Men from the Boys (7 page)

I shook his hand. It was soft and wet as the River Cam. Marty was fabulously unmoved.

‘And what?’ he said, his pale features set in stone. ‘Some fancy title makes you too important to get a cup of tea for the talent?’

The silence of the mortuary lab. And then Marty laughed. And Blunt and I smiled, relieved to hear something, anything, to break that awful silence.

‘Just pulling your chain,’ Marty laughed, standing up to offer his hand. He could ingratiate himself with management when he felt like it.

‘We need to talk about the direction of
A Clip Round the Ear,’
said Blunt, regaining his composure, remembering his power. ‘If you can find a window for me.’

Marty nodded briskly.

‘Let me get my coat and I’ll see you in my office,’ he said.

The young man looked startled. ‘Now?’ he said, glancing at the big old-fashioned clock. It was way after midnight. Marty and I smiled at each other.

‘Son,’ he told Blunt, ‘this is not a nine-to-five job.’

The three of us left Broadcasting House and walked down to Mayfair through empty city streets that I had known all my adult life. The streets around here never seemed to change. But I knew that I was changing.

‘When you’re thirty you want to be free,’ I told Marty as we crossed Berkeley Square. ‘But when you’re forty you want to belong.’

Marty nodded. ‘There’s a little minx from Vilnius that I’ve been seeing,’ he guffawed. ‘I wouldn’t mind belonging to her for an hour or two.’

Then he slapped me on the back, and turned to bark at Blunt, who was trailing behind us, worried about what he was getting into.

But I really believed it.

Ten years ago I longed for a life that was limitless and free, even though – or perhaps because – I knew I would never
have it. But now, on the edge of forty, I just wanted my family, and roots, and to belong. And I thought that was typical. But Marty was the kind of man who, even at the edge of forty, wanted to belong to a Lithuanian pole dancer.

We came through the door of the Pussy Galore and a young woman in a nightdress took Blunt’s arm.

‘Want to party?’ she said, her accent curiously American, yet ripe with some former Communist hell. ‘Where you stay? Want to dance? Want to party?’ She leaned in, all close and conspiratorial. ‘We party at my place…’

Blunt stepped back as if she had a gun.

‘Maybe later,’ I told her, and put my arm around him, steering him away from the hungry eyes at the bar.

Marty had gone on ahead of us. He had a girl clinging on to each arm and some manager was whisking him off to the VIP area. His office.

‘What is this place?’ Blunt said, his voice quivering with a heady cocktail of fear and distaste.

‘It’s not what it was,’ I said. ‘Nothing like. Come on.’

We hurried downstairs into the blackness of Hades and Marty’s office – a cosy VIP cubbyhole behind a red velvet rope. There was a former heavyweight boxer in black tie guarding the rope. He lifted it gently to allow Marty and the girls to enter. We quickly followed him, as if it was the last lifeboat on the
Titanic.

Marty sat smothered in girls.

A song was playing that sounded like a beautiful heartbeat. It was the one where he says to the girl that he is not loving her the way he wanted to. That one. It’s good, I like it.

Blunt and I perched on the end of the curved sofa like maiden aunts at a Roman orgy. Blunt stared at Marty Mann with appalled eyes.

‘Ten years ago this place was quite chaste,’ I told him, because I felt I should say something. ‘Full of local girls who wanted to be models and actresses. Doing a bit of lap dancing so they could pay the rent until they became Dame Judi Dench.’

We turned our heads tracking a burst of hysterical laughter. The two blondes had removed their nightwear and were unfurling themselves all over Marty’s grateful face in nothing more than a little strategic dental floss.

‘Now it’s full of girls who are from out of the neighbourhood,’ I said. ‘That’s one of the things the EU has done for these places. Allowed freedom of movement for prostitutes.’

A waitress in a tutu brought a bottle of Pol Roger in a bucket of ice. She poured five glasses. Blunt shook his head at Marty.

