Men from the Boys

by Tony Parsons

  But I wonder if he really did. Sometimes what we think we can remember are just stories that we have been told by our parents.

  ‘You grow out of all that, I guess,’ he said.

  ‘Asking the big questions?’ I said.

  My son shook his head, and blew on his tea. ‘Expecting any answers,’ he said.

  We went back to the ward.

  We sat either side of his bed, watching him sleep.

  There was light coming from somewhere, that hospital night-light that is as unavoidable as moonshine, and I could see his face inside the oxygen mask that was clamped over his mouth, and I could see where the straps pressed into the flesh of his cheeks.

  He was in the High Dependency Unit with eleven other men, and we could hear them moaning and moving in their sleep, and sometimes the sharp electric buzz of the metal box that called for help, and then the voices of the nurses – soothing, reassuring, endlessly practical – as they did what they could.

  ‘He hasn’t got long, has he?’ Pat said.

  ‘It only ends one way,’ I said. ‘You know that. People talk about bravery when someone’s fighting illness.’ I shook my head. ‘In the end, that’s meaningless. A life just narrows down to a point of pain, and bravery doesn’t come into it.’

  Pat almost smiled. ‘If it was just about bravery,’ he said, ‘then he would get out of that bed and walk out of here tonight.’

  I watched my son watching the old man’s face, and I thought I knew what he was thinking. Even with the oxygen, the air being pumped into those exhausted lungs was not enough. Ken’s chest rose and fell in that restless sleep, the breath wheezed and strained. Not enough air. Never enough air ever again. It was like watching someone drown.

  Nothing anyone can do, I thought bitterly. I had called his children, and left messages on their machines. Singe Rana had gone home and would be back in the morning. All anyone could do now was to sit and wait for the end.

  A nice Chinese doctor gave us a reassuring rap about making him comfortable. But that just meant pumping him with enough opiates to kill the pain. Until the pain killed him. Already his face had the ghostly pallor of morphine.

  Ken moaned in his sleep. Pat reached out and held the old man’s hands. Ken twisted and settled, and the moaning stopped. Pat continued to hold his hands. It seemed to soothe the dying old man.

  The boy held the old man’s hand. ‘I’ll stay with you,’ he said.

  And so I was wrong.

  There was still something that could be done.

  The night moved slowly. I must have slept for a while because his voice jolted me awake. The fog had cleared for a moment, that fog that comes in with the morphine and smothers the pain but also smothers everything else. Above the oxygen mask his eyes were shining with tears and fear. The terror of it, I thought. Knowing the ending is here in this bed in this room and there is nowhere to go.

  Pat was staring at him, wide-eyed and alert. The boy had not slept. He leaned forward as the old man’s words came out on a trickle of breath. Their hands clawed at each other.

  ‘This is not me,’ the old man told us.

  I stood in the hospital car park and I shivered in the dark as I watched the day creeping in. A smear of white over the East End, and then the birds starting up as a halo of light appeared above the rooftops, then the flat red glare of sunrise. It wasn’t so cold. I felt my body relax, and I realised I was tired and needed to sleep. I leaned against the hospital doors and closed my eyes. I snapped awake when a woman said my name.

  ‘Harry?’ she said. ‘Thanks for being here.’

  Tracey and Ian. I looked at Ken Grimwood’s grown-up children and I tried to see him in them. Ian had those gimlet eyes, like little blue lasers, but his face and his body and his manner were just too soft to resemble his father. I could see more of Ken in Tracey – not so much the broad forehead, or the sharp razor-cut of a mouth – but the unforgiving, implacable hardness in her. It was there even now, even after they had been crying all night long.

  ‘My son’s in with him,’ I said. ‘Your dad seems to like him being there.’

  Tracey nodded briskly, as if the family were taking over now, and the old man would like that even more.

  ‘It hasn’t always been easy,’ Tracey said. ‘In fact, it’s never been easy. My father can be a very difficult old man,’ she said, and her words got clogged up on the bitter truth of it.

