Men From the Boys
Tony Parsons

For my son.And for my daughter, too.

‘I remember everything!’ cried Pinocchio. ‘Tell me quickly, dear snail, where did you leave my good fairy? What is she doing? Has she pardoned me? Does she still remember me? Does she love me still?’

Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Part one: autumn term – the secret language of girls

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part two: spring term – if i were a boy

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Part three: summer term – what are you waiting for?

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part one: autumn term – the secret language of girls

One

September. The first day of school. New blue blazers everywhere, leaves and conkers underfoot, but an untouched sky and summer clinging on. And now I thought I understood why my son had been so quiet and preoccupied all through the long holiday. I should have guessed, shouldn’t I? Sooner or later, there was going to be a girl.

I had wanted to believe it was just because he was almost fifteen.

I watched my son watching the girl. His face got red just looking at her.

‘You could talk to her,’ I said. ‘You could just walk right up to her and – you know. Talk to her.’

Pat laughed. He watched the girl dawdling by the school gates. Black haired, brown eyed. Laughing, swinging a rucksack stuffed with books. Tall for her age. Radiant in the blue blazer of Ramsay MacDonald Comprehensive School. Surrounded by admirers.

‘Talk to her?’ he muttered, all polite disbelief, as though I had said, Levitate, why don’t you? The ladies love a bit of levitation. The chicks go crazy when they see a lad who can levitate. ‘Probably not,’ he said.

‘Is she in your year?’ I said.

He shook his head, and a matted veil of blond hair fell over his eyes. He pushed it away with a sigh, the love-sick Hamlet of the local comp.

‘No, she’s in the year above me.’

So she was fifteen. Or maybe already sixteen. An older woman. I should have guessed he would fall for an older woman.

I watched him fumbling nervously with the Predator football boots that were resting on his lap.

‘Do you know her name?’ I asked. He took a breath. He swallowed. He brushed some flakes of dried mud from his Ramsay Mac blazer. He did not look at me. He kept looking at her. He was afraid he might miss something.

‘Elizabeth Montgomery,’ he said.

The eight syllables tripped off his tongue. The way he said them, it was infinitely more than a name. It was a sigh, a prayer, a kiss, a love song. He slumped back in the passenger seat, weak with exhaustion. It had taken a lot out of him, saying Elizabeth Montgomery’s name.

‘Just talk to her,’ I said, and his face burned again at the very thought of it.

He looked at me. ‘But what would I say?’

‘What do you want to say?’

‘I want to tell her…’ He shook his head, struck dumb, but then it came in a barely audible torrent. ‘I want to tell her that she is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. That her eyes – they shine. They just shine, that’s all. Like…black fire or something.’

I shifted uneasily in my seat.

‘Well, Pat, some of that stuff you might want to save for the second date.’

He was that age where he still believed in the secret language of girls.

The age where you believe that girls speak in an Esperanto that is alien to you – a mere boy, consumed with longing and unworthiness, tongue-tied by youth and yearning.

And I wanted to help him. I really did. I wanted to be the Yoda of love he could turn to. And even if it did not work out with him and Elizabeth Montgomery – if they never fell in love, if he was not the millionaire who shared her wedding day, if she never became the one the angels asked him to recall – then at least I thought I might be able to help him have a conversation with the girl. That did not seem too much to ask.

A distant bell began to ring. Elizabeth Montgomery moved off, the centre of attention in a blue-blazered crowd of boys and girls. It was not just Pat. Everybody loved Elizabeth Montgomery.

I drove him to school every morning. Although by the time they are pushing fifteen you no longer really drive them to school. You drive them close to school and let them walk the rest of the way before you have a chance to embarrass them with kisses, hugs or words of sage advice on the mysteries of attraction. He opened the passenger door.

‘You around tonight?’ I said.

He pushed his hair out of his eyes. It had grown long over the summer. ‘I’ve got my Lateral Thinking Club after school and then I’m around,’ he said. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m around,’ I said. ‘But late – there’s some black-tie thing. The show’s up for an award. Lateral Thinking?’

‘You know. Thinking outside the box. Creative thinking. Edward de Bono.’

‘Oh right – Edward de Bono. Used to be married to Cher. No, that was Sonny Bono. Before your time.’

‘Everybody was before my time,’ he laughed, getting out of the car. ‘I haven’t had my time yet.’

He slammed the door shut and looked at me through the window.

‘Enjoy your Lateral Thinking,’ I said. ‘And talk to her, kiddo. Talk to Elizabeth Montgomery.’

He waved and went. That was my son. Some kids his age were out mugging old ladies for their iPods. But he had his Lateral Thinking Club and his one-way love for Elizabeth Montgomery. I watched him go as the bell faded away.

Parents were still milling around, so I did not look twice at the woman parked directly across from the school gates. In fact, I didn’t really look at her once. But then she got out of her car and I saw that she was watching Pat too.

And now I looked.

She was tall, blonde, and a little too thin. Dressed for serious exercise – a dark tracksuit, proper trainers – and a raincoat thrown over the top of her running clothes. Looking a touch unkempt and exhausted, but who doesn’t in the aftermath of the school run? Despite the blue September sky, the morning was cold enough for me to see her breath.

I stared straight at her, and straight through her and then we both watched Pat go through the gates, the tail of his white shirt already coming out of his trousers, unfurling like a flag of surrender.

And then I looked at her again and something deep inside me fell away.

Because I always think that it is bizarre – no, I always think that it is unbelievable – that you can love someone, really and truly love someone, and then one day you do not recognise their face.

If you have loved someone, you would think that you would know that face always and forever – wouldn’t you? Shouldn’t every line of that face be stamped on your heart?

But it is not. Your heart forgets.

Especially after – what? Seven years? Could it really be seven years since I had seen her? Where did seven years go?

She got into her car and as she pulled away she looked at me with a kind of wary interest.

So she felt it too. Who is this stranger?

And by then it was all coming back to me. All of it. Oh yes. She had changed – older, thinner and many miles travelled in worlds that had nothing to do with me – but I remembered Gina.

I remembered loving her more than I had ever loved anyone, and I remembered our marriage and the birth of our son, and I remembered how it felt to sleep by her side. And I remembered how all that was good had gone bad, and how it had hurt so much that I truly believed nothing could ever be good again.

So, yes, now that I came to think of it, she did look vaguely familiar.

We envied families who had had a good divorce.

Families where the love was still intact, despite everything. Families where they remembered every birthday – on the actual day. Families that did not let entire years slip by, entire years just wasted. Families where the absent parent turned up at the weekend on time, stone-cold sober and eager to prove the wise old saying, ‘You don’t divorce your children.’

But some people do.

So we – my son and I – looked longingly on the families that had had a good divorce.

To us, they were like the family in a commercial for breakfast cereal, an impossible ideal that we could never truly aspire to, a wonderful dream that we could only gawp at with our noses pressed up against the windowpane.

Families that had had a good divorce – they were the Waltons to us. They were the Jacksons. They were the Little Broken Home on the Prairie. They were what we would have loved to have been and what we would never be.

Families that had had a good divorce – we could hardly stand to look at them. Because it was nothing like that for us. Me and my boy.

It never felt like much to ask. A life like other lives. A divorce that could hold its head up high. Some love to remain after the love had flown.

Dream on, kiddo.

Home at midnight. And in a bit of a state.

I had not really touched dinner – rubber chicken for five hundred – so now my stomach was growling and my head was reeling and I was a shade drunker than I had planned to be. My bow tie was coming undone. There was a smear of crème brûlée on the black satin collar of my dinner jacket. Now how the hell did that happen?

It was a school night and Pat should have been tucked up in bed like the rest of the family. But he was sitting at the dining-room table, Japanese homework scattered around him, pushing a fistful of hair out of his eyes as I came into the room with the exaggerated care of the accidental drunk.

He was always mad at me if he thought I had drunk more than I could take.

‘Celebrating, are you?’ he said, tapping an impatient biro.

I suddenly realised that I was carrying a bag containing a magnum of champagne and – something else. I looked inside. The something else was a shiny gold ear set on a base of glass and chrome. My award. The show’s award. I placed both the bottle and the award on the table, careful to avoid Pat’s homework.

‘Congratulations,’ he said, softening a little. ‘The show won. You won.’ But then he scowled again when he saw me fumbling with the foil on the bottle. Just a nightcap, I thought.

‘No show tomorrow?’ he said. ‘I thought you had a show tomorrow.’

‘I’ll be all right.’

‘And I thought recovering from hangovers became harder as you got older.’

I had removed the foil and now I was easing off the wire. ‘So they say.’

‘They must be getting really hard for you then,’ he said. ‘Now you’re forty.’

I stopped and looked at him. He had this infuriating smirk on his face. ‘But I’m not forty, am I?’ I said. ‘I’m only thirtynine and three-quarters.’

He got up from the table. ‘You’re almost forty,’ he said, and exhaled the endlessly exasperated sigh that only a teenager can make. He went off to the kitchen and I put the champagne unopened on the table. It was true. We were on air tomorrow. Opening a bottle at midnight was possibly not the best idea I ever had.

Pat came back with a pint glass of water and gave it to me.

‘Dehydration,’ I said, trying to worm my way back into his good books. ‘My body’s dehydrated.’

‘And your brain,’ he said dryly, and he began collecting his books. I saw that he had been waiting up for me. Then he thought of something. ‘Someone called. He wanted you. An old man. He didn’t leave a message.’

‘That’s strange,’ I said. ‘We don’t know any old people, do we?’

‘Apart from you, you mean?’

I chugged down some water and followed him as he went around turning off lights, and checking locked doors.

I watched him making sure we were safe, and with my wife and our daughters sound asleep upstairs, for a few moments it felt as though the family had once again boiled down to just the two of us. The last light went out.

I did not mention his mother.

The next day, when he was back from school, we walked to the large expanse of grass at the end of our street.

The recreation ground, it was called with no apparent irony. There was a patch of concrete where some lost civilisation had once built an adventure playground, brimming with swings and slides and seesaws and all manner of wonders. But that was all long gone, destroyed by vandals and health and safety officers, and now the recreation ground was just a place to boot your ball, or take your dog for a dump, or get your head kicked in after dark.

‘Three and in?’ I said, balancing the football on my forehead, feeling some flakes of dried mud fall away.

Pat was sitting on the grass, lacing his Predator boots. ‘Just take shots at me,’ he said.

We took off our tracksuit tops, threw them down for goalposts and I smiled as Pat went through some stretching exercises. He was tall for his age, all long-limbed awkwardness, and he always seemed surprised at how far and how fast he had grown. But he looked like what he wanted to be. He looked like a goalkeeper. And I really thought he would make the school team this year but I knew better than to mention it.

Some things are too big to talk about.

I curled a shot at him and he leapt up and snatched it from the air. There was a round of mocking applause and we turned and saw a group of teenagers who had annexed the two benches that were the highlight of the recreation ground. They were maybe a bit older than Pat. Or perhaps just wilder. A couple of girls among a group of boys. One of them was a lot bigger than the rest, built more like a man than a boy, and the shadow of his beard looked all wrong above his Ramsay Mac blazer. They leered at us, roosting on the back of the benches with their feet where their baggy-arsed trousers were meant to go.

Pat rolled the ball out to me and I drove it back at him, low and hard. He got down quickly, his body behind the ball. More applause, and I turned to look at them again. In the fading light, their cigarettes glowed like fireflies.

