Man And Wife

thirteen
My wife.

I could always spot her across a crowded room. Something about the curve of her face, the tilt of her head, the way she pushed her hair out of her eyes. Just a glimpse was all it took. I couldn’t mistake my wife for anyone else. Even when I wasn’t expecting to see her.

It was a party at the station to launch the new season of programmes. Wine and canapés, gossip and flattery, a speech from Barry Twist about forthcoming attractions. An evening of compulsory fun. There was a lot of that in my game. And even though Eamon was officially resting and there was no Fish on Friday in the spring schedule, I thought I should be there. Marty Mann’s advice had been nagging at me more than I cared to admit. Maybe I should be searching around for new talent, looking to diversify. Maybe only a fool pinned all of their hopes on just one person. But right now I couldn’t think about any of that because my wife was here. I pushed my way through the crowd. Cyd was not surprised to see me.

’Harry. What are you up to?’

’Working.’ If you could call it working, these few hours of small talk and Chardonnay. My old man would have considered it a big night out. For me it was another day toiling at the coalface. ’How about you?’ Although of course I had guessed by now.

’Working, too.’ For the first time I noticed she was holding a silver tray by her side, empty apart from a few crumbs of fish cakes or satay. ’Sally’s babysitting for me. I mean – us. I got a call this afternoon. Luke and his people usually cater for this do, but they’re snowed under right now. It’s a good job for me to get.’

Luke. Wanker.

We smiled at each other. I was so glad to see her. I was feeling party-lonesome until her face was suddenly there. Cyd had been to quite a few of these evenings with me, although not recently. And although she never ducked these dos, this wasn’t really her thing at all – too much smoke, too much alcohol, and too much meaningless chitchat with people she would never see again, people who were always looking over your shoulder for someone more famous. Too much like hard work. But she had been with me in this room before, so it didn’t seem that strange to see her here. Even with a silver tray in her hands.

I touched her arm. ’Can I get you a drink?’

She laughed. ’Got to work, babe. I’ll see you later, okay? We can go home together, if you can stick around until I’ve cleared up.’

She gave me a peck on the cheek and went back to the kitchen to load up with more satay and fish cakes, while I wandered around the party trying to avoid people who would want to talk about Eamon and his nervous exhaustion. There was a bank of TV sets in the middle of the room, repeating a loop of trailers for the new season’s shows. A lot of Marty Mann shows. Six Pissed Students in a Flat was coming back, so was the CCTV programme, You’ve Been Robbed! I stood there nursing my beer, watching the tasters for irreverent game shows, irreverent talk shows and irreverent dramas.

Tired old irreverence, I thought. It’s killing television.

A couple of suited and booted business types appeared by my side, tossing peanuts into their mouths and gawping at the screens as though they had never seen a television before. They couldn’t be from the TV station or any of the production companies that made the shows, because they were far too formally dressed. We had a strict dress code at the station you had to be fashionably scruffy at all times. Maybe they were advertisers, invited to give them a taste of cut-price glamour.

Cyd brushed past me carrying two silver trays piled high with sashimi. She gave me a wink, and bent to place one of the trays on a table. The men turned away from the bank of screens, their jaws working furiously on their peanuts.

’Look at the legs on that,’ one of them said.

’They go all the way up to her neck,’ said the other.

’No arse, though.’

’Flat as a pancake.’

’And no tits.’

’You don’t get tits with legs like that.’

’You need a nice arse though.’

Til give you that.’

’You need either tits or arse, right, even with legs like that. Because you need something to hold on to when you start your ascent.’

’Great legs, though.’

’Get those wrapped around your neck, mate, you’ll never want to come up for air.’

They chortled in perfect harmony, watching my wife walk away.

I stared at the pair of them, my face burning. I kept staring, wanting them to notice me.

They didn’t notice me.

Then all the peanuts were gone and, after rifling in the salty bowls for a bit, they sloped off, looking for more tasty snacks. I went looking for my wife. When I caught up with her she was handing out her sashimi to a bunch of women I vaguely recognised. They were helping themselves to raw fish while simultaneously managing to ignore Cyd completely. These bloody people. Who did they think she was? Nobody?

Cyd smiled at me. She had a lovely face. She was always going to have a lovely face, no matter how many years went by. But I couldn’t smile back at her.

’Get your coat. We’re leaving.’

’Leaving? I can’t leave. Not yet, babe. What’s wrong? You look all -’

’I want to go.’

’But I’ve got to work. You know that.’

The women were starting to stare at us. They were holding slivers of salmon and tuna in their podgy fingers. I took Cyd’s arm and pulled her aside. Her silver tray banged into someone’s back. The Sashimi wobbled precariously.

’I mean it, Cyd. I’m going home. Right now. And I want you to come with me. Please?’

She wasn’t smiling any more.

’You might be going home, Harry, but I’m working. What happened? Come on. Tell me. Did someone say something about Eamon? Is that why you’re upset? Forget about Eamon. Marty’s right – get something new going for yourself

I wanted to tell her – don’t waste your time here. I know exactly what these men are like, because I’m one of the bastards myself. But she wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. She was all innocence, she thought it was all about raw fish and chicken on a stick and people appreciating you for doing a good job.

’Please, Cyd. Come with me.’

’No, Harry.’

’Then do what you want.’

’I will.’

So I left her at the party, left her feeding all those hard, empty faces, and went out to look for a cab. I left her there, all by herself, even though I knew she was too good for that place, and too good for those people.

When I got home Peggy had been in bed for hours. Sally was on the sofa, idly channel-surfing with one hand and soothing her baby in her carrycot with the other. Soothing Precious. That was the baby’s name. Precious. Sally asked me how the evening had gone – she meant for Food Glorious Food, not the station – and I told her that everything was fine. Then I got her a minicab. Luke Moore drove my wife home. By then I was pretending to be asleep, lying on my side, breathing easily, trying to fake the soft rhythms of sleep. I listened to my wife quietly undressing in the dark, heard her clothes slipping from her long, slim body, and inside my Marks & Spencer pyjamas, my heart ached for her. Then we lay in the darkness for a long time, trying hard not to disturb each other.

Back to back in the marital bed, and never quite touching.

’Your heart is a small miracle, Mr Silver,’ said Dr Baggio. ’A small miracle.’

My wife is having an affair, I thought. She’s fucking this guy. I just know it.

’The heart is a pump about the size of a fist,’ said my doctor, inflating the strap she had wrapped around my arm. I could feel it tightening against my skin. ’We all have blood pressure. It’s simply the pressure created by the constant pumping of blood around the body. In a healthy adult a normal blood pressure is

120 over 80. Yours is… goodness.’

It happens. You promise to love each other forever. You really mean it. You plan to sleep with no one else for the rest of your life. Then time wears away at your love, as the tide wears away a rock. And in the end your feelings – her feelings – are not what they were once upon a time. Other people are let in, like light in a darkened room. You can’t get them out again. Not once you have let them in. What can you do once you have let them in?

’You can put your shirt back on,’ my doctor said.

She didn’t want sex any more. Not with me. Not even with one of my magic condoms. Oh, we still had our Saturday night shag, which was sometimes postponed to Sunday or Monday if the catering business was booming. But I felt as if she was just doing it to keep me quiet. That it was easier to lie back and think of nothing than argue about it. Too tired, she always said. Yeah, right. Tired of me. It wasn’t even the sex I missed most.

It was all the other stuff. It was the being loved.

’There are lots of things you can do to control your blood pressure,’ my doctor said. ’You can reduce your intake of alcohol. Lose weight. Increase physical activity. Most important of all, you can change your wife.’

Change my wife?

Things weren’t that bad. I wanted my marriage to last. I wanted to get it right this time. Get it right once and forever.

’But I love my wife.’

’Not your wife. Your life. Don’t let things get to you. Find time for yourself. Control your anxieties. You need to change your life, Mr Silver. You only get one of them.’

Life. Not wife.

You obviously get more than one of those.

The heart is a small miracle.

’I liked the way it made me feel,’ Eamon said. ’Once upon a time. And I wanted to have that feeling again.’

We were walking in the grounds of a private hospital an hour’s drive south of London. Eamon talked about cocaine as we kicked our way through the leaves. He was only halfway through a 28-day detox programme, but he was already looking fitter than I had seen him since he was fresh from the Edinburgh Festival. He was meant to be playing football this afternoon substance abusers versus the manic dépressives – but the match had been cancelled. The manic dépressives were too depressed.

’We have these group sessions. Such stories, Harry. You’d love it. All these alcoholics and cokeheads and junkies telling you where it all went wrong. Every kind of addict under the sun. Some of them are very articulate. And do you know what I heard someone say this morning? Alcohol gave me wings to fly

– and then it took away the sky. Isn’t that great? That’s exactly how I feel about coke.’

’But that still doesn’t explain it. You’ve got this great life

– money, fame, weather girls. And you screw it all up for a feeling. Not even a feeling – the memory of a feeling.’

’Come on, Harry. I know you’re not a drinking man. And I know that drugs are not your thing. But it’s the same for you.’

’How’s that?’

’It’s the same for you with women.’

And I saw that he was right. That’s why I wanted Cyd to be the woman I first met, that’s why I had gone to Kazumi’s door. I was hooked on a feeling too.

The remembrance of the greatest feeling in the world.

It wasn’t the rush of cocaine or the fog of alcohol, it was the feeling I got when I was starting with a woman. Passion, sex, romance, feeling alive, feeling wanted – it was all of those things, wrapped up in a fleeting moment of time.

I liked the way it made me feel.

And I couldn’t help it. I wanted that feeling again.

Even if it meant trouble galore.

fourteen

Jim Mason resembled a male model just starting to go to seed.

The chiselled features were beginning to show signs of a double chin, and under the leather jacket the beer paunch was developing like a promising marrow. But he still looked capable of causing trouble. Cyd’s ex-husband arrived to pick up his daughter.

’Hello, Harry. How you doing, mate? Peggy ready to rock and roll?’

It was one of those scenes that I had never imagined playing, an event where I would love to have known the correct etiquette. This man had broken the heart of the woman I loved. But if he hadn’t broken her heart, my wife and I wouldn’t be together. Should I thank him or thump him? Or both?

Cyd was once crazy about this guy, and behind her back he had jumped on the bones of every Asian woman who would let him from Houston to Hoxton. My true love had done everything to make it work with this creep. She had followed him to London when it was clear that America was indifferent to his existence, she had supported him when he fell off his motorbike and mangled his stupid leg, and she even gave him a second chance after she had met me. And of course she had given birth to his child, and then raised her alone. I should have hated Jim Mason. But I found that I just couldn’t quite manage hate. Only the dull ache of jealousy.

The real reason he made my flesh crawl wasn’t because he had treated Cyd so badly. It was because he had won her heart without even trying, and shattered it so casually. But I couldn’t loathe him, this man who was my wife’s other husband.

He was always so nice to me.

’Cyd out working? A woman’s work is never started, right? Only kidding, mate, only kidding. Give her my best. My little princess ready?’

’Daddy!’

Peggy threw aside her Lucy Doll Ballerina and charged her dad. Jim scooped her up and placed a loud kiss on the top of her dark hair as she wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, hugging him with theatrical abandon. They saw each other so sporadically, this dad and daughter, that their reunions were always emotional affairs, resembling a prisoner of the Vietcong being reunited with his family. But I was never quite sure if the emotion was forced or not. Prolonged separation can sometimes make a parent and child act with the self-consciousness of strangers.

I saw them to the door. Their routine was always the same. A ride on Jim’s motorbike to KFC or Pizza Express. At Peggy’s age, I don’t know if it was even legal. Jim wasn’t the kind to care. Once Cyd had protested that Peggy was a bit too young for motorbikes, and Jim had stormed out, leaving his daughter in bitter tears. He didn’t see her for three months. After that, the joy rides were never questioned.

Jim’s visits traditionally involved the purchase of a large, inappropriate, stupendously useless toy. Stuffed bears that were bigger than Peggy herself were a favourite.

When Peggy had gone I realised with a jolt of alarm that she had forgotten her child-sized helmet. Cyd had laid down strict rules for motorbike riding.

Always wear a helmet.

Hold on tight to Daddy.

No riding in the rain.

No long journeys.

No motorways.

I dashed out to the street but the bike – a huge brute of a Norton – was already roaring away, Peggy clinging on to her dad’s leather-clad back, the hair on her bare head flying.

I chased down the middle of the street, shouting their names, the kid’s helmet in my hands. But they didn’t hear me. It was a long straight road and I watched Jim’s taillights receding, cursing him for being so thoughtless.

And then at the last moment they turned back.

I stood in the street as the bike barrelled towards me, my heart filling my chest with that boiling feeling you get when your child has been placed in unnecessary danger. The Norton skidded to a halt in front of me, Jim and Peggy grinning, their faces flushed with excitement. I jammed the helmet down on her head.

’You fucking idiot, Jim.’

He shook his handsome head in disbelief.

’What did you call me?’

’You heard. And what did your mum tell you, Peggy? What’s the most important rule about the bike? What’s rule number one?’

Neither of them was smiling now, and the way they were looking at me from under their helmets made their faces seem almost identical. I always thought that Peggy resembled Cyd. But I saw now that she was just as much Jim’s child.

’Come on. What did Mummy say, Peggy? What did Mummy tell you again and again? What must you always remember?’

’Hold on tight to Daddy,’ my stepdaughter said.

It’s so difficult for the step-parent to strike a balance between caring too much and caring too little.

The horror step-parents – the ones who end up in court, or in newspapers, or in jail – don’t think about it. They don’t care. The child of their partner is a pain, a chore, and a living reminder of a dead relationship. But what about the rest of us? The ones who are desperate to do the right thing?

There’s nothing special about us. We are not better human beings because we have taken on the parenting of a kid who is not our biological child. You get into these things without thinking about them, or if you think about it at all, you imagine that it will work itself out somehow. Love and the blended family will find a way. That’s what you think.

But the blended family has all the problems of the old family, and problems that are all its own. You can’t give your stepchild nothing but kindness and approval, because no parent can ever do that. And yet you do not have the right to reproach a stepchild the way a real parent does.

I had never raised a hand to Pat.

But I couldn’t even raise my voice to Peggy.

Step-parents – the ones who are trying their best – want to be liked. Parents – real parents – don’t need to be liked.

Because they know they are loved.

It is a love that is given unconditionally and without reservation. A parent has to do very bad things to squander the love of their child. A step-parent just doesn’t get that kind of love.

And, increasingly, I believed that there was nothing you could do to earn it.

I was either too soft – desperate to be liked, starving for a few scraps of Peggy’s approval – or I tried to pass myself off as the real thing. Passing, that was the step-parent’s major crime. Pretending to be something I wasn’t, and could never be.

I knew, in my calmer moments, that it was not easy for Richard. I knew that the things he wanted for my son museums, Harry Potter, tofu, even the new life in another country – were not meant as punishments. I didn’t hate Richard because of those things. I hated him because he had taken my son away from me. Who did he think he was? He wasn’t Pat’s father.

The step-parent has a thankless job. The step-parent can’t win. You are either involved with this pint-sized stranger too much or not enough. But there’s one thing that the step-parent should always remember. It is even worse for the child.

Grown-ups can always get a new husband or wife. But the children of divorce can’t get a new father or mother, no more than they can get a new heart, new lungs, new eyes. For better, for worse, for richer for poorer, you are trapped with the parents you are born with.

Peggy was lumbered with me, this man in her mother’s bed who was neither fish nor fowl, friend nor father, just a male parent impersonator.

Uncle Dad.

A night that was just like the old days. That was the idea. There was a new print of Annie Hall showing at the Curzon Mayfair. Then we were going for Peking duck in Chinatown. And maybe we would end the evening with a shot of espresso in some small Soho dive before returning home for slow, lazy sex and a good night’s sleep.

Film, duck, coffee, fuck.

Then making spoons, and sharing the same pillow for a good eight hours.

The perfect date.

Our night on the town wasn’t exactly hanging out at the Met Bar with the Gallaghers, but I knew that it would make us happy. It had many times before. But maybe I tried a little too hard to make it like the old days.

The movie was good. And we walked through the narrow streets of Soho hand in hand, laughing about Alvy Singer and his Annie Hall, lost in the film and each other, just like it was in our once upon a time.

It only started to go wrong in Chinatown.

The Shenyang Tiger was crowded. There was an entire Chinese family at the next table – nan, granddad, a few young husbands and wives and their flock of beautiful kids, including a brand-new baby, a fat-faced Buddha with a startling shock of jet-black Elvis hair.

Cyd and I stared at the baby, then smiled at each other.

’Isn’t he gorgeous?’ she said. ’All that hair.’

’Would you like one? It’s not too late to change your order. I can have the duck and you can have the baby.’

I was only kidding – wasn’t I? – but her smile vanished instantly.

’Oh, come on. Not the baby thing again, Harry. You never shut up about it, do you?’

’What are you talking about? It wasn’t the baby thing again. I’m just pulling your leg, darling. You used to have a sense of humour.’

’And you used to let me have a life.’

’What does that mean?’

’I know you want me to give up the business. It’s true, isn’t it? You want me pregnant and in the kitchen. I know you do.’

I said nothing. How could I deny that I would prefer her to make dinner for her family rather than half of fashionable London? How could I deny that I wanted a baby, a family, and all the old-fashioned dreams?

I wanted us to be the way we were. But it wasn’t because I wanted to imprison her. It was because I loved her.

The waiter arrived with our Peking duck, and plates of cucumber, spring onion and plum sauce. I waited until he had shredded the duck and gone.

’I just want you to be happy, Cyd.’

’Then leave me alone, Harry. Let me run my business. Let me try to do something for myself for just once in my life. Stop trying to make me give it all up to be – I don’t even know what it is you want. Doris Day, is it? Mary Tyler Moore? Your mother? Some fifties housewife who doesn’t go out at night.’

My mother was actually out all the time. Doing the Four-Star Boogie and the Get In Line and the I Like It I Love It and the Walkin’ Wazi. But I let it pass.

’I don’t mind you going out at night. I’m happy your business is going so well. I just wish that there were more nights like this. When you were spending the night with me.’

But her blood was up now.

’You really want to be the sole breadwinner, don’t you? The big man. Are you going to spend the rest of your life trying to be your father?’

’Probably. I can think of worse things to be than my old man.’ I pushed my plate away. Suddenly I didn’t have much of an appetite. ’And are you going to spend the rest of your life sucking up to creeps?’

