Men from the Boys. Tony Parsons
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watched the TV shows, or saw the DVDs, she was unmoved by all those white teeth, all that canned laughter and all those teenage children trying to talk like they were in a Neil Simon play. Joni was never going to go for cheesy American rubbish. So I stuck with the classics.
Terrible curses. Murderous adults. Wicked stepmothers. Beautiful maidens being taken to the woods for slaughter. Girls drugged and placed in glass coffins. All the stuff to give a seven-year-old a good night’s sleep.
Tonight it was Aurora.
We settled down. I had just got to the bit where Briar Rose had realised that the nice peasant boy and Prince Philip were – conveniently enough – one and the same when Joni yawned, lay back on her pillow and raised her hand, bidding me stop.
For a long time – years – Joni had been afraid of Maleficent, and at first I thought that she wanted me to stop before I reached the wicked witch losing her rag.
But it wasn’t that.
‘They all end the same way, don’t they?’ said my daughter. ‘The princess stories. They start off a bit different but they all end the same way. The prince saves them and they get married and they live happily ever after.’
I smiled and closed the book. ‘Well, it’s true,’ I said. ‘It’s always the same ending.’ I felt like kissing her on the cheek but I knew that wasn’t allowed. So I just touched her hair. ‘You’re getting a bit old for these stories now.’
She snuggled down and I pulled the duvet up to her chin.
‘It’s a load of arse,’ said my seven-year-old, and I cursed the day that Ken Grimwood had come to our door.
Elizabeth Montgomery was being dropped off at school.
She was in the car in front of us as I pulled up to let Pat out. And I know he saw her too, because he was perfectly still yet poised for flight, like a rabbit who suddenly realises that he is loitering in the fast lane of a motorway.
Elizabeth Montgomery wasn’t being dropped off by her dad. Not unless her dad had a barbed-wire tattoo at the top of his arm, and played the Killers at full volume at eight thirty in the morning in his souped-up BMW. Which I suppose was entirely possible in the lousy modern world.
In the passenger seat, Pat sat petrified.
‘Probably her brother,’ I said, but before the words were out the driver in front had his tongue in Elizabeth Montgomery’s ear, and she was laughing and squirming away. ‘More likely a cousin,’ I said.
And I felt like saying, Ah, don’t care so much, kiddo. Don’t be so quick to say, Here’s my heart. Why not have a game of five-a-side football with it? Go ahead. And I felt like saying, You will meet a dozen like Elizabeth Montgomery. A hundred.
But I didn’t, because I knew it was not true.
My son was almost fifteen years old and there would only ever be one Elizabeth Montgomery.
And I felt it again – I wanted to give him some sage advice. I wanted to say something meaningful about the fleeting nature of desire, or the way the person who cares the most is always the person who gets hurt the most.
I wanted to talk about love. But everything I could have said would have been about forgetting Elizabeth Montgomery. And I knew he could not do that.
So what I said was, ‘I saw Gina.’
He started at his mother’s name. A physical flinch, as if he had been struck. That is what it had come to.
He turned away from Elizabeth Montgomery in the car in front of us and looked at me. And I saw that his eyes were exactly the same colour as his mother’s eyes. This Pacific Ocean blue. The blue you see on a Tiffany catalogue. It is a special blue.
‘What do you mean – you saw her?’
‘She’s back from Japan,’ I said.
‘A holiday?’ he said.
‘Back for good. Back in London. She wants to see you.’
I have this theory about divorce. I have this theory that it is never a tragedy for adults and always a tragedy for children. Adults can lose weight, find someone nicer, get their life back. Divorce gives grown-ups a get-out-of-jail-free card. It is the children who pay the price, and pay it for the rest of their lives. But we can’t admit that, all us scarred veterans of the divorce court, because it would mean admitting that we have inflicted wounds on our children that they will carry for the rest of their lives.
Pat was looking back at Elizabeth Montgomery. But I don’t think he was seeing her any more.
‘How long…’
‘I saw her last week,’ I said. ‘She’s been back for about a month. She wants to see you.’
I watched the fury flush his face. ‘And you tell me now? You get round to telling me now?’
The children of divorced parents hold something back. They get so used to shuttling between warring homes when they are little that it stays with them. This restraint, this pragmatic reserve, this need to be a pint-sized Kofi Annan diplomat. So when they lose it, they really lose it.
He was out of the car, hauling out his rucksack, furious with me. I wasn’t so naïve that I thought it was just me that he was angry about. It was divorce, separation, the absent parent – it was the whole sorry package that he had been handed without ever asking for it.
‘You around tonight?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, and he slammed the passenger door.
I watched him walk through the school gates, his rucksack slung over his shoulder, his shirt miraculously unfurling from his trousers, the swatch of white cloth that appeared as if from a magician’s hat. Then he was gone, but still I sat there, boxed in by the car in front and the car behind.
Watching Elizabeth Montgomery snog the boy with the barbed-wire tattoo, as the bell rang for registration.
Riddle me this, Lateral Thinking Club – she is my daughter but I am not her father: who am I?
I am a step-parent. Ah, but I don’t really believe in the term step-parent. I don’t think the role exists. Not really. For in the end you are either a child’s parent or you are not. And blood does not have a lot to do with it. At least, that is what I would like to believe.
Cyd and I watched Peggy coming down the stairs. She was almost exactly the same age as Pat and yet she seemed to be effortlessly gliding on air to adulthood. Peggy went to stage school, and every day of her life she danced and she sang, and she studied the performing arts and wrestled with the sub-text of difficult plays while other girls her age were snogging older boys with cars and barbed-wire tattoos. While other kids wore blazers, Peggy donned a black leotard and learned to dance jazz, ballet and tap. Above all, she wanted to act, following in the footsteps of Italia Emily Stella Conti, her school’s founder, and her father, a TV cop.
Peggy made life look easy.
Now she was all dressed up for going out – a cowboy hat, and cowboy boots, a retro Motorhead-London T-shirt and a skirt that was way too short. She kissed both of us on the cheek and glided off to the mirror in the hall. We could hear her humming a popular tune.
Cyd was looking at me and smiling. ‘Don’t say it,’ she said.
I looked dumb.
‘You know,’ she said. ‘“You’re not going out dressed like that.”’
What women forget is that men know boys. We know what is in their heads and in their hearts. We are all poachers turned gamekeepers. Every single one of us. And I knew that no boy was going to look at Peggy and think, Yeah, Motorhead, Lemmy and all that, yeah, they were a pretty good band. I knew exactly what they would be thinking, the dirty little bastards. And I didn’t like it.
‘It’s