Men from the Boys (10 page)

For now we would stick with books that we thought we knew because we had seen the Walt Disney movie, but that we didn’t really know at all.

‘Pinocchio, spurred on by the hope of finding his father and of being in time to save him, swam all night long.’

This was better than all those princesses and their chiseljawed princes with a private income. This was the real thing.

Wanting to be a real boy. Wanting to be like all the other real boys. Carlo Collodi made that simple wish feel like an impossible dream.

And my daughter stared up at me, her eyes shining, as our heads struggled with the knowledge that not all stories have the same happy ending.

My father’s medal sat at the back of my desk.

I could not remember the last time I had looked inside the claret-coloured box. Long enough ago for me to forget that there were also three rings in there. My mother’s engagement ring, her wedding ring and her eternity ring. They were very small, like trinkets for a child’s hand. They were all made of low-grade wartime gold, hardly metal at all, and the cheapness of them made something stick in the back of my throat, and block my chest, and burn my eyes.

Yet my mum and dad were together from school to the grave. So who was I to put a value on those rings?

I took out the rings and stored them carefully in the back of the desk. Then I looked at the medal.

There was a blue ribbon with two parallel white stripes that had been darkened by the sixty years that had passed since it was pinned on my father’s chest by the King. The worn silver had the face of the king on one side and on the back there was a crown, and laurel leaves around the tiny words
FOR DISTINGUISHED SERVICE
.

I closed the box and slipped it into the pocket of my jeans.

I wanted to give it to Ken Grimwood. It felt like the least I could do.

Downstairs, Joni was hunched over the coffee table, pens scattered all around. She was in her school uniform, ready to go, but busy working on a card that said –
It’s your birthday! – Don’t
be sad! – Eat cake!
On the front of the card was a cartoon cake and a sad-looking little cartoon man. She was adding dozens of multi-coloured candles to the cake, making it look like a fire hazard, and she was making the sad little cartoon man smile by turning his mouth around. She saw me coming and hurriedly threw an arm around the card.

‘Nothing, nothing, nothing,’ she said breezily, as her mother called her name.

And I thought – Oh, yeah. Now I remember.

Tomorrow is my birthday.

The thing about turning forty is that you are looking your life right in the eye. You are still young, but you are too old to kid yourself. It is when you know what you have made of your life.

It didn’t bother me. There were things I would have liked more of, and things I would have liked less of. More money. Less weight. More hair. Less work. But I didn’t believe in the mid-life crisis. I thought it was a myth. When I was barely thirty, my life fell apart around me. What could be more of a crisis than that?

‘Daddy, you didn’t look, did you?’ said my daughter.

I smiled and shook my head. ‘Didn’t see a thing, angel.’

‘Good.’

I went to work.

‘You know we love you,’ Blunt said, his soft mouth twisting in a grotesque parody of affection. I could not imagine him loving anyone.

‘I think I might have the shark and pumpkin ravioli,’ Marty said, looking around for the waiter. Totally oblivious. But I knew. At the BBC they never tell you they love you until the day that you are dumped.

I love you. So now you must die.

And I suddenly took in the venue – a wood-panelled Italian fish restaurant in Mayfair that was inexplicably popular with the movers and shakers of our business – and realised that making any kind of scene would be self-defeating. We would
look like sore losers. And nobody is going to give a gig to sore losers.

There was bread on the table. It was not sliced. It was torn by hand, and meant to represent the way the Italian peasants would eat their bread.

‘Could we get this bread torn a little smaller?’ Marty asked a passing waitress, and she took it back to the kitchen.

‘The post-watershed demographic is changing,’ Blunt was saying.
‘A Clip Round the Ear
does what it says on the tin – but should we really be pandering to baby boomers who want to kill someone they see using a mobile behind the wheel of a car?’

‘Definitely,’ I said, even though in my bones I suspected it was too late.

‘Are you going to have a starter?’ Marty said. He patted the growing equator of his trouser line. ‘I might skip the starter.’

‘Marty,’ I said, looking at Blunt. ‘Marty – we’re being sacked.’

It was a loud restaurant. The places we went to were all like that. It was as though nobody was actually using their mouth for anything but talk. But Marty continued to wave his menu at harassed young East Europeans in white aprons. I stared at Blunt.

‘Because we didn’t come to your crummy speech?’ I said. ‘Your big-swinging-media-dick speech? Because we weren’t available around the clock? Because we have lives? Because we have families?’

Blunt flushed. ‘Oh, that’s not it.’

‘But it didn’t help, right?’

‘We just want to make a few changes.’

‘Why is it when people say that, the changes are never to your advantage?’ I said. ‘Why do changes always make life worse? Why can’t things ever just stay the same?’

