Men from the Boys (22 page)

‘Can we go home now?’ Pat asked.

Cyd got up when she heard us.

We were in the bathroom, Pat sitting on the edge of the bath as I swabbed at the blood under his swollen eye. The cut from the ring was deep and neat.

Cyd stood in the doorway, fastening her dressing gown, staring at Pat’s face without expression.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said, and I let her.

She said nothing as she cleaned him up. First she got off the caked blood, and then she dabbed at the cuts with TCP.

The sound of crying from down the hall.

Joni, calling out in her sleep.

‘I’ve got it,’ I said, and before Cyd had a chance to reply I went down to Joni’s bedroom. She was sitting up, rubbing her eyes. I sat on the bed and took her in my arms.

‘An asteroid,’ she sobbed. ‘An asteroid is going to hit our planet.’

Her body was so warm. I touched her forehead, checking for fever.

‘No, it’s okay,’ I said. ‘An asteroid’s not going to hit our planet.’

She was suddenly furious.

‘An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs,’ my daughter insisted. ‘Rulers of Earth for a hundred and sixty million…’ a pause to choke down a sob ‘…years. Dead. Gone. In seven days. Wiped out by a giant asteroid.’

She simmered down. I patted her back, kissed the top of her head. She got back under her duvet.

‘That’s the dinosaurs,’ I said. ‘That’s not us, Joni.’

‘But the average gap,’ she said, although she was fading fast. ‘Average gap between giant asteroids striking Earth.’

‘Average gap?’ I said, not following.

‘Every hundred million years,’ she said, taking a deep breath and as she let it out, she seemed to slide deeper into sleep. ‘A giant…asteroid…hits Earth…every hundred million…years…’ I patted her head as she buried it into the pillow. ‘Dinosaurs…sixty-five million years ago…so…’

She yawned.

I completed the math for her, stroking her hair.

‘So that means we’re due for another asteroid in thirty-five million years,’ I said. ‘Little darling, let’s worry about it in the morning.’

When I was sure that she was sleeping, I went back to the bathroom. Pat’s eye seemed to be closing by the second and yet somehow he looked a bit better now that Cyd had removed the dried blood. Or maybe it was just being cared for that made him look a bit better. As though he was safe now.

‘All right?’ she said.

‘All right,’ he said.

When she had finished, the floor of the bathroom was covered with white towels that were stained a strange rusty brown. Then she made him open his mouth and inspected his teeth.

Then she smiled. A private smile, something between the pair of them.

‘You’ll live,’ she said.

But she told him to go down to the freezer, find a pack of frozen peas and hold it against his eye for as long as he could stand.

‘Okay,’ Pat said. ‘Thanks, Cyd.’

He left us.

‘That poor kid,’ she said. ‘What did you do to him now?’

I reached for her as she brushed past me. I said her name, softly because I did not want to wake Joni, but she just kept going. I watched her enter the darkness of our bedroom.

‘Sorry, Harry,’ she said. ‘I’m just too tired for you now.’

After a few moments I followed her. I got undressed and slipped under the covers, our bodies not touching, a few inches and several light years apart. I lay there for a long time without sleep coming. I did not turn on the light.

And I must have slept at some point, because I woke up to the sounds of them leaving.

The bags being lugged downstairs, the diesel engine of the taxi in the street, and the excited chatter of Joni deciding what books she would take.

I got out of bed and went to the window. Cyd was watching the driver hefting a suitcase into the cab. I came downstairs and found Joni kneeling beside another suitcase, and stuffing a tattered copy of Jacqueline Wilson’s
Sleepovers
into her pink rucksack.

‘We’re going on holiday,’ my daughter told me, her eyes shining. ‘We’re going to have a bit of a break.’

Cyd came inside and looked at me.

‘Peggy’s going to stay on with her dad for a while,’ she said. ‘I think it will be good for both of them.’

I shook my head and held out my hands.

‘I hope Pat’s all right,’ she said. ‘That cut is the worst of it.’

She reached for the suitcase but I picked it up. Not because I wanted to help her but because I wanted to stop her.

‘Where are you going?’ I wanted to know.

‘And I hope your friend doesn’t suffer too much,’ she said. ‘The old gentleman.’

‘He’s not my friend,’ I said. ‘He’s my father’s friend.’

‘I think he’s your friend, too,’ Cyd said.

I shook my head. ‘When are you coming back?’

‘I don’t know. I just need to catch my breath. I need to see where I am. Do you ever feel that way, Harry? I feel that way all the time.’

