The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys
‘Well, those are the changes I want to make.’
‘Wait a minute. I’m not getting a new contract?’
Marty spread his hands as if to say – what can I do? It’s a crazy world!
‘Listen, Harry. You don’t want me to move you sideways into some little nothing job that you could do with your eyes closed. That would look terrible, wouldn’t it?’
‘Marty,’ I said. ‘Marty. Hold on. Hold on just a minute. I really need this job. Now more than ever. There’s the thing with Gina – I’ve got Pat living with me – and I don’t know what’s going to happen. You know all that. And I can’t lose my job. Not now.’
‘I’m sorry, Harry. We need to make some changes.’
‘What is this? Punishment for not being available twenty-four hours a day when my marriage is breaking up? I’m sorry I wasn’t in the office this morning, okay? I can’t leave my son alone. I had to –’
‘Harry, there’s no need to raise your voice. We can do this in a civilised fashion.’
‘Come on, Marty. You’re Mister fucking Controversy. You’re not worried about a little scene, are you?’
‘I’m sorry, Harry. Siobhan’s in. You’re out. And you’ll thank me for it one day. This could be the best thing that’s ever happened to you. No hard feelings?’
The little shit actually held out his hand. I ignored it, getting up as quickly as I could and smacking my thighs against the side of the table.
He shook his head, all disappointed in me.
I began to walk out of the restaurant, my legs aching and my cheeks burning, only turning back when I heard Marty shriek with pain.
Somehow the waitress had spilled an entire plate of pasta in his lap.
‘Boy, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Would you like a little parmesan on that?’
My parents drove Pat home. My mother went around turning on all the lights while my father asked me how work was going. I told him that it was going great.
They stayed with Pat while I did our shopping at the local supermarket. It was only a five-minute drive away, but I was gone for quite a while because I was secretly watching all the women I took to be single mothers. I had never even thought about them before, but now I saw that these women were heroes. Real heroes.
They were doing it all by themselves. Shopping, cooking, entertaining, everything. They were bringing up their children alone.
And I couldn’t even wash Pat’s hair.
‘His hair’s filthy,’ my mum said as my parents were leaving. ‘It needs a good old wash.’
I knew that already. But Pat didn’t want me to wash his hair. He had told me so when I had casually dropped hair-washing into the conversation after we had come back from Glenn’s. Pat wanted his mother to wash his hair. The way she always did.
Yet we couldn’t put it off any longer. And soon he was standing in the middle of the soaking wet bathroom floor wearing just a pair of pants, his dirty blond hair hanging down over eyes that were red from tears and the baby shampoo that Gina still used on him.
It wasn’t working. I was doing something wrong.
I knelt by his side. He wouldn’t look at me.
‘What’s wrong, Pat?’ I asked him.
‘Nothing.’
We both knew what was wrong.
‘Mummy’s gone away for a little while. Won’t you let Daddy wash your hair?’
Stupid question. He shook his head.
‘What would a Jedi Knight do at a time like this?’ I asked him.
He didn’t reply. Sometimes a four-year-old doesn’t bother to reply.
‘Listen,’ I said, fighting back the urge to scream. ‘Do you think that Luke Skywalker cries when he has his hair washed?’
‘Don’t know, don’t care.’
I had tried to wash his hair with him leaning into the bath, but that hadn’t worked. So now I helped him out of his pants, scooped him up and placed him sitting down in the tub. He wiped snot from his little nose while I ran the water until it was the right temperature.
‘This is fun, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘We should do this together more often.’
He scowled at me. But he leaned forward and allowed me to run the water over his head. Then he felt my hands applying more shampoo and something snapped. He stood up, throwing one of his legs over the side of the bath in a pitiful attempt to escape.
‘Pat!’ I said. ‘Sit down, please.’
‘I want Mummy to do it!’
‘Mummy’s not here! Sit down!’
‘Where is she? Where is she?’
‘I don’t know!’
He blindly tried to climb out of the bath, howling as the suds dripped into his eyes. I pushed him back down and held him there, quickly hosing off the shampoo and trying to ignore his screams.
‘This is not how a Jedi Knight acts,’ I said. ‘This is how a baby acts.’
