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Pat was comfortable in the house where I grew up. Something wound tight inside him seemed to relax out here. He spent the best part of his childhood in the old house. No parents fighting, crying, going their separate ways. No great upheavals or infidelities or thrown mobile phones out here in the sprawl where the town finally gives way to the countryside. Just Star Wars videos and cups of tea, and going to the fridge without having to ask anyone’s permission. Sweet, simple hours spent sitting on the floor listening to familiar voices singing old songs in the back garden. And every moment of those easy days filled with an uncomplicated, unconditional love. First from both of my parents, and now from just my mother. The love remained.
‘He’s the man of my dreams. Aren’t you, gorgeous?’
My son smiled patiently, and wandered off to rummage around upstairs. His oldest toys were out here, many of them too young for him now. A collection of Star Wars videos of course, and plenty of stuff he would no longer watch, wrestling tapes and cartoons from Disney, gathering dust, marking the years. He had a bedroom here, stacks of clothes, and a life. He could have followed the path from television to fridge and back again with his eyes closed.
Everything was easy out here. The stilted conversations we often had over our Sunday Happy Meals were not needed. We slumped in front of the TV, my son and I, while my mum made lunch, which she called dinner, or dinner, which she called tea, or a cup of tea, which she called a nice cup of tea.
She refused our help with used cups, cutlery and dishes. Pat and I had been well trained by the women in our lives, and we did our bit around the houses we lived in without even thinking about it, without being asked.
But my mum would not hear of it. In her own home, she laid down the rules and one rule said that she did the lot. She was the boss who served. Her word was law, her way of doing things was not negotiable. Sometimes I watched her through the little serving hatch, singing a Dolly Parton song, clanging about in the kitchen, and I wanted to hug her in that fierce, unembarrassed way that my son sometimes hugged her.
We loved her, and we loved it out here because we did not have to think about anything. What a relief – to just switch off brains that had been taught to negotiate the marshland of divorce, remarriage and blended families. Can he have a Coke? Can he watch a video? Can he leave the table and does he really have to eat all of those lentils? How good it is to not have to think about what is good for you. But it never lasts.
After our star-crossed trip to Paris, my timekeeping became meticulous. Getting back to London, getting Pat back to his mother, I always allowed for road works on the A127, pile-ups on the M25, Sunday afternoon football in north London. We just couldn’t be late again.
‘Time to go home, darling,’ I told my son. And he gave me a look that you should never see on the face of a seven-year-old. More than anywhere, said the look on my son’s face, this place feels like my home.
So what’s that other place?
We left my mum just as it was getting dark, and I knew that soon the lights would be on and would stay on all night long, while my mum lay in bed humming Dolly Parton songs to keep her spirits up, and my father’s old suits waited in the wardrobe, far too precious to be given away to Oxfam.
five (#ulink_5021817f-aa99-5d2c-aa1b-6c361c8c9e4a)
Gina was waiting for me in the school car park.
She must have come straight from the office because she was in a two-piece business suit, wearing heels and carrying a battered old briefcase. She looked great, like some fashion editor’s idea of a working woman, although thinner than I ever remembered her being. My ex-wife was still beautiful, still a woman who turned heads in the street. But she looked more serious than she ever did in her twenties.
‘Sorry I’m late, Gina.’
‘It’s okay. We’re both early.’ She gave me a peck on the cheek, squeezing my arm. She had forgiven me for Paris, I guess. ‘Let’s go and see teacher, shall we?’
We went into the main school building and walked down corridors that seemed unchanged from the ones I remembered from all those years ago. Children’s paintings on the wall, the aroma of institutional cooking, distant shouts of physical exercise. Echoes and laughter, the smell of disinfectant and dirt. We made our way to the office of the headmistress without having to ask for directions. This was not the first time we had been summoned to our son’s school.
Pat’s headmistress, Miss Wilkins, was a pale-faced young woman with a white-blonde crop. With her Eminem haircut and funky trainers, she didn’t look old enough for the top job, she just about looked old enough to be out of school herself. But promotion came fast around here. Pat’s school was ringed by tough estates, and many teachers just couldn’t stand the pace.
‘Mr and Mrs Silver. Come in.’
‘Actually it’s Mr Silver and Mrs McRae,’ Gina said. ‘Thank you.’
Miss Wilkins softened us up with the usual comforting preamble – our son was a lovely boy, such a sweet nature, adored by teachers and children alike. And then came the reason why we were here.
He was completely and totally out of control.
‘Pat is never rude or violent,’ said Miss Wilkins. ‘He’s not like some of them. He does everything with a smile.’
