Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘In which case,’ he shouted after her, ‘you might just as well have stayed home with me.’

But she was buttoned up in her National Health blue uniform by then, belted and badged as though there were a war on, and already in the street.

Once a week a lady with a mutating mole on her neck and no flesh on her bones visited the house to do the cleaning. Catherine. ‘Ah, Catherine, Catherine — and would that be Catherine Wheel or Catherine the Great?’ Teddy Merriweather hummed when he was apprised of her appointment. ‘Catherine the Great Unwashed,’ his wife corrected him with a snort. Charlie was frightened of Catherine because of her mole, because poverty had ingrained her skin with soot, because she called him ‘Sonny Jim’, and because she seemed to find the height of him amusing. Once she pushed open the door when he was sitting on the lavatory. Once she found him leaning out of his bedroom window, throwing lead soldiers at the garden shed to see if he could frighten out the mats and rice. Another time she sneaked up on him when he was lying on his bed, talking to Pobble, the bear he’d owned since he was a baby. She moved so silently about the house, on slippers which must have been distributed charitably to the poor, for he had never seen any but poor people wearing them, that he was never given warning she was coming. It seemed to Charlie that she was spying on him, deliberately seeking him out in compromising positions so she could wag her finger at him, call him Sonny Jim and laugh in his face.

But he had been brought up to be a little gentleman, albeit a little tall gentleman, which meant going to the rescue, sometimes, even of people you didn’t like. So he knew what to do the day he came home from school early on account of a teacher committing suicide and found a man with no clothes on pressing Catherine to the floor, presumably with a view to robbing her or murdering her or both. Entirely against his instinct, which was to leave her there and let the man rob and murder her as often as he had a mind to, Charlie grabbed an umbrella from the umbrella stand and began striking the man’s back with it. Only when the man turned around did Charlie realise it was his father. Charlie recognised the expression on his face. The last time he’d seen his father with a face like that was when the person with the two angry-cheeked dogs had accused him of being unable to read and ordered him off his property.

Charlie was right. Thanks to his father he was never not going to feel sad again. Never.

Although he had no words for what had happened, Charlie knew it was wrong in some way that would upset his mother. ‘I won’t tell that you were robbing Catherine,’ he told his father, who was back under the table now, holding on to his briefcase and sobbing like a child.

But Catherine too must have needed reassuring, because she sat him on the sofa and snuggled up to him not long after and thanked him for saving her and asked him to name his reward. Charlie couldn’t think of anything he wanted. ‘How about an introduction to Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton?’ Catherine asked. When Charlie said he did not know who Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton was, Catherine roared with the sort of laughter Charlie associated with witches and took his hand and introduced him, whereupon it was Charlie’s turn to begin sobbing like a child, though he at least had the excuse of being a child.

He was an unlucky boy. Unlucky in his parents, unlucky to have been carted off to Leicestershire and then sent back down to Lewes to finish his schooling, unlucky in his encounters with the lower classes and, until he met Charlie and his luck changed, unlucky in love. He couldn’t find anybody. One by one the other boys caught up with Simon Lawrence. Oral sex? Nothing to it. Straight sex? A breeze. Now they were all biting pencils and wearing lockets. All except Charlie. He bought a locket of course, but put his mother’s picture in it. ‘Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton,’ he would have said, had anybody enquired. Some love charm! — the chain gave him a neck rash while the locket itself smacked into his sternum whenever he moved. Small wonder he continued to be lacking in the necessary confidence. They can smell it on me, he thought, I must stink of everything I haven’t done. He did. At school dances girls shied away from him, put off by the avidity with which he stared at them, frightened of his big hungry face, repelled by the odour of his virginity. He believed it was his penis that stank, and washed it in a basin a hundred times a day. He thought he had some disease, he thought his penis was putrefying. He thought his sperm smelt off. But of course it had nothing to do with his penis or his sperm. It was his attitude that stank. Marvin Kreitman pointed that out to him when they met in their first week at university. He emptied a bottle of Givenchy over Charlie, advised him to keep his drawers and cupboards open for a year, recommended he stop wearing vests and change into clean underpants every morning, put it to him that he might consider circumcision, but above all ordered him to stop looking so needy.

‘How do I do that?’ Charlie wanted to know.

‘You put your tongue back inside your mouth for a start.’

‘Do you know what the worst of it is,’ he told Kreitman, ‘legs and nipples.’ He longed for legs and nipples. Ached for them. It was an Indian summer and all the girls had their legs bare and their nipples pushing at their shirts and cardigans, like eyes in the wrong place. ‘Why eyes in the wrong place should get to me the way they do, I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but they do and I’m going mad for a pair.’

‘Your nipples are fine,’ Kreitman told him.

‘Listen to me, Kreitman,’ Charlie said, ‘if I don’t get to walk out with someone with nipplissimus erectibissimus before this term’s out I’ll shoot myself.’

Soon after, rather than let that happen, Kreitman introduced him to Charlie.

And guess what? She had tiny introverted nipples and wore brassières and men’s jackets.

And long canvas skirts.

And woolly winter tights.

But Charlie fell in love with her for all that.

And should have lived happily ever after, if there were any fairness in the universe. Yet here he was again, at the beginning of another century, wondering to what end those shadows on the walls of the school pavilion leapt and cavorted.

As a general rule other people did not have as much fun as you feared they were having; he had learnt that as he’d got older. The grass isn’t always greener. Your neighbour is invariably as dissatisfied with his ox as you are with yours. Figuratively speaking, he wasn’t the only one who had worn his mother’s portrait round his neck. Everybody added a little to the truth. ‘No one ever goes to as wild a party as you throw for them in your head, Charlemagne,’ his wife used to tell him when she feared he was growing restless. Some such calculation of human sameness is necessary to keep us all in a passable state of contentment and it had been enough for Charlie for twenty years. Nice sex with Chas twice a month — and Charlie in his peroration to Marvin Kreitman had not exaggerated how nice sex between them was, sex so nice he sometimes wanted to cry while he was having it — nice books to write about children who were only comically not nice, nice sales, nice house on the river at Richmond, nice friends. He even sent off self-effacing articles to fogey journals in praise of his lifestyle, joys of suburbia, charm of the old-fashioned, what you don’t know you don’t miss, better a buffoon than a bounder, as if he’d clean forgotten what it was like to fear you had a putrefying penis. And it was enough. It did. More than that, it was true. The rest was lies. Silliness and lies. Then suddenly it wasn’t. Suddenly the rest was truth and he was lies.