Man and Boy (2 page)

When I could no longer stand the sight of the rusty white van dawdling along in front of me, I swung the MGF into the oncoming traffic and smacked my foot down.

My new car squirted past the old van with a confident, throaty roar. As I cut back in front of it, I caught a glimpse of the driver—a blur of bad teeth, tattoos, and loathing—before he disappeared in my rearview mirror.

I felt good. The MGF meant that I no longer had to look at rusty white vans or their drivers. All that was behind me now. I could look forward to a future full of open-top motoring and admiring glances. Then the van pulled up alongside me at the very next red light.

Jesus, I thought. Road rage.

“You stupid little bastard,” he told me, winding down his window to reveal a face like a Big Mac in a bucket of beer. “Get out and push it.”

After he had driven off, I sat shaking at the green light for a while, thinking about what I should have said to him.

If I get out, pal, it will be to push your crappy van up your tattooed back passage! If I pushed this thing, pal—it would have been really good to call him pal—I’d still be going faster than you. You lager-bellied moron! You fat fuck!

I saw myself delivering some perfect put-down and then pulling away in a squeal of rubber, an infuriating little smile on my face. But what actually happened was that I just sat there trembling and dreaming until all the cars behind me started sounding their horns and shouting stuff about the lights having changed.

So I drove off, thinking about what my dad would have done.

He certainly wouldn’t have sat there and said nothing. And he wouldn’t have wasted time cooking up some devastating response worthy of Oscar Wilde at his pithy best.

My father would simply have got out of the MGF and punched that van driver’s lights out. He really would.

Not that my dad would ever be seen dead in a fancy sports car, to tell you the truth. He thought they were for wankers.

My dad would have felt much more at home in one of those white vans.

***

Gina had been incredibly understanding about the MGF. She had encouraged me to go back and talk to the salesman when even I was starting to find the idea of buying a sports car a bit stupid.

And there were plenty of reasons why buying it was crazy. Its trunk was smaller than a supermarket cart. We really didn’t need two cars. A soft top in London is a hate object for any spotty fourteen-year-old cretin with a chip on his shoulder and a blade in his sock. But Gina just wasn’t interested.

She told me to buy the thing and to stop thinking that my life was over just because I was turning thirty. She told me I was being pathetic, but she laughed when she said it and put her arm around me, giving me a little shake. Trying to shake some sense into me. Fat chance.

At any other time during the seven years we had been together, we wouldn’t have been able to afford a good second car. In fact, at any other time we wouldn’t have been able to afford an incredibly crappy second car. We hadn’t even owned our crappy first car for very long.

But we no longer had to practically have a heart attack every time we received a bill. At last my job was going well.

I was the producer of
The
Marty
Mann
Show
, a late night talk show that went out every Saturday on television. For the six years before that I had been the producer of
The
Marty
Mann
Show
, back when it was on local radio and most of the country had not even heard the first rumors about its mad bastard presenter. It seemed a long time ago now.

Over the last twelve months we had turned a no-budget radio show into a low-budget TV show. The line between the two was surprisingly thin. But crossing that thin line was enough to make Marty Mann some sort of star.

If you walked into a restaurant with him, everybody stopped eating and talking just so they could look at him. Girls who a few years earlier wouldn’t have touched him wearing surgical gloves now thought he was a love god. He got photographed even when he wasn’t doing anything special. Marty had arrived big time and he had been decent enough to bring me along with him.

The critics, or at least the ones who liked him, called Marty child-like—meaning he was open, frank, and intuitive. They thought that he asked the kind of questions other interviewers decided it was best not to even think about. And it was true—the editing process that exists in most of us seemed to be completely missing from Marty’s brain. And he got answers, even when what he really deserved was a punch in the mouth.

The critics who didn’t like Marty also called him childlike—meaning he was selfish, immature, and cruel. But Marty wasn’t really childlike at all. Sometimes I watched our Pat peacefully play for hours with his little plastic
Star Wars
toys. That was childlike. Marty’s attention span was nowhere near that long. Marty wasn’t childlike. He was just undeveloped.