  Ian had started to cry again. I didn’t look at him.

  ‘But you can always make up for lost time,’ she told me. ‘It’s never too late, is it?’

  I nodded and I watched them go through the hospital doors to see their dying father.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely to think so?’ I said.

  Pat came out after a while.

  I knew he could talk to the two adults. He could handle it. He was gracious enough, smart enough, sensitive enough. He would tell them what kind of a night their father had had. He would be able to accept their stuttered thanks. Then he would know when it was time to go. I knew he could do all of that and I wasn’t worried.

  I was proud of him. Proud of the man he was growing into.

  I watched him light a cigarette and suck on it hungrily, struggling to keep my eyes open. It was full summer daylight now, and getting brighter by the moment.

  ‘I might go in,’ he said after a while, and at first I thought he meant go back into the hospital. ‘To school,’ he said. ‘To Ramsay Mac. I might just go in today.’

  I shook my head, suddenly completely awake.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I said. ‘It’s nearly the end of term. You missed all your exams.’

  A flash of something in those blue eyes.

  ‘Maybe I didn’t miss them,’ he said. ‘Maybe I strolled in and knocked off my exams, and they were all a piece of cake, and I’ll do better than all of those thickos.’

  I brightened. ‘Is that what happened, Pat?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Who cares? Exams mean nothing. They don’t get you to stay in school so you can find a better job. They get you to stay in school because it keeps the unemployment figures down.’ Then he nodded, deciding something. ‘But I want to go in today. When they are all there. All of them. Every single one of them.’

  ‘Nobody at Ramsay Mac cares if you show up or not,’ I said, feeling uneasy. I felt that he was free of Ramsay Mac now, and that we should put it all behind us.

  I did not want him to go to school.

  ‘But I want to,’ he said, reading my mind, and exhaling two trails of smoke from his nostrils. He crushed the cigarette under his scuffed school shoes and kicked it into the gutter. ‘I just think it’s something I should do,’ he said.

  So we went for some breakfast and then I drove him to Ramsay Mac for the very last time.

  Out in the playing fields they were erecting some kind of marquee. This big white Bedouin tent for the last day of term, for all the prize-giving and the back-slapping and the speeches. I thought it likely that we would probably skip all that.

  The bell was tolling for the start of lessons as we pulled up outside the gates. But the exams were over, and the holidays were coming, and the Ramsay Mac regime was even more lax than normal.

  And so they were all outside the school gates.

  All of them. The regular kids, who just wanted to get through it all in one piece, and the rest of them.

  William Fly. Spud Face. The assorted snickering thugs and butterfly-tormentors that attach themselves to the likes of Fly and his spud-faced henchman.

  And Elizabeth Montgomery, more beautiful than ever, almost a woman now, and an engagement ring the size of a Ramada Inn flashing on the third finger of her left hand.

  They were all there. The one my son had loved, and the ones who had made his life a misery, and all the bit players in their ragged blue blazers.

  They watched him get out of the car and approach the gates.

  Then their eyes turned to William Fly, and they saw him as he looked away from Pat�
��s face, and stared at the ground.

  Pat walked to the gates of Ramsay Mac and William Fly stepped aside. The boys who followed him did the same. Elizabeth Montgomery did not move. She just scratched her ear, the fat diamond ring flashing in the end-of-term sunlight.

  Then William Fly nodded at Pat, almost deferential, dipping his broken nose.

  But Pat walked past them all, his long hair shining, his blue eyes staring ahead, as if none of them were even there.

  My son walked into school.

  And they all left him alone.

  Twenty-four

  False alarm. No need to panic.

  Gina wasn’t a lesbian after all.

  The new guy was in her kitchen making us tea. He was wearing a silky vest and snug shorts and his hard, hairless body was almost hysterically male. His skin jutted with carefully nurtured muscles that had been pumped and pampered and fed with protein. He looked like a condom stuffed with walnuts. I was more of a lesbian than he was. We smiled at him as he placed a tray before us, and then withdrew to the kitchen for more domestic chores.

