Men from the Boys (3 page)

By the time I came down the dishes from last night were clean and drying, and there was tea and juice on the table.

Pat was shuffling about the kitchen. I could smell toast. I went to pull the newspaper from the letterbox and when I came back he was putting breakfast on the table.

The girls were still upstairs. Pat was Mister Breakfast. He had been Mister Breakfast since the time he had been old enough to boil a kettle. That was the thing about the pair of us – it worked. And it had always worked.

The thing that used to get on my nerves was when people said to me, ‘Oh, so you’re his mother as well as his father?’ I could never work that one out.

I was his father. And if his mother wasn’t around, then I could still only be his father. If you lose your right arm, does your left arm become both your right and left arm? No, it doesn’t. It’s still just your left arm. And you get on with it. Both his mother and his father? Hardly. It took everything I had to pull off being his dad.

‘You all right?’ he said, wiping his hands on the dishcloth, looking at me sideways.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘All good.’

And still I did not mention his mother.

Joni appeared. At seven, her footsteps were so light that, if she was not rushing somewhere, or talking, or singing, you often did not hear her coming. You turned around and she
was just there. She shuffled slowly towards the table, dressed for school but still more asleep than awake.

She yawned widely. ‘I don’t want to eat anything today,’ she said.

‘You have to eat something,’ I said.

She cocked a leg and hauled herself up on her chair, like a cowboy getting on his horse.

‘But look,’ she said.

She opened her mouth and as Pat and I bent to peer inside, she began to manoeuvre one of her front teeth with her tongue. It was so loose that she could get it horizontal.

She closed her mouth. Her eyes shone with tears. Her chin wobbled.

Pat went off to the kitchen and I sat down at the table. ‘Joni,’ I said, but she held up her hands, cutting me off, pleading for understanding.

‘Cereal hurts my gums,’ she said, waving her hands. ‘Not just Cookie Crisps. All of them.’

I touched her arm. Upstairs I could hear Cyd and Peggy laughing outside the bathroom door. I groped for the correct parental soundbite.

‘Breakfast is, er, the most important meal of the morning,’ I reminded her, but my daughter looked away with frosty contempt, furiously worrying at her wonky tooth with the tip of her tongue.

‘There you go,’ Pat said.

He placed a sandwich in front of Joni. Two slices of lightly toasted white bread with the crusts removed, the chemical yellow of processed cheese sticking out of the sides like a toxic spill. Cut into triangles.

Her favourite.

Pat returned to the kitchen. I picked up the newspaper. Joni lifted the sandwich in both hands and began to eat.

Here’s a good one for the Lateral Thinking Club – if a marriage produces a great child, then can that marriage ever be said to have failed?

If the marriage produces some girl or boy who just by existing makes this world a better place, then has that marriage failed just because Mum and Dad have split up? Is the only criterion of a successful marriage staying together? Is that really all it takes? Hanging in there? Butching it out?

Does my friend Marty Mann have a successful marriage because it has lasted for years? Does it matter that he likes his Latvian lap dancers two at a time before going home to his wife? Has he got a successful marriage because it remained untouched by the divorce courts?

If a woman and a man abandon their wedding vows and run eagerly through all the usual hateful clichés – saying hurtful things, sleeping with other people, cutting up clothes, running off with the milkman – then is that a failed marriage?

Well, obviously. It’s a bloody disaster.

But still – I could not bring myself to call my union with my first wife a failed marriage. Despite everything. Despite crossing the border between love and hate and then going so far into alien territory that we could not even recognise each other.

Gina and I were young and in love. And then we were young and stupid, and getting everything wrong.

First me. Then both of us.

But a failed marriage? Never.

Not while there was the boy.

As the record came to an end, I looked at Marty’s eyes through the studio’s glass wall.

‘Line two,’ I said into the microphone, ‘Chris from Croydon.’ Marty’s fingers flew across the board, as natural as a fish in water, and the light on the mic in front of him went red.

Marty adjusted himself in his chair, and leaned into the mic as if he might snog it.

