Man and Boy

by Tony Parsons

  “The Heathrow Express,” Eamon said. “The train to the airport. Haven’t you noticed? Just outside of Paddington, you pass this enormous great yard full of shining, brand-new cars. And a little bit farther down the line, there’s another yard—but this one is full of rusting, rotting, burned-out old cars all stacked on top of each other like the junk they are.”

  “I think I’m missing something here, Eamon,” I said. “You’re saying that life is like the Heathrow Express?”

  “I’m saying that relationships are like those cars,” he said, sliding the palm of his hand up one of Mem’s golden young thighs, even though there was a strict no touching rule. “An Indonesian thigh? A Thai thigh? They start off all shiny and new and looking like they’re going to last forever. And then they end up as rubbish.”

  “You’re the devil,” I said, standing up. “And I’m drunk.”

  “Oh, don’t go, Harry,” he pleaded.

  “Got to pick up my boy from my parents,” I said. “I mean, my mother.”

  I kissed him on the cheek and shook Mem’s hand—for some reason that seemed the right way round to do it, rather than kissing Mem and shaking Eamon’s hand—and I was halfway to the door when I remembered where I had heard that name before.

  And I knew that Eamon was wrong. If you are always craving, always wanting, never satisfied, never happy with what you’ve got, you end up even more lost and lonely than you do if you are some poor sap like me who believes that all the old songs were written about just one girl.

  The men who fuck around are not free. Not really. They end up more enslaved than anyone because they can never stop suspecting that the women they want are just the same as them. Just as unfettered, just as faithless, just as ready to move on or to make a quick detour as the hero of one of the new songs.

  He was outside the club, waiting in the shadows with all the other boyfriends of the dancers. Somehow I knew he would be there.

  And I knew he would look like all the rest of them, despite the flash cars—or in his case, the big BMW motorbike—that they had parked by the curb. He didn’t look happy. None of the boyfriends looked very happy.

  They were standing behind the taxi drivers who were touting for trade. The cabbies were talking to each other and to the men who emerged from the club—need a taxi, sir? where you going? ten quid to Islington?—but the boyfriends of the dancers were silent and still and alone. They looked as though their dreams had come true, but all it had brought them was jealousy and disgust.

  I saw him waiting, although he didn’t see me, saw him stewing in the night with all the rest of the turbo-charged studs.

  Jim Mason, Cyd’s handsome ex, waiting for his Mem to finish work for the night.

  thirty-two

  Visiting hours were meaningless now. My father’s waking moments were entirely dependent on the ebb and flow of pain and morphine.

  You could sit with him all morning and he would sleep right through your visit—if you can dignify that drug-sodden rest in the hospital as sleep. And then as the opiates wore off, but before the tumor started to gnaw at him again, he might wake up and talk to you with eyes that were watery with suffering and an unendurable sadness. And that’s when I would be waiting for him.

  Halfway to dawn he stirred, his tongue flicking at his parched lips, waking me from my own fitful rest. The ward was silent apart from the snores of the old man in the next bed but one. I helped my dad to sit up, wetting his mouth with a pitiful little amount of water.

  When he started to catch his breath—he would always catch his breath now—I helped him put the oxygen mask over his face and held his hand as he desperately sucked in some air. So little air, so little water. It broke my heart to see what he was surviving on.

  He took off the mask, his face twisting with agony, and I thought again about how nobody warns you about this pain. But I still couldn’t decide what was worse—seeing him in all that terrible suffering or seeing him with his mind numbed by morphine, no longer truly himself. It was the pain, I decided. Seeing him in pain was worse.

  He turned his eyes on me, shaking his head hopelessly.

  And then he looked away.

  I took his hand in mine and held it tight, knowing his spirits were sinking. He was a brave man, but he couldn’t fight this sadness that came in the middle of the night, this sadness that made you feel that nothing could ever be any good again.

  And nobody warns you about the sadness. You are half-prepared for the pain. You can guess at the agonies of dying from cancer. But with all that physical suffering came a sense of loss that no shot of morphine could smother.

  “The worst thing about it,” my father whispered in the darkness, “is knowing what you will be missing. I don’t mean the things that haven’t happened yet—Pat’s wedding day, seeing you finally settle down—but the things that you take for granted. Seeing Pat ride his bike, telling him a story, kissing him good night. Watching him running around the garden with his bloody light saber. All those small things that mean more than anything.”

  “You might come home soon,” I said, still clinging to hope because that is what we do, because there is no real alternative, still clinging to life even when life is full of torment. “You might be doing all those things before you know it.”

  But he was beyond kidding himself. Or me.

  “I’ll miss my garden. Your mother. Her cooking. Your television shows.”

  I was flattered and embarrassed that he would put my work in the same league as his wife, his grandson, and his garden. And I was a little ashamed too—ashamed that I hadn’t done more in the time that we had, that I hadn’t done more to impress him and win his approval. A couple of television shows and a broken marriage. That was about it.

