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MAN AND BOY
Tony Parsons
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1999
Copyright © Tony Parsons 1999
Cover design by Sim Greenaway © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photograph © Joe Partridge
Tony Parsons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780006512134
Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780007362899
Version: 2019-06-18
Praise for Tony Parsons
‘As ever, [Tony Parsons] is in impressively depth-charging, straight-talking form. A broadsheet mind with a tabloid tongue, he remains one of the few male writers prepared to look beyond his own navel in search of answers’
GQ
‘As tautly plotted as a thriller and its rich cast of characters defy stereotype … Like Kern or Gershwin, he touches the universal via the specific and we weep’
Irish Times
‘Unashamedly touching … funny and well-written’
Telegraph magazine
‘I sobbed my way shamelessly through this book’
Woman’s Journal
‘Superb. Man and Boy is as witty and sharp as you would expect from Parsons but it is not at all bitter – rather profoundly moving. It will strike chords with many readers’
Yorkshire Post
‘Entertaining. Hugely so. Parsons has the skill to grip you by the collar and drag you into the heart of the story’
Manchester Evening News
‘Parsons is a brisk and punchy writer, moving the story on in a series of jaunty episodes and comic vignettes’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Anyone expecting Parsons’ trademark razor-sharp mockney one-liners will find something altogether more subtle. It might sound a bit Nick Hornby but I’d liken it to Kramer v Kramer. A surprising tear-jerker’
Mirror
‘What distinguishes Parsons’s effort from a shelfful of “male identity” outings is his ability to take the traditional framework of the genre … and work within it to produce a series of wholly unexpected twists and eddies … If this is the direction in which British chaps’ fiction is heading, then no one who cares about contemporary writing can seriously complain’
Literary Review
‘The writing is confident and accomplished … He makes the reader care … This is art shot through with humanity’
Independent on Sunday
‘He takes as his specialist subject contemporary emotional issues which almost every other male writer has ignored’
Guardian
‘Funny, serious, tender and honest … Tony Parsons is writing about the genuine dilemmas of modern life’
Sunday Express
‘Memorable and poignant – nobody squeezes more genuine emotion from a scene than Tony Parsons’
Spectator
‘One of the many great things about a Tony Parsons novel is that they always make you feel not just alive, but even more aware of how precious life is … Another modern classic’
Mirror
‘Parsons manages to astutely cut right to the heart of family life’
Woman and Home
‘His stories show all too well how we muddle along in search of love and fulfilment, and when we fluff it … sometimes that’s just because it’s easier’
Observer
Dedication
For my mother
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Tony Parsons
Dedication
Foreword to the 20th Anniversary Edition
Part One: Skylarking
The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part Two: The ding-dong man
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Part Three: Guess what?
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Inside:
Writing Man and Boy: Q & A with Tony Parsons
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Tony Parsons
About the Publisher
Foreword to the 20th Anniversary Edition
I started writing Man and Boy the day that I held my mother’s hand as the doctor told her that she had terminal lung cancer and there was nothing more they could do.
My mum took the news with her usual combination of humour, stoicism and defiance. She came out of the doctor’s surgery with a big grin, totally convinced she was about to prove the medical profession wrong. Typical mum. I went home and started writing a story about a family that looked a lot like my family.
It hit me hard that day, knowing that I would soon be in a world that would not contain either of my parents. My dad – Victor, but always Vic – had been gone for twelve years. My mum – Emma, but always Em – would be gone in twelve months, the doctors said (Em begged to differ). The story I started that day was about family and feelings, parents and their children, illness that is terminal and a love that can’t be killed by death. It was a celebration of family, but there was a sadness in it because I suddenly knew how hard – impossible, in the end – it is to hold on to the ones you care about. Man and Boy was a simple story, plainly told, and for some reason it went on to sell in millions.
We all watch our parents age as our children grow, and we all look for love and often misplace it. We see our family grow and change, and in the end we all must say goodbye to those we love the most. In the end, children grow up and find a family of their own. In the end your parents die. It is the most natural thing in the world, and yet somehow the most unimaginable. But not even a family full of love lasts forever.
At events to promote Man and Boy, I regularly looked up and saw members of the audience crying – and of course they were not crying about my story, they were remembering their own losses. It was a book that was written from the heart and so it had no trouble touching many other hearts. Because a lot of people knew exactly what this stuff felt like. And if they didn’t, then they knew it was waiting down the road. It wasn’t complicated.
