Man and Boy (15 page)

Glenn was dressed in his winter plumage—a ratty Afghan coat draped over a shiny blue tank top that revealed the hairs on his scrawny chest, and hipsters so tight that they made a mountain out of his molehill. He was so far out of fashion that he had just come back in style.

“Hello, Harry man,” he said, clasping my hand in some obscure power-to-the-people shake that thirty years ago probably signaled the revolution was about to commence. “How you doing? Is the little dude around? All well? Sweet, sweet.”

There was a time when I wanted my old man to be more like Gina’s dad. A time when I wished my father had appeared in glossy magazines in his youth, grinned on
Top
of
the
Pops
once or twice in the early seventies, and shown some interest in the world beyond the rose bushes at the end of his garden. But as I looked at Glenn’s wizened ass through his tight trousers, it seemed like a long time ago.

Glenn’s youngest daughter was lurking behind him. At first, I thought that Sally was in a bad mood. She came into the house all surly, avoiding eye contact by taking a great interest in the carpet, letting her stringy brown hair—longer than I remembered it—fall over her pale face as if she wanted to hide from the world and everything in it. But she wasn’t really in a bad mood at all. She was fifteen years old. That was the problem.

I took them into the kitchen, depressed at the sight of two of Gina’s relatives turning up out of the blue and wondering how soon I could get rid of them. But I softened when Sally’s face lit up—really lit up—when Pat padded into the room with Peggy. Perhaps she was human after all.

“Hi, Pat!” she beamed. “How you doing?”

“Fine,” he said, giving no sign that he remembered his mother’s half-sister. What was she to him? Half an aunt? A step-cousin? These days we have relatives that we haven’t even invented names for yet.

“I made you a tape,” she said, fumbling in her rucksack and eventually producing a cassette without its case. “You like music, don’t you?”

Pat stared at the tape blankly. The only music I could remember him liking was the theme from
Star
Wars
.

“He likes music, doesn’t he?” she said to me.

“Loves it,” I said. “What do you say, Pat?”

“Thank you,” he said. He took the tape and disappeared with Peggy.

“I remembered how much he liked hip-hop when we were all staying at my dad’s place,” she said. “There’s just a few of the classics on there. Coolio. Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Tupac. Doctor Dre. Stuff like that. Things that a little kid might like.”

“That’s really kind of you,” I said.

They sipped their drinks in silence—herb tea for Glenn, regular Coke for Sally—and I felt a stab of resentment at these reminders of Gina’s existence. What were they doing here? What did either of these people have to do with my life? Why didn’t they just fuck off?

Then Pat or Peggy must have stuffed Sally’s tape into the stereo because suddenly an angry black voice was booming above a murderous bass line in the living room.

“You fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you—so that would be a dumb fucking, motherfucking thing to fucking do.”

“That’s lovely,” I said to Sally. “He’ll treasure it. So—you visiting your dad again?”

She shook her head.

“I’m living there now,” she said, shooting her old man a look from under her ratty bangs.

“A few problems back home,” Glenn said. “With my ex-lady. And her new partner.”

“Old hippies,” Sally sneered, “who can’t stand the thought of anybody else having fun.”

“Heavy scene with the new guy,” Glenn said. “Bit of a disciplinarian.”

“That moron,” Sally added.

“And how’s your boyfriend?” I said, remembering the ape boy smirking on the sofa.

“Steve?” she said, and I thought I saw the sting of tears in her eyes. “Packed me in, didn’t he? The fat pig. For Yasmin McGinty. That old slut.”

“But we spoke to Gina the other night,” Glenn said, his foggy brain finally getting down to business. “And we promised that we would look in on you and Pat if we were in the neighborhood.”

Now I understood what they were doing here. No doubt they were responding to Gina’s prompting. But in their own ham-fisted way, they were trying to help.

“Heard you’ve got a new gig,” Glenn said. “Just wanted to say that the boy’s welcome to crash with us any time.”

“Thanks, Glenn. I appreciate the offer.”

“And if you ever need a babysitter, just give me a call,” Sally said, hiding behind her hair and staring at a point somewhere beyond my shoulder.

It was really sweet of her. And I knew I needed a bit of extra cover with Pat now that I was working part-time.

But Jesus Christ. I wasn’t that desperate.

***

Cyd loved London the way only a foreigner could love it. She saw past the stalled traffic, the dead pubs, the congealed poverty of the projects. She looked beyond the frightened pensioners, the girls who looked like women, the women who looked like men, the men who looked like psychos. She saw beyond all of that. She told me the city was beautiful.

