Man and Boy

by Tony Parsons

  “No, I don’t like Star Wars very much. I just play it because he likes it.”

  “It’s a boy’s game, isn’t it?” my mom said, never much of a one for breaking down traditional gender stereotypes.

  Peggy followed Pat into the house and my mom smiled at Cyd, who was holding back, half a step behind me, still gripping my arm. I had never seen her looking shy before. My mom grabbed her and kissed her on the cheek.

  “And you must be Cyd. Come in, dear, and make yourself at home.”

  “Thank you,” Cyd said.

  Cyd went into the house where I had grown up and my mom gave me a quick smile behind her back, lifting her eyebrows like a surprised lady in one of those old saucy seaside postcards.

  It had been quite a while, but I had brought home enough girls to know what that look meant.

  It meant that Cyd was what my mom would call a smasher.

  ***

  And in the back garden was what my mom would call quite a spread.

  The kitchen table had been carried out to the back and covered with a paper tablecloth splattered with images of party balloons, exploding champagne bottles, and laughing rabbits.

  The table had been loaded with bowls of crisps, nuts, and little bright orange cheesy things, plates of sandwiches with their crusts cut off, trays of mini-sausage rolls and six individual little paper dishes containing jelly and tinned fruit. In the center of this feast was a birthday cake in the shape of Darth Vader’s helmet with five candles.

  When we were all seated around the table and had sung a few renditions of “Happy Birthday, Dear Pat,” my dad offered around the mini-sausage rolls, looking at me shrewdly.

  “Bet you had a job all getting into that little sports car,” he said.

  From the living room I could hear one of his favorite albums on the stereo. It was the end of side two of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!, Frank breezing his way through Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.”

  “We didn’t come out in the MGF, Dad,” I said. “We came in Cyd’s car.”

  “Completely impractical, a car like that,” he continued, ignoring me. “Nowhere for the children, is there? A man has to think of those things when he buys a car. Or he should.”

  “My daddy’s got a motorbike,” Peggy told him.

  My father stared at her, chewing a mini-sausage roll, lost for words. Her daddy? A motorbike?

  “That’s nice, dear,” my mom said.

  “And a Thai girlfriend.”

  “Lovely!”

  “Her name’s Mem.”

  “What a pretty name.”

  “Mem’s a dancer.”

  “Goodness.”

  We all watched in silence, waiting for further revelations, as Peggy lifted open her sandwich and examined the contents. The further revelations didn’t come. Peggy closed her sandwich and shoved it in her mouth.

  I crunched my way through some bright orange cheesy things, feeling depressed.

  My parents were trying as hard as they could. But this tiny little girl already had another life that they could never be a part of. The all-consuming delight that they felt for their grandchild could never be felt for little Peggy. That kind of unconditional love was already impossible. She would always be too much of a stranger. I felt for them. And for Peggy too.

  “Mem’s not really a dancer,” Cyd said, watching my face, reading my mind. “She’s more of a stripper.”

  My old man coughed up a piece of a barbecued chip.

  “Bit went down the wrong hole,” he explained.

  My mom turned to Cyd with a bright smile.

  “Jelly?” she said.

  ***

  Once we had Mem’s job description out of the way, the party settled down. And my parents liked Cyd. I could tell that they liked her a lot.

  There were minefields to be negotiated—my dad had this thing about single mothers subsidized by the state and my mom had this thing about working mothers—but Cyd skipped through them without spilling her jelly.

  “The state can never take the place of a parent, Mr. Silver—and it shouldn’t try.”

  “Call me Paddy, love,” my dad said.

  “Some women have to work, Mrs. Silver—but that doesn’t mean their children don’t come first.”

  “Call me Elizabeth, dear,” my mom said.

  And she talked to Paddy and Elizabeth about all the things they wanted to talk about—the kind of films that a five-year-old should be allowed to watch with my mom, the right time to remove the training wheels on a child’s bike with my dad.

  And she made all the right noises: admiring my mom’s sausage rolls (“Homemade they are, dear; I’ll give you the recipe if you like”) and my dad’s garden (“Harry’s never been interested in gardens—I can’t understand that attitude myself”).

  But Cyd wasn’t some little local girl with whom I had danced a couple of times in a suburban club, one of the Kims and Kellys that I had brought home all the time until the day I brought home Gina.

  Cyd was visibly a woman with a past—meaning a past that contained marriage, pregnancy, and divorce, although not necessarily in that order. And it felt like the only way my parents could deal with that past was by ignoring it.

  Their conversation lurched between her childhood in Houston to the present day in London, as if everything in between had been withdrawn by censors.

  “Texas, you say?” my dad said. “Never been to Texas myself. But I met a few Texans in the war.” He leaned toward her conspiratorially. “Good card players, Texans.”

  “It must be lovely having sisters,” my mom said. “I had six brothers. Can you imagine that? Six brothers! Some women don’t like watching football and boxing on the telly. But it never bothered me. Because I had six brothers.”

