Starting Over
Tony Parsons

For Yuriko

Foreword

That was the last time the girl Wendy ever saw him. For a little longer she tried for his sake not to have growing pains; and she felt she was untrue to him when she got a prize for general knowledge. But the years came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met again Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys. Wendy was grown up. You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up.

J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Wendy

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

Part One The Canteen Cowboy V The Careless Boy

The Shape Of A Heart

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Part Two Zen And The Art Of Swimming Pool Maintenance

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Part Three The Dipping Crew

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

About the Author

By the Same Author

Praise for Tony Parsons

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One The Canteen Cowboy v The Careless Boy

The Shape of A Heart

She doesn’t feel comfortable driving this car. It is too big, too unfamiliar, too much her husband’s car. And the woman on the sat nav just will not shut up.

‘If possible, try to make a U-turn…try to make a U-turn.’

It is late now. She doesn’t know this neighbourhood. The big BMW X5 rolls past strips of worn-out shops, ugly superstores, unlit yards protected by razor wire. And everywhere, there are the children. In groups of three or four or more, standing by their bikes, the light from their phones glowing in their fists, their faces hidden inside their hooded tops.

‘Try to make a U-turn…’

‘I’m trying!’ she shouts, suddenly aware that she has had perhaps one glass of wine too many.

Eyes follow her. At least that is how it feels. She is too well dressed for this area, the car too conspicuously expensive. She should have taken her own beat-up little runaround. But her husband had pressed the BMW X5 on her, telling her she would feel safer.

Yeah, right.

The terrain changes. Suddenly the exhausted shops and the superstores and the herds of sullen youth have gone. There are no signs of life here. These are streets full of – what are they? – warehouses. Old warehouses. Big, black buildings with long skylights that have been smashed. They look as though they were deserted years ago, as though they are rotting, as though they are waiting to be swept away and built upon. The big car barrels through the dead streets. She is perhaps a few miles from home but this no longer feels like her town.

‘Try to make a U-turn…’

‘Oh, try to put a bloody sock in it!’ she cries.

And then she sees him.

The boy lying in the middle of the road. He is curled up in a foetal position, but one arm is stretched out, supporting his head. Her foot touches the brakes, but only for a moment. It is the arm stretched out, making a pillow for his head, that makes her feel that this is wrong, all wrong, that this is trouble waiting to happen.

So she does not stop.

She puts her foot on the throttle and yanks at the steering wheel, swerving around the boy at the last moment. In the rear-view mirror she sees that he has not stirred. The car almost hit him and yet he did not move a muscle. And all at once she believes that she is mistaken.

This is someone who is really hurt, she thinks. This is someone who needs her help.

The car comes to a halt.

She pulls out her phone.

No signal.

Then she finally obeys the woman on the sat nav and makes a U-turn, abruptly pulling off the road and into an abandoned petrol station where the pumps are gone but the roof still bears the fading name of an oil company. There is a low wall running around the petrol station and beyond it the place has been turned into a rubbish dump. Debris everywhere. She registers black bags that have been ripped open by sharp teeth, a burned-out car, a grease-blackened oven, and some old computers with their screens stoved in. Suddenly it is like driving on the surface of the moon. The BMW X5 bounces over God knows what and now she is glad to be driving this thing.

She pulls up next to a pothole where a petrol pump once stood and she leans forward, the engine idling, staring at the boy in the middle of the road lit by her headlights.

And she still doesn’t know.

She still doesn’t know if he is really hurt. She can’t just leave him lying there. But she can’t get out of the car.

So she puts her foot down and drives through the ruined petrol station, the big car lurching and bumping, and all the while she watches the boy, illuminated by her lights, and then receding in the rear-view mirror.

And he never moves.

But she knows she is not getting out of this car and so she swings it on to the road and heads back the way she came with the woman on the sat nav silent now, as if happy at last.

They could not be more understanding at the police station. They tell her she did the right thing. You don’t get out of your car in that neighbourhood. A young red-haired cop in a suit and tie drives her back to where she saw the boy in the road.

And he has gone.

The cop and the woman get out of the unmarked car. Perhaps this wasn’t the place? No, this was definitely the place. She recognises the petrol station with the disappearing name. This is it, she insists.

And that is when they see the body.

He must have been hiding behind the low wall that skirts the petrol station. Waiting for her to stop. Waiting for her to get out of the car to help his friend. Waiting for her to do the right thing, which would have been exactly the wrong thing.

And when the woman had turned her car round, when she had finally made that U-turn, she had driven right across him.

The one who was hiding, the one who was waiting. She looks away quickly but not fast enough to avoid seeing the tyre marks on his face. Too young, she thinks. Still in his teens. Too young for this to happen.

And then he makes a noise and both the woman and the cop cry out.

Somehow he is alive.

Somehow he is still alive.

But not for long.

And at the hospital, after the young unknown male has been pronounced dead in the A&E, the red-haired cop stands with the duty nurse and signs a form acknowledging receipt of the sad contents of the dead boy’s pockets. One by one, the policeman drops them into a small plastic bag.

Some keys. An Oyster card. A wallet with a picture of a small child, somewhere between a baby and a toddler. A little boy, thinks the cop, but only because the Babygro is blue. A woman is holding the child. You can see her hands, her arms, and a part of her smile.

There are a handful of credit cards, each bearing a different name. Hiroshi Yamamoto. Deirdre Smith. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. A few crumpled notes. And a cheap mobile phone, still switched on. It suddenly lights up and begins to ring. Some popular tune or other. The cop places it to one side, staring at it, as if trying to place the melody.

And finally there is the blue plastic card. The cop looks at the card.

It’s not much.

It is just a blue plastic card with a few white words and a splash of red, in the shape of a heart.

And the woman is at home, safe and sound but still shaking, with her husband and a stiff drink, and he says thank God she did the right thing by staying in the car.

And she sips her drink and she thanks God too.

Once upon a time she would have got out of the car. She would have reached out a helping hand to her fellow man.

But you grow out of all that.

one

I waited for my son to come home.

I watched the late news and turned it off. I flicked through the paper and tossed it aside. I went to the back door and smoked a cigarette with one foot in the kitchen and the other in the garden, watching the smoke disappear into the night sky, waving it on its way, destroying the evidence.

But all the while I was waiting.

My head ached with all the things that can go wrong at seventeen. The wrecked car. The knife pulled. The powder cut with poison. Beyond my window there were children killing children, and my boy was out there among them.

And all I could do was wait.

Rufus was a smart kid but he was raw. That was his problem. Not his recklessness, or his stupidity, but his youth. I trusted him but I didn’t trust the world. You need a bit of luck at that age, I thought, and I waited at the window, and still he did not come home.

My son at seventeen. Most nights he went out in a clapped-out old Beetle bought with his own money from a summer job. We didn’t know where he went. We didn’t have a clue. You lose them after a certain age and they never come back. They start out as a part of you, indistinguishable from yourself for years and years, and they end up as people that you hardly recognise. I could see it coming.

My son and I were not quite strangers yet – I could still glimpse the same father and son who went to the park on a bike that had stabilisers. But it was a big thing between us, this not knowing, this unknown other life, the Grand Canyon of ignorance, and it felt like it was growing bigger every time he went out the front door.

And when midnight came and went I suddenly knew that I would never see him again. I knew it with a total certainty that choked my throat and tightened my chest. And I knew exactly how it would be when I told his mother and sister, and I could see the look on the faces of his grandparents, and I could imagine his dumbstruck friends and schoolmates, attending their first funeral, far too young to be wearing all that black. And I knew exactly what it would be like. It would be like the end of the world.

Then I heard his car coming up the drive.

There were lights in the window, the engine dying, a door slamming – boys do not have a light touch at seventeen – and suddenly there he was, towering above me, eye contact not easy, and as always I was both relieved and uneasy at his physical presence. Glad to have him back in one piece, yet baffled by this oversized man-child.

Who was he? Where did he come from? What was his connection to the little boy with the blond Beatle-cut? On tiptoes – and I am six foot nothing – I kissed him on the fuzzy cheek he shaved once a week, and when he gave me a sort of half-hearted sideways squeeze in response, I felt the sharp bones of my only son.

We had always kissed each other, but for a while now there had been self-consciousness and shyness in our embrace. Somehow I knew that Rufus would prefer it if the ritual, long since drained of all real meaning, would stop. But stopping it would feel like we were making too big a thing of it. So we continued with our manly kisses, even though they made both of us uncomfortable.

I felt him pull away.

‘So,’ I said, as lightly as I could manage, ‘what have you been up to?’

‘Just driving around,’ he said in his deep, booming voice – that big man’s voice coming out of my little boy! – and I felt myself flinch at the voice, at the words, at the blatant and obvious lie.

Whatever my son did at night, I knew it was not just driving around.

‘Okay,’ I said evenly, and I reached for the AlcoHawk Pro that was waiting on the coffee table.

It was a rectangular piece of plastic, gun-metal grey, about the size of one of those palm-held devices that the world and its brother seem to spend their entire lives staring into these days, when they could be looking at each other, or the stars. There was a stubby mouthpiece on one side, about the size of the cigarette butt that I had booted into the rose bushes.

‘I didn’t drink anything,’ Rufus said in his defensive baritone, although I could smell the contents of a small brewery on him.

‘Good,’ I said flatly. ‘Then it will be clear.’

I pressed the power switch and on the AlcoHawk Pro’s circular screen the red digits quickly counted down from 200 to zero. Then I handed it to Rufus. He took a breath, and blew into the mouthpiece until there was a sharp beep. He gave it back to me and we waited, saying nothing, not looking at each other, just the ambient noise of the city between us. Then there was a series of little beeps and the reading was displayed.

Three zeroes, it said; 000 – like the winning line on a fruit machine. Strange, I thought. I knew I smelled booze. I shook the AlcoHawk Pro and looked at it again. But it still said 000, and that meant there was no alcohol in the bloodstream of my son. At least he was telling me the truth about one thing in his life.

I showed the reading to Rufus and when he nodded politely, I felt like hugging him. It was such a gracious gesture, that polite little nod. There was a real sweetness about my boy, even now, a sweetness that had everything to do with his mother and nothing to do with me. I felt like hugging the kid. But I didn’t hug him. And the moment passed.

