Authors: Tony Parsons
She still couldn’t wear a bra because of the scar, because it was still so raw and sore. This seemed insultingly cruel. Again I was reminded that this cancer seemed sadistically committed to making my mum feel like less of a woman than she was before.
But she dealt with all the indignity, pain and terror without complaint, with the kind of good-natured, mocking pragmatism that she had shown all her life. She went to make more tea, and she smiled at me over Kazumi’s shoulder, raising her eyebrows while giving a little nod. I knew that look. I had seen it when I brought Gina home for the first time. And Cyd, too. That look meant –
she’s a smasher
.
Kazumi was on the living-room floor with Pat. They had met before, of course, when she took his photograph in Gina’s garden, and I was both happy and worried that my son remembered her so clearly.
Would he mention Kazumi to Gina? Or, worse still, to Cyd? How would I get out of that one? Kazumi was patient and kind, playing with one of his video games, while he regarded her with a kind of delighted curiosity. I feared that my son understood more than I would wish. Not yet eight years old,
he was already wise to the ways of the world. Or at least the ways of his old man.
Is this what it would be like for Pat and me at the other end of our lives? In thirty years or so, would I be old and fighting illness, with my son all grown-up and divorced and ready to try again? And when I was fighting for my life, would my adult son still be bringing home some young woman for my approval, acting like he’d never been in love before?
Kazumi was good with Pat. They laughed together, they played together, and although I knew it was unfair to compare her to Cyd, who had the permanently thankless role of step-parent, I couldn’t help it. This just felt easier.
Maybe it would have been different if we were living together. No, definitely it would have been different. But as Kazumi and Pat played Nuke Universe Two I dreamed of running off with the pair of them. To Paris or County Kerry or anywhere far from here. I looked at my son with Kazumi and I believed that it was not too late to start again. And as I thought of the infinite kindness in my mother’s face, I also desperately wanted to travel with her, to see some other things while we still could and before it was too late. I wanted to get us all away from this place.
My mum returned with tea and biscuits and I showed her the brochures that I had brought with me. She handled them carefully, as if she had to give them back to their rightful owner.
‘Nashville, Mum. The home of country. Listen to this, Mum. We can go together. Pat, too. In one of the holidays. Kazumi, if she’s not busy with her work. A real holiday for you. Listen, Mum:
Six million people a year travel to Nashville, Tennessee, the home of country music. Enjoy the rhinestone glitter of the Grand Ole Opry, Music Row and the Country Music Hall of Fame. Experience the Nashville Sound of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Kenny Rogers and Shania Twain
. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Mum?’
But my mum was different from me. She didn’t dream of escape. She wanted to stay here.
‘Sounds lovely, darling, but I’m happy in my own home.’
She put the brochure down. And I saw that my mum was
never going to make it to Nashville. This is where we were so different. Unlike me, my mother didn’t believe that happiness was always somewhere else.
‘I like holidays,’ she said to Kazumi. ‘My husband and I, we used to go somewhere every year. Cornwall and Dorset when Harry was young. We even went to Norway a few times – I’ve got a brother who settled there after the war, met a lovely girl. I had six brothers, did Harry tell you that?’
Kazumi made suitably impressed noises. She was getting the hang of this very quickly.
‘Then Spain later, when Harry didn’t want to come with us any more,’ continued my mum. ‘But I like it here. Do you know what I mean? I like that feeling you get, that feeling you don’t get on holiday, when you’re away from everything familiar. You know, that feeling you get when you’re part of a family.’
Then my mum looked at her hands, as if admiring her bright-red nail polish, or searching for signs of lymphoedema, or maybe just looking at her wedding ring, a modest band of burnished gold that somehow contained an entire world.
You never saw anyone so happy to be having a baby.
When I came back from running in the park, she was on the stairs, laughing and crying at the same time.
‘I’m
pregnant,’
she said, like it was the best thing in the world. Then she was in my arms and later, when we had untangled our limbs, and stared at each other, laughing out loud, unable to believe our luck, after all of that she showed me the blue line on the pregnancy test – that thin, blue, indisputable line.
