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The sound of Gina sleeping never failed to stir an enormous tenderness in me. It was the only time she ever seemed vulnerable, the only time I could kid myself that she needed me to protect her. She stirred when I slid into bed and wrapped my arm around her.
‘Good show tonight,’ she murmured.
She was warm and sleepy and I loved her like that. She had her back to me, her usual sleeping position, and she sighed as I snuggled up against her, kissing the back of her neck and letting my hand trace the length of one of those long legs that had knocked me out when I first met her. And still did.
‘Oh, Gina. My Gina.’
‘Oh, Harry,’ she said softly. ‘You don’t want to – do you?’ She brushed me with her hand. ‘Well. Maybe you do.’
‘You feel great.’
‘Pretty frisky, aren’t you?’ she laughed, turning to look at me, her eyes still half-closed with sleep. ‘I mean, for a man of your age.’
She sat up in bed, pulled the T-shirt she was wearing over her head and tossed it to the floor. She ran her fingers through her hair and smiled at me, her long, familiar body lit by the street light seeping through the blinds. It was never really dark in our room.
‘Still want me?’ she said. ‘Even after all these years?’
I may have nodded. Our lips were just about to touch when Pat began to cry. We looked at each other. She smiled. I didn’t.
‘I’ll get him,’ Gina said, as I flopped back against the pillow.
She returned to the bedroom with Pat in her arms. He was sort of gasping for breath and tearfully trying to explain his nightmare – something about big monsters – while Gina soothed him, rolling him into bed between us. As always, in the warmth of our bed his sobbing immediately stopped.
‘Make spoons,’ Gina told us.
Pat and I obediently rolled over, his warm little legs in their brushed cotton pyjamas tucked up inside the back of mine. I could hear him sniffing, but he was okay now. Gina threw one of her long thin arms over the pair of us, nestling up against Pat.
‘Go to sleep now,’ she whispered. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’
I closed my eyes, the boy between us, and as I drifted away I wondered if Gina was talking to me, or to Pat, or to both of us.
‘There are no monsters,’ she said, and we slept in her arms.
four (#ulink_b4468d90-6493-561d-9efc-749619cd2e11)
Gina’s thirtieth birthday had not been completely painless.
Her father had called her in the early evening to wish her a happy birthday – which meant she had spent all of the morning and all of the afternoon wondering if the worthless old git would call her at all.
Twenty-five years ago, just before Gina had started school, Glenn – as her dad insisted everyone call him, especially his children – walked out the door, dreaming of making it as a rock musician. And although he had been working behind the counter of a guitar shop in Denmark Street for a couple of centuries, and all the dreams of glory had receded along with his hippy hairline, he still thought he was some kind of free spirit who could forget birthdays or remember them as the mood took him.
Glenn had never made it as a musician. There had been one band with a modest recording contract and one minor hit single. You might have glimpsed him playing bass on Top of the Pops just before Ted Heath left 10 Downing Street forever.
He was very good-looking when he was younger – Glenn, not Ted Heath – a bit of a Robert Plant figure, all blond Viking curls and bare midriff. But I always felt that Glenn’s true career had been building families and then smashing them up.
Gina’s little family had been just the first in a long line of wives and children that Glenn had abandoned. They were scattered all over the country, the women like Gina’s mother, who had been considered such a great beauty back in the sixties and seventies that her smiling face was sometimes featured in glossy magazines, and the children like Gina, who had grown up in a single parent family back when it was still called a broken home.
Glenn breezed in and out of their lives, casually missing birthdays and Christmases and then turning up unexpectedly with some large, inappropriate gift. Even though he was now a middle-aged suburban commuter who worked in a shop, he still liked to think he was Jim bloody Morrison and that the rules which applied to other people didn’t apply to him.
But I can’t complain too much about old Glenn. In a way he played Cupid to me and Gina. Because what she liked about me most was my family.