I wrote Man and Boy when my mum was dying and that is why it is full of raw emotion. Although much of it is about fathers and sons and the gaps between them, it is my mother’s love and spirit that gives life to every line. She smiled when I told her the book was going to be dedicated to her. “Then I must be on the way out!” Em said. And we laughed with tears in our eyes because it was true – she really was on her way out of this life.
My mum’s illness made me think long and hard about my father and how different it had been when the old man – always my hero – was dying.
With my mum, I was by her side for every doctor’s appointment, for every blood test and x-ray, all those dates marked by slowly diminishing hope. My father had died of the same disease – lung cancer, for my folks were from the generation who believed in the glamour of Bogart and Bacall’s languidly-held cigarettes – without telling anyone that he was dying. Because my dad – and more than thirty years later, I still find this hard to believe – decided not to tell anyone that he had terminal cancer. As the bewildered characters in Man and Boy reflect, perhaps he was trying to protect the people he loved. Or perhaps he could not find the words. Or perhaps it was some strange combination of pride and vulnerability, and a reluctance to admit to human weakness. But memories of my singular old man gave the book its shape and its central theme. “A love letter to a son from his father, and to a father from his son,” said an early review, one of those rare reviews that help an author better understand their own book. Harry Silver, the protagonist of Man and Boy, is poised between the generations in a way that we are all at some point in our lives. I wrote Man and Boy when my last surviving parent was dying and my first-born child was growing up fast. As the twentieth century ran out and I banged away at Man and Boy, I never felt so much like somebody’s son and somebody’s father. I was never so aware of the generation that came before me and the generation that would eventually replace me. The cycle of life was no longer theoretical – the evidence was all around me, in my blood and in my bones and in my dreams, and in the changing faces of my dying mother and my growing son.
Man and Boy is a book that was written from the heart. I had something I needed to say about the most ordinary things in the world – family and feelings, fathers and sons, our mothers and their love, growing children and dying parents – that are also the most momentous things we ever know.
The simple tale I told is, as they say, based on a true story. Yes, I had been a young single father with a beautiful four-year-old son who helped me meet girls. And it’s true that my father was a suburban working class man on a modest income who was also a war hero with a torso covered in scar tissue and a Distinguished Service Medal shoved at the back of some dusty drawer. But fiction sets you free to mould the raw messy, material of real life into something that makes much more sense. So, although my father was a lot like the dying dad in Man and Boy, somehow it is still not quite my old man. One of the most vivid memories of my childhood is going into the garage of our house in Billericay and seeing a handgun on the back seat of my father’s car. Now my dad was a greengrocer – why did he have a handgun on the backseat of his car? I never asked, and so I never knew. But that colourful vignette never made it into Man and Boy because it simply did not fit the story. In real life, people remain a mystery. Even people we love; especially people we love. But in fiction, everything is a slave to the story.
Writers make sense of their world by telling stories about it. That’s really all I was doing with Man and Boy – trying to understand a world that I never expected to live in. A world without my mum and dad. A world where I was a single parent. My son – all grown up now – once asked me if it was true that he had split open his head in an empty swimming pool, as Pat – Harry’s young son – does in Man and Boy. I had to think about that one. And it turned out that, no, in real life my boy split his head open using a bed as a trampoline. But every parent in the world knows the sick fear that never leaves the parental heart, the dread that real harm is coming for your child.
Like Harry in Man and Boy, I took my small son to see his grandfather when he was on his death bed because I thought it would be good for both of them. Like Harry, I was dead wrong – it was painful, confusing and heartbreaking for both of them. The scene made it to the book because often fiction can improve on real life but sometimes it really can’t.
Man and Boy was published in July 1999. A few weeks earlier, just before dawn of a lovely spring day, my mum died in the home where I had grown up, the semi-detached house in Billericay where she had been a young wife and mother, and for twelve years a widow. She died in the home where she had built a life – and a life for her tough old husband, her wayward son, and her beloved grandson whose parents divorced before he started school.
The prospect of death had not scared my mother. In a family full of hard men – she had six brothers who all served in the armed forces during the war and a husband who had been a Royal Naval Commando – she was by some distance the bravest of the lot. The only thing she was afraid of was being made to leave her home to die in a hospital or a hospice. She got her wish to die at home.
