Men from the Boys (18 page)

And that is why I always resisted the hour’s drive out to the grave they shared. Apart from the fact that I was always busy with my life, and apart from the fact that it was a drag battling through the commuters heading east on the M25. Apart from all that, I did not believe that my mother and father were actually resting in this bleakly picturesque graveyard, with the five-hundred-year-old church behind it and the yellow fields rolling away beyond.

And I was wrong.

They were here.

And their grandson, his long blond hair roughly shorn close to his head, was with them.

Elizabeth Montgomery looked up as I approached the grave.

I saw Pat take a drag on his cigarette, his eyes squinting as he exhaled and muttered, ‘It’s only my dad.’

Elizabeth Montgomery stood up, smoothing her skirt, and smiled. She had a great smile. And I thought, What a wonderful choice. If you are a boy and you are choosing a girl to go crazy about, then you couldn’t do better than Elizabeth Montgomery. A girl who will come and smoke and drink cider with you at your grandparents’ grave. How could you do better than a girl like that?

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘The need to pee.’

I looked at Pat and then I looked at the grave. They had brought flowers, I realised with a pang of guilt.

‘You certainly know how to show a girl a good time,’ I said. ‘Cider. A graveyard. And a packet of low-tar. Last of the big spenders.’

‘Don’t tell me you never hung out in graveyards,’ he said, not looking at me.

I laughed, remembering lurking in this very graveyard with my best mate, looking down the sights of a .22 air rifle and running for home every time the sky got dark and we heard the rustle of leaves behind a gravestone.

Pat held out the bottle of cider.

‘Go on then,’ I said, and I took a swig.

‘The thing about grandparents,’ said my son, ‘is that they love you in a different way. Parents – sorry – but they drive you up the wall. Because they are always on at you to be better. Smarter. Tougher. Nicer.’ He looked at the gravestone. ‘Grandparents just accept you the way you are. Grandparents are
happy
with you in a way that parents never are. Parents are always trying to make improvements – as if you are some derelict property that needs doing up. With grandparents it’s unconditional love. That’s how I remember it, anyway.’ Pat glanced at the gravestone.

‘That’s how it was,’ I said, and took another swig of the cider.

‘They’ve been gone for quite a while,’ Pat said.

For most of his life. ‘I wish they’d known Joni,’ I said. ‘I regret that – them not knowing her.’

Pat laughed. ‘They’d have eaten her up.’

I gave him back his bottle of cider. ‘Yeah, she’s an edible little thing.’ I felt like hugging him, but I didn’t. ‘Your hair…’

He self-consciously ran his fingers through it. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.

‘I’ll complain to the headmaster.’

‘Good luck with that.’ He shook his head. ‘They’ve done worse. They do worse every day. You just don’t see it.’

Elizabeth Montgomery came back. She crouched down by Pat’s side and kissed his face. He didn’t move, just pinched out the remains of his cigarette and put it in his school blazer. The grave was very clean.

‘Give you a ride back?’ I asked them.

Elizabeth Montgomery looked at Pat, and he shook his head.

‘We’ll stay for a bit longer,’ he said.

Elizabeth Montgomery held up a paper bag that said Gourmet Fare on the side. ‘We’ve brought sandwiches,’ she said. ‘We were going to make a day of it.’

I looked at them uncertainly. ‘You promise me you’ll go back tonight? She’s worried. Your mother’s worried.’

Pat looked up at me. I was expecting some coruscating teenage sarcasm, but he nodded seriously. ‘We’re going back tonight, okay?’

Elizabeth Montgomery stood up and smiled at me. ‘We’re fine,’ she said. ‘We can get the train.’

‘Okay.’

I looked down at the yellow fields. With that perfect harmony that made them seem more like a private world than a married couple, my parents had died on almost the same day. More than a decade had separated their deaths, but on the calendar it was only twenty-four hours apart. So when I saw the yellow fields of spring, they both came back at once. I should come to this place more often, I realised. If only to see the yellow fields.

I shook Elizabeth Montgomery’s hand and gave my son a hard, fierce kiss on the top of his head. That was definitely the right way round to do it. I stuffed a few notes in the pocket of his school blazer. All done without asking his permission, and without giving him a chance to protest.

