Twenty-Three

      Glenn was dressed in his winter plumage – a ratty Afghan coat draped over a shiny blue tank top that revealed the hairs on his scrawny chest, and hipsters so tight that they made a mountain out of his molehill. He was so far out of fashion that he had just come back in style.

      ‘Hello, Harry man,’ he said, clasping my hand in some obscure power-to-the-people shake that thirty years ago probably signalled the revolution was about to commence. ‘How you doing? Is the little dude around? All well? Sweet, sweet.’

      There was a time when I wanted my old man to be more like Gina’s dad. A time when I wished my father had appeared in glossy magazines in his youth, grinned on Top of the Pops once or twice in the early seventies and shown some interest in the world beyond the rose bushes at the end of his garden. But as I looked at Glenn’s wizened old bollocks sticking up through his tight trousers, it seemed like a long time ago.

      Glenn’s youngest daughter was lurking behind him. At first I thought that Sally was in a bad mood. She came into the house all surly, avoiding eye contact by taking a great interest in the carpet, letting her stringy brown hair – longer than I remembered it – fall over her pale face as if she wanted to hide from the world and everything in it. But she wasn’t really in a bad mood at all. She was fifteen years old. That was the problem.

      I took them into the kitchen, depressed at the sight of two of Gina’s relatives turning up out of the blue and wondering how soon I could get shot of them. But I softened when Sally’s face lit up – really lit up – when Pat padded into the room with Peggy. Perhaps she was human after all.

      ‘Hi Pat!’ she beamed. ‘How you doing?’

      ‘Fine,’ he said, giving no sign that he remembered his mother’s half-sister. What was she to him? Half an aunt? A step-cousin? These days we have relatives we haven’t even invented names for yet.

      ‘I made you a tape,’ she said, fumbling in her rucksack and eventually producing a cassette without its case. ‘You like music, don’t you?’

      Pat stared at the tape blankly. The only music I could remember him liking was the theme from Star Wars.

      ‘He likes music, doesn’t he?’ she asked me.

      ‘Loves it,’ I said. ‘What do you say, Pat?’

      ‘Thank you,’ he said. He took the tape and disappeared with Peggy.

      ‘I remembered how much he liked hip-hop when we were all staying at my dad’s place,’ she said. ‘There’s just a few of the classics on there. Coolio. Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Tupac. Doctor Dre. Stuff like that. Things that a little kid might like.’

      ‘That’s really kind of you,’ I said.

      They sipped their drinks in silence – herbal tea for Glenn, regular Coke for Sally – and I felt a stab of resentment at these reminders of Gina’s existence. What were they doing here? What did either of these people have to do with my life? Why didn’t they just fuck off?

      Then Pat or Peggy must have stuffed Sally’s tape into the stereo because suddenly an angry black voice was booming above a murderous bass line in the living room.

      ‘You fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you – so that would be a dumb fucking, mother-fucking thing to fucking do.’

      ‘That’s lovely,’ I said to Sally. ‘He’ll treasure it. So – you visiting your dad again?’

      She shook her head. ‘I’m living there now,’ she said, shooting her old man a look from under her ratty fringe.

      ‘A few problems back home,’ Glenn said. ‘With my exlady. And her new partner.’

      ‘Old hippies,’ Sally sneered. ‘Old hippies who can’t stand the thought of anybody else having fun.’

      ‘Heavy scene with the new guy,’ Glenn said. ‘Bit of a disciplinarian.’

      ‘That moron,’ Sally added.

      ‘And how’s your boyfriend?’ I asked, remembering the ape-boy smirking on the sofa.

      ‘Steve?’ she said, and I thought I saw the sting of tears in her eyes. ‘Packed me in, didn’t he? The fat pig. For Yasmin McGinty. That old slapper.’

      ‘But we spoke to Gina the other night,’ Glenn said, his foggy brain finally getting down to business. ‘And we promised that we would look in on you and Pat if we were in the neighbourhood.’

      Now I understood what they were doing here. No doubt they were responding to Gina’s prompting. But in their own ham-fisted way, they were trying to help.

      ‘Heard you’ve got a new gig,’ Glenn said. ‘Just wanted to say that the boy’s welcome to crash with us any time.’

      ‘Thanks, Glenn. I appreciate the offer.’

      ‘And if you ever need a babysitter, just give me a call,’ Sally said, hiding behind her hair and staring at a point somewhere beyond my shoulder.

      It was really sweet of her. And I knew I needed a bit of extra cover with Pat now that I was working part-time. But Jesus Christ. I wasn’t that desperate.

      Cyd loved London the way only a foreigner could love it.

      She saw past the stalled traffic, the dead pubs, the congealed poverty of the council estates. She looked beyond the frightened pensioners, the girls who looked like women, the women who looked like men, the men who looked like psychos. She saw beyond all of that. She told me the city was beautiful.

      ‘At night,’ Cyd said. ‘And from the air. And walking across the royal parks. It’s so green – the only city I ever saw that is greener than Houston.’

      ‘Houston’s green?’ I said. ‘I thought it was some dusty prairie town.’

      ‘Yeah, but that’s because you’re a dumb limey. Houston is green, mister. But not as green as here. You can walk right across the centre of town through the three royal parks – St James’s, Green Park, Hyde Park – and your shoes never touch anything but green, green grass. Do you know how far that is?’

      ‘A mile or so,’ I guessed.

      ‘It’s four miles,’ she said. ‘Four miles of flowers, trees and green. And people riding horses! In the heart of one of the biggest cities on the planet!’

      ‘And the lake,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget the lake.’

      We