‘You’re with
Marty Mann’s Clip Round the Ear
live here on BBC Radio Two,’ Marty said, half-smiling. ‘Enjoying good sounds in bad times. Mmmm, I’m enjoying this ginger nut. Chris from Croydon – what’s on your mind, mate?’

‘I can’t go to the pictures any more, Marty. I just get too angry – angry at the sound of some dopey kid munching his lunch, and angry at the silly little gits – can I say gits? – who think they will disappear into a puff of smoke if they turn their Nokias off for ninety minutes, and angry at the yak-yak-yak of gibbering idiots – ’

‘Know what you mean, mate,’ Marty said, cutting him off. ‘They should be shot.’

‘Whitney Houston,’ I said, leaning forward. ‘“I Will Always Love You”.’

‘And now a song written by the great Dolly Parton,’ Marty said. He knew music. He was from that generation that had music at the centre of its universe. This wasn’t just a hit song from a Kevin Costner film to him. ‘Before all music started sounding like it was made from monosodium glutamate.’

This was the starting point for our show – nothing was as good as it used to be. You know, stuff like pop music, and the human race.

Whitney’s cut-glass yearning began and Marty gave me a thumbs-up as he whipped off his headphones. He barged open the door. ‘Four minutes thirty-seconds on Whitney,’ I said.

‘Great, I can pee slowly,’ he said. ‘What’s next?’

I consulted my notes. ‘Let’s broaden it out,’ I said. ‘Nonspecific anger. Rap about being angry about everything. Being angry with people who litter. Yet also angry with people who make you recycle. Angry about people who swear in front of children, angry at traffic wardens, angry at drivers who want to kill your kids.’

‘Those bastards in Smart cars,’ Marty said, as he kept moving.

‘People, really,’ I said, calling after him. ‘Feeling angry at people. Any kind of rudeness, finger wagging or ignorance. And then maybe go to a bit of Spandau Ballet.’

‘I can do that,’ he said, and then he was gone.

‘Two minutes forty on and we’re back live,’ said Josh, the Oxford graduate who ran our errands – the BBC was full of them, all these Oxbridge double-firsts chasing up wayward
mini-cabs – and I could hear the nerves in his voice. But I just nodded. I knew that Marty would be back just as Whitney was disappearing from Kevin Costner’s life forever. We were not new to this.

Marty and I were back on radio now – a couple of old radio hams who had taken a beating on telly and crawled back to where we had begun. It happens to guys like us. In fact, I have often thought that it is the only thing that happens to guys like us. One day the telly ends. But we were making a go of it.
A Clip Round the Ear
was doing well – we had that glass ear awarded by our peers to prove it. Ratings were rising for a show that played baby boomer standards and boldly proclaimed that everything was getting worse.

Music. Manners. Mankind.

I watched Marty come out of the gents, clumsily fumbling with the buttons on his jeans – I know he was angry about there never being zips on jeans – and saw a couple of guests for the show next door do a double take. Since his golden years as the presenter of late-night, post-pub TV, he had put on a little weight and lost some of that famous carrot-topped thatch. But people still expected him to look as he did when he was interviewing Kurt Cobain.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ I said, and I felt an enormous pang of tenderness for him.

Being on television is a lot like dying young. You stay fixed in the public imagination as that earlier incarnation. Someone who interviews the young and thin Simon Le Bon – they do not grow old as we grow old. But every TV show comes to an end. And, as Marty was always quick to point out, even the true greats – David Frost, Michael Parkinson, Jonathan Ross – have their wilderness years, the time spent working in Australia or getting rat-faced in the Groucho Club, waiting for the call to come again.

Marty settled himself in front of the mic, and pulled on his headphones. I didn’t know if Marty – and by extension, his producer: me – would ever get that call. For every great
who comes again there are a thousand half-forgotten faces who never do come again. As much as I loved him, I suspected that Marty Mann was more of a Simon Dee than a David Frost.

‘You are angry because you know how things should be,’ Marty was saying to his constituency, as he teed up Morrissey. ‘Anger comes with experience, anger comes with wisdom. This is
A Clip Round the Ear
saying embrace your anger, friends. Love your anger. It is proof that you are alive. And – how about a bit of English seaside melancholia: “Everyday Is Like Sunday”.’

