The Family Way. Tony Parsons

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       Three

      Paulo and Michael grew up in one of the rougher parts of Essex, their father an engineer at Ford in Dagenham, and their childish dreams were full of cars.

      More than half the men in their neighbourhood worked at the plant. Cars were everything here. Cars meant jobs, a wage packet, a glimpse of freedom. Cars were how the boy became a man. A teenager’s first Ford Escort was a rite of passage as momentous as any tribal scar. Yet although the brothers both loved cars, they loved them in very different ways.

      Paulo was fetishistically obsessed with V8 engines, camshafts and the life of Enzo Ferrari. Michael’s interest veered more towards what he called ‘pussy magnets’.

      Paulo loved cars for themselves. Michael loved them for what they could get you, the sweet illusions they projected, and the dreams they made come true.

      Michael liked girls as much as he liked cars. His specialist subject, even when he was a spotty little virgin, sharing a bedroom with his slightly bigger brother, was ‘what drives them wild’.

      While Paulo learned about Modena and Le Mans, Michael read top-shelf magazines and absorbed the lessons of ‘shallow fucking’ (‘You don’t put it all the way in – drives them wild, it says so here’) and locating the G-spot (‘Put a moistened finger inside and then move it as if you want someone to come towards you – drives them wild, Paulo, apparently’).

      They both covered the walls with pictures of Ferraris, but Michael had Sam Fox sandwiched between the Maranellos and the Spiders. Until one day their devout mother saw her.

      ‘I’m not having the Whore of-a Babylon in my house,’ she said, pulling down the poster with one hand and deftly cuffing Michael around the ear with the other. She knew it wouldn’t be Paulo putting up Whore of Babylon pictures. ‘Put up our Holy Mother.’

      ‘No jugglies on the wall, lads,’ their father quietly told them later. ‘They upset your mother.’

      And the brothers thought – jugglies? What would their old man know about jugglies?

      Their parents had come across from Napoli as small children, landing within a year of each other, although you would never know it. Their father, another Paulo, sounded every inch a working-class Londoner, all glottal stops and talk of West Ham and Romford dogs, while their mother, Maria, had never lost the accent and the attitudes of the old country.

      Maria – who was called ‘Ma’ by both her husband and her sons – didn’t drive, never saw a bill and never had a job. ‘My home is my job,’ she said. Yet she was the volatile, undisputed emperor of their little terraced home, giving her sons what she called ‘a clip round the earhole’ as often as she kissed their cheeks with a fierce, moist-eyed passion. The boys couldn’t recall their father ever raising his voice.

      As a child, Paulo felt most Italian when he visited the homes of his friends. That’s when he knew his own family was special, not because they attended Mass or because they ate baked ziti or because his parents spoke to each other in a foreign language, but because they resembled the type of family that was dying out in this country.

      Some of his friends lived with just their mother, one of them lived with just his father, many were in strange patchwork families, made up of new fathers, half-brothers and stepmothers. His own family was much more simple, and old-fashioned, and he was grateful for that fact. It was the kind of family that Paulo wanted for himself one day.

      There were only ten months between the brothers, and many people mistook them for twins. They grew up unusually close, dreaming of going into business together one day – something with cars. Racing them, mending them, selling them. Anything. This was what they had learned from their father and all those long years at Ford. ‘You can’t get rich working for somebody else,’ said the old man, again and again, just before he fell asleep in front of the ten o’clock news.

      After leaving school at sixteen, the brothers drove taxis for ten years, Paulo in a black London cab after passing the Knowledge, and Michael working the minicabs, until finally they had enough of a stake to get a loan from the bank.

      Now they sold imported Italian cars from a showroom off the Holloway Road in north London. They brought in small quantities of pre-ordered merchandise from Turin, Milan and Rome, driving the cheaper left-hand-drive cars back to the UK themselves, doing the conversion to right-hand drive in their body shop, or else they bought second-hand in the boroughs of Islington, Camden and Barnet. Above their modest showroom a row of green, white and red Italian flags streamed in the weak sunlight of north London, above the name of the firm – Baresi Brothers.

      They made a good living, enough to support both their families, although like many small businessmen they found СКАЧАТЬ