‘That’s William Fly,’ he said. ‘The big one.’

‘Just ignore them,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

Pat threw the ball out to me and I trapped it, took another touch, and banged it back. Pat skipped across his goalmouth and hugged the ball to his midriff. No applause this time, and I looked up to see the little group had wandered off to the knackered strip of shops that lay beyond the recreation ground.

‘William Fly,’ Pat said. ‘He nearly got expelled for putting something down the toilet.’

‘What did he put down the toilet?’

‘The physics teacher,’ he said, bouncing the ball at his feet. ‘William Fly is famous.’

He kicked the ball back to me.

‘No,’ I said, watching it coming. ‘Winston Churchill is famous. Dickens. Beckham. David Frost. Justin Timberlake is famous. This guy is not famous. He’s just a hard nut.’

‘Same thing,’ Pat said. ‘Same thing when you’re at school.’

He was on the balls of his feet, springing around the goalmouth because he saw me flicking up the ball, getting ready to unload my legendary volley. I laughed, happy to be here, and happy to be alone with my son.

The ball came off my instep with a crisp smack. Pat threw himself sideways, stretched at his full length, but he couldn’t get to it.

Then he went to get the ball while I ran round in circles in the fading light, trying to avoid what irresponsible dog owners had left behind, my arms held aloft in triumph.

Cyd went to the foot of the stairs and called their names. All three of them. Pat. Peggy. Joni. My kid. Her kid. Our kid. Although after ten years we thought of them all as our kids.

From the kitchen I heard chairs being shoved back from computers, doors slamming, laughter. A high, tiny voice struggling to make its point amid two bigger voices. And then a small herd of elephants – our mob coming down for dinner. Cyd came back and watched me trying to chop up parsley without removing a few fingers.

‘Did you tell him yet?’ Cyd said.

I shook my head. ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘The time wasn’t right.’

‘He has to see her,’ she said. ‘He has to know she’s back. He has to see his mother.’

I nodded. I wanted him to see her. I wanted it to be great.

Cyd poured the pasta into a colander and looked at me through the steam.

‘Are you afraid of him getting hurt, Harry? Or are you afraid of losing him?’

‘Can’t I be afraid of both?’

Our mob came into the dining room. Pat. Peggy. Joni. This was a bit of an event because we rarely ate dinner together.

My radio show, Marty Mann’s Clip Round the Ear, went on air at ten, four nights a week, so I was usually around for dinner. But at seven Joni had the social life of Paris Hilton, a constant round of playdates and dance lessons. Peggy had a best friend – the kind of giddy, isolationist, all-consuming friendship you have at fifteen – and was often at the friend’s house, which wasn’t a problem just as long as she observed the curfew. Pat had Lateral Thinking and football. And Cyd’s catering business, Food Glorious Food, meant she was sometimes going out to work when everyone else was coming home.

So often, only bits and pieces of the family sat down for dinner together. But not tonight. Tonight we were eating together, and Cyd had made spaghetti meatballs, because it always felt like celebration food. So I naturally felt a spike of irritation when the doorbell rang just as I was about to take off my apron.

Here’s one for the show, I thought, as my family began without me. Reasons to be angry, number ninety-three. Someone ringing your doorbell when you never asked them to.

There was an old man on my doorstep, eyes bright behind his glasses.

He was short but too broad in the shoulder to be thought of as small. And immaculate – everything about him was smart, in an old-fashioned, Sunday-best sort of way. He was wearing a shirt and tie with a dark blazer and lighter trousers. Clean-shaven and smelling of things that I thought that they had stopped making years ago. Old Spice and Old Holborn.

The neatness of this old man – that’s what I noticed most of all. Even at that first moment of seeing him, that was what I saw above everything – that military bearing, tidy and trim and ship-shape to the point of fanaticism.

As though he was on parade, and he would always be on parade.

He blinked at me through his glasses.

‘Good evening,’ he said, his voice thick with formality and old London, and I wondered what he could possibly be selling that I could conceivably wish to buy. ‘I’m looking for Mr Silver.’

‘You found him,’ I said coldly. I could hear my family eating dinner behind me.

And then the old man laughed at me.

He took me in – the white Ted Baker shoes that I wore to stave off the black day that I bought a pair of slippers, the frayed black jeans from Boss Homme, the floral Cath Kidston apron – and the cheeky old git looked at me as if I was some kind of transsexual.

I felt like saying, It’s an apron, not a frilly pink dress. What do you wear when you’re chopping parsley? But he probably never chopped parsley in his life.

‘But you’re not Pat Silver,’ he said, bristling slightly, and despite the effort to be polite, I could see he had a temper on him. It happens as you get older. You just get grumpier and grumpier. By the time that Marty Mann is that age, he will probably be on the roof of some public building with a high-velocity rifle.

‘Pat’s my son,’ I said, and I could see no connection that this belligerent old hobbit could possibly have to my boy. And then I got it. ‘And my dad,’ I said, as the ship came out of the mist. ‘You’re looking for my father, aren’t you?’ We stared at each other. ‘You better come inside,’ I said.

‘Kenneth Grimwood,’ he said, and we shook hands. ‘I was in the same mob as your dad.’

He called their outfit his mob – the same word I used to describe my family, and I remembered that they were as close as a family, that diminishing band of brothers, those old men who had been Royal Naval Commandos before they were out of their teens.

‘We served together,’ Ken Grimwood said, as we came down the hall. My family looked up at us from their pasta, as I wondered – do people do that any more? Talk about serving? These days everyone wants to be served.

He stared at them and gave no sign of embarrassment, no sense that he even saw them. ‘Your dad and me were in Italy together,’ he said. ‘Sicily. Salerno. Anzio. Monte Cassino.’

And suddenly I felt a mounting excitement. Because this old man must have been with my father at Elba. Where he won his medal. Where he nearly died.

I remembered my dad taking his shirt off on summer days on English beaches and in our back garden, and people who did not know him staring with horror at the starburst of scar tissue that completely covered his torso. That was from Elba.

I wanted to know all about it. So much had been lost, so much that I would never know. Here was my last link to the past.

‘And Operation Brassard,’ I said. Oh, I knew all about it. I had read books. I knew everything apart from what had actually happened. What it was like. ‘The raid on Elba. You must have been with him at Elba.’

But the old man shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t make it as far as Elba,’ he said, and he stared at my youngest daughter. She had a loose front tooth and was working it with her tongue as she stared back at the old man.

I felt the disappointment flood me. He wasn’t at Elba? Then I would never know.

Cyd was on her feet and smiling. She came over to us and shook his hand. Introductions were made. She pointed at our children, told him their names.

‘You’re having your tea,’ Ken said, and I hadn’t heard that for years. It was a word from my childhood – when your lunch was your dinner and your dinner was your tea.

Cyd asked him to join us and he took one look at what we were eating and recoiled. For a moment I thought he was going to say something about, ‘Foreign muck,’ which I also had not heard for a while. But instead he looked at Pat – really looked at him – with a sly smile.

‘You’re the grandson,’ Ken said. ‘You’re the apple of his eye.’ The old man nodded emphatically. ‘Named after him, you are. He thinks the sun shines out of your arse.’

A silence settled across the dining room. Not total silence – I realised that Bach’s ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ was playing on the Bose. Joni covered her face with her hands.

‘Arse,’ she guffawed. ‘The man said arse.’

‘No need for you to repeat it, young lady,’ Cyd snapped, and our daughter looked at her plate of pasta with wry raised eyebrows.

Ken Grimwood looked at me appraisingly. I was still wearing my Cath Kidston. I quickly pulled it off and tossed it aside. I did not want him to see me in an apron. Even if he wasn’t at Elba.

‘Our mob are marching,’ he said, ‘that’s why I’m here.’

Then I watched in horror as he took out a pack of cigarettes with a death’s head covering most of the packet. Perhaps I imagined it, but I think I heard Cyd’s intake of breath.

‘Didn’t have any Old Holborn in your newsagent,’ he told me, as if I was personally to blame. ‘The geezer didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Foreign chap.’

The children were all staring at him, their dinner forgotten. They had never seen someone taking out a pack of fags in our house – or any house – before. That twenty-pack of Silk Cuts had the exotic danger of an Uzi, or a gram of crack cocaine, or a ton of bootleg plutonium.

‘You know,’ Ken said. ‘At the Cenotaph. The eleventh hour of the eleventh month of the eleventh day.’ He stuck a Silk Cut in his mouth. ‘Nearest Sunday, anyway,’ he said, fumbling in his blazer for a light. ‘What did I do with those Swan Vestas?’ he muttered.

My wife looked at me as if she would tear out my heart and liver if I did not stop him immediately. So I took his arm and gently steered him to the back garden.

I sat him down at the little table at the back, just beyond the Wendy House. Through the glass I could see my family eating their dinner. Joni was still laughing at the hilarity of someone saying ‘arse’ and thinking they could smoke in our house.

And I realised that Ken Grimwood talked about my father in the present tense.

‘But he died ten years ago,’ I said, afraid he might unravel. ‘More than ten years. Lung cancer.’

Ken just looked thoughtful. Then he struck a match, lit up and sucked hungrily on his Silk Cut. I had brought a saucer out with me – we hadn’t owned an ashtray since the last century – and I pushed it towards him.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Someone should have told you.’

He took it surprisingly well. Perhaps he had seen enough death – as a young man, as an old man – to vaccinate him against the shock. I had seen a few of them over the years – those old men from my dad’s mob. I remembered their green berets at the funeral of my father, and later my mother, although there were less of them by then. But Ken Grimwood was new to me.

‘You lose touch over the years,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘Some of our mob – well, they liked the reunions, the marching, putting on the old medals.’ He considered his Silk Cut and coughed for a bit. ‘That wasn’t for me.’ He looked at me shrewdly. ‘Or your old man.’

It was true. For most of his life, my father never gave me the impression that he wanted to remember the war. Forgetting seemed like more his thing. It was only towards the end, when the time was running out, that he talked about going back to Elba, and seeing the graves of boys that he had known and loved and lost before they were twenty. But he never got around to it. No time.

And it turned out that Ken Grimwood’s time was running out too.

‘Lung cancer,’ he said casually. ‘Yeah, that’s what I’ve got.’

He stubbed out his Silk Cut, lit up another and saw me looking at him, and his cigarette, and his fag packet with a skull. ‘You’ve got to go sometime, son,’ he chuckled, dry-eyed and enjoying my shock. ‘I reckon I’ve had a good innings.’

And we sat there in the twilight until he could not force any more smoke into his dying lungs, and my meatballs had gone stone cold.

I walked him to the bus stop at the end of our road.

It took some time. I had not noticed until we were out on the street that he had a slow, strange walk – this laborious, rolling gait. When we finally got there I shook his hand and went back home.

Cyd was watching the bus stop from the window. She’s a kind person, and I knew she would not approve of me abandoning him on the mean streets of Holloway.

‘But you can’t just leave him out there, Harry,’ she said. ‘It’s dangerous.’

‘He’s a former Commando,’ I said. ‘If he’s anything like my dad, he’s probably killed dozens of Nazis and he’s probably had bits of old shrapnel worming its way out of his body for the last sixty years. He can catch a bus by himself. He’s only going to the Angel.’

She started to follow me into the kitchen. And then she stopped. And I heard it too.

A smack of air, then breaking glass, and then laughter. And again. The crack of air, the breaking glass, and laughter. We went back to the window and saw the two men standing in front of the house across the street.