‘I’m not a baby! You are!’
I towelled him down, took him by the hand and dragged him back to his bedroom, his little legs moving quickly to keep up with me. We glared at each other while I put him in his pyjamas.
‘Making such a fuss,’ I said. ‘I’m really disappointed in you.’
‘I want Mummy.’
‘Mummy’s not here.’
‘But when will I see her again?’ he said, suddenly plaintive. ‘That’s what I want to know.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know, darling.’
‘But what did I do?’ he said, and it broke my heart. ‘I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it at all.’
‘You didn’t do anything. Mummy loves you very much. You’ll see her soon. I promise.’
Then I took him in my arms, smelling the shampoo that I had missed, holding him close for a long time, and wondering how two flawed adults had ever managed to make something so perfect.
I read him Where The Wild Things Are until he fell asleep. When I came out of his room there were three messages on the answer machine. All of them were from Gina.
‘I’m sorry, but I had to get away for a while. You’ll never know how much you hurt me. Never. It was supposed to be for life, Harry. Not until one of us got a bit bored. Forever – not until one of us decided that things were getting a bit dull in the old marital bed. It doesn’t work like that. It can never work like that. Do you think I could let you touch me when I know you’ve been touching someone else? Your hands, your mouth…I can’t stand all that. The lying, the sneaking around, the sound of someone crying themselves to sleep every night. I had enough of that when I was growing up. If you think –’
The machine cut her off. It only let you talk for a certain amount of time. There was a beep and then her second message. She was calmer now. Or trying to be.
‘I just spoke to Glenn. He told me that you collected Pat. That really wasn’t necessary. He was perfectly happy there. And I know how busy you are at work. But if you are going to look after him until I get back, then you need to know that he has his hair washed every Sunday. And don’t let him put sugar on his Coco Pops. He can go to the toilet by himself – you know that already – but sometimes he forgets to lift the lid. Make sure he cleans his teeth. Don’t let him watch Star Wars videos all the time. If he doesn’t sleep in the afternoon then make sure he’s in bed by no later than –’
Another beep. A final message. Not so calm any more, the words tumbling out.
‘Just tell Pat I love him, okay? Tell him I’ll see him very soon. Take good care of him until then. And don’t ever feel too sorry for yourself, Harry. You’re not Mr Wonderful. Women all over the world look after children alone. Millions of them do it. Literally millions. What’s so special about you?’
Long after I had turned off all the lights, I stayed there watching our boy sleep. And I saw that I had let everyone down.
Gina. My mother and father. Even Marty. I hadn’t been strong enough, I hadn’t loved them enough, I hadn’t been the man they wanted me to be, or the man that I wanted myself to be. In different ways, I had betrayed them all.
I pulled the blanket that Pat had kicked off up to his shoulders, making one final promise, which this time I would keep – I would never betray this child.
Yet there was a distant voice, like someone calling on a bad line from the other side of the world, and it kept on saying – you did, you did, you already did.
Eleven
Children live in the moment. The good thing about falling out with them is that they have forgotten all about it the next day. At least that’s what Pat was like at four years old.
‘What do you want for breakfast?’ I asked him.
He considered me for a moment.
‘Green spaghetti.’
‘You want spaghetti? For breakfast?’
‘Green spaghetti. Yes, please.’
‘But – I don’t know how to make green spaghetti. Have you had it before?’
He nodded. ‘In the little place across the big road,’ he said. ‘With Mummy.’
We lived on the wrong side of Highbury Corner, next to the Holloway Road rather than Upper Street, the side where there were junk stores rather than antique shops, pubs rather than bars, quiet little cafés instead of trendy restaurants. Some of these cafés were so quiet that they had the air of the morgue, but there was a great one right at the end of our street, a place called Trevi where they spoke English at the counter and Italian in the kitchen.
The beefy, good-humoured men behind the counter greeted Pat by name.
‘This is the place,’ he said, settling at a table by the window.
I watched the waitress come out of the kitchen and approach our table. It was her. She still looked tired.
‘What can I get you boys?’ she said, smiling at Pat. There was a trace of the south in her voice which I hadn’t noticed when I was with Marty.
