MAN AND BOY
Tony Parsons

For my mother

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One: Skylarking

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part Two: The Ding-Dong Man

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Part Three: Guess What?

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

part one: skylarking

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World

It’s a boy, it’s a boy!

It’s a little boy.

I look at this baby – as bald, wrinkled and scrunched up as an old man – and something chemical happens inside me.

It – I mean he – looks like the most beautiful baby in the history of the world. Is it – he – really the most beautiful baby in the history of the world? Or is that just my biological programming kicking in? Does everyone feel this way? Even people with plain babies? Is our baby really so beautiful?

I honestly can’t tell.

The baby is sleeping in the arms of the woman I love. I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the pair of them, feeling like I belong in this room with this woman and this baby in a way that I have never belonged anywhere.

After all the excitement of the last twenty-four hours, I am suddenly overwhelmed, feeling something – gratitude, happiness, love – well up inside me and threaten to spill out.

I am afraid that I am going to disgrace myself – spoil everything, smudge the moment – with tears. But then the baby wakes up and starts squawking for food and we – me and the woman I love – laugh out loud, laugh with shock and wonder.

It’s a small miracle. And although we can’t escape the reality of everyday life – when do I have to get back to work? – the day is glazed with real magic. We don’t really talk about the magic. But we can feel it all around.

Later my parents are there. When she is done with the hugs and kisses, my mother counts the baby’s fingers and toes, checking for webbed feet. But he is fine, the baby is fine.

‘He’s a little smasher,’ my mum says. ‘A little smasher!’

My father looks at the baby and something inside him seems to melt.

There are many good things about my father, but he is not a soft man, he is not a sentimental man. He doesn’t gurgle and coo over babies in the street. My father is a good man, but the things he has gone through in his life mean that he is also a hard man. Today some ice deep inside him begins to crack and I can tell he feels it too.

This is the most beautiful baby in the world.

I give my father a bottle I bought months ago. It is bourbon. My father only drinks beer and whisky, but he takes the bottle with a big grin on his face. The label on the bottle says ‘Old Granddad’. That’s him. That’s my father.

And I know today that I have become more like him. Today I am a father too. All the supposed landmarks of manhood – losing my virginity, getting my driving licence, voting for the first time – were all just the outer suburbs of my youth. I went through all those things and came out the other side fundamentally unchanged, still a boy.

But now I have helped to bring another human being into the world.

Today I became what my father has been forever.

Today I became a man.

I am twenty-five years old.

one

Some situations to avoid when preparing for your all-important, finally-I-am-fully-grown thirtieth birthday.

Having a one-night stand with a colleague from work.

The rash purchase of luxury items you can’t afford.

Being left by your wife.

Losing your job.

Suddenly becoming a single parent.

If you are coming up to thirty, whatever you do, don’t do any of that.

It will fuck up your whole day.

Thirty should be when you think – these are my golden years, these are my salad days, the best is yet to come – and all that old crap.

You are still young enough to stay up all night, but you are old enough to have a credit card. All the uncertainties and poverty of your teens and twenties are finally over – and good riddance to the lot of them – but the sap is still rising.

Thirty should be a good birthday. One of the best.

But how to celebrate reaching the big three-oh? With a collection of laughing single friends in some intimate bar or restaurant? Or surrounded by a loving wife and adoring small children in the bosom of the family home?

There has to be a good way of turning thirty. Perhaps they are all good ways.

All my images of this particular birthday seemed to be derived from some glossy American sitcom. When I thought of turning thirty, I thought of attractive thirty-nothing mar-rieds snogging like teens in heat while in the background a gurgling baby crawls across some polished parquet floor, or I saw a circle of good-looking, wisecracking friends drinking latte and showing off their impressive knitwear while wryly bemoaning the dating game. That was my problem. When I thought of turning thirty, I thought of somebody else’s life.

That’s what thirty should be – grown-up without being disappointed, settled without being complacent, worldly wise, but not so worldly wise that you feel like chucking yourself under a train. The time of your life.

By thirty you have finally realised that you are not going to live forever, of course. But surely that should only make the laughing, latte-drinking present taste even sweeter? You shouldn’t let your inevitable death put a damper on things. Don’t let the long, slow slide to the grave get in the way of a good time.

Whether you are enjoying the last few years of unmarried freedom, or have recently moved on to a more adult, more committed way of life with someone you love, it’s difficult to imagine a truly awful way of turning thirty.

But I managed to find one somehow.

The car smelled like somebody else’s life. Like freedom.

It was parked right in the window of the showroom, a wedge-shaped sports car which, even with its top off, looked as sleek and compact as a muscle.

Naturally it was red – a flaming, testosterone-stuffed red.

When I was a little bit younger, such blatant macho corn would have made me sneer, or snigger, or puke, or all of the above.

Now I found it didn’t bother me at all. In fact, it seemed to be just what I was looking for at this stage of my life.

I’m not really the kind of man who knows what cars are called, but I had made it my business – furtively lingering over the ads in glossy magazines – to find out the handle of this particular hot little number. Yes, it’s true. Our eyes had met before.

But its name didn’t really matter. I just loved the way it looked. And that smell. Above all, that smell. That anything-can-happen smell. What was it about that smell?

Amidst the perfume of leather, rubber and all those yards of freshly sprayed steel, you could smell a heartbreaking newness, a newness so shocking that it almost overwhelmed me. This newness intimated another world that was limitless and free, an open road leading to all the unruined days of the future. Somewhere they had never heard of traffic cones or physical decay or my thirtieth birthday.

I knew that smell from somewhere and I recognised the way it made me feel. Funnily enough, it reminded me of that feeling you get when you hold a newborn baby.

The analogy was far from perfect – the car couldn’t squint up at me with eyes that had just started to see, or grasp one of my fingers in a tiny, tiny fist, or give me a gummy little smile. But for a moment there it felt like it just might.

‘You only live once,’ the car salesman said, his heels clicking across the showroom floor.

I smiled politely, indicating that I would have to think that one over.

‘Are you in the market for some serious fun?’ he said. ‘Because if the MGF is about one thing, it’s about fun.’

While he gave me his standard sales pitch, he was sizing me up, trying to decide if I was worth a test drive.

He was pushy, but not so pushy that it made your flesh crawl. He was just doing his job. And despite my weekend clothes – which because of the nature of my work were not really so different from my weekday clothes – he must have seen a man of substance. A fast-track career looking for some matching wheels. Young, free and single. A life as carefree as a lager commercial. How wrong can you be?

‘This model has the Variable Valve Control system,’ he said, with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm. ‘The opening period of the inlet valves can be varied by altering the rotational speed of each cam lobe.’

What the fuck was he going on about? Was it something to do with the engine?

‘A total babe magnet,’ he said, noting my dumbfounded expression. ‘Plenty of poke. A young single guy couldn’t do any better than the MGF.’

This was my kind of sales pitch. Forget the technical guff, just tell me that you can lose yourself in a car like this. Let me know you can lose yourself. That’s what I wanted to hear.

The salesman was distracted by something on the street, and I followed his gaze out of the showroom’s plate-glass wall.

He was looking at a tall blonde woman holding the hand of a small boy wearing a Star Wars T-shirt. They were surrounded by bags of supermarket shopping. And they were watching us.

Even framed by all those plastic carrier bags and chaperoning a little kid, the woman was the kind that you look at more than once.

What you noticed about her child – and he was certainly her child – was that he was carrying a long, plastic tube with a dull light glowing faintly inside.

If you had been to the cinema at any time over the last twenty years you would recognise it as a light sabre, traditional weapon of the Jedi Knights. This one needed new batteries.

The beautiful woman was smiling at me and the salesman. The little kid pointed his light sabre, as if about to strike us down.

‘Daddy,’ he mouthed from the other side of the plate-glass wall which divided us. You couldn’t hear him, but that’s what he was saying.

‘My wife and son,’ I said, turning away, but not before I caught the disappointment in the salesman’s eyes. ‘Got to go.’

Daddy. That’s me. Daddy.

‘You don’t even like cars,’ my wife reminded me, edging our old VW estate through the thick early-evening traffic.

‘Just looking.’

‘And you’re too young for a mid-life crisis,’ she said. ‘Thirty is much too young, Harry. The way it works, you wait for fifteen years and then run off with a secretary who’s young enough to be your second wife. And I cut off the sleeves of all your suits. Not to mention your bollocks.’

‘I’m not thirty, Gina,’ I chuckled, although it wasn’t really all that funny. She was always exaggerating. ‘I’m twenty-nine.’

‘For one more month!’ she laughed.

‘It’s your birthday soon,’ our boy said, laughing along with his mother, although he didn’t have a clue why, and tapping me on the back of the head with his sodding light sabre.

‘Please don’t do that, Pat,’ I said.

He was back there with the week’s shopping, strapped into his little car seat and muttering under his breath, pretending to be in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon with Harrison Ford.

‘I’ve lost my starboard engine,’ he jabbered away to himself. ‘Fire when ready.’

I turned to look at him. He was four years old with dirty blond hair that hung down over eyes that were the same shade of blue as his mother’s. Tiffany blue. Catching my eye, he grinned at me with pure childish delight.

‘Happy birthday, dear Daddy,’ he sang. ‘Happy birthday, birth-day.’

To Pat, my birthday was a chance to finally give me the home-made card he had hidden under his bed (Luke Skywalker decapitating a space monster with his trusty light sabre). To me it meant that the best might already be over. It really did.

When would I feel the way I felt the night my wife said that she would marry me? When would I feel the way I felt the morning my son was born? When would life be that – I don’t know – real again? When?

‘When did you become interested in cars?’ Gina asked. She wouldn’t let this car thing rest. ‘I bet you don’t even know what kind of petrol this one uses, do you?’

‘Oh, come on, Gina.’

‘What is it, then?’

Fucking hell.

‘The green kind,’ I said, taking a wild guess. ‘You know – non-leaded. The one that saves a rain forest every time you fill her up.’

‘It’s diesel, you doughnut,’ she laughed. ‘I never knew a man less interested in cars than you. What happened?’

What could I tell her? You don’t tell a wife that some inanimate object somehow represents all those things you know you are never going to have. The places you are never going to see, the women you are never going to love, the things you are never going to do. You can’t tell a wife all that stuff. Not even a wife you love very much. Especially not a wife like that.

‘It only carries one passenger,’ she said.

‘What does?’ I said, playing dumb.

‘You know very well what I’m talking about,’ she said. ‘It only carries one passenger – one thin, female passenger.’

‘You’re still pretty thin and female,’ I said. ‘Or you were the last time I looked.’

‘What’s brought all this on, Harry? Come on. Tell me.’

‘Maybe I’m compensating for becoming an old git,’ I said. ‘I’m joining the old gits’ club, so, pathetically, I want to recapture my glorious youth. Even though I know it’s ultimately futile and even though my youth wasn’t particularly glorious. Isn’t that what men do?’

‘You’re turning thirty,’ she said. ‘We’re going to open a couple of bottles and have a nice cake with candles.’

‘And balloons,’ Pat said.

‘And balloons,’ Gina said. She shook her lovely head. ‘We’re not having you put down, Harry.’

Gina was a couple of months older than me. She had breezed through her thirtieth birthday surrounded by friends and family, dancing with her son to Wham’s greatest hits, a glass of champagne in her hand. She looked great that night, she really did. But clearly my own birthday was going to be a bit more traumatic.

‘You don’t regret anything, do you?’ she said.

‘Like what?’

‘You know,’ she said, suddenly deadly serious. ‘Like us.’

We had married young. Gina was three months pregnant with Pat on our wedding day and it was, by some distance, the happiest day of my life. But nothing was ever really the same again after that day. Because after that there was no disguising the fact that we were grown-ups.

The radio station where I was working gave me the week off and we spent our honeymoon back at our little flat watching daytime television in bed, eating M&S sandwiches and talking about the beautiful baby we were going to have.

We talked about eventually taking a proper, grown-up honeymoon – Gina wanted us to snorkel among the tropical fish of Okinawa. But by the time there was a bit of money and a bit of time, we had Pat and the course of our lives seemed set.