No, not men – boys.

A security light came on – the kind of blinding floodlight that was becoming increasingly popular on our street – and illuminated William Fly and his mate, a spud-faced youth who cackled by his side, every inch the bully’s apprentice.

Fly lifted his hand, pointing it at the light, and I heard my wife gasp beside me as the air pistol fired.

The security light went dark in a tinkle of glass and a ripple of laughter.

They moved on down the street, letting the next security light come on, and I was glad that we had decided against getting one. Fly shot out that light too, and they sauntered on, down to the bus stop where the old man was sitting.

My wife looked at me, but I just kept staring out the window, willing the bloody bus to come.

The two boys looked down at the old man.

He stared at them curiously. They were saying something to him. He shook his head. I saw the air pistol being brandished in the right hand of William Fly.

Then my wife said my name.

And we both saw the glint of the blade.

I was out of the house and running down the street, a diminished number of the security lights coming on as I went past them, and I was almost upon them when I realised that the knife was in the hand of the old man.

And they were laughing at him.

And as I watched, Ken Grimwood jammed the blade deep into his left leg.

As hard as he could, just below the knee, half of the blade disappearing into those neatly pressed trousers and the flesh beneath. And he did not even flinch.

There was a long moment when we stood and stared at the knife sticking out of the old man’s leg.

Me. And the boys. And then William Fly and Spud Face were gone, and I was approaching Ken Grimwood as if in a dream.

Still sitting at the bus stop, still showing no sign of pain, he pulled out his knife and rolled up his trousers.

His prosthetic leg was pink and hairless – that’s what struck me, the lack of hair – and it was like a photograph of a limb rather than the thing of flesh and blood and nerves that it had replaced.

And all at once I understood why this old man had not been at Elba with my father.

Two

By the time I came down the dishes from last night were clean and drying, and there was tea and juice on the table.

Pat was shuffling about the kitchen. I could smell toast. I went to pull the newspaper from the letterbox and when I came back he was putting breakfast on the table.

The girls were still upstairs. Pat was Mister Breakfast. He had been Mister Breakfast since the time he had been old enough to boil a kettle. That was the thing about the pair of us – it worked. And it had always worked.

The thing that used to get on my nerves was when people said to me, ‘Oh, so you’re his mother as well as his father?’ I could never work that one out.

I was his father. And if his mother wasn’t around, then I could still only be his father. If you lose your right arm, does your left arm become both your right and left arm? No, it doesn’t. It’s still just your left arm. And you get on with it. Both his mother and his father? Hardly. It took everything I had to pull off being his dad.

‘You all right?’ he said, wiping his hands on the dishcloth, looking at me sideways.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘All good.’

And still I did not mention his mother.

Joni appeared. At seven, her footsteps were so light that, if she was not rushing somewhere, or talking, or singing, you often did not hear her coming. You turned around and she was just there. She shuffled slowly towards the table, dressed for school but still more asleep than awake.

She yawned widely. ‘I don’t want to eat anything today,’ she said.

‘You have to eat something,’ I said.

She cocked a leg and hauled herself up on her chair, like a cowboy getting on his horse.

‘But look,’ she said.

She opened her mouth and as Pat and I bent to peer inside, she began to manoeuvre one of her front teeth with her tongue. It was so loose that she could get it horizontal.

She closed her mouth. Her eyes shone with tears. Her chin wobbled.

Pat went off to the kitchen and I sat down at the table. ‘Joni,’ I said, but she held up her hands, cutting me off, pleading for understanding.

‘Cereal hurts my gums,’ she said, waving her hands. ‘Not just Cookie Crisps. All of them.’

I touched her arm. Upstairs I could hear Cyd and Peggy laughing outside the bathroom door. I groped for the correct parental soundbite.

‘Breakfast is, er, the most important meal of the morning,’ I reminded her, but my daughter looked away with frosty contempt, furiously worrying at her wonky tooth with the tip of her tongue.

‘There you go,’ Pat said.

He placed a sandwich in front of Joni. Two slices of lightly toasted white bread with the crusts removed, the chemical yellow of processed cheese sticking out of the sides like a toxic spill. Cut into triangles.

Her favourite.

Pat returned to the kitchen. I picked up the newspaper. Joni lifted the sandwich in both hands and began to eat.

Here’s a good one for the Lateral Thinking Club – if a marriage produces a great child, then can that marriage ever be said to have failed?

If the marriage produces some girl or boy who just by existing makes this world a better place, then has that marriage failed just because Mum and Dad have split up? Is the only criterion of a successful marriage staying together? Is that really all it takes? Hanging in there? Butching it out?

Does my friend Marty Mann have a successful marriage because it has lasted for years? Does it matter that he likes his Latvian lap dancers two at a time before going home to his wife? Has he got a successful marriage because it remained untouched by the divorce courts?

If a woman and a man abandon their wedding vows and run eagerly through all the usual hateful clichés – saying hurtful things, sleeping with other people, cutting up clothes, running off with the milkman – then is that a failed marriage?

Well, obviously. It’s a bloody disaster.

But still – I could not bring myself to call my union with my first wife a failed marriage. Despite everything. Despite crossing the border between love and hate and then going so far into alien territory that we could not even recognise each other.

Gina and I were young and in love. And then we were young and stupid, and getting everything wrong.

First me. Then both of us.

But a failed marriage? Never.

Not while there was the boy.

As the record came to an end, I looked at Marty’s eyes through the studio’s glass wall.

‘Line two,’ I said into the microphone, ‘Chris from Croydon.’ Marty’s fingers flew across the board, as natural as a fish in water, and the light on the mic in front of him went red.

Marty adjusted himself in his chair, and leaned into the mic as if he might snog it.

‘You’re with Marty Mann’s Clip Round the Ear live here on BBC Radio Two,’ Marty said, half-smiling. ‘Enjoying good sounds in bad times. Mmmm, I’m enjoying this ginger nut. Chris from Croydon – what’s on your mind, mate?’

‘I can’t go to the pictures any more, Marty. I just get too angry – angry at the sound of some dopey kid munching his lunch, and angry at the silly little gits – can I say gits? – who think they will disappear into a puff of smoke if they turn their Nokias off for ninety minutes, and angry at the yak-yak-yak of gibbering idiots – ’

‘Know what you mean, mate,’ Marty said, cutting him off. ‘They should be shot.’

‘Whitney Houston,’ I said, leaning forward. ‘“I Will Always Love You”.’

‘And now a song written by the great Dolly Parton,’ Marty said. He knew music. He was from that generation that had music at the centre of its universe. This wasn’t just a hit song from a Kevin Costner film to him. ‘Before all music started sounding like it was made from monosodium glutamate.’

This was the starting point for our show – nothing was as good as it used to be. You know, stuff like pop music, and the human race.

Whitney’s cut-glass yearning began and Marty gave me a thumbs-up as he whipped off his headphones. He barged open the door. ‘Four minutes thirty-seconds on Whitney,’ I said.

‘Great, I can pee slowly,’ he said. ‘What’s next?’

I consulted my notes. ‘Let’s broaden it out,’ I said. ‘Nonspecific anger. Rap about being angry about everything. Being angry with people who litter. Yet also angry with people who make you recycle. Angry about people who swear in front of children, angry at traffic wardens, angry at drivers who want to kill your kids.’

‘Those bastards in Smart cars,’ Marty said, as he kept moving.

‘People, really,’ I said, calling after him. ‘Feeling angry at people. Any kind of rudeness, finger wagging or ignorance. And then maybe go to a bit of Spandau Ballet.’

‘I can do that,’ he said, and then he was gone.

‘Two minutes forty on and we’re back live,’ said Josh, the Oxford graduate who ran our errands – the BBC was full of them, all these Oxbridge double-firsts chasing up wayward mini-cabs – and I could hear the nerves in his voice. But I just nodded. I knew that Marty would be back just as Whitney was disappearing from Kevin Costner’s life forever. We were not new to this.

Marty and I were back on radio now – a couple of old radio hams who had taken a beating on telly and crawled back to where we had begun. It happens to guys like us. In fact, I have often thought that it is the only thing that happens to guys like us. One day the telly ends. But we were making a go of it. A Clip Round the Ear was doing well – we had that glass ear awarded by our peers to prove it. Ratings were rising for a show that played baby boomer standards and boldly proclaimed that everything was getting worse.

Music. Manners. Mankind.

I watched Marty come out of the gents, clumsily fumbling with the buttons on his jeans – I know he was angry about there never being zips on jeans – and saw a couple of guests for the show next door do a double take. Since his golden years as the presenter of late-night, post-pub TV, he had put on a little weight and lost some of that famous carrot-topped thatch. But people still expected him to look as he did when he was interviewing Kurt Cobain.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ I said, and I felt an enormous pang of tenderness for him.

Being on television is a lot like dying young. You stay fixed in the public imagination as that earlier incarnation. Someone who interviews the young and thin Simon Le Bon – they do not grow old as we grow old. But every TV show comes to an end. And, as Marty was always quick to point out, even the true greats – David Frost, Michael Parkinson, Jonathan Ross – have their wilderness years, the time spent working in Australia or getting rat-faced in the Groucho Club, waiting for the call to come again.

Marty settled himself in front of the mic, and pulled on his headphones. I didn’t know if Marty – and by extension, his producer: me – would ever get that call. For every great who comes again there are a thousand half-forgotten faces who never do come again. As much as I loved him, I suspected that Marty Mann was more of a Simon Dee than a David Frost.

‘You are angry because you know how things should be,’ Marty was saying to his constituency, as he teed up Morrissey. ‘Anger comes with experience, anger comes with wisdom. This is A Clip Round the Ear saying embrace your anger, friends. Love your anger. It is proof that you are alive. And – how about a bit of English seaside melancholia: “Everyday Is Like Sunday”.’

Then the two hours were up and we gathered our things and got ready to go home. That was a sign of the times. When we worked on The Marty Mann Show – when he was television’s Marty Mann – we always hung around for hours when we were off air, working our way through the wine, beer and cheese and onion crisps in our lavish green-room banquet, coming down off of that incredible rush you only get from live TV – even if you are behind the cameras. When we were doing The Marty Mann Show ten years ago, we could carouse in the green room until the milkman was on his way. But that was telly then and this was Radio Two now.

Broadcasting House was a bit of a dump when it came to post-gig entertainment. The place did not encourage loitering, or hospitality, or lavish entertaining. There wasn’t a sausage roll in sight. You did your gig and then you buggered off. There was nothing there – just a couple of smelly sofas and some tragic vending machines.

The green room. That was another thing that wasn’t as good as it used to be.

Gina was waiting for me when I came out of work.

Standing across the street from Broadcasting House, in the shadow of the Langham Hotel, just where the creamy calm of Portland Place curves down to the cheapo bustle of Oxford Circus.

She looked more like herself now – or at least I could recognise the woman I had loved. Tall, radiant Gina. Loving someone is a bit like being on TV. A face gets locked in a memory vault, and it is a shock to see it has changed when you were not looking. We both took a step towards each other and there were these long awkward moments as the cars whizzed between us. Then I shouldered my bag and made it across.

‘I couldn’t remember if you were live or not,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘The show,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know if you recorded it earlier. Or if it really was ten till midnight.’

I nodded. ‘A bit late for you, isn’t it?’

‘My body’s still on Tokyo time,’ she said. ‘Or somewhere between there and here.’ She attempted a smile. ‘I’m not sleeping much.’

