by Tony Parsons
But I didn’t do it. I finished filling my tank as he was making a great play of giving Maggie Thatcher the chocolates and flowers, and that’s when I caught a glimpse of myself in my car window, and the image held me. By the time I had recovered, Tex and his dancing partner had gone.
And I knew I could not approach him because I was afraid that I was that kind of man too – a pretender, conning a woman out of her love by appearing to be nice, terminating all emotion when the first bill arrived. What Tex did to my mum – was it really so different from what I was doing to Cyd?
With all my heart, I wanted to be the other sort of man, a man like my father. Loyal, true, a keeper of promises. A forever and ever man. But I suspected that I was much more like this toy cowboy than I was ever like my dad.
All smooth talk and empty promises, all milk chocolates and flowers, then running a country mile as soon as the going got rough.
Gina called me on the day she arrived in London, but it wasn’t the call I’d been expecting – cursory, formal, and anxious to get me off the line and out of her life.
Instead, the call, when it came, was at midnight, with Gina in tears, a hard-core soundtrack booming in the background.
‘Harry?’
One word and I could tell it was her, even if the word was all choked up with emotion.
‘Gina, what’s wrong?’
Cyd stirred beside me as I sat up in bed. She’d had a late night, catering for some launch, and she had fallen asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.
‘Harry, it’s awful.’
‘You’re in London? Speak up, I can’t hear you.’
‘We’re in our flat. Pat and me. In Belsize Park. I thought it would be nice around here. But the people next door – they’ve got So Solid Crew going at full blast.’
‘You want me – what? You want me to come around?’
I felt my wife – my current wife, that is – pick up her alarm clock and slam it back down.
‘Do you know what time it is, Harry?’ Cyd said.
‘Could you, Harry?’ Gina said. ‘It’s driving me nuts and it sounds like there are a lot of them. Some sort of party. I’m afraid to knock on the door.’
I put my hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Gina’s in town. There’s a problem with the flat. Noisy neighbours.’
‘Tell her to call the police.’ Cyd sat up in bed. She was wearing this old Tom Petty T-shirt. When we first started, even when we were first married, she used to wear the kind of nightdresses that drove me wild. Short, silky, see-through. Pants like dental floss at the top of her dancer’s legs. Now it was Tom Petty T-shirts. ‘Give me the phone, and I’ll tell her myself.’
‘Pat can’t sleep either,’ Gina said.
That was enough for me.
‘Give me the address,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’ As I was pulling on my clothes in the darkness, Cyd turned on her bedside light.
‘She’s not your problem any more, Harry. You’re divorced. That relationship is over. Let her husband sort it out. Let the cops.’
I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to fight. But I knew that I couldn’t just ignore Gina’s call and go back to sleep. The old saying was right.
Our marriage had lasted for seven years.
But our divorce would last forever.
It was a big white house in Belsize Park. A good house, in an affluent neighbourhood. Lots of trees and builders’ skips, and the two kinds of cars that you always saw in neighbourhoods like this, the cars that were serious – Mercedes-Benz SLKs, Audi TTs, 3-series BMWs – and the cars that were just for fun – original Beetles and Minis, and the new nostalgia versions, rusty Morris Minors, prehistoric Citroëns. I paid the minicab, already looking up at the house that contained my son and my former wife. I didn’t need to look at the numbers. I could hear the music coming from the second floor.
I pressed the button for the top floor and Gina buzzed me through the front door. The music thundered above my head. Once you got inside, the big white house reeked of rented property. Stacks of mail addressed to former tenants were piled on the worn carpet like autumn leaves. This place would not be cheap, probably two grand a month, but it didn’t feel like anyone’s home. The owners of the flats inside the big white house all lived somewhere else.
I walked up past the party on the second floor, hearing their laughter and screams, a smashing glass. The music they were playing sounded like a never-ending burglar alarm.
Getting old, Harry.
