Tony Parsons - Men from the Boys

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

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

So she felt it too. Who is this stranger?

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

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

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

We envied families who had had a good divorce.

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

But some people do.

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

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

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

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

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

Dream on, kiddo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’ll be all right.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Apart from you, you mean?’

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

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

I did not mention his mother.

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

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

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

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

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

Some things are too big to talk about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What did he put down the toilet?’

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