It was a small, ordinary family – I’m the only child – and we lived in a pebble-dashed semi in the Home Counties which could have been in almost any suburb in England. We were surrounded by houses and people, but you had to walk for half a mile before you could buy a newspaper – surrounded by life, yet never escaping the feeling that life was happening somewhere else. That’s the suburbs.
My mum watched the street from behind net curtains (‘It’s my street,’ she would say, when challenged by my dad and me). My dad fell asleep in front of the television (‘There’s never anything on,’ he always moaned). And I kicked a ball about in the back garden, dreaming of extra time at Wembley and trying to avoid my dad’s roses.
How many families are there like that in this country? Probably millions. Yet certainly a lot less than there were. Families like us, we’re practically an endangered species. Gina acted as though my mum and my dad and I were the last of the nuclear families, protected wild life to be cherished and revered and wondered over.
To me, of course, my family was on the staid side. All that car-washing, all that peeking from behind net curtains, all the nights spent in front of the television, all the B&B holidays in Devon and Cornwall or a caravan in Frinton. I envied Gina’s exotic background – her mum a former model, her dad a would-be rock star, the pictures in the glossy magazines, even though the pictures were fading now.
But Gina remembered the missed birthdays of her childhood, a father who was always preoccupied with his more recent, more exciting attachments, the promised holidays that never happened, and her mother going to bed alone, growing old alone, getting sick alone, crying alone and finally dying alone. Gina could never be cavalier about an ordinary family. It wasn’t in her.
The first Christmas I took Gina home, I saw her choking up when my mum gave her a little present – just some smelly stuff in a basket from the Body Shop, some soap in the shape of polar bears covered in cling film – and I knew I had her. She looked at those polar bears and she was hooked.
You should never underestimate the power of the nuclear family. These days coming from an unbroken home is like having independent means, or Paul Newman eyes, or a big cock. It’s one of life’s true blessings, given to just a lucky few. And difficult to resist.
But those unbroken homes can lull their children into a false sense of security. When I was growing up, I took it for granted that every marriage would be as stable and everlasting as my mum and dad’s – including my own. My parents made it look easy. But it’s not easy at all.
Gina would probably have washed her hands of Glenn years ago if her mother had lived. But she died of breast cancer just before Gina walked into the radio station and my life, and suddenly she felt the need to salvage the few ragged bits of family she still had left.
So Glenn came to our wedding, and rolled a joint in front of my mum and dad. Then he tried to get off with one of the bridesmaids. Pushing fifty, he seemed to be under the impression that he was nineteen years old and everything was still before him. He wore leather trousers that went creak-creak-creak when he danced. And, oh, how he danced.
Gina had been so upset that Glenn couldn’t manage even the vaguest impersonation of a father that she didn’t want to send him any photographs of Pat when he was born. But I had put my foot down, insisting the man had a right to see pictures of his only grandchild. And I secretly thought that when Glenn saw our beautiful boy, he would be instantly smitten. When he forgot Pat’s birthday for the third year in a row, I realised that I now had reasons of my own to hate the old hippy bastard.
‘Maybe he’s terrified of being a grandfather,’ I said. ‘Freaked out – isn’t that what he’d call it?’
‘Yes, there’s that,’ Gina said. ‘And there’s also the fact that he’s a selfish arsehole who never grew up. Let’s not forget that.’
Unlike Gina’s mother and father, nobody had ever thought my parents were a golden couple. Nobody had ever thought that their union summed up the spirit of an era. My mum’s picture had never appeared in a glossy magazine – although her prize-winning tomatoes had once been prominently featured in the local rag. But my parents had stayed together for a lifetime. And Gina and I were going to do the same.
Since our wedding day, we had friends who had met someone, fallen in love, married, divorced and started to hate their ex-partner’s guts. That would never happen to us. Though our backgrounds were different, they meant we wanted the same thing.
