Men from the Boys (14 page)

I followed my wife.

It was actually quite difficult. In the films they make it look easy. You just have to be ready to duck inside a doorway or bury your head in a newspaper when your prey turns around, their suspicions momentarily aroused.

But it wasn’t like that at all.

Cyd had taken her Food Glorious Food van. I followed in my car, pulling one of Pat’s old beanie hats over my head for a cunning disguise and giving her a five-minute start.

I thought I would struggle to keep up with her. But that wasn’t the problem. As soon as we hit the Holloway Road, she ground to a halt in the mid-morning traffic jam, while I hovered dangerously close behind. I had to pause at a green light, provoking the wrath of my fellow motorists, to avoid catching up with her.

She was seeing ‘a friend’, she’d said, a wonderfully vague appointment. Perhaps she did not want to lie to my face. Perhaps that is what they all say.

I was hanging back, beanie hat pulled down, watching the back of her car, and watching the back of her head too – her hair worn up, her neck showing – and I marvelled at that curiously upright gait she had, and I felt this numb ache inside me just looking at her, and ducked my head every time she glanced in the rear-view mirror.

And I did not want it to be true.

Oh, Cyd, I thought, I love you so much, but then I had
to pay attention when I was nearly sideswiped by a bendy bus turning off for Kentish Town.

Then I lost her.

At the great screaming hub of Archway, she put her foot down on a yellow light – that naughty girl – and I had to pull up, although a flock of cyclists blithely kept going, shaking their fists and screaming their murderous curses at motorists with the right of way.

The traffic was clearer beyond the junction, and the road rose with Cyd as she climbed the hill towards London’s leafy highlands.

And then she was gone.

But it did not matter, because here was one more thing that was different from the films.

I knew exactly where she was going.

It was one of those big white houses in Belsize Park. Nice neighbourhood. Nice architecture. Nice life.

The street was quiet and calm and rich. Far too affluent to tolerate a man in a black beanie hat lurking in the shadows of its sturdy trees. So I took to driving around the block. Even that was risky – a young dog-walker with half a dozen pampered mutts on a lead paused to watch me going round in circles for the third time. But when I went round again the dog-walker was gone, and there was just me and the house where Jim Mason lived, and the terrible knowledge that Cyd was in there with him. I parked in a residents-only bay down the street. And after an hour, the front door opened.

I was stretching my legs under one of those old trees and I watched them come out. Cyd first, her arms folded across her chest in that way she had when the world needed to be kept at bay. And then him, then Jim, his handsome head down, all serious. No sign of Liberty, his nurse from Manila.

So no surprise there then.

And so the world turns.

On the top step Cyd turned to look at him. I held my
breath, waiting for them to kiss, but instead they embraced – or rather, they held on to each other, as if each was preventing the other one from falling. Somehow that was worse.

I don’t know what happened after that because I didn’t stick around to find out. I got in the car, did a three-point turn and went back the way I had come, heading downhill to London’s lowlands, the great black hole of betrayal in my chest, sticking two fingers up at all the crazed cyclists, and my eyes half-blinded by the tears.

The three of us sat outside the headmaster’s office, a family once again.

Gina and Pat and I – when was the last time we had sat together like this? It was beyond memory, it was another lifetime. Some family dinner, before the fall? But no – because those three people no longer existed. The young husband and father. His tall, radiant wife. Proud parents of their moptopped little
Star Wars-barmy
boy. Where were they today? They were not outside the head’s office.

School sounds, school smells. Laughter and threats. Food and chlorine. Pat slumped low and unmoving in his chair, as if trying to disappear, as if he was a boy in a coma, the only sign of life the occasional flickering of his gaze as some giant child ambled by – the boys mean and hard-looking, quick to take offence, the girls with their skirts hiked up, wearing their sexual power like a prefect’s badge. And they looked at the boy humiliated by sitting with dear old mum and dad, but I could not tell if their gaze meant everything, or nothing.

Gina was impassive, strangely calm considering the circumstances. All charm with the head’s secretary when we were told that we had to wait, Mr Whitehead was running late, Gina all smiley understanding, not remotely defensive or surly, every inch the good parent.

