Читать книгу The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys - Tony Parsons - Страница 21

Children live in the moment. The good thing about falling out with them is that they have forgotten all about it the next day. At least that’s what Pat was like at four years old.

‘What do you want for breakfast?’ I asked him.

He considered me for a moment.

‘Green spaghetti.’

‘You want spaghetti? For breakfast?’

‘Green spaghetti. Yes, please.’

‘But – I don’t know how to make green spaghetti. Have you had it before?’

He nodded. ‘In the little place across the big road,’ he said. ‘With Mummy.’

We lived on the wrong side of Highbury Corner, next to the Holloway Road rather than Upper Street, the side where there were junk stores rather than antique shops, pubs rather than bars, quiet little cafés instead of trendy restaurants. Some of these cafés were so quiet that they had the air of the morgue, but there was a great one right at the end of our street, a place called Trevi where they spoke English at the counter and Italian in the kitchen.

The beefy, good-humoured men behind the counter greeted Pat by name.

‘This is the place,’ he said, settling at a table by the window.

I watched the waitress come out of the kitchen and approach our table. It was her. She still looked tired.

‘What can I get you boys?’ she said, smiling at Pat. There was a trace of the south in her voice which I hadn’t noticed when I was with Marty.

‘Do you do anything that could be described as green spaghetti?’

‘You mean spaghetti pesto? Sure.’

‘Isn’t that too hot for you?’ I asked Pat.

‘Is it green?’ he said.

I nodded. ‘It’s green.’

‘That’s what I have.’

‘How about you?’ she asked.

‘I’ll have the same,’ I replied.

‘Anything else?’

‘Well, I was wondering how many jobs you’ve got.’

She looked at me properly for the first time.

‘Oh, I remember you,’ she said. ‘You were the guy with Marty Mann. The one who told him to give me a break.’

‘I thought you didn’t recognise him.’

‘I’ve been here for almost a year. Of course I recognised the little dickhead.’ She glanced at Pat. ‘Excuse me.’

He smiled at her.

‘I don’t get to watch much TV – you don’t in this job – but his ugly mug is always in the papers. Doing not very much, far as I can see. Funnily enough, you were my last customers. Paul didn’t like my style.’

‘Yeah, well. If it’s any consolation, I lost my job around the same time as you.’

‘Yeah? And you didn’t even get to drop a plate of pasta on Marty’s shrivelled little –’ She looked quickly at Pat. ‘Head. Anyway. He deserved it.’

‘He sure did. But I’m sorry you lost your job.’

‘No big deal. A girl can always get another job as a waitress, right?’

She looked up from her pad. Her eyes were so far apart that I had trouble looking at them both at the same time. They were brown. Huge. She turned them on Pat.

‘Having lunch with your dad? Where’s your mom today?’

Pat glanced at me anxiously.

‘His mother’s in Tokyo,’ I said.

‘That’s Japan,’ Pat said. ‘They drive on the same side of the road as us. But when it’s nighttime there, it’s daytime here.’ I was surprised he remembered so much of what I had told him. He knew almost as much about the place as I did.

She looked at me with those wide-set brown eyes and I thought that somehow she knew that our little family was all broken and scattered. Which was absurd. How could she have possibly known?

‘She’s coming back soon,’ Pat said.

I put my arm around him.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘But it’s just us for a while.’

‘That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ the waitress said. ‘I mean – you looking after your boy. Not many men do that.’

‘I guess it happens,’ I said.

‘I guess it does,’ she said.

I could see that she liked me a little bit now that she knew I was taking care of Pat. But of course she didn’t know me. She didn’t know me at all. And she had me all wrong.

She saw a man alone with a child and she thought that somehow that must make me better than other men – more kind-hearted, more compassionate, less likely to let a woman down. The new, improved male of the species, biologically programmed for child-caring duties. As if I had planned for my life to work out this way.

‘How about you?’ I asked her. ‘What brought you to London from – where?’

‘Houston,’ she said. ‘Houston, Texas. Well, what brought me was my partner. Ex-partner. This is where he’s from.’

‘That’s a long way to come for some guy, isn’t it?’

She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘Do you think so? I always thought that, if you really love someone, you’ll follow them anywhere.’

