Wild Things Are, placing a bowl of green pasta before him, hugging him so fiercely that you couldn’t tell where she ended and where he began.
But I had no real idea what went on between Richard and Pat, this man in his middle thirties who I didn’t know at all, and this seven-year-old child whose skin, whose voice, whose face were more familiar to me than my own.
Did Richard kiss my son good night? I didn’t ask. Because I really didn’t know what would hurt me more. The warmth, the closeness, the caring that a good-night kiss would indicate. Or the cold distance implicit in the absence of a kiss.
Richard was not a bad guy. Even I could see that. My ex-wife wouldn’t be married to him if he was any kind of child-hater. I knew, even in my bleakest moments, that there were worse step-parents than Richard. Not that anyone says step-parent any more. Too loaded with meaning.
Pat and I had both learned to call Richard a partner –as though he were involved in an exciting business venture with the mother of my son, or possibly a game of bridge.
The thing that drove me nuts about Richard, that had me raising my voice on the phone to my ex-wife – something I would really have preferred to avoid – was that Richard just didn’t seem to understand that my son was one in a million, ten million, a billion.
Richard thought Pat needed improving. And my son didn’t need improving. He was special already.
Richard wanted my son to love Harry Potter, wooden toys and tofu. Or was it lentils? But my son loved Star Wars, plastic light sabres and pizza. My son stubbornly remained true to the cause of mindless violence and carbohydrates with extra cheese.
At first Richard was happy to play along, back in the days when he was still trying to gain entry into Gina’s pants. Before he was finally granted a multiple-entry visa into those pants, before he married my ex-wife, my son’s mum, Richard used to love pretending to be Han Solo to my son’s Luke Skywalker. Loved it. Or at least acted like he did.
And quite frankly my son would warm to Saddam Hussein if he pretended to be Han Solo for five minutes.
Now Richard was no longer trying, or he was trying in a different way. He didn’t want to be my son’s friend any more. He wanted to be more like a parent. Improving my boy.
As though improving someone is any kind of substitute for loving them.
You make all those promises to your spouse and then one day you get some lawyer to prove that they no longer mean a thing. Gina was part of my past now. But you don’t get divorced from your children. And you can never break free of your vows to them.
That’s what Paris was all about.
I was trying to keep my unspoken promises to my son. To still matter to him. To always matter. I was trying to convince him, or perhaps myself, that nothing fundamental had changed between us. Because I missed my boy.
When he was not there, that’s when I really knew how much I loved him. Loved him so much that it physically hurt, loved him so much that I was afraid some nameless harm would come to him, and afraid that he was going to forget me, that I would drift to the very edge of his life, and my love and the missing would all count for nothing.
I was terrified that I might turn up for one of my access visits and he wouldn’t be able to quite place me. Ridiculous? Maybe. But we spent most of the week apart. Most of the weekends, too, even with our legally approved trysts. I was never there to tuck him in, to read him a story, to dry his eyes when he cried, to calm his fears, to just be the man who came home to him at night. The way my old man was there for me.
Can you be a proper dad in days like these? Can you be a real father to your child if you are never around?
Already, just two years after he went to live with his mother, I was on the fast track to becoming a distant figure. Not a real dad at all. A weekend dad, at the very best. As much of a pretend dad as Richard. That was not the kind of father I wanted to be. I needed my son to be a part of my life.
My new life.
Cyd and I had been married for just over a year.
It had been a great year. The best year ever. She had become my closest friend and she hadn’t stopped being my lover. We were at that stage when you feel both familiarity and excitement, when things are getting better and nothing has worn off, that happy period when you divide your time between building a home and fucking each other’s brains out. Shopping at Habitat and Heal’s followed by wild, athletic sex. You can’t beat it.
Cyd was the nicest person I knew, and she also drove me crazy. The only reason I went to the gym was because I didn’t want her to stop fancying me. My sit-ups were all for her. I hoped it would always be that way. But if you have been badly burned once, you can never be totally sure. After you have taken a spin through the divorce courts, forever seems like a very long time. And maybe that’s a positive thing. Maybe that stops you from treating the love of your life like a piece of self-assembly furniture.
It wasn’t like that with my son. I planned to stay with Cyd until we were both old and grey. But you never know, do you? In my experience, relationships come and go but being a parent lasts a lifetime. What’s the expression?
Till death do us part.
There were lots of things we were planning to do in Paris.
Pat wanted to go up the Eiffel Tower, but the queues were dauntingly long, so we decided to save it for some other time. I contemplated taking him to the Louvre, but I decided he was too small and the museum was too big.
So what we did was take a bateau-mouche down the Seine and then grabbed a couple of croque-monsieurs in a little café in the Marais.
‘French cheese on toast,’ Pat said, tucking in. ‘This is really delicious.’
After that we went for a kickabout in the Jardin du Luxembourg, booting his plastic football around under the chestnut trees while young couples necked on park benches and pampered dogs sauntered around with their noses in the air and everybody smoked as though it was the fifties.
Apart from the boat trip down the river, and the fancy cheese on toast, it wasn’t so different from our usual Sundays. But it felt special, and I think our hearts were lighter than they ever were in London. It was one of those days that you feel like putting in a bottle, so you can keep it for the rest of your life and nobody can ever take it away from you.
It all went well until we got back to the Gare du Nord. As soon as we went up to the departure gates on the station’s first floor, you could see something was wrong. There were people everywhere. Backpackers, businessmen, groups of tourists. All stranded because there was something on the line. Leaves or refugees? Nobody knew.
But there were no trains coming in or leaving.
That’s when I knew we were in trouble.
I was glad that my own father was not alive to see all of this. The shock would have killed him, I swear to God it would.
But I knew in my heart that I didn’t spend endless hours with my own dad. My old man never took me to Paris for the day.
I may have grown up with my dad under the same roof, but he worked six days a week, long hours, and then he came home speechless with exhaustion, sitting there eating his cooked dinner in front of the TV, reflecting silently on the latest
