The Best a Man Can Get

by John O'Farrell

  When the time came for us to leave and I was trying to put my arm down the wrong sleeve of my jacket, our host was adamant that we had both drunk too much to drive home.

  ‘Really, I’m fine to drive. I’ve hardly drunk a thing,’ maintained Catherine, still anxious not to reveal her secret.

  ‘No, I insist. Michael can pick up the car in the morning. I’ve ordered you a minicab.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll pick up the car in the morning,’ I slurred. ‘We can’t have you doing it, Catherine, not with you being pregnant.’

  She was in quite a bad mood when we got home, but then pregnancy can do all sorts of things to a woman’s temperament. I suppose the difference between Catherine and me was that she only lied up to a point; she knew when to come clean. If it had been me, I would still have been denying I was pregnant when I was lying in the delivery room with my legs up in stirrups. Apart from her sister and brother-in-law, who had managed to guess after I had let slip that one little clue, Catherine told people that she was pregnant exactly when she had planned to – at the end of the third month. Everyone said congratulations with slightly less excitement and amazement than they had expressed about our second child, which was slightly less than for our first.

  ‘We wanted to have them all quite close together,’ she said, using the royal ‘we’, and I glanced around wondering who else she could be referring to.

  ‘Aaaahhhh,’ said all our friends and relations, who patted her tummy as if it were suddenly public property. From now on the little embryo would have to get used to people constantly banging on the walls. I felt quite protective of the miniature baby in there. At twelve weeks the foetus is already the approximate shape of a person. All the major organs are formed. There is a heartbeat, there are lungs that will breathe air, there is a stomach that will digest food, there is a spleen that will, well, do whatever a spleen does … get ruptured in accidents.

  The embryo has also formed a backbone. I’m glad one of us had. Catherine was still very tired and tearful, so the last thing she wanted was for me to tell her that we were experiencing some temporary financial problems. While she told everyone the happy news, I kept the bad news to myself. To avoid my pregnant wife worrying about threatening letters arriving on the doormat, I decided it was time to act and I finally posted an envelope to the bank. It didn’t contain a cheque for all the money I owed them, but it did request that from now on all correspondence should be sent to my South London address, so that was that problem dealt with.

  The only person I still hadn’t told about the new baby was my father. Dad had retired to live on his own in Bournemouth and I didn’t get round to seeing him that often. He had a very carefully worded answerphone message, which was scripted to give as little away as possible. When I listened to it, I could almost see him carefully reading it off a piece of paper. He said, ‘The person who you are calling is unable to come to the phone at the moment, although he may well be in.’ And he imagined that any burglars calling were going, ‘Drat, drat. If only he’d said he was out, then I would have gone round and done the place over.’ He had still not seen our little house in Kentish Town, which made me feel guilty every time I thought about it, but he was worried about coming up to London in case there was another poll-tax riot. After he got e-mail we communicated more regularly, because he kept ringing me up to ask why he couldn’t get his e-mail to work.

  ‘What about the net, Michael? Do you do the net?’

  ‘You don’t “do the net”, Dad. It’s not some new dance craze, like the twist or the locomotion.’

  ‘Well, I can’t seem to do the net, either. I think there must be something jammed in my computer.’

  I could have shared the news of his new grandchild over the phone, but I felt I wanted to tell him to his face. Catherine said that by the time I finally got round to this, the baby would probably have been born, grown up and gone off to university, so I rang him back and suggested that we came down and cooked him lunch, and then afterwards I could give him a computer lesson. He was delighted by the idea. ‘Ooh, that would be lovely, Michael. Now before you come down, is Microsoft something I ought to buy?’

