Men from the Boys Read online

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ I said, and I held out my hand to Singe Rana.

  He shook it, a handshake as soft as a child’s.

  ‘Nobody knows anything these days,’ Ken said. ‘Nobody knows bugger all. That’s the problem with this country.’ He looked at his friend. ‘Wanted him to march with us, didn’t we? Paddy Silver. March at the Cenotaph.’

  Singe Rana confirmed this with a curt nod. If he was upset about my father’s death, he gave no sign. But of course it was all a long time ago. All of it.

  ‘But he was never much of a marcher, your old man,’ Ken said. ‘He was never one for wearing the beret and doing the marching and putting on the medals. But we thought he could come down there. And if he didn’t fancy a march, well, then he could just watch.’

  He looked at Singe Rana.

  The old Gurkha shrugged.

  I handed Ken his reading glasses.

  ‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘I’ll come with my son.’

  When I was twenty-five years old, and about to become a father for the first time, my mother told me the same thing again and again.

  ‘As soon as you’re a parent,’ she said, ‘your life is not your own.’

  What she meant was, Put away those records by The Smiths. What she meant was, Wake up. The careless freedom of your life before there was a pushchair in the hall is about to come to an end.

  But I never really felt that way. Yes, of course everything was changed by the birth of our baby boy – but I never felt as though I had surrendered my life. I never felt as though parenthood was holding me hostage. I never felt that my life was not my own.

  Not until that night I waited for Pat to come home from Gina’s place in Soho. Not until he was absent and I was waiting. Then I really felt it, manifesting itself as a low-level nausea in the pit of my stomach, and nerve ends that jangled at every passing car. Finally, I understood.

  My life was not my own.

  The sound of Joni came down the child monitor and Cyd tossed aside her Vogue. ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘Dr Who always gives her nightmares.’

  ‘It’s the Weeping Angels,’ I said. ‘They give me nightmares, those Weeping Angels.’

  ‘I’ll lie down with her for a bit,’ Cyd said. ‘Until she settles.’ She stroked the top of my arm. ‘I’m sure he’s fine,’ she said.

  It was near midnight when Gina’s taxi pulled up outside. She didn’t get out but waited until he had opened the front door before driving away. He came into the living room, his face a mask.

  ‘You all right?’ I said, keeping it as light as I could.

  He nodded. ‘Fine.’ Not looking at me.

  ‘Everything go okay?’

  He was fussing with his school rucksack, checking for something inside.

  ‘I’m going back next week,’ he said evenly. ‘Gina asked me to go back next week.’

  He still wasn’t looking at me. ‘Well, that’s good. That’s great.’ Then I thought of something else. ‘You take your pills?’

  He shot me a furious look. ‘You don’t have to remind me,’ he said. ‘I’m not a baby.’

  He had to take these pills.

  A few years ago, just at the start of big school, he had been laid flat by what looked like flu at first and, after he had missed most of the first half-term, began to look horribly like ME. We found out, just after one of the less fun-packed Christmas celebrations, that he had a thyroid condition. So he took these pills and they made him well. But he would have to take them every day for the rest of his life. There are children all over the world who have to deal with a lot worse than that.

  But I went to bed knowing that I would be wound too tight to sleep tonight, or at least until it was nearly time to get up.

  Because that was another thing that Gina had missed.

  Five

  Tyson saw me as soon as I got out of the car.

  At first he just stared – ears back, teeth bared, a long stream of drool coming out of the corner of his vicious maw. As if he couldn’t quite believe his luck. The object of his base lust had returned.

  Then suddenly he left the side of his Old Lad masters, their huge boiled-egg heads leaning together in hideous fraternity, and bounded across the courtyard, weaving between the brand-new Mercs and rusty jalopies with Polish plates.

  Too late.

  By then I was halfway up the concrete staircase, already hearing the whine of the dusty wind that whistled down the corridors of Nelson Mansions.

  I banged on the old man’s door.

  It took him an agonisingly long time to open, but I was inside the trapped air of his flat before Tyson arrived. We could hear his meaty paws slapping against the thin door as he howled of his unnatural love.

