Men from the Boys

I watched him walk through the school gates, his rucksack slung over his shoulder, his shirt miraculously unfurling from his trousers, the swatch of white cloth that appeared as if from a magician’s hat. Then he was gone, but still I sat there, boxed in by the car in front and the car behind.

Watching Elizabeth Montgomery snog the boy with the barbed-wire tattoo, as the bell rang for registration.

Riddle me this, Lateral Thinking Club – she is my daughter but I am not her father: who am I?

I am a step-parent. Ah, but I don’t really believe in the term step-parent. I don’t think the role exists. Not really. For in the end you are either a child’s parent or you are not. And blood does not have a lot to do with it. At least, that is what I would like to believe.

Cyd and I watched Peggy coming down the stairs. She was almost exactly the same age as Pat and yet she seemed to be effortlessly gliding on air to adulthood. Peggy went to stage school, and every day of her life she danced and she sang, and she studied the performing arts and wrestled with the sub-text of difficult plays while other girls her age were snogging older boys with cars and barbed-wire tattoos. While other kids wore blazers, Peggy donned a black leotard and learned to dance jazz, ballet and tap. Above all, she wanted to act, following in the footsteps of Italia Emily Stella Conti, her school’s founder, and her father, a TV cop.

Peggy made life look easy.

Now she was all dressed up for going out – a cowboy hat, and cowboy boots, a retro Motorhead-London T-shirt and a skirt that was way too short. She kissed both of us on the cheek and glided off to the mirror in the hall. We could hear her humming a popular tune.

Cyd was looking at me and smiling. ‘Don’t say it,’ she said.

I looked dumb.

‘You know,’ she said. ‘“You’re not going out dressed like that.”’

What women forget is that men know boys. We know what is in their heads and in their hearts. We are all poachers turned gamekeepers. Every single one of us. And I knew that no boy was going to look at Peggy and think, Yeah, Motorhead, Lemmy and all that, yeah, they were a pretty good band. I knew exactly what they would be thinking, the dirty little bastards. And I didn’t like it.

‘It’s only her dad,’ Cyd said.

We heard a motorbike outside and Peggy ran to the door with a happy, ‘I’ll get it!’

Cyd gave me a look and drifted off to the kitchen. I went to the door and looked out at Peggy’s dad sitting astride his Harley.

Jim Mason. Ten years ago he was the bad boy. The deserter, the fornicator, the runaway. The absent father. But in recent years I had to admit Jim’s stock had risen. After a long, disorderly line of Asian girlfriends in the wake of his marriage to Cyd, he had been married to a nurse from Manila for years – but there had been no more children. And I suspected that must have been a relief for Peggy.

I never really spoke to the guy, beyond platitudes about what the latest weather meant for motorbikes. A couple of years ago, when his TV show was taking off – you might have seen him, he was the divorced, alcoholic detective on PC Filth: An Unfair Cop – he had offered to start paying Peggy’s school fees. I had brushed him off, told him that Cyd and I had it covered. But I felt that he could teach Gina and me a few lessons about how to conduct yourself after a divorce. Despite his inappropriately long hair, and Lewis Leathers, and past crimes, Peggy’s dad was living proof that you could be an absent parent and still be some kind of presence in your child’s life.

An absent parent but a parent still.

Peggy pulled on her helmet and climbed on to the pillion. They both raised their hands and I waved as they shot off, the throaty roar of the Harley ringing through the neighbourhood. The group of kids loitering at the end of the road watched them go. Long after they had disappeared, I could hear the growl of the motorbike.

And I felt a dull ache of resentment towards him. I could not help it. Because although the guy did his best to be a good dad to Peggy, there was so much he had missed. She was my daughter although I would never be her dad. We did not have the unbreakable bonds of blood, but we had something else.

I was the one who was there when, aged ten, she split her head open on the ice rink at Somerset House, foolishly attempting a complicated leap. And I was the one who was there when she endured two terms of bullying at her old school before we got her into Italia Conti. And I was there for other stuff – no blood, no tears. But meals shared together, and TV watched together, and holidays, and walking to school, and a good-night hug. Sometimes I think that stuff is more important than the times of high drama, when there is blood on the ice rink and a mad dash to Accident and Emergency.