We stared at each other.

‘Hello, Harry.’

‘Gina.’

We didn’t kiss. We went for coffee. I knew a Never Too Latte just off Carnaby Street that stayed open until two. She took a seat in the window and I went to the counter and ordered a cappuccino with extra chocolate for her and a double macchiato for myself. Then I had to take it back because she had stopped drinking coffee during her years in Tokyo and only drank tea now.

‘How well you know me,’ she said after I had persuaded some Lithuanian girl to exchange a coffee for tea. Was she that sharp when we were together? I don’t think so. She was another one who had got angrier with the years.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Stupid of me not to read your mind.’

And we took it from there.

‘Japan’s over,’ she said. ‘The economy is worse than here.’

‘Nowhere is worse than here,’ I said. ‘Ah, Gina. You could have called.’

‘Yes, I could have called. I could have phoned home and had to be polite to your second wife.’

‘She’s not my second wife,’ I said. ‘She’s my wife.’

My first wife wasn’t listening.

‘Or I could have phoned your PA at work and asked her if you had a window for me next week. I could have done all of that but I didn’t, did I? And why should I?’ She leaned forward and smiled. ‘Because he’s my child just as much as he’s your child.’

I stared at her, wondering if there ever came a point where that was simply no longer true.

And I wondered if we had reached that point years ago.

‘What’s with the keep-fit routine?’ I said, changing the subject. She was in terrific shape.

‘It’s not a routine.’ She flexed her arms self-consciously. ‘I just want to look after myself as I get older.’

I smiled. ‘I can’t see you on the yoga mat.’

She didn’t smile back. ‘I had a scare a couple of years back. A health scare. That was something you missed.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Please don’t apologise.’

‘Jesus Christ – why can’t you just let me say I’m sorry?’

‘And why can’t you just drop dead?’

We stared at our drinks.

We had started out with good intentions. Difficult to believe now, I know, but when we divorced back then we were a couple of idealistic young kids. We really thought that we could have a happy break-up. Or at least a divorce that always did the right thing.

But Gina had blown in and out of our lives. And gradually other things got in the way of good intentions. In my experience it is so easy to push good intentions to the back of the queue – or to have them quietly escorted from the building.

Gina wanted to be a good mother. I know she did. I know she loved Pat. I never doubted that. But she was always one step from fulfilment, and life got in the way, and everything let her down. Her second husband. Working abroad. And me, of course. Me first and worst of all.

We sat in silence for a bit.

‘Is this the way we are going to do it?’ I said.

‘What way?’

‘You know what way, Gina.’

‘What way do you want to do it? Shall we be nice to each other? First time for everything, I guess.’

‘I don’t want us to be this way,’ I said. ‘How long are we going to spit poison at each other?’

‘I don’t know, Harry. Until we get tired of the taste.’

‘I was tired years ago.’

We sat in silence as if the people we had once been no longer existed. As if there was nothing between us. And it wasn’t true.

‘He’s my son too,’ she said.

‘Biologically,’ I said.

‘What else is there?’

‘Are you kidding me? Look, Gina – I think it’s great you’re back.’

‘Liar.’

‘But I don’t want him hurt.’

‘How could he be hurt?’

‘I don’t know. New man. New job. New country. You tell me.’

‘You don’t break up with your children.’

‘I love it when people say that to me. Because it’s just not true. Plenty of people break up with their children, Gina. Mostly, they’re men. But not all of them.’

‘Do you want me to draw you a diagram, Harry?’

‘Hold on – I’ll get you a pen.’

I lifted my hand for the waitress. Gina pushed it down. It was the first time we had touched in years and years, and it was like getting an electric shock.

‘I broke up with you, Harry – not him. I went off you – not him. I stopped loving you – not him. Sorry to break this to you, Harry.’

‘I’ll get over it.’

‘But I never stopped loving him. Even when I was busy. Preoccupied. Absent.’ She sipped at her tea and looked at me. ‘How is he?’

‘Fine. He’s fine, Gina.’

‘He’s so tall. And his face – he has such a lovely face, Harry. He was always a beautiful kid, wasn’t he?’

I smiled. It was true. He was always the most beautiful boy in the world. I felt myself softening towards her.

‘He’s in the Lateral Thinking Club,’ I said, warming up to the theme, happy to talk about the wonder of our son, and we both laughed about that.

‘Bright boy,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know what Lateral Thinking is – thinking outside the box? Training the mind to work better?’

‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘He can explain it better than me.’ I had finished my coffee. I wanted to go home to my family. ‘What do you want, Gina?’

‘I want my son,’ she said. ‘I want to know him. I want him to know me. I know we – I – have wasted so much time. That’s why I want it now. Before it’s too late.’

And I thought it would never be too late. There was a Gina-sized hole in Pat’s life, had been for years, but I thought that it could never be too late to fill it. For both of them – I thought that there would always be time to put things right. That’s how dumb I am. Already my mind was turning to the practicalities of shipping Pat around town.

‘Where you living, Gina?’

‘I’ve got a two-bedroom flat on Old Compton Street,’ she said. ‘Top floor. Plenty of space. Nice light.’ She looked out the window. ‘Five minutes from here.’

I was amused. ‘Soho?’ I said. ‘That’s an interesting choice. What you trying to do – recapture your youth?’

Her mouth tightened at that.

‘I didn’t have any youth, Harry,’ she said. ‘I was married to you.’

Then my phone began to vibrate. I took the call as Gina looked away and a woman with a Jamaican accent told me that they had Ken Grimwood at the hospital.

When he was seven years old my son almost drowned. We were in a quiet corner of Crete called Agios Stephanos – years before the island was claimed by the boys in football shirts – and the last thing we were expecting on our mini-break was death and tragedy. We could get all that at home.

These were the years after I split up with Gina, and then my dad died and then my mum got sick – and it felt like every time you turned around someone was either walking out or dying. We were not really in Crete for sun, sea and Retsina. We just wanted to catch our breath.

In my mind I see a windy, rocky beach. And I see Pat – all skinny limbs and tangled blond mop and baggy trunks, splashing out with a float while I settled down with a paperback.

My son at seven.

He made me smile, because he was wearing a pair of sunglasses that were way too big for him, purchased at the airport and proudly worn ever since, even at night. He would squint at his moussaka and chips in the Cretan twilight.

The waves were whipping up, but it did not cross my mind to be worried. He did not go far. But sometimes you do not have to go far to get into more trouble than you can handle. He had settled down on his float, got all dreamy in the sunlight and then he must have drifted. And by the time he noticed, it was more than drifting.

‘Dad!’

You know your child’s voice. Even on a crowded beach, with small children shouting and calling out on all sides, you know it instantly.

He was trying to stand up, although you couldn’t really stand up on that float, and he kept sinking to one knee as it threatened to pitch him into the sea. And he was scared. Face pale with fear behind those oversized sunglasses. Calling for me.

And I was on my feet and running, my heart a hammer as I ran to the water, suddenly aware of the speed of the clouds, suddenly noticing the swell of the waves, suddenly remembering that it can all fall apart at any moment.

He was a good swimmer. Even at seven. Maybe that’s why it happened, why I was too relaxed about letting him go out with a float. But suddenly it wasn’t enough that he could rescue a plastic brick while wearing his pyjamas.

I crashed through waves that seemed to be at once taking Pat out to open sea and smashing me back to the shore, switching between breaststroke and crawl and back again, getting a sickening gutful of water every time I called his name.

Finally I got to him. One hand on a corner of the float, another wrapped tight round a skinny limb. It was like trying to hold a fish.

And that was when he went into the water.

Flailing white limbs in the foggy depths. Silence, apart from the rushing sound in my ears. And then one of my arms wrapped around his waist as I kicked for the surface. The float was above our heads and somehow I got him on it and I made him lie flat on his belly, while I lumbered back to the beach, telling him that everything was all right. He clung on, somehow still wearing those oversized sunglasses and too numb to cry.

Then finally we were on the beach.

How bad was it? The parental mind has this endless ability to vault to the absolute worst-case scenario. No trouble at all. A parent panics not because of what is happening but because of what might.

But this was bad enough for everyone on the beach to put down their suntan lotion and copies of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and stare at us even when it was clear that nobody was going to die, even as we staggered off to our shared hotel room, both salty with tears and regurgitated Aegean. Bad enough for me to remember for the rest of my life.

And what I remember most is the feeling of trying to reach my son as the sea and the wind and tide combined to push me back to the shore while they tried to carry Pat out to the open sea. That’s what I remember the most. Because sometimes it felt like that was the story of us, the story of me and my boy. Trying to reach each other, wanting to reach each other, but forever kept apart by forces that were bigger than both of us.

And the funny thing about calling your child’s name is that it doesn’t do a blind bit of good.

But you do it anyway.

Ken Grimwood sat propped up in his hospital bed in a robe that enveloped his small body like a circus tent, and when he grinned at me he was gummy as a newborn baby. On the bedside table, his false teeth sat in a glass of water.

‘They found him at the bus depot,’ a Filipina nurse told me. ‘He was unconscious. He couldn’t breathe. And he had a cigarette in his hand. We found this in his pocket.’

She handed me a BBC business card with my name on, as if I might want it back. And I remembered giving it to him before he left my house only because I wanted to get rid of him. And here he was, bounced back into my life because he had my card.

‘I hardly know him,’ I said, keeping my voice down. ‘He’s not actually anything to do with me.’

Ken laughed and we watched him produce a tin of Old Holborn and a packet of Rizlas from somewhere inside his giant robe. He must have been the only person left who wasn’t using roll-ups to smoke illegal substances. He flashed his toothless grin and as the nurse advanced towards him he stuck his smoking paraphernalia under the sheet.

‘Just pulling your leg, sweetheart,’ he said.

She took his blood pressure, shaking her head.

But when she left he produced his baccy tin and his papers. He winked at me slyly.

I walked down to the nurses’ station. The Filipina was there with a large Jamaican duty nurse. They looked at me as if I had done something wrong.

‘Your father is a very sick man,’ the duty nurse said. ‘There’s fluid on his lungs and I don’t know how much longer he can breathe unaided, okay? And of course you are aware that the cancer is at an advanced stage.’

‘He’s not my father,’ I said.

‘Friend of the family?’ the duty nurse asked.

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ I said.

It was clear they wanted the bed. They wanted him out of there. But they would not discharge him without someone to take care of him. And I realised that just because I had been dumb enough to give him my business card, the National Health Service were nominating me.

‘I hardly know him,’ I told them. ‘He was a friend of my father’s. I’ve only met him once. I think he has children. Do his children know? Can’t his children come?’

The nurse looked at me as though I had suggested putting him in a plastic bag and leaving him on the pavement. But she talked to Ken and got a couple of telephone numbers from the old boy. There was a daughter in Essex and a son in Brighton. I quickly took out my phone and began calling.

I got through to an answer machine. And then another answer machine. I left messages on both – telling them what had happened to their father, telling them to come quick, telling them to call me back. Then I held my phone, expecting it to vibrate at any moment. But it did not stir, as if his children were reluctant to claim him too.

Down the hall I could hear a Jamaican accent telling Ken Grimwood that there was no smoking on hospital premises.

And as I stared at the silent phone in my fist, I could hear the mocking sound of the old man’s laughter.

Three

Joni grinned at me with her vampire smile.

