random that I could have sat down in Old Compton Street and wept.
Would she take him out to dinner? Or would it be easier for both of them if they stayed home? They would talk, wouldn’t they? Or would Gina – would both of them – want to avoid too much talking, and just try to rack up some together time?
It’s their thing, I thought. And I was totally lost. I felt flat. And suddenly older.
If I had not slept with someone else, if she had given me another chance, if she had not been so quick to try again with another man…not much had to happen to keep us together, I thought.
But I was the child of a nuclear family, and growing up in a family that never comes apart makes you believe in the inevitability of staying together. And I could see that there was a banality about my expectations – like the predictability of the princess stories that my seven-year-old daughter had suddenly grown out of.
Gina came from a family where the father walked out. She did not expect happy endings. She did not expect families to stay together. She expected them to fall apart. I walked out of Soho and into Chinatown, reluctant to start the drive back across town in case it all went wrong, and there were accusations and raised voices and slammed doors and the call to come quick. I kept my phone in my hand in case it suddenly began to vibrate. But I walked all over Chinatown, and it never did.
Five good things about being a single parent.
You are alone now, so you can make all decisions concerning your kid without consultation.
You know, with total certainty, that a child only needs one good parent.
You know that your child is loved, and will always be loved.
There is no need to feel like a freak at the school gates, because the world is overflowing with single parents now.
And your ex is out of your life.
Five bad things about being a single parent.
You are alone now, so you constantly feel like you are the last line of defence between your kid and the lousy modern world.
You know, with total certainty, that a child is always better off with two good parents.
You know your child is scarred by his parents breaking up, and will carry those scars forever.
You feel like a freak at the school gates, because the world is full of happy, unbroken families.
And our ex can come barging back into your life whenever they feel like it, just by uttering the magic words – ‘This is my child too.’
But what did I know about it?
I had not been a single parent for years.
What made me such an expert?
It had been ten years since Pat and I had lived alone – that strange, messy period between my first marriage and my second. A time of raw pain all round, and being unable to wash his hair without both of us having a nervous breakdown, and the slow realisation of how much I had relied on Gina to give shape to my life, and form to our family, and to wash our child’s hair and put him to bed while I heard their laughter through the walls.
And what I remembered most of all about that time was the feeling that I had failed. I could still taste it, ten years down the line. The feeling of failure, as undeniable as a broken arm – failed as a father, failed as a husband, failed as a man. Lugging that feeling of failure to the supermarket, to the school gates, to the house of my parents – that’s what I remembered most of all. Failed as a son.
But it was all years ago. And although I still noticed the single parents at the school gates – their time much tighter, their love somehow fiercer and more protective and more evident – I could not pretend that I was one of their number.
I had a wife and three children. And they were our children. And if you wanted to be picky, and prissy, and small-hearted, then you could say that the boy was my son and the older girl was her daughter and the seven-year-old was our daughter together.
But we did not think that way.
The whole menagerie had been mixed up for so long – for most of the lives of the elder two, and for all of the life of the youngest – so that we did not think in those terms. Sociologists and commentators and politicians – they think in terms of blended families. In the real world, you just get on with it, and it either works or it doesn’t.
It worked for us.
This little post-nuclear family where the females out-numbered the males. It was home. But seeing Gina again had prised open some secret chamber in my heart where I still felt like the father I had been so long ago.
A card-carrying single parent.
Gina made me see that bitter truth.
Once a single parent, always a single parent.
‘The whites are worse than the darkies,’ Ken Grimwood said, and I did not know where to begin.
He was a time capsule containing everything that was rotten about the country I grew up in. Yet I found myself feeling curiously grateful that he was enlightened enough to see that the morality had little to do with the colour of your skin. But the casual talk of darkies – it gave me exactly the feeling of dread that I felt when I saw him producing his tin of tobacco and packet of Rizlas, which he was doing right at this moment. I felt like opening all the windows.
‘Please, could you save it until I’ve got you home?’ I said. His home was only in another corner of North London. But it felt like another planet, another century.
‘At least the darkies have God and church,’ he said, carrying on as if an audience had asked him to elaborate on his feelings about race relations in modern Britain. The roll-ups and the baccy tin sat in his lap, apparently forgotten. ‘God and church keep them in line. Nothing wrong with a fear of hell. Nothing wrong with believing you’re going to burn in the eternal fires of hell if you step out of line.’
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘It’s very healthy.’
‘As long as their God doesn’t tell them to stick a rucksack full of Semtex on the Circle Line,’ he said.
I looked at him and shook my head. ‘How can you talk like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘All this stuff about darkies,’ I said. ‘You fought against all of that, didn’t you? When the Nazis were building factories to kill people. You were fighting for tolerance. For freedom.’
He smiled. ‘I fought for your dad,’ he said. ‘I fought for my mates. For them. Not for King and country or anything else. We fought for each other.’
I kept my eyes on the road. Where was his son? Where was his daughter? They had never called back. Didn’t they love their father? Shouldn’t they be doing this chore, instead of Harry’s Magic Taxis?
He was looking out the window. The twenty-four-hour shops were lit up like prison camps. And I remembered how my mother and father would look at those same streets, the streets of London where they grew up. The look that said, There must be something out there I still recognise. ‘But the whites – what have they got? Cheap booze and talent shows and benefits,’ the old man said, looking at me sternly, as if I had just disagreed with him.
‘What’s the knife for?’ I said. ‘I can’t believe it’s just for sticking in your leg.’
‘Dogs,’ he said. ‘The knife is for dogs. Where I live, there’s a lot of big dumb animals – and some of them own very large dogs. The kind of dog that gets a kiddy in its cakehole and doesn’t let go. You can’t pull them off. Do you think you can pull them off? You can’t. That’s what the knife is for, smart arse. If a dog gets a kiddy.’
‘What did you do?’ I said. ‘What was your job?’
‘Print,’