Men from the Boys (11 page)

So I took them to this dog track out on the borders of the East End and Essex that I remembered from my childhood. I thought it might have disappeared around the same time as the New Romantics, but when I Googled Badham Cross Greyhound Stadium it was still there.

In a bar that smelled of fish and chips, Ken removed one of those tiny biros that builders use from behind his ear. He licked the tip of it and bent over his racecard. As always, he was immaculate in his blazer, shirt and tie. I believe he may have slept like that. Singe Rana stared out at the track, and
then up at the sky. His bets were placed on form, weather conditions and a meticulously calculated weighing of risk and reward. Ken was more superstitious. He chose his runners on the basis of names, portents, hidden omens. Ken rarely won and Singe Rana won all the time. But the amounts they gambled were so tiny that it did not make much difference.

‘Lonesome Traveller,’ Ken said, watching the dogs as they were paraded past. ‘Number five. Look at him.’

Number five was sniffing the air, but apart from that he looked exactly like the other greyhounds. They were built more like missiles than dogs.

Singe Rana shook his head. ‘The going is too soft for Lonesome Traveller,’ he said. ‘He likes the ground to be hard. But there was morning rain.’

‘He smells the blood,’ Ken insisted. He turned to me. ‘Some of them train with real rabbits, see. Makes them run a lot faster, because a real rabbit tastes a bit better than a metal rabbit. When they’ve trained with real rabbits, we say they can smell the blood.’

Again Singe Rana shook his head. ‘Not that one,’ he said. ‘Not after the morning rain.’

‘I came here with your dad once,’ Ken told me. ‘Before you were born. We bumped into Alf Ramsay. Before he was Sir Alf Ramsay. You heard of him, have you?’

I was slightly offended. ‘Manager of the England team that won the World Cup in 1966,’ I said. ‘I know my dad was at school with him.’

Ken nodded. ‘Alf had started to change his accent. What do you call it? Evolution lessons. He was very keen on his evolution lessons, old Alf. So he could natter like the toffs.’ Ken chuckled at the memory. ‘Your dad thought that was priceless.’

I thought of my father in this place. How old would he have been? Younger than I was now. A metallic parody of a rabbit rattled past. A cry went up as the dogs burst from their traps.

‘I never told him I loved him,’ I said.

Ken looked askance. ‘Alf Ramsay?’

‘My dad,’ I said. ‘Apart from the once. At the end. In the hospital. When I knew he was dying. I told him then. But I only ever told him the once. And I regret that.’

Ken Grimwood grimaced, straightening up inside his blazer. He looked a little nauseous.

‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Your father wasn’t the kind that needed a hug. He wouldn’t have thanked you for slobbering all over him every second of the day.’

Voices were raised. The metallic rabbit came rattling past, followed by the soft thunder of the greyhounds after it. Number five, Lonesome Traveller, was nowhere to be seen. Ken began ripping his betting slip into tiny shreds. Singe Rana laughed. The dog at the front of the pack wore black and white stripes with a red number six.

‘Six!’ cried Singe Rana, bouncing up and down. ‘Come on, you number six!’

Ken Grimwood sniffed, not looking at me.

‘You told him you loved him once,’ he said, his builder’s biro flitting across his betting slip, ready for the next race. ‘And for a man like your dad, believe me – once is plenty.’

There was a pack of them, methodically destroying the bus stop.

Hooded and beanie-capped in deference to the CCTV cameras on every corner, but beyond that quite brazen as they skimmed lumps of concrete through the panes of glass. It smashed like an explosion of diamonds under the yellow streetlights, and they whooped with pure joy.

I had dropped Ken and Singe Rana off at Nelson Mansions, and I was glad they were not with me. That was one good thing. They would have done something stupid. Like trying to stop them.

They seemed to be multiplying before my eyes. They were spilling out into the road, ducking and shrieking with delight as the glass sprayed around them. I put my foot on the brake, and I could feel my breathing. I wanted to turn around and
find another way. But it was too late. My headlights caught them, trapped them in the accusing glare. And, as if they had one mind among them, they turned to look at me. And then I saw him.

In the middle of the pack.

A thick wedge of blond hair sticking out from his beanie cap.

A lump of concrete the size of a pizza in his hands.