And while I was still reeling from that fact – although I think we reel from it forever, I think we never really get over the feeling of being orphaned, no matter how old we get – Man and Boy went out into the world. And slowly, steadily, driven by word-of-mouth from readers and a passionate publisher and not least by a beautiful iconic cover, it went on to sell millions.
In the course of a career that lasts for a lifetime, a novelist writes all kind of books. Runaway bestsellers and commercial flops. Critical successes and their widely-derided opposite. Books that are talked about and, far more often, books that are ignored. If he or she is blessed – or in possession of some dumb luck – once in a lifetime they might write a book that is loved. That is what happened to me with Man and Boy.
I will be forever grateful to the book, and to the readers who took it to their hearts, and to the family who inspired it.
TONY PARSONS
London, 2019
part one: skylarking
The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
It’s a boy, it’s a boy!
It’s a little boy.
I look at this baby – as bald, wrinkled and scrunched up as an old man – and something chemical happens inside me.
It – I mean he – looks like the most beautiful baby in the history of the world. Is it – he – really the most beautiful baby in the history of the world? Or is that just my biological programming kicking in? Does everyone feel this way? Even people with plain babies? Is our baby really so beautiful?
I honestly can’t tell.
The baby is sleeping in the arms of the woman I love. I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the pair of them, feeling like I belong in this room with this woman and this baby in a way that I have never belonged anywhere.
After all the excitement of the last twenty-four hours, I am suddenly overwhelmed, feeling something – gratitude, happiness, love – well up inside me and threaten to spill out.
I am afraid that I am going to disgrace myself – spoil everything, smudge the moment – with tears. But then the baby wakes up and starts squawking for food and we – me and the woman I love – laugh out loud, laugh with shock and wonder.
It’s a small miracle. And although we can’t escape the reality of everyday life – when do I have to get back to work? – the day is glazed with real magic. We don’t really talk about the magic. But we can feel it all around.
Later my parents are there. When she is done with the hugs and kisses, my mother counts the baby’s fingers and toes, checking for webbed feet. But he is fine, the baby is fine.
‘He’s a little smasher,’ my mum says. ‘A little smasher!’
My father looks at the baby and something inside him seems to melt.
There are many good things about my father, but he is not a soft man, he is not a sentimental man. He doesn’t gurgle and coo over babies in the street. My father is a good man, but the things he has gone through in his life mean that he is also a hard man. Today some ice deep inside him begins to crack and I can tell he feels it too.
This is the most beautiful baby in the world.
I give my father a bottle I bought months ago. It is bourbon. My father only drinks beer and whisky, but he takes the bottle with a big grin on his face. The label on the bottle says ‘Old Granddad’. That’s him. That’s my father.
And I know today that I have become more like him. Today I am a father too. All the supposed landmarks of manhood – losing my virginity, getting my driving licence, voting for the first time – were all just the outer suburbs of my youth. I went through all those things and came out the other side fundamentally unchanged, still a boy.
But now I have helped to bring another human being into the world.
Today I became what my father has been forever.
Today I became a man.
I am twenty-five years old.
one
Some situations to avoid when preparing for your all-important, finally-I-am-fully-grown thirtieth birthday.
Having a one-night stand with a colleague from work.
The rash purchase of luxury items you can’t afford.
Being left by your wife.
Losing your job.
Suddenly becoming a single parent.
If you are coming up to thirty, whatever you do, don’t do any of that.
It will fuck up your whole day.
Thirty should be when you think – these are my golden years, these are my salad days, the best is yet to come – and all that old crap.
You are still young enough to stay up all night, but you are old enough to have a credit card. All the uncertainties and poverty of your teens and twenties are finally over – and good riddance to the lot of them – but the sap is still rising.
Thirty should be a good birthday. One of the best.
But how to celebrate reaching the big three-oh? With a collection of laughing single friends in some intimate bar or restaurant? Or surrounded by a loving wife and adoring small children in the bosom of the family home?
There has to be a good way of turning thirty. Perhaps they are all good ways.
All my images of this particular birthday seemed to be derived from some glossy American sitcom. When I thought of turning thirty, I thought of attractive thirty-nothing marrieds snogging like teens in heat while in the background a gurgling baby crawls across some polished parquet floor, or I saw a circle of good-looking, wisecracking friends drinking latte and showing off their impressive knitwear while wryly bemoaning the dating game. That was my problem. When I thought of turning thirty, I thought of somebody else’s life.
