Man and Boy

seven

Gina was packing her bags when I got home. Stuffing a suitcase and a weekend bag up in our bedroom, pale-faced and dry-eyed, doing it as quickly as she could, taking only the bare essentials. As if she couldn’t stand to be there any more.

‘Gina?’

She turned and looked at me, and it was as if she were seeing me for the very first time. She seemed almost giddy with contempt and sadness and anger. Especially anger. It scared the shit out of me. She had never looked at me like that before.

She turned again, picking something up from the little table by her side of the bed. An ashtray. No, not an ashtray. We didn’t have any ashtrays. She threw my mobile phone at me.

She had always been a lousy shot – and we had had one or two arguments where things had been thrown – but there wasn’t the room to miss, and it smacked hard against my chest. I picked it up off the floor and a bone just above my heart began to throb.

‘I’ll never forgive you for this,’ she said. ‘Never.’ She nodded at the phone. ‘Why don’t you listen to your messages?’

I pressed the icon on the phone which showed a little envelope. Siobhan’s voice came crackling through, wry and sleepy and completely out of place in our bedroom.

‘It’s always a bad sign if they go before you wake up…but please don’t feel bad about last night…because I don’t…your wife is a lucky woman…and I’m looking forward to working with you…Bye, Harry.’

‘Did you sleep with this girl, Harry?’ Gina asked, then shook her head. ‘What’s wrong with me? Why am I even bothering to ask? Because I want you to tell me that it isn’t true. But of course it’s true.’

I tried to put my arms around her. Not hugging her. Just trying to hold on to her. Trying to calm her down. To stop her getting away. To stop her from leaving me. She shook me off, almost snarling.

‘Some little slut at the office, is she?’ Gina said, still throwing clothes into her suitcase. She wasn’t even looking at the clothes she was packing. She didn’t look as though she thought she was a lucky woman. ‘Some little slut who thinks you can do her a few favours.’

‘She’s actually a really nice girl. You’d like her.’

It was a truly stupid thing to say. I knew it the second the words left my big mouth, but by then it was already too late. Gina came across the bedroom and slapped me hard across the face. I saw her wince with pain, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears. She didn’t really know how to hit someone. Gina wasn’t like that.

‘You think it was romantic or passionate or some such bullshit,’ Gina said. ‘But it’s none of those things. It’s just grubby and sordid and pathetic. Really pathetic. Do you love her?’

‘What?’

‘Are you in love with this girl?’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘If she wants my life, she can have it. All of it. Including you. Especially you, Harry. Because it’s all a lie.’

‘Please, Gina. It was a mistake. A terrible mistake, okay?’ I scrambled for words. ‘It didn’t mean a thing,’ I told her.

She started laughing and crying at the same time. ‘Don’t you understand that makes it worse?’ she said. ‘Don’t you understand anything at all?’

Then she really started to sob, her shoulders all hunched up and shaking, not even trying to wipe away tears that seemed to start somewhere deep inside her chest. I wanted to put my arms around her. But I didn’t dare touch her.

‘You’re just like my father,’ she said, and I knew it was the worst thing in the world she could ever say. ‘Just like him.’

‘Please, Gina,’ I said. ‘Please.’

She shook her head, as if she could no longer understand me, as if I had stopped making any kind of sense.

‘What, Harry? Please? What? You’re like a fucking parrot. Please what?’

‘Please,’ I said, parrot-like. ‘Please don’t stop loving me.’

‘But you must have known,’ she said, slamming shut the suitcase, most of her clothes still unpacked and scattered all over our bed. The other bag was already full. She was almost ready to leave. She was nearly there now. ‘You must have known that this is the one thing I could never forgive,’ she said. ‘You must have known that I can’t love a man who doesn’t love me – and only me. And if you didn’t know that, Harry, then you don’t know me at all.’

I once read somewhere that, in any relationship, the one who cares the least is the one with all the power.

Gina had all the power now. Because she didn’t care at all any more.

I followed her as she dragged her suitcase and bag out into the hall and across to Pat’s bedroom. He was carefully placing Star Wars figures into a little Postman Pat backpack. He smiled up at us.

‘Look what I’m doing,’ he said.

‘Are you ready, Pat?’ Gina asked.

‘Nearly,’ he said.

‘Then let’s go,’ she said, wiping away the tears with her sleeve.