We said goodnight without risking any more embraces, and as I climbed the stairs I could hear him clumping noisily around the kitchen, foraging for food. My wife was sleeping. But when I slid into my side of the bed, I felt her stir.

‘Is he back?’ she murmured, her voice foggy with sleep, her face pointing away from me.

‘He’s back,’ I said. I listened to her breathing for a bit. That was enough for her. The fact that he was back. That was all Lara cared about.

‘But where does he go?’ I said, all despairing.

She exhaled in the darkness, a sound that was half-yawn, half-sigh. ‘He’s a good boy, George,’ she said, already sliding back into sleep. ‘And he’s fine. And he’s home. And he’s safe. Does it matter where he goes?’ Then she thought of something and half sat up. ‘You didn’t breathalyse him again, did you?’

‘I just wonder where he goes,’ I said.

I turned on to my side and we lay there, back to back, the position of animals who had found their home a long time ago. I felt Lara’s small feet on the back of my calves, the swell of her buttocks, the angle of a shoulder blade under brushed cotton pyjamas.

‘And I just don’t want him to get hurt,’ I said, very quietly, although she was sleeping by then.

I had a feeling that I would not sleep much tonight. But then I felt Lara’s body making itself comfortable against mine, and I knew that sleep would eventually come if I didn’t think about it too much.

And I knew that there was something more that I wanted for our son, something more than good sense and safety first, and cool heads to prevail, and the bit of the luck you need at seventeen, and perhaps less lies once in a while, just for a change.

And it was this – what every parent wants for the gawky teenage boy who they suddenly see accelerating towards the grown-up world without a crash helmet or a safety belt, imagining that everything is completely under control.

The silent prayer of the terrified parent.

I wanted to stop the clock.

We rarely saw Rufus at breakfast. In the morning he was an almost mythical figure, elusive yet lumbering, his enormous form sometimes glimpsed banging out the door, rucksack stuffed with books slung over one shoulder like the Yeti of Year 13, or whatever they call the sixth form these days.

The kitchen was full of clues that he had already come and gone. His chair pushed roughly back. A lone Coco Pop on the floor. The cereal bowl dumped in the sink for someone else to wash up.

I felt a ripple of irritation. I knew what this was about. He just wanted to avoid my porridge.

I made one meal a day for my family, and it was breakfast – tasty, nutritious Scott’s Porage Oats. I figured a healthy start balanced out the unhealthy remainder of my day – the cigarettes I secretly puffed, the junk food I noshed at work, the spikes of blood pressure. Every morning I built a barrier against early death. A wall of porridge. But my son never stuck around for it.

Lara appeared as I was drying his bowl. ‘He makes me so angry,’ I said.

She kissed my cheek and patted my ribs. ‘Everything makes you angry, darling.’ She looked up at the ceiling. ‘Ruby!’ No response. She took the bowl from me and put it away, shaking her head. ‘She’ll be late again. Go and get her, will you?’

I checked that the porridge was simmering nicely and went back upstairs. The door to our daughter’s room was open. She was sitting at her computer, in her school uniform, pulling her hair back and knotting it in a ponytail. I smiled at the seriousness of the expression on what was a fifteen-year-old version of her mother’s perfect face.

It wasn’t true that everything made me angry.

My daughter never made me angry.

I could hardly look at her without smiling.

And it had always been that way.

Apocalyptic images moved across her computer screen. Factories belching industrial filth. Dead fish floating in polluted rivers. Highways jammed with unmoving cars.

‘Anyone in here like porridge?’ I said, knocking on the open door.

‘Just let me…’ Her voice trailed away as she stared at ice caps melting, the earth’s crust boiling, the sky ripped asunder by plague and pestilence. ‘I just have to see…’

‘Ruby,’ I said, ‘don’t worry about all that stuff. It’s not the end of the world.’

She looked at me and grimaced. ‘That’s not funny, Daddy.’

But it made me laugh.

When we came downstairs the porridge had gently bubbled to that perfect consistency of creamy thickness that I liked.

Lara came in from the garden, holding something in her right hand. A cigarette butt. She threw it at me. It hit me in the middle of the chest, just where I always felt the tightness. A spitfire, my dad would say. She’s a little spitfire.

‘Do you know what that is, George?’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘That’s another nail in your coffin.’ She sat down at the breakfast table and covered her face with her hands. Ruby and I looked at each other and then back at Lara. ‘Thanks a lot, George,’ my wife said, her voice muffled by her hands. ‘Thanks a bloody million.’

Then we ate our porridge.

Rufus was still at the bus stop.

I stopped the car on the other side of the road and opened the window. He looked across at the car containing his father, his mother and his sister, and seemed to cringe, and looked away. There were a few other kids from his school at the bus stop, but he didn’t seem to be with any of them.

‘Do you want a lift?’ I shouted, the rush-hour traffic roaring between us.

He tore his eyes from the pavement and screwed up his face. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Can’t hear.’ Other kids stared across at us.

I looked at Lara in the passenger’s seat. ‘What could I possibly be asking him? What else could I conceivably be asking the kid?’

Ruby leaned forward. ‘What’s the capital of Peru? If God really exists then why is there so much suffering in the world?’ She sat back with a chuckle, smiling wearily at her big brother scanning the street for a sign of his bus. ‘He wants to get the bus, Daddy.’

She was right.

So we left him at the bus stop, and took Ruby to school – right up to the gates. We were still allowed to do that. She even gave us both a peck on the face, without first checking who might see.

She really did make me smile all the time.

And the smile only faded when she fell into step with one of her classmates, and I saw her moving her skinny hips from side to side as she hiked up her grey skirt. She had started wearing her white school socks above her knee and it was not a good look.

‘Young lady,’ I called.

She turned, raised her plucked eyebrows, and gave us a little wave of the hand that could have meant anything. Okay. Goodbye. Bugger off. But the hemline on that grey school skirt did not go any higher, and that felt like the most I could ask for.

Lara touched her watch as we eased back into the slow morning traffic. ‘I’m going to be late,’ she said.

I hit a switch on the dashboard.

‘No, you’re not,’ I said.

I swung the car to the wrong side of the road as the siren began to wail, watching the oncoming traffic pulling over at the sight of the two blue lights that were flashing inside my grille, and everyone hearing me long before they saw me, and all of them getting out of the way.

Life the way it should be.

‘You know you shouldn’t do this,’ Lara said, sinking into her seat with embarrassment, but laughing at the same time.

I smiled, happy to make my wife happy, proud that I could get her to work on time, and looking forward to the moment when I was alone at last, and lighting up the first one of the day.

two

Just as Eskimos have fifty different words for snow, so the police have endless terms for the copper who never leaves the station.

Station cat. Canteen cowboy. Shiny arse. Clothes hanger. Uniform carrier. Bongo (Books On, Never Goes Out). Flub (Fat Lazy Useless Bastard). And an Olympic torch (yet another thing that never goes out).

And despite the light show that I had put on for Lara, that was me. A shiny-arsed canteen cowboy. Or at least, that is what I had become.

I was third generation. My father and grandfather were both coppers. Unfortunately, policing wasn’t the only thing that ran in the family. So did heart disease. Health issues, a man with glasses called it, not an expression that my grandfather or my father ever had to hear. So despite the dodgy tickers that ran in the family, the old boys never suffered the humiliation of being a shiny-arsed station cat.

But that was another time.

When I got to the station, I went straight to the parade. This is the part of the day that the cop shows get right – a room full of men and a few women, most of them in uniform, all of them drinking the first caffeine of the day while listening to an Onion – onion bhaji, sargie, sergeant – also known as the skipper – talk them through the shift ahead. At the back of the room I saw someone watching me. A heavy man in his forties wearing a cheap suit, grubby white shirt and a tie as lifeless as a dead snake. My old partner, Keith, now in the company of some bright-eyed young boy who was actually taking notes. Keith grinned and lifted his Styrofoam cup in salute, spilt a splash of tea on his chin, cursed and wiped it off with the back of his hand. Then, stifling a yawn, he looked back at the Onion.

‘Might seem a long way off, but already we need to start thinking about Carnival weekend. I have before me the official figures –’ the Onion was saying, turning a page of his notes ‘– and I know you will all be enormously relieved to hear that, according to these statistics, last year’s Carnival went off without a major incident.’

Disbelieving groans from the crowd. The Onion glowered at them from under thick eyebrows, playing it straight.

‘There were six stabbings, forty-eight robberies, and a medium-sized riot around the Boombastic Dancehall Sound System when it was asked to reduce the volume at 3.45 a.m. Happily, the environmental health officer who asked them to turn down the Bob Marley –’ mocking jeers from some of the younger officers ‘– is expected to be out of hospital within a month. The council tell us that the loss of his spleen will not prevent him carrying out his duties. Fortunately, and rather wonderfully, none of these incidents were Carnival-related, so citizens should feel free to bring the wife and kiddies for this year’s fun-packed extravaganza.’

Keith’s new partner busily wrote it all down. I watched the Onion’s briefing, feeling like a man with no fruit and nuts in a knocking shop.

I didn’t know why I came here every morning. No, that’s not true – I knew exactly why I came. As the Sergeant went through his shopping list of stolen cars, burglaries, muggings and knife crime, it made me feel as though I was still chasing the wicked, still part of the war on crime, and still the man I wanted to be.

But when the parade was over, I went up to my desk, forbidding myself a glance at my watch. If I could only stop myself from looking, then the time would pass more quickly. So I lost myself in checking MG3s – reports that officers make to the Crown Prosecution Service, who then get to decide which naughty people to prosecute, and which naughty people to pat on the head and release back into the wild.

When I looked over the top of my computer screen Keith was standing there, dabbing at the tea stain on his shirt.

‘Fancy running a few red lights?’ he said.

Keith’s young partner was waiting in the passenger seat of their car. He looked up from his notes with a shy smile as Keith stuck his head in the window.

‘DC Bailey and I are on an undercover operation all day,’ Keith told him. ‘So sling your hook.’

The young man got out of the car with a bewildered look. ‘But – but what am I supposed to do while you’re undercover with DC Bailey?’

Keith erupted with exasperation. ‘I don’t know, do I? Go and do a bit of face painting. Do what you like.’

I slipped into the passenger seat and settled myself. It felt good. Keith eased himself behind the wheel, red-faced and muttering about a lack of initiative among the younger generation. We left the kid standing in the car park, staring after us with a wistful look.