’Luke Moore is not a creep. He’s a brilliant businessman.’

’Who said anything about Luke bloody Moore? I’m talking about all those drunken City boys who think they can get into your thong because you give them a bit of chicken on a stick.’

A mobile phone began to ring from deep inside her handbag. She fished it out and immediately recognised the number calling. Because it was our number.

’Sally?’ She was babysitting for us. Cyd didn’t like anyone outside our little family looking after Peggy. ’Well, how long has she been vomiting?’

Oh great, I thought. Now the kid’s puking all over the babysitter.

’Everything fine?’ said the waiter.

’Wonderful, thanks.’ I smiled.

’And is it solid or liquid?’ Cyd said. ’Okay, okay. Well, can’t you get her to be sick down the toilet? Right, right. Look, we’ll be home in half an hour, Sally. What? Well, just change her pyjamas and stick the dirty ones in the washing machine. We’re going to jump in a cab. See you.’

’Something wrong?’

’Peggy. You know she doesn’t like it when we’re both out at the same time. She gets an upset tummy.’ She beckoned a passing waitress. ’Can we get the bill, please?’ Then she looked at my stony face. ’Are you sulking because Peggy is sick?’

’We should stay. You should eat your lovely duck. There’s nothing wrong with Peggy.’

’She’s just brought up her Mister Milano pizza. How can you say there’s nothing wrong with her?’

’This always happens.’ It was true. Every time we had one of our rare nights out, it was as if Peggy was sticking her fingers down her throat. ’Look, if she was really sick, I’d be as worried as you.’

’Really? As worried as me? I don’t think so, Harry.’

’Can’t you see? It’s a kind of blackmail. She only does it to get you to come home. Eat your dinner, Cyd.’

’I don’t want my dinner. And you should understand how she feels, Harry. If anyone should understand, it’s you. You know what it’s like to be a single parent.’

’Is that what you think? That you’re a single parent?’ I shook my head. ’You’re married, Cyd. You stopped being a single parent on our wedding day.’

’Then why do I still feel like a single parent? Why do I feel so alone?’

’It’s not because there’s something wrong with Peggy.’ A waiter placed a bill and a quartered orange in front of us. ’It’s because there’s something wrong with us.’

Outside the night had soured.

The good-natured, slow-moving crowds of early evening had been replaced by mobs of noisy drunks. The tourists were coming out of Mamma Mia! and Les Misérables, desperately hailing cabs that were already occupied. The streets were full of yobs in from the suburbs and beggars in from faraway towns. A scrappy, half-hearted fight was starting outside a packed pub. You could hear the sound of broken glass and sirens.

Then I saw her.

Kazumi.

She was in the queue outside that church on Shaftesbury Avenue that they had turned into a club almost twenty years ago. Limelight. Gina and I had gone there a couple of times. I didn’t even know that Limelight was still open.

Kazumi was with a bunch of men and women, slightly younger than herself, all locals by the look of them. She was at the centre of the crowd, the boys trying to impress her, the girls wanting to be her friend. She smiled patiently, caught my eye and stared straight through me, not recognising the man from her friend’s past, or just not caring.

Kazumi was going dancing.

I was going home just as she was going out.

It wasn’t a different kind of night out.

It was a different kind of life.

fifteen

Another postcard from America. On the front, under the words

Connecticut – the Nutmeg state, New England, a rural wilderness ablaze with the colours of fall. On the back, in joined-up writing, a message from my son.

Dear Daddy. We Goodbye.

a dog. His name is Britney. We love him.

’Britney’s a funny old name for a dog,’ said my mother. ’I suppose that was Gina’s idea.’

My mum had once loved Gina. I always said that when they first met, my mum thought Gina was a Home Counties version of Grace Kelly, a perfect combination of blue-eyed beauty, old-fashioned decency and regal bearing. Since our divorce my mum had slowly revised her opinion. Now Gina was less the Princess of Monaco and more the Whore of Babylon.

’Maybe Britney is a bitch, Mum.’

’There’s no need for talk like that,’ said my mother.

We were at my dad’s grave. It was the first time I had been here since Christmas Day after picking up my mum to take her to our place for the holiday. Three months ago now. It had been a surprisingly good Christmas – my mum and Cyd amusing each other greatly as they stuffed a giant turkey, Peggy on the phone to Pat for an hour comparing gifts, and the look on Peggy’s face when she opened her surprise present – an Ibiza DJ Brucie Doll, including his own little turntables.

With Pat gone, I was expecting Christmas to be steeped in feelings of sadness and loss, and in fact it was more of a respite from those things. But time was grinding on, and I saw that my dad’s headstone was no longer as white and pristine as it had seemed a few months ago. It was now stained by the winter, tilted by time. Things were wearing out without me even noticing.

’Is Pat all right?’ my mum said. ’Does he like his school? Has he made friends? There was trouble here, wasn’t there? You and Gina had to see his teacher, I remember. Is he all right now?’

’He’s fine, Mum,’ I said, although in truth I had no idea if Pat was a straight-A student or wandering his new classroom at will. It didn’t feel like my son was thousands of miles away. It felt like light years.

’I miss him, you know.’

’I know you do, Mum. I miss him too.’

’Will he come back for the holidays?’

’The summer vacation. He’ll be back for that.’

’That’s a long time. Summer’s a long way away. What about Easter? Couldn’t he come over for Easter?’

Til talk about it with Gina, Mum.’

’I hope he comes back for his Easter holidays.’

Til try, Mum.’

’Because you never know what’s going to happen, do you? You never know.’

’Mum, nothing is going to happen to him,’ I said, trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice. ’Pat’s fine.’

She looked up at me, briskly rubbing her hands together, wiping off the dirt from my father’s grave.

’I’m not talking about Pat, Harry,’ she said. Tm talking about me.’

And I just stared at her, as I felt the world turn and change.

I had always believed that my dad was the tough one. My mum didn’t drive, she wouldn’t open her front door after dark, and she hated confrontation of every kind. And because she didn’t have a driving licence, because she was polite to rude waiters, because she slept with the light on, I was stupid enough to believe that my mother was a timid woman. Now I was about to learn that my mother had her own well of courage.

’What happened, Mum?’

She took another breath.

’Found a lump, Harry. When I was in the shower. In my breast.’

I could feel my heart.

’Oh God, Mum. Oh Jesus.’

’It’s small. And very hard. I went to see the doctor. You know how much I hate seeing the doctor. A bit like your dad, really. Now I’ve got to go for tests. Graham’s going to take me in his car.’

This is how it happens, I thought. You lose one parent, and then you lose the other. Selfishly, I thought – I went through all this with Dad, and I don’t know if I can do it again. But I knew I would have to. It was the most natural thing in the world.

I could imagine her in the shower. I could see her washing herself with the Body Shop soap in the shape of a dolphin that her grandson had bought her for Christmas. I could see my mother’s face, her kind and irreplaceable face, as she discovered something that had never been there before.

A small, hard lump.

That lump the size of a planet.

When I came home I found Peggy sitting cross-legged on the carpet, studying a book on Lucy Doll.

’Look what I’ve got, Harry.’

I sat on the floor with her and looked at the book. / Love Lucy Doll: The World’s Favourite Dolly was a serious coffee-table job, full of social analysis and cultural deconstruction. First article

– ’Where Is Lucy Doll From?’ I skimmed the article, because I had always wondered that myself. It turned out that Lucy Doll was born in Paris of a part-Thai, part-Brazilian mother and an Anglo-Zulu father. The book revealed that Brucie Doll was from Ibiza.

There were more scholarly articles. Lucy Doll as modern icon. Lucy Doll as a feminist role model. Lucy Doll as a repository for traditional values. Lucy Doll as a radical of the sexual revolution. Lucy Doll was the perfect doll – you could get her to be anything you wanted her to be.

’Where did you get this, darling?’

’Uncle Luke gave it to me.’

’Uncle Luke?’

’He came home with Mummy in his racing car.’

’Did Uncle Luke come in?’

’No. But he gave Mummy this book for me. It’s for big girls.’

I wondered why these creeps always gave this little girl the wrong presents. Her dad with those useless huge stuffed animals that were no good to man or beast. And now a coffee-table book from Uncle Luke. Peggy was at least a decade too young for 7 Love Lucy Doll: The World’s Favourite Dolly. But what did I know? She loved poring over the pictures, and there were page after page of reproductions from all the Lucy Doll catalogues down the ages.

’All the different Lucy Dolls,’ Peggy said.

There they were in all their glory. Office Lady Lucy Doll (Lucy Doll when she was working for a giant Japanese corporation before the bubble burst). Rio Dancer Lucy Doll (Carmen Miranda feathers and tails). And Working Girl Lucy Doll (the blonde locks dyed brunette to denote career-girl seriousness, Working Girl Lucy Doll carried a briefcase and wore spectacles with no lenses).

There was also Space Shuttle Lucy Doll. Funky Diva Lucy Doll. Left Bank Lucy Doll. Hippy Chick Lucy Doll. Chanteuse Lucy Doll. Bungee Jump Lucy Doll. Fighter Pilot Lucy Doll.

Lucy Doll as singer, shopper, housewife, commuter, cook, warrior, adventurer and tourist. Home and career, love and sex, domesticity and glamour, work and fun.

’Which Lucy Doll do you like best of all, Harry?’

I looked at Night-Night-Baby Lucy Doll, who wore a seethrough white negligee that just about came down to her navel.

’I like Working Girl Lucy Doll,’ I said.

’Why’s that?’

’Reminds me of your mum.’

’Me too.’

Cyd was upstairs getting changed. She was sitting at the dressing table in her bra and pants, staring into the mirror. She looked up at me, already defensive, waiting for me to start complaining about the book, the lift home, Uncle Luke.

I shook my head, biting my lip.

’My mum,’ I said.

’What happened?’

’She found a lump in her breast,’ I said, my voice catching on those words and all they could mean. And my wife was across the room, taking me in her arms, and holding me in a way that she had only held me twice before.

When we knew my dad was dying.

And when my son went to live with his mother.

The really bad times, the worst times of all.

She held me. My wife held me. She put her arms around me and squeezed me tight, as if she would never let go, smoothing my hair, whispering words that were as soft as a prayer.

Gently rocking me as I cried, and cried, and cried.

My doctor had me swimming. Most mornings I went to the local public pool as soon as it opened, and joined the office workers doing their lengths.

I swam up and down, chanting my mantra: my heart is a small miracle, my heart is a small miracle. I swam until failure. That was a new expression I had recently learned. It meant doing something until you just couldn’t do it any more. Until failure.

When I came out of the pool, the rush hour was in full booming flow. The people in the park were all hurrying to the tube station.

Apart from her.

Kazumi was crouching on the grass, peering into her camera, the office workers swarming either side of her. A squirrel and I stopped to watch her.

She was wearing a black parka, boots, and a short beigecoloured kilt. Even I could tell it was from Burberry. Black tights. Good legs. Hair falling in front of her face, getting pushed out again. She looked too good for the rush hour.

’What are you taking a picture of?’

She looked up at me. Recognised me this time. Smiled. ’The leaves. All the new leaves. They’re beautiful but they just stay a moment. Like sakura in Japan. You know sakura?’

I nodded. ’Cherry blossom, right? The Japanese go to the park to look at the cherry blossom in full bloom for a few days every year. School kids, salary men, office ladies, old people. All watching the cherry blossom before it dies.’

She stood up, smoothed her Burberry kilt and pushed more hair out of her eyes. ’You know sakura because of Gina?’

’Yes, because of Gina.’ All those years with my first wife had given me a crash course in Japanese culture. I knew my sakura traditions. Tm not sure a few leaves in north London are in quite the same league.’

She laughed. ’Beautiful colours. All the different greens. Not so obvious. You just have to look with different eyes. Are you interested in photography?’

’Me? Absolutely.’

’Really?’

’Sure. For me it’s not just about getting the holiday snaps developed at the chemist. Photography is, you know, a twentiethcentury art form. A, er, genuinely modern medium that hasn’t been fully explored yet.’

What was I going on about? What was all this rubbish? She must have thought I was a complete jerk.

’Plead the fleeting moment to remain,’ she said.

I must have looked baffled.

’Someone once said that about photography. A poet, I think. It’s like watching sakura. The moment is interesting, because it is only a moment. P lead the fleeting moment to remain.’ She smiled. ’I love that. It’s so beautiful.’

Plead the fleeting moment to remain, I thought.

’I love it too,’ I said. And I meant it.

She put the lens cap on her camera, smoothed her kilt again. She was getting ready to go. I scrambled to keep the conversation afloat.

’Everything okay with you, Kazumi? You working here?’

’Trying. Looking.’

’You found a place to live?’

She nodded. ’Still in Primrose Hill. A few blocks from Gina’s old place.’

’That’s nice. Primrose Hill is great.’

’Saw Jude Law in shop. With baby.’

’Lucky old you.’ Although what I really thought was – lucky old Jude Law. ’I’ve been meaning to ask you – can I order some more of those pictures of Pat? If you’re not too busy? I’ve marked the contact sheet. I know exactly what I want.’

She nodded. These small, encouraging nods. ’I post to you.’

’Or I could come to your place and collect them.’

’Or I post.’

’It’s no trouble. Really.’

She stared at me for a moment, thinking about it.

’You want a cup of tea, Kazumi? There’s a café over by the tennis courts.’

’Sure. British always want a cup of tea.’

’Just like the Japanese.’

We walked over to the small café by the tennis courts, moving against the scuttling tide of office workers. And as we ordered our drinks, I could picture myself in her flat in Primrose Hill, see her pulling off her boots and stepping out of her Burberry kilt. I could see it, and it felt like the best thing in the world. It was that old, dangerous feeling of something about to start.

’How’s Pat?’ she said, and I adored her for that. I would have adored anyone who cared enough to ask me about my boy.

’He’s fine, I guess,’ I said. ’Started school. Got a dog called Britney. He’s coming over for his holidays. Soon, I hope. We have to work it out. What about you? Happy in London?’

’Happier than Tokyo. Happier than when I was married.’

I thought of the crying man in Gina’s garden. Part of me didn’t want to know. I hate it when they tell you about the old days. It just puts a crimp in everything for me. But she wanted me to hear. I was too curious to try stopping her.

’He’s a photographer. Famous, sort of. At least in Tokyo. He loved lots of European photographers. Horst, Robert Doisneau, Alan Brooking. Magnum photographers. You know? Magnum agency? He was very brilliant. I was his assistant. First job after college. I – how to say? – looked up for him.’

’Looked up to him.’

’He was very encouraged. Encouraging. Then we got married and he changed. Wanted me to stay home. Have a baby.’

’What kind of man does a thing like that?’

’Didn’t want me to work.’ She sipped her tea. ’Like you and Gina.’

I couldn’t let her get away with that.

’Nothing like me and Gina. She wanted to stay home and raise our son. At least at first.’

’Married men,’ she said, as if that explained everything. She stood up, pulled out a little Prada purse. For all her talk about Magnum photographers, she was a classic Japanese girl. Prada and Burberry mad.

’Put your money away. I’ll get these. You can get them next time.’

’No,’ she said. ’No next time. I post those pictures of Pat.’

Then she was leaving, watched by our squirrel and me as she disappeared among the office workers. An Asian girl in a Burberry kilt. I called after her.

’But when will I see you again?’

She raised her left hand, without turning round. ’When your finger gets better.’

I looked down at my hand and saw the gold band glinting on my third finger. It felt like there was something wrong with it today.

It was cutting into me.

I knew that deep down inside Gina still had a soft spot for me.

’You bloody imbecile,’ she said when I called. ’You dickhead.

You klutz. You 24-carat fool. Do you have any idea what time it is here? Gone one. Pat went to bed hours ago. You moron, Harry.’

’It’s not Pat I want to talk to. It’s you.’

’Make it snappy. I’m just about to floss and go to bed.’

’I want Pat to come back. For a week or so. Seven days. Anything. Easter. How’s Easter?’

I could hear her putting her hand over the receiver, telling Richard that it was me. And I heard him sigh, slam a door, go into a sulk.

’That’s not possible, Harry.’

’Why not?’

’Because it’s too expensive to keep flying him back and forth across the Atlantic. It’s too disruptive. And he’s too young. Who do you think he is? Tony Blair? He’s only seven.’

’He’ll be fine. It will be an adventure. I have to see him. I can’t wait until summer. And the money’s not a problem.’

’Oh really?’ She could be dead sarcastic. ’It might not be a problem for you. But Richard’s job at Bridle-Worthington has not turned out too well.’ A beat. ’He quit.’

’Jesus, he can’t keep changing jobs. He’s just going to have to buckle down and start remembering he has some responsibilities.’

A long silence in reply. And I guessed that my ex-wife had said almost those very words to fussy old Richard.

’So he’s unemployed?’

’No – he’s looking round. But we don’t have money to go -’

Til pay. Don’t worry about that, Gina. I just want to see my son. I just want him to remember he has a life here. He has holidays, doesn’t he? Send him over at Easter. Send him any time.’

Til think about it.’

’Please.’ Begging her to let me see my son. But for some reason I felt no anger. For some reason I couldn’t quite fathom, it was something far closer to pity. ’How’s it going over there?’

’Oh, the New England coast is beautiful. Very historic. Lots of little antique shops and fishing villages. And all these names that remind you of being a kid in England – Yarmouth, Portsmouth. I think there’s even a Little Hampton. All these English names, Harry.”

’Sounds great. I’m happy for you, Gina.’

’But…’

’What?’

Her voice was just above a whisper. As if she was talking to herself, not me. ’Well, it’s not really like that where we live. It’s not so quaint and lovely in Hartford. See, Hartford is a big ugly town. There’s crime. And I’m a bit – I don’t know what you would call it. Lonely, I guess. I think I’m lonely. Richard’s off to the city every day looking for a job. Pat’s at school.’

’Doing well?’

’He’s doing very well. He’s not wandering around in the middle of lessons any more.’

’That’s fantastic, Gina.’

’But I don’t know anyone. Everybody’s gone in the daytime, and locked up at home at night. It’s not quite what I expected.’ She recovered, remembered who she was talking to. ’But we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine.’

’Listen, let Pat come over for a week. He can spend some time with my mum. He’d love that. So would she.’ I didn’t tell Gina about my mum, about the lump the size of a planet. Those days were long gone. ’Because you never know what’s going to happen in life, do you?’

