Man and Boy

by Tony Parsons

  “That’s got nothing to do with it,” I said. “Well, maybe a bit. Maybe even a lot. But that’s not all of it. I know what I feel about you. And I think you feel pretty much the same way about me. I want us to be together.”

  She smiled, shaking her head again, more firmly this time. “No, Harry.”

  “No?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why not?”

  It was a pointless question, the kind of question a child asks. But I had to ask it.

  “Because you want someone with a less complicated life than me,” she said. “No kid. No ex-husband. No reminders of the past. You know you do. Remember how you felt on Pat’s birthday? Remember that? You and I both know there’s no future for us.”

  “I don’t know that at all,” I said.

  “You think you want someone who can transform your life with love. But you don’t really want love, Harry. You couldn’t handle real love. You want romance.”

  Her words were made worse, much worse, by the fact that they were said with enormous tenderness. There was no anger or malice in them. It was as if she felt genuinely sorry for me.

  “And that’s fine,” she said. “That’s the way you are and in a lot of ways it’s a good way to be. But it would never work between us because you can’t make the hearts and flowers stuff last for a lifetime. Not with kids around. Especially when they’re not your own.”

  “We could,” I insisted.

  “No,” she said. “We would end up in exactly the same place that you and Gina ended up. And I don’t want that. I can’t go through all that—not with Peggy. Sweet nothings are fine. Romance is fine. But I want someone who is going to rub my feet when I get old and tell me they love me, even when I can’t remember where I put my keys. That’s what I want. I want someone I can grow old with. And—I’m really sorry—but I don’t think that’s what you want.”

  She reached out to touch my face but I turned away, wondering where I had heard all this before. We sat there in silence in that subterranean car park, the whole weight of Chinatown above our heads.

  “I thought you didn’t want Peggy to get hurt by seeing you in a short-term relationship,” I said.

  “I’d rather she saw that than a long-term relationship that goes wrong,” she said. “And Pat and Peggy will still be friends. She will still see you. But this way you and I both get spared a lot of grief.”

  “This way?” I said. “You sound like you’re ending it.”

  “Not ending it,” she said. “We can still be friends too. But I looked at you at your son’s birthday party and I realized that Peggy and I are not what you want. Not really.”

  “I know what it means when a woman says we can still be friends,” I said. “It means ‘close the door on your way out.’ That’s what it means, doesn’t it?”

  “Don’t feel too bad, Harry,” she said. “People break up every day. It’s not the end of the world.”

  ***

  The thing about cancer is that it can always exceed your worst expectations. There is something pornographic about cancer’s ability to confound your imagination. Whatever new obscenity cancer comes up with to torment and torture you, it can always do worse tomorrow.

  My father was shot full of morphine and his skin no longer had the color of living skin and, even with the oxygen mask, his lungs strained and heaved to take in a pitiful amount of air that simply wasn’t enough.

  Sometimes the fog in his eyes would clear, that fog caused by the pain and the killers of pain, and when it cleared, I saw regret and fear in those eyes swimming with tears and I was convinced that this was it, this was the end, this was surely the end.

  “I love you,” I told him, taking his hands, and saying those words that I had never said to him before.

  And I told him because surely it could get no worse than this—but it did get worse, that’s the thing about cancer, it can always exceed your blackest moment.

  So the next day I went back to that crowded ward, sat by his bed holding his hand, and—crying harder this time—I told my father that I loved him again.

  part three

  guess what?

  thirty-one

  Eamon froze.

  You would have missed it if you were watching from the cheap seats of the studio audience, what with all the cameras and crew obscuring your view. You might even have missed it if you were tuning in from out there in TV land, what with the television being just one more voice droning away in your living room and this particular show not being central to your life in the way that it was to mine.

  But I saw him lose it on one of the monitors up in the gallery, and I knew that this moment could come if you had spent sixty years in front of a camera or sixty seconds. The moment that the autocue and the script and the rehearsal all mean nothing. The moment you lose it.

  “Coming from Kilcarney, I’m shocked at all the divorce over here,” he said, and then he blinked twice, the panic flooding into his face. “Very shocked…”

  He stared into that unforgiving black eye with the red light above it, his mind blank, lost for words. It was more than forgetting the punch line. It was a complete failure of faith, like the tightrope walker who looks down and sees his own body smashed on the ground far, far below. In the studio audience, someone coughed. The silence seemed to hum with his fractured nerves.

  “Come on, come on, you can do it,” I whispered, and he blinked, breathed, and suddenly he was back on his rope.

  “Over here, when a woman meets a guy now, she thinks—is this the sort of man I want my children to spend their weekends with?”

  The audience laughed and Eamon wobbled to safety on the other side. He told his next joke, still shaking with terror, trying very hard not to look down.

  ***

  “It happens,” I said, taking him to a quiet corner of the green room. “Just when you think that you’re on top of this thing and stage fright is something that happens to other people, then it happens.”

  Eamon sucked on a beer.