Gina and I found ourselves separated from the rest of the world by our wedding rings. The other married couples we knew were at least ten years older than us, and friends our own age were still in that brief period between living with their mothers and living with their mortgages. Our little family was on its own.

While our friends were dancing the night away in clubs, we were up all hours with our baby’s teething problems. While they were worrying about meeting the right person, we were worrying about meeting the payments on our first real home. Yet I didn’t regret any of it. Yes, we had given up our freedom. But we had given it up for something better.

I loved my wife and I loved our son. Together, the two of them made my world make sense. My life without them was unimaginable. I knew I was a lucky man. But I couldn’t help it, I just couldn’t help it – lately I found myself wondering when I had stopped being young.

‘I just really hate the way that life starts to contract as you get older,’ I said. ‘The way your options narrow. I mean, when did owning a car like that become ridiculous for me? When exactly? Why is it such a joke? I would love to know. That’s all.’

‘The Force is strong in this one,’ Pat said.

‘A red sports car,’ Gina said to herself. ‘And you don’t even like driving.’

‘Listen, I was just looking, okay?’ I said.

‘Happy birthday to you,’ Pat sang, smacking me across the ear with his light sabre. ‘Squashed tomatoes and glue. You-look-like-a-monkey-and-you-act-like-one-too.’

‘That’s not nice,’ I told him, as the traffic ground to a halt and my ear began to throb.

Gina put the handbrake on and looked at me, as if trying to remember what she had liked about me in the first place. She seemed a bit stumped.

I remembered what I had liked about her. She had the longest legs I had ever seen on a woman. But I still didn’t know if that was the best basis for the love of your life.

Or the worst.

two

When I could no longer stand the sight of the rusty white van dawdling along in front of me, I swung the MGF into the oncoming traffic and smacked my foot down.

My new car squirted past the old van with a confident, throaty roar. As I cut back in front of it I caught a glimpse of the driver – a blur of bad teeth, tattoos and loathing – before he disappeared in my rear-view mirror. I felt good. The MGF meant that I no longer had to look at rusty white vans or their drivers. All that was behind me now. I could look forward to a future full of open-top motoring and admiring glances. Then the van pulled up alongside me at the very next red light.

Jesus, I thought. Road rage.

‘You stupid little git,’ he told me, winding down his window to reveal a face like a Big Mac in a bucket of beer. ‘Get out and push it.’

After he had driven off at the green light, I sat shaking for a while, thinking about what I should have said to him.

If I get out, pal, it will be to push your crappy van up your tattooed back passage! If I pushed this thing, pal – it would have been really good to call him pal – I’d still be going faster than you. You lager-bellied moron! You fat fuck!

I saw myself delivering some perfect put-down and then pulling away in a squeal of rubber, an infuriating little smile on my face. But what actually happened was that I just sat there trembling and dreaming until all the cars behind me started sounding their horns and shouting stuff about the lights having changed.

So I drove off, thinking about what my dad would have done.

He certainly wouldn’t have sat there and said nothing. And he wouldn’t have wasted time cooking up some devastating response worthy of Oscar Wilde at his pithy best.

My father would simply have got out of the MGF and punched that van driver’s lights out. He really would.

Not that my dad would ever be seen dead in a fancy sports car, to tell you the truth. He thought they were for wankers.

My dad would have felt much more at home in one of those white vans.

Gina had been incredibly understanding about the MGF. She had encouraged me to go back and talk to the salesman when even I was starting to find the idea of buying a sports car a bit stupid.

And there were plenty of reasons why buying it was crazy. Its boot was smaller than a supermarket trolley. We really didn’t need two cars. A soft top in London is a hate object for any spotty fourteen-year-old cretin with a chip on his shoulder and a blade in his sock. But Gina just wasn’t interested.

She told me to buy the thing and to stop thinking that my life was over just because I was turning thirty. She told me I was being pathetic, but she laughed when she said it and put her arm around me, giving me a little shake. Trying to force some sense into me. Fat chance.

At any other time during the seven years we had been together, we wouldn’t have been able to afford a good second car. In fact, at any other time we wouldn’t have been able to afford an incredibly crappy second car. We hadn’t even owned our crappy first car for very long.

But we no longer practically had to have a heart attack every time we received a red-topped bill. At last my job was going well.

I was the producer of The Marty Mann Show, a late-night talk show that went out every Saturday on terrestrial television. For the six years before that I had been the producer of The Marty Mann Show back when it was on local radio and most of the country had not even heard the first rumours about its mad bastard presenter. It seemed a long time ago now.

Over the last twelve months Marty and I had turned a no-budget radio show into a low-budget TV show. The line between the two was surprisingly thin. But crossing that thin line was enough to make Marty Mann some sort of star.

If you walked into a restaurant with him, everybody stopped eating and talking just so they could look at him. Girls, who a few years earlier wouldn’t have touched him wearing surgical gloves, now thought he was a love god. He got photographed even when he wasn’t doing anything special. Marty had arrived big time and he had been decent enough to bring me along with him.

The critics, or at least the ones who liked him, called Marty child-like – meaning he was open, frank and intuitive. They thought he asked the kind of questions other interviewers decided it was best not to even think about. And it was true – the editing process that exists in most of us seemed to be completely missing from Marty’s brain. And he got answers, even when what he really deserved was a punch in the mouth.

The critics who didn’t like Marty also called him child-like – meaning he was selfish, immature and cruel. But Marty wasn’t really child-like at all. Sometimes I watched our Pat peacefully play for hours with his little plastic Star Wars toys. That was child-like. Marty’s attention span was nowhere near that long. Marty wasn’t child-like. He was just undeveloped.

We had met at a local radio station where the staff were either on their way up or on their way out. It was a grotty little building full of curdled ambition and stale cigarette smoke, and most of our regular callers were either hopelessly lonely or borderline barking. But I always sort of missed the place. Because that was where I met Gina.

The station was always desperate to get guests – for some reason there was never a mad rush for our cheques, which were so small they were invisible to the naked eye – and so there was often an improvisational element to our bookings.

For instance, when the first Japanese banks started to go bust, the person we booked to talk about what it all meant was not an economist or a financial journalist, but the professor who taught Japanese at the college across the street.

Okay, so he was a language teacher, but like any language teacher he was in love with the country whose lingo he taught. Who better to discuss why the Asian tigers were turning into neutered pussycats? Well, lots of people, probably. But he was the best we could get. Except he didn’t show up.

As if in sympathy with the exploding Japanese bubble, the professor’s appendix burst on the morning he was due to come in, and coming off the bench as his substitute we got his star pupil – Gina.

Tall, radiant Gina. She was fluent in Japanese, apparently an expert on the culture, and she had legs that went on for weeks. I took her into the studio and couldn’t even find the courage to talk to her, couldn’t even look in her eyes. She was beautiful, charming, intelligent. But most important of all, she was also way, way out of my league.

And then when the red light came on in the studio, something happened. Or rather, nothing happened at all. Gina became paralysed with nerves. She couldn’t speak.

When I had first seen her I had thought she was unapproachable. But as I watched her stuttering and sweating her way through her incoherent tale of economic decline, she was suddenly human. And I knew I had a chance. A slim chance, maybe. A snowball’s chance in hell, perhaps. But a chance all the same.

I also knew exactly how she felt. The red light always did that to me too. I was never comfortable in front of a microphone or a camera, and the very thought of it can still make me break out in a cold sweat.

So when it was over and Marty had put her out of her misery, it was not difficult for me to commiserate with her. She was very good about it, laughing at her nerves and vowing that her career in broadcasting was over.

My heart sank.

I thought – then when will I see you again?

The thing that got me about Gina is that she didn’t make a big deal about the way she looked. She knew she was good-looking, but she didn’t care. Or rather, she thought it was the least interesting thing about her. But you wouldn’t look twice at me if you saw me in the street. And someone as ordinary-looking as me can never be that casual about beauty.

She took me for sushi in Sogo, the big Japanese department store on Piccadilly Circus, where the staff all knew her. She talked to them in Japanese and they called her ‘Gina-san’.

‘Gina-san?’ I said.

‘It’s difficult to translate exactly,’ she smiled. ‘It sort of means – honourable, respected Gina.’

Honourable, respected Gina. She had been in love with Japanese culture ever since she was a little girl. She had actually lived there during her year out between sixth form and college, teaching English in Kyoto – ‘The happiest year of my life’ – and she was planning to go back. There was a job offer from an American bank in Tokyo. Nothing was going to stop her. I prayed that I would.

Desperately racking my brain for my little knowledge of Japan, I mentioned Yukio Mishima. She dismissed the novelist as a right-wing fruitcake – ‘It’s not all raw fish and ritual suicide, you know’ – and told me I should read Kawabata if I really wanted to understand Japan. She said she would lend some of his stuff to me, if I wanted. I saw my chance and grabbed it.

We met for a drink and she brought a book called Snow Country. I read it as soon as I got home – a jaded playboy falls in love with a doomed geisha in a mountain resort, it was actually pretty good – dreaming of Gina’s eyes, her legs, the way her whole face seemed to light up when she laughed.

She cooked dinner back at her flat. I had to take my shoes off before I came in. We discussed Japanese culture – or rather Gina talked and I listened, dropping bits of chicken teriyaki on the carpet with my chopsticks – until it was time to call a cab or brush my teeth. And then we were making love on the floor – or the futon, as Gina called it. I was ready to bomb Pearl Harbor for her.

And I wanted her to stay with me forever. So I promised her everything – happiness, endless love and, crucially, a family. I knew the family thing would get her – her dad had buggered off when Gina was four years old, and she had grown up pining for the security of family life. But she still cried when she told the bank that she wouldn’t be going to Tokyo after all.

Instead of living in Japan, she worked as a freelance translator for Japanese companies in the City. But many of them were going under or going home by now. Her career wasn’t what it should have been. I knew she had given up a lot to be with me. If I hadn’t been so deliriously happy, I might even have felt a bit guilty.

After we were married and Pat was born, she stayed home. She said she didn’t mind giving up work for Pat and me – ‘my two boys,’ she called us.

I suspected that the fact her career had disappointed her had as much to do with staying home as wanting a real family life. But she always tried to make it sound like the most natural thing in the world.

‘I don’t want my son brought up by strangers,’ she said. ‘I don’t want some overweight teenager from Bavaria sticking him in front of a video while I’m in an office.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘And I don’t want him eating all his meals fresh from the microwave. I don’t want to come home from work too tired to play with him. I don’t want him growing up without me. I want him to have some sort of family life – whatever that is. I don’t want his childhood to be like mine.’

‘Right,’ I said. I knew this was a touchy subject. Gina looked like she was ready to start bawling at any minute. ‘What’s wrong with being a woman who stays home with her kid?’ she said. ‘All that ambition stuff is so pathetically eighties. All that having-it-all crap. We can get by with less money, can’t we? And you’ll buy me sushi once a week, won’t you?’

I told her I would buy her so much raw fish she would sprout gills. So she stayed home to look after our son.

And when I came back from work at night I would shout, ‘Hi honey, I’m home,’ as though we were characters in some American sitcom from the fifties, with Dick Van Dyke bringing home the bacon and Mary Tyler Moore making bacon sandwiches.

I don’t know why I tried to make a joke of it. Maybe because in my heart I believed that Gina was only pretending to be a housewife, while I pretended to be my father.

three

Marty grew up eating dinner with the TV on. Television had been his babysitter, his best friend, his teacher. He could still recite entire programming schedules from his childhood. He could whistle the theme tune to Dallas. His Dalek impersonation was among the best I have ever heard. The Miss World contest had taught him everything he knew about the birds and bees, which admittedly wasn’t very much.

Although I was nothing like him, Marty took to me because I came from the same sort of home. That doesn’t sound like much of a basis for friendship, but you would be surprised at how few people in television come from that kind of background. Most of the people we worked with came from homes with books.

When we first met at the little radio station we were both what was laughingly referred to as multi-skilled. Marty was mostly skilled in fetching sandwiches, sorting mail and making the tea. But even then his grinning, pop-eyed energy was such that everyone noticed him, even if nobody took him seriously.