She was not my daughter but we had been part of the same family for ten years. And I was more of a father to her than her real dad would ever be – wasn’t I?

Sometimes I thought so. But when she went off once a week on the Harley, looking so happy on that pillion, with her dad the big-shot actor, well, then I wasn’t so sure. And mostly I tried not to think about it at all.

Because it’s like someone says in The Terminator when cyborgs are coming back in time to murder children yet unborn:

You could go crazy thinking about this stuff.

Marty and I sat in the Pizza Express next to Broadcasting House and nobody looked at him twice.

TV fame is like youth or money. It just runs out when you are not looking. Ten years ago, Marty walked into a room and everybody stared at him. But the years on radio had eroded that recognition factor, and we were left unmolested by the early evening crowd.

Next to us was a table full of ageing lads in business suits. Their banter was of a sexual nature – birds and blow-jobs. Effing and blinding. Taking the front way and the back way. The usual stuff. Little did they know that they were next door to Marty Mann, the presenter formerly known as edgy and controversial.

And even less did they care.

It was the usual crowd. BBC worker bees grabbing some carbs before the evening shift. Office workers dawdling before they caught the train home. And revellers off to frolic in the tawdry lights of the West End.

The demographic skewed to a younger crowd – probably too young to listen to A Clip Round the Ear on Radio Two – but looking for a table among the funsters were a pair of old ladies who had big night out written all over them. I wondered what musical they were going to see, and I thought of my mum happily singing along to Chicago and Les Misérables and Guys and Dolls. It seemed like a lifetime ago now.

The old ladies carefully parked themselves two tables away from us. The lads in their suits were next door. And suddenly they seemed louder than ever.

‘No, fuck it, this is a true story,’ one of them said, holding his hands up at the derisive profanities of his chums. ‘Guy goes to a whore and says, “How much for a hand-job? One hundred quid? That’s a lot.” But the whore says, “Listen, see this Rolex, I bought it by giving hand-jobs.”’

Marty looked up at me from his Four Seasons. He glanced quickly at the old ladies and looked away. You would think that a man with Marty’s CV would not care about profanity in the pizza parlour. But, like all transgressors, he understood that context is everything.

The old ladies were staring at each other. The suits were in uproar. The comedian took a bite of garlic bread and ploughed on.

‘Next day he goes back and says to the whore, “How much for a blow-job?” She says, “Five hundred quid.” “Five hundred quid! Fuck me, that’s a lot of dough.” She says, “Listen, you see that Mercedes? I bought it by giving blow-jobs.”’

Marty pushed his pizza away.

‘We should say something,’ I said, my voice pathetically low. ‘We should say something to these creeps.’

Marty nodded. But he kept staring at his pizza. ‘Except there’s five of them,’ he said. ‘Except they might not like it. Except they might have knives.’

‘You kidding? These guys haven’t got knives. They’ve got BlackBerrys. What do you think they are going to do? Slash you with their iPhones?’

But for all my big talk, I sat there just like Marty, useless in my disapproval.

There was bedlam at the next table. Red faces. Drunken voices. The joke coming to its punchline. The old ladies were getting up to go. They were telling a confused waitress that they were not so hungry after all.

‘And then he goes to the whore and says, “How much for the lot?” And she says, “One thousand quid.” And he says, “Fuck my old boots, that’s a lot.” And she says, “See that big house over there?”’

‘She says, “If I had a pussy,”’ Marty muttered to himself, ‘“I bet I could buy that.”’

‘I feel like saying something,’ I said, staring at the suits as I watched the old ladies heading for the door, their big night out already violated.

But I just sat there, and I said nothing.

Four (#ulink_b7254237-972e-5447-ad3b-3c9b9e178ff0)

I drove Pat to Soho. He was still not really speaking to me. We were on grunting terms.

I walked him to the door and found the bell with her surname. The name she had before me, the name she had after me. I looked at Pat as I rang it. He was impassive, neutral – the inscrutable offspring of divorced parents.

‘Hello?’

It was strange that I had not recognised her face. Because the voice could not belong to anyone else. Pat and I leaned towards the metal grille.