Authors: Tony Parsons
‘Please don’t leave.’ I didn’t want it to end this way. Not any way. Something inside me recoiled from making the final, necessary break.
‘Why not? This isn’t working, Harry. Not for you. And not for me.’
‘Please…’
I made a move towards her, but she held up her hand like a traffic cop.
‘You’re not a bad guy, Harry. You’ve got a good heart. I really believe that. But we could waste our lives being kind to each other. Twenty years could go by, and we still wouldn’t know why we were together. I know you want what your parents had, Harry. I know you want a marriage like that. Well, guess what? You’re not the only one.’
‘It’s been a tough time. With my mum, with our kids, with work.’
‘The tough times should bring us closer together. I wasn’t expecting nothing but fun-packed adventure. This is a marriage, not Club Med. Sticking together through the bad times, growing stronger and closer through them – that’s what it’s all about. But not our marriage, Harry. And not us.’
I knew I had no right to feel as bad as I felt. But I couldn’t help it. Seeing Cyd packing her bags seemed like the greatest failure of my life. And what pulled at the wound was that I knew she was right. She deserved more than she was getting in this marriage.
‘I’m leaving because you can’t, Harry. Because you’re not cruel enough to go. But don’t do me any favours, okay? Don’t stay because you pity me. Don’t stay because you feel guilty. Don’t stay just because you’re not strong enough to go.’
‘I stay because I care about you.’
She smiled gently, placing her hand on my face. ‘If you really care about me, you’ll help me get out of this thing.’
‘But where will you go?’
‘Back home. To Houston. To my mother and my sisters. There’s nothing for me here any more.’
‘When?’
‘After Jim’s wedding. Peggy is looking forward to being his bridesmaid. I’m not going to take that away from her.’
I picked up a leather photo album from the suitcase on the bed, opening it at a picture that felt like it was taken a lifetime ago. Pat’s fifth birthday party, in the back garden of my parents’ house. Pat fresh-faced and gorgeous. Peggy, that crucial bit older, grave and serious as she examined the strawberry jelly in front of her. And my mum and dad, healthy and grinning for the camera and relieved that the day was going well. And Cyd – smiling, waving a fish-paste sandwich at me as I took the picture. A tall, slim, beautiful woman, a single mother who had just realised that she was not only going to get through this ordeal – meeting her boyfriend’s parents for the first time – but she was actually going to enjoy it. How young we all seemed.
‘Remember this? Remember Pat’s fifth birthday party?’
She laughed.
‘What I remember is your dad choking on a sausage roll when I told him my ex-husband was going out with a Thai stripper.’
I smiled at the memory.
‘A bit went down the wrong hole
. That was one of my old man’s favourite expressions.’
I closed the photo album and placed it back in the suitcase. ‘I’m sorry too, Cyd. I’m sorry I didn’t make you happy.’
I meant it.
‘Come here,’ she said, and I went to her, and we held each other for the longest time.
‘Still friends then?’ I said.
‘Always friends, Harry.’ She gently released me and turned back to her packing. ‘But I’d rather get out while there’s still a little love left.’
My mum had taken to wearing her Dolly Parton wig.
Losing her hair during chemo was about the only indignity that she had been spared, but the big, golden wig was now seeing active service. It framed her still-pretty face as she let Pat and me into her home, and it glinted and glistened in the sunlight like a knight’s suit of armour.
‘But what happened to your head?’ Pat asked.
‘This is my Dolly Parton hair, darling.’
‘You’re okay, are you?’ I asked. ‘Your hair hasn’t started – you know.’
‘Not at all. Fifty pounds this was in Harrods. Shame to waste it. Besides, blondes have more fun. As Rod Stewart said.’
She actually looked terrific in her wig. But as Pat busied himself with the DVD player, I sat in the back garden with my mum while she told me that wearing it had nothing to do with wanting to be blonde.
‘I’m different now,’ she said. ‘People think you’re over it. But you’re never over it. Every ache, every pain – you wonder if it’s coming back, if this is it. You get a cold and you wonder if it’s the cancer. Listen to me. I sound so sorry for myself.’
‘No, you don’t, Mum.’
‘My Dolly Parton wig,’ she said, touching the spun-gold locks. ‘It’s a way of showing the world I’m not the same. I’m different now, okay? People say to me –
back to normal, Liz?’