And in the days and weeks ahead, she kept taking more pregnancy tests, looking for that blue line again and again, as if it was too good to be true. Maybe there are other pregnant women whose favourite pastime is taking pregnancy tests, even though they already know the answer, even though they have already had the happy result confirmed dozens of times.
But Gina was the first woman that I ever really knew.
The first woman I lived with, the first woman I married. She found a source of endless wonder in her daily pregnancy tests, and I found a source of wonder in her.
That was almost nine years ago now. The world turned, and kept turning, and not only was my wife now my ex-wife, but she was about to become the ex-wife of another man. They talk about the divorce statistics, and the fluctuating failure rate of the modern marriage, but for my ex-wife and me the rate seemed to be 100 per cent.
That thin blue line represented a little heartbeat inside her, and that glimmer of life was now a boy, almost eight years old,
changing every week, growing teeth that would have to last him until his dying day, and this life he was leading – bouncing from one home to another, one school to another, one country to another, seeing marriages crumble, learning that the adult world was fragile and weak and fallible – seemed to be robbing him of his – well, I don’t know what you would call it.
Robbing him of his halo of innocence. The aura of light that was all around him as a little boy, the light that made strangers stop and smile at him in the street.
Pat is still a boy in a million. He still shines. To me he still looks like the most beautiful child in the world. But this life has robbed him of that angel glow. It has gone, and it will never come back, and while it is possible that we all lose that angel glow in the end, I can’t help feeling that Gina and I – who held that very first pregnancy test as if it was as precious as our baby himself – share most of the blame. We could have done better for our boy. But Gina’s mood was such that right now she blamed her latest ex-husband for everything.
‘Easter, right? Shouldn’t be a problem, should it? You would think that Easter doesn’t present too many possibilities for domestic strife.’
We were in the tiny kitchen of her flat, drinking some jasmine tea. This love of Japan, this yearning for the life she had given up for marriage and me and Pat – she was never going to grow out of it now, she was never going to stop missing that life she had never known.
‘But Richard objected to the Easter egg that I bought Pat. Can you believe it?’
Pat appeared in the doorway.
‘Can I watch
The Phantom Menace
on DVD?’ This to Gina.
‘No, you’re going out with your father.’
‘Just some of the special features. A few of the deleted scenes. The interview with the director. Production notes.’
‘Go on then.’ Pat disappeared. Stirring orchestral music swelled from the living room. ‘This Easter egg I bought – it was bloody lovely, Harry. Milk chocolate and covered with little hearts in red icing. A big purple bow around it. And
Richard – get this – said it was the kind of egg you buy for a
lover
, not a child. For a lover! An Easter egg for a lover! That’s what he said! He said it was the kind of egg you buy for your husband or wife. I mean, can you believe the pettiness of the man? As if I can’t buy my son whatever Easter egg I bloody well like…’
‘Are you talking to him?’
She smiled. ‘You’ve heard of the old cow syndrome?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘When a bull has mated with a cow once, he’s not interested any more. Doesn’t matter if the cow is really cute. The bull couldn’t care less. It’s called the old cow syndrome.’
‘Is that true?’
She nodded. ‘Once is enough for the bull. No matter how attractive the cow is, he’s just not interested. Well, it works the other way around for this old cow. When I’ve finished with them, I’ve finished with them.’
She made me laugh. I could hear the bitterness in her voice, and I knew that this new life was hard for her too. Because it was hard for any single parent. And – incredibly, it seemed to me – that’s what Gina was now. She was angry, sour and sad. But I felt an enormous affection for this woman who had once been closer to me than anyone in the world. A woman who would almost certainly be my best friend if we hadn’t ruined it by getting married.
And for the first time I started to think that our marriage hadn’t been a failure. Not really. We could have done better for Pat. We could have been kinder to each other. All this was true. But we were together for seven years, we produced a sweet, caring kid whose existence will make this world a better place, and we could still talk to each other. Most of the time. When she was not being an old cow and I was not full of too much old bull. So who is to say that our marriage failed? A few good years and a great kid – maybe that’s the best anyone can hope for.