  Dad had spent his life making a respectable living as a drugs dealer. He wasn’t the sort that had two rottweilers, lots of gold rings and sold crack behind nightclubs in Manchester; Dad never made as much money as those guys because he dealt in the wrong sort of drugs. He sold Beechams Hot Lemon drink and Settlers Turns. I’d tried to imagine him driving round the country and opening up his briefcase for one of his best customers. The pharmacist ripping open one sachet of Alka-Seltzer and dabbing a little on his tongue. ‘That’s good shit, man. But don’t you never try cuttin’ in any low-grade Enos, man, or I’ll see they have to fish your body outta the East River with no head. You dig?’ Dad had been the type of drugs dealer who had a company car and a pension plan.

  His job had involved a lot of nights away from home, particularly after he met a dark-haired chemist called Janet from Royal Leamington Spa. He went to extraordinary lengths to persuade her to buy his range of products, even leaving his wife and only child for her. So then it was just Mum and five-year-old me. I grew up in the Home Counties in a semi-detached house with a semi-detached dad. After my parents were legally divorced I had to spend my lonely weekends staying at his funny-smelling bungalow. Just as he himself had been an evacuee in the war, so I was shipped off to a strange town, clutching my suitcase and a few hastily gathered toys, a refugee from the war of my parents’ partition.

  There was nothing for me to do in his grown-up house miles from all my friends, so I played the piano. All day Saturday and all day Sunday for years and years I practised the piano. There was only one collection of sheet music under the dusty stool, Traditional Hymns for Pianoforte, and I played them all over and over again. At first I just tried to pick out the tunes, but over time I became fluent and confident, until finally I imagined that I was Elton John, wearing four-inch platform glitter boots, strutting out at the Hollywood Bowl and launching into my first number one smash hit ‘Nearer My God to Thee’.

  ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. And now a song that’s been very good to me; everybody get on down to “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”.’ And I’d boogie-woogie my way through all four verses, adlibbing the occasional ‘Yow!’ or ‘Oooh, baby!’ after the bit that went ‘Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?’ Then I took the tempo down a little with ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’. I imagined they were holding up their cigarette lighters by now and swaying gently as far back as I could see. Suddenly fireworks exploded all over the stage and I launched into a sequence of my early hits – favourite rock ’n’ roll classics like ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, ‘Jesu – Lover of My Soul’ and the title track from my latest album ‘I Know That My Redeemer Liveth’. That was my encore and I played it standing up and span around several times as I played the closing bars.

  So I could say that, without my parents’ divorce, I would probably never have learned to play the piano, studied music at college and gone on to the dizzy heights of having my flexi-disc played three times on Thames Valley FM. Now that I was what Dad called a ‘pop-music composer’ he was very proud of me, and he sometimes rang up to tell me he’d just seen an advert for which I had written the music being broadcast on the television.

  ‘Yes, well, the agency have bought a hundred spots, Dad, twenty of them in peak time.’

  ‘Well, they must be pleased with your music, then, if they keep showing it over and over again.’

  As I carried the kids from the car to his house for Sunday lunch, he came down the path to greet us. It was only ten yards, but he put on his hat for the journey. He had a very good reason for wearing a hat, although he didn’t quite feel able to keep it on once he was inside. In the brief couple of years before my dad had split up with Janet the chemist, she had managed to persuade him that he ought to have a hair transplant. Even though his hair hadn’t receded very far, h
e subjected himself to a painstaking and expensive operation in which small clumps of hair were uprooted from the more fertile hair-producing regions and then replanted at the top of his exposed forehead. For a while it seemed the surgeon had pulled off an amazing optical illusion and my father’s fringe had returned. But then, behind the fortifications, the original hair continued to recede at the same inexorable rate. Though the tiny tufts of doll’s hair heroically stood their ground, all around them the indigenous follicles deserted, leaving the transplanted outpost completely isolated.

  Maybe this is what prompted Janet to leave him. His head was by now a classic example of male pattern baldness, a shiny smooth pate stretching from his forehead to his crown, with a straight line of transplanted hair clinging on like clumps of marram grass along the top of a sand dune. It was never ever mentioned.

  He hung up his hat and I tried not to let my eyes wander above his. The moment I was in the front door Dad locked on and engaged me. The less I saw him the more anecdotes he stored up to recount, and nothing could deflect him from immediately delivering this month’s main items of news.