‘Relax,’ I said. ‘Have a drink. The sex is not compulsory. You can still leave these places with your virtue intact.’

‘It’s exploitative,’ he said. ‘Degrading. And it treats half the human race as cattle.’

Then he reached for his champagne.

And by the time I left them, Blunt had lipstick all over his gurning face, half of the Baltic hanging on his fragile frame and his BBC credit card in his hand, waving it wildly as he howled for more, more, more.

Outside the Pussy Galore I let the friendly gorilla on the door hail me a cab. And I saw that there was something else that had not changed about these places over the last ten years.

Standing by the taxi drivers waiting for a fare, there were the boyfriends of the dancers. They were as silent and still and alone as they ever were – the fun-loving studs whose dreams had come true, who had landed the girl with the face and the body and the perfect, rock-hard breasts, and it had done nothing but bring them jealousy and despair.

Those men had not changed at all over the last ten years.

But now there were more of them.

Pat removed a crushed cider can from the grave of his grandparents.

I looked at the headstone – the name of my father above my mother, four middle names between the pair of them, a relic from the days when the children of the working class
were loaded with as many names as a duke or duchess. I looked at their names, and I watched Pat removing the dead flowers, and I felt nothing.

My parents were not here. I didn’t know and it did not matter if the divine spark of life that made them who they were had gone to heaven or oblivion. But it had gone, and all that was left were those husks that I kissed, and touched once, and choked over even though I knew they had nothing to do with my mother and father. My mum and dad never looked like that.

I wasn’t the grave visitor. Part of me – perhaps a big part of me – wanted to keep the grave clean, but only in theory. The crushed cider can had not been tossed on my parents. I couldn’t take it personally. Not the way my son did.

I stared out over the fields beyond. When my parents had been buried – years apart but the same spring month claimed both of them – those fields were bright yellow. Now they were brown and bare.

‘But why do we have to go?’ Pat said, and I turned to watch him arranging the little bunch of flowers we had bought at a petrol station on the way out of town. ‘Why do we have to go to – what’s it called?’

‘The Cenotaph,’ I said. ‘It’s called the Cenotaph. And we have to go because…we owe these old men.’

And because I never talked to my father as much as I should have. And because I never went to the pub with him because I was too busy with work and girls and life. And because I loved him but I didn’t really know him at all. I did not even know what had happened on Elba. And then it was too late.

‘Pat,’ I said, and saying my son’s name in this place gave me a good feeling. ‘We have to go to the Cenotaph for this one Sunday of the year because this is who we are.’

He straightened up from the grave. I have to admit the kid did a good job of keeping it nice. And although my parents were not here, I was grateful for that.

‘But Gina and I were going to go ice skating on Sunday,’ he said.

He was about to say more but I did that thing that my father could always do with me.

I silenced him with a look.

Joni sat reading the latest copy of
Go Girl
as her mother ran the fine-toothed nit comb through her long brown hair.

‘And what do you say if someone says that you have nits?’ Cyd asked, not for the first time.

Joni didn’t look up from her magazine.

‘I say, “Please, miss, but I
don’t
have any nits,”’ she said. ‘I say, “Please, miss, we used the special cream and then the special comb and my mummy checked. She looked all over for the nits, miss, but they had all gone.”’

‘Very good,’ Cyd said.

She began to collect her head-lice equipment – the Nitty Gritty Nit-Free Head Lice comb, the Wild Child hair cream – and stared thoughtfully at Joni’s hair. Under the lights of our living room, it looked impossibly glossy, ridiculously clean.

Our little Holloway home wasn’t big but we had torn down a separating wall on the ground floor and there was a large open space where we all rattled around – eating, reading, watching TV, hanging out, hunting for head lice.

A small keyboard was shoved up against a wall, and Peggy sat playing. You would think a piano would get in the way, but somehow it seemed natural to us. Pat and I were reading at opposite ends of the sofa –
Broadcast
for me, Edward de Bono’s
Lateral Thinking
for him – as Peggy carefully picked out the same snatch of melody.

