by Tony Parsons
It was one of those old-fashioned televisions that I had not seen in years – as deep as it was wide. They had not bothered to steal it, just rammed a pink figurine of a ballet dancer through the screen. She lay surrounded by shards of broken glass, one of her thin legs snapped off below the knee.
I sat down next to Ken. His breathing was more laboured than I had seen it. For the first time he looked like what he was – an old man with a tumour that was killing him. He looked beat.
‘It’s not as though there’s even anything worth nicking,’ he said. His fingers toyed with the tobacco tin on his lap but he made no attempt to roll a cigarette.
And my stomach fell away. Because I remembered that there was something worth stealing.
I quickly crossed the room to where the little chest of drawers had been ravaged. The remains of old age were still there. His reading glasses. More utility bills, preserved for posterity. Curled postcards, fading photographs of grandchildren who were grown up now. It was all there.
But the medal was gone.
In the end it wasn’t much. Pat just went.
I brought down two suitcases from the attic and he stuffed them and his school rucksack with all the clothes and books they could carry. He was leaving behind more than he was taking. I stood in the doorway of his bedroom and watched him hefting the bags. On the wall, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and Darth Vader looked down, as forgotten as the toys of childhood.
A taxi pulled up outside and sat there with its engine idling, ready for a quick getaway. I went to the window and Gina was in the back of a black cab, dressed for the gym and frowning as she tapped out a text message. Waiting. Our front door opened and Cyd appeared, coming down the path to the waiting cab. I heard the voices of the two women, but not their words.
‘I guess that’s it then,’ I said, a breezy note in my borrowed voice. ‘Ready?’
He nodded, all business, and I took one of the suitcases and followed him out of the room, the eyes of the Jedi Knights upon us.
His sisters were waiting at the foot of the stairs. The big one and the little one. Peggy and Joni were both crying, and I felt my heart slide, wanting it to be over. Peggy threw her arms around his neck and Joni wrapped her arms around his thighs.
Pat smiled, dry-eyed but touched.
‘I’m just down the road,’ he said.
Then Cyd was there, standing in front of him and doing the things that it would never cross my mind to do. Pushing the hair off his face, untwisting the strap on his rucksack. Why couldn’t I do that stuff?
‘You take care, Pat,’ she said, and she kissed his face, and she gave him a squeeze. And I knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t thinking of the things she shouted at me about, she wasn’t thinking about nits and fish fingers and dirty laundry. She was just thinking what a lovely kid he was and how we were all going to miss him.
He turned to look at me. I smiled and nodded encouragement, and for want of anything else to do, I held out my right hand. He gave it a soft little shake and then we let go of each other. We had never shaken hands before.
The front door was open. His mother was waiting. His sisters wiped their eyes, and said his name, and Joni was suddenly babbling something about Christmas, and we all had to reassure her that nothing had changed. Even though everything had changed.
‘Okay,’ I said, and we carried his bags out to the waiting car. And my son left home, and I watched him go, my throat all choked up because I had absolutely nothing to say.
I went into Joni’s room and found her sitting up in bed waiting for me, hugging her knees, glowing from her bath, all smiley and smelling brand new. I sat on the edge of her bed and she snuggled down as I opened the book in my hands.
‘Are you sitting comfortably?’
‘Not really,’ she said. That vampire smile. ‘Just kidding.’
I laughed for the first time that day. And we began where we had left off.
‘Fancy the happiness of Pinocchio on finding himself free,’ I read. ‘Without saying yes or no, he fled from the city and set out on the road that was to take him back to the house of the lovely Fairy.’
This is what we had settled for, in the time between princesses and hot vampire boys. This is the way we chose to go – back to the good stuff, the ones that had lasted. The princesses – and the mice in tutus, and the crocodiles on tractors, and all the animals who had the power of speech – were over, and there would be time enough later for the hot undead boys.
For now we would stick with books that we thought we knew because we had seen the Walt Disney movie, but that we didn’t really know at all.
‘Pinocchio, spurred on by the hope of finding his father and of being in time to save him, swam all night long.’
This was better than all those princesses and their chiseljawed princes with a private income. This was the real thing.
Wanting to be a real boy. Wanting to be like all the other real boys. Carlo Collodi made that simple wish feel like an impossible dream.
And my daughter stared up at me, her eyes shining, as our heads struggled with the knowledge that not all stories have the same happy ending.
Nine
My father’s medal sat at the back of my desk.
I could not remember the last time I had looked inside the claret-coloured box. Long enough ago for me to forget that there were also three rings in there. My mother’s engagement ring, her wedding ring and her eternity ring. They were very small, like trinkets for a child’s hand. They were all made of low-grade wartime gold, hardly metal at all, and the cheapness of them made something stick in the back of my throat, and block my chest, and burn my eyes.
Yet my mum and dad were together from school to the grave. So who was I to put a value on those rings?
I took out the rings and stored them carefully in the back of the desk. Then I looked at the medal.
There was a blue ribbon with two parallel white stripes that had been darkened by the sixty years that had passed since it was pinned on my father’s chest by the King. The worn silver had the face of the king on one side and on the back there was a crown, and laurel leaves around the tiny words FOR DISTINGUISHED SERVICE.
