Authors: Tony Parsons
‘Look at the legs on that,’ one of them said.
‘They go all the way up to her neck,’ said the other.
‘No arse, though.’
‘Flat as a pancake.’
‘And no tits.’
‘You don’t get tits with legs like that.’
‘You need a nice arse though.’
‘I’ll give you that.’
‘You need either tits or arse, right, even with legs like that. Because you need something to hold on to when you start your ascent.’
‘Great legs, though.’
‘Get those wrapped around your neck, mate, you’ll never want to come up for air.’
They chortled in perfect harmony, watching my wife walk away.
I stared at the pair of them, my face burning. I kept staring, wanting them to notice me.
They didn’t notice me.
Then all the peanuts were gone and, after rifling in the salty bowls for a bit, they sloped off, looking for more tasty snacks. I went looking for my wife. When I caught up with her she was handing out her sashimi to a bunch of women I vaguely recognised. They were helping themselves to raw fish while simultaneously managing to ignore Cyd completely. These bloody people. Who did they think she was? Nobody?
Cyd smiled at me. She had a lovely face. She was always going to have a lovely face, no matter how many years went by. But I couldn’t smile back at her.
‘Get your coat. We’re leaving.’
‘Leaving? I can’t leave. Not yet, babe. What’s wrong? You look all—’
‘I want to go.’
‘But I’ve got to work. You know that.’
The women were starting to stare at us. They were holding slivers of salmon and tuna in their podgy fingers. I took Cyd’s arm and pulled her aside. Her silver tray banged into someone’s back. The sashimi wobbled precariously.
‘I mean it, Cyd. I’m going home. Right now. And I want you to come with me. Please?’
She wasn’t smiling any more.
‘You might be going home, Harry, but I’m working. What happened? Come on. Tell me. Did someone say something about Eamon? Is that why you’re upset? Forget about Eamon. Marty’s right – get something new going for yourself.’
I wanted to tell her – don’t waste your time here. I know exactly what these men are like, because I’m one of the bastards myself. But she wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. She was all innocence, she thought it was all about raw fish and chicken on a stick and people appreciating you for doing a good job.
‘Please, Cyd. Come with me.’
‘No, Harry.’
‘Then do what you want.’
‘I will.’
So I left her at the party, left her feeding all those hard, empty faces, and went out to look for a cab. I left her there, all by herself, even though I knew she was too good for that place, and too good for those people.
When I got home Peggy had been in bed for hours. Sally was on the sofa, idly channel-surfing with one hand and soothing her baby in her carrycot with the other. Soothing Precious. That was the baby’s name. Precious. Sally asked me how the evening had gone – she meant for Food Glorious Food, not the station – and I told her that everything was fine. Then I got her a minicab.
Luke Moore drove my wife home. By then I was pretending to be asleep, lying on my side, breathing easily, trying to fake the soft rhythms of sleep. I listened to my wife quietly undressing
in the dark, heard her clothes slipping from her long, slim body, and inside my Marks & Spencer pyjamas, my heart ached for her. Then we lay in the darkness for a long time, trying hard not to disturb each other.
Back to back in the marital bed, and never quite touching.
‘Your heart is a small miracle, Mr Silver,’ said Dr Baggio. ‘A small miracle.’
My wife is having an affair, I thought. She’s fucking this guy. I just know it.
‘The heart is a pump about the size of a fist,’ said my doctor, inflating the strap she had wrapped around my arm. I could feel it tightening against my skin. ‘We all have blood pressure. It’s simply the pressure created by the constant pumping of blood around the body. In a healthy adult a normal blood pressure is 120 over 80. Yours is…goodness.’
It happens. You promise to love each other forever. You really mean it. You plan to sleep with no one else for the rest of your life. Then time wears away at your love, as the tide wears away a rock. And in the end your feelings – her feelings – are not what they were once upon a time. Other people are let in, like light in a darkened room. You can’t get them out again. Not once you have let them in. What can you do once you have let them in?
‘You can put your shirt back on,’ my doctor said.
