Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Only recently, while sitting at a bar in an exhibition hall in Hamburg — off buying purses — he had fallen into conversation with a couple of Biedermeier gays from Berlin. He had liked them, found them handsome, found their neatness transfixing, enjoyed the musky smell of them, got drunk and allowed his tongue to run away with him. ‘This gay business …’ He was speaking as a man’s man himself, he hoped they understood. Which they did, perfectly. The only thing they didn’t understand was why a man’s man chose to spend so much time — so much quality time, they laughed — in the company of women. ‘What?’ He was surprised by his own surprise. As were they. Had he really never stopped to ask himself before today what it said about his masculinity that it shied so nervously — they were only taking him at his own word here — from masculinity in others. They didn’t put it to him like this, of course, they were altogether far too urbane, but if anyone were to be called a sissy …

Was the cyclist who shouted ‘Honk, honk, urgent delivery’ and deliberately all but ran Kreitman down on the corner of Broadwick and Poland Street gay? He rode as though dozing in an armchair, not remotely urgent, his head thrown back, his hands insolently off his handlebars, wearing green bulging lunch-pack shorts, a thunder and lightning sleeveless vest, a pink and purple nylon baseball cap reversed, with a matching pink and purple nylon backpack scarcely big enough to hold an eyeliner pencil and a couple of tightly rolled condoms — what did that say?

‘My fucking right of way!’ Kreitman yelled after him. ‘Try that again, you moron, and I’ll have you in the fucking gutter!’

Almost out of sight by now, for Kreitman delivered long sentences, the cyclist put one of his free hands behind his back and showed Kreitman his finger. Was it painted?

‘Make me Mayor of London for just five minutes, Charlie,’ Kreitman fumed, ‘invest me with the power and I’ll have every sanctimonious fucking faggot cyclist in the capital in clink.’

‘Only the faggot ones?’

‘What gets me is they think they’ve got some God-given dispensation, the lot of them, just because they’re not punching holes in the ozone layer. I’ve seen the future, Charlie — we fetishise these arseholes and they run us down! Serves us right.’

What amazed Charlie was how furious Kreitman had become, how quickly and seamlessly furious, given the smallness of the offence and the number of reasons (five plus four) Kreitman had to be happy.

This didn’t happen every time the two men lunched late in town. Mostly they would plunge back peaceably into twilit Soho, enjoying the nightly handover, the silver cans of film spilling stardust as they skipped between production houses, the workers leaking home and the theatregoers nosing out, the shops shuttering, the rubbish piling, the bars starting to fill, the daytime beggars leaving with their sleeping bags over their shoulders, ceding to the night shift, and the mobs of inflamed teenage boys from penurious countries, bound in a sort of helix of indecision, drifting apart but always attached to one another, like the arms of a kindergarten mobile. In their different ways, both Marvin Kreitman and Charlie Merriweather felt at home here; nothing to do with the film and television industry, or the wholesale jewellery trade, or the silk merchants, or the Lithuanian lowlifes; what they enjoyed was the peculiarly English early-evening melancholy, the sensible damped-down expectancy, the scruffiness taking from the excitement, unless scruffiness happened to be what excited you …

‘What I can’t decide,’ Kreitman said, ‘is whether it’s like peeling off an expensive whore and finding cheap cotton underwear, or undressing a scrubber and finding La Perla.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Merriweather, setting his big chin. ‘I wouldn’t know either way.’

Whereupon they would decrease their pace, ring their wives on their mobiles, and decide on somewhere to have dinner.

Tonight, and it was to be a night different from all other nights for both of them, they chose a big noisy Italian which Kreitman’s window dresser had told him about and where, therefore, he couldn’t take her mother — one of the new steel-cool New York Italians, sans napery and sans space between the tables, in which, supposing they let you in, you were laughed at if you asked for fegato or tiramisu and waitresses as touchy as grenades took you through pastas named after eminent Mafiosi.

‘Christ, Charlie, what’s cavatappi? ’

‘Ask the waitress.’

‘I’m frightened to. But it comes with a sauce of smoked turkey, seared leeks and brandied shallots. Nice and light. I’ll have that. You?’

‘ Elicoidali with five cheeses.’

‘What’s elicoidali? ’

‘What it sounds like. Italian for coronary.’

‘Then don’t have it.’

‘Too late to start worrying about that.’

He rubbed his great dog’s-paw hands together, daring death. Charlie the high-risk voluptuary. Around food he was still the prep-school glutton, smacking his chops and popping his cheeks to cram in one more lolly. Be the same around the you-know-what, Kreitman thought, deliberately courting ugliness, not himself yet, not recovered from the affront of being almost knocked down by a cocksucker. And lectured to by his best friend — was it a lecture? — about nice sex.

‘And a bottle of Brunello di Montecello,’ he told the waitress. It was time to start that.

Had they not eaten Chinese for lunch they might well have gone for Indian tonight. Not the poncy stuff. Not cuisine vindaloo, served on big white plates — two dry lamb chops presented with their legs in the air, like Soho pole-dancers, in a baby-powdering of fenugreek. By Indian, the two friends still meant stainless-steel bowls of blistering brown slop, suddenly called balti. They had lived in Indian restaurants in their student days, shovelling down old-fashioned bhunas and madrases in Camden High Street before and after going to see Jack Nicholson movies. Kreitman’s choice; Charlie Merriweather didn’t care for movies and only went to have somewhere quiet to sleep off one curry and dream of the next. Kreitman (who could have passed for an Indian anywhere but in India — Sabu, they had called him at school) even got around to learning to cook festive Indian dishes, sitting cross-legged in the kitchen of his too expensive digs, crumbling saffron and separating sheets of vark, the edible silver leaf of which angels’ tongues are made, with a view to transforming the humble pilau into an offering to the gods. And Charlie? He rubbed his hands and watched. Sometimes he rubbed his stomach and salivated. ‘Knives and forks, Charlie!’ Kreitman would shout. ‘Bowls! Pickles! Spoons!’

Considering their upbringings — Charlie left to fend for himself at an unheated minor public school near Lewes, Kreitman encouraged to run riot at a progressive in Farnborough and never once to make a bed or rinse a toothbrush if he wasn’t minded — you would have put your money on Charlie turning out the housemaker. But Charlie had been awed by university and fell helpless the moment he got there. His bulk embarrassed him. When he went to lectures, he felt his head was too big and annoyed the people behind. He tried slumping, but that only drew sarcasm from the lecturer who told him that if he was as tired as he looked perhaps he ought not to have got up. He was ashamed of his voice which was too public school for the crowd he had half fallen in with, and too loud as well. ‘Don’t boom at me,’ a girl from Newcasde had told him on what couldn’t quite pass for a date, and that had made him more ashamed and somehow, as though to compensate, more booming still. By the end of his first term he was racked with confusion, a person who was too noisy and too shy, who was too much there and yet not there at all. He drooped disconsolately, like a puppy who had grown too big for its owner and been thrown on to the streets. ‘I’m just waiting for someone to take pity on me,’ he told Kreitman. ‘I’ve taken pity on you,’ Kreitman reminded him. ‘No,’ Charlie said, ‘I mean a woman.’ Someone to take pity on him, adore him, cook him breakfast and give him a good home.