Men from the Boys (9 page)

But grey plastic X-wing fighters and a big
Millennium
Falcon
hung from the ceiling. The classic poster was above his single bed. Luke aiming his gun at the camera, flanked by Han Solo wielding a pink-beamed light sabre – when did Han Solo ever use a light sabre? I didn’t remember that – and Princess Leia blasting away. And the glorious bit players – Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the two droids, and Chewbacca. And looming above them all, the patron saint of lousy fathers – Darth Vader, gazing blankly at the Death Star.

Something had been arrested in this room. A clock had stopped. It was as if time had stood still at the point in my son’s childhood when things had still been uncomplicated.

He had started sleeping over at Gina’s. On a school night, it was just about do-able, the run from Soho to Islington. If he skipped breakfast, or stuffed down an almond croissant on the tube, then he could make it to school on time. There were no lifts to school from his mother. Gina did not own a car. As far as I could tell, there were multiple reasons for the lack of a car – because you could walk most places if you lived in Soho, because she had a bit of a phobia about driving, and an even bigger phobia about parking. And so I kept my mouth shut. And he started to make himself at home at Gina’s place.

Cyd appeared at my side and put her arm around me. A moment later, Joni squirmed between us, wearing her pyjamas and brushing her teeth.

‘You should do that in the bathroom,’ Cyd said.

Joni looked at her brother’s
Star Wars
bedroom, still brushing her teeth. Then she lifted her face. There was toothpaste all around her mouth. It looked like ice cream.

‘But why can’t Pat’s mummy come and see him here?’ she said. And we didn’t have an answer. Joni wandered back to the bathroom. Soon we could hear her elaborately spitting into the sink as she rinsed out her mouth.

‘He’s fine,’ Cyd told me. ‘You know he’s fine, you good man. And you are a good man. And you are a loving father. And that beautiful boy will be all right. And it’s good that he knows his mother, Harry. And it is very necessary.’

I swallowed.

I should have done something, I know. Or said something. Showed her that I was happy and grateful she was on my side. But I just kept staring at Luke Skywalker pointing his gun at me. I could feel my wife’s patience being tested.

‘Is it going to be like this every time he sees her?’ Cyd said. ‘Don’t you
want
her to know him? She didn’t leave him, you know.’ I knew what was coming next. ‘She left you.’

That was true.

But there were times when it felt like she had left both of us.

And sometimes they lasted for years.

We were at a Lee Marvin double bill at the NFT when he told me.

The Dirty Dozen
and
Hell in the Pacific.
Lee Marvin in Nazioccupied France on a suicide mission with a bunch of doomed misfits and psychopaths. And then, after a twenty-minute break, Lee Marvin stranded on a desert island with a fanatical Japanese soldier. A perfect Saturday afternoon for a father and son. We could spend hours together without hardly ever being required to actually talk.

‘We got enough here to blow up the whole world!’
I quoted as we came out of
The Dirty Dozen,
and Pat smiled shyly.

The booksellers were packing up their stalls. It was getting dark early now and the lights were coming on all along the Thames. The dome of St Paul’s shone dully in the last light of the day. Ancient brown barges drifted down the river. I bought hot chocolate for Pat and a tea for me. The giddiness from the film started to wear off. We looked at the river rolling towards the night.

Pat sipped his drink and stared back at the cinema, a white moustache of cream on his upper lip.

‘We’ve got a break before
Hell in the Pacific,’
I said, and he nodded. There were a few blond hairs on the side of his face, like the fuzzy fluff you get on a new tennis ball. He would have to start shaving one day. Give it a year, I thought. He wiped the foam from his lip and looked at me.

I saw him draw a breath.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said.

‘You’ve been thinking?’ I said, all startled.

Pat nodded. ‘I might move in with Gina for a while,’ he said, giving a little nod as if the idea had just occurred to him. ‘See how that goes.’

I stared at him for a bit and then I looked away. ‘What about school?’ I said. ‘You going to make that journey every day?’

‘I’ve done it already,’ he said quickly. He had thought this out, anticipated my questions.

‘But not every day of the week,’ I said, aware that I was somehow getting this all wrong. My son, who would clearly carry the weight of his parents’ divorce to his dying day, was telling me that he wanted to live with his mother.

And I was talking about bus timetables.

‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I want to know her, properly know her. Not just the bits and pieces of her that I’ve had over the years. But properly know her. Like normal people.’

‘If it makes you happy,’ I said, and all those wasted years made my heart feel like lead. I never felt more like holding him. But I didn’t touch him. ‘Of course you should know each other. And she loves you. Of course she does. I just worry, that’s all.’

His face furrowed in a sort of babyish scowl. ‘What do you worry about?’

I shook my head. ‘Exams,’ I said, feebly. ‘School. Just – all the disruption, Pat.’

‘I don’t want disruption,’ he said. ‘I want the opposite of disruption. Whatever the opposite of disruption is, that’s what I want.’

The opposite of disruption, I thought. Stability? Normality? Happiness? A quiet life.