It would have been a good item on our show. Our audience would have loved that.

At Pussy Galore there was a problem with Marty’s card.

A waitress in a tutu brought it back with an embarrassed smile and a bouncer. He hovered behind her, waiting to see which way this thing was going to go.

‘Do you know who I am?’ Marty said, staring down at the card on the silver tray, and the brute lifted his enormous head, as if sniffing prey. Then I was by Marty’s side, laying a soothing hand on his arm and reaching for my wallet. We had only had one bottle. I would pay cash.

‘Come quick,’ called the bouncer to a brace of his Neanderthal mates. ‘There’s a man here who doesn’t know who he is…’

‘How much is it?’ I said, and the waitress in the tutu helpfully shone her torch on the bill. Marty and I stared at it blindly. The truth was we both needed reading glasses in the Pussy Galore but we did not want to admit it. The Pussy Galore would be the last place we would wear any reading glasses.

But I didn’t have enough cash. Nowhere near it. A bottle of fizz at Pussy Galore was surprisingly steep. So I pulled out my own card, already with a sinking feeling, and laid it next to Marty’s.

The waitress went away. She returned with both our cards cut in two.

‘Company cards,’ I said to Marty, as the bouncer reached out with huge meaty hands and seized our collars. ‘They stop those pretty quick.’

He dragged us through the crowds of almost naked girls asking men in suits if they wanted to party. He did it alone. That was humiliating. I think it would have been much better if we had had a bouncer each. And it would have been better still if Marty hadn’t picked up that ice bucket and swung it in his face.

They all came running.

And then they took us out the back way. It was dark, but only just. We could hear the traffic going mental in the surrounding streets as the rush hour kicked off.

A chef from the restaurant next door was smoking a
quiet spliff in the alley. He took one look at us and scarpered. I watched the bouncer who had been hit in the ear with the ice bucket knee Marty between the legs. He went down hard.

Another bouncer appeared in the doorway carrying two brown boxes. The contents of our desks. We had left them in the club. That was thoughtful, I thought, bringing those for us. Then I watched the bouncer empty the boxes into the rubbish-strewn alley. That wasn’t very nice. Then someone hit me once in the ribs and I never knew it was possible to feel such pain.

‘Not in the head,’ somebody said. ‘Kick them anywhere but the head.’

I stood outside Ken’s front door, trying to stop myself from being sick.

The day had somehow slipped away. How long had we been in Pussy Galore? And how many hours had we waited to be patched up in Accident and Emergency? The day had dwindled down to next to nothing. There was hardly any day left.

And I felt the same way. I was worn out, weak from drink and the beating. My nose, my throat – full of gunk. One side of my rib cage felt like it was on fire. I wiped a patch of something wet from my chin and gingerly touched my front teeth with the tip of my tongue, feeling all sorts of strange new peaks and valleys.

But I still had the medal. Somehow I still carried my father’s medal. Everything had been lost – my job, my dignity, my tooth – but the medal remained. And I believed that some good could yet come out of this rotten day if I could only give my dad’s DSM to his old friend.

And so I rang the doorbell. Then I rang it again. And only then did I notice that the flat was in darkness. It looked abandoned, because the council had taken away the smashed door and put up a thick slab of wood enmeshed in a metal grille. The place looked like a derelict prison. I turned away,
the eternal wind of those flats bringing tears to my eyes, and I wondered if I would ever see Ken Grimwood again.

For once the concrete stairs were empty of all life forms. I increased my pace, hearing distant cries and laughter. The flats were sometimes empty but never silent. Then I saw him at the bottom of the steps, flat on his belly, chewing on a dead tennis ball.

Tyson.

‘Good dog,’ I said, stepping over him and simultaneously pressing my car key. The car beeped and the orange lights flashed twice. Oh, let’s get out of here right now, they seemed to say.

But Tyson growled from the back of his throat, leapt up and wrapped his mighty front legs around my thigh. His hind legs began pumping furiously. I looked down at his blank features, the tongue lolling hideously from his wet mouth, the dull gleam of lust in his eyes.

‘Bad dog,’ I told him and I kept walking.

Tyson held on to my leg as if he would never allow us to be parted.

I came home as a distant church bell began to measure midnight.

I stood there for a moment with the key in the lock, controlling my breathing, feeling my forties begin.

My head spun with questions. Did I have more years behind me than in front of me? Would I ever get another job? And what was I going to say to my wife? And my dry cleaner?