  But Cyd’s broken marriage was always there waiting to be confronted. In the end Cyd dealt with it as casually as if it was just a stale sausage roll that had to be found and cast aside. She had never seemed more American.

  “My family is like your family,” she said to my mother. “Very close. I only came over here because Jim—that’s Peggy’s father—is English. That didn’t work out, but somehow I never made it back. Now I’ve met your son, I’m glad I didn’t.”

  And that was it.

  My mom looked at us as if we were Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw in Love Story. Even my dad seemed to be brushing away a tear from his eye. Then I realized it was just a crumb from a mini-sausage roll.

  By the time Pat blew out his five candles and we cut the cake, my parents were acting as if they had known Cyd and Peggy all their lives.

  If they were put out by the fact that the girl of my dreams had chosen someone to share her dreams with before me, then they were pretty good at hiding it. This should have pleased me more than it did.

  While Cyd was helping my mom clear the table and my dad was showing Pat and Peggy how he dealt with the menace of snails, I went into the living room and over to the stereo.

  Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! had stopped playing hours ago, but the cover of the record—an old vinyl LP, my father had never joined the CD revolution—was still propped up against the Sony music station.

  That album cover had always been special to me. Sinatra—tie askew, snap brim fedora on the back of his head—grins down at the perfect fifties couple, some Brylcreemed Romeo in a business suit with his suburban Juliet in pearl earrings and a little red dress.

  They look like an ordinary couple—you can’t imagine them hanging out with the Rat Pack in Vegas. But they look as though they have wrung as much joy out of this world as anyone possibly could. And I always loved looking at that couple when I was a child because I always thought they looked like my parents at the exact moment that they fell in love.

  Someone called my name from the garden, but I stared at the cover of Songs for Swingin’ Love
rs!, pretending that I hadn’t heard.

  They don’t make them like that anymore, I thought.

  ***

  “Everybody had a good time,” Cyd said.

  “It seemed to go very well,” I said.

  We were back in London and up in her flat. Peggy and Pat were sitting on the sofa watching a tape of Pocahontas (Peggy’s choice). Tired from a couple of hours in Cyd’s wheezing old Beetle, they were starting to snap at each other. I wanted to get home.

  “Everybody had a good time,” Cyd said again. “Pat liked his presents. Peggy ate so much that I won’t have to feed her for a week. And I really loved meeting your mom and dad. They’re really sweet people. Yes, everybody had a good time. Except you.”

  “What are you talking about? I had a good time.”

  “No,” she said. “And what hurts me—what really hurts me—is that you didn’t even try. Your mom and dad made an effort. I know they loved Gina and I know it couldn’t have been easy for them. But they really tried to make it work today. You just couldn’t be bothered, could you?”

  “What do you want me to do? Start doing the Lambada after a couple of Diet Cokes? I had as good a time as I could ever have at a kid’s birthday party.”

  “I’m a grown woman and I have a child, okay? You have to learn to deal with that, Harry. Because if you can’t, we haven’t got any kind of future.”

  “I like Peggy,” I said. “And I get on great with her.”

  “You liked Peggy when she was just the little girl who palled around with your son,” she said. “You liked her when she was just the cute little kid who played nicely on the floor of your home. What you don’t like is what she’s become now that you’ve started going out with me.”

  “And what’s that?” I said.

  “The reminder of another man’s fuck,” she said.

  The reminder of another man’s fuck? That was a bit strong. You couldn’t imagine Sinatra sticking that on one of his album covers.

  twenty-seven

  It was more than the reminder of another man’s fuck.

  If living alone with Pat had taught me anything, it was that being a parent is mostly intuitive—we make it up as we go along. Nobody teaches you how to do it. You learn on the job.

  When I was a kid, I thought that my parents had some secret knowledge about how to keep me in line and bring me up right. I thought that there was some great master plan to make me eat my vegetables and go to my room when I was told. But I was wrong. I know now that they were doing what every parent in the world does. Just winging it.

  If Pat wanted to watch Return of the Jedi at four in the morning or listen to Puff Daddy at midnight, then I didn’t have to think about it—I could just pull the plug and send him back to bed.

  And if he was down after a phone call from Gina or because of something that had happened at school, I could take him in my arms and give him a cuddle. When it’s your own flesh and blood, you don’t have to think about doing the right thing. You don’t have to think at all. You just do it.

  But I would never have that luxury with Peggy.

  ***

  She was on the sofa, her little bare legs stretched out on the coffee table, watching her favorite Australian soap. I was sitting next to her, trying to shut out the background babble of dysfunctional surfers who didn’t know the true identity of their parents as I read an article about another bank collapsing in Japan. It looked like complete chaos over there.

  “What do you mean—you’re not my mother?” somebody said on screen and Peggy began to stir as the theme music began.

  Usually she was off and running the moment the Aussies were gone. But now she stayed right where she was, leaning forward across the coffee table and picking up Cyd’s nail polish from among the jumble of magazines and toys. I watched her as she began to unscrew the top of the small glass vial.

  “Peggy?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t play with that, darling.”