I closed the box and slipped it into the pocket of my jeans.
I wanted to give it to Ken Grimwood. It felt like the least I could do.
Downstairs, Joni was hunched over the coffee table, pens scattered all around. She was in her school uniform, ready to go, but busy working on a card that said – It’s your birthday! – Don’t be sad! – Eat cake! On the front of the card was a cartoon cake and a sad-looking little cartoon man. She was adding dozens of multi-coloured candles to the cake, making it look like a fire hazard, and she was making the sad little cartoon man smile by turning his mouth around. She saw me coming and hurriedly threw an arm around the card.
‘Nothing, nothing, nothing,’ she said breezily, as her mother called her name.
And I thought – Oh, yeah. Now I remember.
Tomorrow is my birthday.
The thing about turning forty is that you are looking your life right in the eye. You are still young, but you are too old to kid yourself. It is when you know what you have made of your life.
It didn’t bother me. There were things I would have liked more of, and things I would have liked less of. More money. Less weight. More hair. Less work. But I didn’t believe in the mid-life crisis. I thought it was a myth. When I was barely thirty, my life fell apart around me. What could be more of a crisis than that?
‘Daddy, you didn’t look, did you?’ said my daughter.
I smiled and shook my head. ‘Didn’t see a thing, angel.’
‘Good.’
I went to work.
‘You know we love you,’ Blunt said, his soft mouth twisting in a grotesque parody of affection. I could not imagine him loving anyone.
‘I think I might have the shark and pumpkin ravioli,’ Marty said, looking around for the waiter. Totally oblivious. But I knew. At the BBC they never tell you they
love you until the day that you are dumped.
I love you. So now you must die.
And I suddenly took in the venue – a wood-panelled Italian fish restaurant in Mayfair that was inexplicably popular with the movers and shakers of our business – and realised that making any kind of scene would be self-defeating. We would look like sore losers. And nobody is going to give a gig to sore losers.
There was bread on the table. It was not sliced. It was torn by hand, and meant to represent the way the Italian peasants would eat their bread.
‘Could we get this bread torn a little smaller?’ Marty asked a passing waitress, and she took it back to the kitchen.
‘The post-watershed demographic is changing,’ Blunt was saying. ‘A Clip Round the Ear does what it says on the tin – but should we really be pandering to baby boomers who want to kill someone they see using a mobile behind the wheel of a car?’
‘Definitely,’ I said, even though in my bones I suspected it was too late.
‘Are you going to have a starter?’ Marty said. He patted the growing equator of his trouser line. ‘I might skip the starter.’
‘Marty,’ I said, looking at Blunt. ‘Marty – we’re being sacked.’
It was a loud restaurant. The places we went to were all like that. It was as though nobody was actually using their mouth for anything but talk. But Marty continued to wave his menu at harassed young East Europeans in white aprons. I stared at Blunt.
‘Because we didn’t come to your crummy speech?’ I said. ‘Your big-swinging-media-dick speech? Because we weren’t available around the clock? Because we have lives? Because we have families?’
Blunt flushed. ‘Oh, that’s not it.’
‘But it didn’t help, right?’
‘We just want to make a few changes.’
‘Why is it when people say that, the changes are never to your advantage?’ I said. ‘Why do changes always make life worse? Why can’t things ever just stay the same?’
It would have been a good item on our show. Our audience would have loved that.
At Pussy Galore there was a problem with Marty’s card.
A waitress in a tutu brought it back with an embarrassed smile and a bouncer. He hovered behind her, waiting to see which way this thing was going to go.
‘Do you know who I am?’ Marty said, staring down at the card on the silver tray, and the brute lifted his enormous head, as if sniffing prey. Then I was by Marty’s side, laying a soothing hand on his arm and reaching for my wallet. We had only had one bottle. I would pay cash.
‘Come quick,’ called the bouncer to a brace of his Neanderthal mates. ‘There’s a man here who doesn’t know who he is…’
‘How much is it?’ I said, and the waitress in the tutu helpfully shone her torch on the bill. Marty and I stared at it blindly. The truth was we both needed reading glasses in the Pussy Galore but we did not want to admit it. The Pussy Galore would be the last place we would wear any reading glasses.
But I didn’t have enough cash. Nowhere near it. A bottle of fizz at Pussy Galore was surprisingly steep. So I pulled out my own card, already with a sinking feeling, and laid it next to Marty’s.
The waitress went away. She returned with both our cards cut in two.
‘Company cards,’ I said to Marty, as the bouncer reached out with huge meaty hands and seized our collars. ‘They stop those pretty quick.’
He dragged us through the crowds of almost naked girls asking men in suits if they wanted to party. He did it alone. That was humiliating. I think it would have been much better if we had had a bouncer each. And it would have been better still if Marty hadn’t picked up that ice bucket and swung it in his face.
They all came running.
And then they took us out the back way. It was dark, but only just. We could hear the traffic going mental in the surrounding streets as the rush hour kicked off.
