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

Black tie, it said on the invitation, and I always felt excited when I had to dig out my dinner jacket, dress shirt and black bow tie – a proper bow tie that you had to spend ages doing yourself, not the pre-tied dicky bow on a bit of elastic as worn by small boys and clowns.

I could remember my old man wearing black tie once a year for his company’s annual dinner and dance at some fancy hotel on Park Lane. There was something about the tailored formality of a tuxedo that suited his stocky, muscular frame. My mum always looked slightly amused by whatever ball gown she had climbed into that year. But my old man was born to wear black tie.

‘Wow,’ said Sally, shyly grinning up at me through a curtain of hair as I came down the stairs. ‘You look just like a bouncer. Outside a, like, really, really cool club.’

‘No,’ Pat said, pointing his index finger at me and cocking his thumb. ‘You look like James Bond. 007. Licensed to shoot all the bad people.’

But as I stood in front of the hall mirror, I knew what I really looked like in a dinner jacket.

More and more, I looked like my father.

Cyd wore a green cheongsam in Chinese silk – high-necked, tight as a second skin, the greatest dress I had ever seen in my life.

She hadn’t done anything to her hair – just pulled it back behind her head in a ponytail, and I liked it that way, because that way I could see her face all the more clearly.

Sometimes we are only aware of how happy we are when the moment has passed. But now and again, if we are very lucky, we are aware of happiness when it is actually happening. And I knew that this was what happiness felt like. Not happiness in dewy-eyed retrospect or in some imagined future but here and now, in a green dress.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said to Cyd as our cab dropped us outside the hotel. I took her hands in mine and we stood there in silence, the rush hour on Park Lane roaring behind us, a frost on Hyde Park glinting beyond the traffic.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked me.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘That’s the point.’

I knew that I would never forget the way she looked that night, I knew that I would never forget the way she looked in her green Chinese dress. And I wanted to do more than enjoy it, I wanted to hold the moment so that I could remember it later, after the night had gone.

‘Okay?’ she said, smiling.

‘Okay.’

Then we joined the laughing throng in their dinner jackets and evening dresses, and went inside to the awards ceremony.

‘And the best newcomer is…’

The luscious weather girl fumbled with the envelope.

‘…Eamon Fish.’

Eamon stood up, drunk and grinning, looking more pleased than he would have wanted to with all the cameras watching, and he hugged me with real feeling as he walked past.

‘We did it,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘you did it. Go and get your award.’

Over his shoulder I saw Marty Mann and Siobhan at another table – Marty in one of those bright waistcoats worn by people who think that wearing black tie is like smoking a pipe or wearing carpet slippers, Siobhan slim and cool in some white diaphanous number.

She smiled. He gave me the thumbs up. Later, when all the awards had been handed out, they came across to our table.

Although Marty was a bit pissed and a bit pissed off – there were no awards for him this year – they couldn’t have been more gracious.

I introduced them to Cyd and to Eamon. If Marty remembered Cyd as the same woman who had once dropped a plate of pasta in his lap, he didn’t show it. He congratulated Eamon on his award. Siobhan congratulated Cyd on her dress.

Siobhan didn’t say – And what do you do?, she was too smart and sensitive ever to ask that question, so Cyd didn’t have to say – Oh, I’m a waitress right now, so Siobhan didn’t have to get embarrassed and neither did Cyd, they could just get on with each other in that easy, seemingly natural way that only women can manage.

They began talking to each other about not knowing what to wear at these things, and Marty put a conspiratorial arm around my shoulder. His face was far heavier than I remembered it. He had the leaden, vaguely disappointed air of a man who, after years of dreaming, had finally landed his own talk show only to discover that he couldn’t attract anyone who was worth talking to.

‘A word?’ he said, crouching down by my side.

Here it comes, I thought. Now he wants me back. Now he’s seen how well Eamon’s doing, he wants me back on the show.

‘I want you to do me a favour,’ Marty said.

‘What’s that, Marty?’

He leaned closer.

‘I want you to be my best man,’ he said.

Even Marty, I thought.

Even Marty dreams of getting it right, of finding the one, of discovering the whole world in another human being. Just like everyone else.

‘Hey, Harry,’ said Eamon, watching the weather girl cross the room, adjusting his weight as a ridge of high pressure passed through his underpants. ‘Guess who I’m shagging tonight?’

Well, perhaps not quite everyone.

* * *

There were too many lights on in the house. There were lights upstairs. There were lights downstairs. There were lights blazing everywhere at a time when there should have been just one faint glow coming from the living room.

And there was music pouring out of my home – loud, booming bass lines and those skittering drum machines that sounded like the aural equivalent of a heart attack. New music. Terrible new music blasting from my stereo.

‘What’s going on?’ I said, as if we had come to the wrong place, as if there had been some mistake.

There was someone in the darkness of the small front garden. No, there were a few of them. A boy and a girl necking just outside the open front door. And another boy lurking by the dustbin, being sick all over his Tommy Hilfiger anorak and his YSL trousers.

I went inside the house while Cyd paid the cab driver.

It was a party. A teenage party. All over my home there were youths in Polo gear snogging, shagging, drinking, dancing and being sick. Especially being sick. There was another couple puking their stupid guts up in the back garden.

In the living room Pat was in his pyjamas swaying to the music at one end of the sofa, while at the other end Sally was being groped by some fat boy. Pat grinned at me – isn’t this fun? – as I surveyed the damage – lager cans with their contents spilled on the parquet floor and cigarettes stubbed out on their rims, scraps of takeaway pizza smeared on the furniture and God knows what stains on the beds upstairs.

There were maybe a dozen of them in all. But it felt like the Mongol Hordes had moved in. Worse than that – it was like one of those grotesque commercials for crisps or soft drinks or chinos, full of young people having the time of their life. Except that they were having the time of their life in my living room.

‘Sally,’ I said, ‘what the fuck is going on?’

‘Harry,’ she said, and there were tears of joy in her eyes. ‘It’s Steve.’

She indicated the slack-jawed youth on top of her. He squinted at me with his cretinous porky eyes, eyes with nothing behind them but hormonal overload and nine cans of lager.