‘When’s all this going to happen?’ I said.

He looked hopeful. ‘Next weekend?’ he suggested.

Then I exploded. ‘But that’s our weekend for the Clint Eastwood double bill!
Where Eagles Dare
and
Kelly’s Heroes
!’

‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I’m not really that crazy about war films.’

I was dumbfounded. ‘You don’t like war films?’

‘Not really. I mean, they’re okay.
From Here to Eternity
was all right.’

‘All right? All right?
From Here to Eternity
was all right?’

He shrugged. He drained his hot chocolate. ‘Pretty good, then. The bits with Frank Sinatra in his Hawaiian shirt. And the bits with James Dean when he refuses to join the boxing team.’

‘That’s not James Dean,’ I shuddered. ‘That’s Montgomery Clift. Then what are we doing here, if you don’t like war films?’

‘We go because
you
like them,’ he said. ‘And because it’s a way for us to – you know – do stuff. We can’t just kick a ball around forever, can we?’

We stared at the river in silence.

Pat cleared his throat. ‘Lee Marvin starts in a bit,’ he said.

‘Bugger Lee Marvin,’ I said. But he was right. Faces that I recognised from the audience
of The Dirty Dozen
were necking their skinny lattes and going back inside. But still I watched the river flow.

‘I’m sorry it wasn’t more settled,’ I said, and I meant it, and I could feel it sticking at the back of my throat. ‘I wish – I don’t know. I wish it had all been more settled for you when you were growing up.’ I felt a quick sting in the eyes and then it was gone. So I looked at him. ‘I’m sorry, Pat. I really am.’

He laughed. ‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m fine. It’s just…I don’t remember that much. Of me and Gina, I mean. I think a lot of what I remember is just photographs I’ve seen. Sitting on a horse when I was four. Climbing over the back of a brown sofa with a light sabre. On a trampoline in the back garden. But I don’t think I really remember that stuff. I’ve just seen the photographs.’ Then he touched my arm lightly. ‘Come on,’ he said, his ludicrously blue eyes under his dirty blond fringe, his slow, all-knowing smile creeping across his face. ‘Let’s go and see Lee Marvin. You know you want to.’

‘What about Elizabeth Montgomery?’ I said, playing my
trump card. ‘You’ll be living further away from Elizabeth Montgomery. I mean, I know you’ll still see her at school, but you’ll be living in different parts of town.’

I didn’t want him to get hurt. It was just that, wasn’t it? That’s what I was worried about.

But now he really laughed.

‘Elizabeth Montgomery?’ he said. ‘She’s not interested in me, Dad.’

Sid’s neighbour did not lose his eye and we did not lose our jobs.

Marty and I sat across from Blunt, but the tension was gone. There were papers on the desk but they contained think pieces and leaders hailing Sid from Surbiton as a defender of decency, an honest man pushed too far by the feckless, a lonely dissident voice armed with nothing but a starting pistol, standing against the yob values of mangled Britain.

‘We could get Sid into the studio,’ Marty said. ‘He’s a have-a-go hero. Let him choose his top ten tracks from the eighties and talk about what’s wrong with the lousy modern world.’

Blunt laughed. ‘Let’s not push our luck,’ he said, and he smiled at us. It looked like a real smile. ‘I wanted to invite the pair of you to the conference in Glasgow this weekend,’ he said. ‘It’s the largest digital media industry event in the country.’ We looked blank. ‘I’ll be making a speech about the next generation of video and audio content across multiple platforms,’ Blunt said.

But still we looked blank.

Then Marty leaned forward, straining to decipher what Blunt was saying. Was it something to do with telly? And I thought of my son’s bedroom. Would he take everything – just clean it out? Would he want me to help him move? Why hadn’t he told me that he didn’t like war films?

My phone began to vibrate and I looked at it. UNKNOWN NUMBER, it said, and I rose from my chair.

‘I have to take this,’ I said.

‘This is Singe Rana,’ he said, and it took me a long moment to connect the old Gurkha with the voice on the phone. ‘You have to come. I can’t talk to him today. You have to come. They have taken everything.’

When I hung up, Blunt was looking at me.

‘This weekend?’ he said, waiting.

‘What about it?’ I said. This weekend was when it all happened. This weekend was when my son moved from my life to his mother’s life.

‘Will you come?’ Blunt said, testier now. ‘It’s the world’s largest digital media industry event, attended by leading media, entertainment and communications professionals.’ He visibly preened. ‘I’m giving the keynote speech.’

‘This weekend?’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Can’t make it. Sorry.’

The BBC man looked at Marty. He shrugged and laughed. ‘I can’t make it either,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why. But I’ll think of something.’

When we were out of his office, Marty took my arm and snarled. ‘They want you to open up a vein these days,’ he said. ‘They want to own your life. We do the show and then we go home. That’s enough, isn’t it?’

The phone in my pocket began to vibrate again.

‘That’s more than enough,’ I said.

I called his daughter on the way over.

