Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

I told my mother that he had no real friends, but I was wrong. I feel that these people are all genuinely proud to know my dad. I sense that they admire and like him. They are honored to be here and excited about surprising him on his birthday. I feel proud of him, glad that he’s my father.

They have come from the four corners of the city to celebrate my father’s birthday. There are brash, beefy men who knew him from his years on the sports pages of national news-papers. There are youthful middle-aged men in colored spectacles, and loud girls in combat boots who know him from his appearances on their radio and television shows. There are people from his publishing house, sympathetic critics, important booksellers, talk show hosts, fellow writers, all these friends, colleagues and allies who have aided and abetted my dad’s brilliant career.

The party is around our indoor swimming pool. We are in here because it is the only room in the house big enough to hide almost a hundred people. They are milling around the pool, taking drinks and satay and tamaki rolls from the waiters, making jokes about going for a dip. But this is a good place for a celebration.

The bright fluorescent lights make the party feel like it’s being held in some kind of giant spotlight. The swimming pool shimmers turquoise and gold, the light catching the silver trays of the white-suited caterers as they move among guests holding twinkling flutes of champagne. A special night for a special man.

“He’s coming!” my mother announces and the main lights go out. But the room is still not quite dark because there are spotlights in the swimming pool, shimmering under water like yellow ghosts. Someone hits another switch and the room is suddenly pitch black.

Guests giggle and murmur in the darkness as we listen to my father’s Mercedes purring on the street. After a while the engine dies and soon there is the sound of his key in the door. There are another couple of self-conscious laughs which are urgently shushed. We wait for my father in complete darkness and total silence. Nothing happens. We wait some more. Still nothing happens. Nobody speaks. And then the door to the pool room finally opens.

There are shadows in the doorway, the soft ruffle of clothes, something like a sigh. We hear him step into the darkened room and wait for him to turn on the lights. But he doesn’t. Instead there’s the sound of creaking wood. He’s on the diving board! He’s going for a swim! All around me I can feel the laughter being stifled, the tension mounting.

Suddenly the lights come on and the room is full of grinning people and far too bright.

“Surprise!” someone shouts, and then the laughter abruptly dies in our throats.

My father is standing naked on the diving board, his disbelieving eyes slowly taking in the presence of everyone he knows. His eyes stop on my mother’s face for a short horrible moment, and then he looks away in shame.

Lena is kneeling in front of him, fully clothed, her golden head bobbing up and down to some inner rhythm. She is making the diving board squeak.

But I’m the one she fancies, I think. That should be me! It’s not fair! Then my father rests a hand on the back of her head. She stops moving, slowly opening her eyes, looking up at him.

The noise my mother makes is not a scream. It’s not quite as formed as that, not so clear in its meaning. The noise my mother makes is more of a howl that somehow manages to contain disbelief, humiliation and a shame she doesn’t deserve.

The party is paralyzed for a few seconds. Then my mother turns and barges her way through the guests, pushing aside a waiter, who loses his balance, seems to regain it for a second and then starts toppling toward the pool. A silver tray carrying half a dozen champagne flutes slips away from the palm of his hand and lands with a crash of metal and glass as he hits the water.

“Does this mean the party’s over?” says my nan.

My parents were always Mike and Sandy. Never Sandy and Mike. Always Mike and Sandy. Always and forever, my father had top billing.

They seem like old-fashioned names to me, Mike and Sandy, names from an England that no longer exists, the England that was there when my parents and their friends and neighbors and my aunts and uncles were young.

It was an England of country pubs, dinner dances and trips to the seaside on Bank Holiday Monday. A land of small pleasures, quietly savored-card games (men and women) on Christmas night, football (men and boys) on Boxing Day, a trip to the local for a game of darts and a couple of pints (men only) when we had “guests.”

That land was a cold, insular place with real winters, where every foreign holiday to Greece or Spain felt like the trip of a lifetime. The Beatles had come and gone and left behind a kingdom where suburban grown-ups smoked for the same reason that they wore paisley shirts and miniskirts, the same reason they nervously went to Italian and Indian restaurants-because they thought it made them look both young and sophisticated. The England of my childhood, that innocent place that yearned to be grown-up. Mike and Sandy’s country.

Mike and Sandy. They are friendly names, approachable names, sociably abbreviated, the name of a respectable married couple who know how to have a laugh. Within reason.

Mike and Sandy. They are not their given names, of course. My father was Michael and my mother was Sandra. But somewhere in the sixties and seventies, when the clothes and the television sets and the expectations were going from black and white to color, when the austerity that had clung to the country like acne for twenty-odd years was finally clearing up, the names of the young-and the not quite so young, the new mothers and fathers-were becoming brighter and breezier too.

Mike and Sandy. The names of a married couple that was at home in a country where nobody ever left, nobody got divorced, nobody ever died and every family lasted forever.

He somehow gets his clothes on and escapes with Lena-or maybe he doesn’t get his clothes on, maybe he just hops butt-naked into his flash car and drives away-but as the caterers fish the waiter from the pool we hear the Mercedes pulling away with a frightened shriek of rubber, as if he can’t get out of our lives fast enough.

The next morning I wander through the silent house, looking at all the top-of-the-range detritus of his life, all those things he values so much, and I wonder why my mother doesn’t trash the lot. It wouldn’t settle the score. But it might make her feel better.

My mother could obliterate every trace of his rotten life. I wouldn’t blame her. In fact I would be very happy to help her.

But she doesn’t touch any of his things.

Instead, when she finally emerges from her bedroom the next morning, pale-faced and red-eyed, still wearing her beautiful party dress, insisting that she is all right, adamant that she doesn’t want anything to eat or drink, my mother goes out to the garden she loves and sets about destroying it.

At the end of the garden there is a trellis where honeysuckle grows and smells sweet on summer mornings. My mother does her best to rip that down with her bare hands but she can’t quite manage it, she can only pull down half of it and leaves the rest smashed but still attached to the wall.

There are terra-cotta pots containing new bulbs that she hurls against the garden wall, leaving behind shell bursts of exploded dirt. She hacks at her flower beds with rake and trowel and fingers, aborting all the spring bulbs that she recently planted with such endless care.

By the time I reach her she is tearing her hands to pieces by pulling up the rose bushes. I put my arm around her and hold her tight, determined not to let her go until she has stopped trembling. But she doesn’t stop trembling. Her body shakes with shock and grief and rage and I can’t do anything to stop it. She keeps shaking long after I have taken her back into the empty house and drawn all the blinds and tried to shut out the world.