Men from the Boys (8 page)

He leaned towards me. ‘It feels a bit like being in church,’ he whispered, with a little half-smile, and I felt a flash of irritation. But then I nodded and touched his shoulder. Because he was right.

Despite the light breeze on our faces, and the dazzling winter sunlight in our eyes, it was exactly like being in church. The quiet awe, the reverence of the crowd. The sense of being
in the presence of something monumental, the way that being in this sacred place did something to your breathing, and to your heart. My father felt very close.

The soldiers were old now – more than old. And surprisingly small. Almost like a different species of man. They reminded me of school field-trips and dinky suits of medieval armour gawped at inside glass cases. A race of pint-sized warriors.

They were stiff-limbed, self-conscious. It was more than old age. It was more than the memory of military bearing; it was as if they were self-conscious at being watched. Not by us, not by the crowds on Whitehall. But by the others. The ghosts of that Sunday morning. All of their fallen brothers.

I looked at Pat’s face. He had loved his grandfather more than he loved anyone in the world, but he had lost him when he was too young to understand. And I wanted him to understand. Because I could see that it was fading among his generation. All that priceless knowledge. The memory of what they did, and the awareness of our debt. Did he remember the way his grandfather looked when he took off his shirt in his back garden? Did Pat remember that terrible starburst of scar tissue that almost covered my father’s upper body?

‘Here they come,’ he said, and I turned back to the serried ranks of soldiers, scanning the row upon row upon row for the green berets.

I could see them too, and I felt my heart beat faster at the sight of what my dad called ‘my mob’. The Royal Naval Commandos. The bravest of the brave.
In primo exulto.
Rejoice in being first.

They were almost level with us when Pat’s phone began to ring.

Playing more than ringing.

It was that song again.

The song that sounds like a heartbeat. ‘Love Lockdown’ by Kanye West.
Dun-dun-dun,
it went, and the heads of the crowds turned towards us.
Dun-dun-dun.
Just like a piercing electronic heartbeat. And as Pat fumbled in his pocket, the
people around us shook their heads and went
tch-tch-tch
and snorted with disgust. And someone behind us commented, ‘Oh, for God’s
sake
!’ as if we knew nothing, my son and I.

He had the phone out of his pocket, so it was suddenly louder, but in his rush to turn it off it squirted out of his fingers and fell to the pavement. You would think that might shut up old Kanye West, but it didn’t. The phone went on as if it was what in the old days we used to call the twelveinch disco mix.
Dun-dun-dun,
it went, as Pat fell to his knees – not easy in those packed crowds at the Cenotaph.
Dun-dun-dun.
Pat’s face burning like my blood.

I looked back at the old soldiers just in time to see Ken Grimwood and the others from the pub marching past. Pat picked up his phone and squirmed through the crowds, getting away. I called his name but he did not stop. I looked back at the Commandos, hoping that their hearing might have faded to the point where they could not hear Kanye West’s ‘Love Lockdown’ at the Cenotaph. But their hearing was not that bad.

And I could read their faces, the faces of the old men, those beloved, unforgiving old soldiers, just as I could read my father’s face when I broke a window, or dropped out of school, or got divorced.

For this?

For this?

We did it all for this?

Somewhere beyond the Remembrance Day crowds, and where the idling tourists began, I caught up with my son.

‘Give me that thing,’ I said. He did not move. I turned up the volume. ‘Just give it to me,’ I demanded, my voice way too loud, and tourists gawped as if we were a Covent Garden mime act.

The tears welling up, Pat gave me his phone.

I looked at it.

ONE MISSED CALL FROM GINA, it said.

My fist tightened on the bloody thing as if to crush it,
and I held my hand above my head, truly meaning to bring it down on the pigeon-flecked pavement and smash the phone beyond all repair.

Then I looked at my son and he looked at me.

I watched him wipe his nose on the back of his sleeve and choke down the tears. I looked at the poppy sticking awkwardly out of the buttonhole of his school blazer. I sighed and shook my head.

Still white with fury, I slowly lowered my hand and gave him back his phone.

‘Come on, kiddo,’ I said, putting my arm around his shoulders, not wanting him to start crying, and suddenly, desperately, wanting to be away from this place. ‘Let’s go home.’

But as we walked in silence to the tube station, I could feel it between us.

It did not really matter that I had given him his phone back.

Something had been broken.