He bit his bottom lip as he tossed the concrete through the last of the glass. Then they were gone. Back into the warren of flats. And I sat there with a million diamonds in my headlights, thinking, It was a boy who looked just like him. That’s all. A white kid in his mid-teens with long fair hair and a face that was young for his age.

There must be a million kids who look like that.

There was the full-throated rumble of a Harley-Davidson outside our house, and then the immediate sound of footsteps on the stairs. Peggy gave me a quick hug and the motorbike helmet she was carrying pressed against my ribs.

‘He’s here,’ she said, giving me a peck on the cheek, and a smile that looked as though it was trying to hold itself back. ‘My dad’s here.’

‘Have a good time,’ I said, but what I thought was, You can’t compete with blood. Well, you can compete, but you will always lose. Straight sets. TKO. Ten – nil. Take on blood and you do not even make it to a penalty shoot-out.

I went to the window and gazed down at Jim’s face, so familiar from his leading role on the hit TV show,
PC Filth: An Unfair Cop.
Jim Mason, heroically beautiful in black Belstaff leather from tousled hair to the adorably scuffed toes of his biker boots, sat astride his mighty steed, leathery legs spread wide, smiling at his daughter. And her mother. He had removed his helmet and his face was red and sweaty but still dead gorgeous.

And more than that – instantly recognisable. I mean, I am not one of the millions who tune in to watch his clichéd cop show (alcoholism – check, divorced – check, dead partner – check, long-running feud with a genius serial killer – check) but even I knew every contour of his high-cheekboned face.

And as the three of them stood there – Jim and Peggy in
their leathers, Cyd with her arms folded across her chest – I felt a hard lump form in my throat. They looked like a real family.

Cyd and Jim had had a traditional divorce – casual infidelity (his), bitter recriminations (hers) and a growing sense of bafflement (his and hers) that they had ever managed to be in the same room together, let alone have a crack at the marriage game.

And they had fought for their love. They had met in her hometown of Houston, Texas, where Jim was working as a despatch rider and seemed to young, impressionable Cyd as if he was an incredibly glamorous postman.

They married, but when he failed to make the kind of impact on America that he made on the tall, leggy brunette he danced with at the Yucatan Liquor Store, Jim came home to England with his leather tail between his legs and she came with him, facing poverty, rain and the ritual humiliation of immigration officers who refused to believe they were really in love.

But it was the real thing. Until Jim, after an unhappy spell delivering takeaways for the Double Fortune restaurant on the Holloway Road, began having a thing with the manageress, a nubile Kowloon lass. And then one of the waitresses, a native of Kuala Lumpur. And then her younger sister.

‘He’s into the bamboo,’ Cyd told me when explaining why her marriage had broken up.

But now I watched Cyd with Jim and there was clearly a restored affection between them. It was as though they were engaged in a second courtship – the relationship that is formed after you go your separate ways. He was grinning at her, wiping sweat from his forehead in a gesture that was almost shy. She reached out and rubbed his arm. Softly, twice. Blink and you would have missed it. The gesture was so shocking that I almost looked away. But I couldn’t.

Because I could see what was happening.

There was a secret chamber in my wife’s heart that longed for her old life. When she was with the only man that she
had ever married. When they had a baby girl that shared their blood. When there was nobody else around – refugees from broken homes, wounded stragglers from the divorce courts dragging their confused, wounded children behind.

I watched them down in the street and I knew.

Cyd – or at least a part of her – wanted a family without any sharp, jagged edges. It did not seem like much to ask for.

And between you and me, I could see the appeal.

There was a rustle by my side and suddenly Joni was there, clambering up on the sofa to look out the window. She took my hand.

‘Looks dangerous,’ Joni said thoughtfully. ‘This motorbike lark.’

We watched Jim and Peggy ride away. Cyd stood in the street until they were out of sight, and when she turned back to the house Joni slammed the palms of her hands against the window.

But Cyd didn’t look up.

‘It was easy in your day,’ I told the old men, not looking them in the eye, but studying the form for the afternoon’s racing at Goodwood. ‘The men and women thing. The parents and children thing. It was all so much easier.’

Singe Rana stared at me with those kind, soulful eyes that revealed absolutely nothing. Ken gave no indication that he had even heard.

‘What do you fancy for the three thirty, me old china?’ he said, narrowing his eyes at his
Racing Post.
‘Only Boy?’

