Man and Boy. Tony Parsons

neighbours were watching us. With a sinking feeling, I realised that’s the kind of couple we had become.

      I carried Gina’s bag back into the house, where the phone was ringing. It was Marty.

      ‘Can you believe what these fuckers are saying about me in the papers?’ he said. ‘Look at this one – ban mad mann from our telly. And this one – A MANN OF FEW WORDS – ALL OF THEM ****ING OBSCENE. What the fuck are they implying? These people want my job, Harry. My mum is really upset. What are we going to do?’

      ‘Marty,’ I said. ‘Gina’s left me.’

      ‘She’s left you? You mean she’s walked out?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘What about the kid?’

      ‘She’s taken Pat with her.’

      ‘Has she got someone else?’

      ‘Nothing like that. It was me. I did something stupid.’

      Marty chuckled in my ear. ‘Harry, you dirty dog. Anyone I know?’

      ‘I’m frightened, Marty. I think she might be gone for good.’

      ‘Don’t worry, Harry. The most she can get is half of everything you own.’

      He was wrong there. Gina had already walked out with everything I had ever wanted. She had got the lot.

       eight

      Barry Twist worked for the station. Over the past year, I had been to dinner at his home, and he had come to dinner at mine. But, the way our world worked, we weren’t exactly friends. I couldn’t tell him about Gina. It felt like I knew a lot of people like that.

      Barry had been the first of the television people to take Marty and me out to lunch when we were doing the radio show. He had thought the show would work on television and, more than anyone, he had been responsible for putting us there. Barry had smiled all the way through that first lunch, smiled as though it was an honour to be on the same planet as Marty and me. But he wasn’t smiling now.

      ‘You’re not a couple of kids dicking about on the radio any more,’ he said. ‘These are big boys’ rules.’ His conversation was full of stuff like ‘big boys’ rules’, as though working in television was a lot like running an undercover SAS unit in South Armagh. ‘We had nine hundred phone calls complaining about the fucking language.’

      I wasn’t going to roll over and die just because he was our commissioning editor.

      ‘Spontaneous TV, Barry, that’s what you pay him for. On this kind of show it’s not what the guests say that makes news. It’s what they do.’

      ‘We don’t pay him to assault the guests.’ Barry indicated the papers on his desk with a thin little smile. I picked up a fistful of them.

      ‘Front page of the Mirror and the Sun,’ I said. ‘A two-column story on page one of the Telegraph…Nice colour picture of Marty on page three of The Times…’

      ‘This is the wrong kind of news,’ Barry said. ‘And you know it. I repeat – this isn’t talk radio any more. You’re not just being listened to by a couple of cranks and their cats. And it’s not as though we’re some crappy little satellite outfit scratching in the dust for viewers. There are advertisers, there are broadcasting authorities, there are viewers’ associations, there is the man upstairs. And please take my word for it, Harry – they are all going fucking ape shit.’

      I put the papers back on his desk, my fingers black with print. As nonchalantly as I could manage, I rubbed my hands together. But the print wouldn’t come off.

      ‘Let me tell you what’s going to happen, Barry. Marty is going to be called every name in the book – and next week we will get our biggest ratings ever. That is what’s going to happen. And they are going to be talking about that last show for years – that’s going to happen too.’

      Barry Twist shook his head.

      ‘It was too much. It’s not just Marty. The man upstairs is getting called every name in the book – and he doesn’t like it. Over the last twelve months The Marty Mann Show has had drunken guests, abusive guests and guests who have tried to remove their clothes. But this is the first time you’ve had a guest who has been beaten up. It’s got to stop. We can’t have a manifestly unstable man going out live on national television.’

      ‘What are you suggesting?’

      ‘No more live shows, Harry. Record the show on the afternoon of transmission. That way, if Marty assaults anyone else – or decides to beat them to death with his ego – we can edit it out.’

      ‘As live? You want us to go as live? Marty will never stand for it.’

      ‘Make him stand for it, Harry. You’re his producer – do some producing. Doesn’t your contract come up for renewal soon?’

      I knew they couldn’t drop Marty. He was already too big for that. But for the first time I understood that it wasn’t Marty’s hide that was on the line.

      It was mine.

      Despite all his games of death and destruction, Pat was a very loving child. He was always hugging and kissing people, even total strangers – I had once seen him embracing the old geezer who cleaned our street – in a way that was no longer permissible, or even wise, in the lousy modern world.

      But Pat didn’t know or care about any of that. He was four years old and he was full of love. And when he saw me on the doorstep of his other grandfather’s home he went crazy, holding my face in his hands and kissing me on the lips.

      ‘Daddy! Are you staying with us? Staying with us on our – on our – on our holiday at granddad Glenn’s?’

      I found them the day after they left. It wasn’t difficult. I made a few phone calls to Gina’s friends from college, the ones who had turned up for her thirtieth birthday party, but it had been years since she had been really close to any of them. She had let them drift out of her life, kidding herself that she could get everything she needed from me and Pat. That’s the trouble with a relationship as close as ours – when it comes undone, you’re left with no one.

      It didn’t take me long to work out that Gina had been so desperate for somewhere to stay that she had gone home to her father, who was currently between marriages.

      Glenn lived in a small flat right on the edge of the A to Z, among golf clubs and green belts, a neighbourhood that he must have thought looked a bit like Woodstock when he first moved in. But instead of jamming with Dylan and The Band, every day Glenn took the commuter train to his guitar shop in Denmark Street. He was home when I knocked on his door, greeting me with what seemed like real warmth as I stood holding my son.

      ‘Harry, how are you doing, man? Sorry about your troubles.’

      In his early fifties now, what was left of Glenn’s hair was carefully arranged to approximate the Viking feather cut of his prime. He was still snake-hip thin, and still wore clothes that would have looked appropriate on a Jimi Hendrix roadie. And he was still good-looking, in a faded old roué kind of way. But he must have looked pretty funky walking down the King’s Road in 1975.

      For all his faults – the missed birthdays, the forgotten promises, the fact that he tended to fuck off and leave his wife and kids every few years – Glenn wasn’t really an evil man. He had a friendly, easy charm about him, flashes of which I could see in Gina. Glenn’s fatal flaw was that he had never been able to see further than the end of his own gratification. Yet all the wounds he inflicted were unintentional. He wasn’t a cruel man, not unless weakness is another kind of cruelty.

      ‘Looking for Gina?’ he said, putting an arm around me. ‘She’s inside.’

      Inside