There was a vigorous practicality in his father. He’d been through the army. Grown up in the fifties. He’d worked with men in garages. He’d known times of austerity and rebellion. He’d done it all on Teesside, where such things struck harder. So he could submerge his deeper upsets and resentments and concentrate on the proper things he could do for his son at this time. Arranging for a van, for example, to transport his few things to college in the autumn. Making sure he got his head down and revised hard enough to pass his exams in the first place. His father could see this process as some kind of endurance test and, that way, he could understand it. Vince had to run the distance. And that included smartening himself up for interviews.
At seventeen Vince would have been happy to turn up looking a state but his father wanted to see him right. At seventeen he barely even thought about what he was wearing, slouching around the place in faded jeans and those bloody green trainers of his. He’d had them for years and he wore them in all weathers. His father was a dandy, sprucing himself up teddy-boy style for the big club every Friday night in his drainpipes, midnight-blue jacket and shoestring tie. He manicured his quiff in the mirror in the living room. Vince’s father knew what you had to do to pull the lasses and get on in the world. He stood and stared and sighed at Vince’s wilful negligence of his appearance.
The day he drove him up to the Metro Centre, his father took a long appraising look at him while they had cappuccinos in a Grecian-style cafe. How much like his mother he was! Almost a man … well, he was a man, really. And there was that pale skin, the orange hair, the same mouth. Vince’s dad remembered the very day Vince had told him he didn’t want his father kissing him any more. It wasn’t long after his mam had walked out. Looking at Vince’s mouth now, across the table from him, his father could forget that the voice coming from it was broken. He could find himself wanting to kiss it. As your kids got bigger, your thoughts got funnier and more complicated. Sometimes you didn’t know where you were. And there was the kid, completely headstrong, set on what he wanted. It was always the parents that got left mixed up, wasn’t it?
‘Drink up,’ his father said. ‘We’d better go and see what we can get you.’
Vince would have liked to look in the bookshops that afternoon, but Dad didn’t read. He barely watched television. Anything that entailed sitting down longer than ten minutes without eating or drinking was suspect in his world. Whenever Vince was reading he could be sure Dad was doing sit-ups on the top landing or tinkering with his car.
‘We’ve got to decide what sort of suit you’ll need and how much I can afford to spend.’
They headed for the escalators, and Vince realised he was scowling. He really didn’t want his father going to any expense. He didn’t want to be any more indebted to him than necessary. He hated the thought of his father standing there when he was being measured and trying on suits, Dad attempting to impose his own vision of his son on him… Vince liked to play himself down in his green trainers and his ‘Meat Is Murder’ T-shirt.
As they headed down the brightly lit hallways of the Metro Centre, Vince’s mind was made up. He was having cheap and he was having tacky. Something he couldn’t respect or feel grateful for. Sometimes he got into these moods. I’m a spoiled cunt, I am, he thought savagely as they went through Next, Top Man, Principles, Burtons. I’m purposely turning up my nose at everything he suggests. It’s all I ever do. Why do I treat him as if he’s always got to be making up for something? He was the one here for me. He did me right. But no matter how hard done by he thought his father was, left behind with an ungrateful son, Vince was far more angry on his own account. He felt that no one had ever talked to him. Someone had taken a look at him and simply assumed what he wanted: this is the kind of life you want, a boy like you. All he wanted to say was that he wasn’t a boy like him. He clung doggedly to a private self, an inner self they didn’t see.
His earliest book was one of fairy stories, an anthology whose spine wore away with overuse, far outlasting the building sets, the electronic devices and mechanical things his father bought in ensuing years for them to share. And in the book was a retelling of Pinocchio. For Vince it had always gone without saying that he and his father were Gepetto and Pinocchio. The tale underlay their everyday lives as surely and obviously as genetics. It was something he never questioned, even as late as seventeen.
When Vince looked back to his first suit, the one he wore at seventeen, it made him cringe. It was a lightweight, satiny material of blue and white checks. He wore it everywhere, even to school, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows like someone out of Miami Vice. And his hair was streaked with gold, cut spiky, blown back on top, grown long, almost halfway down his back.
Vince got his place at Lancaster without even having to go for an interview, but his father still wished Vince had chosen a nicer suit.
In Darlington on the afternoon of their reunion Andy pulled out scores of