  “I don’t know that I can do this thing, Harry. I don’t know if I can go out there every week knowing there’s the possibility that my mind is going to suddenly seize up.”

  “You just have to learn to live with the knowledge that your mind can go completely blank when a million people are watching you.”

  “Fuck me.”

  “You can do it.”

  “But the point is—I can’t. I might look confident and cocky to the folks back home, but it’s all an act. It’s not real, Harry. I throw up in my dressing room before I go on. I wake up at three in the morning dreaming that everybody’s looking at me and I’ve lost my voice. I can’t do it. I’m too nervous.”

  “You’re not nervous,” I said. “You’re excited.”

  “What about when I puke my guts up before a show?”

  “You’re excited. You’re about to go out there and entertain the country. Naturally you’re excited. Who wouldn’t be?”

  “What about my bad dreams?”

  “That’s not nerves. That’s excitement. Teach yourself the presenter’s mantra and chant it again and again—I am not nervous, I am excited.”

  “I am not nervous,” Eamon said. “I am excited.”

  “That’s it.”

  Someone came over with a sausage roll in one hand and a glass of white wine in the other and told Eamon that was the best show he had ever done.

  “You want to get a real drink?” he asked me.

  ***

  “Sorry, gents,” said a black bouncer the size of a schooner, making us sound like a couple of public lavatories. “It’s dress corporate.”

  “Dress corporate?” I said.

  “Suits. Ties. Business garb.”

  But then the other bouncer, a white guy, recognized Eamon’s face.

  “It’s all rig
ht, Chris,” he said, lifting the red velvet rope. “How you doing, Eamon?”

  Smiles all around. Come in, come in. Me and my famous mate went into the darkness of the club and suddenly I had never felt more sober.

  All over the bar there were beautiful half-naked girls—no, more like three-quarters naked girls, or nine-tenths naked girls—writhing and grinding and dancing in the faces of seated businessmen whose brows were beaded with sweat and whose paunchy bodies were immobilized by longing and lager. The girls all wore garter belts halfway up their thighs. The garter belts were stuffed with ten- and twenty-pound notes.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Eamon said. “The penetration is all in your wallet.”

  We went downstairs where a smiling black girl in a kind of little white tutu number greeted Eamon by name. She led us to a table by the side of a stage where more girls wearing only high heels and dental floss for underwear were sliding up and down poles.

  They—and their scantily clad sisters torturing middle-ranking executives all over the room—were dancing to one of those American girl singers whose name I could never remember, the one who boasts about being both a bitch and a lover. One of the new songs. I realized that most of the songs I knew were old songs.

  A bottle of champagne appeared. I told Eamon that I wanted a beer, but he said we could only get champagne at these tables. The champagne was compulsory where we were.

  A statuesque blond in a kind of disposable evening dress appeared. She smiled at me as if she had been looking for me all her life.

  “Would you like a dance?”

  What the hell. I could probably use a dance.

  “Sure,” I said, standing up and starting to jig around from foot to foot in that lame excuse for dancing that we have in this country. I felt good. This song about being a bitch and a lover wasn’t so bad after all.

  “No,” said Venus impatiently. I realized that she had a Birmingham accent. “You don’t dance. You just sit there.”

  She indicated the poleaxed businessmen lusting silently in their chairs all over the room as girls bent double and winked at them from between their legs or almost grazed the broken veins in their boozy noses with a perfect nipple. “I dance for you, okay? You sit there and watch. No touching. One song for £10. Minimum.”

  “Maybe later,” I said, sitting down and gulping some champagne. Venus disappeared.

  “Relax, Harry,” Eamon smiled. “You’re not nervous. You’re excited.” He slapped me on the back and roared. “I love you, you fucking bastard. How the fuck are you?”

  “Brilliant,” I said. “My old man’s in a cancer ward and my wife—my ex-wife—wants custody of our son.”

  He looked at me with real concern. Not easy with a flute of champagne in your hand and naked dancing girls swarming all around.

  “How is your dad?”

  “He’s stabilized,” I said. “That’s what the doctors call it. That means there’s no marked deterioration. If he stays like this, maybe he can come home. But he wouldn’t be coming home to get better.”

  “Can I dance for you, Eamon?” said a young Asian girl with hair down to her waist.

  She was the only Asian girl in the house. There were a few black women in here but mostly the girls were blonds, either by birth or bottle. It was a bit like flicking through Playboy. This was a place where blonds ruled the world.

  “Later,” Eamon said, turning back to me as the Asian beauty disappeared into the crowd. “I’m sorry about your dad, Harry. And it’s a drag that your ex-missus is cutting up rough. But cheer up, you miserable fucker.” He drained his flute and filled it again. “At least you’ve got Cyd. She’s a grand girl.”

  “That’s finished,” I said.

  “Would you like a dance?” some pneumatic blond asked me.

  “No thanks,” I said. She went away, not taking it personally. “Me and Cyd—we had our problems.”

  “Problems?” Eamon said. “At the award thing, you looked like you were getting on fine.”

