Men from the Boys. Tony Parsons
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Название: Men from the Boys
Автор: Tony Parsons
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Книги о войне
isbn: 9780007327997
isbn:
The old Gurkha shrugged.
I handed Ken his reading glasses.
‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘I’ll come with my son.’
When I was twenty-five years old, and about to become a father for the first time, my mother told me the same thing again and again.
‘As soon as you’re a parent,’ she said, ‘your life is not your own.’
What she meant was, Put away those records by The Smiths. What she meant was, Wake up. The careless freedom of your life before there was a pushchair in the hall is about to come to an end.
But I never really felt that way. Yes, of course everything was changed by the birth of our baby boy – but I never felt as though I had surrendered my life. I never felt as though parenthood was holding me hostage. I never felt that my life was not my own.
Not until that night I waited for Pat to come home from Gina’s place in Soho. Not until he was absent and I was waiting. Then I really felt it, manifesting itself as a low-level nausea in the pit of my stomach, and nerve ends that jangled at every passing car. Finally, I understood.
My life was not my own.
The sound of Joni came down the child monitor and Cyd tossed aside her Vogue. ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘Dr Who always gives her nightmares.’
‘It’s the Weeping Angels,’ I said. ‘They give me nightmares, those Weeping Angels.’
‘I’ll lie down with her for a bit,’ Cyd said. ‘Until she settles.’ She stroked the top of my arm. ‘I’m sure he’s fine,’ she said.
It was near midnight when Gina’s taxi pulled up outside. She didn’t get out but waited until he had opened the front door before driving away. He came into the living room, his face a mask.
‘You all right?’ I said, keeping it as light as I could.
He nodded. ‘Fine.’ Not looking at me.
‘Everything go okay?’
He was fussing with his school rucksack, checking for something inside.
‘I’m going back next week,’ he said evenly. ‘Gina asked me to go back next week.’
He still wasn’t looking at me. ‘Well, that’s good. That’s great.’ Then I thought of something else. ‘You take your pills?’
He shot me a furious look. ‘You don’t have to remind me,’ he said. ‘I’m not a baby.’
He had to take these pills.
A few years ago, just at the start of big school, he had been laid flat by what looked like flu at first and, after he had missed most of the first half-term, began to look horribly like ME. We found out, just after one of the less fun-packed Christmas celebrations, that he had a thyroid condition. So he took these pills and they made him well. But he would have to take them every day for the rest of his life. There are children all over the world who have to deal with a lot worse than that.
But I went to bed knowing that I would be wound too tight to sleep tonight, or at least until it was nearly time to get up.
Because that was another thing that Gina had missed.
Tyson saw me as soon as I got out of the car.
At first he just stared – ears back, teeth bared, a long stream of drool coming out of the corner of his vicious maw. As if he couldn’t quite believe his luck. The object of his base lust had returned.
Then suddenly he left the side of his Old Lad masters, their huge boiled-egg heads leaning together in hideous fraternity, and bounded across the courtyard, weaving between the brand-new Mercs and rusty jalopies with Polish plates.
Too late.
By then I was halfway up the concrete staircase, already hearing the whine of the dusty wind that whistled down the corridors of Nelson Mansions.
I banged on the old man’s door.
It took him an agonisingly long time to open, but I was inside the trapped air of his flat before Tyson arrived. We could hear his meaty paws slapping against the thin door as he howled of his unnatural love.
Singe Rana was sitting on the orange sofa, watching the racing. He glanced over at me, made a small gesture with his impassive face and turned back to the 2.20 at Chepstow.
‘I brought you these,’ I said, and gave Ken the A4 envelope I was carrying.
He reached inside and took out a handful of black-and-white photographs, pushing his face against them. I found his reading glasses and gave them to him. He took the photographs over to the sofa and I stood behind the two old men as they leafed through them. They picked up the first one.
It could have been a holiday photograph. There were perhaps a dozen young men, tanned and hard, posing in the sunshine on the deck of a ship.
‘On the way to North Africa,’ Ken said.
‘That was lovely trip,’ said Singe, and his Nepalese accent had a soft Indian lilt to it. He smiled at the memory. ‘There were dolphins swimming and flying fish used to flap about on the deck of our landing craft. We saw a whale and her children.’
And another photograph of men in uniform. Maybe twenty of them. Less smiles here, and less sunshine. But still the shy grins as they stood for the camera recording the moment before they went to war.
Most of the photographs were posed. As formal as a school photograph, and as determined to hold that fleeting moment. Ken muttered the names and nicknames of long ago. Lofty and Albert. Tubby and Fred. Chalky and Sid. And sometimes he would remember where they had died.
Salerno. Dieppe. Elba. Names that I learned in childhood. Anzio. Sicily. Normandy.
Ken tapped the face of a thin boy with slick black hair. He smiled at me.
‘Who’s that then?’ he said.
My old man. Dark-eyed and cocky. A wild boy. The uniform too big, proud of the flash on his shoulder. R.N. Commando. Eighteen years old. A boy I never knew. Not much older than my son was now.
‘In Italy,’ said Singe Rana, ‘we passed fields of wheat and many grapes. We drank wine. The women and children stared at us. The men looked away. We did not speak to the girls until they spoke to us.’
I wanted to take them out for lunch. But they said they already had some dinner prepared. Singe Rana collected a plate of potato cakes from the kitchen. I took a bite and stuffed inside the potato I tasted chilli and ginger, turmeric and cayenne pepper. It was like something my wife would have served to a room full of investment bankers.
‘Aloo Chop,’ Ken told me. ‘Spicy СКАЧАТЬ