too hot for you?’ I asked Pat.
‘Is it green?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘It’s green.’
‘That’s what I have.’
‘How about you?’ she asked.
‘I’ll have the same,’ I replied.
‘Anything else?’
‘Well, I was wondering how many jobs you’ve got.’
She looked at me properly for the first time.
‘Oh, I remember you,’ she said. ‘You were the guy with Marty Mann. The one who told him to give me a break.’
‘I thought you didn’t recognise him.’
‘I’ve been here for almost a year. Of course I recognised the little dickhead.’ She glanced at Pat. ‘Excuse me.’
He smiled at her.
‘I don’t get to watch much TV – you don’t in this job – but his ugly mug is always in the papers. Doing not very much, far as I can see. Funnily enough, you were my last customers. Paul didn’t like my style.’
‘Yeah, well. If it’s any consolation, I lost my job around the same time as you.’
‘Yeah? And you didn’t even get to drop a plate of pasta on Marty’s shrivelled little –’ She looked quickly at Pat. ‘Head. Anyway. He deserved it.’
‘He sure did. But I’m sorry you lost your job.’
‘No big deal. A girl can always get another job as a waitress, right?’
She looked up from her pad. Her eyes were so far apart that I had trouble looking at them both at the same time. They were brown. Huge. She turned them on Pat.
‘Having lunch with your dad? Where’s your mom today?’
Pat glanced at me anxiously.
‘His mother’s in Tokyo,’ I said.
‘That’s Japan,’ Pat said. ‘They drive on the same side of the road as us. But when it’s nighttime there, it’s daytime here.’ I was surprised he remembered so much of what I had told him. He knew almost as much about the place as I did.
She looked at me with those wide-set brown eyes and I thought that somehow she knew that our little family was all broken and scattered. Which was absurd. How could she have possibly known?
‘She’s coming back soon,’ Pat said.
I put my arm around him.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘But it’s just us for a while.’
‘That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ the waitress said. ‘I mean – you looking after your boy. Not many men do that.’
‘I guess it happens,’ I said.
‘I guess it does,’ she said.
I could see that she liked me a little bit now that she knew I was taking care of Pat. But of course she didn’t know me. She didn’t know me at all. And she had me all wrong.
She saw a man alone with a child and she thought that somehow that must make me better than other men – more kind-hearted, more compassionate, less likely to let a woman down. The new, improved male of the species, biologically programmed for child-caring duties. As if I had planned for my life to work out this way.
‘How about you?’ I asked her. ‘What brought you to London from – where?’
‘Houston,’ she said. ‘Houston, Texas. Well, what brought me was my partner. Ex-partner. This is where he’s from.’
‘That’s a long way to come for some guy, isn’t it?’
She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘Do you think so? I always thought that, if you really love someone, you’ll follow them anywhere.’
So she was the romantic kind.
Under that tough, touch-me-again-buster-and-you’ll-get-linguini-in-your-lap exterior, she was one of those women who was willing to turn her world inside out for some man who almost certainly didn’t deserve it.
Maybe my wife was right. The romantic ones are the worst.
Gina came home late the next day.
Pat and I were playing on the floor with his toys. Neither of us reacted to the diesel rumble of a black cab pulling up outside. But we looked at each other as we heard the rusty clank of our little gate, then a key turning in the front door, and finally the sound of her footsteps in the hall. Pat turned his face to the door.
‘Mummy?’
‘Pat?’
And suddenly there she was, smiling down at our son, bleary from the twelve-hour flight from Narita and lugging her old suitcase that still had a scarred sticker from our distant holiday in Antigua.
Pat flew into her arms and she held him so tight that he disappeared inside the folds of her light summer coat, all of him gone, apart from the top of his head and a tuft of hair that was exactly the same shade of blond as his mother’s. Their faces were so close that you couldn’t see where Gina ended and Pat began.
I watched them feeling something better than happy. I was sort of glowing inside, believing that my world had been restored. And then she looked at me – not cold, not angry, just from a great distance, as though she was still somewhere far away and always would be – and my spirits sank.
She hadn’t come back for me.
She had come back for Pat.
‘You all right?’ I asked her.
‘Bit tired,’ she said. ‘It’s a long flight. And you get back the same day that you leave. So the day never seems to end.’
‘You should have told us you were coming. We would have met you at the airport.’
‘That’s okay,’ she said, holding Pat out to inspect him.
And I could see that she had come back because she thought I couldn’t do it. She thought I wasn’t up to looking after our child alone while she was away. She thought that I wasn’t a real parent, not the way that she was a real parent.
Still holding Pat, her eyes took in the squalid ravages of the living room, a room which seemed to confirm that even her own lousy father was a better prospect than me.
There were toys everywhere. A video of The Lion King playing unwatched on the television. Two takeaway pizza boxes – one large, one small – from Mister Milano squatting on the floor. And Pat’s pants from yesterday sitting on the coffee table like a soiled doily.
‘Goodness, look at your dirty hair,’ Gina said brightly. ‘Shall we give it a good old wash?’
‘Okay!’ Pat said, as if it were an invitation to Disneyland.
They went off to the bathroom and I made a start on clearing up the room, listening to the sound of running water mixing with their laughter.
‘I’ve been offered a job,’ she told me in the park. ‘It’s a big job. As a translator for an American bank. Well, more of an interpreter, really. My written Japanese is too rusty for translating documents. But my spoken Japanese is more than good enough for interpreting. I would be sitting in on meetings, liaising with clients, all that. The girl who’s been doing the job – she’s really nice, a Japanese-American, I met her – is leaving to have a baby. The job’s mine if I want it. But they need to know now.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘This job’s in Tokyo?’
She looked away from Pat’s careful negotiation of the lower reaches of the climbing frame.
‘Of course it’s in Tokyo,’ she said sharply. Her eyes returned to our