  Top stories on the hour today: Dad’s friend Brian has bought a new car in Belgium and made a considerable saving. The queuing system at the bank has been changed and now you have to take a blessed ticket with a number on. And finally, no more printed headed paper, decides Dad, until they sort out the blessed telephone codes once and for all. But first, back to that top story of Brian’s new car . . .

  Information was fired at me non-stop, oblivious to any preoccupation I might have with child care or preparing the lunch. I had dropped Catherine off at the supermarket to get some bread and vegetables, so I was left looking after the children on my own as I searched through his cupboards and found some gravy powder. Actually, ‘powder’ is a generous description of what remained when I tore the wrapping away. It was a dark-brown gravy brick which had fossilized some time around the Cretaceous period. Being a war baby, Dad didn’t like to waste anything. Stale bread made perfectly good stale toast. The oil from a tin of tuna was saved in a little egg cup and could be used to fry anything that you wanted to taste of tuna. A few years back, when he’d had a new plastic hip-joint fitted, he’d remarked that he didn’t like to ask what they’d done with the old hip bone. I could tell he felt it was a bit of a waste just to throw it away. I could have made a nice stock with that, he’d been thinking.

  I tried to put on the roast, listen to Dad and deal with the children, but the combination was too demanding for any mortal.

  ‘Brian was going to get the two-litre Mondeo, but opted for the 1.6, what with all the tax they’re putting on petrol.’

  Millie dropped her beaker, and because I hadn’t put the lid on properly, milk started to glug across the kitchen floor. What did Dad say to this? ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get a cloth,’ or, ‘Let me hold Alfie while you wipe that up’? No. He said, ‘The 1.6 still has ABS and power steering, but by buying it from a dealership in Belgium he saved three thousand pounds. How about that!’ I didn’t know Brian, or how much Mondeos normally cost, but I tried my best to look impressed as I searched in vain for the kitchen towels.

  ‘Well, I told him that I’d been thinking of getting a Ford Focus, but I’m not sure if I want to go all the way to Belgium, especially after the way they caved in during the war.’

  His cat had started to drink the milk as it formed a puddle on the lino, and Millie was trying to pull the cat away by tugging its tail, which made the cat liable to spin round at any second and scratch Millie’s face.

  ‘Millie, don’t pull the cat’s tail.’

  ‘She drink my milk.’

  ‘. . . but Brian said that you can get people to bring them over from Belgium for you, as far as Harwich anyway, but I said I can’t pay out any money without seeing the car first; they might bring me a left-hand drive or something and then where does that leave me . . .’

  ‘Hang on a minute, Dad, I’ll just clear this up. Stop it, Millie.’

  But like the creature in Alien that locked its tentacles round John Hurt’s face, he demanded my full attention and was not going to let go. I tried to nod, as if I was listening, but the potatoes boiled over and the water extinguished the gas ring and then Alfie crawled into the puddle of milk and got his trousers wet and started to cry.

  ‘But they’re not just in Belgium, Brian said you can get some very good deals in the Netherlands. I mean, what do you think, Michael? Do you think it would be safe to buy a new car from the continent?’

  ‘It’s all right, Alfie. Um, I don’t know, Dad. Stop it, Millie.’

  The cat finally lashed out at Millie and drew blood from her arm, making her scream in panic which, to his credit, Dad did actually manage to acknowledge.

  ‘Oh dear, the cat’s scratched her arm. That’ll need a plaster. But Brian says they’re all right-hand drive, with airbag, ABS, central locking and everything as standard. And you should see his, it’s very nice, with a proper British number plate and everything.’

  Millie could have been sawing her little brother’s limbs off with the bread knife but still my dad wouldn’t have considered this a valid reason to let up for a second.

  ‘There, there, Millie. Yes, Mummy’ll be here in a minute. Don’t cry, Alfie, it’s only milk. No, I have to wash it, Millie, and then we can put on a Little Mermaid plaster . . . Nought per cent finance for three years. Really, Dad?’

