by Tony Parsons
But most of all I thought about how good Eamon had been with Pat—admiring his light saber, talking to him about Luke’s home planet, telling me that he was a special kid.
I know that at that stage of my life—and at all the future stages of my life, come to that—I would like anyone who liked my boy. When you are alone with a child, you want as many people rooting for him as you can get. This young Irish comic with dried wax in his ears seemed to be on our side. And so I found myself on his side too.
I was ready to work with him on a part-time basis because I was bored and broke. But most of all I was ready to work with him because he thought my son was going to make it.
“I need to see your act,” I said. “I need to see what you do on stage so I can think about how it could work on the box. Have you got a sample tape?”
“What?” he said.
twenty-two
Whatever the opposite of inscrutable is, that’s what small children are.
Maybe in ten years’ time Pat would be able to hide his feelings behind some blank adolescent mask and the old man—me—wouldn’t have a clue what he was thinking. But at four going on five, I could tell that the latest phone call from his mother had given him the blues.
“You okay, Pat?”
He nodded listlessly, and I followed him down to the bathroom where he squirted some children’s toothpaste on his Han Solo toothbrush.
“How’s Mommy?”
“She’s all right. She’s got a cold.”
He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t about to cry. His eyes were dry and his mouth was still. But he was down.
“You want to watch a video?” I said, watching him polish teeth that still looked brand new.
He spat into the sink and shot me a suspicious look.
“It’s school tomorrow,” he said.
“I know it’s school tomorrow. I don’t mean watch the whole film. Just, say, the start of the first film up until the two ’droids get captured. How about that?”
He finished spitting into the sink and replaced his brush in the rack.
“Want to go to bed,” he said.
So I followed him into his bedroom and tucked him in. He didn’t want a story. But I couldn’t turn out the light knowing that he was depressed.
I knew what he was missing and it wasn’t even what you could call a mother’s love. It was a mother’s indulgence. Someone who would tell him that it didn’t matter if he couldn’t tie his shoes yet. Someone who would tell him that he was still the center of the universe when he had just learned what we all learn on our first day of school—that we are not the center of the universe. I was so desperate for him to make it that I couldn’t be relaxed about him making it. Gina’s indulgence. That’s what he really missed.
“She’ll be back,” I said. “Your mother. You know that she’ll be back for you, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“As soon as she’s done her work,” he said.
“We’re okay, aren’t we?” I asked him. “You and me—we’re doing okay, aren’t we?”
He stared at me, blinking away the fatigue, trying to understand what I was going on about.
“We’re managing without Mommy, aren’t we, Pat? You let me wash your hair now. I make you things you like to eat—bacon sandwiches and stuff. And school’s okay, isn’t it? You like school. We’re all right, aren’t we? You and me?”
I felt bad about pushing him like this. But I needed him to tell me that we were doing all right. I needed to know that we were coping.
He gave me a tired David Niven smile.
“Yes, we’re all right, Daddy,” he said, and I kissed him good night, hugging him gratefully.
That’s the worst thing about splitting up, I thought as I turned out his light. It makes children hide their hearts. It teaches them how to move between separate worlds. It turns them all into little diplomats. That’s the biggest tragedy of all. Divorce turns every kid into half a pint of semi-skinned Henry Kissinger.
***
“I come from a little town called Kilcarney,” said Eamon Fish, removing the mike from its stand and gently tapping the transparent hearing device in his left ear. “A quiet little town called Kilcarney where the girls are legendary.”
I was watching him on a monitor, sitting in the front row of the small studio audience that was facing the backsides of five cameramen. Although we were surrounded by all the usual paraphernalia of the television studio—lights burning in the rigging, cables snaking across the floor, the shadows beyond the cameras teeming with people whose jobs ranged from floor manager to working the teleprompter to pouring water, all of them wearing what we called “blacks”—the director was shooting Eamon’s act to make it look more like a stand-up routine than just another late night chat show. There were already too many talk shows that looked like boot sale David Lettermans. But what would really make it different was the host.
“For those of you who have never been to that beautiful part of my country, you should know that Kilcarney has largely been untouched by the modern world. There are, for example, no vibrators in Kilcarney.” The audience tittered. “It’s true. The priests had them all removed. Because Kilcarney girls kept chipping their teeth.”
There was laughter from the audience, laughter that grew slightly nervous as Eamon ambled off the small stage and slowly came closer to us.
“I mean, I’m not saying Kilcarney girls are stupid,” he said. “But why does a Kilcarney girl always wash her hair in her mother’s sink? Because that’s where you wash vegetables.”
The laughter grew louder. None of the studio audience—the usual collection of the bored and the curious on the lam for a couple of hours of free fun—had ever seen this Eamon Fish before. But now they felt he was harmless. Then he turned on them.
