Читать книгу The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys - Tony Parsons - Страница 24

‘I know there’ve been a few problems at home,’ the nursery teacher said, making it sound as though the dishwasher was playing up, making it sound as though I could just pick up Yellow Pages and sort out my life. ‘And believe me,’ she said, ‘everyone at Canonbury Cubs is sympathetic.’

It was true. The teachers at Canonbury Cubs always made a big fuss of Pat when I delivered him in the morning. As the blood drained from his face yet again, as his bottom lip started to quiver and those huge blue eyes filled up at the prospect of being taken away from me for another day, they really couldn’t have been kinder.

But ultimately he wasn’t their problem. And no matter how kind they were, they couldn’t mend the cracks that were showing in his life.

Unless it was to be with my fun-mad parents, Pat didn’t like being separated from me. There was high drama when we parted at the gate of Canonbury Cubs every morning and then I went home to pace the floor for hours, fretting about how he was doing, while back at the nursery poor old Pat kept asking the teachers how long before he could go home and crying all over his finger paintings.

Nursery wasn’t working. So amid their concerned talk about possibly finding a child psychologist and time healing all wounds, Pat dropped out.

As the other kids started work on their Plasticine worms, I took Pat’s hand and led him out of that rainbow-coloured basement for the last time. He cheered up immediately, far too happy and relieved to feel like any kind of misfit. The teachers brightly waved goodbye. The little children looked up briefly and then returned to their innocent chores.

And I imagined my son, the nursery-school dropout, returning to the gates of Canonbury Cubs in ten years’ time, just to sneer and leer and sell them all crack.

The job seemed perfect.

The station wanted to build a show around this young Irish comedian who was getting too big to do the clubs yet who was not quite big enough to do beer commercials.

He didn’t actually do anything as old-fashioned as tell jokes, but he had wowed them up at the Edinburgh Festival with an act built completely around his relationship with the audience.

Instead of telling gags, he spoke to the crowd, relying on intelligent heckling and his Celtic charm to pull him through. He seemed born to host a talk show. Unlike Marty and every other host, he wouldn’t be dependent on celebrities revealing their secrets or members of the public disgracing themselves. He could even write his own scripts. At least that was the theory. They just needed an experienced producer.

‘We’re very excited to see you here,’ said the woman sitting opposite me. She was the station’s commissioning editor, a small woman in her middle thirties with the power to change your life. The two men in glasses on either side of her – the show’s series producer and the series editor – smiled in agreement. I smiled back at them. I was excited too.

This show was just what I needed to turn my world around. The money was better than anything I had ever got working for Marty Mann, because now I was coming from another television show instead of some flyblown outpost of radio. But although it would be a relief not to worry about meeting the mortgage and the payments on my car, this wasn’t about the money.

I had realised how much I missed going to an office every day. I missed the phones, the meetings, the comforting rituals of the working week. I missed having a desk. I even missed the woman who came around with sandwiches and coffee. I was tired of staying at home cooking meals for my son that he couldn’t eat. I was sick of feeling as if life was happening somewhere else. I wanted to go back to work.

‘Your record with Marty Mann speaks for itself,’ the commissioning editor said. ‘Not many radio shows can be made to work on television.’

‘Well, Marty’s a brilliant broadcaster,’ I said. The ungrateful little shitbag. May he rot in hell. ‘He made it easy for me.’

‘You’re very kind to him,’ the series editor said.

‘Marty’s a great guy,’ I said. The treacherous, treacherous little bastard. ‘I love him.’ My new show’s going to blow you out of the water, Marty. Forget the diet. Forget the personal trainer. You’re going back to local radio, pal.

‘We hope that you can have the same relationship with the presenter of this show,’ the woman said. ‘Eamon’s a talented young man, but he is not going to get through a nine-week run without someone of your experience behind him. That’s why we would like to offer you the job.’

I could see the blissful, crowded weeks stretching out ahead of me. I could imagine the script meetings at the start of the week, the minor triumphs and disasters as guests dropped out and came in, the shooting script coming together, the nerves and cock-ups of studio rehearsal, the lights, cameras and adrenaline of doing the show, and finally the indescribable relief that it was all over for seven more days. And, always, the perfect excuse to avoid doing anything I didn’t want to do – I’m too busy at work, I’m too busy at work, I’m too busy at work.

We all stood up and shook hands, and they came with me out into the main office where Pat was waiting. He was sitting on a desk being fussed over by a couple of researchers who stroked his hair, touched his cheek and gazed with wonder into his eyes, shocked and charmed by the sheer dazzling newness of him. You didn’t get many four-year-olds in an office like this.

I had been a bit worried about bringing Pat with me. Apart from the possibility of him refusing to be left outside the interview room, I didn’t want to rub their noses in the fact that I was currently playing the single parent. How could they hire a man who had to lug his family around with him? How could they give a producer’s job to a man who couldn’t even organise a babysitter?

I needn’t have worried. They seemed surprised but touched that I had brought my boy to a job interview. And Pat was at his most charming and talkative, happily filling the researchers in on all the gory details of his parents’ separation.

‘Yes, my mummy is in abroad – in Japan – where they drive on the left side of the road like us. She’s going to get me, yes. And I live with my daddy, but at weekends I sometimes stay with my nan and granddad. My mummy still loves me, but now she only likes my dad.’

His face lit up when he saw me, and he jumped down off the desk, running to my arms and kissing me on the cheek with that fierceness he had learned from Gina.

As I held him and all those television people grinned at us and each other, I glimpsed the reality of my new brilliant career – the weekends spent writing a script, the meetings that started early and finished late, the hours and hours in a studio chilled to near freezing point to stop beads of sweat forming on the presenter’s forehead – and I knew that I would not be taking this job.

They liked the single father and son routine when it had a strictly limited run. But they wouldn’t like it when they saw me buggering off at six every night to make Pat’s fishfingers.

They wouldn’t like it at all.