Men from the Boys by Tony Parsons Read Free Book Online Page A

at me from his Four Seasons. He glanced quickly at the old ladies and looked away. You would think that a man with Marty’s CV would not care about profanity in the pizza parlour. But, like all transgressors, he understood that context is everything.
    The old ladies were staring at each other. The suits were in uproar. The comedian took a bite of garlic bread and ploughed on.
    ‘Next day he goes back and says to the whore, “How much for a blow-job?” She says, “Five hundred quid.” “Five hundred quid! Fuck me, that’s a lot of dough.” She says, “Listen, you see that Mercedes? I bought it by giving blow-jobs.”’
    Marty pushed his pizza away.
    ‘We should say something,’ I said, my voice pathetically low. ‘We should say something to these creeps.’
    Marty nodded. But he kept staring at his pizza. ‘Except there’s five of them,’ he said. ‘Except they might not like it. Except they might have knives.’
    ‘You kidding? These guys haven’t got knives. They’ve got BlackBerrys. What do you think they are going to do? Slash you with their iPhones?’
    But for all my big talk, I sat there just like Marty, useless in my disapproval.
    There was bedlam at the next table. Red faces. Drunken voices. The joke coming to its punchline. The old ladies were getting up to go. They were telling a confused waitress that they were not so hungry after all.
    ‘And then he goes to the whore and says, “How much for the lot?” And she says, “One thousand quid.” And he says, “Fuck my old boots, that’s a lot.” And she says, “See that big house over there?”’
    ‘She says, “If I had a pussy,”’ Marty muttered to himself, ‘“I bet I could buy that.”’
    ‘I feel like saying something,’ I said, staring at the suits as I watched the old ladies heading for the door, their big night out already violated.
    But I just sat there, and I said nothing.

Four
    I drove Pat to Soho. He was still not really speaking to me. We were on grunting terms.
    I walked him to the door and found the bell with her surname. The name she had before me, the name she had after me. I looked at Pat as I rang it. He was impassive, neutral – the inscrutable offspring of divorced parents.
    ‘Hello?’
    It was strange that I had not recognised her face. Because the voice could not belong to anyone else. Pat and I leaned towards the metal grille.
    ‘It’s us,’ I said.
    ‘It’s me,’ Pat said.
    Gina laughed with delight – a sound that I had not heard in, oh, about a thousand years. ‘Great, come up,’ she said, and she buzzed the front door open. Pat gave me a blank look and went inside. I stood there for just a moment after the door swung shut.
    I don’t know what I had been expecting. But I had driven him across town with a mounting sense of dread. And nothing had happened. Had it? I walked back to the car. But I did not get in. I just kept walking. And the reasons that we stay together or come apart just seemed so heartbreakingly 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 – wantto 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