by Tony Parsons
Before I had the handbrake on she had picked him up and squeezed the air out of him. She held him at arm’s length and stared with wonder at his gorgeous face. She shook her head, unable to believe that he was back.
If only for a week.
We went inside. Pink and purple leaflets were strewn across her coffee table. My mother quickly began to gather them up. But not before I caught sight of some of the titles.
Here for You. Coping with a Diagnosis. Breast Reconstruction. Friends of Breast Cancer Care. Going into Hospital. Zoladex. Taxol. Taxotere. Arimidex. Chemotherapy. Radiotherapy.
I didn’t even understand half of the titles. But I knew what they all meant.
‘You okay, Mum?’ I asked, the most useless question of all, but one I couldn’t stop myself asking. Because I wanted so much for her to tell me that everything was going to be all right, and that she would always be in this world.
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she said, not wanting to make a fuss, seeking to avoid self-pity and melodrama at all costs. ‘They sent me this stuff. I don’t know how they expect me to read it all.’
She gathered up her cancer leaflets and stuffed them into a drawer.
Then she clapped her hands.
‘I’m going to make a nice cup of tea for my two boys,’ she said. ‘How about that?’
‘I can’t have caffeine,’ Pat said, picking up the television remote. ‘Mummy said.’
‘And I’ve already had a few cappuccinos,’ I said. ‘My doctor doesn’t want me to have more than three shots of caffeine a day. Bad for blood pressure, you see.’
‘Oh,’ said my mum, bewildered. ‘Oh, all right. I’ll just make one for myself then, shall I?’
So Pat and I slumped on that sagging old sofa that seemed to know every last nook and curve in our bodies and my mum went off to the kitchen, humming Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’, and contemplating this strange new world where her son and grandson were both forbidden from having a nice cup of tea.
Later we were in the park watching Pat tackle the upper regions of a rusty climbing frame. He wasn’t the tentative small boy he had been only a couple of years earlier. Now he was as fearless as a mountain goat.
Two bigger boys were clambering around the very top like monkeys in Tommy Hilfiger. Every now and again Pat would pause, hold on tight, and gaze up at them with adoration. He still loved bigger boys. They ignored him completely.
‘It’s good to have him back,’ I said. ‘Feels more like a proper family again. Especially when we are out here with you. Just a regular family where you don’t have to think too much about anything. Where it all seems – I don’t know – normal. Like you and Dad.’
My father would have happily concurred with my yearning for normality. The old man would have bemoaned the death of the family, the rise in the divorce rate, the generation of children who were being brought up with one of their parents missing. He would have done all that while rolling himself a cigarette.
My dad was all for normality.
But my mum was made of different stuff.
‘What’s normal?’ she said. ‘Your dad and I were married for ten years before you came along. You call us normal? We felt like anything but normal. We felt like freaks.’
The two bigger boys jumped off the climbing frame and ran to the swings. Pat smiled at them with undiluted affection.
‘All our friends were having children,’ my mum said. ‘Like a bunch of rabbits, they were. One of them always had a bun in the oven. Up the spout, in the club, knocked up. But it didn’t happen for us.’ She gave a smile. ‘And you call us normal, Harry. Bless you. We didn’t feel very normal, I can tell you.’
I watched my son laboriously edging his way up the climbing frame, his face stern with concentration, and rosy-cheeked from the cold.
‘You know what I mean. We were normal. You, me and Dad.’
And I thought of Christmas with all the aunts and uncles, caravan holidays in Cornwall, the smell of the Sunday roast cooking while my old man washed his car in the little driveway. I remembered runs to Southend, not for the pier or the beach, but for the dog track. And I remembered lying on the back seat of the car, the yellow lights of the Essex A-roads streaming about my head, coming home from seeing my nan or, once a year, a pantomime at the London Palladium, telling my mum that I couldn’t sleep, I wasn’t tired, not tired at all. Just rest your eyes, she would tell me. Just rest your eyes. There was a simplicity and a goodness about my childhood, and already it seemed too late for my son to have the same thing. ‘You couldn’t get more normal than us,’ I said.