Gina opened her door, pale and tearful, wrapped up in some kimono-style dressing gown that looked a few sizes too big. Or maybe it was meant to be like that. Underneath she had her pyjamas on, and I thought how unfair it was of Cyd to expect Gina to break up a drunken party in her pyjamas.
‘I’ll go and have a word with them, okay?’
‘Thanks, Harry.’
‘Pat?’
‘He’s all right. Sleeping, the last time I looked. Although God knows how.’
I felt my heart beating as I went down a flight of stairs and knocked on the door. No response. I knocked harder. Finally a gawky white kid with a retro Beatle cut opened the door. Students, I thought. Unlikely to knife me. But what was I expecting in Belsize Park? The Bloods and the Crips?
‘You should have four American Hots, two Garlic Love-ins, and a Capricciosa,’ the gawky kid said. ‘And a Vesuvio with extra pepperoni. Plus, you know, some coleslaw, garlic bread and stuff.’
‘Actually I’m not delivering pizza. I’m from upstairs. Your music is keeping my son and my…wife awake.’
Over his high, bony shoulder I could see a flat full of young people laughing and dancing and trying to convince themselves that they were in a vodka commercial. A shorter, fatter youth appeared by his side.
‘Has he got the Belgian chocolate ice cream?’
I could smell the sickly-sweet aroma of puff. Would that affect my son one flight up? Could my boy get passively stoned?
‘He’s not from Mister Milano,’ said the gawky kid. ‘He’s from upstairs.’
‘Upstairs?’ said fatty.
‘Wants us to keep the noise down.’
‘Disturbing him, is it?’
‘Apparently.’
They were laughing at me. I had been expecting threats to my person. I hadn’t expected them to laugh at me.
‘No problem, mate,’ the fat one said. ‘We’ll be quiet as a rat.’
‘You won’t hear us – what is it rats do? – squeak,’ said the gawky one.
They held on to each other, rocking with laughter.
‘Appreciate it,’ I said. ‘Because my son, he’s seven, he—’
‘No problem, mate.’
They closed the door in my face. And as I climbed the stairs to Gina’s place, the music miraculously decreased to a level that didn’t rattle the fillings in my teeth.
‘Well done, Harry.’
I gave my ex-wife an it-was-nothing smile. And immediately the music was turned up to a volume that was louder than ever.
‘Little bastards,’ I said, making for the door. ‘Don’t go.’
I looked at her. She pulled the kimono thing tighter, as if trying to hide inside it.
‘Gina? It’s not just those idiots downstairs, is it?’
‘No.’
I put my arm around her and we went inside her flat. It was clearly expensive, but clearly on a lease. The heavy olde-English furniture, the blood-red leather sofa, the Gustav Klimt prints on the wall – none of these things could have been chosen by Gina, who loved all that was light and modern and Japanese. This place looked as though it had been decorated by Queen Victoria.
We sat on the blood-red leather sofa.
‘Is it your dad?’ I hadn’t asked what was actually wrong with him. Since my own father had died, I fatalistically assumed that any illness an old person contracted was terminal.
‘My dad’s okay.’ She smiled for the first time, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. ‘He’s a silly old bu
gger. He put his hip out snowboarding.’
‘Snowboarding? I thought there was something wrong with him.’
‘Only the thing that’s been wrong with him all his life. He can’t grow up.’
I had slipped my shoes off at the door – even in these rented rooms, I didn’t need to be told that Gina liked you to take your shoes off at the door, Japanese style – and now I could feel my feet quivering with the vibrations coming through the floor.
‘I’m going to go and talk to those morons.’
‘Don’t, Harry.’
‘Don’t worry, they’re not going to hurt me. They’re all middle-class kiddies from safe, rich homes.’
‘Not like us, then.’
‘No, nothing like us.’
I looked at her. Despite her tiredness and the tears, and all the years, she had the same glow about her that had left me breathless and speechless the first time I ever saw her. But something had happened to Gina, something terrible.