‘Do you do anything that could be described as green spaghetti?’
‘You mean spaghetti pesto? Sure.’
‘Isn’t that too hot for you?’ I asked Pat.
‘Is it green?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘It’s green.’
‘That’s what I have.’
‘How about you?’ she asked.
‘I’ll have the same,’ I replied.
‘Anything else?’
‘Well, I was wondering how many jobs you’ve got.’
She looked at me properly for the first time.
‘Oh, I remember you,’ she said. ‘You were the guy with Marty Mann. The one who told him to give me a break.’
‘I thought you didn’t recognise him.’
‘I’ve been here for almost a year. Of course I recognised the little dickhead.’ She glanced at Pat. ‘Excuse me.’
He smiled at her.
‘I don’t get to watch much TV – you don’t in this job – but his ugly mug is always in the papers. Doing not very much, far as I can see. Funnily enough, you were my last customers. Paul didn’t like my style.’
‘Yeah, well. If it’s any consolation, I lost my job around the same time as you.’
‘Yeah? And you didn’t even get to drop a plate of pasta on Marty’s shrivelled little –’ She looked quickly at Pat. ‘Head. Anyway. He deserved it.’
‘He sure did. But I’m sorry you lost your job.’
‘No big deal. A girl can always get another job as a waitress, right?’
She looked up from her pad. Her eyes were so far apart that I had trouble looking at them both at the same time. They were brown. Huge. She turned them on Pat.
‘Having lunch with your dad? Where’s your mom today?’
Pat glanced at me anxiously.
‘His mother’s in Tokyo,’ I said.
‘That’s Japan,’ Pat said. ‘They drive on the same side of the road as us. But when it’s nighttime there, it’s daytime here.’ I was surprised he remembered so much of what I had told him. He knew almost as much about the place as I did.
She looked at me with those wide-set brown eyes and I thought that somehow she knew that our little family was all broken and scattered. Which was absurd. How could she have possibly known?
‘She’s coming back soon,’ Pat said.
I put my arm around him.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘But it’s just us for a while.’
‘That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ the waitress said. ‘I mean – you looking after your boy. Not many men do that.’
‘I guess it happens,’ I said.
‘I guess it does,’ she said.
I could see that she liked me a little bit now that she knew I was taking care of Pat. But of course she didn’t know me. She didn’t know me at all. And she had me all wrong.
She saw a man alone with a child and she thought that somehow that must make me better than other men – more kind-hearted, more compassionate, less likely to let a woman down. The new, improved male of the species, biologically programmed for child-caring duties. As if I had planned for my life to work out this way.
‘How about you?’ I asked her. ‘What brought you to London from – where?’
‘Houston,’ she said. ‘Houston, Texas. Well, what brought me was my partner. Ex-partner. This is where he’s from.’
‘That’s a long way to come for some guy, isn’t it?’
She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘Do you think so? I always thought that, if you really love someone, you’ll follow them anywhere.’
So she was the romantic kind.
Under that tough, touch-me-again-buster-and-you’ll-get-linguini-in-your-lap exterior, she was one of those women who was willing to turn her world inside out for some man who almost certainly didn’t deserve it.
Maybe my wife was right. The romantic ones are the worst.
Gina came home late the next day.
Pat and I were playing on the floor with his toys. Neither of us reacted to the diesel rumble of a black cab pulling up outside. But we looked at each other as we heard the rusty clank of our little gate, then a key turning in the front door, and finally the sound of her footsteps in the hall. Pat turned his face to the door.
‘Mummy?’
‘Pat?’
And suddenly there she was, smiling down at our son, bleary from the twelve-hour flight from Narita and lugging her old suitcase that still had a scarred sticker from our distant holiday in Antigua.
Pat flew into her arms and she held him so tight that he disappeared inside the folds of her light summer coat, all of him gone, apart from the top of his head and a tuft of hair that was exactly the same shade of blond as his mother’s. Their faces were so close that you couldn’t see where Gina ended and Pat began.
I watched them feeling something better than happy. I was sort of glowing inside, believing that my world had been restored. And then she looked at me – not cold, not angry, just from a great distance, as though she was still somewhere far away and always would be – and my spirits sank.