’That’s right,’ said my ex-wife. ’You never know what’s going to happen in life.’

sixteen

If you saw my mum walking down the street, you might think she was just another little old lady on her way to buy some cat food. But you would be wrong.

She can’t stand cats for a start, because she claims they leave a terrible mess everywhere (although strangely she always stoops to pet and coo over even the most flea-bitten moggy she encounters on her travels). Looking at my mum, you might think you knew all about her. But you would not know her at all.

Some things I know about my mother.

She thinks Dolly Parton is the greatest singer in the world and that people shouldn’t make fun of Dolly’s figure all the time. She will watch any kind of sport on TV but prefers the more violent games (boxing, rugby, the NFL). She believes that her grandson was the most beautiful baby in the history of the world. She reckons that is a completely objective opinion, and she is not remotely biased.

Some more things I know about my mum. She gets unimaginably lonely since my dad died. It doesn’t matter how many people are around her. She worshipped my father, and talks to his photographs when she thinks nobody is listening. A visit to his grave is my mum’s idea of a good day out.

I know she inspires an incredible love in her family and friends – young neighbours repair her guttering for a cup of tea, her army of silver-haired friends are constantly asking her to hang out at the new shopping mall, and her brothers call her every day.

My mum is kind, funny and brave. Very brave. Although she doesn’t open her front door after dark, she is always ready to stand up to any passing bully. When Pat was very small she threatened to punch out a gang of youths who were getting what she called wild in the local General Lee’s Tasty Tennessee Kitchen.

I was angry with her at the time – I thought they might stab her, because even little old ladies are not safe in the lousy modern world – but now I am glad she did it. That’s her. That’s my mum. That’s what she’s like. I am proud of her.

She doesn’t have the short fuse that my father had. She is tolerant of other ways of life, believing in the essential goodness of mankind. But when she loses her temper, she goes… well, wild is what she would call it.

Her favourite brother, the one who is closest to her in age, likes reminding her about the scar she put in the upright piano in the East End home they grew up in. My mum, enraged at some teasing from her brother, threw a knife at his head. It missed him by inches and stuck in the piano, quivering the way knives only do in cartoons. The attempted murder of her brother was out of character. She was a quiet, shy girl, bullied at school for a slight speech impediment (not bullied by her schoolmates, bullied by teachers, for that East End school was as brutal as a workhouse in Dickens). She always claimed the knife had slipped. Her brother insisted she had aimed the blade to perfection.

In a house full of boys, she was as distant and regal as a Virgin Queen. Doted on by her parents, encouraged to think of herself as special, she was as indulged as an only child.

I know my mum was always loved – as the only girl in a large family of boys, and as the only female in the small family that I grew up in – and I believe that is why she is so good at giving love. I know that Pat and I would be lost without her. I can’t even imagine what the world would be like without my mum in it.

She is full of life. She has more life in her than anyone I’ve ever known. She likes to sing and dance. I know she likes a laugh, even at the worst of times, especially at the worst of times. We still smile about when she slammed her head against my father’s coffin at his funeral.

Only someone who loves people as much as my rnum could ever get so lonely. She carefully plans her evening viewing. She likes the news, real-people documentaries, but she raises an eyebrow at all the pierced tongues and nipples on Six Pissed Students in a Flat. I know she sneers at soap operas, although back in the eighties she liked JR in Dallas. Cartoon villainy amuses her.

What else? Oh yes.

I know my mother hates going to the doctor.

In the end Tex didn’t take my mum to the hospital. Apparently his car was having trouble with its big end, although I suspected that the real problem was Tex having trouble with his nerve.

My mum told me she would get the bus. I said that I would come to the hospital with her. She said the bus was fine. She didn’t want to make a fuss. That was always one of her big things – not making a fuss. If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appeared in her back garden, rampaging through her rose bushes, my mum would try not to make a fuss.

Having a laugh and not making a fuss. That was her way. That was her philosophy. A kind of light-hearted stoicism that pulled at my heart, and made me feel like putting my arm around her.

But it was difficult to laugh today. It was difficult to grin and bear it on days like these.

When she came out from seeing the specialist I could tell the news was bad.

She was struggling to understand the diagnosis, trying to understand the language, trying to understand how a hardened piece of flesh could change your world so completely.

She didn’t want to talk about it in the overcrowded waiting room. She didn’t want to talk about it until we were back in my car.

We sat in the hospital’s endless car park. Other cars circled like sharks, looking for a precious parking space. It was a busy day for the hospital. They were probably all busy days.

’Look – I’ve written it down.’ She showed me a scrap of paper. She had written invasive carcinoma in her shaky hand.

’What does it mean?’ I said, sort of knowing what it meant, but unable to believe it.

’Breast cancer,’ said my mum.

Of course, I thought. First one parent and then the other. The most natural thing in the world, as natural as the birth of a child. Then why did it feel like the world was coming apart?

’The doctor at the breast unit says they don’t know what they’re going to do yet. How to treat it. Nice bloke. Some sort of Mediterranean. Spoke English better than me. They do, don’t they? Gave it to me straight. Says there’s something called staging. It means they have to assess the risk of it spreading. And, you know. How far it’s spread already.’

I was speechless.

’I met the breast care nurse. She was nice. Lovely girl. Her nose was – what do you call it? Pierced. Specially trained to deal with my kind of case. I’ve got to go back, Harry. I can get the bus. Don’t worry. I know you’re busy.’

I stared at her profile as she looked across at the hospital, I watched that soft, kind face that I had known longer than any other, and saw all the emotions churning inside her.

Shock. Fear. Bewilderment. Anger. Even the darkest kind of amusement.

’Graham didn’t stick around long, did he? Old Tex. Cowboy Joe from the Rio Southend. Soon buggered off when the music stopped. Your dad would have been here. Your dad would have been here for me, Harry. That man would have walked through fire for me. That’s a marriage, Harry. That’s what a marriage is all about.’

’There’s lots they can do, isn’t there?’

She was silent, lost in her own thoughts.

’Mum? I said, there’s plenty they can do, isn’t there?’

’Oh yes. Oh yes. Lots they can do. I’m going to beat this thing. I mean it, Harry. People live with breast cancer. They do. People live. It’s not like your dad. Can’t fight lung cancer. Can’t fight that. Bloody lung cancer. Bloody cancer. Took your dad. It’s not going to take me. Bloody, bloody cancer. It’s a right… bastard.’ She glanced at me. ’Excuse my language.’

’Mum?’

’What, love?’

Tm really proud that you’re my mum.’

She nodded, took my hand and held it. Held it so tight in her own small hand that I could feel that piece of precious metal pressing into my palm, that sliver of gold, burnished by a lifetime.

My mother’s wedding ring.

It fit her perfectly.

My parents met through her brother. The one she threw the knife at and tried to kill. He was always her favourite.

My mum’s brother and my dad went to the same boxing club for boys. This was back when boxing was as popular among schoolboys as football. That’s all changed now, of course, and the only men in television I know who boxed at school all went to Eton.

But this was back when boxing was considered a healthy pastime for growing boys. And after sparring together – my uncle and my father were exactly the same weight and age, both one year older than my mum – my mum’s brother brought my dad home to that house in an East End banjo, which was what they called their little dead-end street, a banjo, because that’s exactly what it was shaped like. And growing up in that banjo, a house full of boys. And one girl.

At seventeen, my dad had already been at work for three years. He was cocky and wild, his pride primed with an explosive temper – after one of his army of cousins had sworn at him, he had tied her to a lamppost and washed her mouth out with soap. There was an anger in him. He would fight anyone. He seemed to enjoy it. Then he saw my mother, just sixteen years old, the spoilt princess of the banjo, and he found his reason to stop fighting and start living.

She taught him to be gentle – her and the unimaginable things he did and saw in the war. He taught her to be strong. Or maybe it was all there already – the roaring boy was more sensitive than he dared to let on. And perhaps she was always harder than she seemed. The reserved sixteen-year-old girl had been toughened up by poverty, life in the banjo and all those brothers.

But they had a deliriously happy marriage. Even up to the day my father died, they were mad about each other. For an entire lifetime, they never really stopped courting.

He sent her red roses, she brought him breakfast in bed. He stared at her, unable to believe his luck. She wrote him poems. Put them in his lunch box. I saw his cards to her – Mother’s Day, birthday, Christmas. His angel, he called her. The love of his life. He seemed like the least romantic man in the world, and she inspired him to write sonnets.

The products of close-knit, crowded communities, they were content in the company of each other. The only real trauma in their union was all those years at the start when a baby just would not come. And later, after I finally arrived, when she suffered a heartbreaking string of miscarriages. One of my clearest memories of childhood is my mum sitting on the floor of our rented flat above a greengrocer’s shop, inconsolable as my father tried to comfort her, his broken-hearted angel, his devastated true love, crying for another lost child.

My first look at married life.

When I became a parent, I found myself imitating them, trying to strike their balance between being strict and being gentle. They seemed like perfect parents to me. Loving and tough.

My father never lifted a finger to either of us – he reserved his violence for strangers who were dumb enough to cross him. My mum was not averse to aiming a shoe at me – at least it wasn’t a knife – when I drove her to distraction with my daydreaming and solitary games, the comforts of the only child that frequently prevented me from coming when I was called. But she had waited too long for a baby to ever be mad at me for long.

’I,!

’Wait until your father gets home,’ she would tell me, and it was her ultimate threat.

It never frightened me, though. Because I knew they loved me, and I knew that it was a love that was unconditional and everlasting, a love that was built to last a lifetime and beyond.

No, what frightened me as a child was the thought of losing my mother. Small, curly-haired, five foot and a bit, she would disappear up to the row of shops near our home on black, blustery winter evenings, the kind of November and December nights that we no longer seem to get, off to buy something for our tea. Those were the years when it snowed in winter and, in my memory at least, the streets were shrouded in the fog of countless open fires. She would be on an errand for mince, pork chops or baked beans, or on Fridays fish and chips wrapped in newspaper – the menu of my childhood.

And I would be anxious, unbearably anxious for the return of this woman, my mum, who had just nipped down the shops. Still in my school uniform of grey flannel trousers, grey shirt and stripy tie, that old man’s drag they made us wear, I would stand on the back of the sofa and press my face against a window streaming with condensation, scanning the dark, empty streets.

Searching for the irreplaceable sight of my mother, and tortured by the thought that she was never coming home again.

Cyd and I took my mum to a show.

My father had always taken my mother to shows. Every six months or so they would put on their best clothes and head for the bright lights of London. For two people who spent most evenings in front of the television set, they were connoisseurs of musical theatre.

When the film versions of Oklahoma!’, West Side Story or My Fair Lady came on TV, they would both sing along, word perfect. My mum would also dance – she did a particularly good imitation of the cool-daddy-o ballet of the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story. For my mum, musicals were not a passive experience. She had been going to the West End for fifty years, and there were few tunes being banged out nightly on Shaftesbury Avenue, the Strand and Haymarket that she didn’t know better than the people singing them.

Now she decided she wanted to catch Les Misérables again.

’I love that one,’ she told Cyd. ’I like the little girl. And I like the prostitutes. And I like it when all the students get shot. It’s very sad and there are some lovely melodies in it.’

She wore a white two-piece suit from Bloomingdale’s that I had brought her back from a trip to New York. She looked lovely but frail, and older, far older, than I had ever thought she would be.

Cyd took her hand when we picked her up, and never let it go as we made our way to the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus. Cyd held her hand on the drive into town, held it as we made our way through the teeming early-evening crowds, my mum looking too easily broken for the city, too delicate to be surrounded by all the traffic and bustle and hordes.

The audience inside the Palace was the usual mixture of foreign tourists, coach trips in from the suburbs and locals on a big night out. Directly in front of us there was a young man in a pinstripe suit, some well-scrubbed junior hotshot from the City, with what looked like his mother on one side and his grandmother on the other side. I didn’t like him from the start.

He made a big deal about turning round and shaking his head just because my mum clipped him around the ear a few times with her coat as she was struggling to take it off. Then he tutted elaborately when she whistled through the overture. And then, when the show began, he kept on loudly clearing his throat when my mum sang along to Fantine’s big dying number, ’I Dreamed a Dream’. Finally, as my mum joined in for the cast’s stirring rendition of ’Do You Hear the People Sing?’, he turned around angrily.

’Will you please shut up?’ he hissed.

’Leave her alone, pal,’ said Cyd, and I loved her for it. ’We’ve paid for our tickets too.’

’We can’t enjoy the show if she acts like she’s part of the chorus!’

’Who’s she?’ I demanded.

Behind us people started going, ’Ssssh!’ Bald and permed heads were turning. Well-fed faces creased with irritation.

’Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men?’ sang my mum, happily oblivious. ’It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!’

The young suit’s posh old granny stuck her oar in. ’We’ve paid for our seats, too, you know.’

’We can’t concentrate on the performance,’ whined her frumpy daughter.

’You don’t need to concentrate, lady,’ said Cyd. ’You just need to lie back and enjoy it. You know how to lie back and enjoy it, don’t you?’

’Well, really!’

’I’m getting help,’ said her son, and went off to find a young woman with a torch.

Then they threw us out.

They were very nice about it. Told us that if we couldn’t silence my mum then the management reserved the right to ask us to leave. And there was no way of shutting up my mum when we still had the deaths of Valjean, Javert, Eponine and all those nice students to look forward to.

So we went. My wife and my mother and me. Laughing about it already, as though getting thrown out of a musical was actually much more fun than watching one. Making our way through the funky crowds to the Bar Italia where my mum was promised a lovely cup of tea.

The three of us, my wife and my mother and me, arm in arm in the streets of Soho.

Singing ’Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’ at the top of our voices.

seventeen

I met my son at the airport.

He came through the arrival gate holding the hand of a young British Airways stewardess. There was some sort of identification tag around his neck, as worn by child evacuees in old black-and-white wars, or Paddington Bear.

Please look after this child.

’Pat! Over here! Pat!’

The stewardess spotted me before he did. He was chatting away to her, his face pale and serious, and then he saw me through the legs of all those arriving tourists and business types. He broke away from the BA girl and ran to my arms, and I was on my knees, holding him tight and kissing his mop of blond hair.

’Let me look at you, darling.’

He grinned and yawned, and I saw that the gummy gap that had existed at the front of his mouth had changed. There were now two uneven fragments of pure white bone pushing through. The teeth that would have to last him a lifetime.

There were other changes. He was taller, and his hair was maybe slightly darker, and I didn’t recognise any of his clothes.

’Are you all right? How was the flight? It’s so good to see you, darling!’

’You can’t sleep on planes because they keep coming round making you try to eat things,’ he reflected, blinking his tired blue eyes. ’You have to choose between fish and chicken.’

’He’s a little bit jet-lagged, aren’t you, Pat?’ said the BA girl. Then she gave me a dazzling white smile. ’He’s such a lovely boy.’

It was true. He was a lovely boy. Smart, funny and beautiful. And independent and brave – flying across the Atlantic all by himself. A terrific kid.

My son, when he was seven years old.

We thanked the girl from BA and caught a cab back into town. My heart felt lighter than it had in months.

’Everything okay in Connecticut?’

’Fine.’

’You like your new school? Making friends?’

’Good.’

’Mummy all right?’

’She’s okay.’ He paused, frowning at the slow-moving traffic heading for the motorway. ’But she argues with Richard. They had a little bit of a row about Britney.’

So that was the trouble with Gina. For a moment I wondered who Britney was – some hot little babysitter? Or some cute secretary looking for love? But Britney couldn’t be a secretary. Richard didn’t have a job. It had all fallen through at BridleWorthington. So who was this mystery woman?

’Britney was sick in the living room,’ Pat said. ’Richard was very angry. Then Britney wet the Indian rug and had to have an operation and Richard said it was disgusting the way Britney kept biting at the stitches.’

I was thinking that Britney must be one hell of a babysitter, and then I remembered. Of course. My son had a dog now.

A slow smile spread across Pat’s face.

’Guess what? At dinner he sits right by the table and licks his, you know, willie.’

I raised my eyebrows.

’Richard or Britney?’

My son thought about it for a moment.

’You must be joking,’ he said.

’Come here, you.’

Then he slid across the seat and climbed on to my lap. I could smell that old Pat smell of sugar and dirt, sense his exhaustion. Within minutes he was fast asleep.

The cab driver had pictures of three small children on his dashboard. He looked at us in his rear-view mirror and smiled.

’You two boys come far?’ he said.

I held my son close.

’Oh yes,’ I said. ’We’ve come a very long way.’

Cyd had hung balloons on the front door, and it filled me with gratitude and love.

She was waiting for us as I paid the driver, wreathed in smiles. As I dragged Pat’s suitcase up our garden path she crouched down and threw her arms around him and I felt like we were becoming a real family at last.

Peggy was in the living room watching a Lucy Doll video. It was a film that Peggy and I had watched before, an animated double bill featuring a cheapo cartoon version of Lucy Doll Rock and Roll and her blank-faced band getting stranded in a fifties time warp.

’Lucy Doll Rock and Roll and her friends can’t wait to join the hep teens down at the soda shop for a bebopping, finger-licking good time,’ said Peggy. ’Strap yourself in for action, because the countdown to fun has begun!’

Pat smiled shyly at his oldest friend.

’Hello, Pat,’ Peggy said with the brisk formality of minor royalty. ’So how’s America?’

’Good,’ he said. ’I’ve got a dog. His name’s Britney. He’s not allowed in the house because he licks his willie right in front of everybody.’

’Sorry to disappoint you, Pat,’ sniffed Peggy. ’But he can’t be a boy dog if his name is Britney. Because Britney is a girl’s name, stupid.’

Pat looked up at me for support. ’Britney is a boy dog, isn’t he?’

I thought of Britney licking his enormous great penis at the dinner table.

’I would say so, darling.’

’Do you want to watch Lucy Doll’s American Graffiti with me?’ said Peggy. ’Lucy Doll Rock and Roll magically comes to life in this stunning adaptation of the much loved classic.’

Cyd and I smiled at each other. She gave my arm a little squeeze. She knew how much this meant to me.

Pat considered the vision in pink doing a Chuck Berry duck-walk across the TV screen.

’Lucy Doll sucks,’ he said.

’Pat,’ I said.

’Lucy Doll sucks big time.’

’Pat.’

’Lucy Doll can kiss my royal ass.’

’Pat, I’m warning you.’

’Lucy Doll can go fuck herself.’