‘He sounds like Mr Popularity,’ I said. I could never stop myself defending him. I always felt the need to put in a good word.
‘He would be. If only he could stay in his seat for an entire lesson.’
‘He goes walkabout,’ Gina said, nervously biting her thumbnail, and for a second it was as if she had been brought here because of her own misbehaviour. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? He just wanders around the class. Chatting to other children. Chatting away while they are trying to do their work.’ She looked at me. ‘We’ve been here before. More than once.’
‘May I ask you a personal question?’ Miss Wilkins said. She may have had a different kind of haircut, but she still sounded like every teacher I ever knew.
‘Of course,’ said Gina.
A beat.
‘Was it a very stressful divorce?’
‘Aren’t they all?’ I said.
We followed Miss Wilkins down the corridor. There was a small square pane of glass in the thick slab of every classroom door. Like the spyhole in a prison cell. The albino head of Miss Wilkins bobbed in front of one of them for a moment and then she stood back, smiling grimly, raising an index finger to her lips. Gina and I peered through the window into our son’s classroom.
I spotted him immediately. Even surrounded by thirty other six- and seven-year-olds, some of them with the same shaggy mop top, all of them in the same green sweater that passed for a uniform in these parts, I couldn’t miss him.
Pat was in the middle of the class, bent over a drawing, just like all the other children. And I thought about how shiny his hair always looked, like something from a conditioner commercial, even when it needed what my mum would call a good old wash.
On the blackboard the teacher had sketched a cartoon of planet earth, a chalky globe lost in all that black space, the blurry lines of the continents just about recognisable. She was writing something above it. Our World, it said.
The children were all drawing intently. Even Pat. And for a moment I could kid myself that everything was all right. There was something moving about the scene. Because of course these inner-city children came from every ethnic group on the planet. But the trouble was the drawing my son was bent over belonged to someone else. He was helping a little girl to colour it in.
‘Pat?’ the teacher said, turning from the blackboard. ‘Excuse me. I’ve asked you before to stay at your own desk, haven’t I?’
He ignored her. Still radiating that rakish charm, peering out shyly from under that golden fringe, he eased between the desks, peering over the shoulders of his classmates, flashing smiles and muttering comments to children who were all concentrating on planet earth.
‘Yes,’ Gina said, and I didn’t need to look at her to know that she was holding back the tears. ‘In answer to your question. It was a very stressful divorce.’
We did these things together.
There was no question that only one of us would go to the school, get lectured to by the surprisingly prim punk headmistress, and have to fret about our son all alone.
We were both his parents, no matter where he lived, and nothing could ever change that fact. That was our attitude.
Gina was miles better at all of this stuff than me – not feeling the need to be defensive about Pat, always communicating with the staff, opening up about our personal problems, giving anyone who was vaguely curious a guided tour of our dirty laundry, which was surely getting a bit threadbare and old by now. And I took it to heart a lot more than she did. Or at least I let it depress me more. Because deep down, I also blamed the divorce for Pat’s problems at school.
‘Cheer up, Harry, he’ll grow out of it,’ Gina told me over coffee. This is what we did. After being dragged along to the school every few weeks or so we went to a small café on Upper Street. We used to come here in the old days, before we had Pat. Now these mid-morning cappuccinos were the extent of our social life together. ‘He’s a good kid. Everybody likes him, he’s smart. He just has difficulty settling. He finds it hard to settle to things. It’s not attention deficiency syndrome, or whatever they call it. It’s just a problem settling.’
‘Miss Wilkins thinks it’s our fault. She thinks we’ve messed him up. And maybe she’s right, Gina.’
‘It doesn’t matter what Miss bloody Wilkins thinks. Pat’s happiness – that’s all that matters.’
‘But he’s not happy, Gina.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He hasn’t been happy since – you know. Since we split up.’
‘Change the record, Harry.’
‘I mean it. He’s lost that glow he had. Remember that beautiful glow? Listen, I’m not blaming you or Richard.’
‘Richard’s a very good stepfather.’ She always got touchy if I suggested that perhaps divorce had not been an unalloyed blessing in our child’s life. ‘Pat’s lucky to have a stepfather like Richard who cares about his education, who doesn’t want him to spend all his time with a light sabre and a football, who wants him to take an interest in museums.’
‘And Harry Potter.’
‘What’s wrong with Harry Potter? Harry Potter’s great. All children love Harry Potter.’