The house was black. Not the forsaken, vacant blackness of Ken’s home. The blackness of sleep, and rest, and peace, and children tucked up for the night. I was glad and grateful, and I let myself inside as quietly as I could.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in the hall. Even with all the lights off, I could make out the scuffed, misshapen look of my face, as though I had been shaving with a bread knife. One eye was closing. There was blood on the front of my shirt. There was a love token from Tyson staining the leg
of my jeans. I shook my leg, grimacing with disgust. My cardboard box was falling to bits. I stared at it with numb disbelief. I could not understand why I had not thrown it away.

I listened to the sleeping house, hearing the rasping sound of my breath, and I felt like a creature of the night.

Then I went into the living room and turned on the light.

And there they all were, waiting for me with champagne and big smiles and presents. Waiting for me to come home from work. Waiting to celebrate the day I was born.

My wife. My beautiful wife. My big daughter, looking like a young woman. My little daughter, struggling to stay awake so far past her bedtime. Ken Grimwood, in his striped tie and blazer. Singe Rana. And even Gina, with a smile that I remembered, a smile that I knew, as though our marriage had been an honourable defeat, and no worse than that. And my son, by his mother’s side, instinctively tipping his head forward so that his flaxen fringe would shield his eyes.

But they were all smiling. I watched their smiles freeze at the terrible sight of me.

And Cyd advanced with the cake in her hands, the candles flickering as if they might expire at any moment, as the church bell in the distance tolled one last time.

I am forty years old, I thought to myself. How did that happen?

‘Surprise,’ said my wife.

They stared straight through me. That was fine by me. I did not want them to look at me. I wanted to be invisible. I preferred it that way.

The party was on the thirtieth floor of some shining glass tower high above the river. These were the last of the fat years, before the area would be decimated by the money meltdown. Before too long many of these men – and they were mostly men – would be carrying their belongings out of this building in an old champagne box from Berry Brothers. But that was all in the unimaginable future. Tonight they were celebrating their bonuses. And my wife was doing the catering.

Cyd appeared at my side, smiling as she gave my arm a squeeze.

‘Do you want me to get some more vegetable samosas out here?’ I said.

She patted my bum. ‘First clear up the empties,’ she said.

They were used to being served, these people, and they did not even notice me as I moved among them, collecting the plates scattered with the picked-clean sticks of yakitori and the rice crumbs of sushi. Some guy in an apron. Nothing special. Not like them.

I piled up the dirty plates and headed for the kitchen. You would not think that there was a kitchen on the thirtieth floor of one of Babylon’s shining towers. But apparently they had lunches and dinners in the boardrooms up here. Sometimes
these big shots just couldn’t be bothered to make it down to a restaurant. It was another world.

I shouldered my way through the door and then I just stood there, the plates still in my arms, because I had caught my reflection in the window. It was an incredible view of London from up there, one of those views to make you believe that there is nothing more beautiful and romantic in this world than a big city at night. London shone like God’s own jewel box.

But I did not see any of it. Not now. All I saw was myself.

And I got that feeling – the feeling you get when you look down at the city, and it seems to be calling you, and providing all the answers as it tells you to step out the window and just do it, just fall through the air, just jump. That feeling we all get when we look down at the pavement from a great height.

Or is that just me?

I felt the air leaving me. All of it, all at once. Like a man drowning in his own life. Oh bugger, I thought. Just what I need. A panic attack.

Cyd came into the kitchen and stared at me as she picked up a tray of samosas.

‘Harry,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’

But I didn’t reply.

I just stood there, the dishes in my arms, looking at the man in the glass, and trying to get my breath under control, and wondering if I was going to have a heart attack. She left, looking concerned. But, slick with sweat and breathless, I did not move.

The man in the glass looked back at me, like a shadow of my former self.

Because of the boy I was a better man, I thought. Because of the boy I was more patient, and less selfish, and a kinder human being. Because of the boy I had grown up. Because of the boy I had learned how to put someone above myself. Because of the boy I had learned how to love.

And then the boy was taken away from me. It had been
two months since he had moved in with Gina. Almost two weeks since I had last seen him – his Christmas Day with us, and then back to Gina on Boxing Day.

It was a different life now, and a different way of being a father and a son. It is not the things you do with them that count – the Lee Marvin double bills, the trips to football and the theme parks, all the fun family outings that are so much fun that you never have to actually talk to each other – it is the day-to-day confluence of everyday life that matters, the unadorned fact of living together, that is what makes your souls stick to each other.

And now all that was gone and I wondered where did that leave me? What did that make me? What was the good of me? What was I for? Losing my job hadn’t helped fight this feeling of being lost. But it was not the work thing. I could always find another job. But the boy was irreplaceable. My sense of myself was wrapped up in the boy. My measure of my worth. And with the boy not around, what was I worth? What was the point of me?