And it sort of went downhill from there.

I had never seen my mother so happy in my life.

This was more than happiness. Seeing her grandson again provoked a kind of ecstasy, a kind of delirious abandon. My mum lost herself in her grandson.

Before I had the handbrake on she had picked him up and squeezed the air out of him. She held him at arm’s length and stared with wonder at his gorgeous face. She shook her head, unable to believe that he was back.

If only for a week.

We went inside. Pink and purple leaflets were strewn across her coffee table. My mother quickly began to gather them up. But not before I caught sight of some of the titles.

Here for You. Coping with a Diagnosis. Breast Reconstruction. Friends of Breast Cancer Care. Going into Hospital. Zoladex. Taxol. Taxotere. Arimidex. Chemotherapy. Radiotherapy.

I didn’t even understand half of the titles. But I knew what they all meant.

’You okay, Mum?’ I asked, the most useless question of all, but one I couldn’t stop myself asking. Because I wanted so much for her to tell me that everything was going to be all right, and that she would always be in this world.

’Oh, I’m fine,’ she said, not wanting to make a fuss, seeking to avoid self-pity and melodrama at all costs. ’They sent me this stuff. I don’t know how they expect me to read it all.’

She gathered up her cancer leaflets and stuffed them into a drawer.

Then she clapped her hands.

’I’m going to make a nice cup of tea for my two boys,’ she said. ’How about that?’

’I can’t have caffeine,’ Pat said, picking up the television remote. ’Mummy said.’

’And I’ve already had a few cappuccinos,’ I said. ’My doctor doesn’t want me to have more than three shots of caffeine a day. Bad for blood pressure, you see.’

’Oh,’ said my mum, bewildered. ’Oh, all right. I’ll just make one for myself then, shall I?’

So Pat and I slumped on that sagging old sofa that seemed to know every last nook and curve in our bodies and my mum went off to the kitchen, humming Dolly Parton’s ’Jolene’, and contemplating this strange new world where her son and grandson were both forbidden from having a nice cup of tea.

Later we were in the park watching Pat tackle the upper regions of a rusty climbing frame. He wasn’t the tentative small boy he had been only a couple of years earlier. Now he was as fearless as a mountain goat.

Two bigger boys were clambering around the very top like monkeys in Tommy Hilfiger. Every now and again Pat would pause, hold on tight, and gaze up at them with adoration. He still loved bigger boys. They ignored him completely.

’It’s good to have him back,’ I said. ’Feels more like a proper family again. Especially when we are out here with you. Just a regular family where you don’t have to think too much about anything. Where it all seems – I don’t know – normal. Like you and Dad.’

My father would have happily concurred with my yearning for normality. The old man would have bemoaned the death of the family, the rise in the divorce rate, the generation of children who were being brought up with one of their parents missing. He would have done all that while rolling himself a cigarette.

My dad was all for normality.

But my mum was made of different stuff.

’What’s normal?’ she said. ’Your dad and I were married for ten years before you came along. You call us normal? We felt like anything but normal. We felt like freaks.’

The two bigger boys jumped off the climbing frame and ran to the swings. Pat smiled at them with undiluted affection.

’All our friends were having children,’ my mum said. ’Like a bunch of rabbits, they were. One of them always had a bun in the oven. Up the spout, in the club, knocked up. But it didn’t happen for us.’ She gave a smile. ’And you call us normal, Harry. Bless you. We didn’t feel very normal, I can tell you.’

I watched my son laboriously edging his way up the climbing frame, his face stern with concentration, and rosy-cheeked from the cold.

’You know what I mean. We were normal. You, me and Dad.’

And I thought of Christmas with all the aunts and uncles, caravan holidays in Cornwall, the smell of the Sunday roast cooking while my old man washed his car in the little driveway. I remembered runs to Southend, not for the pier or the beach, but for the dog track. And I remembered lying on the back seat of the car, the yellow lights of the Essex A-roads streaming about my head, coming home from seeing my nan or, once a year, a pantomime at the London Palladium, telling my mum that I couldn’t sleep, I wasn’t tired, not tired at all. Just rest your eyes, she would tell me. Just rest your eyes. There was a simplicity and a goodness about my childhood, and already it seemed too late for my son to have the same thing. ’You couldn’t get more normal than us,’ I said.

’So we became normal when you came along? And if you hadn’t come along, we would have stayed freaks?’

’I don’t know. I just know it felt sort of easy. In a way that it doesn’t feel easy any more. Pat and Peggy are not talking. Cyd’s angry with me because she thinks I’m spoiling Pat. I’m mad at Cyd because I think she resents Pat coming over for just one lousy week.’

’Why aren’t Pat and Peggy talking?’

’They had a bit of a bust-up. He called Lucy Doll a two-dollar crack whore. You know how Peggy feels about Lucy Doll.’

’Brothers and sisters fight all the time. I nearly stabbed one of my brothers.’

’Yes, but they’re not brother and sister, are they? That’s the point. So it can never be normal. Not really. If it falls to pieces, then what happens? We never see each other again. You’re telling me that’s what you call normal? Come on, Mum. Not even you’re that broad-minded.’

We watched Pat climb to the summit of the frame. He stood there silhouetted against the big blue sky, the smell of spring in the air despite the chill, grinning at us, all wrapped up in his padded anorak. He held on tight with both hands. Golden strands of hair stuck out from inside the bobble hat that his grandmother had knitted him.

’I just don’t like all this talk about normal,’ said my mum. ’Because for years I felt anything but normal. Ten years we tried for you. Every month was another heartbreak. Times that by ten, Harry. You’re the smart one. You work it out.’

One of Pat’s trainers seemed to slip and I watched the expression on his face change from pride to alarm as he suddenly lurched backwards into thin air. But then he recovered, found his footing and gripped the climbing frame with his tiny fists.

’There’s no such thing as a normal family,’ said my mum.

Gina called.

It was close to midnight. The kids had been asleep for hours

– Peggy in her room, Pat on an old futon in the guest room and Cyd was out catering for the launch of one of those trendy hotels that were springing up all over town. After the slurs on Lucy Doll’s morality, we were all talking again, although it was with a strained politeness that sometimes seemed even worse than angry silence. I was glad that nobody was around when my ex-wife called.

’Is he okay, Harry?’

’He’s fine.’

’You’re not letting him have sugar, are you? Or caffeine? Or British beef?’

’He hasn’t had a Happy Meal since he’s been here.’

’I want you to take him to see my dad.’

’Your dad? Take him to see Glenn?’

’That’s right. Pat’s grandfather.’

It was always difficult for me to remember that Pat had two sets of grandparents. Gina’s mother had died before our son was born, and although her old man was still out there and Pat had seen him sporadically down the years, he had never been a traditional grandfather figure.

Glenn was what he had always been – a mullet-haired musician who had never quite made it out of the minor leagues. There had been the odd appearance on Top of the Pops at the cusp of the sixties and seventies, but Glenn had spent almost three decades as a sales assistant in a guitar shop on Denmark Street, playing ’Stairway to Heaven’ for teenage NME readers. The best part of his energies had gone into forming a new band every few years, not to mention a new family. Gina and her mother had been left behind a lifetime ago. Musical differences, probably.

’I want him to see my dad. I want him to know that he has another grandfather. It wasn’t just your dad, Harry.’

’Okay. I’ll take Pat to see Glenn.’

’Thank you.’

’How’s everything over there? Britney still upsetting Richard? Pat’s told me all about it. Is he still licking his penis at the dinner table? The dog, I mean. Not Richard.’

’That dog is the least of our troubles,’ said my ex-wife.

My son cried out in the middle of the night. I slipped out of bed, feeling Cyd stir beside me, and I went to him, treading carefully as I was more asleep than awake.

And it was as if we had never been apart.

His long fair hair was stuck to his head with perspiration. I sat him up and gave him some water, rubbing his back the way I’d done when he was a baby and needed winding.

’You can’t sleep on planes,’ he said in the darkness, talking in a dream. ’It’s very difficult, right, because you’re moving and there’s all this food all the time and a little telly too. Isn’t it difficult, Daddy?’

’But it’s okay now. Everything’s okay now.’

I held my boy close and rocked him, feeling the warmth of him through the brushed-cotton pyjamas, sensing his little chest rise and fall with each passing breath, feeling all the love I had for him rise up inside me.

It was four in the morning. The house slept on. But now I was awake, and remembering some words from long ago.

’Just rest your eyes,’ I told my boy.

eighteen

Peggy surveyed the crowds swarming around the giant Ferris wheel.

’There’s lots of people,’ she said, taking my hand.

I looked up at the London Eye towering above us, and down at her worried face. I smiled and gave her hand a squeeze.

’We’ll be up there soon.’

She nodded, holding my hand tighter. Sometimes Peggy put her hand in mine and I thought that everything was going to be all right.

She was so small, so smart, so wise, so trusting and so beautiful that all she had to do was take my hand and I wanted to protect her for the rest of my life. I held that warm hand in mine and nothing else mattered. Not the sporadic visits from her useless father. Not the running battle she was currently having with Pat about their early-evening DVD entertainment. And not even the fact that her mother looked at her in a way she could never look at my son. Peggy took my hand and something chemical happened inside me. I felt like her father.

High above us the great wheel revolved in the clear April sky. It was turning so slowly that from where we were you could hardly tell that it was moving at all. But new people kept pouring in and out of the steel and glass capsules, so something was happening up there.

The crowd edged towards the departure gate. Pat was excitedly darting between the barriers, checking on our progress. Cyd was reading a brochure about the London Eye, occasionally saying, ’Now this is interesting…” before reading us some fact about the big wheel’s architects, construction or size. But while Pat ran around and Cyd read aloud, Peggy just held my hand as we slowly moved forward.

She was far more self-possessed than Pat, but that was not the reason she was being quiet today. My son was giddy with the fairground excitement of the London Eye, but something about all these people unnerved Peggy.

’We’ll be able to see where we live, Peg,’ I told her. ’And we’ll be able to see Parliament and all the parks and all the way to Docklands.’

’And Big Ben?’ In a very small voice.

’And Big Ben too.’ I gave her hand another squeeze. ’We’ll be all right, Peg.’

She didn’t look so certain. Pat dashed back, happy and breathless. Cyd tucked her brochure under her arm. She put her other arm around my waist and rested her head on my shoulder. When she lifted her face to look at me we smiled at each other, the kind of smiles that you can only really get after loving each other for a long time, smiles that somehow contained both a question and its answer.

Happy?

Thanks to you.

Then my wife slapped my arm with her London Eye brochure.

’Hey, don’t forget,’ she said. ’Peggy’s school play is next week. It’s really important that you guys are there. I’ll slap your asses if you don’t come.’

’We wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

I really meant it. We felt like a family today. And I wanted this feeling to last.

We were so close to the giant wheel that now you had to crane your neck to see the top of it. You could see that it was definitely moving.

’Nearly there,’ gasped Pat.

So I held Peggy’s hand in mine as the big wheel kept turning and, everywhere she looked, the adult world towered above her.

’Hello, boys,’ said Gina’s dad. ’Cool. Sweet. How about a cup of tea? Herbal all right?’

Glenn. Pat’s other grandfather. Easy to remember him as my ex-wife’s useless bastard father, the sorry excuse for a man who made all men suspect, who made all men seem capable of terrible betrayal. Less easy to remember that he was my son’s grandfather.

My parents had been such a large part of Pat’s life, a source of stability and unconditional love during what sometimes seemed like unbroken years of domestic mayhem, that it was hard for me to think of Gina’s wayward old man in quite the same way. Glenn wasn’t my idea of a grandfather. He was more my idea of an ageing hippy who believed his withered old dick was the centre of the known universe. If Glenn wasn’t there for his daughter, why should we expect any more for his grandson?

Yet it was difficult for me to hate him, despite all the sadness he had caused in his lifetime. On the odd occasions when we met, this elderly groover in his cracked leather trousers seemed like a lonely, pathetic figure. After all the big dreams and great loves and hysterical scenes in his life, he had ended up in a rented one-bedroom flat in Hadley Wood. Because he had mistaken hedonism for happiness.

And there was an undeniable sweetness about him. I knew that he was a selfish old git who had sacrificed everyone he had ever loved for his knob and his guitar, and I knew that Gina still carried the wounds that he had inflicted by walking out and casually starting again. But he appeared genuinely glad to see Pat and me, and there was something in the way that he looked at my son that seemed infinitely gentle. Given the chance, the pair of them got on very well. Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part, but when Glenn looked at Pat, I believed I saw love in his eyes.

While Glenn laboured with our drinks – the smallest act of domesticity was beyond him – I sat on a sofa that was made out of the same cracked leather material as his trousers. Pat wandered the flat. There wasn’t a lot of space to stroll around, and everywhere you looked there was music.

Dad rock magazines on the coffee table. An acoustic and an electric guitar leaning back in their stands. A good sound system, although like Glenn himself, the material on the speakers was fraying with age. Shining towers of CDs. And fat stacks of old twelve-inch vinyl LPs. Pat picked one of them up.

’What’s this then?’ he said, brandishing a dark, twelve-inch cardboard square at me.

’That’s a long-playing record, Pat.’

’What’s it do then?’

’It plays music.’

Pat looked doubtful. ’It’s too big,’ he said.

On the cover of the album he was holding, a beautiful young man stared moodily out of the darkness. In the background three less lovely young men hovered like ugly sisters waiting to be invited to the ball.

Glenn came back into the room carrying our mugs of camomile.

’Good choice, man,’ he said. ’That’s the first Doors album. Considered by many to be the greatest debut album of all time.’

’Pat’s not curious about Jim Morrison, Glenn,’ I said. ’He’s just never seen an LP before.’

Glenn almost dropped the herbal tea. ’You’re kidding me!’

And then he was away. Sitting with Pat on the floor of his rented flat, sifting through half a century of music while the Doors belted out ’Break On Through (to the Other Side)’.

It was all there, from Elvis and Little Richard to the Beatles and the Stones, Hendrix and the Who, the Pistols and the Clash, the Smiths and the Stone Roses, Nirvana and the Strokes, and every side road, every detour, from country rock to glam to grunge to nu metal, the greats, the has-beens and – his speciality – the one-hit wonders. Glenn led his charmed, bewildered grandson on a guided tour through a rock and roll wonderland.

Now these guys are interesting,’ Glenn chuckled, producing a sleeve that showed five boys in psychedelic trousers frolicking in a children’s park. ’Ah yes, the Trollies. Started out as a basic Mod covers band called the Trolley Boys. Got into the whole psychedelic thing as the Trollies. Wandering around the council flats having a bit of a cosmic vision – you know the sort of thing, Pat. And later recorded some rather interesting, hugely underrated concept albums as Maximum Troll.’ Glenn handed the sleeve to Pat. ’See anyone you recognise?’

I peered over their shoulders. And I saw him immediately the face of a drug-ravaged choirboy, the Robert Plant bubble cut tumbling over his velvet jacket, leering at the camera with his mates. The Glenn of thirty years ago, when Gina was a baby, the Glenn who was as close as he would ever be to having his dreams come true.

’That’s your granddad, Pat,’ I said, resisting the urge to say

– your other granddad. ’He was on Top of the Pops once, isn’t that right, Glenn?’

Pat’s mouth dropped open. ’You were on Top Pops?’ He had always called it Top Pops. I had given up trying to correct him. I sort of liked his mistake anyway.

’With this very line-up. Oh, apart from Chalky Brown on drums. By the time we did ”Roundhouse Lady”, we had Sniffer Penge on the skins.’]

Pat was enchanted. He had never imagined his errant grand- j father to be capable of such glory. And Glenn was humbled and J happy, perhaps happier than I had ever seen him. |

My father hated talking about his past – the poverty in the East End, the service with the Royal Naval Commandos, the death and destruction of the war, the nineteen-year-old friends who never came home. But Glenn didn’t feel the same way about his past – playing the Scene as the Trolley Boys with Pete Townshend and Roger Daltry in the audience, getting a big hit as the Trollies with ’Roundhouse Lady’, moving out to the country with Maximum Troll to record double concept albums. Glenn could hardly shut up about it.

And I saw for the first time that Glenn was as much a grandfather to Pat as my own dad.

It was certainly an alternative version of manhood that Gina’s dad offered. Instead of the soldier, father and husband that my father had been, Glenn was musician, free man and artist.

If you can call a former member of Maximum Troll an artist.

We were late leaving Glenn’s place.

The pair of them had been so wrapped up in talking about music – or rather Glenn talked about music while Pat stared in wonder, sometimes saying, ’You were on Top Pops, Granddad?’

– that by the time we got to the car, we were in the middle of the rush hour.

The car crawled south on the Finchley Road. In the end we decided to park, sit out the traffic for a while and get something to eat. We had an important date later that evening – Peggy’s school play was tonight – but we had plenty of time.

At least that’s the way it seemed.

There was a little Japanese place in Camden Town. Thanks to his mother, Pat was an expert on Japanese food, adept with chopsticks and capable of putting away sashimi and tempura the way most seven-year-olds polish off a Big Mac. It was only when we went inside that we discovered we were in a tepenyaki restaurant. This place wasn’t about food so much as theatre.

All the seating was at big tables arranged around large metal grills with a space for a chef to do his stuff. These cooks strutted the restaurant like culinary gunslingers, bandy-legged as if they had just done ten days in the saddle, big white hats perched on the back of their heads, and huge knives in low-slung holsters hanging by the side of their aprons.

These chefs didn’t just cook for you, they put on a show. All over the restaurant they were dealing prawns and slivers of meat or vegetables on to the sizzling grills, slicing them up, mixing them with rice, then flamboyantly throwing jars of spices and herbs in the air and catching them behind their back. And all °f it executed in a lightning blur of speed, just like Tom Cruise m Cocktail, but done with an extremely large chopper.

But it took ages to even get started. We had to wait for our table to fill up with other customers before the show could begin. I looked at my watch, calculating how late we could leave this place and still make it to Peggy’s play. Finally, when our table was fully occupied, a young Filipino chef greeted us, melodramatically whipped out his knife and started tossing foodstuffs into the air. He must have been new because he kept dropping things – a wayward prawn nearly took out the eye of a German tourist – but Pat smiled encouragement. The time ebbed away, and Pat kept ordering more food to be thrown, sliced and sizzled.

’We really should make a move, Pat,’ I said, knowing that I didn’t have the heart to stop his fun.