“Actually, I’m making all this up,” he said. “It’s all crap. Kilcarney girls have the best exam results in Western Europe. In fact, the average Kilcarney girl has more A Levels than the average Englishman has tattoos. It’s not true that the only difference between a Kilcarney girl and a mosquito is that a mosquito stops sucking if you hit it on the head. It’s not true that Kilcarney girls only get fifteen minutes for lunch because any longer than that and you have to retrain them. It’s not true that what Kilcarney girls and bottled Guinness have in common is that both of them are empty from the neck up. None of it is true.”
Eamon sighed, ran his free hand through his thick mop of black hair, and sat down on the side of the stage.
“What is true is that even in this Guardian-reading, muesli-munching, politically correct age, we seem to need someone to hate. Once it was the thick Irishman and the ball-breaking mother-in-law. Now it’s blond girls. Essex girls. Kilcarney girls.”
He shook his sleepy head.
“Now, we all know in our hearts that geographical location and hair color have got bugger all to do with sexual morality or intelligence. So why do we need a group of people we can sneer at? What fundamental need in our pathetic souls does it fulfill? When we laugh about the blond Kilcarney girl from Essex who turns off the light after sex by closing the car door, what’s in it for us?”
It was only the pilot show, but I could already tell that Eamon was going to do it. After removing all the dried wax from his ears, he had crashed through the fear barrier and was learning how to be himself with five cameras watching. Fish was fine. I was more worried about the studio audience.
They had come in expecting to have their funny bones tickled, and discovered that they were expected to defend their prejudices. They felt defensive, cheated, not good. It was a problem that we were always going to have with Eamon’s show. As I saw it, the only way to solve this dilemma was to get them all drunk.
At our first production meeting after the pilot, I told the assistant producer to open a few bottles and cans and serve it to the audience while the
y were waiting in line to come into the studio. Everybody looked at me as if I was a genius.
That’s what I love about television. You recommend opening a few cans of lager and they act as though you just painted the Sistine Chapel.
***
“So it’s a better job than the last one, but they pay you less money,” my father said. “How do they work that out then?”
“Because I don’t work all week,” I told him yet again.
We were in their back garden, supposedly kicking a ball around with Pat, although he had retreated to the far end of the garden with his light saber and dreams of conquering intergalactic evil. So that left me and two pensioners kicking a plastic football around between us in the autumn-tinged sunlight.
It was turning cold, but we were reluctant to go back inside. It was late September. The year was running out. There wouldn’t be too many more Sunday afternoons like this one.
“If it really is a better job, then they should cough up the readies,” said my dad, the international businessman, gently side-footing the ball to his wife. “All these TV companies are loaded.”
“Not the ones that Harry works for,” my mom said, thinking she was being loyal, and trapping the ball under the sole of her carpet slipper.
“I go in for a couple of production meetings and I’m there when we record the show,” I said. “And that’s it. I’m not in the office all day, every day. I don’t give them my life. I just go in twice a week and act like a big shot, bossing everyone around and coming up with brilliant ideas. Then I go home.”
“Home to Pat,” said my mom, knocking the ball to me. “Your grandson.”
“I know who my grandson is,” my old man said irritably.
“Some people executive produce a whole bunch of shows,” I said. “But I’m just going to do this one. I’ve worked it out. It’s going to bring in less than we had before, but it will be enough.”
“This way he gets to pay his bills, but he’s there when Pat comes home from school,” my mom said.
My dad wasn’t convinced.
He wanted me to have everything that life has to offer—the career and the kids, the family and the salary, the happy hearth and the fat paycheck. He wanted me to have it all. But nobody gets away with having it all.
“Pele,” he said, swinging a foot at the plastic football. It shot off his toe and into the rose bushes. “Bugger,” he said. “I’ll get it.”
My mom and I watched him wander down to the end of the garden to retrieve the ball. He took the opportunity to put his arm around Pat and ask him what he was doing. Pat chattered away excitedly, his smooth round face turned up toward his grandfather, and my old man grinned down at him with eternal tenderness.
“Is he all right?” I asked her. “He had a funny turn in the park the other day.”
“Fighting for his breath, was he?” my mom said, not taking her eyes from him. And not surprised.
“Yes,” I said. “Fighting for his breath.”
“I’m trying to get him to go to the doctor,” she said. “Or the quack, as your dad calls him.”
We smiled at each other in the encircling darkness.
“He must be the last person in the world who calls doctors quacks,” I said.
“I’m not going to no quack,” my mom said. It was a pretty good impersonation of all the bad-tempered certainty my father was capable of summoning up. “I don’t want no sawbones messing about with me.”
We laughed out loud, loving his old-fashioned distrust of anyone with any kind of authority, from the lowliest traffic cop to the most revered members of the medical profession, both of us taking comfort from the fact that my father was exactly the same as he always had been, even if we feared that might no longer be true.
He came back from the end of the garden with the ball and his grandson, asking us what was so funny.
“You are,” my mom said, taking his arm, and we all went back inside my father’s house.
I didn’t want it all. All I wanted was one more chance. One more chance to have a unified life, a life without broken bits and jagged edges. One more shot at happiness.