‘Joni?’ Peggy said, not lifting her eyes from the keys.

Joni put down
Go Girl. ‘
What, Peg?’

‘Have you got nits?’ Peggy asked.

Cyd shook her head at the general laughter. ‘Don’t make fun of her,’ she said, kissing Joni on the back of her bugfree head. But our youngest was proudly flashing her vampire smile.

‘I have no nits,’ she said. ‘I am a nit-free girl. There are no nits on me.’

She jumped down from the table and got herself a banana. Pat and I went back to our reading. Peggy carried on producing the same little ribbon of notes.

‘Oh, that’s nice, Peg,’ Pat said. ‘Mariah Carey?’

Peggy snorted. ‘Mariah Carey? This is Mendelssohn, sunshine.’ She delicately picked out the same few haunting notes.
‘Lieder ohne Worte.
“Songs Without Words” to you.’

‘Sounds like Mariah Carey,’ Pat said good-naturedly, grinning at me.

‘What do they teach you at Ramsay Mac?’ Peggy said.

‘Not much,’ he said, returning to his
Lateral Thinking.

Joni appeared before me with a banana in her hand. She bared her fangs at me. ‘Don’t forget,’ she told me, ‘the Tooth Fairy still hasn’t been yet.’

Pat and Peggy were watching me, poker-faced and unsmiling.

I nodded. ‘I’m on it,’ I said. Joni went off to sit next to her sister on the piano stool.

‘Give me your hands,’ Peggy said. ‘I’ll show you how to do it.’

‘Joni,’ Cyd said, ‘don’t play the piano when you’re eating a banana.’

I followed my wife to the kitchen. She was experimenting with some dips. All these different little pots of something between red and orange. It looked like Thai sweet chilli sauce to me.

‘This Tooth Fairy stuff,’ I said.

Cyd’s eyes widened. ‘You didn’t lose her teeth, did you?’

I held up my hands. ‘Got them in a matchbox up in my
room,’ I said. ‘But I remember how scathing she was about Father Christmas in Selfridge’s. I thought she was going to tear down Santa’s Grotto. And that was – what? Nine months ago.’

‘Ah,’ Cyd said. ‘But that’s because it wasn’t the
real
Father Christmas. Don’t you get it? She believes but she doesn’t believe,’ my wife said. ‘Don’t you ever feel that way?’

Marty had sunk three Red Bulls and he was ready to take on the most powerful nation on the planet.

‘Obama removing Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office,’ he said, shaking his script at the mic. ‘What’s all that about?’ He crumpled an empty Red Bull can in his fist. ‘You heard about this?’ he said. ‘Bronze bust of Winston Churchill by Sir Jacob Epstein – worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, as it happens – loaned to the Americans after 9/11 – and this guy Obama decides he doesn’t want it in the White House…’

He looked up at me through the glass. He was waiting for calls from outraged listeners eager to give the American President a clip round the ear. I shook my head. The subject wasn’t making the lights come on. Marty continued with his riff.

‘Who does Obama think is out there dodging the roadside bombs in Afghanistan? The French? The Germans? The Belgians? No – it’s our boys. Standing side by side with Uncle Sam, just as we always do, in good wars and in bad. And then Obama has the brass neck to leave a bust of Churchill out for the bin men.’

This wasn’t strictly true. Obama had given the bust back to the British Ambassador and replaced it with one of Lincoln. But Marty was so steeped in American culture that he could not fail to be hurt. He felt rejected. He took the return of the Churchill bust as a snub, and that was good – good for the show. What was bad was that his listeners apparently did not care what the American President had sitting on his mantelpiece. When he went to Mariah’s ‘I Stay In Love’, I hit the button.

‘They’re not going for it,’ I said. ‘We’ve got a guy on line one who wants to talk about inconsiderate parking. Sid from Surbiton.’

