Men from the Boys

by Tony Parsons

  He was charming. I mean, we were not offered tea and crumpets, but he was friendly enough in a stern, Victorian dad sort of way, and he did not treat us like the scum of the earth because my son had flattened a sports teacher. I suppose he saw a lot worse than that every day.

  ‘We take any form of violence against a member of staff very seriously,’ he said, his gaze moving from concerned parents to troubled child. Pat stared beyond his shoulder and out of the window, taking great interest in the totally empty playground and the playing fields beyond, as if this had nothing much to do with him.

  ‘It was an accident,’ I blurted, and Gina’s head snapped in my direction. ‘But it was,’ I said feebly. ‘He didn’t mean it.’ I looked at my son. ‘Did you?’

  Pat shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘They all hate me anyway.’

  ‘How are you, Patrick?’ Mr Whitehead said, and I realised with a shock that he actually seemed to like our son.

  Pat nodded, still intent on the empty playground. ‘I’m all right, sir.’

  ‘You were doing so well,’ the head said. ‘Japanese – that was your subject, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Sir,’ Pat affirmed, still not looking at him. And I could see that the boy was prepared to endure everything today, apart from a little kindness.

  The headmaster even smiled. ‘And as I recall, you were a leading light in…the Theatre Club?’

  Pat finally looked at him. ‘The Lateral Thinking Club, sir.’

  Mr Whitehead nodded. Then he looked at Gina and I and his smile grew wider. ‘I’m not even sure I know quite what they do in the Lateral Thinking Club,’ he confessed.

  Nervous laughter all round.

  ‘Me neither!’ I offered, a note of total hysteria in my voice.

  ‘There have been bullying issues,’ Gina said, and she looked at Pat and for a second I thought she was going to tell him to sit up straight. ‘Issues of bullying that have been going on for quite a while.’

  ‘He has to learn to stand up for himself,’ I said, and she was on me.

  ‘You think that’s the answer to everything,’ she said, biting my head off. ‘But what if someone can’t stand up to the bullying, Harry? What if they are too gentle or too timid or too alone? What happens then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I suppose then you get your head pushed down a toilet.’

  Mr Whitehead raised his hands, like a marriage counsellor calling time out.

  ‘We do not tolerate a culture of bullying at Ramsay Mac,’ he said. Pat snorted with bitter laughter, and for the first time the headmaster looked as though he was ready to kill someone. ‘You are suspended for one week, young man,’ he said, jabbing an angry Parker Pen at my son. ‘And I am taking into account that you did not intentionally strike Mr Jones and that for the last four years you have been a good, hard-working student.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to you this year, Patrick. But if your behaviour doesn’t improve then you will give the school no option but permanent exclusion.’

  Pat got a secret little smile on his face. He looked up at his mother.

  ‘We have been thinking about changing schools,’ Gina told the headmaster. ‘My husband and I are no longer together.’

  The headmaster nodded. ‘I gathered that.’

  Was it so obvious? I couldn’t believe that it was only the couples that broke up that got on each other’s nerves. I thought that everyone did it.

  Mr Whitehead shook his head. ‘But this is a big year for Patrick,’ he said. ‘An exam year.’

  ‘Well, then it would happen on the other side of exams,’ Gina said. ‘Probably.’

  ‘I can tell you’ve really thought this through,’ I said, looking from my ex-wife to my son. ‘When did we start thinking about changing schools?’ Neither of them would look me in the eye. ‘Because I don’t remember that conversation.’

  ‘The travelling has become difficult for my son,’ Gina said, ignoring me. ‘There are these bullying issues. And now this suspension.’ She cast down her eyes, and then shyly looked up at the headmaster. Ah, Gina. She still had that old magic. The headmaster put down his Parker Pen. ‘I do appreciate your understanding,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Well,’ Mr Whitehead said, ‘you must let me know what you decide. But I strongly recommend sticking with us until the end of the academic year.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Gina said sweetly, as if she had just been told, Go ahead, love, do what you like.

  But my blood was up. A new school? Who mentioned anything about a new school?

