Man and boy

Then she expertly slid the tray on to the nearest table and came towards us. 'It's my son! Get an ambulance!' 'It will be quicker if I drive you,' she said. There were white lines on the hospital' floor that directed you to the casualty department, but before we got anywhere near it we were surrounded by nurses and porters who took I'at from my arms and laid him on a trolley. It was a trolley for an adult, and he looked tiny on it. Just so tiny.

Tears came to my eyes for the first time, and I blinked (hem away. I couldn't look at him. I couldn't stop looking at him. Your child in a hospital. It's the worst thing in the world.

They wheeled him deeper into the building, under the sick yellow strip lights of crowded, noisy corridors, asking me questions about his birthday, his medical history, the cause of his head wound.

I tried to tell them about the bike on the diving board above the empty swimming pool, but I don't know if it made much sense to them. It didn't make much sense to me.

'We'll take care of him,' a nurse said, and the trolley banged through green swing doors.

I tried to follow them and caught a glimpse of men and women in green smocks with masks on their faces, the polished chrome of medical equipment, and a kind of padded slab where they laid him down, that slab as thin and ominous as a diving board. Cyd gently took my arm.

'You have to let him go,' she said, and led me to a bleak little waiting area where she bought us coffee in polystyrene cups from a vending machine. She filled mine with sugar without asking if that's how I liked it. 'Are you okay?' she said. I shook my head. 'I'm so stupid.'

'These things happen. Do you know what happened to me when I was about that age?'

She waited for my reply. I looked up at her wide-set brown eyes. 'What?'

T was watching some kids playing baseball and I went up and stood right behind the batter. Right behind him.' She smiled at me. 'And when he swung back to hit the ball, he almost took my head off. That bat was only made of some kind of plastic, but it knocked me out cold. I actually saw stars. Look.'

She pushed the black veil of hair off her forehead. Just above her eyebrow there was a thin white scar about as long as a thumbnail.

'I know you feel terrible now,' she said. 'But kids are tough. They get through these things.'

'It was so high,' I said. 'And he fell so hard. The blood -it was everywhere.'

But I was grateful for Cyd's thin white scar. I appreciated the fact that she had been knocked unconscious as a child. It was good of her.

A young woman doctor came and found us. She was about twenty-five years old, and looked as though she hadn't had a good night's sleep since medical school. She was vaguely sympathetic, but brisk, businesslike, as honest as a car wreck.

'Patrick is in a stable condition, but with such a severe blow to the head we have to take X-rays and a brain scan. What I'm worried about is the possibility of a depressed fracture to the skull - that's when the skull is cracked and bony fragments are driven inward, causing pressure on the brain. I'm not saying that's happened. I'm saying it's a possibility.' 'Jesus Christ.' Cyd took my hand and squeezed it.

'This is going to take a while,' the doctor said. 'If you and your wife would like to stay with your son tonight, there's time to go home and get some things.' 'Oh,' Cyd said. 'We're not married.' The doctor looked at me and studied her chart. 'You're Patrick's father, Mr Silver?' 'Yes.' 'I'm just a friend,' Cyd said. 'I should go,' she told me, standing up. I could tell that she thought she was getting in the way. But she wasn't at all. She was the only thing keeping me from falling apart. 'And the child's mother?' the doctor asked.

'She's out of the country,' I said. 'Temporarily out of the country.' 'You might want to call her,' the doctor said. My mother had been crying, but she wasn't going to do it in public. She always saved her tears for behind closed doors, for the eyes of the family.

At the hospital she was all gritty optimism and common sense. She asked practical questions of the nurses. What was the risk of permanent damage? How long before we would know? Was it okay for grandparents to stay the night? It made me feel better having her around. My dad was a bit different.

The old soldier looked lost in the hospital cafeteria. He wasn't used to sitting and waiting. He wasn't used to situations that were beyond his control. His thick tattooed arms, the broad shoulders, his fearless old heart - they were all quite useless in here.

I knew that he would have done anything for Pat, that he loved him with the unconditional love you can probably only feel for a child, a love that's far more difficult to feel when your perfect child has grown into one more fallible adult. He loved Pat in a way that he had once loved me. Pat was me before I had a chance to screw everything up. It gnawed at my father inside that all he could do was sit and wait.

'Does anyone want any more tea?' he said, desperate to do something, anything to make our miserable lot a little better.

'We'll have tea coming out of our ears,' my mum said. 'Just sit down and relax.'

'Relax?' he snorted, glaring at her, and then deciding to leave it.

He flopped into a cracked plastic chair and stared at the wall. There were bags under his eyes the colour of bruised fruit. Then after five minutes he went to get us some more tea. And as he waited for news of his grandson and sipped tea that he didn't really want, my father seemed suddenly old. 'Why don't you try Gina again?' my mother asked me.

I don't know what she was expecting. Possibly that Gina would get on the next plane home and soon our little family would be united once more and forever. And maybe I hoped for that, too.

But it was no good. I went out to the reception area and called Gina's number, but all I got was the strange purring sound of a Japanese telephone that nobody answers.

It was midnight in London, which made it eight in the morning in Tokyo. She should have been there. Unless she had already left for work. Unless she hadn't come home last night. Her phone just kept on purring.

This was how it was going to be from now on. If I had spoken to Gina, I know that her strength and common sense would have got the better of any fear or panic. She would have been more like my mum than my dad. Or me. She would have asked what had happened, what were the dangers and when would we know. She would have found out the time of the next flight home and she would have been on it. But I just couldn't reach her.

I hung up the phone, knowing that the rest of our lives were going to be like this, knowing that things had gone too wrong to ever be the way they were, knowing that we were too far away from each other to ever find our way back. eighteen The doctor came looking for me at five in the morning. I was in the empty cafeteria, nursing a cup of tea that had gone cold hours ago. I stood up as she came towards me, waiting for her to speak.

'Congratulations,' she said. 'Your son has a very hard head.' 'He's going to be okay?'

'There's no fracture and the scan is clear. We're going to keep him in for observation for a few days, but that's standard procedure when we've put twelve stitches in a four-year-old's head wound.'

I wanted that doctor to be my best friend. I wanted us to meet up for dinner once a week so she could pour out all her frustrations with the NHS. I would listen and I would care. She had saved my son. She was beautiful. 'He's really all right?'

'He'll have a sore head for a few weeks, and a scar for life. But, yes, he's going to be okay.' 'No side effects?'

'Well, it will probably help him get girls in fifteen years' time. Scars are quite attractive on a man, aren't they?' I took her hands and held them a bit too long. 'Thank you.' 'That's why we're here,' she smiled. I could see that I was embarrassing her, but I couldn't help it. Finally I let go. 'Can I see him?' He was at the far end of a ward full of children. Next to Pat there was a pretty little five-year-old in Girl Power pyjamas with her hair all gone from what I guessed was chemotherapy. Her parents were by her side, her father asleep in a chair, and her mother at the foot of the bed, staring at her daughter's face. I walked quietly past them to my son's bed, knowing that I had been wrong to wallow in self-pity for so long. We were lucky.

Pat was on a saline drip, his face as white as his pillow, his head swathed in bandages. I sat on his bed, stroking his free arm, and his eyes flickered open.

'You angry with me?' he asked, and I shook my head, afraid to speak.

He closed his eyes, and suddenly I knew that I could do this thing.

I could see that my performance so far had been pretty poor. I didn't have enough patience. I spent too much time thinking about Gina and even Cyd. I hadn't been watching Pat closely enough in the park. All that was undeniable. But I could do this thing.

Maybe it would never be perfect. Maybe I would make a mess of being a parent just as I had made a mess of being a husband.

But for the first time I saw that being a man would have nothing to do with it. All families have their own legends and lore. In our little family, the first story that I featured in was when I was five years old and a dog knocked out all my front teeth.

I was playing with a neighbour's Alsatian behind the row of shops where we had our flat. The dog was licking my face and I was loving it until he put his front paws on my chest to steady himself and tipped me over. I landed flat on my mouth, blood and teeth everywhere, my mother screaming.

I can just about remember the rush to hospital and being held over a basin as they fished out bits of broken teeth, my blood dripping all over the white enamel sink. But most of all I remember my old man insisting that he was staying with me as they put me out with the gas.

When the story was retold in our family, the punch line was what I did when I came home from the hospital with my broken mouth - namely stuff it with a bag of salt and vinegar crisps.

That ending appealed to my old man, the idea that his son came back from the hospital with eight bloody stumps where his front teeth used to be and was so tough that he immediately opened a packet of crisps. But in reality I wasn't tough at all. I just liked salt and vinegar crisps. Even if I had to suck them.

I knew now that my dad wasn't quite as tough as he would have liked to have been. Because nobody feels tough when they take their child to a hospital. The real punch line to that story was that my father had refused to leave my side.

Now I could understand how he must have felt watching his five-year-old son being put out with gas so that the doctors could remove bits of broken teeth from his gums and tongue.

He would have had that feeling of helpless terror that only the parent of a sick or injured child can understand. I knew exactly how he must have felt - like life was holding him hostage. Was it really possible that I was starting to see the world with his eyes?

He was standing outside the main entrance to the hospital, smoking one of his roll-up cigarettes. He must have been the only surviving Rizla customer in the world who didn't smoke dope. He looked up at me, holding his breath. 'He's going to be fine,' I said. He released a cloud of cigarette smoke. 'It's not - what did they call it? - a compressed fracture?'

'It's not fractured. They've given him twelve stitches and he'll have a scar, but that's all.' 'That's all?' 'That's all.'

'Thank Christ for that,' he said. He took a tug on his roll-up. 'And how about you?' 'Me? I'm fine, Dad.' 'Do you need anything?' 'A good night's kip would be nice.'

When I was with my father, I sometimes found myself talking his language. He was the only person in the country who still referred to sleep as kip.

'I mean, are you all right for money? Your mum told me you're not going to take this job.'

T can't. The hours are too long. I'd never be home.' I looked across the almost empty carpark to where the night sky was streaked with light. Somewhere birds were singing. It wasn't late any more. It was early. 'But something will turn up.'

He took out his wallet, peeled off a few notes and handed them to me. 'What's this for?' I asked. 'Until something turns up.'

'That's okay. I appreciate the offer, Dad, but something really will turn up.'

'I know it will. People always want to watch television, don't they? I'm sure you'll get something soon. This is for you and Pat until then.' My dad, the media expert. All he knew about television was that these days they didn't put on anything as funny as Fawlty Towers or Benny Hill or Morecambe and Wise. Still, I took the notes he offered me.

There was a time when taking money from him would have made me angry - angry at myself for still needing him and his help at my age, and even angrier at him for always relishing his role as my saviour.

Now I could see that he was just sort of trying to show me that he was on my side. 'I'll pay this back,' I said. 'No rush,' said my father. Gina wanted to get on the next plane home, but I talked her out of it. Because by the time I finally reached her late the following day, getting on the next plane home didn't matter quite so much.

She had missed those awful minutes rushing Pat to the emergency room. She had missed the endless hours drinking tea we didn't want while waiting to learn if his tests were clear. And she had missed the day when he sat up with his head covered in bandages, clutching his light sabre, in a bed next to the little girl who had lost all her hair because of the treatment she was receiving.

Gina had missed all that, she had missed all that through no fault of her own. Personally, I blamed that fucking bastard Richard.

By the time I reached Gina, we knew that Pat was going to be all right. Now I didn't want her to come home.

I told myself that it was because I didn't want her to hold Pat and tell him everything was going to be fine and then leave again. But I knew it was not quite as noble as that. Where the fuck was Gina when we needed her? 'I can be there tomorrow,' she said. 'This job can wait.'

'There's no need,' I said, dead calm. 'It was just a knock. A bad knock. But he's going to be okay.'

'I'll be coming home soon anyway. I'm not quite sure when -' 'Don't change your plans,' I said.

Listen to us - as formal as two people feeling their way at a dull dinner party. Once we could talk all night, once we could talk about anything. Now we sounded like two strangers who had never been properly introduced. Listen to us, Gina. Cyd was standing on my doorstep holding a takeaway container. 'Is this a bad time?' 'No, it's not a bad time. Come in.' She came into my home, handing me the container. 'For Pat. Spaghetti pesto.' 'Green spaghetti. His favourite. Thank you.'

'You just need to put it in the microwave. Can you do that?'

'Are you kidding? Even I know how to use a microwave. One minute or two?' 'One ought to do it. Is he awake?' 'He's watching some TV. Just for a change.'

Pat was sprawled all over the sofa, still in his Star Wars pyjamas and M amp;S dressing gown, watching the director's cut of Return ofthejedi. The rule book had been thrown out of the window since he had come home from the hospital.

'Hi Pat,' Cyd said, crouching down beside him and stroking his hair, carefully avoiding the large plaster that now covered one side of his forehead. 'How's your poor old head?' 'It's fine. My stitches are a bit itchy.' T bet they are.' 'But - guess what? They don't have to be taken out. My stitches.' 'No?'

'No, they just fade away,' Pat said, looking to me for confirmation.

'That's right,' I said. 'They dissolve. They're the new kind of stitches, aren't they?'

'The new kind,' Pat nodded, turning his attention back to Princess Leia dressed as a scantily-clad concubine in the court of Jabba the Hutt. 'That's some outfit she's got on,' Cyd said. 'Yes, it is,' agreed Pat. 'She's a slave girl.' 'Goodness.'

They watched Princess Leia squirming on the end of her chain for a few moments. 'Well, I'm going to leave you to get better,' Cyd said. 'Okay.'

'Cyd brought you some dinner,' I said. 'Green spaghetti. What do you say?'

'Thank you.' He gave her his most charming, David Niven-like smile. 'You're welcome,' she said.

I walked her to the door and I realised that something inside me felt like it was singing. I didn't want her to go. 'Thanks for coming round,' I said. 'It's made my day.'

She turned and looked at me with those wide-set brown eyes.

T mean it,' I said. 'This is the best thing that's happened to me all day. Definitely.' 'But I don't understand,' she said. 'What don't you understand?' 'Why do you like me? You don't even know me.' 'Do you really want to know?' 'Yes.'" So I told her.

'I like you because you're strong but you're not hard. I like it that you don't take crap from men, but you still left your country for a man because you thought he was the one for you.' 'Biggest mistake of my life.'

'Maybe. But I like it that you're so romantic from watching all those MGM musicals as a little girl.' She laughed, shaking her head.

'You see right through men, but you still want to find a man to share your life with,' I said. 'Says who?'

'And I like the way your entire face lights up when you smile. I like your eyes. I like your legs. I like the way you know how to talk to a four-year-old kid. I like the way you were there when I needed someone. Everyone else just stood and stared. You were kind. And you didn't have to be kind.' 'Anything else?' 'You're beautiful.' 'I'm not beautiful at all.'

'You're beautiful and brave and I'm jealous of every man who ever went out with you. Now and again I walk in front of the place where you work in the hope of bumping into you.' 'You miss your wife,' she said. 'You really miss her.'

'That's true,' I conceded. 'But it's also true that you blow me away.'

'Boy,' she said, shaking her head. 'But you still don't know me.'

She didn't say it the way she had said it before. Now she said it gently, kindly, as if it weren't my fault that I didn't know her.

And she moved towards me as she said it, looking at me with those eyes for a moment before they closed as she placed her mouth upon mine. I kissed her back. 'I know you a little bit,' I said.

'Yes,' she said, giving me that. 'You know me a little bit.' nineteen

Pat started school.

The uniform he had to wear should have made him look grown up. The grey V-necked sweater, the white shirt and yellow tie should have made him look like a little man. But they didn't.

The formality of his school clothes only underlined the shocking newness of him. Approaching his fifth birthday, he wasn't even young yet. He was still brand new. Even though he was dressed more grown-up than me.

As I helped him get ready for his first day at school, I was startled to realise just how much I loved his face. When he was a baby I couldn't tell if he was really beautiful, or if that was just my parental software kicking in. But now I could see the truth.

With those light blue eyes, his long yellow hair and the way his slow, shy smile could spread right across his impossibly smooth face, he really was a beautiful boy.

And now I had to let my beautiful boy go out into the world. At least until 3.30. For both of us, it felt like a lifetime.

He wasn't smiling now. At breakfast he was pale and silent in his pastiche of adult's clothing, struggling to stop his chin trembling and his bottom lip sticking out, while over the Coco Pops I kept up a running commentary about the best days of your life.

The Coco Pops were interrupted by a call from Gina. I knew it must have been difficult for her to phone - the working day was still going strong where she was - but I also knew that she wouldn't miss Pat's big day. I watched him talking to his mother, uncomfortable in his shirt and tie, a baby suddenly forced to impersonate a man. Then it was time to go.

As we drove closer to the school I was seized by a moment of panic. There were children everywhere, swarms of them all in exactly the same clothes as Pat, all heading in the same direction as us. I could lose him in here. I could lose him forever.

We pulled up some way from the school gates. There were cars double-parked and treble-parked everywhere. Tiny girls with Leonardo DiCaprio lunch boxes scrambled out of off-road vehicles the size of Panzer tanks. Bigger boys with Arsenal and Manchester United kitbags climbed out of old bangers. The noise from this three-foot-high tribe was unbelievable.

I took Pat's clammy hand and we joined the throng. I could see a collection of small, bewildered new kids and their nervous parents milling about in the playground. We were just going through the gates to join them when I noticed the lace on one of Pat's brand new black leather shoes was undone.

'Let me get your lace for you, Pat,' I said, kneeling down to tie it, realising that this was the first day in his life he had ever been out of trainers.

Two bigger boys rolled past, arm in arm. They leered at us. Pat smiled at them shyly. 'He can't even do his shoes up,' one of them snorted. 'No,' Pat said, 'but I can tell the time.'

They collapsed in guffaws of laughter, holding each other up for support, and reeled away repeating what Pat had said with disbelief. 'But I can tell the time, can't I?' Pat said, thinking they doubted his word, his eyes blinking furiously as he seriously considered bursting into tears.

'You can tell the time brilliantly,' I said, unable to really believe that I was actually going to turn my son loose among all the cynicism and spite of the lousy modern world. We went into the playground.

A lot of the children starting school had both parents with them. But I wasn't the only lone parent. I wasn't even the only man.

There was another solo father, maybe ten years older than me, a shagged out business type accompanying a composed little girl with a rucksack bearing the grinning mugs of some boy band I had never heard of. We exchanged a quick look and then he avoided my eyes, as if what I had might be catching. I suppose his wife could have been at work. I suppose she could have been anywhere.

