Men from the Boys (13 page)

‘Poor thing.’

‘Yes,’ he hissed, and I saw that I had got to him. Somewhere
deep inside – beyond the sensitive specs and the business suit – there was a temper wanting to get out. ‘You’re right. Poor thing. Abandoned by her father when she was a little girl. And then her husband cheats on her because he is having some pathetic, premature mid-life crisis.’

I grinned at him. ‘Keep going. You’re doing good.’

He pushed his coffee cup aside. ‘Look, I don’t actually care about you. Or your son.’

I nodded. I put down my teacup. ‘Okay,’ I said.

‘But I love Gina and I want her to be happy. Your son is clearly a very troubled boy – ’

That’s when I reached across the table and grabbed him by the collar of his open-necked shirt. A tie would have made it easier. But I got a good fistful of blue-and-white striped cotton from Paul Smith. There was a crash as something hit the floor. A milk jug. We were both on our feet, our chairs scraping back and everybody staring now. I didn’t let go.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right now.’

I could feel my anger for him closing my throat. The feeling was a black, bitter chunk that made speech impossible. I wanted to tell him so much but I couldn’t get the words out. So I let him go. Then I picked up the sugar bowl and hurled it as hard as I could at the wall behind his head. It exploded and he cowered beneath the shrapnel of sugar lumps.

‘Watch your mouth,’ I said, and I did not recognise my voice. I pulled some notes out of my pocket and threw them on the table. ‘Say what you like about my ex-wife. And say what you like about me. But when you talk about my son, you just watch your fucking mouth.’

When I got home the street where I lived looked strange to me. The years spent toiling at the coal face of TV and radio meant that I was used to seeing it at all hours of the day and night. But I was accustomed to seeing it from the perspective of someone in work. The street in the middle of a mid-week morning, with no work that day, or the next day – it was like another planet.

Or perhaps that was just because Jim Mason was parked outside our house. Sitting astride his bike, the engine throbbing between his legs. Did he ever get off that thing?

He was part-man, part-Harley.

Cyd was with him. Her arms folded across her chest. Longlimbed and coatless, the laces of her trainers undone. I loved the dimensions of her. Just the way she was – the heavenly engineering of her body. It knocked me out. Still.

They did not see me. Jim’s bike was pointing in the opposite direction and they both had their backs to me. And so I stopped, conscious that I was interrupting something. This is the way to do it, I thought. When love has flown but you have a child together, this is how you do it. Not like me and Gina, who had happily danced across the thin cliché separating love from hate. You do it like this, I thought, and then I may have gasped as Cyd reached out and touched his face.

He did nothing, just let her hand stray across his lovable stubble for a few moments before it withdrew. And then he kicked his bike into roaring life and was gone, and she watched him for a moment and went back inside the house.

When I came through the door seven minutes later she was reading the newspaper. She looked up at me and smiled.

‘What’s happening?’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

I nodded and looked away.

You touched his face, I thought.

Pat came round for dinner.

We were celebrating his birthday late. We had missed it because Gina had suddenly whisked him off to some ski resort in the dying days of the Christmas break.

I did not want it to be a major production. I mean, I wanted us all to give the kid a great birthday dinner, but I didn’t want anyone holding their breath and afraid to speak. The best thing would have been if Pat could have just come round for dinner and everything be normal. I really missed
normal. Pat having dinner with us – it should not have been a big deal. But it was a big deal.

His sisters were waiting for him in the hall with their presents when the mini-cab dropped him off.

‘Pat!’ cried Joni.

‘Hello, gorgeous,’ said Peggy.

‘Hello, ugly,’ said Pat, and then he picked up Joni and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Hello, you.’

She squirmed from his arms, averting her face, kissing still being gross.

Cyd came out of the kitchen and the three of them held him. Joni hugging him around the thighs. Peggy with her arms wrapped around his neck, and crying a bit. And Cyd laughing with her arms thrown around the whole scrum.

I hung back, feeling wound up and weird.

My son was coming round for dinner.

That’s all.

He unwrapped his presents as we all slowly trailed into the living room, Joni holding on to his leg and Peggy with one hand resting lightly on his shoulder, Cyd and I bringing up the rear. She slipped her arm in mine and smiled at me.

‘What have we got here?’ Pat said, opening up Joni’s tatty, falling-to-bits, self-wrapped package. His eyes widened at the sight of a Pussycat Dolls CD. ‘Wow,
Doll Domination,’
he read, impressed.