I stared at my mirror image for a moment longer and then I felt the stack of dirty dishes slipping from my fingers. No paper plates in here, so the noise was shattering, followed by appalled silence. A ripple of nervous laughter, and then the rest of the hired hands went back to work. It was just a waiter having a nervous breakdown.

I slumped over the sink and after an unknowable stretch of time I felt my wife at my side.

‘That’s one way of doing it,’ Cyd said. ‘Or you could just put them in the dishwasher. That works, too. Come on, let’s get you outside.’

And the bankers or brokers or whatever they were stared at us and moved aside as we walked through them to the lift. Cyd took my hand and smiled as we went down to the ground level, and she kept telling me that it was okay, it was all okay. I wasn’t so sure. There was nowhere really to sit when we reached the lobby so we went outside and stood looking out at the river as we had long ago, as we had on our very first
date, when we were just starting out. The river made me feel better. The river and the way she would not let go of my hand.

‘Pat will be all right,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said, very quickly, almost before it was out of her mouth.

‘It’s just hard,’ she said. She smiled, shrugged. Trying to explain. ‘All of it, I mean. Always. The way we build our lives. Work. Home. Having a career. Raising kids. Doing the lot. Like the song says – caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender.’

‘I know that song,’ I said. ‘That’s a good song.’

‘I mean, our parents and grandparents had it hard, but it was a different kind of hard.’

‘You mean the possibility of nuclear holocaust? The Great Depression? Hitler and Stalin? All that twentieth-century stuff?’

‘All that twentieth-century stuff,’ she said. ‘War. The Bomb. Buddy, can you spare a dime? I am not minimising it. But things were simple. For men and women. Nobody thought they had to do it all.’ She put her arm around me, and it was as if there was nobody left in the city but us. ‘It’s hard,’ my wife said. ‘It’s just hard, having it all.’

And I thought –
having it all?

I wouldn’t mind having just a bit of it.

Marty held up his hands, anxious to share his vision with the commissioning editor.

‘Whose Tattoo Are You?’
Marty said excitedly. ‘Panel game. I chair two teams of comedians. You know the sort. Smug, edgy comedians who dance on the borderline of good taste. But who desperately need the work.’

The commissioning editor frowned, not really getting it. ‘And they…get tattooed?’

Marty laughed like a maniac. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘They have to
identify the owner of a tattoo.’

I cleared my throat. ‘So you would see a close-up shot of
a bar code on somebody’s neck,’ I said. ‘Or a butterfly. Or one of those, you know, Chinese symbols.’

‘It could be live!’ Marty said. ‘Doesn’t need to be a photograph! Could be a live feed from the green room!’

‘Put people in masks,’ I suggested.

‘Masks are good!’ Marty said. ‘Those sort of Venetian masks – you know what I mean? The masks they wear in Venice. At the festival. Spooky, sexy masks. Then after some witty exchanges from the two panels we pull back the curtain to reveal…
David Beckham.
Or
Amy Winehouse.
Or
Cheryl Cole.
Or
Samantha Cameron.
The great thing is – everyone has a tattoo these days.’

The commissioning editor looked doubtful. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘And do you really think you can get Beckham?’

‘Well, Beckham might be a booking too far,’ I said. ‘But all these Premiership footballers have got bar codes and barbed wire and Chinese dragons tattooed somewhere. So if we can’t get Becks, we can at least get someone who wants to be him.’

Marty smiled at me. ‘It’s a gap in the game-show market,’ he said. ‘A yawning chasm.’

The commissioning editor touched his watch. ‘Or perhaps a bottomless abyss,’ he muttered.

‘My So-Called Teeth,’
Marty suggested. ‘I go undercover to investigate why the British have the worst teeth in the world. Posing as a dental hygienist, I infiltrate – ’

‘Don’t like it,’ the man from the BBC said.

I sipped my tea. It had gone cold.

‘Or, or, or –
Marty Mann’s Binge Britain,’
Marty said. ‘I go undercover to expose Binge Britain – but I do it while drunk…absolutely rat-faced…while binged out of my brilliant mind…’

The commissioning editor looked as if he was in pain.

‘Or animals,’ Marty said, his voice rising high with panic.
‘How Clean is Your Hamster Cage? Britain’s Most Embarrassing Animals
…’

The commissioning editor frowned. ‘What – you mean a
dachshund called Darcy who has developed a taste for his own excrement? And an oversexed corgi called Colin?’

‘Exactly!’

‘We did that already,’ said the man from the BBC. ‘And we did
Help Me, Anthea, I’m Infested
and we did
Dog Borstal
and we did
My Life as a Pig,
where celebrities that only their mothers have ever heard of sleep among pigs, eat like pigs and even learn to converse like pigs.’