The kindly headmistress came and led us into the assembly hall. She gave us a brief, breezy pep talk and then the children were all assigned to their individual classrooms.

Pat got Miss Waterhouse, and with a handful of other parents and new kids we were marched off to her class by one of the trusted older children who were acting as guides. Our guide was a boy of around eight years old. Pat stared up at him, dumbstruck with admiration.

In Miss Waterhouse's class a flock of five-year-olds were sitting cross-legged on the floor, patiently waiting for a story from their teacher, a young woman with the hysterical good humour of a game-show host.

'Welcome, everyone!' Miss Waterhouse said. 'You're just in time for our morning story. But first it's time for everyone to say goodbye to their mummy.' She beamed at me. 'And daddy.' It was time to leave him. Although there had been a few emotional goodbyes before he dropped out of nursery school, this time felt a bit different. This time it felt as though I were being left.

He was starting school, and by the time he left school he would be a man and I would be middle-aged. Those long days of watching Star Wars videos at home while life went on somewhere else were over. Those days had seemed empty and frustrating at the time, but I missed them already. My baby was joining the world.

Miss Waterhouse asked for volunteers to look after the new boys and girls. A forest of hands shot up, and the teacher chose the chaperones. Suddenly a solemn, exceptionally pretty little girl was standing next to us.

T'm Peggy,' she told Pat. 'And I'm going to take care of you.'

The little girl took his hand and led him into the classroom. He didn't even notice me leaving. I can remember sleeping on the back seat of my father's car. We were driving away from the city, coming back from nights out - the yearly visit to the London Palladium to see a pantomime, the weekly visits to see my grandmother -and I would watch the yellow lamps of East End streets and Essex A-roads blurring high above my dreaming head.

I would stretch out on the back seat of my dad's car - 'You don't have to sleep, just rest your eyes,' my mother would tell me - and soon I would be rocked off to sleep by the motion of the car and the murmur of my parents' voices.

The next thing I knew I would be in my father's arms, the car up our drive, the engine still running as he lifted me from the back seat, swaddled in the tartan blanket that he kept in the car for our trips to the seaside and relatives and the London Palladium. These days it takes next to nothing to wake me. A drunk staggering home, a car door slammed, a false alarm miles away - they are all enough to snap me out of sleep and leave me staring at the ceiling for hours. But when I was a child sleeping on the back seat of my dad's car, nothing could wake me up. I hardly stirred from my dreams when we arrived home and I was carried up the stairs to bed wrapped up in that tartan blanket and my father's arms.

I wanted Pat to have memories like that. I wanted Pat to feel as secure as that. But with Gina gone and our old VW estate sold to pay the mortgage, these days Pat was by my side in the passenger seat of the MGF, struggling and fighting against sleep even when we were coming back from my parents and there was an hour's worth of empty motorway ahead of us.

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. T 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? 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 suence 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.

I thought that it might have stopped him. But he carried on in his half-crouch, supporting Pat's bike as we made our way through the daisies and the dog crap. 'Who is she?' he asked. 'Just a friend. We might go to the pictures.'

He finally stopped, rubbing his back as he straightened up to look at me.

'You think that's appropriate behaviour for someone in your position, do you?' 'Going to the pictures? I don't see why not.'

'I'm not talking about going to the pictures. I'm talking about going out with a strange woman just after -' He nodded at the hood of Pat's anorak. 'You know.'

'There's nothing strange about her,' I said. 'And we're only going to the pictures. We're not eloping.'

He shook his head, dumbfounded at what the world was coming to.

T don't care what you get up to,' he said. Then he indicated Pat again. 'What I care about is him. This girl - is it serious?'

T don't know, Dad. Can we get our first date out of the way before we start picking out curtains?'

I was playing the injured innocent. But I knew that if I went out with a woman it would confuse and frighten him. It wasn't my intention to hurt him. I just wanted to show him that I was thirty years old and that he couldn't decide when I took my stabilisers off.

We had come to a ragged scrap of tarmac in front of a tatty stage. 'Are you ready?' my father asked Pat. 'Ready,' Pat said, sounding not very ready at all. 'I'm holding you, okay?' my dad said, increasing his pace. 'I'm going to keep holding you. Just keep your back straight. And pedal.' 'Okay.' 'Are you holding on?' 'I'm holding on!'

They took off across the tarmac, Pat's face hidden by the hood of his anorak and my father bent double by his side, like a little elf being chased by a hunchback. Then my dad let go of the bike. 'You holding on, Granddad?'

'I'm holding on!' he cried as Pat left him behind. 'Pedal! I've got you!'

His little legs pedalled. Bluebell gave a dangerous wobble as Pat splashed through a puddle, but the bike seemed to right itself and gather speed. 'You're doing it!' my dad shouted. 'You're doing it, Pat!'

He turned to look at me and we both laughed out loud. I ran to my father's side and he put his arm around my shoulders. He smelled of Old Spice and Old Holborn. 'Look at him go,' my dad said proudly.

The bike reached the edge of the tarmac, bounced once and skidded on to the grass. Pat was moving more slowly now, but still pedalling furiously as he made a beeline for the trees.

'Don't go too far!' I shouted. But he couldn't hear me. He disappeared into the shadows of some old oak trees, like some hooded creature of the forest returning to his lair.

My father and I looked at each other. We weren't laughing now. We took off after him, our shoes sliding on the wet grass, calling his name.

Then he was nonchalantly riding towards us out of the trees, the hood of his anorak flown off, and grinning from ear to ear.

'Look what I can do,' he said proudly, briefly standing up in Bluebell's stirrups before skidding to a halt.

'That's brilliant, Pat,' I said. 'But don't go off like that again, okay? Always stay where we can see you.' 'What's wrong with Granddad?' he said.

My father was leaning against a tree, clawing at his chest and gasping for air. The blood had drained from his face and there was something in his eyes that I had never seen before. It might have been fear. 'I'll be fine,' he wheezed. 'Granddad?' Pat said. 'Granddad's fine,' he said.

After a long, desperate minute he managed to get some air in his lungs. Still breathing hard, he laughed off the concern of his son and grandson.

'Just getting old,' he said. 'Too old for a jog in the woods.'

And I thought that's exactly what it was - old age catching up on a man whose body had endured so much in his youth. All my life those small pieces of shrapnel, jagged and black, had been squeezing out of his tough old body. Every summer we saw that giant starburst of a scar on his side. All that pain and punishment was bound to catch up on him sooner or later.

But I was wrong. It wasn't the past calling. It was the future.

'Don't worry about me,' my father told us. 'I'm fine. Let's go home.'

We walked back to his car through the lengthening shadows of that September afternoon, Pat riding his bike ahead of us, my old man humming, 'You Make Me Feel So Young', consoled and comforted by his personal Dean Martin, his own private Sinatra. twenty When you are deep into a relationship that you expect to last forever, it never crosses your mind that one day you will be taking your third shower of the day and getting ready to go out on a date.

Like getting your mum to do your washing or having to borrow money from your dad, you think that all those nervy bathroom rituals are way behind you.

You never dream that there will again come a time when you are as fanatical about your personal hygiene as a fifteen-year-old with a permanent erection. That you will once more find yourself standing in front of the mirror trying to do something with your hair. That you will be brushing teeth that are already perfectly clean. And that you will do all these things so you can sit in the dark for a couple of hours with a member of the opposite sex who you have only just met.

It's scary. Dating is a young person's game. You get out of practice. You might not be any good at it any more.

You use a different part of your brain for going out with someone you have just met than you use for going out with someone you are married to. You use different muscles. So perhaps it's only natural that when you start using those muscles again, they can feel a little stiff.

Two grown-ups going through all those teenage mating rituals - trying to look nice, meeting at the arranged hour, knowing what it is time to do and what should wait a while and what should wait forever. It should be really difficult to get back into all that stuff after you have been with someone for years. But it didn't feel difficult with Cyd. She made it feel easy. 'The first film we see together is really important,' Cyd said. 'I know we're just friends and all, but our choice of movie tonight is really important.'

I tried to look as though I knew what she was talking about.

'A lot of people on a first date, they try to play safe. They go for a big summer movie. You know, one of those films where New York gets destroyed by aliens or a tidal wave or a big monkey or something. They think that kind of movie guarantees a good time. But a big summer movie is not a good choice.' 'It isn't?'

She shook her head. 'Nobody really has a good time at those movies apart from thirteen-year-old kids in Idaho. It's the law of diminishing returns. When you've seen the Empire State Building blown up once, you don't need to see it again.'

I was starting to get it. 'You think the earth is going to move. But you end up yawning as the aliens zap the White House.'

'If you choose a big summer movie, it shows you have really low expectations,' she said, shooting me a look as I squeezed the MGF through the afternoon traffic clogging up around the Angel. 'About everything. It means you think life is essentially just a bucket of stale popcorn and a carton of flat Diet Coke. And that's the most that anyone can hope for.' I tried to remember the first film I had seen with Gina. It had been something arty and Japanese at the Barbican. It was about depressed people.

'Art-house movies are just as bad,' Cyd said, reading my mind. 'It means you are both pretending to be something that you're probably not.'

'And think of all those couples around the world whose first film was Titanic,' I said. 'All those budding relationships doomed before they had even really begun. Before they had even left port.'

She gave me a punch on the arm. 'This is serious,' she said. T had a friend back home who got married to a guy who took her to see The Fly on their first date.' 'And later he turned into a bug?'

'As good as,' she said. 'He certainly changed. For the worse.' 'So what do you want to see?' I asked her. 'Trust me?' she said. T trust you,51 said.

She wanted to see one of those films that they put on television every Christmas. One of those films that I somehow imagined I had already seen a dozen times. But I don't think I had ever really seen it at all.

I don't know why they were showing If's A Wonderful Life down at the NFT on the South Bank. It might have been a Frank Capra season or a James Stewart season. They might have had a restored, digitally-enhanced, freshly polished print. I don't know and it doesn't matter. That was the movie we went to see on our first night together. And at first it seemed like pretty grim stuff.

The special effects were from the steam age. Up in a starry sky that was clearly just a painted sheet of cardboard with a torch behind it, some angels - or rather, heavenly beings represented by pinpricks in the cardboard - were discussing George Bailey, pillar of his community, and his date with destiny.

As the action switched to a small American town and their merry little Christmas, I found myself yearning for aliens or a tidal wave or a big monkey to come along and destroy the lot. If Cyd's theory about the omens of your first film were true, then we would be lucky to last the evening.

Then gradually, as all of James Stewart's hopes and dreams began to recede, I found myself drawn into this story of a man who had lost sight of why he was alive.

The film was far tougher than I remembered it when it had been flickering in black and white in the background of my multicoloured childhood, sandwiched between Christmas Top of the Pops and my mum's turkey sandwiches.

As his world starts to unravel, James Stewart abuses one of his children's teachers on the phone and gets punched out by her husband in a bar. He bitterly resents the loving wife he gave up his dreams of travelling the world for. Most shocking of all, he is rotten to his children - an irritable, bad-tempered bully. But you know that it's not because he doesn't love them enough. It's because he loves them so much.

In the darkness, Cyd reached over and squeezed my hand.

'Don't worry,' she said. 'Everything works out all right in the end.' It was still light when we came out of the film, but only just. We bought slices of pizza in the NFT cafe and ate them at those long wooden tables outside where you have to share with other people and you feel like a student.

The NFT is in an ugly building in a beautiful part of town. It's inside a dumb concrete sixties block plonked down just where the Thames curls south as it passes under the shadow of Waterloo Bridge, and it faces right across the river from the lights of the Victoria embankment and St Paul's. That's where Cyd told me that she had grown up in a home full of women and movies.

'The first film my parents saw together was Gone with the Wind,' she said. 'And after my dad died, my mom saw it sixteen times alone. She would have seen it more often. But she was trying to ration herself.'

Cyd was the youngest of four sisters. Her mother worked as a nurse at the Texas Medical Center - 'Where big shots go to get their hearts fixed' - and her father had driven trucks out in the oil fields.

'Houston is an oil town,' she said. 'When oil prices are high, life is sweet. And when oil prices fall through the floor, we tighten our belts. But for better or worse, for richer or poorer, Houston is always an oil town.'

The way she told it, her parents never came off their honeymoon. Even when they had four teenage daughters, they would still hold hands in public and give each other a single flower and leave love notes in lunch boxes.

'When I was twelve, it embarrassed me,' Cyd said. 'Now I love it. Now I love it that they were that much in love. I know what you're thinking - maybe they were never really like that and I just like to remember them that way. Maybe they got on each other's nerves and snapped at each other. But I know what I saw. They were mad about each other. They chose right.'

Then one Sunday she was with her friends in the Dairy Queen at the Galleria shopping mall when her oldest sister came to find her to tell her that their father had died of a heart attack.

'My mom didn't grow old overnight,' Cyd said. 'It wasn't like that at all. She just sort of retreated into the past. Maybe she figured that the best was over. She still went to work. She still cooked our meals. But now she watched a lot of old movies. And some of her video collection must have rubbed off on me. Because when I met the guy I came to England for, I thought he was Rhett Butler.'

I am never comfortable when the conversation turns to someone's old partners. All those hopes that came to nothing, all those wounds that haven't healed, all the bitterness and disappointment of seeing your love get left out for the dustbin men - it seems to take the shine off the whole evening. And she could feel it too. She changed the subject, veering away from her sad story by playing chirpy tourist guide.

'Did you know that Houston was the first word spoken on the moon?' she said. 'That's a fact. Neil Armstrong said to Mission Control - Houston, Tranquillity base here. The Eagle has landed.'

'Until I met you, I never really thought about Houston,' I said. 'It's not one of those American cities that you can see in your head.'

'It's not like here,' she said. 'If it's got a second coat of paint, it's an antique. We have these drinking joints by the side of the road called ice houses where all the women look like they just stepped out of a Hank Williams song. But if you're young you go to the Yucatan Liquor Store on a Saturday night where the girls try to look like Pamela Anderson and the boys can't help looking like Meatloaf.'

'It sounds a bit like Essex,' I said. 'So where did you meet this English guy?'

'At the Yucatan Liquor Store. On a Saturday night. He asked me if I wanted a drink and I said no. Then he asked me if I wanted to dance and I said yes. He was working in Houston as a despatch rider. That's what he does. He delivers stuff on a motorbike. Sort of a glamorous postman. Naturally, I was impressed.' 'And he didn't turn out to be Rhett Butler after all?'

'Well, you know,' she said. 'Not even Clark Gable turned out to be Rhett Butler, did he?' 'But you came to London with him?' 'Yeah.' 'Why didn't you stay over there? Did they kick him out?'

'Oh, no. We were married. He had his Green Card. Did you know a Green Card is really pink?' I shook my head.

'It surprised us, too. We had to go through those interviews with immigration officials who make sure you're really in love. We showed them our wedding album and it wasn't a problem. We could have stayed there forever.' She thought about it. 'I think he felt like he should be doing more with his life. America can make you feel like a bit of a failure. So we came here.' 'And what went wrong?'

'Everything.' She looked at me. 'He was into the bamboo. Do you know what that means?' I shook my head. 'Is it some drug thing?'

'No. Well, in a way. It means he liked Asian girls. And still does. And always will.' 'Asian girls?'

'You know- Korean girls. Chinese. Japanese. Filipinas. He wasn't that fussy - which is a bit insulting to Asian women, as they can look as different to each other as a Swede and a Turk. But he genuinely didn't care, as long as they were Asian. The night we met, he was at the Yucatan with a little Vietnamese girl. We have a lot of Vietnamese in Houston.' 'Asian? You mean Orientals.'

'You can't say Orientals any more. It's considered insulting - like Negro or stewardess. You have to say African-American and flight attendant. And Asian instead of Oriental.' 'To me, Asian sounds like Indian.' 'Sorry, mister. That's what you have to say.' 'What did he like about them?'

'Maybe he liked the fact that they didn't look like him. That they looked like something completely different. I can understand that. Heterosexuality - it's all about being attracted to someone who doesn't look like you, isn't it?'

'So if he liked Asian girls - if this guy who wasn't Rhett Butler was into the bamboo - why did he like you?'

'Search me. I think I was an aberration. A working holiday. I don't know.'

She brushed her black bell of hair from her forehead and stared at me with those wide-set brown eyes. Now she mentioned it, I could see how someone who was into the bamboo could fall for her. In a certain light.

'We were together for two years,' she said. 'One year back home and another year over here. Then he reverted to type. Or I found out that he had reverted to type. With a Malaysian student who he met in a park. He showed her London - and a few other things. He wasn't a bad guy. He's still not a bad guy. I just chose wrong. What about you?' 'Me?' 'Yeah, what happened to your marriage?'

I tried to figure out what had happened to Gina and me. I knew that it had something to do with getting older and taking something for granted and feeling that life was slipping away. James Stewart could have explained it to me.

T don't really know what happened,' I said. T lost my moorings there for a while.'

'Oh, I see,' Cyd said. 'You mean you fancied a quick fuck?'

'It was more than that. Although that was a part of it. But I just - I don't know how to explain. I sort of let the light go out.' She stared at me for a moment and then she nodded. 'Let's go and look at the lights,' she said.

It was dark now. On the other side of the river you could see the illuminations running all the way along the embankment like a string of pearls. In the morning you would be looking across at grey office blocks and another traffic jam and the city scuttling to pay the rent. But tonight it was beautiful. 'Looks like Christmas,' she said, taking my arm. It did. And it felt like Christmas too. 'I'm going to take a chance on you,' she told me. twenty-one When the chain-smoking babysitter realised that we weren't going to steal her away forever, Peggy was finally allowed to come home with Pat for a couple of hours.

'Look what I've got,' she told me, producing a little man made of moulded plastic. He was looking very pleased with himself inside white satin trousers, a spangly silver waistcoat and what looked like a purple tuxedo.

'Disco Ken,' she said. 'Barbie's friend. Going to the disco.'

It was strange watching them play together. Pat wanted to blow up the Death Star. Peggy wanted to hang drapes in the Millennium Falcon.

Excited to the point of hysteria at having his friend in his very own living room - although noticeably unimpressed by Disco Ken - Pat bounced off the furniture waving his light sabre above his head and shouting, 'I'll never join you on the Dark Side!'

Peggy considered him with her solemn dark eyes and then began moving little Star Wars figures around the Millennium Falcon - heavily Sellotaped on one side after crash landing into a radiator - as though they were having tea and buttered scones at the Ritz.

