laughed, you did. We must have watched them for hours. Do you remember that?’
‘Dad?’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know if I can do it, Dad.’
‘Do what?’
‘I don’t know if I can look after Pat alone. I don’t know if I’m up to it. I told Gina I could do it. But I don’t know if I can.’
He turned on me, eyes blazing, and for a moment I thought that he was going to hit me. He had never laid a finger on me in my life. But there’s always a first time.
‘Don’t know if you can do it?’ he said. ‘Don’t know if you can do it? You have to do it.’
It was easy for him to say. His youth might have been marred by the efforts of the German army to murder him, but at least in his day a father’s role was set in stone. He always knew exactly what was expected of him. My dad was a brilliant father and – here’s the killer – he didn’t even have to be there to be a brilliant father. Wait until your father gets home was enough to get me to behave. His name just had to be evoked by my mother and suddenly I understood all I needed to know about being a good boy. Wait until your father gets home, she told me. And the mere mention of my father was enough to make everything in the universe fall into place.
You don’t hear that threat so much today. How many women actually say, Wait until your father gets home now? Not many. Because these days some fathers never come home. And some fathers are home all the time.
But I saw he was right. I might not do it as well as he had – I couldn’t imagine Pat ever looking at me the way I looked at my old man – but I had to do it as well as I could.
And I did remember the ducks trying to land on the frozen lake. Of course I remembered the ducks. I remembered them well.
Apart from the low wages, unsociable hours and lack of standard employee benefits such as medical insurance, probably the worst thing about being a waitress is that in the course of her work she has to deal with a lot of creeps.
Like a little apron and a notepad, creeps come with the job. Men who want to talk to her, men who ask her for her number, men who just refuse to leave her alone. Creeps, the lot of them.
Creeps from building sites, creeps from office blocks, creeps in business suits, creeps with their bum crack displayed above the back of their jeans, creeps of every kind – the ones who think they’re funny, the ones who think they’re God’s gift, the ones who think that just because she brings them the soup of the day, they’re in with a chance.
She was serving a table of creeps when I took my seat at the back of the café. One creep – a business creep rather than a building-site creep – was leering up at her while his creep friends – all pinstripes, hair gel and mobile phones – smiled with admiration at his creepy cheek.
‘What’s your name?’
She shook her head. ‘Now why do you need to know my name?’
‘I suppose it’s something typically southern, is it? Peggy-Sue? Becky-Lou?’
‘It’s certainly not.’
‘Billie-Joe? Mary-Beth?’
‘Listen, are you going to order or what?’
‘What time do you get off?’
‘Did you ever date a waitress?’
‘No.’
‘Waitresses get off late.’
‘You like being a waitress? Do you like being a service executive in the catering industry?’
That got a big laugh from all the creeps who thought they looked pretty cool talking about nothing on a mobile phone in the middle of a crowded restaurant.
‘Don’t laugh at me.’
‘I’m not laughing at you.’
‘Long hours, lousy pay. That’s what being a waitress is like. And plenty of assholes. But enough about you.’ She tossed the menu on the table. ‘You think about it for a while.’
The business creep blushed and grinned, trying to butch it out as she walked away. His creepy friends were laughing, but they were not quite as hearty as before.
She came over to me. And I still didn’t know her name.
‘Where’s your boy today?’
‘He’s at nursery school.’ I held out my hand. ‘Harry Silver.’
She looked at me for a moment and then she smiled. I had never seen a smile like it. Her face lit up the room. It just shone.
‘Cyd Mason,’ she said, shaking my hand. It was a very soft handshake. It’s only men who try to break your bones when you shake their hand. It’s only creeps.
‘Pleased to meet you, Harry.’
‘As in Sid Vicious?’
‘As in Cyd Charisse. You probably never even heard of Cyd Charisse, did you?’
‘She danced with Fred Astaire in Paris in Silk Stockings. She had a haircut like the one you’ve got now. What’s that haircut called?’
‘A China chop.’
‘A China chop, is it? Yeah, Cyd Charisse. I know her. She was probably the most beautiful woman in the world.’
‘That’s Cyd.’ She was impressed. I could tell. ‘My mother was crazy about all those old MGM movies.’
I caught a glimpse of her childhood, saw her sitting at the age of ten in front of the TV in some little apartment, the air-con turned up to full blast and her mother getting all choked up as Fred twirled Cyd across the Left Bank. No wonder she had grown up with a warped view of romance. No wonder she had followed some creep to London.
‘Can I tell you about the specials?’ she said.
She was really nice and I felt like talking to her about Houston and MGM musicals and what had happened between her and the man who had brought her to London. Instead I kept my eyes on my pasta and my mouth shut.
Because I didn’t want either of us to start thinking that I was just another creep.
Gina was gone and she was everywhere. The house was full of CDs I would never listen to (sentimental soul music about love lost and found), books I would never read (women struggling to find themselves in a world full of rotten men) and clothes I would never wear (skimpy M&S underwear).
And Japan. Lots of books about Japan. All the classic texts that she had urged me to read – Black Rain, Pink Samurai, Barefoot Gen, Memories of Silk and Straw – and a battered old copy of Snow Country, the one I had actually read, the love story she said I had to read if I was ever going to understand.
Gina’s things, and they chewed up my heart every time I saw them.
They had to go.
I felt bad about throwing it all out, but then if someone leaves you, they really should take their stuff with them. Because every time I saw one of her Luther Vandross records or Margaret Atwood novels or books about Hiroshima, I felt all the choking grief rise up inside me again. And in the end I just couldn’t stand it any more.
Gina, I thought, with her dreams of undying love and hard-won independence, Gina who could happily accommodate Naomi Wolf’s steely, post-feminist thoughts and Whitney Houston’s sweet nothings.
That was my Gina all right.
So I got to work, stuffing everything she had left behind into rubbish sacks. The first one was quickly full – did the woman never throw anything away? – so I went back into the kitchen and got an entire roll of heavy-duty binliners.
When I had finished removing all her paperbacks, the