Starting Over. Tony Parsons

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      ‘Say something to your father,’ she commanded, and Ruby immediately threw herself on me with a ‘Daddy!’ that came out like a sob, the impact knocking the wind out of me for a second, and I held her with the arm that didn’t have an IV drip stuck into it, and I could smell the shampoo in her long brown hair.

      Then it was her brother’s turn.

      Rufus reluctantly shuffled towards me, uncomfortable in this hospital ward, uncomfortable in his troubled skin, uncomfortable with the whole thing. He didn’t want to do it, he recoiled from it all, probably wanted to run away and hide in his room. But Lara gently led him to the bed where he touched the top sheet and held it to his mouth. He began to cry. Pulling my sheet up like that made my feet stick out the end of the bed, and I felt the air conditioning chill my toes.

      There was something unbearable about his tears. He was not a child any more but he cried like one and I recalled a playground accident, a split head, blood all over the happily coloured climbing frame, and then the mad dash to the emergency ward. That is the worst thing about having children. You want to protect them more than you ever can. You try to endure that unendurable fact. But it is always there.

      I patted the back of his hand and I was amazed to see the amount of hair sprouting there. It was practically a rain forest. It must have been years since I had touched his hands.

      ‘Rufus,’ I said, ‘when did you get so hairy?’

      He pulled his hand away as if he had been scalded with boiling water. Then I needed to rest. I had to close my eyes immediately, and the pain punched a big hole in the morphine, and yet still I slept.

      

      How George met Lara.

      Twenty years ago I was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue, heading south towards Piccadilly Circus, the early-evening crowds making that bit of space they create for a uniformed police officer, even one who was just a year out of training and still raw like sushi. Then I heard a woman’s voice.

      ‘Excuse me? Hello there. Oh, excuse me!’

      I turned to see a blonde, not tall, with that swingy hair that I suddenly realised I liked – hair that swings, do you know what I mean? Hair that doesn’t just sit there but swings about with mad abandon. She had that hair. Not long, not short – just down to her shoulders. And swinging. On such details we build our lives.

      And she had – I couldn’t help but notice – a hard little body inside her training gear. She was quite small, and looked very fit, and she had a sexiness about her that was hard to define. I mean, there wasn’t much of her, but it was all good. Far too good for me, in fact, and so I thought she must be shouting to someone else. A boyfriend who had walked past their meeting place? A friend she had just spotted in the crowd? One look at her and I could see she was out of my league. And also, she didn’t seem to be in any kind of distress. Most people – all people – who run towards a uniformed police officer want him to help.

      But Lara didn’t want help. She wanted to give me something. She stood there laughing, and catching her breath. And I recognised her now, just as she handed me the tickets. She was one of the dancers.

      I had just spent an hour in the theatre where she worked. There had been widespread thieving in the dressing rooms, both male and female. It took a couple of hours and all my powers of detection to work out that there was something suspicious about a caretaker with a locker containing seventeen Prada bags, some lovely watches and credit cards in twenty different names. He was nicked, and they were grateful. All those good-looking boys and girls radiating future stardom. I looked down at the tickets in my hand, as though I had never seen tickets before.

      ‘For tonight,’ she said. ‘Bring your girlfriend.’

      I brought Keith. Police Constable Keith Rooney, as he was in those days. We sat in the front row of the circle, still in uniform, and at first it was difficult for me to spot her. She was one of the Peasant Women who wanted to lynch Jean Valjean when he was caught nicking the old priest’s candlesticks, but I lost sight of her for a bit until she was one of the Lovely Ladies urging Fantine to solve her problems by turning to prostitution. And then, as Keith chomped his way through a bag of Revels, I finally got a fix on her. Because nobody in that show moved like Lara.

      She was a dancer. Most of them could do a bit of everything, and do it very well. But – I learned later – she never had much of a voice, and didn’t really have the confidence to sing if she wasn’t hiding in a group of seventeenth-century French peasants or prostitutes. But she could move. Lithe, springy, a natural grace. I don’t know what it was, but I knew I had never seen anything like it.

      Not a lot of call for dancing in Les Misérables, of course, apart from the wedding of Cosette and Marius. It is mostly people dying tragic deaths while the survivors mooch around sadly. But the way she moved still held me. After the massacre of the posh students, she was one of The Women singing the song about how nothing ever changes, and nothing ever will, and by then I couldn’t take my eyes from her. In the end, Lara hovered on the edge of the stage, like an angel in her newly laundered nightgown, as Jean Valjean died in the arms of his heartbroken daughter and by my side Keith gently sobbed into his bag of Revels.

      I woke to the darkness and the smell of alcohol. I groaned and shifted in my bed, feeling the tug of the IV drip in my arm.

      It was the middle of the night and the television was on with the sound turned down. At first I thought I was alone. And then I saw Keith. Under the light of the sports channel, he was slumped in one of the chairs, the bottle of vodka in his lap sticking up like a codpiece.

      My eyes drifted to the TV. It was a highlights show. Nothing but goals. All the boring bits cut out. I didn’t recognise any of the players or any of the teams. It was some sort of Third World league. I watched a big lean striker nod the ball over a flailing goalkeeper and then run towards the camera. And just before his kissy-kissy teammates reached him, he did a back flip, and then another back flip and then one more. His body violent with health and vitality and youth. His teeth bone-white in his grinning face.

      Mocking me.

      Mocking me.

      Mocking me.

      

      When I awoke again there was a light and I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know if it was just a vision caused by billions of brain synapses shutting down or a chemical hallucination or something else. I did not know if it was my dope-addled imagination or some new unimagined reality. I didn’t know if it was the drugs or heaven.

      Lara’s voice held me.

      ‘You never have to say it back,’ she was saying, and now everyone was crying, including me, although I was getting beyond tears, and that was why it seemed so strange when the doctor burst into the room, laughing like a nutcase and his face all shiny with delight.

      ‘We’ve got one,’ he said.

       four

      In my dream I was in this field.

      It was as unfeasibly smooth and green as a billiard table, my dream field, and as I jogged across it I was aware of the crowd watching me. Getting excited, they were, as if they knew what was coming before I did.

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