I was in a more elevated position than Marty, writing items, producing shows and sometimes very nervously reading the news. As I said, I was always lousy at coming alive when the red light came on – only slightly better than Gina. The red light came on and, instead of coming alive, I went sort of dead. But it turned out to be what Marty was born to do.

When we suddenly lost the regular presenter of our late-night phone-in – the nut shift, we called it – to a job in cable television, I persuaded the station to give Marty a shot. Partly because I thought he would be good at it. But mostly because I was terrified of having to do it myself.

Amazingly, he worked wonders with the most unpromising material imaginable. Five nights a week Marty took calls from hangers, floggers, conspiracy theorists, alien watchers and assorted loony tunes. And he turned it into good radio.

What made it good radio was that Marty sounded like there was nowhere else he would rather be than chatting to the mouth-foaming denizens of nut nation.

We slowly started to build what they call a cult following. After that, we very quickly began to get offers to put the show on television. People bought us lunch, made flattering noises and made big promises. And very soon we abandoned our successful radio show, a rare case of rats deserting a floating ship.

But it was different on television. We couldn’t just let our guests practically wander in off the street as they had done on radio. Amusing lunatics who had been impregnated by randy aliens were no longer quite enough.

After a year fronting his own show, Marty still looked like he was exactly where he wanted to be. But the strain was starting to tell, and every week he needed a little more time in make-up to cover the cracks. It wasn’t just the seven-day stress of finding good guests that was putting those licks of grey in his bottle-blond hair. When we were on radio, Marty had nothing to lose. And now he did.

He was in the chair of the make-up room when I arrived at the studio, brainstorming about future guests to the group of young women who surrounded him, hanging on to his every wishful thought while the make-up girl attempted to make his skin look vaguely human for the cameras. He dubiously sipped the glass of water which had been placed in front of him.

‘Is this Evian?’

‘Did you want sparkling?’ asked a sweet-faced young woman in combat trousers and army boots.

‘I wanted Evian.’

She looked relieved. ‘That’s Evian.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, it’s Badoit.’

Marty looked at her.

‘But there wasn’t any Evian in the vending machine,’ she said.

‘Try the green room,’ he suggested with a little sigh.

There were murmurs of assent. The green room – the holding pen for the show’s guests – was definitely the place to find Marty’s Evian. Crestfallen but smiling bravely, the girl in combat trousers went off to find the right water.

‘I’m thinking classic encounter with Hollywood legend,’ Marty said. ‘I’m thinking Michael Parkinson meets the stars with his clipboard. I’m thinking Tinsel Town. I’m thinking Oscar nominee. I’m thinking…Jack Nicholson?’

‘Jack’s not in town,’ our researcher said. She was a small, nervous girl who wouldn’t be doing this job for much longer. Her fingernails were already chewed to the knuckle.

‘Leonardo DiCaprio?’

‘Leo’s unavailable.’

‘Clint Eastwood?’

‘I’ve got a call in with his office. But – doubtful.’

‘Robert Mitchum? James Stewart?’

‘They’re dead.’

Marty shot her a vicious look.

‘Don’t ever say that,’ he said. ‘They are merely unable to commit to the show at this moment in time.’

He looked at me in the mirror, his beady eyes blinking inside a cloud of orange foundation.

‘Why can’t we get any of these fucking screen greats, Harry?’

‘Because none of the people you mentioned have any product out,’ I told him, as I had to tell him every week. ‘And when they do, we still have to fight for them with all the other talk shows.’

‘Did you see the news tonight?’ the make-up girl said dreamily, the way make-up girls do, completely oblivious to the nervous breakdowns that were happening all around her. ‘It was really interesting. They showed you those protesters out at the airport. The ones chaining themselves to the trees? Protesting against the new terminal?’

‘What about them?’ Marty asked. ‘Or are you just making conversation?’

‘I really like their leader,’ she said. ‘You know – Cliff. The one with the dreadlocks? He’s gorgeous.’

Every woman in the room muttered agreement. I had seen this Cliff character up his tree – skinny, well-spoken, dreadlocks – but I had had no idea he was considered a sexual entity.

‘That’s who you should have on the show,’ the make-up girl said triumphantly, dabbing Marty’s face with a powder puff. ‘He’s much more interesting than some old superstar with a hair transplant and an action thriller on general release.’

‘Cliff’s not a bad idea,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know how to reach him. Although he can’t be as difficult as Clint Eastwood.’

‘Well, I’ve got a mobile number for him,’ someone said from the back of the make-up room. ‘If that’s any use.’

We all turned to look at her.

She was a slim redhead with that kind of fine Irish skin that is so pale it looks as though it has never seen the sun. She was in her early twenties – she looked as though she had been out of university for about forty-five minutes – but she still had a few freckles. She would always have a few freckles. I had never seen her before.

‘Siobhan Kemp,’ she said to no one in particular, blushing as she introduced herself. ‘I’m the new associate producer. Well – shall I give Cliff a call?’

Marty looked at me. I could tell that he liked the idea of the tree man. And so did I. Because, like all television people, what we worshipped above all else was authenticity. Apart from genuine, high-octane celebrity, of course. We worshipped that most of all.

We were sick of junior celebs pushing their lousy product. We hungered after real people with real lives and real stories – stories not anecdotes. They offered us great television at rock-bottom prices. We offered them therapy, a chance to get it all off their chest, an opportunity to let it all just gush out over a million carpets.

Of course, if Jack Nicholson had suddenly called up begging to appear on the show then we would have immediately called a security guard to escort all the real people from the building. But somehow Jack never did. There were just not enough celebrities to go round these days.

So we revered real people, real people who felt passionate about something, real people with no career to protect. And someone up a tree with police dogs snapping at his unwashed bollocks sounded about as real as it gets.

‘How do you know him?’ I asked her.

‘I used to go out with him,’ she said.

Marty and I exchanged a glance. We were impressed. So this Siobhan was a real person too.

‘It didn’t work out,’ she said. ‘It’s difficult when one of you is up a tree for so much of the time. But we managed to stay close and I admire him – he really believes in what he’s doing. The way he sees it, the life-support systems of the planet are nearing exhaustion, and all the politicians ever do is pay lip service to ecological issues. He thinks that when man enters the land, he should leave only footprints and take only memories.’

‘Fucking brilliant,’ Marty said. ‘Who’s his agent?’

I was up in the gallery watching a dozen screens showing five different shots of Marty interviewing a man who could inflate a condom with it pulled down over the top half of his head – he was actually pretty good – when I felt someone by my side.

It was Siobhan, smiling like a kid on her first day at a new school who has suddenly realised that she is going to be okay.

In the darkness of the gallery her face was lit by the monitors on the wall. They are TV sets, that’s all, but we call them monitors. They provide the director with a choice of shots for transmission. Monitors don’t only show the image that is going out, but all the images that could be. Siobhan smiled up at them. She had a beautiful smile.

‘I thought that this Cliff didn’t do interviews,’ I said. ‘Not since he was stitched up by that Sunday paper who said he was just in it for the glory and the hippy chicks.’ Then I remembered she had gone out with him. ‘No offence meant.’

‘None taken,’ she said. ‘That’s true, but he might do this one.’

‘Why? Because of you?’

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Because he likes Marty. He doesn’t consider him part of the media establishment.’

I looked at Marty on the monitors, almost gagging with laughter as the condom exploded on the guy’s head. If anyone was part of the media establishment, it was Marty. He would have considered it a compliment.

‘And most of all,’ said Siobhan, ‘because we’re live.’

It was true that we were practically the last live show on television. By now most shows were what are called ‘as live’ – meaning they faked the excitement of live television while always having the safety net of recording. Phoney as hell.

But The Marty Mann Show was the real thing. When you watched that guy with a condom on his head, it was actually being inflated at that very moment.

‘The way these eco-warriors see it,’ Siobhan said, ‘the only place in the media where there’s no censorship is live television. Can I ask you something?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Is that your MGF down in the carpark? The red one?’

Here it comes, I thought. The lecture about what cars do to the muck in the air and the hole in the sky. Sometimes I despair for the young people of today. All they ever think about is the future of the planet.

‘Yeah, that’s mine,’ I said.

‘Nice car,’ she said.

They were both asleep by the time I got home. I brushed my teeth and undressed in the darkness, listening to my wife softly breathing in her sleep.

The sound of Gina sleeping never failed to stir an enormous tenderness in me. It was the only time she ever seemed vulnerable, the only time I could kid myself that she needed me to protect her. She stirred when I slid into bed and wrapped my arm around her.

‘Good show tonight,’ she murmured.

She was warm and sleepy and I loved her like that. She had her back to me, her usual sleeping position, and she sighed as I snuggled up against her, kissing the back of her neck and letting my hand trace the length of one of those long legs that had knocked me out when I first met her. And still did.

‘Oh, Gina. My Gina.’

‘Oh, Harry,’ she said softly. ‘You don’t want to – do you?’ She brushed me with her hand. ‘Well. Maybe you do.’

‘You feel great.’

‘Pretty frisky, aren’t you?’ she laughed, turning to look at me, her eyes still half-closed with sleep. ‘I mean, for a man of your age.’

She sat up in bed, pulled the T-shirt she was wearing over her head and tossed it to the floor. She ran her fingers through her hair and smiled at me, her long, familiar body lit by the street light seeping through the blinds. It was never really dark in our room.

‘Still want me?’ she said. ‘Even after all these years?’

I may have nodded. Our lips were just about to touch when Pat began to cry. We looked at each other. She smiled. I didn’t.

‘I’ll get him,’ Gina said, as I flopped back against the pillow.

She returned to the bedroom with Pat in her arms. He was sort of gasping for breath and tearfully trying to explain his nightmare – something about big monsters – while Gina soothed him, rolling him into bed between us. As always, in the warmth of our bed his sobbing immediately stopped.

‘Make spoons,’ Gina told us.

Pat and I obediently rolled over, his warm little legs in their brushed cotton pyjamas tucked up inside the back of mine. I could hear him sniffing, but he was okay now. Gina threw one of her long thin arms over the pair of us, nestling up against Pat.

‘Go to sleep now,’ she whispered. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

I closed my eyes, the boy between us, and as I drifted away I wondered if Gina was talking to me, or to Pat, or to both of us.

‘There are no monsters,’ she said, and we slept in her arms.

four

Gina’s thirtieth birthday had not been completely painless.

Her father had called her in the early evening to wish her a happy birthday – which meant she had spent all of the morning and all of the afternoon wondering if the worthless old git would call her at all.

Twenty-five years ago, just before Gina had started school, Glenn – as her dad insisted everyone call him, especially his children – walked out the door, dreaming of making it as a rock musician. And although he had been working behind the counter of a guitar shop in Denmark Street for a couple of centuries, and all the dreams of glory had receded along with his hippy hairline, he still thought he was some kind of free spirit who could forget birthdays or remember them as the mood took him.

Glenn had never made it as a musician. There had been one band with a modest recording contract and one minor hit single. You might have glimpsed him playing bass on Top of the Pops just before Ted Heath left 10 Downing Street forever.

He was very good-looking when he was younger – Glenn, not Ted Heath – a bit of a Robert Plant figure, all blond Viking curls and bare midriff. But I always felt that Glenn’s true career had been building families and then smashing them up.

Gina’s little family had been just the first in a long line of wives and children that Glenn had abandoned. They were scattered all over the country, the women like Gina’s mother, who had been considered such a great beauty back in the sixties and seventies that her smiling face was sometimes featured in glossy magazines, and the children like Gina, who had grown up in a single parent family back when it was still called a broken home.

Glenn breezed in and out of their lives, casually missing birthdays and Christmases and then turning up unexpectedly with some large, inappropriate gift. Even though he was now a middle-aged suburban commuter who worked in a shop, he still liked to think he was Jim bloody Morrison and that the rules which applied to other people didn’t apply to him.

But I can’t complain too much about old Glenn. In a way he played Cupid to me and Gina. Because what she liked about me most was my family.