  My sixty-six-year-old dad was really just another infant in need of attention. He even looked like a baby, with his big bald head and food stains down his front. When you are in your thirties, they both want your attention just as much – your new children and your old parents. They are like selfish siblings competing for your love. ‘Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!’ went Millie, but I couldn’t deal with her because I was still trying to listen to my daddy. My only chance of peace was to time everyone’s lunch so carefully that Dad had his afternoon sleep at the same hour as the other children. Maybe I should rig up a musical mobile above the sofa to make sure he went off all right.

  Catherine and I eventually told him that he was to be a grandfather again and he seemed genuinely delighted and rang his new lady friend, Jocelyn, to tell her, although knowing Dad he would have a different lady friend by the time the baby was born. After lunch he did us a favour by sleeping for an hour and a half. He left a small patch of damp saliva on the cushion beside his mouth. ‘That’s where you get that habit from,’ said Catherine and I was mortified. I always took delight in observing aspects of myself in my children, but I was horrified by the prospect of slowly turning into my dad. My only comfort was that I wasn’t the kind of man to have a casual affair and recklessly throw away a marriage in the way Dad had done.

  As we drove back to London I wondered why it was that so many men seemed to find it impossible to stay committed to one partner? Jim, for example, had had five or six girlfriends since I’d known him. Where was the happiness in that? I mean, really, how could any young man be attracted to the idea of making love to an endless succession of beautiful women? A voluptuous blonde one month, a svelte brunette the next? It just defied explanation.

  Jim had just begun a new relationship with a girl called Monica and the following week, when I was in my studio, he called my mobile to invite me down to the Duke of Devonshire to join them. I had been failing to get my computer to print out some invoices and going to the pub seemed about as likely to get the printer to work as everything else I’d attempted. When I arrived, Monica’s best friend Kate was in the pub garden with them and so I found myself chatting to her. Kate was pretty and slim and bubbly and carefree and all the things it is quite easy to be when you’re not the pregnant mother of two small children. She had a bob of dark brown hair, which she threw back when she laughed at my jokes, and a white short-sleeved shirt that showed off her tan. This is quite nice, I thought to myself, enjoying the company of attractive young women. Of course, I wasn’t going to pursue her, but there was a certain amount of pleasure in cha
tting and making her laugh. Even if I wasn’t going to sleep with another woman ever again, there was a certain excitement to be had in placing myself in a situation where it could at least have been possible. And she warmed to me. She seemed genuinely impressed by the fact that I wrote the music for the Mr Gearbox ad they played on Capital Radio.

  Jim had an open-topped sports car, which his parents must have bought him for learning to tie his shoelaces or something, and so, with the hood down and the stereo blaring out Supergrass, we drove up to Chelsea. Jim and his girlfriend in the front and Kate and me in the back. The wheels screeched as Jim overtook a BMW on a roundabout and Kate squealed with laughter and grabbed my arm for a moment. On the stereo they sang about being young and running free and feeling all right, and I thought, Yeah! Look out Wandsworth one-way system! I was enjoying pretending to be cool. So what if it was nearly dark; the sunglasses weren’t there for me looking out, they were there for other people looking in. Suddenly I was as young as the beautiful, posh girl riding beside me.

  I felt a tinge of unease as we sped over the river. The Thames ran down the middle of my life; north of the river I was a husband and father, south of the river I was a carefree young man. I once turned down a trip on a riverboat just because I felt I wouldn’t know who to go as. Now the young reckless Michael was spreading his wings – all of London was my bachelor playground. We were going to a party, the party of a very rich man for whom Kate and Monica worked in the crazy carefree world of bond yields and corporate leasing. It was the most lavish, glamorous do I’d ever been to. I kept turning my back whenever the photographer appeared in case Catherine spotted me the following week in the pages of Hello! The music was supplied by a Japanese man who played Chopin at a grand piano. I’m not sure that anyone else in the room appreciated or even noticed how very, very good he was.