The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys. Tony Parsons
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into the little flat, big and handsome, all gleaming leathers and wide white smile, tickling his daughter until she howled. We shook hands and swapped some small talk about the problems of parking in this neck of the woods. And when Peggy went to collect her things, Cyd was waiting for him, her face as impassive as a clenched fist.
‘How’s Mem?’ she asked.
‘She’s fine. Sends her love.’
‘I’m sure she doesn’t. But thanks anyway. And is her job going well?’
‘Very well, thanks.’
‘Business is booming for strippers, is it?’
‘She’s not a stripper.’
‘She’s not?’
‘She’s a lap dancer.’
‘My apologies.’
Jim looked at me with a what-can-you-do? grin.
‘She always does this,’ he said, as if we had some kind of relationship, as if he could tell me a thing or two.
Peggy came back carrying a child-sized motorbike helmet, smiling from ear to ear, anxious to get going. She kissed her mother and me and took her father’s hand.
From the window we watched Jim carefully place his daughter on the bike and cover her head with the helmet. Sliding behind her, he straddled the machine, kicked it into life and took off down the narrow street. Above the throaty roar of the bike, you could just about hear Peggy squealing with delight.
‘Why do you hate him so much, Cyd?’
She thought about it for a moment.
‘I think it’s because of the way he ended it,’ she said. ‘He was home from work – hurt his leg in another accident, I think he was scraped by a cab, he was always getting scraped by a cab – and he was lying on the sofa when I got back from dropping Peggy off at her nursery school. I bent over him – just to look at his face, because I always liked looking at his face – and he said the name of a girl. Right out loud. The name of this Malaysian girl he was sleeping with. The one he left me for.’
‘He was talking in his sleep?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He was pretending to talk in his sleep. He knew he was going to leave me and Peggy already. But he didn’t have the guts to look me in the eye and tell me. Pretending to talk in his sleep – pretending to say her name while he was sleeping – was the only way he could do it. The only way he could drop the bomb. The only way he could tell me that his bags were packed. And that just seemed so cruel, so gutless – and so typical.’
I had different reasons for hating Jim – some of them noble, some of them pitiful. I hated him because he had hurt Cyd so badly, and I hated him because he was better looking than me. I hated him because I hated any parent who breezed in and out of a kid’s life as though they were a hobby you could pick up and put down when you felt like it. Did I think that Gina was like that? Sometimes, on those odd days when she didn’t phone Pat, and I knew – just knew – that she was somewhere with Richard.
And I hated Jim because I could feel that he still mattered to Cyd – when she had said that thing about always loving his face, I knew it was still there, eating her up. Maybe she didn’t love him, maybe all that had curdled and changed into something else. But he mattered.
I suppose a little piece of my heart should have been grateful. If he had been a loyal, loving husband who knew how to keep his leather trousers on – and if he wasn’t into the bamboo – then Cyd would be with him and not me. But I wasn’t grateful at all.
As soon as he brought Peggy back safely from Pizza Express, I would have been quite happy for him to wrap his bike around a number 73 bus and get his lovely face smeared all over the Essex Road. He had treated Cyd as if she were nothing much at all. And that was reason enough for me to hate his guts.
But when Peggy came back home with a phenomenally useless stuffed toy the size of a refrigerator, and pizza all over her face, I was aware that there was another, far more selfish reason for hating him.
Without ever really trying to match him, I knew that I could never mean as much in Peggy’s life as he did. That’s what hurt most of all. Even if he saw her only when he felt like it, and fucked off somewhere else when he felt like doing that, he would always be her father.
That’s what made her giddy with joy. Not the motorbike. Or the pizza. Or the stupid stuffed toy the size of a fridge. But the fact that this was her dad.
I knew I could live with the reminder of another man’s fuck. I could even love her. And I could compete with a motorbike and a giant stuffed toy and a prettier face than my own.
But you can’t compete with blood.
‘Who do I look like?’ Pat said when the trees in the park were bare and he had to wear his winter coat all the time and Gina had been gone for just over four months.
He tilted his head to stare up at the car’s vanity mirror, looking at his face as if seeing it for the first time, or as if it belonged to someone else.
Who did he look like? People were always telling me – and him – that he looked like me. But I knew that wasn’t quite right. He was a far prettier kid than I had ever been. Even if I had never had all my front teeth knocked out by a dog, he would still have been better looking than me. The truth was, he looked like both of us. He looked like me and he looked like Gina.
‘Your eyes are like Mummy’s eyes,’ I said.
‘They’re blue.’
‘That’s right. They’re blue. And my eyes are green. But your mouth, that’s like my mouth. We’ve got lovely big mouths. Perfect for kissing, right?’
‘Right,’ he said, not smiling along with me, not taking his eyes from the little rectangular mirror.
‘And your hair – that’s very fair. Like Mummy’s hair.’
‘She had yellow hair.’
‘She still does, baby,’ I said, wincing at that past tense. ‘She still has yellow hair. She’s still got yellow hair. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ he said, flipping up the mirror and staring out of the window. ‘Let’s go.’
And your teeth are like your mother’s – a little bit gappy, a little bit goofy, teeth that give every single smile a rakish air – but your sawn-off snub nose is like mine, although your strong, beautiful chin belongs to your mother and so does your skin – fair skin that loves the sun, fair skin that starts to tan as soon as it stops raining.
Pat didn’t look like me. And he didn’t look like Gina. He looked like both of us.
Even if we had ever wanted to, we couldn’t escape his mother. She was there in his smile and in the colour of his eyes. I was stuck with Gina’s ghost. And so was Pat.
‘I don’t understand what’s going to happen to the kids,’ my father said. ‘The kids like Pat and Peggy. I can’t imagine what growing up with just one parent around is going to do to them.’
He didn’t say it the way he would have said it in the past – angry, contemptuous and with a mocking wonder at what the world was coming to. He didn’t say it with his old loathing for single parents and all the changes they represented. He said it gently, with a small, bewildered shake of his head, as if the future were beyond his imagination.
‘You grew up with two parents around,’ he said. ‘At least you had some idea of what a marriage looked like. What a marriage could be. But they don’t have that, do they? Pat and Peggy and all the rest of them.’
‘No. They don’t.’
‘And