My mum shook her head. ‘I get so mad. I can’t pretend that this thing hasn’t happened to me. How can you tell them? How can you make them understand? Life will never be normal again. Normal has changed.’
I knew what she meant. At least, I think I did. Getting sick again was always going to be a possibility. And now it was going to be like this forever.
‘But I’m stronger too,’ my mum said. ‘Look at me in my big
hair – I go down the shops and I don’t care who looks at me. What people say – that’s the least of our problems, isn’t it? I’m living for now. Trying to live life to the full. In my own quiet way. I don’t plan ten years ahead. If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster. Now I try to appreciate what I’ve got.’ She took my hand. ‘And appreciate how much I’m loved.’
‘You’re going to be around for years, Mum. You’ve beaten this thing. You’ll see Pat grow up.’
I really wanted to believe it.
‘It’s hard for people,’ she said, as if she hadn’t heard a word I had said. ‘I think your dad felt this way. When he came back from the war. Who could he talk to – really talk to – about what he’d been through? Only men who had been through the same thing. The ones who knew.’
She showed me a leaflet. It was one of those pink and purple breast cancer leaflets. But this was a new one.
‘You can get training,’ my mum said, opening the leaflet. ‘They train you to be a counsellor. So you can talk to women who are going through the same thing you went through. And I know now that’s what I want to do. I want to help women who are fighting breast cancer. See, Harry? I can actually say it now. I couldn’t even say it before.
Cancer
. As if I had something to be ashamed of, as if it was my fault. Do you remember a young blonde girl at the hospital? A pretty thing? A bit younger than you. Two little boys, she had. Little smashers. About Pat’s age.’
I had a vague memory of a pale young woman who was in my mother’s ward.
‘Well, she died,’ my mum said, her eyes suddenly welling up.
‘You’re not going to die.’
‘I want to talk to girls like that. Women, I mean. You have to call them women now, don’t you? Well, she was just a girl to me.’
Pat came into the garden, bored with the DVD. He hadn’t wanted to come to his grandmother’s house today. Bernie Cooper had asked him over to play. I felt guilty doing it,
but I had persuaded my son that we had to be with his grandmother now. Because my mum was right. Normal had changed. And I had no way of knowing how long we had left.
‘My two beautiful boys,’ she said, throwing open her arms. ‘Hug me. The pair of you. Come on, I’m not going to break.’
So we hugged her, and we laughed as we buried our faces in that Dolly Parton wig, and we knew that at that moment we loved her more than anyone on the face of the earth.
Pat wandered back to the living room, and my mum smiled with sadness and happiness all at once, patting my shoulder.
‘Your dad would be proud of you.’
I laughed. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘Because you’ve taken good care of me through all this. Because you love your son. Because you’re a good man. You always compare yourself to your dad and find yourself lacking. And you’re wrong, Harry. No matter how tall your father is, you still have to do your own growing.’
‘But how did you and Dad
do
it, Mum? How do you love someone for a lifetime? How do you make a marriage work for all that time?’
My mum didn’t even have to think about it.
‘You have to keep falling in love,’ she said. ‘You just have to keep falling in love with the same person.’
You always took your shoes off at Gina’s, so the moment Pat let us in with his own personal key, I saw them immediately – great big size tens forcing everything else off the
WELCOME
mat, a bit down at heel and in need of a good polish, more like landing craft than shoes.
A new boyfriend, I guessed. No surprise there. She was never going to be alone for very long. Not looking like that. Still.
And as I helped Pat out of his coat, I thought what I so often thought when I was around my ex-wife.
What about my boy?
If Gina starts seeing someone new, then what does that mean
for Pat? Will the guy like my son? Or will he see him as an irritation?
Gina appeared by our side, looking red-faced and flustered. I felt a flash of irritation at my ex-wife. What the hell was she doing in there with that big-foot guy?
‘Granny’s got new hair,’ Pat told her.
‘That’s nice, darling,’ she said, not listening to him, looking at me looking at the landing craft.
‘It’s yellow,’ Pat said.
‘Lovely.’
Pat was out of his coat and kicking off his shoes.
‘You go inside. Someone in there wants to see you. I want to talk to your daddy.’
Pat ran up the stairs to the living area of the flat. I could hear a man’s baritone talking to him, and Pat responding with his sweet, high voice.
‘Richard,’ Gina said.
‘Richard?’
