Men from the Boys. Tony Parsons
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Название: Men from the Boys

Автор: Tony Parsons

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Книги о войне

Серия:

isbn: 9780007327997

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ my father.

       Two

      By the time I came down the dishes from last night were clean and drying, and there was tea and juice on the table.

      Pat was shuffling about the kitchen. I could smell toast. I went to pull the newspaper from the letterbox and when I came back he was putting breakfast on the table.

      The girls were still upstairs. Pat was Mister Breakfast. He had been Mister Breakfast since the time he had been old enough to boil a kettle. That was the thing about the pair of us – it worked. And it had always worked.

      The thing that used to get on my nerves was when people said to me, ‘Oh, so you’re his mother as well as his father?’ I could never work that one out.

      I was his father. And if his mother wasn’t around, then I could still only be his father. If you lose your right arm, does your left arm become both your right and left arm? No, it doesn’t. It’s still just your left arm. And you get on with it. Both his mother and his father? Hardly. It took everything I had to pull off being his dad.

      ‘You all right?’ he said, wiping his hands on the dishcloth, looking at me sideways.

      ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘All good.’

      And still I did not mention his mother.

      Joni appeared. At seven, her footsteps were so light that, if she was not rushing somewhere, or talking, or singing, you often did not hear her coming. You turned around and she was just there. She shuffled slowly towards the table, dressed for school but still more asleep than awake.

      She yawned widely. ‘I don’t want to eat anything today,’ she said.

      ‘You have to eat something,’ I said.

      She cocked a leg and hauled herself up on her chair, like a cowboy getting on his horse.

      ‘But look,’ she said.

      She opened her mouth and as Pat and I bent to peer inside, she began to manoeuvre one of her front teeth with her tongue. It was so loose that she could get it horizontal.

      She closed her mouth. Her eyes shone with tears. Her chin wobbled.

      Pat went off to the kitchen and I sat down at the table. ‘Joni,’ I said, but she held up her hands, cutting me off, pleading for understanding.

      ‘Cereal hurts my gums,’ she said, waving her hands. ‘Not just Cookie Crisps. All of them.’

      I touched her arm. Upstairs I could hear Cyd and Peggy laughing outside the bathroom door. I groped for the correct parental soundbite.

      ‘Breakfast is, er, the most important meal of the morning,’ I reminded her, but my daughter looked away with frosty contempt, furiously worrying at her wonky tooth with the tip of her tongue.

      ‘There you go,’ Pat said.

      He placed a sandwich in front of Joni. Two slices of lightly toasted white bread with the crusts removed, the chemical yellow of processed cheese sticking out of the sides like a toxic spill. Cut into triangles.

      Her favourite.

      Pat returned to the kitchen. I picked up the newspaper. Joni lifted the sandwich in both hands and began to eat.

      

      Here’s a good one for the Lateral Thinking Club – if a marriage produces a great child, then can that marriage ever be said to have failed?

       If the marriage produces some girl or boy who just by existing makes this world a better place, then has that marriage failed just because Mum and Dad have split up? Is the only criterion of a successful marriage staying together? Is that really all it takes? Hanging in there? Butching it out?

      Does my friend Marty Mann have a successful marriage because it has lasted for years? Does it matter that he likes his Latvian lap dancers two at a time before going home to his wife? Has he got a successful marriage because it remained untouched by the divorce courts?

      If a woman and a man abandon their wedding vows and run eagerly through all the usual hateful clichés – saying hurtful things, sleeping with other people, cutting up clothes, running off with the milkman – then is that a failed marriage?

      Well, obviously. It’s a bloody disaster.

      But still – I could not bring myself to call my union with my first wife a failed marriage. Despite everything. Despite crossing the border between love and hate and then going so far into alien territory that we could not even recognise each other.

      Gina and I were young and in love. And then we were young and stupid, and getting everything wrong.

      First me. Then both of us.

      But a failed marriage? Never.

      Not while there was the boy.

      

      As the record came to an end, I looked at Marty’s eyes through the studio’s glass wall.

      ‘Line two,’ I said into the microphone, ‘Chris from Croydon.’ Marty’s fingers flew across the board, as natural as a fish in water, and the light on the mic in front of him went red.

      Marty adjusted himself in his chair, and leaned into the mic as if he might snog it.

      ‘You’re with Marty Mann’s Clip Round the Ear live here on BBC Radio Two,’ Marty said, half-smiling. ‘Enjoying good sounds in bad times. Mmmm, I’m enjoying this ginger nut. Chris from Croydon – what’s on your mind, mate?’

       ‘I can’t go to the pictures any more, Marty. I just get too angry – angry at the sound of some dopey kid munching his lunch, and angry at the silly little gits – can I say gits? – who think they will disappear into a puff of smoke if they turn their Nokias off for ninety minutes, and angry at the yak-yak-yak of gibbering idiots – ’

      ‘Know what you mean, mate,’ Marty said, cutting him off. ‘They should be shot.’

      ‘Whitney Houston,’ I said, leaning forward. ‘“I Will Always Love You”.’

      ‘And now a song written by the great Dolly Parton,’ Marty said. He knew music. He was from that generation that had music at the centre of its universe. This wasn’t just a hit song from a Kevin Costner film to him. ‘Before all music started sounding like it was made from monosodium glutamate.’

      This was the starting point for our show – nothing was as good as it used to be. You know, stuff like pop music, and the human race.

      Whitney’s cut-glass yearning began and Marty gave me a thumbs-up as he whipped off his headphones. He barged open the door. ‘Four minutes thirty-seconds on Whitney,’ I said.

      ‘Great, I can pee slowly,’ he said. ‘What’s next?’

      I consulted my notes. ‘Let’s broaden it out,’ I said. ‘Nonspecific anger. Rap СКАЧАТЬ