  Singe Rana was sitting on the orange sofa, watching the racing. He glanced over at me, made a small gesture with his impassive face and turned back to the 2.20 at Chepstow.

  ‘I brought you these,’ I said, and gave Ken the A4 envelope I was carrying.

  He reached inside and took out a handful of black-and-white photographs, pushing his face against them. I found his reading glasses and gave them to him. He took the photographs over to the sofa and I stood behind the two old men as they leafed through them. They picked up the first one.

  It could have been a holiday photograph. There were perhaps a dozen young men, tanned and hard, posing in the sunshine on the deck of a ship.

  ‘On the way to North Africa,’ Ken said.

  ‘That was lovely trip,’ said Singe, and his Nepalese accent had a soft Indian lilt to it. He smiled at the memory. ‘There were dolphins swimming and flying fish used to flap about on the deck of our landing craft. We saw a whale and her children.’

  And another photograph of men in uniform. Maybe twenty of them. Less smiles here, and less sunshine. But still the shy grins as they stood for the camera recording the moment before they went to war.

  Most of the photographs were posed. As formal as a school photograph, and as determined to hold that fleeting moment. Ken muttered the names and nicknames of long ago. Lofty and Albert. Tubby and Fred. Chalky and Sid. And sometimes he would remember where they had died.

  Salerno. Dieppe. Elba. Names that I learned in childhood. Anzio. Sicily. Normandy.

  Ken tapped the face of a thin boy with slick black hair. He smiled at me.

  ‘Who’s that then?’ he said.

  My old man. Dark-eyed and cocky. A wild boy. The uniform too big, proud of the flash on his shoulder. R.N. Commando. Eighteen years old. A boy I never knew. Not much older than my son was now.

  ‘In Italy,’ said Singe Rana, ‘we passed fields of wheat and many grapes. We drank wine. The women and children stared at us. The men looked away. We did not speak to the girls until they spoke to us.’

  I wanted to take them out for lunch. But they said they already had some dinner prepared. Singe Rana collected a plate of potato cakes from the kitchen. I took a bite and stuffed inside the potato I tasted chilli and ginger, turmeric and cayenne pepper. It was like something my wife would have served to a room full of investment bankers.

  ‘Aloo Chop,’ Ken told me. ‘Spicy potato cakes. Gurkha nosh.’

  But both of them ate like my seven-year-old daughter. Taking a bite and making it last forever. I got the impression that eating was something the pair of them had largely given up years ago.

  ‘Keep some of this Aloo Chop for your tea,’ Ken told Singe Rana. ‘When you’re at work.’

  I must have looked surprised.

  ‘Got a little job, haven’t you?’ Ken said to his friend, and Singe Rana confirmed his employment with a curt nod. ‘Security job,’ Ken elaborated. ‘Night watchman. At that firework factory on the City Road.’ He turned to me. ‘Know it, do you?’

  I nodded, vaguely remembering some ugly concrete block surrounded by council flats around Old Street. What I remembered most were the faded images on its windowless walls. Cheery cartoons of rockets, roman candles, sparklers, jumping jacks and bangers, all joyfully ex
ploding, and all so worn away by time that they looked as though they had been painted there by cavemen.

  Ken grinned at Singe Rana with boundless amusement. ‘Keeps him off the streets,’ he cackled. ‘Keeps him out of trouble.’

  ‘Gurkha people,’ said Singe Rana seriously. ‘Always trusted for security position.’

  ‘You don’t want to nick a packet of sparklers when he’s on guard duty,’ Ken chortled. ‘He’ll slit your throat soon as look at you!’ Then he looked at his friend with affection. ‘And the money comes in handy. Minimum wage. But it helps when you’re having a flutter. And we do like a little flutter, don’t we, Singe Rana?’

  While we ate the Aloo Chop they consulted the racing pages of their newspapers, and when we had finished they were ready to go to the betting shop.

  Ken Grimwood lived at the sharp end of the Angel, where Islington fell away to the borders of King’s Cross. We walked slowly past a sad little strip of shops. Everywhere was crowded, everything was worn out. Nail parlours and junk food and mobile phones. Cheap neon on a grey day, some of the lights burned out, as glaring as missing teeth.