Out on the road, Keith pulled out a couple of packets from under the dash. Zestoretic. Amlodipine. He pushed out a pill from each and washed them down with a swig from a can of Red Bull.

‘Goes a treat with your blood-pressure medication,’ he smiled.

‘We’re getting old,’ I said. Keith was forty-two, five years younger than me, although he looked as though he had even more miles on the clock. ‘In fact, we are old.’

Keith just laughed and pulled out a packet of cigarettes with a skull on the front. Then with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on his high-tar snouts, he pulled his car on to the wrong side of the road and really put his foot down, as if he was trying to outrace someone.

We came across a woman crying.

‘Pictures of my children,’ she sobbed. ‘It had all the pictures of my children.’

‘Someone thieve your phone?’ Keith said, and when the woman nodded, he motioned for her to get in the back of the car. ‘Hop in, love,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We’ll get your phone back for you.’

This was what Keith was good at. This was where he excelled. We drove around slowly, the lady still upset on the back seat, until we were passing a tube station where some kids in school uniform were talking to a skinny guy in his twenties. He had a scabby pallor about him that marked him as a heroin addict.

‘He’s not eating his greens, is he?’ observed Keith, stopping on a double-yellow line. When we got out of the motor and moved closer to the little crowd, I could see how scared the school kids were. The suspect had one hand in the pocket of his shabby parka, and held the other palm outstretched to the school kids. One of them was giving him an iPod. Keith chuckled as he put his arm around the suspect’s shoulder.

‘What’s going on here then?’ he said.

The suspect looked at him with a start. ‘Just listening to some music, officer.’ He handed back the iPod and made to bolt, but Keith’s friendly arm held him in place.

Keith was nodding. ‘Downloading a few banging tunes, are we?’ He nodded at the iPod. ‘What you got on there? Bit of garage? Bit of Shirley Bassey? I’m a Clash fan myself.’ He looked at the frightened faces of the schoolchildren. ‘Never heard of The Clash? What do they teach you at these schools?’ He made a small gesture with his head. ‘Better run off and do some homework.’

They scarpered. The suspect made one last effort to get away. Keith embraced him tighter.

‘Not you, moonbeam,’ he said. ‘You’ve got detention.’

With his free hand, Keith reached into the parka and pulled out a screwdriver. The metal had been sharpened to a vicious point.

‘That’s what he waved in my face,’ said the woman. She wasn’t crying now.

Keith considered the screwdriver. ‘Planning a bit of woodwork, are we? Knocking up a few dovetail joints?’

I went through the rest of his pockets. Each one produced a mobile phone. When the lady found the one that belonged to her, Keith told her to get into the car and wait. She didn’t move.

Keith pulled the thief under a sign that said NO ENTRY and into the tube station. The lady and I followed them. I could hear the trains rumbling far below us. Keith slammed him back against the wall and gave him a slap across the cheek.

‘Stealing someone’s pictures of their children,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that’s very nice.’

‘You can’t do that,’ the suspect said. ‘That’s police brutality.’

‘I can do what I like if you resist arrest,’ Keith said. ‘Did you see him resisting arrest, DI Smith?’

‘It was appalling, DI Jones,’ I said.

‘I know my rights,’ the suspect said. ‘I want my lawyer.’

‘Yeah, call your lawyer,’ Keith agreed. ‘Get him down here from the EU Court of Human Rights.’ His face was getting red again. ‘I’ll give him a good hiding too.’ Then he thought of something. ‘But you can’t call your lawyer, can you? You haven’t got any stolen phones left.’

The lady was standing by his side. ‘Can I have a go?’ she said.

Keith was expansive. ‘Be my guest!’

He held the suspect’s collar while the woman’s open palm crashed against his unshaven cheek. For the first time, she smiled.

‘How did that feel?’ Keith said. ‘It looked like it felt pretty good.’

‘It felt very good,’ the lady said. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘Oh, you’re welcome,’ Keith said politely. He began dragging the suspect to the car. The lady went back at him for seconds, but I gently restrained her. I was already thinking about the Himalayas of paperwork we were going to have to climb, but when we got to the street Keith let him go, like a fisherman throwing back a little one, chuckling as the suspect dashed into the crowds.

‘Not taking him in?’ I said.

Keith shook his head. ‘What’s the point? So in six months’ time some judge can give him community service? It’s not worth the wait.’ He pulled open the driver’s door and I went round the other side. ‘He’s not going to show his face around here again,’ Keith said over the roof. ‘Probably going to devote himself to good works.’

And when we got into the car, the lady opened up her mobile phone and showed us the pictures of her children.

By the middle of the afternoon, I was kidding myself. By the middle of the afternoon, I thought that I was a real policeman again. And that’s when we saw the patrol car.

It was parked in front of a derelict building, its yellow-and-blue Battenburg markings the only splash of colour on the street. I recognised it as a BMW 530iD, an ARV – armed-response vehicle. There were three cops in uniform crouching behind it, looking up at the building. Keith parked the car and we strolled over to them.

There were two constables, one of them a girl, and an inspector, the double silver pips of his rank shining on both epaulettes. He looked at us and then looked away, unimpressed. Keith and I smiled at each other.

It is a popular misconception that plain-clothes policemen are somehow higher-ranking than coppers in uniform. In fact, we all operate within exactly the same command structure as everyone else. So Keith and I outranked the two young police constables, but our balls were no bigger than the ones on the uniformed inspector. And didn’t he want to let us know it.

‘I bet he knows his way around a stapler,’ Keith said to me, making no attempt to lower his voice. ‘Bloody chimps.’ Chimps were coppers who were Completely Hopeless In Most Policing Situations. ‘Do you think the chimp’s got his own biro?’ Keith cackled.

‘There’s a man in that building with a firearm,’ the inspector said without turning round. ‘Name of Rainbow Ron. You might want to get your heads down before he blows them off.’

‘Who’s Rainbow Ron when he’s at home?’ said Keith.

I looked at the uniformed inspector. He probably had a degree. I had five O-levels from my local comprehensive and Keith might have had a certificate for swimming his width, although I wouldn’t swear to it. I coughed for a bit and then pulled out my cigarettes. Keith and I were just lighting up when there was the crack of a shot. We scooted down behind the patrol car. The inspector was screaming.

‘He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!’

‘Get away, Sherlock,’ Keith muttered.

Seeing us all hiding behind the Beemer, a young man at the end of the street began shouting abuse. Pigs this and filth that. The usual material. He was what we in the trade call a hundred-yard hero: a citizen who hurls insults at the police from a safe distance. Keith and I stared at him for a bit and then I noticed something glinting in the gutter. I crawled across to it and picked it up. It looked like a tiny silver mushroom. I handed it to Keith and he began to laugh.

‘That’s a pellet from a .22 air rifle,’ I said.

Keith wiped away tears of mirth. ‘So do you think we can rule out al-Qaeda?’

We stood up. Keith handed the pellet to the uniformed inspector. ‘A souvenir of your first shoot-out,’ he said. We began walking towards the derelict house. ‘Come out with your hands up,’ I shouted, as though I was not a canteen cowboy. ‘Or I’ll stuff that pop-gun right up your rectal passage.’

A bearded man appeared in the doorway of the house, gripping an air rifle by its stock. There were a few steps leading up to the front door and he stopped there, staring down at us. His hair was wild and matted and he was wearing an old trenchcoat. We stopped.

‘Rainbow Ron,’ said Keith. ‘Probably an alias. Drop your water pistol, sonny.’

He could have been a vagrant or a runaway from a funny farm. Either way, he looked like someone with hardly anything to lose. Then, just as I started to feel the fear in my breathing, he threw the air rifle down the stairs. Keith stooped to pick it up. I kept my eyes on Rainbow Ron, and saw his gaze sweep down the street and fix on something. I turned to see what he was looking at. It was some old dear coming slowly down the street, on her way to the supermarket to blow her pension on two cans of cat food. Rainbow Ron started down the steps. I took a quick look over my shoulder; the uniforms were still behind their motor, peeking out at the action. The old woman kept coming, muttering away to herself. I held up my hand. She didn’t see me. She was getting closer. I held my hand up higher and shouted a warning. She must have had the volume on her deaf-aid turned down low, because she didn’t stop. Rainbow Ron reached the bottom of the steps as Keith straightened up, looking at the air rifle in his hand, and the old lady shuffled between us. I saw Rainbow Ron slip one of his dirty paws inside his trenchcoat.

And I thought – knife?

‘Ah, that’s not a gun,’ Keith said, smiling affectionately at the air rifle and looking up to see what I saw at exactly the same moment – the snub-nosed handgun that Rainbow Ron had magically produced from somewhere inside his coat. ‘But stone me,’ Keith added, diving sideways. ‘That is.’

Then Rainbow Ron had the old lady by her fake-fur collar and he was screaming at us to stay back, waving his black handgun in her face, and Keith and I had our hands above our heads and we were shouting at him to just calm down, calm down, and behind us I could hear the uniformed inspector calling for backup on his radio and in the distance the hundred-yard hero was going hysterical.

I looked at the eyes of Rainbow Ron blazing like the winner of a Charles Manson lookalike contest from behind his greasy fringe.

He looked stuffed and cuffed, jail no bail, going down for sure, and that made him dangerous. I took a step back. And then he flung the old lady forward, sending her sprawling, and I felt my blood surge to boiling point.

Then he was off. Back up the steps and into the house. We gave chase. He went up the stairs and he kept going. We followed. But by the time we reached the second floor, Keith was dropping behind, clutching his ribs and gasping for breath.

‘I need a cigarette,’ I heard him say, and so then I was on my own. Rainbow Ron certainly ran fast for a raving lunatic. I followed him all the way to the top of the house. A skylight was open. I stepped out on to the roof, the city buzzing far below, and he whirled round to confront me with the gun in his hand pointing right at my face.

And the anger was gone. All gone. All I could feel was the fear. I did not want to die on this roof. And when I tried to speak, almost cross-eyed from looking down the short black barrel of the terrible thing in his hand, nothing came out.

It looked like a toy. A cruel, ugly toy. The cheap shoddy banality of the thing. That’s what I noticed. A toy from hell. It was just a stubby right angle of black metal held in a redraw, sweating fist. And it looked like the end of the world.

Pointing at my face.

