Tony Parsons - Man And Wife

All that old bullshit.

And in the end – I could imagine his pale face staring at her, giving nothing away, not even his fear – she played her trump card.

When they left London and moved to their new home in Connecticut, surrounded by all those fresh green pastures on the far side of the hill, she would buy him the one thing that he had always wanted.

A dog.

That’s what my ex-wife promised her son, that was his compensation for giving up London, his grandmother, his father, his best friend, his life. When he moved to another country, she would buy him a dog. A magical mutt who would make everything all right.

I cursed Gina, and the way her decisions, her choices, could still tear my world apart. After all this time I still wasn’t free of her. Fragments of Gina were embedded in every part of my life, like a grenade that had exploded long ago, like the black shards of shrapnel that wormed their way out of my father’s body for fifty years. The past never setting you free, long gone and there forever. I would never be free, because she had my son. And now she was planning to take him away.

Only the lawyers could stop her.

When I raised the subject of moving – always with a breeziness I did not feel – that little face I loved so much seemed to turn into a mask.

’You going to send me a postcard, Pat? You going to send your dad a postcard as soon as you get to America?’

’I’ll text you. Or email. Or phone on the telephone, maybe.’

’You don’t want to send me a postcard? I like getting postcards. Postcards are great.’

’But I don’t know how.’

’Mummy will show you.’

’Will she? Then I might post a card to you. I might!

’The important thing is – come home soon. Come and stay with me. In your holiday. That’s what matters. Okay, darling?’

’Okay.’

’And Pat?’

’What?’

Til miss you.’

’Miss you too,’ he said, and I got down on my knees and held him in my arms, my face buried in his dirty-blond hair, smelling the hot chocolate on his breath, and choked with love for him.

’America will be lovely,’ my mum said, and I felt she was trying to cheer up both her grandson and her son. ’New York, New York – my word! So good they named it twice! What a lucky boy.’

’It’s over the water,’ Pat said, tilting his face to her. ’Like France. In Paris. Only a bit further. You can’t get a train, you know. You have to go on the plane.’

’You’ll have a lovely time in America, sweetheart.’

And the funny thing about my mum is that she probably meant it. She loved her grandson so much, and with such a purity of love, that what she cared about most was his happiness.

And if she thought that it was barking madness – Gina dragging him around the globe, leaving his friends and school, abandoning his father, and his grandmother, and a life that was finally starting to settle into some kind of routine – then my mum said nothing.

We were at my father’s grave.

Both my mother and my son considered a trip to the cemetery to be an ideal way to spend a Sunday afternoon. They were both big grave visitors. I was less keen. I had seen my dad’s body in the back room of the funeral director’s office, and I had no doubt that the spark that had made him the man he was had flown. I didn’t believe that we would find him in the graveyard of the old church on the hill, that church that looked down on the fields where I had roamed with my air rifle as a boy. My father was somewhere else now. But coming to this place didn’t make me sad any more.

I can’t remember when visiting my father’s grave stopped being sad. It was after the first year or so, when we were all starting to be grateful for his life, rather than shattered by his death. Now the visits didn’t really feel like acts of mourning. They were more practical in nature – to change the flowers, to wipe the headstone clean, to remove the odd cigarette butt or beer can left by some local punk who was trying to be a man.

These visits were also ceremonial. We came here to remember my dad, to state that he still mattered, that he was still loved. We came to this place because otherwise there was nowhere else to go. Only into memory, and into dreams, and all the photos that were starting to fade.

And there was something else.

With the packing for America already begun, I felt the need to bring my boy to his grandfather’s grave today, just as – against all advice – I had felt the need to bring him to see his granddad when the old man was dying in hospital. They worshipped each other, that hard old soldier and that sweet-faced child, and then, as now, I believed I owed it to them both to give them a chance to say goodbye.

Later we went back to my mum’s place and she put on her carpet slippers to kick a ball around with Pat in the back garden.

She seemed to be in high spirits, blasting a plastic football in the rose bush, singing snatches of Dolly Parton, claiming against all the evidence that she was Pele, and it was only when her grandson got bored and mooched off to watch a video that the mask slipped.

’He’s in a right old pickle,’ she said, shaking her head, furiously cleaning her gleaming sink. ’My darling boy is in a right old pickle.’

She was right. And her words made me think about how momentous this move would be, how unimaginably huge in my son’s life. Pat leaving London. Pat leaving one half of his parents, his best friend Bernie Cooper, his school, his home, the only life he had ever known. I still couldn’t begin to comprehend how all this could happen.

My mum was right. Pat was in a right old pickle. Her boy was in a right old pickle.

It took me quite a while longer to realise that my mother was talking about me.

We sat in my car outside Gina’s house, both of us reluctant to go inside.

We sat there for ages – Pat fiddling with the radio, trying to find some Kylie Minogue, and me just staring at him

– his uncombed hair, his grass-stained clothes, and all his careless beauty.

Eamon reckoned that I would get him back when he grew up. But I knew by then my son would be someone else, and the child I loved so much would be gone forever. So we sat in the car, silenced by all that was about to be lost. Then lights started coming on in Gina’s house, and I knew it was time to go inside.

Usually Pat was handed over like a Cold War hostage at Checkpoint Charlie. I escorted him to the gate, Gina waited at her front door. And the pair of us watched him cross no-man’s-land – the garden path – that marked the gap between one world and another.

Tonight was different. Tonight Gina came out and approached the car. I lowered the window, expecting to get an earful for assaulting her husband or getting back late or ruining her life or something. But she smiled at me with what looked a little like the old warmth.

’Come inside for a bit, Harry. Don’t look like that. It’s okay. Richard’s playing golf.’

Pat was suddenly excited, Kylie forgotten. ’Yeah, come inside, Daddy, and you can see my room where I live!’

I had never been inside their home before. Ironic that I should be shown around now that there was a For Sale sign outside. I made half-hearted attempts to cry off, but they both insisted. I admit I was curious. So with my son taking my hand and my ex-wife following me, I was escorted into a real metropolitan home, a temple to urban affluence, lots of light and glass and open space, all polished floors and Asian knick-knacks and tasteful black-and-white photos on the walls.

’Nice place, Gina.’

’The mortgage is a killer. That’s one of the reasons…’

Her words trailed off. She knew I wasn’t interested in their financial woes.