Man and Wife (22 page)

And it was as if we had never been apart.

His long fair hair was stuck to his head with perspiration. I sat him up and gave him some water, rubbing his
back the way I’d done when he was a baby and needed winding.

‘You can’t sleep on planes,’ he said in the darkness, talking in a dream. ‘It’s very difficult, right, because you’re moving and there’s all this food all the time and a little telly too. Isn’t it difficult, Daddy?’

‘But it’s okay now. Everything’s okay now.’

I held my boy close and rocked him, feeling the warmth of him through the brushed-cotton pyjamas, sensing his little chest rise and fall with each passing breath, feeling all the love I had for him rise up inside me.

It was four in the morning. The house slept on. But now I was awake, and remembering some words from long ago.

‘Just rest your eyes,’ I told my boy.

eighteen

Peggy surveyed the crowds swarming around the giant Ferris wheel.

‘There’s lots of people,’ she said, taking my hand.

I looked up at the London Eye towering above us, and down at her worried face. I smiled and gave her hand a squeeze.

‘We’ll be up there soon.’

She nodded, holding my hand tighter. Sometimes Peggy put her hand in mine and I thought that everything was going to be all right.

She was so small, so smart, so wise, so trusting and so beautiful that all she had to do was take my hand and I wanted to protect her for the rest of my life. I held that warm hand in mine and nothing else mattered. Not the sporadic visits from her useless father. Not the running battle she was currently having with Pat about their early-evening DVD entertainment. And not even the fact that her mother looked at her in a way she could never look at my son. Peggy took my hand and something chemical happened inside me. I felt like her father.

High above us the great wheel revolved in the clear April sky. It was turning so slowly that from where we were you could hardly tell that it was moving at all. But new people kept pouring in and out of the steel and glass capsules, so something was happening up there.

The crowd edged towards the departure gate. Pat was excitedly darting between the barriers, checking on our progress. Cyd was reading a brochure about the London Eye, occasionally
saying, ‘Now
this
is interesting…’ before reading us some fact about the big wheel’s architects, construction or size. But while Pat ran around and Cyd read aloud, Peggy just held my hand as we slowly moved forward.

She was far more self-possessed than Pat, but that was not the reason she was being quiet today. My son was giddy with the fairground excitement of the London Eye, but something about all these people unnerved Peggy.

‘We’ll be able to see where we live, Peg,’ I told her. ‘And we’ll be able to see Parliament and all the parks and all the way to Docklands.’

‘And Big Ben?’ In a very small voice.

‘And Big Ben too.’ I gave her hand another squeeze. ‘We’ll be all right, Peg.’

She didn’t look so certain. Pat dashed back, happy and breathless. Cyd tucked her brochure under her arm. She put her other arm around my waist and rested her head on my shoulder. When she lifted her face to look at me we smiled at each other, the kind of smiles that you can only really get after loving each other for a long time, smiles that somehow contained both a question and its answer.

Happy?

Thanks to you
.

Then my wife slapped my arm with her London Eye brochure.

‘Hey, don’t forget,’ she said. ‘Peggy’s school play is next week. It’s really important that you guys are there. I’ll slap your asses if you don’t come.’

‘We wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

I really meant it. We felt like a family today. And I wanted this feeling to last.

We were so close to the giant wheel that now you had to crane your neck to see the top of it. You could see that it was definitely moving.

‘Nearly there,’ gasped Pat.

So I held Peggy’s hand in mine as the big wheel kept turning and, everywhere she looked, the adult world towered above her.

*   *   *

‘Hello, boys,’ said Gina’s dad. ‘Cool. Sweet. How about a cup of tea? Herbal all right?’

Glenn. Pat’s other grandfather. Easy to remember him as my ex-wife’s useless bastard father, the sorry excuse for a man who made all men suspect, who made all men seem capable of terrible betrayal. Less easy to remember that he was my son’s grandfather.

My parents had been such a large part of Pat’s life, a source of stability and unconditional love during what sometimes seemed like unbroken years of domestic mayhem, that it was hard for me to think of Gina’s wayward old man in quite the same way. Glenn wasn’t my idea of a grandfather. He was more my idea of an ageing hippy who believed his withered old dick was the centre of the known universe. If Glenn wasn’t there for his daughter, why should we expect any more for his grandson?

