Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

(Surprising, really, that Kreitman never recounted this experience to his young daughters, lying stiff as lozenges in their beds. For it contained everything he liked in a story — expectation, sensuality, disappointment, failure.)

‘ Todos los otros son fríos ,’ the pregnant whore sings — not to him, to the other whores, but it is music to his ears.

All of the others. All cold. All except him cold.

And not just cold as in the opposite to hot. But friós . Which sounds icy to his Spanish. Arctic. Freezing in the blood. Frigid and frigidaired with fear.

But not him.

‘ Gracias ,’ he says.

She smiles at him. ‘ De nada .’

He is thirteen, on a school trip to Barcelona. ‘Don’t go off the beaten track,’ the teacher tells them, so they do. Old Knotty with his twisted teeth. ‘Careful, boys.’ So they’re not. But it’s only beer the five under-age boys are after, cerveza in a shady bar where they can practise their Spanish and get a taste of what it will be like to be men in a foreign country. Sooner than they think.

‘ Aqui! ’ the barman orders them. He is wonderfully blind in one eye and lame in one leg. Everyone in Spain is either half blind or half lame. The legacy of the Civil War, according to Knotty. So there’s the smell of killing in the calle , too. You don’t argue with killers. The barman rattles open bead curtains — ‘ Aqui, aqui! ’ — to a bare anteroom with a single bullfight poster on the wall. Here, confessions will have been beaten out of traitors. Kreitman has seen the films. Cruel hands shaving the heads of young girls who consorted with the enemy. A scrubbed table awaits them. A jug of beer is slid in. And some colourless liquor in an unlabelled bottle. Did they ask for that? ‘Clip joint,’ they all think, their five little hearts beating as one. But they don’t know what a clip joint is yet.

After the beer, the whores. One after another they enter, like aunties bearing birthday gifts. A fat one, a thin one, an old one, a young one, and his, the pregnant one, not too far gone, only a blip where her belly is and eyes that dance at him. Older than his mother, but otherwise could be his mother. The fat one sits on Gerald Barnish’s lap. The thin one inclines her head on Hugo Feaver’s shoulder. The old one and the young one carve up the Dorment twins. And Kreitman’s drums her fingers on his thighs. Call it the beginning of his life, call it the end. Everything is decided for him at this moment. Whatever it is I’m feeling now, he tells himself, is what I was put on earth to feel. Blood runs like honey through his veins. His bones fold. Tremors skate across his skin as though on a field of melted butter. Now he knows.

And the others? Frightened and wanting to go home. Fríos .

He is so whatever the opposite to frío is himself, the bottom of his mouth has welded itself to the top. ‘ Cuànto? ’ he manages to ask.

‘ Diecinueve .’ Her voice is harsh and alcoholic. A bicycle chain lubricated with aniseed.

‘ Pesetas? ’

Could it be pesetas? For that many pesetas he could have her a hundred times that night and still leave with money in his pocket.

She laughs a gypsy laugh, her drumming fingers scaling heights he did not know were there. ‘ Años ,’ she says.

He knows she isn’t nineteen years . But if lying is to be part of it, he’s up for that as well. For lies, too, taste sweet.

‘ Muy hermosa ,’ he says.

‘ Quien? ’

‘ Usted .’

She laughs at him, the little red-faced fiery formal boy. ‘ Gracias, señor ,’ she says.

‘ De nada .’

But he never does find out how many pesetas. Suddenly, Knotty with his twisted teeth is asking for them at the bar. Five boys, in blazers, seen disappearing into a disreputable bodega much like this. Yes, those five. And now, out!

Must he? He feels the tears rise. Will he never see her again? Never, never, never, never?

Relieved to be rescued, even by Old Knotty, the other boys file out. But not Kreitman. Kreitman feels his life is over. The whores shrug lazily. Kreitman shows his tear-torn face to his. She smiles and raps one final melody on his leg. ‘ Adiós ,’ she says. ‘ Adiós, mi héroe .’ And then in gargled English, ‘Till the next time.’

And now the next time is all he can think about. Confined to his hotel the following day. Out of town on a bus trip the day after. Musical theatre the evening after that. Something about bells in a village in the Pays Basque. Ding-dong, ding-dong. The clanging of his heart. For he is in love as well as on heat. On his last night, clutching all the pesetas he owns, he gives his frigid school friends the slip and goes looking for her. Down this calle and up that. But how to tell one disreputable bodega from another? He has no luck. Every barman has one eye. Every bar a beaded curtain to a naked anteroom. And because he doesn’t know her name he cannot ask for her, even were desperation to give him the courage to shape the sentence. Towards the end of the night, sad and footsore, he thinks he sees her ahead of him. He runs to show her his pesetas. It will be like showing her his heart, for he is not at all dismayed by the element of transaction in this, his first passion, whatever his mother would have said. Not at all. The pesetas define his excitement. In some important way, they are the excitement. It was exciting just counting them out. But the woman he overtakes is only a ghastly simulacrum of his woman, respectable and half her age.

In bars he cannot find, women sing with the voices of men. The smell of melancholy, now and for ever, is garlic prawn. Hot nights in cobbled alleys will always remind him of desire gone begging.

He never does find her. Never, never, never, never. But for a whole year he thinks about her all the time, and for the rest of his life he thinks about her some of the time. Todos los otros son fríos …

It helps to have that said in your hearing. It explains your difference from other men.

And now he knows that he never is and never will be happy unless he is suffering the pain of hope gone begging, of thwarted desire and of unbearable loss.

Ordered to get some rest, Kreitman agreed to let Hazel drive him down slowly to a hotel they both liked, though Kreitman less than Hazel, on one of the softer edges of Dartmoor.

It wasn’t just being knocked down he needed rest from. He needed rest from Charlie. All week, as though ducking flying bullets, Kreitman had been dodging his friend’s calls. You know when someone’s desperate to reach you. You hear it in the way the phone rings. And every time Kreitman’s phone rang he knew it was Charlie, demented, ill with fidelity, pushing for the swap.

You also know when someone’s avoiding you. Conversing with his women, Charlie thought. Making assignations even while his bones ache. Talking dirty. Three on a phone. The couple of times he did get through, Kreitman cut him short. ‘Up to my ears, Charlie. Let’s have another day in Soho again soon. Yes, exactly — on the principle that a man who crashes his car should start driving it again without delay. This Thursday? Love to, but let me see, let me see — no, can’t.’

Wouldn’t, more like. He’d been trying not to think about Charlie, but when he did, he understood that the best reason for denying him — sanity and decency aside — was that he didn’t want him in so close, didn’t want to forgo the experience of having him out there as a dumbstruck spectator of his irregularities. Everything else was pointing to the conventionality of Kreitman’s routines. Twenty years ago he’d been a wild man, the Casanova of University College, now what he did his own daughters considered too naff even to tackle him about. Yuk, Daddy, adultery? Get a life! But Charlie at least was still bulging his eyes. Shame to lose that. And lose it he would once he and Charlie became, so to speak, brothers in arms.