Rainbow Ron came forward, sure of himself now, seeing my terror, encouraged by it, as if it proved he was making all the smart moves, and he pressed the barrel against the bridge of my nose. It looked like a toy, but somehow I knew it was real.

He squeezed off the trigger and I felt it at the same terrible moment – the shock of pain in my chest.

It was a dam-break of pain, obliterating everything, surging in the centre of my chest and spreading out, claiming me, a new and unexpected kind of pain, a pain to rob you of your senses.

It felt like everything was being squeezed. The pressure was unbelievable, dumbfounding, and increasing by the second as the pain consolidated its ownership of me and my chest felt like it was being held in a giant vice, as though the life was being forced out of me, as though the pain itself intended to kill me, and I knew that this was it, the end of all things.

I blacked out.

When I awoke, eager hands were lifting me on to a gurney. Rainbow Ron was flat on his face and the female constable was cuffing his hands behind his back. Then we were moving. Through the skylight and down the stairs. The squeezing in my chest was still there, but the fear was stronger than the pain.

I thought of my wife. I thought of my son and daughter. They needed me. I didn’t want to die. Tears stung my eyes as we clanged into the back of an ambulance and immediately pulled away. And through the blurry veil of tears I saw Keith’s face.

‘It’s a replica,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me, George? It’s just a fake. It was never going to work. You understand what I’m saying?’

Not really.

Keith was talking about the gun.

But I thought he was talking about my heart.

three

Think of death as the ultimate lie-in. Think of death that way. A lazy Sunday morning that goes on for all eternity, with you just dozing away until the end of days. That’s not such a bad way to think of death. Come on – it’s not all bad.

What stops us thinking of death that way? I opened my eyes and I knew.

My family were there at the stations of the hospital bed. It felt like a lot of time had gone by, and that they had not slept, or had any sleep worthy of the name, and that things had got worse. My wife, our boy, our girl.

The great gawky Rufus, who had grown so extravagantly and yet still had so much growing to do. And Ruby, my darling girl, her face perfectly and incredibly poised between the child she had been and the woman she would become. And Lara, my wife, who I was planning to grow old with, because why would I ever want to be anywhere else? And now I never would, and now I never could.

Those three were what stopped me from thinking of death as a Sunday morning that I would never wake from. Lara, Rufus, Ruby. The ones I would leave behind. They changed everything and made it impossible to let go, and made me want to weep, for them and for myself, because I loved them with all of my clogged-up, thoroughly knackered, pathetic excuse for a heart.

A doctor came and fiddled about. Glancing at charts, squinting at me over the top of his reading glasses. And when I paid a bit more attention, I saw that there was an entire herd of doctors with him. Baby doctors, learning their trade, looking at him as though he were the font of all medical wisdom, and me as though I was a specimen in a jar.

‘Male, forty-seven, history of heart disease, had a myocardial infarction – let’s see – three days ago.’

Three days? Was it already three days? The doctor held up a floppy black picture and pointed at some ghostly images. The baby doctors leaned forward with excitement.

‘See that? The coronary artery was already damaged by atheroma. Can you all see? Blood will not clot on healthy lining. Looks rather like the fur in a kettle, doesn’t it?’ The baby doctors eagerly agreed. ‘That’s what caused the thrombus – the blood clot – which blocked the artery, depriving a segment of the heart muscle of oxygen, and quite literally suffocating it.’ He put down the floppy black picture. ‘And that was the heart attack.’

He was talking about me. For some reason I listened to all this with total indifference. It might have been the drugs. The doctor peered at Lara over the top of his reading glasses. ‘How long has he been on the NTD?’ he said, and she looked bewildered. ‘The National Transplant Database,’ he translated, and a light dawned in her eyes, a terrible light. Because of course she knew what he was talking about. It had become a big black chunk of our lives.

‘Three months,’ she said. ‘That makes it sound as though it’s a new problem, but it’s not.’ She was talking too fast, almost babbling. She held my hand as if that would make things a bit better. And funnily enough, it did. ‘The problems have been going on for years,’ she said.

I looked at Rufus and Ruby, who had retreated to the walls when the doctors came in. They were in the chairs pressed up against the corner of the little room, frightened and uncertain, and I saw that at seventeen and fifteen, they were suddenly children again. They did not seem like teenagers now.

No wry superiority in a hospital ward.

No knowing smirks in here.

‘What are the odds?’ Lara said to the doctor, and one of our children whimpered at the question.

The boy.

‘The odds get better the longer he holds on,’ the doctor said, getting ready to leave. He was smiling at Lara now, even as he edged towards the door. ‘Thousands of men die before even making it to the list. One in ten waiting for a transplant don’t make it because there’s no donor.’ He gave her a smile, and it wasn’t much of a smile, but I saw that he wasn’t such a bad guy, it was just that what was the end of the world for us was merely another day at work for him. And it was a big enough smile for my wife to cling to, and I could see that she was grateful. Some of the baby doctors were already out of the room. The big chief doctor was ready to say goodbye. ‘So the longer he holds on,’ he said to Lara, and it was as if I wasn’t there, or in a coma, or invisible, ‘the better the odds.’

It was good news.

Sort of good news.

So I couldn’t understand why it made Lara unravel. She hugged me, making my IV drip wobble dangerously, and she told me the thing that was always between us though never spoken. And I regretted it now, leaving it unspoken through all those years, not telling her more often, and it seemed like such a stupid thing to have forgotten. And such a waste.

‘I love you,’ she whispered, stroking the back of my head. ‘It’s okay,’ she smiled. ‘You don’t have to say it back.’

Then she straightened up. She was tough, my wife. She was brave.

‘Say something to your father,’ she commanded, and Ruby immediately threw herself on me with a ‘Daddy!’ that came out like a sob, the impact knocking the wind out of me for a second, and I held her with the arm that didn’t have an IV drip stuck into it, and I could smell the shampoo in her long brown hair.

Then it was her brother’s turn.

Rufus reluctantly shuffled towards me, uncomfortable in this hospital ward, uncomfortable in his troubled skin, uncomfortable with the whole thing. He didn’t want to do it, he recoiled from it all, probably wanted to run away and hide in his room. But Lara gently led him to the bed where he touched the top sheet and held it to his mouth. He began to cry. Pulling my sheet up like that made my feet stick out the end of the bed, and I felt the air conditioning chill my toes.

There was something unbearable about his tears. He was not a child any more but he cried like one and I recalled a playground accident, a split head, blood all over the happily coloured climbing frame, and then the mad dash to the emergency ward. That is the worst thing about having children. You want to protect them more than you ever can. You try to endure that unendurable fact. But it is always there.

I patted the back of his hand and I was amazed to see the amount of hair sprouting there. It was practically a rain forest. It must have been years since I had touched his hands.

‘Rufus,’ I said, ‘when did you get so hairy?’

He pulled his hand away as if he had been scalded with boiling water. Then I needed to rest. I had to close my eyes immediately, and the pain punched a big hole in the morphine, and yet still I slept.

How George met Lara.

Twenty years ago I was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue, heading south towards Piccadilly Circus, the early-evening crowds making that bit of space they create for a uniformed police officer, even one who was just a year out of training and still raw like sushi. Then I heard a woman’s voice.

‘Excuse me? Hello there. Oh, excuse me!’

I turned to see a blonde, not tall, with that swingy hair that I suddenly realised I liked – hair that swings, do you know what I mean? Hair that doesn’t just sit there but swings about with mad abandon. She had that hair. Not long, not short – just down to her shoulders. And swinging. On such details we build our lives.

And she had – I couldn’t help but notice – a hard little body inside her training gear. She was quite small, and looked very fit, and she had a sexiness about her that was hard to define. I mean, there wasn’t much of her, but it was all good. Far too good for me, in fact, and so I thought she must be shouting to someone else. A boyfriend who had walked past their meeting place? A friend she had just spotted in the crowd? One look at her and I could see she was out of my league. And also, she didn’t seem to be in any kind of distress. Most people – all people – who run towards a uniformed police officer want him to help.

But Lara didn’t want help. She wanted to give me something. She stood there laughing, and catching her breath. And I recognised her now, just as she handed me the tickets. She was one of the dancers.

I had just spent an hour in the theatre where she worked. There had been widespread thieving in the dressing rooms, both male and female. It took a couple of hours and all my powers of detection to work out that there was something suspicious about a caretaker with a locker containing seventeen Prada bags, some lovely watches and credit cards in twenty different names. He was nicked, and they were grateful. All those good-looking boys and girls radiating future stardom. I looked down at the tickets in my hand, as though I had never seen tickets before.

‘For tonight,’ she said. ‘Bring your girlfriend.’

I brought Keith. Police Constable Keith Rooney, as he was in those days. We sat in the front row of the circle, still in uniform, and at first it was difficult for me to spot her. She was one of the Peasant Women who wanted to lynch Jean Valjean when he was caught nicking the old priest’s candlesticks, but I lost sight of her for a bit until she was one of the Lovely Ladies urging Fantine to solve her problems by turning to prostitution. And then, as Keith chomped his way through a bag of Revels, I finally got a fix on her. Because nobody in that show moved like Lara.

She was a dancer. Most of them could do a bit of everything, and do it very well. But – I learned later – she never had much of a voice, and didn’t really have the confidence to sing if she wasn’t hiding in a group of seventeenth-century French peasants or prostitutes. But she could move. Lithe, springy, a natural grace. I don’t know what it was, but I knew I had never seen anything like it.

Not a lot of call for dancing in Les Misérables, of course, apart from the wedding of Cosette and Marius. It is mostly people dying tragic deaths while the survivors mooch around sadly. But the way she moved still held me. After the massacre of the posh students, she was one of The Women singing the song about how nothing ever changes, and nothing ever will, and by then I couldn’t take my eyes from her. In the end, Lara hovered on the edge of the stage, like an angel in her newly laundered nightgown, as Jean Valjean died in the arms of his heartbroken daughter and by my side Keith gently sobbed into his bag of Revels.

I woke to the darkness and the smell of alcohol. I groaned and shifted in my bed, feeling the tug of the IV drip in my arm.

It was the middle of the night and the television was on with the sound turned down. At first I thought I was alone. And then I saw Keith. Under the light of the sports channel, he was slumped in one of the chairs, the bottle of vodka in his lap sticking up like a codpiece.

