved toward me as she said it, looking at me with those eyes for a moment before they closed as she placed her mouth upon mine. I kissed her back.

  “I know you a little bit,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, giving me that. “You know me a little bit.”

  part two

  the ding-dong man

  nineteen

  Pat started school.

  The uniform he had to wear should have made him look grown-up. The gray V-necked sweater, the white shirt, and the yellow tie should have made him look like a little man. But they didn’t.

  The formality of his school clothes only underlined the shocking newness of him. Approaching his fifth birthday, he wasn’t even young yet. He was still brand new. Even though he was dressed more grown-up than me.

  And as I helped him get ready for his first day at school, I was startled to realize just how much I loved his face. When he was a baby, I couldn’t tell if he was really beautiful or if that was just my parental software kicking in. But now I could see the truth.

  With those light blue eyes, his long yellow hair, and the way his slow, shy smile could spread right across his impossibly smooth face, he really was a beautiful boy. And now I had to let my beautiful boy go out into the world. At least until 3:30 p.m. For both of us, it felt like a lifetime.

  He wasn’t smiling now. At breakfast he was pale and silent in his adult clothing, struggling to stop his chin trembling and his bottom lip sticking out, while over the Coco Pops I kept up a running commentary about the best days of your life.

  The Coco Pops were interrupted by a call from Gina. I knew it must have been difficult for her to phone—the working day was still going strong where she was—but I also knew that she wouldn’t miss Pat’s big day. I watched him talking to his mother, uncomfortable in his shirt and tie, a baby suddenly forced to impersonate a man. Then it was time to go.

  ***

  As we drove closer to the school I was seized by a moment of panic. There were children everywhere, swarms of them all in exactly the same clothes as Pat, all heading in the same direction as us. I could lose him in here. I could lose him forever.

  We pulled up some way from the school gates. There were cars double-parked and triple-parked everywhere. Tiny girls with Leonardo DiCaprio lunch boxes scrambled out of sport-utility vehicles the size of a Panzer tank. Bigger boys with Arsenal and Manchester United backpacks climbed out of old station wagons. The noise from that three-foot-high tribe was unbelievable.

  I took Pat’s clammy hand and we joined the throng. I could see a collection of small, bewildered new kids and their nervous parents milling about in the playground. We were just going through the gates to join them when I noticed one of Pat’s brand-new black leather shoes’ laces were undone.

  “Let me get your shoelace for you, Pat,” I said, kneeling down to tie it, realizing that this was the first day in his life he had ever been out of sneakers.

  Two bigger boys rolled past, arm in arm. They leered at us. Pat smiled at them shyly.

  “He can’t even do his shoes up,” one of them snorted.

  “No,” Pat said, “but I can tell the time.”

  They collapsed in guffaws of laughter, holding each other up for support, and reeled away, repeating what Pat had said with disbelief.

  “But I can tell the time, can’t I?” Pat said, thinking they doubted his word, his eyes blinking furiously as he seriously considered bursting into tears.

  “You can tell the time brilliantly,” I said, unable to really believe that I was actually going to turn my son loose among all the cynicism and spite of the lousy modern world. We went into the playground.

  A lot of the children starting school had both parents with them. But I wasn’t the only lone parent. I wasn’t even the only man.

  There was another solo father, maybe ten years older than me, a worn-out business type accompanying a composed little girl with a backpack bearing the grinning mugs of some boy band I had never heard of. We exchanged a quick look and then he avoided my eyes, as if what I had might be catching. I suppose his wife could have been at work. I suppose she could have been anywhere.

  The kindly headmistress came and led us into the assembly hall. She gave us a brief, breezy pep talk and then the children were all assigned to their individual classrooms.

  Pat got Miss Waterhouse, and with a handful of other parents and new kids we were marched off to her class by one of the trusted older children who were acting as guides. Our guide was a boy around eight years old. Pat stared up at him, dumbstruck with admiration.

