Free Man and Boy by Tony Parsons Page B

remote control against his lower teeth and didn’t take his eyes from a video of an angry man with no shirt on, a singer who looked like he should be helping police with their inquiries. Glenn would know who he was. Glenn would have all his records. But he made me wonder if music was getting crap or I was getting old. Or both.
    “Hi,” the girl said.
    “Hi. I’m Harry—Pat’s dad. Is Gina around?”
    “Nah—she went to the airport.”
    “The airport?”
    “Yeah—she had to, you know, what do you call it? Catch a plane.”
    I put Pat down. He settled himself among the Star Wars figures that were scattered over the floor, shooting admiring glances at the spotty youth watching MTV on the sofa. Pat really loved big boys. Even dumb, ugly big boys.
    “Where did she go?”
    The girl—Sally—frowned with concentration.
    “To China. I think.”
    “China? Really? Or Japan? It’s very important.”
    Her face brightened.
    “Yeah—maybe Japan.”
    “There’s a big difference between China and Japan,” I said.
    The boy—Steve—looked up for the first time.
    “Not to me,” he said.
    The girl laughed. So did Pat. He was only little. He didn’t know what he was laughing about. I realized that his face was dirty. Without a bit of encouragement, Pat had a very cavalier attitude to personal hygiene.
    Steve turned back to the TV with a satisfied smirk, still tapping the remote control against his lower teeth. I could have cheerfully stuffed it down his throat.
    “Do you know how long she’ll be gone?”
    She grunted a negative, absentmindedly squeezing Steve’s beefy leg.
    “Glenn not around?” I said.
    “Nah—my dad’s at work,” said Sally.
    So that was it. The girl was one of Glenn’s abandoned kids, from a marriage or two after Gina’s mother.
    “You visiting?” I asked.
    “Staying here for a while,” she said. “Been getting a lot of hassle from my mom. Whining about my friends, my clothes, the time I come home, the time I don’t come home.”
    “Is that right?”
    “‘You’re treating this place like a hotel,’” Sally screeched. “‘You’re too young to smoke that stuff.’ Blah blah blah.” She sighed with the weariness of the very young. “The usual. It’s not as though she didn’t do it all herself back in the dark ages, the hypocritical old bitch.”
    “Bitch,” said Steve.
    “She’s a bitch,” smiled Pat, a Star Wars figure in each tiny fist, and Steve and Sally laughed at him.
    This is how it works, I thought. You break up and your child becomes a kind of castaway, set adrift in a sea of daytime television and ducked responsibilities. Welcome to the lousy modern world where the parent you live with is a distant, contemptible figure and the parent you don’t live with feels guilty enough to grant you asylum any time things get too tense at home.
    But not my boy.
    Not my Pat.
    “Get your coat and your toys,” I told him.
    His dirty little face brightened.
    “Are we going to the park?”
    “Darling,” I said, “we’re going home.”

ten
    We were meant to be celebrating.
    Barry Twist had come up with the idea of a fifteen-minute delay system for the show, meaning we would go back to doing the thing live but with a short time lag before transmission as insurance against either the host or the guests going bananas.
    The station was happy because it meant they still had time to edit out anything that was really going to give the advertisers the running squirts, and Marty was happy because it meant he no longer got paralysis of the lower teleprompter.
    So Marty took me to lunch at his favorite restaurant, a fashionably spartan basement where well-fed people in television put authentic Italian peasant food on their expense accounts.
    Like most of the places we went to, its bare floorboards and white walls made it look more like a gym than a restaurant, possibly to make us feel that we were doing ourselves some good in there. When we arrived just after two—I was running