  “We got on fine when there were just the two of us. But she’s got a kid. And I’ve got a kid. And they’re great kids. But that means she’s got an ex-husband and I’ve got an ex-wife. And it was all—I don’t know—just so crowded.”

  “And that was your problem?”

  “Well, the biggest problem was that she dumped me. But she dumped me because I sometimes got depressed at how crowded it was. And because she thought I wanted—it sounds stupid—some kind of perfect love. And maybe she was right. She could handle things the way they were. But for some reason, I couldn’t.”

  “Because you’re a romantic, Harry,” Eamon said. “Because you believe in all the old songs. And the old songs don’t prepare you for real life. They make you allergic to real life.”

  “What’s wrong with the old songs? At least nobody thinks it’s clever to be a bitch and a lover in the old songs.”

  “You’re in love with love, Harry. You’re in love with the idea of love. Cyd’s a grand girl—but what’s really special about her is that you can’t have her. That’s what really grabs you.”

  That wasn’t true. I missed her. I especially missed the way she put her arms around me when we slept. Most couples, they turn their backs on each other as soon as it’s time for sleep. Not her. She snuggled and cuddled and tried to make us one flesh. That’s ridiculous, I know, that’s the impossible dream. But that’s the dream she made me dream. And the thought that we would never sleep like that again was unbearable.

  “She was special,” I said.

  “Look around,” Eamon said, trying to fill my flute. I put my hand over the top of my glass. I’m not much of a drinker and I was buzzed already. “There’s what? A hundred girls in here?”

  I looked around. On the outskirts of the room where the girls in tutus waited with their torches and their trays, dozens of girls roamed the shallow waters of the club.

  Dozens more squirmed rhythmically in front of businessmen who leered and snickered when they were in their little gangs and then sat there all bashful and—yes—actually reverential when one of them bought a dance. It’s so easy to push our buttons, I thought, unable to imagine any woman melting—while simultaneously reaching for her money—at the sight of any man’s buttocks.

  Looking at the faces of the men looking at all that perfect female flesh—flesh toned by youth and gym, flesh that here and there had been enhanced by the surgeon’s hand—it was easy to believe that being a man is like being chained to the village idiot.

  “One…two…three,” said Eamon, knocking back the champagne as he started counting the girls, “…eight…nine…ten…”

  “Yes,” I said. “Maybe a hundred girls.”

  “They’re all special, Harry. So many special girls that I can’t even count them. The world is full of special girls.”

  “Not like Cyd,” I said.

  “Bollocks,” said Eamon. “Great big hairy bollocks, Harry.” He emptied his glass, tried to fill it again, and seemed surprised to discover that the bottle was empty. He ordered another and put his arm around me. “You love it, Harry. You love all this suffering, because it’s so much easier than actually living with a woman.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “I may be drunk, Harry, but I know women. You might know television—and may God love you and keep you for knowing television, for you have saved my Kilcarney hide on more than one occasion—but I know women. And I know you would change your mind about Cyd if you lived with her for the next seven years. Because we always do.”

  “Not always.”

  “Always,” he said. “The old songs don’t tell you that. The old songs talk about love found and love lost. Heroic love, eternal love, sweet and sour love. But they don’t talk about love grown dull and old. They don’t write songs about that.”

  “Yes they fucking do,” I shouted.

&nb
sp; “Would you like a dance?” said some vision in a see-through night dress.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “‘Where Did Our Love Go?,’ ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,’ ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’—they write loads of songs about love going off the boil.”

  “But they make it sound heroic,” Eamon said. “And it’s not. It’s boring and stupid. Look around you, Harry, just look around this room—why would any man want to settle down with just one woman? It’s not the way we’re made.”

  “It’s not the way you’re made,” I said. “But that’s just because all you care about is your nasty little prick and putting it in as many places as possible.”

  “Not my prick, Harry.”

  “Sorry, Eamon. I insist. Your nasty little prick.”

  “Not my prick, Harry. My seed.”

  “Okay, your seed.”

  The Asian girl with hair down to her waist came over and sat on Eamon’s lap. She placed a chaste kiss on his dark, unshaven cheek.

  “I’m Mem,” she said to me, and I said, “Harry,” and we shook hands, as though we were about to discuss some business deal. Funny enough, in that room full of stale cigarette smoke and naked flesh and middle-aged dreams, there was a lot of formality going on, there was a lot of shaking hands and introductions and business cards quietly being handed over with the cash.

  That was the genius of the place—the men were flattered into believing that they were really in with a chance, as if these girls were desperate to be bought dinner in some crap fake French restaurant when they could be in here turning every man into their own personal cash machine with just a glint in their eye, a twitch of their hips, and some new song about being a bitch and a lover.

  Mem began to dance for Eamon, and as she pulled her dress over her head and began to slowly move her hard little body in front of his face, I could see why this small Asian girl—what was she? Indonesian? Thai?—managed to hold her own here on planet blond.

  “It’s like the Heathrow Express,” Eamon said.

  “What the fuck are you going on about now?” I said.