Then I walked back to my car, where I phoned his mother and told her that Pat was with his girlfriend, and with his grandparents, and that our boy was safe and sound.

Oh yes, I thought, as I crawled out of bed, got dressed in the dark and drove to the hospital. I remember now.

With my parents gone for so many years, I had forgotten that in the end there is always the call that comes in the middle of the night.

But the scene at the hospital was so unchanged – the men standing outside in their pyjamas and dressing gowns, sucking down a shot of nicotine, the laughing nurses looking forward to the end of their night shift, the homeless man sleeping on a bench outside a shuttered shop in the deserted reception area – that it could have been the same stage set, populated by the same characters.

It all came back to me now.

Walking along the corridors with their same old night noises of equipment being moved and the sick moaning in their sleep, for one mad moment I felt that I was looking for the bed where my father lay dying. I found the nurses’ station I was looking for and they directed me to a dark, crowded ward where the end bed had the curtains pulled around it. I stepped inside.

Singe Rana was sleeping, propped up in bed with his head falling forward. Ken sat by his bedside, rifling in a large box of Quality Street. Even at this hour, he was wearing his Sunday best. But then he always wore his Sunday best.

‘Stroke,’ Ken said. ‘Know what one of them is, do you?’

I shook my head. ‘Not really.’

I only really knew about cancer. My parents were from the generation that courted to
Casablanca.
Cigarette smoke and true love were inseparable in their minds. So it was always cancer that was big in our house.

‘Not really or not at all?’ he snapped, furiously unwrapping a Caramel Swirl.

I looked at Singe Rana’s face. It was still smooth and youthful, but the beautiful golden colour seemed more burnished now, suddenly older, as though many years had passed in just one night.

‘Not at all,’ I admitted.

‘The quack called it a pulmonary embolism,’ Ken said, his mouth full of chocolate. ‘Blood clot. Finds its way from the heart to the brain.’

He considered his box of Quality Street. Picked up a Coconut Éclair and threw it back. ‘Sorry to call you in the middle of the night,’ he said. ‘Just thought you might want to know. Bit pointless, really.’

I shook my head. ‘I want to know. I’m glad you called. And I am not big on the whole sleep thing right now.’ We both looked at Singe Rana. ‘What’s going to happen to him?’ I said.

‘Too soon to tell.’ Ken shrugged. ‘Impaired functions, they told me. That’s quack-speak for anything from a tingling sensation to coma, paralysis, death.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah – they don’t narrow it down much, do they?’ He looked at his sleeping friend. ‘If he gets through the first week or two, he’ll be right as rain.’

He held out the Quality Street and I shook my head. But then he rattled the box at me and I took a Green Triangle. I remembered this one. Delicious hazelnut wrapped in milk chocolate, if I wasn’t mistaken.

‘We were at the dogs,’ he said, his eyes not leaving Singe Rana’s face. ‘He was talking about Italy. He likes to talk about Italy more and more. He rattles on about Italy as if it was the best holiday of his life.’ He chuckled. ‘Oranges and lemons,
he talks about. The fields and the girls and the wine. The mountains and the vineyards. I don’t remember much of all that. But then he’s a glass-half-full kind of bloke, old Singe Rana.’

Ken scratched his leg, the one he had lost, and I wondered if the story was true, I wondered if he could still feel it after all these years of living without it.

‘What I remember is the cold,’ he said. ‘And the noise. And the mud. And the stink. It stunk, that mud in Italy. Bloody stunk, it did. Somebody said it stunk in exactly the same way that the Somme stunk in the first turnout. Something to do with the mud and shells and the rotting bodies.’ He nodded. ‘I remember that smell. And I remember the wounded lying in rows with the kind of wounds that they never show you in the films or on the news. Boys with their guts hanging out, calling for God or their mother to come and help. Men holding their intestines. Head wounds from 88-millimetre shells so bad that you could see bits of brain. This is on the living, mind. Limbs gone. Minds gone. Faces blown off. Bollocks shot off. Smashed bodies everywhere.’ He looked up at me. ‘Still wish you were there, do you?’

I felt a stab of anger.

‘I never said that, did I?’ I said.

