Men from the Boys

‘Friend of the family?’ the duty nurse asked.

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ I said.

It was clear they wanted the bed. They wanted him out of there. But they would not discharge him without someone to take care of him. And I realised that just because I had been dumb enough to give him my business card, the National Health Service were nominating me.

‘I hardly know him,’ I told them. ‘He was a friend of my father’s. I’ve only met him once. I think he has children. Do his children know? Can’t his children come?’

The nurse looked at me as though I had suggested putting him in a plastic bag and leaving him on the pavement. But she talked to Ken and got a couple of telephone numbers from the old boy. There was a daughter in Essex and a son in Brighton. I quickly took out my phone and began calling.

I got through to an answer machine. And then another answer machine. I left messages on both – telling them what had happened to their father, telling them to come quick, telling them to call me back. Then I held my phone, expecting it to vibrate at any moment. But it did not stir, as if his children were reluctant to claim him too.

Down the hall I could hear a Jamaican accent telling Ken Grimwood that there was no smoking on hospital premises.

And as I stared at the silent phone in my fist, I could hear the mocking sound of the old man’s laughter.

Three (#ulink_d87374b3-f013-5168-83ec-b77418ad92f3)

Joni grinned at me with her vampire smile.

Her two front teeth were both gone now. The wonky one had come out in her sandwich and the one next to it had quickly come out in sympathy. It must have been looser than she knew when she was focusing all her attention on the wonky one. So now when she smiled the milk teeth that remained at the sides of her mouth appeared like fangs.

‘I’ll brush my teeth,’ she said, and her gummy grin gave her a jaunty air, like a sailor on shore leave. ‘You get the book.’

‘Okay.’

She had strict bedtime rituals. When she was in her pyjamas and her remaining teeth had been cleaned, she hugged everyone who was in the house and told them she loved them. But she didn’t kiss anyone, because kissing was gross this year. Then she trooped up to her room and I read her a story. As she settled herself under the duvet, I looked at her bookcase for something suitable.

Joni was at that awkward age when she was getting too old for princesses and fairies but was still too young for anything to do with having a crush on boys. My wife and I had made half-hearted attempts to interest her in the Hannah Montana industry and the High School Musical business but when Joni watched the TV shows, or saw the DVDs, she was unmoved by all those white teeth, all that canned laughter and all those teenage children trying to talk like they were in a Neil Simon play. Joni was never going to go for cheesy American rubbish. So I stuck with the classics.

Terrible curses. Murderous adults. Wicked stepmothers. Beautiful maidens being taken to the woods for slaughter. Girls drugged and placed in glass coffins. All the stuff to give a seven-year-old a good night’s sleep.

Tonight it was Aurora.

We settled down. I had just got to the bit where Briar Rose had realised that the nice peasant boy and Prince Philip were – conveniently enough – one and the same when Joni yawned, lay back on her pillow and raised her hand, bidding me stop.

For a long time – years – Joni had been afraid of Maleficent, and at first I thought that she wanted me to stop before I reached the wicked witch losing her rag.

But it wasn’t that.

‘They all end the same way, don’t they?’ said my daughter. ‘The princess stories. They start off a bit different but they all end the same way. The prince saves them and they get married and they live happily ever after.’

I smiled and closed the book. ‘Well, it’s true,’ I said. ‘It’s always the same ending.’ I felt like kissing her on the cheek but I knew that wasn’t allowed. So I just touched her hair. ‘You’re getting a bit old for these stories now.’

She snuggled down and I pulled the duvet up to her chin.

‘It’s a load of arse,’ said my seven-year-old, and I cursed the day that Ken Grimwood had come to our door.

Elizabeth Montgomery was being dropped off at school.

She was in the car in front of us as I pulled up to let Pat out. And I know he saw her too, because he was perfectly still yet poised for flight, like a rabbit who suddenly realises that he is loitering in the fast lane of a motorway.

Elizabeth Montgomery wasn’t being dropped off by her dad. Not unless her dad had a barbed-wire tattoo at the top of his arm, and played the Killers at full volume at eight thirty in the morning in his souped-up BMW. Which I suppose was entirely possible in the lousy modern world.

In the passenger seat, Pat sat petrified.

‘Probably her brother,’ I said, but before the words were out the driver in front had his tongue in Elizabeth Montgomery’s ear, and she was laughing and squirming away. ‘More likely a cousin,’ I said.

And I felt like saying, Ah, don’t care so much, kiddo. Don’t be so quick to say, Here’s my heart. Why not have a game of five-a-side football with it? Go ahead. And I felt like saying, You will meet a dozen like Elizabeth Montgomery. A hundred.

But I didn’t, because I knew it was not true.

My son was almost fifteen years old and there would only ever be one Elizabeth Montgomery.

And I felt it again – I wanted to give him some sage advice. I wanted to say something meaningful about the fleeting nature of desire, or the way the person who cares the most is always the person who gets hurt the most.

I wanted to talk about love. But everything I could have said would have been about forgetting Elizabeth Montgomery. And I knew he could not do that.

So what I said was, ‘I saw Gina.’

He started at his mother’s name. A physical flinch, as if he had been struck. That is what it had come to.

He turned away from Elizabeth Montgomery in the car in front of us and looked at me. And I saw that his eyes were exactly the same colour as his mother’s eyes. This Pacific Ocean blue. The blue you see on a Tiffany catalogue. It is a special blue.

‘What do you mean – you saw her?’

‘She’s back from Japan,’ I said.

‘A holiday?’ he said.

‘Back for good. Back in London. She wants to see you.’

I have this theory about divorce. I have this theory that it is never a tragedy for adults and always a tragedy for children. Adults can lose weight, find someone nicer, get their life back. Divorce gives grown-ups a get-out-of-jail-free card. It is the children who pay the price, and pay it for the rest of their lives. But we can’t admit that, all us scarred veterans of the divorce court, because it would mean admitting that we have inflicted wounds on our children that they will carry for the rest of their lives.

Pat was looking back at Elizabeth Montgomery. But I don’t think he was seeing her any more.

‘How long…’

‘I saw her last week,’ I said. ‘She’s been back for about a month. She wants to see you.’

I watched the fury flush his face. ‘And you tell me now? You get round to telling me now?’

The children of divorced parents hold something back. They get so used to shuttling between warring homes when they are little that it stays with them. This restraint, this pragmatic reserve, this need to be a pint-sized Kofi Annan diplomat. So when they lose it, they really lose it.

He was out of the car, hauling out his rucksack, furious with me. I wasn’t so naïve that I thought it was just me that he was angry about. It was divorce, separation, the absent parent – it was the whole sorry package that he had been handed without ever asking for it.

‘You around tonight?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, and he slammed the passenger door.