We had met at a local radio station where the staff was either on their way up or on their way out. It was a rundown little building full of curdled ambition and stale cigarette smoke, and most of our regular callers were either desperately lonely or borderline mad. But I always sort of missed the place. Because that was where I met Gina.

The station was always desperate to get guests—for some reason there was never a mad rush for our checks, which were so small they were invisible to the naked eye—and so there was often an improvisational element to our bookings.

For instance, when the first Japanese banks started to go bust, the person we booked to talk about what it all meant was not an economist or a financial journalist but the professor who taught Japanese at the college across the street.

Okay, so he was a language teacher, but like any language teacher he was in love with the country whose lingo he taught. Who better to discuss why the Asian tigers were turning into neutered pussycats? Well, lots of people, probably. But he was the best we could get. Except he didn’t show up.

As if in sympathy with the exploding Japanese bubble, the professor’s appendix burst on the morning he was due to come in, and coming off the bench as his substitute we got his star pupil—Gina.

Tall, radiant Gina. She was fluent in Japanese, apparently an expert on the culture, and she had legs that went on for weeks. I took her into the studio and couldn’t even find the courage to talk to her, couldn’t even look in her eyes.

She was beautiful, charming, intelligent. But most important of all, she was also way, way out of my league.

And then when the red light came on in the studio, something happened. Or rather, nothing happened at all. Gina became paralyzed with nerves. She couldn’t speak. When I had first seen her, I thought she was unapproachable. But as I watched her stuttering and sweating her way through her incoherent tale of economic decline, she was suddenly human. And I knew I had a chance. A slim chance, maybe. A snowball’s chance in hell, perhaps. But a chance all the same.

I also knew exactly how she felt. The red light always did that to me too. I was never comfortable in front of a microphone or a camera and the very thought of it can still make me break out in a cold sweat.

So when it was over and Marty had put her out of her misery, it was not difficult for me to commiserate with her. She was very good about it, laughing at her nerves and vowing that her career in broadcasting was over.

My heart sank.

I thought—then when will I see you again?

The thing that got me about Gina is that she didn’t make a big deal about the way she looked. She knew she was good-looking, but she didn’t care. Or rather, she thought it was the least interesting thing about her. But you wouldn’t look twice at me if you saw me in the street. And someone as ordinary-looking as me can never be that casual about beauty.

She took me for sushi in Sogo, the big Japanese department store on Piccadilly Circus, where the staff all knew her. She talked to them in Japanese and they called her, “Gina-san.”

“Gina-san?” I said.

“It’s difficult to translate exactly,” she smiled. “It sort of means—honorable, respected Gina.”

Honorable, respected Gina. She had been in love with Japanese culture ever since she was a little girl. She had actually lived there a year before college, teaching English in Kyoto—“The happiest year of my life”—and she was planning to go back. There was a job offer from an American bank in Tokyo. Nothing was going to stop her. I prayed that I would.

Desperately racking my brain for my little knowledge on Japan, I mentioned Yukio Mishima. She dismissed the novelist as a right-wing fruitcake—“It’s not all raw fish and ritual suicide, you know”—and told me I should read
Kawabata
if I really wanted to understand Japan. She said she would lend some of his stuff to me, if I wanted. I saw my chance and grabbed it.

We met for a drink and she brought a book called
Snow
Country
. I read it as soon as I got home—a jaded playboy falls in love with a doomed geisha in a mountain resort, it was actually pretty good—dreaming of Gina’s eyes, her legs, the way her whole face seemed to light up when she laughed.

She cooked dinner back at her flat. I had to take my shoes off before I came in. We discussed Japanese culture—or rather Gina talked and I listened, dropping bits of chicken teriyaki on the carpet with my chopsticks—until it was time to call a cab or brush my teeth. And then we were making love on the floor—or the futon, as Gina called it.

And I wanted her to stay with me forever. So I promised her everything—happiness, endless love, and, crucially, a family. I knew the family thing would get her—her dad had run off when Gina was four years old and she had grown up pining for the security of family life. But she still cried when she told the bank that she wouldn’t be going to Tokyo after all.

Instead of living in Japan, she worked as a freelance translator for Japanese companies in the city. But many of them were going under or going home by now. Her work wasn’t what it should have been. I knew she had given up a lot to be with me. If I hadn’t been so deliriously happy, I might even have felt a bit guilty.

