The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys

But how to celebrate reaching the big three-oh? With a collection of laughing single friends in some intimate bar or restaurant? Or surrounded by a loving wife and adoring small children in the bosom of the family home?

There has to be a good way of turning thirty. Perhaps they are all good ways.

All my images of this particular birthday seemed to be derived from some glossy American sitcom. When I thought of turning thirty, I thought of attractive thirty-nothing mar-rieds snogging like teens in heat while in the background a gurgling baby crawls across some polished parquet floor, or I saw a circle of good-looking, wisecracking friends drinking latte and showing off their impressive knitwear while wryly bemoaning the dating game. That was my problem. When I thought of turning thirty, I thought of somebody else’s life.

That’s what thirty should be – grown-up without being disappointed, settled without being complacent, worldly wise, but not so worldly wise that you feel like chucking yourself under a train. The time of your life.

By thirty you have finally realised that you are not going to live forever, of course. But surely that should only make the laughing, latte-drinking present taste even sweeter? You shouldn’t let your inevitable death put a damper on things. Don’t let the long, slow slide to the grave get in the way of a good time.

Whether you are enjoying the last few years of unmarried freedom, or have recently moved on to a more adult, more committed way of life with someone you love, it’s difficult to imagine a truly awful way of turning thirty.

But I managed to find one somehow.

The car smelled like somebody else’s life. Like freedom.

It was parked right in the window of the showroom, a wedge-shaped sports car which, even with its top off, looked as sleek and compact as a muscle.

Naturally it was red – a flaming, testosterone-stuffed red.

When I was a little bit younger, such blatant macho corn would have made me sneer, or snigger, or puke, or all of the above.

Now I found it didn’t bother me at all. In fact, it seemed to be just what I was looking for at this stage of my life.

I’m not really the kind of man who knows what cars are called, but I had made it my business – furtively lingering over the ads in glossy magazines – to find out the handle of this particular hot little number. Yes, it’s true. Our eyes had met before.

But its name didn’t really matter. I just loved the way it looked. And that smell. Above all, that smell. That anything-can-happen smell. What was it about that smell?

Amidst the perfume of leather, rubber and all those yards of freshly sprayed steel, you could smell a heartbreaking newness, a newness so shocking that it almost overwhelmed me. This newness intimated another world that was limitless and free, an open road leading to all the unruined days of the future. Somewhere they had never heard of traffic cones or physical decay or my thirtieth birthday.

I knew that smell from somewhere and I recognised the way it made me feel. Funnily enough, it reminded me of that feeling you get when you hold a newborn baby.

The analogy was far from perfect – the car couldn’t squint up at me with eyes that had just started to see, or grasp one of my fingers in a tiny, tiny fist, or give me a gummy little smile. But for a moment there it felt like it just might.

‘You only live once,’ the car salesman said, his heels clicking across the showroom floor.

I smiled politely, indicating that I would have to think that one over.

‘Are you in the market for some serious fun?’ he said. ‘Because if the MGF is about one thing, it’s about fun.’

While he gave me his standard sales pitch, he was sizing me up, trying to decide if I was worth a test drive.

He was pushy, but not so pushy that it made your flesh crawl. He was just doing his job. And despite my weekend clothes – which because of the nature of my work were not really so different from my weekday clothes – he must have seen a man of substance. A fast-track career looking for some matching wheels. Young, free and single. A life as carefree as a lager commercial. How wrong can you be?

‘This model has the Variable Valve Control system,’ he said, with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm. ‘The opening period of the inlet valves can be varied by altering the rotational speed of each cam lobe.’

What the fuck was he going on about? Was it something to do with the engine?

‘A total babe magnet,’ he said, noting my dumbfounded expression. ‘Plenty of poke. A young single guy couldn’t do any better than the MGF.’

This was my kind of sales pitch. Forget the technical guff, just tell me that you can lose yourself in a car like this. Let me know you can lose yourself. That’s what I wanted to hear.

The salesman was distracted by something on the street, and I followed his gaze out of the showroom’s plate-glass wall.

He was looking at a tall blonde woman holding the hand of a small boy wearing a Star Wars T-shirt. They were surrounded by bags of supermarket shopping. And they were watching us.

Even framed by all those plastic carrier bags and chaperoning a little kid, the woman was the kind that you look at more than once.

What you noticed about her child – and he was certainly her child – was that he was carrying a long, plastic tube with a dull light glowing faintly inside.

If you had been to the cinema at any time over the last twenty years you would recognise it as a light sabre, traditional weapon of the Jedi Knights. This one needed new batteries.

The beautiful woman was smiling at me and the salesman. The little kid pointed his light sabre, as if about to strike us down.

‘Daddy,’ he mouthed from the other side of the plate-glass wall which divided us. You couldn’t hear him, but that’s what he was saying.

‘My wife and son,’ I said, turning away, but not before I caught the disappointment in the salesman’s eyes. ‘Got to go.’

Daddy. That’s me. Daddy.

‘You don’t even like cars,’ my wife reminded me, edging our old VW estate through the thick early-evening traffic.

‘Just looking.’

‘And you’re too young for a mid-life crisis,’ she said. ‘Thirty is much too young, Harry. The way it works, you wait for fifteen years and then run off with a secretary who’s young enough to be your second wife. And I cut off the sleeves of all your suits. Not to mention your bollocks.’

‘I’m not thirty, Gina,’ I chuckled, although it wasn’t really all that funny. She was always exaggerating. ‘I’m twenty-nine.’

‘For one more month!’ she laughed.

‘It’s your birthday soon,’ our boy said, laughing along with his mother, although he didn’t have a clue why, and tapping me on the back of the head with his sodding light sabre.

‘Please don’t do that, Pat,’ I said.

He was back there with the week’s shopping, strapped into his little car seat and muttering under his breath, pretending to be in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon with Harrison Ford.

‘I’ve lost my starboard engine,’ he jabbered away to himself. ‘Fire when ready.’

I turned to look at him. He was four years old with dirty blond hair that hung down over eyes that were the same shade of blue as his mother’s. Tiffany blue. Catching my eye, he grinned at me with pure childish delight.

‘Happy birthday, dear Daddy,’ he sang. ‘Happy birthday, birth-day.’

To Pat, my birthday was a chance to finally give me the home-made card he had hidden under his bed (Luke Skywalker decapitating a space monster with his trusty light sabre). To me it meant that the best might already be over. It really did.

When would I feel the way I felt the night my wife said that she would marry me? When would I feel the way I felt the morning my son was born? When would life be that – I don’t know – real again? When?

‘When did you become interested in cars?’ Gina asked. She wouldn’t let this car thing rest. ‘I bet you don’t even know what kind of petrol this one uses, do you?’

‘Oh, come on, Gina.’