by Tony Parsons
“Is she cohabiting?”
“What?”
“Has your ex-wife got a boyfriend, Mr. Silver? A boyfriend that she lives with?”
“Yes,” I said, grateful to him for downgrading Gina’s relationship with Richard to something as grubby as cohabiting, grateful that the big diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand didn’t mean a damn to Nigel Batty. “She’s living with some guy she met in Tokyo.”
“Let’s get this clear,” he said. “She walked out and left you with your son?”
“Well, more or less. She actually took Pat—our son—with her when she went to her father’s place. But I collected him and brought him home when she went to Japan.”
“So she abandoned the marital home and, to all intents and purposes, left the child in your care,” said Nigel Batty. “And now she’s back in town and decides that she would like to play mother for a while.”
“She says she realizes how much she loves him.”
“We’ll see about that,” said my lawyer.
thirty-three
The weight was falling off him. My father had never been a thin man in his life, but now his cheeks were hollowing and the skin under his neck was starting to hang in loose, unshaven flaps. More and more, he was looking like someone I didn’t recognize.
Even his arms had lost their old beefy strength, and those tattoos proclaiming his loyalty to my mother and the Commandos were looking as faded as photographs from another century.
The flesh was slipping away and his bones were becoming more visible with every visit, pushing up through skin with its waning tan that I realized with a start would probably never see the sun again.
But he was smiling.
Sitting up in bed and smiling. And it was a real smile—not a being brave smile, not a smile that was forced or strained, but a smile of pure delight at the sight of his grandson.
“Hello, darling,” my dad said as Pat walked up to his bed ahead of me, my mother and Uncle Jack. My father held up his right arm, the one where the intravenous drip was hooked to a vein in his wrist. “Look at the state your old granddad’s in.”
Pat had been full of life in Uncle Jack’s car—excited to be awarded the special treat of a day off school, thrilled to be riding in the back of a limo instead of the passenger seat of a vandalized sports car. But now he fell silent, warily approaching the bed and the sight of his grandfather’s gaunt, stubbled face.
“Come here,” my father said, his voice gruff with emotion, holding out his free arm, and Pat climbed up on the bed and silently lay his head on my father’s poor broken chest. They held each other in silence.
My mother shot a look at me. She had been against this visit.
There was no way of knowing if my father would be awake when we arrived. There was a very good chance that the pain could have been so bad that they were pumping him full of opiates while we were looking for a parking space and all Pat would have found was his grandfather lost and unknowing in some morphine fog. Or he could have been struggling for breath, his chest heaving, the oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, and his eyes wet with pain and fear. Or, although she didn’t say it, he could have been dead.
All that was possible, even probable, and in the kitchen of her home my mother became angry and tearful with me at the thought of inflicting any one of those terrible things on Pat.
I had put my arms around her and assured her that it would be all right. And I was wrong. It was not all right—Pat was shocked and dismayed by the sight of his grandfather ravaged by disease, wasting away in a hospital bed in that room for dying men, the kind of dying that you never see on television or in the movies, the kind of dying that is full of agony and drugs and sadness at all that is about to be lost. I had been unprepared for the reality of death, and there was no reason to believe that a five-year-old boy brought up on a diet of Star Wars would be any better prepared.
No, it wasn’t all right. But it was necessary. My father and my son needed to see each other. They needed to see that the bond between them still existed and would always exist. The love between them would always be there. They needed to know that the cancer couldn’t kill that.
And I somehow knew—I just knew—that my father wouldn’t be knocked out on narcotics or choking for breath if Pat was there.
There was no rational reason to believe that wouldn’t happen if his grandson was there. It wasn’t logical. Perhaps it was simply foolish. But I believed with all my heart that my dad would protect Pat from the very worst of it. I still believed that there was a part of him that was invincible. I couldn’t stop believing.
“Are you coming home soon?” Pat asked.
“Got to wait and see,” my father said. “See what the doctors say. See if old Granddad gets a bit better. How’s school?”
“Fine.”
“And the bike? How’s old Bluebell?”
“Good.”
“A bit more fun without the training wheels.”
“Yes,” Pat smiled. “But I miss you.”
“I miss you too,” my father said and squeezed him tight, Pat’s blond head pressed against his striped-blue pajamas, the kind of old man’s pajamas that he would never wear at home.
Then he nodded at me.
“Time to go,” I said.
That was my father saying good-bye to his beloved grandson. Propped up in his hospital bed, surrounded by people who loved him and yet ultimately alone. Had we been there for five minutes or an hour? I couldn’t tell. But I knew he wanted us to leave him now.
And so we left my father fumbling with his oxygen mask, hunched and stubbled and looking older than I thought he would ever look, a young nurse chatting breezily at the foot of his bed.
Here, finally, was the worst thing of all. The awful and complete isolation of death, the terrible loneliness of the terminally ill. Nobody warns you about that.
With his breath going and the pain coming, we left him in that overcrowded hospital ward with winter sunlight coming through the big unwashed window and the chipmunk chatter of daytime television in the background. We left him. In the end, it was all we could do.