Marty cursed. ‘Our nation is publicly humiliated by the American President and this guy wants to talk about Mr Jones from next door parking his Vauxhall Fiasco over his drive?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Line one, after Mariah Carey. Coming back in ninety seconds.’

Marty tore the final can from his Red Bull four-pack, popped it and took a swig. Then he meticulously tore the cardboard packing to little pieces as Sid from Surbiton told us about his next-door neighbour parking across his drive.

‘I’ll tell you what we should do with someone like that, Sid,’ Marty broke in. ‘He should be shot.’

Then he reached for the switch to cut off Surbiton Sid, but somehow backhanded the last can of Red Bull. It clunked against the live mic and toppled over, its contents spreading over the script before him.

Like blood sitting on a pavement, I thought.

I reached for my wife and she did not even turn away. She did not have to. It was as if I had not touched her, and so I retreated to my side of the bed. I was just sliding into sleep when she started talking.

‘How did stepmothers get such a rotten reputation?’ Cyd said in the darkness. ‘How did that happen? For years and years you cook fish fingers and do the laundry and sew the name-tags on for someone else’s kid and it’s never enough. And it’s never appreciated. And you do it all for a child who is not your own, and even after you learn to love them, you can never be number one. You can never be good enough. You wipe their nose and treat their nits – their nits, Harry, remember the nit comb, when it was Pat and Peggy who were giving a home to the nits? – and yet you still get treated as if you just dumped Hansel and Gretel in the forest.’

I turned on the light.

‘You’re right, baby.’

‘Don’t “baby” me, Harry. And turn that light off, will you?’

I turned the light off and lay on my side, one hand stroking her arm, but ready to withdraw at the first sign of hostility.

‘You think you’ve got it hard, Harry? Try being a stepmother for ten years. Try being the wicked witch whose only crime is not being the mother of the kid she’s trying to raise.’

Cyd was great with Pat. She had never forced it. They had been friends and, over the years, it had become more than that. The only thing missing was the blood. If you ask me, the blood is overrated. It’s the fish fingers and the name-tags and the nit comb that count.

‘You think it’s easy for me, having Gina come back and start playing happy families? And seeing Pat torn between his mother and his father? And me as the meaningless bit player in the family drama. You think I like it?’

‘We appreciate it,’ I said. ‘All of it. Everything you’ve done. Just being here.’

It was true. We appreciated it. But we also took it for granted. Especially now that Gina was back. The fish fingers and the name-tags and the nits were being consigned to history. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to be sorry. Just a little less self-absorbed would be good. Would be nice. Would be appreciated. And have a word with Pat. He’s started bringing his phone to the dinner table just in case she calls or texts or deigns to get in touch. He never did that before. You think you’re the only one. And it’s hard for all of us.’ Her pillow rustled as she shook it. ‘Gina,’ she said. ‘That bloody…’

But she couldn’t find the words. There were no words. And then she let me take her in my arms and I loved my wife. And that was the way I always thought of her – my wife. I never thought of Cyd as my second wife, because that made her sound like some kind of consolation prize, or runnerup, or second best, and she was never that. Cyd was not my second wife. She was my wife. Although where exactly that left my son, I never really knew.

But wherever it was, I could see that it wasn’t a great place to be.

‘You can’t smoke in pubs?’ Ken Grimwood said, the glowing roll-up halfway to his incredulous mouth. ‘Since when can’t you smoke in pubs?’

‘It’s been a while,’ I said, and I looked up at the barmaid as if she might make an exception for someone who had lost a leg freeing the world from tyranny.

But she just stood there staring blankly at the offending fag until the old man holding it had stubbed it out. Then she turned away.

And I realised that Ken Grimwood was having me on. He knew very well that there was no smoking in pubs.

The old men in their green berets all chuckled. On their chests their medals glinted in the twilight of the little brown pub. There were six of them plus Singe Rana. They all wore shirt, tie and blazer, making me feel ludicrously underdressed in my leather jacket and black jeans. They all wore the green beret of the Royal Naval Commandos, apart from the old Gurkha who wore a bush hat with a cotton hatband, the rim pinned up on one side. It had a square patch of green felt with a silver badge – two crossed kukri knives under a crown.