I sat in the kitchen hunched over the glow of the laptop’s screen as my wife moved through the house locking up, checking windows and turning off the lights. She hovered in the doorway, tomorrow’s school satchel in her hands.

‘You coming up then?’ Cyd said.

‘I’ll be right up,’ I smiled, and she nodded and moved away. Then I could hear her out the back, the recycled bottles clinking like wind chimes. She came back inside, and I heard the key in the lock.

I typed ‘Commando’ into the search engine and waited.

And then I sighed.

Type ‘Commando’ into a search engine and what you get is old Arnold Schwarzenegger product, violent video games and cheerleaders with no pants.

Going Commando once meant risking your life to save the free world. Now it means dispensing with your under-wear.

Cyd came back and stared at me. I pressed quit and the cheerleaders were instantly gone. My wife folded her arms and leaned against the doorjamb.

‘Interesting?’ she said.

‘Not really,’ I said. Then we both looked at the child monitor as Joni began to call out in her sleep.

‘I’ll get her,’ my wife said. ‘Don’t worry, Harry. You just carry on with what you’re doing.’

When she was gone I typed ‘Beach Parties’ into the
search engine. I was offered just over 30,000 sites featuring people with no pants.

And soon I could hear the sound of my wife soothing our daughter on the child monitor, the little green lights rising and falling with the sound of their voices.

But long after their voices had faded to silence, and the house was still, I sat in the kitchen, looking for the ghost of my father.

‘We love edgy,’ Blunt said, speaking for the station, for the corporation, for the entire BBC. He gave Marty a professional smile. ‘We love controversial. We love danger. We love all those things.’ Another smile that glittered with frosty familiarity. Then he looked down with some distaste at the newspapers spread across his desk. ‘But we don’t like trouble. We don’t like anti-BBC leaders in national newspapers. We don’t like the media ripping out our liver and feeding it to the dogs.’

Sid from Surbiton had taken Marty’s advice. He had attempted to solve the parking dispute with his neighbour by shooting him in the face with a starting pistol.

Sid blamed Marty. SHOOT THY NEIGHBOUR, SHOCK JOCK TOLD ME, a tabloid screamed. The papers blamed Marty. The broadsheets had debates about the licence fee being used to promote gun crime. The tabloids just went bananas, absolutely ape-shit with righteous rage, choosing us as this week’s telling vignette from badly mangled Britain.

Pictures of Sid being hauled off to the cells shared front pages with Marty photos from the archives. He picked up a copy of the
Daily Mirror
that had a picture of him arriving at some forgotten premiere. He shook his head and looked at me with desperation in his eyes.

‘Am I losing my hair?’ he asked. ‘Have I put on a few pounds?’

I ignored him.

‘How bad is it?’ I said to Blunt.

‘The neighbour has a damaged retina,’ Blunt said. ‘It gets
worse if he loses the eye. If he keeps the eye – that would be helpful. So we want him to keep the eye.’

I placed my hands on the pile of papers, fighting the rising tide of panic. The car was still parked across Sid’s driveway. So a fat lot of good shooting his neighbour had done.

‘Some of these reporters talked to other residents,’ I said. ‘Nobody liked this guy. The guy that got shot. They call him a neighbour from hell.’ There was a photograph of a front yard with a refrigerator dumped on a shabby lawn, and a pack of unwashed, unsupervised, sugar-crazed children clambering all over it. ‘Inconsiderate parking was just the start. He has kids running wild. One of those amusing signs saying,
Beware of the Children,
which is never funny if you actually live next door to the little bastards. Music turned up to eleven. A dog that had apparently been trained to pee through your letterbox.’

‘The usual,’ Marty said, making no attempt to stifle a yawn. ‘Chav scum.’

‘Popular opinion is definitely with Sid from Surbiton,’ Blunt conceded. ‘But I am not sure the response was commensurate with the crime. After all, the show is called
A Clip Round the Ear.
Not
A Gun Blast to the Face.’

‘It’s a – what do you call it?’ Marty said. ‘An aphorism. A maxim. If you want to start getting all literal-minded then we could call it
Hanging’s too Good for the Chav Scum.’

We both ignored him.

‘So it doesn’t help us,’ I said to Blunt. ‘It doesn’t help us that everyone hated this guy.’

‘It doesn’t help you,’ he corrected.

And we stared at each other across a BBC desk covered with the morning papers, and we understood each other perfectly.

