The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys. Tony Parsons
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protected wild life to be cherished and revered and wondered over.
To me, of course, my family was on the staid side. All that car-washing, all that peeking from behind net curtains, all the nights spent in front of the television, all the B&B holidays in Devon and Cornwall or a caravan in Frinton. I envied Gina’s exotic background – her mum a former model, her dad a would-be rock star, the pictures in the glossy magazines, even though the pictures were fading now.
But Gina remembered the missed birthdays of her childhood, a father who was always preoccupied with his more recent, more exciting attachments, the promised holidays that never happened, and her mother going to bed alone, growing old alone, getting sick alone, crying alone and finally dying alone. Gina could never be cavalier about an ordinary family. It wasn’t in her.
The first Christmas I took Gina home, I saw her choking up when my mum gave her a little present – just some smelly stuff in a basket from the Body Shop, some soap in the shape of polar bears covered in cling film – and I knew I had her. She looked at those polar bears and she was hooked.
You should never underestimate the power of the nuclear family. These days coming from an unbroken home is like having independent means, or Paul Newman eyes, or a big cock. It’s one of life’s true blessings, given to just a lucky few. And difficult to resist.
But those unbroken homes can lull their children into a false sense of security. When I was growing up, I took it for granted that every marriage would be as stable and everlasting as my mum and dad’s – including my own. My parents made it look easy. But it’s not easy at all.
Gina would probably have washed her hands of Glenn years ago if her mother had lived. But she died of breast cancer just before Gina walked into the radio station and my life, and suddenly she felt the need to salvage the few ragged bits of family she still had left.
So Glenn came to our wedding, and rolled a joint in front of my mum and dad. Then he tried to get off with one of the bridesmaids. Pushing fifty, he seemed to be under the impression that he was nineteen years old and everything was still before him. He wore leather trousers that went creak-creak-creak when he danced. And, oh, how he danced.
Gina had been so upset that Glenn couldn’t manage even the vaguest impersonation of a father that she didn’t want to send him any photographs of Pat when he was born. But I had put my foot down, insisting the man had a right to see pictures of his only grandchild. And I secretly thought that when Glenn saw our beautiful boy, he would be instantly smitten. When he forgot Pat’s birthday for the third year in a row, I realised that I now had reasons of my own to hate the old hippy bastard.
‘Maybe he’s terrified of being a grandfather,’ I said. ‘Freaked out – isn’t that what he’d call it?’
‘Yes, there’s that,’ Gina said. ‘And there’s also the fact that he’s a selfish arsehole who never grew up. Let’s not forget that.’
Unlike Gina’s mother and father, nobody had ever thought my parents were a golden couple. Nobody had ever thought that their union summed up the spirit of an era. My mum’s picture had never appeared in a glossy magazine – although her prize-winning tomatoes had once been prominently featured in the local rag. But my parents had stayed together for a lifetime. And Gina and I were going to do the same.
Since our wedding day, we had friends who had met someone, fallen in love, married, divorced and started to hate their ex-partner’s guts. That would never happen to us. Though our backgrounds were different, they meant we wanted the same thing.
I wanted a marriage that would last forever because that’s what my parents had. Gina wanted a marriage that would last forever because that was exactly what her parents had never had.
‘That’s what is so good about us,’ Gina told me, ‘our dreams match.’
Gina was mad about my parents and the feeling was mutual. They looked at this blonde vision coming up the garden path with their little grandson, and the pair of them seemed to visibly swell with pleasure, smiling shyly behind their reading glasses and geraniums.
None of them could believe their luck. My parents thought they were getting Grace Kelly. Gina thought she was getting the Waltons.
‘I’m going to take Pat to see your mum and dad,’ she said before I went to work. ‘Can I borrow your mobile phone? The battery’s flat on mine.’
I was happy to lend it to her. I can’t stand those things. They make me feel trapped.
A shiver of panic ran through the gallery.
‘The fly’s back!’ the director said. ‘We got the fly!’
There it was on the monitor. The studio fly.
Our fly was a huge beetle-black creature with wings as big as a wasp’s and a carcass so bloated that it seemed to have an undercarriage. On a close-up of Marty reading his autocue, we watched the fly lazily circle our presenter’s head and then bank off into a long slow climb.
The fly lived somewhere in the dark upper reaches of the studio, up there among the tangle of sockets, cables and lights. The fly only ever put in an appearance during a show, and up in the gallery the old-timers said that it was responding to the heat of the studio lights. But I always thought that the fly was attracted to whatever juice it is that human glands secrete when they are on live television. Our studio fly had a taste for fear.
Apart from the fly’s aerial display, Marty’s interview with Cliff was going well. The young green started off nervously, scratching his stubble, tugging his filthy dreadlocks, stuttering his way through rambling sentences and even committing television’s cardinal sin of staring directly into the camera. But Marty could be surprisingly gentle with nervous guests and, clearly sympathetic to Cliff’s cause, he eventually made the young man relax. It was only when Marty was winding up the interview that it all began to go wrong.
‘I want to thank Cliff for coming in tonight,’ Marty said, unusually solemn, brushing away the studio fly. ‘And I want to thank all his colleagues who are living in trees out at the airport. Because the battle they are fighting is for all of us.’
As the applause swelled, Marty reached out and shook his guest’s hand. Cliff held it. And continued to hold it. Then he reached inside the grubby, vaguely ethnic coat he was wearing and produced a pair of handcuffs. While Marty watched with an uncertain smile, Cliff snapped one metal ring around his own wrist and the other around Marty’s.
‘Free the birds,’ Cliff said quietly. He cleared his throat.
‘What – what is this?’ Marty asked.
‘Free the birds!’ Cliff shouted with growing confidence. ‘Free the birds!’
Marty shook his head. ‘Do you have the key for this thing, you smelly little shit?’
Up in the gloaming of the gallery we watched the scene unfold on the bank of screens shining in the darkness. The director carried on choreographing the five cameras – ‘Stay on Marty, two…give me a close-up of the handcuffs, four…’ – but I had the feeling that you only get when live television is going very wrong, a feeling which somehow combines low-grade nausea, paralysis and terrible fascination, as it sits there in the pit of your stomach.
And suddenly there was the fly, hovering for a few seconds by Cliff’s hair, then executing a perfect landing on the bridge of his nose.
‘Free the birds!’
Marty considered his arm, unable to quite believe that he was really chained to this scruffy young man whose make-up was starting to melt under the lights. Then he picked up the water jug that was on the table between them and, almost as if he were trying to swat the studio fly, smashed it into Cliff’s face. There was an eruption of blood and water. Marty was left holding just the jug’s broken handle.
‘Fuck the birds,’ he said. ‘And bugger the hole in the ozone layer.’
A floor manager appeared on camera, his mouth open with wonder, his headphones dangling around