Steve turned back to the television with a satisfied smirk, still tapping the remote control against his lower teeth. I could have cheerfully stuffed it down his throat.
‘Do you know how long she’ll be gone?’
Sally grunted a negative, absent-mindedly squeezing Steve’s beefy leg.
‘Glenn not around?’ I said.
‘Nah – my dad’s at work,’ said Sally.
So that was it. The girl was one of Glenn’s abandoned kids, from a marriage or two after Gina’s mother.
‘You visiting?’ I asked.
‘Staying here for a while,’ she said. ‘Been getting a lot of hassle from my mum. Whining about my friends, my clothes, the time I come home, the time I don’t come home.’
‘Is that right?’
‘“You’re treating this place like a hotel,”’ Sally screeched. ‘“You’re too young to smoke that stuff. Blah blah blah.”’ She sighed with the weariness of the very young. ‘The usual. It’s not as though she didn’t do it all herself back in the dark ages, the hypocritical old bitch.’
‘Bitch,’ said Steve.
‘She’s a bitch,’ smiled Pat, a Star Wars figure in each tiny fist, and Steve and Sally laughed at him.
This is how it works, I thought. You break up and your child becomes a kind of castaway, set adrift in a sea of daytime television and ducked responsibilities. Welcome to the lousy modern world where the parent you live with is a distant, contemptible figure and the parent you don’t live with feels guilty enough to grant you asylum any time things get too tense at home.
But not my boy.
Not my Pat.
‘Get your coat and your toys,’ I told him.
His dirty little face brightened.
‘Are we going to the park?’
‘Darling,’ I said, ‘we’re going home.’
We were meant to be celebrating.
Barry Twist had come up with the idea of a fifteen-minute delay system for the show, meaning we would go back to doing the thing live, but with a short time-lag before transmission as insurance against either the host or the guests going bananas.
The station was happy because it meant there was still time to edit out anything that was really going to give the advertisers the running squirts, and Marty was happy because it meant he no longer got paralysis of the lower autocue.
So Marty took me to lunch at his favourite restaurant, a fashionably spartan basement where well-fed people in television put authentic Italian peasant food on their expense accounts.
Like most of the places we went to, its bare floorboards and white walls made it look more like a gym than a restaurant, possibly to make us feel that we were doing ourselves some good in there. When we arrived just after two – I was running late after delivering Pat to my parents, leaving him with them because with Gina gone there was no one to pick him up after nursery – the place was already crowded, but the reception desk was empty.
A waitress approached us. She was clearly not having a good day. She was hot and flustered and there was a red wine stain on her white uniform. She kept doing this thing with her hair, which was shiny and black and cut in one of those old-fashioned bell shapes that you imagine on women in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, or on Hong Kong girls in the fifties. A bob. That’s what you call it. The fringe kept flying up as she stuck out her bottom lip and blew some air through it.
‘Can I help you?’ she said.
‘We have a table,’ Marty said.
‘Sure,’ she said, picking up the book of reservations. ‘Name?’
‘Marty Mann,’ he said, with that special little emphasis that indicated he expected her to recognise him now and practically faint with excitement. But Marty didn’t mean a thing to her. She was American.
‘Sorry,’ she said, consulting the book. ‘Can’t see your name on the list, sir.’
Then she gave us a smile. She had a good smile – wide, white and open. One of those smiles that just shines.
‘Believe me,’ Marty said, ‘we do have a table.’
‘Not here, you don’t.’
She slammed the book shut and moved to walk away.
Marty blocked her path. She looked pissed off. She stuck out her bottom lip and blew some air through her fringe. ‘Excuse me,’ she said.
She was tall and thin with a dancer’s legs and wide-set brown eyes. Good-looking, but not a kid. Maybe a couple of years older than me. Most of the people working in this restaurant that looked like a gym were cool young things who clearly thought they were on their way to somewhere better. She wasn’t like that at all.
She looked at Marty and massaged the base of her spine as though it had been aching for a long time.
‘Do you know how important I am?’ Marty asked.
‘Do you know how busy I am?’ she replied.
‘We might not be on the list,’ Marty said very slowly, as though he were talking to someone who had just had part of their brain removed, ‘but one of my people called Paul – the manager? You do know Paul?’
‘Sure,’ she said evenly. ‘I know Paul.’
‘Paul said it would be okay. It’s always okay.’
‘I’m real glad that you and Paul have got such an understanding relationship. But if I don’t have a spare table, I can’t give you one, can I? Sorry again.’
This time she left us.
‘This is fucking stupid,’ Marty said.
But Paul had spotted us and quickly crossed the crowded restaurant to greet his celebrity client.
‘Mr Mann,’ he said, ‘so good to see you. Is there a problem?’
‘Apparently there’s no table.’
‘Ah, we always have a table for you, Mr Mann.’ Paul’s Mediterranean smile flashed in his tanned face. He had a good smile too. But it was a completely different smile to the one she had. ‘This way, please.’
We walked into the restaurant and got the usual stares and murmurs and goofy grins that Marty’s entrance always provoked. Paul snapped his fingers and a table was brought from the kitchen. It was quickly covered with a tablecloth, cutlery, a wedge of rough-hewn peasant bread
