Man and Boy Read Online Free

any minute.
    “What’s wrong with being a woman who stays home with her kid?” she said. “All that ambition stuff is so pathetically eighties. All that having-it-all crap. We can get by with less money, can’t we? And you’ll buy me sushi once a week, won’t you?”
    I told her I would buy her so much raw fish she would sprout gills. So she stayed home to look after our son.
    And when I came back from work at night I would shout, “Hi, honey, I’m home,” as though we were characters in some sitcom from the fifties, with Dick Van Dyke bringing home the bacon and Mary Tyler Moore making bacon sandwiches.
    I don’t know why I tried to make a joke of it. Maybe because in my heart I believed that Gina was only pretending to be a housewife while I pretended to be my father.

three
    Marty grew up eating dinner with the TV on. Television had been his babysitter, his best friend, his teacher. He could still recite entire programming schedules from his childhood. He could whistle the theme tune to Dallas . His Dalek impersonation was among the best I have ever heard. The Miss World Contest had taught him everything he knew about the birds and bees, which admittedly wasn’t very much.
    Although I was nothing like him, Marty took to me because I came from the same sort of home. That doesn’t sound like much of a basis for friendship, but you would be surprised at how few people in television come from that kind of background. Most of the people we worked with came from homes with books.
    Back at the little radio station where we first met, we were both what was laughingly referred to as multiskilled. Marty was mostly skilled in fetching sandwiches, sorting mail, and making the tea. But even then his grinning, pop-eyed energy was such that everyone noticed him, even if nobody took him seriously.
    I was in a more elevated position than Marty, writing items, producing shows, and sometimes very nervously reading the news. I was always lousy at coming alive when the red light came on—only slightly better than Gina. The red light came on and instead of coming alive, I went sort of dead. But it turned out to be what Marty was born to do.
    When we suddenly lost the regular presenter of our late night phone-in—the nut shift, we called it—to a job in cable television, I persuaded the station to give Marty a shot. Partly it was because I thought he would be good at it. But mostly it was because I was terrified of having to do it myself.
    And he worked wonders with the most unpromising material imaginable. Five nights a week, Marty took calls from conspiracy theorists, alien watchers, and assorted loony tunes. And he turned it into good radio.
    What made it good radio was that Marty sounded like there was nowhere else he would rather be than chatting to the mouth-foaming denizens of nut nation.
    We slowly started to build what they call a cult following. And after that, we very quickly began to get offers to take the show to TV. People bought us lunch, made flattering noises, and made big promises. And very soon we abandoned our successful radio show, a rare case of rats deserting a floating ship.
    But it was different on television. We couldn’t just let our guests practically wander in off the street as they had done on radio. Amusing lunatics who had been impregnated by randy aliens were no longer quite enough.
    After a year fronting his own show, Marty still looked like he was exactly where he wanted to be. But the strain was starting to show, and every week he needed a little more time in makeup to cover the cracks. It wasn’t just the seven-day stress of finding good guests that was putting those licks of gray in his bottle-blond hair. When we were on radio, Marty had nothing to lose. And now he did.
    He was in the chair of the makeup room when I arrived at the studio, brainstorming about future guests to the group of young women who surrounded him, hanging on to his every wishful thought while the makeup girl attempted