  ‘Wow, Gina,’ I said. ‘He’s got muscles in places where I don’t think I have places. Where did you find him?’

  She sat cross-legged on her sofa, pouring milk for the pair of us. She knew how I liked it. She didn’t need to ask. She was wearing tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt. Hair pulled back so you could see that fabulous face in all its slightly goofy beauty. No make-up, skin still glistening from her early morning exercise – whatever that might have been.

  ‘He works at the same gym as Sian,’ she said, fussing over our cups. One sugar for me, none for her. Just a dash of milk for both of us. ‘We struck up a conversation when he helped me with my glutes.’

  ‘Very romantic.’

  I sipped my tea, ever so slightly disappointed that Gina had not stuck with being a lesbian. There would have been something strangely reassuring about a woman who goes off men after breaking up with you. Turning your ex-wife into a lesbian – you could take it as a backhanded compliment.

  ‘Siân was just so possessive,’ she said, reading my mind. ‘The sexual jealousy – my God! Worse than a bloody man.’ She sighed. ‘Shall we go outside?’

  We went out to the balcony. Four floors below us Soho was caught between night and day. There were still holloweyed revellers sipping one last espresso in Bar Italia and going for breakfast in Patisserie Valerie, but the security grilles were coming down all along Old Compton Street.

  ‘I want it to be better, Harry,’ Gina said to me, and when she looked at me, the years fell away. All the dead ends and disappointments and distractions – working in Tokyo and a small army of Mr Rights and Mr Right Nows and her shortlived career as a lesbian – none of it mattered as much as what we had once been together. Because I knew exactly what she meant.

  ‘I want it to be better too,’ I said honestly. ‘For you. And for Pat.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to him,’ she said. ‘Before he left. Before he went back to you. I wanted to tell him – I don’t know. That I loved him. That I had always loved him. But it didn’t happen. Somehow I never got the chance. He just packed his stuff and left. He was here and then he was gone.’

  She glanced back at her apartment, as if seeking evidence that he had really lived here for a while. But there was nothing.

  ‘We wait for these big moments,’ I said. ‘When everything will be settled and revealed. And most of the time, they don’t happen. People just go.’

  ‘But when he was living with me,’ she said, ‘it was like we were two strangers. He wasn’t that little boy any more. That blond moppet who wouldn’t put down his light sabre. He was this…teenager. And I didn’t recognise him.’

  ‘That happens,’ I said. ‘They grow up. And it’s true – you don’t recognise them. You struggle to find the connection between this great big scowling lump and that sweet little kid with the light sabre. But he’s still the same boy.’

  Did I really believe that? I knew that I loved him now because I had loved him then. But it was different for Gina. She had missed so much. I knew she wanted to make up for all the lost time. She was ready – now she had worked out where she wanted to live, and who she wanted to sleep with, and now she was done with all the endless searching for the core of herself. But while she was preparing herself, while she was getting ready, our boy had grown up.

  And it was hard to love a stranger. For both of them.

  ‘What’s he like, Harry?’ she said, and I felt the time piling up between us. She looked like a kid today – what with the sun shining on her toned skin, and all the good sex with the new guy, and her hair pulled back. But Gina was not a kid any more, and there were unknowable years between us.

  ‘He likes football but he’s not that good at it,’ I said. ‘He likes lateral thinking. And he likes racing.’

  She looked interested. Gina the health nut. Gina the queen of the cardiovascular workout. I think she imagined they might bond over their deltoid thrusts. ‘Racing?’ she said. ‘Field and track? Working out, you mean?’

  ‘Horse racing,’ I said. ‘And dog racing. Greyhounds. That kind of racing.’

  She frowned. She disapproved. She wanted him to be someone that he would never be.

  ‘And cigarettes,’ I said. ‘He enjoys a Marlboro Light at every opportunity, although I imagine someone will get him to stop one day. But it won’t be you or me. It will be a woman. Or it will be a child. And he will stop for them. Because he loves them.’