Yet it was difficult for me to hate him, despite all the sadness he had caused in his lifetime. On the odd occasions when we met, this elderly groover in his cracked leather trousers seemed like a lonely, pathetic figure. After all the big dreams and great loves and hysterical scenes in his life, he had ended up in a rented one-bedroom flat in Hadley Wood. Because he had mistaken hedonism for happiness.

And there was an undeniable sweetness about him. I knew that he was a selfish old git who had sacrificed everyone he had ever loved for his knob and his guitar, and I knew that Gina still carried the wounds that he had inflicted by walking out and casually starting again. But he appeared genuinely glad to see Pat and me, and there was something in the way that he looked at my son that seemed infinitely gentle. Given the chance, the pair of them got on very well. Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part, but when Glenn looked at Pat, I believed I saw love in his eyes.

While Glenn laboured with our drinks – the smallest act of domesticity was beyond him – I sat on a sofa that was made out of the same cracked leather material as his trousers. Pat wandered the flat. There wasn’t a lot of space to stroll around, and everywhere you looked there was music.

Dad rock magazines on the coffee table. An acoustic and an electric guitar leaning back in their stands. A good sound system, although like Glenn himself, the material on the speakers was fraying with age. Shining towers of CDs. And fat stacks of old twelve-inch vinyl LPs. Pat picked one of them up.

‘What’s this then?’ he said, brandishing a dark, twelve-inch cardboard square at me.

‘That’s a long-playing record, Pat.’

‘What’s it do then?’

‘It plays music.’

Pat looked doubtful. ‘It’s too big,’ he said.

On the cover of the album he was holding, a beautiful young man stared moodily out of the darkness. In the background three less lovely young men hovered like ugly sisters waiting to be invited to the ball.

Glenn came back into the room carrying our mugs of camomile.

‘Good choice, man,’ he said. ‘That’s the first Doors album. Considered by many to be the greatest debut album of all time.’

‘Pat’s not curious about Jim Morrison, Glenn,’ I said. ‘He’s just never seen an LP before.’

Glenn almost dropped the herbal tea. ‘You’re kidding me!’

And then he was away. Sitting with Pat on the floor of his rented flat, sifting through half a century of music while the Doors belted out ‘Break On Through (to the Other Side)’.

It was all there, from Elvis and Little Richard to the Beatles and the Stones, Hendrix and the Who, the Pistols and the Clash, the Smiths and the Stone Roses, Nirvana and the Strokes, and every side road, every detour, from country rock to glam to grunge to nu metal, the greats, the has-beens and – his speciality – the one-hit wonders. Glenn led his charmed, bewildered grandson on a guided tour through a rock and roll wonderland.

‘Now
these
guys are interesting,’ Glenn chuckled, producing a sleeve that showed five boys in psychedelic trousers frolicking
in a children’s park. ‘Ah yes, the Trollies. Started out as a basic Mod covers band called the Trolley Boys. Got into the whole psychedelic thing as the Trollies. Wandering around the council flats having a bit of a cosmic vision – you know the sort of thing, Pat. And later recorded some rather interesting, hugely underrated concept albums as Maximum Troll.’ Glenn handed the sleeve to Pat. ‘See anyone you recognise?’

I peered over their shoulders. And I saw him immediately – the face of a drug-ravaged choirboy, the Robert Plant bubble cut tumbling over his velvet jacket, leering at the camera with his mates. The Glenn of thirty years ago, when Gina was a baby, the Glenn who was as close as he would ever be to having his dreams come true.

‘That’s your granddad, Pat,’ I said, resisting the urge to say – your other granddad. ‘He was on
Top of the Pops
once, isn’t that right, Glenn?’

Pat’s mouth dropped open. ‘
You
were on
Top Pops?’

He had always called it
Top Pops
. I had given up trying to correct him. I sort of liked his mistake anyway.

‘With this very line-up. Oh, apart from Chalky Brown on drums. By the time we did “Roundhouse Lady,” we had Sniffer Penge on the skins.’

Pat was enchanted. He had never imagined his errant grandfather to be capable of such glory. And Glenn was humbled and happy, perhaps happier than I had ever seen him.