‘I know you maybe don’t like the Pussycat Dolls, but they’re really great,’ Joni said quickly. She pointed at a girl on the cover. ‘I like that one. She’s very pretty.’

‘I might keep it here,’ Pat said. He looked down at his sister. ‘Will you look after it for me?’

She snatched the Pussycat Dolls from his hand and ran off.

‘I’ll keep it in my room,’ she shouted. ‘You can listen to it whenever you want.’

Pat began to unwrap Peggy’s immaculately wrapped present. It even had a ribbon and a bow.

‘I didn’t know you could ski,’ she said.

‘I can’t,’ he laughed, not looking at her. But then he smiled as he unwrapped a DVD of the first
Star Wars
film.

Peggy looked embarrassed.

‘It’s the enhanced version of A
New Hope,’
she said, looking sideways at it. ‘And it’s got, er, the theatrical version on there too – but you’ve probably got it already.’

‘No, I haven’t got it,’ he said, studying the cover like a wine expert sniffing a rare Margaux. Then he looked her in the eye. ‘It’s great, Peg,’ he said quietly. ‘Thank you.’

He was a very gracious kid. He made a polite fuss of all our presents. Cyd and I gave him a watch – one of those watches that look like they will tell you the time at the bottom of the ocean, and he put it on and admired it, even though I knew he had never worn a watch in his life, and might not start now.

Cyd slapped the pair of us on the back.

‘Eat,’ she commanded.

Cyd was cooking chicken curry – Pat’s favourite, and I felt a real stab of gratitude as the smells filled the house. Turmeric and peppers and ginger and garlic and onions and coriander. It would have been no different if he was our own child. She could not have loved him more.

Dinner was fine. Dinner was good. Cyd made a killer curry and Pat ate like a horse. We all laughed about his appetite, the way we always used to.

And he was lovely. Appreciative of the food, keen to help – he had always been quick to clear up the table and cart the empties to the kitchen. In the past it had sometimes made me uncomfortable – if Cyd had been his real mother, would he have always been on such perfect behaviour? But tonight I was grateful for my boy’s good manners.

Peggy turned off the lights and in the darkness Cyd brought out a chocolate cake with fifteen candles. We all sang, ‘Happy Birthday, dear Pat,’ and after he had blown out the candles – in one go, to wild applause – we all had a slice.

After dinner Peggy slipped off to do her homework and Pat sat on the floor with Joni. She was showing him some
dog game on her Nintendo DS, and every now and again the game gave a very authentic yelp.

‘So you’ve got two homes now,’ Joni said, not looking up from her dog game.

Pat laughed. ‘I’ve got no homes now,’ he said, and smiled when Joni lifted her serious, seven-year-old face to him. ‘Show me how you take Bouncy for a walk,’ he said.

But it was a school night and after a while Cyd called to Joni to go and brush her teeth.

‘Can I stay up late?’ she said, her vampire mouth pleading. ‘As Pat’s here? As it was his birthday some time ago?’

‘You are staying up late,’ Cyd said. ‘Clean those teeth and get your pyjamas on.’

The evening was winding down. Joni reluctantly went off to the bathroom. I went to help Cyd in the kitchen and Pat wandered out to the garden.

Through the kitchen window I saw the security light come on and illuminate him, all slouching limbs and uncombed hair, looking up at the house as if he was remembering something. Then the light went off and all you could see was his silhouette, lit by moonlight and the orange glow that always hangs over the city.

I felt almost relaxed. He could come round and eat dinner with us and it was as if nothing had changed. I could hear Peggy’s music filtering down from upstairs. The sound of Joni spitting in the downstairs bathroom. I watched Cyd rinse a pot and when she had finished I took her wet hand and held it against my face.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she smiled. ‘I love seeing him.’

Then her smile faded. She squinted at the garden. And I saw it too. The faint red glow in Pat’s mouth.

As if the silhouette in the garden knew that it was being watched, it quickly slipped into the Wendy House. But even inside the little wooden playhouse, you could see the red glow in the darkness as it rose and fell from my son’s lips.

‘Does he smoke now?’ Cyd said.

I shook my head. ‘Not that I know of,’ I said, and I made a move to the garden and then felt her stop me.

‘Let me talk to him,’ she said. ‘It will be better coming from me.’

