Tony Parsons - Men from the Boys

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

‘Dad?’

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

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

‘Is he all right?’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But she was right.

He was an impossible old man.

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

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

Then she hung up. Ken was laughing to himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I looked at Ken Grimwood’s Victoria Cross.

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

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

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

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

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

I shook my head.

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

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

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

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

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

He looked at Singe Rana.

The old Gurkha shrugged.

I handed Ken his reading glasses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My life was not my own.

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

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

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

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

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

He nodded. ‘Fine.’ Not looking at me.

‘Everything go okay?’

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

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

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

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