And as we bided our time, waiting to be summoned into the head’s office, I felt strangely elated – this wild, mad joy welling up inside me.

I thought it was because Pat was fighting back. But perhaps
it was something else. Perhaps it was just sitting there with my son and his mother, and a glimpse at the old comforting symmetry of our long-lost family, like a dead loved one met again in a dream.

‘Mr Whitehead will see you now,’ we were told, the old secretary’s rheumy eyes staring at us over the top of her reading glasses, seeing right through us, but Gina was all smiles and thanks, gently indicating that Pat should snap out of his coma, and that I should get to my feet, and that we should both follow her into the headmaster’s office.

He was charming. I mean, we were not offered tea and crumpets, but he was friendly enough in a stern, Victorian dad sort of way, and he did not treat us like the scum of the earth because my son had flattened a sports teacher. I suppose he saw a lot worse than that every day.

‘We take any form of violence against a member of staff very seriously,’ he said, his gaze moving from concerned parents to troubled child. Pat stared beyond his shoulder and out of the window, taking great interest in the totally empty playground and the playing fields beyond, as if this had nothing much to do with him.

‘It was an accident,’ I blurted, and Gina’s head snapped in my direction. ‘But it was,’ I said feebly. ‘He didn’t mean it.’ I looked at my son. ‘Did you?’

Pat shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘They all hate me anyway.’

‘How are you, Patrick?’ Mr Whitehead said, and I realised with a shock that he actually seemed to like our son.

Pat nodded, still intent on the empty playground. ‘I’m all right, sir.’

‘You were doing so well,’ the head said. ‘Japanese – that was your subject, wasn’t it?’

‘Sir,’ Pat affirmed, still not looking at him. And I could see that the boy was prepared to endure everything today, apart from a little kindness.

The headmaster even smiled. ‘And as I recall, you were a leading light in…the Theatre Club?’

Pat finally looked at him. ‘The Lateral Thinking Club, sir.’

Mr Whitehead nodded. Then he looked at Gina and I and his smile grew wider. ‘I’m not even sure I know quite what they do in the Lateral Thinking Club,’ he confessed.

Nervous laughter all round.

‘Me neither!’ I offered, a note of total hysteria in my voice.

‘There have been bullying issues,’ Gina said, and she looked at Pat and for a second I thought she was going to tell him to sit up straight. ‘Issues of bullying that have been going on for quite a while.’

‘He has to learn to stand up for himself,’ I said, and she was on me.

‘You think that’s the answer to everything,’ she said, biting my head off. ‘But what if someone can’t stand up to the bullying, Harry? What if they are too gentle or too timid or too alone? What happens then?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I suppose then you get your head pushed down a toilet.’

Mr Whitehead raised his hands, like a marriage counsellor calling time out.

‘We do not tolerate a culture of bullying at Ramsay Mac,’ he said. Pat snorted with bitter laughter, and for the first time the headmaster looked as though he was ready to kill someone. ‘You are suspended for one week, young man,’ he said, jabbing an angry Parker Pen at my son. ‘And I am taking into account that you did not intentionally strike Mr Jones and that for the last four years you have been a good, hard-working student.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to you this year, Patrick. But if your behaviour doesn’t improve then you will give the school no option but permanent exclusion.’

Pat got a secret little smile on his face. He looked up at his mother.

‘We have been thinking about changing schools,’ Gina told the headmaster. ‘My husband and I are no longer together.’

The headmaster nodded. ‘I gathered that.’

Was it so obvious? I couldn’t believe that it was only the
couples that broke up that got on each other’s nerves. I thought that everyone did it.

Mr Whitehead shook his head. ‘But this is a big year for Patrick,’ he said. ‘An exam year.’

‘Well, then it would happen on the other side of exams,’ Gina said. ‘Probably.’

‘I can tell you’ve really thought this through,’ I said, looking from my ex-wife to my son. ‘When did we start thinking about changing schools?’ Neither of them would look me in the eye. ‘Because I don’t remember that conversation.’

