Men from the Boys (20 page)

I had hated him for years.

I had told myself that it was because of the way he had treated my wife when she was his wife.

And I had told myself that it was because he had been a haphazard parent to Peggy, breezing in and out of her life as the mood took him.

But I saw now that my abiding loathing for Jim Mason was not quite so noble.

Because most of all I had hated him for loving her when her world was uncomplicated, unbroken and new. For loving her first, and for being loved by her in return – that’s why I hated his guts.

Because she had loved him in a complete world. She was trying again with me. That’s all. Trying again. She had always been trying again with me. I knew that now.

But as I watched his face in close-up on the monitor, I was shocked to discover that the old hatred just wasn’t there any more. It would have been good to think that I was all grown-up now, and beyond sexual jealousy and romantic envy. But I suspected it was just that I no longer cared so much. And that felt like the saddest thing in the world.

‘Are you watching this, Harry?’ the director said to me.

I leaned closer. We were in the show’s sound stage, an aircraft hangar of a building containing all the sets we would need for a series. But it all fell away – the cameras, the lights, the hovering make-up girls and continuity editors and the
carpenters and the sparks – and all I saw was the monitor before me.

Jim was playing DCI Steele. He was in an Irish bar – we would dub on the Pogues’ ‘Rainy Night in Soho’ later – and depressed after discovering his ex-wife was going out with a rich lawyer.

The scene didn’t require him to do much – just sit there drinking whisky – iced tea – and looking suicidal.

But he was shaking.

The hand that held the pretend whisky was visibly trembling, and it seemed to transmit anxiety to every part of his body.

The director bridled with irritation.

‘What’s with the Method Actor crap?’ he said.

I said nothing. The camera went in close and I had never seen such panic in a pair of eyes.

‘I know he’s supposed to be a recovering alcoholic who’s about to fall off the wagon,’ the director said. ‘But this Stanislavski crap – being in the moment – it’s too much, isn’t it?’

Jim had not told them about the Parkinson’s. They thought the trembling hand on the iced tea was Jim trying to be Brando.

And I wondered how long that could last.

‘Shoot it,’ I said, and I looked at that handsome face I had loathed for so long. ‘He’s good.’

We sat in the hotel bar and I watched Jim sip his beer. His hand was steady now. He smacked his lips and deliberately placed his beer on the coaster, smiling at me. He had a beautiful smile.

‘It’s not all the time,’ he said. ‘The shakes. Unwanted excitation of muscle, as my doctor calls it. They come and go. Today was the first time that I got it on set.’

I sighed. ‘But it’s only week three,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to tell them sooner or later.’

‘Isn’t that your job?’

‘Probably. I guess. What about your agent?’

‘She’s not talking. Because as soon as it’s news, my stock plummets. The bastards will write me out, I know they will. Who wants an actor who doesn’t know if he’ll make it to the Christmas special?’ He looked at his strong, steady hands. ‘The way I see it, I’m only really screwed when it gets to my speech.’ Some hardness crept into him, and I had seen it before, in the early days when the wounds from his marriage to Cyd were still fresh. ‘Parkinson’s doesn’t make you stupid. Mental faculties are not affected,’ he said, and I could tell he was quoting his doctor again. He held his beer. ‘They just seem to be affected because you can’t control the muscles of speech.’

Over his shoulder I saw a middle-aged man and his daughter enter the bar. She was wearing a summer dress. He was in a suit jacket and jeans.

And then the man leaned into the girl and I knew it wasn’t his daughter.

The man had to be around my age, although he was fighting it. With the jeans, the store-bought tan and of course with the girl.

And the girl was Elizabeth Montgomery.

‘Don’t they have drugs?’ I asked Jim, tearing my eyes from her. ‘They must have drugs.’

Jim grinned. ‘Yeah, they have Benztropine, Benzhexol, all that good stuff to reduce muscle spasms. But it’s a degenerative disease. They control symptoms. They’re not a cure.’

There were no tables. A waiter escorted Elizabeth Montgomery and the man to seats at the bar. The man picked up a cocktail menu and squinted at it. With an embarrassed little smirk, he took out some frameless reading glasses.

Elizabeth Montgomery got up, kissed him on the cheek and left the bar.

