The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys. Tony Parsons
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In the darkness of the gallery her face was lit by the monitors on the wall. They are TV sets, that’s all, but we call them monitors. They provide the director with a choice of shots for transmission. Monitors don’t only show the image that is going out, but all the images that could be. Siobhan smiled up at them. She had a beautiful smile.
‘I thought that this Cliff didn’t do interviews,’ I said. ‘Not since he was stitched up by that Sunday paper who said he was just in it for the glory and the hippy chicks.’ Then I remembered she had gone out with him. ‘No offence meant.’
‘None taken,’ she said. ‘That’s true, but he might do this one.’
‘Why? Because of you?’
‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Because he likes Marty. He doesn’t consider him part of the media establishment.’
I looked at Marty on the monitors, almost gagging with laughter as the condom exploded on the guy’s head. If anyone was part of the media establishment, it was Marty. He would have considered it a compliment.
‘And most of all,’ said Siobhan, ‘because we’re live.’
It was true that we were practically the last live show on television. By now most shows were what are called ‘as live’ – meaning they faked the excitement of live television while always having the safety net of recording. Phoney as hell.
But The Marty Mann Show was the real thing. When you watched that guy with a condom on his head, it was actually being inflated at that very moment.
‘The way these eco-warriors see it,’ Siobhan said, ‘the only place in the media where there’s no censorship is live television. Can I ask you something?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Is that your MGF down in the carpark? The red one?’
Here it comes, I thought. The lecture about what cars do to the muck in the air and the hole in the sky. Sometimes I despair for the young people of today. All they ever think about is the future of the planet.
‘Yeah, that’s mine,’ I said.
‘Nice car,’ she said.
They were both asleep by the time I got home. I brushed my teeth and undressed in the darkness, listening to my wife softly breathing in her sleep.
The sound of Gina sleeping never failed to stir an enormous tenderness in me. It was the only time she ever seemed vulnerable, the only time I could kid myself that she needed me to protect her. She stirred when I slid into bed and wrapped my arm around her.
‘Good show tonight,’ she murmured.
She was warm and sleepy and I loved her like that. She had her back to me, her usual sleeping position, and she sighed as I snuggled up against her, kissing the back of her neck and letting my hand trace the length of one of those long legs that had knocked me out when I first met her. And still did.
‘Oh, Gina. My Gina.’
‘Oh, Harry,’ she said softly. ‘You don’t want to – do you?’ She brushed me with her hand. ‘Well. Maybe you do.’
‘You feel great.’
‘Pretty frisky, aren’t you?’ she laughed, turning to look at me, her eyes still half-closed with sleep. ‘I mean, for a man of your age.’
She sat up in bed, pulled the T-shirt she was wearing over her head and tossed it to the floor. She ran her fingers through her hair and smiled at me, her long, familiar body lit by the street light seeping through the blinds. It was never really dark in our room.
‘Still want me?’ she said. ‘Even after all these years?’
I may have nodded. Our lips were just about to touch when Pat began to cry. We looked at each other. She smiled. I didn’t.
‘I’ll get him,’ Gina said, as I flopped back against the pillow.
She returned to the bedroom with Pat in her arms. He was sort of gasping for breath and tearfully trying to explain his nightmare – something about big monsters – while Gina soothed him, rolling him into bed between us. As always, in the warmth of our bed his sobbing immediately stopped.
‘Make spoons,’ Gina told us.
Pat and I obediently rolled over, his warm little legs in their brushed cotton pyjamas tucked up inside the back of mine. I could hear him sniffing, but he was okay now. Gina threw one of her long thin arms over the pair of us, nestling up against Pat.
‘Go to sleep now,’ she whispered. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’
I closed my eyes, the boy between us, and as I drifted away I wondered if Gina was talking to me, or to Pat, or to both of us.
‘There are no monsters,’ she said, and we slept in her arms.
Gina’s thirtieth birthday had not been completely painless.
Her father had called her in the early evening to wish her a happy birthday – which meant she had spent all of the morning and all of the afternoon wondering if the worthless old git would call her at all.
Twenty-five years ago, just before Gina had started school, Glenn – as her dad insisted everyone call him, especially his children – walked out the door, dreaming of making it as a rock musician. And although he had been working behind the counter of a guitar shop in Denmark Street for a couple of centuries, and all the dreams of glory had receded along with his hippy hairline, he still thought he was some kind of free spirit who could forget birthdays or remember them as the mood took him.
Glenn had never made it as a musician. There had been one band with a modest recording contract and one minor hit single. You might have glimpsed him playing bass on Top of the Pops just before Ted Heath left 10 Downing Street forever.
He was very good-looking when he was younger – Glenn, not Ted Heath – a bit of a Robert Plant figure, all blond Viking curls and bare midriff. But I always felt that Glenn’s true career had been building families and then smashing them up.
Gina’s little family had been just the first in a long line of wives and children that Glenn had abandoned. They were scattered all over the country, the women like Gina’s mother, who had been considered such a great beauty back in the sixties and seventies that her smiling face was sometimes featured in glossy magazines, and the children like Gina, who had grown up in a single parent family back when it was still called a broken home.
Glenn breezed in and out of their lives, casually missing birthdays and Christmases and then turning up unexpectedly with some large, inappropriate gift. Even though he was now a middle-aged suburban commuter who worked in a shop, he still liked to think he was Jim bloody Morrison and that the rules which applied to other people didn’t apply to him.
But I can’t complain too much about old Glenn. In a way he played Cupid to me and Gina. Because what she liked about me most was my family.
It was a small, ordinary family – I’m the only child – and we lived in a pebble-dashed semi in the Home Counties which could have been in almost any suburb in England. We were surrounded by houses and people, but you had to walk for half a mile before you could buy a newspaper – surrounded by life, yet never escaping the feeling that life was happening somewhere else. That’s the suburbs.
My mum watched the street from behind net curtains (‘It’s my street,’ she would say, when challenged by my dad and me). My dad fell asleep in front of the television (‘There’s never anything on,’ he always moaned). And I kicked a ball about in the back garden, dreaming of extra time at Wembley and trying to avoid my dad’s roses.
How many families are there like that in this country? Probably millions. Yet