And as we walked back to the car, Pat fought back the tears, angry—no, furious—at something that he couldn’t name. I tried to comfort him but he wasn’t interested in being comforted.
My son looked like he felt he had been cheated.
***
There was a moving van outside Cyd’s flat.
It wasn’t one of those huge lorries that you can load with the contents of a family’s lifetime, one of those massive trucks that can hold pianos and worn-out furniture that you like too much to throw away and all the accumulated junk of the years. It was from the kind of moving firm that advertises in the back of the listings magazines, perfect for a little family that was traveling light.
I watched two young men in T-shirts edging a child’s single bed into the back of the van. Although Cyd and Peggy lived on the top floor, the men looked as though this was one of their easier jobs.
Peggy appeared in the front door, dragging behind her a stuffed toy the size of a fridge. She looked at me with her solemn brown eyes, not surprised to see me here.
“Look what I’ve got,” I said, holding out a leering male doll in spangly silver trousers and what looked like a lilac tuxedo. It was a sex-change Barbie.
“Disco Ken,” she said, taking him.
“You left him at my house,” I said. “I thought you might want him back.”
“Thank you,” she said, that beautifully behaved little girl.
Then Cyd was behind her, a stack of paperbacks in her arms.
“Look what Harry brought me,” Peggy said. “Disco Ken. I’ve been looking for him.”
Cyd told her to go up to her room and make sure she wasn’t leaving anything behind. Peggy left the stuffed toy the size of a fridge on the pavement and d
isappeared into the house still clutching Disco Ken.
“How about you?” I said. “You left anything behind?”
“No,” she said. “I think I’ve got just about everything.”
The two moving guys brushed past us on their way back into the house.
“Moving without telling me?” I said. “Some friend you turned out to be.”
“I was going to tell you. It’s just—I don’t know—it’s easier this way. For everybody.”
“I looked for you at the café.”
“I quit.”
“So they told me.”
“We’re moving across town. To Notting Hill.”
“West London?”
“Christ, don’t look so shocked, Harry. I’m an American. Moving from one side of a city to another isn’t quite as traumatic for me as it would be for you. Listen, I’m sorry but I’m really busy. What do you want? I can’t believe that you came here just to bring back Disco Ken.”
“Disco Ken was part of it,” I said. “But also I wanted to tell you that you’re wrong.”
“About what?”
“About us. You’re wrong about us. If we split up, then it’s the end of the world.”
“Oh, Harry.”
“It’s true. I know you don’t believe in the one, the one person for someone in the whole world, but I do. You make me believe it, Cyd. And anyway, it doesn’t matter what we believe. It’s good between us. It works. And I’ve been thinking about it. There’s not one more chance for me to get it right—you’re it, you’re my last chance for happiness, and even if there was another chance I wouldn’t want it. As Olivia Newton John said to John Travolta, you’re the one that I want.”
“Wasn’t it the other way ’round? Didn’t John Travolta say it to Olivia Newton John?”
“Possibly.”
“Harry,” she said. “There’s something you have to know. I’m getting back with Peggy’s dad. Jim and I are going to give it another go.”
I stared at her as the movers carried a sofa bed between us. “Nearly done,” one of them said. They went back inside the house.
“Sorry,” she told me.
“But do you love him?” I said.
“He’s the father of my little girl.”
“But do you love him?”
“Come on, Harry, you’re the one who’s always agonizing about the breakup of the family. You’re the one who is always complaining about how hard it is to compete with blood, about all the messy, broken bits of what you call the lousy modern world. You should be pleased for me. You should wish me well.”
“But you have to love him, Cyd. None of it means a thing if you don’t love him. Do you love him?”
“Yes. Okay? I love him. I never stopped loving him. And I want to give it a shot because he’s given up his girlfriend, the Thai stripper, and he promises me that’s all out of his system. The whole bamboo thing.”
“She’s not a stripper. She’s a lap dancer.”
“Whatever,” she said. “But Peggy’s thrilled that we’re giving it another go. So even if you hate me, you should be pleased for her.”
“I don’t hate you. I could never hate you.”
“Then please wish me well.”
“I wish you well,” I said, and I even sort of meant it. She deserved to be happy. So did Peggy. I kissed her quickly on the cheek. “Just don’t tell me I don’t know you, okay?”
I let them get on with their moving. Anything I said now would have sounded empty and selfish, as if they were just weasel words designed to get her to come back to me.
Yet as she prepared to go back to her husband, at last I saw the limits of the nuclear family. Now I realized that dad and mom and the kids is all very well.
But if you don’t love each other, you might as well be shacked up with Disco Ken.
***
“We’ve had a response from the other side,” Nigel Batty said. “Your ex-wife says that she remained faithful to you throughout the duration of your marriage, but that you committed adultery with a colleague from work.”
“Well, that’s true,” I said. “But it was just a one-night stand. I’m not saying it’s nothing, but—”
“She also alleges that your son received a severe head injury while in your care.”
