he snorted, glaring at her, and then deciding to leave it.
He flopped into a cracked plastic chair and stared at the wall. There were bags under his eyes the colour of bruised fruit. Then after five minutes he went to get us some more tea. And as he waited for news of his grandson and sipped tea that he didn’t really want, my father seemed suddenly old.
‘Why don’t you try Gina again?’ my mother asked me.
I don’t know what she was expecting. Possibly that Gina would get on the next plane home and soon our little family would be united once more and forever. And maybe I hoped for that, too.
But it was no good. I went out to the reception area and called Gina’s number, but all I got was the strange purring sound of a Japanese telephone that nobody answers.
It was midnight in London, which made it eight in the morning in Tokyo. She should have been there. Unless she had already left for work. Unless she hadn’t come home last night. Her phone just kept on purring.
This was how it was going to be from now on. If I had spoken to Gina, I know that her strength and common sense would have got the better of any fear or panic. She would have been more like my mum than my dad. Or me. She would have asked what had happened, what were the dangers and when would we know. She would have found out the time of the next flight home and she would have been on it. But I just couldn’t reach her.
I hung up the phone, knowing that the rest of our lives were going to be like this, knowing that things had gone too wrong to ever be the way they were, knowing that we were too far away from each other to ever find our way back.
The doctor came looking for me at five in the morning. I was in the empty cafeteria, nursing a cup of tea that had gone cold hours ago. I stood up as she came towards me, waiting for her to speak.
‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘Your son has a very hard head.’
‘He’s going to be okay?’
‘There’s no fracture and the scan is clear. We’re going to keep him in for observation for a few days, but that’s standard procedure when we’ve put twelve stitches in a four-year-old’s head wound.’
I wanted that doctor to be my best friend. I wanted us to meet up for dinner once a week so she could pour out all her frustrations with the NHS. I would listen and I would care. She had saved my son. She was beautiful.
‘He’s really all right?’
‘He’ll have a sore head for a few weeks, and a scar for life. But, yes, he’s going to be okay.’
‘No side effects?’
‘Well, it will probably help him get girls in fifteen years’ time. Scars are quite attractive on a man, aren’t they?’
I took her hands and held them a bit too long.
‘Thank you.’
‘That’s why we’re here,’ she smiled. I could see that I was embarrassing her, but I couldn’t help it. Finally I let go. ‘Can I see him?’
He was at the far end of a ward full of children. Next to Pat there was a pretty little five-year-old in Girl Power pyjamas with her hair all gone from what I guessed was chemotherapy. Her parents were by her side, her father asleep in a chair, and her mother at the foot of the bed, staring at her daughter’s face. I walked quietly past them to my son’s bed, knowing that I had been wrong to wallow in self-pity for so long. We were lucky.
Pat was on a saline drip, his face as white as his pillow, his head swathed in bandages. I sat on his bed, stroking his free arm, and his eyes flickered open.
‘You angry with me?’ he asked, and I shook my head, afraid to speak.
He closed his eyes, and suddenly I knew that I could do this thing.
I could see that my performance so far had been pretty poor. I didn’t have enough patience. I spent too much time thinking about Gina and even Cyd. I hadn’t been watching Pat closely enough in the park. All that was undeniable. But I could do this thing.
Maybe it would never be perfect. Maybe I would make a mess of being a parent just as I had made a mess of being a husband.
But for the first time I saw that being a man would have nothing to do with it.
All families have their own legends and lore. In our little family, the first story that I featured in was when I was five years old and a dog knocked out all my front teeth.
I was playing with a neighbour’s Alsatian behind the row of shops where we had our flat. The dog was licking my face and I was loving it until he put his front paws on my chest to steady himself and tipped me over. I landed flat on my mouth, blood and teeth everywhere, my mother screaming.
I can just about remember the rush to hospital and being held over a basin as they fished out bits of broken teeth, my blood dripping all over the white enamel sink. But most of all I remember my old man insisting that he was staying with me as they put me out with the gas.
When the story was retold in our family, the punch line was what I did when I came home from the hospital with my broken mouth – namely stuff it with a bag of salt and vinegar crisps.
That ending appealed to my old man, the idea that his son came back from the hospital with eight bloody stumps where his front teeth used to be and was so tough that he immediately opened a packet of crisps. But in reality I wasn’t tough at all. I just liked salt and vinegar crisps. Even if I had to suck them.
I knew now that my dad wasn’t quite as tough as he would have liked to have been. Because nobody feels tough when they take their child to a hospital. The real punch line to that story was that my father had refused to leave my side.
Now I could understand how he must have felt watching his five-year-old son being put out with gas so that the doctors could remove bits of broken teeth from his gums and tongue.
He would have had that feeling of helpless terror that only the parent of a sick or injured child can understand. I knew exactly how he must have felt – like life was holding him hostage. Was it really possible that I was starting to see the world with his eyes?
He was standing outside the main entrance to the hospital, smoking one of his roll-up cigarettes. He must have been the only surviving Rizla customer in the world who didn’t smoke dope.
He looked up at me, holding his breath.
‘He’s going to be fine,’ I said.
He released a cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘It’s not – what did they call it? – a compressed fracture?’
‘It’s not fractured. They’ve given him twelve stitches and he’ll have a scar, but that’s all.’
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s all.’
‘Thank