  “It’s okay, Harry. Mommy lets me.”

  She removed the lid with the small brush on and, very delicately, began painting crimson nail polish over her tiny, almost nonexistent toe nails and, I couldn’t help noticing, all over the tips of her toes.

  “Be careful with that stuff, Peggy. It’s not for playing with, okay?”

  She shot me a look.

  “Mommy lets me do this.”

  Globs of bright red nail polish slid down toes the size of a half a matchstick. She soon looked as though she had been treading grapes or wading through an abattoir. She lifted her foot, admiring her handiwork, and a drizzle of red paint plopped onto a copy of Red.

  With Pat I would have raised my voice or grabbed the nail polish or sent him to his room. With Peggy, I didn’t know what to do. I certainly couldn’t touch her. I certainly couldn’t raise my voice.

  “Peggy.”

  “What, Harry?”

  I really wanted her to do the right thing and not get nail polish all over her feet and the carpet and the coffee table and the magazines. But, far more than all of this, I wanted her to like me. So I sat there watching her small feet turning bright red, making doubtful noises, doing nothing.

  Cyd came out of the bathroom wrapped in a white robe, toweling her hair. She saw Peggy daubing her toes with nail polish and sighed.

  “How many times have I told you to leave that stuff alone?” she asked, snatching away the nail polish. She lifted Peggy off the ground like a cat plucking up an unruly kitten. “Come on, miss. In the bath.”

  “But—”

  “Now.”

  What made me laugh—or rather what made me want to bury my face in my hands—is that you would never guess that so much of our time was spent dealing with the fallout of the nuclear family. Cyd’s small flat was like a temple to romance.

  The walls were covered with posters from films—films that told tales of perfect love, love that might bang its head against a few obstacles now and again, but love that was ultimately without any of the complications of the modern world.

  As soon as you came into the flat, there was a framed poster of Casablanca in the poky little hallway. There were framed posters of An Affair to Remember and Brief Encounter in the slightly less poky living room. And of course there was Gone with the Wind in the place of honor right above the bed. Even Peggy had a poster of Pocahontas on her wall looking down on all her old Ken and Barbie dolls and Spice Girls merchandise. Everywhere you looked—men smoldering, women melting, and true love conquering.

  These posters weren’t stuck up in the way that a student might stick them up—halfhearted and thoughtless and mostly to cover a patch of rising damp or some crumbling plaster. There was far more than blu-tack keeping them up. Placed behind glass and encased in tasteful black frames, they were treated like works of art—which I suppose is what they were.

  Cyd had bought those posters from one of those cine-head shops in Soho, taken them to the Frame Factory or somewhere similar and then lugged them all the way home. She had to go out of her way to have those posters of Gone with the Wind and the rest up on her walls. The message was clear—this is what we are about in this place.

  But it wasn’t what we were about, not really. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman might have had their love affair cut short by the Nazi invasion of Paris, but at least Bogie didn’t have to worry about how he should treat Ingrid’s child from her relationship with Victor Laszlo. And it is open to debate if Rhett Butler would have been quite so keen on Scarlett O’Hara if she had been dragging a kid from a previous romance around Georgia.

  I had never been around a little girl before, and there was an air of calm about Peggy—and it was definitely calm more than sugar and spice or any of that stuff—that I had never seen in Pat or other small boys. There was a composure about her that you wouldn’t see in a boy of the same age. Maybe a
ll little girls are like that. Maybe it was just Peggy.

  What I am saying is—I liked her.

  But I didn’t know if I was meant to be her friend or her father, if I was meant to be sweetness and light or firm but fair. None of it felt right. When your partner has got a child, it can never be like the movies. And anyone who can’t see that has watched a few too many MGM musicals.

  Cyd came back into the room with Peggy all clean and changed and ready for her big night out at Pizza Express with her father. The little girl climbed on my lap and gave me a kiss. She smelled of soap and shampoo. Her mother ruffled my hair.

  “What are you thinking about?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Peggy’s eyes got big and wide with excitement when she heard the sound of a powerful motorbike pulling up in the street.

  “Daddy!” she said, scrambling from my lap, and I felt a stab of jealousy that caught me by surprise.

  From the window we all watched Jim Mason park the big BMW bike, swinging his legs off as if he was dismounting from a horse. Then he removed his helmet and I saw that Cyd had been right—he was a good-looking bastard, all chiseled jawline and short, thick, wavy hair, like the face on a Roman coin or a male model who likes girls.

  I had always kind of hoped that there was going to be something of Glenn about him—a fading pretty boy whose years of breaking hearts had come and gone. But this one looked as though he still ate all his greens.

  He waved up at us. We waved back.

  Meeting your partner’s ex should be awkward and embarrassing. You know the most intimate details of their life and yet you have never met them. You know they did bad things because you have been told all about them and also because, if they hadn’t done bad things, you would not be with your partner.

  It should be a bumpy ride meeting the man she knew before she knew you. But meeting Jim wasn’t that much of a problem for me. I got off lightly as there was still so much unfinished business between him and Cyd.