After we were married and Pat was born, she stayed home. She said she didn’t mind giving up work for Pat and me—“my two boys,” she called us.

I suspected that the fact her career had disappointed her had as much to do with staying home as wanting a real family life. But she always tried to make it sound like the most natural thing in the world.

“I don’t want my son brought up by strangers,” she said. “I don’t want some overweight teenager sticking him in front of a video while I’m in an office.”

“Fine,” I said.

“And I don’t want him eating all his meals fresh from the microwave. I don’t want to come home from work too tired to play with him. I don’t want him growing up without me. I want him to have some sort of family life—whatever that is. I don’t want his childhood to be like mine.”

“Right,” I said. I knew this was a touchy subject. Gina looked like she was ready to start bawling at any minute.

“What’s wrong with being a woman who stays home with her kid?” she said. “All that ambition stuff is so pathetically eighties. All that having-it-all crap. We can get by with less money, can’t we? And you’ll buy me sushi once a week, won’t you?”

I told her I would buy her so much raw fish she would sprout gills. So she stayed home to look after our son.

And when I came back from work at night I would shout, “Hi, honey, I’m home,” as though we were characters in some sitcom from the fifties, with Dick Van Dyke bringing home the bacon and Mary Tyler Moore making bacon sandwiches.

I don’t know why I tried to make a joke of it. Maybe because in my heart I believed that Gina was only pretending to be a housewife while I pretended to be my father.

Marty grew up eating dinner with the TV on. Television had been his babysitter, his best friend, his teacher. He could still recite entire programming schedules from his childhood. He could whistle the theme tune to
Dallas
. His Dalek impersonation was among the best I have ever heard. The Miss World Contest had taught him everything he knew about the birds and bees, which admittedly wasn’t very much.

Although I was nothing like him, Marty took to me because I came from the same sort of home. That doesn’t sound like much of a basis for friendship, but you would be surprised at how few people in television come from that kind of background. Most of the people we worked with came from homes with books.

Back at the little radio station where we first met, we were both what was laughingly referred to as multiskilled. Marty was mostly skilled in fetching sandwiches, sorting mail, and making the tea. But even then his grinning, pop-eyed energy was such that everyone noticed him, even if nobody took him seriously.

I was in a more elevated position than Marty, writing items, producing shows, and sometimes very nervously reading the news. I was always lousy at coming alive when the red light came on—only slightly better than Gina. The red light came on and instead of coming alive, I went sort of dead. But it turned out to be what Marty was born to do.

When we suddenly lost the regular presenter of our late night phone-in—the nut shift, we called it—to a job in cable television, I persuaded the station to give Marty a shot. Partly it was because I thought he would be good at it. But mostly it was because I was terrified of having to do it myself.

And he worked wonders with the most unpromising material imaginable. Five nights a week, Marty took calls from conspiracy theorists, alien watchers, and assorted loony tunes. And he turned it into good radio.

What made it good radio was that Marty sounded like there was nowhere else he would rather be than chatting to the mouth-foaming denizens of nut nation.

We slowly started to build what they call a cult following. And after that, we very quickly began to get offers to take the show to TV. People bought us lunch, made flattering noises, and made big promises. And very soon we abandoned our successful radio show, a rare case of rats deserting a floating ship.

But it was different on television. We couldn’t just let our guests practically wander in off the street as they had done on radio. Amusing lunatics who had been impregnated by randy aliens were no longer quite enough.

After a year fronting his own show, Marty still looked like he was exactly where he wanted to be. But the strain was starting to show, and every week he needed a little more time in makeup to cover the cracks. It wasn’t just the seven-day stress of finding good guests that was putting those licks of gray in his bottle-blond hair. When we were on radio, Marty had nothing to lose. And now he did.

He was in the chair of the makeup room when I arrived at the studio, brainstorming about future guests to the group of young women who surrounded him, hanging on to his every wishful thought while the makeup girl attempted to make his skin look vaguely human for the cameras. He dubiously sipped the glass of water that had been placed in front of him.

“Is this Evian?”

“Did you want sparkling?” asked a sweet-faced young woman in combat trousers and army boots.

