Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Like her? The same droll obligingness, not devoid of a sense of duty? The same passive recipience of what was and yet was not erotic liberty? Maybe the same. Or, if not the same, similar.

As for Charlie’s mother, Dotty on the telephone to Charlie in London swore blind that she had seen the coalman position himself a hot breath behind her at the Shepton Mallet street party for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and manoeuvre her hand into his flies.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Charlie said. Though she could quite picture the pantomime. Lawk-a-mercy, Mr Brotherton!

‘Then don’t believe me. But if you’d seen him bulging in his best suit you’d have wished it was your hand.’

‘Dotty! What did Daddy say?’

‘Daddy? Daddy was away surveying, as usual.’

‘So what did Mummy do?’

‘She kept it there, silly.’

Well, I suppose it was a party, Charlie told herself. And in a small, cold community you don’t hurt the feelings of the coalman.

She pursed her lips for the traffic cop in Vauxhall, thought about a joke since Hazel was with her, then thought better of it and blew into the bag.

And despite the family susceptivity she truly only opened her mouth for her professor, and never moved away her hand, on that one occasion?

Truly.

And never ever, post Charlie, with anybody else?

Never ever?

Well … just the teensiest time. But that wasn’t anything of vital importance either.

‘Shhh!’ she ordered him, smoothing his hair.

Kreitman loved nothing more than having a woman’s hand in or near his hair. Had someone told him that God was a woman and would stroke his brow and run her fingers through his hair on his arrival in Her presence, he would gladly have gone to Her at once, and to hell with all the others.

Now more than ever. A woman to blow cool air across his brain, that’s what he needed. A woman to blow women out of his brain.

The cruel paradox of Kreitman’s life, as he saw it: he was ill with women, but only a woman could make him better.

He felt a little less ill, opening his eyes this time, than when he’d first come out of his faint on the Soho streets. For Kreitman, fainting was the proof that he would the badly, and that life was an accident, without meaning or purpose. He had been a congenital fainter as a boy. The sight of blood did it. Horror stories did it. Hot food did it. His father did it. Being struck did it. Seeing a hand raised in anger, even if not to him, did it. Nietzsche went mad on the streets of Trieste, seeing a man beating a horse. Marginally less unstable than the philosopher, Marvin Kreitman fainted at the zoo, seeing a parrot, crazed with being caged, denuding itself of its feathers. Kreitman knew how the parrot felt. Not the being caged, but the futility. Sometimes he plucked at himself, ripping out his fingernails and toenails, tearing the skin from his knuckles, pulling out individual hairs from his scalp. And fainting. Told by the doctor that this was merely a phase Marvin was going through, his mother took him to be examined by a specialist. Several thousand pounds of tests later, Marvin was diagnosed ‘sensitive’. Money well spent. ‘My son is clinically sensitive,’ she informed friends. ‘I could have told you that and saved us a fortune,’ his father croaked. Whereupon Marvin fainted again.

The fainting itself he could live with. Sometimes it was even pleasurable just to vanish from the scene. What he could not bear was the coming-to. When Kreitman came to after fainting it was as though he were being reassembled. So why wasn’t there satisfaction in that? Reunification is meant to be a happy event. Things coming together which have been apart — friends, lovers, nations, ligaments — are deemed to be fortunate. Occasions for a party. Fireworks. Not in Kreitman’s case. When Kreitman came to after fainting, he felt he was being reassembled out of parts that were not his and did not fit. There was physical pain in it, the agony of bones going into sockets that would not take them; but the mental anguish was the hardest to support, the nauseating certainty that the mind you’d been given back was not your mind, that it was of another colour and configuration from your mind, that the patterns you saw were not the patterns you were accustomed to seeing, that there was a music to the objects you woke to which bore no resemblance to any music you knew, or to any rhythmic pattern or system of notation you recognised or liked. He had been reassembled randomly, thrown together, a stranger to himself, without consideration of suitability or match, and that proved there was no meaning or purpose out there. Kabbalists argued that the Godhead who had once presided over a unified and harmonious universe had become alienated from himself, and as a consequence we were all so many scattered sparks, shaken as through from a falling torch. Fine by Kreitman. There had been meaning once, but there wasn’t any now. Unfortunately, he was living now.

Among the scattered sparks that comprised this latest disgusting composition of what wasn’t himself was a fiery recollection of loose talk with Charlie Merriweather. What he thought he could remember couldn’t possibly be the actual event. Another person’s conversation had been confused with his. As for how he’d spent his own evening, some poor insensible bastard elsewhere on the planet was waking with a dream of that.

But he was still alarmed to find Charlie Merriweather’s wife, standing like Florence Nightingale in a spinnaker, by his bed.

‘Where are the others?’ he asked her. ‘Or are you here on your own?’

Because Kreitman noticed such things, he noticed that she didn’t say, ‘Why, would you like me to be here on my own?’ But he also noticed that she also didn’t say, ‘And what, Marvin, would I be doing here on my own?’

‘Charlemagne’s asleep on a bench in the waiting room,’ was what she did say, ‘and Hazel’s having breakfast with Nyman.’

Here we go again, Kreitman thought. Wrong parts. ‘Nyman?’

‘The cyclist.’

‘Which cyclist? Not the faggot who ran me down?’

Charlie shrugged and shook her head, as though Kreitman’s bad language were a poisonous insect that had flown into her hair and she wanted to be rid of it.

‘And he’s called Nyman, you say?’

‘Yes. An Anglicisation of Niemand.’

‘How the fuck do you know that?’

‘He tells you.’

‘A German?’

‘I don’t know. An Austrian, I think.’

‘There are no such things as Austrians. All Austrians are Germans.’

‘Hush, Marvin.’

‘I don’t have to hush. Germans I can say what I like about. That’s their function for the next thousand years — to be the butt of everyone who isn’t German. Especially when they’re faggots who run me down in the street. And Hazel’s having breakfast with him, did I hear you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘Loyal of her. And would you have any idea how Hazel happened to run into this Nyman?’

‘He was here. He’s been here all night with Charlie.’

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Kreitman said, ‘why don’t you join them for breakfast and leave me to have another little faint. Maybe when I next surface the world will make more sense. It’s kind of you to have come, Charlie.’

‘ De nada ,’ Chas said.

Neither quite awake, nor quite unconscious, impressionable Kreitman drifts through Spain.

Schlock Spain, but then what other kind is there? Castanets, garlic, warm nights, a dusty bar in a dusty calle , beaded curtains rattling like snakes, and a pregnant whore, older than his mother, fingers hotter than hell, thrumming out a malagueña on his thighs.