Free Men from the Boys by Tony Parsons

In the end, it always comesdown to practicalities with children. Times for pick-ups and drop-offs. Homework assignments and meal requirements. The endless vigilance of the search for nits. That sort of thing.
    We were being nice to each other. For the sake of our son. We were trying to be mature grown-ups and keep the party polite.
    If you had glanced at us on the street, then you would have taken us for a couple. But it was as if there was somebody walking between us, keeping us almost ludicrously apart, making accidental physical contact impossible.
    For we walked the way that old lovers do.
    ‘It’s so beautiful, this city,’ she said, smiling at the gypsy glamour of the barges and the tugs on the Thames. ‘You forget how beautiful. Why is that? Why do we forget? I walked down here with Pat last weekend. And he got it. A lot of boys his age – they wouldn’t get it, would they? But he definitely got it.’
    I was used to the way she looked now. I had got my head around it. It wasn’t complicated. She was a good-looking woman in her forties and everything we had lost was so long ago that it hardly even hurt. It wasn’t pain any more. It was more like a memory of pain. I was relieved that we would never have to go through it again.
    Besides, when she had suggested meeting, I had been expecting this kind of stuff. The forgotten beauty of our city. The remembered beauty of our son. Philosophical Gina, who had somehow achieved enlightenment while she was working as a translator in Tokyo. That is what I had been expecting. Reflective Gina – sighing at the tugs and the barges and something our son had said.
    Maybe even an apology or two. Why not? That would be nice, I thought. For the years wasted on useless men and pointless jobs and faraway places with strange-sounding names. An apology on behalf of her – and all absent parents just like her – for the time when their child wasn’t top of the list. It was a good job I wasn’t bitter.
    But she surprised me. She could do that now, because weno longer really knew each other. It wasn’t like when we were married and you pretty much knew what was coming next.
    ‘I don’t like him taking this medication,’ she said. ‘It’s not right. A teenage boy taking pills every day of his life.’
    ‘Thyroxine,’ I said. And I actually laughed. ‘You make it sound as though he’s raiding the medicine cabinet. You make it sound as though the kid lives for chemical kicks.’
    She frowned at me. ‘No need to get excited,’ she said, with a disapproving pout of her lips. Did she used to do that? I didn’t remember that move. Someone had taught her that gesture. It was nothing to do with me.
    I took a breath. I could do this thing. I could get through this conversation without my head exploding. Probably. We were mature grown-ups. If we were any more mature, we would be fossilised.
    ‘Pat was sick, Gina,’ I said quietly. ‘As soon as he started big school. He was flattened by – whatever it was. Just exhausted.’
    ‘We spoke, remember?’ she said coldly. ‘I knew all about it.’
    ‘But you didn’t really,’ I said. ‘Because you weren’t here. You were in Tokyo. You were busy with your new job or the new guy in Shibuya.’
    ‘You can’t argue, can you?’ she said, turning to face me. She had forgotten about the beauty of the eternal river. ‘You never learned to argue in a civilised fashion. And it was Shinjuku not Shibuya. And it wasn’t some new guy – it was exactly the same useless bastard that I was with in London.’
    ‘My apologies,’ I said. And then I was quiet, because I thought about the school year slipping away as Pat stayed in his room, only emerging to haul himself into a cab to see yet another doctor or paediatrician. And I remembered almost sobbing with gratitude when we discovered that he had a thyroid condition that was easily rectified, and that he wasn’t going to die. And I understood that there is nothing in this world that