I stood in the newsagent’s looking up at the shelves of tobacco. SMOKING KILLS, it said under a leering skull. SMOKING HARMS YOURSELF AND OTHERS. YOU ARE GOING
TO DIE NOW. DEATH. DEATH. CERTAIN DEATH. PUFF, PUFF – YOU’RE DEAD.

‘Is it for yourself?’ said the boy behind the counter.

‘No, it’s a gift,’ I said.

I thought that I would buy Ken a tin of Old Holborn. The kind of tin that he carried, and that I could clearly remember my father having – yellow and white, with a drawing of a Ye Olde Georgian street on the front, and ‘Old Holborn Blended Virginia’ written in that fake fountain-pen font, as if nothing in this universe was more tasteful and sophisticated and classy than rolling your own soggy little man-made snout.

I thought that I might be purchasing the last loose tobacco in captivity. But the newsagent’s was full of the stuff. Just not in tins.

‘You could try eBay,’ the kid behind the counter told me. ‘They sell them on eBay. But we got these.’

The kid made a gracious gesture with his hand, like a proud sommelier presenting me with his extensive wine list. Amber Leaf. Golden Virginia. Van Nelle. Samson. Domingo. Drum. And Old Holborn itself – still going strong but in small packs rather than big tins now, and given new brave new world colours of orange, black and blue, kin to a lovely pack of Jaffa cakes.

‘You want some skins with that?’ said the kid behind the counter.

I stared at him, struck dumb by the fact that the baton dropped by my father’s generation had been picked up by what my dad would have called the pot heads – the kind of people he despised above all others. Apart from men who wore dresses. And Germans.

I got a 500-gram pack containing ten convenient grow-your-own-tumour sachets. It wouldn’t make up for Pat’s phone going off at the Cenotaph. It would not make up for smashing the silence with ‘Love Lockdown’ by Kanye West.

But I didn’t know how else to say I was sorry.

At Nelson Mansions, Tyson dozed at the foot of the concrete staircase, his enormous front paws clamped possessively on some hideously chewed object, possibly a human bone.

I stepped over him and skipped up the stairs, passing a couple of children huddled in their elf-like hoods, like some Tolkien nightmare. It felt much colder than November, but that might have been just the ceaseless wind that always whipped through Nelson Mansions, whatever the weather.

I rang the doorbell and a man in his early fifties answered. He looked soft and rich, like a banker enjoying his day off in lime-green Lacoste, a man whose life had treated him well. His thin lips and little eyes made three slits of his face, and he could be nobody else’s son. I held out my hand and introduced myself.

‘Ian Grimwood,’ he said, and his accent was different to his father’s – a classless modern drawl. ‘Thank you for – you know. Everything.’

I saw him looking at the Old Holborn in my hands. ‘No problem,’ I said.

Singe Rana was just leaving. He turned his soft golden face towards me. ‘I’ll come back when it’s over,’ he said.

‘I wanted to say I was sorry,’ I told him. ‘My son’s phone – it rang as you were marching. And – I felt bad. I felt terrible. About all the old soldiers.’

Singe Rana smiled gently. ‘Don’t be so fretful,’ he said. ‘Half of them are so deaf they couldn’t hear a bomb go off. And the other half don’t care.’ He tapped my arm fondly with his rolled-up copy of the
Racing Post.
‘They have seen worse things.’

Then he slipped away.

Voices were being raised in the kitchen. Ken’s unmoving, old man quaver and, much louder, the voice of a woman. She had the same accent as her brother. One of those accents that sound as though you come from nowhere.

‘I don’t know how you can even think such things,’ she said, coming out of the kitchen. She was a bit younger and in much better shape than the man. A good-looking fifty-year-old
woman. But she had the same small slash of a mouth, and the same slightly squinty eyes as her brother, and her father, who followed her out of the kitchen with a bread knife in his hand.

‘Go on,’ Ken invited her. ‘Stick it in me. Right there, girl.’ He gestured at the crest on his blazer pocket. ‘Then you’ll all be happy.’

The son held up his hands. ‘Come on now, let’s all calm down,’ he said, and I could see that it was the daughter who shared her father’s temper.

Ken leaned against the television set for a breather. The woman was looking at me.

‘Tracey,’ her brother said, ‘this is Mr Silver, who brought Dad back from the hospital.’

She was shaking her head. ‘Please don’t tell me this is for him,’ she said, snatching the 500-gram pack from my hand. ‘Don’t tell me that.’

I felt a flare of resentment. ‘Well,’ I began.