  Then suddenly the women with pushchairs crowded with children and shopping were jumping out of the way. Something was stampeding towards us – big kids on small bikes, as multi-racial as a Benetton marketing campaign, whooping with joy as the crowd scattered.

  I quickly stepped into the gutter, with that easy middle-class cowardice that comes so naturally these days.

  But Ken Grimwood dipped his right shoulder, tucked in his chin and stood his ground. They hurtled towards him and it seemed certain they would run him down. He did not budge. And as the lead cyclist reached the old man it was as if he leaned into him, putting the full weight of his short, broad body into the boy on the bike.

  It didn’t seem like much, but the kid went sprawling.

  I stooped to help him up, anxious to avoid an unpleasant scene, and he bared his fangs, backing me off.

  His friends had pulled up and they stared at Ken Grimwood in disbelief. We all stared at him. Only Singe Rana looked unimpressed, as though he had seen it all a thousand times before.

  ‘Fool!’ shrieked the biggest one. ‘Who you think you are, old man?’

  And Ken Grimwood just smiled to himself, as though his mind was somewhere far away, with his mob in the sunshine off the coast of Africa, and the flying fish falling into the landing craft.

  Gina and I walked out of Soho, turned south down the Charing Cross Road, strolled along the Strand for a bit, and then turned right to the Victoria Embankment and the river.

  There was stuff to sort out. In the end, it always comes down to practicalities with children. Times for pick-ups and drop-offs. Homework assignments and meal requirements. The endless vigilance of the search for nits. That sort of thing.

  We were being nice to each other. For the sake of our son. We were trying to be mature grown-ups and keep the party polite.

  If you had glanced at us on the street, then you would have taken us for a couple. But it was as if there was somebody walking between us, keeping us almost ludicrously apart, making accidental physical contact impossible.

  For we walked the way that old lovers do.

  ‘It’s so beautiful, this city,’ she said, smiling at the gypsy glamour of the barges and the tugs on the Thames. ‘You forget how beautiful. Why is that? Why do we forget? I walked down here with Pat last weekend. And he got it. A lot of boys his age – they wouldn’t get it, would they? But he definitely got it.’

  I was used to the way she looked now. I had got my head around it. It wasn’t complicated. She was a good-looking woman in her forties and everything we had lost was so long ago that it hardly even hurt. It wasn’t pain any more. It was more like a memory of pain. I was relieved that we would never have to go through it again.

  Besides, when she had suggested meeting, I had been expecting this kind of stuff. The forgotten beauty of our city. The remembered beauty of our son. Philosophical Gina, who had somehow achieved enlightenment while she was working as a translator in Tokyo. That is what I had been expecting. Reflective Gina – sighing at the tugs and the barges and something our son had said.

  Maybe even an apology or two. Why not? That would be nice, I thought. For the years wasted on useless men and pointless jobs and faraway places with strange-sounding names. An apology on behalf of her – and all absent parents just like her – for the time when their child wasn’t top of the list. It was a good job I wasn’t bitter.

  But she surprised me. She could do that now, because we no longer really knew each other. It wasn’t like when we were married and you pretty much knew what was coming next.

  ‘I don’t like him taking this medication,’ she said. ‘It’s not right. A teenage boy taking pills every day of his life.’

  ‘Thyroxine,’ I said. And I actually laughed. ‘You make it sound as though he’s raiding the medicine cabinet. You make it sound as though the kid lives for chemical kicks.’

  She frowned at me. ‘No need to get excited,’ she said, with a disapproving pout of her lips. Did she used to do that? I didn’t remember that move. Someone had taught her that gesture. It was nothing to do with me.

  I took a breath. I could do this thing. I could get through this conversation without my head exploding. Probably. We were mature grown-ups. If we were any more mature, we would be fossilised.

  ‘Pat was sick, Gina,’ I said quietly. ‘As soon as he started big school. He was flattened by – whatever it was. Just exhausted.’

  ‘We spoke, remember?’ she said coldly. ‘I knew all about it.’

  ‘But you didn’t really,’ I said. ‘Because you weren’t here. You were in Tokyo. You were busy with your new job or the new guy in Shibuya.’

