Tony Parsons - The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy - Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys

‘Perhaps because I tried loving someone from my own country. And he broke my heart.’

It took me a moment to realise that she was talking about me.

‘Does he know you’ve got a kid?’

‘Of course he knows. Do you think I would hide that from anyone?’

‘And how does he feel about it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Is he interested in Pat? Is he worried about the boy? Does he care about his wellbeing? Or does he just want to fuck his mother?’

‘If you’re going to talk like that, Harry, I’m going to hang up.’

‘How else am I meant to put it?’

‘We haven’t talked about the future. We haven’t got that far.’

‘Let me know when you get that far.’

‘I will. But please don’t use Pat as a rod for my back.’

Is that what I was doing? I couldn’t tell where my genuine concern ended and my genuine jealousy began.

Pat was one of the reasons I wanted to see Gina’s boyfriend dead in a car crash. But I knew he wasn’t the only reason. Maybe he wasn’t even the main reason.

‘Just don’t try to poison my son against me,’ I said.

‘What are you talking about, Harry?’

‘Pat tells everyone he meets that you said you love him but you only like me.’

She sighed.

‘That’s not what I said. I told him exactly what I’ve just told you. I told him that I still loved you both but unfortunately and sadly I was no longer in love with you.’

‘I still don’t know what that means.’

‘It means that I’m glad for the years we spent together. But you hurt me so much that I can never forgive you or trust you again. And I think it means that you’re no longer the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. You’re too much like any other man. Too much like my father.’

‘It’s not my fault that your old man walked out on you and your mum.’

‘You were my chance to get over all that. And you messed it up. You left me, too.’

‘Come on. It was one night, Gina. How many times are we going to have this conversation?’

‘Until you understand the way I feel. If you can do it once, you can do it a thousand times. That’s the first law of fucking around. The unified theory of fucking around clearly states that if they do it once, they will do it again and again. You broke my trust and I just don’t know how to mend it. And that hurts me too, Harry. I wasn’t trying to turn Pat against you. I was just trying to explain the situation to him. How do you explain it?’

‘I can’t explain it. Not even to myself.’

‘You should try. Because if you don’t understand what happened to us, you’re never going to be happy with anyone.’

‘You explain it to me.’

She sighed. You could hear her sighing all the way from Tokyo.

‘We had a marriage that I thought was working, but you thought was becoming routine. You’re a typical romantic, Harry. A relationship doesn’t measure up to your pathetic and unrealistic fantasy so you smash it up. You ruin everything. And then you’ve got the nerve to act like the injured party.’

‘Who’s providing the armchair psychology? Your Yank boyfriend?’

‘I’ve discussed what happened with Richard.’

‘Richard? Is that his name? Richard. Hah! Jesus Christ.’

‘Richard is a perfectly ordinary name. It’s certainly no stranger than Harry.’

‘Richard. Rich. Dicky. Dick. Old Richard Dicky-dickhead.’

‘Sometimes I look at you and Pat, and I honestly can’t tell which one is the four-year-old.’

‘It’s easy. I’m the one who can pee without getting anything on the floor.’

‘Blame yourself for all this,’ she said, just before she hung up. ‘It happened because you didn’t appreciate what you had.’

That wasn’t true. I was smart enough to know what I had. But too dumb to know how to keep it.

Like any couple living under the same roof, we soon developed our daily rituals.

Just after daybreak, Pat would stagger bleary-eyed into my bedroom, asking me if it was time to get up. I would tell him that it was still the middle of the bloody night and he would climb into bed with me, immediately falling asleep in the spot where Gina used to sleep, throwing his arms and legs about in his wild, childish dreams until eventually I would give up trying to get any more rest and get up.

I would be reading the papers in the kitchen when Pat dragged himself out of bed, and I would immediately hear him sneak into the living room and turn on the video.

Now that Pat was out of nursery and I was out of a job, we could take our time getting ready. But I was still reluctant to let him do exactly what he wanted to do, and what he wanted to do was watch videos all day long. So I would go and turn the video off and escort him to the kitchen, where he would toy with a bowl of Coco Pops until I gave him his freedom.

After we were washed and dressed, I would take him over the park on his bike. It was called Bluebell, and it still had the stabilisers on. Pat and I sometimes discussed removing the stabilisers and trying to ride it with just two wheels. But it seemed like an impossible leap forward to both of us. Knowing when the time was right to remove a bike’s stabilisers was the kind of thing that Gina was good at.

In the afternoons my mother would usually collect Pat and this would give me a chance to do some shopping, clean up the house, worry about money, pace the floor and imagine Gina moaning with pleasure in the bed of another man.

But in the morning, we went to the park.

Pat liked to ride his bike by this open-air swimming pool at the edge of the park.

The little pool was kept empty all year round apart from a few weeks early in the summer when the council grudgingly filled it with heavily chlorinated water which made the local children smell as though they had been dipped in industrial waste.

Long before the summer was over, the water would be drained from the pool and the odd supermarket trolley fished from the bottom. We were only in the middle of August, but the little pool had already been abandoned for another year by everyone apart from Pat and his Bluebell.

There was something depressing about the almost permanently empty pool. It was in a desolate part of the park, nowhere near the adventure playground where children screamed with delight, or the little café where mums and dads – but they were mostly mums – drank endless cups of tea.

But the little asphalt strip that surrounded the pool was somewhere for Pat to ride his bike without having to plough through the discarded kebabs, used condoms and dog shit that littered most of the park. And to tell you the truth, it suited me to be away from all those mums.

I could see what they were thinking when we entered the park every morning.

Where’s the mother?

Why isn’t he at work?

Is that really his kid?

And of course I could understand their concern, most of the perverts in this world being the proud owner of a penis. But I was tired of feeling that I should apologise for taking my son to the park. I was tired of feeling like a freak. The empty swimming pool suited me fine.

‘Daddy! Look at me!’

Pat was on the far side of the pool, breathing hard as he paused by the stubby little diving board that poked out over the empty deep end.

I smiled from the bench where I sat with my paper, and as soon as he saw that he had my attention he shot off again – eyes shining, hair flying, his little legs pumping furiously as he tore around the pool on Bluebell.

‘Stay right away from the edge!’

‘I will! I do!’

For the fifth time in five minutes, I read the opening sentence of an article about the collapse of the Japanese economy.