Man and boy

'Always,' he said. 'The old songs don't tell you that. The old songs talk about love found and love lost. Heroic love, eternal love, sweet and sour love. But they don't talk about love grown dull and old. They don't write songs about that.' 'Yes, they fucking do,' I shouted. 'Would you like a dance?' said some vision in a see-through nightdress.

'No, thank you,' I said. '"Where Did Our Love Go?", "You Don't Send Me Flowers," "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" - they write loads of songs about love going off the boil.' 'But they make it sound heroic,' Eamon said. 'And it's not. It's boring and stupid. Look around you, Harry, just look around this room - why would any man want to settle down with just one woman? It's not the way we're made.' 'It's not the way you're made,' I said. 'But that's just because all you care about is your nasty little knob and putting it in as many places as possible.' 'Not my knob, Harry.' 'Sorry, Eamon. I insist. Your nasty little knob.' 'Not my knob, Harry. My seed.' 'Okay, your seed.'

The Asian girl with hair down to her waist came over and sat on Eamon's lap. She placed a chaste kiss on his dark, unshaven cheek.

'I'm Mem,' she said to me, and I said, 'Harry,' and we shook hands, as though we were about to discuss some business deal. Funnily enough, in that room full of stale cigarette smoke and naked flesh and middle-aged dreams, there was a lot of formality going on, there was a lot of shaking hands and introductions and business cards quietly being handed over with the cash.

That was the genius of the place - the men were flattered into believing that they were really in with a chance, as if these girls were desperate to be bought dinner in some crap fake French restaurant when they could be in here turning every man into their own personal cashpoint machine with just a glint in their eye, a twitch of their hips and some new song about being a bitch and a lover.

Mem began to dance for Eamon, and as she pulled her dress over her head and began to slowly move her hard little body in front of his face, I could see why this small Asian girl - what was she? Indonesian? Thai? - managed to hold her own here on planet blonde. 'It's like the Heathrow Express,' Eamon said. 'What the fuck are you going on about now?' I asked.

'The Heathrow Express,' Eamon said. 'The train to the airport. Haven't you noticed? Just outside of Paddington, you pass this enormous great yard full of shining, brand new cars. And a little bit further down the line, there's another yard - but this one is full of rusting, rotting, burned out old cars all stacked on top of each other like the junk they are.'

T think I'm missing something here, Eamon,' I said. 'You're saying that life is like the Heathrow Express?'

'I'm saying that relationships are like those cars,' he said, sliding the palm of his hand up one of Mem's golden young thighs, even though there was a strict no touching rule. An Indonesian thigh? A Thai thigh? 'They start off all shiny and new and looking like they're going to last forever. And then they end up as rubbish.' 'You're the devil,' I said, standing up. 'And I'm drunk.' 'Oh, don't go, Harry,' he pleaded.

'Got to pick up my boy from my parents,' I said. T mean, my mother.'

I kissed him on the cheek and shook Mem's hand - for some reason that seemed the right way round to do it, rather than kissing Mem and shaking Eamon's hand - and I was halfway to the door when I remembered where I had heard that name before. And I knew that Eamon was wrong. If you are always craving, always wanting, never satisfied, never happy with what you've got, you end up even more lost and lonely than you do if you are some poor sap like me who believes that all the old songs were written about just one girl.

The men who fuck around are not free. Not really. They end up more enslaved than anyone because they can never stop suspecting that the women they want are just the same as them. Just as unfettered, just as faithless, just as ready to move on or to make a quick detour as the hero of one of the new songs.

He was outside the club, waiting in the shadows with all the other boyfriends of the dancers. Somehow I knew he would be there.

And I knew he would look like all the rest of them, despite the flash cars - or in his case, the big BMW motorbike - that they had parked by the kerb. He didn't look happy. None of the boyfriends looked very happy.

They were standing behind the taxi drivers who were touting for trade. The cabbies were talking to each other and to the men who emerged from the club - need a taxi, sir? where you going? ten quid to Islington? - but the boyfriends of the dancers were silent and still and alone. They looked as though their dreams had come true, but all it had brought them was jealousy and disgust.

I saw him waiting, although he didn't see me, saw him stewing in the night with all the rest of the turbo-charged studs.

Jim Mason, Cyd's handsome ex, waiting for his Mem to finish work for the night. thirty-two Visiting hours were meaningless now. My father's waking moments were entirely dependent on the ebb and flow of pain and morphine.

You could sit with him all morning and he would sleep right through your visit - if you can dignify that drug-sodden rest in the hospital as sleep. And then as the opiates wore off, but before the tumour started to gnaw at him again, he might wake up and talk to you with eyes that were watery with suffering and an unendurable sadness. And that's when I would be waiting for him.

Halfway to dawn he stirred, his tongue flicking at his parched lips, waking me from my own fitful rest. The ward was silent apart from the snores of the old man in the next bed but one. I helped my dad to sit up, wetting his mouth with a pitifully small amount of water.

When he started to catch his breath - he would always catch his breath now - I helped him put the oxygen mask over his face and held his hand as he desperately sucked in some air. So little air, so little water. It broke my heart to see what he was surviving on.

He took off the mask, his face twisting with agony, and I thought again about how nobody warns you about this pain. But I still couldn't decide what was worse - seeing him in all that terrible suffering, or seeing him with his mind numbed by morphine, no longer truly himself. It was the pain, I decided. Seeing him in pain was worse.

He turned his eyes on me, shaking his head hopelessly, and then he looked away.

I took his hand in mine and held it tight, knowing his spirits were sinking. He was a brave man, but he couldn't fight this sadness which came in the middle of the night, this sadness which made you feel that nothing could ever be any good again.

And nobody warns you about the sadness. You are half-prepared for the pain. You can guess at the agonies of dying from cancer. But with all that physical suffering came a sense of loss that no shot of morphine could smother.

'The worst thing about it,' my father whispered in the darkness, 'is knowing what you will be missing. I don't mean the things that haven't happened yet - Pat's wedding day, seeing you finally settle down - but the things that you take for granted. Seeing Pat ride his bike, telling him a story, kissing him goodnight. Watching him running around the garden with his bloody light sabre. All those small things that mean more than anything.'

'You might come home soon,' I said, still clinging to hope because that is what we do, because there is no real alternative, still clinging to life even when life is full of torment. 'You might be doing all those things before you know it.' But he was beyond kidding himself. Or me.

'I'll miss my garden. Your mother. Her cooking. Your television shows.'

I was flattered and embarrassed that he would put my work in the same league as his wife, his grandson and his garden. And I was a little ashamed too - ashamed that I hadn't done more in the time that we had, that I hadn't done more to impress him and win his approval. A couple of television shows and a broken marriage. That was about it. But there was always Pat. And I knew that he loved his grandson more than he loved anything in this world. It felt as though Pat was my only real gift to him.

My father wanted to sit up. I pressed the little metal box that controlled his bed and it whirred in the silence of the ward until the back was raised. Then he leaned forward and held on to me while I placed a pillow behind his back, his unshaven face rough against the skin of my cheek.

The old smells of Old Spice and OldHolborn were gone now and they had been replaced by hospital smells, the smell of illness and chemicals. There was no tobacco or aftershave in here. That was all behind him.

It still seemed strange to be physically helping him. The undeniable fact of my father's strength bad been such a large part of my childhood and my youth that, now that his strength was gone, it felt like the world was ending, as though some immutable law of nature had been unceremoniously overturned.

And I could see for the first time that his strength wasn't the reason I loved him.

I had always believed that his toughness- that old world toughness which was endorsed by and embodied in his medal - was why he was my hero.

Now, as I helped him to sip water or to sit up in his hospital bed, I saw that I loved him for the same reasons that my mother loved him and my son loved him.

For his gentleness, for his compassion and for a courage that had nothing to do with physical strength.

'Don't say anything to your mother, but I don't think I'll be coming home.' 'Don't say that, Dad.'

'I don't think I will be. I can feel it. And I would like to see Pat.' 'Of course.' He didn't say one last time. He didn't have to. And besides, there were some things that were too painful to say out loud. But we knew that we were talking about death.

'If that's all right with you,' he said. 'If you don't think it would upset him too much. You have to decide. You're his father.'

'I'll bring him the next time I come. But now try to sleep for a bit, Dad.' 'I'm not tired.' 'Just rest your eyes.' Pat came out of school with a dark-haired boy who was swinging a battered Godzilla lunch box. 'You want to watch Star Wars at my house?' Pat asked him. 'Is it widescreen or pan and scan?' the boy said. 'Widescreen.' 'Okay.' 'Can he, Dad?'

I was searching the loud, laughing hordes for the one familiar face that I knew would be solemn and composed among all the high-pitched mayhem of 3.30. One little brown-eyed girl with a Pocahontas sandwich box. But she wasn't there. "Where's Peggy?' I asked.

'Peggy wasn't in today,' Pat said. 'Is it okay if Charlie comes back?'

No Peggy? I looked down at Charlie. Charlie looked up at me.

'It's fine by me,' I said. 'But we have to clear it with Charlie's mum.'

Pat and Charlie began cheering and laughing and shoving each other. The sharp edge of a Godzilla lunch box smacked against my knee. I missed Peggy already.

***

I opened the front door and Sally was standing there, warily peering up at me through her greasy fringe. 'Didn't think I'd see you again,' I said. 'I've come to say sorry.' I let her in.

Pat and Charlie were bickering about Star Wars on the sofa. Charlie wanted to fast forward over the love scenes and moments of reflection and get straight to the combat. Pat -ever the purist - wanted to watch the film from beginning to end. Sally stuck her head around the door to say hello to Pat and then we went into the kitchen.

'I've been thinking,' she said. 'And I realise how dumb it was of me to let Steve's friends in.'

'It would have been helpful if you'd thought about it at the time.'

'I know,' she said, her sheepish eyes peering at me from behind a curtain of hair. 'Sorry. I was just - I don't know how to put it - so happy to see him again.'

'Well, I can understand that,' I said. 'My heart skips a beat whenever Steve comes into view.' 'You don't like him,' she said. 'You're making fun.' 'How's it going anyway? You and Steve, I mean.'

'That's all over,' she said, and, as her eyes filled with tears, I suddenly felt very sorry for this painfully shy kid. 'He gave me the elbow again. Once he got what he wanted.'

'Sorry,' I said. 'It's true Steve's not my favourite human being. But I know you liked him. How old are you now? Fifteen?' 'Sixteen.'

'You'll meet somebody else. I'm not going to tell you that you don't know what love is at your age, because I don't believe that's true. But you will meet someone else, I promise you.' 'That's okay,' she said, sniffing snot up her nose. I handed her a piece of kitchen towel and she honked on it loudly. 'Doesn't matter. I just wanted to apologise for that night. And to tell you that if you were to give me another chance at babysitting for you, it wouldn't happen again.'

