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

He shook his head, dumbfounded at what the world was coming to.

‘I don’t care what you get up to,’ he said. Then he indicated Pat again. ‘What I care about is him. This girl – is it serious?’

‘I don’t know, Dad. Can we get our first date out of the way before we start picking out curtains?’

I was playing the injured innocent. But I knew that if I went out with a woman it would confuse and frighten him. It wasn’t my intention to hurt him. I just wanted to show him that I was thirty years old and that he couldn’t decide when I took my stabilisers off.

We had come to a ragged scrap of tarmac in front of a tatty stage.

‘Are you ready?’ my father asked Pat.

‘Ready,’ Pat said, sounding not very ready at all.

‘I’m holding you, okay?’ my dad said, increasing his pace. ‘I’m going to keep holding you. Just keep your back straight. And pedal.’

‘Okay.’

‘Are you holding on?’

‘I’m holding on!’

They took off across the tarmac, Pat’s face hidden by the hood of his anorak and my father bent double by his side, like a little elf being chased by a hunchback. Then my dad let go of the bike.

‘You holding on, Granddad?’

‘I’m holding on!’ he cried as Pat left him behind. ‘Pedal! I’ve got you!’

His little legs pedalled. Bluebell gave a dangerous wobble as Pat splashed through a puddle, but the bike seemed to right itself and gather speed.

‘You’re doing it!’ my dad shouted. ‘You’re doing it, Pat!’

He turned to look at me and we both laughed out loud. I ran to my father’s side and he put his arm around my shoulders. He smelled of Old Spice and Old Holborn.

‘Look at him go,’ my dad said proudly.

The bike reached the edge of the tarmac, bounced once and skidded on to the grass. Pat was moving more slowly now, but still pedalling furiously as he made a beeline for the trees.

‘Don’t go too far!’ I shouted. But he couldn’t hear me. He disappeared into the shadows of some old oak trees, like some hooded creature of the forest returning to his lair.

My father and I looked at each other. We weren’t laughing now. We took off after him, our shoes sliding on the wet grass, calling his name.

Then he was nonchalantly riding towards us out of the trees, the hood of his anorak flown off, and grinning from ear to ear.

‘Look what I can do,’ he said proudly, briefly standing up in Bluebell’s stirrups before skidding to a halt.

‘That’s brilliant, Pat,’ I said. ‘But don’t go off like that again, okay? Always stay where we can see you.’

‘What’s wrong with Granddad?’ he said.

My father was leaning against a tree, clawing at his chest and gasping for air. The blood had drained from his face and there was something in his eyes that I had never seen before. It might have been fear.

‘I’ll be fine,’ he wheezed.

‘Granddad?’ Pat said.

‘Granddad’s fine,’ he said.

After a long, desperate minute he managed to get some air in his lungs. Still breathing hard, he laughed off the concern of his son and grandson.

‘Just getting old,’ he said. ‘Too old for a jog in the woods.’

And I thought that’s exactly what it was – old age catching up on a man whose body had endured so much in his youth. All my life those small pieces of shrapnel, jagged and black, had been squeezing out of his tough old body. Every summer we saw that giant starburst of a scar on his side. All that pain and punishment was bound to catch up on him sooner or later.

But I was wrong. It wasn’t the past calling. It was the future.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ my father told us. ‘I’m fine. Let’s go home.’

We walked back to his car through the lengthening shadows of that September afternoon, Pat riding his bike ahead of us, my old man humming, ‘You Make Me Feel So Young’, consoled and comforted by his personal Dean Martin, his own private Sinatra.

Twenty (#ulink_da18538b-7979-5c30-b1e6-12568ecb48c1)

When you are deep into a relationship that you expect to last forever, it never crosses your mind that one day you will be taking your third shower of the day and getting ready to go out on a date.

Like getting your mum to do your washing or having to borrow money from your dad, you think that all those nervy bathroom rituals are way behind you.

You never dream that there will again come a time when you are as fanatical about your personal hygiene as a fifteen-year-old with a permanent erection. That you will once more find yourself standing in front of the mirror trying to do something with your hair. That you will be brushing teeth that are already perfectly clean. And that you will do all these things so you can sit in the dark for a couple of hours with a member of the opposite sex who you have only just met.

It’s scary. Dating is a young person’s game. You get out of practice. You might not be any good at it any more.

You use a different part of your brain for going out with someone you have just met than you use for going out with someone you are married to. You use different muscles. So perhaps it’s only natural that when you start using those muscles again, they can feel a little stiff.

Two grown-ups going through all those teenage mating rituals – trying to look nice, meeting at the arranged hour, knowing what it is time to do and what should wait a while and what should wait forever. It should be really difficult to get back into all that stuff after you have been with someone for years. But it didn’t feel difficult with Cyd.

She made it feel easy.

‘The first film we see together is really important,’ Cyd said. ‘I know we’re just friends and all, but our choice of movie tonight is really important.’

I tried to look as though I knew what she was talking about.

‘A lot of people on a first date, they try to play safe. They go for a big summer movie. You know, one of those films where New York gets destroyed by aliens or a tidal wave or a big monkey or something. They think that kind of movie guarantees a good time. But a big summer movie is not a good choice.’

‘It isn’t?’

She shook her head. ‘Nobody really has a good time at those movies apart from thirteen-year-old kids in Idaho. It’s the law of diminishing returns. When you’ve seen the Empire State Building blown up once, you don’t need to see it again.’

I was starting to get it. ‘You think the earth is going to move. But you end up yawning as the aliens zap the White House.’

‘If you choose a big summer movie, it shows you have really low expectations,’ she said, shooting me a look as I squeezed the MGF through the afternoon traffic clogging up around the Angel. ‘About everything. It means you think life is essentially just a bucket of stale popcorn and a carton of flat Diet Coke. And that’s the most that anyone can hope for.’