She didn’t want sex any more. Not with me. Not even with one of my magic condoms. Oh, we still had our Saturday night shag, which was sometimes postponed to Sunday or Monday if the catering business was booming. But I felt as if she was just doing it to keep me quiet. That it was easier to lie back and think of nothing than argue about it. Too tired, she always said. Yeah, right. Tired of me. It wasn’t even the sex I missed most.
It was all the other stuff. It was the being loved.
‘There are lots of things you can do to control your blood pressure,’ my doctor said. ‘You can reduce your intake of alcohol. Lose weight. Increase physical activity. Most important of all, you can change your wife.’
Change my wife?
Things weren’t that bad. I wanted my marriage to last. I wanted to get it right this time. Get it right once and forever. ‘But I love my wife.’
‘Not your wife. Your
life
. Don’t let things get to you. Find time for yourself. Control your anxieties. You need to change your life, Mr Silver. You only get one of them.’
Life. Not wife.
You obviously get more than one of those.
The heart is a small miracle.
‘I liked the way it made me feel,’ Eamon said. ‘Once upon a time. And I wanted to have that feeling again.’
We were walking in the grounds of a private hospital an hour’s drive south of London. Eamon talked about cocaine as we kicked our way through the leaves. He was only halfway through a 28-day detox programme, but he was already looking fitter than I had seen him since he was fresh from the Edinburgh Festival. He was meant to be playing football this afternoon – substance abusers versus the manic depressives – but the match had been cancelled. The manic depressives were too depressed.
‘We have these group sessions. Such stories, Harry. You’d love it. All these alcoholics and cokeheads and junkies telling you where it all went wrong. Every kind of addict under the sun. Some of them are very articulate. And do you know what I heard someone say this morning?
Alcohol gave me wings to fly—and then it took away the sky
. Isn’t that great? That’s exactly how I feel about coke.’
‘But that still doesn’t explain it. You’ve got this great life—money, fame, weather girls. And you screw it all up for a feeling. Not even a feeling – the memory of a feeling.’
‘Come on, Harry. I know you’re not a drinking man. And I know that drugs are not your thing. But it’s the same for you.’
‘How’s that?’
‘It’s the same for you with women.’
And I saw that he was right. That’s why I wanted Cyd to
be the woman I first met, that’s why I had gone to Kazumi’s door. I was hooked on a feeling too.
The remembrance of the greatest feeling in the world.
It wasn’t the rush of cocaine or the fog of alcohol, it was the feeling I got when I was starting with a woman. Passion, sex, romance, feeling alive, feeling wanted – it was all of those things, wrapped up in a fleeting moment of time.
I liked the way it made me feel.
And I couldn’t help it. I wanted that feeling again.
Even if it meant trouble galore.
Jim Mason resembled a male model just starting to go to seed.
The chiselled features were beginning to show signs of a double chin, and under the leather jacket the beer paunch was developing like a promising marrow. But he still looked capable of causing trouble. Cyd’s ex-husband arrived to pick up his daughter.
‘Hello, Harry. How you doing, mate? Peggy ready to rock and roll?’
It was one of those scenes that I had never imagined playing, an event where I would love to have known the correct etiquette. This man had broken the heart of the woman I loved. But if he hadn’t broken her heart, my wife and I wouldn’t be together. Should I thank him or thump him? Or both?
Cyd was once crazy about this guy, and behind her back he had jumped on the bones of every Asian woman who would let him from Houston to Hoxton. My true love had done everything to make it work with this creep. She had followed him to London when it was clear that America was indifferent to his existence, she had supported him when he fell off his motorbike and mangled his stupid leg, and she even gave him a second chance after she had met me. And of course she had given birth to his child, and then raised her alone. I should have hated Jim Mason. But I found that I just couldn’t quite manage hate. Only the dull ache of jealousy.
The real reason he made my flesh crawl wasn’t because he had treated Cyd so badly. It was because he had won her heart
without even trying, and shattered it so casually. But I couldn’t loathe him, this man who was my wife’s other husband.
He was always so nice to me.
‘Cyd out working? A woman’s work is never started, right? Only kidding, mate, only kidding. Give her my best. My little princess ready?’
‘Daddy!’