The young tepenyaki chef threw a jar of cinnamon into the air and came really, really close to catching it. I half-heartedly joined in the sympathetic applause.

’I’m very hungry,’ Pat said, his eyes sparkling with wonder.

What was it with my family and the theatre?

Pat was green around the gills by the time we reached the school.

’I told you not to have that third helping of squid,’ I said.

The play had already begun. All around the assembly hall, proud parents were filming a multicultural celebration of diversity called The Egg. What did it have to do with Easter? As little as possible.

Children representing the religions of the world were in a stable where a papier-mâche dove of peace had just been born. On the tiny stage, there was a little boy in a white sheet and a black beret, possibly representing a Shinto priest, a little girl in an orange beach towel with a pink swimming cap on her head, denoting baldness, who was definitely meant to be a Buddhist monk, and a child of indeterminate sex with a cotton-wool beard and sandals meant to represent either Islam or Judaism or both.

And then there was Peggy, her arms and legs sticking out of an old Pocabontas duvet, with a Habitat scarf around her head, probably representing the Virgin Mary.

I could see Cyd in the middle of a row, two empty seats beside her. I grabbed Pat’s hand and we began inching our way towards her. Proud parents with digicams cried out in pain and tutted disapprovingly as we trod on their toes and banged against their knees.

’Sorry, sorry,” I whispered, as Pat moaned and groaned and clutched his stomach. On stage the play was reaching its climax.

’What-is-this-strange-creature?’ said the Shinto priest.

’Where-has-it-come-from?’ said the Buddhist monk.

’What-does-it-mean-for-the-people-of-the-world?’ said the child with the cotton-wool beard.

’Where the hell have you two been?’ demanded my wife.

’Sssh!’ One of the parents with a camera.

’Sorry. I couldn’t get him away from Glenn.’

’Glenn? That disgusting old punk?’

’And then we got stuck in a tepenyaki restaurant.’

’SSSH!’

We turned our attention to the stage.

Cyd hissed at me out of the corner of her mouth. ’You knew this was Peggy’s special night. You knew it.’

’WILL YOU PLEASE STOP TALKING, PLEASE?’ Some old granny in the row directly behind us.

Pat opened his mouth, leaned forward and quietly began to retch.

Everyone on stage was looking at Peggy. The Buddhist monk in the orange beach towel and swimming cap. The Shinto priest in the white sheet and black beret. The bearded elder with cotton-wool facial hair and sandals. All waiting for Peggy to say her line.

’What-does-it-mean-for-the-people-of-the-worldP’ repeated the elder.

’You’re so selfish,’ Cyd told me, hardly bothering to keep her voice down. ’All you care about is your son. Nobody else means a thing to you.’

’WILL YOU PLEASE -’

Cyd swivelled in her seat. ’Oh, change the record, Granny.’

Peggy was staring out into the crowd, as if waiting for a prompt. Her mouth opened but nothing came out. Unlike Pat, who chose this moment to vomit elaborately over my lap.

The voice of a kindly teacher came from the wings.

’This bird means that all persons must live as one and…’

’And-love-one-another,’ mumbled the actors on the stage, gathering around their cardboard dove. Apart from Peggy, who was looking imploringly at her mother. As I cleaned up Pat and myself with a lone Kleenex, Peggy moved towards the edge of the stage, the scarf around her head starting to unravel.

I called out to her but it was too late. She raised her hand to shield her eyes from the footlights and, to the gasps of the audience, promptly fell off the stage.

’I’ll never forgive you for this,’ said Cyd.

Nobody was seriously hurt.

Peggy’s fall was broken by a group of first years sitting cross-legged in the front row. Pat immediately felt better after throwing up his tepenyaki squid. Proud, happy parents and grandparents enjoyed tea, biscuits and after-show analysis. But Cyd and I decided that we didn’t need to stick around for the social stuff.

As soon as Pat had been cleaned up a bit and Peggy’s tears had dried, we apologised once again to the first years, their parents and the teachers and headed for the car park, my wife and I almost dragging our children out of there.

’You just don’t care, do you?’ said Cyd. ’If it’s nothing to do with you and Pat, you don’t give a damn.’

That’s not true.’

’It was the squid what did it,’ said Pat, like a hopeless drunk blaming it all on a bad pint.

’Let’s just go home,’ I said, although the thought of another night in my blended home filled me with despair.

’It would have been all right if you had been here,’ Cyd said, her eyes all wet. ’If only you had cared enough to be here.’

’Harry?’ A little voice at my side.

’Yes, Peggy?’

I bent down beside her.

She whispered in my ear.

’I fucking hate you, Harry.’

An old lady with a camera around her neck smiled at us.

’What a lovely little family,’ she said.

nineteen

We lay in the darkness, not touching, waiting for sleep to come, although it was a very long way off.

’You spoil him,’ she said. She didn’t say it in a spiteful way. It was almost gentle, the way she said it. ’If you didn’t spoil him so much, these things wouldn’t happen.’

’Someone’s got to spoil him. Who else is going to do it? You?’

’There was no need to stay so long with his granddad.’ ’They haven’t seen each other for ages. I don’t know when they’ll see each other again. They were having a good time.’ ’I really wanted the pair of you to be there tonight. For Peggy.

And me.’

’You don’t want him around. One lousy week he’s with us. And it’s too much for you.’

’That’s not true. And it’s not fair.’

’Do you know why I got married? Do you have any idea, Cyd? I got married so that my son could have a family. Isn’t that a laugh? Isn’t that the funniest thing in the world? Some family this turned out to be.’

She didn’t say anything. As though she was thinking it over.

’I thought you got married because you wanted a family, Harry. You. A family for yourself. Not a family for Pat.’

’One rotten week, that’s all. And it’s too much for you.’ j

We lay there for a while in silence. We had already said too much. After a bit I thought she was asleep.

But she wasn’t sleeping at all.

’We used to be crazy about each other. It wasn’t long ago. We were going to give each other so much. Remember all that, Harry? I don’t know what’s happening to us. We used to be happy together.’

I thought she was going to reach out and touch me. But she didn’t. And I didn’t reach out for her. We just lay there in the darkness, my wife and I, wondering how it ever had come to this.

’Sometimes I wonder why you married me,’ I said.

It was true. I knew that the sex was good, and we could talk to each other, and that on most days she was a joy to be around. But so what? She could have picked almost anyone. Out of all the guys in the world, why did she choose me?

’I fell in love with you,’ she said.

’But why? That’s the bit I don’t get, Cyd. I mean it. Falling in love doesn’t explain it. If you had looked around a bit, you could have found someone with more money, a bigger dick and a much nicer personality.’

’I didn’t want anyone else. I wanted you.’

’But why?’

’Because you’re a good father.’

In the garden of the old house, there was an air of real excitement.

We were excited because Pat was flying back to America in the morning, and my mother and I were desperate to make every hour special.

And we were excited because it was the first really hot day of the year, and I had stretched a long piece of plastic sheeting down the length of the garden, which my mum hosed down until it was as slippery as an ice rink.

But mostly the excitement was because of our very special guest.

Bernie Cooper was with us.

As I heard the pair of them happily jabbering upstairs as they changed into their swimming trunks, I realised that I should have arranged this earlier in the week. Bernie Cooper and Pat should have spent more than one day together. But I was so anxious for Pat to see my mum, and Cyd, and Peggy, and even old Glenn, that I almost forgot to schedule time for the person he wanted to see most of all. So on the night before the last day, I called Bernie’s parents, and got permission to take him out to my mum’s place. We were going to see a movie, have a kickabout in the park, and go for a pizza. But the sun shone as if it was already summer, and the two boys never left my mum’s back garden.

They spent the long hot afternoon skidding across a watersoaked piece of plastic. Bernie as dark as Pat was fair, fearless where Pat was careful – Bernie sliding on his stomach, hurtling down the strip of plastic and into the rose bushes – and loud where Pat was quiet. So different, and yet somehow perfect together.

My mother and I watched them for hours, their thin, wet limbs skidding across the garden, my mum occasionally hosing down the sheet of plastic, telling them to be careful when they clattered to the ground while running across the wet grass to do it all over again, smiling to herself as the boys almost exploded with laughter. Bernie Cooper and Pat, seven years old, and a day that they wished could last for the rest of their lives.

And I knew that my son would make other friends. In Connecticut. In the new neighbourhood. At big school. At college. He was a likeable boy, and he would always make new friends. Maybe never quite as good as this one, maybe never quite as good as Bernie Cooper, but they would still be real friends. No matter how much it hurt, Bernie would have to let him go. And so would I.

My mum came with us to the airport.

Pat took her hand when we got off the Heathrow Express, the tourists and businessmen swarming all around us, and it was almost as if he was taking care of her, rather than the other way around. When had that changed? When had my mum become old?

We found the British Airways desk and handed Pat over to a smiling stewardess. She seemed genuinely happy to see him. People were like that with Pat. They were always happy to see him. An easy child to love.

I crouched by his side at the departure gate and kissed his face, telling him we would see each other again soon. He nodded curtly. He wasn’t afraid, he wasn’t sad. But he seemed a long way away, as if he was already back in his other life.

My mum gave him a hug that squeezed the breath out of him. The young woman from British Airways took his hand. It was only then that my son seemed concerned.

’It’s a long way to go,’ he said. ’It will take me all night to get there.’

’Just rest your eyes,’ said my mum.

I remembered the day that I took Pat to see his grandfather in the hospital, when it was near the end and the breath wouldn’t come any more and I thought that my father and my son should see each other one last time. The loss of our grandparents, I thought, that’s usually the first time we understand that life is a series of goodbyes.

And as my son took the hand of the girl from British Airways, I wondered if my mum and Pat would ever see each other again.

’As you know, the station has the highest regard for Eamon Fish,’ Barry Twist told me in the snug of the Merry Leper.

That sounded like trouble.

’He’s funky. He’s spunky. He’s cutting edge,’ gushed Barry. ’He’s hot. He’s cool. Research shows that, among ABC males in the eighteen to thirty club, he’s the comedian of choice.’

’You wait until Eamon’s back in Ireland to tell me all this?’

Eamon was resting. I thought of him on a farm in County Kerry. He had been there for weeks now, where the mountains met the sea, and where there was no chance of Eamon meeting his cocaine dealer.

The waiter came.

’Glass of champagne. Two, Harry? Two. And some nibbles. Peanuts, rice crackers, crisps.’

’Nor for me.’

Too much salt in those things. Poison for your blood pressure. I had to worry about all that old-man stuff these days. And losing my job. I had to worry about that, too.

’We want to come back,’ I said, switching into producer mode. ’Eamon Fish is the most important comic of his generation. Keeping him off air is a crime against broadcasting.’

’It’s not quite that simple,’ said Barry Twist.

’Why not?’

’Well, our research shows us also that a majority of AB males between twenty and forty in the south-east quite like the fact that Eamon has been – you know – resting. The advertisers are not quite so keen. The Big Six – beer, cars, soft drinks, sporting equipment, personal grooming and finance – don’t want to be associated with someone who was so recently… exhausted.’

’Speak English, damn you.’ ›!

’The Colombian marching powder. The Charlie. The hokey- cokey. It’s changed Eamon’s image, kid. He used to be this I loveable Irish rogue with a taste for weather girls. Now he’s not quite so loveable. And not quite so hot.’

He tossed a paper on the table between us. ’You seen this thing in the Trumpet? Evelyn Blunt on Eamon Fish. Actually it’s a piece about the death of the new comedy.’

’Evelyn Blunt’s a wanker. A bitter, twisted hack who hates the world because he never quite made it as a – what was it he wanted to be? A novelist? A human being?’

’I quite like Evelyn Blunt. He’s waspish, he’s irreverent, he’s m controversial.’

He foraged around in a bowl of nibbles.

Any tosspot with a PC can make a minor splash and six figures by being waspish, irreverent and controversial.’

’Six figures? Really? That’s not bad. I mean, his column can’t take him very long, can it?’

’He’s always had it in for Eamon. Jealous twat. What did the fat, oily bastard write this time?’

Barry Twist wiped the crumbs from his fingers and put on his reading glasses.

’For a generation of comedians -whose careers are receding faster than their hairlines -’

’That’s rich. Evelyn Blunt is no oil painting. It’s always the ugliest fuckers who are always going on about someone’s physical appearance.’

’- Eamon Fish was the poster-boy of cutting-edge, stand-up comedy. But now Fish is ”resting”. The edge is dull. And the roaring boys of open-mike night just can’t make it stand up the way they did way back in the nineties. Then he starts getting personal. Headline Waiter, There’s a Fish in a Stew.’

’Those that can, do,’ I said. ’Those that can’t, become irreverent critics.’

’How is the lad? Doing well? Chilling out?’

’He’s anxious to get back to work. To get back to his show.’

’The show.’ Barry’s eyes roamed the Merry Leper. He waved half-heartedly at someone he knew. ’Of course, of course.’

’Is there a problem?’

’No problem. Just a slight change of plan.’

He let the words hang between us.

’You’re dropping Fish on Friday’?’

Barry laughed at the very idea. ’No, no, no, no, no,’ he said. Then he looked sheepish. ’Yes.’

’Christ, Barry. That show is Eamon’s life.’

I also thought – and my livelihood. I thought of the money I sent to Gina, the money for Pat, the bills at home, and wondered what I would do if our show went down the pan. Perhaps Marty Mann had been right. I was stupid to trust so much in just one person. When it all goes wrong, what have you got left? Monogamy breaks your fucking heart.

’We remain committed to Eamon. But after recent events, all to do with his ravenous little nose, we no longer see Eamon as talk-show material. We see him as something a bit more… street. Slightly more… youth. Bringing the drama, as it were. Busting a cap and so on. We want him to host Wicked World.’

’What’s Wicked World when it’s at home?’

’Well, co-host, actually. With Hetmione Gates.’

’That airhead with the tattoos who’s always at some launch party showing her drawers?’

Barry nodded enthusiastically. ’That’s Hermione. Isn’t she great? Very hip. Spunky. With a post-girl power sort of vibe.’

He stroked his chin thoughtfully. ’She does show her drawers a lot, doesn’t she?’

’And Wicked World! What is it? Some harebrained mix of inane chat and bad music for pissed students who are just back from the uni bar and want to gorge themselves on borderline obscenity for an hour before they collapse in a stupor?’

’That’s the general idea,’ said Barry. ’It’s made by Mad Mann Productions. Your old pal, Marty Mann. Their star is in the ascendant, Harry. Marty’s got a whole raft of programmes on air this season. The reality TV thing, Six Pissed Students in a Flat, is back with a bang. And he’s got that new dating game, Dude, Where’s My Trousers? And that quiz show, Sorry, I’m a Complete Git. Marty’s also doing our new late-night cultural review Art? My Arse!’

’Up my arse? What kind of a title is that?’

’Not up my arse. Art? My Arse! Harry. Art? My Arse! It’s irreverent, topical, cutting edge.’

He saw the look on my face.

’Just run it past him, will you? The Wicked World thing. Time moves on. I know young men like Eamon – and you, Harry imagine that TV is always going to be there for them. But it doesn’t work like that. The world keeps turning. New faces are coming up all the time. Television is a good mistress but a bad wife.’

I was about to launch into my defence of Eamon – he had cleaned up his act, he was far too good to present late-night rubbish designed to ingratiate itself to drunken thickos – when over Barry’s shoulder I saw Cyd come into the Merry Leper. She was not alone.

Luke Moore had a proprietorial arm around my wife’s waist as he steered her through the bar and into the restaurant at the back. There was something different about her, I thought. And then I realised.

She looked happy.

I felt a stab of pain when I remembered she used to look like that when she was by my side. The mixture of pride and happiness you feel when you have found the one you have been looking for. And suddenly I knew that I didn’t marry her just for the sake of my son. I married Cyd because I was crazy about her. Because I loved her.

The man from the TV station stifled a yawn.

’That’s the thing about the modern world,’ he told me. ’Sooner or later, we all get dropped.’

When I got home Sally was sleeping on the sofa.

A mop of dyed blonde hair, baggy jeans, and a discreet navel ring just visible under her cropped T-shirt. The girl next door. What made Sally slightly different from the average babysitter was that her own baby was sleeping on the rug in front of the fire.

Precious was on her back, wearing Gap Kid pyjamas, her arms raised level with her ears, like a pint-sized weightlifter. She looked a lot bigger than I remembered, but then she must have been two years old already. And I realised that soon I would be exactly like one of those old wrinklies who got on my nerves all the time when I was growing up, saying aren’t you getting big? And the kid will think – stupid old git, that Uncle Harry.

Sally woke up, rubbing her eyes and smiling.

’Peggy went down well,’ she said. ’It’s very quiet without Pat.’

’How do you do it, Sally?’

She scooped up her sleeping daughter, started fussing with her wispy hair. ’How do I do what?’

’Precious. Bringing her up on your own. How do you manage it?’

’Well, my parents are great. Like your mum with Pat. And you know what it’s like. You looked after Pat by yourself for a bit, didn’t you? It’s not so bad.’

’I did it for a while. You’re doing it for life. It must be hard without – what’s his name? Steve? – pulling his weight.’

Td rather be on my own than with some useless bastard of a man,’ said Sally, rocking Precious in her arms. ’Like her fat-arsed father. No arguments. No bitching about who does what. Just me and my girl. The single parent answers to no one. Tell you what I like about it, Harry.’ She kissed the fluff on Precious’s head. ’It’s uncomplicated.’

I remembered the time Pat and I had been on our own, after Gina had gone to Japan to find herself, to get her life back, but before Cyd and I had begun. For all the support I had received from my parents, I had often felt like the last line of defence between my son and all the dark stuff in the world. Sometimes I felt lonely and afraid. And yet I remembered it as a happy time in my life. Pat and me together, just the two of us – I sort of missed those days.

Because Sally was right. It was uncomplicated.

I was taking a shower when Cyd came home.

She stuck her head around the shower curtain and gave me her goofy grin.

’Room for one more inside?’

She looked as though she’d had a drink or two. I thought of my wife with Luke Moore at the back of the Merry Leper. Why hadn’t she told me that she was meeting that creep? What was she trying to hide?

I could hear her humming to herself as she slipped out of her clothes. She seemed happy and playful, a slightly drunk woman coming home to her husband with a clear conscience. I turned my face to the shower head and let the hot water beat against my face.

Cyd stepped into the shower with me, her long, slim body pressing against me. I felt myself respond immediately. I couldn’t deny it to myself. I still fancied her like mad.

