Man and Boy

MAN AND BOY
Tony Parsons

For my mother

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One: Skylarking

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part Two: The Ding-Dong Man

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Part Three: Guess What?

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

part one: skylarking

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World

It’s a boy, it’s a boy!

It’s a little boy.

I look at this baby – as bald, wrinkled and scrunched up as an old man – and something chemical happens inside me.

It – I mean he – looks like the most beautiful baby in the history of the world. Is it – he – really the most beautiful baby in the history of the world? Or is that just my biological programming kicking in? Does everyone feel this way? Even people with plain babies? Is our baby really so beautiful?

I honestly can’t tell.

The baby is sleeping in the arms of the woman I love. I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the pair of them, feeling like I belong in this room with this woman and this baby in a way that I have never belonged anywhere.

After all the excitement of the last twenty-four hours, I am suddenly overwhelmed, feeling something – gratitude, happiness, love – well up inside me and threaten to spill out.

I am afraid that I am going to disgrace myself – spoil everything, smudge the moment – with tears. But then the baby wakes up and starts squawking for food and we – me and the woman I love – laugh out loud, laugh with shock and wonder.

It’s a small miracle. And although we can’t escape the reality of everyday life – when do I have to get back to work? – the day is glazed with real magic. We don’t really talk about the magic. But we can feel it all around.

Later my parents are there. When she is done with the hugs and kisses, my mother counts the baby’s fingers and toes, checking for webbed feet. But he is fine, the baby is fine.

‘He’s a little smasher,’ my mum says. ‘A little smasher!’

My father looks at the baby and something inside him seems to melt.

There are many good things about my father, but he is not a soft man, he is not a sentimental man. He doesn’t gurgle and coo over babies in the street. My father is a good man, but the things he has gone through in his life mean that he is also a hard man. Today some ice deep inside him begins to crack and I can tell he feels it too.

This is the most beautiful baby in the world.

I give my father a bottle I bought months ago. It is bourbon. My father only drinks beer and whisky, but he takes the bottle with a big grin on his face. The label on the bottle says ‘Old Granddad’. That’s him. That’s my father.

And I know today that I have become more like him. Today I am a father too. All the supposed landmarks of manhood – losing my virginity, getting my driving licence, voting for the first time – were all just the outer suburbs of my youth. I went through all those things and came out the other side fundamentally unchanged, still a boy.

But now I have helped to bring another human being into the world.

Today I became what my father has been forever.

Today I became a man.

I am twenty-five years old.

one

Some situations to avoid when preparing for your all-important, finally-I-am-fully-grown thirtieth birthday.

Having a one-night stand with a colleague from work.

The rash purchase of luxury items you can’t afford.

Being left by your wife.

Losing your job.

Suddenly becoming a single parent.

If you are coming up to thirty, whatever you do, don’t do any of that.

It will fuck up your whole day.

Thirty should be when you think – these are my golden years, these are my salad days, the best is yet to come – and all that old crap.

You are still young enough to stay up all night, but you are old enough to have a credit card. All the uncertainties and poverty of your teens and twenties are finally over – and good riddance to the lot of them – but the sap is still rising.

Thirty should be a good birthday. One of the best.

But how to celebrate reaching the big three-oh? With a collection of laughing single friends in some intimate bar or restaurant? Or surrounded by a loving wife and adoring small children in the bosom of the family home?

There has to be a good way of turning thirty. Perhaps they are all good ways.

All my images of this particular birthday seemed to be derived from some glossy American sitcom. When I thought of turning thirty, I thought of attractive thirty-nothing mar-rieds snogging like teens in heat while in the background a gurgling baby crawls across some polished parquet floor, or I saw a circle of good-looking, wisecracking friends drinking latte and showing off their impressive knitwear while wryly bemoaning the dating game. That was my problem. When I thought of turning thirty, I thought of somebody else’s life.

That’s what thirty should be – grown-up without being disappointed, settled without being complacent, worldly wise, but not so worldly wise that you feel like chucking yourself under a train. The time of your life.

By thirty you have finally realised that you are not going to live forever, of course. But surely that should only make the laughing, latte-drinking present taste even sweeter? You shouldn’t let your inevitable death put a damper on things. Don’t let the long, slow slide to the grave get in the way of a good time.

Whether you are enjoying the last few years of unmarried freedom, or have recently moved on to a more adult, more committed way of life with someone you love, it’s difficult to imagine a truly awful way of turning thirty.

But I managed to find one somehow.

The car smelled like somebody else’s life. Like freedom.

It was parked right in the window of the showroom, a wedge-shaped sports car which, even with its top off, looked as sleek and compact as a muscle.