So she was the romantic kind.

Under that tough, touch-me-again-buster-and-you’ll-get-linguini-in-your-lap exterior, she was one of those women who was willing to turn her world inside out for some man who almost certainly didn’t deserve it.

Maybe my wife was right. The romantic ones are the worst.

Gina came home late the next day.

Pat and I were playing on the floor with his toys. Neither of us reacted to the diesel rumble of a black cab pulling up outside. But we looked at each other as we heard the rusty clank of our little gate, then a key turning in the front door, and finally the sound of her footsteps in the hall. Pat turned his face to the door.

‘Mummy?’

‘Pat?’

And suddenly there she was, smiling down at our son, bleary from the twelve-hour flight from Narita and lugging her old suitcase that still had a scarred sticker from our distant holiday in Antigua.

Pat flew into her arms and she held him so tight that he disappeared inside the folds of her light summer coat, all of him gone, apart from the top of his head and a tuft of hair that was exactly the same shade of blond as his mother’s. Their faces were so close that you couldn’t see where Gina ended and Pat began.

I watched them feeling something better than happy. I was sort of glowing inside, believing that my world had been restored. And then she looked at me – not cold, not angry, just from a great distance, as though she was still somewhere far away and always would be – and my spirits sank.

She hadn’t come back for me.

She had come back for Pat.

‘You all right?’ I asked her.

‘Bit tired,’ she said. ‘It’s a long flight. And you get back the same day that you leave. So the day never seems to end.’

‘You should have told us you were coming. We would have met you at the airport.’

‘That’s okay,’ she said, holding Pat out to inspect him.

And I could see that she had come back because she thought I couldn’t do it. She thought I wasn’t up to looking after our child alone while she was away. She thought that I wasn’t a real parent, not the way that she was a real parent.

Still holding Pat, her eyes took in the squalid ravages of the living room, a room which seemed to confirm that even her own lousy father was a better prospect than me.

There were toys everywhere. A video of The Lion King playing unwatched on the television. Two takeaway pizza boxes – one large, one small – from Mister Milano squatting on the floor. And Pat’s pants from yesterday sitting on the coffee table like a soiled doily.

‘Goodness, look at your dirty hair,’ Gina said brightly. ‘Shall we give it a good old wash?’

‘Okay!’ Pat said, as if it were an invitation to Disneyland.

They went off to the bathroom and I made a start on clearing up the room, listening to the sound of running water mixing with their laughter.

‘I’ve been offered a job,’ she told me in the park. ‘It’s a big job. As a translator for an American bank. Well, more of an interpreter, really. My written Japanese is too rusty for translating documents. But my spoken Japanese is more than good enough for interpreting. I would be sitting in on meetings, liaising with clients, all that. The girl who’s been doing the job – she’s really nice, a Japanese-American, I met her – is leaving to have a baby. The job’s mine if I want it. But they need to know now.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘This job’s in Tokyo?’

She looked away from Pat’s careful negotiation of the lower reaches of the climbing frame.

‘Of course it’s in Tokyo,’ she said sharply. Her eyes returned to our boy. ‘What do you think I’ve been doing out there?’

To be honest, I thought she was having a break. Seeing a few old Japanese and expatriate friends from her year out, shooting about on the bullet train, taking in a few temples in Kyoto, just getting away from it all for a while.

I had forgotten that she wanted her life back.

That’s what she had been doing after moving into her father’s flat – making a few international calls, reviving some old contacts, seeing if she still had an option on all the things she had given up for me.

I knew her well enough to realise that she was dead serious about this job. But I still couldn’t quite believe it.

‘You’re really going to take a job in Japan, Gina?’

‘I should have done it years ago.’

‘For how long? Forever?’

‘The contract is for a year. After that, well, we’ll see.’

‘What about Pat?’

‘Well, Pat comes with me. Obviously.’

‘Pat goes with you? To Tokyo?’

‘Of course. I’m not going to leave him here, am I?’

‘But you can’t just uproot him,’ I said, trying to keep the note of hysteria out of my voice. ‘Where are you going to live?’

‘The bank will sort that out.’

‘What’s he going to eat?’

