Men from the Boys

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

Too late.

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

I banged on the old man’s door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who’s that then?’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I must have looked surprised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For we walked the way that old lovers do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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