Naturally it was red – a flaming, testosterone-stuffed red.

When I was a little bit younger, such blatant macho corn would have made me sneer, or snigger, or puke, or all of the above.

Now I found it didn’t bother me at all. In fact, it seemed to be just what I was looking for at this stage of my life.

I’m not really the kind of man who knows what cars are called, but I had made it my business – furtively lingering over the ads in glossy magazines – to find out the handle of this particular hot little number. Yes, it’s true. Our eyes had met before.

But its name didn’t really matter. I just loved the way it looked. And that smell. Above all, that smell. That anything-can-happen smell. What was it about that smell?

Amidst the perfume of leather, rubber and all those yards of freshly sprayed steel, you could smell a heartbreaking newness, a newness so shocking that it almost overwhelmed me. This newness intimated another world that was limitless and free, an open road leading to all the unruined days of the future. Somewhere they had never heard of traffic cones or physical decay or my thirtieth birthday.

I knew that smell from somewhere and I recognised the way it made me feel. Funnily enough, it reminded me of that feeling you get when you hold a newborn baby.

The analogy was far from perfect – the car couldn’t squint up at me with eyes that had just started to see, or grasp one of my fingers in a tiny, tiny fist, or give me a gummy little smile. But for a moment there it felt like it just might.

‘You only live once,’ the car salesman said, his heels clicking across the showroom floor.

I smiled politely, indicating that I would have to think that one over.

‘Are you in the market for some serious fun?’ he said. ‘Because if the MGF is about one thing, it’s about fun.’

While he gave me his standard sales pitch, he was sizing me up, trying to decide if I was worth a test drive.

He was pushy, but not so pushy that it made your flesh crawl. He was just doing his job. And despite my weekend clothes – which because of the nature of my work were not really so different from my weekday clothes – he must have seen a man of substance. A fast-track career looking for some matching wheels. Young, free and single. A life as carefree as a lager commercial. How wrong can you be?

‘This model has the Variable Valve Control system,’ he said, with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm. ‘The opening period of the inlet valves can be varied by altering the rotational speed of each cam lobe.’

What the fuck was he going on about? Was it something to do with the engine?

‘A total babe magnet,’ he said, noting my dumbfounded expression. ‘Plenty of poke. A young single guy couldn’t do any better than the MGF.’

This was my kind of sales pitch. Forget the technical guff, just tell me that you can lose yourself in a car like this. Let me know you can lose yourself. That’s what I wanted to hear.

The salesman was distracted by something on the street, and I followed his gaze out of the showroom’s plate-glass wall.

He was looking at a tall blonde woman holding the hand of a small boy wearing a Star Wars T-shirt. They were surrounded by bags of supermarket shopping. And they were watching us.

Even framed by all those plastic carrier bags and chaperoning a little kid, the woman was the kind that you look at more than once.

What you noticed about her child – and he was certainly her child – was that he was carrying a long, plastic tube with a dull light glowing faintly inside.

If you had been to the cinema at any time over the last twenty years you would recognise it as a light sabre, traditional weapon of the Jedi Knights. This one needed new batteries.

The beautiful woman was smiling at me and the salesman. The little kid pointed his light sabre, as if about to strike us down.

‘Daddy,’ he mouthed from the other side of the plate-glass wall which divided us. You couldn’t hear him, but that’s what he was saying.

‘My wife and son,’ I said, turning away, but not before I caught the disappointment in the salesman’s eyes. ‘Got to go.’

Daddy. That’s me. Daddy.

‘You don’t even like cars,’ my wife reminded me, edging our old VW estate through the thick early-evening traffic.

‘Just looking.’

‘And you’re too young for a mid-life crisis,’ she said. ‘Thirty is much too young, Harry. The way it works, you wait for fifteen years and then run off with a secretary who’s young enough to be your second wife. And I cut off the sleeves of all your suits. Not to mention your bollocks.’

‘I’m not thirty, Gina,’ I chuckled, although it wasn’t really all that funny. She was always exaggerating. ‘I’m twenty-nine.’

‘For one more month!’ she laughed.

‘It’s your birthday soon,’ our boy said, laughing along with his mother, although he didn’t have a clue why, and tapping me on the back of the head with his sodding light sabre.

‘Please don’t do that, Pat,’ I said.

He was back there with the week’s shopping, strapped into his little car seat and muttering under his breath, pretending to be in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon with Harrison Ford.

‘I’ve lost my starboard engine,’ he jabbered away to himself. ‘Fire when ready.’

I turned to look at him. He was four years old with dirty blond hair that hung down over eyes that were the same shade of blue as his mother’s. Tiffany blue. Catching my eye, he grinned at me with pure childish delight.