’Ho ho ho,’ she said. Boy, she was really tipsy. ’Are you just pleased to see me or is that a large erection? Come on, give me that soap.’

She worked up some suds and started lathering her limbs. Then she turned her attention to me, soaping my back. It was diligent rather than sexy – the work of a woman used to cleaning a child – but I was soon bone hard. I turned to face her, her wide-set eyes squinting in the spray, black hair plastered to her shoulders.

’In the shower,’ she laughed. ’We haven’t done this for ages, have we?’

’How was your evening?’

'Fine.’

’Sorry, who did you say you were seeing?’

’Oh, just these two women who do the catering for some of the blue-chip corporations in the City. We had a couple of drinks and grabbed some supper in the Merry Leper. Pat get off okay?’

’A couple of women, you say?’

She closed her eyes and moaned, gripping me like a handbrake about to be released.

I broke away from her, pushing the shower curtain aside and grabbing the nearest towel.

’What’s wrong? Harry?’

I furiously dried myself, soap all over my back, my wife’s face all wet and confused. I wished I didn’t want her so badly. I wanted it to be over, so that all this feeling would stop.

’There’s not enough room in there for me,’ I told her, tossing the towel at the laundry basket and leaving her to shower alone.

And I saw that our marriage was a lot like the London Eye, that giant Ferris wheel on the south bank of the Thames.

Even when everything appeared to be perfectly still, even when nothing at all seemed to be happening, it was up there in the darkness, turning, turning, in motion all the time.

twenty

’Keep it simple,’ Eamon said. ’That’s the first thing they tell you in AA. All the lying and the running around will never do you any good. If you’re ever going to get well, you have to keep it simple, Harry.’

Before us the land stretched out like a postcard of County Kerry. A still silver lake was the only break in miles of moorland that ran all the way to where the rocks of the mountains finally met the sea. That sea looked enormous, as though it went on not to America, but to the end of the world.

Eamon had warned me that the tourists were trampling all over his homeland, seeking the craic in every pub, a bit of Celtic mysticism around every corner, and girls who looked like the Corrs at every bed and breakfast. But the only sign of life I saw in all of this wild, rugged landscape was a comedian who had put on a few pounds since the last time I saw him.

’They want to drop the show, Eamon. I know this isn’t the best time to tell you, but I can’t help it. The drugs scared them. If you had just been pissed out of your skull it would be another matter. They could have passed that off as jack-the-lad antics. They think that alcohol abuse is cute. It would have gone down well with all the booze advertisers. But drugs are something else.’

Tm out? Just like that?’

’They’re not going to recommission Fish on Friday. They want you to co-present some late-night zoo. Wicked World, it’s called. You and Hermione Gates.’

’Her who’s always showing her drawers?’

’That’s the one.’

He thought about it for a while. The sweet-smelling grass scrunched under my brand-new Timberland boots.

’And what about you, Harry? Are you coming with me? I’m not doing it if they don’t want you.’

I was touched that Eamon would think of me. But it hadn’t crossed my mind that the makers of a funky, spunky show like Wicked World would want an unfunky, unspunky producer like me. I assumed that they would want some young hotshot with jeans so low that you could see his pierced scrotum.

’Don’t worry about me.’ I thought of the money that I sent to Gina for Pat, the money that Cyd and I relied on for our mortgage. Til be fine.’

We walked down into a shadowy dip in the land and came up into sunlight on a small rise. In the distance, just before the bracken gave way to the rocks by the sea, there was a small farmhouse. It hadn’t been anyone’s home since the potato famine, but it had been an authentically rustic holiday home ever since Ireland had become a place that people came to rather than left. This had been Eamon’s home the last month. And now a taxi was approaching it on the winding peninsula road.

’That’ll be him,’ Eamon said. ’Evelyn Blunt.’

We watched the taxi.

’Are you sure you want to do this, Eamon? You don’t have to talk to this guy.’

’I trust Blunt about as far as I can ejaculate.’

’That far?’

’But he’s already called me every dirty name under the sun. What else can he do to me?’

The interview had been Barry Twist’s brainwave.

Twist believed that the public loved the idea of a sinner eventually seeing the error of his ways. The folks out there would forgive you anything, Barry reckoned, as long as you didn’t look as though you had actually enjoyed any of it in the first place. It was no longer enough for someone to dry out, they had to be seen to have dried out. The world had a taste for public repentance.

Evelyn Blunt, the poison pen in Eamon’s side for so long, had been invited to do the interview because his paper was thought to have an influential circulation – that is, people in the media read it, the opinion formers who would decide if this comeback was a success – while Blunt himself was writing longer, more thoughtful features these days, as he attempted to make the transition from his spiteful little hatchet jobs to something more like real writing. Blunt had failed as a TV presenter, novelist and talk-radio jock. It was inevitable that sooner or later he would have a go at being a journalist.

We came down the hill to the farmhouse as the taxi deposited its passengers next to my hire car. Blunt got out and looked at all that wild grandeur with his sour, crumpled face. There was something sweaty about him, as though he was still recovering from the dipso he had been in his debauched youth. He wasn’t alone. There was a young woman with him. The photographer.

I couldn’t see her face as the taxi driver helped her haul out black nylon bags full of lights, film and tripod from the boot of his cab. Then she straightened up, looking at the land as she pushed a veil of black hair out of her face. And I saw her.

Kazumi.

We were at the farmhouse now. Blunt took Eamon’s hand and pumped it as though he hadn’t really been using my friend as a punch bag for the last two years. Kazumi and I stared at each other. Then she nodded at the Atlantic.

’Look.’

Many miles out to sea, a storm was coming in. Huge black rolling clouds were sweeping towards the coast, but they seemed so far away that it felt like weather seen in a dream.

’Ah, that’s a long ways out,’ said Eamon. His Kerry accent was always a lot thicker once you got him out of Soho. ’We don’t run for cover round here. We have a nap and then we run for cover.’

But Kazumi had already gone, clambering over the jagged rocks with a camera swinging around her neck. We watched her crouch on the rocks and start taking pictures of the coming storm.

’Sweet little Kazumi,’ said Evelyn Blunt. ’I’m in there tonight.”

It wasn’t until Eamon had been cornered in the toilets by a gang of English tourists in Manchester United shirts and Evelyn Blunt had climbed on the table to show us his Riverdance routine that Kazumi and I had a chance to be alone.

’So did London work out for you?’ I shouted over the pub band’s spirited version of Van Morrison’s ’Real Real Gone’.

She tapped her ears. I liked the way they stuck out a bit. I liked it quite a lot.

’Can’t hear,’ she said, sipping her Guinness.

’Are you getting much freelance work? Have you worked for the Trumpet before?’

She smiled, shook her head, and touched those sticky-out ears. It was true. The noise in here was deafening. I realised I could say what I liked to her.

’I said – I’m so happy to see you. You look gorgeous. I think you’re lovely. I am so glad you walked into my life. I think I’m losing my mind.’

She smiled politely.

A laughing German tourist in a Glasgow Celtic shirt smashed into our table. He was clapping his hands and stamping his feet as Blunt jigged around with his arms so stiff by his side that they could have been tied there.

’These crazy Irish,’ said the German. ’They have such a good time, no?’

’He lives in Hampstead,’ I said. ’Hampstead in London.’

’Crazy, crazy Irish.’

A cheer went up as the band, a bunch of crusty-looking hippies who resembled extras from Braveheart, tore into Van Morrison’s ’One Irish Rover’.

Blunt went up a gear.

A coach party of Italians arrived, swelling the pub to overload. They placed their orders for Guinness with the red-haired student behind the bar. Blunt stubbed his toe on a large glass ashtray and began hopping around on one leg, grimacing in agony. The tourists applauded excitedly, mistaking his injury for part of the official floorshow.

The German tourist nodded knowledgably. ’Music is very important to the Irish. Boomtown Rats. Thin Lizzy. U2. It’s in their soul.’

He climbed on to the table with Blunt. Eamon came back. He looked up at Blunt and the German, shaking his head. ’Will you look what happens when they watch Titanic one time too many?’

A tray of pints was placed on the table and, trying to upstage the German, who was doing a basic acid house dance – arms waving, feet planted, the antithesis of the common or garden Riverdance – Blunt attempted to execute an advanced Lord of the Dance leap across the stout. That’s when he fell off the table and landed face first in an Australian tourist’s cheese and tomato toastie. Eamon sipped his mineral water and smiled at Kazumi. My spirits dipped. Eamon wasn’t going to try to sleep with her, was he? The drugs had replaced the girls in his life. But now the drugs were gone.

Then the band got stuck into ’Brown-Eyed Girl’ and the whole place was up on its feet. A handsome young Italian approached Kazumi and asked her if she wanted to dance. Suddenly Evelyn Blunt was between them, his red face scowling, and a slice of tomato hanging from one sweaty eyebrow.

’She’s taken, mate.’

They eventually threw us out.

The visitors were willing to go right through till dawn, but the young red-haired bartender had to get up for his IT course at college in the morning.

So the four of us walked back along a rutted country road where the only light was the twinkling canopy of stars and the only sound was the roaring boom of the sea.

That and the tourists throwing up in the coach car park.

It was hard to sleep in that farmhouse by the bay.

The night winds whipped off the Atlantic and made the ancient timbers of the farmhouse creak and groan like a ship tossed on a stormy sea. And it was freezing – my M &S pyjamas were supplemented with an old Fish on Friday T-shirt and thermal socks, and I still shivered under the wafer-thin duvet that was there for the summer trade.

But tonight it wasn’t the cold or the noise that kept me awake. It was the thought of Kazumi huddled beneath the sheets of the room at the top of the house. That’s what truly kept me from sleeping. And that’s why I was awake when she knocked on my door at three in the morning.

She was wearing tartan pyjamas. That girl liked her tartan more than any Scot I ever knew. She was also wearing chunky socks and a woollen hat. It must have been even colder at the top of the building. I blinked at her, uncertain if this was a dream. Then she spoke. In a whisper, as if afraid of waking the house.

’Sorry,’ she said.

’It’s okay. What’s wrong?’

’Problem in room.’

I followed her across the darkened living room and, carefully, up a short ladder to the top of the farmhouse. Evelyn Blunt was lying on his stomach across her bed, mouth agape and drooling, snoring loudly.

’Said he went to toilet and got the wrong room coming back,’ she said.

We looked from the drunken hack to the rickety ladder that you needed to climb to enter this room. Nobody gets as drunk as that, I thought.

’Big fat liar,’ Kazumi said.

’Did he – did he hurt you at all?’

She shook her pretty head. ’Grabbed my hot-water bottle and then fell asleep. I can’t wake him up.’

Til try.’ I shook his shoulder. ’Wake up, Blunt, you’re in the wrong room. Wake up, you sweaty fat bastard.’

He moaned a bit and held my hand to his cheek, a look of inebriated ecstasy passing across his bloated features. It was no use. I couldn’t stir him.

’You can have my room,’ I told her. Til sleep on the couch.’

’No, no, no.’

’It’s not a problem. Really. Go on. You take my room.’

She looked at me for a moment. ’Or we could – you know share your room.’

In the silence you could hear the sea smashing against the shore.

’Yes,’ I said. ’We could always do that.’

As shy as two five-year-olds on our first day at school, we made our way back to my room. Then we quickly jumped into opposite sides of the bed, and my hopeful heart soared, although I knew that she was driven not by passion, but by the possibility of hypothermia.

I lay on my back, with Kazumi turned away from me. I could hear my breathing, feel her body warmth, and when I couldn’t stand it any more I reached out and lightly touched her ribs, feeling the brushed cotton of her tartan pyjamas on the palm of my hand.

’No, Harry,’ she said, a bit sad, but not moving.

I took my hand away. I didn’t want to be like Blunt. Whatever else I was, I didn’t want to be that kind of man.

’Why not?’

’You’ve got a wife and son.’

’It’s a bit more complicated than that.’

’And other reasons.’

’Like what?’ I tried out a little laugh. ’Because you’re not that kind of girl? I know you’re not that kind of girl. That’s why I like you so much.’

’I like you too. You’re nice.’

’You do?’

’Yes. You’re funny and kind. And lonely.’

’Lonely? Am I?’

’I think so, yes.’

’Then what’s wrong?’

’You’re not that kind of man.’ She rolled on to her back and looked at me, her brown eyes shining in the moonlight, like a girl in a song by Van Morrison.

I rolled on to my side, loving the way her black hair fell across her face. I touched her foot with mine, woolly sock against woolly sock. She placed the palm of her hand against my chest and it made me catch my breath. Our voices in the dark were as soft as prayers.

’I want to sleep with you,’ I said.

’Then close your eyes and go to sleep.’ Unsmiling.

’You know what I mean. I want to make love to you.’

She shook her head. ’You’re not free.’

’The world wouldn’t care. It’s just you and me. We’re not hurting anyone. Nobody would know, Kazumi,’

’We would know.’

She had me there.

’I don’t want to be the kind of woman who sleeps with a married man. And you don’t want to be that kind of married man.’

’I do.’

’No, Harry. You’re better than that.’ She stroked my face. ’Just hold me,’ she said, rolling on to her side. I pushed up against her, two layers of pyjamas between her bottom and my erection. I put my free arm around her waist and pulled her close. She lifted my arm, placed a chaste kiss on my wrist, and squeezed my hand. We stopped talking, and for a long time I listened to the winds whipping off the Atlantic, the old farmhouse creaking in the night and the soft sound of her breathing.

And as Kazumi slept in my arms, I wondered how you keep a life simple. Do you keep it simple by staying where you are?

Or by starting all over again?

twenty-one

She was gone when I awoke.

I could hear voices down on the rocky beach. From the window I saw Kazumi already up and taking her pictures of Eamon.

Huddled up inside a red fleece, he struck his carefully casual poses – staring moodily out to sea, staring moodily straight at the camera, staring moodily at nothing in particular while she moved around him, briskly click-clicking her way through another roll, changing film, murmuring instructions and encouragement.

A Japanese person with a camera, I thought. One of the clichés of the modern world. The snapping hordes mindlessly documenting every tourist site, and then getting back on the bus. But as I watched Kazumi taking her photographs of Eamon on the wind-lashed beach by Dingle Bay, it seemed to me that this young woman with her camera was possessed by an insatiable curiosity for this world and everything in it, and I felt an enormous surge of tenderness for her and her camera. Plead the fleeting moment to remain, she had told me some poet said of photography. And that’s what she was doing. Pleading the fleeting moment to remain.

By the time I was washed and dressed, Eamon and Kazumi had moved further down the beach. She must have thought that she had the images she needed, because now they were working more slowly, trying things out. She crouched on the kelp-strewn rocks while Eamon slowly strolled towards her, hands stuffed inside his pockets, staring – I guess you would call it moodily

– at a point just above her head.

And although it filled me with regret to admit it, I thought that perhaps she was right after all. Sex last night would not have been wise. A one-night stand with Kazumi would have been a big mistake. Because one night with this woman would never be enough.

And what did that mean? What did it mean when one night was not enough?

It meant an affair.

I had worked with enough married men who were conducting affairs to know that they were hard work.

The one-way telephone communications, the constant fear of discovery, the guilt, the anxiety, the tears at Christmas and New Year when home and hearth were calling, the feeling of being constantly and forever Tom. And the lying. It couldn’t be done without the lying.

I wasn’t the man for all of that. I didn’t have the heart. I couldn’t do it to Cyd. Or myself. Or Kazumi. At least that’s how I felt in the light of day with Kazumi fifty metres away, not wrapped up in tartan pyjamas and my arms.

I had been true to my wife.

I had done the right thing.

So why did I feel so miserable?

There was a low, mournful mooing by my side. It was Blunt, green around the gills and still buttoning his shirt. A muted belch escaped his lips. His face was covered in a thin film of sweat.

’Must have got a bad pint,’ he said, wandering off down to the beach where Kazumi was taking a final few shots of Eamon.

And I didn’t want to be so stuck on this young woman I hardly knew. Cyd was more than my wife and my lover. She was my best friend. At least until the other man came into our lives.

I remembered the moments that measured out our love. Cyd and I had had our share of good times. Looking at the lights by the Thames, the first night we ever spent together, last Christmas Day when everything struck us as hilarious, from Ibiza DJ Brucie Doll’s tiny turntables to my mum’s appalled expression as she inserted the stuffing up the turkey’s rear end.

But what had really forged the bond between us were the other times, the bad times. My son in the hospital, his head split open from a fall in the park. The wrenching sadness of my divorce from Gina. Cyd was there for me through all of that, and I knew she cared about me in a way that nobody else in the world did.

But now it felt like I was losing my wife, and finding a gap in my life that Kazurni was filling, even if she didn’t want to.

That gap the size of a family, and the shape of a heart.

One night I had cooked dinner for the four of us. Cyd and me, Peggy and Pat. Since I married Cyd, my cooking skills had atrophied. But I thought I would do it one night. Do it for the family.

The four of us were sitting around the table’s points of the compass. At the start Cyd and Pat had made a good job of feigning enthusiasm for my cooking, even if what Peggy said sounded spiced with sarcasm.

’Spaghetti Bolognese, Harry. Mmmm, I can’t wait!’

’Hah! You might have to, Peg!’

There was sometimes a sickening jollity in the exchanges between my stepdaughter and myself.

’Make sure the pasta is al dente, will you?’ she advised imperiously. ’I don’t like it too soft. You do know what I mean by al dente, don’t you?’

I stirred my bubbling meat and tomato sauce at the stove, my smile stiff with tension.

’You know you have to essentially treat it like a stew, don’t you?’ Cyd said gently. ’It takes a long, long time simmering that amount of meat.’

’Please,’ I said, trying to keep it friendly. ’My turn to cook tonight, okay?’

I cooked spaghetti Bolognese. Spag Bog. Can’t go wrong. I used to cook this stuff all the time when Pat and I were living alone. But for some reason I had it in my head that spaghetti Bolognese was a quick dish to prepare. I thought it took as long as – I don’t know. As long as it takes them to bring it to you in a restaurant. But I was wrong about spaghetti Bolognese, just as I have been wrong about so many things.