‘You don’t have to. It’s clear as day. I saw it in my Mick – the one that’s in Australia.’ A thin smile. ‘Wishing he was there. This feeling that he – your lot – the sons – had missed something. Something big. Something important. A test. A challenge. The experience. I don’t know what you call it, but you know what I mean. And I know you feel it too, even if you can’t admit it. That wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself. This need to do something bigger and better and more important than buying a car that you’ve seen Jeremy Clarkson drive on
Top Gear.’

‘I thought Mick was your favourite,’ I said.

‘He is,’ Ken said.

Then suddenly a family was there, bustling around the bed,
unloading presents. A tiny old lady, thin as a child, Singe Rana’s wife, and two strapping middle-aged men and their wives, and assorted nippers from their teens to a babe in arms. And they all had that open-faced calm that I now thought of as Nepalese.

As if awakened from his dreams by the smell of Aloo Chop, Singe Rana stirred. He sleepily smiled at the sight of his family as they unloaded parcels of food. But they ignored Singe Rana and began offering it to Ken and me. Flat bread, curried vegetables, fried rice, milky tea and of course the spicy potato cakes. Ken brandished his box of Quality Street, trying to return the hospitality. They impatiently waved him away.

Over extensive protests, Ken gave up his chair to Singe Rana’s wife, and then gently placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

The two old men looked at each other but said nothing. He took his hand away. We left.

In the corridor, Ken removed a stiff cream-coloured envelope from his blazer. I assumed it was a Get Well card and that he would want to go back to give it to Singe Rana. Despite his unsentimental front, I suspected that Ken was the kind of man who would bring someone a Get Well card. He looked at the card for a moment as if he had forgotten it was there and then he slowly removed it from the envelope, as if he was going to announce the winner of some great prize.

It was a white card with discreet silver bells and roses and swirly gold writing.

‘This is my invitation,’ Ken said, as though he had never received one before, or as if it was so long ago that it was lost to memory.

He held the white card with swirly writing very gently and in both hands, like a thing of great delicacy and value.

‘My invitation,’ repeated Ken Grimwood. ‘I was meant to go out there today. Or do I mean yesterday? My Tracey was going to take me. But I stayed here. Missed my lift.’ He gestured
towards his friend. ‘Because of him in there.’ A short laugh as he slipped his invitation back inside his jacket. ‘My Tracey went mental.’

And loneliness too, I thought.

That’s what old age is about, even more than the calls that come in the middle of the night. The kind of loneliness that comes when most of what you have loved has gone.

A crop-haired boy in a suit stopped us as we were going into the church.

‘Bride or groom?’ he said.

‘Neither,’ Ken said, and the boy rolled his eyes, as if he had heard that one already today.

‘Bride’s side,’ I said, and the boy gave us both a white rose buttonhole, the little stem sheathed in silver paper.

We stepped inside. Light streamed through the stainedglass windows and lit up the women in their hats. It smelled of even more roses. There were children everywhere, running up and down the aisle, and their laughter echoed with the protests of their parents.

Ken was still holding his rose in both hands as if it was a tiny bouquet. I took it from him and put it into his blazer’s buttonhole. Then we found a seat on the bride’s side, towards the back and on the aisle, as if we were planning on making a quick escape. There were two young men waiting at the altar with a female vicar. Tracey was standing up in the front row, adjusting her hat.

‘I don’t know these people,’ Ken muttered.

Then I saw his daughter spot him. She came down the aisle, holding her hat, her high heels clicking on the flagstones.

‘Glad you made it, Dad,’ she said, giving me a quick nod as she took her father’s arm and gently lifted him to his feet.

Ken looked bewildered. ‘You’re the bride’s granddad,’ Tracey explained, her eyes scanning the entrance. ‘You have to sit with us.’

He let her lead him to the front row as the organ began the wedding march. Then the bride was suddenly there in
an explosion of white, with Ian clinging tearfully to her arm. The bride was pretty and pregnant, hovering between smiles and tears, and she looked more like her grandmother than anyone else in the front row. There was the same sweet, dark-eyed mischief about her that I remembered from the wedding pictures of Ken and his Dot. Or perhaps it was just because she was around the same age as her grandmother had been in those wedding pictures, and everything was still before her.