‘The same things he eats here. Nobody’s going to make him have miso soup for breakfast. You can get Coco Pops in Japan. You don’t have to worry about us, Harry.’

‘I am worried. This is serious, Gina. Who’s going to look after him when you’re working? What about all his stuff?’

‘His stuff?’

‘His bike, his toys, his videos. All his stuff.’

‘We’ll ship it over. How hard can it be to crate up a four-year-old’s possessions?’

‘What about his grandparents? You going to crate them up and ship them out? What about his friends at the nursery? What about me?’

‘You can’t stand the thought of me having a life without you, can you? You really can’t stand it.’

‘It’s not that. If this is really what you want, then I hope it works out for you. And I know that you can do it. But Pat’s life is here.’

‘Pat’s life is with me,’ she said, a touch of steel in her voice. Yet I could tell that I was getting through to her.

‘Leave him with me,’ I said. Pleaded, really. ‘Just until you get settled, okay? A few weeks, a couple of months, whatever it takes. Just until you’re on top of the job and you’ve found somewhere to live. Let him stay with me until then.’

She watched me carefully, as if I were making sense but still couldn’t be trusted.

‘I’m not trying to take him away from you, Gina. I know I could never do that. But I can’t stand the thought of him being looked after by some stranger in some little flat while you’re at the office trying to make a go of your new job. And I know you can’t stand it either.’

She watched our boy slowly clamber to the top of the climbing frame. He carefully turned so that he could grin at us.

‘I have to take this chance,’ she said. ‘I have to know if I can do it. It’s now or not at all.’

‘I understand.’

‘I’d call him every day, of course. And send for him as soon as I can. Maybe you can bring him out.’

‘That sounds good.’

‘I love Pat. I love my son.’

‘I know you do.’

‘You really think you can look after him by yourself for a while, do you?’

‘I can manage it. I can.’ We looked at each other for a long time. ‘Just until you’re settled.’

We took Pat home and put him to bed. Happy and tired, he was soon asleep, lost in dreams that he wouldn’t remember in the morning.

Gina chewed her bottom lip.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll take good care of him.’

‘Just until I’m settled.’

‘Just until you’re settled.’

‘I’ll be back for him,’ Gina said, more to herself than to me.

And eventually, she did come back for him. But things were a bit different by then.

By the time Gina came back for Pat there wouldn’t be yesterday’s pants on the coffee table and Mister Milano pizza boxes on the floor. By the time she came back for our boy, I would be something like a real parent, too.

That’s where Gina got it wrong. She thought that she could change but that I would always remain the same.

The way my parents dealt with Gina going away, they tried to turn Pat’s life into a party.

Overnight their non-negotiable ‘one Coke a day’ rule was abolished. Suddenly when Pat and I turned up at their house there were gifts waiting for him, such as a special edition Return of the Jedi (‘New Scenes, New Sounds, New Special Effects’). More and more they wanted him to stay over with them, no doubt hoping to replace my gloomy face and moody silences with their canned laughter, laughter so strained that it made me feel like weeping.

And now one of them always wanted to accompany us to the gates of Pat’s nursery school. It was a long drive for them – reaching us took at least an hour going anti-clockwise around the M25 in the rush hour – but they were willing to do it day after day.

‘As a special treat,’ my dad said, groaning as he folded his old legs into my low-slung car.

I knew what they were doing and I loved them for it. They were trying to stop their grandson from crying. Because they were afraid that if he started crying, then he would never stop.

But Pat’s life wasn’t a party with his mother gone. And no amount of Star Wars merchandise or good intentions could make it a party.

‘What are you doing today then, Pat?’ my father said, his grandson perched on his lap in the MGF’s passenger seat. ‘Making some more Plasticine worms? Learning about Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat? That’ll be good!’

Pat didn’t reply. He stared at the congealed early-morning traffic, his face pale and beautiful, and no amount of jolly banter from my old man could draw him out. He only spoke when we were at the gates of the Canonbury Cubs nursery.

‘Don’t want to go,’ he muttered. ‘Want to stay home.’

‘But you can’t stay home, baby,’ I said, about to use the great parental cop-out and tell him that Daddy had to go to work. But of course Daddy didn’t have a job any more. Daddy could stay in bed all day and still not be late for work.