My eyes drifted to the TV. It was a highlights show. Nothing but goals. All the boring bits cut out. I didn’t recognise any of the players or any of the teams. It was some sort of Third World league. I watched a big lean striker nod the ball over a flailing goalkeeper and then run towards the camera. And just before his kissy-kissy teammates reached him, he did a back flip, and then another back flip and then one more. His body violent with health and vitality and youth. His teeth bone-white in his grinning face.

Mocking me.

Mocking me.

Mocking me.

When I awoke again there was a light and I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know if it was just a vision caused by billions of brain synapses shutting down or a chemical hallucination or something else. I did not know if it was my dope-addled imagination or some new unimagined reality. I didn’t know if it was the drugs or heaven.

Lara’s voice held me.

‘You never have to say it back,’ she was saying, and now everyone was crying, including me, although I was getting beyond tears, and that was why it seemed so strange when the doctor burst into the room, laughing like a nutcase and his face all shiny with delight.

‘We’ve got one,’ he said.

four

In my dream I was in this field.

It was as unfeasibly smooth and green as a billiard table, my dream field, and as I jogged across it I was aware of the crowd watching me. Getting excited, they were, as if they knew what was coming before I did.

I smiled to myself, because suddenly I knew too, and then I was in the air and upside down – hanging there for that magic second in the middle of a back flip when the crown of the head is just inches from the ground and the soles of the feet are pointing at heaven. And the world is upside down.

I had once seen a photograph of a fifties actor on a New York street with his girlfriend and the camera had captured him at just that exact moment – hanging upside down in the middle of a back flip, his blond curls almost scraping the city sidewalk, his right-way-up girlfriend smiling at the camera, beautiful and proud. His name was Russ Tamblyn. He had been in West Side Story. Or maybe he hadn’t been in West Side Story just yet, and that was still ahead. But he was a dancer. Like my wife. She was the one who showed me the photograph.

And then I landed and the crowd gasped with astonishment. It was pretty obvious that they had never seen such a perfectly executed back flip. They made that very clear. So I gave them another one. And then another. And every back flip only seemed to make them gasp louder, and clap harder, and go madder.

I can do back flips, I thought. Good ones, too. Like Russ Tamblyn in the fifties. Him in West Side Story. Bloody hell.

Then I saw the face in the crowd. All those faces, but that face was the only one I could see. I started running towards the special face, and then I was sliding across the impossibly green grass on my pain-free, highly flexible knees and into the arms of Lara, as the capacity crowd roared their approval.

When I woke the following morning I was breathing on a ventilator and Lara was holding my hand. We were in the Intensive Care Unit and she was wearing a mask, gloves and a gown, looking a bit like a superhero. Everyone in there was dressed the same way. But I knew it was her.

It could not be anyone else.

‘You don’t have to say it back,’ she was saying.

I wanted to tell her that she looked like a superhero, but instead I went back to sleep, wondering if I would ever wake up again. Even in my heavily drugged state, I knew this was the dodgy bit.

They had filled me with immunosuppressant drugs so that my immune system was weakened, and my new heart could squat in my old body and have a chance of not being annihilated. But by deliberately weakening my immune system, by sucking the life out of all the blood and tissue and good stuff that fights bacteria and viruses, they had given me a good chance of being croaked by some killer infection. So it’s Catch 23. Which is like Catch 22, but worse.

They had given me the first dose of immunosuppressants when I was sparko in the operating theatre, in the night, which is when all transplants take place. Now I would have to take them for the rest of my life. However long that might be.

I slept. I woke. Lara was still there, dressed as a superhero. This went on for quite a while. Slept. Woke. I wanted to ask her, Haven’t you got a home to go to? I wanted to say to her, Sorry about all this, I know it’s a bloody pain. I wanted to say, I like you, you’re nice.

But instead I slept, and if there were dreams then I couldn’t recall them.

I was in the ICU for three days and then they moved me to my own little room on what they called a step-down ward. The ventilator had gone. By then Lara had stopped dressing like a superhero and stopped telling me that I didn’t have to say it back, and I sort of missed it.

But that was a good thing.

Because it meant she thought that I was going to live.

When they give you a new heart, your body tries to destroy it.

Bit stupid that.

But the body really goes crazy trying to annihilate what it sees as this invader. They call it rejection but it is actually a lot more than that. Rejection sounds as though your body is snubbing the new heart, refusing to acknowledge its presence, not wanting it to move into the neighbourhood and lower property prices.

And it’s not like that at all. Your body really wants to kill it.

It is like you wake up in the middle of the night and there is an intruder in your home. You chase the stranger around in the darkness, slashing at it with kitchen knives and broken milk bottles and anything else you can get your hands on. You feel like you are fighting for your life. You feel that your survival depends on killing this stranger.

Then you turn on the light.

And the stranger is you.

When I woke up my dad was there.

I automatically scanned the room for my mum – the kind, smiling, tea-making moderator between my father and me for these last forty-seven years – but there was no sign of her. Our five-foot-high buffer was gone, no doubt in search of tea, and my dad and I looked at each other.

‘You’re all right,’ he said, the familiar voice soft and gruff. It wasn’t a question. And I found that I was pathetically grateful for his optimistic diagnosis, even if it was coming from a retired copper with no formal training in heart surgery.

I could feel the pain in my chest flexing with every breath.

‘It hurts,’ I said, wincing as the breath came out of me. I arched my spine and the tube in the back of my hand pulled at me, as if urging restraint. I sank back into a pillow that was far too soft, like a giant marshmallow.

My father pulled his chair closer and took my hand. The one without the drip. The touch of his hand felt strange. Soft and rough at the same time. Like his voice.

‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘Have a kip. Have a little kip now.’

And I wanted to sleep. The mere act of waking seemed to exhaust me. But instead I stared in wonder at my hand in my father’s hand. I suppose he must have held my hand before. Walking me to school. Taking me to the park. Did he ever do those things? Once upon a time? I had no memory of it. Maybe he had never done those things because he was working. This felt like the first time he had ever held my hand.

‘The pain will go,’ he said, and he squeezed my fingers, and gave them a gentle shake that meant, Be brave. And it didn’t feel like the first time that he had told me that.

I closed my eyes and my dad kept holding my hand. I felt the sleep of the heavily drugged come sliding in, and still he held my hand.

Then Lara and my mum came into the room with tea and coffee and I opened my eyes.

‘There he is,’ my mum said, as if I might have slipped out for a spot of bungee jumping while she was at the vending machine.

And that was when I felt him let go of my hand.

They wanted me to exercise. The doctors. The nurses. They wanted me up and about. They could see that I was becoming quite comfortable in that overheated bubble of my little room, regular food and affection being delivered to my bed as if I was a newborn. And that is not a million miles from what it felt like. The sheer fact of being here at all made me feel like laughing out loud.

Because I should have been dead by now.

But I was getting too attuned to the delights of daytime television. The recipes and rolling news and screaming family feuds. The hospital soaps and celebrity gossip. The fabricated drama of sport.

Time to snap out of it. Time to start thinking about my rehabilitation programme and physiotherapy schedule.

Time to take my first steps.

And after a few practice shuffles around my room, I was pretty much given the freedom of the hospital. They didn’t have the time or the inclination to supervise me. They had sick people to worry about. They just got me out of bed and got my blood pumping. Then they let me get on with it.

And that was how I discovered the roof.

I walked down the hospital corridor, refastening the belt of my dressing gown, making it tighter, anxious not to expose myself in my stripy M&S pyjamas. I went past the nurses’ station to the far end of the corridor and caught the service lift to the top floor. Porters with big rubbish bags and little English went about their business in this lift, and greeted my presence with polite indifference. When I got to the top floor, and said goodbye to whichever porter was lugging his bin bags around, I took a few steep steps up to a door that was never locked in case of fire. And when I walked through the door there was the roof, there was the city, there was the world.

Silence and the city’s eternal hum. Fresh air and car fumes. Solitude and all those lives that I would never know.

The metal railing encircling the roof was so low that it made my breath catch, my head spin, my carpet slippers take a step back. Six floors below, the Marylebone Road flowed like a mighty river. I inhaled, smiled, and felt someone behind me.

‘Dad?’

It was Rufus. I looked up at him. His eyes were red and his shoulders sagged. If it wasn’t for my dressing gown and stripy pyjamas, you might have thought that I was visiting him.

‘Looking on Google,’ he said, and his voice caught. He closed his eyes and composed himself. The sob settled somewhere deep down inside him. ‘Me and Ruby. Reading about – you know. What happened to you.’ He closed his eyes. Controlled his breathing. And looked at his father. ‘Half of transplant patients are dead after ten years.’

I smiled at him.

‘So that means half of us are alive.’

His body twisted with discomfort. ‘Yeah, but…’

‘Don’t be one of those guys,’ I said, and it came out harsher than I wanted it to. ‘One of those glass-half-empty kind of guys.’

We stood there awkwardly for a bit, the city flowing far below. Then he said that he might go back inside and I told him that was a good idea. I would be down in a while. All this without a second of eye contact.

I watched him go, wishing that I had the words to make him feel better, to make him understand that you don’t whine and quibble and go on Google in the face of a miracle.

How could I explain it to him? I was feeling stronger. Feeling good. Feeling happy. Feeling young again.

Feeling – what’s the word?

Alive.

‘Uncle Keith,’ Ruby said, and she got up to hug him as he came into the room.

I was glad that she still called him Uncle Keith, even though he wasn’t her real uncle or any kind of blood relation. I was glad that she wasn’t too cool or grown-up for that.

‘Hello, gorgeous,’ he said. ‘How’s the patient?’

The pair of them smiled at me sitting up in bed. ‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you two alone.’ A flurry of anxiety crossed her lovely face. ‘I’ll just be in the café,’ she told me.

I nodded. It was fine. I didn’t want her to worry so much, even though I knew that was asking a lot. When Ruby had gone, Keith pulled a chair up to my bed and began eating the grapes he was carrying.

‘Not dead yet then?’ he said.

I looked at my watch. ‘It’s still early.’

He smiled. ‘We need to get our story straight,’ he said.

‘Our story?’ I said.

Keith nodded his enormous head. ‘Why you were on that roof. Why a canteen cowboy was out chasing naughty people. Why you were in the car instead of my twelve-year-old partner.’

I thought about it. ‘We were going to lunch and we saw uniformed officers in need of assistance.’