‘Go and look in on Pat, will you? I’ll make us some tea. Is jasmine okay? It’s all I’ve got.’
‘Jasmine’s fine.’
Gina went into the small kitchen and I tried a few doors until I saw the familiar tousle-haired figure sleeping flat on his back.
My son, at seven years of age, sleeping in the second bedroom of a rented flat in Belsize Park. While I lived a few miles away with another woman, another child. As always, I was shocked by the love I felt for my boy. The hip-hop from below was shaking his windows. He didn’t seem to care. I pulled his Phantom Menace duvet up over his shoulders and closed his door as quietly as I could.
Gina was placing two cups of pale-green tea on the coffee table.
‘Sleeping,’ I said.
‘He could sleep through anything, that kid. You should have seen him on the plane. Turbulence all the way across the Atlantic. Didn’t even stir.’
‘What is it, Gina? What’s really wrong?’
‘It’s Richard. I’ve left him.’
It took a moment for this to sink in. ‘You’ve left Richard? So this trip to London—’
‘Permanent. We’re not going back.’
‘So when you said it was for a few weeks…’
‘That was the original plan. But there’s no point in going back. Oh fuck, Harry, my life is such a mess. What am I doing in this bloody flat with these stupid students and their awful music? I’m going to end up on Jerry Springer, I swear I am.’
‘You’re not going to end up on Jerry Springer. What happened?’
‘Children.’
I thought she meant Pat. I thought she meant that her life didn’t fit with both Richard and Pat. But that wasn’t it.
‘We couldn’t have any,’ she said. ‘We tried and tried. I couldn’t get pregnant. And it broke us up, Harry. It just broke us up.’
I sipped my tea. Even though it was scalding hot. I didn’t know if I should be hearing this. I didn’t know if I wanted to.
‘I think a marriage needs children, Harry. It’s hard enough to keep together even if you have a kid. Without them – I don’t know if it’s possible. We had all the tests. Richard and me. It was okay at first. We even laughed about it – him masturbating into a little plastic container, me with my legs up in the air getting prodded and probed. They couldn’t find anything. But there’s something wrong somewhere. In the end, it was too much of a strain. Maybe it would have been easier, maybe we could have stood it, if Pat wasn’t there. But it was hard for Richard. It’s hard loving someone else’s child when you can’t have one of your own.’
‘So Richard blamed Pat?’
‘I didn’t say that, Harry. But it’s such a thankless task, being a step-parent. I think in the end Richard felt he couldn’t win.’ She sighed. ‘Then I saw his credit card bill. Flowers, hotel rooms, restaurants.’ She looked at me. ‘Flowers I didn’t receive. Hotel rooms I had never stayed in. Restaurants I had only read about.’
‘Who was she?’
‘A neighbour. Some bored housewife with three kids, funnily enough. No doubt it would have been some woman at work if he’d had a job. Because he’s still unemployed, he had to find what he was looking for in Safeway. She probably thought she was missing out on something too.’
‘He must be crazy. Cheating on you.’
That gave her a laugh. ‘You did, Harry. You did.’
‘I’m sorry, Gina. Sorry about you and Richard. About you and me. About the students downstairs. About everything.’
‘What happened to us, Harry? What happened to the boy and girl who were going to stay together forever?’
‘I don’t know what happened. Time, I guess. Just time, Gina.’
‘Don’t you ever wish that it could be like that again? That innocent? That straightforward?’
I finished my Japanese tea and stood up. I was ready to face the music.
‘Now and then,’ I said.
My mother slept.
White with exhaustion and pumped full of painkillers and medicine to kill the sickness, oblivious to the echoing, malodorous life of the hospital going on all around her, she was tucked into bed in her own little post-operation room, an IV drip attached to a pale-blue vein in her hand, and she lay on her back and slept.
