Tony Parsons - Starting Over

And Nan and little Lara felt like it most of the time.

They loved Gene, Ginger, Fred, Debbie and the rest, but they loved Cyd Charisse above all. They loved her dancing with Gene Kelly in the great Broadway dream sequence in Singin’ in the Rain – Kelly on his knees before Cyd the gangsters’ moll in her green dress – and they loved Cyd with Fred Astaire in Bandwagon , dancing in a seedy, smoky bar, doing the kind of dancing that starts fights.

Although she had done her childish ballet and tap, that was where the dancing really began for her, those wet Sunday afternoons watching MGM musicals with Nan. Those other Sundays, long ago, where the colours seemed brighter than real life. Better than real life. And as I watched Lara and her nan watching their film, I wondered if anything had changed. It felt to me as if the dancing still measured out her dreams.

‘One day I will dance the tango in Buenos Aires,’ she said, sitting on the arm of Nan’s chair, one arm lightly draped across the old lady’s thin shoulders, neither of them taking their eyes from Gene Kelly. ‘You can take lessons when you get down there. To BA, I mean. They call it BA. I looked it up on the Internet.’ She laughed, and glanced over at me. ‘That’s the final frontier for an MGM musical nut,’ she said. ‘Dancing the tango with your husband in some little milonga dance hall in Argentina, with the music and the crowd and the sweat, and all the colours better than the real world.’

Might be a bit tricky, I thought. I put on my dancing shoes during our courting days, but these days Lara had her work cut out getting me to dance at weddings.

When Lara went to place the order for Nan’s dinner, the old lady gestured for me to come closer. I thought she was going to tell me something about George Gershwin or Gene Kelly. But instead she hissed a warning in my ear.

‘Don’t get old,’ she told me.

My parents wore matching kit at their self-defence class. They were a couple of trim seventy-somethings in their Adidas tracksuits, red for her and black for him, their uniforms as shiny as an oil slick. Accompanied by around a dozen other pensioners, mostly women, they shuffled across the floor of the gym on the instructions of their trainer, their kindly faces frowning with feigned violence.

‘Dogs don’t know Kung Fu,’ the instructor told them. ‘Dogs don’t know Karate or Tae Kwon Do or boxing. Yet every dog can protect itself.’

The class smiled benignly at him. Their footwear was as white as their hair. It looked box fresh. It looked as though it would never get old. The instructor clenched his fists and his teeth.

‘What did he say, dear?’ one old lady asked my mother.

‘He said, “Dogs don’t know Kung Fu”, dear,’ said my mum, and she gave me a delighted smile. She was happy to see me. I didn’t see them enough. I was always too busy.

‘Dealing with the frontal bear hug,’ the instructor said, motioning my father to step forward, ‘you are gripped around the arms and the waist.’ He proceeded to embrace my father in a way that I had never embraced him. Perhaps my mum had never embraced him like that either.

‘First – knee your opponent in the testicles,’ said the instructor.

‘What’s that?’ said the old lady.

‘Testicles, dear,’ my mum said. ‘Knee your opponent in the testicles, dear.’

My dad gamely lifted his foot a few inches off the floor as he mimed crushing the instructor’s testicles.

‘Next,’ the instructor said, ‘with the inner edge of your shoe scrape his shin-bone from just below the knee to the ankle.’

My father traced the assault in slow motion.

‘Then – stamp on his foot,’ said the instructor, and – playing to the gallery, as always – my dad pretended to bring his heel down on the instructor’s foot.

The pensioners all chuckled. There was some mild applause. My mother beamed with amusement and pride. My dad looked very pleased with himself.

‘If he still hasn’t got the message,’ the instructor said, giving a little jerk of his head, ‘then smash your forehead as hard as you can against the bridge of his nose. And goodnight, Vienna. Okay, let’s try that in our pairs.’

I sat on a bench and watched my parents and their friends, marvelling at their vitality and bravery, but most of all stunned at their heartbreaking innocence and trust in the world.

How could they feel so certain of being attacked by just one person?

At the end of the class they came over to me. My mum kissed me and oohed and aahed over some recent pictures of the kids taken at home after I got out of the hospital, and she said she couldn’t believe how Rufus was turning into such a handsome young man and that Ruby, little Ruby, was practically a young lady already.

And my mum looked very hopeful when I said that we must have them round for Sunday lunch soon. But my dad saw right through me. My father, the retired policeman, always saw straight through me. He waited until my mum had gone off to the changing rooms.

‘Still not back at work, then?’ he said.

Sometimes I was down.

It was less a swing of mood – the heart doctor had told me to expect those – than a change of perception. I suddenly got it. The fragility of all things. Especially me. And our boiler. I could hear it spluttering its guts out in the bathroom. It will need a plumber soon, I thought with a sigh that was silent and endless, and I wondered exactly when my life had shrunk to a list of domestic chores.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Lara said, putting her arm around me.

But I didn’t know where to start, or where to end, or what the middle should look like.

‘I might be up for a while,’ I said, and she took her arm away, and nodded, and soon I could hear her moving around in our bedroom. And then after a while I heard nothing, apart from the midnight hum of the fridge and the coughing and spluttering of the boiler on the blink.

The bottle of red wine was half gone by the time Rufus came home. He looked in a bad way. And he reeked of beer. Like something the cat had dragged in and washed in Special Brew. He looked at the AlcoHawk Pro sitting on the coffee table.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said, suddenly seeing it for the ludicrous bit of plastic it was. ‘I think we can skip that tonight.’

‘I don’t mind,’ he said, and he bent his ungainly frame to pick it up. He looked at the shiny grey device in his hand. And then he looked at me. ‘I didn’t drink anything,’ he said.

I smiled. ‘Right,’ I said. It was so blatantly untrue that I had to admire his front. ‘Just try to get some in your mouth next time.’

Then there was that sudden flare of outrage, the easy outrage that is the natural habitat of the teenage boy. ‘You don’t believe anything I say, do you?’ he said.

‘Volume lower,’ I said. ‘Your mother and sister are sleeping.’

‘Not a word of it,’ he said, shaking his head at the AlcoHawk. ‘Not a bloody word.’

I sighed. ‘But, Rufus,’ I said, shaking my head with wonder at his ability to stand there stinking like a brewery and lie to my face, ‘I can smell it.’

‘But I didn’t drink it,’ he said. ‘They threw it. They chucked beer at me, Dad.’

He had lost me. ‘They did what? Who are you talking about? Who are they ?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, although I could tell it mattered more than anything.

And I looked at my son, this great gawky monster, this thin-skinned stranger, and I willed myself to see the mophaired boy he had once been, the boy I could hug and who would hug me back, and who would not pull away.

‘What happened to us, Rufus? We were mates, weren’t we? Do you remember when you were little? We went to the park. We went to the football. We went to Legoland. Remember Legoland?’