Man and Wife (21 page)

He came through the arrival gate holding the hand of a young British Airways stewardess. There was some sort of identification tag around his neck, as worn by child evacuees in old black-and-white wars, or Paddington Bear.

Please look after this child.

‘Pat! Over here! Pat!’

The stewardess spotted me before he did. He was chatting away to her, his face pale and serious, and then he saw me through the legs of all those arriving tourists and business types. He broke away from the BA girl and ran to my arms, and I was on my knees, holding him tight and kissing his mop of blond hair.

‘Let me look at you, darling.’

He grinned and yawned, and I saw that the gummy gap that had existed at the front of his mouth had changed. There were now two uneven fragments of pure white bone pushing through. The teeth that would have to last him a lifetime.

There were other changes. He was taller, and his hair was maybe slightly darker, and I didn’t recognise any of his clothes.

‘Are you all right? How was the flight? It’s so good to see you, darling!’

‘You can’t sleep on planes because they keep coming round making you try to eat things,’ he reflected, blinking his tired blue eyes. ‘You have to choose between fish and chicken.’

‘He’s a little bit jet-lagged, aren’t you, Pat?’ said the BA girl. Then she gave me a dazzling white smile. ‘He’s such a lovely boy.’

It was true. He was a lovely boy. Smart, funny and beautiful. And independent and brave – flying across the Atlantic all by himself. A terrific kid.

My son, when he was seven years old.

We thanked the girl from BA and caught a cab back into town. My heart felt lighter than it had in months.

‘Everything okay in Connecticut?’

‘Fine.’

‘You like your new school? Making friends?’

‘Good.’

‘Mummy all right?’

‘She’s okay.’ He paused, frowning at the slow-moving traffic heading for the motorway. ‘But she argues with Richard. They had a little bit of a row about Britney.’

So that was the trouble with Gina. For a moment I wondered who Britney was – some hot little babysitter? Or some cute secretary looking for love? But Britney couldn’t be a secretary. Richard didn’t have a job. It had all fallen through at Bridle-Worthington. So who was this mystery woman?

‘Britney was sick in the living room,’ Pat said. ‘Richard was very angry. Then Britney wet the Indian rug and had to have an operation and Richard said it was disgusting the way Britney kept biting at the stitches.’

I was thinking that Britney must be one hell of a babysitter, and then I remembered. Of course. My son had a dog now.

A slow smile spread across Pat’s face.

‘Guess what? At dinner he sits right by the table and licks his, you know, willie.’

I raised my eyebrows.

‘Richard or Britney?’ My son thought about it for a moment.

‘You must be joking,’ he said.

‘Come here, you.’

Then he slid across the seat and climbed on to my lap. I could
smell that old Pat smell of sugar and dirt, sense his exhaustion. Within minutes he was fast asleep.

The cab driver had pictures of three small children on his dashboard. He looked at us in his rear-view mirror and smiled.

‘You two boys come far?’ he said.

I held my son close.

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘We’ve come a very long way.’

Cyd had hung balloons on the front door, and it filled me with gratitude and love.

She was waiting for us as I paid the driver, wreathed in smiles. As I dragged Pat’s suitcase up our garden path she crouched down and threw her arms around him and I felt like we were becoming a real family at last.

Peggy was in the living room watching a Lucy Doll video. It was a film that Peggy and I had watched before, an animated double bill featuring a cheapo cartoon version of ‘Lucy Doll Rock and Roll and her blank-faced band getting stranded in a fifties time warp.

Lucy Doll Rock and Roll and her friends can’t wait to join the hep teens down at the soda shop for a bebopping, finger-licking good time,’ said Peggy. ‘Strap yourself in for action, because the countdown to fun has begun!’

Pat smiled shyly at his oldest friend.

‘Hello, Pat,’ Peggy said with the brisk formality of minor royalty. ‘So how’s America?’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a dog. His name’s Britney. He’s not allowed in the house because he licks his willie right in front of everybody.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you, Pat,’ sniffed Peggy. ‘But he can’t be a boy dog if his name is Britney. Because Britney is a girl’s name,
stupid.’

Pat looked up at me for support. ‘Britney is a boy dog, isn’t he?’

I thought of Britney licking his enormous great penis at the dinner table.

‘I would say so, darling.’