A chef from the restaurant next door was smoking a quiet spliff in the alley. He took one look at us and scarpered. I watched the bouncer who had been hit in the ear with the ice bucket knee Marty between the legs. He went down hard.
Another bouncer appeared in the doorway carrying two brown boxes. The contents of our desks. We had left them in the club. That was thoughtful, I thought, bringing those for us. Then I watched the bouncer empty the boxes into the rubbish-strewn alley. That wasn’t very nice. Then someone hit me once in the ribs and I never knew it was possible to feel such pain.
‘Not in the head,’ somebody said. ‘Kick them anywhere but the head.’
I stood outside Ken’s front door, trying to stop myself from being sick.
The day had somehow slipped away. How long had we been in Pussy Galore? And how many hours had we waited to be patched up in Accident and Emergency? The day had dwindled down to next to nothing. There was hardly any day left.
And I felt the same way. I was worn out, weak from drink and the beating. My nose, my throat – full of gunk. One side of my rib cage felt like it was on fire. I wiped a patch of something wet from my chin and gingerly touched my front teeth with the tip of my tongue, feeling all sorts of strange new peaks and valleys.
But I still had the medal. Somehow I still carried my father’s medal. Everything had been lost – my job, my dignity, my tooth – but the medal remained. And I believed that some good could yet come out of this rotten day if I could only give my dad’s DSM to his old friend.
And so I rang the doorbell. Then I rang it again. And only then did I notice that the flat was in darkness. It looked abandoned, because the council had taken away the smashed door and put up a thick slab of wood enmeshed in a metal grille. The place looked like a derelict prison. I turned away, the eternal wind of those flats bringing tears to my eyes, and I wondered if I would ever see Ken Grimwood again.
For once the concrete stairs were empty of all life forms. I increased my pace, hearing distant cries and laughter. The flats were sometimes empty but never silent. Then I saw him at the bottom of the steps, flat on his belly, chewing on a dead tennis ball.
Tyson.
‘Good dog,’ I said, stepping over him and simultaneously pressing my car key. The car beeped and the orange lights flashed twice. Oh, let’s get out of here right now, they seemed to say.
But Tyson growled from the back of his throat, leapt up and wrapped his mighty front legs around my thigh. His hind legs began pumping furiously. I looked down at his blank features, the tongue lolling hideously from his wet mouth, the dull gleam of lust in his eyes.
‘Bad dog,’ I told him and I kept walking.
Tyson held on to my leg as if he would never allow us to be parted.
I came home as a distant church bell began to measure midnight.
I stood there for a moment with the key in the lock, controlling my breathing, feeling my forties begin.
My head spun with questions. Did I have more years behind me than in front of me? Would I ever get another job? And what was I going to say to my wife? And my dry cleaner?
The house was black. Not the forsaken, vacant blackness of Ken’s home. The blackness of sleep, and rest, and peace, and children tucked up for the night. I was glad and grateful, and I let myself inside as quietly as I could.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in the hall. Even with all the lights off, I could make out the scuffed, misshapen look of my face, as though I had been shaving with a bread knife. One eye was closing. There was blood on the front of my shirt. There was a love token from Tyson staining the leg of my jeans. I shook my leg, grimacing with disgust. My cardboard box was falling to bits. I stared at it with numb disbelief. I could not understand why I had not thrown it away.
I listened to the sleeping house, hearing the rasping sound of my breath, and I felt like a creature of the night.
Then I went into the living room and turned on the light.
And there they all were, waiting for me with champagne and big smiles and presents. Waiting for me to come home from work. Waiting to celebrate
the day I was born.
My wife. My beautiful wife. My big daughter, looking like a young woman. My little daughter, struggling to stay awake so far past her bedtime. Ken Grimwood, in his striped tie and blazer. Singe Rana. And even Gina, with a smile that I remembered, a smile that I knew, as though our marriage had been an honourable defeat, and no worse than that. And my son, by his mother’s side, instinctively tipping his head forward so that his flaxen fringe would shield his eyes.
But they were all smiling. I watched their smiles freeze at the terrible sight of me.
And Cyd advanced with the cake in her hands, the candles flickering as if they might expire at any moment, as the church bell in the distance tolled one last time.
I am forty years old, I thought to myself. How did that happen?
‘Surprise,’ said my wife.
Part two: spring term –
if i were a boy
Ten
They stared straight through me. That was fine by me. I did not want them to look at me. I wanted to be invisible. I preferred it that way.
The party was on the thirtieth floor of some shining glass tower high above the river. These were the last of the fat years, before the area would be decimated by the money meltdown. Before too long many of these men – and they were mostly men – would be carrying their belongings out of this building in an old champagne box from Berry Brothers. But that was all in the unimaginable future. Tonight they were celebrating their bonuses. And my wife was doing the catering.
Cyd appeared at my side, smiling as she gave my arm a squeeze.
‘Do you want me to get some more vegetable samosas out here?’ I said.
She patted my bum. ‘First clear up the empties,’ she said.
They were used to being served, these people, and they did not even notice me as I moved among them, collecting the plates scattered with the picked-clean sticks of yakitori and the rice crumbs of sushi. Some guy in an apron. Nothing special. Not like them.