‘Happy birthday, dear Daddy,’ he sang. ‘Happy birthday, birth-day.’

To Pat, my birthday was a chance to finally give me the home-made card he had hidden under his bed (Luke Skywalker decapitating a space monster with his trusty light sabre). To me it meant that the best might already be over. It really did.

When would I feel the way I felt the night my wife said that she would marry me? When would I feel the way I felt the morning my son was born? When would life be that – I don’t know – real again? When?

‘When did you become interested in cars?’ Gina asked. She wouldn’t let this car thing rest. ‘I bet you don’t even know what kind of petrol this one uses, do you?’

‘Oh, come on, Gina.’

‘What is it, then?’

Fucking hell.

‘The green kind,’ I said, taking a wild guess. ‘You know – non-leaded. The one that saves a rain forest every time you fill her up.’

‘It’s diesel, you doughnut,’ she laughed. ‘I never knew a man less interested in cars than you. What happened?’

What could I tell her? You don’t tell a wife that some inanimate object somehow represents all those things you know you are never going to have. The places you are never going to see, the women you are never going to love, the things you are never going to do. You can’t tell a wife all that stuff. Not even a wife you love very much. Especially not a wife like that.

‘It only carries one passenger,’ she said.

‘What does?’ I said, playing dumb.

‘You know very well what I’m talking about,’ she said. ‘It only carries one passenger – one thin, female passenger.’

‘You’re still pretty thin and female,’ I said. ‘Or you were the last time I looked.’

‘What’s brought all this on, Harry? Come on. Tell me.’

‘Maybe I’m compensating for becoming an old git,’ I said. ‘I’m joining the old gits’ club, so, pathetically, I want to recapture my glorious youth. Even though I know it’s ultimately futile and even though my youth wasn’t particularly glorious. Isn’t that what men do?’

‘You’re turning thirty,’ she said. ‘We’re going to open a couple of bottles and have a nice cake with candles.’

‘And balloons,’ Pat said.

‘And balloons,’ Gina said. She shook her lovely head. ‘We’re not having you put down, Harry.’

Gina was a couple of months older than me. She had breezed through her thirtieth birthday surrounded by friends and family, dancing with her son to Wham’s greatest hits, a glass of champagne in her hand. She looked great that night, she really did. But clearly my own birthday was going to be a bit more traumatic.

‘You don’t regret anything, do you?’ she said.

‘Like what?’

‘You know,’ she said, suddenly deadly serious. ‘Like us.’

We had married young. Gina was three months pregnant with Pat on our wedding day and it was, by some distance, the happiest day of my life. But nothing was ever really the same again after that day. Because after that there was no disguising the fact that we were grown-ups.

The radio station where I was working gave me the week off and we spent our honeymoon back at our little flat watching daytime television in bed, eating M&S sandwiches and talking about the beautiful baby we were going to have.

We talked about eventually taking a proper, grown-up honeymoon – Gina wanted us to snorkel among the tropical fish of Okinawa. But by the time there was a bit of money and a bit of time, we had Pat and the course of our lives seemed set.

Gina and I found ourselves separated from the rest of the world by our wedding rings. The other married couples we knew were at least ten years older than us, and friends our own age were still in that brief period between living with their mothers and living with their mortgages. Our little family was on its own.

While our friends were dancing the night away in clubs, we were up all hours with our baby’s teething problems. While they were worrying about meeting the right person, we were worrying about meeting the payments on our first real home. Yet I didn’t regret any of it. Yes, we had given up our freedom. But we had given it up for something better.

I loved my wife and I loved our son. Together, the two of them made my world make sense. My life without them was unimaginable. I knew I was a lucky man. But I couldn’t help it, I just couldn’t help it – lately I found myself wondering when I had stopped being young.

‘I just really hate the way that life starts to contract as you get older,’ I said. ‘The way your options narrow. I mean, when did owning a car like that become ridiculous for me? When exactly? Why is it such a joke? I would love to know. That’s all.’

‘The Force is strong in this one,’ Pat said.

‘A red sports car,’ Gina said to herself. ‘And you don’t even like driving.’

‘Listen, I was just looking, okay?’ I said.

‘Happy birthday to you,’ Pat sang, smacking me across the ear with his light sabre. ‘Squashed tomatoes and glue. You-look-like-a-monkey-and-you-act-like-one-too.’

‘That’s not nice,’ I told him, as the traffic ground to a halt and my ear began to throb.

Gina put the handbrake on and looked at me, as if trying to remember what she had liked about me in the first place. She seemed a bit stumped.