She hadn’t come back for me.
She had come back for Pat.
‘You all right?’ I asked her.
‘Bit tired,’ she said. ‘It’s a long flight. And you get back the same day that you leave. So the day never seems to end.’
‘You should have told us you were coming. We would have met you at the airport.’
‘That’s okay,’ she said, holding Pat out to inspect him.
And I could see that she had come back because she thought I couldn’t do it. She thought I wasn’t up to looking after our child alone while she was away. She thought that I wasn’t a real parent, not the way that she was a real parent.
Still holding Pat, her eyes took in the squalid ravages of the living room, a room which seemed to confirm that even her own lousy father was a better prospect than me.
There were toys everywhere. A video of The Lion King playing unwatched on the television. Two takeaway pizza boxes – one large, one small – from Mister Milano squatting on the floor. And Pat’s pants from yesterday sitting on the coffee table like a soiled doily.
‘Goodness, look at your dirty hair,’ Gina said brightly. ‘Shall we give it a good old wash?’
‘Okay!’ Pat said, as if it were an invitation to Disneyland.
They went off to the bathroom and I made a start on clearing up the room, listening to the sound of running water mixing with their laughter.
‘I’ve been offered a job,’ she told me in the park. ‘It’s a big job. As a translator for an American bank. Well, more of an interpreter, really. My written Japanese is too rusty for translating documents. But my spoken Japanese is more than good enough for interpreting. I would be sitting in on meetings, liaising with clients, all that. The girl who’s been doing the job – she’s really nice, a Japanese-American, I met her – is leaving to have a baby. The job’s mine if I want it. But they need to know now.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘This job’s in Tokyo?’
She looked away from Pat’s careful negotiation of the lower reaches of the climbing frame.
‘Of course it’s in Tokyo,’ she said sharply. Her eyes returned to our boy. ‘What do you think I’ve been doing out there?’
To be honest, I thought she was having a break. Seeing a few old Japanese and expatriate friends from her year out, shooting about on the bullet train, taking in a few temples in Kyoto, just getting away from it all for a while.
I had forgotten that she wanted her life back.
That’s what she had been doing after moving into her father’s flat – making a few international calls, reviving some old contacts, seeing if she still had an option on all the things she had given up for me.
I knew her well enough to realise that she was dead serious about this job. But I still couldn’t quite believe it.
‘You’re really going to take a job in Japan, Gina?’
‘I should have done it years ago.’
‘For how long? Forever?’
‘The contract is for a year. After that, well, we’ll see.’
‘What about Pat?’
‘Well, Pat comes with me. Obviously.’
‘Pat goes with you? To Tokyo?’
‘Of course. I’m not going to leave him here, am I?’
‘But you can’t just uproot him,’ I said, trying to keep the note of hysteria out of my voice. ‘Where are you going to live?’
‘The bank will sort that out.’
‘What’s he going to eat?’
‘The same things he eats here. Nobody’s going to make him have miso soup for breakfast. You can get Coco Pops in Japan. You don’t have to worry about us, Harry.’
‘I am worried. This is serious, Gina. Who’s going to look after him when you’re working? What about all his stuff?’
‘His stuff?’
‘His bike, his toys, his videos. All his stuff.’
‘We’ll ship it over. How hard can it be to crate up a four-year-old’s possessions?’
‘What about his grandparents? You going to crate them up and ship them out? What about his friends at the nursery? What about me?’
‘You can’t stand the thought of me having a life without you, can you? You really can’t stand it.’
‘It’s not that. If this is really what you want, then I hope it works out for you. And I know that you can do it. But Pat’s life is here.’
‘Pat’s life is with me,’ she said, a touch of steel in her voice. Yet I could tell that I was getting through to her.
‘Leave him with me,’ I said. Pleaded, really. ‘Just until you get settled, okay? A few weeks, a couple of months, whatever it takes. Just until you’re on top of the job and you’ve found somewhere to live. Let him stay with me until then.’
She watched me carefully, as if I were making sense but still couldn’t be trusted.