Nature or nurture? I knew that Pat had never been encouraged to play violent games - in fact his never-ending blood baths often drove me up the wall. Not quite five years old, he was actually a gentle, loving little boy who was too sweet for the rough and tumble of the playground. There had been some bullying because he didn't have a mother waiting for him at the school gates, and neither of us had yet worked out a way to deal with it.

Peggy was completely different. At five-and-a-half, she was a strong, confident little girl who nothing seemed to faze or frighten. I never saw any fear in those serious brown eyes.

Pat wasn't built for hunting and gathering, and Peggy wasn't made for making jam and jumpers. Yet give them a box of Star Wars toys and suddenly they were responding to their gender stereotypes. Peggy just wasn't interested in games of death and destruction. And that's all that Pat was interested in.

It didn't stop them from enjoying each other's company. Pat hung on to the back of the sofa, grinning with love and admiration as Peggy shoved little figures of Princess Leia and Han Solo and Luke Skywalker around grey plastic spaceships which had clocked up a lot of miles in hyperspace. 'Where's your mum?' Peggy asked him. 'She's in abroad,' Pat said. 'Where's your mum?'

'She's at work. Bianca picks me up from school but she's not allowed to smoke in the flat. It makes her grumpy.'

There didn't seem to be a man anywhere near Peggy's life, but that was hardly worth commenting on these days. I wondered who he was - probably some jerk who had fucked off the moment he was asked to buy some nappies.

The door bell rang. It was one of those young men who are out of work but not yet out of hope. I admire that spirit, and I always try to support them by buying some chamois leather or rubbish sacks. But this one didn't have the usual kitbag full of household goods.

'Really sorry to disturb you,' he said. 'I'm Eamon. Eamon Fish.'

At first it didn't register. Living in the city you get so used to complete strangers knocking on your door that it comes as a shock when someone who has actually touched your life rings the bell.

But of course - this was Eamon Fish, the young comedian who would probably be doing beer commercials and sleeping with weather girls by this time next year. Or next month. Or next week. The same Eamon Fish whose show I was asked to produce and had turned down because of fish finger cooking duties.

I didn't know what to do with him. I didn't know why he was here. I was expecting some down-at-heel young man who was going to sell me chamois leather. And here was some down-at-heel young man who would soon be getting pissed at the next BAFTAs. 'What can I do for you?' I asked him.

'What's that?' he said, frowning and cocking his head towards me. 'What do you want?' 'Can we talk? It would mean a lot to me.'

I let him in. We went into the living room where Peggy and Pat were sitting surrounded by an avalanche of toys. Pat still had his light sabre in his hand.

'Wow,' Eamon said. 'A light sabre! Traditional weapon of the Jedi Knights! Can I have a look?'

A slow smile spreading across his face, Pat stood up and handed the young stranger his light sabre. 'Good fellow you are,' Eamon said.

He swept the light sabre back and forth, making a buzzing sound that made Pat's smile grow even wider.

'I haven't held one of these for years,' Eamon said. 'But you never forget, do you?' He grinned at Pat. 'I come from a little town called Kilcarney. And when I was growing up, I felt a lot like Luke Skywalker felt growing up on Tatooine. You know Tatooine?' 'Luke's home planet,' Pat said. 'With the two suns.'

'What's that?' Eamon said. 'Luke's home planet, you say? Well, that's right. And he felt cut off from the rest of the galaxy, didn't he? Luke felt a long way from the action, stuck out there under the two suns of old Tatooine. And when I was growing up in sleepy old Kilcarney, I also dreamed of escaping and having lots of adventures in faraway places that I could hardly imagine.' He handed Pat his light sabre. 'And that's exactly what I did.'

'Yes,' said Peggy. 'But what happened between then and now?' 'What's that you say?' Was he completely deaf?

'I said - what happened between leavingyour home planet and todayt Peggy shouted.

'Well, that's what I want to talk to your daddy about,' Eamon said.

'He's not my daddy,' Peggy said. 'My daddy's got a motorbike.'

'The boy's mine,' I said, indicating Pat. He was still staring at Eamon with profound approval for his light sabre technique.

'He's got it,' Eamon said, smiling with what seemed like real warmth. 'Around the chin, I mean. He's got it. He's a handsome lad, all right.'

'Come into the kitchen,' I told him. 'I'll make us some coffee.' 'Coffee, you say? Top man.'

While I put the kettle on he sat at the kitchen table poking his ears with an index finger and muttering to himself. 'Bad day?' I said. "What's that?' he asked.

I put a cup of coffee down in front of him and put my face very close to his. He had those black Irish good looks and a long-term scruffiness, like a Kennedy who has just spent the summer sleeping in a doorway. And he seemed to be as deaf as a post. 'I said - what's wrong with your hearing?'

'Ah that,' he said. 'Let me explain about the ears thing. There's a posh place down in the West End where they fit hearing aids. But they also fit ear pieces - for television presenters. So their producers and directors can talk into their lugholes while they're presenting a programme. You might know the place.'

I knew it well. I remembered when Marty had been down there to get fitted for his ear pieces. That's when we knew we were really leaving radio.

'I just came from there,' Eamon said. 'Left in a bit of a hurry, as it happens. What the hearing man does when he is measuring you up, he pours some stuff like warm wax into your ears. Then you have to wait for a while until it sets. And then they know what size ears you have. For your ear pieces, that is.' T understand.'

'Except with me, he never got quite that far. He had just poured the hot wax into my ears and we were waiting for it to set when I thought - what the fuck am I doing here?' Eamon shook his head. Flakes of dried wax flew out. 'What makes me think that I can present a television show? What makes anyone think that I can present a television show? I'm a comedian. I do stand-up. Some people like it. But so what? Why does that mean I will be able to present a TV show?'

'So you were being fitted for your ear pieces and you got stage fright.' 'Before I got anywhere near a stage,' he said. T don't know if you could dignify it with the term stage fright. I suppose a bollock-shrivelling panic attack is probably more what it was. Anyway, I ran out of there with the wax still sloshing about in my ears. It seems to have set quite well.'

I gave him a tissue and some cotton buds and watched him scrape the hardened wax out of his ears. They always measure them for two ear pieces, one in either ear, although nobody ever uses more than one. Now I saw that it was just a ploy to stop you running away. T really wanted you to produce the show,' he said. T need - what do they call it? - an enabler. Someone to show me the way. Same as you showed Marty Mann the way when he left his radio show. I was disappointed when they said you weren't going to do it.'

'It's nothing to do with you,' I said. 'I'm looking after my son. Alone. I can't go back to work full-time. I need to be around for him.'

'But I notice he's wearing a uniform. Isn't the little feller at school now?' 'That's right.' 'So he's out of the house for most of the day?' 'Well, yes.'

'So - forgive me asking - what do you do all day, Harry?'

What did I do all day? I got Pat up, got him dressed and got him off to school. I shopped and cleaned. I was waiting for him at the school gates in the afternoon when he came out. Then I made sandwiches, read to him and got him ready for bed. What did I do all day? 'Nothing,' I said. 'Don't you miss it? Work, I mean?' 'Sure I miss it. I used to have quality time with my son - meaning I saw him for five minutes at the start and at the end of each day. Now I have quantity time instead. I didn't choose that change. That's just the way it has worked out. But that's why I can't produce the show for you.'

'But you could be the executive producer, couldn't you? You could come in a few times a week just to oversee the show? You could tell me what I need to do to stop looking like a complete eejit? You could help me play to my strengths, couldn't you?' 'Well,' I said. 'Maybe.'

I had never even considered the possibility that there was a compromise between working full-time and not working at all. It had never crossed my mind.

'Look, I admire what you're doing with your boy,' Eamon said. 'Believe me, you would go down a storm with the mothers of Kilcarney. But I need you. I'm here for really selfish reasons. I'm shitting coloured lights about presenting this show. That's why I'm dropping bits of hardened wax all over your kitchen floor. And I know you can get me through it without total humiliation. It might even be good.'

I thought about the long mornings and endless afternoons when Pat wasn't around. And I thought about my most recent meeting with the bank manager, who was impressed by my efforts to look after my son and less impressed by my expanding overdraft.

But most of all I thought about how good Eamon had been with Pat - admiring his light sabre, talking to him about Luke's home planet, telling me that he was a special kid.

I knew that at this stage of my life - and at all the future stages of my life, come to that - I would like anyone who liked my boy. When you are alone with a child, you want as many people rooting for him as you can get. This young Irish comic with dried wax in his ears seemed to be on our side. And so I found myself on his side, too. I was ready to work with him on a part-time basis because I was bored and broke. But most of all I was ready to work with him because he thought my son was going to make it.

'I need to see your act,' I said. 'I need to see what you do on stage so I can think about how it could work on the box. Have you got a show reel?' 'What?' he said. twenty-two Whatever the opposite of inscrutable is, that's what small children are.

Maybe in ten years' time Pat would be able to hide his feelings behind some blank adolescent mask and the old man - me - wouldn't have a clue what he was thinking. But he was four going on five and I could tell that the latest phone call from his mother had given him the blues. 'You okay, Pat?'

He nodded listlessly, and I followed him down to the bathroom where he squirted some children's toothpaste on his Han Solo toothbrush. 'How's Mummy?' 'She's all right. She's got a cold.'

He wasn't crying. He wasn't about to cry. His eyes were dry and his mouth was still. But he was down.

'You want to watch a video?' I asked him, watching him polish teeth that still looked brand new. He spat into the sink and shot me a suspicious look. 'It's school tomorrow,' he said.

'I know it's school tomorrow. I don't mean watch the whole film. Just, say, the start of the first film up until the two 'droids get captured. How about that?' He finished spitting and replaced his brush in the rack. 'Want to go to bed,' he said. So I followed him into his bedroom and tucked him in. He didn't want a story. But I couldn't turn out the light knowing that he was depressed.

I knew what he was missing and it wasn't even what you could call a mother's love. It was a mother's indulgence. Someone who would tell him that it didn't matter if he couldn't tie his shoes up yet. Someone who would tell him that he was still the centre of the universe when he had just learned what we all learn on our first day of school - that we are not the centre of the universe. I was so desperate for him to make it that I couldn't be relaxed about him making it. Gina's indulgence. That's what he really missed.

'She'll be back,' I said. 'Your mother. You know that she'll be back for you, don't you?' He nodded. 'As soon as she's done her work,' he said.

'We're okay, aren't we?' I asked him. 'You and me - we're doing okay, aren't we?'

He stared at me, blinking away the fatigue, trying to understand what I was going on about.

'We're managing without Mummy, aren't we, Pat? You let me wash your hair now. I make you things you like to eat - bacon sandwiches and stuff. And school's okay, isn't it? You like school. We're all right, aren't we? You and me?'

I felt bad about pushing him like this. But I needed him to tell me that we were doing all right. I needed to know that we were coping. He gave me a tired smile.

'Yes, we're all right, Daddy,' he said, and I kissed him goodnight, hugging him gratefully.

That's the worst thing about splitting up, I thought as I turned out his light. It makes children hide their hearts. It teaches them how to move between separate worlds. It turns them all into little diplomats. That's the biggest tragedy of all. Divorce turns every kid into half a pint of semi-skimmed Henry Kissinger. 'I come from a little town called Kilcarney,' said Eamon Fish, removing the mike from its stand and gently tapping the transparent hearing device in his left ear. 'A quiet little town called Kilcarney where the girls are legendary.'

I was watching him on a monitor, sitting in the front row of the small studio audience that was facing the backsides of five cameramen. Although we were surrounded by all the usual paraphernalia of the television studio - lights burning in the rigging, cables snaking across the floor, the shadows beyond the cameras teeming with people whose jobs ranged from floor manager to working the autocue to pouring water, all of them wearing what we called 'blacks' - the director was shooting Eamon's act to make it look more like a stand-up routine than just another late-night chat show. There were already too many talk shows that looked like boot sale David Lettermans. But what would really make it different was the host.

'For those of you who have never been to that beautiful part of my country, you should know that Kilcarney has largely been untouched by the modern world. There are, for example, no vibrators in Kilcarney.' The audience tittered. 'It's true. The priests had them all removed. Because Kilcarney girls kept chipping their teeth.'

There was laughter from the audience, laughter which grew slightly nervous as Eamon ambled off the small stage and slowly came closer to us.

'I mean, I'm not saying Kilcarney girls are stupid,' he said. 'But why does a Kilcarney girl always wash her hair in her mother's sink? Because that's where you wash vegetables.' The laughter grew louder. None of the studio audience - the usual collection of the bored and the curious on the lam for a couple of hours of free fun - had ever seen this Eamon Fish before. But now they felt he was harmless. Then he turned on them.

'Actually, I'm making all this up,' he said. 'It's all bollocks. Kilcarney girls have the best exam results in western Europe. In fact, the average Kilcarney girl has more A levels than the average Englishman has tattoos. It's not true that the only difference between a Kilcarney girl and a mosquito is that a mosquito stops sucking if you hit it on the head. It's not true that Kilcarney girls only get fifteen minutes for lunch because any longer than that and you have to retrain them. It's not true that what Kilcarney girls and bottled Guinness have in common is that both of them are empty from the neck up. None of it is true.'

Eamon sighed, ran his free hand through his thick mop of black hair and sat down on the side of the stage.

'What is true is that even in this Guardian-reading, muesli-munching, politically correct age we seem to need someone to hate. Once it was the thick Irishman and the ball-breaking mother-in-law. Now it's blonde girls. Essex girls. Kilcarney girls.' He shook his sleepy head.

'Now we all know in our hearts that geographical location and hair colour have got bugger all to do with sexual morality or intelligence. So why do we need a group of people who we can sneer at? What fundamental need in our pathetic souls does it fulfil? When we laugh about the blonde Kilcarney girl from Essex who turns off the light after sex by closing the car door, what's in it for us?'

It was only the pilot show, but I could already tell that Eamon was going to do it. After removing all the dried wax from his ears, he had crashed through the fear barrier and was learning how to be himself with five cameras watching. Fish was fine. I was more worried about the studio audience.

They had come in expecting to have their funny bones tickled, and had discovered that they were expected to defend their prejudices. They felt cheated, not good. It was a problem that we were always going to have with Eamon's show. As I saw it, the only way to solve this dilemma was to get them all pissed.

At our first production meeting after the pilot I told the AP to open a few bottles and cans and serve them to the audience while they were waiting in line to come into the studio. Everybody looked at me as if I were a genius.

That's what I love about television. You recommend opening a few cans of lager and they act as though you just painted the Sistine Chapel. 'So, it's a better job than the last one but they pay you less money,' my father said. 'How do they work that out then?' 'Because I don't work all week,' I told him yet again.

We were in their back garden, supposedly kicking a ball around with Pat, although he had retreated to the far end of the garden with his light sabre and dreams of conquering intergalactic evil. So that left me and two pensioners kicking a plastic football around between us in the autumn-tinged sunlight.

It was turning cold, but we were reluctant to go back inside. It was late September. The year was running out. There wouldn't be too many more Sunday afternoons like this one.

'If it really is a better job then they should cough up the readies,' said my dad, the international businessman, gently side-footing the ball to his wife. 'All these TV companies are loaded.' 'Not the ones Harry works for,' my mum said, thinking she was being loyal, and trapping the ball under the sole of her carpet slipper.

'I go in for a couple of production meetings and I'm there when we record the show,' I said. 'And that's it. I'm not in the office all day, every day. I don't give them my life. I just go in twice a week and act like a big shot, bossing everyone around and coming up with brilliant ideas. Then I go home.'

'Home to Pat,' said my mum, knocking the ball to me. 'Your grandson.' 'I know who my grandson is,' my old man said irritably.

'Some people executive produce a whole bunch of shows,' I said. 'But I'm just going to do this one. I've worked it out. It's going to bring in less than we had before, but it will be enough.'

'This way he gets to pay his bills but he's there when Pat comes home from school,' my mum said. My dad wasn't convinced.

He wanted me to have everything that life has to offer -the career and the kids, the family and the salary, the happy hearth and the fat pay cheque. He wanted me to have it all. But nobody gets away with having it all.

'Bobby Charlton,' he said, swinging a foot at the plastic football. It shot off his toe and into the rose bushes. 'Bugger,' he said. 'I'll get it.'

My mum and I watched him wander down to the end of the garden to retrieve the ball. He took the opportunity to put his arm around Pat and ask him what he was doing. Pat chattered away excitedly, his smooth round face turned up towards his grandfather, and my old man grinned down at him with eternal tenderness.

'Is he all right?' I asked my mum. 'He had a funny turn in the park the other day.'

'Fighting for his breath, was he?' she asked, not taking her eyes from him. And not surprised. 'Yes,' I said. 'Fighting for his breath.'

'I'm trying to get him to go to the doctor,' she said. 'Or the quack, as your dad calls him.' We smiled at each other in the encircling darkness.

'He must be the last person in the world who calls doctors quacks,' I said.

' "I'm not going to no quack,"' my mum said. It was a pretty good impersonation of all the bad-tempered certainty my father was capable of summoning up. '"I don't want no sawbones messing about with me."'

We laughed out loud, loving his old-fashioned distrust of anyone with any kind of authority, from the lowliest traffic warden to the most revered members of the medical profession, both of us taking comfort from the fact that my father was exactly the same as he always had been, even if we feared that might no longer be true.

He came back from the end of the garden with the ball and his grandson, asking us what was so funny.

'You are,' my mum said, taking his arm, and we all went back inside my father's house.

I didn't want it all. All I wanted was one more chance. One more chance to have a unified life, a life without broken bits and jagged edges. One more shot at happiness.

I didn't care how long it took before Gina came back from Tokyo. I was happy with Pat. And I wasn't looking for a brilliant career. All I wanted from work was a way to pay the mortgage.

But I wasn't ready to grow old and cold, hating women and the world because of what had happened to me. I didn't want to be fat, bald and forty, boring my teenage son to tears about all the sacrifices I had made for him. I wanted some more life. One more chance to get it right. That's what I wanted. That didn't seem like much to ask. Just one more chance. Then the next day, Gina's dad came round to our place with his daughter Sally, the sulky teenage girl on the sofa, one of the many kids that Glenn had begat and abandoned as he moved on to sexier pastures, and it crossed my mind that what has truly messed up the lousy modern world is all the people who always want one more chance. twenty-three Glenn was dressed in his winter plumage - a ratty Afghan coat draped over a shiny blue tank top that revealed the hairs on his scrawny chest, and hipsters so tight that they made a mountain out of his molehill. He was so far out of fashion that he had just come back in style.

'Hello, Harry man,' he said, clasping my hand in some obscure power-to-the-people shake that thirty years ago probably signalled the revolution was about to commence. 'How you doing? Is the little dude around? All well? Sweet, sweet.'