I remembered what I had liked about her. She had the longest legs I had ever seen on a woman. But I still didn’t know if that was the best basis for the love of your life.

Or the worst.

two

When I could no longer stand the sight of the rusty white van dawdling along in front of me, I swung the MGF into the oncoming traffic and smacked my foot down.

My new car squirted past the old van with a confident, throaty roar. As I cut back in front of it I caught a glimpse of the driver – a blur of bad teeth, tattoos and loathing – before he disappeared in my rear-view mirror. I felt good. The MGF meant that I no longer had to look at rusty white vans or their drivers. All that was behind me now. I could look forward to a future full of open-top motoring and admiring glances. Then the van pulled up alongside me at the very next red light.

Jesus, I thought. Road rage.

‘You stupid little git,’ he told me, winding down his window to reveal a face like a Big Mac in a bucket of beer. ‘Get out and push it.’

After he had driven off at the green light, I sat shaking for a while, thinking about what I should have said to him.

If I get out, pal, it will be to push your crappy van up your tattooed back passage! If I pushed this thing, pal – it would have been really good to call him pal – I’d still be going faster than you. You lager-bellied moron! You fat fuck!

I saw myself delivering some perfect put-down and then pulling away in a squeal of rubber, an infuriating little smile on my face. But what actually happened was that I just sat there trembling and dreaming until all the cars behind me started sounding their horns and shouting stuff about the lights having changed.

So I drove off, thinking about what my dad would have done.

He certainly wouldn’t have sat there and said nothing. And he wouldn’t have wasted time cooking up some devastating response worthy of Oscar Wilde at his pithy best.

My father would simply have got out of the MGF and punched that van driver’s lights out. He really would.

Not that my dad would ever be seen dead in a fancy sports car, to tell you the truth. He thought they were for wankers.

My dad would have felt much more at home in one of those white vans.

Gina had been incredibly understanding about the MGF. She had encouraged me to go back and talk to the salesman when even I was starting to find the idea of buying a sports car a bit stupid.

And there were plenty of reasons why buying it was crazy. Its boot was smaller than a supermarket trolley. We really didn’t need two cars. A soft top in London is a hate object for any spotty fourteen-year-old cretin with a chip on his shoulder and a blade in his sock. But Gina just wasn’t interested.

She told me to buy the thing and to stop thinking that my life was over just because I was turning thirty. She told me I was being pathetic, but she laughed when she said it and put her arm around me, giving me a little shake. Trying to force some sense into me. Fat chance.

At any other time during the seven years we had been together, we wouldn’t have been able to afford a good second car. In fact, at any other time we wouldn’t have been able to afford an incredibly crappy second car. We hadn’t even owned our crappy first car for very long.

But we no longer practically had to have a heart attack every time we received a red-topped bill. At last my job was going well.

I was the producer of The Marty Mann Show, a late-night talk show that went out every Saturday on terrestrial television. For the six years before that I had been the producer of The Marty Mann Show back when it was on local radio and most of the country had not even heard the first rumours about its mad bastard presenter. It seemed a long time ago now.

Over the last twelve months Marty and I had turned a no-budget radio show into a low-budget TV show. The line between the two was surprisingly thin. But crossing that thin line was enough to make Marty Mann some sort of star.

If you walked into a restaurant with him, everybody stopped eating and talking just so they could look at him. Girls, who a few years earlier wouldn’t have touched him wearing surgical gloves, now thought he was a love god. He got photographed even when he wasn’t doing anything special. Marty had arrived big time and he had been decent enough to bring me along with him.

The critics, or at least the ones who liked him, called Marty child-like – meaning he was open, frank and intuitive. They thought he asked the kind of questions other interviewers decided it was best not to even think about. And it was true – the editing process that exists in most of us seemed to be completely missing from Marty’s brain. And he got answers, even when what he really deserved was a punch in the mouth.

The critics who didn’t like Marty also called him child-like – meaning he was selfish, immature and cruel. But Marty wasn’t really child-like at all. Sometimes I watched our Pat peacefully play for hours with his little plastic Star Wars toys. That was child-like. Marty’s attention span was nowhere near that long. Marty wasn’t child-like. He was just undeveloped.

We had met at a local radio station where the staff were either on their way up or on their way out. It was a grotty little building full of curdled ambition and stale cigarette smoke, and most of our regular callers were either hopelessly lonely or borderline barking. But I always sort of missed the place. Because that was where I met Gina.

The station was always desperate to get guests – for some reason there was never a mad rush for our cheques, which were so small they were invisible to the naked eye – and so there was often an improvisational element to our bookings.

