Men from the Boys

I lifted my hand for the waitress. Gina pushed it down. It was the first time we had touched in years and years, and it was like getting an electric shock.

‘I broke up with you, Harry – not him. I went off you – not him. I stopped loving you – not him. Sorry to break this to you, Harry.’

‘I’ll get over it.’

‘But I never stopped loving him. Even when I was busy. Preoccupied. Absent.’ She sipped at her tea and looked at me. ‘How is he?’

‘Fine. He’s fine, Gina.’

‘He’s so tall. And his face – he has such a lovely face, Harry. He was always a beautiful kid, wasn’t he?’

I smiled. It was true. He was always the most beautiful boy in the world. I felt myself softening towards her.

‘He’s in the Lateral Thinking Club,’ I said, warming up to the theme, happy to talk about the wonder of our son, and we both laughed about that.

‘Bright boy,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know what Lateral Thinking is – thinking outside the box? Training the mind to work better?’

‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘He can explain it better than me.’ I had finished my coffee. I wanted to go home to my family. ‘What do you want, Gina?’

‘I want my son,’ she said. ‘I want to know him. I want him to know me. I know we – I – have wasted so much time. That’s why I want it now. Before it’s too late.’

And I thought it would never be too late. There was a Gina-sized hole in Pat’s life, had been for years, but I thought that it could never be too late to fill it. For both of them – I thought that there would always be time to put things right. That’s how dumb I am. Already my mind was turning to the practicalities of shipping Pat around town.

‘Where you living, Gina?’

‘I’ve got a two-bedroom flat on Old Compton Street,’ she said. ‘Top floor. Plenty of space. Nice light.’ She looked out the window. ‘Five minutes from here.’

I was amused. ‘Soho?’ I said. ‘That’s an interesting choice. What you trying to do – recapture your youth?’

Her mouth tightened at that.

‘I didn’t have any youth, Harry,’ she said. ‘I was married to you.’

Then my phone began to vibrate. I took the call as Gina looked away and a woman with a Jamaican accent told me that they had Ken Grimwood at the hospital.

When he was seven years old my son almost drowned. We were in a quiet corner of Crete called Agios Stephanos – years before the island was claimed by the boys in football shirts – and the last thing we were expecting on our mini-break was death and tragedy. We could get all that at home.

These were the years after I split up with Gina, and then my dad died and then my mum got sick – and it felt like every time you turned around someone was either walking out or dying. We were not really in Crete for sun, sea and Retsina. We just wanted to catch our breath.

In my mind I see a windy, rocky beach. And I see Pat – all skinny limbs and tangled blond mop and baggy trunks, splashing out with a float while I settled down with a paperback.

My son at seven.

He made me smile, because he was wearing a pair of sunglasses that were way too big for him, purchased at the airport and proudly worn ever since, even at night. He would squint at his moussaka and chips in the Cretan twilight.

The waves were whipping up, but it did not cross my mind to be worried. He did not go far. But sometimes you do not have to go far to get into more trouble than you can handle. He had settled down on his float, got all dreamy in the sunlight and then he must have drifted. And by the time he noticed, it was more than drifting.

‘Dad!’

You know your child’s voice. Even on a crowded beach, with small children shouting and calling out on all sides, you know it instantly.

He was trying to stand up, although you couldn’t really stand up on that float, and he kept sinking to one knee as it threatened to pitch him into the sea. And he was scared. Face pale with fear behind those oversized sunglasses. Calling for me.

And I was on my feet and running, my heart a hammer as I ran to the water, suddenly aware of the speed of the clouds, suddenly noticing the swell of the waves, suddenly remembering that it can all fall apart at any moment.

He was a good swimmer. Even at seven. Maybe that’s why it happened, why I was too relaxed about letting him go out with a float. But suddenly it wasn’t enough that he could rescue a plastic brick while wearing his pyjamas.

I crashed through waves that seemed to be at once taking Pat out to open sea and smashing me back to the shore, switching between breaststroke and crawl and back again, getting a sickening gutful of water every time I called his name.

Finally I got to him. One hand on a corner of the float, another wrapped tight round a skinny limb. It was like trying to hold a fish.

And that was when he went into the water.

Flailing white limbs in the foggy depths. Silence, apart from the rushing sound in my ears. And then one of my arms wrapped around his waist as I kicked for the surface. The float was above our heads and somehow I got him on it and I made him lie flat on his belly, while I lumbered back to the beach, telling him that everything was all right. He clung on, somehow still wearing those oversized sunglasses and too numb to cry.

Then finally we were on the beach.

How bad was it? The parental mind has this endless ability to vault to the absolute worst-case scenario. No trouble at all. A parent panics not because of what is happening but because of what might.

But this was bad enough for everyone on the beach to put down their suntan lotion and copies of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and stare at us even when it was clear that nobody was going to die, even as we staggered off to our shared hotel room, both salty with tears and regurgitated Aegean. Bad enough for me to remember for the rest of my life.

And what I remember most is the feeling of trying to reach my son as the sea and the wind and tide combined to push me back to the shore while they tried to carry Pat out to the open sea. That’s what I remember the most. Because sometimes it felt like that was the story of us, the story of me and my boy. Trying to reach each other, wanting to reach each other, but forever kept apart by forces that were bigger than both of us.

And the funny thing about calling your child’s name is that it doesn’t do a blind bit of good.

But you do it anyway.

Ken Grimwood sat propped up in his hospital bed in a robe that enveloped his small body like a circus tent, and when he grinned at me he was gummy as a newborn baby. On the bedside table, his false teeth sat in a glass of water.

‘They found him at the bus depot,’ a Filipina nurse told me. ‘He was unconscious. He couldn’t breathe. And he had a cigarette in his hand. We found this in his pocket.’

She handed me a BBC business card with my name on, as if I might want it back. And I remembered giving it to him before he left my house only because I wanted to get rid of him. And here he was, bounced back into my life because he had my card.

‘I hardly know him,’ I said, keeping my voice down. ‘He’s not actually anything to do with me.’

Ken laughed and we watched him produce a tin of Old Holborn and a packet of Rizlas from somewhere inside his giant robe. He must have been the only person left who wasn’t using roll-ups to smoke illegal substances. He flashed his toothless grin and as the nurse advanced towards him he stuck his smoking paraphernalia under the sheet.

‘Just pulling your leg, sweetheart,’ he said.

She took his blood pressure, shaking her head.

But when she left he produced his baccy tin and his papers. He winked at me slyly.

I walked down to the nurses’ station. The Filipina was there with a large Jamaican duty nurse. They looked at me as if I had done something wrong.

‘Your father is a very sick man,’ the duty nurse said. ‘There’s fluid on his lungs and I don’t know how much longer he can breathe unaided, okay? And of course you are aware that the cancer is at an advanced stage.’

‘He’s not my father,’ I said.