So I watched her go.

And I watched her long-limbed shadow cross the garden and enter the Wendy House. And after not very long at all she came back, holding something that emitted a faint red glow in the darkness. She burst through the door and I don’t think I had ever seen her so angry. I recognised that sickly sweet smell immediately. She held up a soggy hand-rolled cigarette, her eyes blazing.

‘Mexican weed in the Wendy House!’ she said. ‘Very nice! Smoking Mexican weed in the Wendy House!’

Then Pat burst into the house, tears streaming down his face and chin trembling. Hardly what you would expect from a hardened user who had turned his sister’s Wendy House into a drug den.

I said his name but he kept heading for the front door. I went after him. Joni appeared in the door of the bathroom, an electric toothbrush vibrating in her hand. Peggy was on the stairs. I looked back at Cyd. She shook her head, the joint extinguished but still in her hand.

The front door opened and closed with a bang.

I called his name again. And then I went after him. I chased him down the street and I could see him ahead of me for a while but then we got to the Holloway Road and I lost him. He must have jumped on a bus or in a cab. I walked the streets until I knew that he was gone, calling his phone again and again even though it always went straight to the answer machine. And then I went back to the house.

It had been a while. Joni had been packed off to bed. The music had stopped in Peggy’s room. And the only sounds I could hear were the dishwasher and the muted, troubled voice of my wife on the phone. She hung up when she saw me.

‘Wrong number,’ she said.

Liar.

Even the parents looked different.

We all shivered on the same muddy touchline, the February wind whipping through our winter coats, stamping our feet against the cold as we waited for the teams to appear. But there was no mistaking the parents of the three-grand-a-term UTI kids from the mums and dads of Ramsay Mac. They looked as though it wasn’t just a different education they were buying, but a different life.

We looked poorer. We looked fatter. We looked pastier – even though we were a far more multi-racial bunch. Our hair was thinner, gone or bleached to the point of wispy no return. Their hair was long and lustrous, falling in magnificent curls and ringlets – especially the dads. We looked not quite mature – there were lurid tattoos, and replica football shirts – especially among the mothers. And there were more of them – the UTI families bred like pampered rabbits, and younger brothers and sisters frolicked at the feet of their affluent parents, a few of them holding babes in arms. You think that we would have that over them – that at least the Ramsay Mac parents would be able to knock out more kids than they could. You would think that at least we could procreate better than them. But, you see, the UTI parents stayed together. And at Ramsay Mac, we came apart. I inhaled deeply, smelling their swimming pool, and I felt the sharp pang of chlorine and envy.

Their playing fields went on forever, and the cries and
shouts of other matches drifted across as the teams made their way to the pitch. UTI in their red-and-black stripes, and Ramsay Mac in all white. Apart from Pat, who sloped roundshouldered near the back of his teammates as if wishing that his limbs were all slightly shorter. He was wearing a bright orange top, black shorts and socks. Plus his Predator boots, newly cleaned. He looked great. I laughed and applauded wildly. Kill these rich spoilt bastards, I thought, sportingly.

UTI sprinted on to the pitch. They began knocking a few balls about and doing some elaborate stretching. Ramsay Mac were slower, more sullen, trying to act as if this was all slightly beneath them. I recognised a few of them. William Fly was the big striker up front. Spud Face hovered by his side, doing some surprisingly impressive keepy-uppy, his pock-marked face frowning with concentration. As Pat dumped his towel in the back of the goal and tried on his gloves, a small, darkskinned youth held back, dragging deeply on a Marlboro Light. The referee, a huge red-bearded man all in black, turned on him, eyes blazing.

‘Put that fag out, Patel!’ he bawled. It was the legendary Ramsay Mac sports teacher. Jones the Psycho, in the flesh.

The boy ground the cigarette out under the heel of his boot, grinning with embarrassment. The sports teacher glared at him as he joined his teammates. And then I saw her.

Elizabeth Montgomery and an older UTI lad, maybe as old as eighteen, his arm draped casually around her shoulder, her hand slipped inside his red-and-black blazer.

‘Come on, UTI!’ he shouted, but Elizabeth Montgomery turned her back on the field and snuggled up inside his blazer.

Patel, still coughing a bit from his cigarette, shirt cuffs pulled over his hands to keep warm, peppered shots at Pat’s goal. My boy tipped them over the bar, pushed them round the post, caught them good and solid, wrapping his body around the ball. He was soon covered in mud, sweating hard, his breath making mist in the cold.