After an hour or so, Peggy was impatiently tapping Lucy Doll Secret Agent against the table. Pat was gawping at the remote control in his fist, as if waiting for a sign. And Cyd – after asking me really nicely if I minded – was doing her tax return. And still I stood at the stove, stirring the sauce that was taking inexplicably longer than any restaurant. I thought that maybe it wasn’t spaghetti Bolognese that I cooked so quickly and so easily for Pat and myself. Maybe it was spaghetti pesto. Yes, that was it. Spaghetti pesto was the one that was done in minutes. You just opened the can and chucked it on the pasta. It was simple and tasty. Green spaghetti, my son had called it.

Now, two years on from the days of green spaghetti, he dropped the remote control. It clattered against the wooden floor. ’Whoops,’ he said, smirking around the table, looking for supportive laughter. Peggy and Cyd ignored him.

I picked up the remote and angrily stuffed it inside my apron pocket.

’Stop thinking about TV for five minutes of your life, will you?’

My son’s chin began to tremble, a sure sign that he was fighting back tears. Peggy sighed elaborately.

’Please may I leave the table now?’ she said. ’I am very busy tonight.’

’Wait a little while longer,’ Cyd said, not looking up from her accounts. ’You can go and get Brucie Doll Secret Agent if you want. He can talk to Lucy Doll about their mission while we’re waiting for Harry.’

’Yeah, everybody just wait a little while longer,’ I said, furiously stirring my meat sauce. ’Lucy Doll’s costume change can wait until after dinner.’

’Well!’ said Peggy. ’Someone got out of bed the wrong day.’

Cyd looked up from her accounts. ’It’s okay, Harry. I’ve spoken to her. You don’t have to put your five cents in, darling.’

’If you did it more often, I wouldn’t have to, darling.’

My wife put down her calculator and sighed. ’How much longer anyway?’

’I don’t know. It’s this minced beef. It’s taking ages.’

’Beef?’ Peggy said. ’Did you say – beef? I can’t eat beef.’

’Why not?’ ”

’Because meat is murder.’ She paused dramatically. ’Didn’t I tell you? I am not eating meat any more. I’ve decided to become a vegetarian.’

’Me too,’ said Pat. Tm a vegetable, too. Can I watch TV now? Dude, Where’s My Trousers? is on soon.’

I wanted a meal that would make us feel like a real family. That’s all. Not much to ask for. And maybe that’s exactly what I achieved.

Because by the time my spaghetti Bolognese was ready, none of us were talking to each other.

Eamon was walking towards me. Blunt and Kazumi were still down on the beach. He was saying something to her while scratching his distended belly. She was shaking her head and packing away her equipment. They began making their way back to the farmhouse, Blunt making no attempt to help Kazumi carry her gear.

’Good night last night?’ Eamon said.

’Nothing happened.’

’Hey, who am I to cast the first stone? What you get up to on a business trip is none of my business.’

’I mean it, Eamon. Nothing happened.’

’Sort of like Tantric sex, you mean?’

’Nothing happened.’

Nothing happened and everything happened. Because for the first time it had occurred to me that, if I couldn’t have a family with my wife, then perhaps I could have one with someone else.

’I love a bit of the old Tantric sex, me,’ Eamon said. ’Lasts for hours, doesn’t it? You know my favourite position in Tantric sex? The plumber. You stay in all day and nobody comes.’

If we had slept together – or rather, if we had not just slept together – there would have been a shyness between us now. Or, far worse, a false intimacy that we hadn’t really earned. But we walked on the beach, away from the farmhouse where Blunt was interviewing Eamon, and there was no postcoital awkwardness between us. We had spent the night in each other’s arms, but that was all we had done. Walking on that rocky beach, the clouds whipping in off the sea, the first of the day’s tourist coaches creeping around Dingle Bay, felt like the most natural thing in the world.

’I hope the pictures are okay,’ Kazumi said. ’This is my first job for them. The photo editor is – how to say? – a tough old bitch. She doesn’t give you second chances.’

’The pictures will be fine. You’re a brilliant photographer.’

She gave me a smile. ’Smooth talk.’

’No, not smooth talk. I’ve seen your photographs. You took pictures of my son.’

’Of course,’ she said. ’Pat.’

I liked it that she could see my boy’s spark. That she could tell he was special. I really liked it quite a lot.

’Will I see you in London?’

She stopped and stared out to sea. Another storm was coming in, the clouds bigger and blacker than they had been yesterday, rolling and tumbling low above the surf-skimmed Atlantic towards the shore. It was coming in quickly. Eamon’s folk wisdom – that you could have a pint of Guinness and listen to the Corrs’ greatest hits before a storm arrived – looked increasingly like a load of old bollocks.

’Kazumi?’

’What’s the point?’

’The point?’

’If we see each other in London, what’s the point?’ She abruptly took my left hand and pulled at my wedding ring. Doesn’t come off. You see? Not so easy.’

’We haven’t done anything wrong.’

’Not yet.’

Til meet you on Primrose Hill. Right on the top where you can see the entire city. Sunday morning. About ten?’

The rain started to fall. We were a long way down the beach now. The farmhouse was disappearing in a sudden shroud of sea mist.

’This way,’ she said, breaking into a run.

I followed her to a broken-down shed with a rotting rowing boat outside. The door was unlocked. Inside it was dark. It smelled of tobacco and kelp. It was some kind of abandoned fisherman’s hut. Either that, or a holiday home for a family of affluent Bavarians.

We were both soaked through to the skin. I thought perhaps that this was the bit where we would take off our sodden clothes and fall into each other’s arms. But she just sat shivering on the kitchen table and fussed over the camera that she had slung around her neck, examining it for damage.

I stood at the window, watching the fog come in, hearing but no longer seeing the waves crash against the rocks. I was cold inside my damp clothes but then a pair of arms were wrapping around me from behind, hugging me hard, bringing the warmth that I needed.

This is what it is, I thought. Nothing more. Just two animals, huddling together on the west coast of Ireland. Looking for a little comfort. Doing nothing wrong.

’I’m not going to Primrose Hill.’

’Okay.’

’Not on Sunday morning.’

’Fine.’

’Not ever.’

’All right then.’

Somehow I had turned around and faced her, and she was tilting her head, lifting it towards me. Then I kissed her, and I saw her brown eyes close, and open, shining in the misty twilight, the rattle of the rain on the roof, and I felt the heat of her body through the dampness of her clothes, and I tasted the sea on her lips.

This is what it is, I thought. Two cold, wet creatures shivering in the fog. That’s all. Don’t turn it into something that it’s not, Harry.

And I thought of Gina, and also of Cyd. I had lost the two best friends I ever had by having sex with them, by marrying them, by trying to make it last forever. Kazumi and I were never going to get that far, and it was probably just as well.

But I knew that I would keep this moment. I would lock it away and take it out when the world was hard and lonely. This was enough.

Primrose Hill was too much to hope for.

twenty-two

When I arrived home there was an airmail envelope on the welcome mat. My name and address in Gina’s neat, elegant handwriting.

And inside, a photograph – a man, woman and child, standing by a white picket fence in dazzling sunshine. Pat was at the front of the picture, in faded Phantom Menace T-shirt and shorts, squinting in the light, that half-filled gap in the middle of his smile. Gina was right behind him, one hand raised against the sun, the other lightly resting on our son’s shoulder. She was thinner than I had ever seen her, wearing some worn sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled up. But for all the years and whatever her troubles in her new life, she still had that radiant beauty that I had fallen in love with, she still had those looks that she didn’t really like you to talk about.

Then there was Richard, this man my ex-wife had married, standing to one side, unsmiling, half lost in the shadows of a white clapboard house. He didn’t look happy. He had the look of an expatriate who had returned home, but not in triumph. But what did I know? He had married my former wife, he lived with my only son. I couldn’t think of him as a loser. There was a piece of paper still in the envelope.

A note from Gina.

Harry -

We are coming back to London for a few weeks. Just the two of us. Pat and me. My dad has something wrong with his leg. He needs some help around the house. We are not staying with him

– / bave a flat. Will call you when we get in. Pat seems to have had a good time with you. But you know Pat – he doesn’t say much. Please thank Cyd. I hope your mum is okay. Got to go. Gina

’Hello, Harry.’

Peggy was at the top of the stairs. She was dressed in a long white lacy dress with short puffed-up sleeves. She looked like a bride. Or an angel.

’You look lovely, Peg.”

’My daddy’s getting married. To his girlfriend Liberty. She’s a nurse. From Manila. I’m going to be their bridesmaid.’

’Come on,’ Cyd said, appearing on the landing next to her. ’You go and take off that dress. Watch the pins on the hem, okay? I’ll be right in.’

My wife came down the stairs.

’Good trip? How’s Eamon? Is he all right?’

I didn’t reply. I left my bags in the hall and went into the kitchen. The work surfaces were covered with dishes of guacamole, chilli sauce and Tabasco, bottles of Cantonese plum sauce and Caribbean banana ketchup. Sweet and sharp.

’Experimenting with my dips,’ Cyd said. ’I spoke to your mum. She’s not feeling so good.’

My wife held out her arms to me but I just stared at her.

’You lied to me,’ I said.

’What?’

’Before I went away. You told me some story about going out with two women. Two women, you said. But I saw you with him. Luke Moore. In the Merry Leper. I saw you, Cyd.’

’Harry.’

’I saw the pair of you.’

’Harry?’

’What?’

’It’s not what it seems. He wants to buy the company. That’s why I met him. I couldn’t tell you because I knew you would

– do this.’

For the first time since I had come home, I looked my wife in the eye.

’And what did you tell him?’

’I told him what I have told him all along, Harry.’ We stared at each other. ’I told him no.’

’What else did he try to buy? Don’t tell me. I can fucking guess.’

I tried to brush past her but she grabbed my arm. ’I don’t want anyone else, okay? That’s it. You should know that already. I don’t want anyone else, Harry. Never have done. But you can wear out someone’s love, Harry, just like you can wear out anything else. So you either stop all this or…”

’Or what?’

’Or I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.’

She touched my face, and then saw the photograph I was holding. She took my hand and held it.

’Is that a picture of Pat?’

’What do you care?’

’Oh Harry.’ She released my hand. ’That’s not fair. If I don’t love your son in exactly the same way as you, that’s not some kind of betrayal.’

She had me there, of course.

Eamon cracked.

Perhaps it was Evelyn Blunt’s hatchet job. The journalist had pulled off the oldest party trick known to hacks – acting as Eamon’s best friend in the flesh, and then his public executioner in print. Under the headline No Laughing Matter, Blunt devoted

3,000 words to explaining why Eamon Fish was unimportant and the readers of his newspaper should take absolutely no interest in him. The photos were good, though – Eamon wild-eyed and windswept, his dark good looks almost a part of the Kerry landscape. And very, very moody.

Or perhaps it was the celebrity chef that made him crack. Eamon’s first chore on Wicked World was interviewing Wee Willie Hiscock, the loveable Geordie cook. All through the big English breakfast Hiscock blatantly plugged his new book, Right in Your Gobhole, Too, Bonnie Lad, the sequel to his bestseller, Right in Your Gobhole, Bonnie Lad. Eamon had always been averse to such blatant promotion, but where he had happily slapped it down on Fish on Friday, now he seemed unable to stem the flow of plugs.

Or perhaps it was the boy group that pushed him over the edge. Hermione Gates made no secret of the fact that she was a huge fan of Lads Unlimited, five young, handsome, hairless men who could carry a tune, but not very far, and who performed a series of dance steps that looked like gentle exercises for sufferers of arthritis.

The studio monitor clearly showed Hermione flashing her drawers in excitement during Lads Unlimited’s rendition of ’Our Funky Love Will Live Forever’. The monitor also clearly showed Eamon (favourite albums: Nevermind by Nirvana, Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin and Is This It? by the Strokes) looking at his watch.

But probably Eamon would still be presenting Wicked World to this very day if he hadn’t been asked to interview the winner of Six Pissed Students in a Flat.

The winner was Warren, a tanned, pierced, pumped-up plumber with a fashionably shaven head who was hoping that the success of Six Pissed Students in a Flat would allow him to put down his tool box and become something really useful, like a game-show host or a DJ in Ibiza.

Warren sat between Hermione and a dazed-looking Eamon. The retired plumber idly lifted up his pastel-blue vest, revealing his rippling six-pack and a diamond stud in his navel.

’For me the, like, turning point? Was in week six? When I discovered Darren had taken me milk out of the fridge. Without asking, innit?’

Hermione frowned at the memory. ’You were very angry, weren’t you, babes?’

Eamon’s head was hanging.

’Well, for me, asking before you use someone’s milk is what it’s all about.’

’Absolutely, babes. I’m, like – have a word with yourself, Darren, you muppet.’

Eamon had buried his face in his hands.

’Chloe and Zoë, right, they wanted to stop me confronting, Darren, innit? Who I could always relate to because we both have issues because of not being properly parented?’

Suddenly Eamon was on his feet, addressing camera two with its little red light shining above it. I felt a surge of pride. Even at moments of supreme stress, he never looked into the wrong camera.

’Turn it off,’ he said. ’Turn it off right now!’

’Babes?’ said Hermione Gates.

’You’re poisoning your mind with this rubbish. We all are. What’s wrong with us? We used to fill our screens with heroes. Now we want people we can look down on. People we can look down on.’ He looked with real sadness at Hermione and Warren. ’I want no part of it. ’ He tore off his microphone, pulled out the clear wax earplug that linked him to the gallery, threw them at the feet of the stunned floor manager. Tm going outside now. I may be a while.’

Then he was gone. In the gloaming of the studio wings, Barry Twist and I watched him go.

’You know he’ll never read an autocue in this town again, don’t you?’ said Barry.

’Sometimes you have to start again,’ I said. ’It’s painful and it’s messy. But sometimes you just have to make the break and start again.’

My mother was going into hospital in the morning.

I would pick her up first thing, and I knew already she would be wearing what she called her Sunday best, and then I would drive her to the hospital in the next town. And that’s where a surgeon would perform what they called a simple mastectomy.

One of her breasts, the one with the tumour, would be lost so that her life could be saved. That breast – one of the curves my father had fallen in love with when she was a young girl, and never stopped loving as they grew old together, the breast that had sustained me as a baby – would be gone, cut off to separate my mother from the tumour that wanted to kill her.

This thing that had given me life, that had made my father gasp with wonder and gratitude, would be cut off and – what?

– thrown away? Burned? Preserved for medical science?

I couldn’t think about these things, and none of the brochures

– not Talking with Your Children about Breast Cancer, or Living with Lymphoedema, or Exercises after Breast Surgery – gave any hint as to the fate of the amputated breast. They didn’t want you to think about it.

I sat in the living room of the old house, drinking cup after cup of strong sweet tea, feeling that my mother had been thrust into some kind of war. Everything suddenly seemed uncertain, unbalanced, in opposition. The breast and the tumour, love and sickness, life and death.

My mother was happy. She was happy because the old house was full of people, and this woman – one of seven children, mother of an only child who took years to arrive, widow of two years – seemed to feel that she was fulfilling her destiny again. The tea and biscuits, the sandwiches in the kitchen, the occasional beer produced for one of her brothers. It didn’t feel like the house was full because of cancer surgery. It felt more like Christmas.

The family is dying off now, that old family I knew as a child. All the aunts and uncles, the brothers of my parents, and the matches they made, beloved wives found in the same few streets, and then kept for a lifetime.

I knew these people better than I knew anyone. I knew their generosity, their resilience and their loyalty.

I was thankful that they fussed around my mother now ’Anything we can do, love, anything at all, let us know,’ I was told, time after time – but I wasn’t surprised.

My uncles and my aunts. Retired now, for the most part, or getting there. But I remembered them from the years when I was a child. Their aches and pains, the pills that now had to be taken, the unsettling visits to the doctor – they couldn’t cloud my memory of lean, hard men and their small, pretty wives, the men all factory workers and printers and shopkeepers at first, and later the shops being replaced by supermarkets, back when supermarkets were modern and new, and the women homemakers decades before the term was invented, homemakers the lot of them, even the ones who worked. And how they worked.

These women, my aunts, would never have thought of themselves as career women, but they worked in school kitchens, on the buses, doing the books in a wholesale warehouse, in shops and supermarkets. They worked because they had to.

They didn’t work to be fulfilled or to discover themselves. They worked to pay the rent, they worked because there were always children – my army of cousins – and never much money.

That old family rallied around my mother the night before she had a date with the surgeon. And even though their numbers were diminishing – my old man had been the first to go, but my mother had already lost two of her brothers since then, their hearts giving out on them just when they were ready to enjoy their gardens and their grandchildren – there was still something indomitable about these old Londoners who moved out to the suburbs a lifetime ago.

The house was full of cowboy music and laughter. I was sent to the local shop for more milk and sugar. The cancer leaflets with their terrible drawings of women who had had a breast surgically removed were ignored, lying on the coffee table next to the TV listings and a biography of Shirley Bassey.

When I was growing up, dreaming of escape, plotting a career in television, I believed that my family had lived small lives – never thinking of what was out there beyond their few suburban towns, never caring, never dreaming. But now I saw that they had lived better lives than me – fuller, happier lives, lives with more meaning, where loyalty and decency were taken for granted, where you reacted to cancer by putting on the kettle and a Dolly Parton record. How I envied them now, now that I saw that old dying family as my mother fought for her life, now that it was all too late.

My Aunt Doll talked softly with my mother in the kitchen. Sometimes this old family seemed as segregated as Muslims.

There were things that my mother would never dream of discussing with me, or with her brothers. Things that I only read about in the cancer literature.

Total mastectomy can be the better option when - the tumour is in the centre of the breast or directly behind the nipple; the breast is small and would be distorted by a partial mastectomy; there are several cancerous or precancerous areas in the breast; the woman would rather have the whole breast removed,

I had to read about these things. Perhaps I was glad my mother would not talk to me about them.

In the garden my Uncle Jack, my dad’s brother, Aunt Doll’s small, dark, nattily dressed husband, was smoking a roll-up. Smoking outside the house. A new thing. A small concession to the new century, or perhaps my father’s lung cancer. Cigarettes, once consumed as freely as tea and chocolate digestives in this house, now had to be smoked in the garden. I watched my Uncle Jack smoke, and I saw the ghost of my father’s face in his face.

Uncle Jack’s big black Merc was parked outside the house, a superior set of wheels on a street full of light vans and old Fords. Uncle Jack was a driver – taking businessmen to the airport, waiting for them with his sign at arrivals, smoking his roll-ups outside the car so that the air inside was daisy fresh. Uncle Jack came with me when I went to see my father’s body at the undertaker’s. I wondered if we would have to look at my mother’s body soon.