Her two front teeth were both gone now. The wonky one had come out in her sandwich and the one next to it had quickly come out in sympathy. It must have been looser than she knew when she was focusing all her attention on the wonky one. So now when she smiled the milk teeth that remained at the sides of her mouth appeared like fangs.

‘I’ll brush my teeth,’ she said, and her gummy grin gave her a jaunty air, like a sailor on shore leave. ‘You get the book.’

‘Okay.’

She had strict bedtime rituals. When she was in her pyjamas and her remaining teeth had been cleaned, she hugged everyone who was in the house and told them she loved them. But she didn’t kiss anyone, because kissing was gross this year. Then she trooped up to her room and I read her a story. As she settled herself under the duvet, I looked at her bookcase for something suitable.

Joni was at that awkward age when she was getting too old for princesses and fairies but was still too young for anything to do with having a crush on boys. My wife and I had made half-hearted attempts to interest her in the Hannah Montana industry and the High School Musical business but when Joni watched the TV shows, or saw the DVDs, she was unmoved by all those white teeth, all that canned laughter and all those teenage children trying to talk like they were in a Neil Simon play. Joni was never going to go for cheesy American rubbish. So I stuck with the classics.

Terrible curses. Murderous adults. Wicked stepmothers. Beautiful maidens being taken to the woods for slaughter. Girls drugged and placed in glass coffins. All the stuff to give a seven-year-old a good night’s sleep.

Tonight it was Aurora.

We settled down. I had just got to the bit where Briar Rose had realised that the nice peasant boy and Prince Philip were – conveniently enough – one and the same when Joni yawned, lay back on her pillow and raised her hand, bidding me stop.

For a long time – years – Joni had been afraid of Maleficent, and at first I thought that she wanted me to stop before I reached the wicked witch losing her rag.

But it wasn’t that.

‘They all end the same way, don’t they?’ said my daughter. ‘The princess stories. They start off a bit different but they all end the same way. The prince saves them and they get married and they live happily ever after.’

I smiled and closed the book. ‘Well, it’s true,’ I said. ‘It’s always the same ending.’ I felt like kissing her on the cheek but I knew that wasn’t allowed. So I just touched her hair. ‘You’re getting a bit old for these stories now.’

She snuggled down and I pulled the duvet up to her chin.

‘It’s a load of arse,’ said my seven-year-old, and I cursed the day that Ken Grimwood had come to our door.

Elizabeth Montgomery was being dropped off at school.

She was in the car in front of us as I pulled up to let Pat out. And I know he saw her too, because he was perfectly still yet poised for flight, like a rabbit who suddenly realises that he is loitering in the fast lane of a motorway.

Elizabeth Montgomery wasn’t being dropped off by her dad. Not unless her dad had a barbed-wire tattoo at the top of his arm, and played the Killers at full volume at eight thirty in the morning in his souped-up BMW. Which I suppose was entirely possible in the lousy modern world.

In the passenger seat, Pat sat petrified.

‘Probably her brother,’ I said, but before the words were out the driver in front had his tongue in Elizabeth Montgomery’s ear, and she was laughing and squirming away. ‘More likely a cousin,’ I said.

And I felt like saying, Ah, don’t care so much, kiddo. Don’t be so quick to say, Here’s my heart. Why not have a game of five-a-side football with it? Go ahead. And I felt like saying, You will meet a dozen like Elizabeth Montgomery. A hundred.

But I didn’t, because I knew it was not true.

My son was almost fifteen years old and there would only ever be one Elizabeth Montgomery.

And I felt it again – I wanted to give him some sage advice. I wanted to say something meaningful about the fleeting nature of desire, or the way the person who cares the most is always the person who gets hurt the most.

I wanted to talk about love. But everything I could have said would have been about forgetting Elizabeth Montgomery. And I knew he could not do that.

So what I said was, ‘I saw Gina.’

He started at his mother’s name. A physical flinch, as if he had been struck. That is what it had come to.

He turned away from Elizabeth Montgomery in the car in front of us and looked at me. And I saw that his eyes were exactly the same colour as his mother’s eyes. This Pacific Ocean blue. The blue you see on a Tiffany catalogue. It is a special blue.

‘What do you mean – you saw her?’

‘She’s back from Japan,’ I said.

‘A holiday?’ he said.

‘Back for good. Back in London. She wants to see you.’

I have this theory about divorce. I have this theory that it is never a tragedy for adults and always a tragedy for children. Adults can lose weight, find someone nicer, get their life back. Divorce gives grown-ups a get-out-of-jail-free card. It is the children who pay the price, and pay it for the rest of their lives. But we can’t admit that, all us scarred veterans of the divorce court, because it would mean admitting that we have inflicted wounds on our children that they will carry for the rest of their lives.

Pat was looking back at Elizabeth Montgomery. But I don’t think he was seeing her any more.

‘How long…’

‘I saw her last week,’ I said. ‘She’s been back for about a month. She wants to see you.’

I watched the fury flush his face. ‘And you tell me now? You get round to telling me now?’

The children of divorced parents hold something back. They get so used to shuttling between warring homes when they are little that it stays with them. This restraint, this pragmatic reserve, this need to be a pint-sized Kofi Annan diplomat. So when they lose it, they really lose it.

He was out of the car, hauling out his rucksack, furious with me. I wasn’t so naïve that I thought it was just me that he was angry about. It was divorce, separation, the absent parent – it was the whole sorry package that he had been handed without ever asking for it.

‘You around tonight?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, and he slammed the passenger door.

I watched him walk through the school gates, his rucksack slung over his shoulder, his shirt miraculously unfurling from his trousers, the swatch of white cloth that appeared as if from a magician’s hat. Then he was gone, but still I sat there, boxed in by the car in front and the car behind.

Watching Elizabeth Montgomery snog the boy with the barbed-wire tattoo, as the bell rang for registration.

Riddle me this, Lateral Thinking Club – she is my daughter but I am not her father: who am I?

I am a step-parent. Ah, but I don’t really believe in the term step-parent. I don’t think the role exists. Not really. For in the end you are either a child’s parent or you are not. And blood does not have a lot to do with it. At least, that is what I would like to believe.

Cyd and I watched Peggy coming down the stairs. She was almost exactly the same age as Pat and yet she seemed to be effortlessly gliding on air to adulthood. Peggy went to stage school, and every day of her life she danced and she sang, and she studied the performing arts and wrestled with the sub-text of difficult plays while other girls her age were snogging older boys with cars and barbed-wire tattoos. While other kids wore blazers, Peggy donned a black leotard and learned to dance jazz, ballet and tap. Above all, she wanted to act, following in the footsteps of Italia Emily Stella Conti, her school’s founder, and her father, a TV cop.

Peggy made life look easy.

Now she was all dressed up for going out – a cowboy hat, and cowboy boots, a retro Motorhead-London T-shirt and a skirt that was way too short. She kissed both of us on the cheek and glided off to the mirror in the hall. We could hear her humming a popular tune.

Cyd was looking at me and smiling. ‘Don’t say it,’ she said.

I looked dumb.

‘You know,’ she said. ‘“You’re not going out dressed like that.”’

What women forget is that men know boys. We know what is in their heads and in their hearts. We are all poachers turned gamekeepers. Every single one of us. And I knew that no boy was going to look at Peggy and think, Yeah, Motorhead, Lemmy and all that, yeah, they were a pretty good band. I knew exactly what they would be thinking, the dirty little bastards. And I didn’t like it.

‘It’s only her dad,’ Cyd said.

We heard a motorbike outside and Peggy ran to the door with a happy, ‘I’ll get it!’

Cyd gave me a look and drifted off to the kitchen. I went to the door and looked out at Peggy’s dad sitting astride his Harley.

Jim Mason. Ten years ago he was the bad boy. The deserter, the fornicator, the runaway. The absent father. But in recent years I had to admit Jim’s stock had risen. After a long, disorderly line of Asian girlfriends in the wake of his marriage to Cyd, he had been married to a nurse from Manila for years – but there had been no more children. And I suspected that must have been a relief for Peggy.

I never really spoke to the guy, beyond platitudes about what the latest weather meant for motorbikes. A couple of years ago, when his TV show was taking off – you might have seen him, he was the divorced, alcoholic detective on PC Filth: An Unfair Cop – he had offered to start paying Peggy’s school fees. I had brushed him off, told him that Cyd and I had it covered. But I felt that he could teach Gina and me a few lessons about how to conduct yourself after a divorce. Despite his inappropriately long hair, and Lewis Leathers, and past crimes, Peggy’s dad was living proof that you could be an absent parent and still be some kind of presence in your child’s life.

An absent parent but a parent still.

Peggy pulled on her helmet and climbed on to the pillion. They both raised their hands and I waved as they shot off, the throaty roar of the Harley ringing through the neighbourhood. The group of kids loitering at the end of the road watched them go. Long after they had disappeared, I could hear the growl of the motorbike.

And I felt a dull ache of resentment towards him. I could not help it. Because although the guy did his best to be a good dad to Peggy, there was so much he had missed. She was my daughter although I would never be her dad. We did not have the unbreakable bonds of blood, but we had something else.

I was the one who was there when, aged ten, she split her head open on the ice rink at Somerset House, foolishly attempting a complicated leap. And I was the one who was there when she endured two terms of bullying at her old school before we got her into Italia Conti. And I was there for other stuff – no blood, no tears. But meals shared together, and TV watched together, and holidays, and walking to school, and a good-night hug. Sometimes I think that stuff is more important than the times of high drama, when there is blood on the ice rink and a mad dash to Accident and Emergency.

She was not my daughter but we had been part of the same family for ten years. And I was more of a father to her than her real dad would ever be – wasn’t I?

Sometimes I thought so. But when she went off once a week on the Harley, looking so happy on that pillion, with her dad the big-shot actor, well, then I wasn’t so sure. And mostly I tried not to think about it at all.

Because it’s like someone says in The Terminator when cyborgs are coming back in time to murder children yet unborn:

You could go crazy thinking about this stuff.

Marty and I sat in the Pizza Express next to Broadcasting House and nobody looked at him twice.

TV fame is like youth or money. It just runs out when you are not looking. Ten years ago, Marty walked into a room and everybody stared at him. But the years on radio had eroded that recognition factor, and we were left unmolested by the early evening crowd.

Next to us was a table full of ageing lads in business suits. Their banter was of a sexual nature – birds and blow-jobs. Effing and blinding. Taking the front way and the back way. The usual stuff. Little did they know that they were next door to Marty Mann, the presenter formerly known as edgy and controversial.

And even less did they care.

It was the usual crowd. BBC worker bees grabbing some carbs before the evening shift. Office workers dawdling before they caught the train home. And revellers off to frolic in the tawdry lights of the West End.

The demographic skewed to a younger crowd – probably too young to listen to A Clip Round the Ear on Radio Two – but looking for a table among the funsters were a pair of old ladies who had big night out written all over them. I wondered what musical they were going to see, and I thought of my mum happily singing along to Chicago and Les Misérables and Guys and Dolls. It seemed like a lifetime ago now.

The old ladies carefully parked themselves two tables away from us. The lads in their suits were next door. And suddenly they seemed louder than ever.

‘No, fuck it, this is a true story,’ one of them said, holding his hands up at the derisive profanities of his chums. ‘Guy goes to a whore and says, “How much for a hand-job? One hundred quid? That’s a lot.” But the whore says, “Listen, see this Rolex, I bought it by giving hand-jobs.”’