There was a time when I wanted my old man to be more like Gina's dad. A time when I wished my father had appeared in glossy magazines in his youth, grinned on Top of the Pops once or twice in the early seventies and shown some interest in the world beyond the rose bushes at the end of his garden. But as I looked at Glenn's wizened old bollocks sticking up through his tight trousers, it seemed like a long time ago.

Glenn's youngest daughter was lurking behind him. At first I thought that Sally was in a bad mood. She came into the house all surly, avoiding eye contact by taking a great interest in the carpet, letting her stringy brown hair - longer than I remembered it - fall over her pale face as if she wanted to hide from the world and everything in it. But she wasn't really in a bad mood at all. She was fifteen years old. That was the problem. I took them into the kitchen, depressed at the sight of two of Gina's relatives turning up out of the blue and wondering how soon I could get shot of them. But I softened when Sally's face lit up - really lit up - when Pat padded into the room with Peggy. Perhaps she was human after all. 'Hi Pat!' she beamed. 'How you doing?'

'Fine,' he said, giving no sign that he remembered his mother's half-sister. What was she to him? Half an aunt? A step-cousin? These days we have relatives we haven't even invented names for yet.

'I made you a tape,' she said, fumbling in her rucksack and eventually producing a cassette without its case. 'You like music, don't you?'

Pat stared at the tape blankly. The only music I could remember him liking was the theme from Star Wars. 'He likes music, doesn't he?' she asked me. 'Loves it,' I said. 'What do you say, Pat?'

'Thank you,' he said. He took the tape and disappeared with Peggy.

T remembered how much he liked hip-hop when we were all staying at my dad's place,' she said. 'There's just a few of the classics on there. Coolio.?? Dirty Bastard. Tupac. Doctor Dre. Stuff like that. Things that a little kid might like.' 'That's really kind of you,' I said.

They sipped their drinks in silence - herbal tea for Glenn, regular Coke for Sally - and I felt a stab of resentment at these reminders of Gina's existence. What were they doing here? What did either of these people have to do with my life? Why didn't they just fuck off?

Then Pat or Peggy must have stuffed Sally's tape into the stereo because suddenly an angry black voice was booming above a murderous bass line in the living room.

'You fuck with me and I'll fuck with you - so that would be a dumb fucking, mother-fucking thing to fucking do.'

'That's lovely,' I said to Sally. 'He'll treasure it. So - you visiting your dad again?'

She shook her head. 'I'm living there now,' she said, shooting her old man a look from under her ratty fringe.

'A few problems back home,' Glenn said. 'With my ex-lady. And her new partner.'

'Old hippies,' Sally sneered. 'Old hippies who can't stand the thought of anybody else having fun.'

'Heavy scene with the new guy,' Glenn said. 'Bit of a disciplinarian.' 'That moron,' Sally added.

'And how's your boyfriend?' I asked, remembering the ape-boy smirking on the sofa.

'Steve?' she said, and I thought I saw the sting of tears in her eyes. 'Packed me in, didn't he? The fat pig. For Yasmin McGinty. That old slapper.'

'But we spoke to Gina the other night,' Glenn said, his foggy brain finally getting down to business. 'And we promised that we would look in on you and Pat if we were in the neighbourhood.'

Now I understood what they were doing here. No doubt they were responding to Gina's prompting. But in their own ham-fisted way, they were trying to help.

'Heard you've got a new gig,' Glenn said. 'Just wanted to say that the boy's welcome to crash with us any time.' 'Thanks, Glenn. I appreciate the offer.'

'And if you ever need a babysitter, just give me a call,' Sally said, hiding behind her hair and staring at a point somewhere beyond my shoulder.

It was really sweet of her. And I knew I needed a bit of extra cover with Pat now that I was working part-time. But Jesus Christ. I wasn't that desperate. Cyd loved London the way only a foreigner could love it. She saw past the stalled traffic, the dead pubs, the congealed poverty of the council estates. She looked beyond the frightened pensioners, the girls who looked like women, the women who looked like men, the men who looked like psychos. She saw beyond all of that. She told me the city was beautiful.

'At night,' Cyd said. 'And from the air. And walking across the royal parks. It's so green - the only city I ever saw that is greener than Houston.'

'Houston's green?' I said. T thought it was some dusty prairie town.'

'Yeah, but that's because you're a dumb limey. Houston is green, mister. But not as green as here. You can walk right across the centre of town through the three royal parks -St James's, Green Park, Hyde Park - and your shoes never touch anything but green, green grass. Do you know how far that is?' 'A mile or so,' I guessed.

'It's four miles,' she said. 'Four miles of flowers, trees and green. And people riding horses! In the heart of one of the biggest cities on the planet!' 'And the lake,' I said. 'Don't forget the lake.'

We were in a cafe up on the first floor of a huge white building from the thirties on Portland Place - the Royal Institute of British Architects, right across the street from the Chinese embassy, a monumental oasis of beauty and calm that I never knew existed until she took me there.

T love the lake,' she said. T love the Serpentine. Can we still hire a rowing boat at this time of the year? Is it too late?'

'I'm not sure,' I said. It was the last week in September. 'We might be able to get a boat for a few more days. You want to try?' Those wide-set brown eyes got even bigger. 'You mean now?' 'Why not?' She looked at her watch.

'Because I've got to get to work,' she smiled. 'Sorry. I would have loved it.'

'Then how about tomorrow? First thing. Before the crowds get there. We'll get an early start. I'll meet you at your place after breakfast.' I still hadn't seen her flat.

'Or I could come to your place after I get through at work tonight,' she said. 'Tonight?'

'That way we would really be sure of getting an early start.' 'You'll come to my place after work?'

'Yes.' She looked down at the clouds in her coffee and then back at me. 'Would that be okay?' 'That would be good,' I said. 'That would be great.' Maybe the thing with Cyd had started off as some dumb infatuation when I was still reeling from Gina leaving me. But after we slept together for the first time it really wasn't like that any more. Because Cyd's mouth fit mine in a way that no other mouth ever had - not even Gina's mouth.

I'm not kidding - Cyd's mouth was a perfect fit. Not too hard, not too soft, not too dry, not too wet, not too much tongue and not too little. Just perfect.

I had kissed her before of course, but this was different. Now when we kissed, I wanted it to go on forever. Our mouths could have been made for each other. And how often can you say that? How often do you find someone whose mouth is a perfect fit for your mouth? I'll tell you exactly - once. That's how many times. There're a lot of nice people in the world, a million people who you could fall in love with. But there's only one person out there whose mouth is a perfect fit.

And despite everything that happened later, I still believe that. I really do. In the early hours I watched her while she was sleeping, loving it that she was on my side of the bed, happy that she knew so little about my old life that she hadn't automatically taken Gina's side.

I drifted off knowing that we had begun, and it was up to the two of us what side of the bed we slept on. And then she woke up screaming. It was only Pat.

Probably disturbed by drunks staggering home at the fag-end of a Saturday night, he had stumbled out of his bed and crawled into mine, never really waking, not even when he threw a leg over Cyd's waist and she woke up as if someone was kicking in the window. She turned towards me, hiding her face in her hands.

'Oh God - I thought - I don't know what I thought. I could see you. But I could feel someone else.'

I put my arm around her shoulders, trying to comfort her. Pat was out cold on her side of the bed, his mouth open, his arms above his head, his smooth round face turned away from us, but one leg still draped over Cyd.

'I'm all right, I'm all right,' she said, gently removing Pat's leg. She slid over me and got out of bed, not sounding all right at all.

I thought she was going to the bathroom. But when she didn't come back after five minutes, I went looking for her. She was sitting at the kitchen table wearing a shirt of mine that she must have found in the laundry basket. I sat down beside her, taking her hands. I kissed her on the mouth. Softly, lips together. I loved to kiss her all different ways.

'I'm sorry he scared you,' I said. 'He does that sometimes. Climbs in my bed, I mean. I should have warned you.' 'I'm okay.' 'Are you sure?' She shook her head. 'Not really.'

'Listen, I really am sorry he frightened you like that. I'll try to make sure it doesn't happen again. I'll put a lock on my door. Or tie him down. Or -' 'It's not Pat,' she said. 'It's us.' 'What do you mean?' 'We haven't really talked, have we?'

'Sure we have. I told you about Gina. You told me about the guy who was into the bamboo. The one who wasn't Rhett Butler. We talked a lot. We got all the sad stories out of the way.'

'That's the past. I mean we haven't talked about now. We don't know what the other one wants. I like you, Harry. You're funny and you're sweet. You're good with your boy. But I don't know what you're expecting from me.' 'I'm not expecting anything.'

'That's not true. Of course you are. Same as I am. Same as anyone is when they start sleeping together or holding hands in beautiful buildings and getting all dreamy over the coffee and all that. Everyone is expecting things. But I'm not sure if they're the same things.' 'How do you mean?' 'Well - do you want more children?' 'Jesus. We just slept together for the first time.' 'Ah, come on. You know in your heart if you want more children or not, Harry. I don't mean with me. I mean with anyone.' I looked at her. As it happens, I had been thinking about it a lot.

'I want more children if the person I have them with is going to be with me forever. Okay?'

'But nobody can guarantee that they're going to stay together forever.'

'Well, that's what I want. I don't want to go through it all again. I don't like seeing all the pain and disappointment that you pass on to some innocent little kid who didn't ask for it and who doesn't deserve it. I didn't like going through all that with Pat and I'm never going through it again, okay? And neither is any child of mine.'

'Sounds very noble,' she said. 'But it's not really noble at all. It's just your get-out clause. You want more children, but you only want them if you're guaranteed a happy ending. Only Walt Disney can guarantee you a happy ending, Harry. And you know it. Nobody can ever give you that kind of guarantee. So everything just - I don't know - drifts.'

I didn't like the way this was going. I wanted more kisses. I wanted to watch her sleeping. I wanted her to show me beautiful buildings that I never knew existed. And the boats - we were still going on the boats, weren't we?

'You can't just transfer your heart to another woman after your marriage breaks up, Harry. You can't do it without thinking a little about what you want. What you're expecting. Because if you don't, then seven years down the line you will be in exactly the same place you reached with Gina. I like you, and you like me. And that's great. But it's not enough. We have to be sure we want the same things. We're too old for games.' 'We're not too old,' I said. 'For anything.'

'Too old for games,' she said. 'As soon as you've got a kid, you're too old for games.' What did she know about having a kid? 'I have to go home,' she said, standing up. 'What about rowing on the lake?' I asked. 'Rowing on the lake can wait.' twenty-four 'It's the ding-dong man,' Peggy said.

She was sitting on the floor playing with Star Wars figures, lost in some weird happy families game where Darth Vader and Princess Leia set up home on the Millennium Falcon and spend their evenings trying to get Harrison Ford to go to sleep.

Pat was standing on the sofa, massive headphones wrapped around his ears, groaning and rolling his eyes to the heavens and swaying from side to side as he listened to Sally's tape.

'The ding-dong man is coming,' Peggy said to no one in particular, lifting her head with a secret smile.

At first I didn't have a clue what she was going on about. Then I heard what her new five-year-old ears had picked up a lot earlier than my decrepit old lugholes - a chiming of distant bells that seemed to echo around the neighbourhood.

They didn't have the dull insistence of church bells. There was something tender and cheap and unexpected about them - they were an invitation rather than a command.

Naturally I remembered those bells from my own childhood, but for some reason I was always surprised to find that they still existed. He was still out there, still doing the rounds, still asking the children to put down their games and come into the street and stuff their happy little faces with sugar and milk. It was the ice-cream man. 'The ding-dong man,' Peggy said. I pretended I hadn't heard her, turning back to the work that was spread out before me on the coffee table. Peggy wasn't even supposed to be here. This wasn't one of the afternoons when she came home with Pat. It was the day before the show and I had a shooting script to wade through, a task I found much easier when Pat and Peggy were not squawking on the carpet or listening to Sally's tape and those songs about bitches, gangsters and guns. Peggy was a sweet kid and never any trouble. But on a day like today, I preferred to have Pat squawking on the carpet alone.

Peggy was only here because her useless, chain-smoking babysitter had not been at the school to pick her up.

I had gone to meet Pat and found the pair of them holding hands at the gate, chatting away to Miss Waterhouse, their adoring faces lifted towards their young teacher.

Miss Waterhouse left us with a big grin and went off to do whatever primary school teachers do for the second half of the day, while we waited for Bianca's thin, sallow face to come coughing through the crowds in a halo of cigarette smoke. Except that Bianca didn't show up.

So the three of us waited at the school gates holding hands. And, as all those young mums swirled around us collecting their children, I stood among their bright chatter and car fumes feeling like the neighbourhood leper.

There were all kinds of young mothers outside those school gates. There were mums with Range Rovers and those waxed green coats that are made for the country. There were mums who caught the bus in ankle bracelets. And there were all the young mums in the middle who had enough sense not to have their partners' names tattooed on their shoulders, but who weren't rich or stupid enough to ferry around their five-year-olds in enormous four-wheel drives with bull bars on the front.

But whether they were in ankle bracelets or Alice bands, Prada or polyester, these young mothers all had one thing in common. They all looked at me as though I were the enemy.

At first I thought it was paranoia. I hardly had to explain that my marriage had broken up - just being there, a man alone, always without the company of a woman - unless it was my mother - was like drawing a diagram of our broken home and hanging it on the school gates. But these women didn't even know me or Gina - so why should they dislike me? I decided that I must be feeling thin-skinned and sensitive after all the changes of the last few months.

Yet as the term wore on and the days got darker and shorter, I came to realise that it wasn't paranoia at all. Young mothers didn't talk to me. They avoided my eye. They really didn't want to know. At first I tried to engage some of them in small talk, and they acted as if I had asked them for a blow job. So after a while, I didn't bother.

All those mums smiling sweetly at each other, they really would have preferred it if I weren't there. It got to the point where I tried to time my arrival at the school gates to the very second when the children were set free. Because I couldn't stand being around all those young mothers. And they couldn't stand being around me.

The teachers were always very friendly to me, and when I was talking to Miss Waterhouse it was easy to convince myself that I was part of the modern world where men could be single parents too. But that was proved to be a load of old bollocks any time I had to pause at the school gates.

Whether they were from the big white houses or the council flats, the mothers always gave me a wide berth. It had started on the first day of school, and it had somehow continued through all th? other days.

The women in Alice bands had more in common with the women in ankle bracelets than they did with me. The women who were single parents had more in common with the women who had partners than they did with me. At least that's how they all acted.

It was all very English and understated, but there was no denying that the suspicion and embarrassment were always there. There might be understanding and enlightenment for a single father with a little kid out in the working world. But here at the sharp end of parenting, outside those school gates, nobody wanted to know. It was as if Pat and I were a reminder of the fragility of all their relationships.

But when Bianca failed to show up, and I stood waiting for her with Pat and Peggy, it felt like it was even more than that. Those mothers seemed to look upon me as a reminder of the thousand things that could go wrong with men.

Standing at those gates, I felt as though I was an ambassador for all the defective males in the world. The men who were never there. The men who had pissed off. The men who couldn't be trusted around children.

Well, fuck the lot of them. I was sick of being treated like the enemy.

It wasn't that I minded being considered an oddball. I expected that. After all, I knew I was an oddball. But I was tired of carrying the can for every faulty man in the world.

I loathed Peggy's babysitter - this girl who couldn't even make it to the gates of a primary school at an appointed hour, this useless coughing cow who couldn't even manage to get a phone call to the teacher to warn us that she wasn't coming, bloody Bianca with her modern name and her modern assumption that someone else would take care of her responsibilities.

But at least Peggy wasn't her child. And far more than the bitterness I felt towards Peggy's useless babysitter was the loathing I felt for Peggy's useless parents.

It's true that I didn't really know anything about them, apart from the fact that her father was out of the picture and that her mother worked strange hours. But in all the important ways, I felt that I knew everything about them.

Peggy's dad clearly took his parental responsibility about as seriously as he would a fortnight's package holiday in Florida. And it didn't really matter if Peggy's mum were some hotshot in the City or if she were supplementing her welfare state pocket money with a dip in the black economy. She obviously put her daughter's wellbeing at the bottom of her list of life's priorities.

They were typical modern parents. They were incapable of looking after this child. And if there was one thing that I had grown to hate, it was people who bring a kid into the world and then figure that the difficult bit is done. Well, fuck the pair of them, too.

So after the crowds were starting to thin out, just when all the young mums had gone and the worst was over and I didn't actually mind standing at the school gates any more, we went into the front office and I told the secretary that Peggy was coming home with us.

Delighted at their unexpected chance to hang out together, Pat and Peggy squealed with delight as they crammed their little bodies into the front seat of the MGF. And I found myself making an effort not to cry, which was something I found myself doing every once in a while at those school gates. I felt sorry for Peggy, just as I felt sorry for Pat. We mess up our lives, and it is these forlorn little figures who pick up the bill.

Now I looked at her playing quietly on the floor, ignored even by Pat as he listened to Sally's brutal songs, the bells of the ding-dong man starting to fade away, and I felt a knot of regret and shame in my heart.

'Do you want an ice cream?' I asked her, feeling about as inadequate as I had ever felt in my life, feeling that I owed her some sort of apology.

Sorry about the collapse of the modern marriage, Peggy. Sorry that adults these days are so self-centred and dumb that we can't even manage to bring up our own children. Sorry that the world is so messed up that we think about our sons and our daughters about as deeply as the average barnyard animal. But how about a Cornetto? I was paying the ice-cream man for three 99s when Cyd came around the corner. 'You want a 99?' I asked her. 'What's a 99?'

'One of these,' I said. 'A cornet with a chocolate flake stuck in it. They're great.'

'No thanks,' she said. 'I think I'll keep a few teeth for dinner. How you doing?'

'I'm okay,' I said, leaning forward and kissing her on the mouth. She didn't make much of an attempt to kiss me back. 'I thought you were at work.'

'I got a call to come and pick up Peggy,' she said. 'Bianca couldn't make it. Sorry about that.'

I stared at her for a moment, unable to work out how these two worlds were connected. 'You know Peggy?' I said. She shook her head. I didn't get it, did I? 'She's my daughter, Harry.' We were standing outside the front door of my house.

She looked at me with those wide-set brown eyes. Waiting. 'Peggy's your daughter?'

'I was going to tell you,' she said. 'Honest.' She gave a little laugh that said she knew it wasn't all that funny. 'I was just waiting for the right time. That's all.'