‘The travelling has become difficult for my son,’ Gina said, ignoring me. ‘There are these bullying issues. And now this suspension.’ She cast down her eyes, and then shyly looked up at the headmaster. Ah, Gina. She still had that old magic. The headmaster put down his Parker Pen. ‘I do appreciate your understanding,’ she said quietly.

‘Well,’ Mr Whitehead said, ‘you must let me know what you decide. But I strongly recommend sticking with us until the end of the academic year.’

‘Thank you,’ Gina said sweetly, as if she had just been told, Go ahead, love, do what you like.

But my blood was up. A new school? Who mentioned anything about a new school?

‘There are bullies in every playground,’ I said, immune to the power of Gina’s eyelashes. ‘In every playground in every school in the country. There will always be someone.’ I shook my head. ‘He can’t just run away. It doesn’t work like that.’

‘Do you want him to go around punching everyone?’ she said, as if I was some kind of psychopath. ‘He’s not like your father, Harry. And you know what?’ The trouble with old partners is that they know what will hurt you the most. ‘Neither are you,’ she said.

Then Pat and the headmaster looked away, the pair of them embarrassed to be in the same room as us.

We lingered at the school gates, car keys in our hands, reluctant to go our separate ways with so many angry words
still unsaid. I shuddered with the cold. Winter felt as though it was never going to end. I looked at Gina.

‘Have they got any good schools in Soho?’ I said.

She looked at me sharply. ‘Have they got any round here?’

‘Ramsay Mac is not so bad,’ I said. ‘You should see their A-Level results for Crack Dealing and Knife Fighting.’

Her mouth hardened. ‘You think this is funny?’

I took a breath. Should I suggest coffee? A pint and a game of arrows? We seemed beyond all of that. But I didn’t want to fight with Gina any more. I had a wife. I could be at home fighting with her. What was I doing expending all my energy on this stranger? But of course I knew the answer to that. It was because of the boy. Without our son Gina and I would be happily living on different planets.

‘We’re in this together,’ I said, and I almost reached out to touch her arm. Luckily I managed to restrain myself.

‘In it together,’ she said, all numb. ‘Yeah – like two ferrets in a sack.’

I stared back at the school where my son had returned to his unknowable day. Double maths and a ducking in the toilet? Abusive text messages and a kicking by the bike sheds? Collecting his rucksack and starting his suspension? I looked away, ashamed of myself, wondering when I had lost the power to protect him.

‘I should have mentioned the change of schools,’ Gina said, thawing a bit. ‘I’m sorry, Harry, I really am. But this is not working.’

Everything was working fine until you decided to make a guest appearance in our lives, I thought. But I said nothing, and felt suddenly empty. The one thing left of our love was our ability to argue about anything.

‘Do you ever wonder,’ Gina said, ‘what life would have been like if we had stayed together?’ She half-smiled, and I had no idea what was in that smile. ‘Do you wonder what would have happened, Harry, if you hadn’t fucked around and I hadn’t fucked off?’

‘That’s beautifully put,’ I muttered, and I let a long breath
ease out, and another long breath ease in, as I remembered the uncomplicated past, the unbroken and enduring past, with the little blond boy and the knock-out young mother, and the proud, capable father who loved them both, and never thought they would slip away when he wasn’t looking.

I saw all of that letting one breath out, and one breath in, but it was always sliding away from me, like trying to remember the kind of dream that fades upon waking. I did not love this woman before me. I loved Cyd. I loved my wife.

I looked Gina in her blue eyes. They did nothing for me now.

‘No,’ I said.

I had forgotten about hospitals. The waiting around. The endless bad tea. The mind-numbing bureaucracy of terminal illness. How bored you could get in death’s waiting room. Ken and I sat outside his doctor’s office. He studied his
Racing Post
while I read my copy of Matthew Parker’s
Monte Cassino.

Only the bloodbaths of Verdun and Passchendaele, or the very worst of the Second World War fighting on the Eastern Front, can compare to Monte Cassino. The largest land battle in Europe, Cassino was the bitterest and bloodiest of the Western Allies’ struggles with the German Wehrmacht on any front of the Second World War. On the German side, many compared it unfavourably with Stalingrad.

‘I quite fancy Lucky Sue in the two thirty at Haydock Park,’ Ken said, more to himself than me.