‘But he has to fit in, the poor little bastard. Pat, I mean. Not Harry Potter. He has to fit in everywhere he goes. Can’t you see that? When he’s with you and Richard. When he’s with me and Cyd. He always has to tread carefully. You can admit that, can’t you?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘The only time he’s relaxed is with my mum. Children shouldn’t have to fit in. Our little drama has given Pat a walk-on part in his own childhood. No child deserves that.’
She didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t blame her. I would like to have thought that our son’s trouble at school was nothing to do with us, and everything to do with the fact that he was a lazy git. But I just couldn’t believe it. The reason he had ants in his pants at school was because he wanted to be liked, he needed to be loved. And I knew that had something to do with me and my ex-wife. Maybe it had everything to do with us. How could I not wonder what it would have been like if we had stayed together?
‘Do you ever think about the past?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Do you ever miss us?’ I said, crossing the line between what was acceptable and what was not. ‘Just now and again? Just a tiny bit?’
She smiled wearily at me over her abandoned cappuccino. There was no warmth left in either the coffee or her smile.
‘Miss us? You mean staying home alone while you were playing the big shot out in the glamorous world of television?’
‘No, that wasn’t really –’
‘You mean going to your launches, and your parties, and your functions and being treated like the invisible woman because I looked after our son, instead of presenting some crappy little TV show?’
‘Well, what I was actually –’
‘People thinking I was second-rate because I was bringing up a child – when what I was doing was the most important job in the world. Telling people I was a homemaker and some of them actually smiling, Harry, some of them actually thinking it was funny, that it was a joke.’
Not all this again.
‘I’ll get the bill, shall I?’
‘When what was really funny was that I had the kind of degree that these career morons could only dream about. When what was funny was that I was bilingual while most of those cretins hadn’t quite mastered English. Miss any of that? No, not really, Harry, not now you come to mention it. And I don’t miss sleeping in our bed with our little boy sleeping in the next room while you were out banging one of the office juniors.’
‘You know what I mean. Just the lack of complication. That’s all. There’s no need to drag up all that old –’
‘No, I can’t say I miss it. And you shouldn’t either. You shouldn’t miss that old life, because it was built on a lie. I like it now, if you really want to know. That’s the difference between you and me. I like it now. I like my life with Richard. To me, these are the good old days. And you should be grateful, Harry.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because Pat has a stepfather who cares about him deeply. Some step-parents are abusive. Some are violent. Many of them are indifferent.’
‘I should be grateful that my son is not being abused? Give me a break, Gina.’
‘You should be grateful that Richard is a wonderful, caring man who wants what’s best for Pat.’
‘Richard tries to change him. He doesn’t need changing. He’s fine the way he is now.’
‘Pat’s not perfect, Harry.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Oh, Harry. We all know that.’
We glared at each other for a few moments and then Gina called for the bill. I knew her well enough not to try to pay it.
We always did this – supported each other, tried to be friends, and then for an encore drove each other nuts. We couldn’t seem to stop ourselves. In the end we maddened each other by picking at old wounds, we turned the closeness between us into an infuriating claustrophobia.
I knew that I had angered her today. And that’s why the news she told me as we were walking back to our cars sounded like an act of supreme cruelty and spite.
‘None of this matters,’ she said. ‘The trouble at school. All that tired old crap we keep dragging around the block. None of it matters any more, Harry.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We’re going to America.’
I just stared at her.
‘I’ve been meaning to tell you. But it wasn’t definite. Not until this week.’
I thought about it for a while. But I didn’t understand. Not yet.
‘How long would you be gone? I’m not saying taking Pat out of school for a couple of weeks is a bad idea. Might do him some good. A break might be what he needs. It’s not as though he’s learning very much right now.’
My ex-wife shook her head. She couldn’t believe that I could be so slow.
‘Come on, Harry.’
And as we stood in that deserted school car park, I finally started to get it. I finally started to understand that my ex-wife could do whatever she liked. What a sucker I had been.
‘Hold on. Tell me you mean a vacation, Gina. Tell me you’re talking about Disneyland and Florida?’
‘I’m talking about leaving London, Harry. And leaving the country. I’m talking about us moving there for good. To live, Harry. Richard and me and Pat. Richard’s contract is ending, and he’s never really settled here –’
‘Richard hasn’t settled here? Richard? What about Pat? What about Pat being allowed to fucking settle?’
‘Would you like to watch your language? He’s seven years old. Children are very adaptable. They get used to anything.’
‘But his school is here. And his grandmother is here. And Bernie Cooper is here.’
‘Who the hell is – oh, little Bernie. God, Harry, he can make some new friends. It’s a work thing, okay? Richard can get a better position in the States.’
‘But your job is here. Look at you, Gina. You finally got your life back. Why would you throw that away?’
