Twenty-Four

      ‘It’s the ding-dong man,’ Peggy said.

      She was sitting on the floor playing with Star Wars figures, lost in some weird happy families game where Darth Vader and Princess Leia set up home on the Millennium Falcon and spend their evenings trying to get Harrison Ford to go to sleep.

      Pat was standing on the sofa, massive headphones wrapped around his ears, groaning and rolling his eyes to the heavens and swaying from side to side as he listened to Sally’s tape.

      ‘The ding-dong man is coming,’ Peggy said to no one in particular, lifting her head with a secret smile.

      At first I didn’t have a clue what she was going on about. Then I heard what her new five-year-old ears had picked up a lot earlier than my decrepit old lugholes – a chiming of distant bells that seemed to echo around the neighbourhood.

      They didn’t have the dull insistence of church bells. There was something tender and cheap and unexpected about them – they were an invitation rather than a command.

      Naturally I remembered those bells from my own childhood, but for some reason I was always surprised to find that they still existed. He was still out there, still doing the rounds, still asking the children to put down their games and come into the street and stuff their happy little faces with sugar and milk. It was the ice-cream man.

      ‘The ding-dong man,’ Peggy said.

      I pretended I hadn’t heard her, turning back to the work that was spread out before me on the coffee table. Peggy wasn’t even supposed to be here. This wasn’t one of the afternoons when she came home with Pat. It was the day before the show and I had a shooting script to wade through, a task I found much easier when Pat and Peggy were not squawking on the carpet or listening to Sally’s tape and those songs about bitches, gangsters and guns. Peggy was a sweet kid and never any trouble. But on a day like today, I preferred to have Pat squawking on the carpet alone.

      Peggy was only here because her useless, chain-smoking babysitter had not been at the school to pick her up.

      I had gone to meet Pat and found the pair of them holding hands at the gate, chatting away to Miss Waterhouse, their adoring faces lifted towards their young teacher.

      Miss Waterhouse left us with a big grin and went off to do whatever primary school teachers do for the second half of the day, while we waited for Bianca’s thin, sallow face to come coughing through the crowds in a halo of cigarette smoke. Except that Bianca didn’t show up.

      So the three of us waited at the school gates holding hands. And, as all those young mums swirled around us collecting their children, I stood among their bright chatter and car fumes feeling like the neighbourhood leper.

      There were all kinds of young mothers outside those school gates. There were mums with Range Rovers and those waxed green coats that are made for the country. There were mums who caught the bus in ankle bracelets. And there were all the young mums in the middle who had enough sense not to have their partners’ names tattooed on their shoulders, but who weren’t rich or stupid enough to ferry around their five-year-olds in enormous four-wheel drives with bull bars on the front.

      But whether they were in ankle bracelets or Alice bands, Prada or polyester, these young mothers all had one thing in common. They all looked at me as though I were the enemy.

      At first I thought it was paranoia. I hardly had to explain that my marriage had broken up – just being there, a man alone, always without the company of a woman – unless it was my mother – was like drawing a diagram of our broken home and hanging it on the school gates. But these women didn’t even know me or Gina – so why should they dislike me? I decided that I must be feeling thin-skinned and sensitive after all the changes of the last few months.

      Yet as the term wore on and the days got darker and shorter, I came to realise that it wasn’t paranoia at all. Young mothers didn’t talk to me. They avoided my eye. They really didn’t want to know. At first I tried to engage some of them in small talk, and they acted as if I had asked them for a blow job. So after a while, I didn’t bother.

      All those mums smiling sweetly at each other, they really would have preferred it if I weren’t there. It got to the point where I tried to time my arrival at the school gates to the very second when the children were set free. Because I couldn’t stand being around all those young mothers. And they couldn’t stand being around me.

      The teachers were always very friendly to me, and when I was talking to Miss Waterhouse it was easy to convince myself that I was part of the modern world where men could be single parents too. But that was proved to be a load of old bollocks any time I had to pause at the school gates.

      Whether they were from the big white houses or the council flats, the mothers always gave me a wide berth. It had started on the first day of school, and it had somehow continued through all the other days.

      The women in Alice bands had more in common with the women in ankle bracelets than they did with me. The women who were single parents had more in common with the women who had partners than they did with me. At least that’s how they all acted.

      It was all very English and understated, but there was no denying that the suspicion and embarrassment were always there. There might be understanding and enlightenment for a single father with a little kid out in the working world. But here at the sharp end of parenting, outside those school gates, nobody wanted to know. It was as if Pat and I were a reminder of the fragility of all their relationships.

      But when Bianca failed to show up, and I stood waiting for her with Pat and Peggy, it felt like it was even more than that. Those mothers seemed to look upon me as a reminder of the thousand things that could go wrong with men.

      Standing at those gates, I felt as though I was an ambassador for all the defective males in the world. The men who were never there. The men who had pissed off. The men who couldn’t be trusted around children.

      Well, fuck the lot of them. I was sick of being treated like the enemy.

      It wasn’t that I minded being considered an oddball. I expected that. After all, I knew I was an oddball. But I was tired of carrying the can for every faulty man in the world.

      I loathed Peggy’s babysitter – this girl who couldn’t even make it to the gates of a primary school at an appointed hour, this useless coughing cow who couldn’t even manage to get a phone call to the teacher to warn us that she wasn’t coming, bloody Bianca with her modern name and her modern assumption that someone else would take care of her responsibilities.

      But at least Peggy wasn’t her child. And far more than the bitterness I felt towards Peggy’s useless babysitter was the loathing I felt for Peggy’s useless parents.

      It’s true that I didn’t really know anything about them, apart from the fact that her father was out of the picture and that her mother worked strange hours. But in all the important ways, I felt that I knew everything about them.

      Peggy’s dad clearly took his parental responsibility about as seriously as he would a fortnight’s package holiday in Florida. And it didn’t really matter if Peggy’s mum were some hotshot in the City or if she were supplementing her welfare state pocket money with a dip in the black economy. She obviously put her daughter’s wellbeing at the bottom of her list of life’s priorities.

      They were typical modern parents. They were incapable of looking after this child. And if there was one thing that I had grown to hate, it was people who bring a kid into the world and then figure that the difficult bit is done.

      Well, fuck the pair of them, too.

      So after the crowds were starting to thin out, just when all the young mums had gone and the worst was over and I didn’t actually mind standing at the school gates any more, we went into the front office and I told the secretary