Marty looked up at me from his Four Seasons. He glanced quickly at the old ladies and looked away. You would think that a man with Marty’s CV would not care about profanity in the pizza parlour. But, like all transgressors, he understood that context is everything.

The old ladies were staring at each other. The suits were in uproar. The comedian took a bite of garlic bread and ploughed on.

‘Next day he goes back and says to the whore, “How much for a blow-job?” She says, “Five hundred quid.” “Five hundred quid! Fuck me, that’s a lot of dough.” She says, “Listen, you see that Mercedes? I bought it by giving blow-jobs.”’

Marty pushed his pizza away.

‘We should say something,’ I said, my voice pathetically low. ‘We should say something to these creeps.’

Marty nodded. But he kept staring at his pizza. ‘Except there’s five of them,’ he said. ‘Except they might not like it. Except they might have knives.’

‘You kidding? These guys haven’t got knives. They’ve got BlackBerrys. What do you think they are going to do? Slash you with their iPhones?’

But for all my big talk, I sat there just like Marty, useless in my disapproval.

There was bedlam at the next table. Red faces. Drunken voices. The joke coming to its punchline. The old ladies were getting up to go. They were telling a confused waitress that they were not so hungry after all.

‘And then he goes to the whore and says, “How much for the lot?” And she says, “One thousand quid.” And he says, “Fuck my old boots, that’s a lot.” And she says, “See that big house over there?”’

‘She says, “If I had a pussy,”’ Marty muttered to himself, ‘“I bet I could buy that.”’

‘I feel like saying something,’ I said, staring at the suits as I watched the old ladies heading for the door, their big night out already violated.

But I just sat there, and I said nothing.

Four

I drove Pat to Soho. He was still not really speaking to me. We were on grunting terms.

I walked him to the door and found the bell with her surname. The name she had before me, the name she had after me. I looked at Pat as I rang it. He was impassive, neutral – the inscrutable offspring of divorced parents.

‘Hello?’

It was strange that I had not recognised her face. Because the voice could not belong to anyone else. Pat and I leaned towards the metal grille.

‘It’s us,’ I said.

‘It’s me,’ Pat said.

Gina laughed with delight – a sound that I had not heard in, oh, about a thousand years. ‘Great, come up,’ she said, and she buzzed the front door open. Pat gave me a blank look and went inside. I stood there for just a moment after the door swung shut.

I don’t know what I had been expecting. But I had driven him across town with a mounting sense of dread. And nothing had happened. Had it? I walked back to the car. But I did not get in. I just kept walking. And the reasons that we stay together or come apart just seemed so heartbreakingly random that I could have sat down in Old Compton Street and wept.

Would she take him out to dinner? Or would it be easier for both of them if they stayed home? They would talk, wouldn’t they? Or would Gina – would both of them – want to avoid too much talking, and just try to rack up some together time?

It’s their thing, I thought. And I was totally lost. I felt flat. And suddenly older.

If I had not slept with someone else, if she had given me another chance, if she had not been so quick to try again with another man…not much had to happen to keep us together, I thought.

But I was the child of a nuclear family, and growing up in a family that never comes apart makes you believe in the inevitability of staying together. And I could see that there was a banality about my expectations – like the predictability of the princess stories that my seven-year-old daughter had suddenly grown out of.

Gina came from a family where the father walked out. She did not expect happy endings. She did not expect families to stay together. She expected them to fall apart. I walked out of Soho and into Chinatown, reluctant to start the drive back across town in case it all went wrong, and there were accusations and raised voices and slammed doors and the call to come quick. I kept my phone in my hand in case it suddenly began to vibrate. But I walked all over Chinatown, and it never did.

Five good things about being a single parent.

You are alone now, so you can make all decisions concerning your kid without consultation.

You know, with total certainty, that a child only needs one good parent.

You know that your child is loved, and will always be loved.

There is no need to feel like a freak at the school gates, because the world is overflowing with single parents now.

And your ex is out of your life.

Five bad things about being a single parent.

You are alone now, so you constantly feel like you are the last line of defence between your kid and the lousy modern world.

You know, with total certainty, that a child is always better off with two good parents.

You know your child is scarred by his parents breaking up, and will carry those scars forever.

You feel like a freak at the school gates, because the world is full of happy, unbroken families.

And our ex can come barging back into your life whenever they feel like it, just by uttering the magic words – ‘This is my child too.’

But what did I know about it?

I had not been a single parent for years.

What made me such an expert?

It had been ten years since Pat and I had lived alone – that strange, messy period between my first marriage and my second. A time of raw pain all round, and being unable to wash his hair without both of us having a nervous breakdown, and the slow realisation of how much I had relied on Gina to give shape to my life, and form to our family, and to wash our child’s hair and put him to bed while I heard their laughter through the walls.

And what I remembered most of all about that time was the feeling that I had failed. I could still taste it, ten years down the line. The feeling of failure, as undeniable as a broken arm – failed as a father, failed as a husband, failed as a man. Lugging that feeling of failure to the supermarket, to the school gates, to the house of my parents – that’s what I remembered most of all. Failed as a son.

But it was all years ago. And although I still noticed the single parents at the school gates – their time much tighter, their love somehow fiercer and more protective and more evident – I could not pretend that I was one of their number.

I had a wife and three children. And they were our children. And if you wanted to be picky, and prissy, and small-hearted, then you could say that the boy was my son and the older girl was her daughter and the seven-year-old was our daughter together.

But we did not think that way.

The whole menagerie had been mixed up for so long – for most of the lives of the elder two, and for all of the life of the youngest – so that we did not think in those terms. Sociologists and commentators and politicians – they think in terms of blended families. In the real world, you just get on with it, and it either works or it doesn’t.

It worked for us.

This little post-nuclear family where the females out-numbered the males. It was home. But seeing Gina again had prised open some secret chamber in my heart where I still felt like the father I had been so long ago.

A card-carrying single parent.

Gina made me see that bitter truth.

Once a single parent, always a single parent.

‘The whites are worse than the darkies,’ Ken Grimwood said, and I did not know where to begin.

He was a time capsule containing everything that was rotten about the country I grew up in. Yet I found myself feeling curiously grateful that he was enlightened enough to see that the morality had little to do with the colour of your skin. But the casual talk of darkies – it gave me exactly the feeling of dread that I felt when I saw him producing his tin of tobacco and packet of Rizlas, which he was doing right at this moment. I felt like opening all the windows.

‘Please, could you save it until I’ve got you home?’ I said. His home was only in another corner of North London. But it felt like another planet, another century.

‘At least the darkies have God and church,’ he said, carrying on as if an audience had asked him to elaborate on his feelings about race relations in modern Britain. The roll-ups and the baccy tin sat in his lap, apparently forgotten. ‘God and church keep them in line. Nothing wrong with a fear of hell. Nothing wrong with believing you’re going to burn in the eternal fires of hell if you step out of line.’

‘I agree,’ I said. ‘It’s very healthy.’

‘As long as their God doesn’t tell them to stick a rucksack full of Semtex on the Circle Line,’ he said.

I looked at him and shook my head. ‘How can you talk like that?’

‘Like what?’

‘All this stuff about darkies,’ I said. ‘You fought against all of that, didn’t you? When the Nazis were building factories to kill people. You were fighting for tolerance. For freedom.’

He smiled. ‘I fought for your dad,’ he said. ‘I fought for my mates. For them. Not for King and country or anything else. We fought for each other.’

I kept my eyes on the road. Where was his son? Where was his daughter? They had never called back. Didn’t they love their father? Shouldn’t they be doing this chore, instead of Harry’s Magic Taxis?

He was looking out the window. The twenty-four-hour shops were lit up like prison camps. And I remembered how my mother and father would look at those same streets, the streets of London where they grew up. The look that said, There must be something out there I still recognise. ‘But the whites – what have they got? Cheap booze and talent shows and benefits,’ the old man said, looking at me sternly, as if I had just disagreed with him.

‘What’s the knife for?’ I said. ‘I can’t believe it’s just for sticking in your leg.’

‘Dogs,’ he said. ‘The knife is for dogs. Where I live, there’s a lot of big dumb animals – and some of them own very large dogs. The kind of dog that gets a kiddy in its cakehole and doesn’t let go. You can’t pull them off. Do you think you can pull them off? You can’t. That’s what the knife is for, smart arse. If a dog gets a kiddy.’

‘What did you do?’ I said. ‘What was your job?’

‘Print,’ he said, cramming sixty years of working life into one syllable. ‘That ended.’ He laughed. ‘The welfare state was built for men like your father,’ he said, and then his eyes shone with a sudden flare of anger. ‘Gift of a grateful nation. It was meant to be an effing safety net for the needy – not an effing comfy sofa for the effing feckless. Men – like your dad and me.’

Except that my dad would never have said effing three times in the same sentence. That was the big difference between my old man and this old man. I glanced at him and saw him staring out at the city streets, shaking his head.

‘Where did England go?’ said Ken Grimwood.

‘You’re looking at it,’ I replied.

‘This country’s finished,’ he said. ‘Land fit for heroes? They told us we were heroes and then they made us crawl. Told us we were heroes and then they made us crawl! More like a land fit for yobs and scroungers and anyone who just jumped off the banana boat…’

‘Then why stay?’ I said, cheerfully rising to the bait. I had argued like this before. It was like Sunday dinner with Dad.

‘I wanted to go,’ the old man said, with that same hard, resentful certainty that my father could summon up so easily. ‘Fifty year ago. To Australia. That’s the place. Got a son out there. Wanted to go myself. We were going to be ten-pound Poms. You went on the boat. Took bloody ages. We had been down to Australia House. Filled in all the forms and everything.’

‘What happened?’

‘My wife,’ he said. ‘My Dot.’ He smiled, thinking about his dead wife. ‘In the end she wouldn’t leave her mum.’ Then his voice went flat and hard. ‘So we stayed.’

‘I think they may have one or two immigrants in Australia,’ I said. ‘In fact, now I come to think of it, the entire country is made up of immigrants.’

‘That’s just where you’re wrong,’ he said, and he looked out at the grimy streets of King’s Cross but he was seeing Bondi Beach. ‘And I fancied seeing the penguins. I always wanted to see that. The penguins on Phillip Island near Melbourne. Thousands and thousands of the little buggers. They come out of the sea when it gets dark. On Summerland Beach. Every night of the year. I always fancied seeing that. What a sight it must be – all the penguins on Summerland Beach.’

‘Penguins?’ I said. ‘In Australia?’

He stared at me thoughtfully.

‘Exactly how little do you know?’ he said.

The dog was on me as soon as I got out of my car.

A rocket of muscle and teeth and bulging eyes, bounding up on my chest, pushing me back against the car, growling as though it had a human bone lodged somewhere deep in its throat.

Two men were milling around outside the flats. They were not kids with hooded tops that covered their faces and baggy jeans that did not cover their backsides. They were men around my age who had been losing hair and gaining weight for twenty years, so that now they resembled a pair of giant boiled eggs. I could see them tearing up the terraces in their number one crops two decades ago. They were old but they were not exactly adult. They were Old Lads. They looked up at me with their blank white faces. And they smiled.

Ken was ambling across the courtyard, fumbling with his keys. I tried to follow him and the dog shoved me back against the car with an outraged snarl. I looked up at the Old Lads.

‘He likes you,’ one of them said, and they both had a giggle at that. ‘Tyson likes you, mate. If Tyson didn’t like you he would have ripped your face off by now. You should be flattered, mate.’