She reached for the suitcase but I held it away from her. Our daughter stood in the doorway, her pink rucksack turned towards us, looking at the cab.

‘Don’t stop loving me,’ I said to my wife.

‘I’m trying,’ she said. ‘It’s just a bit harder than it used to be, okay?’

I nodded. And when she reached for the suitcase for a third time, I let her have it. Then I picked up my daughter and I kissed her although she squirmed in my arms because kissing was gross. I put her down and she ran laughing to the cab. And I felt that if I lost her then it would be the end of my world.

I followed them to the kerb and I told our daughter to
mind her fingers as I closed the door. Then I watched them go. The taxi’s brake lights flashed red twice in farewell as they reached the end of our road, and then they were gone.

I looked up at the sky, checking for asteroids, and then I went back inside the house, closing the door quietly because my son was still sleeping upstairs. He had no school today.

He had no school on any day.

We stopped at the top of the stone steps and the stadium laid spread out before us.

The expanse of green like a secret garden in the heart of the city. The track of wet sand. The six traps waiting, open. The old men in flat caps and the young men in trainers. Everybody smoking, coughing, studying form, then looking up to watch the greyhounds being walked by their handlers.

Pat sucked on his cigarette and narrowed his eyes.

He was wearing his school uniform but it looked like something a pirate had plundered from a dead midshipman. Buttons missing or dangling by a thread on his Ramsay MacDonald blazer. The Ramsay Mac tie rakishly tucked inside his shirt, like a David Niven cravat. The top two buttons undone on his white shirt. Bunking off had turned into a way of life. I knew he wouldn’t go back.

‘You’ll stop one day,’ I said, looking at him with his cigarette. ‘Right? The smoking thing. It can’t go on forever.’

He nodded, toking hard. ‘When I’m thirty,’ he said, and I could tell he honestly believed that he would never be thirty, not in a million years. ‘Don’t worry. I want to live.’ Then his face lit up. ‘There they are!’ he said.

The old men had parked themselves down by the winning post. As we approached, they raised their ancient faces. Ken from the
Racing Post,
Singe Rana from the programme.

‘Going to miss this old place,’ Ken said, and we all looked
at the condemned dog track. ‘Online poker. Internet bookies. E-casinos. What a load of old bollocks.’

They were tearing Badham Cross dog track down. This was the last BAGS meeting ever, but even free admission had not tempted many punters through the gates. Only the young men with no jobs to go to and the old men who had nowhere else to go. And the boy who should have been in school.

They stood in the first sunlight of summer, watching the dogs.

‘That one,’ Ken said, getting out his tin of Old Holborn. ‘Number six. He smells the blood.’

We watched the greyhounds approach, as sleek as panthers. The dog in black-and-white stripes with the red number six had his nose in the air, his eyes black and gleaming. He was a very light brown, the colour of a beach at the end of the day.

Ken coughed as he rolled his snout. ‘Don’t tell me that mutt’s been training with some tin bunny,’ he said to Singe Rana, who just shrugged at him. ‘Look at him,’ Ken insisted. ‘He’s had more live rabbit than you’ve had Aloo Chop, sunshine.’ Ken looked at Pat. ‘He’s already had a couple of winners, the jammy git.’ Then back at his thoughtful friend. ‘When’s your lucky streak going to end?’

Singe Rana didn’t look up from his
Racing Post.
‘It is not a lucky streak,’ he said. ‘It’s an era.’

Ken licked the Rizla on his roll-up as the dogs came past us, heading for the traps. ‘Only Boy,’ he sighed, and it took me a moment to realise he was talking about number six.

Pat studied form. ‘Only Boy is a long shot,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Beaten every time in thirteen starts.’ He nodded at the red numbers flickering on the tote betting board. ‘The smart money’s all on Vigorous Fella.’

‘But Only Boy smells the blood,’ Ken insisted.

He drew deeply on his roll-up and then embarked on a coughing fit. When it had stopped he blinked at us from
behind his glasses, his eyes wet from the effort. ‘You can’t stop them when they smell the blood,’ he pointed out, taking one last suck on his snout before he tossed it away. It tumbled down the old stone steps, sparks flying. ‘Get on it,’ he whispered to me.

I nodded. Pat and I went down the steps to the rails where the line of bookies were waiting, and he put our bet on: £25. First place or nothing.

‘A pony to win on Only Boy for the young scholar,’ the bookie said, and his assistant wrote it down. ‘Good luck, son.’