I looked at the man and I wondered if he had a room here. And I wondered if there was a wife and kids waiting at the end of some gravel drive. And I wondered how he had met Elizabeth Montgomery, and how it worked.

When she came out of the rest room I was waiting for her. She didn’t look remotely surprised to see me. Maybe she had clocked me when they came in. Or perhaps she was just a very cool customer, that Elizabeth Montgomery.

‘Helping you with your homework, is he?’

She laughed.

There was one of those little mirrors in her hand. She glanced at it and then back at me.

‘I don’t need anyone to help me with my homework,’ she said, and the mirror went into the small bag she was carrying. She didn’t look as though she was planning to spend the night here. Or maybe they had checked in already. Or maybe it was all still undecided, and he would make his play after a few £15 cocktails. I felt sick to my stomach.

‘He’s too old for you,’ I said. ‘And what about Pat?’

Presumably she had thought about Pat already.

Still, I felt I had to ask.

‘Maybe Pat’s too young for me,’ she said, and started back to the bar, her high heels click-clacking on the marble of the hotel lobby. I wanted to stop her but I knew I could not touch her. But she stopped just outside the bar. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I love Pat.’

‘Yeah, looks like it. Drinking cocktails with Granddad.’

‘Nick’s thirty-five,’ she said.

‘Is that what he told you? And the rest,’ I said. ‘What did he tell you about his wife? Let me guess – she doesn’t understand him but they stay together for the sake of the kids.’

‘Isn’t that what everyone does?’

‘Very funny. Where did you meet him? In a chat room? They always lie about their age. He’s grooming you.’

She smiled as if she was older than I would ever be. ‘Unfortunately I am way beyond the grooming stage, Harry.’ She looked into the bar. Her decrepit old lover was still squinting at the price of Mohitos through his reading glasses.

And I saw that she wanted me to understand.

‘Pat is the most lovable boy I have ever met,’ she said. ‘He’s sweet and gentle and all those things. But I am seventeen years
old and I am just not ready for all that big love stuff. Maybe I never will be. Maybe when I’m old. Twenty-five or something.’

‘Don’t do this to him,’ I said, although I knew it was a ridiculous thing to say. The hotel maid was probably placing his-and-her chocolates on their pillows even as we spoke.

‘Don’t you get it?’ Elizabeth Montgomery said. ‘Pat’s just too serious.’

She went back to the bar. I followed a few seconds later, reeling from a world where they could dump you for caring too much.

Jim had ordered another round of beers. He pushed one towards me.

‘Keep an eye on Peggy for me, will you, Harry?’ he said. ‘Whatever happens. Keep an eye on her.’

I held his gaze. ‘Always,’ I said.

Then he had a conspiratorial smile on his handsome face.

‘I hated you for so long,’ he confessed.

They had pushed the furniture back to give them space.

The old man had two battered old leather pads on his hands, these scarred old mitts that were flat on one side and with a sort of glove on the other, and they made a sound like something cracking when he slapped them together.

Pat faced him, his long thin arms hanging by his side, his hand inside the huge brown boxing gloves that said,
Lonsdale – London – sixteen ounce.
They looked beyond old. They looked fossilised.

‘This is stupid,’ I said, and they ignored me. This wasn’t what I had in mind at all. I am not sure what I had in mind. But not this wax on, wax off
Karate Kid
bullshit. This could get him killed.

Ken held up the pads either side of his head and shuffled forward.

‘Double jab,’ he said, and the boy tentatively poked his right hand at one of the pads. ‘Southpaw, see?’ Ken said to me. ‘Leads with his right because he’s left-handed. Double
jab,’ he said, and again Pat struck the pads with the force of a medium-sized butterfly. ‘Good,’ Ken said, but it sounded like lavish praise to me. ‘Keep that left tucked up. Elbow in. The hand protects your chin and the arm protects your ribs. Nice and neat. Not like a statue. Not just standing there waiting to be clumped. Movement, movement. On the balls of your feet. Dance, Pat, dance!’

Then he began coughing and had to sit down.

I sat down beside him.

‘You want to see him dead?’ I said.

Ken finished coughing and said, ‘Do you?’

With rising panic, I watched Pat help Ken up from the sofa – not easy in those big gloves – and they took up their positions.