'The right time? Why didn't you tell me straightaway? Why wasn't that the right time?' 'I'll explain later.' 'Explain now.'

'Okay,' she said, pulling the front door so that it was almost closed. So the kids couldn't hear us. Our kids. 'Because I don't want my daughter to meet strange men who might be out of my life very soon.'

'You don't want her to meet strange men? What are you going on about, Cyd? I'm not a strange man. She spends more time in this house than she does anywhere. Peggy knows me already.'

'She knows you as Pat's dad. She doesn't know you as my - well. What are you, Harry? I guess you're my boyfriend, aren't you? She doesn't know you as my boyfriend. And I don't want her to meet a boyfriend until I've been seeing him for a while. Okay?'

This didn't make any kind of sense to me. A blob of ice cream dropped on to my hand.

'But she had dinner here almost every night last week!' I said. 'She sees more of me than she does of that feckless bastard you married!' 'You don't know him.' I loved that. 'Oh - good guy, is he?' 'Maybe not,' she said. 'But I don't want her to grow up believing that every man is going to disappear the way her father disappeared. I don't want her finding strange men in my bed - and you are strange. In that way, you are, Harry. I don't want a strange man there when she wakes up. I don't want her thinking that it doesn't mean anything. And I don't want her getting attached to someone who might not be around that long.'

She was trying to be calm, but her voice was choking up a bit now and I felt like putting my arms around her. Which would have been very messy, as I was still holding three melting 99s.

'Because I don't want her getting more hurt than she has been already,' she said. 'I don't want her to give her little heart to someone and then he casually breaks it. Okay, Harry? Okay?' 'Okay,' I said. 'Okay.'

She blinked hard, tightening her mouth. I cleaned the ice cream from my hands. Then we went inside and I realised that nothing is extraordinary to a child.

Maybe when you are a kid life is still so full of wonder that there can be no real surprises, because almost everything is a surprise. Or perhaps children just adapt faster than adults. Either way, Peggy and Pat didn't faint with shock when Cyd walked into the house.

'Mommy,' Peggy said, and I thought - of course. Now I knew where I had seen those eyes before.

Cyd sat down on the floor and listened to her daughter explaining the domestic set-up on the Millennium Falcon. She took the headphones from my son and listened to a song he liked. Then, after we had all finished our ice creams, she told Peggy that it was time to go home. 'I'll call you,' I said.

'If you want to,' she said. 'I know this must be a bit of a shock.' 'You crazy or what? Of course I want to.' 'You're sure?'

'I'm sure,' I said, touching her arm. 'This doesn't change anything.' It changed everything. twenty-five 'Did you make love to the make-up girl?' I asked Eamon.

He looked at me in his dressing-room mirror and I caught a flash of something passing across his face. Fear maybe. Or anger. Then it was gone. 'What's that?' he said. 'You heard me the first time.'

The show was taking off. Ratings were good and the offers of lager commercials were starting to come in. But to me he was still a scared kid from Kilcarney with wax in his ears.

'Yes or no, Eamon? Did you make love to the makeup girl?' 'Why do you ask?'

'Because she's crying. We can't even get her to put some slap on the guests because she's sobbing all over her powder puff. It's gone all soggy.' 'What's it got to do with me?' 'I know she left the studio with you last week.'

He twisted on his little swivel chair, turning to face me with his head framed by the mirror's border of bare electric lights. He didn't look so scared any more, despite a shining trickle of sweat snaking through the thick layer of powder on his forehead. 'You're asking me if I made love to the make-up girl?'

'That's right,' I said. 'I don't care about your morals, Eamon. You can bugger the lighting director during the commercial break if you want to. I don't care what you do when we're off air. Just as long as it doesn't interfere with the running of the show. And a weepy make-up girl who can't do her job interferes with the running of the show.'

You've been a big help to me, Harry,' he said quietly. Sometimes his voice was so low that you had to concentrate just to hear what he was saying. It gave him a certain power. 'From the moment we met, everything you've said to me has made sense. "Remember - you're only ever talking to one person," you said. "If you have a good time then they will have a good time." This stuff might not mean much to you but it's helped me to get through it. It's helped me to make it work. I couldn't have done it without you and I'm grateful. That's why I'm not angry that you're asking me this question, a question that - perhaps you'll agree? - would be a bit rude coming from my mother or my priest.' 'Did you make love to the make-up girl, Eamon?' 'No, Harry. I did not make love to the make-up girl.' 'Is that the truth?'

'That's the truth. I did not make love to the makeup girl.' 'Okay. That's all I wanted to know.'

'I fucked the make-up girl.'? 'There's a difference, is there?'

'A big difference. It wasn't the start of a meaningful relationship, Harry. It was the culmination of something quite meaningless - that's what I liked about it. And Carmen -that's the make-up girl's name, Harry, she's called Carmen - might be a bit upset right now that there's not going to be a repeat performance, but I strongly suspect that's what she liked about it too. The very fact that it was a bit raw, a bit rough and for one night only. Sometimes a woman wants you to make love to her. Sometimes she just wants to get fucked. They are just the same as us, Harry. That's the big secret. They're just the same.'

'Why didn't anyone tell me before now? My life would have been so much simpler.'

'I'm getting a lot of offers at the moment, Harry. And not all of them are beer commercials. Carmen's a lovely girl. I'll treat her with respect. I'll be friendly to her. But she wanted exactly what I wanted and she got it. She can't expect anything more from me. And when she gets a grip of herself, she'll understand that.'

'You're not the first young guy who got laid because his ugly mug is on television once a week, Eamon. Just don't bring your personal dramas into this studio, okay?'

'Okay, Harry,' he said mildly. 'I'm sorry that this has been a disruptive influence, I really am. And I understand that you're my executive producer and telling me this stuff is why you're here. But I'm a man, okay?'

'Yeah? Really? You sound more like some old blues song. I'm a man. Spelt m-a-n. Christ, you're so fucking butch. You'll be advertising aftershave next.'

'I'm a man, Harry. And the reason I'm here is to plant my seed in as many places as I possibly can. That's why we're here. That's what men do.' 'Bollocks,' I said. 'That's what boys do.'

But later, as I watched him leave the studio with the show's cutest researcher, I thought - why not?

Why shouldn't he plant his seed in as many places as possible? What would he be saving it for? And what was so great about the solitary little flowerpot that I was cultivating? Suddenly there were all these rules.

I could stay at Cyd's small, top-floor flat, but I had to be gone by the time Peggy got up. Cyd was happy to have me there when Peggy went to bed, and happy about me sleeping with her on the old brass bed under a framed poster of Gone with the Wind. But I had to be out of there before morning came.

Actually, there were not lots of rules. There was just that one rule. But it felt like a lot of rules.

'Maybe later it will be different,' Cyd said. 'If we decide -you know - we want to take it further. If we want to make a proper commitment.'

As soon as I stopped looking into her wide-set brown eyes and she had turned out the light, I didn't feel like making a proper commitment. To tell you the truth, what I really felt like was something a bit less complicated.

I wanted to be able to sleep in my girl's arms without being woken up and told it was time to go home. I wanted the kind of relationship where you didn't have to remember the rules. Most of all, I wanted things to be the way they were before everything got all smashed. I was still dreaming when I felt Cyd's mouth on mine. 'Baby,' she whispered. 'Sorry. But it's time.'

It was still dark outside, but I could hear pigeons hopping around on the roof directly above our heads, a sure sign that it was time to put on my pants and piss off before the sun came up.

'Got it all worked out, haven't you?' I sighed, rolling away from her and getting out of bed. T wish you could stay, Harry. I really do.'

'So how long is it since you split up with Peggy's dad? Three years? More? And how many men have you introduced her to?'

'You're the first,' she said quietly, and I wondered if that was true. T just don't understand what harm it does if she sees me eating a bowl of Cornflakes. Jesus - the kid sees me all week long.'

'We've been through all this,' Cyd said in the darkness. 'It's confusing for her if you're here in the morning. Please try to understand. She's five - you're not.' 'She likes me. And I like her. We've always got on fine.'

'That's all the more reason for going now. I don't want you to be an uncle to Peggy, okay? I want you to be more than that or less than that. But you're not going to be an uncle. She deserves better. So do you.' 'Fine,' I said. 'Absolutely fine.'

'You should love me for being like this,' she said, more angry than hurt. 'You should understand that I'm just trying to protect her and do what's best for her. You've got a kid yourself. You know what it's like. If anyone should understand, then you should understand.' She was right. I should have loved her. For the first time in my life I could sort of understand why men of my age go out with younger women.

I never really got it before. Women in their thirties, their bodies are still springy and you can talk to them. They are still young, but they have seen something of life - probably quite a few of the same views that you have seen.

Why would any man trade that kind of equal partnership for someone with a pierced navel whose idea of a hot date is some awful nightclub and half a tab of something pretending to be Ecstasy?

If you can go out with someone who has read the same books as you, who has watched the same television programmes as you, who has loved the same music as you, then why would you want someone whose idea of a soul singer is the guy in Jamiroquai? But now I got it. Now I could understand the attraction.

Men of my age like younger women because the younger woman has fewer reasons to be bitter.

The younger woman is less likely to have had her heart bashed around by broken homes, divorce lawyers and the sight of children who are missing a parent. The younger woman doesn't have all those disappointments that women - and men, too, don't forget the men - in their thirties drag around with them like so much excess luggage.

It was cruel but true. The younger woman is far less likely to have had her life fucked up by some man.

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. twenty-six 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.

I crunched my way through some bright orange cheesy things, feeling depressed.

My parents were trying as hard as they could. But this tiny little girl already had another life that they would never and could never be a part of. The all-consuming delight that they felt for their grandchild could never be felt for little Peggy. That kind of unconditional love was already impossible. She would always be too much of a stranger. I felt for them. And for Peggy too.

'Mem's not really a dancer,' Cyd said, watching my face, reading my mind. 'She's more of a stripper.'

My old man coughed up a piece of barbecue-flavoured crisp. 'Bit went down the wrong hole,' he explained.

My mum turned to Cyd with a bright smile. 'Jelly?' she said. Once we had Mem's job description out of the way, the party settled down. And my parents liked Cyd. I could tell that they liked her a lot.

There were minefields to be negotiated - my dad had this thing about single mothers subsidised by the state and my mum had this thing about working mothers - but Cyd skipped through them without spilling her jelly.

'The state can never take the place of a parent, Mr Silver - and it shouldn't try.' 'Call me Paddy, love,' my dad said.

'Some women have to work, Mrs Silver - but that doesn't mean their children don't come first.' 'Call me Elizabeth, dear,' my mum said.

She talked to Paddy and Elizabeth about all the things they wanted to talk about - the kind of films that a five-year-old should be allowed to watch with my mum, the right time to remove the stabilisers on a child's bike with my dad.

And she made all the right noises - admiring my mum's sausage rolls ('Home-made they are, dear, I'll give you the recipe if you like') and my dad's garden ('Harry's never been interested in gardens -1 can't understand that attitude myself).

But Cyd wasn't some little local girl who I had danced with a couple of times in a suburban club, one of the Kims and Kellys who I had brought home all the time until the day I brought home Gina.

Cyd was visibly a woman with a past - meaning a past that contained marriage, pregnancy and divorce, although not necessarily in that order. And it felt like the only way my parents could deal with that past was by ignoring it.

Their conversation lurched between her childhood in Houston to the present day in London, as if everything in between had been withdrawn by censors.

'Texas, you say?' my dad said. 'Never been to Texas myself. But I met a few Texans in the war.' He leaned towards her conspiratorially. 'Good card players, Texans.'

'It must be lovely having sisters,' my mum said. 'I had six brothers. Can you imagine that? Six brothers! Some women don't like watching football and boxing on the telly. But it never bothered me. Because I had six brothers.'

But Cyd's broken marriage was always there waiting to be confronted. In the end, Cyd dealt with it as casually as if it were just a stale sausage roll that had to be found and cast aside. She had never seemed more American. 'My family is like your family,' she said to my mother. 'Very close. I only came over here because Jim - that's Peggy's father - is English. That didn't work out, but somehow I never made it back. Now I've met your son, I'm glad I didn't.' And that was it.

My mum looked at us as if we were Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw in Love Story. Even my dad seemed to be brushing away a tear from his eye. Then I realised it was just a crumb from a mini sausage roll.

By the time Pat had blown out his five candles and we had cut the cake, my parents were acting as if they had known Cyd and Peggy all their lives.

If they were put out by the fact that the girl of my dreams had chosen someone else to share her dreams with before me, then they were pretty good at hiding it. This should have pleased me more than it did.

While Cyd was helping my mum clear the table and my dad was showing Pat and Peggy how he dealt with the menace of snails, I went into the living room and over to the stereo.

Songs for Swingin' Lovers! had stopped playing hours ago, but the cover of the record, an old vinyl LP - my father had never joined the CD revolution - was still propped up against the Sony music station.

That album cover had always been special to me. Sinatra - tie askew, snap-brim fedora on the back of his head -grins down at the perfect fifties couple, some Brylcreemed Romeo in a business suit with his suburban Juliet in pearl earrings and a little red dress.

They look like an ordinary couple - you can't imagine them hanging out with the Rat Pack in Vegas. But they look as though they have wrung as much joy out of this world as anyone possibly could. And I always loved looking at that couple when I was a child, because I always thought, they looked like my parents at the exact moment they fell in love.

Someone called my name from the garden but I stared at the cover of Songs for Swingin' Lovers!, pretending that I hadn't heard. They don't make them like that any more, I thought. 'Everybody had a good time,' Cyd said. 'It seemed to go very well,' I said.

We were back in London and up in her flat. Peggy and Pat were sitting on the sofa watching a tape of Pocahontas (Peggy's choice). Tired from a couple of hours in Cyd's wheezing old Beetle, they were starting to bitch at each other. I wanted to get home.

'Everybody had a good time,' Cyd said again. 'Pat liked his presents. Peggy ate so much that I won't have to feed her for a week. And I really loved meeting your mum and dad. They're really sweet people. Yes, everybody had a good time. Except you.' 'What are you talking about? I had a good time.'

'No,' she said. 'And what hurts me - what really hurts me - is that you didn't even try. Your mum and dad made an effort. I know they loved Gina and I know it couldn't have been easy for them. But they really tried to make it work today. You just couldn't be bothered, could you?'

'What do you want me to do? Start doing the lambada after a couple of Diet Cokes? I had as good a time as I could ever have at a kid's birthday party.'

'I'm a grown woman and I have a child, okay? You have to learn to deal with that, Harry. Because if you can't, we haven't got any kind of future.' T like Peggy,' I said. 'And I get on great with her.' 'You liked Peggy when she was just the little girl who palled around with your son,' she said. 'You liked her when she was just the cute little kid who played nicely on the floor of your home. What you don't like is what she's become now that you've started going out with me.' 'And what's that?' I asked her. 'The reminder of another man's fuck,' she said.

The reminder of another man's fuck? That was a bit strong. You couldn't imagine Sinatra sticking that on one of his album covers. twenty-seven It was more than the reminder of another man's fuck.

If living alone with Pat had taught me anything, it was that being a parent is mostly intuitive - we make it up as we go along. Nobody teaches you how to do it. You learn on the job.

When I was a kid I thought that my parents had some secret knowledge about how to keep me in line and bring me up right. I thought that there was some great master plan to make me eat my vegetables and go to my room when I was told. But I was wrong. I knew now that they were doing what every parent in the world does. Just winging it.

If Pat wanted to watch Return of the Jedi at four in the morning or listen to Puff Daddy at midnight, then I didn't have to think about it - I could just pull the plug and send him back to bed.

And if he was down after a phone call from Gina or because of something that had happened at school, I could take him in my arms and give him a cuddle. When it's your own flesh and blood, you don't have to think about doing the right thing. You don't have to think at all. You just do it. But I would never have that luxury with Peggy. She was on the sofa, her little bare legs stretched out on the coffee table, watching her favourite Australian soap. I was sitting next to her, trying to shut out the background babble of dysfunctional surfers who didn't know the true identity of their parents, as I read an article about another bank collapsing in Japan. It looked like complete chaos over there.

'What do you mean - you're not my mother?' somebody said on screen, and Peggy began to stir as the theme music began.

Usually she was off and running the moment the Aussies were gone. But now she stayed right where she was, leaning forward across the coffee table and picking up Cyd's nail polish from among the jumble of magazines and toys. I watched her as she began to unscrew the top of the small glass vial. 'Peggy?' 'What?' 'Maybe you shouldn't play with that, darling.' 'It's okay, Harry. Mommy lets me.'

She removed the lid with the small brush on and, very delicately, began painting crimson nail polish over her tiny, almost non-existent toenails and, I couldn't help noticing, all over the tips of her toes.

'Be careful with that stuff, Peggy. It's not for playing with, okay?' She shot me a look. 'Mommy lets me do this.'

Globs of bright red nail polish slid down toes the size of half a matchstick. She soon looked as though she had been treading grapes or wading through an abattoir. She lifted her foot, admiring her handiwork, and a drizzle of red paint plopped on to a copy of Red.

With Pat I would have raised my voice or grabbed the nail polish or sent him to his room. I would have done something. With Peggy, I didn't know what to do. I certainly couldn't touch her. I certainly couldn't raise my voice. 'Peggy.' 'What, Harry?'

I really wanted her to do the right thing and not get nail polish all over her feet and the carpet and the coffee table and the magazines. But, far more than all of this, I wanted her to like me. So I sat there watching her small feet turning bright red, making doubtful noises, doing nothing.

Cyd came out of the bathroom wrapped in a white robe, towelling her hair. She saw Peggy daubing her toes with nail polish and sighed. . 'How many times have I told you to leave that stuff alone?' she asked, snatching away the nail polish. She lifted Peggy like a cat plucking up a unruly kitten. 'Come on, miss. In the bath.' 'But -' 'Now.'

What made me laugh - or rather what made me want to bury my face in my hands - is that you would never guess that so much of our time was spent dealing with the fall-out of the nuclear family. Cyd's small flat was like a temple to romance.

The walls were covered with posters from films - films that told tales of perfect love, love that might bang its head against a few obstacles now and again, but love that was ultimately without any of the complications of the modern world.

As soon as you had come into the flat, there was a framed poster of Casablanca in the poky little hallway. There were framed posters of An Affair to Remember and Brief Encounter in the slightly less poky living room. And of course there was Gone with the Wind in the place of honour right above the bed. Even Peggy had a poster of Pocahontas on her wall looking down on all her old Ken and Barbie dolls and Spice Girls merchandise. Everywhere you looked - men smouldering, women melting and true love conquering.