I looked at her carefully, knowing that some extra help with Pat would be useful. The old support network had suddenly disappeared. My dad was in the hospital. Cyd was gone. I was even starting to miss Bianca. Now it was just me and my mum, and we were sometimes finding it a struggle. 'You're on,' I said. 'I could use a babysitter.' 'Good,' Sally smiled. 'Because I could use the money.' 'Still living with Glenn?' 'Yeah. But I'm sort of, well, pregnant.' 'Jesus, Sally. Is this Steve's kid?' 'There hasn't been anybody else.' 'And what does Steve have to say about becoming a dad?'

'He's not too keen. I think his exact words were - fuck off and die. He wants me to get rid of it.' 'And you want to keep it?' She thought about it for a moment. Just a moment.

'I think it'll be good,' she said. 'I always wanted something that was only mine. Something that I could love and that would love me back. And this baby, this baby will love me.' 'Your dad knows about this, does he?'

She nodded. 'That's the one good thing about having a father who never stopped being a hippy,' she said. 'He doesn't get too upset by stuff like this. He was very cool when I had my stomach pumped when I was thirteen. Teenage pregnancy doesn't worry him. Although I think he's a bit shocked that I don't want an abortion.' 'But how are you going to support this child, Sally?' 'By babysitting for you.' 'That's not going to be enough.' 'We'll manage,' she said, and for once I didn't envy all the certainties of youth, I pitied them. 'Me and my baby.' Sally and her baby.

They would manage all right, but only with the state playing surrogate daddy because Steve wasn't quite up to the job. I wondered why I bothered paying taxes. I could just stick the money in Sally's pram and cut out the middleman.

Christ. Now I was really starting to sound like my old man.

'A baby's not the same as a teddy bear, Sally,' I said. 'It's not just there to cuddle and make you feel good. Once you've got a kid, you're not free any more. I don't know how to explain it. But it's like they own your heart.'

'But that's what I want,' she said. 'I want something to own my heart.' She shook her head, gently chastising me. 'You talk as though it's a bad thing.' Glenn came to pick her up, and they were just leaving when Marty arrived to talk about arrangements for his wedding day. I was about to make the introductions, but Glenn and Marty greeted each other like old friends. Now I remembered. They had met on my own wedding day.

So I made more coffee while they reminisced about Top of the Pops back in the glory days of the seventies, when Marty had been a fanatical viewer every Thursday night, and Glenn had briefly been a participant. Sally watched the pair of them with the smirking contempt of extreme youth. It was only when Glenn and Sally had finally gone that Marty told me he was having trouble sleeping.

'Everybody feels like that,' I said. 'A few doubts are natural before you get married.'

'I'm not worried about getting married,' he said. 'I'm worried about the show. Have you heard anything?' 'Like what?'

'Any rumours that the show isn't going to be recommis-sioned next year?'

'Your show? You're kidding. They would never drop The Marty Mann Show. Would they?'

'Sure they would. The word is that people shows are dying.' Marty sadly shook his head. 'That's the trouble with the world today, Harry. People are getting sick of the people.' 'Men die younger than women,' said my new solicitor. 'We catch cancer more often than women. We commit suicide with greater frequency than women. We are more likely to be unemployed than women.' His smooth, pudgy face creased into a grin, as though it were all a huge joke. His teeth were small and sharp. 'But for some reason I have never been able to fathom, Mr Silver, women are considered the victims.'

Nigel Batty was recommended to me by a couple of the boys on the show, the lighting director and the sound supervisor, who had both been through messy divorces over the last year.

A man said to have a messy divorce or two of his own behind him, Batty had a reputation for being fanatical about men's rights. For him all this stuff about long-term male unemployment and prostate cancer and men going into the garage and letting the engine run was far more than a sales pitch - it was the one true way, a new religion waiting to be born.

Despite his lack of height, the comfortable waistline concealed by a well-cut suit, and the milk-bottle glasses, Batty looked like a bruiser. I felt better already, knowing that he was in my corner.

'I warn you now that the law does not favour the father in cases such as this,' he said. 'The law should favour the child. And in theory it does. In theory, the welfare of the child should be the paramount consideration. But in practice it is not.' He looked at me with mean, angry eyes. 'The law favours the mother, Mr Silver. For generations of politically correct judges, the welfare of the child has been subjugated to the welfare of the mother. I warn you of this before we begin.'

'Anything you can do,' I said. 'Anything you can do to get me custody of my son.'

'It's not called custody any more, Mr Silver. Although the media still routinely talks of custody battles, since the Children Act of 1989, a parent no longer wins custody of their child. They are granted residency. You want to be granted a residence order in your favour.' 'I do?' Batty nodded.

'Residency replaced custody as a way of removing the confrontational nature of deciding where a child lives. A residence order does not deprive any other person of parental responsibility. The law was changed to make it clear that a child isn't a possession which can be won or lost. Under the terms of a residence order, a child lives with you. But a child does not belong to you.'

T don't get it,' I said. 'So what's the difference between trying to get a residence order and fighting for custody?'

'Not a damn thing,' Batty smiled. It's just as confrontational. Unfortunately it's far easier to change the law than it is to change human nature.' He examined the papers on his desk, nodding approvingly.

'The divorce is straightforward enough. And it looks to me like you're doing a pretty good job with your young son, Mr Silver. He's happy at school?' 'Very happy.' 'He sees his mother?' 'She can see him whenever she likes. She knows that.'

'And yet she wants him back,' said Nigel Batty. 'She wants residency.' 'That's right. She wants him to live with her.' 'Is she cohabiting?' 'What?'

'Has your ex-wife got a boyfriend, Mr Silver? A boyfriend who lives with her?'

'Yes,' I said, grateful to him for downgrading Gina's relationship with Richard to something as grubby as cohabiting, grateful that the big diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand meant bugger all to Nigel Batty. 'She's living with some guy she met in Tokyo.'

'Let's get this clear,' he said. 'She walked out and left you with your son?'

"Well, more or less. She actually took Pat - our son - with her when she went to her father's place. But I collected him and brought him home when she went to Japan.'

'So, she abandoned the marital home and, to all intents and purposes, left the child in your care,' said Nigel Batty. 'And now she's back in town and decides that she would like to play mother for a while.' 'She says she realises how much she loves him.' 'We'll see about that,' said my solicitor. thirty-three The weight was falling off him. My father had never been a thin man in his life, but now his cheeks were hollowing and the skin under his neck was starting to hang in loose, unshaven flaps. More and more, he was looking like someone I didn't recognise.

Even his arms had lost their old beefy strength, and those tattoos proclaiming his loyalty to my mother and the Commandos were looking as faded as photographs from another century.

The flesh was slipping away and his bones were becoming more visible with every visit, pushing up through skin with its waning tan that I realised with a start would probably never see the sun again. But he was smiling.

Sitting up in bed and smiling. And it was a real smile - not a being brave smile, not a smile that was forced or strained, but a smile of pure delight at the sight of his grandson.

'Hello, darling,' my dad said, as Pat walked up to his bed ahead of me, my mother and Uncle Jack. My father held up his right arm, the one where the intravenous drip was hooked to a vein in his wrist. 'Look at the state your old granddad's in.'

Pat had been full of life in Uncle Jack's car - excited to be awarded the special treat of a day off school, thrilled to be riding in the back of an executive saloon instead of the passenger seat of a vandalised sports car. But now he fell silent, warily approaching the bed and the sight of his grandfather's gaunt, stubbled face.

'Come here,' my father said, his voice gruff with emotion, holding out his free arm, and Pat climbed up on the bed and lay his head on my father's poor broken chest. They held each other in silence.

My mother shot a look at me. She had been against this visit.

There was no way of knowing if my father would be awake when we arrived. There was a very good chance that the pain could have been so bad that they would be pumping him full of opiates while we were looking for a parking space, and all Pat would have found was his grandfather lost and unknowing in some morphine fog. Or he could have been struggling for breath, his chest heaving, the oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, and his eyes wet with pain and fear. Or, although she didn't say it, he could have been dead.

All that was possible, even probable, and in the kitchen of her home, my mother had become angry and tearful with me at the thought of inflicting any one of those terrible things on Pat.

I had put my arms around her and assured her that it would be all right. And I was wrong. It was not all right -Pat was shocked and dismayed by the sight of his grandfather ravaged by disease, wasting away in a hospital bed in that room for dying men - the kind of dying that you never see on television or in the movies, the kind of dying that is full of agony and drugs and sadness at all that is about to be lost. I had been unprepared for the reality of death and there was no reason to believe that a five-year-old boy brought up on a diet of Star Wars would be any better prepared. No, it wasn't all right. But it was necessary. My father and my son needed to see each other. They needed to see that the bond between them still existed and would always exist. The love between them would always be there. They needed to know that the cancer couldn't kill that.

And I somehow knew - I just knew - that my father wouldn't be knocked out on narcotics or choking for breath if Pat was there.

There was no rational reason to believe that wouldn't happen if his grandson was there. It wasn't logical. Perhaps it was simply foolish. But I believed with all my heart that my dad would protect Pat from the very worst of it. I still believed there was a part of him that was invincible. I couldn't stop believing. 'Are you coming home soon?' Pat asked.

'Got to wait and see,' my father said. 'See what the doctors say. See if old Granddad gets a bit better. How's school?' 'Fine.' 'And the bike? How's old Bluebell?' 'Good.' 'A bit more fun without the stabilisers.' 'Yes,' Pat smiled. 'But I miss you.'

T miss you too,' my father said, and squeezed him tight, Pat's blonde head pressed against his striped blue pyjamas, the kind of old man's pyjamas that he would never wear at home. Then he nodded at me. 'Time to.go,' I said.

That was my father saying goodbye to his beloved grandson. Propped up in his hospital bed, surrounded by people who loved him and yet ultimately alone. Had we been there for five minutes or an hour? I couldn't tell. But I knew he wanted us to leave him now. And so we left my father fumbling with his oxygen mask, hunched and stubbled and looking older than I thought he would ever look, a young nurse chatting breezily at the foot of his bed.

Here, finally, was the worst thing of all. The awful and complete isolation of death, the terrible loneliness of the terminally ill. Nobody warns you about that.

With his breath going and the pain coming, we left him in that overcrowded NHS ward with winter sunlight coming through the big unwashed window and the chipmunk chatter of daytime television in the background. We left him. In the end, it was all we could do.

And as we walked back to the car Pat fought back the tears, angry - no, furious - at something that he couldn't name. I tried to comfort him but he wasn't interested in being comforted. My son looked like he felt he had been cheated. There was a removal van outside Cyd's flat.

It wasn't one of those huge lorries that you can load with the contents of a family's lifetime, one of those massive trucks which can hold pianos and worn-out furniture that you like too much to throw away and all the accumulated junk of the years. It was from the kind of removal firm that advertises in the back of the listings magazines, perfect for a little family that was travelling light.

I watched two young men in T-shirts edging a child's single bed into the back of the van. Although Cyd and Peggy lived on the top floor, the men looked as though this was one of their easier jobs.