  But there was always Pat. And I knew that he loved his grandson more than he loved anything in this world. It felt like Pat was my only real gift to him.

  My father wanted to sit up. I pressed the little metal box that controlled his bed and it whirred in the silence of the ward until the back was raised. Then he leaned forward and held onto me while I placed a pillow behind his back, his unshaven face rough against the skin of my cheek.

  The old smells of Old Spice and Old Holborn were gone now and they had been replaced by hospital smells, the smell of illness and chemicals. There was no tobacco or aftershave in here. That was all behind him.

  It still seemed strange to be physically helping him. The undeniable fact of my father’s strength had been such a large part of my childhood and my youth that, now that his strength was gone, it felt like the world was ending, as though some immutable law of nature had been unceremoniously overturned.

  And I could see for the first time that his strength wasn’t the reason that I loved him.

  I had always believed that his toughness—that old-world toughness that was endorsed by and embodied in his medal—was why he was my hero.

  Now, as I helped him to sip water or to sit up in his hospital bed, I saw that I loved him for the same reasons that my mother loved him and my son loved him.

  For his gentleness, for his compassion, and for a courage that had nothing to do with physical strength.

  “Don’t say anything to your mother, but I don’t think I’ll be coming home.”

  “Don’t say that, Dad.”

  “I don’t think I will be. I can feel it. And I would like to see Pat.”

  “Of course.”

  He didn’t say one last time. He didn’t have to. And besides, there were some things that were too painful to say out loud. But we knew that we were talking about death.

  “If that’s all right with you,” he said. “If you don’t think it would upset him too much. You have to decide. You’re his father.”

  “I’ll bring him the next time I come. But now try to sleep for a bit, Dad.”

  “I’m not tired.”

 
“Just rest your eyes.”

  ***

  Pat came out of school with a dark-haired boy who was swinging a battered Godzilla lunch box.

  “You want to watch Star Wars at my house?” Pat asked him.

  “Is it widescreen or pan and scan?” the boy said.

  “Widescreen.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can he, Dad?”

  I was searching the loud, laughing hordes for one familiar face that I knew would be solemn and composed among all the high-pitched mayhem of 3:30. One little brown-eyed girl with a Pocahontas sandwich box. But she wasn’t there.

  “Where’s Peggy?” I said.

  “Peggy wasn’t in today,” Pat said. “Is it okay if Charlie comes back?”

  No Peggy? I looked down at Charlie. Charlie looked up at me.

  “It’s fine by me,” I said. “But we have to clear it with Charlie’s mom.”

  Pat and Charlie began cheering and laughing and shoving each other. The sharp edge of a Godzilla lunch box smacked against my knee. I missed Peggy already.

  ***

  I opened the front door and Sally was standing there, warily peering up at me through her greasy bangs.

  “Didn’t think I’d see you again,” I said.

  “I’ve come to say sorry,” she said.

  I let her in.

  Pat and Charlie were bickering about Star Wars on the sofa. Charlie wanted to fast-forward over the love scenes and moments of reflection and get straight to the combat. Pat—ever the purist—wanted to watch the film from beginning to end. Sally stuck her head around the door to say hello to Pat and then we went into the kitchen.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “And I realize how dumb it was of me to let those kids in.”

  “It would have been helpful if you’d thought about it at the time.”

  “I know,” she said, her sheepish eyes peering at me beyond a curtain of hair. “Sorry. I was just—I don’t know how to put it—so happy to see Steve again.”

  “Well, I can understand that,” I said. “My heart skips a beat whenever Steve comes into view.”

  “You don’t like him,” she said. “You’re making fun.”

  “How’s it going anyway? You and Steve, I mean.”

  “That’s all over,” she said, and as her eyes filled with tears I suddenly felt very sorry for this painfully shy kid. “He gave me the elbow again. Once he got what he wanted.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s true Steve’s not my favorite human being. But I know you liked him. How old are you now? Fifteen?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “You’ll meet somebody else. I’m not going to tell you that you don’t know what love is at your age, because I don’t believe that’s true. But you will meet someone else, I promise you.”

  “That’s okay,” she said, sniffing the snot up her nose. I handed her a paper towel, and she honked on it loudly. “Doesn’t matter. I just wanted to apologize for that night. And to tell you that if you were to give me another chance at babysitting for you, it wouldn’t happen again.”

  I looked at her carefully, knowing that some extra help with Pat would be useful. The old support network had suddenly disappeared. My dad was in the hospital. Cyd was gone. I was even starting to miss Bianca. Now it was just me and my mom, and we were sometimes finding it a struggle.

  “You’re on,” I said. “I could use a babysitter.”

  “Good,” Sally smiled. “Because I could use the money.”

  “Still living with Glenn?”

  “Yeah. But I’m sort of, well, pregnant.”

  “Jesus, Sally. Is this Steve’s kid?”

  “There hasn’t been anybody else.”

  “And what does Steve have to say about becoming a dad?”

  “He’s not too keen. I think his exact words were—fuck off and die. He wants me to get rid of it.”

