Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

What had happened? Nothing in his relations with Charlie, he was sure of that. Dear Chas — they still worked as they had always done, on ancient clitter-clatter typewriters at opposite ends of a large pine table with a vase of freshly cut flowers between them, and he still had only to raise his eyes from his machine and see her engrossed in hers, poking her little fingers into the keyboard, as conscientious and unworldly as a head girl at a convent school; still had only to catch her looking quizzically at him over her bifocals, ascertaining whether he was genuinely listening to what she was reading (‘Charlemagne, attend!’ she would say when she thought his attention was wandering), and his soul would leap as it had always leapt to nuzzle into hers. So, no, nothing to do with Chas. Nothing to do, either, with his son getting his nipple pierced (talking of nipples) and showing up without a word of warning on Blind Date . ‘My name’s Tim Merriweather and I’m from Rich … mond!’ Nor with his daughter getting her nipple pierced and informing them that while she wasn’t once and for all committed and they mustn’t think that that was her settled for the duration and that she wouldn’t be giving them grandchildren eventually, she did fancy having a tentative stab at the other thing. ‘Kitty’s a bulldyke!’ Charlie announced with a wail, during a party for grown-ups on the lawn, and all their friends roared with laughter. Strangers boating on the Thames roared with laughter too. Not at the daughter’s waywardness but at the father’s drollery. Who cared if there was or wasn’t another bulldyke in the world? It was all regulation Richmond. As was, when all was said and done, Dotty with her frayed-sleeved toyboy — yawn, yawn. Respectable Middle England which had never, in truth, been in the slightest bit respectable at all, simply opened its insatiable maw and swallowed the lot. No, none of Charlie’s externals had changed. Something had just switched on in his body. Or in his head. Maybe he’d banged himself. Walked into a wall or ricked his neck rolling off Charlie. Smack, rick, switch — behold, a pervert! No one was ever having as much fun as you feared they were having? The hell they weren’t! Look at Kreitman. Well, don’t look at him just this minute, with blood in his nostrils and tyre marks on his shirt; but in a general way, look at him.

How many houses did Kreitman have? How many love nests? With how many lovers in each? A new woman every night, was that his routine? Two new women? Two together? Should he have asked for two before Kreitman walked into the cyclist? Would Kreitman remember anything of the conversation when he woke? Would he know if Charlie told him that the deal was two — his beloved Chas for any two of Kreitman’s? Or three? Would he remember enough to know that three had never been on the table?

He was parting company with his reason but there was nothing he could do to reverse the process. He wanted to be parted from his reason. The poison had entered his body. Never mind Kreitman, he was the one they should be jabbing against tetanus.

Contrary to what moralists tell you, an excessive preoccupation with sex makes you serious. Or perhaps that should go the other way round: only the serious are able to brave wholeheartedly the repercussions of sexual thought. The young are excepted from this. Sex in the young is another matter, unphilosophical, a necessity not a luxury, the fulfilment of an instinct not an illness. Thought to be a jolly person in the past, though tinged of course with that melancholy incident to any man who has looked about him or been sent to public school, Charlie Merriweather was now possessed of so much of the gravitas of unsatisfied desire he barely recognised the weight of his own limbs.

The other burden he had to carry, of course, was that of treachery, and treachery’s twin brother, loneliness. He didn’t feel he was acting against Chas in his heart, but of course he was. They had done everything together since he was a young man. When he’d been unhappy or uncertain he’d told her and she’d kissed him better. His unhappiness was her unhappiness. They were a couple. They shared. But she couldn’t share this one, could she? He was acting against her, thinking against her, by simple virtue of the fact that what he was thinking he couldn’t tell her. There was the betrayal — not the imaginary other women themselves, but his having to exclude her from all knowledge of them. For the first time since they’d become a pair, he had reverted to being single. And the cruelty of that, for him, was that he had no one to talk to just when he needed someone to talk to most.

So it wasn’t with any idling lightness that he sat looking at Kreitman’s rescued mobile and thought about the contents of its databank. Pick a number, press a key, and that lurid world of which Charlie Merriweather had for so many years denied the very existence would at once dance into lunatic life. He turned it about in his fingers, picking at the stitches of its leather case (everything Kreitman owned came in a leather case), while he waited for Chas to turn up with the tea and egg baps. Nyman wasn’t watching; fearing he may have killed a man, the cyclist slumped with his head between his cycling shorts, intermittently leaping to his feet to make another desperate representation to the receptionist.

‘Nyman, why don’t you go home?’ Charlie said. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ But the minute he said it he realised his mistake. By his own confession — ‘I am Nyman,’ was how he had introduced himself while they were watching Kreitman being stretchered into the ambulance, ‘I am no one in particular’ — Nyman had been waiting for such an evening all his life. Nyman the Killer — so that’s who I am!

‘I will get some air,’ he said. ‘Please to call me if there are developments.’

Charlie wasn’t certain he believed the cyclist was Austrian or German, let alone, as Kreitman had insisted, a faggot, however many German faggots on bicycles Kreitman said there were in Soho. He watched Nyman’s back recede, in its pretend athletic vest, then went like a thief into the phone book of Kreitman’s mobile and pressed a key.

The name Erica appeared on the display. He pressed another key. Bernadette. Then Jane. Then Ooshi. Then Vanessa. Then Dotty. Then Shelley …

Then who was that? He went back a number. Dotty? Kreitman was in the habit of ringing Dotty?

He felt the blood run into his neck. Was Kreitman already halfway to enjoying both sisters? The thought sent a sewer of bile into Charlie’s stomach. A man should not fuck sisters, whatever attitude the Old Testament took to Jacob fucking Leah and Rachel. A man should not fuck sisters. In a decent world a man would not even think about fucking sisters. Not Chas and Dotty. Not Dotty and Chas. So where did that leave him? Up in flames, longing for abominations and going madder by the minute.

Hope and pray it was a different Dotty. Kreitman must have known a thousand Dotties. Charlie did not recognise the number, but then Charlie did not recognise any number. In his house Chas did all the ringing. She had even programmed his mobile for him — just as she still put together his outfits for the day, which socks with which pants — showing him how to operate the phone book, though the only number he could find in it was his own. He checked his watch — fast approaching two in the morning — then pressed the yes key anyway. If this was Dotty’s number and she was asleep she’d either have her phone off or switched over to answering machine, the way Chas did theirs. Anyone else, well, what the hell. His own needs came first. The phone rang four times, then someone picked it up. The voice irascible with broken sleep — ‘Who’s that?’ Dotty! Dotty, for sure. Remembering to pinch her lips together, even though barely awake, lest words made the muscles round her mouth collapse. ‘Wh’s tht?’ Dotty without a doubt. ‘Oh, Lord!’ Charlie said, whereupon Dotty said, ‘Charlie, is that you? What’s the matter? Is everything all right? Has anything happened to Charlie?’ And all Charlie could think of saying in return was, ‘I’m losing my mind.’