Peggy appeared at the front door, dragging behind her a stuffed toy the size of a fridge. She looked at me with her solemn brown eyes, not surprised to see me here. 'Look what I've got,' I said, holding out a leering male doll in spangly silver trousers and what looked like a lilac tuxedo. It was a sex-change Barbie. 'Disco Ken,' she said, taking him.

'You left him at my house,' I said. 'I thought you might want him back.'

'Thank you,' she said, that beautifully behaved little girl. Then Cyd was behind her, a stack of paperbacks in her arms.

'Look what Harry brought me,' Peggy said. 'Disco Ken. I've been looking for him.'

Cyd told her to go up to her room and make sure she wasn't leaving anything behind. Peggy left the stuffed toy the size of a fridge on the pavement and disappeared into the house still clutching Disco Ken. 'How about you?' I said. 'You left anything behind?' 'No,' she said. 'I think I've got just about everything.'

The two removal guys brushed past us on their way back into the house.

'Moving without telling me?' I said. 'Some friend you turned out to be.'

'I was going to tell you. It's just - I don't know - it's easier this way. For everybody.' T looked for you at the cafe.' 'I quit.' 'So they told me.' 'We're moving across town. To Notting Hill.' 'West London?'

'Christ, don't look so shocked, Harry. I'm an American. Moving from one side of a city to another isn't quite as traumatic for me as it would be for you. Listen, I'm sorry but I'm really busy. What do you want? I can't believe that you came here just to bring back Disco Ken.'

'Disco Ken was part of it,' I said. 'But also I wanted to tell you that you're wrong.' 'About what?' 'About us. You're wrong about us. If we split up, then it's the end of the world.' 'Oh, Harry.'

'It's true. I know you don't believe in the one, the one person for someone in the whole world, but I do. You make me believe it, Cyd. And anyway, it doesn't matter what we believe. It's good between us. It works. And I've been thinking about it. There's not one more chance for me to get it right - you're it, you're my last chance for happiness, and even if there was another chance, I wouldn't want it. As Olivia Newton John said to John Travolta, you're the one that I want.' 'Wasn't it the other way round? Didn't John Travolta say it to Olivia Newton John?' 'Possibly.'

'Harry,' she said. 'There's something you have to know. I'm getting back with Peggy's dad. Jim and I are going to give it another go.' I stared at her as the removal men carried a sofabed between us. 'Nearly done,' one of them said. They went back inside the house. 'Sorry,' she told me. 'But do you love him?' I said. 'He's the father of my little girl.' 'But do you love him?'

'Come on, Harry, you're the one who's always agonising about the break-up of the family. You're the one who is always complaining about how hard it is to compete with blood, about all the messy, broken bits of what you call the lousy modern world. You should be pleased for me. You should wish me well.'

'But you have to love him, Cyd. None of it means a thing if you don't love him. Do you love him?' 'Yes. Okay? I love him. I never stopped loving him. And I want to give it a shot because he's given up his girlfriend, the Thai stripper, and he promises me that's all out of his system. The whole bamboo thing.' 'She's not a stripper. She's a lap dancer.'

'Whatever,' she said. 'But Peggy's thrilled that we're giving it another go. So even if you hate me, you should be pleased for her.' T don't hate you. I could never hate you.' 'Then please wish me well.'

T wish you well,' I said, and I even sort of meant it. She deserved to be happy. So did Peggy. I kissed her quickly on the cheek. 'Just don't tell me I don't know you, okay?'

I let them get on with their moving. Anything I said now would have sounded empty and selfish, as if they were just weasel words designed to get her to come back to me.

Yet as she prepared to go back to her husband, at last I saw the limits of the nuclear family. Now I realised that dad and mum and the kids is all very well.

But if you don't love each other, you might as well be shacked up with Disco Ken. 'We've had a response from the other side,' Nigel Batty said. 'Your ex-wife says that she remained faithful to you throughout the duration of your marriage but that you committed adultery with a colleague from work.'

'Well, that's true,' I said. 'But it was just a one-night stand. I'm not saying it's nothing, but -'

'She also alleges that your son received a severe head injury while in your care.'

'What does that mean? That sounds like I'beat him up or something. He fell, okay? There was an accident in the local park. He fell into an empty swimming pool and split his head open. And maybe I could have done more. Maybe I should have been watching him more closely. Does she honestly believe that hasn't crossed my mind again and again and again? But at least I was there for him. She was eating tempura with her boyfriend in Tokyo.' The solicitor peered closely at the papers on his desk.

'And she seems to believe that you're not exercising proper parental control over what your son watches or listens to.' 'That's just crazy.'

'He's allowed to watch violent films unsupervised, she suggests. Videos with adult themes. And she says that on her last access visit she discovered that he had in his possession a music tape containing songs of a profane and adult nature.' I could feel my face reddening with anger. 'That fucking… fucking

I couldn't find the word. There was no word strong enough.

Nigel Batty laughed out loud, as though I were finally starting to understand. thirty-four 'Can I see the medal?' I asked. 'Of course you can,' my mother said.

She went to the cabinet where the stereo sat, and I could hear her shuffling through insurance documents, bank statements, letters, all the paperwork of a lifetime.

She came back with a small rectangular box which was coloured somewhere beyond claret, but not quite black. Inside, there was a silver medal, not that clean, resting on purple velvet. My father's medal.

The medal's ribbon was blue and white, two broad vertical white stripes with one thin vertical white stripe between them dissecting a blue background. 'For Distinguished Service,' it said on the medal, next to the image of the head of the King.

In the top of the box the maker's name was inscribed on white silk - 'By Appointment,' it said above the Royal Warrant, 'J. R. Gaunt amp; Son Ltd, 60 Conduit Street, London.' And I remembered how, as a child, the name of that company - did it still exist? would it be there if I looked for it? - had seemed like another part of the citation.

I gently took it out, as surprised by the weight of my father's DSM at thirty as I had been as a boy.

'Pat used to love playing with Dad's medal,' my mother laughed. 'You let Pat play with this?' I said, incredulous. 'He liked pinning it on me,' she smiled. 'I had to be Princess Layla at the end of that film.' 'Leia, Mum. She's Princess Leia.'

It was just past the middle of the night, and we were too tired to sit by his hospital bed any longer, but too restless to sleep. So we were going to have a nice cup of tea. Still my mother's answer to everything.

And as she went off to put the kettle on, I held the medal in my fist and thought about how the games I had played as a boy had prepared me to be the man my father had been, and the man his father had been before him - a fighting man, a man who kissed some tearful woman goodbye and put on a uniform and went to war.

Looking back on the games we had played in the fields and the backstreets of my childhood, they seemed to be more than childish pastimes lauding the manly virtues -they seemed to be preparing us for the next war, for our own Normandy or Dunkirk or Monte Casino.

My generation had played games with toy guns - or sticks pretending to be guns, or fingers pretending to be guns, anything could stand in for a gun - and nobody had thought that it was unhealthy or distasteful. But the only wars we saw as young men were small wars, television wars, as real and as life-threatening to the non-combatants as a video game.

My generation, the last of the generations of small boys who played with toy guns, were luckier than we knew. We didn't have a war waiting for us when we grew up. There were no Germans or Japanese for us to fight.

Our wives, that's who we fought with, this generation of men blessed with peace. And the divorce courts, that's where we fought our own grubby little wars.

I had seen the scars on my father's body enough times to know that war was not a John Wayne movie. But the men who survived - and who came home in more or less one piece - found someone to love for a lifetime. Which was better? War and a perfect love? Or peace and love which came in instalments of five, six or seven years? Who was really the lucky man? My father or me?

'You liked this girl, didn't you?' my mum said, coming back into the room with a steaming mug in each hand. 'This woman, I mean. Cyd. You liked her a lot.' I nodded.

'I wish we could have held it together. Like you and Dad did. It seems impossible these days.'

'You're too sentimental about the past,' she said, not unkindly. 'You think it was all brown ale and red roses. But it was harder than that.' 'But you and Dad were happy.'

'Yes, we were,' she said, her eyes drifting away to some place where I couldn't follow her. 'We were happy.' And I thought - I was happy too.

When I thought of my childhood, I thought of some sunbaked August - right at the start of the month, when the long six-week holiday was still stretching gloriously out ahead of me, and I knew there would be car rides to country pubs where my dad and my uncles would play darts and bring lemonade and crisps out to me and my cousins playing on the grass, our mothers laughing over Babychams at wooden tables, as separated from the men as Muslims.

Or it was some other holiday - Christmas, late at night with my uncles and aunts smoking and drinking in a card school, with football on Boxing Day at a misty Upton Park for the men and the boys.

Or it would be a Bank Holiday run to the coast, with huge pink clouds of candyfloss on a stick and the smell of the sea and frying onions, or to the dog track where my mum always bet on the number six dog because she liked the colours, she liked the way the red number looked against the black and white stripes.

I was grateful for that suburban childhood - for those memories of car rides and modest gambling and day trips - it seemed like a childhood crowded with life and love, a good time to be growing up, when Bobby Moore was at West Ham and Miss World was on the box and my mum and my aunts wore miniskirts.

And although my son's childhood had more material things, it also had the numbing bankruptcy of divorce.

With all the diplomatic skills and emotional armour that a five-year-old could muster, he now ricocheted between his mother and her boyfriend and his father and his badly bruised heart. A video recorder and the passenger seat of a flash car seemed like small compensation for all that.

It felt to me like Gina and I - and the million couples just like us - hadn't left much of an inheritance for the next generation.

'It worked between us because we made it work,' my mother said. 'Because we wanted it to work. Because -even when we didn't have money, even when we couldn't have a baby - we didn't chuck in the towel. You have to fight for your happy ending, Harry. It doesn't just drop in your lap.'

'You think I didn't fight for my happy ending? You think I haven't got enough fight in me? Not like Dad?'

I was curious to know what she believed. There was a time, when I was young and cocky, when I felt that my parents knew nothing of life beyond their well-tended garden and their overheated living room. But I didn't feel that way about them any more.

'I think you've got a lot of fight in you, Harry. But you beat yourself up sometimes. You can't be the same man your father was - it's a different world. Almost a different century. You have to fight different battles and not expect anyone to pin a medal on your chest. Looking after a child alone - you think your father could have done that? I love him more than my life, but that would have been beyond him. You have to be strong in a different way. You have to be a different kind of tough guy.' I put the medal back in its box and the telephone rang.

My mother's eyes flicked to the clock and back to me, full of tears. It was just after four in the morning and this could only be my Uncle Jack calling from the hospital. We both knew.

We held each other tight, the phone still ringing in the hall. Ringing and ringing.

'We should have been there with him,' my mother said, as she would say so many times in the days and weeks and years to come. 'We should have been there.'

Here's what a happy ending looks like, I thought bitterly. You spend your life with someone and then, if they go before you, you feel as though you have lost all your limbs.

At least my generation - the fuck around, fuck up and fuck off generation - would be spared the knowledge of exactly what that particular amputation feels like. Assuming that we don't have any happy endings of our own.