‘Careful, Ken,’ one of them said in a Glasgow accent, ‘you’ll have the Health and Safety inspector down on us.’

They were having a good time. They had not seen each other for a while.

A few years before smoking had been banned in public houses, and everywhere else, the Royal Naval Commando Association had been disbanded, due to the toll of the years. There were not many of them left. The youngest of them – the ones who were teenagers in the war – had to be in their eighties now. They sipped their half-pints of mild and bitter and laughed together in the Trafalgar Square tourist pub.

I looked at Pat sipping his lemonade. He was smiling.

‘Singe Rana,’ Ken said. ‘Tell us the one about the three Germans at Monte Cassino.’

The old Gurkha frowned at his orange juice. He was the only one of them who wasn’t drinking beer for breakfast. I had tried to buy some food but they had little interest in eating. I had tempted a couple of them with a bag of cheese-and-onion crisps, and I had a feeling they would call it a meal.

‘That story is worn out from the telling,’ Singe Rana said in his quiet sing-song, and the other old men protested in their voices from the Clyde and the Taff and the Tyne, and the Trent and the Mersey and the Thames. Tourists at the bar turned to look at the noisy band, and then looked away. They were just a bunch of old men in their Sunday best. If the tourists saw the green berets and the medals, they gave no sign.

‘Go on, Singe, one more time, for your old mates,’ Ken said, getting out his tin of Old Holborn. Had he forgotten that there was no nicotine in here? No, I think it was simply that he did not care. The pathetic, semi-skimmed little rule-makers of the lousy modern world – he genuinely did not give a toss about them. He made a small gesture at Pat and me. ‘And for some new mates, too. They haven’t heard it.’

Singe Rana held his glass of orange juice and looked at it as he began talking. The old soldiers smiled and nudged each other with delight. But they let him tell his story without interruption.

‘We were on night patrol at Monte Cassino,’ he said. ‘Our colonel liked to use us for night patrol. He knew the Gurkhas were good mountain troops and that the night held no fear for us.’ He peered with interest at his orange juice. I looked at Pat. He was holding his lemonade and staring at the old man with a fixed smile. Ken Grimwood was chuckling to himself as he made himself a roll-up.

‘On our first night patrol at Cassino we found three Germans asleep in a slit trench,’ Singe said. ‘We took the two men on the outside and cut off their heads.’ His voice was very quiet. ‘The one in the middle we let sleep on. So that when he awoke,
he would find his friends sitting with him.’ Singe allowed himself a small smile at this point. ‘And tell the others.’

The Gurkha sipped his orange juice as the old Commandos fell about laughing. I saw Pat still wearing his frozen grin, uncertain how to react, a little white around the gills. As if he thought he was missing something, as if the old men might be having him on. He looked at me for guidance then quickly stared down at his drink, suddenly knowing that every word of Singe Rana’s story was true.

We stood among the silent crowds on Whitehall and squinted against the bright November sunshine as the soldiers came marching past.

THE GLORIOUS DEAD, it said on the Cenotaph, and the poppies and the flags were bright splashes of colour against the pale Portland stone, and the three words burned my eyes.

I looked at my son’s face and I wanted to believe that he felt it too. All of it. The sacrifice, the courage. How ridiculously easy it would have been for my father to have died at Anzio or Elba or Monte Cassino, shot in a ditch or bleeding out in a landing craft or drowning in a dock choked with smashed men and machinery, how easy it would have been for my dad to die aged eighteen, and for neither of us to ever be born.

Pat felt it too, I thought, despite not growing up with it the way I did, despite not being taught about it at school. He got it. The heroism, the wild reckless courage. The armies of boys who never came home, or who came home with their bodies in shreds. And all that we would forever owe to these old men.