The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys. Tony Parsons
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gently took my arm.
‘You have to let him go,’ she said, and led me to a bleak little waiting area where she bought us coffee in polystyrene cups from a vending machine. She filled mine with sugar without asking if that’s how I liked it.
‘Are you okay?’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘I’m so stupid.’
‘These things happen. Do you know what happened to me when I was about that age?’
She waited for my reply. I looked up at her wide-set brown eyes.
‘What?’
‘I was watching some kids playing baseball and I went up and stood right behind the batter. Right behind him.’ She smiled at me. ‘And when he swung back to hit the ball, he almost took my head off. That bat was only made of some kind of plastic, but it knocked me out cold. I actually saw stars. Look.’
She pushed the black veil of hair off her forehead. Just above her eyebrow there was a thin white scar about as long as a thumbnail.
‘I know you feel terrible now,’ she said. ‘But kids are tough. They get through these things.’
‘It was so high,’ I said. ‘And he fell so hard. The blood – it was everywhere.’
But I was grateful for Cyd’s thin white scar. I appreciated the fact that she had been knocked unconscious as a child. It was good of her.
A young woman doctor came and found us. She was about twenty-five years old, and looked as though she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since medical school. She was vaguely sympathetic, but brisk, businesslike, as honest as a car wreck.
‘Patrick is in a stable condition, but with such a severe blow to the head we have to take X-rays and a brain scan. What I’m worried about is the possibility of a depressed fracture to the skull – that’s when the skull is cracked and bony fragments are driven inward, causing pressure on the brain. I’m not saying that’s happened. I’m saying it’s a possibility.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
Cyd took my hand and squeezed it.
‘This is going to take a while,’ the doctor said. ‘If you and your wife would like to stay with your son tonight, there’s time to go home and get some things.’
‘Oh,’ Cyd said. ‘We’re not married.’
The doctor looked at me and studied her chart.
‘You’re Patrick’s father, Mr Silver?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m just a friend,’ Cyd said. ‘I should go,’ she told me, standing up. I could tell that she thought she was getting in the way. But she wasn’t at all. She was the only thing keeping me from falling apart.
‘And the child’s mother?’ the doctor asked.
‘She’s out of the country,’ I said. ‘Temporarily out of the country.’
‘You might want to call her,’ the doctor said.
My mother had been crying, but she wasn’t going to do it in public. She always saved her tears for behind closed doors, for the eyes of the family.
At the hospital she was all gritty optimism and common sense. She asked practical questions of the nurses. What was the risk of permanent damage? How long before we would know? Was it okay for grandparents to stay the night? It made me feel better having her around. My dad was a bit different.
The old soldier looked lost in the hospital cafeteria. He wasn’t used to sitting and waiting. He wasn’t used to situations that were beyond his control. His thick tattooed arms, the broad shoulders, his fearless old heart – they were all quite useless in here.
I knew that he would have done anything for Pat, that he loved him with the unconditional love you can probably only feel for a child, a love that’s far more difficult to feel when your perfect child has grown into one more fallible adult. He loved Pat in a way that he had once loved me. Pat was me before I had a chance to screw everything up. It gnawed at my father inside that all he could do was sit and wait.
‘Does anyone want any more tea?’ he said, desperate to do something, anything to make our miserable lot a little better.
‘We’ll have tea coming out of our ears,’ my mum said. ‘Just sit down and relax.’
‘Relax?’ he snorted, glaring at her, and then deciding to leave it.
He flopped into a cracked plastic chair and stared at the wall. There were bags under his eyes the colour of bruised fruit. Then after five minutes he went to get us some more tea. And as he waited for news of his grandson and sipped tea that he didn’t really want, my father seemed suddenly old.
‘Why don’t you try Gina again?’ my mother asked me.
I don’t know what she was expecting. Possibly that Gina would get on the next plane home and soon our little family would be united once more and forever. And maybe I hoped for that, too.
But it was no good. I went out to the reception area and called Gina’s number, but all I got was the strange purring sound of a Japanese telephone that nobody answers.
It was midnight in London, which made it eight in the morning in Tokyo. She should have been there. Unless she had already left for work. Unless she hadn’t come home last night. Her phone just kept on purring.
This was how it was going to be from now on. If I had spoken to Gina, I know that her strength and common sense would have got the better of any fear or panic. She would have been more like my mum than my dad. Or me. She would have asked what had happened, what were the dangers and when would we know. She would have found out the time of the next flight home and she would have been on it. But I just couldn’t reach her.
I hung up the phone, knowing that the rest of our lives were going to be like this, knowing that things had gone too wrong to ever be the way they were, knowing that we were too far away from each other to ever find our way back.
The doctor came looking for me at five in the morning. I was in the empty cafeteria, nursing a cup of tea that had gone cold hours ago. I stood up as she came towards me, waiting for her to speak.
‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘Your son has a very hard head.’
‘He’s going to be okay?’
‘There’s no fracture and the scan is clear. We’re going to keep him in for observation for a few days, but that’s standard procedure when we’ve put twelve stitches in a four-year-old’s head wound.’
I wanted that doctor to be my best friend. I wanted us to meet up for dinner once a week so she could pour out all her frustrations with the NHS. I would listen and I would care. She had saved my son. She was beautiful.
‘He’s really all right?’
‘He’ll have a sore head for a few weeks, and a scar for life. But, yes, he’s going to be okay.’
‘No side effects?’
‘Well, it will probably help him get girls in fifteen years’ time. Scars are quite attractive on a man, aren’t they?’
I took her hands and held them a bit too long.
‘Thank you.’
‘That’s why we’re here,’ she smiled. I could see that I was embarrassing her, but I couldn’t help it. Finally I let go. ‘Can I see him?’
He was at the far end of a ward full of children. Next to Pat there was a pretty little five-year-old in Girl Power pyjamas with her hair all gone from what I guessed was chemotherapy. Her parents were