I picked up the telephone and my Uncle Jack told me that my father had died. In the morning I went up to see Pat as soon as I heard his footsteps padding across the floor to the box of toys that my parents always kept for him in their second bedroom, the room where he always slept when he was here, the room that had once been mine.

He looked up at me from the toy box, a Star Wars figure in each hand, his eyes still puffy with sleep. I picked him up, kissed his sweet face, and sat down on the bed with him on my lap. 'Pat, your grandfather died in the night.' He blinked at me with those blue eyes.

'Granddad had been ill for a long time and now he doesn't have to suffer any more,' I said. 'Now he's at peace. We can be happy about that, can't we? He's not in pain any more. He will never feel any more pain again.' 'Where is he now?' This threw me. 'Well, his body is at the hospital. Later it will be buried.'

I realised that I knew nothing about the bureaucracy of death. When would they collect his body from the hospital? Where would they keep it before his funeral? And who exactly were they?

'We're sad now,' I said. 'But one day we will be grateful for Granddad's life. We will realise that we were lucky - I was lucky to have him as my father and you were lucky to have him as your grandfather. We were both very lucky. But we can't feel lucky today. It's too soon.'

Pat nodded, very businesslike. 'He's still at the hospital?' 'His body is at the hospital. But his spirit has gone.' 'What's his spirit?'

'That's the spark of life that made your granddad the man he was.' 'Where's it gone?' I took a breath.

'Some people think the spirit goes to heaven and lives forever. Some people think that it just disappears and then you sleep forever.' 'What do you believe?

T think that the spirit lives on,' I said. 'I don't know if it's in heaven or if it's somewhere else, some other place that I don't know anything about. But it doesn't just die. It lives on. Even if it's only in the hearts of the people we love.' 'That's what I believe too,' said my son. With the slashed roof of the MGF cracking like a torn sail in a stiff gale, I drove slowly down the high street of the little town where I had grown up, not recognising the place.

Everywhere the shops and small cafes that I had known had become estate agents or the outlets of some big chain. No wonder the English have become so desperate to wave the flag of St George, to remind ourselves that our roots are just as deep and defined as those of the Irish or the Scots. This was my home town. But it could have been anywhere.

I didn't see a thing I recognised until I found my Uncle Jack in the snug of the old Red Lion, this pub seemingly the one part of the high street which was protected by an unofficial preservation order. He was in a fug of cigarette smoke, fag cupped in his palm, drinking a mineral water under the oak beams and horse brasses. 'Sorry about your dad, Harry.' 'Thanks, Uncle Jack.' 'You want one of these? Or shall we just do it?' 'Let's just do it.'

My Uncle Jack was at my side as I dealt with the bureaucracy of death. I was still numb from lack of sleep and the shock of knowing that my father was no longer in the world. But my Uncle Jack's craggy, chain-smoking presence made it a lot easier for me.

We drove to the hospital in the MGF and collected a pitiful little bag from the front office containing my father's belongings.

His wallet with his picture of his grandson inside, his reading glasses, his false teeth.

This was all that was left of him, handed over to me without sentiment or condolences. Why should they be sad for him? Or for me? They never knew my father. We moved on down the chain.

For some obscure administrative reason, we had to register the death in a small town that I had never been to before, although with its Burger King and Body Shop and estate agents, it looked depressingly familiar.

Part of the great procession of living and dying, we were behind a young couple registering their baby's birth and ahead of an old woman registering the death of her husband. And I wondered why Nigel Batty complained about men dying before their partners. What a relief not to have to visit this place, what a relief not to be condemned to living on alone.

Finally, we went back to my home town to see the undertaker. Like the pub, this was another place that had never changed in my memory - getting pissed and dropping dead, the two great perennials of the English high street.

With its gloomy window display of white headstones arrayed against acres of black silk, it had always looked closed when I was growing up, this boutique for the bereaved, and it looked closed now. When I was a child just discovering that I wasn't going to live forever, I used to walk quickly past this place. Now I went inside. And it was fine. Uncle Jack lightly rested a hand on my shoulder and I talked calmly to the undertaker about the funeral arrangements, as if this happened to me every day. With the death certificate between us, it seemed perfectly natural to be talking to this sombre old man in black about my father's burial. The only truly strange moment was when, almost apologetically, the undertaker produced a glossy brochure. I had to choose my father's coffin. It was a brochure like any other - tastefully shot, beautifully presented - and the undertaker gently led me through it, starting with the cheapest, simplest pine numbers, going right up to the top of the range model, a large hardwood coffin lined with red satiny material and adorned with big brass handles.

My first instinct was to go for the most expensive one -let's push the boat out, nothing's too good for my old man. But my second instinct was that the top of the range coffin was just a touch too elaborate for my dad to sleep in for all eternity.

I hesitated, and told the undertaker that we would go for the second most expensive coffin. And when Uncle Jack and I were back on the street, I was pleased with my choice.

'Your old man would have had a fit at that posh coffin,' my Uncle Jack grinned.

'The most expensive one?' I smiled. 'Yeah, I thought that was a bit much.'

'Gold handles and a red velvet lining!' chuckled Uncle Jack. 'It looked more like a French knocking shop than a coffin!'

'Talk about turning in your grave,' I laughed. T know what he would have said if we'd gone for that one - "Who do you think I am? Bloody Napoleon?"' I could hear his voice. I would never hear his voice again. I would always hear him. thirty-five 'Two ducks check into a hotel,' said Eamon. 'Best hotel in Kilcarney. Big weekend for the ducks. But - no, listen -they get up to their room and they discover they don't have any condoms. No problem, says the man duck - I'll get room service to send some up. Call down to room service. Eventually the boy appears with the condoms. He says - Do you want me to put these on your bill, sir? And the duck, he says - Do I look like some kind of pervert to you?'

Eamon removed the mike from its stand in complete silence. They were going to put the laughter track on later.

'I feel for that duck,' he said, moving across a stage that seemed somehow brighter than usual, in front of an audience who were noticeably better-looking than normal. 'Because there's no real sex education in Kilcarney. My dad told me that the man goes on top and the woman goes on the bottom. So all through my first serious relationship, my girlfriend and I slept in bunk beds. You see, where I come from, sex is hereditary - if your mum and dad didn't have it, the chances are that you won't either.'

He placed the mike back in its stand, grinning into the lights.

'Luckily I'm a good lover now - but that's only because I practise a lot on my own. Thank you and goodnight!'

The audience applauded wildly as Eamon skipped to the side of the stage where a beautiful girl with a clipboard and headphones handed him a bottle of beer. Then he seemed to swoon, sinking to one knee, the bottle of beer still in his hand as he half-turned and retched into a sand bucket - a real sand bucket, not a pretend one. 'Cut, cut,' the director said.

I ran on to the set and crouched by Eamon's side, my arm around his shaking shoulders. Mem stood by my side, wide-eyed with concern and unrecognisable with her clothes on.

'Don't be afraid, Eamon,' I said. 'It's only a lager commercial.' 'I'm not afraid,' he said weakly. 'I'm excited.' I wasn't excited. I was afraid. Very afraid.

My father - my father's body - was at the undertaker's. And I was going to see it.

The undertaker had mentioned the possibility of seeing the body - viewing the loved one at rest, he had said quietly, proud of this service they offered at no extra charge - and this meeting, this final meeting between my father and me, had assumed impossible proportions in my head.

How would I feel when I saw the man who gave me life lying in his coffin? Would I unravel? Could I stand the sight of my great protector waiting for his grave? I couldn't stop myself believing that it would be too much, that I would crumple and come apart, that the years would be wiped away and I would be a sobbing child once more.

When I saw him lying there, the brutal fact of his death would be beyond all lingering doubt and disbelief. Could I take it? That's what I wanted to know. I had learned that fathering a child didn't make you truly adult. Does a man have to bury his father before he feels truly grown?

My Uncle Jack was waiting for me in the snug of the old Red Lion. My mother had shaken her head and turned away when I had asked her if she wanted to come with me. I didn't blame her. But I needed to know if I could live with the knowledge that I was alone now.

Not alone, of course. There was still my mother, sleeping with the lights in her bedroom blazing all night long, bewildered to be alone for the first time in a lifetime. And there was Pat, bouncing between the joy of seeing Gina again and the suffocating grief in our own home. And there was Cyd - out there somewhere, lost in some other part of the city, sharing her life with some other man.

But with my father gone, there was a part of me that felt alone - at last and forever.

Even when relations between us had been strained, he had always been my shield, my guardian, my greatest ally. Even when we had bickered and fought, even when I had disappointed him or let him down, I had always been secure in the knowledge that he would still do anything for me. Now all that was gone.

Uncle Jack stubbed out his roll-up and drained his mineral water. We walked to the undertaker's, not saying much, although when we went inside and a little bell jingled announcing our arrival, Uncle Jack placed his hand on my shoulder. My uncle wasn't keen to see his brother's body. He was doing this for me.

The undertaker was expecting us. He led us into an antechamber which looked like some kind of changing room. There were heavy curtains on both sides, divided up into maybe half a dozen individual compartments. I took a breath and held it as he pulled back one of the little curtains to reveal my father in his coffin.

Except that it wasn't my father. Not any more. His face - the only part of him that was visible with the coffin lid opened just a shade - had an expression I had never seen before. He didn't look peaceful, or as though he were sleeping or any of death's soothing cliches. His face was empty. It had nothing to do with him any more, it was drained of identity as well as all pain and exhaustion. It was like knocking on a door and discovering that nobody was home. More than this - it was as though we had come to the wrong place. The spark that had made my father the man he was had gone. I knew with total certainty that his soul had flown. I had come looking for my father, to see him one last time. But I wouldn't find him here.

I wanted to see Pat. I wanted to hold my son in my arms and tell him that everything we had both tried so hard to believe was all true. thirty-six Usually I stayed inside the house, well back from the window, watching from behind the blinds as the silver Audi snaked down the street, looking for a scrap of parking space. But today I came out when I saw them coming - the now familiar car with the familiar configuration inside.

Pat's blond head in the back seat, looking down at some new trinket he had been given. Gina in the passenger seat, turning to talk to him. And in the driving seat, this unimaginable Richard, the semi-separated man, cool and confident at the wheel, as if ferrying Gina and Pat around town in his Audi were the natural order of things.

I had never spoken to him. I had never even seen him get out of his car when they delivered Pat back to me. He was dark, beefy and wore glasses - a suit that worked out. Good-looking in a Clark Kent kind of way. There was a tiny parking space just in front of the house, and I watched him expertly reverse the Audi into it, the bastard.

Usually Gina knocked on the door, said hello to me and quickly kissed Pat goodbye. The handover was done with minimum civility, which was about as much as either of us could muster. Still, we were trying. Not for our sakes, but for the sake of our child. But today I was waiting at the front gate for them. She didn't seem surprised. 'Hello, Harry.' 'Hi.' 'Look what I've got!' Pat said, brandishing his new toy - some scowling plastic spaceman with an unfeasibly large laser gun - as he brushed past me into the house.

'Sorry about your dad,' Gina said, staying on the other side of the gate. 'Thanks.'