“I wanted Evian.”

She looked relieved. “That’s Evian.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, it’s Badoit.”

Marty looked at her.

“But there wasn’t any Evian in the vending machine,” she said.

“Try the green room,” he suggested with a little sigh.

There were murmurs of assent. The green room—the holding pen for the show’s guests—was definitely the place to find Marty’s Evian. Crestfallen but smiling bravely, the girl in combat trousers went off to find the right water.

“I’m thinking classic encounter with Hollywood legend,” Marty said. “I’m thinking Michael Parkinson meets the stars with his clipboard. I’m thinking Tinsel Town. I’m thinking Oscar nominee. I’m thinking…Jack Nicholson?”

“Jack’s not in town,” our researcher said. She was a small, nervous girl who wouldn’t be doing this job for much longer. Her fingernails were already chewed to the knuckle.

“Leonardo DiCaprio?”

“Leo’s unavailable.”

“Clint Eastwood?”

“I’ve got a call in with his office. But—doubtful.”

“Robert Mitchum? James Stewart?”

“They’re dead.”

Marty shot her a vicious look.

“Don’t ever say that,” he said. “They are merely unable to commit to the show at this moment in time.”

He looked at me in the mirror, his beady eyes blinking inside a cloud of orange foundation.

“Why can’t we get any of these fucking screen greats, Harry?”

“Because none of the people you mentioned have any product out,” I told him, as I had to tell him every week. “And when they do, we still have to fight for them with all the other talk shows.”

“Did you see the news tonight?” the makeup girl said dreamily, the way makeup girls do, completely oblivious to the nervous breakdowns that were happening all around her. “It was really interesting. They showed you those protesters out at the airport. The ones chaining themselves to the trees? Protesting against the new terminal?”

“What about them?” Marty said. “Or are you just making conversation?”

“I really like their leader,” she said. “You know—Cliff. The one with the dreadlocks? He’s gorgeous.”

Every woman in the room muttered agreement. I had seen this Cliff character up his tree—skinny, well-spoken, dreadlocks—but I had no idea he was considered a sexual entity.

“That’s who you should have on the show,” the makeup girl said triumphantly, dabbing Marty’s face with a powder puff. “He’s much more interesting than some old superstar with a hair transplant and an action thriller on general release.”

“Cliff’s not a bad idea,” I said. “But I don’t know how to reach him. Although he can’t be as difficult as Clint Eastwood.”

“Well, I’ve got a cell phone number for him,” someone said from the back of the makeup room. “If that’s any use.”

We all turned to look at her.

She was a slim redhead with that kind of fine Irish skin that is so pale it looks as though it has never seen the sun. She was in her early twenties—she looked as though she had been out of the university for about forty-five minutes—but she still had a few freckles. She would always have a few freckles. I had never seen her before.

“Siobhan Kemp,” she said to no one in particular, blushing as she introduced herself. “I’m the new associate producer. Well—shall I give Cliff a call?”

Marty looked at me. I could tell that he liked the idea of the tree man. And so did I. Because like all television people, what we worshiped above all else was authenticity. Apart from genuine, high-octane celebrity, of course. We worshiped that most of all.

But we were sick of junior celebs pushing their lousy product. We hungered after real people with real lives and real stories—stories, not anecdotes. They offered us great television at rock-bottom prices. We offered them therapy, a chance to get it all off their chest, an opportunity to let it all just gush out over a million carpets.

Of course if Jack Nicholson had suddenly called up begging to appear on the show then we would have immediately called a security guard to escort all the real people from the building. But somehow Jack never did. There were just not enough celebrities to go ’round these days.

So we revered real people, real people who felt passionate about something, real people with a story to tell, real people with no career to protect. And someone up a tree with police dogs snapping at his unwashed bollocks sounded about as real as it gets.

“How do you know him?” I asked her.

“I used to go out with him,” she said. Marty and I exchanged a glance. We were impressed. So this Siobhan was a real person too.

“It didn’t work out,” she said. “It’s difficult when one of you is up a tree for so much of the time. But we managed to stay close and I admire him—he really believes in what he’s doing. The way he sees it, the life-support systems of the planet are nearing exhaustion and all the politicians ever do is pay lip service to ecological issues. He thinks that when man enters the land, he should leave only footprints and take only memories.”