One of the teachers came to collect him, looking at me meaningfully as she gently took his hand. It wasn’t the first time that Pat had been reluctant to leave me. In the week since Gina had been gone, he didn’t like to let me out of his sight.

With my dad promising him unimaginable fun and games at the end of the day, we watched Pat go, holding on to the teacher’s hand, his blue eyes swimming in tears, his bottom lip starting to twitch.

He would probably make it to the little classroom without cracking. They might even get his coat off. But by the time the Plasticine worms were unveiled he would lose it, inconsolable, sobbing his heart out while the other kids stared at him or impassively went about their four-year-old business. We wouldn’t have to look at any of that.

‘I remember when you were that age,’ my dad said as we walked back to the car. ‘I took you to the park in the week between Christmas and the New Year. Bloody freezing, it was. You had your little sledge with you. I had to drag you on it all the way from home. And at the park we watched the ducks trying to land on the frozen lake. They just kept coming in to land and – boom! Sliding on their bums across the ice. And you just laughed fit to burst. Laughed and laughed, you did. We must have watched them for hours. Do you remember that?’

‘Dad?’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know if I can do it, Dad.’

‘Do what?’

‘I don’t know if I can look after Pat alone. I don’t know if I’m up to it. I told Gina I could do it. But I don’t know if I can.’

He turned on me, eyes blazing, and for a moment I thought that he was going to hit me. He had never laid a finger on me in my life. But there’s always a first time.

‘Don’t know if you can do it?’ he said. ‘Don’t know if you can do it? You have to do it.’

It was easy for him to say. His youth might have been marred by the efforts of the German army to murder him, but at least in his day a father’s role was set in stone. He always knew exactly what was expected of him. My dad was a brilliant father and – here’s the killer – he didn’t even have to be there to be a brilliant father. Wait until your father gets home was enough to get me to behave. His name just had to be evoked by my mother and suddenly I understood all I needed to know about being a good boy. Wait until your father gets home, she told me. And the mere mention of my father was enough to make everything in the universe fall into place.

You don’t hear that threat so much today. How many women actually say, Wait until your father gets home now? Not many. Because these days some fathers never come home. And some fathers are home all the time.

But I saw he was right. I might not do it as well as he had – I couldn’t imagine Pat ever looking at me the way I looked at my old man – but I had to do it as well as I could.

And I did remember the ducks trying to land on the frozen lake. Of course I remembered the ducks. I remembered them well.

Apart from the low wages, unsociable hours and lack of standard employee benefits such as medical insurance, probably the worst thing about being a waitress is that in the course of her work she has to deal with a lot of creeps.

Like a little apron and a notepad, creeps come with the job. Men who want to talk to her, men who ask her for her number, men who just refuse to leave her alone. Creeps, the lot of them.

Creeps from building sites, creeps from office blocks, creeps in business suits, creeps with their bum crack displayed above the back of their jeans, creeps of every kind – the ones who think they’re funny, the ones who think they’re God’s gift, the ones who think that just because she brings them the soup of the day, they’re in with a chance.

She was serving a table of creeps when I took my seat at the back of the café. One creep – a business creep rather than a building-site creep – was leering up at her while his creep friends – all pinstripes, hair gel and mobile phones – smiled with admiration at his creepy cheek.

‘What’s your name?’

She shook her head. ‘Now why do you need to know my name?’

‘I suppose it’s something typically southern, is it? Peggy-Sue? Becky-Lou?’

‘It’s certainly not.’

‘Billie-Joe? Mary-Beth?’

‘Listen, are you going to order or what?’

‘What time do you get off?’

‘Did you ever date a waitress?’

‘No.’

‘Waitresses get off late.’

‘You like being a waitress? Do you like being a service executive in the catering industry?’

That got a big laugh from all the creeps who thought they looked pretty cool talking about nothing on a mobile phone in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

‘Don’t laugh at me.’

‘I’m not laughing at you.’

‘Long hours, lousy pay. That’s what being a waitress is like. And plenty of assholes. But enough about you.’ She tossed the menu on the table. ‘You think about it for a while.’

The business creep blushed and grinned, trying to butch it out as she walked away. His creepy friends were laughing, but they were not quite as hearty as before.