Gina and I had been through the mill, and we could still sit in a room together, drinking jasmine tea while she bitched
about her future ex-husband. Deep in our history, Gina and I had something that Cyd and I lacked.
It went back to that blue line.
It went back to that day I came home from running in the park and, through laughter and tears, Gina told me that she was having our baby.
We had missed that, Cyd and I, the hope and joy and optimism that Gina saw in that blue line, that thin blue line leading to all our tomorrows, and our stake in the future.
‘Ah, sure, there’s nothing like it,’ Eamon said. ‘To love pure and chaste from afar. Nothing like it – except, perhaps, wild unprotected sex as you take her roughly from behind. Sure, that’s even slightly better.’
I was beginning to wish that I had lied. I was beginning to wish that I had never told him that Kazumi and I hadn’t consummated our relationship.
‘She understands me.’ It was true. Kazumi knew what I was going through with my mum. And my son. Even, although we didn’t like to put it into so many words, with my wife.
‘She understands you too well, Harry.’ Eamon took a slug of his mineral water, ran a hand through his thick black locks. ‘She’s playing you, man. Don’t be fooled by that sweet act. All that hello-flowers, hello-sky stuff.’
‘Hello-flowers, hello-sky?’
‘Kazumi understands that when a man gets what he wants, he never wants it again.’
We were in Eamon’s dressing room in a comedy club in the East End. The dressing room was more of a broom cupboard compared with what we were used to in television, and the club was actually an old-fashioned, pints-and-pork-scratchings, tobacco-stained pub that had belatedly tried to hitch a ride on the comedy bandwagon.
It was not a million miles away from the kind of place that Eamon had appeared in before TV came calling. What had changed was his attitude to women. The cavalier shag merchant of old was now urging caution, doing everything he
could to get me to go back to my wife and stop the madness. Addiction had done to Eamon what it does to a lot of people.
It had made him long for stability.
‘You’re messed up, Harry. You’ve screwed too many of the wrong women and screwed over too many of the right women. Like your wife.’
He had always had a soft spot for Cyd.
‘You’re on in five minutes.’
But he would not let it go. Eamon – the only one who knew anything about us, apart from the cello-playing flatmate – thought that it would be different if I could sleep with Kazumi. Get it out of my system. If Kazumi and I had sex, Eamon told me, then I would see her as just another girl. Because right now that was the one thing Kazumi was not – just another girl. But I didn’t think that sex, when it finally happened, would make any difference. Except to make it impossible to live without her.
‘Can’t you see what you’re doing, Harry? You’re making the best bit go on and on.’
‘The best bit?’
‘The chase. The pursuit. The fever of anticipation. It’s the best bit, isn’t it? If we own up, it’s much better than anything that comes later.’
‘Remind me never to have sex with you.’
‘You don’t want the good stuff to die, Harry. Like it died with Gina. And with Cyd. Your wife. And every other woman you ever knew. You want the best to last. So what do you do? You get this platonic thing going. You make the chase, the pursuit, the delay of pleasure last forever.’
‘Is that what I am doing? I don’t think so. I’ve slept with plenty of women that I didn’t love. Why can’t I love a woman that I haven’t slept with?’
Slept with –
I couldn’t stop using that inaccurate euphemism. Everything else just sounded too mechanical.
‘Look at it this way. What is it all about? The whole thing – sex and romance, men and women? It’s about delaying the moment of release. It’s about postponing pleasure. It’s about putting ecstasy on hold. Relax, don’t do it. Frankie Goes to
Hollywood knew what they were talking about, Harry. And what are you doing with this woman you haven’t slept with?’
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s obvious. By falling so hard for someone you haven’t shagged, you’re delaying the moment of release – permanently. Of course you’re mad about her. Why wouldn’t you be? You’ll be mad about her until you see that she’s flesh and blood. Just like your wife.’
‘You think I’d stop caring about Kazumi if we had sex?’