‘Do you want to watch
Lucy Doll’s American Graffiti
with me?’ said Peggy. ‘Lucy Doll Rock and Roll magically comes to life in this stunning adaptation of the much loved classic.’

Cyd and I smiled at each other. She gave my arm a little squeeze. She knew how much this meant to me.

Pat considered the vision in pink doing a Chuck Berry duck-walk across the TV screen.

‘Lucy Doll sucks,’ he said.

‘Pat,’ I said.

‘Lucy Doll sucks big time.’

‘
Pat.’

‘Lucy Doll can kiss my royal ass.’

‘Pat, I’m warning you.’

‘Lucy Doll can go fuck herself.’

And it sort of went downhill from there.

I had never seen my mother so happy in my life.

This was more than happiness. Seeing her grandson again provoked a kind of ecstasy, a kind of delirious abandon. My mum lost herself in her grandson.

Before I had the handbrake on she had picked him up and squeezed the air out of him. She held him at arm’s length and stared with wonder at his gorgeous face. She shook her head, unable to believe that he was back.

If only for a week.

We went inside. Pink and purple leaflets were strewn across her coffee table. My mother quickly began to gather them up. But not before I caught sight of some of the titles.

Here for You. Coping with a Diagnosis. Breast Reconstruction. Friends of Breast Cancer Care. Going into Hospital. Zoladex. Taxol. Taxotere. Arimidex. Chemotherapy. Radiotherapy
.

I didn’t even understand half of the titles. But I knew what they all meant.

‘You okay, Mum?’ I asked, the most useless question of all, but one I couldn’t stop myself asking. Because I wanted so much for her to tell me that everything was going to be all right, and that she would always be in this world.

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she said, not wanting to make a fuss, seeking to avoid self-pity and melodrama at all costs. ‘They sent me this stuff. I don’t know how they expect me to read it all.’

She gathered up her cancer leaflets and stuffed them into a drawer.

Then she clapped her hands.

‘I’m going to make a nice cup of tea for my two boys,’ she said. ‘How about that?’

‘I can’t have caffeine,’ Pat said, picking up the television remote. ‘Mummy said.’

‘And I’ve already had a few cappuccinos,’ I said. ‘My doctor doesn’t want me to have more than three shots of caffeine a day. Bad for blood pressure, you see.’

‘Oh,’ said my mum, bewildered. ‘Oh, all right. I’ll just make one for myself then, shall I?’

So Pat and I slumped on that sagging old sofa that seemed to know every last nook and curve in our bodies and my mum went off to the kitchen, humming Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’, and contemplating this strange new world where her son and grandson were both forbidden from having a nice cup of tea.

Later we were in the park watching Pat tackle the upper regions of a rusty climbing frame. He wasn’t the tentative small boy he had been only a couple of years earlier. Now he was as fearless as a mountain goat.

Two bigger boys were clambering around the very top like monkeys in Tommy Hilfiger. Every now and again Pat would pause, hold on tight, and gaze up at them with adoration. He still loved bigger boys. They ignored him completely.

‘It’s good to have him back,’ I said. ‘Feels more like a proper family again. Especially when we are out here with you. Just a regular family where you don’t have to think too much about anything. Where it all seems – I don’t know – normal. Like you and Dad.’

My father would have happily concurred with my yearning for normality. The old man would have bemoaned the death of the family, the rise in the divorce rate, the generation of children
who were being brought up with one of their parents missing. He would have done all that while rolling himself a cigarette.

My dad was all for normality.

But my mum was made of different stuff.

‘What’s normal?’ she said. ‘Your dad and I were married for ten years before you came along. You call us normal? We felt like anything but normal. We felt like freaks.’

The two bigger boys jumped off the climbing frame and ran to the swings. Pat smiled at them with undiluted affection.

‘All our friends were having children,’ my mum said. ‘Like a bunch of rabbits, they were. One of them always had a bun in the oven. Up the spout, in the club, knocked up. But it didn’t happen for us.’ She gave a smile. ‘And you call us normal, Harry. Bless you. We didn’t feel very normal, I can tell you.’

I watched my son laboriously edging his way up the climbing frame, his face stern with concentration, and rosy-cheeked from the cold.

‘You know what I mean. We were normal. You, me and Dad.’