Tm really sorry. He was the most gentle man I ever met.' 'He was mad about you.' T was mad about him, too.' 'Thanks for Pat's toy.' 'Richard bought it for him in Hamley's.' 'Good old Richard.' She shot me a look. 'I'd better be going,' she said. 'I thought you didn't like Pat playing with guns.'

She shook her head and gave a little laugh, one of those laughs that's meant to indicate that it wasn't funny at all. 'If you really want to know, I believe that there's enough violence in this world without encouraging children to think that guns are a form of light entertainment. Okay? But he wanted the gun.' 'I'm not going to give him up, Gina.' 'That's for the lawyers to decide. And we're not supposed -'

'I've changed my life to look after my son. I took a part-time job. I learned to organise things in the house, stuff that I never even had to think about before. Feeding him, clothing him, getting him to bed. Answering his questions, being there for him when he was sad or frightened.' 'All the things I did more or less alone for years.'

'That's my point exactly. I taught myself how to care for our child - the way you cared for him. And then you come back and tell me that's all over.'

'You've done a good job over the last few months, Harry. But what do you want? A medal?'

'I don't need a medal. I haven't done anything more than I should have done. I know it's nothing special. But you expect too much of me, Gina. I learned how to be a real father to Pat - I had to, okay? Now you want me just to act as though it never happened. And I can't do it. How can I do it? Tell me how I can do it.'

'Is there a problem?' Richard said, emerging from the Audi. So he did have legs after all. 'Get back in the car, Richard,' Gina said. 'Yeah, get back in the car, Richard,' I said. He got back in the car, blinking behind his glasses.

'You have to decide what you really want, Gina. All of you.' 'What are you talking about?'

'I'm all for men taking responsibility for their children. I'm all for men doing their bit in bringing up their kids. But you can't have it both ways. You can't expect us to take part in the parenting and then just step aside when you want us to, as if we were just like our dads, as if it was all really women's work. Remember that the next time you see your solicitor.' 'And you remember something, Harry.' 'What's that?' 'I love him, too.' Pat was on the floor of his room, tipping a box full of toys on to the floor.

'You have a good time, darling? A good time with Mummy and Richard?'

I sounded ridiculously upbeat, like a game-show host when the really big prize is up for grabs, but I was determined to make Pat feel okay about these new arrangements. I didn't want him to feel that he was betraying me every time he went out to have a good time with his mother and her boyfriend. But I didn't want him to have too good a time either.

'It was all right,' he said. 'Richard and Mummy had a little bit of a row.' Wonderful news. 'Why was that, darling?'

'I got some Magnum on the seat of his stupid car. He thought I shouldn't eat Magnum in the car.' 'But you like Richard?' 'He's all right.'

I felt a pang of sympathy for this man I had never met. Not much of a pang. Just a little one. But a pang all the same. The role he had chosen felt like an impossible part to play. If he tried to be a father to Pat, then he would surely fail. And if he decided to be just a friend, then that would be a kind of failure, too. But at least Richard had a choice.

Who asked Pat if he wanted to be eating a Magnum in the back of that silver Audi? Cyd was working in one of those designer Asian restaurants that were starting to appear all over town, one of those places that sells Thai fishcakes, Japanese soba noodles and cold Vietnamese spring rolls as if they all come from the same place, as if that entire continent had been turned into one big kitchen for the West. It was bright and white, full of polished wood and gleaming chrome, like an art gallery or a dentist's surgery.

From the street I watched Cyd placing two steaming plates of what looked like Malaysian king prawn curry in front of a pair of young women who smiled their thanks at her.

Like every other waitress in there, she was wearing a starched white apron, black trousers and a white shirt. Her hair was cut shorter than I had ever seen it - it was almost boyish now, she had gone from an F. Scott Fitzgerald bob to a Beatle cut in just one trip to the hairdresser's. I knew it meant something important when a woman chopped off her hair, but I couldn't remember what.

She headed towards the back of the place, saying something to the young black guy behind the bar that made him laugh, and disappeared into the kitchen. I took a seat near the front of the restaurant, waiting for her to appear again.

It was after three, and the place was almost empty. Apart from me and the two young women eating their spicy prawns, the only other customers were a table of three well-lunched businessmen, empty bottles of Asahi Super Dry strewn in front of them. A young waitress placed a menu on my table just as Cyd banged back out of the kitchen doors.

At head height and balanced on the palm of her hand, she was carrying a tray holding three bottles of Japanese beer. She unloaded them in front of the drunken suits, not noticing me, ignoring their red-faced leers, not really aware of any of us. 'When do you get off?' one of them asked.

'Don't you mean how?' she said, turning away as they erupted with laughter, and seeing me at last. She slowly came over to my table. 'What would you like?' 'How about spending the rest of our lives together?' 'That's off. How about some noodles?' 'Okay. Have you got the thick kind?'

'Udon? Sure. We do udon noodles in broth with prawns, fish, shitake mushrooms and all that good stuff.'

'Actually, I'm not that hungry. But this is a coincidence, isn't it? Running into each other like this.'

'It certainly is, Harry. How did you know I was working here?' 'I didn't. This is the forty-second place I've tried over the last few days.' 'You really are crazy.' 'Crazy for you.' 'Just crazy. How's your dad?' 'The funeral's tomorrow.' 'God, I'm sorry. Is Pat all right?' I took a breath.

'They were very close. You know that. It's a big loss for him. I don't know - he's dealing with it. Same as my mother. I'll be glad to get the funeral behind us.'

'After the funeral can be the worst part. Because everybody goes home and life starts to go on again. Except, for you, it doesn't. Is there anything I can do?' 'Yes.' 'What's that?' 'You can let me walk you home.' 'You've got to stop following me around,' she said as we walked through the silent white side streets of Notting Hill. 'It's got to stop.' 'I like your hair.' She grabbed her fringe in her hand.

'It's no good for you and it's no good for me,' she said. 'Oh, I don't know. It doesn't look that bad.' 'You know what I'm talking about.' 'I want us to be a family.'

T thought you hated that kind of family - the kind of family that is full of other people's children and ex-partners. I thought you wanted an uncomplicated life.'

T don't want an uncomplicated life. I want a life with you. And Peggy. And Pat. And maybe a kid of our own.' 'One of those families? With your kid and my kid fighting our kid? You'd hate it. You would really hate it, Harry. You'd last - well, I don't know how long you'd last.'

'I could never hate my life if it was with you. Listen, there was a tattoo on my dad's arm, some words written under one of those long, thin Commando knives. And it said - United We Conquer. And that's how I feel about us.' 'You're getting a tattoo?' 'No.' 'You're joining the army?'

'What I'm saying is that if we're together, then everything will be all right. I don't know what kind of family life it will be - because there have never been families like this before. But I know that it would be better than any other family we could ever have apart. Just think about it, okay?'

'Sure, Harry. I'll discuss it with my husband over dinner tonight.'

We had stopped outside an old white town house that had been chopped up into flats forty years ago. 'This is it, Harry,' she said.

And then Jim was suddenly bursting out of the front door, his arm in a plaster cast and a sling, screaming, 'Stay away from my wife, you bastard!' as he smoothly swung round in a full circle and his motorcycle boot exploded in my mouth.

I reeled backwards, my gums split and bloody, my legs gone to jelly, and two things were immediately clear.

Jim knew a bit about martial arts. And he had fallen off his bike again.

I bounced off some dustbins and lifted my fists as he came at me, but Cyd had moved between us and he howled with pain as she grabbed his broken arm. 'Leave him alone! Leave him alone!' she shouted at him.

'Watch my fucking arm, will you!' he shouted back at her. But he let her lead him back to the door. He turned to growl at me. 'If ever I see your face again,' he said, 'you lose all your teeth.' 'It wouldn't be the first time.'

I didn't explain that a friendly dog had pushed me on my face when I was five years old. That wouldn't have sounded quite so impressive. He went back inside the house, holding his plaster cast.

They must have been living in the ground floor flat because I could hear what sounded a lot like Peggy crying. Cyd turned to look at me. 'Please leave me alone now, Harry.'

'Just think about what I said,' I slurred through my fat and bloody lips. 'Please consider my offer.'

She shook her head and - I know it's dumb - but I felt that she was starting to really like me. 'You don't give up, do you?' she said. T get it from my father,' I said.

Then she closed the door of the big white house and went back to her life. thirty-seven A mile from our family home, there is a small church on a hill.

As a boy, wandering where he wasn't supposed to wander on light summer nights, I had sometimes lurked in the graveyard of this church, drinking cider and choking on a Number 6 and peering down the sights of my friend's.22 air rifle.

We were not as cocky as we looked. At the slightest sound - the wind in the trees, the rustle of leaves across the cold stone of a grave, some ancient wood creaking inside the church - my friend and I would bolt in panic, terrified that the dead were about to reveal themselves to us. And now my father was going to be buried here.

I woke to the sound of the paper boy's bike, the Mirror roughly shoved through the letter box, the low hum of the radio coming from the kitchen. For one moment between sleep and waking, it felt like just another day.

But after breakfast we donned our bleak uniforms of mourning, my son and I, both awkward in our black ties and white shirts, and we sat on the floor of my old bedroom, thumbing through box after box of photographs, consoling ourselves with images of my father, his grandfather.

Time ran backwards, unravelled. There were bright colour pictures of my dad with Pat - opening Christmas presents, riding his Bluebell bike with the stabilisers still attached, Pat as an impossibly blond toddler, and as a sleeping baby in the arms of his grinning grandfather.

And lots of pictures with the colours fading now - my dad and my mum with Gina and me on our wedding day, me as a smirking teenager with my dad, a fit fifty-odd, our arms around each other in our back garden - proud of his garden, proud of me - and still further back, me as a goofy eleven-year-old with my parents, still young, in the crowd shot of some cousin's wedding.

And all the way back to the beginning of memory and beyond - a black and white shot of me as a crop-haired child with my dad and the horses on Salisbury Plain, another black and white picture of my dad laughing as he lifted me up on some windswept beach, and pictures in shades of grey of him in uniform and my parents on their wedding day.

No pictures of him as a child or a baby. I knew it was simply because they had been too poor to have a camera, but it felt as though his life had only begun with our little family.

Downstairs the flowers had started arriving. Pat and I went to the window of my parents' room at the front of the house and watched the florist unloading them from his van. Soon the cellophane-wrapped bouquets covered all of the front lawn, and I thought of Princess Diana and the sea of flowers that had washed up against the black railings of the royal palaces. It was just another job for the florist, and the first job of the day, but he seemed genuinely moved.

'I wish I had known this man,' I heard him tell my mother, and I knew that he meant it. We had a laugh when the coffin arrived at the church. It was a desperate laugh, one of those laughs that is there as a dam against tears which you are afraid will never stop if they are allowed to start, but a laugh all the same.

We were following the coffin into the old church, my mother, my son and I, but for some reason the four pallbearers stopped at the entrance. Although Pat and I had her between us, our arms around her, my mother kept going, her eyes on the ground. And she only stopped when she smacked her head hard against the end of her husband's coffin.

