their house there were gifts waiting for him, such as a special edition Return of the Jedi (‘New Scenes, New Sounds, New Special Effects’). More and more they wanted him to stay over with them, no doubt hoping to replace my gloomy face and moody silences with their canned laughter, laughter so strained that it made me feel like weeping.
And now one of them always wanted to accompany us to the gates of Pat’s nursery school. It was a long drive for them – reaching us took at least an hour going anti-clockwise around the M25 in the rush hour – but they were willing to do it day after day.
‘As a special treat,’ my dad said, groaning as he folded his old legs into my low-slung car.
I knew what they were doing and I loved them for it. They were trying to stop their grandson from crying. Because they were afraid that if he started crying, then he would never stop.
But Pat’s life wasn’t a party with his mother gone. And no amount of Star Wars merchandise or good intentions could make it a party.
‘What are you doing today then, Pat?’ my father said, his grandson perched on his lap in the MGF’s passenger seat. ‘Making some more Plasticine worms? Learning about Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat? That’ll be good!’
Pat didn’t reply. He stared at the congealed early-morning traffic, his face pale and beautiful, and no amount of jolly banter from my old man could draw him out. He only spoke when we were at the gates of the Canonbury Cubs nursery.
‘Don’t want to go,’ he muttered. ‘Want to stay home.’
‘But you can’t stay home, baby,’ I said, about to use the great parental cop-out and tell him that Daddy had to go to work. But of course Daddy didn’t have a job any more. Daddy could stay in bed all day and still not be late for work.
One of the teachers came to collect him, looking at me meaningfully as she gently took his hand. It wasn’t the first time that Pat had been reluctant to leave me. In the week since Gina had been gone, he didn’t like to let me out of his sight.
With my dad promising him unimaginable fun and games at the end of the day, we watched Pat go, holding on to the teacher’s hand, his blue eyes swimming in tears, his bottom lip starting to twitch.
He would probably make it to the little classroom without cracking. They might even get his coat off. But by the time the Plasticine worms were unveiled he would lose it, inconsolable, sobbing his heart out while the other kids stared at him or impassively went about their four-year-old business. We wouldn’t have to look at any of that.
‘I remember when you were that age,’ my dad said as we walked back to the car. ‘I took you to the park in the week between Christmas and the New Year. Bloody freezing, it was. You had your little sledge with you. I had to drag you on it all the way from home. And at the park we watched the ducks trying to land on the frozen lake. They just kept coming in to land and – boom! Sliding on their bums across the ice. And you just laughed fit to burst. Laughed and laughed, you did. We must have watched them for hours. Do you remember that?’
‘Dad?’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know if I can do it, Dad.’
‘Do what?’
‘I don’t know if I can look after Pat alone. I don’t know if I’m up to it. I told Gina I could do it. But I don’t know if I can.’
He turned on me, eyes blazing, and for a moment I thought that he was going to hit me. He had never laid a finger on me in my life. But there’s always a first time.
‘Don’t know if you can do it?’ he said. ‘Don’t know if you can do it? You have to do it.’
It was easy for him to say. His youth might have been marred by the efforts of the German army to murder him, but at least in his day a father’s role was set in stone. He always knew exactly what was expected of him. My dad was a brilliant father and – here’s the killer – he didn’t even have to be there to be a brilliant father. Wait until your father gets home was enough to get me to behave. His name just had to be evoked by my mother and suddenly I understood all I needed to know about being a good boy. Wait until your father gets home, she told me. And the mere mention of my father was enough to make everything in the universe fall into place.
You don’t hear that threat so much today. How many women actually say, Wait until your father gets home now? Not many. Because these days some fathers never come home. And some fathers are home all the time.
But I saw he was right. I might not do it as well as he had – I couldn’t imagine Pat ever looking at me the way I looked at my old man – but I had to do it as well as I could.
And I did remember the ducks trying to land on the frozen lake. Of course I remembered the ducks. I remembered them well.
Apart from the low wages, unsociable hours and lack of standard employee benefits such as medical insurance, probably the worst thing about being a waitress is that in the course of her work she has to deal with a lot of creeps.
Like a little apron and a notepad, creeps come with the job. Men who want to talk to her, men who ask her for her number, men who just refuse to leave her alone. Creeps, the lot of them.
Creeps from building sites, creeps from office blocks, creeps in business suits, creeps with their bum crack displayed above the back of their jeans, creeps of every kind – the ones who think they’re funny, the ones who think they’re God’s gift, the ones who think that just because she brings them the soup of the day, they’re in with a chance.
She was serving a table of creeps when I took my seat at the back of the café. One creep – a business creep rather than a building-site creep – was leering up at her while his creep friends – all pinstripes, hair gel and mobile phones – smiled with admiration at his creepy cheek.
‘What’s your name?’
She shook her head. ‘Now why do you need to know my name?’
‘I suppose it’s something typically southern, is it? Peggy-Sue? Becky-Lou?’
‘It’s certainly not.’
‘Billie-Joe? Mary-Beth?’
‘Listen, are you going to order or what?’
‘What time do you get off?’
‘Did you ever date a waitress?’
‘No.’
‘Waitresses get off late.’
‘You like being a waitress? Do you like being a service executive in the catering industry?’
That got a big laugh from all the creeps who thought they looked pretty cool talking about nothing on a mobile phone in the middle of a crowded restaurant.
‘Don’t laugh at me.’
‘I’m not laughing at you.’
‘Long hours, lousy pay. That’s what being a waitress is like. And plenty of assholes. But enough about you.’ She tossed the menu on the table. ‘You think about it for a while.’