“At night,” Cyd said. “And from the air. And walking across the royal parks. It’s so green—the only city I ever saw that is greener than Houston.”

“Houston’s green?” I said. “I thought it was some dusty prairie town.”

“Yeah, but that’s because you’re a dumb Limey. Houston is green, mister. But not as green as here. You can walk right across the center of town through the three royal parks—St. James’s, Green Park, Hyde Park—and your shoes never touch anything but green, green grass. Do you know how far that is?”

“A mile or so,” I guessed.

“It’s four miles,” she said. “Four miles of flowers, trees, and green. And people riding horses! In the heart of one of the biggest cities on the planet!”

“And the lake,” I said. “Don’t forget the lake.”

We were in the café up on the first floor of a huge white building from the thirties on Portland Place—the Royal Institute of British Architects, right across the street from the Chinese embassy, a monumental oasis of beauty and calm that I never knew existed until she took me there.

“I love the lake,” she said. “I love the Serpentine. Can we still hire a rowing boat at this time of the year? Is it too late?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. It was the last week in September. “We might be able to get a boat for a few more days. You want to try?”

Those wide-set brown eyes got even bigger.

“You mean now?”

“Why not?”

She looked at her watch.

“Because I’ve got to get to work,” she smiled. “Sorry. I would have loved it.”

“Then how about tomorrow? First thing. Before the crowds get there. We’ll get an early start. I’ll meet you at your place after breakfast.”

I still hadn’t seen her flat.

“Or I could come to your place after I get through at work tonight,” she said.

“Tonight?”

“That way we would really be sure of getting an early start.”

“You’ll come to my place after work?”

“Yes.” She looked down at the clouds in her coffee and then back at me. “Would that be okay?”

“That would be good,” I said. “That would be great.”

***

Maybe the thing with Cyd had started off as some dumb infatuation when I was still reeling from Gina leaving me.

But after we slept together for the first time it really wasn’t like that anymore. Because Cyd’s mouth fit mine in a way that no other mouth ever had—not even Gina’s.

I’m not kidding—Cyd’s mouth was a perfect fit. Not too hard, not too soft, not too dry, not too wet, not too much tongue, and not too little tongue. Just perfect.

I had kissed her before, of course, but this was different. Now when we kissed, I wanted it to go on forever. Our mouths could have been made for each other. And how often can you say that? How often do you find someone whose mouth is a perfect fit for yours? I’ll tell you exactly—once. That’s how many times.

There are a lot of nice people in the world, a million people who you could fall in love with. But there’s only one person out there whose mouth is a perfect fit.

And despite everything that happened later, I still believe that. I really do.

***

In the early hours, I watched her while she was sleeping, loving it that she was on my side of the bed, happy that she knew so little about my old life that she hadn’t automatically taken Gina’s side.

I drifted off knowing that we had begun, and it was up to the two of us what side of the bed we slept on.

And then she woke up screaming.

***

It was only Pat.

Disturbed by drunks staggering home at the end of a Saturday night, he had stumbled out of his bed and crawled into mine, never really waking, not even when he threw a leg over Cyd’s waist and she woke up as if someone was kicking in the window.

She turned toward me, hiding her face in her hands.

“Oh God—I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I could see you. But I could feel someone else.”

I put my arm around her shoulders, trying to comfort her. Pat was out cold on her side of the bed, his mouth open, his arms above his head, his smooth round face turned away from us, but one leg still draped over Cyd.

“I’m all right, I’m all right,” she said, gently removing Pat’s leg. She slid over me and got out of bed, not sounding all right at all.

I thought she was going to the bathroom. But when she didn’t come back after five minutes I went looking for her. She was sitting at the kitchen table wearing a shirt of mine that she must have found in the laundry basket.

I sat down beside her, taking her hands. I kissed her on the mouth. Softly, lips together. I loved to kiss her all different ways.

“I’m sorry he scared you,” I said. “He does that sometimes. Climbs in my bed, I mean. I should have warned you.”

“I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

She shook her head.

“Not really.”

“Listen, I’m really sorry he frightened you like that. I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’ll put a lock on my door. Or tie him down. Or—”

“It’s not Pat,” she said. “It’s us.”

“What do you mean?”

“We haven’t really talked, have we?”