She staggered backwards, holding her forehead, looking for blood on her fingertips, and then she looked at me and we both laughed out loud. We were both hearing his voice, that old London voice full of weary affection. 'What are you doing, woman?'

Then we went inside the coolness of the church and it was like stepping into a dream, a dream where everyone you have ever known - relatives, friends of the family, neighbours from the present and the past, men in Royal Naval Commando ties who had met as teenagers and were now seventy - had gathered together for one last time, row upon row of them, some starting to cry at the sight of my father's coffin.

The three of us were in the front pew. Once the three of us would have meant my parents and me. Now it was my mother, my son and me. Their heads were down, staring at the flagstones, the laughter all gone, but I watched the vicar as he began to quote from Isaiah - 'They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.'

His sermon was about the good soldier who became a man of peace - the warrior who learned to be the loving husband, the kind father, the caring neighbour. And I could tell that he had worked hard at this speech, that he had talked to my mother and my uncles and Auntie Ethel next door who wasn't really my auntie. But the vicar had never met my father, and so he could never really capture him and his life.

It was only when the old song that my mother had chosen echoed through the crowded church that I had to get a grip of my heart, that I felt the weight of all that we had lost.

More than the hymns or the sermon or the well-meant platitudes or the faces of all the people he had ever known, it was this old song that got to me. Sinatra's voice, very young, very pure, lacking all the swagger and cynicism of his later years. It rose and soared around that little church.

And my mother didn't move, but I could feel her holding Pat more fiercely, as if she were afraid of being swept to some other place and time, somewhere in the lonely future when she could only sleep with the bedroom lights blazing, or somewhere in the lost, unrecoverable past. Someday When I'm awfully low, When the world is cold, I will feel a glow Just thinking of you, And the way you look tonight. And I could hear my father's voice complaining at the choice, his voice full of wonder at this woman he had shared his life with but who never ceased to amaze him.

'Not early Sinatra, woman! Not all that swooning bobby-soxer stuff he recorded for Columbia! If you've got to pick Sinatra, then pick something from one of the Capitol albums of the fifties - "One For My Baby", "Angel Eyes", "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" - one of the great saloon songs. But not that early stuff! And what's wrong with Dean Martin? I always preferred old Dino anyway.'

It was true. My father's favourite was Dean Martin. Sinatra, as much as he liked him, was a bit too much of the smooth romantic for my old man. He far preferred Dean Martin's hard centre. But of course the song wasn't my father's choice. It was my mother's. It wasn't about how he saw himself. It was about how she saw him, knew him, loved him. But you're lovely! With your smile so warm And your cheek so soft There is nothing for me But to love you Just the way you look tonight. The undertaker's men carried my father's coffin out of the church - gently, gently - and into the graveyard as we followed, dazed by the rituals of death, to the latest grave in a sloping field of headstones.

The freshly dug plot was at the end of a long line of graves, and one day, after this church had seen many more funerals, it would be difficult to find my father's resting place because it would be in the middle of a forest of headstones, just one among the many. But not now. Not today. Today my father was the latest arrival in this eternal place. It was easy to find his grave today.

And there was his headstone - white and new, my father's epitaph carved in gleaming black on the top half, leaving space for another inscription - for his wife, my mother, Pat's grandmother - to one day be carved.

PATRICK WILLIAM ROBERT SILVER, DSM, it said, a name from the days when ordinary families gave their children as many names as they could remember, as many names as they could carry, and below the dates of his birth and death, BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER AND GRANDFATHER.

The vicar was talking - ashes to ashes, dust to dust, come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world - but all I could hear was a scrap from one of the old songs, a song asking someone to never, ever change.

We were on the edge of the open grave, at the front of a large crowd of mourners. Some of them I didn't know. Some of them I had known all my life. And yet the faces that I knew were changed - I remembered laughing uncles and good-looking aunts in their middle years, the good years of new cars and bright clothes and summer days on the coast, their children growing or perhaps already grown.

Now these faces I knew were older than I had ever expected them to be, and the confidence of their thirties and forties had somehow slipped away with the years. They had come to see my father buried, the first of their generation to go, and their own deaths must have suddenly seemed very real. They wept for him and also for themselves.

In the distance I could see the fields where I had roamed as a boy, dark brown in mid-winter and as rectangular as playing fields, bordered by scrawny bare trees.

Did children still play on that ragged farmland? Somehow it seemed unlikely. But I remembered every brilliant stream, every muddy ditch, the stagnant pond inside the thick spinney, and all the farmers who chased us away, me and my friends, those city children with suburban lives.

Up here there was no sign of the housing estates and shopping centres that were very close by. Up here all you could see were fields. Up here this place felt like real country.

This was why my father had escaped the city. Those fields where I had played as a boy - that was what my dad had dreamed of, and now he was going to be buried among them.

There was crying all around now - louder, uncontrolled, more stung with grief - and I looked up and saw the tears on faces that I loved. My dad's brothers. Our neighbours. My mother and my son.

But I stood there dry-eyed as I watched them lower my father's coffin into the freshly dug grave, one arm wrapped tightly around my mother, who had her own arms around her sobbing grandson, and my free hand stuffed deep into the pocket of my black suit, my fist holding my father's silver medal as though I would never let it go. thirty-eight 'The world is changing,' said Nigel Batty. 'It's not the seventies any more. This isn't Kramer versus Kramer. In residency disputes, the law still favours the mother - and it always will. But there's a growing awareness that not every lousy parent is a man.'

T hate the thought of my son growing up around some other guy,' I said, more to myself than to my lawyer. T hate the thought of him being in the same house as someone who hasn't really got any interest in him at all. Someone who's only interested in his mother.'

'That's not going to happen. No matter what she says -she left both of you. And you've done a good job while your son has been in your care. No matter what she tells her solicitor.'

T can't believe she's making me out to be negligent. If she kept it clean, I could respect her. But this - it makes my blood boil, you know what I mean, Nigel?' T know.'

My lawyer was no longer Mr Batty to me. Now he was Nigel. Now he had told me his story.

Seven years ago he had married a French woman who he had met while she was working for a barrister in London. They settled here and had twin daughters within a year of their wedding. But when their marriage came apart two years ago, his wife - soon to be ex-wife - decided she wanted to return to France. And with the Court of Appeal's approval, she had received permission to take their daughters out of the country. Nigel Batty hadn't seen them since.

'So my children end up losing one parent and no doubt loathing the other one,' he said. 'Thanks to some dumb fuck of a judge who thinks that the mother is the only parent who counts. And there's nothing special about me - plenty of fathers lose contact with their children. Because the women they married want to punish them.'

I made sympathetic noises. It was late in the evening and the cleaning staff were shuffling around his empty office in the West End. He sat on his desk and stared down at the traffic clogged up on Hanover Square.

'My children would certainly be better off with two parents. But working that one out - the impossible task of letting them keep both parents - that would have taken a degree of compromise. And residency disputes are not about compromise. And they are not about what's best for the children. They should be, but they're not. They are invariably about what the mother decides she wants.' He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

'Although the law tries to take the sting out of a residence order, it has to end in victory for one parent and defeat for the other. It has to. The one who loses is usually the man. But - and this is what has changed over the last twenty years - not always. And we can win this one. We deserve to win this one.' 'But she does love him.' 'What?' 'Gina loves Pat. I know that she loves him.'

Nigel shuffled some papers on his desk, almost embarrassed on my behalf. 'I'm not sure that's really relevant here, is it?' he said.

***

I watched them from the window. Gina emerged from the Audi's passenger seat and let Pat out of the back door -he had told me that Richard had fitted a child lock - and then, crouching on the pavement so that they were the same height, she wrapped her arms around him, burying his blond head against her neck, grasping her last few seconds with him before she gave him back to me.

Gina lingered by the car door - we couldn't talk any more, but she would wait until she saw me before she got in - and as I watched Pat run up the little path to our door, his eyes shining, I knew that he deserved to be loved as much as any child in this world is loved. Later, he was playing on the floor of his room with his toys. 'Pat?' 'Yes?'

'You know Mummy and I don't get on very well right now?' 'You don't talk to each other.' 'That's because we're having an argument at the moment.'

He silently smacked Luke Skywalker against the side of the Millennium Falcon. I sat down on the floor next to him. He kept smacking Luke.

'We both love you very much. You know that, don't you?' He didn't speak. 'Pat?' 'I guess.'

'And we both want you to live with us. Where would you prefer to live? With me?' 'Yeah.' 'Or with Mummy?' 'Yeah.'

'It can't be both of us. You understand that, don't you? It can't be both. Not any more.' He came to my arms and I cuddled him. 'It's difficult, isn't it, darling?' 'It's difficult.'

'But that's what the argument is about. I want you to stay here. And Mummy wants you to stay with her. Her and Richard.' 'Yeah, but what about my stuff?' 'What?'

'All my stuff. All my stuff is here. What if I went over there to live - what about my stuff?'

'That wouldn't be a problem, darling. We could move your things. You don't have to worry about that. The important thing is where you live. And I want you to stay here.' He looked up at me. They were Gina's eyes. 'Why?'

'Because it's the right thing for you,' I said, and even as the words were forming, I wondered if that were really true.

I had changed over the last six months, my months of bringing up Pat alone. The show with Eamon was just a way to pay the mortgage, not the way to prove my worth to myself and everyone else. Work was no longer the centre of my universe. The centre of my universe was my boy.

When I felt pride or fear or wonder or anything that reminded me that I was alive, it wasn't because of anything that happened at the studio, it was because Pat had learned to tie his laces or because he had been bullied at school or because he said something or did something which just stunned me with love, something that reminded me that my son was the most beautiful boy in the world. If he went away then I would feel that I had lost everything. 'I just want what's best for you,' I said, wondering for the first time if I really wanted what was best for him, or what was best for myself. 'Your dad and I saw her at the Palladium when she was eighteen years old,' my mother said. 'They called her the Girl from Tiger Bay.' Her blue eyes became wide with excitement - why had I never noticed how blue they were in the past? In the gloaming of the Albert Hall, my mother's eyes shone like something in the window of Tiffany.

Although they had always spent most of their evenings at home, my parents always took in a show every six months or so - Tony Bennett at the Royal Festival Hall, a revival of Oklahoma! or Guys and Dolls in the West End - and so now I was taking my mother to a show at the Albert Hall. Her personal all-time favourite - the girl from Tiger Bay. 'Shirley Bassey!' my mother said.

I had been dragged to a few Shirley Bassey shows before I was old enough to protest. But when I was growing up, her audience hadn't been anywhere near as mixed as the crowd that confronted us inside the Albert Hall.

Impossibly handsome young men with little Uzbek caps and plucked eyebrows looked for their seats along with stolid elderly couples from the Home Counties, the men country-club formal in blazers, the women with that peculiarly frozen Maggie Thatcher hair-do that my mother's generation sport on a night out.