Peggy threw aside her Lucy Doll Ballerina and charged her dad. Jim scooped her up and placed a loud kiss on the top of her dark hair as she wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, hugging him with theatrical abandon. They saw each other so sporadically, this dad and daughter, that their reunions were always emotional affairs, resembling a prisoner of the Vietcong being reunited with his family. But I was never quite sure if the emotion was forced or not. Prolonged separation can sometimes make a parent and child act with the self-consciousness of strangers.
I saw them to the door. Their routine was always the same. A ride on Jim’s motorbike to KFC or Pizza Express. At Peggy’s age, I don’t know if it was even legal. Jim wasn’t the kind to care. Once Cyd had protested that Peggy was a bit too young for motorbikes, and Jim had stormed out, leaving his daughter in bitter tears. He didn’t see her for three months. After that, the joy rides were never questioned.
Jim’s visits traditionally involved the purchase of a large, inappropriate, stupendously useless toy. Stuffed bears that were bigger than Peggy herself were a favourite.
When Peggy had gone I realised with a jolt of alarm that she had forgotten her child-sized helmet. Cyd had laid down strict rules for motorbike riding.
Always wear a helmet.
Hold on tight to Daddy.
No riding in the rain.
No long journeys.
No motorways.
I dashed out to the street but the bike – a huge brute of a Norton – was already roaring away, Peggy clinging on
to her dad’s leather-clad back, the hair on her bare head flying.
I chased down the middle of the street, shouting their names, the kid’s helmet in my hands. But they didn’t hear me. It was a long straight road and I watched Jim’s taillights receding, cursing him for being so thoughtless.
And then at the last moment they turned back.
I stood in the street as the bike barrelled towards me, my heart filling my chest with that boiling feeling you get when your child has been placed in unnecessary danger. The Norton skidded to a halt in front of me, Jim and Peggy grinning, their faces flushed with excitement. I jammed the helmet down on her head.
‘You fucking idiot, Jim.’
He shook his handsome head in disbelief.
‘What did you call me?’
‘You heard. And what did your mum tell you, Peggy? What’s the most important rule about the bike? What’s rule number one?’
Neither of them was smiling now, and the way they were looking at me from under their helmets made their faces seem almost identical. I always thought that Peggy resembled Cyd. But I saw now that she was just as much Jim’s child.
‘Come on. What did Mummy say, Peggy? What did Mummy tell you again and again? What must you always remember?’
‘Hold on tight to Daddy,’ my stepdaughter said.
It’s so difficult for the step-parent to strike a balance between caring too much and caring too little.
The horror step-parents – the ones who end up in court, or in newspapers, or in jail – don’t think about it. They don’t care. The child of their partner is a pain, a chore, and a living reminder of a dead relationship. But what about the rest of us? The ones who are desperate to do the right thing?
There’s nothing special about us. We are not better human beings because we have taken on the parenting of a kid who is not our biological child. You get into these things without thinking
about them, or if you think about it at all, you imagine that it will work itself out somehow. Love and the blended family will find a way. That’s what you think.
But the blended family has all the problems of the old family, and problems that are all its own. You can’t give your stepchild nothing but kindness and approval, because no parent can ever do that. And yet you do not have the right to reproach a stepchild the way a real parent does.
I had never raised a hand to Pat.
But I couldn’t even raise my voice to Peggy.
Step-parents – the ones who are trying their best – want to be liked. Parents – real parents – don’t need to be liked.
Because they know they are loved.
It is a love that is given unconditionally and without reservation. A parent has to do very bad things to squander the love of their child. A step-parent just doesn’t get that kind of love.
And, increasingly, I believed that there was nothing you could do to earn it.
I was either too soft – desperate to be liked, starving for a few scraps of Peggy’s approval – or I tried to pass myself off as the real thing. Passing, that was the step-parent’s major crime. Pretending to be something I wasn’t, and could never be.
I knew, in my calmer moments, that it was not easy for Richard. I knew that the things he wanted for my son – museums, Harry Potter, tofu, even the new life in another country – were not meant as punishments. I didn’t hate Richard because of those things. I hated him because he had taken my son away from me. Who did he think he was? He wasn’t Pat’s father.