It was a small, ordinary family – I’m the only child – and we lived in a pebble-dashed semi in the Home Counties which could have been in almost any suburb in England. We were surrounded by houses and people, but you had to walk for half a mile before you could buy a newspaper – surrounded by life, yet never escaping the feeling that life was happening somewhere else. That’s the suburbs.

My mum watched the street from behind net curtains (‘It’s my street,’ she would say, when challenged by my dad and me). My dad fell asleep in front of the television (‘There’s never anything on,’ he always moaned). And I kicked a ball about in the back garden, dreaming of extra time at Wembley and trying to avoid my dad’s roses.

How many families are there like that in this country? Probably millions. Yet certainly a lot less than there were. Families like us, we’re practically an endangered species. Gina acted as though my mum and my dad and I were the last of the nuclear families, protected wild life to be cherished and revered and wondered over.

To me, of course, my family was on the staid side. All that car-washing, all that peeking from behind net curtains, all the nights spent in front of the television, all the B&B holidays in Devon and Cornwall or a caravan in Frinton. I envied Gina’s exotic background – her mum a former model, her dad a would-be rock star, the pictures in the glossy magazines, even though the pictures were fading now.

But Gina remembered the missed birthdays of her childhood, a father who was always preoccupied with his more recent, more exciting attachments, the promised holidays that never happened, and her mother going to bed alone, growing old alone, getting sick alone, crying alone and finally dying alone. Gina could never be cavalier about an ordinary family. It wasn’t in her.

The first Christmas I took Gina home, I saw her choking up when my mum gave her a little present – just some smelly stuff in a basket from the Body Shop, some soap in the shape of polar bears covered in cling film – and I knew I had her. She looked at those polar bears and she was hooked.

You should never underestimate the power of the nuclear family. These days coming from an unbroken home is like having independent means, or Paul Newman eyes, or a big cock. It’s one of life’s true blessings, given to just a lucky few. And difficult to resist.

But those unbroken homes can lull their children into a false sense of security. When I was growing up, I took it for granted that every marriage would be as stable and everlasting as my mum and dad’s – including my own. My parents made it look easy. But it’s not easy at all.

Gina would probably have washed her hands of Glenn years ago if her mother had lived. But she died of breast cancer just before Gina walked into the radio station and my life, and suddenly she felt the need to salvage the few ragged bits of family she still had left.

So Glenn came to our wedding, and rolled a joint in front of my mum and dad. Then he tried to get off with one of the bridesmaids. Pushing fifty, he seemed to be under the impression that he was nineteen years old and everything was still before him. He wore leather trousers that went creak-creak-creak when he danced. And, oh, how he danced.

Gina had been so upset that Glenn couldn’t manage even the vaguest impersonation of a father that she didn’t want to send him any photographs of Pat when he was born. But I had put my foot down, insisting the man had a right to see pictures of his only grandchild. And I secretly thought that when Glenn saw our beautiful boy, he would be instantly smitten. When he forgot Pat’s birthday for the third year in a row, I realised that I now had reasons of my own to hate the old hippy bastard.

‘Maybe he’s terrified of being a grandfather,’ I said. ‘Freaked out – isn’t that what he’d call it?’

‘Yes, there’s that,’ Gina said. ‘And there’s also the fact that he’s a selfish arsehole who never grew up. Let’s not forget that.’

Unlike Gina’s mother and father, nobody had ever thought my parents were a golden couple. Nobody had ever thought that their union summed up the spirit of an era. My mum’s picture had never appeared in a glossy magazine – although her prize-winning tomatoes had once been prominently featured in the local rag. But my parents had stayed together for a lifetime. And Gina and I were going to do the same.

Since our wedding day, we had friends who had met someone, fallen in love, married, divorced and started to hate their ex-partner’s guts. That would never happen to us. Though our backgrounds were different, they meant we wanted the same thing.

I wanted a marriage that would last forever because that’s what my parents had. Gina wanted a marriage that would last forever because that was exactly what her parents had never had.

‘That’s what is so good about us,’ Gina told me, ‘our dreams match.’

Gina was mad about my parents and the feeling was mutual. They looked at this blonde vision coming up the garden path with their little grandson, and the pair of them seemed to visibly swell with pleasure, smiling shyly behind their reading glasses and geraniums.

None of them could believe their luck. My parents thought they were getting Grace Kelly. Gina thought she was getting the Waltons.

‘I’m going to take Pat to see your mum and dad,’ she said before I went to work. ‘Can I borrow your mobile phone? The battery’s flat on mine.’

I was happy to lend it to her. I can’t stand those things. They make me feel trapped.

A shiver of panic ran through the gallery.

‘The fly’s back!’ the director said. ‘We got the fly!’

There it was on the monitor. The studio fly.

Our fly was a huge beetle-black creature with wings as big as a wasp’s and a carcass so bloated that it seemed to have an undercarriage. On a close-up of Marty reading his autocue, we watched the fly lazily circle our presenter’s head and then bank off into a long slow climb.

The fly lived somewhere in the dark upper reaches of the studio, up there among the tangle of sockets, cables and lights. The fly only ever put in an appearance during a show, and up in the gallery the old-timers said that it was responding to the heat of the studio lights. But I always thought that the fly was attracted to whatever juice it is that human glands secrete when they are on live television. Our studio fly had a taste for fear.

Apart from the fly’s aerial display, Marty’s interview with Cliff was going well. The young green started off nervously, scratching his stubble, tugging his filthy dreadlocks, stuttering his way through rambling sentences and even committing television’s cardinal sin of staring directly into the camera. But Marty could be surprisingly gentle with nervous guests and, clearly sympathetic to Cliff’s cause, he eventually made the young man relax. It was only when Marty was winding up the interview that it all began to go wrong.

‘I want to thank Cliff for coming in tonight,’ Marty said, unusually solemn, brushing away the studio fly. ‘And I want to thank all his colleagues who are living in trees out at the airport. Because the battle they are fighting is for all of us.’

As the applause swelled, Marty reached out and shook his guest’s hand. Cliff held it. And continued to hold it. Then he reached inside the grubby, vaguely ethnic coat he was wearing and produced a pair of handcuffs. While Marty watched with an uncertain smile, Cliff snapped one metal ring around his own wrist and the other around Marty’s.

‘Free the birds,’ Cliff said quietly. He cleared his throat.

‘What – what is this?’ Marty asked.

‘Free the birds!’ Cliff shouted with growing confidence. ‘Free the birds!’

Marty shook his head. ‘Do you have the key for this thing, you smelly little shit?’

Up in the gloaming of the gallery we watched the scene unfold on the bank of screens shining in the darkness. The director carried on choreographing the five cameras – ‘Stay on Marty, two…give me a close-up of the handcuffs, four…’ – but I had the feeling that you only get when live television is going very wrong, a feeling which somehow combines low-grade nausea, paralysis and terrible fascination, as it sits there in the pit of your stomach.

And suddenly there was the fly, hovering for a few seconds by Cliff’s hair, then executing a perfect landing on the bridge of his nose.

‘Free the birds!’

Marty considered his arm, unable to quite believe that he was really chained to this scruffy young man whose make-up was starting to melt under the lights. Then he picked up the water jug that was on the table between them and, almost as if he were trying to swat the studio fly, smashed it into Cliff’s face. There was an eruption of blood and water. Marty was left holding just the jug’s broken handle.

‘Fuck the birds,’ he said. ‘And bugger the hole in the ozone layer.’

A floor manager appeared on camera, his mouth open with wonder, his headphones dangling around his neck.

Cliff cradled his crushed nose. Someone in the audience started booing. And that’s when I knew we were stuffed. Marty had done the one thing he wasn’t allowed to do on our kind of show. He had lost the audience.

Up in the gallery the telephones all began to ring at once, as if to commemorate my brilliant career going straight down the toilet. Suddenly I was aware of how hard I was sweating.

The studio fly appeared briefly on all the monitors, seemed to perform a victory roll, and then was gone.

‘I’m so stupid,’ Siobhan said hours later in the deserted gallery. ‘It’s all my fault. I should never have booked him. I should have guessed he wanted to use us to do something like this. He always was a selfish little bastard. Why did I do it? Because I was trying to impress everyone. And now look what’s happened.’

‘You’re not stupid,’ I told her. ‘Marty was stupid. It was a good booking. Despite what happened, it’s still a good booking.’

‘But what’s going to happen now?’ she asked, suddenly seeming very young. ‘What will they do to us?’

I shook my head and shrugged. ‘We’ll soon find out.’ I was tired of thinking about it. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

I had sent Marty home, smuggled out of the back of the building into a minicab which was waiting by the freight entrance, telling him to talk to no one. The press would tear him to pieces. We could count on that. I was more worried about what the station would do to him. And us. I knew they needed The Marty Mann Show. But did they need it this badly?

‘It’s so late,’ Siobhan said, as we got into the lift. ‘Where can I get a cab?’

‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

I should have guessed that she would say Camden Town. She just had to be living in one of those old working-class neighbourhoods that had been colonised by the people in black. Actually, she was not that far from our little house by Highbury Corner. We were at opposite ends of the same road. But Siobhan was at the end of the Camden Road where they aspired to Bohemia. I was at the end where they dreamed of suburbia.

‘I can give you a lift,’ I said.

‘What – in your MGF?’

‘Sure.’

‘Great!’

We laughed for the first time in hours – although I couldn’t quite work out why – and took the lift down to the underground carpark where the little red car was standing completely alone. It was late. Almost two. I watched her slide her legs under the dashboard.

‘I’m not going to go on about it,’ she said, ‘but I just want to say you’ve been really sweet about tonight. Thank you for not being angry with me. I appreciate it.’

It was a gracious apology for something that she really didn’t have to apologise for. I looked at her pale Irish face, realising for the first time how much I liked her.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, quickly turning on the ignition to cover my embarrassment. ‘We’re on the same side, aren’t we?’

It was a warm summer night and the city streets were as close to empty as they were ever going to get. Within twenty minutes we were driving past the shuttered flea market, the funky ethnic restaurants and all the second-hand stores with their grotesquely oversized signs – there were giant cowboy boots, colossal rattan chairs and monster slabs of vinyl, all of them looming above the street like the visions caused by some bad drug. Gina and I used to shop around here on Saturday afternoons. It was years ago now.

Siobhan gave me directions until we pulled up in front of a large white town house that had long ago been converted into flats.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘goodnight then.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘for everything.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Listen, I don’t think I can sleep yet. Not after tonight. Do you want to come in for a drink?’

‘A drink might keep me awake,’ I said, hating myself for sounding like a pensioner who had to scurry back to the cocoa and incontinence sheets of his sheltered accommodation.

‘You sure?’ she asked, and I was ridiculously flattered that she seemed a bit disappointed. I also knew that she wouldn’t ask again.

Go home, a voice inside me said. Decline with a polite smile and go home now.

And maybe I would have if I hadn’t liked her so much.

Maybe I would have if it hadn’t been such a rough night.

Maybe I would have if I wasn’t coming up to thirty.

Maybe I would have if her legs had been a couple of inches shorter.

‘Okay,’ I said, far more casually than I felt. ‘Sounds good.’

She looked at me for just a moment, and then we were kissing each other, her hands on the back of my neck, tugging at my hair with small, urgent fists. That’s strange, I thought. Gina never does that.

five

A child can change in a moment. You turn your back for a couple of seconds, and when you look again you find they have already grown into someone else.

I can remember seeing Pat smile properly for the first time. He was a little fat bald thing, Winston Churchill in a Babygro, howling because his first teeth were pushing through, so Gina rubbed some chocolate on his sore gums and he immediately stopped crying and grinned up at us – this big, wide, gummy grin – as if we had just revealed the best secret in the world.

And I can remember him walking for the first time. He was holding himself up by the rail of his little yellow plastic stroller, swaying from side to side as if he were caught in a stiff breeze, as was his custom, when without warning he suddenly took off, his fat little legs sticking out of his disposable nappy and pumping furiously to keep up with the stroller’s spinning blue wheels.

He bombed off out of the room and Gina laughed and said he looked as though he was going to be late for the office again.