Sleeping at noon on a Sunday. Something she had never done in her life. If you could call it sleep, that drugged unconsciousness that was the aftermath of her operation.
I sat by her side, afraid to touch her.
Her kind face, her smallness, and the thought of the dressing on her wound under that hospital nightdress – these things tore at my heart, and made me hold my head and almost choke on all that was inside me.
There were no visitors, not yet, and the doctors and nurses had all gone away. They had cut off the breast with the tumour and they were confident that the operation had been a success.
They talked me through what happened next. Chemotherapy. Then radiotherapy. The chemotherapy would most likely cause my mother’s hair to fall out and make her sick to her stomach. The radiotherapy would feel itchy, sore, like bad sunburn. Before all of that, when she awoke, she would feel a pain in her arm, and pins and needles, and sickness, the sickness would never be far away now. The wound, the cut that had been made to remove the thing that was killing her, that would be sore and tender and tight for months.
The doctors told me something that my mother would never tell me. That she wouldn’t be able to wear a bra. Not yet. The wound was too fresh. It seemed as if everything about this illness was painstakingly designed to make my mother feel less like a woman.
When they had all gone, the optimistic doctors and the cheerful nurses, the affable oncologist and the genial surgeon and the easy-going anaesthetist, I cried for what my mother had gone through, and all that she still had to go through.
Even if she beat this thing, even if she lived.
‘I love you so much,’ I whispered, telling her things that we would both have been too shy and embarrassed to hear if she was awake. ‘You don’t deserve this, Mum. Not you. Not anyone.’
I sat there for hours. All that Sunday she didn’t wake up. It felt like the kind of sleep that would last for decades, like something from a fairy tale. By the time I left, the spring afternoon was fading behind the drawn curtains of that tiny room. It was only when I was looking for my car in the hospital’s vast parking lot that I remembered the appointment I had missed.
I liked the lights on Primrose Hill.
They were, and still are, those old kind of Victorian street-lamps. Tall and black with a chunky glass casing at the top. Those lamps look like throwbacks to some older, lost city, the London of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, peasouper fogs and tugs on the Thames.
The lamps had not been illuminated when I arrived at Primrose Hill. The days were getting longer. But night was falling at last and they would be turned on soon.
The crowds were thinning. It was becoming too dark for ball games, the pampered dogs of the neighbourhood were almost exhausted, and the young love
rs were strolling off arm-in-arm to dinner in Camden Town or Hampstead or Swiss Cottage. I decided to take a quick walk to the top, and then go home.
The park on Primrose Hill is built upon one high, grassy peak. From up there you can see for miles. Down to London Zoo and the lush expanse of Regent’s Park. The West End and the City and Docklands in the distance. And, on the hill behind you, the wild woods of Hampstead Heath. I watched my city as day turned to night. The stars came out. The great metropolis was starting to twinkle.
And that’s when I saw her walking up the hill towards me. Her pretty face was flushed with exertion. She looked as though she had been walking all day. Ever since we had been supposed to meet, in fact.
‘Sorry I’m a bit late, Kazumi.’
She reached the top of the hill, breathing heavily. She shook her head, and I didn’t know if she was telling me that she didn’t care or that she was speechless with rage. Then she sort of looked at me in a way that I understood completely.
Because it said – kiss me, stupid.
So I did.
And just at that moment, from Prince Albert Road in the south, to King Henry’s Road in the north, from St John’s Wood in the west, to Grand Union Canal in the east, all over the length and breadth of Primrose Hill, the lights came on.
part three: the greatest girl
in the history of the world
twenty-three
‘Viagra,’ Eamon suggested, without me even asking him. ‘Just the thing for a man with both a wife and a girlfriend. That’s what you need, Harry. Viagra. Amazing stuff. Although of course you know you’re getting a bit old when you can’t get it down.’
But it wasn’t Viagra that I needed. Because for a man with both a wife and a girlfriend, it was amazing how little sex I was getting.