  ‘You can’t argue, can you?’ she said, turning to face me. She had forgotten about the beauty of the eternal river. ‘You never learned to argue in a civilised fashion. And it was Shinjuku not Shibuya. And it wasn’t some new guy – it was exactly the same useless bastard that I was with in London.’

  ‘My apologies,’ I said. And then I was quiet, because I thought about the school year slipping away as Pat stayed in his room, only emerging to haul himself into a cab to see yet another doctor or paediatrician. And I remembered almost sobbing with gratitude when we discovered that he had a thyroid condition that was easily rectified, and that he wasn’t going to die. And I understood that there is nothing in this world that has the power to slaughter your heart like having a sick child. Sorry, Gina, but no woman can kill you like that.

  ‘The pills make him well,’ I said, very quietly, because I felt so very much like shouting. ‘The pills are nothing. I appreciate your concern, Gina. But he needs them.’

  She touched my arm. Patted it twice, and then sort of stroked it with the middle joint of her index finger. That was new too. I quite liked it. We smiled at each other, and turned to look at a barge floating by as if on air. She was right. It was beautiful.

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why are you so angry?’ she said.

  ‘Because you didn’t put him first,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter what else was going on. New man, new job, new life. He should have been top of your list. And he wasn’t.’

  A kind of laugh. ‘Was he top of your list when you were on top of that little slut from work?’

  ‘One night, Gina.’

  ‘One night is plenty.’ She shook her head and looked at all the painted barges. ‘Don’t act as though you were burned at the stake, Harry. You were the one who fucked around.’

  Ah yes.

  There would always be that.

  After the show I was in the studio with Marty talking about airport security. I sat on the desk among the dead microphones, all of them a different primary colour. Like the Teletubbies. Marty swung in his chair, his hands stuffed deep inside his combat trousers.

  ‘When they stop some little old lady who looks like your granny,’ I said.

&
nbsp; Marty grimaced. ‘When they stop some little old lady who looks like your granny but they don’t stop the guy who looks like Osama bin Laden.’

  I laughed bitterly. ‘The way they don’t let you carry a pair of nail scissors on board in case you burst into the cockpit and give the pilot a quick pedicure.’

  Marty laughed at the insanity of the lousy modern world. ‘The way they don’t let you carry a pair of nail scissors on board but they will flog you a bottle of duty-free booze and nobody bats an eyelid.’

  ‘And what would you rather be attacked with?’ I asked. ‘A dinky pair of nail scissors or a broken bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label?’

  ‘Let me think about it for a bit,’ Marty said. He swung in his chair. ‘Shouldn’t we be writing some of this down? It’s all good stuff.’

  ‘You’ll remember it,’ I said.

  Marty looked over at the gallery. Josh had gone home. The sound engineer had gone home. But through the big glass window we could see some young guy with glasses staring at us. He had a rockabilly haircut and his quiff stood up like a shark’s fin.

  I didn’t recognise him. But that was the BBC for you. There were always new kids fresh from their firsts at Oxford and Cambridge turning up to fetch us a sausage roll.

  ‘Fancy a cup of char?’ Marty asked me, and made a ‘T’ sign with his hands towards the booth. The young guy with glasses and the shark’s fin quiff just stared at us. Marty impatiently banged the top part of the ‘T’ down on the bottom part. The sap on the other side of the glass just smiled weakly, shaking his head. He held up a hand – please wait, o mighty one – and came through to us, his cheeks a rosy glow.

  ‘Come on, you thick bastard,’ Marty barked at him, swinging his feet up on the desk. ‘You’re not taking a punt down the River Cam now. There’s no Bollinger on the lawn with the rowdies from the Bullingdon Club.’ Marty had dropped out of a comprehensive in Croydon. ‘This is the real world. Tea for two and be sharp about it.’

  The young man laughed. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. They were all posh boys. And even the ones who weren’t posh boys had mastered the accent, if nothing else. ‘I should have introduced myself but I didn’t want to interrupt your editorial meeting.’ He glanced at me, as if I might help him out. ‘Blunt,’ he said. ‘Giles Blunt. Controller of Editorial Guidelines.’