But I can’t remember when his games changed. I don’t know when all his toddler’s games of fire engines and Postman Pat videos gave way to his obsession with Star Wars. That was one of the changes which happened when I wasn’t looking.

One minute his head was full of talking animals, the next it was all Death Stars, stormtroopers and light sabres.

If we let him, he would watch the three Star Wars films on video all day and all night. But we didn’t let him – or rather Gina didn’t let him – so when the television was turned off, he spent hours playing with his collection of Star Wars figures and grey plastic spaceships, or bouncing on the sofa, brandishing his light sabre, muttering scraps of George Lucas storylines to himself.

It seemed like only the day before yesterday when nothing gave him more pleasure than his collection of farmyard animals – or ‘aminals’, as Pat called them. He would sit in his bubble bath, a little blond angel with suds on his head, parading his cows, sheep and horses along the side of the tub, mooing and baaing until the water turned cold.

‘I’m taking me bath,’ he would announce. ‘I need me aminals.’

Now his aminals were collecting dust in some forgotten corner of his bedroom while he played his endless games of intergalactic good and evil.

They were a lot like the games I could remember from my own childhood. And sometimes Pat’s fantasies of brave knights, evil warlords and captured princesses sounded like echoes from a past that was long gone, as if he were trying to recover something precious that had already been lost forever.

Siobhan slept like someone who was single.

She edged right into the middle of the bed, her freckled limbs thrown out every which way, or she rolled over on her side, taking my share of the duvet with her. I lay there in that strange bed wide awake, clutching a scrap of sheet the size of a handkerchief as the room got light.

It was too soon to feel really bad. Pushed to the back of my mind there was the thought of Gina and all the promises I had ever made to her – promises from the days when I was trying to persuade her to love me, the promises we made on our wedding day, and all the promises of all the days beyond, all that stuff about undying love and never wanting anyone else that I had really meant at the time. And still did, I discovered. Now more than ever, in a funny sort of way.

Later, this would all really get to me, and driving home I would look in the mirror wondering when I had become the kind of man I used to hate. But now was too soon for all that. I lay there as the night faded away thinking to myself – well, that seemed to go okay.

The reason that most men stray is opportunity, and the joy of meaningless sex should never be underestimated. It had been a meaningless, opportunistic coupling. That’s what I had liked most about it.

What I liked least about it was that already I was starting to feel like a traitor.

And it was far from great. You try too hard with someone new. You try too hard to truly enjoy yourself. Sex with someone new is too much like taking your driving test. Yet when I thought of all the things that could have gone wrong – and all of them seemed to involve timing – it was okay.

Thank God, thank God, thank God.

But all the time I was with Siobhan, while half of me thought that this was probably the woman I hadn’t realised I had been looking for all my life, this pale Irish beauty who would have lovely red-headed children, the other half of me sort of missed my wife.

I missed the easy familiarity you get with someone who you have been with for years. If I was going to be unfaithful, then I kind of wished it could have been with Gina.

Still, you can get tired of always being the man who pays the mortgage and calls the plumber and can’t put together the self-assembly furniture. You get tired of being that man because in the end you don’t feel like much of a man at all, more of a domestic appliance.

So you go home with some stranger who doesn’t let you have your share of the duvet and end up feeling more tired of yourself than ever. Now what did I do with my trousers?

Daylight was creeping into the room as I got dressed, and glimpses of Siobhan’s life floated into view. It was a good flat – the kind of comfortable, ordered flat I had always wanted but never had. I seemed to have gone straight from student squalor to domestic disorder.

The only photographs I could see were of Siobhan as a teenager, laughing as she held on to grinning dogs or some sweet-looking old people. Pictures of pets and parents.

There were some Japanese prints on the walls, of peasants struggling through a rainy landscape – stuff Gina would have liked. Shelves neatly stacked with books and CDs revealed a taste for literature that had made it to the movies and a weird mix of rock groups and mellow jazz – Oasis and U2 next to Stan Getz, Chet Baker and the softer side of Miles.

Looking at her books and records made me like her more. But probably looking at anyone’s books and records will make you feel that way, even if they have lots of rubbish. Because what they like, and what they used to like, reveals things about them that they wouldn’t normally choose to advertise.

I liked it that Siobhan had probably grown out of white rock bands and was now looking for something a bit more cool and sophisticated (it seemed unthinkable that she might have started out on Chet Baker and Miles Davis then later switched to U2 and Oasis). It showed she was still really young and curious, still discovering what she wanted from the world. Still inventing her life rather than trying to recover it.

It was very much a young single woman’s apartment, the flat of a girl who could please herself. Despite the magazines and clothes that were strewn around, there was none of the real mess and clutter that you get in a place with a child, none of the homely chaos I was used to. You could make it all the way to the door without stepping on a Han Solo figurine.

But I sort of missed all of the clutter and mess that I knew from my home, just as I already missed being the kind of man who knows how to keep his promises.

Gina was crying when I got home.

I sat on the side of the bed, afraid to touch her.

‘It was crazy after last night’s show,’ I said. ‘I had to stay at the station.’

‘I understand,’ she said. ‘It’s not that.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘It’s your mum, Harry.’

‘What about her?’

‘She’s so good with Pat,’ Gina choked. ‘It just comes so easily to her. I’ll never be like her. She’s so patient, so kind. I told her that I sometimes feel like I’m going crazy – at home all day with nobody to talk to but a little boy. And when he’s at his nursery school, it’s even worse.’ She looked up at me, her eyes brimming. ‘I don’t think she even understood what I was talking about.’

Thank Christ for that. For a moment there I thought she knew everything.

‘You’re the best mother in the world,’ I said, taking her in my arms. And I meant it.

‘No, I’m not,’ she said. ‘You want me to be. And I want to be, I really do. But just wanting something doesn’t make it true.’

She cried some more, although her sobs had lost that desperate edge. It happened sometimes, this crying, and I never knew what might start it off. To me it always looked as though she was crying about nothing. Not a good mother? I mean, what was all that about? Gina was a brilliant mother. And if she was feeling a bit isolated during the day, she could give me a call at work. My secretary would always take a message. Or there was an answering machine on my mobile. How could she ever be lonely? I just didn’t get it.

I cuddled her until the tears were gone and then I went downstairs to make us some coffee. There were about a million messages on the machine. The world was going crazy about Marty. But I wasn’t too worried about the newspapers and the station.

I had heard somewhere that a problem at work is like a plane crash that you can walk away from. It’s not like your home life, where you can’t get away from your problems, no matter how far you run.

six

Every father is a hero to his son. At least when they are too small to know any better.

Pat thinks I can do anything right now. He thinks I can make the world bend to my will – just like Han Solo or Indiana Jones. I know that one day soon Pat will work out that there are a few differences between Harrison Ford and his old dad. And when he realises that I don’t actually own a bullwhip or a light sabre, he will never look at me in quite the same way again.

But before they grow out of it, all sons think their dad is a hero. It was a bit different with me and my dad. Because my father really was a hero. He had a medal to prove it and everything.

If your saw him in his garden or in his car, you would think he was just another suburban dad. Yet in a drawer of the living room of the pebble-dashed semi where I grew up there was a Distinguished Service Medal that he had won during the war. I spent my childhood pretending to be a hero. My dad was the real thing.

The DSM – that’s important. Only the Victoria Cross is higher, and usually you have to die before they give you that. If you saw my dad in a pub or on the street you would think you knew all about him, just by looking at his corny jumper or his balding head or his family saloon or his choice of newspaper. You would think that you knew him. And you would be dead wrong.

I picked up the phone. I could ignore all the messages from the station and the papers. But I had to call my parents.

My old man answered the phone. That was unusual. He couldn’t stand the phone. He would only pick it up if my mum was nowhere near it, or if he happened to be passing on his way from Gardener’s World to the garden.

‘Dad? It’s me.’

‘I’ll get your mother.’

He was gruff and formal on the phone, as if he had never got used to using one. As if we had never met. As if I were trying to sell him something he didn’t want.

‘Dad? Did you see the show last night?’

I knew he had seen it. They always watched my show.

There was a pause.

‘Quite a performance,’ my father said.

I knew he would have hated it all – the swearing, the violence, the politics. I could even hear him bitching about the commercials. But I wanted him to tell me that it didn’t matter. That I was forgiven.

‘That’s live television, Dad,’ I said with a forced laugh. ‘You never know what’s going to happen.’

The old man grunted.

‘It’s not really my scene,’ he said.

At some point during the nineties, my father had started using the vernacular of the sixties.

His speech was peppered with ‘no ways’ and ‘not my scenes’. No doubt in another thirty years he would be collecting his pension and hobbling about in a zimmer frame while proclaiming that he was ‘sorted’ and ‘mad for it’. But by then the world wouldn’t know what he was going on about.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘there’s no need to worry. Everything’s under control.’

‘Worried? I’m not worried,’ he said.

The silence hummed between us. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know how to bridge the gap between our separate worlds. I didn’t know where to start.

‘I’ll get your mother.’

While he went to get my mum, Pat wandered into the room. He was in his pyjamas, his mass of dirty yellow hair sticking up, those eyes from Tiffany still puffy with sleep. I held out my arms to him, realising with a stab of pain how much I loved him. He walked straight past me and over to the video machine.

‘Pat? Come here, darling.’

He reluctantly came over to me, clutching a tape of Return of the Jedi. I pulled him on to my lap. He had that sweet, musty smell kids have when they have just got up. He yawned wide, as I kissed him on the cheek. His skin was brand new. Freshly minted. The softest thing in the world.

And he still looked like the most beautiful thing in the world to me, like a little blond angel who had dropped off a cloud on his way to the celestial video shop.

Was he really that pretty? Or was that just my parental gene kicking in? Does every child in the world look like that to its parent? I still don’t know.

‘Did you have a nice time at Nanny and Granddad’s house?’ I asked.

He thought about it for a moment.

‘They don’t have any good films,’ he said.

‘What kind of films do they have?’

‘Stupid ones. Just with…pictures.’

‘You mean cartoons?’

‘Yeah. Just pictures. For babies.’

I was indignant.

‘Pat, they’re not for babies. You don’t like Dumbo? The elephant with the big ears? The poor little elephant who everyone makes fun of?’

‘Dumbo’s stupid.’

‘Dumbo’s great! What’s wrong with Dumbo? Jesus Christ, I grew up with Dumbo!’

I was going to give him a lecture about the genius of Walt Disney and the glory of animation and the magic of childhood, but my mum came on the line.

‘Harry? We were so worried. What on earth’s going to happen? Will you lose your job?’

‘Mum, I’m not going to lose my job. What happened last night – that’s what we call good television.’

‘Really, dear? I thought you once told me that it was good television if the guest attacked the host. I didn’t know it worked the other way round.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said, although she had a point. All the talk show punch-ups I could remember involved the presenter getting twatted. And not the other way around. ‘They’re giving me a new contract soon. Don’t worry, Mum – we don’t have to send Pat up a chimney just yet.’

‘And what’s wrong with Gina? She seems so – I don’t know – down.’

‘Gina’s fine,’ I said. ‘What’s Gina got to be down about?’

After I’d hung up, Pat beetled over to the video machine and stuffed in Return of the Jedi. The film began where he had left it – Princess Leia dressed as a slave girl at the feet of Jabba the Hutt. Drool slipped from Jabba’s filthy lips as he considered his nubile concubine. My four-year-old son watched the scene impassively. This couldn’t be good for him, could it?

‘Why don’t we have a game?’ I suggested.

His face brightened.

‘Okay!’

‘What do you want to play?’

‘Star Wars.’

Grinning from ear to ear, he hauled his favourite toy box in from his bedroom and emptied its contents on to the carpet. Out spilled all the things that made George Lucas famous. I sat on the floor with Pat while he carefully manoeuvred Han, Luke, Chewie and the two ’droids around his grey plastic Millennium Falcon.

‘Princess Leia is being held captured on the Death Star,’ Pat said.

‘Captive,’ I said. ‘She’s being held captive.’

‘Being held captured,’ he said. ‘We have to rescue her, Daddy.’

‘Okay.’

I sat playing with my son for a while, something I knew I didn’t do nearly enough. Then after about five or ten minutes I decided I had better get in to work. It was going to be a long day.