‘He’s got cancer,’ she said, very slowly, as if English was not my first language. ‘Lung cancer. Caused by this stuff.’ She threw the pack back at me. It hit me on the chest but I caught it.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘What’s going on in there?’ Tracey Grimwood said. She tapped her temple with an impatient index finger. ‘Are you as stupid as he is? You give Old bloody Holborn to a man who is dying of lung cancer? What are you thinking?’

I took a breath.

‘I was thinking that it wouldn’t make much difference,’ I said, more calmly than I felt. I remembered my own parents giving up their Bogart-and-Bacall smoking fantasy before they died. And a lot of good it did them.

She threw up her hands and went into the kitchen, where I could see her putting the kettle on. Ken took the tobacco from me and winked.

‘Just go easy with it, Dad,’ Ian said, gazing anxiously at the kitchen.

‘A little of what you fancy does you good,’ Ken said, settling
himself on the sofa. He expertly cracked open the 500-gram pack and began emptying the sachets into his battered tin, the kind you can only find on eBay. He turned towards the kitchen. ‘I deserve a few small pleasures.’

Tracey’s head appeared from the kitchen.

‘If you wanted pleasure, then you could have been a real grandfather to your grandchildren,’ she said. Then she looked at me. ‘Do you see any photos of my kids? Or Ian’s children?’

I looked up at the mantelpiece. There was the young boxer. And the three children in the faded colours of the sixties. And in the middle, the one of Ken Grimwood’s wedding day. I looked at it now. He wore his naval uniform and stood proudly in his bandy-legged gait, his shy bride almost covered by the waves of her white wedding dress.

Tracey came into the living room. ‘Beautiful grandchildren, he has,’ she said. ‘Beautiful, they are. Or were – they’re grown-ups themselves now. But did he ever take them to the park or read them a story? Did he ever do all the normal granddad things? No, he was too wrapped up in himself. Horses. And greyhounds. And gambling.’

Ken was frowning at his tobacco. ‘Punk rockers, they were,’ he said. ‘Punk rockers and skinheads.’

Tracey exploded. ‘That was years ago!’

‘I’ll make the tea,’ Ian said, scuttling off to the kitchen.

‘And Suzy was a Goth, not a punk rocker,’ Tracey said. ‘Now she’s married with a kid of her own. And does he show a blind bit of interest?’ She watched him unloading the sachets into his tin and sighed – a lifetime of frustration in one long breath. ‘And why are you here, Mr Silver? Apart from encouraging this silly old goat to smoke himself to death.’

I thought about it.

I didn’t know how to explain it.

‘He – Ken – was with my father,’ I said, and he didn’t look at me but I thought he was listening. ‘In the war, I mean. They fought together.’ I looked at her. ‘My dad was a Royal Naval Commando too,’ I said.

She nodded, calmer than I had seen her. She picked up the bread knife from where it was sitting on top of the TV.

‘And your father passed away, I presume?’

I was watching that knife.

‘Ten years ago,’ I said. ‘From lung cancer, as it happens. And he had stopped smoking in the final years. Not that it did him any good.’

‘Paddy Silver,’ Ken chuckled. ‘Hard as teak, that boy. A very good boy, old Paddy.’

‘Then you are one of those,’ Tracey said, tapping the bread knife in her palm. ‘I’ve seen a few of your type over the years.’

‘And what’s my type?’ I asked. I didn’t want to argue with her. But I felt I was going to.

She looked at her father.

‘Men who think the old medal he’s got stuck at the back of some drawer holds the meaning of the universe.’ She smiled with vicious amusement. ‘Well, thanks for stopping by, Mr Silver, and thank you for your inappropriate gift, which I am sure is given with the best intentions. But let me tell you something about my dad, so that you do not leave here under any illusions.’

‘Ian!’ Ken barked. ‘That bleeding tea ready yet?’

A plaintive voice from the kitchen. ‘Coming, Dad,’ the son said.

Tracey took a step closer to me, the bread knife hanging by her side. I wanted to step back but I stood my ground.

‘He’s not a hero,’ said the old man’s daughter. ‘And he’s not your father. So if you are here looking for a hero, or you’re here looking for your father, then you have come to the wrong place. He’s just a stupid, selfish old man who is waiting for death.’ She pointed at me with the bread knife. ‘And you can have him.’

I stood in the doorway of my son’s bedroom and I didn’t turn on the light. Everything was
Star Wars.
Everything was still
Star Wars.
Shouldn’t it be something else by now?