‘Looks like we’re going to have another crack at it.’
Upstairs I could hear Richard and Pat exchanging stilted small talk.
What about my boy?
‘You surprise me, Gina.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes. What about the old cow theory?’
‘The old bull theory.’
‘Whatever it was. I thought that when you were finished with them, you were really finished with them.’
She laughed. ‘Maybe I was thinking of you, Harry.’
I took a breath, let it pass.
‘What happened?’
She shrugged. ‘I guess I felt isolated. And a little bit scared, maybe. You know what it’s like when you’re living on your own with a child.’
‘Yes, I know what it’s like.’
‘You get lonesome. You do. No matter how much you love them, you get lonesome. And it’s hard to meet new people. It’s
really hard, Harry. And I’m not even sure I want to go through all that crap. Dates – God, spare me from dates. Who’s got the energy for all that crap at our age?’
‘I bumped into Richard. Did he tell you?’
She nodded, but there was nothing in her eyes to indicate that she knew about Kazumi and me. So Richard had kept my secret. Or perhaps he truly didn’t care.
All he wanted was his wife back.
‘It wasn’t so bad between us,’ Gina said. ‘The move was tough. And trying for a baby and not getting one – that was even tougher. But we’re going to have a crack at IVF.’
‘Fertility treatment?’
She nodded. ‘They give me drugs to produce a large number of eggs. Richard has to – you know – masturbate.’
Shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for Richard.
I stared at her. One minute she was finished with this guy, and the next minute her ovaries were working overtime to have his baby. I didn’t understand her at all. Is who we share our life with really so random? Is it so easily torn down, and then put back together?
Gina mistook my silence for doubts about fertility treatment.
‘It’s all the rage these days, Harry. In some fertility clinics, the really good ones, you have a better chance of conception with IVF than you have with regular old-fashioned shagging. It’s true.’
‘I don’t know, Gina. I heard IVF treatment is expensive. And doesn’t always work.’
‘Maybe going through it will make us stronger. Make us a real husband and wife. Isn’t that what we all want?’
‘But you don’t love him any more, Gina. You can’t just be with someone – be married to them, have a baby with them – because you’re feeling a bit lonesome.’
‘Can’t you? What am I supposed to do? Wait for Mr Right to come along? Not enough time, Harry, not enough energy. Sometimes this is what I think – the person you’re with is just the person you’re with. That’s all. End of story. It’s no more than that.’
‘You old romantic.’
‘It’s not so bad. You’re partners. You stick together. You support each other. So it’s not like one of the old songs – so what? A grown-up can’t go around falling in love all the time like some dumb-ass teenager. What kind of mess would that make of your life?’
‘You don’t choose who you fall in love with.’
‘How naïve you sound. Of course you choose, Harry. Of course you do.’
I liked to think that we were friends. And I liked to think that I still cared about her. That I would always care about her. But this caring for my ex-wife, it only went so far. In the end, my thoughts always came back to the same place.
‘What about my boy?’
‘Your boy?’ she said. ‘Your boy, Harry? You should have thought of your boy before you banged some little slut from your office, shouldn’t you?’
And all at once I saw that there’s no one on this planet more distant than someone you were once married to.
‘Man gets on a crowded flight,’ said Eamon, roaming through the smoky gloaming. ‘Plane’s totally full. But the seat next to him, the seat next to him is empty.’ Hand to mouth, little Woody Allen cough. ‘Thinks – wonder who I’m going to be sitting next to? As you do, right? Then the most beautiful woman he ever saw in his life comes down the aisle. The face of an angel and legs up to her neck. Sure enough, she sits right down in the seat next to our man.’ Hunched in the spotlight. The crowd paying attention. ‘The guy finally works up the courage to talk to her. “Excuse me? Excuse me? Where are you headed?” “Oh,” says she, “I’m off to the Kilcarney Sex Convention. I lecture on the subject. Dispel some of the myths surrounding sex.” “Like what?” “Well, for example,” says she, “many people believe that black men are more generously endowed than other men. And in fact it is Native American men who are more likely to reveal that physiological trait. And then popular wisdom has it that French men make the best lovers. Whereas statistics show that Greek men are far more likely to give sexual pleasure to their partners.” Then she blushed. “But I’m telling you all this, and I don’t even know your name.” The guy reached out his hand. “Tonto,” he said. “Tonto Papadopolous.”’