Pat was disappointed that I was cutting our game short, but he cheered up when I switched his video of Princess Leia as a beautiful slave girl back on. He really liked that bit.

We were all over the papers.

The broadsheets saw the Cliff incident as symptomatic of a medium in terminal decline, desperate for cheap sensation in a world of visual overload and limited attention spans. The tabloids were going barmy about the blood and bad language.

All of them were calling for the head of Marty Mann. I was going to call him from the car, but I remembered that I had lent Gina my mobile phone.

Marty’s company – Mad Mann Productions – had a floor in a building on Notting Hill Gate, a large open-plan office where self-consciously casual young people in their twenties worked on The Marty Mann Show or spent months planning future Mad Mann projects. The office was currently working on a game show for clever people, an alternative travel programme, a scuba diving series that would allow Marty to spend six months in the Maldives, and lots of other ideas which would almost certainly never actually happen.

We called it development. The outside world would call it farting around.

Only Marty and I had offices at Mad Mann. Actually they were more like little private cubbyholes, full of tapes and shooting scripts and a few VCRs. Siobhan was waiting for me in mine.

She had never been in my room before. We sort of blushed at each other. Why is it so easy to talk to someone before you go to bed with them for the first time and then suddenly so difficult?

‘You should have woken me up before you left,’ she said.

‘I was going to,’ I said, ‘but you looked so…’

‘Peaceful?’

‘Knackered.’

She laughed. ‘Well, it was a bad night. The only good thing about it was you.’

‘Listen, Siobhan –’

‘It’s okay, Harry. I know. I’m not going to see you again, am I? Not like last night, I mean. You don’t have to pretend. You don’t have to say anything that isn’t true. I know you’re married.’

‘You’re a great girl, Siobhan. You really are.’

And I meant it.

‘But you love your wife. I know, I know. Don’t worry. I would prefer to hear it now than six months down the line. I would rather get it over with before I start to really like you. At least you’re not like some of them. You didn’t tell me that your wife doesn’t understand you. You didn’t tell me that you’re probably going to break up. You didn’t spend months sneaking out of the house to phone me. You’re not a stinking hypocrite.’

Not a hypocrite? I spent last night with you and I’ll spend tonight with my wife. Surely a hypocrite is exactly what I am?

‘You’re no good at all this, Harry. That’s what I like about you. Believe me, there are not many around like you. I know. The last one – Jesus! I really thought he was going to leave his wife and that we were actually going to get married. That’s how stupid I am.’

‘You’re not stupid,’ I said, putting my arms around her.

We held each other tight, with real feeling. Now we were splitting up, we were getting on brilliantly.

Then she started to get choked up about how difficult it is to find a good man, while I thought to myself – well, that’s a relief. We aren’t going to star in a remake of Fatal Attraction after all.

I knew I was getting off lightly. Siobhan was going to let me go without pouring acid on my MGF or putting our pet rabbit in a pot. Not that we had a rabbit. But after the relief had subsided I was surprised to find that I felt a little hurt. Was it so easy to say goodbye to me?

‘This always happens to me,’ Siobhan laughed, although her eyes were all wet and shining. ‘I always pick the ones who have already been picked. Your wife is a lucky woman. As I believe I said on that message I left you.’

‘What message?’

‘The message on your mobile.’

‘My mobile?’

‘I left a message on your mobile phone,’ Siobhan said, drying her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Didn’t you get it?’

seven

Gina was packing her bags when I got home. Stuffing a suitcase and a weekend bag up in our bedroom, pale-faced and dry-eyed, doing it as quickly as she could, taking only the bare essentials. As if she couldn’t stand to be there any more.

‘Gina?’

She turned and looked at me, and it was as if she were seeing me for the very first time. She seemed almost giddy with contempt and sadness and anger. Especially anger. It scared the shit out of me. She had never looked at me like that before.

She turned again, picking something up from the little table by her side of the bed. An ashtray. No, not an ashtray. We didn’t have any ashtrays. She threw my mobile phone at me.

She had always been a lousy shot – and we had had one or two arguments where things had been thrown – but there wasn’t the room to miss, and it smacked hard against my chest. I picked it up off the floor and a bone just above my heart began to throb.

‘I’ll never forgive you for this,’ she said. ‘Never.’ She nodded at the phone. ‘Why don’t you listen to your messages?’

I pressed the icon on the phone which showed a little envelope. Siobhan’s voice came crackling through, wry and sleepy and completely out of place in our bedroom.

‘It’s always a bad sign if they go before you wake up…but please don’t feel bad about last night…because I don’t…your wife is a lucky woman…and I’m looking forward to working with you…Bye, Harry.’

‘Did you sleep with this girl, Harry?’ Gina asked, then shook her head. ‘What’s wrong with me? Why am I even bothering to ask? Because I want you to tell me that it isn’t true. But of course it’s true.’

I tried to put my arms around her. Not hugging her. Just trying to hold on to her. Trying to calm her down. To stop her getting away. To stop her from leaving me. She shook me off, almost snarling.

‘Some little slut at the office, is she?’ Gina said, still throwing clothes into her suitcase. She wasn’t even looking at the clothes she was packing. She didn’t look as though she thought she was a lucky woman. ‘Some little slut who thinks you can do her a few favours.’

‘She’s actually a really nice girl. You’d like her.’

It was a truly stupid thing to say. I knew it the second the words left my big mouth, but by then it was already too late. Gina came across the bedroom and slapped me hard across the face. I saw her wince with pain, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears. She didn’t really know how to hit someone. Gina wasn’t like that.

‘You think it was romantic or passionate or some such bullshit,’ Gina said. ‘But it’s none of those things. It’s just grubby and sordid and pathetic. Really pathetic. Do you love her?’

‘What?’

‘Are you in love with this girl?’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘If she wants my life, she can have it. All of it. Including you. Especially you, Harry. Because it’s all a lie.’

‘Please, Gina. It was a mistake. A terrible mistake, okay?’ I scrambled for words. ‘It didn’t mean a thing,’ I told her.

She started laughing and crying at the same time. ‘Don’t you understand that makes it worse?’ she said. ‘Don’t you understand anything at all?’

Then she really started to sob, her shoulders all hunched up and shaking, not even trying to wipe away tears that seemed to start somewhere deep inside her chest. I wanted to put my arms around her. But I didn’t dare touch her.

‘You’re just like my father,’ she said, and I knew it was the worst thing in the world she could ever say. ‘Just like him.’

‘Please, Gina,’ I said. ‘Please.’

She shook her head, as if she could no longer understand me, as if I had stopped making any kind of sense.

‘What, Harry? Please? What? You’re like a fucking parrot. Please what?’

‘Please,’ I said, parrot-like. ‘Please don’t stop loving me.’

‘But you must have known,’ she said, slamming shut the suitcase, most of her clothes still unpacked and scattered all over our bed. The other bag was already full. She was almost ready to leave. She was nearly there now. ‘You must have known that this is the one thing I could never forgive,’ she said. ‘You must have known that I can’t love a man who doesn’t love me – and only me. And if you didn’t know that, Harry, then you don’t know me at all.’

I once read somewhere that, in any relationship, the one who cares the least is the one with all the power.

Gina had all the power now. Because she didn’t care at all any more.

I followed her as she dragged her suitcase and bag out into the hall and across to Pat’s bedroom. He was carefully placing Star Wars figures into a little Postman Pat backpack. He smiled up at us.

‘Look what I’m doing,’ he said.

‘Are you ready, Pat?’ Gina asked.

‘Nearly,’ he said.

‘Then let’s go,’ she said, wiping away the tears with her sleeve.

‘Okay,’ Pat said. ‘Guess what?’ He was looking at me now, his beautiful face illuminated by a smile. ‘We’re going on a holiday.’

I let them get as far as the door and then I realised that I couldn’t stand losing them. I just couldn’t stand it. I grabbed the handle of Gina’s bag.

‘Where are you going? Just tell me where you’re going.’

She tugged at the bag, but I refused to let go. So she just left me holding it as she opened the front door and stepped across the threshold.

I followed them out into the street, still holding Gina’s bag, and watched her strap Pat into his child seat. He had sensed that something was very wrong. He wasn’t smiling any more. Suddenly I realised that he was my last chance.

‘What about Pat?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you going to think about him?’

‘Did you?’ she said. ‘Did you think about him, Harry?’

She heaved her suitcase into the back of the estate, not bothering to get the other bag back from me. She let me keep it.

‘Where will you stay?’

‘Goodbye, Harry.’

And then she left me. Pat’s face was small and anxious in the back seat. Gina stared straight ahead, her eyes hard and shining. She already looked like someone else. Someone I didn’t know. She turned on the ignition.

I watched the car until it had turned the bend in the street where we lived, and only then was I aware of the curtains that were twitching with curiosity. The neighbours were watching us. With a sinking feeling, I realised that’s the kind of couple we had become.

I carried Gina’s bag back into the house, where the phone was ringing. It was Marty.

‘Can you believe what these fuckers are saying about me in the papers?’ he said. ‘Look at this one – ban mad mann from our telly. And this one – A MANN OF FEW WORDS – ALL OF THEM ****ING OBSCENE. What the fuck are they implying? These people want my job, Harry. My mum is really upset. What are we going to do?’

‘Marty,’ I said. ‘Gina’s left me.’

‘She’s left you? You mean she’s walked out?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What about the kid?’

‘She’s taken Pat with her.’

‘Has she got someone else?’

‘Nothing like that. It was me. I did something stupid.’

Marty chuckled in my ear. ‘Harry, you dirty dog. Anyone I know?’

‘I’m frightened, Marty. I think she might be gone for good.’

‘Don’t worry, Harry. The most she can get is half of everything you own.’

He was wrong there. Gina had already walked out with everything I had ever wanted. She had got the lot.

eight

Barry Twist worked for the station. Over the past year, I had been to dinner at his home, and he had come to dinner at mine. But, the way our world worked, we weren’t exactly friends. I couldn’t tell him about Gina. It felt like I knew a lot of people like that.

Barry had been the first of the television people to take Marty and me out to lunch when we were doing the radio show. He had thought the show would work on television and, more than anyone, he had been responsible for putting us there. Barry had smiled all the way through that first lunch, smiled as though it was an honour to be on the same planet as Marty and me. But he wasn’t smiling now.

‘You’re not a couple of kids dicking about on the radio any more,’ he said. ‘These are big boys’ rules.’ His conversation was full of stuff like ‘big boys’ rules’, as though working in television was a lot like running an undercover SAS unit in South Armagh. ‘We had nine hundred phone calls complaining about the fucking language.’

I wasn’t going to roll over and die just because he was our commissioning editor.

‘Spontaneous TV, Barry, that’s what you pay him for. On this kind of show it’s not what the guests say that makes news. It’s what they do.’

‘We don’t pay him to assault the guests.’ Barry indicated the papers on his desk with a thin little smile. I picked up a fistful of them.

‘Front page of the Mirror and the Sun,’ I said. ‘A two-column story on page one of the Telegraph…Nice colour picture of Marty on page three of The Times…’

‘This is the wrong kind of news,’ Barry said. ‘And you know it. I repeat – this isn’t talk radio any more. You’re not just being listened to by a couple of cranks and their cats. And it’s not as though we’re some crappy little satellite outfit scratching in the dust for viewers. There are advertisers, there are broadcasting authorities, there are viewers’ associations, there is the man upstairs. And please take my word for it, Harry – they are all going fucking ape shit.’

I put the papers back on his desk, my fingers black with print. As nonchalantly as I could manage, I rubbed my hands together. But the print wouldn’t come off.

‘Let me tell you what’s going to happen, Barry. Marty is going to be called every name in the book – and next week we will get our biggest ratings ever. That is what’s going to happen. And they are going to be talking about that last show for years – that’s going to happen too.’

Barry Twist shook his head.

