The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys. Tony Parsons
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you? Semi-separated. That’s a suitably vague way of putting it. I haven’t heard that one before. Semi-separated. That’s very good. That just about covers any eventuality. That should allow him to string both of you along nicely. He can keep the little wife at home making sushi while he sneaks off with you to the nearest love hotel.’
‘Oh, Harry. The least you could do is wish me well.’
‘Who is he? Some Japanese salary man who gets his kicks by sleeping with western women? You can’t trust the Japanese, Gina. You think you’re the big expert, but you don’t know them at all. They don’t have the same value system as you and me. The Japanese are a cunning, double-dealing race.’
‘He’s American.’
‘Well, why didn’t you say? That’s even worse.’
‘You wouldn’t like anyone I got involved with, would you, Harry? He could be an Eskimo and you would say – “Ooh, Eskimos, Gina. Cold hands, cold heart. Steer well clear of Eskimos, Gina.”’
‘I just don’t understand why you’ve got this thing about foreigners.’
‘Perhaps because I tried loving someone from my own country. And he broke my heart.’
It took me a moment to realise that she was talking about me.
‘Does he know you’ve got a kid?’
‘Of course he knows. Do you think I would hide that from anyone?’
‘And how does he feel about it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Is he interested in Pat? Is he worried about the boy? Does he care about his wellbeing? Or does he just want to fuck his mother?’
‘If you’re going to talk like that, Harry, I’m going to hang up.’
‘How else am I meant to put it?’
‘We haven’t talked about the future. We haven’t got that far.’
‘Let me know when you get that far.’
‘I will. But please don’t use Pat as a rod for my back.’
Is that what I was doing? I couldn’t tell where my genuine concern ended and my genuine jealousy began.
Pat was one of the reasons I wanted to see Gina’s boyfriend dead in a car crash. But I knew he wasn’t the only reason. Maybe he wasn’t even the main reason.
‘Just don’t try to poison my son against me,’ I said.
‘What are you talking about, Harry?’
‘Pat tells everyone he meets that you said you love him but you only like me.’
She sighed.
‘That’s not what I said. I told him exactly what I’ve just told you. I told him that I still loved you both but unfortunately and sadly I was no longer in love with you.’
‘I still don’t know what that means.’
‘It means that I’m glad for the years we spent together. But you hurt me so much that I can never forgive you or trust you again. And I think it means that you’re no longer the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. You’re too much like any other man. Too much like my father.’
‘It’s not my fault that your old man walked out on you and your mum.’
‘You were my chance to get over all that. And you messed it up. You left me, too.’
‘Come on. It was one night, Gina. How many times are we going to have this conversation?’
‘Until you understand the way I feel. If you can do it once, you can do it a thousand times. That’s the first law of fucking around. The unified theory of fucking around clearly states that if they do it once, they will do it again and again. You broke my trust and I just don’t know how to mend it. And that hurts me too, Harry. I wasn’t trying to turn Pat against you. I was just trying to explain the situation to him. How do you explain it?’
‘I can’t explain it. Not even to myself.’
‘You should try. Because if you don’t understand what happened to us, you’re never going to be happy with anyone.’
‘You explain it to me.’
She sighed. You could hear her sighing all the way from Tokyo.
‘We had a marriage that I thought was working, but you thought was becoming routine. You’re a typical romantic, Harry. A relationship doesn’t measure up to your pathetic and unrealistic fantasy so you smash it up. You ruin everything. And then you’ve got the nerve to act like the injured party.’
‘Who’s providing the armchair psychology? Your Yank boyfriend?’
‘I’ve discussed what happened with Richard.’
‘Richard? Is that his name? Richard. Hah! Jesus Christ.’
‘Richard is a perfectly ordinary name. It’s certainly no stranger than Harry.’
‘Richard. Rich. Dicky. Dick. Old Richard Dicky-dickhead.’
‘Sometimes I look at you and Pat, and I honestly can’t tell which one is the four-year-old.’
‘It’s easy. I’m the one who can pee without getting anything on the floor.’
‘Blame yourself for all this,’ she said, just before she hung up. ‘It happened because you didn’t appreciate what you had.’
That wasn’t true. I was smart enough to know what I had. But too dumb to know how to keep it.
Like any couple living under the same roof, we soon developed our daily rituals.
Just after daybreak, Pat would stagger bleary-eyed into my bedroom, asking me if it was time to get up. I would tell him that it was still the middle of the bloody night and he would climb into bed with me, immediately falling asleep in the spot where Gina used to sleep, throwing his arms and legs about in his wild, childish dreams until eventually I would give up trying to get any more rest and get up.
I would be reading the papers in the kitchen when Pat dragged himself out of bed, and I would immediately hear him sneak into the living room and turn on the video.
Now that Pat was out of nursery and I was out of a job, we could take our time getting ready. But I was still reluctant to let him do exactly what he wanted to do, and what he wanted to do was watch videos all day long. So I would go and turn the video off and escort him to the kitchen, where he would toy with a bowl of Coco Pops until I gave him his freedom.
After we were washed and dressed, I would take him over the park on his bike. It was called Bluebell, and it still had the stabilisers on. Pat and I sometimes discussed removing the stabilisers and trying to ride it with just two wheels. But it seemed like an impossible leap forward to both of us. Knowing when the time was right to remove a bike’s stabilisers was the kind of thing that Gina was good at.
In the afternoons my mother would usually collect Pat and this would give me a chance to do some shopping, clean up the house, worry about money, pace the floor and imagine Gina moaning with pleasure in the bed of another man.
But in the morning, we went to the park.
Pat liked to ride his bike by this open-air swimming pool at the edge of the park.
The little pool was kept empty all year round apart from a few weeks early in the summer when the council grudgingly filled it with heavily chlorinated water which made the local children smell as though they had been dipped in industrial waste.
Long before the summer was over, the water would