“Sure we have. I told you about Gina. You told me about the guy who was into the bamboo. The one who wasn’t Rhett Butler. We talked a lot. We got all the sad stories out of the way.”

“That’s the past. I mean we haven’t talked about now. We don’t know what the other one wants. I like you, Harry. You’re funny and you’re sweet. You’re good with your boy. But I don’t know what you’re expecting from me.”

“I’m not expecting anything.”

“That’s not true. Of course you are. Same as I am. Same as anyone is when they start sleeping together or holding hands in beautiful buildings and getting all dreamy over coffee and all that. Everyone is expecting things. But I’m not sure if they’re the same things.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well—do you want more children?”

“Jesus. We just slept together for the first time.”

“Ah, come on. You know in your heart if you want more children or not, Harry. I don’t mean with me. I mean with anyone.”

I looked at her. As it happens I had been thinking about it a lot.

“I want more children if the person I have them with is going to be with me forever. Okay?”

“But nobody can guarantee that they’re going to stay together forever.”

“Well, that’s what I want. I don’t want to go through it all again. I don’t like seeing all the pain and disappointment that you pass on to some innocent little kid who didn’t ask for it and who doesn’t deserve it. I didn’t like going through all that with Pat and I’m never going through it again, okay? And neither is any child of mine.”

“Sounds very noble,” she says. “But it’s not really noble at all. It’s just your get-out clause. You want more children, but you only want them if you’re guaranteed a happy ending. But only Walt Disney can guarantee you a happy ending, Harry. And you know it. Nobody can ever give you that kind of guarantee. So everything just—I don’t know—drifts.”

I didn’t like the way this was going. I wanted more kisses. I wanted to watch her sleeping. I wanted her to show me beautiful buildings that I never knew existed. And the boats—we were still going on the boats, weren’t we?

“You can’t just transfer your heart to another woman after your marriage breaks up, Harry. You can’t do it without thinking a little about what you want. What you’re expecting. Because if you don’t, then seven years down the line you will be in exactly the same place you reached with Gina. I like you and you like me. And that’s great. But it’s not enough. We have to be sure we want the same things. We’re too old for games.”

“We’re not too old,” I said. “For anything.”

“Too old for games,” she said. “As soon as you’ve got a kid, you’re too old for games.”

What did she know about having a kid?

“I have to go home,” she said, standing up.

“What about rowing on the lake?” I said.

“Rowing on the lake can wait.”

“It’s the ding-dong man,” Peggy said.

She was sitting on the floor playing with
Star Wars
figures, lost in some weird happy families game where Darth Vader and Princess Leia set up home on the Millennium Falcon and spend their evenings trying to get Harrison Ford to go to sleep.

Pat was standing on the sofa, massive headphones wrapped around his ears, groaning and rolling his eyes to the heavens and swaying from side to side as he listened to Sally’s tape.

“The ding-dong man is coming,” Peggy said to no one in particular, lifting her head with a secret smile.

At first I didn’t have a clue what she was going on about. Then I heard what her new five-year-old ears had picked up a lot earlier than my decrepit old lugholes—a chiming of distant bells that seemed to echo around the neighborhood.

They didn’t have the dull insistence of church bells. There was something tender and cheap and unexpected about them—they were an invitation rather than a command.

Naturally I remembered those bells from my own childhood, but for some reason I was always surprised to find that they still existed. He was still out there, still doing the rounds, still asking the children to put down their games and come into the street and stuff their happy little faces with sugar and milk. It was the ice cream man.

“The ding-dong man,” Peggy said.

I pretended I hadn’t heard her, turning back to the work that was spread out before me on the coffee table. Peggy wasn’t even supposed to be here. This wasn’t one of the afternoons that she came home with Pat. It was the day before the show and I had a shooting script to wade through, a task I found much easier when Pat and Peggy were not squawking on the carpet or listening to Sally’s tape and those songs about bitches, gangsters, and guns. Peggy was a sweet kid and never any trouble. But on a day like today, I preferred to have Pat squawking on the carpet alone.

Peggy was only here because her useless, chain-smoking babysitter had not been at the school to pick her up.

I had gone to meet Pat and found the pair of them holding hands at the gate, chatting away to Miss Waterhouse, their adoring faces lifted toward their young teacher.

Miss Waterhouse left us with a big grin and went off to do whatever primary school teachers do for the second half of the day while we waited for Bianca’s thin, sallow face to come coughing through the crowds in a halo of cigarette smoke. Except that Bianca didn’t show up.