‘So we became normal when you came along? And if you hadn’t come along, we would have stayed freaks?’
‘I don’t know. I just know it felt sort of easy. In a way that it doesn’t feel easy any more. Pat and Peggy are not talking. Cyd’s angry with me because she thinks I’m spoiling Pat. I’m mad at Cyd because I think she resents Pat coming over for just one lousy week.’
‘Why aren’t Pat and Peggy talking?’
‘They had a bit of a bust-up. He called Lucy Doll a two-dollar crack whore. You know how Peggy feels about Lucy Doll.’
‘Brothers and sisters fight all the time. I nearly stabbed one of my brothers.’
‘Yes, but they’re not brother and sister, are they? That’s the point. So it can never be normal. Not really. If it falls to pieces, then what happens? We never see each other again. You’re telling me that’s what you call normal? Come on, Mum. Not even you’re that broad-minded.’
We watched Pat climb to the summit of the frame. He stood there silhouetted against the big blue sky, the smell of spring in the air despite the chill, grinning at us, all wrapped up in his padded anorak. He held on tight with both hands. Golden strands of hair stuck out from inside the bobble hat that his grandmother had knitted him.
‘I just don’t like all this talk about normal,’ said my mum. ‘Because for years I felt anything but normal. Ten years we tried for you. Every month was another heartbreak. Times that by ten, Harry. You’re the smart one. You work it out.’
One of Pat’s trainers seemed to slip and I watched the expression on his face change from pride to alarm as he suddenly lurched backwards into thin air. But then he recovered, found his footing and gripped the climbing frame with his tiny fists.
‘There’s no such thing as a normal family,’ said my mum.
Gina called.
It was close to midnight. The kids had been asleep for hours – Peggy in her room, Pat on an old futon in the guest room – and Cyd was out catering for the launch of one of those trendy hotels that were springing up all over town. After the slurs on Lucy Doll’s morality, we were all talking again, although it was with a strained politeness that sometimes seemed even worse than angry silence. I was glad that nobody was around when my ex-wife called.
‘Is he okay, Harry?’
‘He’s fine.’
‘You’re not letting him have sugar, are you? Or caffeine? Or British beef?’
‘He hasn’t had a Happy Meal since he’s been here.’
‘I want you to take him to see my dad.’
‘Your dad? Take him to see Glenn?’
‘That’s right. Pat’s grandfather.’
It was always difficult for me to remember that Pat had two sets of grandparents. Gina’s mother had died before our son was born, and although her old man was still out there and Pat had seen him sporadically down the years, he had never been a traditional grandfather figure.
Glenn was what he had always been – a mullet-haired musician who had never quite made it out of the minor leagues. There had been the odd appearance on Top of the Pops at the cusp of the sixties and seventies, but Glenn had spent almost three decades as a sales assistant in a guitar shop on Denmark Street, playing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for teenage NME readers. The best part of his energies had gone into forming a new band every few years, not to mention a new family. Gina and her mother had been left behind a lifetime ago. Musical differences, probab
ly.
‘I want him to see my dad. I want him to know that he has another grandfather. It wasn’t just your dad, Harry.’
‘Okay. I’ll take Pat to see Glenn.’
‘Thank you.’
‘How’s everything over there? Britney still upsetting Richard? Pat’s told me all about it. Is he still licking his penis at the dinner table? The dog, I mean. Not Richard.’
‘That dog is the least of our troubles,’ said my ex-wife.
My son cried out in the middle of the night. I slipped out of bed, feeling Cyd stir beside me, and I went to him, treading carefully as I was more asleep than awake.
And it was as if we had never been apart.
His long fair hair was stuck to his head with perspiration. I sat him up and gave him some water, rubbing his back the way I’d done when he was a baby and needed winding.
‘You can’t sleep on planes,’ he said in the darkness, talking in a dream. ‘It’s very difficult, right, because you’re moving and there’s all this food all the time and a little telly too. Isn’t it difficult, Daddy?’