“Fucking brilliant,” Marty said. “Who’s his agent?”

***

I was up in the gallery watching a dozen screens showing five different shots of Marty interviewing a man who could inflate a condom with it pulled down over the top half of his head—he was actually pretty good—when I felt someone by my side.

It was Siobhan, smiling like a kid on her first day at a new school who has suddenly realized that she is going to be okay.

In the darkness of the gallery, her face was lit by the monitors on the wall. They are TV sets, that’s all, but we call them monitors. They provide the director with a choice of shots for transmission. Monitors don’t show only the image that is going out, but all the images that could be. Siobhan smiled up at them. She had a beautiful smile.

“I thought that this Cliff didn’t do interviews,” I said. “Not since he was stitched up by that Sunday paper who said he was just in it for the glory and the hippy chicks.” Then I remembered she had gone out with him. “No offense meant.”

“None taken,” she said. “That’s true, but he might do this one.”

“Why? Because of you?”

“No,” she laughed. “Because he likes Marty. He doesn’t consider him part of the media establishment.”

I looked at Marty on the monitor, almost gagging with laughter as the condom exploded on the guy’s head. If anyone was part of the media establishment, it was Marty. He would have considered it a compliment.

“And most of all,” said Siobhan, “because we’re live.”

It was true that we were practically the last live show on TV. By now, most shows were what they called “as live”—meaning they faked the excitement of live television while always having the safety net of recording. Phony as hell.

But
The
Marty
Mann
Show
was the real thing. When you watched that guy with a condom on his head, it was actually being inflated at that very moment.

“The way these eco-warriors see it,” Siobhan said, “the only place in the media where there’s no censorship is live television. Can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“Is that your MGF down in the parking lot? The red one?”

Here it comes, I thought. The lecture about what cars do to the muck in the air and the hole in the sky. Sometimes I despair for the young people of today. All they ever think about is the future of the planet.

“Yeah, that’s mine,” I said.

“Nice car,” she said.

***

They were all asleep by the time I got home. I brushed my teeth and undressed in the darkness, listening to my wife softly breathing in her sleep.

The sound of Gina sleeping never failed to stir an enormous tenderness in me. It was the only time that she ever seemed vulnerable, the only time that I could kid myself that she needed me to protect her. She stirred when I slid into bed and wrapped my arm around her.

“Good show tonight,” she murmured.

She was warm and sleepy and I loved her like that. She had her back to me, her usual sleeping position, and she sighed as I snuggled up against her, kissing the back of her neck and letting my hand trace the length of one of those long legs that had knocked me out when I first met her. And still did.

“Oh, Gina. My Gina.”

“Oh, Harry,” she said softly. “You don’t want to—do you?” She brushed me with her hand. “Well. Maybe you do.”

“You feel great.”

“Pretty frisky, aren’t you?” she laughed, turning to look at me, her eyes still half-closed with sleep. “I mean, for a man of your age.”

She sat up in bed, pulled the T-shirt she was wearing over her head and tossed it to the floor. She ran her fingers through her hair, and smiled at me, her long, familiar body lit by the street light seeping through the blinds. It was never really dark in our room.

“Still want me?” she said. “Even after all these years?”

I may have nodded. Our lips were just about to touch when Pat began to cry. We looked at each other. She smiled. I didn’t.

“I’ll get him,” Gina said as I flopped back against the pillow.

She returned to the bedroom with Pat in her arms. He was sort of gasping for breath and tearfully trying to explain his nightmare—something about big monsters—while Gina soothed him, rolling him into bed between us. As always, in the warmth of our bed his sobbing immediately stopped.

“Make spoons,” Gina told us.

Pat and I obediently rolled over, his warm little legs in the brushed cotton pajamas tucked up inside the back of mine. I could hear him sniffing, but he was okay now. Gina threw one of her long thin arms over the pair of us, nestling up against Pat.

“Go to sleep now,” she whispered. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

I closed my eyes, the boy between us, and as I drifted away I wondered if Gina was talking to me, or to Pat, or to both of us.

“There are no monsters,” she said, and we slept in her arms.