Then the two hours were up and we gathered our things and got ready to go home. That was a sign of the times. When we worked on
The Marty Mann Show
– when he was television’s Marty Mann – we always hung around for hours when we were off air, working our way through the wine, beer and cheese and onion crisps in our lavish green-room banquet, coming down off of that incredible rush you only get from live TV – even if you are behind the cameras. When we were doing
The Marty Mann Show
ten years ago, we could carouse in the green room until the milkman was on his way. But that was telly then and this was Radio Two now.

Broadcasting House was a bit of a dump when it came to post-gig entertainment. The place did not encourage loitering, or hospitality, or lavish entertaining. There wasn’t a sausage roll in sight. You did your gig and then you buggered off. There was nothing there – just a couple of smelly sofas and some tragic vending machines.

The green room. That was another thing that wasn’t as good as it used to be.

Gina was waiting for me when I came out of work.

Standing across the street from Broadcasting House, in the shadow of the Langham Hotel, just where the creamy calm of Portland Place curves down to the cheapo bustle of Oxford Circus.

She looked more like herself now – or at least I could
recognise the woman I had loved. Tall, radiant Gina. Loving someone is a bit like being on TV. A face gets locked in a memory vault, and it is a shock to see it has changed when you were not looking. We both took a step towards each other and there were these long awkward moments as the cars whizzed between us. Then I shouldered my bag and made it across.

‘I couldn’t remember if you were live or not,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘The show,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know if you recorded it earlier. Or if it really was ten till midnight.’

I nodded. ‘A bit late for you, isn’t it?’

‘My body’s still on Tokyo time,’ she said. ‘Or somewhere between there and here.’ She attempted a smile. ‘I’m not sleeping much.’

We stared at each other.

‘Hello, Harry.’

‘Gina.’

We didn’t kiss. We went for coffee. I knew a Never Too Latte just off Carnaby Street that stayed open until two. She took a seat in the window and I went to the counter and ordered a cappuccino with extra chocolate for her and a double macchiato for myself. Then I had to take it back because she had stopped drinking coffee during her years in Tokyo and only drank tea now.

‘How well you know me,’ she said after I had persuaded some Lithuanian girl to exchange a coffee for tea. Was she that sharp when we were together? I don’t think so. She was another one who had got angrier with the years.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Stupid of me not to read your mind.’

And we took it from there.

‘Japan’s over,’ she said. ‘The economy is worse than here.’

‘Nowhere is worse than here,’ I said. ‘Ah, Gina. You could have called.’

‘Yes, I could have called. I could have phoned home and had to be polite to your second wife.’

‘She’s not my second wife,’ I said. ‘She’s my wife.’

My first wife wasn’t listening.

‘Or I could have phoned your PA at work and asked her if you had a window for me next week. I could have done all of that but I didn’t, did I? And why should I?’ She leaned forward and smiled. ‘Because he’s my child just as much as he’s your child.’

I stared at her, wondering if there ever came a point where that was simply no longer true.

And I wondered if we had reached that point years ago.

‘What’s with the keep-fit routine?’ I said, changing the subject. She was in terrific shape.

‘It’s not a routine.’ She flexed her arms self-consciously. ‘I just want to look after myself as I get older.’

I smiled. ‘I can’t see you on the yoga mat.’

She didn’t smile back. ‘I had a scare a couple of years back. A health scare. That was something you missed.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Please don’t apologise.’

‘Jesus Christ – why can’t you just let me say I’m sorry?’

‘And why can’t you just drop dead?’

We stared at our drinks.

We had started out with good intentions. Difficult to believe now, I know, but when we divorced back then we were a couple of idealistic young kids. We really thought that we could have a happy break-up. Or at least a divorce that always did the right thing.

But Gina had blown in and out of our lives. And gradually other things got in the way of good intentions. In my experience it is so easy to push good intentions to the back of the queue – or to have them quietly escorted from the building.

Gina wanted to be a good mother. I know she did. I know she loved Pat. I never doubted that. But she was always one step from fulfilment, and life got in the way, and everything let her down. Her second husband. Working abroad. And me, of course. Me first and worst of all.