T never realised that old Shirley was so big with the gay crowd,' I said. T guess it makes sense - the boys love that combination of showbiz glitz and personal tragedy. She's our Judy Garland.'

'The gay crowd?' my mum said, bewildered. 'What gay crowd?' I gestured at the young men in Versace and Prada who stood out so obviously against the wool and polyester of the suburban set. 'All around you, Mum.'

As if on cue, the boy next to my mother - a male model type who was simply too good-looking to be heterosexual - stood up and squealed with excitement as the orchestra struck up the opening chords to 'Diamonds are Forever'. 'We love you, Shirley! You're fabulous!'

'Well, he's not gay,' my mum whispered in my ear, totally serious.

I laughed and put my arm around her, kissing her on the cheek. She leaned forward excitedly as Shirley Bassey appeared at the top of the stage stairs - her evening dress sparkling with what looked like fairy lights, her hands tossed extravagantly in the air. 'How do you do it, Mum?' 'How do I do what?'

'How do you manage to carry on after losing Dad? I mean, you were with him all your life. I can't imagine what it must be like to try to fill a gap that big.' .'Well, you don't get over it, of course. You can never get over it. I miss him. I'm lonely. Sometimes I'm frightened. And I still have to sleep with the light on.'

She looked at me. Shirley Bassey was prowling the front of the stage to thunderous applause and showers of bouquets. Yes, she was definitely our Judy Garland.

'But you have to learn to let go,' my mother said. 'That's part of it, isn't it?' 'Part of what?'

'Part of what it means to love someone. To really love someone. If you love someone then you don't just see them as an extension of yourself. You don't just love them for what's in it for you.' My mother turned back to the stage. In the darkness of the Albert Hall I could see that her blue eyes were shining with tears. 'Love means knowing when to let go,' she told me. thirty-nine 'You're crazy,' Nigel Batty said. 'You're going to voluntarily give up your child? You're going to just hand him over to your ex-wife when we could fucking beat her? She's going to love this - you know that, don't you?'

'I'm not doing this for her,' I said. 'I'm doing it for him.'

'You know how many men would love to be in your position? You know how many men I see in this office - grown men fucking weeping, Harry - who would give everything they've got to keep their children? Who would give their right nuts? And you're just walking away from him.'

'No, I'm not walking away from him. I'm not giving up. But I know how much he loves to be with Gina, although he tries not to show it because he thinks it will hurt me or be a betrayal or something. And either they make some kind of connection again, or she's going to become someone he just sees at weekends. I can see it happening already.' 'Whose fault is that?'

T know you're disappointed, Nigel. But I'm just thinking of my boy.'

'You think she thought of him when she walked out? You think she thought of him when she was in the cab to Heathrow?'

'I don't know. I just think that a child needs two parents. Even a kid whose parents are divorced. Especially a kid whose parents are divorced. I'm doing what I can to make that happen.'

'What about the guy she lives with? This Richard? You don't know anything about him. You're happy to turn your son over to him?'

'I'm not turning Pat over to anyone. He's my son and he will always be my son. I'm his father and I will always be his father. But I have to assume that Gina hasn't got completely lousy taste in men.'

'She seems to go for fucking fruitcakes, if you ask me. You know what's going to happen, don't you? You're going to become one of those weekend dads - sitting in Pizza Express on a Sunday afternoon trying to think of something to say to this stranger who used to be your kid.' 'Pat and I will never be like that.' 'Don't bet on it.'

'I'm not saying it's what I would have wanted. But don't you see? We fuck up our lives again and again and it's always our children who pick up the bill. We move on to new relationships, always starting over, always thinking we've got another chance to get it right, and it's the kids from all these broken marriages who pay the price. They - my son, your daughters, all the millions like them - are carrying around wounds that are going to last a lifetime. It has to stop.' I shrugged helplessly, knowing that he was disgusted with me. T don't know, Nigel. I'm just trying to be a good father.' 'By giving up your son.' 'It feels like the least I can do.' 'The way it's going to work,' I told Pat, 'is that you can leave as much of your stuff at our house as you want. Your room will always be your room. Nobody is ever going to touch it. And you can come back whenever you want. For a day, for a night, or forever.'

'Forever?' Pat said, pushing Bluebell by my side. His voice was very small.

'You're going to live with your mother. But nobody's going to make you live there. We are both going to look after you. And we both want you to be happy.' 'You're not arguing any more?'

'We're trying to stop arguing. Because we both love you very much and we both want what's best for you. I'm not saying that we will never argue again. But we're trying, okay?' 'Do you love each other again?'

'No, darling. That time of our life is gone. But we both love you.' 'Where will I sleep at Mummy's place?'

'She's preparing a new room for you. And it's going to be great - you can spread out your Star Wars toys all over the floor, turn on a bit of hip-hop, drive all the neighbours crazy.' 'And nobody's allowed to touch my old room?' 'Nobody.' 'Not even you?' 'Not even me.'

We were at the park now. The asphalt road winding around the lake spread out before us. This was where he loved to ride Bluebell, taking off at such a speed that the swans rose up from the water's edge when they saw him coming. But Pat made no move to get on his bike.

'I like it now,' he said, and it tore me up. 'I like it the way it is.'

'Me too,' I said. 'I like to make you breakfast in the morning. And I like to see you with all your toys spread out on the floor in the afternoon. And I like it when we get a Chinese takeaway or a pizza and watch a film together on the sofa. And going to the park together. I like all that stuff.' 'Me too. I like it too.'

'And we're still going to do all of that, okay? Nobody can stop us. That's never going to end. Not until you're a very big boy who wants to go off with his friends and leave his old dad alone.' 'That's going to be never.'

'But give it a good try, okay? Living with Mummy, I mean. Because she loves you very much, and I know that you love her too. That's good. I'm glad. I'm glad that you love each other. And although it makes me sad to see you go, it's not the end of anything. You can come back whenever you want. So try to be happy with Mummy. Okay?' 'Okay.' 'And Pat?' 'What?' 'I'm proud that you're my son.'

He dropped his bike and came to my arms, pressing his face against me, overwhelming me with what felt like the very essence of him. He filled my senses - his unruly mop of blond hair, his impossibly smooth skin, that Pat smell of dirt and sugar. My beautiful son, I thought, tasting the salt of our tears.

There was more that I wanted to say but I couldn't find the words. It's not perfect, I wanted to say. It will never be perfect. I'm not so dumb that I don't know that. But given the way that things have turned out, it's probably the best that we can do. It's not perfect. Because the only perfect thing in my life has always been you. My beautiful boy. My beautiful boy. My beautiful boy. Gina took Pat into his new bedroom and I stood there in the middle of their flat with a box of Star Wars toys in my arms, feeling as lost as I had ever felt in my life. 'Here, let me take those,' Richard said. I gave him the box and he set it on the table.

We smiled at each other awkwardly. He was different from what I had expected - more self-effacing, gentler, less of the brash suit than I had imagined. 'This is a big day for Gina,' he said. 'A big day for all of us,' I said.

'Sure,' he said quickly. 'But Gina - well, as you know, she's a Libra. Home, family - it's all central to her.' 'Right.'

He wasn't quite what I had expected. But that didn't mean he wasn't a bit of a dickhead, of course. 'How about Pat?' he asked. 'What sign is he?' 'Please Clean Up My Room,' I said. Gina came out of Pat's new bedroom and smiled at me. 'Thanks for helping him move.' 'No problem.'

'And thanks for everything,' she said, and for just a second there I recognised the Gina who had loved me. 'I know how much he means to you.' 'Love means knowing when to let go,' I told her. I didn't see it coming. I swung the MGF on to the main road and suddenly the black cab was swerving to avoid me, horn blaring, rubber burning, the driver's face twisted with rage. Heads turned to look at the idiot in the sports car with the torn roof.

I pulled over to the kerb and sat there breathing deeply, trying to get my heart under some kind of control as the traffic ebbed and flowed around me. My hands were shaking. I gripped the wheel until my knuckles were white and the shaking began to stop. Then I slowly started to make my way home, driving with exaggerated care because I knew that my mind was on some other road, that it kept wandering away to a black and white image of a father and son glimpsed once in a photograph album, and the fragment of some old song about being a stranger in paradise.

'Anyway, Dad,' I said out loud, really needing to talk to my old man, really needing to know what he thought. 'Did I do the right thing?' forty We heard the church before we could see it.

The big black Daimler swung left into Farringdon Road, and as we trundled down that long narrow channel to the river, the bells were ringing for Marty and Siobhan.

We turned left again into the little Clerkenwell square and the church seemed to fill the big blue sky. In the back seat of the limo, Marty shifted uneasily inside his morning suit, squinting out at the guests being handed buttonholes at the entrance to the church.

'Should we go round a few times?' he said. 'Keep them waiting a bit?' 'That's what the bride does, Marty. Not you.' 'And are you sure you've got the -' I held out the two gold rings. He nodded. There was nothing else to do but to do it.

We got out of the Daimler, the bells so loud now that they were all you could think about. Marty kept buttoning and unbuttoning his morning coat as we made our way up the steep stone steps to the church, smiling and nodding at the people we knew, and even the people we didn't know. We were halfway to the top when Marty trod on something and I had to catch his arm as he stumbled.

Marty picked up a nine-inch man made of moulded plastic. He was sporting a lavender jacket, spangly silver trousers and a white satin shirt. And he was either wearing a cummerbund or his stomach was heavily bandaged. He had lost one of his little white shoes.

'Now who the fuck is that meant to be?' Marty said. 'Liberace?'

'Not Liberace,' I said, taking it from him. 'That's Disco Ken.'

With the sun streaming through the stained glass windows behind her, a small girl came flying down the aisle of the church, holding on to her hat, which was the same colour as the yellow party dress she was wearing. 'Peggy,' I said.

'Disco Ken,' she said, taking him from me. 'I've been looking for him.'

Then Cyd was there, looking at me from under the brim of a big black hat. It was a little too big for her. Maybe she had bought it before she cut her hair. 'I'll be inside,' Marty said. 'On the altar.' 'At the altar,' I corrected him. 'I know where I'm going to be,' he said. 'Good luck,' Cyd smiled at him.

We watched him go, and then we looked at each other for a long moment. 'I didn't expect to see you here,' I said. 'I'm on the bride's side.' 'Of course. Siobhan really likes you. So - how's it going?' 'Okay, okay. Really okay. And how's Pat?'

'He's living with Gina now. It seems to be working out. You'll see him later.' 'Pat's coming?' Peggy asked. 'He's a pageboy.' 'Good,' she said, and ducked back inside the church.

'And he's happy?' Cyd said, and I knew it really mattered to her, and I wanted to hold her.

"There's a few teething problems with the boyfriend. He's a bit alternative. He doesn't like it when Pat hits him around the head with his light sabre. I keep telling him - no, no, Pat - if you're going to hit him, go for his eyes.' She shook her head and smiled. 'Where would you be without your little jokes, Harry?' 'I don't know.' 'But you see him?'

'All the time. Every weekend and once during the week. We haven't worked out about the school holidays yet.' 'You must miss him.'