These posters weren't stuck up in the way that a student might stick them up - half-hearted and thoughtless and mostly to cover a patch of rising damp or some crumbling plaster. There was far more than Blu-tack keeping them up. Placed behind glass and encased in tasteful black frames, they were treated like works of art - which I suppose is what they were.

Cyd had bought those posters from one of those cine-head shops in Soho, taken them to the Frame Factory or somewhere similar, and then lugged them all the way home. She had to go out of her way to have those posters of Gone with the Wind and the rest up on her walls. The message was clear - this is what we are about in this place.

But it wasn't what we were about, not really. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman might have had their love affair cut short by the Nazi invasion of Paris, but at least Bogey didn't have to worry about how he should treat Ingrid's child from her relationship with Victor Laszlo. And it is open to debate if Rhett Butler would have been quite so keen on Scarlett O'Hara if she had been dragging a kid from a previous romance around Georgia.

I had never been around a little girl before, and there was an air of calm about Peggy - it was definitely calm more than sugar and spice or any of that stuff- that I had never seen in Pat or other small boys. There was a composure about her that you wouldn't see in a boy of the same age. Maybe all little girls are like that. Maybe it was just Peggy. What I am saying is - I liked her.

But I didn't know if I was meant to be her friend or her father, if I was meant to be sweetness and light or firm but fair. None of it felt right. When your partner has got a child, it can never be like the movies. And anyone who can't see that has watched a few too many MGM musicals.

Cyd came back into the room with Peggy all clean and changed and ready for her big night out at Pizza Express with her father. The little girl climbed on my lap and gave me a kiss. She smelled of soap and Junior Timotei. Her mother ruffled my hair. 'What are you thinking about?' she asked me. 'Nothing,' I said.

Peggy's eyes got big and wide with excitement when she heard the sound of a powerful motorbike pulling up in the street.

'Daddy!' she said, scrambling from my lap, and I felt a stab of jealousy that caught me by surprise.

From the window we all watched Jim Mason park the big BMW bike, swinging his legs off as if he were dismounting from a horse. Then he removed his helmet and I saw that Cyd had been right - he was a good-looking bastard, all chiselled jawline and short, thick wavy hair, like the face on a Roman coin or a male model who likes girls.

I had always kind of hoped that there was going to be something of Glenn about him - a fading pretty boy whose years of breaking hearts had come and gone. But this one looked as though he still ate all his greens. He waved up at us. We waved back.

Meeting your partner's ex should be awkward and embarrassing. You know the most intimate details of their life and yet you have never met them. You know they did bad things because you have been told all about them and also because, if they hadn't done bad things, you would not be with your partner.

It should be a bumpy ride meeting the man she knew before she knew you. But meeting Jim wasn't that much of a problem for me. I got off lightly as there was still so much unfinished business between him and Cyd.

He came into the little flat, big and handsome, all gleaming leathers and wide white smile, tickling his daughter until she howled. We shook hands and swapped some small talk about the problems of parking in this neck of the woods. And when Peggy went to collect her things, Cyd was waiting for him, her face as impassive as a clenched fist. 'How's Mem?' she asked. 'She's fine. Sends her love.'

'I'm sure she doesn't. But thanks anyway. And is her job going well?' 'Very well, thanks.' 'Business is booming for strippers, is it?' 'She's not a stripper.' 'She's not?' 'She's a lap dancer.' 'My apologies.' Jim looked at me with a what-can-you-do? grin.

'She always does this,' he said, as if we had some kind of relationship, as if he could tell me a thing or two.

Peggy came back carrying a child-sized motorbike helmet, smiling from ear to ear, anxious to get going. She kissed her mother and me and took her father's hand.

From the window we watched Jim carefully place his daughter on the bike and cover her head with the helmet. Sliding behind her, he straddled the machine, kicked it into life and took off down the narrow street. Above the throaty roar of the bike, you could just about hear Peggy squealing with delight. 'Why do you hate him so much, Cyd?' She thought about it for a moment.

T think it's because of the way he ended it,' she said. 'He was home from work - hurt his leg in another accident, I think he was scraped by a cab, he was always getting scraped by a cab - and he was lying on the sofa when I got back from dropping Peggy off at her nursery school. I bent over him -just to look at his face, because I always liked looking at his face - and he said the name of a girl. Right out loud. The name of this Malaysian girl he was sleeping with. The one he left me for.' 'He was talking in his sleep?'

'No,' she said. 'He was pretending to talk in his sleep. He knew he was going to leave me and Peggy already. But he didn't have the guts to look me in the eye and tell me. Pretending to talk in his sleep - pretending to say her name while he was. sleeping - was the only way he could do it. The only way he could drop the bomb. The only way he could tell me that his bags were packed. And that just seemed so cruel, so gutless - and so typical.'

I had different reasons for hating Jim - some of them noble, some of them pitiful. I hated him because he had hurt Cyd so badly, and I hated him because he was better looking than me. I hated him because I hated any parent who breezed in and out of a kid's life as though they were a hobby you could pick up and put down when you felt like it. Did I think that Gina was like that? Sometimes, on those odd days when she didn't phone Pat, and I knew - just knew - that she was somewhere with Richard.

And I hated Jim because I could feel that he still mattered to Cyd - when she had said that thing about always loving his face, I knew it was still there, eating her up. Maybe she didn't love him, maybe all that had curdled and changed into something else. But he mattered.

I suppose a little piece of my heart should have been grateful. If he had been a loyal, loving husband who knew how to keep his leather trousers on - and if he wasn't into the bamboo - then Cyd would be with him and not me. But I wasn't grateful at all.

As soon as he brought Peggy back safely from Pizza Express, I would have been quite happy for him to wrap his bike around a number 73 bus and get his lovely face smeared all over the Essex Road. He had treated Cyd as if she were nothing much at all. And that was reason enough for me to hate his guts.

But when Peggy came back home with a phenomenally useless stuffed toy the size of a refrigerator, and pizza all over her face, I was aware that there was another, far more selfish reason for hating him.

Without ever really trying to match him, I knew that I could never mean as much in Peggy's life as he did. That's what hurt most of all. Even if he saw her only when he felt like it, and fucked off somewhere else when he felt like doing that, he would always be her father.

That's what made her giddy with joy. Not the motorbike. Or the pizza. Or the stupid stuffed toy the size of a fridge. But the fact that this was her dad.

I knew I could live with the reminder of another man's fuck. I could even love her. And I could compete with a motorbike and a giant stuffed toy and a prettier face than my own. But you can't compete with blood. twenty-eight 'Who do I look like?' Pat said when the trees in the park were bare and he had to wear his winter coat all the time and Gina had been gone for just over four months.

He tilted his head to stare up at the car's vanity mirror, looking at his face as if seeing it for the first time, or as if it belonged to someone else.

Who did he look like? People were always telling me - and him - that he looked like me. But I knew that wasn't quite right. He was a far prettier kid than I had ever been. Even if I had never had all my front teeth knocked out by a dog, he would still have been better looking than me. The truth was, he looked like both of us. He looked like me and he looked like Gina. 'Your eyes are like Mummy's eyes,' I said. 'They're blue.'

'That's right. They're blue. And my eyes are green. But your mouth, that's like my mouth. We've got lovely big mouths. Perfect for kissing, right?'

'Right,' he said, not smiling along with me, not taking his eyes from the little rectangular mirror. 'And your hair - that's very fair. Like Mummy's hair.' 'She had yellow hair.'

'She still does, baby,' I said, wincing at that past tense. 'She still has yellow hair. She's still got yellow hair. Okay?'

'Okay,' he said, flipping up the mirror and staring out of the window. 'Let's go.' And your teeth are like your mother's - a little bit gappy, a little bit goofy, teeth that give every single smile a rakish air - but your sawn-off snub nose is like mine, although your strong, beautiful chin belongs to your mother and so does your skin - fair skin that loves the sun, fair skin that starts to tan as soon as it stops raining.

Pat didn't look like me. And he didn't look like Gina. He looked like both of us.

Even if we had ever wanted to, we couldn't escape his mother. She was there in his smile and in the colour of his eyes. I was stuck with Gina's ghost. And so was Pat. 'I don't understand what's going to happen to the kids,' my father said. 'The kids like Pat and Peggy. I can't imagine what growing up with just one parent around is going to do to them.'

He didn't say it the way he would have said it in the past - angry, contemptuous and with a mocking wonder at what the world was coming to. He didn't say it with his old loathing for single parents and all the changes they represented. He said it gently, with a small, bewildered shake of his head, as if the future were beyond his imagination.

'You grew up with two parents around,' he said. 'At least you had some idea of what a marriage looked like. What a marriage could be. But they don't have that, do they? Pat and Peggy and all the rest of them.' 'No. They don't.'

'And I just worry what it's going to do to them. If divorce is just something that everyone does, then what chance is there for their marriages? And for their children?'

We were on the wooden bench just outside the kitchen door, sitting in the three o'clock twilight watching Pat poke around with his light sabre at the far end of the garden. 'Everything just seems so… broken up,' my dad said. 'Do you know what Peggy said to me? She asked me if I would be her granddad. It's not her fault, is it? The poor little mite.'

'No, it's not her fault,' I said. 'It's never the child's fault. But maybe growing up with divorce will make them more careful about getting into a marriage. And more determined to make it work when they do.' 'Do you really think so?' my father said hopefully.

I nodded, but only because I didn't have the heart to shake my head. What I really thought was that his generation had faced up to its responsibilities in a way that my lot never could.

His generation had looked after their children, they had lots of early nights, and if they also had their own home and a fortnight in a caravan in Frinton, they had considered themselves lucky.

But my generation had grown up with our own individual little pile of happiness at the top of our shopping list.

That's why we fucked around, fucked off and fucked up with such alarming regularity.

My generation wanted perfect lives. Why should our children be any different? My dad had learned early on that nobody gets away with a perfect life.

'Yes, maybe it will be all right,' my old man said, thinking about it. 'Because every kid has got two parents, haven't they? Even a kid from - what do you call it? - a single-parent family. And perhaps Pat and Peggy and the rest of them won't grow up being like the parent who went away. Perhaps they'll be like the parent who stayed behind.' 'How do you mean?'

'Well, you're doing a good job with Pat,' he said, not looking at me. 'You work hard. You take care of him. He sees all that. So why shouldn't he be like that with his children?' I laughed with embarrassment.

T mean it,' he said. T don't know that I could have coped if your mother - you know.' His callused right hand rested lightly on my shoulder. He still wasn't looking at me. 'You're doing all right with that boy, Harry.' 'Thanks,' I said. 'Thanks, Dad.'

Then we heard my mother calling urgently from the living room, and when we ran inside she was standing by the window, pointing at my car.

T saw the little bastards,' said my mum, who never swore. T saw the little bastards do it!'

The MGF's soft top had been repeatedly slashed with a knife. The ribbons of what was left of the roof had caved into the car, as if something had been dropped on it from a great height.

I stared at my mutilated car. But my father was already out of the front door. Auntie Ethel was on her doorstep.

'The alley!' she cried, pointing to the far end of our street, the rough end where there was a small cul-de-sac of council houses, like a ghetto for people who owned souped-up Ford Escorts and West Ham away shirts and didn't give a toss about roses.

There was an alley at this end of the street that led to a tired little string of shops where you could get your Lottery ticket during the daytime and get your face smashed in after dark. Two youths - the two who had tried to burgle my parents? or two just like them? - were legging it towards the alley. My father was chasing them.

I looked at the ruined roof and felt a surge of anger rise up in me. You stupid, spiteful little gits, I thought, furious at what they had done to my car and even more furious for taking my father from his garden.

I started after them, seeing them nervously glance over their shoulders as a murderous voice called after them, threatening to fucking kill them, and I was shocked to discover that the murderous voice seemed to belong to me.

The two yobs disappeared into the alley just as my dad suddenly stopped. At first I thought he had given up, but it was worse than that, because he sank to one knee and clutched his chest, as though he were suffocating.

By the time I caught up with him he was on both knees, holding himself up with one hand pressed flat on the ground. He was making a terrible, unearthly sound, his throat rasping with short, shallow breaths.

I put my arms around him and held him, smelling his Old Holborn and Old Spice, and he gasped for air, choked for air, his lungs fighting with all their might and yet still unable to suck in what they needed. He turned his eyes towards me and I saw the fear in them.

Eventually he managed to retrieve enough air to get shakily to his feet. Still with my arm around him, I led him slowly back to the house. My mother, Pat and Auntie Ethel were all by the front gate. Pat and Auntie Ethel were white with shock. My mother was angry.

'You must go to the doctor,' she said, tears streaming down her face. 'No more excuses.'

'I will,' he said meekly, and I knew he wouldn't try to get out of it. He could never refuse her anything.

'Aren't they evil little rotters?' Auntie Ethel said. 'It makes your blood boil, doesn't it?' 'Yes,' said Pat. 'They're motherfuckers.' Black tie, it said on the invitation, and I always felt excited when I had to dig out my dinner jacket, dress shirt and black bow tie - a proper bow tie that you had to spend ages doing yourself, not the pre-tied dicky bow on a bit of elastic as worn by small boys and clowns. I could remember my old man wearing black tie once a year for his company's annual dinner and dance at some fancy hotel on Park Lane. There was something about the tailored formality of a tuxedo that suited his stocky, muscular frame. My mum always looked slightly amused by whatever ball gown she had climbed into that year. But my old man was born to wear black tie.

'Wow,' said Sally, shyly grinning up at me through a curtain of hair as I came down the stairs. 'You look just like a bouncer. Outside a, like, really, really cool club.'

'No,' Pat said, pointing his index finger at me and cocking his thumb. 'You look like James Bond. 007. Licensed to shoot all the bad people.'

But as I stood in front of the hall mirror, I knew what I really looked like in a dinner jacket. More and more, I looked like my father. Cyd wore a green cheongsam in Chinese silk - high-necked, tight as a second skin, the greatest dress I had ever seen in my life.

She hadn't done anything to her hair - just pulled it back behind her head in a ponytail, and I liked it that way, because that way I could see her face all the more clearly.

Sometimes we are only aware of how happy we are when the moment has passed. But now and again, if we are very lucky, we are aware of happiness when it is actually happening. And I knew that this was what happiness felt like. Not happiness in dewy-eyed retrospect or in some imagined future but here and now, in a green dress.

'Wait a minute,' I said to Cyd as our cab dropped us outside the hotel. I took her hands in mine and we stood there in silence, the rush hour on Park Lane roaring behind us, a frost on Hyde Park glinting beyond the traffic. 'What's wrong?' she asked me. 'Nothing,' I said. 'That's the point.'

I knew that I would never forget the way she looked that night, I knew that I would never forget the way she looked in her green Chinese dress. And I wanted to do more than enjoy it, I wanted to hold the moment so that I could remember it later, after the night had gone. 'Okay?' she said, smiling. 'Okay.'

Then we joined the laughing throng in their dinner jackets and evening dresses, and went inside to the awards ceremony. 'And the best newcomer is…' The luscious weather girl fumbled with the envelope. '… Eamon Fish.'

Eamon stood up, drunk and grinning, looking more pleased than he would have wanted to with all the cameras watching, and he hugged me with real feeling as he walked past. 'We did it,' he said. 'No,' I said, 'you did it. Go and get your award.'

Over his shoulder I saw Marty Mann and Siobhan at another table - Marty in one of those bright waistcoats worn by people who think that wearing black tie is like smoking a pipe or wearing carpet slippers, Siobhan slim and cool in some white diaphanous number.

She smiled. He gave me the thumbs up. Later, when all the awards had been handed out, they came across to our table.

Although Marty was a bit pissed and a bit pissed off -there were no awards for him this year - they couldn't have been more gracious.

I introduced them to Cyd and to Eamon. If Marty remembered Cyd as the same woman who had once dropped a plate of pasta in his lap, he didn't show it. He congratulated Eamon on his award. Siobhan congratulated Cyd on her dress.

Siobhan didn't say - And what do you do?, she was too smart and sensitive ever to ask that question, so Cyd didn't have to say - Oh, I'm a waitress right now, so Siobhan didn't have to get embarrassed and neither did Cyd, they could just get on with each other in that easy, seemingly natural way that only women can manage.

They began talking to each other about not knowing what to wear at these things, and Marty put a conspiratorial arm around my shoulder. His face was far heavier than I remembered it. He had the leaden, vaguely disappointed air of a man who, after years of dreaming, had finally landed his own talk show only to discover that he couldn't attract anyone who was worth talking to. 'A word?' he said, crouching down by my side.

Here it comes, I thought. Now he wants me back. Now he's seen how well Eamon's doing, he wants me back on the show. T want you to do me a favour,' Marty said. 'What's that, Marty?' He leaned closer. 'I want you to be my best man,' he said. Even Marty, I thought.

Even Marty dreams of getting it right, of finding the one, of discovering the whole world in another human being. Just like everyone else.

'Hey, Harry,' said Eamon, watching the weather girl cross the room, adjusting his weight as a ridge of high pressure passed through his underpants. 'Guess who I'm shagging tonight?' Well, perhaps not quite everyone.*** There were too many lights on in the house. There were lights upstairs. There were lights downstairs. There were lights blazing everywhere at a time when there should have been just one faint glow coming from the living room.

And there was music pouring out of my home - loud, booming bass lines and those skittering drum machines that sounded like the aural equivalent of a heart attack. New music. Terrible new music blasting from my stereo.

'What's going on?' I said, as if we had come to the wrong place, as if there had been some mistake.

There was someone in the darkness of the small front garden. No, there were a few of them. A boy and a girl necking just outside the open front door. And another boy lurking by the dustbin, being sick all over his Tommy Hilfiger anorak and his YSL trousers. I went inside the house while Cyd paid the cab driver.

It was a party. A teenage party. All over my home there were youths in Polo gear snogging, shagging, drinking, dancing and being sick. Especially being sick. There was another couple puking their stupid guts up in the back garden.

In the living room Pat was in his pyjamas swaying to the music at one end of the sofa, while at the other end Sally was being groped by some fat boy. Pat grinned at me - isn't this fun? - as I surveyed the damage - lager cans with their contents spilled on the parquet floor and cigarettes stubbed out on their rims, scraps of takeaway pizza smeared on the furniture and God knows what stains on the beds upstairs.

There were maybe a dozen of them in all. But it felt like the Mongol Hordes had moved in. Worse than that - it was like one of those grotesque commercials for crisps or soft drinks or chinos, full of young people having the time of their life. Except that they were having the time of their life in my living room. 'Sally,' I said, 'what the fuck is going on?' 'Harry,' she said, and there were tears of joy in her eyes. 'It's Steve.'