And he did like me. I could tell by the way he suddenly settled down with his hindquarters wrapped around one of my legs. The growling subsided to a romantic moan.

I tore myself away, the vicious creature whimpering with frustration, and ran after Ken. He had paused halfway up the stairs.

‘Just taking a breather,’ he said, and I remembered how, near the end of his life, every breath my father took had been an effort. I stared down at the courtyard that the low-rise council flats overlooked. The Old Lads were shuffling off, the dog snarling and snorting around their snow-white trainers.

‘They should keep that thing on a lead,’ I said.

Ken began to get up. I took his arm and helped him the rest of the way.

‘They love their dogs round here,’ he said. ‘Big animal lovers, they are. Those two charmers are in the flat above me. With their old mum. They love their mum and their mutt, but not much else, as far as I can fathom.’

We had reached the first-floor landing. He had his keys in his hand, outside a green door that appeared to be made of cardboard. I could hear what sounded like a hundred television sets. I wasn’t used to it. All these people living on top of you.

‘Thanks for the lift,’ he said. ‘Fancy a cup of tea before you shoot off?’

I wanted to get out of here. But I looked down at the courtyard and the Old Lads were still mooching around with their killer dog. They strolled around the double-parked cars as if they owned all they surveyed, their giant bald noggins like twin moons. It looked like a car park in hell.

So I found myself following Ken inside. His flat seemed far too tiny to be the final stop in a lifetime. On the wall was a framed poster of a blonde girl on a white beach. Australia, it said. What are you waiting for?

There were photos on the mantelpiece. In black and white, a sailor and his bride. Also in black and white, a boxer posing for the camera, trying not to smile. The young Ken Grimwood, fists in a southpaw stance, a glint in his eye, his stomach like a washboard. And in faded colour, three smiling children in the sixties. Two boys and a girl, grinning on the doorstep of a caravan.

‘Good to be home,’ coughed Ken. ‘Take a pew while I put the kettle on.’

I sank into an orange sofa made of some synthetic material that must have seemed modern in the 1950s and now was just a fire hazard. On the coffee table was a copy of the Racing Post. The sofa seemed to suck me into its polyester heart.

The telephone rang. Ken was banging around in a kitchen the size of a coffin, busy with our tea. The phone kept ringing. I picked it up.

‘Dad?’

A woman’s voice. The daughter in Brighton. Tracey.

‘I’ll get him,’ I said, and when she wanted to know who I was, I told her. No apology for not calling me back. No thanks to Harry’s Magic Taxis for bringing him home from the hospital.

‘Is he all right?’ she said.

I looked at the phone. ‘He’s dying,’ I said.

Ken came back into the room with two mugs of tea on a tray. There was the damp squib of a roll-up glowing between his lips.

‘I know he’s dying,’ she snapped, as if I was the idiot home help. ‘I mean, apart from that.’

‘Apart from the dying? Oh, apart from that, he’s great.’

I heard the woman bristling with irritation. ‘He’s not still smoking, is he?’ Then her voice choked and broke. ‘Oh, that impossible old man.’

Ken smiled at me and bent to place the tea on the coffee table. When he had straightened up – it took a while – he took the phone from me. I could hear the voice of his daughter. He didn’t say much.

‘Yes…no…yes, as it happens…no, as it happens.’

He winked at me as he took a long toke on his cigarette and I looked away. I had already decided that I didn’t like her very much.

But she was right.

He was an impossible old man.

‘She wants a word,’ Ken said, handing me back the phone. The daughter’s voice was shrill with hysteria in my ear.

‘I just can’t believe you’re letting him smoke,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

Then she hung up. Ken was laughing to himself.

‘I was married to her mother for near on fifty year,’ he said. ‘Her and that useless git she married managed about forty-five minutes. And they had a couple of kiddies too. So how come she’s the one dishing out advice?’

I sipped my tea. It was scalding hot, but I tried to bolt it down, despite the third-degree burns. I wanted to get out of there.

Ken took off his glasses, picked up the Racing Post and squinted at it with his mole-like eyes while patting the pockets of his blazer. He peered blindly around the room and for the first time I thought I saw a touch of fear on Ken Grimwood’s face.

‘Me reading glasses,’ he said. ‘Didn’t leave them at the hospital, did I?’

He made a move to rise but I held up a hand. Life’s too short, I thought, and began searching for his missing reading glasses. The dead air of old smoke stung my eyes and made me want to go home. The doorbell rang and I let him get it. I would find his glasses and then I would leave.

‘Try the chest of drawers,’ he advised, lumbering to the door.

I opened the drawer and rifled through old bills, a pension book, curling postcards from Down Under.

And a rectangular, claret-coloured box that I recognised from long ago and far away. It was about the size of a palm-held phone. The reading glasses were next to it, on top of a stack of prehistoric betting slips. There were voices at the door.

I looked up and saw Ken letting in another old man. Even smaller than him, and some kind of Asian. His skin was the colour of gold. He was old, maybe only slightly younger than Ken, but his face was curiously unlined by time.

I looked back at the box. I picked it up. As the two old men shuffled into the flat, Ken doing all the muttering, I opened it.

And I looked at Ken Grimwood’s Victoria Cross.

I felt a stab of – what? Jealousy certainly – my dad’s DSM was the second highest award for bravery. The VC trumped that, and the lot. And I felt shock. And shame. It all hit me at once, as real as a kick in the stomach.

I had never seen one before. I had held my father’s Distinguished Service Medal a million times, but I had never seen one of these. FOR VALOUR it said on a semi-circular scroll, under the lion and the crown. The medal was suspended by a ring from a suspension bar of laurel leaves. The ribbon was pale pink, but I suppose it could have faded with time. I closed the box and shut the drawer. Then I opened it again and took out the reading glasses.

‘This is Paddy Silver’s boy,’ Ken was saying to the golden old man. Ken was smiling. The other old boy watched me without expression. ‘He passed away,’ Ken said, and his friend looked at him quickly. Ken smiled and nodded. ‘Ten year ago. More. Same as I’ve got. Cancer of the lung.’

The other old man nodded once, and looked back at me.

‘This here’s Singe Rana,’ Ken said. ‘His mob were at Monte Cassino with our mob. Did you know that? Did you know the Gurkhas were with our lot in Italy?’

I shook my head.

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said, and I held out my hand to Singe Rana.

He shook it, a handshake as soft as a child’s.

‘Nobody knows anything these days,’ Ken said. ‘Nobody knows bugger all. That’s the problem with this country.’ He looked at his friend. ‘Wanted him to march with us, didn’t we? Paddy Silver. March at the Cenotaph.’

Singe Rana confirmed this with a curt nod. If he was upset about my father’s death, he gave no sign. But of course it was all a long time ago. All of it.

‘But he was never much of a marcher, your old man,’ Ken said. ‘He was never one for wearing the beret and doing the marching and putting on the medals. But we thought he could come down there. And if he didn’t fancy a march, well, then he could just watch.’

He looked at Singe Rana.

The old Gurkha shrugged.

I handed Ken his reading glasses.

‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘I’ll come with my son.’

When I was twenty-five years old, and about to become a father for the first time, my mother told me the same thing again and again.

‘As soon as you’re a parent,’ she said, ‘your life is not your own.’

What she meant was, Put away those records by The Smiths. What she meant was, Wake up. The careless freedom of your life before there was a pushchair in the hall is about to come to an end.

But I never really felt that way. Yes, of course everything was changed by the birth of our baby boy – but I never felt as though I had surrendered my life. I never felt as though parenthood was holding me hostage. I never felt that my life was not my own.

Not until that night I waited for Pat to come home from Gina’s place in Soho. Not until he was absent and I was waiting. Then I really felt it, manifesting itself as a low-level nausea in the pit of my stomach, and nerve ends that jangled at every passing car. Finally, I understood.

My life was not my own.

The sound of Joni came down the child monitor and Cyd tossed aside her Vogue. ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘Dr Who always gives her nightmares.’

‘It’s the Weeping Angels,’ I said. ‘They give me nightmares, those Weeping Angels.’

‘I’ll lie down with her for a bit,’ Cyd said. ‘Until she settles.’ She stroked the top of my arm. ‘I’m sure he’s fine,’ she said.

It was near midnight when Gina’s taxi pulled up outside. She didn’t get out but waited until he had opened the front door before driving away. He came into the living room, his face a mask.

‘You all right?’ I said, keeping it as light as I could.

He nodded. ‘Fine.’ Not looking at me.

‘Everything go okay?’

He was fussing with his school rucksack, checking for something inside.

‘I’m going back next week,’ he said evenly. ‘Gina asked me to go back next week.’

He still wasn’t looking at me. ‘Well, that’s good. That’s great.’ Then I thought of something else. ‘You take your pills?’

He shot me a furious look. ‘You don’t have to remind me,’ he said. ‘I’m not a baby.’

He had to take these pills.

A few years ago, just at the start of big school, he had been laid flat by what looked like flu at first and, after he had missed most of the first half-term, began to look horribly like ME. We found out, just after one of the less fun-packed Christmas celebrations, that he had a thyroid condition. So he took these pills and they made him well. But he would have to take them every day for the rest of his life. There are children all over the world who have to deal with a lot worse than that.

But I went to bed knowing that I would be wound too tight to sleep tonight, or at least until it was nearly time to get up.

Because that was another thing that Gina had missed.

Five

Tyson saw me as soon as I got out of the car.

At first he just stared – ears back, teeth bared, a long stream of drool coming out of the corner of his vicious maw. As if he couldn’t quite believe his luck. The object of his base lust had returned.

Then suddenly he left the side of his Old Lad masters, their huge boiled-egg heads leaning together in hideous fraternity, and bounded across the courtyard, weaving between the brand-new Mercs and rusty jalopies with Polish plates.

Too late.

By then I was halfway up the concrete staircase, already hearing the whine of the dusty wind that whistled down the corridors of Nelson Mansions.

I banged on the old man’s door.

It took him an agonisingly long time to open, but I was inside the trapped air of his flat before Tyson arrived. We could hear his meaty paws slapping against the thin door as he howled of his unnatural love.

Singe Rana was sitting on the orange sofa, watching the racing. He glanced over at me, made a small gesture with his impassive face and turned back to the 2.20 at Chepstow.

‘I brought you these,’ I said, and gave Ken the A4 envelope I was carrying.

He reached inside and took out a handful of black-and-white photographs, pushing his face against them. I found his reading glasses and gave them to him. He took the photographs over to the sofa and I stood behind the two old men as they leafed through them. They picked up the first one.

It could have been a holiday photograph. There were perhaps a dozen young men, tanned and hard, posing in the sunshine on the deck of a ship.

‘On the way to North Africa,’ Ken said.

‘That was lovely trip,’ said Singe, and his Nepalese accent had a soft Indian lilt to it. He smiled at the memory. ‘There were dolphins swimming and flying fish used to flap about on the deck of our landing craft. We saw a whale and her children.’

And another photograph of men in uniform. Maybe twenty of them. Less smiles here, and less sunshine. But still the shy grins as they stood for the camera recording the moment before they went to war.

Most of the photographs were posed. As formal as a school photograph, and as determined to hold that fleeting moment. Ken muttered the names and nicknames of long ago. Lofty and Albert. Tubby and Fred. Chalky and Sid. And sometimes he would remember where they had died.

Salerno. Dieppe. Elba. Names that I learned in childhood. Anzio. Sicily. Normandy.

Ken tapped the face of a thin boy with slick black hair. He smiled at me.