  ‘There are bullies in every playground,’ I said, immune to the power of Gina’s eyelashes. ‘In every playground in every school in the country. There will always be someone.’ I shook my head. ‘He can’t just run away. It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘Do you want him to go around punching everyone?’ she said, as if I was some kind of psychopath. ‘He’s not like your father, Harry. And you know what?’ The trouble with old partners is that they know what will hurt you the most. ‘Neither are you,’ she said.

  Then Pat and the headmaster looked away, the pair of them embarrassed to be in the same room as us.

  We lingered at the school gates, car keys in our hands, reluctant to go our separate ways with so many angry words still unsaid. I shuddered with the cold. Winter felt as though it was never going to end. I looked at Gina.

  ‘Have they got any good schools in Soho?’ I said.

  She looked at me sharply. ‘Have they got any round here?’

  ‘Ramsay Mac is not so bad,’ I said. ‘You should see their A-Level results for Crack Dealing and Knife Fighting.’

  Her mouth hardened. ‘You think this is funny?’

  I took a breath. Should I suggest coffee? A pint and a game of arrows? We seemed beyond all of that. But I didn’t want to fight with Gina any more. I had a wife. I could be at home fighting with her. What was I doing expending all my energy on this stranger? But of course I knew the answer to that. It was because of the boy. Without our son Gina and I would be happily living on different planets.

  ‘We’re in this together,’ I said, and I almost reached out to touch her arm. Luckily I managed to restrain myself.

  ‘In it together,’ she said, all numb. ‘Yeah – like two ferrets in a sack.’

  I stared back at the school where my son had returned to his unknowable day. Double maths and a ducking in the toilet? Abusive text messages and a kicking by the bike sheds? Collecting his rucksack and starting his suspension? I looked away, ashamed of myself, wondering when I had lost the power to protect him.

  ‘I should have mentioned the change of schools,’ Gina said, thawing a bit. ‘I’m sorry, Harry, I really am. But this is not working.’

  Everything was working fine until you decided to make a guest appearance in our lives, I thought. But I said nothing, and felt suddenly empty. The one thing left of our love was our ability to argue about anything.

  ‘Do you ever wonder,’ Gina said, ‘what life would have been like if we had stayed together?’ She half-smiled, and I had no idea what was in that smile. ‘Do you wonder what would have happened, Harry, if you hadn’t fucked around and I hadn’t fucked off?’

  ‘That’s beautifully put,’ I muttered, and I let a long breath ease out, and another long breath ease in, as I remembered the uncomplicated past, the unbroken and enduring past, with the little blond boy and the knock-out young mother, and the proud, capable father who loved them both, and never thought they would slip away when he wasn’t looking.

  I saw all of that letting one breath out, and one breath in, but it was always sliding away from me, like trying to remember the kind of dream that fades upon waking. I did not love this woman before me. I loved Cyd. I loved my wife.

  I looked Gina in her blue eyes. They did nothing for me now.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I had forgotten about hospitals. The waiting around. The endless bad tea. The mind-numbing bureaucracy of terminal illness. How
bored you could get in death’s waiting room. Ken and I sat outside his doctor’s office. He studied his Racing Post while I read my copy of Matthew Parker’s Monte Cassino.

  Only the bloodbaths of Verdun and Passchendaele, or the very worst of the Second World War fighting on the Eastern Front, can compare to Monte Cassino. The largest land battle in Europe, Cassino was the bitterest and bloodiest of the Western Allies’ struggles with the German Wehrmacht on any front of the Second World War. On the German side, many compared it unfavourably with Stalingrad.

  ‘I quite fancy Lucky Sue in the two thirty at Haydock Park,’ Ken said, more to himself than me.

  ‘Dad,’ a woman’s voice said, and we looked up to see Tracey and Ian bustling down the corridor. Then they had to press against the wall to let a man with a trolley-load of blood samples pass by, his little bottles rattling away, but they never stopped smiling at their father.

  ‘Sorry we’re late,’ Tracey said. ‘The traffic.’

