him because he had hurt Cyd so badly, and I hated him because he was better looking than me. I hated him because I hated any parent who breezed in and out of a kid’s life as though they were a hobby you could pick up and put down when you felt like it. Did I think that Gina was like that? Sometimes, on those odd days when she didn’t phone Pat, and I knew – just knew – that she was somewhere with Richard.
And I hated Jim because I could feel that he still mattered to Cyd – when she had said that thing about always loving his face, I knew it was still there, eating her up. Maybe she didn’t love him, maybe all that had curdled and changed into something else. But he mattered.
I suppose a little piece of my heart should have been grateful. If he had been a loyal, loving husband who knew how to keep his leather trousers on – and if he wasn’t into the bamboo – then Cyd would be with him and not me. But I wasn’t grateful at all.
As soon as he brought Peggy back safely from Pizza Express, I would have been quite happy for him to wrap his bike around a number 73 bus and get his lovely face smeared all over the Essex Road. He had treated Cyd as if she were nothing much at all. And that was reason enough for me to hate his guts.
But when Peggy came back home with a phenomenally useless stuffed toy the size of a refrigerator, and pizza all over her face, I was aware that there was another, far more selfish reason for hating him.
Without ever really trying to match him, I knew that I could never mean as much in Peggy’s life as he did. That’s what hurt most of all. Even if he saw her only when he felt like it, and fucked off somewhere else when he felt like doing that, he would always be her father.
That’s what made her giddy with joy. Not the motorbike. Or the pizza. Or the stupid stuffed toy the size of a fridge. But the fact that this was her dad.
I knew I could live with the reminder of another man’s fuck. I could even love her. And I could compete with a motorbike and a giant stuffed toy and a prettier face than my own.
But you can’t compete with blood.
‘Who do I look like?’ Pat said when the trees in the park were bare and he had to wear his winter coat all the time and Gina had been gone for just over four months.
He tilted his head to stare up at the car’s vanity mirror, looking at his face as if seeing it for the first time, or as if it belonged to someone else.
Who did he look like? People were always telling me – and him – that he looked like me. But I knew that wasn’t quite right. He was a far prettier kid than I had ever been. Even if I had never had all my front teeth knocked out by a dog, he would still have been better looking than me. The truth was, he looked like both of us. He looked like me and he looked like Gina.
‘Your eyes are like Mummy’s eyes,’ I said.
‘They’re blue.’
‘That’s right. They’re blue. And my eyes are green. But your mouth, that’s like my mouth. We’ve got lovely big mouths. Perfect for kissing, right?’
‘Right,’ he said, not smiling along with me, not taking his eyes from the little rectangular mirror.
‘And your hair – that’s very fair. Like Mummy’s hair.’
‘She had yellow hair.’
‘She still does, baby,’ I said, wincing at that past tense. ‘She still has yellow hair. She’s still got yellow hair. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ he said, flipping up the mirror and staring out of the window. ‘Let’s go.’
And your teeth are like your mother’s – a little bit gappy, a little bit goofy, teeth that give every single smile a rakish air – but your sawn-off snub nose is like mine, although your strong, beautiful chin belongs to your mother and so does your skin – fair skin that loves the sun, fair skin that starts to tan as soon as it stops raining.
Pat didn’t look like me. And he didn’t look like Gina. He looked like both of us.
Even if we had ever wanted to, we couldn’t escape his mother. She was there in his smile and in the colour of his eyes. I was stuck with Gina’s ghost. And so was Pat.
‘I don’t understand what’s going to happen to the kids,’ my father said. ‘The kids like Pat and Peggy. I can’t imagine what growing up with just one parent around is going to do to them.’
He didn’t say it the way he would have said it in the past – angry, contemptuous and with a mocking wonder at what the world was coming to. He didn’t say it with his old loathing for single parents and all the changes they represented. He said it gently, with a small, bewildered shake of his head, as if the future were beyond his imagination.
‘You grew up with two parents around,’ he said. ‘At least you had some idea of what a marriage looked like. What a marriage could be. But they don’t have that, do they? Pat and Peggy and all the rest of them.’
‘No. They don’t.’
‘And I just worry what it’s going to do to them. If divorce is just something that everyone does, then what chance is there for their marriages? And for their children?’
We were on the wooden bench just outside the kitchen door, sitting in the three o’clock twilight watching Pat poke around with his light sabre at the far end of the garden.
‘Everything just seems so…broken up,’ my dad said. ‘Do you know what Peggy said to me? She asked me if I would be her granddad. It’s not her fault, is it? The poor little mite.’
‘No, it’s not her fault,’ I said. ‘It’s never the child’s fault. But maybe growing up with divorce will make them more careful about getting into a marriage. And more determined to make it work when they do.’
‘Do you really think so?’ my father said hopefully.
I nodded, but only because I didn’t have the heart to shake my head. What I really thought was that his generation had faced up to its responsibilities in a way that my lot never could.
His generation had looked after their children, they had lots of early nights, and if they also had their own home and a fortnight in a caravan in Frinton, they had considered themselves lucky.
But my generation had grown up with our own individual little pile of happiness at the top of our shopping list.
That’s why we fucked around, fucked off and fucked up with such alarming regularity.
My generation wanted perfect lives. Why should our children be any different? My dad had learned early on that nobody gets away with a perfect life.
‘Yes, maybe it will be all right,’ my old man said, thinking about it. ‘Because every kid has got two parents, haven’t they? Even a kid from – what do you call it? – a single-parent family. And perhaps Pat and Peggy and the rest of them won’t grow up being like the parent who went away. Perhaps they’ll be like the parent who stayed behind.’
‘How do