My father hated talking about his past – the poverty in the East End, the service with the Royal Naval Commandos, the death and destruction of the war, the nineteen-year-old friends who never came home. But Glenn didn’t feel the same way about his past – playing the Scene as the Trolley Boys with Pete Townshend and Roger Daltry in the audience, getting a big hit as the Trollies with ‘Roundhouse Lady’, moving out to the country with Maximum Troll to record double concept albums. Glenn could hardly shut up about it.

And I saw for the first time that Glenn was as much a grandfather to Pat as my own dad.

It was certainly an alternative version of manhood that Gina’s
dad offered. Instead of the soldier, father and husband that my father had been, Glenn was musician, free man and artist.

If you can call a former member of Maximum Troll an artist.

We were late leaving Glenn’s place.

The pair of them had been so wrapped up in talking about music – or rather Glenn talked about music while Pat stared in wonder, sometimes saying,
‘You
were on
Top Pops
, Granddad?’ – that by the time we got to the car, we were in the middle of the rush hour.

The car crawled south on the Finchley Road. In the end we decided to park, sit out the traffic for a while and get something to eat. We had an important date later that evening – Peggy’s school play was tonight – but we had plenty of time.

At least that’s the way it seemed.

There was a little Japanese place in Camden Town. Thanks to his mother, Pat was an expert on Japanese food, adept with chopsticks and capable of putting away sashimi and tempura the way most seven-year-olds polish off a Big Mac. It was only when we went inside that we discovered we were in a tepenyaki restaurant. This place wasn’t about food so much as theatre.

All the seating was at big tables arranged around large metal grills with a space for a chef to do his stuff. These cooks strutted the restaurant like culinary gunslingers, bandy-legged as if they had just done ten days in the saddle, big white hats perched on the back of their heads, and huge knives in low-slung holsters hanging by the side of their aprons.

These chefs didn’t just cook for you, they put on a show. All over the restaurant they were dealing prawns and slivers of meat or vegetables on to the sizzling grills, slicing them up, mixing them with rice, then flamboyantly throwing jars of spices and herbs in the air and catching them behind their back. And all of it executed in a lightning blur of speed, just like Tom Cruise in
Cocktail
, but done with an extremely large chopper.

But it took ages to even get started. We had to wait for our table to fill up with other customers before the show could
begin. I looked at my watch, calculating how late we could leave this place and still make it to Peggy’s play. Finally, when our table was fully occupied, a young Filipino chef greeted us, melodramatically whipped out his knife and started tossing foodstuffs into the air. He must have been new because he kept dropping things – a wayward prawn nearly took out the eye of a German tourist – but Pat smiled encouragement. The time ebbed away, and Pat kept ordering more food to be thrown, sliced and sizzled.

‘We really should make a move, Pat,’ I said, knowing that I didn’t have the heart to stop his fun.

The young tepenyaki chef threw a jar of cinnamon into the air and came really, really close to catching it. I half-heartedly joined in the sympathetic applause.

‘I’m very hungry,’ Pat said, his eyes sparkling with wonder.

What was it with my family and the theatre?

Pat was green around the gills by the time we reached the school.

‘I told you not to have that third helping of squid,’ I said.

The play had already begun. All around the assembly hall, proud parents were filming a multicultural celebration of diversity called
The Egg
. What did it have to do with Easter? As little as possible.

Children representing the religions of the world were in a stable where a papier-mâché dove of peace had just been born. On the tiny stage, there was a little boy in a white sheet and a black beret, possibly representing a Shinto priest, a little girl in an orange beach towel with a pink swimming cap on her head, denoting baldness, who was definitely meant to be a Buddhist monk, and a child of indeterminate sex with a cotton-wool beard and sandals meant to represent either Islam or Judaism or both.

And then there was Peggy, her arms and legs sticking out of an old
Pocahontas
duvet, with a Habitat scarf around her head, probably representing the Virgin Mary.

I could see Cyd in the middle of a row, two empty seats
beside her. I grabbed Pat’s hand and we began inching our way towards her. Proud parents with digicams cried out in pain and tutted disapprovingly as we trod on their toes and banged against their knees.