She came over to me. And I still didn’t know her name.

‘Where’s your boy today?’

‘He’s at nursery school.’ I held out my hand. ‘Harry Silver.’

She looked at me for a moment and then she smiled. I had never seen a smile like it. Her face lit up the room. It just shone.

‘Cyd Mason,’ she said, shaking my hand. It was a very soft handshake. It’s only men who try to break your bones when you shake their hand. It’s only creeps.

‘Pleased to meet you, Harry.’

‘As in Sid Vicious?’

‘As in Cyd Charisse. You probably never even heard of Cyd Charisse, did you?’

‘She danced with Fred Astaire in Paris in Silk Stockings. She had a haircut like the one you’ve got now. What’s that haircut called?’

‘A China chop.’

‘A China chop, is it? Yeah, Cyd Charisse. I know her. She was probably the most beautiful woman in the world.’

‘That’s Cyd.’ She was impressed. I could tell. ‘My mother was crazy about all those old MGM movies.’

I caught a glimpse of her childhood, saw her sitting at the age of ten in front of the TV in some little apartment, the air-con turned up to full blast and her mother getting all choked up as Fred twirled Cyd across the Left Bank. No wonder she had grown up with a warped view of romance. No wonder she had followed some creep to London.

‘Can I tell you about the specials?’ she said.

She was really nice and I felt like talking to her about Houston and MGM musicals and what had happened between her and the man who had brought her to London. Instead I kept my eyes on my pasta and my mouth shut.

Because I didn’t want either of us to start thinking that I was just another creep.

Gina was gone and she was everywhere. The house was full of CDs I would never listen to (sentimental soul music about love lost and found), books I would never read (women struggling to find themselves in a world full of rotten men) and clothes I would never wear (skimpy M&S underwear).

And Japan. Lots of books about Japan. All the classic texts that she had urged me to read – Black Rain, Pink Samurai, Barefoot Gen, Memories of Silk and Straw – and a battered old copy of Snow Country, the one I had actually read, the love story she said I had to read if I was ever going to understand.

Gina’s things, and they chewed up my heart every time I saw them.

They had to go.

I felt bad about throwing it all out, but then if someone leaves you, they really should take their stuff with them. Because every time I saw one of her Luther Vandross records or Margaret Atwood novels or books about Hiroshima, I felt all the choking grief rise up inside me again. And in the end I just couldn’t stand it any more.

Gina, I thought, with her dreams of undying love and hard-won independence, Gina who could happily accommodate Naomi Wolf’s steely, post-feminist thoughts and Whitney Houston’s sweet nothings.

That was my Gina all right.

So I got to work, stuffing everything she had left behind into rubbish sacks. The first one was quickly full – did the woman never throw anything away? – so I went back into the kitchen and got an entire roll of heavy-duty binliners.

When I had finished removing all her paperbacks, the book shelves looked like a mouth full of broken teeth.

Throwing away her clothes was much easier because there was no sorting involved. Soon her side of our wardrobe was empty apart from mothballs and wire coat hangers.

I felt better already.

Starting to sweat hard, I prowled the house mopping up what was left of her presence. There were all the Japanese prints from her single days. A painting she had bought on our holiday to Antigua when Pat was a baby. A pink razor on the edge of the bath. A couple of Gong Li videos. And a photograph of our wedding day with her looking like the most beautiful girl in the world and me grinning like a happy, dopey bastard who never believed he could get so lucky.

All trash now.

Finally, I looked in the laundry basket. Among Pat’s Star Wars pyjamas and my faded Calvins there was the old Gap T-shirt that Gina liked to sleep in. I sat on the bottom of the stairs holding that T-shirt for a while, wondering what she was sleeping in tonight. And then I threw it into the last rubbish sack.

It’s amazing how quickly you can remove the evidence of someone’s life from a house. It takes so long to put your mark on a home, and so little time to wipe it away.

Then I spent another few hours fishing it all out of the rubbish sacks and carefully returning the clothes, the CDs, the books, the prints and everything else to exactly where I had found them.

Because I missed her. I missed her like mad.

And I wanted all her things to be just as she had left them, all ready and waiting for her in case she ever felt like coming back home.