  In Miss Waterhouse’s class a flock of five-year-olds were sitting cross-legged on the floor, patiently waiting for a story from their teacher, a young woman with the hysterical good humor of a game show host.

  “Welcome everyone!” Miss Waterhouse said. “You’re just in time for our morning story. But first it’s time for everyone to say good-bye to their mommy.” She beamed at me.

  “And daddy.”

  It was time to leave him. And although there had been a few emotional good-byes before he dropped out of nursery school, this time felt a bit different. This time it felt like I was being left.

  He was starting school and by the time he graduated, he would be a man and I would be middle-aged. Those long days of watching Star Wars videos at home while life went on somewhere else were over. Those days had seemed empty and frustrating at the time, but I missed them already. My baby was joining the world.

  Miss Waterhouse asked for volunteers to look after the new boys and girls. A forest of hands shot up and the teacher chose the chaperones. Suddenly, a solemn, exceptionally pretty little girl was standing next to us.

  “I’m Peggy,” she told Pat. “And I’m going to take care of you.”

  The little girl took his hand and led him into the classroom.

  He didn’t even notice me leaving.

  ***

  I can remember sleeping on the backseat of my father’s car. We were driving away from the city, coming back from nights out—the yearly visit to the London Palladium to see a pantomime, the weekly visits to see my grandmother—and I would watch the yellow lamps of East End streets and Essex A-roads blurring high above my dreaming head.

  I would stretch out on the backseat of my dad’s car—“You don’t have to sleep, just rest your eyes,” my mother would tell me—and soon I would be rocked off to sleep by the motion of the car and the murmur of my parents’ voices.

  The next thing I knew I would be in my father’s arms, the car up our drive, the engine still running as he lifted me from the backseat, swaddled in the tartan blanket that he kept in the car for our trips to the seaside and relatives and the London Palladium.

  These days it takes next to nothing to wake me. A drunk staggering home, a car door slamming, a false alarm miles away—they are all enough to snap me out of sleep and leave me staring at the ceiling for hours. But when I was a child sleeping on the backseat of my dad’s car, nothing could wake me up. I hardly stirred from my dreams w
hen we arrived home and I was carried up the stairs to bed wrapped up in that tartan blanket and my father’s arms.

  I wanted Pat to have memories like that. I wanted Pat to feel as secure as that. But with Gina gone and our old VW sold to pay the mortgage, these days Pat was by my side in the passenger seat of the MGF, struggling and fighting against sleep even when we were coming back from my parents and there was an hour’s worth of empty motorway ahead of us.

  I wanted my son to have car rides like the car rides that I had known as a child. But we were traveling light.

  ***

  Cyd called toward the end of the long morning.

  “How did it go?” she said.

  She sounded genuinely anxious. That made me like her even more.

  “It was a bit fraught,” I said. “The chin wobbled when it was time to say good-bye. There were a few tears in the eyes. But that was me, of course. Pat was absolutely fine.”

  She laughed, and in my mind’s eye I could see her smile lighting up the place where she worked, making it somewhere special.

  “I can make you laugh,” I said.

  “Yes, but now I’ve got to get to work,” she said. “Because you can’t pay my bills.” That was true enough. I couldn’t even pay my own bills.

  ***

  My father came with me to meet Pat at the end of his first day at school.

  “A special treat,” my dad said, parking his Toyota right outside the school gates. But he didn’t say if it was a special treat for Pat or a special treat for me.

  As the children came swarming out of the gates at 3:30, I saw that there was never a possibility of losing him in the crowd. Even among hundreds of children dressed more or less the same, you can still spot your own child a mile off.

  He was with Peggy, the little girl who was going to take care of him. She stared up at me with eyes that seemed strangely familiar.

  “Did you enjoy it?” I asked him, afraid that he was going to threaten to hold his breath if he ever had to go back.

  “Guess what?” Pat said. “The teachers have all got the same first name. They’re all called Miss.”