‘But it’s okay now. Everything’s okay now.’
I held my boy close and rocked him, feeling the warmth of him through the brushed-cotton pyjamas, sensing his little chest rise and fall with each passing breath, feeling all the love I had for him rise up inside me.
It was four in the morning. The house slept on. But now I was awake, and remembering some words from long ago.
‘Just rest your eyes,’ I told my boy.
eighteen
Peggy surveyed the crowds swarming around the giant Ferris wheel.
‘There’s lots of people,’ she said, taking my hand.
I looked up at the London Eye towering above us, and down at her worried face. I smiled and gave her hand a squeeze.
‘We’ll be up there soon.’
She nodded, holding my hand tighter. Sometimes Peggy put her hand in mine and I thought that everything was going to be all right.
She was so small, so smart, so wise, so trusting and so beautiful that all she had to do was take my hand and I wanted to protect her for the rest of my life. I held that warm hand in mine and nothing else mattered. Not the sporadic visits from her useless father. Not the running battle she was currently having with Pat about their early-evening DVD entertainment. And not even the fact that her mother looked at her in a way she could never look at my son. Peggy took my hand and something chemical happened inside me. I felt like her father.
High above us the great wheel revolved in the clear April sky. It was turning so slowly that from where we were you could hardly tell that it was moving at all. But new people kept pouring in and out of the steel and glass capsules, so something was happening up there.
The crowd edged towards the departure gate. Pat was excitedly darting between the barriers, checking on our progress. Cyd was reading a brochure about the London Eye, occasionally saying, ‘Now this is interesting…’ before reading us some fact about the big wheel’s architects, construction or size. But while Pat ran around and Cyd read aloud, Peggy just held my hand as we slowly moved forward.
She was far more self-possessed than Pat, but that was not the reason she was being quiet today. My son was giddy with the fairground excitement of the London Eye, but something about all these people unnerved Peggy.
‘We’ll be able to see where we live, Peg,’ I told her. ‘And we’ll be able to see Parliament and all the parks and all the way to Docklands.’
‘And Big Ben?’ In a very small voice.
‘And Big Ben too.’ I gave her hand another squeeze. ‘We’ll be all right, Peg.’
She didn’t look so certain. Pat dashed back, happy and breathless. Cyd tucked her brochure under her arm. She put her other arm around my waist and rested her head on my shoulder. When she lifted her face to look at me we smiled at each other, the kind of smiles that you can only really get after loving each other for a long time, smiles that somehow contained both a question and its answer.
Happy?
Thanks to you.
Then my wife slapped my arm with her London Eye brochure.
‘Hey, don’t forget,’ she said. ‘Peggy’s school play is next week. It’s really important that you guys are there. I’ll slap your asses if you don’t come.’
‘We wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
I really meant it. We felt like a family today. And I wanted this feeling to last.
We were so close to the giant wheel that now you had to crane your neck to see the top of it. You could see that it was definitely moving.
‘Nearly there,’ gasped Pat.
So I held Peggy’s hand in mine as the big wheel kept turning and, everywhere she looked, the adult world towered above her.
* * *
‘Hello, boys,’ said Gina’s dad. ‘Cool. Sweet. How about a cup of tea? Herbal all right?’
Glenn. Pat’s other grandfather. Easy to remember him as my ex-wife’s useless bastard father, the sorry excuse for a man who made all men suspect, who made all men seem capable of terrible betrayal. Less easy to remember that he was my son’s grandfather.
My parents had been such a large part of Pat’s life, a source of stability and unconditional love during what sometimes seemed like unbroken years of domestic mayhem, that it was hard for me to think of Gina’s wayward old man in quite the same way. Glenn wasn’t my idea of a grandfather. He was more my idea of an ageing hippy who believed his withered old dick was the centre of the known universe. If Glenn wasn’t there for his daughter, why should we expect any more for his grandson?