‘I’m not trying to take him away from you, Gina. I know I could never do that. But I can’t stand the thought of him being looked after by some stranger in some little flat while you’re at the office trying to make a go of your new job. And I know you can’t stand it either.’
She watched our boy slowly clamber to the top of the climbing frame. He carefully turned so that he could grin at us.
‘I have to take this chance,’ she said. ‘I have to know if I can do it. It’s now or not at all.’
‘I understand.’
‘I’d call him every day, of course. And send for him as soon as I can. Maybe you can bring him out.’
‘That sounds good.’
‘I love Pat. I love my son.’
‘I know you do.’
‘You really think you can look after him by yourself for a while, do you?’
‘I can manage it. I can.’ We looked at each other for a long time. ‘Just until you’re settled.’
We took Pat home and put him to bed. Happy and tired, he was soon asleep, lost in dreams that he wouldn’t remember in the morning.
Gina chewed her bottom lip.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll take good care of him.’
‘Just until I’m settled.’
‘Just until you’re settled.’
‘I’ll be back for him,’ Gina said, more to herself than to me.
And eventually, she did come back for him. But things were a bit different by then.
By the time Gina came back for Pat there wouldn’t be yesterday’s pants on the coffee table and Mister Milano pizza boxes on the floor. By the time she came back for our boy, I would be something like a real parent, too.
That’s where Gina got it wrong. She thought that she could change but that I would always remain the same.
The way my parents dealt with Gina going away, they tried to turn Pat’s life into a party.
Overnight their non-negotiable ‘one Coke a day’ rule was abolished. Suddenly when Pat and I turned up at their house there were gifts waiting for him, such as a special edition Return of the Jedi (‘New Scenes, New Sounds, New Special Effects’). More and more they wanted him to stay over with them, no doubt hoping to replace my gloomy face and moody silences with their canned laughter, laughter so strained that it made me feel like weeping.
And now one of them always wanted to accompany us to the gates of Pat’s nursery school. It was a long drive for them – reaching us took at least an hour going anti-clockwise around the M25 in the rush hour – but they were willing to do it day after day.
‘As a special treat,’ my dad said, groaning as he folded his old legs into my low-slung car.
I knew what they were doing and I loved them for it. They were trying to stop their grandson from crying. Because they were afraid that if he started crying, then he would never stop.
But Pat’s life wasn’t a party with his mother gone. And no amount of Star Wars merchandise or good intentions could make it a party.
‘What are you doing today then, Pat?’ my father said, his grandson perched on his lap in the MGF’s passenger seat. ‘Making some more Plasticine worms? Learning about Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat? That’ll be good!’
Pat didn’t reply. He stared at the congealed early-morning traffic, his face pale and beautiful, and no amount of jolly banter from my old man could draw him out. He only spoke when we were at the gates of the Canonbury Cubs nursery.
‘Don’t want to go,’ he muttered. ‘Want to stay home.’
‘But you can’t stay home, baby,’ I said, about to use the great parental cop-out and tell him that Daddy had to go to work. But of course Daddy didn’t have a job any more. Daddy could stay in bed all day and still not be late for work.
One of the teachers came to collect him, looking at me meaningfully as she gently took his hand. It wasn’t the first time that Pat had been reluctant to leave me. In the week since Gina had been gone, he didn’t like to let me out of his sight.
With my dad promising him unimaginable fun and games at the end of the day, we watched Pat go, holding on to the teacher’s hand, his blue eyes swimming in tears, his bottom lip starting to twitch.
He would probably make it to the little classroom without cracking. They might even get his coat off. But by the time the Plasticine worms were unveiled he would lose it, inconsolable, sobbing his heart out while the other kids stared at him or impassively went about their four-year-old business. We wouldn’t have to look at any of that.
‘I remember when you were that age,’ my dad said as we walked back to the car. ‘I took you to the park in the week between Christmas and the New Year. Bloody freezing, it was. You had your little sledge with you. I had to drag you on it all the way from home. And at the park we watched the ducks trying to land on the frozen lake. They just kept coming in to land and – boom! Sliding on their bums across the ice. And you just laughed fit to burst. Laughed and laughed, you did. We must have watched them for hours. Do you remember that?’