The noise was rising when we came back. It was that giddy, fleeting moment when everyone in the place still believed, when everyone still had a chance. The dogs were in the traps.

The metal rabbit came rattling by on its ludicrous run.

Pat offered Ken a cigarette and he shook his head. The old man smiled at the boy. The pair of them looked back at the traps. The dogs came bursting out with a metal clack and then there was the pounding of their paws on the sand, and the sound of their panting. Their tongues hung out like strange pink lizards and the cries of the men and the boys drowned out the metal clatter of the rabbit.

Only Boy had come out of the traps as if he was late for dinner. Vigorous Fella hung on to his tail but he was always falling away and by the final bend Only Boy was a length ahead. Pat and Ken jumped up and down, clinging on to each other, and in the final straight Singe Rana just smiled and shook his head with disbelief.

‘He smells the blood!’ Ken shouted. ‘He smells the blood! I told you!’

Only Boy came past the finish line and Ken turned away, his fists full of Pat’s Ramsay Mac blazer, his face shining with triumph.

Then some cloud seemed to pass across his eye and as all around us the men threw away their losing tickets, I watched the life seem to just seep out of him. Pat was still laughing, and Singe Rana slapping him on the back, the pair of them
staring at the track where the greyhounds had reached the rabbit. It was still now, and the dogs were bashing their muzzled mouths against it.

But I saw Ken Grimwood reach for the breath that did not come, and I saw his hands fall away from my son’s school blazer, and I caught him as he fell.

Much later I read about the Victoria Cross he had won at Monte Cassino. For some reason – a lack of imagination on my part – it had never before crossed my mind to find out how he had won it, just as I had never wanted to talk to my father until the day that it was too late to ever talk to him again.

And so I discovered that on Valentine’s Day 1944 Ken Grimwood had single-handedly attacked an enemy machinegun post in the rubble of the bombed monastery. Despite suffering from multiple wounds in his legs, and with all his comrades dead or wounded, he had used his Bren gun and hand grenades to kill the crew. Then he directed fire at enemy positions until he was relieved by New Zealand troops. He had done these things when he was just a few years older than my teenage son.

He had taken the lives of men, and he had saved the lives of other men. He had come very close to dying for the freedom of generations yet unborn – and he would have laughed in my face if you had put it like that. Then he would have told you that he fought for his friends, and that he fought for his survival. That’s what he would have told you, and it would have been true, but it would not have been the entire story.

You would not have looked twice or even once at this old man if you had seen him standing at a bus stop. But he had lived a life that mattered, a life of weight and importance. And that was strange.

Because when I held him in my arms on the day they closed down the old dog track, and I smelled the Old Holborn and Old Spice on him for the very last time, it felt like he weighed nothing at all.

After midnight, Pat and I stood at the vending machine sipping scalding-hot hospital tea that we did not want.

I looked at my son and I remembered taking him to see my father just before the end. Was he four or five years old? He must have been five because he had started school. But it had been a mistake.

They had worshipped each other, my son and my father, and because of some misplaced sentiment on my part I thought that they should have a chance to say goodbye. But Pat was too young and my father was too sick. It was brutal for both of them.

‘Ten years ago you were full of questions,’ I said, moving the plastic cup from one hand to the other to prevent third-degree burns. ‘What happens when we die? Do we really go to heaven or is it just an endless sleep? If God really exists, then why does he allow all this suffering?’ I nodded, both hands burning. ‘That’s what you asked me after we came to see your granddad. All the big stuff. All the big questions.’

He laughed. ‘I remember,’ he said.

But I wonder if he really did. Sometimes what we think we can remember are just stories that we have been told by our parents.

‘You grow out of all that, I guess,’ he said.

‘Asking the big questions?’ I said.

My son shook his head, and blew on his tea. ‘Expecting any answers,’ he said.

We went back to the ward.

We sat either side of his bed, watching him sleep.

There was light coming from somewhere, that hospital night-light that is as unavoidable as moonshine, and I could see his face inside the oxygen mask that was clamped over his mouth, and I could see where the straps pressed into the flesh of his cheeks.

He was in the High Dependency Unit with eleven other men, and we could hear them moaning and moving in their
sleep, and sometimes the sharp electric buzz of the metal box that called for help, and then the voices of the nurses – soothing, reassuring, endlessly practical – as they did what they could.

‘He hasn’t got long, has he?’ Pat said.