And I thought of Christmas with all the aunts and uncles, caravan holidays in Cornwall, the smell of the Sunday roast cooking while my old man washed his car in the little driveway. I remembered runs to Southend, not for the pier or the beach, but for the dog track. And I remembered lying on the back seat of the car, the yellow lights of the Essex A-roads streaming about my head, coming home from seeing my nan or, once a year, a pantomime at the London Palladium, telling my mum that I couldn’t sleep, I wasn’t tired, not tired at all.
Just rest your eyes
, she would tell me.
Just rest your eyes
. There was a simplicity and a goodness about my childhood, and already it seemed too late for my son to have the same thing. ‘You couldn’t get more normal than us,’ I said.

‘So we became normal when you came along? And if you hadn’t come along, we would have stayed freaks?’

‘I don’t know. I just know it felt sort of easy. In a way that it doesn’t feel easy any more. Pat and Peggy are not talking. Cyd’s angry with me because she thinks I’m spoiling Pat. I’m mad at
Cyd because I think she resents Pat coming over for just one lousy week.’

‘Why aren’t Pat and Peggy talking?’

‘They had a bit of a bust-up. He called Lucy Doll a two-dollar crack whore. You know how Peggy feels about Lucy Doll.’

‘Brothers and sisters fight all the time. I nearly stabbed one of my brothers.’

‘Yes, but they’re not brother and sister, are they? That’s the point. So it can never be normal. Not really. If it falls to pieces, then what happens? We never see each other again. You’re telling me that’s what you call normal? Come on, Mum. Not even you’re that broad-minded.’

We watched Pat climb to the summit of the frame. He stood there silhouetted against the big blue sky, the smell of spring in the air despite the chill, grinning at us, all wrapped up in his padded anorak. He held on tight with both hands. Golden strands of hair stuck out from inside the bobble hat that his grandmother had knitted him.

‘I just don’t like all this talk about normal,’ said my mum. ‘Because for years I felt anything but normal. Ten years we tried for you. Every month was another heartbreak. Times that by ten, Harry. You’re the smart one. You work it out.’

One of Pat’s trainers seemed to slip and I watched the expression on his face change from pride to alarm as he suddenly lurched backwards into thin air. But then he recovered, found his footing and gripped the climbing frame with his tiny fists.

‘There’s no such thing as a normal family,’ said my mum.

Gina called.

It was close to midnight. The kids had been asleep for hours – Peggy in her room, Pat on an old futon in the guest room – and Cyd was out catering for the launch of one of those trendy hotels that were springing up all over town. After the slurs on Lucy Doll’s morality, we were all talking again, although it was with a strained politeness that sometimes seemed even worse than angry silence. I was glad that nobody was around when my ex-wife called.

‘Is he okay, Harry?’

‘He’s fine.’

‘You’re not letting him have sugar, are you? Or caffeine? Or British beef?’

‘He hasn’t had a Happy Meal since he’s been here.’

‘I want you to take him to see my dad.’

‘Your dad? Take him to see Glenn?’

‘That’s right. Pat’s grandfather.’

It was always difficult for me to remember that Pat had two sets of grandparents. Gina’s mother had died before our son was born, and although her old man was still out there and Pat had seen him sporadically down the years, he had never been a traditional grandfather figure.

Glenn was what he had always been – a mullet-haired musician who had never quite made it out of the minor leagues. There had been the odd appearance on
Top of the Pops
at the cusp of the sixties and seventies, but Glenn had spent almost three decades as a sales assistant in a guitar shop on Denmark Street, playing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for teenage
NME
readers. The best part of his energies had gone into forming a new band every few years, not to mention a new family. Gina and her mother had been left behind a lifetime ago. Musical differences, probably.

‘I want him to see my dad. I want him to know that he has another grandfather. It wasn’t just your dad, Harry.’

‘Okay. I’ll take Pat to see Glenn.’

‘Thank you.’

‘How’s everything over there? Britney still upsetting Richard? Pat’s told me all about it. Is he still licking his penis at the dinner table? The dog, I mean. Not Richard.’

‘That dog is the least of our troubles,’ said my ex-wife.

My son cried out in the middle of the night. I slipped out of bed, feeling Cyd stir beside me, and I went to him, treading carefully as I was more asleep than awake.