He leaned back in the hospital chair. It creaked in protest, not really designed for the likes of Keith. ‘Yeah, that might work,’ he yawned. He popped a fistful of grapes in his cakehole, and ran his weary eyes over me.

‘Nice grapes?’ I said.

‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Sorry, mate – you want one?’

‘No, you’re all right.’

And then he got this sly grin, and pulled out the unwrapped packet of Low Tars.

‘For emergencies,’ he said, and I nodded my appreciation as I slipped them deep inside the pocket of my dressing gown. He held out the grapes.

‘So – how are you feeling?’

I chewed a grape and it tasted of nothing because of the drugs. Under my stripy pyjamas I could feel the scar on my chest pulsing. It was not the heart that I felt. You would think it would be the heart. But it was the scar.

‘Never better,’ I said.

Keith laughed, shook his head. ‘Hard, aren’t you?’

I smiled. ‘Harder than you,’ I said.

He snorted. ‘Yeah, right.’ He was cutting me some slack. Apart from eating my grapes, he had a lovely bedside manner. I appreciated him coming. I knew it wasn’t just about getting our story straight. But I was a bit sick of people feeling sorry for me. I rolled up the pyjama sleeve on my right arm. Keith narrowed his eyes.

‘Don’t provoke me, shiny-arse,’ he said.

I laughed and started to roll down my sleeve. ‘More chicken than Colonel Sanders…’

He was on his feet, rolling his sleeve right up to his shoulder. I had said the ‘c’ word. There was a tattoo of barbed wire around his biceps that had blurred with the years. We pulled the table that sat across my bed between us. As we placed our elbows on it, we could feel it sagging. It wasn’t really built for arm wrestling.

‘Bit springy,’ Keith said.

‘Stop moaning,’ I said. ‘Best out of three?’

He was on the verge of beating me for the second time when Lara walked into the room, carrying flowers and a portable DVD player. Her smile faded as she watched Keith force my arm down on to the little hospital table with a triumphant roar from him and a yelp of pain and defeat from me. Keith only stopped laughing when he saw my wife.

Lara stood in the doorway of the hospital room, holding the flowers and the DVD player, and staring at us as if we were a pair of big stupid kids. I looked at Keith, his meaty head hung low, and felt like blurting, ‘Best out of five, Granddad?’

But I stifled my anarchic laughter, and said nothing.

five

There was a soft knock on the bedroom door and Ruby came in with a look of shy delight, carrying a breakfast tray.

I blinked back the fog of sleep as the smell of fried bacon filled the room. I could have sworn I had been awake all night long, fretting about how much time the doctors had given me, but I suppose I must have slept just before I was due to wake up. Ruby placed the tray on the empty side of the bed, where her mother slept. Orange juice. A still steaming mug of tea. Bacon. Two fried eggs. An incinerated sausage. ‘Welcome home. I cooked your favourite,’ she smiled.

Lara came into the room, already dressed, rubbing some sort of cream on her hands. The smell of my wife’s hand cream mixed with the smell of my daughter’s breakfast. They did not mix very well. We all looked at the tray, Ruby’s smile slowly fading.

‘That looks really good, darling,’ Lara said briskly. ‘But your father’s not meant to eat –’

‘No, it’s fine,’ I said, cutting her off as I snatched up the knife and fork. I grinned at my daughter and her face brightened. ‘You’re right. My favourite. Best meal of the day.’

Ruby frowned at the plate. ‘The sausage is a bit…’

‘Looks like a good sausage,’ I said, sawing into it.

‘Sausages are difficult,’ Ruby said. ‘Because they’re so thick.’

I nodded, not looking at Lara. But I could sense her folding her arms and choosing her words and getting ready to restore order. I didn’t need to look at her face to know what I would see there. And of course she was right. But she was also completely and totally wrong.

‘Any brown sauce?’ I asked, spearing my cremated banger.

‘Ah,’ Ruby laughed. ‘I knew I’d forgotten something.’ And she went off to get the brown sauce. Daddy’s Sauce, they used to call it when I was her age.

I looked at Lara as I chewed on my sausage. She smiled thinly at me. It was difficult for her. I knew she had my best interests at heart. When she spoke it sounded like the voice of reason in a screaming nuthouse. Calm, rational, quietly infuriated.

‘Have you been listening at all to these doctors? Have you heard a single thing they’ve said? Do you really want to clog up your arteries with the same old junk that you’ve been –’

‘It’s fine,’ I said, gulping down the badly burned banger. It left the taste of ashes in my mouth. But the bacon looked good. Tender, juicy.

‘It’s not fine. It’s stupid. It’s self-destructive. It’s just…’ She shook her head, as if she was giving up on me. But I knew she would never give up on me. ‘Is it because you’re afraid of hurting her feelings? Her feelings will be a lot more hurt if…’

She turned her face away.

‘Lara,’ I said, ‘come on.’ But she didn’t respond as I morosely sawed a piece off the bacon. Ruby came back with the brown sauce in one hand and little transparent shakers in the other.

‘Salt and pepper,’ she said. ‘I forgot that too.’

Lara turned on the pair of us. She put her arm around Ruby’s shoulder.

‘Your dad can’t eat this stuff, Ruby.’ Her words were gentle but insistent. ‘He can’t put salt on his food. Never again. Do you understand? He might as well put rat poison on his meals.’

‘Come on,’ I said. This was too much. ‘Salt’s not quite the same as rat poison.’

She gave me a frosty look. ‘You’re right, George. Rat poison would probably be healthier. There’s more fibre in it.’ She gave Ruby’s shoulder a gentle shake. ‘It’s great you made a meal for your father to welcome him home. It’s such a lovely thing to do. But, darling, you have to understand that things have changed.’ She looked at my breakfast plate and sighed. ‘He can’t eat this kind of stuff any more.’ The hand she had around our daughter dropped to her side. ‘It will kill him,’ she said quietly.

And I laughed. I had stopped eating, but now I began again. It was a bit cold by this time, and it got even colder when I smothered it in brown sauce. ‘One big breakfast is not going to kill me,’ I said, really tucking in.

‘You don’t want the salt, I guess,’ Ruby said, clutching the transparent pots to her chest, as if I might suddenly try to snatch them away from her.

‘Not necessary,’ I said, picking up a slice of toast, and feeling the slither of lavishly applied butter running across my wrist.

My wife and daughter stared at me as I jauntily consumed my big breakfast. As if they were obliged to watch this ritual. As if it was important.

As if they were witnessing the condemned man eating his last meal.

Ruby was in her bedroom.

I knocked, of course, and knocked again until I was given a half-hearted invitation to enter. There she was, at her desk, her head bowed before the computer screen as if in prayer.

‘Thanks for my breakfast,’ I said.

She nodded in response, not looking at me. I looked around for somewhere to sit. There was only her single bed and the chair.

‘You all right?’ I said.

She nodded again, her brown hair falling over her face like a curtain.

‘Can you shove over a bit?’ I said, and she automatically shuffled her bum sideways on her chair. I am a big man but she had always been a skinny kid and there was still just about room enough for two of us on that chair. Luckily she is built like her mother, the dancer, rather than her father, the fat bastard.

‘Something bad is going to happen,’ she said, so quietly that it felt like she was saying it to herself. Because she did not look at me.

I touched her shoulder, patted it. We were so close that I could smell the shampoo she had used in the shower.

‘Nothing bad is going to happen,’ I said. ‘I promise you, Ruby.’

She shook her head, not believing a word of it. ‘Something bad. Something very bad. It’s coming.’

‘Look,’ I said, really needing her to believe me. ‘I have great doctors. I am on the best medication that they can give me. And I feel good.’ I leaned back in the chair and looked at her profile. Her mother’s face, but with hints of me – a big forehead, the long upper lip – that somehow looked better on her than they ever did on me. ‘I’ll be fine, angel.’

And she looked at me.

‘Not you, Dad,’ she said. ‘The planet.’

When the house was finally empty I went into the living room to retrieve the pack of cigarettes that I had hidden.

I was grinning like a maniac, all pleased with myself, because I was finally about to get the hit I was craving, and because the pack was secreted in such a good place – behind the coals of the fake fire that we had at the bottom of our chimney. Nobody would ever look back there.

My smile didn’t fade until I stuck my hand behind the coals, felt around the gas pipe and fished out my fags, seeing the tiny holes that someone had drilled through the pack, destroying what was inside.

Whoever had done it hadn’t bothered to take out the cigarettes. They had just pushed a pin, or whatever it was, into every corner of the packet, the way a magician shoves swords into his magic box, in a careful, all-encompassing frenzy.

Because they didn’t want me to die.

I took out one useless cigarette and examined it. It sagged as if in submission, lovely golden tobacco spilling out of its pierced white paper. I tossed the pack in the rubbish bin and went upstairs, wondering who cared that much.

The floor of Ruby’s bedroom was scattered with clothes, schoolbooks, and random bits of technology. Tiny headphones. A battery charger. An electric toothbrush, still vibrating. I picked it up, turned it off and placed it on her desk. The movement jolted her computer to life, and a screen-saver appeared of our blue planet seen from space.

You could still glimpse the earlier stages of her childhood on the walls. Scraps of posters of grinning actors and long-disbanded boy bands were just visible beyond the more recent additions of the planet in flames, or alternatively, in deep-freeze. BECOME PART OF THE SOLUTION, one of them urged. I stared at the slogan for quite a while.

Then I had a little look in her desk, and there was more archaeological digging to be done in there. Did she keep her High School Musical ruler and her Barbie pencil sharpener for nostalgic reasons, or just because she couldn’t be bothered to throw them out? I had a good rummage around but there was nothing that could obviously be used to destroy her dear old dad’s emergency fags.

So I thought it was probably my wife.

A pin, I thought. A brooch. Something sharp. She kept her jewellery in the bedside table on her side of the bed. There was not much. Just a blue Tiffany box with the bits and pieces that I had bought her over the years. A gold charm bracelet with two lonely heart-shaped charms, one that said IT’S A BOY and the other that said IT’S A GIRL. And there was a string of pearls with a broken clasp. And a silver heart on a chain. So nothing in there.

But there was another box of jewels that had belonged to her mother. I didn’t feel good about looking in there, but I looked anyway, suspecting that the deed could have been done with the pin on one of those old-fashioned brooches that women used to wear.