'It's like he's still there. I can't explain it. Even though he's gone, I feel him all around me. There's just this big gap where he used to be. It's like his absence is as strong as his presence.'

'Even when they're gone, they still hold your heart. That's what being a parent is all about.' T guess so. And Jim's all right?'

'I wouldn't know. That didn't work out. It was a mistake to even try.'

'Well, you tried for Peggy.' At least I hoped she had tried for Peggy. I hoped that she hadn't tried because she still loved him now the way she had loved him once before. 'It was worth trying for Peggy's sake.' 'You think so?' 'Definitely.'

She indicated a Daimler driving slowly past the church. In the back seat was a woman covered in white and a nervous middle-aged man. The car disappeared around the corner. 'We'd better go inside.' 'Well, see you later. We can share a vol-au-vent.' 'Goodbye, Harry.'

I watched her move off to take her place on the bride's side of the church, holding the brim of her hat as if it might fly away. Then Pat was beside me, tugging at my sleeve, dressed in some sort of sailor suit. He looked dapper in a maritime sort of way. I put my arm around him as Gina and Richard came up the church steps.

T told you we wouldn't be able to park so close to the church,' he said.

'We did park, didn't we?' she said. 'Or did I miss something?'

They stopped bitching when they saw me, silently collecting their buttonholes from one of the ushers and passing into the church. I smiled at Pat. 'I like your new suit. How's it feel?' 'Scratchy.' 'Well, you look great.' 'I don't like suits. They're too much like school.'

T guess you're right. Suits are far too much like school. You still on for the weekend?' He nodded. 'What do you want to do?' He thought about it for a moment. 'Something good.'

'Me too. Let's do something good this weekend. But right now we've got a job to do, haven't we?' 'We're pageboys.'

'You might be a pageboy. But I'm the best man. Shall we go to a wedding?' He shrugged and grinned. My beautiful boy.

We stepped inside the church - it smelled of lilies, cool and dark apart from the shafts of honeyed light coming through the ancient windows, the women in their hats -and Pat ran ahead of me, the heels of his new shoes clicking against the flagstones. And watching him run to where Marty was waiting for us at the altar gave me a pang that was somehow very happy and very sad all at the same time.

I don't know. It sort of felt like he was already his own man. The vicar was tall, young and nervous, one of those sweet-natured toffs from the Shires who the Church of England sends into the tower blocks of the inner city, and his Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he spoke of the day of judgement when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed.

He was looking at Marty, fixing him with a stare, asking his questions as though he really expected honest answers - Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour and keep her in sickness and in health, and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, as long as ye both shall live?

And I thought of Marty with his long line of opportunistic couplings that invariably ended up in the Sunday papers when the women he quickly humped and almost as quickly dumped realised that sleeping with him was not the first rung to a career in the entertainment industry.

And I looked at Siobhan standing with her father by her side, her pale Irish face impassive behind all that white lace, and - although it wasn't the time or the place - I couldn't help thinking of her weakness for married men and dodgy boyfriends who chained themselves to trees. But none of it seemed to matter very much today. Not the stung former lovers who gossiped about Marty, or all the wives who had eventually beaten Siobhan into bitter second place. It was all behind them now.

Both of them seemed redeemed today, renewed by these promises of love and devotion, by pledging their troth -even though I was pretty sure that Marty had absolutely no idea what a troth was or indeed how to pledge it. I felt an enormous affection for both of them. And I couldn't find any cynicism left in me. Because this was what I wanted too. It was everything I wanted. To love and to cherish.

I turned to steal a look at the congregation, Cyd was staring at the vicar from under the brim of her hat. I could just about make out the top of Peggy's head. Pat caught my eye and smiled and I thought again what a great little kid he was. I winked at him and turned back as the vicar talked about remaining in perfect love and peace.

As the vicar asked his questions, I was forced to ask some of myself. Such as - can I truly be a positive thing in Peggy's life? And do I really think that I can make a good job of raising that little girl when I know for certain that we will never have the easy bonds of blood? Am I really man enough to bring up another man's child? And what about Cyd? Can we stick by each other for more than the usual five or six or seven years? Can we love and cherish as long as we both shall live? Will one of us - almost certainly me - eventually fuck up, fuck around or fuck off? Do I really believe that our love is big enough md strong enough to survive in the lousy modern world? Well, do I? Do I? Do I?

T do,' I said out loud, and for the first time ever Marty looked at me as though I were the fruitcake. I tapped a silver spoon against the side of my champagne glass and rose to give my best man's speech.

As all those relatives and friends and business colleagues looked up at me, content after the wedding breakfast and ready to be tickled, I looked down at my notes.

They were mostly jokes written by Eamon, scrawled on the back of postcards. They seemed quite useless now. I breathed in and began.

'One of the great thinkers once said - "You drift through the years and life seems tame, then a stranger appears and love is his name.'" I paused dramatically. 'Plato? Wittgenstein? Descartes? No, it was Nancy Sinatra. And she's right, old Nancy. Life just seems so tame, so empty without the stranger. In fact, now I come to think about it, it's worse than that.'

They didn't know what the fuck I was talking about. I don't think I knew myself. I rubbed my throbbing temples. My mouth was dry. I gulped down some water, but it was still dry.

'Worse, much worse,' I muttered, trying to work out what I was trying to say. It was something about the importance of Marty and Siobhan always remembering how they felt today. It was something about never forgetting.

I looked across the crowded room at Cyd, hoping for some sign of encouragement, but she was staring down at the remains of her dessert. Peggy and Pat were running among the tables. Someone coughed. A baby was grizzling. The crowd were getting restless. Someone went off to find the toilet. I quickly glanced down at my notes.

'Wait, I've got some good stuff here,' I said. 'There's the one about love beginning when you sink into someone's arms and ending when you put your arms in someone's sink.' A couple of drunken uncles guffawed.

'And there's the one about the two inexperienced newly-weds who went to see their doctor for a demonstration of the sexual act,' I said. A tipsy auntie tittered.

'The doctor made love to the woman and asked the groom if he had any questions. And the groom said - yes, how often do I have to bring her in?' It got a laugh. Eamon smiled proudly. But I felt the postcards slipping through my trembling fingers. I didn't really need my notes any more. I couldn't use them.

'But what I really want to say is that I hope - I know -that Siobhan and Marty will remember that a life without love is no life at all. Nancy Sinatra said that. And if you find someone to love, then you should never let them slip away. I said that.'

I raised a glass to Marty and Siobhan. Cyd looked up at me and then ducked back down behind her hat.

'Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, please charge your glasses and drink a toast to the gorgeous couple.'

Eamon grabbed me as I came off stage. 'That was really great,' he said. 'But next time throw in a couple of jokes about the groom shagging sheep.' It wasn't until the music started that I realised I had never seen her dancing.

I had no idea if she was a brilliant dancer - like her namesake - or if she was completely yet endearingly crap.

I didn't know if she twirled and glided with infinite grace, or if she just stood there taking those embarrassed little half-steps and wondering what to do with her arms. I didn't know if she danced like Cyd Charisse or Sid James. But I knew I didn't care.

Seeing Cyd dance badly would wrench my heart just as surely as seeing her dance brilliantly. I just wanted to dance with her.

The DJ was playing, 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' and there was something about the goofy euphoria of that old record that filled the floor.

Marty and Siobhan were doing a dangerous-looking jitterbug, the groom's face turning coronary red as he attempted to lift his bride off the ground. Eamon was standing rooted to the spot and throwing his arms around as though he were rat-faced on Ibiza instead of half-cut in Clerkenwell. Mem slunk around him, pouting and grinding and looking dirty, doing the only dance she knew.

Gina was laughing with Pat and clapping her hands as he did this dance that he had just made up, which consisted of these strange little jumps that turned him completely around. Richard was slow-dancing with one of the bridesmaids. My mother was waltzing with the vicar.

And there was Sally, heavily pregnant now, shuffling from side to side in an ironic sort of way, because this was music to make old people feel young again.

And there was Glenn, his eyes closed and waving his arms around as if he was freaking out in the mud at Woodstock. Suddenly it seemed like a perfect party. Because Glenn danced in exactly the same way as Eamon. But I couldn't see Cyd and Peggy.

When Marty put Siobhan down to take a breather, I touched her arm, shouting above George Michael's voice. 'Siobhan, where's Cyd?'

'They had to leave early to catch their plane. They're going back to America.' 'For how long?' 'For good. Didn't she tell you?' I abandoned the MGF on the hard shoulder of the motorway somewhere west of the green suburban sprawl of Osterley Park. A few days later I tried to find the place in the A to Z, but it was too far out of the city to be included. It felt as though I dumped it at the end of the world. Or maybe the start.

But it was clear that I wasn't going to make it in time by car. The traffic on the road to Heathrow wasn't moving. Yet every few seconds another jet as big as an ocean liner roared off into the heavens above my head. It was no good. The MGF couldn't help me any more.

I got out of the car, realising that I didn't know what airline they were on. Virgin Atlantic left from Terminal 3 but British Airways were at Terminal 4. There wasn't time to go to both. What was it to be? Did I go for Richard Branson or the world's favourite airline?

I ran by the side of the motorway, the planes screaming into the blue sky above me, the tails of my morning suit flying. In the end it didn't matter what flight they were on. The day's planes to America had all gone by the time I reached the departure hall.

The crowds were thinning out now. Those travelling were in the air. Those seeing them off were on their way home. By the international departure gate, sweating heavily inside my morning suit, I hung my head and sighed. I had been too late.

Then I saw him on the ground, a little lavender party man. Disco Ken. I picked him up. His silver trousers were filthy. He had lost his remaining shoe.

And then Cyd and Peggy were standing in front of me, their boarding passes still in their hands, their suitcases at their feet. They were both still in their party dresses. 'Great speech,' Cyd said.

'You don't think that it should have been a bit more traditional? You don't think I should have - you know -included some stuff about the groom and sheep?' 'No, it was good.' 'You missed your plane.' 'We let it go.' I shook my head with disbelief. 'It's you,' I said. 'It better be,' she said.

Peggy took Disco Ken from me and looked up at Cyd, as if wondering what happened next. In the early evening, the black cab headed slowly back towards the city. Cyd stared out at the first of the tower blocks along the Westway, lost in her own thoughts, and Peggy slept in my arms.

Sometimes this child could seem so grown up, so self-possessed and assured. But sitting on my lap with her head resting lightly against my chest, she felt like no weight at all. As though she were still a baby, with all her life still stretching out ahead of her, a life still waiting to find its shape.

She stirred in her sleep as she heard an ice-cream van ringing its bell somewhere in the endless streets of west London. More than any birdsong or blooming bud, this was the sign that the days of cold and dark were finally drawing to a close. Spring must be coming soon, because the ding-dong man was out there somewhere.

From the back seat of our black cab, I couldn't see exactly where he was in those quiet suburban streets that stretched out in every direction. But the echo of those chimes rang in my head like a memory of childhood, or a dream of wedding bells.