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

‘Who do I look like?’ Pat said when the trees in the park were bare and he had to wear his winter coat all the time and Gina had been gone for just over four months.

He tilted his head to stare up at the car’s vanity mirror, looking at his face as if seeing it for the first time, or as if it belonged to someone else.

Who did he look like? People were always telling me – and him – that he looked like me. But I knew that wasn’t quite right. He was a far prettier kid than I had ever been. Even if I had never had all my front teeth knocked out by a dog, he would still have been better looking than me. The truth was, he looked like both of us. He looked like me and he looked like Gina.

‘Your eyes are like Mummy’s eyes,’ I said.

‘They’re blue.’

‘That’s right. They’re blue. And my eyes are green. But your mouth, that’s like my mouth. We’ve got lovely big mouths. Perfect for kissing, right?’

‘Right,’ he said, not smiling along with me, not taking his eyes from the little rectangular mirror.

‘And your hair – that’s very fair. Like Mummy’s hair.’

‘She had yellow hair.’

‘She still does, baby,’ I said, wincing at that past tense. ‘She still has yellow hair. She’s still got yellow hair. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ he said, flipping up the mirror and staring out of the window. ‘Let’s go.’

And your teeth are like your mother’s – a little bit gappy, a little bit goofy, teeth that give every single smile a rakish air – but your sawn-off snub nose is like mine, although your strong, beautiful chin belongs to your mother and so does your skin – fair skin that loves the sun, fair skin that starts to tan as soon as it stops raining.

Pat didn’t look like me. And he didn’t look like Gina. He looked like both of us.

Even if we had ever wanted to, we couldn’t escape his mother. She was there in his smile and in the colour of his eyes. I was stuck with Gina’s ghost. And so was Pat.

‘I don’t understand what’s going to happen to the kids,’ my father said. ‘The kids like Pat and Peggy. I can’t imagine what growing up with just one parent around is going to do to them.’

He didn’t say it the way he would have said it in the past – angry, contemptuous and with a mocking wonder at what the world was coming to. He didn’t say it with his old loathing for single parents and all the changes they represented. He said it gently, with a small, bewildered shake of his head, as if the future were beyond his imagination.

‘You grew up with two parents around,’ he said. ‘At least you had some idea of what a marriage looked like. What a marriage could be. But they don’t have that, do they? Pat and Peggy and all the rest of them.’

‘No. They don’t.’

‘And I just worry what it’s going to do to them. If divorce is just something that everyone does, then what chance is there for their marriages? And for their children?’

We were on the wooden bench just outside the kitchen door, sitting in the three o’clock twilight watching Pat poke around with his light sabre at the far end of the garden.

‘Everything just seems so…broken up,’ my dad said. ‘Do you know what Peggy said to me? She asked me if I would be her granddad. It’s not her fault, is it? The poor little mite.’

‘No, it’s not her fault,’ I said. ‘It’s never the child’s fault. But maybe growing up with divorce will make them more careful about getting into a marriage. And more determined to make it work when they do.’

‘Do you really think so?’ my father said hopefully.

I nodded, but only because I didn’t have the heart to shake my head. What I really thought was that his generation had faced up to its responsibilities in a way that my lot never could.

His generation had looked after their children, they had lots of early nights, and if they also had their own home and a fortnight in a caravan in Frinton, they had considered themselves lucky.

But my generation had grown up with our own individual little pile of happiness at the top of our shopping list.

That’s why we fucked around, fucked off and fucked up with such alarming regularity.

My generation wanted perfect lives. Why should our children be any different? My dad had learned early on that nobody gets away with a perfect life.

‘Yes, maybe it will be all right,’ my old man said, thinking about it. ‘Because every kid has got two parents, haven’t they? Even a kid from – what do you call it? – a single-parent family. And perhaps Pat and Peggy and the rest of them won’t grow up being like the parent who went away. Perhaps they’ll be like the parent who stayed behind.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, you’re doing a good job with Pat,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘You work hard. You take care of him. He sees all that. So why shouldn’t he be like that with his children?’

I laughed with embarrassment.

‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘I don’t know that I could have coped if your mother – you know.’ His callused right hand rested lightly on my shoulder. He still wasn’t looking at me. ‘You’re doing all right with that boy, Harry.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

Then we heard my mother calling urgently from the living room, and when we ran inside she was standing by the window, pointing at my car.

‘I saw the little bastards,’ said my mum, who never swore. ‘I saw the little bastards do it!’

The MGF’s soft top had been repeatedly slashed with a knife. The ribbons of what was left of the roof had caved into the car, as if something had been dropped on it from a great height.

I stared at my mutilated car. But my father was already out of the front door. Auntie Ethel was on her doorstep.

‘The alley!’ she cried, pointing to the far end of our street, the rough end where there was a small cul-de-sac of council houses, like a ghetto for people who owned souped-up Ford Escorts and West Ham away shirts and didn’t give a toss about roses.

There was an alley at this end of the street that led to a tired little string of shops where you could get your Lottery ticket during the daytime and get your face smashed in after dark. Two youths – the two who had tried to burgle my parents? or two just like them? – were legging it towards the alley. My father was chasing them.

I looked at the ruined roof and felt a surge of anger rise up in me. You stupid, spiteful little gits, I thought, furious at what they had done to my car and even more furious for taking my father from his garden.

I started after them, seeing them nervously glance over their shoulders as a murderous voice called after them, threatening to fucking kill them, and I was shocked to discover that the murderous voice seemed to belong to me.

The two yobs disappeared into the alley just as my dad suddenly stopped. At first I thought he had given up, but it was worse than that, because he sank to one knee and clutched his chest, as though he were suffocating.

By the time I caught up with him he was on both knees, holding himself up with one hand pressed flat on the ground. He was making a terrible, unearthly sound, his throat rasping with short, shallow breaths.

I put my arms around him and held him, smelling his Old Holborn and Old Spice, and he gasped for air, choked for air, his lungs fighting with all their might and yet still unable to suck in what they needed. He turned his eyes towards me and I saw the fear in them.

Eventually he managed to retrieve enough air to get shakily to his feet. Still with my arm around him, I led him slowly back to the house. My mother, Pat and Auntie Ethel were all by the front gate. Pat and Auntie Ethel were white with shock. My mother was angry.

‘You must go to the doctor,’ she said, tears streaming down her face. ‘No more excuses.’

‘I will,’ he said meekly, and I knew he wouldn’t try to get out of it. He could never refuse her anything.

‘Aren’t they evil little rotters?’ Auntie Ethel said. ‘It makes your blood boil, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Pat. ‘They’re motherfuckers.’