For instance, when the first Japanese banks started to go bust, the person we booked to talk about what it all meant was not an economist or a financial journalist, but the professor who taught Japanese at the college across the street.

Okay, so he was a language teacher, but like any language teacher he was in love with the country whose lingo he taught. Who better to discuss why the Asian tigers were turning into neutered pussycats? Well, lots of people, probably. But he was the best we could get. Except he didn’t show up.

As if in sympathy with the exploding Japanese bubble, the professor’s appendix burst on the morning he was due to come in, and coming off the bench as his substitute we got his star pupil – Gina.

Tall, radiant Gina. She was fluent in Japanese, apparently an expert on the culture, and she had legs that went on for weeks. I took her into the studio and couldn’t even find the courage to talk to her, couldn’t even look in her eyes. She was beautiful, charming, intelligent. But most important of all, she was also way, way out of my league.

And then when the red light came on in the studio, something happened. Or rather, nothing happened at all. Gina became paralysed with nerves. She couldn’t speak.

When I had first seen her I had thought she was unapproachable. But as I watched her stuttering and sweating her way through her incoherent tale of economic decline, she was suddenly human. And I knew I had a chance. A slim chance, maybe. A snowball’s chance in hell, perhaps. But a chance all the same.

I also knew exactly how she felt. The red light always did that to me too. I was never comfortable in front of a microphone or a camera, and the very thought of it can still make me break out in a cold sweat.

So when it was over and Marty had put her out of her misery, it was not difficult for me to commiserate with her. She was very good about it, laughing at her nerves and vowing that her career in broadcasting was over.

My heart sank.

I thought – then when will I see you again?

The thing that got me about Gina is that she didn’t make a big deal about the way she looked. She knew she was good-looking, but she didn’t care. Or rather, she thought it was the least interesting thing about her. But you wouldn’t look twice at me if you saw me in the street. And someone as ordinary-looking as me can never be that casual about beauty.

She took me for sushi in Sogo, the big Japanese department store on Piccadilly Circus, where the staff all knew her. She talked to them in Japanese and they called her ‘Gina-san’.

‘Gina-san?’ I said.

‘It’s difficult to translate exactly,’ she smiled. ‘It sort of means – honourable, respected Gina.’

Honourable, respected Gina. She had been in love with Japanese culture ever since she was a little girl. She had actually lived there during her year out between sixth form and college, teaching English in Kyoto – ‘The happiest year of my life’ – and she was planning to go back. There was a job offer from an American bank in Tokyo. Nothing was going to stop her. I prayed that I would.

Desperately racking my brain for my little knowledge of Japan, I mentioned Yukio Mishima. She dismissed the novelist as a right-wing fruitcake – ‘It’s not all raw fish and ritual suicide, you know’ – and told me I should read Kawabata if I really wanted to understand Japan. She said she would lend some of his stuff to me, if I wanted. I saw my chance and grabbed it.

We met for a drink and she brought a book called Snow Country. I read it as soon as I got home – a jaded playboy falls in love with a doomed geisha in a mountain resort, it was actually pretty good – dreaming of Gina’s eyes, her legs, the way her whole face seemed to light up when she laughed.

She cooked dinner back at her flat. I had to take my shoes off before I came in. We discussed Japanese culture – or rather Gina talked and I listened, dropping bits of chicken teriyaki on the carpet with my chopsticks – until it was time to call a cab or brush my teeth. And then we were making love on the floor – or the futon, as Gina called it. I was ready to bomb Pearl Harbor for her.

And I wanted her to stay with me forever. So I promised her everything – happiness, endless love and, crucially, a family. I knew the family thing would get her – her dad had buggered off when Gina was four years old, and she had grown up pining for the security of family life. But she still cried when she told the bank that she wouldn’t be going to Tokyo after all.

Instead of living in Japan, she worked as a freelance translator for Japanese companies in the City. But many of them were going under or going home by now. Her career wasn’t what it should have been. I knew she had given up a lot to be with me. If I hadn’t been so deliriously happy, I might even have felt a bit guilty.

After we were married and Pat was born, she stayed home. She said she didn’t mind giving up work for Pat and me – ‘my two boys,’ she called us.

I suspected that the fact her career had disappointed her had as much to do with staying home as wanting a real family life. But she always tried to make it sound like the most natural thing in the world.

‘I don’t want my son brought up by strangers,’ she said. ‘I don’t want some overweight teenager from Bavaria sticking him in front of a video while I’m in an office.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘And I don’t want him eating all his meals fresh from the microwave. I don’t want to come home from work too tired to play with him. I don’t want him growing up without me. I want him to have some sort of family life – whatever that is. I don’t want his childhood to be like mine.’