‘I remember that show,’ I said. ‘It was pretty good.’

‘So the animal thing,’ said the man from the BBC, ‘has been pretty well covered.’

‘Then – let’s take it to the next level,’ said Marty. ‘The new generation. A talent show – but for dogs. We are talking post-Simon Cowell – broadcasting that has assimilated the lessons the Einstein of light entertainment has taught us. Dogs! Skilful dogs! And rubbish dogs that – you know. We can laugh at it. They can pee on me! I don’t mind! Really! The audience will love it!’ Marty shot a sideways look at me with the eyes of a seal that is cowering under a baseball bat. ‘Monkeys?’

I felt like hugging him. Instead I smiled and nodded. ‘Monkeys,’ I said with slightly more enthusiasm than I felt. ‘Monkeys are good. Monkeys are classic.’

‘Britain’s Monkeys Got Talent,’
Marty said, and the idea immediately evaporated in the thin air of the commissioning editor’s office.

‘Or something else,’ I suggested.

‘We were programme makers,’ Marty said. ‘Mad Mann Productions.’ There was defiance in his eyes now. ‘Ever heard of
Six Pissed Students in a Flat?’
He tapped his chest. ‘We invented that format. We sold that format all over the world.
Six Pissed Norwegian Students in a Flat. Six Pissed Australian Students in a Flat. Six Pissed Poles…
That show went around the world!’

‘Reality TV,’ said the man with the power to change our lives, parroting this week’s party line, ‘has peaked.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘there will always be a place on the schedules
for cheap programming full of people who are willing to make complete idiots of themselves.’

‘We did one of the first CCTV shows,’ Marty said.

I nodded.
‘You’ve Been Robbed!’

Marty got misty-eyed at the memory. ‘J
^ust
edited highlights of crime caught on camera,’ he said. ‘But it was – you know – a savage indictment of our, er, violent society.’

‘But you’re talking about twentieth-century television,’ said the man. ‘You’re talking about ancient history.’

‘No, I’m trying to show you how broad our range is,’ Marty said. ‘You can’t have all your eggs in one chicken, right? We did the irreverent late-night arts show,
Art? My Arse!
The quiz show,
Sorry, I’m a Complete Git.
We did
Wicked World.’

The man looked interested. ‘Was that the one with Terry Christian and Dani Behr?’

‘You’re thinking
of The Word,’
I said. ‘Our one had Eamon Fish and Hermione Gates and Wee Willie Hiscock, the loveable Geordie cook.’

Wee Willie Hiscock clearly did not ring any bells.

‘Don’t you remember us?’ Marty said, begging now, all defiance gone. ‘We won BAFTAs. Back in the day.’

The commissioning editor stood up, and I realised that it was a new day. I stood up too. The meeting was over. Marty remained in his seat.

‘Just give us a job,’ he pleaded. ‘We’re dying here.’

And that was the problem.

They only wanted you when you did not need them.

We came up the steps and when we got to the top the greyhound stadium was spread out before us.

I remembered Thursday nights as a kid, at the dog track out at Southend, collecting armfuls of losing tickets with my cousins while my dad and my uncles studied form, and my mum and my aunts bet on their lucky numbers. Did we really do that on a school night? We must have done. A lot of it was shockingly unchanged. The smells of tobacco and perfume and beer, the accents and the laughter. Hard men in their
day-off clothes and pretty women done up to the nines. Aftershave and dog shit. The working class at play.

‘I thought this world was gone,’ I laughed. ‘I thought it went years ago.’

‘No, this world is still here,’ Ken said sharply. ‘It’s you that buggered off, sunshine.’

What was different was that we were here in daylight hours. They called it a BAGS meeting – Bookmakers Afternoon Greyhound Service – and entrance was free, designed to entice the real hard core.

We picked up Singe Rana after his shift as a security guard at the firework factory on the City Road, and I took them to the Badham Cross dog track. There wasn’t a lot else I could do with them.

They did not like restaurants because they did not really eat – even when they had personally selected some greasy café in their own neighbourhood, they only picked at their food like fussy toddlers. They preferred staying in Ken’s flat and grazing on Aloo Chop potato cakes, or Nepalese curries called Mitho Chat and Aloo Dum.

Gurkha food. Lots of potatoes. And spices.

They did not like pubs because Singe Rana did not drink alcohol and Ken could not smoke. They did not like walking. They had no interest in movies. It was all rubbish after
Casablanca,
according to Ken. Television bored them, apart from the horses on Channel 4.

But they liked gambling.