Man and Boy - Tony Parsons

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Mann Show. But did they need it this badly?

      ‘It’s so late,’ Siobhan said, as we got into the lift. ‘Where can I get a cab?’

      ‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

      I should have guessed that she would say Camden Town. She just had to be living in one of those old working-class neighbourhoods that had been colonised by the people in black. Actually, she was not that far from our little house by Highbury Corner. We were at opposite ends of the same road. But Siobhan was at the end of the Camden Road where they aspired to Bohemia. I was at the end where they dreamed of suburbia.

      ‘I can give you a lift,’ I said.

      ‘What – in your MGF?’

      ‘Sure.’

      ‘Great!’

      We laughed for the first time in hours – although I couldn’t quite work out why – and took the lift down to the underground carpark where the little red car was standing completely alone. It was late. Almost two. I watched her slide her legs under the dashboard.

      ‘I’m not going to go on about it,’ she said, ‘but I just want to say you’ve been really sweet about tonight. Thank you for not being angry with me. I appreciate it.’

      It was a gracious apology for something that she really didn’t have to apologise for. I looked at her pale Irish face, realising for the first time how much I liked her.

      ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, quickly turning on the ignition to cover my embarrassment. ‘We’re on the same side, aren’t we?’

      It was a warm summer night and the city streets were as close to empty as they were ever going to get. Within twenty minutes we were driving past the shuttered flea market, the funky ethnic restaurants and all the second-hand stores with their grotesquely oversized signs – there were giant cowboy boots, colossal rattan chairs and monster slabs of vinyl, all of them looming above the street like the visions caused by some bad drug. Gina and I used to shop around here on Saturday afternoons. It was years ago now.

      Siobhan gave me directions until we pulled up in front of a large white town house that had long ago been converted into flats.

      ‘Well,’ I said, ‘goodnight then.’

      ‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘for everything.’

      ‘You’re welcome.’

      ‘Listen, I don’t think I can sleep yet. Not after tonight. Do you want to come in for a drink?’

      ‘A drink might keep me awake,’ I said, hating myself for sounding like a pensioner who had to scurry back to the cocoa and incontinence sheets of his sheltered accommodation.

      ‘You sure?’ she asked, and I was ridiculously flattered that she seemed a bit disappointed. I also knew that she wouldn’t ask again.

      Go home, a voice inside me said. Decline with a polite smile and go home now.

      And maybe I would have if I hadn’t liked her so much.

      Maybe I would have if it hadn’t been such a rough night.

      Maybe I would have if I wasn’t coming up to thirty.

      Maybe I would have if her legs had been a couple of inches shorter.

      ‘Okay,’ I said, far more casually than I felt. ‘Sounds good.’

      She looked at me for just a moment, and then we were kissing each other, her hands on the back of my neck, tugging at my hair with small, urgent fists. That’s strange, I thought. Gina never does that.

       five

      A child can change in a moment. You turn your back for a couple of seconds, and when you look again you find they have already grown into someone else.

      I can remember seeing Pat smile properly for the first time. He was a little fat bald thing, Winston Churchill in a Babygro, howling because his first teeth were pushing through, so Gina rubbed some chocolate on his sore gums and he immediately stopped crying and grinned up at us – this big, wide, gummy grin – as if we had just revealed the best secret in the world.

      And I can remember him walking for the first time. He was holding himself up by the rail of his little yellow plastic stroller, swaying from side to side as if he were caught in a stiff breeze, as was his custom, when without warning he suddenly took off, his fat little legs sticking out of his disposable nappy and pumping furiously to keep up with the stroller’s spinning blue wheels.

      He bombed off out of the room and Gina laughed and said he looked as though he was going to be late for the office again.

      But I can’t remember when his games changed. I don’t know when all his toddler’s games of fire engines and Postman Pat videos gave way to his obsession with Star Wars. That was one of the changes which happened when I wasn’t looking.

      One minute his head was full of talking animals, the next it was all Death Stars, stormtroopers and light sabres.

      If we let him, he would watch the three Star Wars films on video all day and all night. But we didn’t let him – or rather Gina didn’t let him – so when the television was turned off, he spent hours playing with his collection of Star Wars figures and grey plastic spaceships, or bouncing on the sofa, brandishing his light sabre, muttering scraps of George Lucas storylines to himself.

      It seemed like only the day before yesterday when nothing gave him more pleasure than his collection of farmyard animals – or ‘aminals’, as Pat called them. He would sit in his bubble bath, a little blond angel with suds on his head, parading his cows, sheep and horses along the side of the tub, mooing and baaing until the water turned cold.

      ‘I’m taking me bath,’ he would announce. ‘I need me aminals.’

      Now his aminals were collecting dust in some forgotten corner of his bedroom while he played his endless games of intergalactic good and evil.

      They were a lot like the games I could remember from my own childhood. And sometimes Pat’s fantasies of brave knights, evil warlords and captured princesses sounded like echoes from a past that was long gone, as if he were trying to recover something precious that had already been lost forever.

      Siobhan slept like someone who was single.

      She edged right into the middle of the bed, her freckled limbs thrown out every which way, or she rolled over on her side, taking my share of the duvet with her. I lay there in that strange bed wide awake, clutching a scrap of sheet the size of a handkerchief as the room got light.

      It was too soon to feel really bad. Pushed to the back of my mind there was the thought of Gina and all the promises I had ever made to her – promises from the days when I was trying to persuade her to love me, the promises we made on our wedding day, and all the promises of all the days beyond, all that stuff about undying love and never wanting anyone else that I had really meant at the time. And still did, I discovered. Now more than ever, in a funny sort of way.

      Later, this would all really get to me, and driving home I would look in the mirror wondering when I had become the kind of man I used to hate. But now was too soon for all that. I lay there as the night faded away thinking to myself – well, that seemed to go okay.

      The reason that most men stray is opportunity, and the joy of meaningless sex should never be underestimated. It had been a meaningless, opportunistic coupling. That’s what I had liked most about it.

      What I liked least about it was that already I was starting to feel like a traitor.

      And it was far from great. You try too hard with someone new. You try too hard to truly enjoy yourself. Sex with someone new is too much like taking your driving test. Yet when I thought of all the things that could have gone wrong – and all of them seemed to involve timing –

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