He got up from the table. ‘You’re almost forty,’ he said, and exhaled the endlessly exasperated sigh that only a teenager can make. He went off to the kitchen and I put the champagne unopened on the table. It was true. We were on air tomorrow. Opening a bottle at midnight was possibly not the best idea I ever had.
Pat came back with a pint glass of water and gave it to me.
‘Dehydration,’ I said, trying to worm my way back into his good books. ‘My body’s dehydrated.’
‘And your brain,’ he said dryly, and he began collecting his books. I saw that he had been waiting up for me. Then he thought of something. ‘Someone called. He wanted you. An old man. He didn’t leave a message.’
‘That’s strange,’ I said. ‘We don’t know any old people, do we?’
‘Apart from you, you mean?’
I chugged down some water and followed him as he went around turning off lights, and checking locked doors.
I watched him making sure we were safe, and with my wife and our daughters sound asleep upstairs, for a few moments it felt as though the family had once again boiled down to just the two of us. The last light went out.
I did not mention his mother.
The next day, when he was back from school, we walked to the large expanse of grass at the end of our street.
The recreation ground, it was called with no apparent irony. There was a patch of concrete where some lost civilisation had once built an adventure playground, brimming with swings and slides and seesaws and all manner of wonders. But that was all long gone, destroyed by vandals and health and safety officers, and now the recreation ground was just a place to boot your ball, or take your dog for a dump, or get your head kicked in after dark.
‘Three and in?’ I said, balancing the football on my forehead, feeling some flakes of dried mud fall away.
Pat was sitting on the grass, lacing his Predator boots. ‘Just take shots at me,’ he said.
We took off our tracksuit tops, threw them down for goalposts and I smiled as Pat went through some stretching exercises. He was tall for his age, all long-limbed awkwardness, and he always seemed surprised at how far and how fast he had grown. But he looked like what he wanted to be. He looked like a goalkeeper. And I really thought he would make the school team this year but I knew better than to mention it.
Some things are too big to talk about.
I curled a shot at him and he leapt up and snatched it from the air. There was a round of mocking applause and we turned and saw a group of teenagers who had annexed the two benches that were the highlight of the recreation ground. They were maybe a bit older than Pat. Or perhaps just wilder. A couple of girls among a group of boys. One of them was a lot bigger than the rest, built more like a man than a boy, and the shadow of his beard looked all wrong above his Ramsay Mac blazer. They leered at us, roosting on the back of the benches with their feet where their baggy-arsed trousers were meant to go.
Pat rolled the ball out to me and I drove it back at him, low and hard. He got down quickly, his body behind the ball. More applause, and I turned to look at them again. In the fading light, their cigarettes glowed like fireflies.
‘That’s William Fly,’ he said. ‘The big one.’
‘Just ignore them,’ I said. ‘Come on.’
Pat threw the ball out to me and I trapped it, took another touch, and banged it back. Pat skipped across his goalmouth and hugged the ball to his midriff. No applause this time, and I looked up to see the little group had wandered off to the knackered strip of shops that lay beyond the recreation ground.
‘William Fly,’ Pat said. ‘He nearly got expelled for putting something down the toilet.’
‘What did he put down the toilet?’
‘The physics teacher,’ he said, bouncing the ball at his feet. ‘William Fly is famous.’
He kicked the ball back to me.
‘No,’ I said, watching it coming. ‘Winston Churchill is famous. Dickens. Beckham. David Frost. Justin Timberlake is famous. This guy is not famous. He’s just a hard nut.’
‘Same thing,’ Pat said. ‘Same thing when you’re at school.’
He was on the balls of his feet, springing around the goalmouth because he saw me flicking up the ball, getting ready to unload my legendary volley. I laughed, happy to be here, and happy to be alone with my son.
The ball came off my instep with a crisp smack. Pat threw himself sideways, stretched at his full length, but he couldn’t get to it.
Then he went to get the ball while I ran round in circles in the fading light, trying to avoid what irresponsible dog owners had left behind, my arms held aloft in triumph.
Cyd went to the foot of the stairs and called their names. All three of them. Pat. Peggy. Joni. My kid. Her kid. Our kid. Although after ten years we thought of them all as our kids.
From the kitchen I heard chairs being shoved back from computers, doors slamming, laughter. A high, tiny voice struggling to make its point amid two bigger voices. And then a small herd of elephants – our mob coming down for dinner. Cyd came back and watched me trying to chop up parsley without removing a few fingers.
‘Did you tell him yet?’ Cyd said.
I shook my head. ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘The time wasn’t right.’
‘He has to see her,’ she said. ‘He has to know she’s back. He has to see his mother.’
I nodded. I wanted him to see her. I wanted it to be great.
Cyd poured the pasta into a colander and looked at me through the steam.
‘Are you afraid of him getting hurt, Harry? Or are you afraid of losing him?’
‘Can’t I be afraid of both?’
Our mob came into the dining room. Pat. Peggy. Joni. This was a bit of an event because we rarely ate dinner together.
My radio show, Marty Mann’s Clip Round the Ear, went on air at ten, four nights a week, so I was usually around for dinner. But at seven Joni had the social life of Paris Hilton, a constant round of playdates and dance lessons. Peggy had a best friend – the kind of giddy, isolationist, all-consuming friendship you have at fifteen – and was often at the friend’s house, which wasn’t a problem just as long as she observed the curfew. Pat had Lateral Thinking and football. And Cyd’s catering business, Food Glorious Food, meant she was sometimes going out to work when everyone else was coming home.
So often, only bits and pieces of the family sat down for dinner together. But not tonight. Tonight we were eating together, and Cyd had made spaghetti meatballs, because it always felt like celebration food. So I naturally felt a spike of irritation when the doorbell rang just as I was about to take off my apron.
Here’s one for the show, I thought, as my family began without me. Reasons to be angry, number ninety-three. Someone ringing your doorbell when you never asked them to.
There was an old man on my doorstep, eyes bright behind his glasses.
He was short but too broad in the shoulder to be thought of as small. And immaculate – everything about him was smart, in an old-fashioned, Sunday-best sort of way. He was wearing a shirt and tie with a dark blazer and lighter trousers. Clean-shaven and smelling of things that I thought that they had stopped making years ago. Old Spice and Old Holborn.
The neatness of this old man – that’s what I noticed most of all. Even at that first moment of seeing him, that was what I saw above everything – that military bearing, tidy and trim and ship-shape to the point of fanaticism.