‘Okay,’ Pat said. ‘Guess what?’ He was looking at me now, his beautiful face illuminated by a smile. ‘We’re going on a holiday.’

I let them get as far as the door and then I realised that I couldn’t stand losing them. I just couldn’t stand it. I grabbed the handle of Gina’s bag.

‘Where are you going? Just tell me where you’re going.’

She tugged at the bag, but I refused to let go. So she just left me holding it as she opened the front door and stepped across the threshold.

I followed them out into the street, still holding Gina’s bag, and watched her strap Pat into his child seat. He had sensed that something was very wrong. He wasn’t smiling any more. Suddenly I realised that he was my last chance.

‘What about Pat?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you going to think about him?’

‘Did you?’ she said. ‘Did you think about him, Harry?’

She heaved her suitcase into the back of the estate, not bothering to get the other bag back from me. She let me keep it.

‘Where will you stay?’

‘Goodbye, Harry.’

And then she left me. Pat’s face was small and anxious in the back seat. Gina stared straight ahead, her eyes hard and shining. She already looked like someone else. Someone I didn’t know. She turned on the ignition.

I watched the car until it had turned the bend in the street where we lived, and only then was I aware of the curtains that were twitching with curiosity. The neighbours were watching us. With a sinking feeling, I realised that’s the kind of couple we had become.

I carried Gina’s bag back into the house, where the phone was ringing. It was Marty.

‘Can you believe what these fuckers are saying about me in the papers?’ he said. ‘Look at this one – ban mad mann from our telly. And this one – A MANN OF FEW WORDS – ALL OF THEM ****ING OBSCENE. What the fuck are they implying? These people want my job, Harry. My mum is really upset. What are we going to do?’

‘Marty,’ I said. ‘Gina’s left me.’

‘She’s left you? You mean she’s walked out?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What about the kid?’

‘She’s taken Pat with her.’

‘Has she got someone else?’

‘Nothing like that. It was me. I did something stupid.’

Marty chuckled in my ear. ‘Harry, you dirty dog. Anyone I know?’

‘I’m frightened, Marty. I think she might be gone for good.’

‘Don’t worry, Harry. The most she can get is half of everything you own.’

He was wrong there. Gina had already walked out with everything I had ever wanted. She had got the lot.

eight

Barry Twist worked for the station. Over the past year, I had been to dinner at his home, and he had come to dinner at mine. But, the way our world worked, we weren’t exactly friends. I couldn’t tell him about Gina. It felt like I knew a lot of people like that.

Barry had been the first of the television people to take Marty and me out to lunch when we were doing the radio show. He had thought the show would work on television and, more than anyone, he had been responsible for putting us there. Barry had smiled all the way through that first lunch, smiled as though it was an honour to be on the same planet as Marty and me. But he wasn’t smiling now.

‘You’re not a couple of kids dicking about on the radio any more,’ he said. ‘These are big boys’ rules.’ His conversation was full of stuff like ‘big boys’ rules’, as though working in television was a lot like running an undercover SAS unit in South Armagh. ‘We had nine hundred phone calls complaining about the fucking language.’

I wasn’t going to roll over and die just because he was our commissioning editor.

‘Spontaneous TV, Barry, that’s what you pay him for. On this kind of show it’s not what the guests say that makes news. It’s what they do.’

‘We don’t pay him to assault the guests.’ Barry indicated the papers on his desk with a thin little smile. I picked up a fistful of them.

‘Front page of the Mirror and the Sun,’ I said. ‘A two-column story on page one of the Telegraph…Nice colour picture of Marty on page three of The Times…’

‘This is the wrong kind of news,’ Barry said. ‘And you know it. I repeat – this isn’t talk radio any more. You’re not just being listened to by a couple of cranks and their cats. And it’s not as though we’re some crappy little satellite outfit scratching in the dust for viewers. There are advertisers, there are broadcasting authorities, there are viewers’ associations, there is the man upstairs. And please take my word for it, Harry – they are all going fucking ape shit.’

I put the papers back on his desk, my fingers black with print. As nonchalantly as I could manage, I rubbed my hands together. But the print wouldn’t come off.

‘Let me tell you what’s going to happen, Barry. Marty is going to be called every name in the book – and next week we will get our biggest ratings ever. That is what’s going to happen. And they are going to be talking about that last show for years – that’s going to happen too.’

Barry Twist shook his head.

