Man and Boy. Tony Parsons

keep up with the big new bands. I didn’t know how he managed it.

      Gina came out of the little guest room, serious and pale. Very pale. I felt like kissing her. But I didn’t.

      ‘Hello, Harry.’

      ‘Can we talk?’

      ‘Of course. There’s a park nearby.’

      We took Pat. Glenn pointed out that, for all the surrounding greenery, the park was actually a fair distance away, past a sad little string of shops and endless big posh houses. So I suggested we took the MGF. Pat almost squealed with delight. Although she wasn’t a four-year-old boy, I hoped Gina might also be impressed – from the moment I had seen that car I knew I wanted to drive around with some special person by my side. Now I saw with terrible clarity that the special person had always been Gina. But she didn’t say anything until we arrived at the park.

      ‘No need to worry about recapturing your youth, Harry,’ she said, swinging her legs out of my new car. ‘You never really lost it.’

      Pat skipped on ahead of us, brandishing his light sabre and howling. When he arrived at the climbing frame he stood there in silence, shyly watching two bigger boys clamber around on the higher part of the frame. He was always full of admiration for bigger boys. Gina and I watched our son watching them.

      ‘I miss you like crazy,’ I said. ‘Please come home.’

      ‘No,’ she said.

      ‘It wasn’t some mad, passionate affair. It was just one night.’

      ‘It’s never just one night. If you can do it once, you can do it again. Again and again and again. And next time it will be easier. I’ve seen it all before, Harry. Seen it all with Glenn.’

      ‘Jesus, I’m nothing like your dad. I don’t even wear an earring.’

      ‘I should have known,’ she said. ‘The romantic ones are always the worst. The hearts and flowers brigade. The ones who promise never to look at another woman. Always the worst. Because they always need that new fix. That regular shot of romance. Don’t you, Harry?’

      I didn’t like the way she was talking about me, as though I were indistinguishable from every other man in the world, as though I were just one of the hairy adulterous masses, as though I were just another sad salary man who got caught fucking around. I wanted to still be the one.

      ‘I’m sorry I hurt you, Gina. And I’ll always be sorry about it. You’re the last person in the world I would want to hurt.’

      ‘It can’t always be a honeymoon, you know.’

      ‘I know, I know,’ I said, but deep down inside what I thought was – Why not? Why not?

      ‘We’ve been together for years. We have a child together. It can never be all that Romeo and Juliet crap again.’

      ‘I understand all that,’ I said, and most of me really did. But a tiny, tiny part of me wanted to say – Oh, I’m off then.

      Gina was right – I wanted us to be the way we were at the start. I wanted us to be like that forever. And you know why? Because we were both so happy then.

      ‘You think it’s been easy living in our house?’ she said, suddenly flaring up. ‘You think it’s easy listening to you whining about not being a teenager any more, getting Pat to stop watching Star Wars for five minutes, taking care of the house? And you’re no help. Like every man on the planet, you think that as long as you do your little job, your work is done.’

      ‘Well,’ I said, taken aback. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t leave years ago.’

      ‘You didn’t give me a reason. Until now. I’m only thirty, Harry. Sometimes I feel like an old woman. You tricked me,’ she said. ‘You tricked me into loving you.’

      ‘Just come back home. You and me and Pat. I want it to be the way it was before.’

      ‘It can never be that way again. You changed it all. I trusted you and you broke my trust. You made me feel stupid for trusting you.’

      ‘People don’t break up because of a one-night stand, Gina. It’s not what grown-ups do. You don’t chuck it all away because of something like that. I know it hurts. I know what I did was wrong. But how did I suddenly go from being Mr Wonderful to Mr Piece of Shit?’

      ‘You’re not Mr Piece of Shit, Harry.’ She shook her head, trying to stop herself from crying. ‘You’re just another guy. I can see that now. No different from the rest. Don’t you get it? I invested so much in you being special. I gave up so much for you, Harry.’

      ‘I know you did. You were going to work abroad. You were going to experience another culture. It was going to be incredible. And then you stayed here because of me. I know all that. That’s why I want to make this marriage work. That’s why I want to try again.’

      ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,’ Gina said, ‘and I’ve worked out that nobody is interested in a woman who stays at home with her child. Not even her husband. Especially not her husband. I’m so boring, he has to sleep around.’

      ‘That’s not true.’

      ‘Looking after your child – it should be the most respected job in the world. It should be worth more than going to any office. But it’s not. Do you know how many people at your fucking little television dinners and parties and launches have made me feel like nothing at all? And what do you do?’ She made it sound like a sneer. ‘And what do you do? Me? Well, I don’t do anything. I just stay at home and look after my little boy. And they stare right through you – the women as well as the men, in fact the women are probably worse – as though you’re some kind of moron. And I’m twice as smart as half of these people you work with, Harry. Twice as smart.’

      ‘I know you are,’ I said. ‘Listen, Gina – I’ll do anything. What do you want?

      ‘I want my life back,’ she said. ‘That’s all, Harry. I want my life back.’

      That sounded like trouble.

       nine

      Things hadn’t quite worked out how my dad had planned. Not with his home. And not with me.

      When my parents had bought the place where I grew up, the area had been countryside. But the city had been creeping closer for thirty years. Fields where I had roamed with an air rifle were now covered with ugly new houses. The old High Street was full of estate agents and solicitors. What my parents had thought would always be a living, breathing episode of The Archers started being swallowed by the suburbs from the moment we moved in.

      My mum didn’t much mind the changes – she was a city girl, and I can remember her complaining about our little town’s lack of shops and a cinema when I was a kid – but I felt for my dad.

      He didn’t like the army of commuters who clogged the railway station on weekdays and the golf courses at the weekend. He didn’t like the gangs of would-be yobs who drifted around the estates pretending they were getting down in South Central LA. He hadn’t expected to be so close to crowds and crime this late in life.

      And then there was me.

      My parents came to the door expecting to see the three of us arriving for dinner. But there was only their son. Bewildered, they watched me drive past their gate, looking for somewhere to park. They didn’t get it.

      When I was a kid, there were no cars parked on this street – one garage for every family had been more than enough. Now you practically had to give yourself a double hernia looking for a parking place. Everything had changed.

      I kissed my mum and shook my dad’s hand. They didn’t know what was happening. There was going to be too much food. They were expecting Gina and Pat.