‘Who’s that then?’ he said.

My old man. Dark-eyed and cocky. A wild boy. The uniform too big, proud of the flash on his shoulder. R.N. Commando. Eighteen years old. A boy I never knew. Not much older than my son was now.

‘In Italy,’ said Singe Rana, ‘we passed fields of wheat and many grapes. We drank wine. The women and children stared at us. The men looked away. We did not speak to the girls until they spoke to us.’

I wanted to take them out for lunch. But they said they already had some dinner prepared. Singe Rana collected a plate of potato cakes from the kitchen. I took a bite and stuffed inside the potato I tasted chilli and ginger, turmeric and cayenne pepper. It was like something my wife would have served to a room full of investment bankers.

‘Aloo Chop,’ Ken told me. ‘Spicy potato cakes. Gurkha nosh.’

But both of them ate like my seven-year-old daughter. Taking a bite and making it last forever. I got the impression that eating was something the pair of them had largely given up years ago.

‘Keep some of this Aloo Chop for your tea,’ Ken told Singe Rana. ‘When you’re at work.’

I must have looked surprised.

‘Got a little job, haven’t you?’ Ken said to his friend, and Singe Rana confirmed his employment with a curt nod. ‘Security job,’ Ken elaborated. ‘Night watchman. At that firework factory on the City Road.’ He turned to me. ‘Know it, do you?’

I nodded, vaguely remembering some ugly concrete block surrounded by council flats around Old Street. What I remembered most were the faded images on its windowless walls. Cheery cartoons of rockets, roman candles, sparklers, jumping jacks and bangers, all joyfully exploding, and all so worn away by time that they looked as though they had been painted there by cavemen.

Ken grinned at Singe Rana with boundless amusement. ‘Keeps him off the streets,’ he cackled. ‘Keeps him out of trouble.’

‘Gurkha people,’ said Singe Rana seriously. ‘Always trusted for security position.’

‘You don’t want to nick a packet of sparklers when he’s on guard duty,’ Ken chortled. ‘He’ll slit your throat soon as look at you!’ Then he looked at his friend with affection. ‘And the money comes in handy. Minimum wage. But it helps when you’re having a flutter. And we do like a little flutter, don’t we, Singe Rana?’

While we ate the Aloo Chop they consulted the racing pages of their newspapers, and when we had finished they were ready to go to the betting shop.

Ken Grimwood lived at the sharp end of the Angel, where Islington fell away to the borders of King’s Cross. We walked slowly past a sad little strip of shops. Everywhere was crowded, everything was worn out. Nail parlours and junk food and mobile phones. Cheap neon on a grey day, some of the lights burned out, as glaring as missing teeth.

Then suddenly the women with pushchairs crowded with children and shopping were jumping out of the way. Something was stampeding towards us – big kids on small bikes, as multi-racial as a Benetton marketing campaign, whooping with joy as the crowd scattered.

I quickly stepped into the gutter, with that easy middle-class cowardice that comes so naturally these days.

But Ken Grimwood dipped his right shoulder, tucked in his chin and stood his ground. They hurtled towards him and it seemed certain they would run him down. He did not budge. And as the lead cyclist reached the old man it was as if he leaned into him, putting the full weight of his short, broad body into the boy on the bike.

It didn’t seem like much, but the kid went sprawling.

I stooped to help him up, anxious to avoid an unpleasant scene, and he bared his fangs, backing me off.

His friends had pulled up and they stared at Ken Grimwood in disbelief. We all stared at him. Only Singe Rana looked unimpressed, as though he had seen it all a thousand times before.

‘Fool!’ shrieked the biggest one. ‘Who you think you are, old man?’

And Ken Grimwood just smiled to himself, as though his mind was somewhere far away, with his mob in the sunshine off the coast of Africa, and the flying fish falling into the landing craft.

Gina and I walked out of Soho, turned south down the Charing Cross Road, strolled along the Strand for a bit, and then turned right to the Victoria Embankment and the river.

There was stuff to sort out. In the end, it always comes down to practicalities with children. Times for pick-ups and drop-offs. Homework assignments and meal requirements. The endless vigilance of the search for nits. That sort of thing.

We were being nice to each other. For the sake of our son. We were trying to be mature grown-ups and keep the party polite.

If you had glanced at us on the street, then you would have taken us for a couple. But it was as if there was somebody walking between us, keeping us almost ludicrously apart, making accidental physical contact impossible.

For we walked the way that old lovers do.

‘It’s so beautiful, this city,’ she said, smiling at the gypsy glamour of the barges and the tugs on the Thames. ‘You forget how beautiful. Why is that? Why do we forget? I walked down here with Pat last weekend. And he got it. A lot of boys his age – they wouldn’t get it, would they? But he definitely got it.’

I was used to the way she looked now. I had got my head around it. It wasn’t complicated. She was a good-looking woman in her forties and everything we had lost was so long ago that it hardly even hurt. It wasn’t pain any more. It was more like a memory of pain. I was relieved that we would never have to go through it again.

Besides, when she had suggested meeting, I had been expecting this kind of stuff. The forgotten beauty of our city. The remembered beauty of our son. Philosophical Gina, who had somehow achieved enlightenment while she was working as a translator in Tokyo. That is what I had been expecting. Reflective Gina – sighing at the tugs and the barges and something our son had said.

Maybe even an apology or two. Why not? That would be nice, I thought. For the years wasted on useless men and pointless jobs and faraway places with strange-sounding names. An apology on behalf of her – and all absent parents just like her – for the time when their child wasn’t top of the list. It was a good job I wasn’t bitter.

But she surprised me. She could do that now, because we no longer really knew each other. It wasn’t like when we were married and you pretty much knew what was coming next.

‘I don’t like him taking this medication,’ she said. ‘It’s not right. A teenage boy taking pills every day of his life.’

‘Thyroxine,’ I said. And I actually laughed. ‘You make it sound as though he’s raiding the medicine cabinet. You make it sound as though the kid lives for chemical kicks.’

She frowned at me. ‘No need to get excited,’ she said, with a disapproving pout of her lips. Did she used to do that? I didn’t remember that move. Someone had taught her that gesture. It was nothing to do with me.

I took a breath. I could do this thing. I could get through this conversation without my head exploding. Probably. We were mature grown-ups. If we were any more mature, we would be fossilised.

‘Pat was sick, Gina,’ I said quietly. ‘As soon as he started big school. He was flattened by – whatever it was. Just exhausted.’

‘We spoke, remember?’ she said coldly. ‘I knew all about it.’

‘But you didn’t really,’ I said. ‘Because you weren’t here. You were in Tokyo. You were busy with your new job or the new guy in Shibuya.’

‘You can’t argue, can you?’ she said, turning to face me. She had forgotten about the beauty of the eternal river. ‘You never learned to argue in a civilised fashion. And it was Shinjuku not Shibuya. And it wasn’t some new guy – it was exactly the same useless bastard that I was with in London.’

‘My apologies,’ I said. And then I was quiet, because I thought about the school year slipping away as Pat stayed in his room, only emerging to haul himself into a cab to see yet another doctor or paediatrician. And I remembered almost sobbing with gratitude when we discovered that he had a thyroid condition that was easily rectified, and that he wasn’t going to die. And I understood that there is nothing in this world that has the power to slaughter your heart like having a sick child. Sorry, Gina, but no woman can kill you like that.

‘The pills make him well,’ I said, very quietly, because I felt so very much like shouting. ‘The pills are nothing. I appreciate your concern, Gina. But he needs them.’

She touched my arm. Patted it twice, and then sort of stroked it with the middle joint of her index finger. That was new too. I quite liked it. We smiled at each other, and turned to look at a barge floating by as if on air. She was right. It was beautiful.

‘Harry?’

‘What?’

‘Why are you so angry?’ she said.

‘Because you didn’t put him first,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter what else was going on. New man, new job, new life. He should have been top of your list. And he wasn’t.’

A kind of laugh. ‘Was he top of your list when you were on top of that little slut from work?’

‘One night, Gina.’

‘One night is plenty.’ She shook her head and looked at all the painted barges. ‘Don’t act as though you were burned at the stake, Harry. You were the one who fucked around.’

Ah yes.

There would always be that.

After the show I was in the studio with Marty talking about airport security. I sat on the desk among the dead microphones, all of them a different primary colour. Like the Teletubbies. Marty swung in his chair, his hands stuffed deep inside his combat trousers.

‘When they stop some little old lady who looks like your granny,’ I said.

Marty grimaced. ‘When they stop some little old lady who looks like your granny but they don’t stop the guy who looks like Osama bin Laden.’

I laughed bitterly. ‘The way they don’t let you carry a pair of nail scissors on board in case you burst into the cockpit and give the pilot a quick pedicure.’

Marty laughed at the insanity of the lousy modern world. ‘The way they don’t let you carry a pair of nail scissors on board but they will flog you a bottle of duty-free booze and nobody bats an eyelid.’

‘And what would you rather be attacked with?’ I asked. ‘A dinky pair of nail scissors or a broken bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label?’

‘Let me think about it for a bit,’ Marty said. He swung in his chair. ‘Shouldn’t we be writing some of this down? It’s all good stuff.’

‘You’ll remember it,’ I said.

Marty looked over at the gallery. Josh had gone home. The sound engineer had gone home. But through the big glass window we could see some young guy with glasses staring at us. He had a rockabilly haircut and his quiff stood up like a shark’s fin.

I didn’t recognise him. But that was the BBC for you. There were always new kids fresh from their firsts at Oxford and Cambridge turning up to fetch us a sausage roll.

‘Fancy a cup of char?’ Marty asked me, and made a ‘T’ sign with his hands towards the booth. The young guy with glasses and the shark’s fin quiff just stared at us. Marty impatiently banged the top part of the ‘T’ down on the bottom part. The sap on the other side of the glass just smiled weakly, shaking his head. He held up a hand – please wait, o mighty one – and came through to us, his cheeks a rosy glow.

‘Come on, you thick bastard,’ Marty barked at him, swinging his feet up on the desk. ‘You’re not taking a punt down the River Cam now. There’s no Bollinger on the lawn with the rowdies from the Bullingdon Club.’ Marty had dropped out of a comprehensive in Croydon. ‘This is the real world. Tea for two and be sharp about it.’

The young man laughed. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. They were all posh boys. And even the ones who weren’t posh boys had mastered the accent, if nothing else. ‘I should have introduced myself but I didn’t want to interrupt your editorial meeting.’ He glanced at me, as if I might help him out. ‘Blunt,’ he said. ‘Giles Blunt. Controller of Editorial Guidelines.’

I shook his hand. It was soft and wet as the River Cam. Marty was fabulously unmoved.

‘And what?’ he said, his pale features set in stone. ‘Some fancy title makes you too important to get a cup of tea for the talent?’

The silence of the mortuary lab. And then Marty laughed. And Blunt and I smiled, relieved to hear something, anything, to break that awful silence.

‘Just pulling your chain,’ Marty laughed, standing up to offer his hand. He could ingratiate himself with management when he felt like it.

‘We need to talk about the direction of A Clip Round the Ear,’ said Blunt, regaining his composure, remembering his power. ‘If you can find a window for me.’

Marty nodded briskly.

‘Let me get my coat and I’ll see you in my office,’ he said.

The young man looked startled. ‘Now?’ he said, glancing at the big old-fashioned clock. It was way after midnight. Marty and I smiled at each other.

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