‘It was too much. It’s not just Marty. The man upstairs is getting called every name in the book – and he doesn’t like it. Over the last twelve months The Marty Mann Show has had drunken guests, abusive guests and guests who have tried to remove their clothes. But this is the first time you’ve had a guest who has been beaten up. It’s got to stop. We can’t have a manifestly unstable man going out live on national television.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘No more live shows, Harry. Record the show on the afternoon of transmission. That way, if Marty assaults anyone else – or decides to beat them to death with his ego – we can edit it out.’

‘As live? You want us to go as live? Marty will never stand for it.’

‘Make him stand for it, Harry. You’re his producer – do some producing. Doesn’t your contract come up for renewal soon?’

I knew they couldn’t drop Marty. He was already too big for that. But for the first time I understood that it wasn’t Marty’s hide that was on the line.

It was mine.

Despite all his games of death and destruction, Pat was a very loving child. He was always hugging and kissing people, even total strangers – I had once seen him embracing the old geezer who cleaned our street – in a way that was no longer permissible, or even wise, in the lousy modern world.

But Pat didn’t know or care about any of that. He was four years old and he was full of love. And when he saw me on the doorstep of his other grandfather’s home he went crazy, holding my face in his hands and kissing me on the lips.

‘Daddy! Are you staying with us? Staying with us on our – on our – on our holiday at granddad Glenn’s?’

I found them the day after they left. It wasn’t difficult. I made a few phone calls to Gina’s friends from college, the ones who had turned up for her thirtieth birthday party, but it had been years since she had been really close to any of them. She had let them drift out of her life, kidding herself that she could get everything she needed from me and Pat. That’s the trouble with a relationship as close as ours – when it comes undone, you’re left with no one.

It didn’t take me long to work out that Gina had been so desperate for somewhere to stay that she had gone home to her father, who was currently between marriages.

Glenn lived in a small flat right on the edge of the A to Z, among golf clubs and green belts, a neighbourhood that he must have thought looked a bit like Woodstock when he first moved in. But instead of jamming with Dylan and The Band, every day Glenn took the commuter train to his guitar shop in Denmark Street. He was home when I knocked on his door, greeting me with what seemed like real warmth as I stood holding my son.

‘Harry, how are you doing, man? Sorry about your troubles.’

In his early fifties now, what was left of Glenn’s hair was carefully arranged to approximate the Viking feather cut of his prime. He was still snake-hip thin, and still wore clothes that would have looked appropriate on a Jimi Hendrix roadie. And he was still good-looking, in a faded old roué kind of way. But he must have looked pretty funky walking down the King’s Road in 1975.

For all his faults – the missed birthdays, the forgotten promises, the fact that he tended to fuck off and leave his wife and kids every few years – Glenn wasn’t really an evil man. He had a friendly, easy charm about him, flashes of which I could see in Gina. Glenn’s fatal flaw was that he had never been able to see further than the end of his own gratification. Yet all the wounds he inflicted were unintentional. He wasn’t a cruel man, not unless weakness is another kind of cruelty.

‘Looking for Gina?’ he said, putting an arm around me. ‘She’s inside.’

Inside Glenn’s modest flat, The Verve were booming from the speakers. He wasn’t one of those classic rock freaks with a copy of Mojo and his gramophone needle stuck forever on the music of his youth. Glenn’s devotion to the cause was so great that he always liked to keep up with the big new bands. I didn’t know how he managed it.

Gina came out of the little guest room, serious and pale. Very pale. I felt like kissing her. But I didn’t.

‘Hello, Harry.’

‘Can we talk?’

‘Of course. There’s a park nearby.’

We took Pat. Glenn pointed out that, for all the surrounding greenery, the park was actually a fair distance away, past a sad little string of shops and endless big posh houses. So I suggested we took the MGF. Pat almost squealed with delight. Although she wasn’t a four-year-old boy, I hoped Gina might also be impressed – from the moment I had seen that car I knew I wanted to drive around with some special person by my side. Now I saw with terrible clarity that the special person had always been Gina. But she didn’t say anything until we arrived at the park.

‘No need to worry about recapturing your youth, Harry,’ she said, swinging her legs out of my new car. ‘You never really lost it.’

Pat skipped on ahead of us, brandishing his light sabre and howling. When he arrived at the climbing frame he stood there in silence, shyly watching two bigger boys clamber around on the higher part of the frame. He was always full of admiration for bigger boys. Gina and I watched our son watching them.

‘I miss you like crazy,’ I said. ‘Please come home.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘It wasn’t some mad, passionate affair. It was just one night.’

‘It’s never just one night. If you can do it once, you can do it again. Again and again and again. And next time it will be easier. I’ve seen it all before, Harry. Seen it all with Glenn.’

‘Jesus, I’m nothing like your dad. I don’t even wear an earring.’

‘I should have known,’ she said. ‘The romantic ones are always the worst. The hearts and flowers brigade. The ones who promise never to look at another woman. Always the worst. Because they always need that new fix. That regular shot of romance. Don’t you, Harry?’

I didn’t like the way she was talking about me, as though I were indistinguishable from every other man in the world, as though I were just one of the hairy adulterous masses, as though I were just another sad salary man who got caught fucking around. I wanted to still be the one.

‘I’m sorry I hurt you, Gina. And I’ll always be sorry about it. You’re the last person in the world I would want to hurt.’

‘It can’t always be a honeymoon, you know.’

‘I know, I know,’ I said, but deep down inside what I thought was – Why not? Why not?

‘We’ve been together for years. We have a child together. It can never be all that Romeo and Juliet crap again.’

‘I understand all that,’ I said, and most of me really did. But a tiny, tiny part of me wanted to say – Oh, I’m off then.

Gina was right – I wanted us to be the way we were at the start. I wanted us to be like that forever. And you know why? Because we were both so happy then.

‘You think it’s been easy living in our house?’ she said, suddenly flaring up. ‘You think it’s easy listening to you whining about not being a teenager any more, getting Pat to stop watching Star Wars for five minutes, taking care of the house? And you’re no help. Like every man on the planet, you think that as long as you do your little job, your work is done.’

‘Well,’ I said, taken aback. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t leave years ago.’

‘You didn’t give me a reason. Until now. I’m only thirty, Harry. Sometimes I feel like an old woman. You tricked me,’ she said. ‘You tricked me into loving you.’

‘Just come back home. You and me and Pat. I want it to be the way it was before.’

‘It can never be that way again. You changed it all. I trusted you and you broke my trust. You made me feel stupid for trusting you.’

‘People don’t break up because of a one-night stand, Gina. It’s not what grown-ups do. You don’t chuck it all away because of something like that. I know it hurts. I know what I did was wrong. But how did I suddenly go from being Mr Wonderful to Mr Piece of Shit?’

‘You’re not Mr Piece of Shit, Harry.’ She shook her head, trying to stop herself from crying. ‘You’re just another guy. I can see that now. No different from the rest. Don’t you get it? I invested so much in you being special. I gave up so much for you, Harry.’

‘I know you did. You were going to work abroad. You were going to experience another culture. It was going to be incredible. And then you stayed here because of me. I know all that. That’s why I want to make this marriage work. That’s why I want to try again.’

‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,’ Gina said, ‘and I’ve worked out that nobody is interested in a woman who stays at home with her child. Not even her husband. Especially not her husband. I’m so boring, he has to sleep around.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Looking after your child – it should be the most respected job in the world. It should be worth more than going to any office. But it’s not. Do you know how many people at your fucking little television dinners and parties and launches have made me feel like nothing at all? And what do you do?’ She made it sound like a sneer. ‘And what do you do? Me? Well, I don’t do anything. I just stay at home and look after my little boy. And they stare right through you – the women as well as the men, in fact the women are probably worse – as though you’re some kind of moron. And I’m twice as smart as half of these people you work with, Harry. Twice as smart.’

‘I know you are,’ I said. ‘Listen, Gina – I’ll do anything. What do you want?

‘I want my life back,’ she said. ‘That’s all, Harry. I want my life back.’

That sounded like trouble.

nine

Things hadn’t quite worked out how my dad had planned. Not with his home. And not with me.

When my parents had bought the place where I grew up, the area had been countryside. But the city had been creeping closer for thirty years. Fields where I had roamed with an air rifle were now covered with ugly new houses. The old High Street was full of estate agents and solicitors. What my parents had thought would always be a living, breathing episode of The Archers started being swallowed by the suburbs from the moment we moved in.

My mum didn’t much mind the changes – she was a city girl, and I can remember her complaining about our little town’s lack of shops and a cinema when I was a kid – but I felt for my dad.

He didn’t like the army of commuters who clogged the railway station on weekdays and the golf courses at the weekend. He didn’t like the gangs of would-be yobs who drifted around the estates pretending they were getting down in South Central LA. He hadn’t expected to be so close to crowds and crime this late in life.

And then there was me.

My parents came to the door expecting to see the three of us arriving for dinner. But there was only their son. Bewildered, they watched me drive past their gate, looking for somewhere to park. They didn’t get it.

When I was a kid, there were no cars parked on this street – one garage for every family had been more than enough. Now you practically had to give yourself a double hernia looking for a parking place. Everything had changed.

I kissed my mum and shook my dad’s hand. They didn’t know what was happening. There was going to be too much food. They were expecting Gina and Pat. They were expecting happy families. And what they got was me.

‘Mum. Dad. There’s something I have to tell you.’

The old songs were playing. Tony Bennett live at Carnegie Hall was on the stereo, although it could just have easily been Sinatra or Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Junior. In my parents’ home the old songs had never stopped playing.

They sat in their favourite chairs staring up at me expectantly. Like a couple of kids. I swear to God they thought I was going to announce the imminent arrival of another grandchild. And I stood there feeling the way I so often felt in front of my parents – more like a soap opera than a son.

‘Well, it looks like Gina’s left me,’ I said.

The tone was all wrong – too casual, too glib, too uncaring. But the alternative was getting down on all fours and weeping all over their shag carpet. Because after yesterday’s trip to the park and a second sleepless night in a bed that was far too big for just me, I was finally starting to believe that she might not be coming back. Yet I felt I was too old to be bringing my parents bad news. And they were too old to have to hear it.

For a few moments they didn’t say a word.

‘What?’ said my father. ‘Left you where?’

‘Where’s the baby?’ my mother said. She got it immediately.

‘Pat’s with Gina. At her dad’s place.’

‘That punk rocker? Poor little thing.’

‘What do you mean she’s left you?’ the old man demanded.

‘She’s walked out, Dad.’

‘I don’t understand.’

He really didn’t get it. He loved her and he loved us and now all of that was finished.

‘She’s buggered off,’ I said. ‘Done a runner. Gone. Scarpered.’

‘Language,’ my mother said. She had her fingers to her mouth, as if she were praying. ‘Oh, Harry. I’m so sorry.’

She came across the room towards me and I sort of flinched. It would be okay if they weren’t kind to me. I could get through it if they didn’t put their arms around me and tell me that they understood. But if they were going to be kind, I didn’t think I could take it. I knew it would all get clogged up inside me. Luckily, the old man came to the rescue. Good old Dad.

‘Walked out?’ my dad said angrily. ‘What – you’re getting a divorce? Is that what you mean?’

I hadn’t really thought about that. Getting a divorce? Where do you start?

‘I guess so. Yes. That’s what people do, isn’t it? When they split up.’

He stood up, the colour draining from his face. His eyes were wet. He took off his glasses to wipe them. I couldn’t stand to look at him.

‘You’ve ruined my life,’ he said.

‘What?’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My marriage falls apart and he becomes the victim? How did that happen? I was sorry that his precious daughter-in-law had walked out of his life. I was sorry that his grandson had seen his parents break up. And most of all, I was sorry that his son had turned out to be just another dumb schmuck bumbling towards the divorce courts. But I wasn’t going to let my father hog the starring role in our little tragedy.

‘How have I managed to ruin your life, Dad? If anyone’s the victim here, it’s Pat. Not you.’

‘You’ve ruined my life,’ he said again.

My face burned with shame and resentment. What was he so bitter about? His wife had never left him.

‘Your life is over,’ I told him angrily.

We looked at each other with something approaching hatred and then he walked out. I could hear him shuffling around upstairs. I was already sorry about what I had said. But I felt that he had given me no choice.

