Tony Parsons - Man and Boy

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?’

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.