I wanted a marriage that would last forever because that’s what my parents had. Gina wanted a marriage that would last forever because that was exactly what her parents had never had.
‘That’s what is so good about us,’ Gina told me, ‘our dreams match.’
Gina was mad about my parents and the feeling was mutual. They looked at this blonde vision coming up the garden path with their little grandson, and the pair of them seemed to visibly swell with pleasure, smiling shyly behind their reading glasses and geraniums.
None of them could believe their luck. My parents thought they were getting Grace Kelly. Gina thought she was getting the Waltons.
‘I’m going to take Pat to see your mum and dad,’ she said before I went to work. ‘Can I borrow your mobile phone? The battery’s flat on mine.’
I was happy to lend it to her. I can’t stand those things. They make me feel trapped.
A shiver of panic ran through the gallery.
‘The fly’s back!’ the director said. ‘We got the fly!’
There it was on the monitor. The studio fly.
Our fly was a huge beetle-black creature with wings as big as a wasp’s and a carcass so bloated that it seemed to have an undercarriage. On a close-up of Marty reading his autocue, we watched the fly lazily circle our presenter’s head and then bank off into a long slow climb.
The fly lived somewhere in the dark upper reaches of the studio, up there among the tangle of sockets, cables and lights. The fly only ever put in an appearance during a show, and up in the gallery the old-timers said that it was responding to the heat of the studio lights. But I always thought that the fly was attracted to whatever juice it is that human glands secrete when they are on live television. Our studio fly had a taste for fear.
Apart from the fly’s aerial display, Marty’s interview with Cliff was going well. The young green started off nervously, scratching his stubble, tugging his filthy dreadlocks, stuttering his way through rambling sentences and even committing television’s cardinal sin of staring directly into the camera. But Marty could be surprisingly gentle with nervous guests and, clearly sympathetic to Cliff’s cause, he eventually made the young man relax. It was only when Marty was winding up the interview that it all began to go wrong.
‘I want to thank Cliff for coming in tonight,’ Marty said, unusually solemn, brushing away the studio fly. ‘And I want to thank all his colleagues who are living in trees out at the airport. Because the battle they are fighting is for all of us.’
As the applause swelled, Marty reached out and shook his guest’s hand. Cliff held it. And continued to hold it. Then he reached inside the grubby, vaguely ethnic coat he was wearing and produced a pair of handcuffs. While Marty watched with an uncertain smile, Cliff snapped one metal ring around his own wrist and the other around Marty’s.
‘Free the birds,’ Cliff said quietly. He cleared his throat.
‘What – what is this?’ Marty asked.
‘Free the birds!’ Cliff shouted with growing confidence. ‘Free the birds!’
Marty shook his head. ‘Do you have the key for this thing, you smelly little shit?’
Up in the gloaming of the gallery we watched the scene unfold on the bank of screens shining in the darkness. The director carried on choreographing the five cameras – ‘Stay on Marty, two…give me a close-up of the handcuffs, four…’ – but I had the feeling that you only get when live television is going very wrong, a feeling which somehow combines low-grade nausea, paralysis and terrible fascination, as it sits there in the pit of your stomach.
And suddenly there was the fly, hovering for a few seconds by Cliff’s hair, then executing a perfect landing on the bridge of his nose.
‘Free the birds!’
Marty considered his arm, unable to quite believe that he was really chained to this scruffy young man whose make-up was starting to melt under the lights. Then he picked up the water jug that was on the table between them and, almost as if he were trying to swat the studio fly, smashed it into Cliff’s face. There was an eruption of blood and water. Marty was left holding just the jug’s broken handle.
‘Fuck the birds,’ he said. ‘And bugger the hole in the ozone layer.’
A floor manager appeared on camera, his mouth open with wonder, his headphones dangling around his neck.
Cliff cradled his crushed nose. Someone in the audience started booing. And that’s when I knew we were stuffed. Marty had done the one thing he wasn’t allowed to do on our kind of show. He had lost the audience.