‘He doesn’t mean it,’ my mum said. ‘He’s upset.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Nothing bad ever happened to me before, Mum. I’ve had it easy. Nothing bad ever happened to me before now.’

‘Don’t listen to your father. He just wants Pat to have what you had. Two parents. Somewhere settled and stable to build his life. All that.’

‘But it’s never going to be like that for him, Mum. Not if Gina’s really gone. I’m sorry, but it’s never going to be that simple.’

My dad came back down eventually and I tried to give them some background as we waded through dinner. There had been trouble at home, things hadn’t been too good for a while, we still cared about each other. There was hope.

I left out all the stuff about me fucking a colleague from work and Gina feeling that she had thrown her life away. I thought that might make them choke on their lamb chops.

When I left, my mum gave me a big hug and told me that things would turn out all right. And my dad did his best too – he put his arm around me and told me to call if there was anything they could do.

I couldn’t look at him. That’s the trouble with thinking your father is a hero. Without saying a word, he can make you feel that you are eight years old again, and you have just lost your first fight.

‘Our guest next tonight no needs introduction,’ Marty said for the third time in a row. ‘Fuck…fuck…fuck…what is wrong with this pigging autocue?’

There was nothing wrong with the autocue and he knew it.

Up in the gallery, the director murmured soothing words into his earpiece about going for the rehearsal again when he was ready. But Marty tore off his microphone and walked off the floor.

When we were live, Marty had always been fearless in front of an autocue. If he made a mistake, if he stumbled over the words rolling before him, he just grinned and kept going. Because he knew that he had to.

Recording was different. You know you can always stop and start again if you are taping. This should make things easier, of course. But it can paralyse you. It can do things to your breathing. It can make you start to sweat. And when the camera catches you sweating, you’re dead.

I caught up with him in the green room where he was ripping open a beer. This worried me more than the tantrum on set. Marty was a screamer, but he wasn’t a drinker. A few beers and his nerves would be so steady he wouldn’t be able to move.

‘Recording a show is a different rhythm,’ I told him. ‘When you’re live, the energy level is so high that you just zip through it from beginning to end. When you’re recording, the adrenaline has to be more controlled. But you can do it.’

‘What the fuck do you know about it?’ he asked me. ‘How many shows have you presented?’

‘I know that you don’t make it easier by ranting about the autocue girl.’

‘She’s moving that thing too fast!’

‘Yes, to keep up with you,’ I said. ‘If you slow down, so will she. Marty, it’s the same girl we’ve been using for a year.’

‘You didn’t even try to keep the show live,’ he sulked.

‘As soon as you smacked Tarzan, all this was inevitable. The station can’t take a chance on that happening again. So we do it live on tape.’

‘Live on fucking tape. That says it all. Whose side are you on, Harry?’

I was about to tell him, when Siobhan stuck her head around the door of the green room.

‘I’ve managed to find a replacement for the autocue girl,’ she said. ‘Shall we try again?’

‘We’re watching telly-vision,’ Pat told me when I arrived at Glenn’s place.

I picked him up and kissed him. He wrapped his arms and legs around me like a little monkey as I carried him into the flat.

‘You’re watching TV with Mummy?’

‘No.’

‘With granddad Glenn?’

‘No. With Sally and Steve.’

In the little living room there was a boy and a girl in their mid teens tangled around each other on the sofa. They were wearing the kind of clothes that don’t look quite right without a snowboard.

The girl – thin, languid, blank – looked up at me as I came into the room. The boy – podgy, spotty, blanker – tapped the TV’s remote control against his lower teeth and didn’t take his eyes from a video of an angry man with no shirt on, a singer who looked as though he should be helping police with their enquiries. Glenn would know who he was. Glenn would have all his records. He made me wonder if music was getting crap or I was getting old. Or both.

‘Hi,’ the girl said.

‘Hi. I’m Harry – Pat’s dad. Is Gina around?’

‘Nah – she went to the airport.’

‘The airport?’

‘Yeah – she had to, you know, what do you call it? Catch a plane.’

I put Pat down. He settled himself among the Star Wars figures that were scattered over the floor, shooting admiring glances at the spotty youth. Pat really did love big boys. Even dumb, ugly big boys.

‘Where did she go?’

The girl – Sally – frowned with concentration.

‘To China. I think.’

‘China? Really? Or was it Japan? It’s very important.’

Her face brightened.

‘Yeah – maybe Japan.’

‘There’s a big difference between China and Japan,’ I said.

The boy – Steve – looked up for the first time.

‘Not to me,’ he said.

The girl laughed. So did Pat. He was only little. He didn’t know what he was laughing about. I realised that his face was dirty. Without a bit of encouragement, Pat had a very cavalier attitude to personal hygiene.

Steve turned back to the television with a satisfied smirk, still tapping the remote control against his lower teeth. I could have cheerfully stuffed it down his throat.

‘Do you know how long she’ll be gone?’

Sally grunted a negative, absent-mindedly squeezing Steve’s beefy leg.

‘Glenn not around?’ I said.

‘Nah – my dad’s at work,’ said Sally.

So that was it. The girl was one of Glenn’s abandoned kids, from a marriage or two after Gina’s mother.

‘You visiting?’ I asked.

‘Staying here for a while,’ she said. ‘Been getting a lot of hassle from my mum. Whining about my friends, my clothes, the time I come home, the time I don’t come home.’

‘Is that right?’

‘“You’re treating this place like a hotel,”’ Sally screeched. ‘“You’re too young to smoke that stuff. Blah blah blah.”’ She sighed with the weariness of the very young. ‘The usual. It’s not as though she didn’t do it all herself back in the dark ages, the hypocritical old bitch.’

‘Bitch,’ said Steve.

‘She’s a bitch,’ smiled Pat, a Star Wars figure in each tiny fist, and Steve and Sally laughed at him.

This is how it works, I thought. You break up and your child becomes a kind of castaway, set adrift in a sea of daytime television and ducked responsibilities. Welcome to the lousy modern world where the parent you live with is a distant, contemptible figure and the parent you don’t live with feels guilty enough to grant you asylum any time things get too tense at home.

But not my boy.

Not my Pat.

‘Get your coat and your toys,’ I told him.

His dirty little face brightened.

‘Are we going to the park?’

‘Darling,’ I said, ‘we’re going home.’

ten

We were meant to be celebrating.

Barry Twist had come up with the idea of a fifteen-minute delay system for the show, meaning we would go back to doing the thing live, but with a short time-lag before transmission as insurance against either the host or the guests going bananas.

The station was happy because it meant there was still time to edit out anything that was really going to give the advertisers the running squirts, and Marty was happy because it meant he no longer got paralysis of the lower autocue.

So Marty took me to lunch at his favourite restaurant, a fashionably spartan basement where well-fed people in television put authentic Italian peasant food on their expense accounts.

Like most of the places we went to, its bare floorboards and white walls made it look more like a gym than a restaurant, possibly to make us feel that we were doing ourselves some good in there. When we arrived just after two – I was running late after delivering Pat to my parents, leaving him with them because with Gina gone there was no one to pick him up after nursery – the place was already crowded, but the reception desk was empty.

A waitress approached us. She was clearly not having a good day. She was hot and flustered and there was a red wine stain on her white uniform. She kept doing this thing with her hair, which was shiny and black and cut in one of those old-fashioned bell shapes that you imagine on women in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, or on Hong Kong girls in the fifties. A bob. That’s what you call it. The fringe kept flying up as she stuck out her bottom lip and blew some air through it.

‘Can I help you?’ she said.

‘We have a table,’ Marty said.

‘Sure,’ she said, picking up the book of reservations. ‘Name?’

‘Marty Mann,’ he said, with that special little emphasis that indicated he expected her to recognise him now and practically faint with excitement. But Marty didn’t mean a thing to her. She was American.

‘Sorry,’ she said, consulting the book. ‘Can’t see your name on the list, sir.’

Then she gave us a smile. She had a good smile – wide, white and open. One of those smiles that just shines.

‘Believe me,’ Marty said, ‘we do have a table.’

‘Not here, you don’t.’

She slammed the book shut and moved to walk away.

Marty blocked her path. She looked pissed off. She stuck out her bottom lip and blew some air through her fringe. ‘Excuse me,’ she said.

She was tall and thin with a dancer’s legs and wide-set brown eyes. Good-looking, but not a kid. Maybe a couple of years older than me. Most of the people working in this restaurant that looked like a gym were cool young things who clearly thought they were on their way to somewhere better. She wasn’t like that at all.

She looked at Marty and massaged the base of her spine as though it had been aching for a long time.

‘Do you know how important I am?’ Marty asked.

‘Do you know how busy I am?’ she replied.

‘We might not be on the list,’ Marty said very slowly, as though he were talking to someone who had just had part of their brain removed, ‘but one of my people called Paul – the manager? You do know Paul?’

‘Sure,’ she said evenly. ‘I know Paul.’

‘Paul said it would be okay. It’s always okay.’

‘I’m real glad that you and Paul have got such an understanding relationship. But if I don’t have a spare table, I can’t give you one, can I? Sorry again.’

This time she left us.

‘This is fucking stupid,’ Marty said.

But Paul had spotted us and quickly crossed the crowded restaurant to greet his celebrity client.

‘Mr Mann,’ he said, ‘so good to see you. Is there a problem?’

‘Apparently there’s no table.’

‘Ah, we always have a table for you, Mr Mann.’ Paul’s Mediterranean smile flashed in his tanned face. He had a good smile too. But it was a completely different smile to the one she had. ‘This way, please.’

We walked into the restaurant and got the usual stares and murmurs and goofy grins that Marty’s entrance always provoked. Paul snapped his fingers and a table was brought from the kitchen. It was quickly covered with a tablecloth, cutlery, a wedge of rough-hewn peasant bread and a silver bowl of olive oil. A waitress appeared by our side. It was her.

‘Hello again,’ she said.

‘Tell me this,’ said Marty. ‘Whatever happened to the good old stereotype of the American waitress? The one who serves you with a smile?’

‘It’s her day off,’ the waitress said. ‘I’ll get you the menu.’

‘I don’t need the menu,’ Marty said. ‘Because I already know what I want.’

‘I’ll get it anyway. For your friend here. We have some interesting specials today.’

‘Shall we have this conversation again once you’ve turned on your hearing aid?’ Marty asked. ‘Read my lips – we eat here all the time. We don’t need the menu.’

‘Give her a break, Marty,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’ She looked at me for the first time. ‘Give me a break, Marty.’

‘I’ll have the twirly sort of pasta with the red stuff on top and he’ll have the same,’ Marty said.

‘Twirly pasta.’ She wrote it down on her little pad. ‘Red stuff. Got it.’

‘And bring us a bottle of champagne,’ Marty said, patting the waitress on her bum. ‘There’s a good girl.’

‘Get your sweaty hand off my butt before I break your arm,’ she said. ‘There’s a good boy.’

‘Just bring us a drink, will you?’ Marty said, quickly removing his hand.

The waitress left us.

‘Christ, we should have ordered a takeaway,’ Marty said. ‘Or got here a bit earlier.’

‘Sorry about the delay,’ I said. ‘The traffic –’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said, raising a hand.

‘I’m glad you agreed to the fifteen-minute delay system,’ I told him. ‘I promise you that it’s not going to harm the show.’

‘Well, that’s just one of the changes we’re making,’ Marty said. ‘That’s why I wanted to talk to you.’

I waited, at last registering that Marty was nervous. He had a set of breathing exercises which were meant to disguise him having the shakes, but they weren’t working now. And we weren’t celebrating after all.

‘I also want Siobhan more involved with the booking of guests,’ Marty said. ‘And I want her up in the gallery every week. And I want her to keep the station off my back.’

I let it sink in for a moment. The waitress brought our champagne. She poured two glasses. Marty took a long slug and stared at his glass, his lips parting as he released an inaudible little belch. ‘Pardon me,’ he said.

I let my glass stand on the table.

‘But all those things – that’s the producer’s job.’ I tried on a smile. ‘That’s my job.’

‘Well, those are the changes I want to make.’

‘Wait a minute. I’m not getting a new contract?’

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