Singe Rana turned his face towards the open door of the bookmakers. A grey drizzle was falling on Essex Road.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Because Only Boy likes the going soft.’

Ken nodded thoughtfully at this sage advice. He tapped the little pen he was holding against the rim of his glasses. I had always thought of those small, child-sized biros as builder’s pens. But I saw now that they were bookmaker’s pens. The builders just nicked them from the bookies.

‘Easier?’ Ken reflected, smiling at his
Racing Post.
‘Don’t
know about easier. Simpler? I would give you simpler. I would grant you that. All those women stuck in marriages where they were knocked about from their wedding night to their dying day. We didn’t have domestic abuse. We had the wife getting knocked about because the old man was back from the boozer, or there had been a bad day at the races, or the boss had treated him like dirt. Or just because he felt like it. Just because he wanted to remind her of her place – under his boot heel. And all those men – the ones who got married to someone they knocked up at seventeen and still didn’t know fifty years later. The ones who made a bad choice and lived with it because they didn’t know what else to do.’

He looked at me and then up at the TV suspended high above our heads. Horses were being led to the starting line, or whatever they called it. This was all still quite new to me.

‘I can see why you’re sorry you missed it,’ Ken said. ‘Marriages that were a life sentence. Marriages that were like prisons. Children who got knocked about or worse.’

‘But the children,’ I insisted, ‘the children were better off. Even if the adults were trapped and miserable. The kids were the great benefactors of those old families.’

‘Sometimes,’ Ken said. ‘In the good homes. Not in the bad ones. We didn’t have sexual abuse in our day. We had fiddling about. Brothers. Uncles. Dads. Fiddling about, some of them. And nowhere to run. Nowhere to go. No way out until they carted you off in a wooden box.’ He jabbed his baby biro in my face, momentarily lost for words, and I wondered if it had happened to him. His childhood was beyond my imagination. Then suddenly he grinned at me, his false teeth as white as bone.

‘Oh yeah, I remember,’ said Ken Grimwood, nudging Singe Rana as Long Shot appeared on screen, a faint mist rising from his sleek, chestnut-coloured shanks. Ken began to laugh, and the laughter became a cough, and I could hear the fluid clogging his lungs.

‘The good old days,’ he said.

In the film we had somehow found ourselves watching, the seas rose and the cities fell. In a peculiarly photogenic manner.

The dome of the White House was carried off like a pingpong ball. The Eiffel Tower collapsing like a reed breaking in a stream. The Taj Mahal, Big Ben, the Sydney Opera House – all washed away like flecks of dandruff.

And the fires came, burning like the ovens of hell. And the smoke billowed through the canyons of skyscrapers like clouds at the end of the world. And the earth cracked. And the human race perished in their millions. And the rains lashed the ravished earth.

‘They’ve been unlucky with the weather,’ I whispered in the darkness, but Pat did not laugh.

I could feel him stir in the seat beside me, half-heartedly rifling his mega-bucket of sweet popcorn. After a while the glow of his mobile phone appeared in his palm.

‘Why don’t you watch the bloody film?’ I snapped, still keeping my voice down, although it seemed a spectacularly old-fashioned convention, like giving up your seat on public transport, or opening the door for a woman. All around the cinema there were phones glowing in the dark, and people enjoying their main meal of the day, and engaging in animated conversation. Not even the end of life on Earth could distract them.

‘You know why?’ Pat said, and he glanced at me. ‘Because it’s just – I don’t know – 9/11 porn or something. All these images – people jumping from buildings, the buildings collapsing, clouds of smoke coming down the street – it’s all lifted from the news, innit?’

‘Don’t say
innit,’
I said.

‘To give some moron his kicks,’ he continued. ‘To give some popcorn-chomping thicko his cheap thrills. Know what I mean? It makes me sick to my stomach, if you want to know the truth.’

‘But apart from that,’ I said. ‘Do you think it’s quite good?’

‘An instant classic,’ he said with contempt.

I got up and started working my way down the aisle. There was a time when this would have caused mild outrage among my fellow cinemagoers. Like talking too loud in a library. This shower did not even lower their kebabs.

I stood outside, looking out at Leicester Square, waiting to see if Pat would join me. We had never walked out of a picture before.