Up in the gallery the telephones all began to ring at once, as if to commemorate my brilliant career going straight down the toilet. Suddenly I was aware of how hard I was sweating.
The studio fly appeared briefly on all the monitors, seemed to perform a victory roll, and then was gone.
‘I’m so stupid,’ Siobhan said hours later in the deserted gallery. ‘It’s all my fault. I should never have booked him. I should have guessed he wanted to use us to do something like this. He always was a selfish little bastard. Why did I do it? Because I was trying to impress everyone. And now look what’s happened.’
‘You’re not stupid,’ I told her. ‘Marty was stupid. It was a good booking. Despite what happened, it’s still a good booking.’
‘But what’s going to happen now?’ she asked, suddenly seeming very young. ‘What will they do to us?’
I shook my head and shrugged. ‘We’ll soon find out.’ I was tired of thinking about it. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’
I had sent Marty home, smuggled out of the back of the building into a minicab which was waiting by the freight entrance, telling him to talk to no one. The press would tear him to pieces. We could count on that. I was more worried about what the station would do to him. And us. I knew they needed The Marty Mann Show. But did they need it this badly?
‘It’s so late,’ Siobhan said, as we got into the lift. ‘Where can I get a cab?’
‘Where do you live?’ I asked.
I should have guessed that she would say Camden Town. She just had to be living in one of those old working-class neighbourhoods that had been colonised by the people in black. Actually, she was not that far from our little house by Highbury Corner. We were at opposite ends of the same road. But Siobhan was at the end of the Camden Road where they aspired to Bohemia. I was at the end where they dreamed of suburbia.
‘I can give you a lift,’ I said.
‘What – in your MGF?’
‘Sure.’
‘Great!’
We laughed for the first time in hours – although I couldn’t quite work out why – and took the lift down to the underground carpark where the little red car was standing completely alone. It was late. Almost two. I watched her slide her legs under the dashboard.
‘I’m not going to go on about it,’ she said, ‘but I just want to say you’ve been really sweet about tonight. Thank you for not being angry with me. I appreciate it.’
It was a gracious apology for something that she really didn’t have to apologise for. I looked at her pale Irish face, realising for the first time how much I liked her.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, quickly turning on the ignition to cover my embarrassment. ‘We’re on the same side, aren’t we?’
It was a warm summer night and the city streets were as close to empty as they were ever going to get. Within twenty minutes we were driving past the shuttered flea market, the funky ethnic restaurants and all the second-hand stores with their grotesquely oversized signs – there were giant cowboy boots, colossal rattan chairs and monster slabs of vinyl, all of them looming above the street like the visions caused by some bad drug. Gina and I used to shop around here on Saturday afternoons. It was years ago now.
Siobhan gave me directions until we pulled up in front of a large white town house that had long ago been converted into flats.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘goodnight then.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘for everything.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘Listen, I don’t think I can sleep yet. Not after tonight. Do you want to come in for a drink?’
‘A drink might keep me awake,’ I said, hating myself for sounding like a pensioner who had to scurry back to the cocoa and incontinence sheets of his sheltered accommodation.
‘You sure?’ she asked, and I was ridiculously flattered that she seemed a bit disappointed. I also knew that she wouldn’t ask again.
Go home, a voice inside me said. Decline with a polite smile and go home now.
And maybe I would have if I hadn’t liked her so much.
Maybe I would have if it hadn’t been such a rough night.
Maybe I would have if I wasn’t coming up to thirty.
Maybe I would have if her legs had been a couple of inches shorter.
‘Okay,’ I said, far more casually than I felt. ‘Sounds good.’
She looked at me for just a moment, and then we were kissing each other, her hands on the back of my neck, tugging at my hair with small, urgent fists. That’s strange, I thought. Gina never does that.
five (#ulink_0a7b5beb-e8f7-5799-80b0-8868002e60ba)