It was a red plastic box with this sort of carpet material on top, in the design of some roses. Even I could see it was corny.

The lid was half-broken, and inside were indeed lots of old-fashioned brooches. There was one in the shape of a butterfly, another made out of some greyish metal, pewter maybe, with a picture of a deer looking over its shoulder, and another featuring a gold model of Concorde. This last one had a long sharp pin, but somehow I knew that Lara wouldn’t use her mother’s jewellery to destroy my cigarettes. There were also three rings. An engagement ring with the tiniest diamond I had ever seen. A plain gold wedding band. And what they used to call an eternity ring.

I closed the box, taking care with the damaged lid, and I put it back where I had found it, feeling the eyes of my wife’s dead parents on me. And then I went to my son’s room.

It didn’t look like a teenager’s room. It looked like the room of a forty-nine-year-old accountant. Nothing on the floor. A neat stack of schoolwork on his desk. His computer turned off. Tomorrow’s white shirt waiting on a wire hanger on the handle of the wardrobe. Bed made with military precision. A small bookcase with neat rows of paperbacks. I pulled one out and flicked through it. A phrase leapt out at me, stopped me in my tracks. The ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being. I looked at the cover. Blue skies. A fifties car. Two men, smiling, their faces half in shadow. On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I put it back, noticing the Swiss army knife sitting on top of the books. I began pulling it open.

It had a tiny screwdriver and assorted thin blades and sharp points that could be used for removing a stone from a horse’s hoof, or for destroying someone’s emergency cigarettes.

He really loved me.

The little bastard.

Then I saw the hat. It was hanging on the back of the door, with the leather jacket that Rufus wore when he wasn’t wearing his school blazer. It was a woollen hat, but with a little rim at the front, so it looked like the kind of hat that a jockey would wear. Except it was made of wool, so it wouldn’t be much good if you fell off a horse.

I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror.

I looked pretty good.

Raffish. Devil-may-care. And younger. It definitely made me look youngish. Young.

The rest of my clothes didn’t really match the jockey’s hat. My baggy polo shirt. My dead man’s chinos. Socks the colour of pewter. They were shown up by the hat. They were humiliated by the hat. They looked old and tired. Over and done. Ready to be chucked out. I was going to have to do something about my wardrobe.

Then I heard a key in the front door and I quickly headed for the stairs, smiling innocently as Lara came in. I helped her carry the shopping bags into the kitchen. She hugged me and kissed me and made me a cup of tea.

‘Why are you wearing that ridiculous hat?’ she said. When we had finished our tea she took me out for a very gentle walk in the park. As if I were a toddler, or a dog.

Or as if I might break.

In my dream I was sleeping by the side of a woman who was wanted by a million men. This phenomenal woman, this fabulous creature, this prize.

And when I awoke it was true.

‘George,’ Lara said. ‘No, George.’

But I would not be denied. She knew that look. Even in the darkness of the early hours, with only a drop of moonlight creeping around the curtains, she recognised that look in my eyes.

Cunning, amused, slightly bashful.

The look of love.

I edged across to her side of the bed and took her in my arms. I kissed her on the mouth. I knew that mouth and I had missed it. I had missed all that side of things, I realised. Our mouths did not want to let go. They fit well. Somewhere Lara’s mother radar searched for the sound of our children.

But Rufus was out and Ruby was sleeping.

‘George, George,’ she said, offering one last chance of a cooling-off period. ‘Are you sure that we should be doing this?’

I was sure.

Then she didn’t say anything else, not even my name, and we loved for the first time in months. And that would have been fine, that would have been great, that would have been enough, but then later we woke, or at least came halfway out of sleep long enough for another slower, easier, less desperate meeting.

And then – somebody pinch me – yet again when it was just before morning and the room was still full of night, and now the urgency of the first time was back again – and I mean both the first time that night and the first time ever. And it was the way it is at the very beginning, when you just can’t get enough of each other, when you can’t believe your luck, and the night goes by in a blissful blur of heat and exhausted sleep and gathering light.

I was sleeping on her side of the bed when she got up and went to the bathroom. I could hear the birds and see the white edge of dawn around the windows. I needed to sleep now, I really needed to sleep. I was worn to a frazzle. But I opened one eye when Lara came back and turned on the bedside lamp. ‘What?’ I said.

She touched my face. ‘Just checking.’ She smiled.

I rolled over to my side of the bed and closed my eyes.

‘Checking what?’ I said into the pillow.

That made her laugh.

‘Checking it’s you,’ she said.

six

A few people stared at us as we walked into the Autumn Grove Care Home. An old lady in a chair who had just been taken for a Sunday afternoon wheel around the park. Her middle-aged son and his two teenage children. A porter I didn’t recognise.

Then the woman on reception smiled and said hello, and they all looked away. But we got that all the time. My wife and I were one of those couples that people take a second look at, without ever really knowing why. But I knew why.

It was because we didn’t seem to fit.

Lara was so small and pretty, and she still had that dancer’s grace, that ease in her own body. Whereas I was so big and lumbering and, well, not exactly ugly, but my nose has been broken twice – once by a Friday-night drunk who threw a traffic bollard in my face, and the other time while we were rolling around on the pavement as I arrested him. It gave my face a bent, damaged look, as though there were a lot of miles on my clock and I was likely to fail my MOT. Actually, now I think about it, ugly is exactly the word.

But Lara had retained some indefinable air from her dancing days. People once paid money to see this woman perform, to see her dance, to see her shine. She would be forty years old on her next birthday, and she was a working mother with two teenage children, but she still had that showbiz glamour. Whereas I was stolid. I wasn’t like the other men she had known. I wasn’t like the one she went out with before me. Her previous boyfriend. I wasn’t a dashing young suitor racing back from Stratford after playing the Prince to rave reviews. I was from a different West End – chasing after glue sniffers and bag snatchers and mouthy drunks waving around traffic bollards so that PC Keith Rooney could give them a slap and tell them to stop being naughty. I was a big, uncomplicated man with a broken hooter who had no fear of the physical world. And that was what she liked about me. That meat-and-potatoes dependability – something that might have put off other girls. Women, I mean. She knew I would never stop loving her. She knew that it wouldn’t even occur to me, that I would always be sort of grateful, because she was so clearly out of my league. Men, especially, looked at us. And the look they gave said, Wow, if the bar is set so low… And then I would stare at them and they would turn away. Because they noticed something about me. It wasn’t a cop thing. It wasn’t my size. It wasn’t even the fact that I tried to carry myself like my father. They sensed they were stepping on sacred ground. Because she was everything to me. And so they took a step back.

It might have been different if her parents hadn’t died in a car crash when she was twelve years old. They were on their way to pick her up from the airport after a school ski trip – seven days of laughter falling over on some French mountain – on a road slick with rain, ploughing into the back of a lorry stopped in the fast lane with a flat tyre.

If they had lived…

But they didn’t.

And you never really appreciate the other side of glamour, the quiet comforts of home and family, until life has taken them all away from you.

‘Have you got my book?’ Lara’s grandmother said, as I helped her from her bed to her chair. When she said book she meant magazine, and by that she meant her favourite TV listings supplement.

‘Right here, Nan,’ Lara said, and she placed it on her lap, already opened at today’s page, with her selected TV programmes circled in red, like fences around her loneliness. Lara sat on the bed and smiled. ‘Anything good on this afternoon?’

‘An American in Paris,’ Nan said, her watery blue eyes gleaming behind her glasses.

Lara was interested. She wasn’t just being polite. ‘Gene Kelly and – who?’ she said.

‘Leslie Caron,’ said Nan, smoothing the TV listings page with her hands. ‘And music by Gershwin.’ She nodded emphatically. ‘I like him, Gershwin,’ she said, as if George Gershwin was a promising newcomer and her tip for the top.

Lara and Nan smiled at each other, their mouths almost watering at the thought of An American in Paris. It still mattered to my wife, the dancing. It never went away. The dancing never goes away. It had always been more than her livelihood. After she lost her first family, and before she got her second family, the dancing was her life. And she got that from Nan. She hadn’t just taken the young Lara to lessons

59 and auditions, the way her mother had. Nan had shown Lara that you could get lost in it – just lose yourself in the dancing, if that was what you wanted, or needed. And for years, that was exactly what she needed.

Twice a week she went to see Nan in the Autumn Grove. Usually not with me. She felt it should have been more often. I watched Lara settling the old lady in front of the TV, getting her a drink, holding the glass as she took a tiny, sparrow-like sip, and I saw how much my wife loved her. It wasn’t just the normal love that you feel for a grandmother. Nan had done so much. She was one of those special grandparents who brings up two generations. Nan had not brought Lara up all the way, but as much as anyone. As much as her parents, she always said.

What happened to Lara’s mother and father is surprisingly common. I have met a few people who lost both their parents in a car crash. Married couples travel in cars together all the time, and sometimes they die together. So it wasn’t just Lara. Although for many years I think it felt as though it was just her. Still does, on her bad days. She once said to me, dry-eyed and thoughtful, I don’t know what would have happened to me without my nan. She took me in. She loved me. She helped me on my way. She stopped me falling through the cracks.

Nan loved MGM musicals. Fred and Ginger putting on the Ritz. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds sparring. And when Lara went to live with her nan, it was the early eighties, the age of video rental. For the first time ever, you could watch Singin’ in the Rain or West Side Story or Oklahoma! whenever you felt like it.

And Nan and little Lara felt like it most of the time.

They loved Gene, Ginger, Fred, Debbie and the rest, but they loved Cyd Charisse above all. They loved her dancing with Gene Kelly in the great Broadway dream sequence in Singin’ in the Rain – Kelly on his knees before Cyd the gangsters’ moll in her green dress – and they loved Cyd with Fred Astaire in Bandwagon, dancing in a seedy, smoky bar, doing the kind of dancing that starts fights.

Although she had done her childish ballet and tap, that was where the dancing really began for her, those wet Sunday afternoons watching MGM musicals with Nan. Those other Sundays, long ago, where the colours seemed brighter than real life. Better than real life. And as I watched Lara and her nan watching their film, I wondered if anything had changed. It felt to me as if the dancing still measured out her dreams.