Then it was time to kick off.

Pat wiped the damp from his brow and crouched low,
watching carefully as UTI surged forward. Jones the Psycho’s face was scarlet, keeping up with the action. Elizabeth Montgomery languished inside the red-and-black blazer of her mannish boyfriend. Pat had not noticed her.

UTI’s number nine was the problem – a hefty blond lad with not much skill but plenty of heart. He shrugged off a couple of tackles, heading straight down the middle, until Ramsay Mac’s own number nine – William Fly – brought him down with a sliding tackle from behind. The referee’s whistle peeped in protest. Both of the number nines writhed in agony. When they got up, Jones the Psycho showed Fly a yellow card.

‘What, sir?’ Fly said, spreading his hands with outraged innocence. ‘What? What? What?’

Patel and Spud Face made for a surprisingly nippy pair of wingbacks, sprinting down their respective touchlines and tormenting the UTI defence with crosses that swung teasingly away from the goalkeeper. But William Fly was slow and lumbering, better at sticking his elbow in someone’s face than getting on the end of a cross, and if it wasn’t dropped on his head or his right boot then he floundered and fell, rising to scream abuse at Patel and Spud Face, and beseeching Jones the Psycho for justice.

Now the UTI number nine had the ball again and was ploughing through the middle of the Ramsay Mac defence. Past one defender, and then another, with William Fly chasing back and then giving up in the centre circle, puffing and cursing.

I looked at Pat and he was crouched like a cat, ready to pounce. Patel and Spud Face were clinging to the men they were marking on the wing, looking at each other, waiting for the other one to do something. Then it was too late. UTI’s number nine was through on an open goal, his right foot swinging at the ball, his mouth grimacing, the braces on his teeth gleaming in the pale winter sunlight.

He shot.

The ball arced slowly through the air towards the goal.
Pat was up on his toes, ready for it, glancing side to side to make sure there was nobody coming in to challenge him.

Then he saw her.

His true love inside the blazer of another.

Her skirt hiked up to new heights.

Her high heels sinking into the mud of UTI’s impressive playing fields.

It was just a moment.

But it was quite long enough for him to take his eyes off the ball and let them settle on the girl. When he looked back the shot was on him, and directly above him and he closed his eyes against the sun, his hands flapping wildly for the ball even as it bounced off the back of his head and dribbled into the goal.

Pandemonium.

The parents going mental. UTI jumping on top of their number nine as Patel threw himself to the ground, his fists pounding against the mud. Spud Face ran towards Pat, screaming abuse.

Pat fumbled among the netting, retrieving the ball. When he fished it out, William Fly was standing in front of him.

‘Sick Note,’ he said, as I read his lips. ‘You really are Sick Note, ain’t you, Silver?’

Pat threw the ball in his face.

It hit Fly flush on the nose and the blood was already starting to flow as the bigger lad shoved his goalkeeper back into the goal and began to pummel him with fists and boots. Pat cringed under the assault, retreating into the back of his goal and squirming in the netting, like something that had been caught.

I was on the pitch and running towards the goal. But Jones the Psycho was already there, between them, pushing them apart.

Then he took out his red card and showed it to both of them. William Fly turned away in disgust, ripping off his white Ramsay Mac shirt and throwing it to the ground, to a chorus of boos. But Pat was tangled up in the netting, trying
not to cry as he attempted to free himself. Jones the Psycho seized him by the scruff of his orange jersey and hauled him into the six-yard box.

‘Off you go,’ he said. ‘Early bath, Sick Note.’

And that is when Pat hit him.

A wild, swinging punch that Jones the Psycho could have easily avoided if he had been looking. But he did not give my son that much credit. So Pat’s tearful haymaker caught Jones the Psycho on the point of the chin just as he was turning away. And he dropped to the ground like a sack of very red potatoes.

Pat did not cry. I was happy about that. White with shock, he was way beyond crying. He collected his belongings from the back of the net – his Predator water bottle, his Predator beach towel, his spare pair of Predator gloves – and stepped over the prostrate figure of Jones the Psycho.

He did not look at me as he passed.

He did not look at anyone.

But as he brushed past Elizabeth Montgomery and her three-grand-a-term boyfriend, I could have sworn I saw her swoon.