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

I wanted my son to have car rides like the car rides I had known as a child. But we were travelling light.

Cyd called towards the end of the long morning.

‘How did it go?’ she asked me.

She sounded genuinely anxious. That made me like her even more.

‘It was a bit fraught,’ I said. ‘The chin wobbled when it was time to say goodbye. There were a few tears in the eyes. But that was me, of course. Pat was absolutely fine.’

She laughed, and in my mind’s eye I could see her smile lighting up the place where she worked, making it somewhere special.

‘I can make you laugh,’ I said.

‘Yes, but now I’ve got to get to work,’ she said. ‘Because you can’t pay my bills.’

That was true enough. I couldn’t even pay my own bills.

* * *

My father came with me to meet Pat at the end of his first day at school.

‘A special treat,’ my dad said, parking his Toyota right outside the school gates. He didn’t say if it was a special treat for Pat or a special treat for me.

As the children came swarming out of the gates at 3.30, I saw that there was never a possibility of losing him in the crowd. Even among hundreds of children dressed more or less the same, you can still spot your own child a mile off.

He was with Peggy, the little girl who was going to take care of him. She stared up at me with eyes that seemed strangely familiar.

‘Did you enjoy it?’ I asked him, afraid that he was going to threaten to hold his breath if he ever had to go back.

‘Guess what?’ Pat said. ‘The teachers have all got the same first name. They’re all called Miss.’

My old man picked him up and kissed him. I wondered how long it would be before Pat would start squirming under our kisses. Then he kissed my dad on the face – one of those hard, fierce kisses he had learned from Gina – and I saw that we still had a while.

‘We’ve got your bike in the back of Granddad’s car,’ my dad said. ‘We can go to the park on the way home.’

‘Can Peggy come?’ Pat asked.

I looked down at the solemn-eyed child.

‘Of course she can,’ I said. ‘But we have to ask Peggy’s mummy or daddy first.’

‘My mum’s at work,’ Peggy told me. ‘So’s my dad.’

‘Then who meets you?’

‘Bianca,’ she said. ‘My babysitter. Although I’m not a baby any more.’

Peggy looked around her, gazing up at the herd of adults meeting children until she saw the face she was looking for.

A girl in her late teens was pushing through the crowds, sucking on a cigarette and searching for her charge.

‘That’s Bianca,’ Peggy pointed.

‘Come on, Peggy,’ the girl said, offering her hand. ‘Let’s go.’

Pat and Peggy stared at each other.

‘We’re off to the park for an hour or so,’ I told Bianca. ‘Peggy’s welcome to come with us. And you too, of course.’

The babysitter curtly shook her head.

‘We’ve got to go,’ she said.

‘See you tomorrow then,’ Peggy told Pat.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Peggy smiled at him as Bianca dragged her off through the thinning crowd.

‘I’ll see her tomorrow,’ Pat said. ‘At my school.’

There was dirt on his hands, paint on his face and a piece of what looked like egg sandwich by his mouth. But he was fine. School was going to be okay.

Another difference between me and my old man. After Pat fell into the empty swimming pool, I would have been quite happy never to set eyes on his bicycle again. But during one of those endless hours at the hospital, my dad drove to the park and recovered Bluebell.

The bike was exactly where we had left it, on its side at the empty deep end, undamaged apart from a bent handlebar. I would have cheerfully stuck it on the nearest skip. My dad wanted Pat to ride it again. I didn’t argue with him. I thought I would leave Pat to do that.

Yet when my father took Bluebell from the boot of his car, my son seemed happy to see it.

‘I’ve straightened the handlebar,’ my dad told us. ‘It needs a lick of paint, that’s all. Shouldn’t take a minute. I can do it for you, if you like.’

My dad knew that I hadn’t held a paintbrush since I had dropped out of O level art.

‘I can do it,’ I said sullenly. ‘Put your coat on, Pat.’

It was September and the first cold snap of autumn was in the air. I helped Pat into his anorak, pulling up the hood, watching the smile spread across his face at the sight of his bike.

‘One more thing,’ my father said, producing a small silver spanner from his car coat. ‘I think it’s time that a big boy like Pat took the stabilisers off his bike.’

This was my old man at seventy – tough, kind, confident, grinning at his grandson with boundless tenderness. And yet I found myself railing against his DIY competence, his manly efficiency, his absolute certainty that he could bend the world to his will. And I was sick of the sight of that bike.

‘Jesus, Dad,’ I said. ‘He just fell off the bloody thing five minutes ago. Now you want him to start doing wheelies.’

‘You always exaggerate,’ my father said. ‘Just like your mother. I don’t want the lad to do wheelies – whatever wheelies might be. I just want him to have a crack at riding without his stabilisers. It will do him good.’

My father got down on his haunches and began to remove the little stabilising wheels from Bluebell. Seeing him at work with a spanner made me feel that I had spent my life watching him do odd jobs, first in his home and later at mine. When the lights went on the blink or the rain started coming through the ceiling, Gina and I didn’t reach for the Yellow Pages. We called my dad.

The burst boiler, the knackered guttering, the hole in the roof – no task was too big or too difficult for his immaculately kept tool box. He loved Gina’s praise when the job was completed – she always laid it on a bit thick – but he would have done it anyway. My father was what my mother would call ‘good around the house’. I was exactly the opposite. I was what I would call ‘fucking useless around the house’.

Now I watched Pat’s face bleaching with fear as my dad finished removing the little stabilising wheels from his bike. For a moment I was about to erupt, but then I kept it in. Because if I started, then I knew all the rows of thirty years would come pouring out – my laziness against my father’s can-do capability, my timidity against my old man’s machismo, my desire for a quiet life against my dad’s determination to get his own way.

I didn’t want all that to come out in front of Pat. Not today. Not any day. So I looked on in silence as my dad helped my son on to his bike.

‘Just a little try,’ my dad said soothingly. ‘If you don’t like it, we can stop. We can stop straightaway. Okay, baby?’

‘Okay, Granddad.’

My father seized hold of the bike’s handlebars with one hand and its seat with the other. Pat clung on to both handlebars for dear life, his already scuffed school shoes trailing reluctantly on the pedals as Bluebell’s wheels rolled round and round. With me bringing up the sulky rear, we wobbled past the swings and slides and across an empty patch of grass.

‘Are you holding on?’ Pat asked.

‘I’m holding on,’ my dad reassured him.

‘Could you look after Pat on Saturday night for me?’ I said.

‘Saturday night?’ he repeated, as if it were a strange request, as though I knew very well that was the night he and my mum liked to go out and drop a few Es.

‘Yes, I’m going out.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We’ll always look after him for you. Something to do with work, is it?’

‘Nothing to do with work, Dad. I don’t have any work right now, remember? I’m going out with a girl.’ That didn’t sound quite right. ‘With a woman.’ That didn’t sound quite right either.