old man answered the phone. That was unusual. He couldn’t stand the phone. He would only pick it up if my mum was nowhere near it, or if he happened to be passing on his way from Gardener’s World to the garden.
‘Dad? It’s me.’
‘I’ll get your mother.’
He was gruff and formal on the phone, as if he had never got used to using one. As if we had never met. As if I were trying to sell him something he didn’t want.
‘Dad? Did you see the show last night?’
I knew he had seen it. They always watched my show.
There was a pause.
‘Quite a performance,’ my father said.
I knew he would have hated it all – the swearing, the violence, the politics. I could even hear him bitching about the commercials. But I wanted him to tell me that it didn’t matter. That I was forgiven.
‘That’s live television, Dad,’ I said with a forced laugh. ‘You never know what’s going to happen.’
The old man grunted.
‘It’s not really my scene,’ he said.
At some point during the nineties, my father had started using the vernacular of the sixties.
His speech was peppered with ‘no ways’ and ‘not my scenes’. No doubt in another thirty years he would be collecting his pension and hobbling about in a zimmer frame while proclaiming that he was ‘sorted’ and ‘mad for it’. But by then the world wouldn’t know what he was going on about.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘there’s no need to worry. Everything’s under control.’
‘Worried? I’m not worried,’ he said.
The silence hummed between us. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know how to bridge the gap between our separate worlds. I didn’t know where to start.
‘I’ll get your mother.’
While he went to get my mum, Pat wandered into the room. He was in his pyjamas, his mass of dirty yellow hair sticking up, those eyes from Tiffany still puffy with sleep. I held out my arms to him, realising with a stab of pain how much I loved him. He walked straight past me and over to the video machine.
‘Pat? Come here, darling.’
He reluctantly came over to me, clutching a tape of Return of the Jedi. I pulled him on to my lap. He had that sweet, musty smell kids have when they have just got up. He yawned wide, as I kissed him on the cheek. His skin was brand new. Freshly minted. The softest thing in the world.
And he still looked like the most beautiful thing in the world to me, like a little blond angel who had dropped off a cloud on his way to the celestial video shop.
Was he really that pretty? Or was that just my parental gene kicking in? Does every child in the world look like that to its parent? I still don’t know.
‘Did you have a nice time at Nanny and Granddad’s house?’ I asked.
He thought about it for a moment.
‘They don’t have any good films,’ he said.
‘What kind of films do they have?’
‘Stupid ones. Just with…pictures.’
‘You mean cartoons?’
‘Yeah. Just pictures. For babies.’
I was indignant.
‘Pat, they’re not for babies. You don’t like Dumbo? The elephant with the big ears? The poor little elephant who everyone makes fun of?’
‘Dumbo’s stupid.’
‘Dumbo’s great! What’s wrong with Dumbo? Jesus Christ, I grew up with Dumbo!’
I was going to give him a lecture about the genius of Walt Disney and the glory of animation and the magic of childhood, but my mum came on the line.
‘Harry? We were so worried. What on earth’s going to happen? Will you lose your job?’
‘Mum, I’m not going to lose my job. What happened last night – that’s what we call good television.’
‘Really, dear? I thought you once told me that it was good television if the guest attacked the host. I didn’t know it worked the other way round.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ I said, although she had a point. All the talk show punch-ups I could remember involved the presenter getting twatted. And not the other way around. ‘They’re giving me a new contract soon. Don’t worry, Mum – we don’t have to send Pat up a chimney just yet.’
‘And what’s wrong with Gina? She seems so – I don’t know – down.’
‘Gina’s fine,’ I said. ‘What’s Gina got to be down about?’
After I’d hung up, Pat beetled over to the video machine and stuffed in Return of the Jedi. The film began where he had left it – Princess Leia dressed as a slave girl at the feet of Jabba the Hutt. Drool slipped from Jabba’s filthy lips as he considered his nubile concubine. My four-year-old son watched the scene impassively. This couldn’t be good for him, could it?
‘Why don’t we have a game?’ I suggested.
His face brightened.
‘Okay!’
‘What do you want to play?’
‘Star Wars.’
Grinning from ear to ear, he hauled his favourite toy box in from his bedroom and emptied its contents on to the carpet. Out spilled all the things that made George Lucas famous. I sat on the floor with Pat while he carefully manoeuvred Han, Luke, Chewie and the two ’droids around his grey plastic Millennium Falcon.
‘Princess Leia is being held captured on the Death Star,’ Pat said.
‘Captive,’ I said. ‘She’s being held captive.’
‘Being held captured,’ he said. ‘We have to rescue her, Daddy.’
‘Okay.’
I sat playing with my son for a while, something I knew I didn’t do nearly enough. Then after about five or ten minutes I decided I had better get in to work. It was going to be a long day.
Pat was disappointed that I was cutting our game short, but he cheered up when I switched his video of Princess Leia as a beautiful slave girl back on. He really liked that bit.
We were all over the papers.
The broadsheets saw the Cliff incident as symptomatic of a medium in terminal decline, desperate for cheap sensation in a world of visual overload and limited attention spans. The tabloids