  ‘I want us to do things together that he enjoys,’ Gina said grimly. ‘But what am I meant to do? Buy him a packet of fags and take him to a betting shop?’

  ‘Yeah, that would work,’ I said. ‘They’re not that hard to please, Gina,’ I said. ‘Kids – they don’t want much. They just want your time. They just want your attention. Someone said to me, “They need your love most when they deserve it the least.” He was talking about that difficult age, I guess. When they suddenly look like strangers.’

  Mr Universe strolled on to the balcony. He was swigging an orange protein drink out of a plastic beaker. He looked like he could crack nuts between those biceps. I was very impressed.

  ‘Not now,’ Gina said sharply, waving him away.

  ‘Girls have just started,’ I said. ‘I think he may have lost his virginity with Elizabeth Montgomery. She dumped him, but I think he still likes her.’ I shrugged. ‘I know what you mean when you say you don’t recognise him any more. It’s true. Something changes when they become teenagers, and you struggle to see your kid in there. The sweetness. The innocence. But it’s still there, if you look hard enough.’ I looked at my watch. It was time to move on. ‘He’s a beautiful boy, Gina. He places great stock in kindness. Get beyond the surly surface, all the mood swings and the Marlboro Lights, and smoking Mexican weed in the Wendy House and all the stuff that he is already growing out of, and he is just a beautiful boy who is growing into a good man.’ I looked at her and I could just about see the girl I had loved. ‘It’s like the old song,’ I said. ‘To know him is to love him. The problem is – you don’t know him, do you?’

  She flared up at that and, funnily enough, at that moment I could see him in her.

  When he was four years old and his mother had walked out and it was clear she wasn’t coming back by teatime, he had looked at his lovely face in the rear-view mirror of my car. Who do I look like? he asked me.

  And the truth was he looked like both of us, although the taken-for-granted beauty had nothing to do with me. That dirty blond hair, those stabbing blue eyes, the sweep of the jawline – he was a good-looking boy and he got all that from his mother. But what had she done for him lately? Being a parent is a daily slog, or it is nothing. Fish fingers, Cyd had told me. Fish fingers and name-tags and nit combs. And she was right. That’s what being a parent is made of.

  ‘He’s as much my son as he is your son,’ Gina said, and we both knew that, somewhere in the unrecoverable past, that had stopped being true.
r />   She turned towards the kitchen, where Mr Universe was waiting.

  ‘We made a good kid, Gina,’ I said. ‘We really did.’

  It was the best I could do.

  Pat would be there when he woke.

  Night and day had lost their meaning, and Ken would wake when the morphine was wearing off. He would twist with the incoming tide of pain, and try to sit up, and that’s when he would need the oxygen mask over his face, and then some water on his lips, and then the mask again.

  A glass of water sat on one side of the bed but it never needed to be refilled. So an intravenous drip stood on the other side of his bed, hooked to a vein in his left arm.

  The waiting exhausted me. It exhausted his children. Even his oldest friend, Singe Rana, would slip away when it was near midnight and the ward was bedding down. For the hours piled upon the hours, and there was nothing to do but sit by his side and watch him sleep. Well-meaning gifts sat by his bedside, fruit and flowers and copies of the Racing Post. All unopened, and all unneeded now.

  The total isolation of death. The loneliness of the dying man. That is what I had noticed about my father’s death. We loved him but, in the end, we left him and he died alone. Because we were tired. Because it was late. Because there was nothing we could do. We loved him and yet he was on his own.

  But when Ken awoke in the dead of night, flinching with the pain that was never far away now, his mind numbed by the opiates but not so much he did not know, he was never alone.

  Because the boy never left his side.

  You never knew what would be waiting for you at the hospital.

  Sometimes I hoped that I would get there and it would all be over, and the thought made me fill with shame.

  Because our every instinct is to cling to life, even when life has narrowed to a world of pain. And I could not stand seeing him in that place, endlessly and senselessly tested, coming out of the fog of drugs when all that was waiting for him was more suffering.