‘What does he expect?’ she said. The phone was removed from her mouth and I could hear her encouraging a grandchild to take just one more bite. Then she came back. ‘He should have moved out of that dump and into a home years ago.’

The door was open when I arrived.

Not so much open as shattered.

Hanging off its hinges at a sick angle, the smashed wood below the frosted glass bearing the imprint of a large trainer. US size 12. It looked like a pitifully inadequate door to keep out the wicked world. I could see figures moving about inside.
Singe Rana. A young policewoman with a notepad. I rang the doorbell. Nobody responded so I went inside.

They had made a mess of the place.

Everything was spilling out of itself. The guts of the slashed sofa where Ken was slumped, small and unmoving, staring off into nothing. The contents of the drawers, their ancient gas and electricity bills and postcards from Australia covering the carpet like propaganda leaflets. And the life that had been lived here. That felt as though it had been dragged out into some harsher light, and smashed to pieces.

Singe Rana acknowledged me with a nod of his head.

There was a rolled-up
Racing Post
in his hand, and he held it like a sword. The policewoman carried on taking her notes. I picked up the photo of his wedding day, the glass a broken spider’s web, and as I replaced it on the mantelpiece I saw the TV set.

It was one of those old-fashioned televisions that I had not seen in years – as deep as it was wide. They had not bothered to steal it, just rammed a pink figurine of a ballet dancer through the screen. She lay surrounded by shards of broken glass, one of her thin legs snapped off below the knee.

I sat down next to Ken. His breathing was more laboured than I had seen it. For the first time he looked like what he was – an old man with a tumour that was killing him. He looked beat.

‘It’s not as though there’s even anything worth nicking,’ he said. His fingers toyed with the tobacco tin on his lap but he made no attempt to roll a cigarette.

And my stomach fell away. Because I remembered that there was something worth stealing.

I quickly crossed the room to where the little chest of drawers had been ravaged. The remains of old age were still there. His reading glasses. More utility bills, preserved for posterity. Curled postcards, fading photographs of grandchildren who were grown up now. It was all there.

But the medal was gone.

In the end it wasn’t much. Pat just went.

I brought down two suitcases from the attic and he stuffed them and his school rucksack with all the clothes and books they could carry. He was leaving behind more than he was taking. I stood in the doorway of his bedroom and watched him hefting the bags. On the wall, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and Darth Vader looked down, as forgotten as the toys of childhood.

A taxi pulled up outside and sat there with its engine idling, ready for a quick getaway. I went to the window and Gina was in the back of a black cab, dressed for the gym and frowning as she tapped out a text message. Waiting. Our front door opened and Cyd appeared, coming down the path to the waiting cab. I heard the voices of the two women, but not their words.

‘I guess that’s it then,’ I said, a breezy note in my borrowed voice. ‘Ready?’

He nodded, all business, and I took one of the suitcases and followed him out of the room, the eyes of the Jedi Knights upon us.

His sisters were waiting at the foot of the stairs. The big one and the little one. Peggy and Joni were both crying, and I felt my heart slide, wanting it to be over. Peggy threw her arms around his neck and Joni wrapped her arms around his thighs.

Pat smiled, dry-eyed but touched.

‘I’m just down the road,’ he said.

Then Cyd was there, standing in front of him and doing the things that it would never cross my mind to do. Pushing the hair off his face, untwisting the strap on his rucksack. Why couldn’t I do that stuff?

‘You take care, Pat,’ she said, and she kissed his face, and she gave him a squeeze. And I knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t thinking of the things she shouted at me about, she wasn’t thinking about nits and fish fingers and dirty laundry. She was just thinking what a lovely kid he was and how we were all going to miss him.

He turned to look at me. I smiled and nodded encouragement, and for want of anything else to do, I held out my right hand. He gave it a soft little shake and then we let go of each other. We had never shaken hands before.

The front door was open. His mother was waiting. His sisters wiped their eyes, and said his name, and Joni was suddenly babbling something about Christmas, and we all had to reassure her that nothing had changed. Even though everything had changed.

‘Okay,’ I said, and we carried his bags out to the waiting car. And my son left home, and I watched him go, my throat all choked up because I had absolutely nothing to say.

I went into Joni’s room and found her sitting up in bed waiting for me, hugging her knees, glowing from her bath, all smiley and smelling brand new. I sat on the edge of her bed and she snuggled down as I opened the book in my hands.

‘Are you sitting comfortably?’

‘Not really,’ she said. That vampire smile. ‘Just kidding.’

I laughed for the first time that day. And we began where we had left off.

‘Fancy the happiness of Pinocchio on finding himself free,’ I read. ‘Without saying yes or no, he fled from the city and set out on the road that was to take him back to the house of the lovely Fairy.’

This is what we had settled for, in the time between princesses and hot vampire boys. This is the way we chose to go – back to the good stuff, the ones that had lasted. The princesses – and the mice in tutus, and the crocodiles on tractors, and all the animals who had the power of speech – were over, and there would be time enough later for the hot undead boys.