‘Please eat your dinner.’
‘No.’
‘Are you going to eat your dinner or not?’
‘No.’
‘Then go to bed.’
‘But it’s early!’
‘That’s right – it’s dinner time. And if you don’t want any dinner then you can go to bed.’
‘That’s not fair!’
‘Life’s not fair! Go to bed!’
‘I hate you, Daddy!’
‘You don’t hate me! You hate my cooking! Go and put your pyjamas on!’
When he had flounced out of the kitchen I snatched up his plate of microwaved crap with added overboiled vegetables and tossed it all in the bin. Then I held the plate under the hot tap until the water burned my hands. I didn’t really blame him for not eating it. It probably wasn’t edible.
When I went into Pat’s bedroom he was lying on his bed, fully clothed, quietly sobbing. I sat him up, dried his eyes and helped him into his pyjamas. He was fading fast – eyes half-closed, mouth all puffy, head nodding like a little dashboard dog – so an early night wouldn’t do him any harm. But I didn’t want him to fall asleep hating my guts.
‘I know I’m not a very good cook, Pat. Not like Granny or Mummy. But I’m going to try harder, okay?’
‘Daddies can’t cook.’
‘That’s not true at all.’
‘You can’t cook.’
‘Well, that’s true. This daddy can’t cook. But there are lots of men who are great cooks – famous chefs in fancy restaurants. And ordinary men, too. Men who live alone. Daddies with little boys and girls. I’m going to try to be like them, okay? I’m going to try to cook you good things that you enjoy. Okay, darling?’
He turned his head away, sniffing with disbelief at something so outrageously unlikely. I knew how he felt. I couldn’t believe it either. I suspected we were both going to have to develop a profound love for sandwiches.
I took him to the bathroom to brush his teeth, and when we came back I managed to get a reluctant goodnight kiss out of him. But he wasn’t really interested in making up. Telling myself that he would have forgotten all about my rotten carrots by the morning, I tucked him in and turned out his light.
I went back to the living room and flopped on the sofa, knowing that I needed to get back to work. A bank statement had arrived that morning. I didn’t have the heart to open it.
They had sacked me the modern way – by letting my contract run out and bunging me just one month’s salary. It was already gone. So I needed to get back to work because we were desperate for money. But I also needed to get back to work because it was the only thing in this world that I was any good at.
I picked up a trade paper and turned to the situations vacant, circling production jobs in radio and TV which looked promising. But after a few minutes of half-hearted job hunting I laid the paper to one side, rubbing my eyes. I was too tired to think about it right now.
The Empire Strikes Back was still running on the video – a battle between the forces of good and evil in the snow of some faraway planet. Even though this stuff was a constant background noise in our lives and sometimes made me feel like I was losing my mind, I was just too exhausted to turn it off.
The action switched from the frozen wasteland to some dark, bubbling swamp where the wise old master was lecturing Luke Skywalker on his destiny. And I suddenly realised how many father figures Luke has, father figures who seem to cover the waterfront of parental possibilities.
There’s Yoda, the wrinkled elder who has good advice coming out of his pointy green ears. And then there’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, who combines homespun homilies with some old-fashioned tough love.
And finally there’s Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of the Sith, who is probably more in keeping with the spirit of our time – an absent father, a neglectful dad, a selfish old man who puts his own wishes – in Mr Vader’s case, a desire to conquer the universe – before any parental responsibility.
My old man was definitely the Obi-Wan Kenobi type. And that’s the kind of father I wanted to be too.
But I fell asleep on the sofa surrounded by the situations vacant, suspecting that I would always be a lot more like the man in the black hat, a father with not enough patience, not enough time, forever lost to the dark side.
‘I know there’ve been a few problems at home,’ the nursery teacher said, making it sound as though the dishwasher was playing up, making it sound as though I could just pick up Yellow Pages and sort out my life. ‘And believe me,’ she said, ‘everyone at Canonbury Cubs is sympathetic.’
It was true. The teachers at Canonbury Cubs always made a big fuss of Pat when I delivered him in the morning. As the blood drained from his face yet again, as his bottom lip started to quiver and those huge blue eyes filled up at the prospect of being taken away from me for another day, they really couldn’t have been kinder.
But ultimately he wasn’t their problem. And no matter how kind they were, they couldn’t mend the cracks that were showing in his life.
Unless it was to be with my fun-mad parents, Pat didn’t like being separated from me. There was high drama when we parted at the gate of Canonbury Cubs every morning and then I went home to pace the floor for hours, fretting about how he was doing, while back at the nursery poor old Pat kept asking the teachers how long before he could go home and crying all over his finger paintings.
Nursery wasn’t working. So amid their concerned talk about possibly finding a child psychologist and time healing all wounds, Pat dropped out.
As the other kids started work on their Plasticine worms, I took Pat’s hand and led him out of that rainbow-coloured basement for the last time. He cheered up immediately, far too happy and relieved to feel like any kind of misfit. The teachers brightly waved goodbye. The little children looked up briefly and then returned to their innocent chores.
And I imagined my son, the nursery-school dropout, returning to the gates of Canonbury Cubs in ten years’ time, just to sneer and leer and sell them all crack.
The job seemed perfect.
The station wanted to build a show around this young Irish comedian who was getting too big to do the clubs yet who was not quite big enough to do beer commercials.
He didn’t actually do anything as old-fashioned as tell jokes, but he had wowed them up at the Edinburgh Festival with an act built completely around his relationship with the audience.
Instead of telling gags, he spoke to the crowd, relying on intelligent heckling and his Celtic charm to pull him through. He seemed born to host a