That’s what thirty should be – grown-up without being disappointed, settled without being complacent, worldly wise, but not so worldly wise that you feel like chucking yourself under a train. The time of your life.
By thirty you have finally realised that you are not going to live forever, of course. But surely that should only make the laughing, latte-drinking present taste even sweeter? You shouldn’t let your inevitable death put a damper on things. Don’t let the long, slow slide to the grave get in the way of a good time.
Whether you are enjoying the last few years of unmarried freedom, or have recently moved on to a more adult, more committed way of life with someone you love, it’s difficult to imagine a truly awful way of turning thirty.
But I managed to find one somehow.
The car smelled like somebody else’s life. Like freedom.
It was parked right in the window of the showroom, a wedge-shaped sports car which, even with its top off, looked as sleek and compact as a muscle.
Naturally it was red – a flaming, testosterone-stuffed red.
When I was a little bit younger, such blatant macho corn would have made me sneer, or snigger, or puke, or all of the above.
Now I found it didn’t bother me at all. In fact, it seemed to be just what I was looking for at this stage of my life.
I’m not really the kind of man who knows what cars are called, but I had made it my business – furtively lingering over the ads in glossy magazines – to find out the handle of this particular hot little number. Yes, it’s true. Our eyes had met before.
But its name didn’t really matter. I just loved the way it looked. And that smell. Above all, that smell. That anything-can-happen smell. What was it about that smell?
Amidst the perfume of leather, rubber and all those yards of freshly sprayed steel, you could smell a heartbreaking newness, a newness so shocking that it almost overwhelmed me. This newness intimated another world that was limitless and free, an open road leading to all the unruined days of the future. Somewhere they had never heard of traffic cones or physical decay or my thirtieth birthday.
I knew that smell from somewhere and I recognised the way it made me feel. Funnily enough, it reminded me of that feeling you get when you hold a newborn baby.
The analogy was far from perfect – the car couldn’t squint up at me with eyes that had just started to see, or grasp one of my fingers in a tiny, tiny fist, or give me a gummy little smile. But for a moment there it felt like it just might.
‘You only live once,’ the car salesman said, his heels clicking across the showroom floor.
I smiled politely, indicating that I would have to think that one over.
‘Are you in the market for some serious fun?’ he said. ‘Because if the MGF is about one thing, it’s about fun.’
While he gave me his standard sales pitch, he was sizing me up, trying to decide if I was worth a test drive.
He was pushy, but not so pushy that it made your flesh crawl. He was just doing his job. And despite my weekend clothes – which because of the nature of my work were not really so different from my weekday clothes – he must have seen a man of substance. A fast-track career looking for some matching wheels. Young, free and single. A life as carefree as a lager commercial. How wrong can you be?
‘This model has the Variable Valve Control system,’ he said, with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm. ‘The opening period of the inlet valves can be varied by altering the rotational speed of each cam lobe.’
What the fuck was he going on about? Was it something to do with the engine?
‘A total babe magnet,’ he said, noting my dumbfounded expression. ‘Plenty of poke. A young single guy couldn’t do any better than the MGF.’
This was my kind of sales pitch. Forget the technical guff, just tell me that you can lose yourself in a car like this. Let me know you can lose yourself. That’s what I wanted to hear.
The salesman was distracted by something on the street, and I followed his gaze out of the showroom’s plate-glass wall.
He was looking at a tall blonde woman holding the hand of a small boy wearing a Star Wars T-shirt. They were surrounded by bags of supermarket shopping. And they were watching us.
Even framed by all those plastic carrier bags and chaperoning a little kid, the woman was the kind that you look at more than once.
What you noticed about her child – and he was certainly her child – was that he was carrying a long, plastic tube with a dull light glowing faintly inside.
If you had been to the cinema at any time over the last twenty years you would recognise it as a light sabre, traditional weapon of the Jedi Knights. This one needed new batteries.
The beautiful woman was smiling at me and the salesman. The little kid pointed his light sabre, as if about to strike us down.
‘Daddy,’ he mouthed from the other side of the plate-glass wall which divided us. You couldn’t hear him, but that’s what he was saying.
‘My wife and son,’ I said, turning away, but not before I caught the disappointment in the salesman’s eyes. ‘Got to go.’
Daddy. That’s me. Daddy.
‘You don’t even like cars,’ my wife reminded me, edging our old VW estate through the thick early-evening traffic.