‘It was too much. It’s not just Marty. The man upstairs is getting called every name in the book – and he doesn’t like it. Over the last twelve months The Marty Mann Show has had drunken guests, abusive guests and guests who have tried to remove their clothes. But this is the first time you’ve had a guest who has been beaten up. It’s got to stop. We can’t have a manifestly unstable man going out live on national television.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘No more live shows, Harry. Record the show on the afternoon of transmission. That way, if Marty assaults anyone else – or decides to beat them to death with his ego – we can edit it out.’

‘As live? You want us to go as live? Marty will never stand for it.’

‘Make him stand for it, Harry. You’re his producer – do some producing. Doesn’t your contract come up for renewal soon?’

I knew they couldn’t drop Marty. He was already too big for that. But for the first time I understood that it wasn’t Marty’s hide that was on the line.

It was mine.

Despite all his games of death and destruction, Pat was a very loving child. He was always hugging and kissing people, even total strangers – I had once seen him embracing the old geezer who cleaned our street – in a way that was no longer permissible, or even wise, in the lousy modern world.

But Pat didn’t know or care about any of that. He was four years old and he was full of love. And when he saw me on the doorstep of his other grandfather’s home he went crazy, holding my face in his hands and kissing me on the lips.

‘Daddy! Are you staying with us? Staying with us on our – on our – on our holiday at granddad Glenn’s?’

I found them the day after they left. It wasn’t difficult. I made a few phone calls to Gina’s friends from college, the ones who had turned up for her thirtieth birthday party, but it had been years since she had been really close to any of them. She had let them drift out of her life, kidding herself that she could get everything she needed from me and Pat. That’s the trouble with a relationship as close as ours – when it comes undone, you’re left with no one.

It didn’t take me long to work out that Gina had been so desperate for somewhere to stay that she had gone home to her father, who was currently between marriages.

Glenn lived in a small flat right on the edge of the A to Z, among golf clubs and green belts, a neighbourhood that he must have thought looked a bit like Woodstock when he first moved in. But instead of jamming with Dylan and The Band, every day Glenn took the commuter train to his guitar shop in Denmark Street. He was home when I knocked on his door, greeting me with what seemed like real warmth as I stood holding my son.

‘Harry, how are you doing, man? Sorry about your troubles.’

In his early fifties now, what was left of Glenn’s hair was carefully arranged to approximate the Viking feather cut of his prime. He was still snake-hip thin, and still wore clothes that would have looked appropriate on a Jimi Hendrix roadie. And he was still good-looking, in a faded old roué kind of way. But he must have looked pretty funky walking down the King’s Road in 1975.

For all his faults – the missed birthdays, the forgotten promises, the fact that he tended to fuck off and leave his wife and kids every few years – Glenn wasn’t really an evil man. He had a friendly, easy charm about him, flashes of which I could see in Gina. Glenn’s fatal flaw was that he had never been able to see further than the end of his own gratification. Yet all the wounds he inflicted were unintentional. He wasn’t a cruel man, not unless weakness is another kind of cruelty.

‘Looking for Gina?’ he said, putting an arm around me. ‘She’s inside.’

Inside Glenn’s modest flat, The Verve were booming from the speakers. He wasn’t one of those classic rock freaks with a copy of Mojo and his gramophone needle stuck forever on the music of his youth. Glenn’s devotion to the cause was so great that he always liked to keep up with the big new bands. I didn’t know how he managed it.

Gina came out of the little guest room, serious and pale. Very pale. I felt like kissing her. But I didn’t.

‘Hello, Harry.’

‘Can we talk?’

‘Of course. There’s a park nearby.’

We took Pat. Glenn pointed out that, for all the surrounding greenery, the park was actually a fair distance away, past a sad little string of shops and endless big posh houses. So I suggested we took the MGF. Pat almost squealed with delight. Although she wasn’t a four-year-old boy, I hoped Gina might also be impressed – from the moment I had seen that car I knew I wanted to drive around with some special person by my side. Now I saw with terrible clarity that the special person had always been Gina. But she didn’t say anything until we arrived at the park.

‘No need to worry about recapturing your youth, Harry,’ she said, swinging her legs out of my new car. ‘You never really lost it.’

Pat skipped on ahead of us, brandishing his light sabre and howling. When he arrived at the climbing frame he stood there in silence, shyly watching two bigger boys clamber around on the higher part of the frame. He was always full of admiration for bigger boys. Gina and I watched our son watching them.