I didn’t care how long it took before Gina came back from Tokyo. I was happy with Pat. And I wasn’t looking for a brilliant career. All I wanted from work was a way to pay the mortgage.
But I wasn’t ready to grow old and cold, hating women and the world because of what had happened to me. I didn’t want to be fat, bald, and forty, boring my teenage son to tears about all the sacrifices I had made for him. I wanted some more life. One more chance to get it right. That’s what I wanted. That didn’t seem like much to ask.
Then the next day, Gina’s dad came round to our place with his daughter Sally, the sulky teenage girl on the sofa, one of the many kids that Glenn had begat and abandoned as he moved on to sexier pastures, and it crossed my mind that what has truly messed up the lousy modern world are all the people who always want one more chance.
twenty-three
Glenn was dressed in his winter plumage—a ratty Afghan coat draped over a shiny blue tank top that revealed the hairs on his scrawny chest, and hipsters so tight that they made a mountain out of his molehill. He was so far out of fashion that he had just come back in style.
“Hello, Harry man,” he said, clasping my hand in some obscure power-to-the-people shake that thirty years ago probably signaled the revolution was about to commence. “How you doing? Is the little dude around? All well? Sweet, sweet.”
There was a time when I wanted my old man to be more like Gina’s dad. A time when I wished my father had appeared in glossy magazines in his youth, grinned on Top of the Pops once or twice in the early seventies, and shown some interest in the world beyond the rose bushes at the end of his garden. But as I looked at Glenn’s wizened ass through his tight trousers, it seemed like a long time ago.
Glenn’s youngest daughter was lurking behind him. At first, I thought that Sally was in a bad mood. She came into the house all surly, avoiding eye contact by taking a great interest in the carpet, letting her stringy brown hair—longer than I remembered it—fall over her pale face as if she wanted to hide from the world and everything in it. But she wasn’t really in a bad mood at all. She was fifteen years old. That was the problem.
I took them into the kitchen, depressed at the sight of two of Gina’s relatives turning up out of the blue and wondering how soon I could get rid of them. But I softened when Sally’s face lit up—really lit up—when Pat padded into the room with Peggy. Perhaps she was human after all.
“Hi, Pat!” she beamed. “How you doing?”
“Fine,” he said, giving no sign that he remembered his mother’s half-sister. What was she to him? Half an aunt? A step-cousin? These days we have relatives that we haven’t even invented names for yet.
“I made you a tape,” she said, fumbling in her rucksack and eventually producing a cassette without its case. “You like music, don’t you?”
Pat stared at the tape blankly. The only music I could remember him liking was the theme from Star Wars.
“He likes music, doesn’t he?” she said to me.
“Loves it,” I said. “What do you say, Pat?”
“Thank you,” he said. He took the tape and disappeared with Peggy.
“I remembered how much he liked hip-hop when we were all staying at my dad’s place,” she said. “There’s just a few of the classics on there. Coolio. Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Tupac. Doctor Dre. Stuff like that. Things that a little kid might like.”
“That’s really kind of you,” I said.
They sipped their drinks in silence—herb tea for Glenn, regular Coke for Sally—and I felt a stab of resentment at these reminders of Gina’s existence. What were they doing here? What did either of these people have to do with my life? Why didn’t they just fuck off?
Then Pat or Peggy must have stuf
fed Sally’s tape into the stereo because suddenly an angry black voice was booming above a murderous bass line in the living room.
“You fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you—so that would be a dumb fucking, motherfucking thing to fucking do.”
“That’s lovely,” I said to Sally. “He’ll treasure it. So—you visiting your dad again?”
She shook her head.
“I’m living there now,” she said, shooting her old man a look from under her ratty bangs.
“A few problems back home,” Glenn said. “With my ex-lady. And her new partner.”
“Old hippies,” Sally sneered, “who can’t stand the thought of anybody else having fun.”
“Heavy scene with the new guy,” Glenn said. “Bit of a disciplinarian.”
“That moron,” Sally added.
“And how’s your boyfriend?” I said, remembering the ape boy smirking on the sofa.
“Steve?” she said, and I thought I saw the sting of tears in her eyes. “Packed me in, didn’t he? The fat pig. For Yasmin McGinty. That old slut.”
“But we spoke to Gina the other night,” Glenn said, his foggy brain finally getting down to business. “And we promised that we would look in on you and Pat if we were in the neighborhood.”
Now I understood what they were doing here. No doubt they were responding to Gina’s prompting. But in their own ham-fisted way, they were trying to help.
“Heard you’ve got a new gig,” Glenn said. “Just wanted to say that the boy’s welcome to crash with us any time.”
“Thanks, Glenn. I appreciate the offer.”
“And if you ever need a babysitter, just give me a call,” Sally said, hiding behind her hair and staring at a point somewhere beyond my shoulder.
It was really sweet of her. And I knew I needed a bit of extra cover with Pat now that I was working part-time.
But Jesus Christ. I wasn’t that desperate.
***