So the three of us stood at the school gates holding hands and as all those young moms swirled around us collecting their children, I stood among their bright chatter and car fumes feeling like the neighborhood leper.

There were all kinds of young mothers outside those school gates. There were moms with Range Rovers and those waxed green coats that are made for the country. There were moms who caught the bus in ankle bracelets. And there were all the young moms in the middle who had enough sense not to have their partner’s name tattooed on their shoulder, but who weren’t rich or stupid enough to ferry around their five-year-old in an enormous four-wheel drive with hull bars on the front.

But whether they were in ankle bracelets or headbands, Prada or polyester, these young mothers all had one thing in common. They all looked at me as if I was the enemy.

At first I thought it was paranoia. I hardly had to explain that my marriage had broken up—just being there, a man alone, always without the company of a woman—unless it was my mother—was like drawing a diagram of our broken home and hanging it on the school gates. But these women didn’t even know me or Gina—so why should they dislike me? I decided that I must be feeling thin-skinned and sensitive after all the changes of the last few months.

But as the term wore on and the days got darker and shorter, I came to realize that it wasn’t paranoia at all. Young mothers didn’t talk to me. They avoided my eye. They really didn’t want to know. At first I tried to engage some of them in small talk and they acted as if I had asked them for a blow job. So after a while, I didn’t bother.

All those moms smiling sweetly at each other, they would really have preferred it if I wasn’t there. It got to the point where I tried to time my arrival at the school gates to the very second when the children were set free. Because I couldn’t stand being around all those young mothers. And they couldn’t stand being around me.

The teachers were always very friendly to me, and when I was talking to Miss Waterhouse it was easy to convince myself that I was part of the modern world where men could be single parents too. But that was proved to be a load of crap any time I had to pause at the school gates.

Whether they were from the big white houses or the projects, the mothers always gave me a wide berth. It had started on the first day of school and it had somehow continued through all the other days.

The women with headbands had more in common with the women in ankle bracelets than they did with me. The women who were single parents had more in common with the women who had partners than they did with me. At least that’s how they all acted.

It was all very English and understated, but there was no denying that the suspicion and embarrassment were always there. There might be understanding and enlightenment for a single father with a little kid out in the working world. But here at the sharp end of parenting outside those school gates, nobody wanted to know. It was as if Pat and I were a reminder of the fragility of all their relationships.

But when Bianca failed to show up and I stood waiting for her with Pat and Peggy, it felt like it was even more than that. Those mothers seemed to look upon me as a reminder of the thousand things that could go wrong with men.

Standing at those gates, I felt as though I was an ambassador for all the defective males in the world. The men who were never there. The men who had pissed off. The men who couldn’t be trusted around children.

Well, fuck the lot of them. I was sick of being treated like the enemy.

It wasn’t that I minded being considered an oddball. I expected to be considered an oddball. After all, I knew I was an oddball. But I was tired of carrying the can for every faulty man in the world.

I loathed Peggy’s babysitter—this girl who couldn’t even make it to the gates of a primary school at an appointed hour, this useless coughing cow who couldn’t even manage to get a phone call to the teacher to warn us that she wasn’t coming, bloody Bianca with her modern name and her modern assumption that someone else would take care of her responsibility.

But at least Peggy wasn’t her child. And far more than the bitterness I felt toward Peggy’s useless babysitter was the loathing I felt for Peggy’s useless parents.

It’s true that I didn’t really know anything about them, apart from the fact that her father was out of the picture and that her mother worked strange hours. But in all the important ways, I felt that I knew everything about them.

Peggy’s dad clearly took his parental responsibility about as seriously as he would a fortnight’s package holiday in Florida. And it didn’t really matter if Peggy’s mom was some hot shot in the city or if she was supplementing her welfare state pocket money with a dip in the black economy. She obviously put her daughter’s well-being at the bottom of her list of life’s priorities.

They were typical modern parents. They were incapable of looking after this child. And if there was one thing that I had grown to hate, it was people who bring a kid into the world and then figure that the difficult bit is done.

Well, fuck the pair of them too.

So after the crowds were starting to thin out, just when all the young moms had gone and the worst was over and I didn’t actually mind standing at the school gates anymore, we went into the front office and I told the secretary that Peggy was coming home with us.