‘One day I will dance the tango in Buenos Aires,’ she said, sitting on the arm of Nan’s chair, one arm lightly draped across the old lady’s thin shoulders, neither of them taking their eyes from Gene Kelly. ‘You can take lessons when you get down there. To BA, I mean. They call it BA. I looked it up on the Internet.’ She laughed, and glanced over at me. ‘That’s the final frontier for an MGM musical nut,’ she said. ‘Dancing the tango with your husband in some little milonga dance hall in Argentina, with the music and the crowd and the sweat, and all the colours better than the real world.’

Might be a bit tricky, I thought. I put on my dancing shoes during our courting days, but these days Lara had her work cut out getting me to dance at weddings.

When Lara went to place the order for Nan’s dinner, the old lady gestured for me to come closer. I thought she was going to tell me something about George Gershwin or Gene Kelly. But instead she hissed a warning in my ear.

‘Don’t get old,’ she told me.

My parents wore matching kit at their self-defence class. They were a couple of trim seventy-somethings in their Adidas tracksuits, red for her and black for him, their uniforms as shiny as an oil slick. Accompanied by around a dozen other pensioners, mostly women, they shuffled across the floor of the gym on the instructions of their trainer, their kindly faces frowning with feigned violence.

‘Dogs don’t know Kung Fu,’ the instructor told them. ‘Dogs don’t know Karate or Tae Kwon Do or boxing. Yet every dog can protect itself.’

The class smiled benignly at him. Their footwear was as white as their hair. It looked box fresh. It looked as though it would never get old. The instructor clenched his fists and his teeth.

‘What did he say, dear?’ one old lady asked my mother.

‘He said, “Dogs don’t know Kung Fu”, dear,’ said my mum, and she gave me a delighted smile. She was happy to see me. I didn’t see them enough. I was always too busy.

‘Dealing with the frontal bear hug,’ the instructor said, motioning my father to step forward, ‘you are gripped around the arms and the waist.’ He proceeded to embrace my father in a way that I had never embraced him. Perhaps my mum had never embraced him like that either.

‘First – knee your opponent in the testicles,’ said the instructor.

‘What’s that?’ said the old lady.

‘Testicles, dear,’ my mum said. ‘Knee your opponent in the testicles, dear.’

My dad gamely lifted his foot a few inches off the floor as he mimed crushing the instructor’s testicles.

‘Next,’ the instructor said, ‘with the inner edge of your shoe scrape his shin-bone from just below the knee to the ankle.’

My father traced the assault in slow motion.

‘Then – stamp on his foot,’ said the instructor, and – playing to the gallery, as always – my dad pretended to bring his heel down on the instructor’s foot.

The pensioners all chuckled. There was some mild applause. My mother beamed with amusement and pride. My dad looked very pleased with himself.

‘If he still hasn’t got the message,’ the instructor said, giving a little jerk of his head, ‘then smash your forehead as hard as you can against the bridge of his nose. And goodnight, Vienna. Okay, let’s try that in our pairs.’

I sat on a bench and watched my parents and their friends, marvelling at their vitality and bravery, but most of all stunned at their heartbreaking innocence and trust in the world.

How could they feel so certain of being attacked by just one person?

At the end of the class they came over to me. My mum kissed me and oohed and aahed over some recent pictures of the kids taken at home after I got out of the hospital, and she said she couldn’t believe how Rufus was turning into such a handsome young man and that Ruby, little Ruby, was practically a young lady already.

And my mum looked very hopeful when I said that we must have them round for Sunday lunch soon. But my dad saw right through me. My father, the retired policeman, always saw straight through me. He waited until my mum had gone off to the changing rooms.

‘Still not back at work, then?’ he said.

Sometimes I was down.

It was less a swing of mood – the heart doctor had told me to expect those – than a change of perception. I suddenly got it. The fragility of all things. Especially me. And our boiler. I could hear it spluttering its guts out in the bathroom. It will need a plumber soon, I thought with a sigh that was silent and endless, and I wondered exactly when my life had shrunk to a list of domestic chores.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Lara said, putting her arm around me.

But I didn’t know where to start, or where to end, or what the middle should look like.

‘I might be up for a while,’ I said, and she took her arm away, and nodded, and soon I could hear her moving around in our bedroom. And then after a while I heard nothing, apart from the midnight hum of the fridge and the coughing and spluttering of the boiler on the blink.

The bottle of red wine was half gone by the time Rufus came home. He looked in a bad way. And he reeked of beer. Like something the cat had dragged in and washed in Special Brew. He looked at the AlcoHawk Pro sitting on the coffee table.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said, suddenly seeing it for the ludicrous bit of plastic it was. ‘I think we can skip that tonight.’

‘I don’t mind,’ he said, and he bent his ungainly frame to pick it up. He looked at the shiny grey device in his hand. And then he looked at me. ‘I didn’t drink anything,’ he said.

I smiled. ‘Right,’ I said. It was so blatantly untrue that I had to admire his front. ‘Just try to get some in your mouth next time.’

Then there was that sudden flare of outrage, the easy outrage that is the natural habitat of the teenage boy. ‘You don’t believe anything I say, do you?’ he said.

‘Volume lower,’ I said. ‘Your mother and sister are sleeping.’

‘Not a word of it,’ he said, shaking his head at the AlcoHawk. ‘Not a bloody word.’

I sighed. ‘But, Rufus,’ I said, shaking my head with wonder at his ability to stand there stinking like a brewery and lie to my face, ‘I can smell it.’

‘But I didn’t drink it,’ he said. ‘They threw it. They chucked beer at me, Dad.’

He had lost me. ‘They did what? Who are you talking about? Who are they?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, although I could tell it mattered more than anything.

And I looked at my son, this great gawky monster, this thin-skinned stranger, and I willed myself to see the mophaired boy he had once been, the boy I could hug and who would hug me back, and who would not pull away.

‘What happened to us, Rufus? We were mates, weren’t we? Do you remember when you were little? We went to the park. We went to the football. We went to Legoland. Remember Legoland?’

‘Legoland? Yeah, I was carsick. Puked all the way to Windsor.’

‘But you enjoyed yourself once you were there. Remember? Once we had cleaned you up a bit. What happened?’

He snorted, looked away. ‘Yeah, well. I grew up.’

Was that it? Was that all it was? Really? The gap that opens up between the father and the son as the years go by? Was it really only natural? I couldn’t believe it. I felt that somewhere along the line I had taken a wrong turn, and that’s why I had lost him.

‘It’s not easy,’ he said. ‘Having a copper for a father. Somebody everyone seems to know. Always getting compared. Always getting measured. Being your father’s son and nothing more. Always seen that way.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘Living in your famous shadow.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m not famous,’ I said. ‘Bill Gates is famous. Brad Pitt is famous. The Dalai Lama…You should be grateful the Dalai Lama is not your father. I’m not famous.’

‘Oh, but you are,’ he said. ‘On a local level. Everyone round here knows who you are. Or who you were, before you got ill. You’re famous in that modern, micro-celebrity sort of way.’

‘You’re too kind.’ I poured myself a large measure of red. Then suddenly there was concern on his face.

‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘A bit of a rotten night. Probably the drugs. They tend to swing your moods around. Don’t worry. Just a lousy night. Like you. Or did you think that you invented lousy nights?’

He still had the AlcoHawk Pro in his hand. I indicated what was left of the red wine.

‘You want a drop of this? They told me not to drink. But I’m really tired of being told what to do. You ever feel like that?’

Rufus shook his head. ‘I don’t drink, Dad. It’s not my thing.’

He put down the AlcoHawk Pro. I looked at him for a long time.

‘Then where do you go?’ I asked him.

And he told me.

When he had finished I gave him one of my clumsy hugs and he gave me one of his awkward squeezes in return and I left him in the kitchen, foraging for food and making a racket.

Upstairs in the bedroom the lights were all off, but my wife was still awake, and waiting for me.

I was jolted awake long before dawn.

This was not me. I had always slept like a baby. I don’t mean like a real baby – waking up wet and screaming every two hours – but like the sleeping baby of myth, comatose from lights out to breakfast. Especially after sex. But not tonight. Not any more. And, I somehow understood, never again.

I lay there for a while, dry-mouthed from the red wine, listening to Lara’s breathing, and then, knowing there would be no more sleep for me tonight, I silently made my way downstairs.

Hunched over my wife’s laptop in the kitchen, the only light coming from the glow of the computer screen, I joined my brothers and sisters. All those people who had been in death’s departure lounge, and then had their journey cancelled just before boarding. God had thrown another log on my fire, wrote one man.

Men and women, adults and children, in every corner of the planet. And as I bent before the computer’s light, I learned what we shared was that we had all been saved by the unimaginable kindness of some unknown stranger. And we shared something else. We had not only been saved. We had been changed. Oh, how we had been changed.

Changed in ways that you can imagine. And changed in ways that were beyond all imagining.

‘I am a Frankenstein,’ cried Louis Washkansky upon waking as the world’s first heart transplant recipient in Cape Town, South Africa, in the month of December, 1967. ‘I am a Frankenstein.’

‘Not a Frankenstein,’ said his nurse. ‘But an angel.’

I turned off the computer. There was still no light from the world outside as I went back up to bed. My family slept on. And my heart leapt to my throat when I saw him as I passed the darkened bathroom – the hair uncut and unkempt, the eyes bright and wild, not a gram of fat on his stubbled face, the flesh just fallen away. It was a face to make your heart leap in the middle of the night.

And it took me a long second to see that I was staring at myself.

seven

I was standing in front of the mirror in the bedroom, my shirt open, looking at the scar on my chest again. It was a long, livid, red wound, as though someone had tried to saw me in half, starting at the top. My fingers moved to touch it and I remembered touching the scar on my wife’s stomach after the birth of our boy. The world had marked me, as it had marked her, as if to signal that one kind of life had ended and another kind of life had begun. I started to button my shirt and Lara appeared in the doorway.

‘The cab here?’ I said.

‘We’re not getting a cab,’ she said, and got this little secret smile.

The bicycles were waiting in the hall, propped against the wall. Ruby’s pink trekking bike, still caked with fresh mud, and Rufus’ big black Saracen Dirtrax, three years old but shining like it had just come out of the box. Sometimes you give a kid a present and they have outgrown it before it is unwrapped.

I looked at the bikes and I looked at my wife. ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said.

‘It’s good for you,’ she said, and squeezed my arm. ‘And you’re ready.’ She gave me a wink. ‘Know what I mean, big boy?’

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