‘Just looking.’
‘And you’re too young for a mid-life crisis,’ she said. ‘Thirty is much too young, Harry. The way it works, you wait for fifteen years and then run off with a secretary who’s young enough to be your second wife. And I cut off the sleeves of all your suits. Not to mention your bollocks.’
‘I’m not thirty, Gina,’ I chuckled, although it wasn’t really all that funny. She was always exaggerating. ‘I’m twenty-nine.’
‘For one more month!’ she laughed.
‘It’s your birthday soon,’ our boy said, laughing along with his mother, although he didn’t have a clue why, and tapping me on the back of the head with his sodding light sabre.
‘Please don’t do that, Pat,’ I said.
He was back there with the week’s shopping, strapped into his little car seat and muttering under his breath, pretending to be in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon with Harrison Ford.
‘I’ve lost my starboard engine,’ he jabbered away to himself. ‘Fire when ready.’
I turned to look at him. He was four years old with dirty blond hair that hung down over eyes that were the same shade of blue as his mother’s. Tiffany blue. Catching my eye, he grinned at me with pure childish delight.
‘Happy birthday, dear Daddy,’ he sang. ‘Happy birthday, birth-day.’
To Pat, my birthday was a chance to finally give me the home-made card he had hidden under his bed (Luke Skywalker decapitating a space monster with his trusty light sabre). To me it meant that the best might already be over. It really did.
When would I feel the way I felt the night my wife said that she would marry me? When would I feel the way I felt the morning my son was born? When would life be that – I don’t know – real again? When?
‘When did you become interested in cars?’ Gina asked. She wouldn’t let this car thing rest. ‘I bet you don’t even know what kind of petrol this one uses, do you?’
‘Oh, come on, Gina.’
‘What is it, then?’
Fucking hell.
‘The green kind,’ I said, taking a wild guess. ‘You know – non-leaded. The one that saves a rain forest every time you fill her up.’
‘It’s diesel, you doughnut,’ she laughed. ‘I never knew a man less interested in cars than you. What happened?’
What could I tell her? You don’t tell a wife that some inanimate object somehow represents all those things you know you are never going to have. The places you are never going to see, the women you are never going to love, the things you are never going to do. You can’t tell a wife all that stuff. Not even a wife you love very much. Especially not a wife like that.
‘It only carries one passenger,’ she said.
‘What does?’ I said, playing dumb.
‘You know very well what I’m talking about,’ she said. ‘It only carries one passenger – one thin, female passenger.’
‘You’re still pretty thin and female,’ I said. ‘Or you were the last time I looked.’
‘What’s brought all this on, Harry? Come on. Tell me.’
‘Maybe I’m compensating for becoming an old git,’ I said. ‘I’m joining the old gits’ club, so, pathetically, I want to recapture my glorious youth. Even though I know it’s ultimately futile and even though my youth wasn’t particularly glorious. Isn’t that what men do?’
‘You’re turning thirty,’ she said. ‘We’re going to open a couple of bottles and have a nice cake with candles.’
‘And balloons,’ Pat said.
‘And balloons,’ Gina said. She shook her lovely head. ‘We’re not having you put down, Harry.’
Gina was a couple of months older than me. She had breezed through her thirtieth birthday surrounded by friends and family, dancing with her son to Wham’s greatest hits, a glass of champagne in her hand. She looked great that night, she really did. But clearly my own birthday was going to be a bit more traumatic.
‘You don’t regret anything, do you?’ she said.
‘Like what?’
‘You know,’ she said, suddenly deadly serious. ‘Like us.’
We had married young. Gina was three months pregnant with Pat on our wedding day and it was, by some distance, the happiest day of my life. But nothing was ever really the same again after that day. Because after that there was no disguising the fact that we were grown-ups.
The radio station where I was working gave me the week off and we spent our honeymoon back at our little flat watching daytime television in bed, eating M&S sandwiches and talking about the beautiful baby we were going to have.
We talked about eventually taking a proper, grown-up honeymoon – Gina wanted us to snorkel among the tropical fish of Okinawa. But by the time there was a bit of money and a bit of time, we had Pat and the course of our lives seemed set.
Gina and I found ourselves separated from the rest of the world by our wedding rings. The other married couples we knew were at least ten years older than us, and friends our own age were still in that brief period between living with their mothers and living with their mortgages. Our little family was on its own.
