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

Men in their thirties and forties don’t go out with a younger woman for her bouncy body and her pierced tongue. That’s just propaganda.

They go out with her so that they can be the one who fucks up her life.

Heidi was a nanny from Munich.

Well, not exactly Munich – more Augsburg. And not exactly a nanny.

A nanny is a professional child minder who has made a career out of caring for small boys and girls. Heidi was a nineteen-year-old who was away from her parents for the very first time. She was just one economy flight on Lufthansa away from a bedroom full of stuffed toys and having her mum do her washing. She knew as much about child care as I knew about theoretical physics. Heidi was more of an au pair.

The plan was that Heidi was going to cook, clean and cover for me with Pat on the days I was working on the show. For this she would receive bed, board and pocket money while she studied English.

Pat was swaying on the sofa, listening to Sally’s tape, when I took Heidi through to meet him.

‘This is Heidi, Pat. She’s going to stay here and help us around the house.’

Pat stared blankly at the big blonde German girl, his mouth lolling open, lost in the music.

‘A lively and active boy,’ Heidi smiled.

Trying to show willing, she asked me what I would like for dinner. I told her that I would grab something in the green room at the station, but she should fix something for her and Pat. She shuffled about in the kitchen until she found a big can of tomato soup.

‘Is okay?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’ I said.

Trying to let her get on with it, I sat at the kitchen table jotting down notes on next week’s shooting script.

Pat wandered in to watch her, leaving the music still blasting from the living room, and I sent him back to turn it off. When he came back he started pulling at my sleeve.

‘Guess what?’ he said.

‘Let Daddy work, darling.’

‘But guess what Heidi’s doing?’

‘And let Heidi do her work, too.’

Elaborately sighing, he sat down at the kitchen table and idly fiddled with a couple of his little plastic men.

Heidi was clanking about by the stove, but I didn’t look up at her until I heard the bubbles of boiling water. That was strange. Why was she boiling water to heat up a can of tomato soup?

‘Heidi?’

‘Is soon ready.’

She had placed the unopened can of soup in a saucepan of water and brought it to boiling point. She gave me a hesitant smile just before the can exploded, flinging steaming red gruel all over the ceiling, the walls and us.

Wiping the tomato soup from my eyes, I saw the livid red slime slide down Heidi’s face, her eyes staring through the oozing muck, mute with shock and wonder. She looked like Sissy Spacek in the prom night scene in Carrie .

Then she burst into tears.

‘Guess what?’ Pat said, blue eyes blinking in a crimson face mask. ‘She can’t cook either.’

So Heidi found a nice family in Crouch End.

And I gave Sally a call.

Auntie Ethel was on her knees in her front garden, planting spring bulbs for next year.

Auntie Ethel wasn’t my real auntie but I had called her Auntie Ethel ever since we had moved in next door to her when I was five years old, and the habit had proved hard to break.

Auntie Ethel straightened up, squinting over her lawn mower at Cyd and Peggy and Pat and me as we climbed out of Cyd’s old VW Beetle, and for a moment I felt as though I were a little kid again, asking Auntie Ethel if I could have my ball back.

‘Harry? Is that you, Harry?’

‘Hello, Auntie Ethel,’ I said. ‘What are you planting there?’

‘Tulips, daffodils, hyacinths. And is that your Pat? I don’t believe it! Hasn’t he grown? Hello, Pat!’

Pat half-heartedly saluted her with his light sabre. We had never been able to persuade him to address Auntie Ethel by her proper title, and he clearly wasn’t going to start now. Auntie Ethel turned her attention to Peggy, a cloud of confusion drifting across her familiar old face.

‘And this little girl…’

‘This one’s mine,’ Cyd said. ‘Hi, Auntie Ethel. I’m Cyd. Harry’s friend. How you doing?’

‘Like Sid James?’

‘Like Cyd Charisse.’

Auntie Ethel’s eyes twinkled behind her glasses.

‘The dancer,’ she said. ‘With Fred Astaire in Silk Stockings . A good pair of legs.’ Auntie Ethel sized Cyd up. ‘Just like you!’

‘I like your Auntie Ethel,’ Cyd whispered, taking my arm as we came up the drive. Then I felt her grip tighten. ‘Oh God – that looks like your mother.’

My mum was standing at the door, all smiles, and Pat ran to meet her.

‘Happy birthday!’ she cried, sweeping him up in her arms. ‘Five years old! Aren’t you a big boy – ouch!’ Still holding him under one arm, she pushed his Jedi weapon away with her free hand. ‘Blooming light saver,’ she laughed, looking down at Peggy. ‘You must be Peggy. You haven’t got a light saver too, have you?’

‘No, I don’t like Star Wars very much. I just play it because he likes it.’

‘It’s a boys’ game, isn’t it?’ my mum said, never much of a one for breaking down traditional gender stereotypes.

Peggy followed Pat into the house and my mum smiled at Cyd, who was holding back, half a step behind me, still gripping my arm. I had never seen her looking shy before. My mum grabbed her and kissed her on the cheek.

‘And you must be Cyd. Come in, dear, and make yourself at home.’

‘Thank you,’ Cyd said.

Cyd went into the house where I had grown up and my mum gave me a quick smile behind her back, lifting her eyebrows like a surprised lady in one of those old saucy seaside postcards.

It had been quite a while, but I had brought home enough girls to know what that look meant.

It meant that Cyd was what my mum would call a smasher.

And in the back garden was what my mum would call quite a spread.

The kitchen table had been carried out the back and covered with a paper tablecloth splattered with images of party balloons, exploding champagne bottles and laughing rabbits.

The table had been loaded with bowls of crisps, nuts and little bright orange cheesy things, plates of sandwiches with their crusts cut off, trays of mini sausage rolls and six individual little paper dishes containing jelly and tinned fruit. In the centre of this feast was a birthday cake in the shape of Darth Vader’s helmet, with five candles.

When we were all seated around the table and had sung a few renditions of, ‘Happy birthday, dear Pat,’ my dad offered around the mini sausage rolls, looking at me shrewdly.

‘Bet you had a job all getting into that little sports car,’ he said.

From the living room I could hear one of his favourite albums on the stereo. It was the end of side two of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! , Frank breezing his way through Cole Porter’s ‘Anything Goes’.

‘We didn’t come out in the MGF, Dad,’ I said. ‘We came in Cyd’s car.’

‘Completely impractical, a car like that,’ he continued, ignoring me. ‘Nowhere for the children, is there? A man has to think of those things when he buys a motor. Or he should do.’

‘My daddy’s got a motorbike,’ Peggy told him.

My father stared at her, chewing a mini sausage roll, lost for words. Her daddy? A motorbike?

‘That’s nice, dear,’ my mum said.

‘And a Thai girlfriend.’

‘Lovely!’

‘Her name’s Mem.’

‘What a pretty name.’

‘Mem’s a dancer.’

‘Goodness.’

We all watched in silence, waiting for further revelations, as Peggy lifted open her sandwich and examined the contents. The further revelations didn’t come. Peggy closed her sandwich and shoved it in her mouth.