four

      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 certainly a lot less than there were. Families like us, we’re practically an endangered species. Gina acted as though my mum and my dad and I were the last of the nuclear families, 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