The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys. Tony Parsons
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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