Delighted at their unexpected chance to hang out together, Pat and Peggy squealed with delight as they crammed their little bodies into the front seat of the MGF. And I found myself making an effort not to cry, which was something I found myself doing every once in a while at those school gates. I felt sorry for Peggy just as I felt sorry for Pat. We mess up our lives and it is these forlorn little figures who pick up the bill.

Now I looked at her playing quietly on the floor, ignored even by Pat as he listened to Sally’s brutal songs, the bells of the ding-dong man starting to fade away, and I felt a knot of regret and shame in my heart.

“Do you want an ice cream?” I asked her, feeling about as inadequate as I had ever felt in my life, feeling that I owed her some sort of apology.

Sorry about the collapse of the modern marriage, Peggy. Sorry that adults these days are so self-centered and dumb that we can’t even manage to bring up our own children. Sorry that the world is so messed up that we think about our sons and our daughters about as deeply as the average barnyard animal.

But how about a Cornetto?

***

I was paying the ice cream man for three 99s when Cyd came around the corner.

“You want a 99?” I asked her.

“What’s a 99?”

“One of these,” I said. “A cornet with a chocolate flake stuck in it. They’re great.”

“No thanks,” she said. “I think I’ll keep a few teeth for dinner. How you doing?”

“I’m okay,” I said, leaning forward and kissing her on the mouth. She didn’t make much of an attempt to kiss me back. “I thought you were at work.”

“I got a call to come and pick up Peggy,” she said. “Bianca couldn’t make it. Sorry about that.”

I stared at her for a moment, unable to work out how these two worlds were connected.

“You know Peggy?” I said.

She shook her head. I didn’t get it, did I?

“She’s my daughter, Harry.”

We were standing outside the front door of my house. She looked at me with those wide-set brown eyes. Waiting.

“Peggy’s your daughter?”

“I was going to tell you,” she said. “Honest.” She gave a little laugh that said she knew it wasn’t all that funny. “I was just waiting for the right time. That’s all.”

“The right time? Why didn’t you tell me straight away? Why wasn’t that the right time?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“Explain now.”

“Okay,” she said, pulling the front door so that it was almost closed. So the kids couldn’t hear us. Our kids. “Because I don’t want my daughter to meet strange men who might be out of my life very soon.”

“You don’t want her to meet strange men? What are you going on about, Cyd? I’m not a strange man. She spends more time in this house than she does anywhere. Peggy knows me already.”

“She knows you as Pat’s dad. She doesn’t know you as my—well. What are you, Harry? I guess you’re my boyfriend, aren’t you? She doesn’t know you as my boyfriend. And I don’t want her to meet a boyfriend until I’ve been seeing him for a while. Okay?”

This didn’t make any kind of sense to me. A blob of ice cream dropped onto my hand.

“But she had dinner here almost every night last week!” I said. “She sees more of me than she does of that feckless bastard you married!”

“You don’t know him.”

I loved that.

“Oh—good guy, is he?”

“Maybe not,” she said. “But I don’t want her to grow up believing that every man is going to disappear the way her father disappeared. I don’t want her finding strange men in my bed—and you are strange. In that way, you are, Harry. I don’t want a strange man there when she wakes up. I don’t want her thinking that it doesn’t mean anything. And I don’t want her getting attached to someone who might not be around that long.”

She was trying to be calm, but her voice was choking up a bit now and I felt like putting my arms around her. Which would have been very messy, as I was still holding three melting 99s.

“Because I don’t want her getting more hurt than she has been already,” she said. “I don’t want her to give her little heart to someone and then he casually breaks it. Okay, Harry? Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

She blinked hard, tightening her mouth. I cleaned the ice cream from my hands. Then we went inside and I realized that nothing is extraordinary to a child.

Maybe when you are a kid life is still so full of wonder that there can be no real surprises because almost everything is a surprise. Or perhaps children just adapt faster than adults. Either way, Peggy and Pat didn’t faint with shock when Cyd walked into the house.

“Mommy,” Peggy said, and I thought—of course. Now I knew where I had seen those eyes before.

Cyd sat down on the floor and listened to her daughter explaining the domestic setup on the Millennium Falcon. She took the headphones from my son and listened to a song he liked. Then, after we had all finished our ice creams, she told Peggy that it was time to go home.

“I’ll call you,” I said.

“If you want to,” she said. “I know this must be a bit of a shock.”

“You crazy or what?” I said. “Of course I want to.”

“You’re sure?” she said.

“I’m sure,” I said, touching her arm. “This doesn’t change anything.”

It changed everything.