When the family had all gone, my Aunt Doll and Uncle Jack the last ones to leave, my mum made some tea for the two of us. The light was failing and there would be no more visitors tonight. No more visitors before the operation. Somehow the years had slipped away, and aunts and uncles who once stayed up playing poker until dawn – smoking their cigarettes, drinking their beer and sherry, their laughter ringing all night long – now liked to be home behind locked doors before it was too dark.

’How are you, Mum?’

T’m all right, love. Don’t worry about me. How are you?’

’Me?’

’You and Cyd.’

’Things are not so good right now, Mum.’ I didn’t want to upset her, tonight of all nights. Yet I felt her bravery deserved some of my own. ’I’ve met someone else. Someone I like a lot. And I think Cyd has too.’

I expected my mother – half of that great double act, my parents, the first husband-and-wife team I knew, the pair who cast their giant shadow on every relationship I’d ever had with a woman – to give me a lecture about the sanctity of the wedding vows, the importance of marriage, the horror of divorce. But she didn’t do any of these things.

’Life is very short,’ my mum said. ’You have to take your pleasures where you can.’

My mum stood at the window, watching the street, as if waiting for someone. But everyone had been. There was nobody left to visit. And then I realised. My dad.

She was waiting for my dad.

My mother stood at the window of the house that I had grown up in, the house that she had grown old in, and when I saw her waiting for a husband who would never come home, I loved her more than I could bear.

Waiting. The night before going into hospital for her simple mastectomy, although there was nothing simple about it, nothing simple at all, my mother standing at the window of the old house, looking out at the empty street beyond the net curtains, waiting for my old man.

Waiting to see him come around that bend in the road in his company car, and take her in his hard old tattooed arms one more time, my father come home to tell her she is beautiful her face, her body, all of her – and that he loves her as he has always done, and that everything is going to be all right. Or maybe just to take her in his arms.

I saw Tex.

I had left my mother at the hospital, left her unpacking her small suitcase in a ward where no bed was empty, a ward full of mostly elderly women in their prim nightdresses, with orange squash, boxes of Quality Street and romantic novels on their bedside tables. My father had died in this hospital and I was surprised how familiar it all was to me – the rank smell of hospital cooking in the corridors, the queues everywhere, the defiant crowds of smokers sucking their cigarettes outside the main doors. The smell of food, disease and medicine seemed to have seeped into every brick. What was different now was that I was visiting a ward full of women – women who laughed, women who talked and complained and commiserated in a way that didn’t happen in the ward full of men.

There was a lot to do. A nurse to take my mum’s blood pressure. A chat with the anaesthetist. The surgeon was on his way. And my mum had to change, from her Sunday best two-piece suit into her own Marks & Spencer nightdress. My mum acted as if she was on a day trip to the seaside. She was being too breezy, too jokey, overdoing the jollity, always her defence in the face of crisis.

I kissed her, much too hard, and left. And when I was filling up my car at the local petrol station, that’s when I saw Tex.

Or rather Graham the insurance salesman from Southend, dressed up for his weekly line dancing, drawing amused glances from pale Essex teenagers in their souped-up Escorts as he filled his battered old estate with diesel. And he wasn’t alone. In the passenger seat, there was an elderly cowgirl – some game old dear in rhinestone and buckskin, a ten-gallon hat sitting on top of her Maggie Thatcher perm. My mother’s line-dancing replacement. Or maybe there had been a few since Tex dumped my mum because he found out that she was ill.

I watched him cross the forecourt and enter the garage. When he came out he was carrying a box of After Eight mints and a cheap bouquet of flowers, the kind you can only buy in petrol stations. Maggie Thatcher saw him coming with his gifts and smiled shyly. What a guy. And I moved to go over to him, to take his arm and make him listen while I told him about what was happening to my mum in the hospital down the road that morning, to tell him about the surgery, and to use words like mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, lymphoedema, until I saw him squirm with shame at his cowardice.

But I didn’t do it. I finished filling my tank as he was making a great play of giving Maggie Thatcher the chocolates and flowers, and that’s when I caught a glimpse of myself in my car window, and the image held me. By the time I had recovered, Tex and his dancing partner had gone.

And I knew I could not approach him because I was afraid that I was that kind of man too – a pretender, conning a woman out of her love by appearing to be nice, terminating all emotion when the first bill arrived. What Tex did to my mum – was it really so different from what I was doing to Cyd?

With all my heart, I wanted to be the other sort of man, a man like my father. Loyal, true, a keeper of promises. A forever and ever man. But I suspected that I was much more like this toy cowboy than I was ever like my dad.

All smooth talk and empty promises, all milk chocolates and flowers, then running a country mile as soon as the going got rough.

Gina called me on the day she arrived in London, but it wasn’t the call I’d been expecting – cursory, formal, and anxious to get me off the line and out of her life.

Instead, the call, when it came, was at midnight, with Gina in tears, a hard-core soundtrack booming in the background.

’Harry?’

One word and I could tell it was her, even if the word was all choked up with emotion.

’Gina, what’s wrong?’

Cyd stirred beside me as I sat up in bed. She’d had a late night, catering for some launch, and she had fallen asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

’Harry, it’s awful.’

’You’re in London? Speak up, I can’t hear you.’

’We’re in our flat. Pat and me. In Belsize Park. I thought it would be nice around here. But the people next door – they’ve got So Solid Crew going at full blast.’

’You want me – what? You want me to come around?’

I felt my wife – my current wife, that is – pick up her alarm clock and slam it back down.

’Do you know what time it is, Harry?’ Cyd said.

’Could you, Harry?’ Gina said. ’It’s driving me nuts and it sounds like there are a lot of them. Some sort of party. I’m afraid to knock on the door.’

I put my hand over the mouthpiece. ’Gina’s in town. There’s a problem with the flat. Noisy neighbours.’

’Tell her to call the police.’ Cyd sat up in bed. She was wearing this old Tom Petty T-shirt. When we first started, even when we were first married, she used to wear the kind of nightdresses that drove me wild. Short, silky, see-through. Pants like dental floss at the top of her dancer’s legs. Now it was Tom Petty T-shirts. ’Give me the phone, and I’ll tell her myself.’

’Pat can’t sleep either,’ Gina said.

That was enough for me.

’Give me the address,’ I said. Til be there as soon as I can.’

As I was pulling on my clothes in the darkness, Cyd turned on her bedside light.

’She’s not your problem any more, Harry. You’re divorced. That relationship is over. Let her husband sort it out. Let the cops.’

I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to fight. But I knew that I couldn’t just ignore Gina’s call and go back to sleep. The old saying was right.

Our marriage had lasted for seven years.

But our divorce would last forever.

It was a big white house in Belsize Park. A good house, in an affluent neighbourhood. Lots of trees and builders’ skips, and the two kinds of cars that you always saw in neighbourhoods like this, the cars that were serious – Mercedes-Benz SLKs, Audi TTs, 3-series BMWs – and the cars that were just for fun

– original Beetles and Minis, and the new nostalgia versions, rusty Morris Minors, prehistoric Citroëns. I paid the minicab, already looking up at the house that contained my son and my former wife. I didn’t need to look at the numbers. I could hear the music coming from the second floor.

I pressed the button for the top floor and Gina buzzed me through the front door. The music thundered above my head. Once you got inside, the big white house reeked of rented property. Stacks of mail addressed to former tenants were piled on the worn carpet like autumn leaves. This place would not be cheap, probably two grand a month, but it didn’t feel like anyone’s home. The owners of the flats inside the big white house all lived somewhere else.

I walked up past the party on the second floor, hearing their laughter and screams, a smashing glass. The music they were playing sounded like a never-ending burglar alarm. Getting old, Harry.

Gina opened her door, pale and tearful, wrapped up in some kimono-style dressing gown that looked a few sizes too big. Or maybe it was meant to be like that. Underneath she had her pyjamas on, and I thought how unfair it was of Cyd to expect Gina to break up a drunken party in her pyjamas. Til go and have a word with them, okay?’ ’Thanks, Harry.’ Tat?’

’He’s all right. Sleeping, the last time I looked. Although God knows how.’

I felt my heart beating as I went down a flight of stairs and knocked on the door. No response. I knocked harder. Finally a gawky white kid with a retro Beatle cut opened the door. Students, I thought. Unlikely to knife me. But what was I expecting in Belsize Park? The Bloods and the Crips?

’You should have four American Hots, two Garlic Love-ins, and a Capricciosa,’ the gawky kid said. ’And a Vesuvio with extra pepperoni. Plus, you know, some coleslaw, garlic bread and stuff.’

’Actually I’m not delivering pizza. I’m from upstairs. Your music is keeping my son and my… wife awake.’

Over his high, bony shoulder I could see a flat full of young people laughing and dancing and trying to convince themselves that they were in a vodka commercial. A shorter, fatter youth appeared by his side.

’Has he got the Belgian chocolate ice cream?’

I could smell the sickly-sweet aroma of puff. Would that affect my son one flight up? Could my boy get passively stoned?

’He’s not from Mister Milano,’ said the gawky kid. ’He’s from upstairs.’

’Upstairs?’ said fatty.

’Wants us to keep the noise down.’

’Disturbing him, is it?’

’Apparently.’

They were laughing at me. I had been expecting threats to my person. I hadn’t expected them to laugh at me.

’No problem, mate,’ the fat one said. ’We’ll be quiet as a rat.’

’You won’t hear us – what is it rats do? – squeak,’ said the gawky one.

They held on to each other, rocking with laughter.

’Appreciate it,’ I said. ’Because my son, he’s seven, he -’

’No problem, mate.’

They closed the door in my face. And as I climbed the stairs to Gina’s place, the music miraculously decreased to a level that didn’t rattle the fillings in my teeth.

’Well done, Harry.’

I gave my ex-wife an it-was-nothing smile. And immediately the music was turned up to a volume that was louder than ever.

’Little bastards,’ I said, making for the door.

’Don’t go.’

I looked at her. She pulled the kimono thing tighter, as if trying to hide inside it.

’Gina? It’s not just those idiots downstairs, is it?’

’No.’

I put my arm around her and we went inside her flat. It was clearly expensive, but clearly on a lease. The heavy olde-English furniture, the blood-red leather sofa, the Gustav Klimt prints on the wall – none of these things could have been chosen by Gina, who loved all that was light and modern and Japanese. This place looked as though it had been decorated by Queen Victoria.

We sat on the blood-red leather sofa.

’Is it your dad?’ I hadn’t asked what was actually wrong with him. Since my own father had died, I fatalistically assumed that any illness an old person contracted was terminal.

’My dad’s okay.’ She smiled for the first time, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. ’He’s a silly old bugger. He put his hip out snowboarding.’

’Snowboarding? I thought there was something wrong with him.’

’Only the thing that’s been wrong with him all his life. He can’t grow up.’

I had slipped my shoes off at the door – even in these rented rooms, I didn’t need to be told that Gina liked you to take your shoes off at the door, Japanese style – and now I could feel my feet quivering with the vibrations coming through the floor. ’I’m going to go and talk to those morons.’ ’Don’t, Harry.’

’Don’t worry, they’re not going to hurt me. They’re all middle-class kiddies from safe, rich homes.’ ’Not like us, then.’ ’No, nothing like us.’

I looked at her. Despite her tiredness and the tears, and all the years, she had the same glow about her that had left me breathless and speechless the first time I ever saw her. But something had happened to Gina, something terrible.

’Go and look in on Pat, will you? I’ll make us some tea. Is jasmine okay? It’s all I’ve got.’ Jasmine’s fine.’

Gina went into the small kitchen and I tried a few doors until I saw the familiar tousle-haired figure sleeping flat on his back.

My son, at seven years of age, sleeping in the second bedroom of a rented flat in Belsize Park. While I lived a few miles away with another woman, another child. As always, I was shocked by the love I felt for my boy. The hip-hop from below was shaking his windows. He didn’t seem to care. I pulled his Phantom Menace duvet up over his shoulders and closed his door as quietly as I could.

Gina was placing two cups of pale-green tea on the coffee table.

’Sleeping,’ I said.

’He could sleep through anything, that kid. You should have seen him on the plane. Turbulence all the way across the Atlantic. Didn’t even stir.’

’What is it, Gina? What’s really wrong?’

’It’s Richard. I’ve left him.’

It took a moment for this to sink in. ’You’ve left Richard? So this trip to London -’

’Permanent. We’re not going back.’

’So when you said it was for a few weeks…”

’That was the original plan. But there’s no point in going back. Oh fuck, Harry, my life is such a mess. What am I doing in this bloody flat with these stupid students and their awful music? I’m going to end up on Jerry Springer, I swear I am.’

’You’re not going to end up on Jerry Springer. What happened?’

’Children.’

I thought she meant Pat. I thought she meant that her life didn’t fit with both Richard and Pat. But that wasn’t it.

’We couldn’t have any,’ she said. ’We tried and tried. I couldn’t get pregnant. And it broke us up, Harry. It just broke us up.’

I sipped my tea. Even though it was scalding hot. I didn’t know if I should be hearing this. I didn’t know if I wanted to.

’I think a marriage needs children, Harry. It’s hard enough to keep together even if you have a kid. Without them – I don’t know if it’s possible. We had all the tests. Richard and me. It was okay at first. We even laughed about it – him masturbating into a little plastic container, me with my legs up in the air getting prodded and probed. They couldn’t find anything. But there’s something wrong somewhere. In the end, it was too much of a strain. Maybe it would have been easier, maybe we could have stood it, if Pat wasn’t there. But it was hard for Richard. It’s hard loving someone else’s child when you can’t have one of your own.’

’So Richard blamed Pat?’

’I didn’t say that, Harry. But it’s such a thankless task, being a step-parent. I think in the end Richard felt he couldn’t win.’ She sighed. ’Then I saw his credit card bill. Flowers, hotel rooms, restaurants.’ She looked at me. ’Flowers I didn’t receive. Hotel rooms I had never stayed in. Restaurants I had only read about.’ ’Who was she?’

’A neighbour. Some bored housewife with three kids, funnily enough. No doubt it would have been some woman at work if he’d had a job. Because he’s still unemployed, he had to find what he was looking for in Safeway. She probably thought she was missing out on something too.’ ’He must be crazy. Cheating on you.’ That gave her a laugh. ’You did, Harry. You did.’ ’I’m sorry, Gina. Sorry about you and Richard. About you and me. About the students downstairs. About everything.’

’What happened to us, Harry? What happened to the boy and girl who were going to stay together forever?’

’I don’t know what happened. Time, I guess. Just time, Gina.’

’Don’t you ever wish that it could be like that again? That innocent? That straightforward?’

I finished my Japanese tea and stood up. I was ready to face the music.

’Now and then,’ I said.

My mother slept.

White with exhaustion and pumped full of painkillers and medicine to kill the sickness, oblivious to the echoing, malodorous life of the hospital going on all around her, she was tucked into bed in her own little post-operation room, an IV drip attached to a pale-blue vein in her hand, and she lay on her back and slept.

Sleeping at noon on a Sunday. Something she had never done in her life. If you could call it sleep, that drugged unconsciousness that was the aftermath of her operation.

I sat by her side, afraid to touch her.

Her kind face, her smallness, and the thought of the dressing on her wound under that hospital nightdress – these things tore at my heart, and made me hold my head and almost choke on all that was inside me.

There were no visitors, not yet, and the doctors and nurses had all gone away. They had cut off the breast with the tumour and they were confident that the operation had been a success.

They talked me through what happened next. Chemotherapy. Then radiotherapy. The chemotherapy would most likely cause my mother’s hair to fall out and make her sick to her stomach. The radiotherapy would feel itchy, sore, like bad sunburn. Before all of that, when she awoke, she would feel a pain in her arm, and pins and needles, and sickness, the sickness would never be far away now. The wound, the cut that had been made to remove the thing that was killing her, that would be sore and tender and tight for months.

The doctors told me something that my mother would never tell me. That she wouldn’t be able to wear a bra. Not yet. The wound was too fresh. It seemed as if everything about this illness was painstakingly designed to make my mother feel less like a woman.

When they had all gone, the optimistic doctors and the cheerful nurses, the affable oncologist and the genial surgeon and the easy-going anaesthetist, I cried for what my mother had gone through, and all that she still had to go through.

Even if she beat this thing, even if she lived.

’I love you so much,’ I whispered, telling her things that we would both have been too shy and embarrassed to hear if she was awake. ’You don’t deserve this, Mum. Not you. Not anyone.’

I sat there for hours. All that Sunday she didn’t wake up. It felt like the kind of sleep that would last for decades, like something from a fairy tale. By the time I left, the spring afternoon was fading behind the drawn curtains of that tiny room. It was only when I was looking for my car in the hospital’s vast parking lot that I remembered the appointment I had missed.

I liked the lights on Primrose Hill.

They were, and still are, those old kind of Victorian streetlamps. Tall and black with a chunky glass casing at the top. Those lamps look like throwbacks to some older, lost city, the London of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, peasouper fogs and tugs on the Thames.

The lamps had not been illuminated when I arrived at Primrose Hill. The days were getting longer. But night was falling at last and they would be turned on soon.

The crowds were thinning. It was becoming too dark for ball games, the pampered dogs of the neighbourhood were almost exhausted, and the young lovers were strolling off arm-in-arm to dinner in Camden Town or Hampstead or Swiss Cottage. I decided to take a quick walk to the top, and then go home.

The park on Primrose Hill is built upon one high, grassy peak. From up there you can see for miles. Down to London Zoo and the lush expanse of Regent’s Park. The West End and the City and Docklands in the distance. And, on the hill behind you, the wild woods of Hampstead Heath. I watched my city as day turned to night. The stars came out. The great metropolis was starting to twinkle.

And that’s when I saw her walking up the hill towards me. Her pretty face was flushed with exertion. She looked as though she had been walking all day. Ever since we had been supposed to meet, in fact.

’Sorry I’m a bit late, Kazumi.’

She reached the top of the hill, breathing heavily. She shook her head, and I didn’t know if she was telling me that she didn’t care or that she was speechless with rage. Then she sort of looked at me in a way that I understood completely. Because it said – kiss me, stupid.

So I did.

And just at that moment, from Prince Albert Road in the south, to King Henry’s Road in the north, from St John’s Wood in the west, to Grand Union Canal in the east, all over the length and breadth of Primrose Hill, the lights came on.