more live shows, Harry. Record the show on the afternoon of transmission. That way, if Marty assaults anyone else – or decides to beat them to death with his ego – we can edit it out.’
‘As live? You want us to go as live? Marty will never stand for it.’
‘Make him stand for it, Harry. You’re his producer – do some producing. Doesn’t your contract come up for renewal soon?’
I knew they couldn’t drop Marty. He was already too big for that. But for the first time I understood that it wasn’t Marty’s hide that was on the line.
It was mine.
Despite all his games of death and destruction, Pat was a very loving child. He was always hugging and kissing people, even total strangers – I had once seen him embracing the old geezer who cleaned our street – in a way that was no longer permissible, or even wise, in the lousy modern world.
But Pat didn’t know or care about any of that. He was four years old and he was full of love. And when he saw me on the doorstep of his other grandfather’s home he went crazy, holding my face in his hands and kissing me on the lips.
‘Daddy! Are you staying with us? Staying with us on our – on our – on our holiday at granddad Glenn’s?’
I found them the day after they left. It wasn’t difficult. I made a few phone calls to Gina’s friends from college, the ones who had turned up for her thirtieth birthday party, but it had been years since she had been really close to any of them. She had let them drift out of her life, kidding herself that she could get everything she needed from me and Pat. That’s the trouble with a relationship as close as ours – when it comes undone, you’re left with no one.
It didn’t take me long to work out that Gina had been so desperate for somewhere to stay that she had gone home to her father, who was currently between marriages.
Glenn lived in a small flat right on the edge of the A to Z, among golf clubs and green belts, a neighbourhood that he must have thought looked a bit like Woodstock when he first moved in. But instead of jamming with Dylan and The Band, every day Glenn took the commuter train to his guitar shop in Denmark Street. He was home when I knocked on his door, greeting me with what seemed like real warmth as I stood holding my son.
‘Harry, how are you doing, man? Sorry about your troubles.’
In his early fifties now, what was left of Glenn’s hair was carefully arranged to approximate the Viking feather cut of his prime. He was still snake-hip thin, and still wore clothes that would have looked appropriate on a Jimi Hendrix roadie. And he was still good-looking, in a faded old roué kind of way. But he must have looked pretty funky walking down the King’s Road in 1975.
For all his faults – the missed birthdays, the forgotten promises, the fact that he tended to fuck off and leave his wife and kids every few years – Glenn wasn’t really an evil man. He had a friendly, easy charm about him, flashes of which I could see in Gina. Glenn’s fatal flaw was that he had never been able to see further than the end of his own gratification. Yet all the wounds he inflicted were unintentional. He wasn’t a cruel man, not unless weakness is another kind of cruelty.
‘Looking for Gina?’ he said, putting an arm around me. ‘She’s inside.’
Inside Glenn’s modest flat, The Verve were booming from the speakers. He wasn’t one of those classic rock freaks with a copy of Mojo and his gramophone needle stuck forever on the music of his youth. Glenn’s devotion to the cause was so great that he always liked to keep up with the big new bands. I didn’t know how he managed it.
Gina came out of the little guest room, serious and pale. Very pale. I felt like kissing her. But I didn’t.
‘Hello, Harry.’
‘Can we talk?’
‘Of course. There’s a park nearby.’
We took Pat. Glenn pointed out that, for all the surrounding greenery, the park was actually a fair distance away, past a sad little string of shops and endless big posh houses. So I suggested we took the MGF. Pat almost squealed with delight. Although she wasn’t a four-year-old boy, I hoped Gina might also be impressed – from the moment I had seen that car I knew I wanted to drive around with some special person by my side. Now I saw with terrible clarity that the special person had always been Gina. But she didn’t say anything until we arrived at the park.
‘No need to worry about recapturing your youth, Harry,’ she said, swinging her legs out of my new car. ‘You never really lost it.’
Pat skipped on ahead of us, brandishing his light sabre and howling. When he arrived at the climbing frame he stood there in silence, shyly watching two bigger boys clamber around on the higher part of the frame. He was always full of admiration for bigger boys. Gina and I watched our son watching them.
‘I miss you like crazy,’ I said. ‘Please come home.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t some mad, passionate affair. It was just one night.’
‘It’s never just one night. If you can do it once, you can do it again. Again and again and again. And next time it will be easier. I’ve seen it all before, Harry. Seen it all with Glenn.’
‘Jesus, I’m nothing like your dad. I don’t even wear an earring.’
‘I should have known,’ she said. ‘The romantic ones are always the worst. The hearts and flowers brigade. The ones who promise never to look at another woman. Always the worst. Because they always need that new fix. That regular shot of romance. Don’t you, Harry?’
I didn’t like the way she was talking about me, as though I were indistinguishable from every other man in the world, as though I were just one of the hairy adulterous masses, as though I were just another sad salary man who got caught fucking around. I wanted to still be the one.
‘I’m sorry I hurt you, Gina. And I’ll always be sorry about it. You’re the last person in the world I would want to hurt.’
‘It can’t always be a honeymoon, you know.’
‘I know, I know,’ I said, but deep down inside what I thought was – Why not? Why not?
‘We’ve been together for years. We have a child together. It can never be all that Romeo and Juliet crap again.’
‘I understand all that,’ I said, and most of me really did. But a tiny, tiny part of me wanted to say – Oh, I’m off then.
Gina was right – I wanted us to be the way we were at the start. I wanted us to be like that forever. And you know why? Because we were both so happy then.
‘You think it’s been easy living in our house?’ she said, suddenly flaring up. ‘You think it’s easy listening to you whining about not being a teenager any more, getting Pat to stop watching Star Wars for five minutes, taking care of the house? And you’re no help. Like every man on the planet, you think that as long as you do your little job, your work is done.’
‘Well,’ I said, taken aback. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t leave years ago.’
‘You