  ‘Hanger Lane was a nightmare,’ Ian said. ‘Chock-a-block, it is.’

  Ken grunted, and turned back to the Racing Post.

  ‘You haven’t missed much,’ he said.

  I went to get tea for the four of us. When I came back, they were still waiting to see the doctor. Tracey was banging on about some homeopathic quackery she had just read about, while Ken rolled his eyes and stared at a point somewhere over her shoulder. Ian smiled nervously, trying to soothe the troubled waters that raged between them.

  ‘It’s really hot,’ I said, passing the white plastic cups around. ‘Give it five minutes.’

  But Tracey was still talking about this miracle cure for cancer. She took a big gulp of molten tea and then jumped up as if she was choking.

  ‘Told you to wait a minute,’ I said.

  She turned on me. ‘And – sorry – remind me,’ she said, ‘why exactly are you here?’

  ‘Tracey,’ said her brother, not the first time, I’ll warrant.

  I cradled my boiling hot cup. ‘I drove your dad here,’ I said quietly.

  ‘That’s not it,’ Ken said with a chuckle. He folded his Racing Post and looked at me. ‘He’s looking for his dad. Aren’t you?’

  I said nothing. I held my book and my tea. It was still too hot to drink. But I brought it to my lips anyway, just for something to do.

  ‘He’s looking for his dad but he’s not going to find him here,’ Ken said. An emphatic little gesture with his head.

  ‘He’s gone, your dad,’ he told me. ‘There’s just me and my tumour.’ He looked pleasantly surprised. ‘Here – sounds like a song.’ He began to sing, to the tune of ‘Me and My Shadow’. ‘Me…and my tumour…strolling down the avenue.’

  Tracey covered her face. ‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Please. Don’t.’

  Ken smiled. ‘You can say what you like when they’re digging your grave.’ He raised his hands in exasperation. ‘Oh, here we go,’ he said. ‘Here come the waterworks. Here comes Niagara Falls.’

  Ian had begun to cry. More of a weeping and a wailing. Great wet tears coursing down his big round face. I swallowed hard. I looked away. But then I had to look at Ken.

  ‘Your dad’s gone,’ he told me. ‘Get it?’

  ‘Got it,’ I managed, and I necked my tea in one go as the nurse stuck her head around the door and said, ‘Mr Grimwood?’

  He stood up, straightened his tie and tugged at the hem of his blazer. ‘Here, miss,’ he said. I watched the Grimwoods troop off to the doctor’s office. Ken turned and beckoned me to join them.

  ‘But what does he need to come in for?’ Tracey demanded. ‘He’s not family.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Ken chuckled. ‘Let him have a bit of fun.’

  Tracey shook her head, and bit her lip. Her brother patted her arm and we all went in where the doctor showed us X-rays of the old man’s lungs, black with primary tumours and foggy with the fluids that clogged his chest.

  The doctor was very nice. He pushed a box of Kleenex across his empty table for Tracey and Ian when they really started to sob. And he told us that only twenty per cent of lung cancer cases are ever suitable for surgery, and explained very patiently why chemotherapy and radiotherapy were inappropriate for an elderly man at this late stage of the disease. So he told us that there was hope. But not today, and not in this room, and not for this old man.

  ‘You have perhaps nine months,’ the doctor said, and Ian and Tracey were leaning out of their chairs, hugging each other.

  I gripped my book with both hands.

  But Ken Grimwood sat there dry-eyed.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ he said. ‘Can I go home now?’

  That was the day that I really saw the hardness in him. Not the hardness that I had always admired – the hardness that gave him and all the men like him the courage to stand up to poverty and war and cancer and death – but the other hardness, the kind that kept his children at a distance, and his wife a little in fear, no matter how much she was in love.

  As though something inside him was forever frozen, and could never melt, and could never be reached. Perhaps they were the same thing, the good hardness and the other kind, and perhaps they had always been the same thing.