‘It only ends one way,’ I said. ‘You know that. People talk about bravery when someone’s fighting illness.’ I shook my head. ‘In the end, that’s meaningless. A life just narrows down to a point of pain, and bravery doesn’t come into it.’

Pat almost smiled. ‘If it was just about bravery,’ he said, ‘then he would get out of that bed and walk out of here tonight.’

I watched my son watching the old man’s face, and I thought I knew what he was thinking. Even with the oxygen, the air being pumped into those exhausted lungs was not enough. Ken’s chest rose and fell in that restless sleep, the breath wheezed and strained. Not enough air. Never enough air ever again. It was like watching someone drown.

Nothing anyone can do, I thought bitterly. I had called his children, and left messages on their machines. Singe Rana had gone home and would be back in the morning. All anyone could do now was to sit and wait for the end.

A nice Chinese doctor gave us a reassuring rap about making him comfortable. But that just meant pumping him with enough opiates to kill the pain. Until the pain killed him. Already his face had the ghostly pallor of morphine.

Ken moaned in his sleep. Pat reached out and held the old man’s hands. Ken twisted and settled, and the moaning stopped. Pat continued to hold his hands. It seemed to soothe the dying old man.

The boy held the old man’s hand. ‘I’ll stay with you,’ he said.

And so I was wrong.

There was still something that could be done.

The night moved slowly. I must have slept for a while because his voice jolted me awake. The fog had cleared for a moment,
that fog that comes in with the morphine and smothers the pain but also smothers everything else. Above the oxygen mask his eyes were shining with tears and fear. The terror of it, I thought. Knowing the ending is here in this bed in this room and there is nowhere to go.

Pat was staring at him, wide-eyed and alert. The boy had not slept. He leaned forward as the old man’s words came out on a trickle of breath. Their hands clawed at each other.

‘This is not me,’ the old man told us.

I stood in the hospital car park and I shivered in the dark as I watched the day creeping in. A smear of white over the East End, and then the birds starting up as a halo of light appeared above the rooftops, then the flat red glare of sunrise. It wasn’t so cold. I felt my body relax, and I realised I was tired and needed to sleep. I leaned against the hospital doors and closed my eyes. I snapped awake when a woman said my name.

‘Harry?’ she said. ‘Thanks for being here.’

Tracey and Ian. I looked at Ken Grimwood’s grown-up children and I tried to see him in them. Ian had those gimlet eyes, like little blue lasers, but his face and his body and his manner were just too soft to resemble his father. I could see more of Ken in Tracey – not so much the broad forehead, or the sharp razor-cut of a mouth – but the unforgiving, implacable hardness in her. It was there even now, even after they had been crying all night long.

‘My son’s in with him,’ I said. ‘Your dad seems to like him being there.’

Tracey nodded briskly, as if the family were taking over now, and the old man would like that even more.

‘It hasn’t always been easy,’ Tracey said. ‘In fact, it’s never been easy. My father can be a very difficult old man,’ she said, and her words got clogged up on the bitter truth of it.

Ian had started to cry again. I didn’t look at him.

‘But you can always make up for lost time,’ she told me. ‘It’s never too late, is it?’

I nodded and I watched them go through the hospital doors to see their dying father.

‘Isn’t it lovely to think so?’ I said.

Pat came out after a while.

I knew he could talk to the two adults. He could handle it. He was gracious enough, smart enough, sensitive enough. He would tell them what kind of a night their father had had. He would be able to accept their stuttered thanks. Then he would know when it was time to go. I knew he could do all of that and I wasn’t worried.

I was proud of him. Proud of the man he was growing into.

I watched him light a cigarette and suck on it hungrily, struggling to keep my eyes open. It was full summer daylight now, and getting brighter by the moment.

‘I might go in,’ he said after a while, and at first I thought he meant go back into the hospital. ‘To school,’ he said. ‘To Ramsay Mac. I might just go in today.’

I shook my head, suddenly completely awake.

‘You don’t have to,’ I said. ‘It’s nearly the end of term. You missed all your exams.’

A flash of something in those blue eyes.

‘Maybe I didn’t miss them,’ he said. ‘Maybe I strolled in and knocked off my exams, and they were all a piece of cake, and I’ll do better than all of those thickos.’

I brightened. ‘Is that what happened, Pat?’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Who cares? Exams mean nothing. They don’t get you to stay in school so you can find a better job. They get you to stay in school because it keeps the unemployment figures down.’ Then he nodded, deciding something. ‘But I want to go in today. When they are all there. All of them. Every single one of them.’