She indicated the slack-jawed youth on top of her. He squinted at me with his cretinous porky eyes, eyes with nothing behind them but hormonal overload and nine cans of lager.

'He packed in that old slapper Yasmin McGinty,' Sally said. 'He's come back to me. Ain't it fantastic?'

'Are you crazy?' I said. 'Are you crazy or stupid? Which is it, Sally?'

'Oh, Harry,' she said, all disappointed. T thought you would understand. You of all people.'

The music suddenly died. Cyd stood there with the plug in her hands.

'Time to clean up this mess,' she told the room. 'Get rubbish sacks and cleaning stuff. Try looking under the sink.'

Steve climbed off Sally, adjusting his monstrous trousers, sneering at the grown-ups who had crashed his party.

'I'm out of here,' he said, as though he came from Beverly Hills instead of Muswell Hill.

Cyd moved swiftly across the room and clasped his nose between her thumb and forefinger.

'You're out of here when I tell you, elephant boy,' she said, making him yelp as she lifted him up on his toes. 'And it won't be until you clean up this mess. Not until then, got it?'

'Okay, okay!' he bleated, his fake American bravado melting in the face of the real thing.

I took Pat up to bed, turfing out a couple mating in the bathroom, while Cyd organised the cleaning detail. By the time I had read Pat a story and got him to settle down, Sally and Steve and their spotty friends were meekly cleaning the floors and the tables. 'Where did you learn to do that?' I asked Cyd. 'Texas,' she said.

It turned out that they were quite useless at housework, just as I imagine they will be useless at everything else they attempt in their brainless, designer-labelled lives.

Some of them were too sick. The rest of them were too stupid.

Steve squirted almost the entire contents of a bottle of lemon-scented, multi-surface liquid cleaner on the floor and then spent an hour trying to remove the suds as it foamed and spumed like a car wash gone mad. Cyd and I ended up doing most of it ourselves.

We kicked them out just after dawn. I kept Sally behind and stuck her in a minicab. She didn't apologise. She was still angry at me for not understanding that the course of true love sometimes leaves stains on the furniture.

'I hope you're satisfied,' she said as she was leaving. 'You ruined my chance with Steve, Harry. He'll probably go back to Yasmin McGinty. That slapper.'

Cyd brought me a cup of coffee when we were finally alone.

'Don't you wish you were still young enough to know everything?' she smiled.

I took her in my arms, feeling the green dress slide under my hands. I kissed her. She kissed me back. Then the telephone rang.

'Sally,' I said, 'calling to give me another piece of her mind.' 'She'll have none left,' Cyd laughed.

But it wasn't Sally. It was Gina, but without the usual little transcontinental blip before she spoke. That's how I knew immediately that Gina wasn't in Japan any more. This was a local call. She was back in town.

'I just realised something,' Gina said. 'This is the only telephone number in the whole world that I know by heart.' twenty-nine I arrived ten minutes early, but Gina was already there, sipping latte at a table for two at the rear of the cafe.

She was a little thinner from all that sashimi and sushi in Shinjuku and she was wearing clothes that I had never seen her in before - some kind of tailored, two-piece business suit. A woman of the working world.

She looked up and saw me and I could tell that she was still unmistakably Gina - the slightly goofy smile, the pale blue eyes - but a little bit older and far more serious than I could ever remember. The same woman, and yet changed in ways that I couldn't imagine.

'Harry,' she said, standing up, and we smiled nervously at each other, wondering if the correct form was to kiss or to shake hands. Neither of them really seemed right. Instead, I patted her quickly on the arm and she flinched as if she had been given a mild electric shock. That seemed to get us over the awkward moment.

'You look well,' she said, sitting down, smiling with a politeness that she had never bothered with in the old days.

And so did she - in her perfect face you could see the girl she had been and the woman she was going to become. Some people grow into their good looks and others grow out of them. And then there are people like Gina, who start turning heads as a child and never stop.

But like all the beautiful ones, Gina had always disliked excessive compliments, apparently assuming that they meant her worth was only skin deep. I guessed that she still felt the same way.

'You're looking well, too,' I said, not wanting to overdo it. 'How's Pat?'

'He's pretty good,' I laughed, and she laughed along with me, waiting for more. Except a waiter came and asked if he could get us anything, so we paused while we ordered another couple of lattes, and when he had gone, we talked about our son. 'A bit bigger now, I bet,' she said.

'Everyone seems to think he's really shooting up. Maybe I don't notice it so much because I see him every day.'

'Of course,' she said. 'But I bet I'll notice a difference. I mean, I haven't seen him for a couple of months.' 'Four months,' I said. 'Surely it's not that long.'

'Since the summer. It's four months, Gina. From July to October. Work it out.'

How could she imagine that it was only a couple of months? It was actually more than four. And it felt like far longer to me.

'Whatever,' she said, a little testy. 'Tell me about Pat. I can't wait to see him.'

What had changed? I looked around the cafe, trying to think what was different since Gina had gone away to Japan. And I was struck by the fact that the cafe hadn't changed at all.

It was one of those places that try to bring a touch of the Marais backstreets to the main drags of London - there was a big zinc bar, a blackboard with names of wines scrawled on it, a rack of newspapers on big wooden poles, and a scattering of chairs and tables on the pavement outside. They even called their full English breakfast something French.

It was a fairly typical cafe in our neighbourhood, and you might walk past it without even looking at it twice. But this place had meaning for us. Gina and I used to come here before Pat was born, back in the days when we were so close that we didn't even feel the need to talk to one another. And you can't get closer than that.

'School's going okay,' I said. 'That's changed. Nursery became a bit of a nightmare, but he's made a good friend at school and that's working well.'

'Why was nursery a nightmare?' she asked, looking all worried.

'He didn't like being left. It was just a phase he went through. A phase I thought might last until he was about eighteen.' 'But he has made friends with a little boy at school?'

A little girl,' I said, and it seemed so strange to be talking about Cyd's daughter to her. 'Peggy.' 'Peggy,' Gina said, trying it out.

'She's got an English dad,' I said. And an American mum. From Houston.'

And is he still crazy about Star Wars?' she smiled. Gina wasn't very interested in Peggy. 'Is it still Luke Skywalker and Han Solo around the clock?'

'Yes,' I said. 'That hasn't changed. But he's started to like other stuff, too.' 'Other stuff?'

'Well, he likes music,' I laughed. 'He likes gangster rap. You know, where they are always boasting about how they are going to shoot you in the head with their piece.'

Her face darkened. 'He likes listening to this music, does he?' 'Yes.' 'And you just let him, do you?'

'Yeah,' I said. 'I just let him.' I was a bit pissed off- she was acting as if I hadn't thought about this, as if I were letting him watch snuff movies or something. 'It's just something he's going through. It probably makes him feel tougher than he really is. Pat is a very sweet, gentle little kid, Gina. It doesn't do any harm. I can't see him getting involved in a drive-by shooting. He's in bed every night by nine.' I could tell she didn't want to argue with me. 'What else?'

'He lets me wash his hair. He washes himself in the bath. He never makes a fuss about going to bed. He can tie his own shoes. He can tell the time. And he's started reading.'

The more I thought about it, the more I realised how much Pat had grown over the last few months. Gina smiled with what looked like a combination of pride and regret. I was embarrassed for her. She had missed all that. 'He sounds like a real little man,' she said. 'You should see him in his tie.' 'He wears a tie?'

'To school. They brought in a uniform because some of the kids were turning up in Polo gear and all that designer stuff. They thought it was unhealthy. So he has to wear a shirt and tie.' 'It must make him look really old.'

It didn't make him look old - dressing him up like a salary man actually made him look younger than ever. But I didn't feel like explaining all that to Gina.

'But what about you?' I asked. 'How long are you in town for?'

'Oh, permanently,' she said. 'Japan's over. For me and for everyone else. The days when some big-nosed pinky could go out East for adventure and a six-figure salary are gone. There's not much call for a translator when companies are going belly up. I got out before they threw me out.' She smiled brightly. 'So here I am,' she said. 'And naturally I want Pat.'

She wanted Pat? Did she mean she wanted to see him? To take him to the zoo and buy him a stuffed toy the size of a refrigerator? What did she mean? 'So you're not planning to live in Japan?'

'You were right, Harry. Even if the bubble hadn't burst, it would never have worked with Pat and me in an apartment the size of our guest room. I want to see him,' she said. 'As soon as possible.'

'Of course,' I said. 'I'm picking him up from my mum and dad this afternoon. You can wait for him at home.'

'No,' she said. 'Not at home. If it's okay with you, I'll meet you in the park.'

Stupid of me to suggest meeting at home. Because of course it wasn't Gina's home any more. And as I looked at the flashy new engagement ring where her simple little wedding band used to be, I suddenly realised that I had missed the really big change in our lives since the summer. Pat lived with me now. My Uncle Jack was at my parents' place.

Unlike Auntie Ethel from next door, Uncle Jack was my real uncle - my dad's brother, a dapper, wiry man who smoked his cigarettes by cupping them in the palm of his hand, as if protecting them from a fierce wind, even when he was in your living room dipping a ginger biscuit into his tea.

Uncle Jack was always in a suit and tie with some highly polished executive wagon parked outside. And on the passenger seat of the Scorpio or five series Beemer or big Merc or whatever it was, his chauffeur's hat would be resting. Uncle Jack was a driver, ferrying businessmen back and forth between their homes and offices to all the London airports. He seemed to spend more of his time waiting than driving, and I always pictured him hanging around the arrivals gate at Gatwick or Heathrow, fag cupped in hand, reading the Racing Post.

Uncle Jack was a gambler, like all my dad's side of the family, and as he grinned at me coming up the drive it seemed to me that all my memories of him revolved around betting of one kind or another.

There were the card schools at our house every Boxing Day. There were trips to the dog tracks at Southend and Romford, where my cousins and I would collect the big pink betting slips that had been discarded by all the unlucky punters. Even further back, when my grandmother was still alive, I could remember the bookie coming round to her house in the East End to collect her tiny daily bet on the horses. When did bookies stop making house calls to little old ladies?

There was another brother, the youngest, Bill, who had moved to Australia in the late seventies, but in my mind the three Silver brothers were together still - knocking back the scotch at Christmas and the brown ale at weddings, dancing the old dances with wives who they had fallen in love with as teenagers, playing nine-card brag into the early hours at Christmas with Tony Bennett singing 'Stranger in Paradise' on the music centre.

This was my father's family - a family of men, shrewd, tough Londoners who were sentimental about children and their suburban gardens, men whose old photographs invariably showed them in uniform, gamblers and drinkers, although neither to the degree where it was ever more than light relief, men who loved their families and looked on work as merely an unpleasant chore undertaken to support those families, men who prided themselves on knowing how the world worked. I knew that Uncle Jack was here for a reason.

'Saw you on telly the other night,' Uncle Jack said. 'At that awards do. Sitting at your table in your tux. He looks a bit of a lad, that Eamon Fish bloke.' 'He's a good kid,' I said. 'How are you, Uncle Jack?'

'I'm all right,' he said. 'Mustn't grumble.' He took my arm and pulled me closer. 'But what about your dad? I've seen him struggling for breath as soon as he gets out of his chair. But now he reckons he's seen the quack and he's been given the all clear.' 'He's okay?' 'So he says.'

My dad was in the back garden kicking a ball around with my mum and Pat. They were both wrapped up in thick coats and scarves, but my father was in just a T-shirt, seeming to take all the old pride in his hard, muscular body with its blurred tattoos and faded scars. As he tucked his T-shirt into his trousers I caught a glimpse of the big scar, the livid starburst on his side, and I realised that it still had the power to shock me. 'Dad? You saw the doctor?' 'Right as rain,' he said. 'Fit as a fiddle.' 'Really? What about your breathing?'

'He shouldn't be smoking, should he?' my mum said, but I could tell she was relieved that the old man had apparently been let off with a slap on the wrist. 'He wants to pack in the Old Holborn.'

'Bit late now,' my dad chuckled, enjoying his role as a dissenting voice in the muesli-sucking, low fat modern world. 'Bobby Charlton,' he said, blasting the ball into the wintry skeleton of the rose bushes. Pat went to fetch it.

'And the doctor really reckons that's the only thing wrong with you?' I asked. My dad put his arm around Pat.

'Could go on for another twenty years,' he said defiantly. 'I'll tell you what - I intend to live to see this little fellow get married.' Pat looked at my father as if he were insane. 'I'm never getting married,' he said. I had forgotten to tell Gina that he could ride his bike.

I had forgotten to tell her that the timid little four-year-old who had tottered around the swimming pool with the aid of stabilisers had become a confident five-year-old who could zip around the park with a cavalier disregard for his safety.

So when Gina saw Pat pedalling towards where she was waiting by the swings and roundabout, she laughed and clapped her hands, laughed out loud with delight and wonder.

'You're so big,' she cried, her voice catching as she held her arms open to him.

Before he pulled away from me, I caught a glimpse of his face. He was smiling - but it wasn't the smooth, practised smile that I had grown used to, it wasn't the David Niven smile full of slick, shallow charm that he reserved for strangers and for reassuring me that everything was all right.

Pat saw Gina and he smiled without thinking about it, he smiled for real.

Then he was in his mother's arms, the hood of his anorak falling off his head as she lifted him up out of the saddle of his bike, and she was crying and getting tears on the top of his head and you could see that their hair was exactly the same colour, exactly the same burnished yellow. 'I'll bring him home in a couple of hours,' Gina called, and Pat pedalled slowly away, her arm around his shoulder, nodding at something that Gina had said to him.

'Be careful on that bike, Pat,' I shouted. 'Don't go too fast, okay?' But they didn't hear me. thirty My father had been lying.

He had been to see the doctor. But there had been no appointment that had ended with my old man being told to put his shirt back on, he was as fit as a fiddle, in remarkable condition for a man of his age, but - slap on the back, matey wink from the quack - he might like to think about cutting down on his roll-ups.

The doctor might have told him that there was no way of knowing how long he had to live. And he might have said that these things can drag out for years. But it is highly unlikely that the GP produced his NHS crystal ball and told my old man that he would live to see his grandson's wedding day.

The thing that was growing inside my dad had gone too far for all that. My mother called me at work for the first time in my life.

He was in the hospital. The High Dependency Unit, she said, her voice breaking on those three clinically modern words.

He had been putting away the garden furniture that always sat in our garden until the middle of winter, storing the blue canvas deck chairs and stripy beach umbrella in the garage until next spring, as he did every year, and that's when he suddenly had no breath, no breath at all, and it was terrifying, absolutely terrifying, she said, and she had called for the ambulance but she didn't think they would get there in time. In time to save him.

'But what is it?' I said, still not understanding, still unable to comprehend that there could be a world without my father in it.

'It's his lungs,' my mother said, and her voice was a sick, shaken whisper. 'A tumour.'

A tumour in his lungs. She couldn't say the word, she couldn't name the thing that was stealing the very air that he breathed, and that terrible, dreaded word hung between us on the telephone line, as if it might go away if we didn't say it.

She didn't really have to say the word. Finally I was starting to understand. It was a modern hospital, but in the middle of miles of farmland.

That was the thing about where I grew up, the thing about the suburbs. You could go from fly-blown concrete jungle to open rolling fields in just a short car ride. It was because of these fields - or fields just like them - that my father had brought his family out here a lifetime ago.

My mother was in the waiting room when I arrived. She hugged me and, with a kind of desperate optimism, told me that the doctor had assured her that there was lots that could be done for my father.

Then she went to get him, the Indian doctor who had given her this wonderful news, and when she came back she stood him before me. He was young enough to still look a little embarrassed at my mother's belief in his powers.

'This is my son, doctor,' she said. 'Please tell him that there's lots that can be done for my husband, please.'

'I was telling your mother that pain management is very sophisticated these days,' he said. 'Pain management?' I said.

'There's much that we can do to help your father breathe more easily, to help him sleep better and to relieve the pain that he has been suffering.'

The doctor told me about the oxygen mask that my father was already using. More obliquely, he talked about the benefits of a good night's sleep and the use of an effective painkiller. 'You mean sleeping pills and morphine?' I said. 'Yes,' he said.

There was lots that could be done, but they were all just things to make my father more comfortable. They were all just controlling the symptoms of what was growing inside him. None of it was going to make him better.

They could force more air into his poor, useless lungs and they could render his exhausted body unconscious for a while and they could pump enough opiates into him to fog his brain and make it blind to the unbearable pain. There was lots that could be done. But there was also nothing that could be done. My father was dying. We sat by his side, watching him sleep.

He was propped up in his hospital bed, a transparent oxygen mask strapped over his nose and mouth, a day's worth of stubble on his face, the face that he always liked to keep well-scrubbed and clean shaven.

There was a metal box with a button for calling for help by his side and a plastic sheet beneath him, and these little things clawed at my heart and made me feel like weeping. Already he seemed as helpless as a newborn baby. He was in a ward with seven other beds containing men - most of them old, but two of them younger than me - who all had the same thing wrong with them.

It might be in different parts of their body and it might be at different stages of development and some of them might go home and some of them might never go home. But they all had the same thing wrong inside them, that thing that we still couldn't say, my mother and I.

'He knew, didn't he?' I asked. 'He's known all along, I bet.'

'He must have known from the start,' my mother said. 'He went for tests when it all began, when he first started to lose his breath - I made him go - and he told me it was all fine.'

T never knew,' I said, amazed that my parents could still keep a secret from me. 'I never knew he had any tests.'

'We didn't tell you because there didn't seem any point in worrying you. You had enough on your plate with Pat. And besides, he was fine. So he said.'

'But he wasn't fine,' I said bitterly, sounding like a small boy whining, it's not fair, it's not fair. 'He hasn't been fine for a long time.'

'He would have known from the start.' My mother's eyes never left his face as she spoke to me. 'I was talking to one of the nurses, and she said there's this thing called gradual disclosure - they don't give you the bad news all at once, not unless you make them, not unless you demand to know what's wrong.'

'And he would have wanted to know,' I said with total certainty. 'He would have made them tell him.'

'Yes,' my mother said. 'He would have made them tell him.'

'Then why did he keep it a secret for so long?' I said, already knowing the answer. 'He must have known that we would find out eventually.' 'He was protecting us,' she said.

My mother took his hands in her hands and held them to her cheek, and I looked away, fearing I might unravel at the sight of how much she still loved him. 'Protecting us,' she repeated.