For a dying man with one leg, Ken was remarkably nimble on his feet. I glanced at the photo of the young boxer on the mantelpiece. Kid Loco, Ken had called himself. Almost thirty fights when he was in the forces. Undefeated. Never knocked down. He had told me, without pride or self-pity, that he would have turned professional if he had not lost a leg at Monte Cassino.

And now he shuffled forwards, backwards and sideways, calling out combinations that Pat followed with gentle obedience.

‘Double jab – right cross – left hook,’ Ken said, and Pat meekly went through the motions.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘He’s not Kid Loco, okay? And he’s not his grandfather.’

‘Typical modern parent,’ Ken sighed. ‘Wants to wrap the kid in cotton wool.’

‘Better cotton wool than a coffin,’ I said.

‘Dad,’ Pat said quietly, and I looked at him. With the thumb of his glove, he pushed back his hair, longer than it had ever been. ‘I want to, all right?’

But the violence wasn’t in him. The spite. The malice. The urge to hurt – it just wasn’t there. It was one of the reasons I loved him.

‘All right,’ I said.

‘Double jab,’ Ken said, and Pat hit the pad twice, slightly harder this time. ‘Always the double jab. Like this.’

Ken threw out his left and the speed amazed me. It was as if he was catching a pair of flies. ‘Everything comes off that double jab,’ he said. ‘Bam-bam, in their face. The rest follows.’

When we were driving home, I told him about Elizabeth Montgomery. I had to tell him, didn’t I? Maybe not. But she would have told him. Or let him find out.

‘I saw your friend,’ I said, my eyes fixed on the road, although I felt his head snap towards me. ‘I saw Elizabeth Montgomery.’

He was watching and waiting. He was thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

‘She wasn’t alone,’ I said.

A beat. ‘The guy from UTI?’ he said, his voice very low. ‘The one with the car?’

‘Somebody else. Somebody older. Almost as old as me.’

Once that could have been his cue for a crack.
But, Dad – nobody’s as old as you.
Not tonight. He said nothing.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Look, there are so many great women in the world, Pat. I know – ’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said. ‘Okay?’

I nodded, my eyes on the road. ‘Okay, kiddo.’

‘And stop calling me kiddo,’ he said.

When I looked at him he was staring at his hands with something like wonder, his fingertips lightly brushing the knuckles, scuffed raw and bloody from the missing layer of skin.

We slept differently at the start.

Before marriage, before Joni – at the start of our ten years – we wrapped ourselves up in each other, and we found that we fit. Face to face. Knee to knee. Mouth to mouth. You name it. We fit together. In those first nights I woke up with her limbs curled around me, and it was the best thing in the world.

But somewhere along the line – after the wedding photographs had started to gather dust, after the baby came along and the nights were split and sleep was suddenly like gold dust – we found that we both just slept better with our backs pressed together.

Still touching – always touching – from the soles of her feet to the delicate wings of her shoulder blades. And touching in the other way – the strokes and the pats just before sleeping or waking that said the same unsayable thing.

I am still me.

You are still you.

We are still here.

Nothing has changed.

But now our sleep seemed to have reached a third and final act. Now our backs turned to each other, but without touching, as if some barrier had built that neither of us could breach.

It was like sleeping in a single bed.

It was like sleeping alone.

‘Do you ever feel that you are too old to start again?’ Cyd said in the darkness, not turning towards me, her voice so soft and low she could have been talking to herself. I heard her sigh. ‘To go through all that business – meeting someone, and seeing if it works, and wondering if what you feel is enough to live with all the baggage they bring? You ever feel like that, Harry?’

I lifted my head. I wanted to put my arm around her. Or just lightly touch her to send the old message. It is still me. But there was that barrier, you see, and I could not cross it.

‘Cyd,’ I said. ‘Are we breaking up?’

‘I feel that way sometimes,’ she said, answering her question and not mine. ‘Just too old and tired to try starting again.’ I felt her pull her legs up and hug them. I wanted to hold her then, but I didn’t. ‘But then sometimes I feel too young to settle for what we’ve got,’ she said. Then she laughed. ‘It’s a bit of a bugger,’ she said, an American dedicated to keeping alive those old English aphorisms.

After that she said nothing.