And we had always had the movies. When Gina left, back when Pat was four, his
Star Wars
obsession turned into something else. Something more. Another world he could retreat into when the real one was too much. There were the toys – eight-inch Han Solos and Luke Skywalkers and Darth Vaders, battle-grey models of the
Millennium Falcon
and X-wing fighters, and plastic light sabres that were dented forever if you stood on them.

But above all there were the films, which he would watch on video until he was dragged away, and which we went to see in double and even triple bills. Once a year you could catch the entire trilogy in some mad corner of the West End.
Star Wars. The Empire Strikes Back. Return of the Jedi.
And at an age when other fathers were taking their sons to the football or fishing – other pastimes where there is not much call for conversation – Pat was building up an enormous capacity to spend hours sitting in the darkness, sustained by Fanta and milk-chocolate-coated raisins and some $100-million fantasy. The cinema had been our thing. And now, it felt like it was all coming to an end.

Then he was there by my side, both of us embarrassed, anxious to avoid a fight. Because what exactly would we be fighting about? A distant voice told me that we should be laughing about this end-of-days, Book of Revelations rubbish. But neither of us was smiling.

‘Chinatown?’ I said.

He grimaced. ‘Not really hungry,’ he said, his hair over his eyes. He looked at his wrist. He was not wearing a watch. ‘School night. Getting late.’

I nodded, as if all things were settled.

‘Then home,’ I said, and the word tasted toxic in my mouth.

Gina opened the door.

She smiled and hugged him and kissed him even as he was brushing past her. He did not say goodbye. She transferred her smile to me as she half-closed the front door, obscuring my view.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ I said.

The smile faded. I could hear him banging about in the kitchen. It sounded like he was getting something to eat. So the not-really-hungry thing was a big fat fib for a start. He just did not want to go to Chinatown. He did not want to be with me.

‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ she said, and there was sudden frost in her voice. Oh I remember you, I thought. ‘Pat’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’s settled in very well. He’s become great friends with Peter.’

‘Peter? Peter? Who the fucking fuck is Peter?’

‘Can you watch your language? Peter is my boyfriend.’

I sighed. ‘Funny, isn’t it? Someone in their forties having a boyfriend. And are you and Peter dating? Or are you just going steady? Do you neck – or do you just make out? How’s the heavy petting going? Jesus Christ, Gina – come up with some new terms. You’re not a teenager.’

She erupted. ‘Even now!’ she said. ‘It never ends with you, does it?’

‘It ends, it ends,’ I said, suddenly afraid the door would slam in my face before I had the chance to tell her what I had realised in the sad, silent walk back to Soho. But she had something to tell me first.

‘Do you know what your trouble is, Harry?’

‘Enlighten me.’

She stepped outside the door, not wanting Pat to hear. I gave her credit for that. It would probably not have occurred to me.

‘It’s straightforward when there’s just one parent,’ she said, lowering her voice but spitting out every word. ‘For all your
Olympic-standard hand-wringing.’ She did an imitation of my voice that sounded nothing like me.
‘Oh, poor little me. Oh, poor little Pat.’

‘Olympic-standard hand-wringing,’ I said. ‘I like that, Gina. That’s good. I’m going to write that down.’

‘So glad you approve, Harry. I live to make you happy.’ She took a half-step beyond her door. ‘But for all the self-pity, Harry, you actually loved it when it was just you. It’s simpler when there’s just one parent. You can play the Great Dictator. What you say goes. The single parent is God.’

‘Yeah, single parents,’ I said. ‘What a bunch of selfish bastards.’

‘Goodnight, Harry.’

She stepped back inside and began to close the door. I stuck my foot in it, like some psycho door-to-door salesman. Gina looked at it and laughed with disbelief.

‘I don’t want to fight, Gina,’ I said, and I searched for the words. I knew how I felt but I had trouble turning it into words. That seemed to happen all the time these days. ‘I just – I don’t want his life to be about us.’

She waited. I took my foot away. It actually hurt quite a bit.

‘I want Pat to have his own life,’ I said. ‘I don’t want his life to be about his mother or his father or what happened between them. Our divorce. All the rest of that mess. We have to let him have his own life, Gina. We owe him that much.’

She smiled and drew back and then I was staring at the closed door. I could hear her double-locking it, and then her footsteps as she went inside. And she didn’t get it. Or perhaps the thought was too unbearable to contemplate.