That's right, Mum. He was shielding us from the worst this world has to offer, he was sparing his family some of the misery that was ahead, he was protecting us. He was doing what he had always done. 'I'm so sorry about your dad, Harry,' Gina said. 'I really am - he always treated me with great kindness.'

'He was mad about you,' I said, nearly adding that it broke his heart when we broke up - but I managed to stop myself in time.

'I'd like to visit him at the hospital,' she said. 'If that's okay with you. And your mum.'

'Sure,' I said, not knowing how to say that it was already clear that he didn't like visitors, that he found it hard to deal with his own pain without witnessing everybody else's. But I couldn't say that to Gina without sounding as though she was being cut off. 'Will Pat see him?' I took a breath.

'Pat wants to see him,' I said. 'But my dad's just too sick at the moment. If there's some improvement, maybe. But right now it would upset both of them too much.' 'What did you tell him?'

'Granddad's sick. Very sick. How do you tell a five-year-old that the grandfather who thinks he's the greatest thing in the world is dying? How do you do it? I don't know.'

'We need to talk about Pat,' she said. 'I know this isn't the best time and I'm genuinely sorry for what you're going through with your dad. But you should know that I want Pat back as soon as possible.' 'You want Pat back?'

'That's right. We don't need to have the arguments we had before, okay? I'm not taking him out of the country. I'm back in London. Richard and I are looking at places in the area. Pat wouldn't even have to change schools.' 'How the hell is old Richard?' 'Fine.' 'Still semi-separated?'

'Permanently separated. His wife is back in the States. And I know it seems fast, but we've been talking about getting married.' 'When?' 'As soon as our divorces come through.' How I laughed.

'Fuck me,' I said. 'You're getting married as soon as your divorces come through? Ain't love grand?'

Gina and I hadn't even started talking about the mechanics of divorce. We had talked plenty about splitting up. But we hadn't discussed the paperwork.

'Please, Harry,' she said, a touch of ice coming into her voice. 'Don't get abusive, okay?' I shook my head.

'You think you can just come back into our lives and pick up where you left off, Gina? You think that you can have Pat back just because the Asian economic miracle turned out to be not all that miraculous after all?'

'We agreed,' she said, suddenly angrier than I had ever seen her. 'You always knew that Pat was going to live with me. If I had stayed in Tokyo or come back here, I always intended to have him with me. What makes you think you've got any right to keep him?' 'Because he's happy with me,' I said. 'And because I can do it. I can do it. It wasn't great at first but I learned, okay? It got better and now it's pretty good. And he's happy where he is. He doesn't need to be with you and some guy, some fucking guy you picked up in a Roppongi bar.'

Her mouth had a set to it that I didn't remember from before.

'I love Richard,' she said. 'And I want Pat to grow up with me.'

'We don't own them, you know. We don't own our children, Gina.'

'You're right - we don't own our children. But my solicitor will argue that, all things being equal, a child should be with his mother.' I got up, tossing a few coins on the table.

'And my solicitor will argue that you and Richard can go fuck yourselves,' I said. 'And my solicitor - when I get one - will also argue that a child should be with the parent most capable of bringing him up. That's me, Gina.'

'I don't want to hate you, Harry. Don't teach me to hate you.'

'I don't want you to hate me. But can't you see what's happened? I've learned to be a real parent. You can't just come back and take that away from me.'

'Unbelievable,' she said. 'You look after him for a couple of months and you think you can take my place?'

'Four months,' I said. And I'm not trying to take your place. It's just that I've found a place of my own.' Cyd took one look at me and told me that she was taking me out to dinner. I wasn't hungry, but I said okay because I was too tired to argue. And also because there was something I had to ask her.

I kissed Pat and left him watching Pocahontas with Peggy. Bianca hovered gloomily in the kitchen, chain-chewing luicy Fruit because she wasn't allowed to smoke in the Hat. 'My car or yours?' Cyd asked.

'Mine,' I said, and we drove to a little Indian restaurant between Upper Street and Liverpool Road. The tape holding together the shredded roof of the MGF had dried, cracked and started to come apart, and it flapped like a ship's sails in a high wind.

The sight of the food repelled me and I half-heartedly pushed some chicken tikka masala around my plate, feeling as though everything was slipping out of focus.

'Eat what you like, honey,' she said. 'Just what you feel like. But try to eat something, okay?'

I nodded, smiling gratefully at this incredible woman who had lost her dad when she was half my age, and I almost asked her the question then and there, but I thought I would stick to my plan and ask her at the end of the evening. Yes, best to stick to the plan.

'We don't have to see this film tonight if you don't want to,' she said. 'It's not important. We can skip it and do whatever you feel like. We can just talk. Or we can do nothing. We don't even have to talk.'

'No, let's go and see it,' I said, so we drove into Soho to see an Italian film called Cinema Paradiso about a young boy's friendship with the old projectionist at the local movie house.

Cyd was usually good at choosing films she knew I would like if I gave them half a chance, films with subtitles and no star names which I wouldn't have even considered a couple of years ago.

But I found myself cooling towards this one at the end when the gruff old projectionist, now blinded by a fire in the cinema, tells the Bambi-eyed young boy, now a teenager, to leave their village and never come back.

The boy, Toto, goes away and becomes a famous film director and doesn't come back to his little village for thirty years, on the day that they are burying Alfredo, the old projectionist who taught him to love the cinema and then sent him away.

'Why did Alfredo send the boy away for good?' I asked as we walked through the crowds on Old Compton Street. 'Why couldn't they at least stay in touch? The way he told him to go away, this boy he had known all his life, it seemed cruel.'

'Because Alfredo knew that Toto would never find the things he needed in that little town,' Cyd smiled, happy to talk about it. 'He had to break free so that he could learn what Alfredo already knew. Life is not what you see in films - life is much harder.' She took my arm and laughed. 'I like it when we talk about this stuff,' she said.

The MGF was in the big carpark at the end of Gerrard Street, the one behind the fire station on Shaftesbury Avenue, Chinatown's carpark. We got in the car but I didn't turn on the ignition.

'I want us to live together,' I said. 'You and Peggy and me and Pat.' Those eyes that I loved looked genuinely surprised. 'Live together?' 'Your flat is too small for all of us,' I said. 'So what would work best is if you moved in with us. What do you think?' She gave a confused shake of her gorgeous head. 'You've had a really rough time,' she said. 'What with your dad. And Gina. You've really been through it.'

'That's got nothing to do with it,' I said. 'Well, maybe a bit. Maybe even a lot. But that's not all of it. I know what I feel about you. And I think you feel pretty much the same way about me. I want us to be together.' She smiled, shaking her head again, more firmly this time. 'No, Harry.' 'No?' 'I'm sorry.' 'Why not?'

It was a pointless question, the kind of question a child asks. But I had to ask it.

'Because you want someone with a less complicated life than me,' she said. 'No kid. No ex-husband. No reminders of the past. You know you do. Remember how you felt on Pat's birthday? Remember that? You and I both know there's no future for us.' T don't know that at all,' I said.

'You think you want someone who can transform your life with love. But you don't really want love, Harry. You couldn't handle real love. You want romance.'

Her words were made worse, much worse, by the fact that they were said with enormous tenderness. There was no anger or malice in them. It was as if she felt genuinely sorry for me.

'And that's fine,' she said. 'That's the way you are and in a lot of ways it's a good way to be. But it would never work between us because you can't make the hearts and flowers stuff last for a lifetime. Not with kids around. Especially when they're not your own.' 'We could,' I insisted.

'No,' she said. 'We would end up in exactly the same place that you and Gina ended up. And I don't want that. I can't go through all that - not with Peggy. Sweet nothings are fine. Romance is fine. But I want someone who is going to rub my feet when I get old and tell me they love me even when I can't remember where I put my keys. That's what I want. I want someone I can grow old with. And - I'm really sorry - but I don't think that's what you want.' She reached out to touch my face but I turned away, wondering where I had heard all this before. We sat there in silence in that subterranean carpark, the whole weight of Chinatown above our heads.

'I thought you didn't want Peggy to get hurt by seeing you in a short-term relationship,' I said.

'I'd rather she saw that than a long-term relationship that goes wrong,' she said. 'And Pat and Peggy will still be friends. She will still see you. But this way you and I both get spared a lot of grief.' 'This way?' I said. 'You sound like you're ending it.'

'Not ending it,' she said. 'We can still be friends, too. But I looked at you at your son's birthday party and I realised that Peggy and I are not what you want. Not really.'

T know what it means when a woman says we can still be friends,' I said. 'It means close the door on your way out. That's what it means, doesn't it?'

'Don't feel too bad, Harry,' she said. 'People break up every day. It's not the end of the world.' The thing about cancer is that it can always exceed your worst expectations. There is something pornographic about cancer's ability to confound your imagination. Whatever new obscenity cancer comes up with to torment and torture you, it can always do worse tomorrow.

My father was shot full of morphine and his skin no longer had the colour of living skin and, even with the oxygen mask, his lungs strained and heaved to take in a pitiful amount of air that simply wasn't enough.

Sometimes the fog in his eyes would clear, that fog caused by the pain and the killers of pain, and when it cleared, I saw regret and fear in those eyes swimming with tears and I was convinced that this was it, this was the end, this was surely the end. T love you,' I told him, taking his hands, and saying those words that I had never said to him before.

And I told him because surely it could get no worse than this - but it did get worse, that's the thing about cancer, it can always exceed your blackest moment.

So the next day I went back to that crowded ward, sat by his bed holding his hand, and - crying harder this time - I told my father again that I loved him. thirty-one Eamon froze.

You would have missed it if you were watching from the cheap seats of the studio audience, what with all the cameras and crew obscuring your view. You might even have missed it if you were tuning in from out there in TV land, what with the television being just one more voice droning away in your living room, and this particular show not being central to your life in the way that it was to mine.

But I saw him lose it on one of the monitors up in the gallery and I knew that this moment could come if you had spent sixty years in front of a camera or sixty seconds. The moment that the autocue and the script and the rehearsal all mean nothing. The moment you lose it.

'Coming from Kilcarney, I'm shocked at all the divorce over here,' he said, and then he blinked twice, the panic flooding into his face. 'Very shocked…'

He stared into that unforgiving black eye with the red light above it, his mind blank, lost for words. It was more than forgetting the punch line. It was a complete failure of faith, like the tightrope walker who looks down and sees his own body smashed on the ground far, far below. In the studio audience, someone coughed. The silence seemed to hum with his fractured nerves.

'Come on, come on, you can do it,M whispered, and he blinked, breathed and suddenly he was back on his rope.

'Over here, when a woman meets a guy now, she thinks - "Is this the sort of man I want my children to spend their weekends with?"'

The audience laughed and Eamon wobbled to safety on the other side. He told his next joke, still shaking with terror, trying very hard not to look down. 'It happens,' I said, taking him to a quiet corner of the green room. 'Just when you think that you're on top of this thing and stage fright is something that happens to other people, then it happens.' Eamon sucked on a lager.

'I don't know that I can do this thing, Harry. I don't know if I can go out there every week knowing there's the possibility that my mind is going to suddenly seize up.' 'You just have to learn to live with the knowledge that your mind can go completely blank when a million people are watching you.' 'Fuck me.' 'You can do it.' 'But the point is -1 can't. I might look confident and cocky to the folks back home, but it's all an act. It's not real, Harry. I throw up in my dressing room before I go on. I wake up at three in the morning dreaming that everybody's looking at me and I've lost my voice. I can't do it. I'm too nervous.' 'You're not nervous,' I said. 'You're excited.' 'What about when I puke my guts up before a show?' 'You're excited. You're about to go out there and entertain the country. Naturally you're excited. Who wouldn't be?' 'What about my bad dreams?'

'That's not nerves. That's excitement. Teach yourself the presenter's mantra and chant it again and again - I am not nervous, I am excited! 'I am not nervous,' Eamon said. T am excited.' 'That's it.'

Someone came over with a sausage roll in one hand and a glass of white wine in the other and told Eamon that was the best show he had ever done. 'You want to get a real drink?' he asked me. 'Sorry, gents,' said a black bouncer the size of a skip, making us sound like a couple of public lavatories. 'It's dress corporate.' 'Dress corporate?' I said. 'Suits. Ties. Business garb.'

But then the other bouncer, a white guy the size of a skip, recognised Eamon's face.

'It's all right, Chris,' he said, lifting the red velvet rope. 'How you doing, Eamon?'

Smiles all round. Come in, come in. Me and my famous mate went into the darkness of the club and suddenly I had never felt more sober.

All over the bar there were beautiful half-naked girls - no, more like three-quarters naked girls, or nine-tenths naked girls - writhing and grinding and dancing in the faces of seated businessmen whose brows were beaded with sweat and whose paunchy bodies were immobilised by longing and lager. The girls all wore garter belts halfway up their thighs. The garter belts were stuffed with ten- and twenty-pound notes.

'Don't get too excited,' Eamon said. 'The penetration is all in your wallet.'

We went downstairs where a smiling black girl in a kind of little white tutu number greeted Eamon by name. She led us to a table by the side of a stage where more girls wearing only high heels and dental floss for underwear were sliding up and down poles.

They - and their scantily clad sisters torturing middle-ranking executives all over the room - were dancing to one of those American girl singers whose name I could never remember, the one who boasts about being both a bitch and a lover. One of the new songs. I realised that most of the songs I knew were old songs.

A bottle of champagne appeared. I told Eamon that I wanted a beer, but he said we could only get champagne at these tables. The champagne was compulsory where we were.

A statuesque blonde in a kind of disposable evening dress appeared. She smiled at me as if she had been looking for me all her life. 'I'm Venus. Would you like a dance?' What the hell. I could probably use a dance. 'Sure,' I said, standing up and starting to jig around from foot to foot in that lame excuse for dancing that we have in this country. I felt good. This song about being a bitch and a lover wasn't so bad after all. 'No,' said Venus impatiently. I realised that she had a Birmingham accent. 'You don't dance. You just sit there.' She indicated the poleaxed businessmen lusting silently in their chairs all over the room as girls bent double and winked at them from between their legs or almost grazed the broken veins in their boozy noses with a perfect nipple, '/dance for you, okay? You sit there and watch. No touching. One song for Ј10. Minimum.'

'Maybe later,' I said, sitting down and gulping some champagne. Venus disappeared.

'Relax, Harry,' Eamon smiled. 'You're not nervous. You're excited.' He slapped me on the back and roared. 'I love you, you fucking bastard. How the fuck are you?'

'Brilliant,' I said. 'My old man's in a cancer ward and my wife - my ex-wife - wants custody of our son.' He looked at me with real concern. Not easy with a flute of champagne in your hand and naked dancing girls swarming all around. 'How is your dad?'

'He's stabilising,' I said. 'That's what the doctors call it. That means there's no marked deterioration. If he stays like this, maybe he can come home. But he wouldn't be coming home to get better.'

'Can I dance for you, Eamon?' said a young Asian girl with hair down to her waist.

She was the only Asian girl in the house. There were a few black women in here but mostly the girls were blondes, either by birth or bottle. It was a bit like flicking through Playboy. This was a place where blondes ruled the world.

'Later,' Eamon said, turning back to me as the Asian beauty disappeared into the gloaming. 'I'm sorry about your dad, Harry. And it's a drag that your ex-missus is cutting up rough. But cheer up, you miserable fucker.' He drained his flute and filled it again. 'At least you've got Cyd. She's a grand girl.' 'That's finished,' I said.

'Would you like a dance?' some pneumatic blonde asked me.

'No thanks,' I said. She went away, not taking it personally. 'Me and Cyd - we had our problems.'

'Problems?' Eamon said. 'At the award thing, you looked like you were getting on fine.'

'We got on fine when there were just the two of us. But she's got a kid. And I've got a kid. And they're great kids. But that means she's got an ex-husband and I've got an ex-wife. And it was all - I don't know - just so crowded.' 'And that was your problem?'

'Well, the biggest problem was that she dumped me. But she dumped me because I sometimes got depressed at how crowded it was. And because she thought I wanted - it sounds stupid - some kind of perfect love. And maybe she was right. She could handle things the way they were. But for some reason, I couldn't.'

'Because you're a romantic, Harry,' Eamon said. 'Because you believe in all the old songs. And the old songs don't prepare you for real life. They make you allergic to real life.'

'What's wrong with the old songs? At least nobody thinks it's clever to be a bitch and a lover in the old songs.'

'You're in love with love, Harry. You're in love with the idea of love. Cyd's a grand girl - but what's really special about her is that you can't have her. That's what really grabs you.'

That wasn't true. I missed her. I especially missed the way she put her arms around me when we slept. Most couples, they turn their backs on each other as soon as it's time for sleep. Not her. She snuggled and cuddled and tried to make us one flesh. That's ridiculous, I know, that's the impossible dream. But that's the dream she made me dream. And the thought that we would never sleep like that again was unbearable. 'She was special,' I said.

'Look around,' Eamon said, trying to fill my flute. I put my hand over the top of my glass. I'm not much of a drinker and I was pissed already. 'There's what? A hundred girls in here?'

I looked around. On the outskirts of the room where the girls in tutus waited with their torches and their trays, dozens of girls roamed the shallow waters of the club. Dozens more squirmed rhythmically in front of businessmen who leered and snickered when they were in their little gangs and then sat there all bashful and - yes - actually reverential when one of them bought a dance. It's so easy to push our buttons, I thought, unable to imagine any woman melting - while simultaneously reaching for her money - at the sight of any man's buttocks.

Looking at the faces of the men looking at all that perfect female flesh - flesh toned by youth and gym, flesh that here and there had been enhanced by the surgeon's hand - it was easy to believe that being a man is like being chained to the village idiot.

'One… two… three,' said Eamon, knocking back the champagne as he started counting the girls. '… eight… nine… ten…' 'Yes,' I said. 'Maybe a hundred girls.'

'They're all special, Harry. So many special girls that I can't even count them. The world is full of special girls.' 'Not like Cyd,' I said.

'Bollocks,' said Eamon. 'Great big hairy bollocks, Harry.' He emptied his glass, tried to fill it again and seemed surprised to discover that the bottle was empty. He ordered another and put his arm around me. 'You love it, Harry. You love all this suffering. Because it's so much easier than actually living with a woman.' 'You're drunk.'

'I may be drunk, Harry, but I know women. You might know television - and may God love you and keep you for knowing television, for you have saved my Kilcarney hide on more than one occasion - but I know women. And I know you would change your mind about Cyd if you lived with her for the next seven years. Because we always do.' 'Not always.'