  “And you want to keep it.”

  She thought about it for a moment. Just a moment.

  “I think it’ll be good,” she said. “I always wanted something that was only mine. Something that I could love and that would love me back. And this baby, this baby will love me.”

  “Your dad knows about this, does he?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s the one good thing about having a father who never stopped being a hippy,” she said. “He doesn’t get too upset by stuff like this. He was very cool when I had my stomach pumped when I was thirteen. Teenage pregnancy doesn’t worry him. Although I think he’s a bit shocked that I don’t want an abortion.”

  “But how are you going to support this child, Sally?”

  “By babysitting for you.”

  “That’s not going to be enough.”

  “We’ll manage,” she said, and for once I didn’t envy all the certainties of youth, I pitied them. “Me and my baby.”

  Sally and her baby.

  They would manage all right, but only with the state playing surrogate daddy because Steve wasn’t quite up to the job. I wondered why I bothered paying taxes. I could just stick the money in Sally’s stroller and cut out the middle man.

  Christ. Now I was really starting to sound like my old man.

  “A baby’s not the same as a teddy bear, Sally,” I said. “It’s not just there to cuddle and make you feel good. Once you’ve got a kid, you’re not free anymore. I don’t know how to explain it. But it’s like they own your heart.”

  “But that’s what I want,” she said. “I want something to own my heart.” She shook her head, gently chastising me. “You talk as though it’s a bad thing.”

  Glenn came to pick her up and they were just leaving when Marty arrived to talk about arrangements for his wedding day. I was about to make the introductions, but Glenn and Marty greeted each other like old friends. Now I remembered. They had met on my own wedding day.

  So I made more coffee while they reminisced about Top of the Pops back in the glory days of the seventies, when Marty had been a fanatical viewer every Thursday night and Glenn had briefly been a participant. Sally watched the pair of them with the smirking contempt of extreme youth. It was only when Glenn and Sally had finally left that Marty told me he was having trouble sleeping.

  “Everybody feels like that,” I said. “A few doubts are natural before you get married.”

  “I’m not worried about getting married,” he said. “I’m worried about the show. Do you hear anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “Any rumors that the show isn’t going to be recommissioned next year?”

  “Your show? You’re kidding. They would never drop The Marty Mann Show. Would they?”

  “Sure they would. The word is that people shows are dying.” Marty sadly shook his head. “That’s the trouble with the world today, Harry. People are getting sick of the people.”

  ***

  “Men die younger than women,” said my new lawyer. “We catch cancer more often than women. We commit suicide with greater frequency than women. We are more likely to be unemployed than women.” His smooth, pudgy face creased into a grin, as if it was all a huge joke. His teeth were small and sharp. “But for some reason I have never been able to fathom, Mr. Silver, women are considered the victims.”

  Nigel Batty was recommended to me by a couple of the boys on the show, the lighting director and the sound supervisor, who had both been through messy divorces over the last year.

  A man said to have a messy divorce or two of his own behind him, Batty had a reputation for being fanatical about men’s rights. For him, all this stuff about long-term male unemployment and prostate cancer and men going into the garage and letting the engine run was far more than a sales pitch—it was the one true way, a new religion waiting to be born.

  Despite his lack of height, the comfortable waistline concealed by a wel
l-cut suit and the milk-bottle glasses, Batty looked like a bruiser. I felt better already knowing that he was in my corner.

  “I warn you now that the law does not favor the father in cases such as this,” he said. “The law should favor the child. And in theory it does. In theory, the welfare of the child should be the paramount consideration. But in practice it is not.” He looked at me with mean, angry eyes. “The law favors the mother, Mr. Silver. For generations of politically correct judges, the welfare of the child has been subjugated to the welfare of the mother. I warn you this before we begin.”

  “Anything you can do to get me custody of my son,” I said.

  “It’s not called custody anymore, Mr. Silver. Although the media still routinely talks of custody battles, since the Children Act of 1989, a parent no longer wins custody of their child. They are granted residency. You want to be granted a residence order in your favor.”

  “I do?”

  Batty nodded.

  “Residency replaced custody as a way of removing the confrontational nature of deciding where a child lives. A residence order does not deprive any other person of parental responsibility. The law was changed to make it clear that a child isn’t a possession that can be won or lost. Under the terms of a residence order, a child lives with you. But a child does not belong to you.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “So what’s the difference between trying to get a residence order and fighting for custody?”

  “Not a damn thing,” Batty smiled. “It’s just as confrontational. Unfortunately, it’s far easier to change the law than it is to change human nature.”

  He examined the papers on his desk, nodding approvingly.

  “The divorce is straightforward enough. And it looks to me like you’re doing a pretty good job with your young son, Mr. Silver. He’s happy at school?”

  “Very happy.”

  “He sees his mother?”

  “She can see him whenever she likes. She knows that.”

  “And yet she wants him back,” said Nigel Batty. “She wants residency.”

  “That’s right. She wants him to live with her.”