  And he might have felt that my father was not there, but I could sense my old man muttering in the wings. I could almost smell the Old Spice and Old Holborn and the brown ale on his breath. And I could see him – I could see ten thousand nights of him eating his dinner on his lap in front of the TV, and I could remember the one special night when he was stone-faced with fury as I told him that my marriage had died, and then near the end, I remembered the nights when he was pumped full of morphine in a hospital ward, and still fearless, still hard as teak, and still totally incapable of tears, or of ever being touched.

  So the old man was wrong.

  My father was there all right.

  Fifteen

  Cyd and I were home alone.

  It was one of those rare moments of peace that descend on any busy household. When you suddenly find time on your hands, and stillness in the house, and the children all elsewhere.

  A Saturday morning, and suddenly I had nothing to do today. In a terse text message, Pat had cancelled our trip to the NFT for the director’s cut of A Bridge Too Far. Peggy was at her salsa class. And Joni had not yet returned from a sleepover at a friend’s house.

  I placed two cups of coffee on the little table in our living room. There was a catalogue on the table for serious kitchen appliances – fridges that can hold enough canapés to feed a thousand, that kind of thing.

  I settled myself on the sofa with my copy of the Racing Post.

  I felt good. I felt calm. I noted that Marley’s Ghost had been found wanting in its last three starts but had now dropped some weight and was expected to get involved in the 1235 at Limerick.

  Interesting, I thought. Very interesting.

  Cyd walked into the room towelling her hair. It was still wet from the shower. She was barefoot, half-dressed, her limbs long and coltish in white shorts and black vest. She knelt on the floor in front of the big wall mirror, lifting her bottom in my general direction as she plugged in the hairdryer.

  It was a bit like one of those mirrors you see in dance studios. A mirror that dominates a wall, and lets you see everything. And I saw how my wife’s body had changed over the years. She was rounder now, made of more curves. Time did that. A baby did that.

  I liked the way she was before and I liked the way she was now. If anything, I liked her more now. Cyd was always lovely, but she was one of those women who grow into their beauty. And she looked great in her white shorts and black vest, her hair all wet and mussed up. I had quite forgotten about Marley’s Ghost getting involved at Limerick.

  She caught me watching her and smiled at me in the mirror.

  ‘What?’ she laughed.

  As if she couldn’t tell.

  I crossed the room to her, the Racing Post still in my hand. She shook her head and turned on the hairdryer. I knelt by her side
, feeling a blast of hot air on my face. Her black hair was flying, all wet and glossy. I threw aside my paper and touched her hair with the tips of my fingers.

  ‘Want me to do that for you?’ I offered, looking at her bare legs. There was a long muscle on the top of her thighs and it really stood out when she knelt down like that.

  ‘You want to blow-dry my hair?’ she said. ‘Thanks, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it.’

  I nuzzled the side of her face, her hair damp against my nose and mouth.

  Then I slipped into my Barry White voice.

  ‘You know, baby, no matter how many times I’ve blowdried your hair, it just never seems like it’s enough…’ I shook my head like the great man. ‘It’s just not enough, baby.’

  Cyd turned off her hairdryer.

  ‘What do you really want?’ she said, and she tilted her head as I kissed her mouth. A perfect fit, as always and forever. She stroked my arms as we knelt side by side, our foreheads touching, looking at each other in the mirror.

  ‘Saturday morning?’ she said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Nobody around. We’re an old married couple. We have to take our pleasures where we can.’

  Her eyes got that sleepy, knowing look that I loved.

  ‘You don’t need any of those little blue pills yet, do you?’ she said.

  That kind of lavish sexual praise always gets me going.

  ‘Not if you catch me before noon,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘Then we’ve got sixty minutes.’

  I slipped back into Barry White.

  ‘That’s good, baby, because you know I’m a sixty-minute man.’

  ‘Promises, promises,’ she said, and laid her hairdryer to one side and put her arms around my neck.

  Then we were rolling around on the floor, and every now and again I would stop kissing her to look at us in the mirror. And Cyd would look too. And what we saw in the mirror would make us want to kiss some more.

  We were just about to get down to the serious stuff when Cyd said, ‘Ouch.’