Yet it was difficult for me to hate him, despite all the sadness he had caused in his lifetime. On the odd occasions when we met, this elderly groover in his cracked leather trousers seemed like a lonely, pathetic figure. After all the big dreams and great loves and hysterical scenes in his life, he had ended up in a rented one-bedroom flat in Hadley Wood. Because he had mistaken hedonism for happiness.
And there was an undeniable sweetness about him. I knew that he was a selfish old git who had sacrificed everyone he had ever loved for his knob and his guitar, and I knew that Gina still carried the wounds that he had inflicted by walking out and casually starting again. But he appeared genuinely glad to see Pat and me, and there was something in the way that he looked at my son that seemed infinitely gentle. Given the chance, the pair of them got on very well. Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part, but when Glenn looked at Pat, I believed I saw love in his eyes.
While Glenn laboured with our drinks – the smallest act of domesticity was beyond him – I sat on a sofa that was made out of the same cracked leather material as his trousers. Pat wandered the flat. There wasn’t a lot of space to stroll around, and everywhere you looked there was music.
Dad rock magazines on the coffee table. An acoustic and an electric guitar leaning back in their stands. A good sound system, although like Glenn himself, the material on the speakers was fraying with age. Shining towers of CDs. And fat stacks of old twelve-inch vinyl LPs. Pat picked one of them up.
‘What’s this then?’ he said, brandishing a dark, twelve-inch cardboard square at me.
‘That’s a long-playing record, Pat.’
‘What’s it do then?’
‘It plays music.’
Pat looked doubtful. ‘It’s too big,’ he said.
On the cover of the album he was holding, a beautiful young man stared moodily out of the darkness. In the background three less lovely young men hovered like ugly sisters waiting to be invited to the ball.
Glenn came back into the room carrying our mugs of camomile.
‘Good choice, man,’ he said. ‘That’s the first Doors album. Considered by many to be the greatest debut album of all time.’
‘Pat’s not curious about Jim Morrison, Glenn,’ I said. ‘He’s just never seen an LP before.’
Glenn almost dropped the herbal tea. ‘You’re kidding me!’
And then he was away. Sitting with Pat on the
floor of his rented flat, sifting through half a century of music while the Doors belted out ‘Break On Through (to the Other Side)’.
It was all there, from Elvis and Little Richard to the Beatles and the Stones, Hendrix and the Who, the Pistols and the Clash, the Smiths and the Stone Roses, Nirvana and the Strokes, and every side road, every detour, from country rock to glam to grunge to nu metal, the greats, the has-beens and – his speciality – the one-hit wonders. Glenn led his charmed, bewildered grandson on a guided tour through a rock and roll wonderland.
‘Now these guys are interesting,’ Glenn chuckled, producing a sleeve that showed five boys in psychedelic trousers frolicking in a children’s park. ‘Ah yes, the Trollies. Started out as a basic Mod covers band called the Trolley Boys. Got into the whole psychedelic thing as the Trollies. Wandering around the council flats having a bit of a cosmic vision – you know the sort of thing, Pat. And later recorded some rather interesting, hugely underrated concept albums as Maximum Troll.’ Glenn handed the sleeve to Pat. ‘See anyone you recognise?’
I peered over their shoulders. And I saw him immediately – the face of a drug-ravaged choirboy, the Robert Plant bubble cut tumbling over his velvet jacket, leering at the camera with his mates. The Glenn of thirty years ago, when Gina was a baby, the Glenn who was as close as he would ever be to having his dreams come true.
‘That’s your granddad, Pat,’ I said, resisting the urge to say – your other granddad. ‘He was on Top of the Pops once, isn’t that right, Glenn?’
Pat’s mouth dropped open. ‘You were on Top Pops?’
He had always called it Top Pops. I had given up trying to correct him. I sort of liked his mistake anyway.
‘With this very line-up. Oh, apart from Chalky Brown on drums. By the time we did “Roundhouse Lady,” we had Sniffer Penge on the skins.’
Pat was enchanted. He had never imagined his errant grandfather to be capable of such glory. And Glenn was humbled and happy, perhaps happier than I had ever seen him.