show, but I could already tell that Eamon was going to do it. After removing all the dried wax from his ears, he had crashed through the fear barrier and was learning how to be himself with five cameras watching. Fish was fine. I was more worried about the studio audience.
They had come in expecting to have their funny bones tickled, and had discovered that they were expected to defend their prejudices. They felt cheated, not good. It was a problem that we were always going to have with Eamon’s show. As I saw it, the only way to solve this dilemma was to get them all pissed.
At our first production meeting after the pilot I told the AP to open a few bottles and cans and serve them to the audience while they were waiting in line to come into the studio. Everybody looked at me as if I were a genius.
That’s what I love about television. You recommend opening a few cans of lager and they act as though you just painted the Sistine Chapel.
‘So, it’s a better job than the last one but they pay you less money,’ my father said. ‘How do they work that out then?’
‘Because I don’t work all week,’ I told him yet again.
We were in their back garden, supposedly kicking a ball around with Pat, although he had retreated to the far end of the garden with his light sabre and dreams of conquering intergalactic evil. So that left me and two pensioners kicking a plastic football around between us in the autumn-tinged sunlight.
It was turning cold, but we were reluctant to go back inside. It was late September. The year was running out. There wouldn’t be too many more Sunday afternoons like this one.
‘If it really is a better job then they should cough up the readies,’ said my dad, the international businessman, gently side-footing the ball to his wife. ‘All these TV companies are loaded.’
‘Not the ones Harry works for,’ my mum said, thinking she was being loyal, and trapping the ball under the sole of her carpet slipper.
‘I go in for a couple of production meetings and I’m there when we record the show,’ I said. ‘And that’s it. I’m not in the office all day, every day. I don’t give them my life. I just go in twice a week and act like a big shot, bossing everyone around and coming up with brilliant ideas. Then I go home.’
‘Home to Pat,’ said my mum, knocking the ball to me. ‘Your grandson.’
‘I know who my grandson is,’ my old man said irritably.
‘Some people executive produce a whole bunch of shows,’ I said. ‘But I’m just going to do this one. I’ve worked it out. It’s going to bring in less than we had before, but it will be enough.’
‘This way he gets to pay his bills but he’s there when Pat comes home from school,’ my mum said.
My dad wasn’t convinced.
He wanted me to have everything that life has to offer – the career and the kids, the family and the salary, the happy hearth and the fat pay cheque. He wanted me to have it all. But nobody gets away with having it all.
‘Bobby Charlton,’ he said, swinging a foot at the plastic football. It shot off his toe and into the rose bushes. ‘Bugger,’ he said. ‘I’ll get it.’
My mum and I watched him wander down to the end of the garden to retrieve the ball. He took the opportunity to put his arm around Pat and ask him what he was doing. Pat chattered away excitedly, his smooth round face turned up towards his grandfather, and my old man grinned down at him with eternal tenderness.
‘Is he all right?’ I asked my mum. ‘He had a funny turn in the park the other day.’
‘Fighting for his breath, was he?’ she asked, not taking her eyes from him. And not surprised.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Fighting for his breath.’
‘I’m trying to get him to go to the doctor,’ she said. ‘Or the quack, as your dad calls him.’
We smiled at each other in the encircling darkness.
‘He must be the last person in the world who calls doctors quacks,’ I said.
‘“I’m not going to no quack,”’ my mum said. It was a pretty good impersonation of all the bad-tempered certainty my father was capable of summoning up. ‘“I don’t want no sawbones messing about with me.”’
We laughed out loud, loving his old-fashioned distrust of anyone with any kind of authority, from the lowliest traffic warden to the most revered members of the medical profession, both of us taking comfort from the fact that my father was exactly the same as he always had been, even if we feared that might no longer be true.
He came back from the end of the garden with the ball and his grandson, asking us what was so funny.
‘You are,’ my mum said, taking his arm, and we all went back inside my father’s house.
I didn’t want it all. All I wanted was one more chance. One more chance to have a unified life, a life without broken bits and jagged edges. One more shot at happiness.
I didn’t care how long it took before Gina came back from Tokyo. I was happy with Pat. And I wasn’t looking for a brilliant career. All I wanted from work was a way to pay the mortgage.
But I wasn’t ready to grow old and cold, hating women and the world because of what had happened to me. I didn’t want to be fat, bald and forty, boring my teenage son to tears about all the sacrifices I had made for him. I wanted some more life. One more chance to get it right. That’s what I wanted. That didn’t seem like much to ask. Just one more chance.
Then the next day, Gina’s dad came round to our place with his daughter Sally, the sulky teenage girl on the sofa, one of the many kids that Glenn had begat and abandoned as he moved on to sexier pastures, and it crossed my mind that what has truly messed up the lousy modern world is all the people who always want one more chance.
Glenn was dressed in his winter plumage – a ratty Afghan coat draped over a shiny blue tank top that revealed the hairs on his scrawny chest, and hipsters so tight that they made a mountain out of his molehill. He was so far out of fashion that he had just come back in style.
‘Hello, Harry man,’ he said, clasping my hand in some obscure power-to-the-people shake that thirty years ago probably signalled the revolution was about to commence. ‘How you doing? Is the little dude around? All well? Sweet, sweet.’
There was a time when I wanted my old man to be more like Gina’s dad. A time when I wished my father had appeared in glossy magazines in his youth, grinned on Top of the Pops once or twice in the early seventies and shown some interest in the world beyond the rose bushes at the end of his garden. But as I looked at Glenn’s wizened old bollocks sticking up through his tight trousers, it seemed like a long time ago.
Glenn’s youngest daughter was lurking behind him. At first I thought that Sally was in a bad mood. She came into the house all surly, avoiding eye contact by taking a great interest in the carpet, letting her stringy brown hair – longer than I remembered