“What does that mean? That sounds like I beat him up or something. He fell, okay? There was an accident in the local park. He fell into an empty swimming pool and split his head open. And maybe I could have done more. Maybe I should have been watching him more closely. Does she honestly believe that hasn’t crossed my mind again and again and again? But at least I was there for him. She was eating tempura with her boyfriend in Tokyo.”
The lawyer peered closely at the papers on his desk.
“And she seems to believe that you’re not exercising proper parental control over what your son watches or listens to.”
“That’s just crazy.”
“He’s allowed to watch violent films unsupervised, she suggests. Videos with adult themes. And she says that on her last access visit she discovered that he had in his possession a music tape containing songs of a profane and adult nature.”
I could feel my face reddening with anger.
“That fucking…fucking….”
I couldn’t find the word. There was no word strong enough.
Nigel Batty laughed out loud, as if I was finally starting to understand.
thirty-four
“Can I see the medal?” I said.
“Of course you can,” my mother said. She went to the cabinet where the stereo sat, and I could hear her shuffling through insurance documents, bank statements, letters, all the paperwork of a lifetime. She came back with a small rectangular box that was colored somewhere beyond claret but not quite black. Inside there was a silver medal, not that clean, resting on purple velvet. My father’s medal.
The medal’s ribbon was blue and white, two broad vertical white stripes with one thin vertical white stripe between them dissecting a blue background. “For Distinguished Service,” it said on the medal, next to the image of the head of the King.
In the top of the box the maker’s name was inscribed on white silk—“By Appointment,” it said above the Royal Warrant, “J.R. Gaunt & Son Ltd., 60 Conduit Street, London.” And I remembered how, as a child, the name of that company—did it still exist? would it be there if I looked for it?—had seemed like another part of the citation.
I gently took it out, as surprised by the weight of my father’s DSM at thirty as I had been as a boy.
“Pat used to love playing with Dad’s medal,” my mother laughed.
“You let Pat play with this?” I said, incredulous.
“He liked pinning it on me,” she smiled. “I had to be Princess Layla at the end of that film.”
“Leia, Mom. She’s Princess Leia.”
It was just past the middle of the night and we were too tired to sit by his hospital bed any longer, but too restless to sleep. So we had a nice cup of tea—still my mother’s answer to everything.
And as she went off to put the kettle on, I held the medal in my fist and thought about how the games I had played as a boy had prepared me to be the man my father had been and the man his father had been before him—a fighting man, a man who kissed some tearful woman good-bye and put on a uniform and went to war.
Looking back on the games we played in the fields and the backstreets of my childhood, they seemed to be more than childish pastimes lauding the manly virtues—they seemed to be preparing us for the next war, for our own Normandy or Dunkirk or Monte Casino.
My generation played games with toy guns—or sticks pretending to be guns, or fingers pretending to be guns, anything could stand in for a gun—and nobody thought that it was unhealthy or distasteful. But the only wars we saw as young men were small wars, t
iny wars, television wars, as real and as life-threatening to the noncombatants as a video game.
My generation, the last of the generations of small boys who played with toy guns, was more lucky than it knew. We didn’t have a war waiting for us when we grew up. There were no Germans or Japanese for us to fight. Our wives, that’s who we fought with, this generation of men blessed with peace. And the divorce courts, that’s where we fought our own grubby little wars.
I had seen the scars on my father’s body enough times to know that war was not a John Wayne movie. But the men who survived—and who came home in more or less one piece—found someone to love for a lifetime. Which was better? War and a perfect love? Or peace and love that came in installments of five, six, or seven years? Who was really the lucky man? My father or me?
“You liked this girl, didn’t you?” my mom said, coming back into the room with a steaming mug in each hand. “This woman, I mean. Cyd. You liked her a lot.”
I nodded.
“I wish we could have held it together. Like you and Dad did. It seems impossible these days.”
“You’re too sentimental about the past,” she said, not unkindly. “You think it was all brown ale and red roses. But it was harder than that.”
“But you and Dad were happy.”
“Yes, we were,” she said, her eyes drifting away to some place I couldn’t follow her. “We were happy.”
And I thought—I was happy too.
When I thought of my childhood, I thought of some sunbaked August—right at the start of the month, when the long, six-week holiday was still stretching gloriously out ahead of me, and I knew there would be car rides to country pubs where my dad and my uncles would play darts and bring lemonade and chips out to me and my cousins playing on the grass, our mothers laughing over Babychams at wooden tables, as separated from the men as Muslims.
Or it was some other holiday—Christmas, late at night with my uncles and aunts smoking and drinking in a card game, with soccer on Boxing Day at a misty Upton Park for the men and the boys.
Or it would be a Bank Holiday run to the coast with huge pink clouds of candy floss on a stick and the smell of the sea and frying onions, or to the dog track where my mom always bet on the number six dog because she liked the colors, she liked the way the red number looked against the black and white stripes.