They started down the aisle and every eye followed them. I could tell which of the boys was the groom now. He smiled at the girl, turned his head to the ground and then looked at her again. Tracey began to smile and dab at her eyes. Although he was head and shoulders shorter than the rest of the front row, I could just about see Ken. And I watched him watching the bride, narrowing his eyes as he squinted at her face, as if she was a girl he knew from somewhere, but it was just out of reach.

The next time I saw him he had a glass of champagne in each hand and was staggering through the wedding reception to where I was talking to the vicar.

‘Beautiful service,’ he said, and attempted to kiss her full on the lips.

The vicar flinched and pulled away but somehow he kept going, eyes closed and lips pursed in readiness. I intercepted him before he fell and as he steadied himself a small crescent of champagne sloshed from one of the glasses and down the vicar’s cassock.

Ken blinked at her from behind his glasses. ‘Beautiful,’ he said.

‘Thank you so much,’ the vicar smiled, and quickly slipped away. Ken watched her go, thoughtfully draining one of the champagne flutes. I gently removed the other one from his hand and downed it before it could do any more harm.

We were in a marquee in the grounds of a country house hotel. It felt like more than a fancy tent, as though it had stood
for a thousand years instead of having been erected that morning. When the music began – a big blast of happy funk, ‘Celebration’ by Kool and the Gang – it seemed to bounce off ancient walls.

Ken headed for the dance floor.

I followed him, suddenly understanding why I had felt the need to stick around.

Tracey cut us off, looking concerned.

‘Dad?’ she said. ‘Have you tried the canapés?’

But Ken kept going, gently bouncing off a waiter with a silver tray of Bellinis and on to the dance floor.

Tracey touched my arm. ‘Don’t let him spoil it for me,’ she said.

He was the third person on the dance floor. Only the bride and her groom were out there before him, holding each other and swaying from side to side, the curious dance of people who had never really learned how to dance. They seemed glad to see Ken appear, if only as a distraction from their embarrassment.

Ken was smiling, doing a technically perfect twist – the ball of one foot stubbing out a cigarette while his hands moved as if drying himself after a shower – and I wondered what long-ago night out with his wife had lodged in his head. People began to clap and cheer. The bride broke away from her husband and reached out for her grandfather.

He looked at her face and his smile vanished.

‘Dot,’ I saw him mouth. ‘My Dot…’

Then his good leg seemed to slip from under him and he was sitting down, still looking up at the girl in her wedding dress, staring at her face as if he remembered everything.

And there was laughter now, not the good kind, as he sat there on the dance floor, and all around the marquee I could see the blue-white glow of screens as people filmed him with their phones as he sat there on the ground. The bride and groom were laughing too, and Kool and the Gang were ordering everyone to have a real good time as I pushed my way through the crowd to get him.

And despite the ten-grand party and the designer duds and the river of cocktails, I could see them in all their modern ugliness now.

The hard-eyed women with the tattoos on their arms and legs not quite hidden by their dresses. The soft-bodied men with elaborate hair, as brittle as toffee apples from styling products, or shaved escaped-convict close to cover the old male pattern baldness. Some of the men were like children – tieless at a wedding, as though they had yet to master the knot. And the children dressed like adults – little girls in high heels, little boys in bow ties wielding mobile phones like blunt instruments, filming the old man on the floor.

All drunk, all overweight.

I shoved the last of them out of the way and bent down to lift Ken. Suddenly his daughter was there, her face in mine.

‘Get him out of here,’ she hissed.

In the shadow of the country house hotel, we sat by a swimming pool, the lights under the water making it shimmer blue and gold.

Music from the marquee drifted to us across the manicured grounds. I could hear that the DJ had moved from family favourites to club classics.

Some guests were coming out of the tent and drifting across to the hotel. Behind us were open French doors, and an almost deserted bar.

Ken groaned. ‘It’s killing me,’ he said, and I helped him on to a sun lounger and watched him roll up his trouser leg until it was above his knee.

His prosthetic limb looked completely lifelike, yet totally inanimate. It seemed alive and dead at the same time. I watched him unclamp it and place it to one side with a relieved sigh. He began to massage the flesh above his knee. It was a mass of scars.