Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘Not me, is it?’ Charlie asked. ‘Oh Lord!’

‘Of course not,’ Hazel reassured him, pinching his cheeks. ‘Why would anyone want to flee from you?’

And it wasn’t him. It was her. Her and him. Them . Hazel knew her daughters. Had Kreitman brought a woman into the house they’d have hit the roof. But for Mummy to be shacked up with a new bloke was cool, even if the new bloke was only soppy Uncle Charles. So disgust wasn’t what motivated them to go to travelling. Not moral disgust, anyway. Aesthetic disgust was nearer the mark. They were not keen on how their mother was dressing for Charlie, and vice versa. Too short, the skirts. Too whispering, the dresses. Too pink and white, Uncle Charles’s chest, scarcely covered by his blue candlewick dressing gown, and too white and blue his unshod feet. Kreitman had been a model father as far as the decorum of the domestic wardrobe went: he wore leather slippers with a crest on them, silk pyjamas and a sort of pasha’s robe that tied around him twice. Sometimes he wore a smoking jacket. And on rare occasions a braided fez. Whatever was uncomfortable. As far as his daughters were concerned this made him a prize old fart, but a prize old fart was how your dad was meant to look. Uncle Charles on the other hand was getting about like a disreputable lodger their mother was knocking off on the side. That dressing gown! The one item in his wardrobe he had not let Hazel burn. At any moment, the girls feared, this appalling ancient garment was going to fall off his shoulders, unravel or undo, or he would simply omit, one fine morning, to wear it at all. And they were sufficiently Kreitman’s daughters not to want to be there when that happened. Gross — that was their verdict on the new situation. Gross and sad. But as they didn’t want to upset their mother by telling her that, they upped and left. Fingers crossed that by the time they returned Uncle Charles would have gone home to Aunty Chas and Mummy would be back wearing trousers.

This couldn’t have suited Charlie better. With the girls gone, it was as if they had never been. No trace of them. How did some families do that? To remove the atmosphere of offspring from his house — his old house — you would have had to flood, earthquake and firebomb it. Twice. And even then a little dolly with a missing arm would surely have survived the flames.

Wonderful, no matter how the effect had been achieved, to move about a space free of consequences. Free of memories as well, for there was no sign that Kreitman had once been here either. Every impression of him upholstered over. So non-repercussive did the place feel, so without recall or aftermath, it could just as well have been a brothel — not that Charlie had ever been inside a brothel — as a home. What was the opposite to nice sex? Nasty sex? No. Just sex from which nothing flowed or issued except more of itself. As long as Hazel wasn’t planning to flick it all away from him, Charlie believed he could at last count himself a happy and disreputable man.

Whereas Hazel — what Hazel loved about Charlie was the aura he gave off of being domiciled. Had anyone charged her with upholstering away all memory of Kreitman she’d have flown into a rage. ‘Excuse me — he upholstered away all memory of himself. He was like a ghost, my husband. When he rose from a chair he left not a dent behind. When he looked in a mirror there was no reflection. He wasn’t here. He never lived here. Tell me I dreamed him and I’ll believe you. The only person you’ll find to vouch for Marvin Kreitman’s existence is his mother, and she’s a ghoul.’

Charlie, on the other hand, left his imprint on everything and smelt of every chair he’d ever sat in. Kreitman had scoffed at Charlie for living bodilessly, for being embarrassed by his own skin. But Kreitman’s judgements were all erotic, and since the erotic life for Kreitman was situated between his ears, he was the last one to talk of incorporeality. Kreitman didn’t need a body; he propelled his penis with his mind. Poor Charlie may have been a bit behind the door sexually, but there was a body there to call on right enough.

‘I’m a fatherless girl,’ she told him. ‘I find it marvellous that when I wake up you’re still there.’

So they both felt it. Wonder of wonders, they each disappeared dreading into the dark, and each woke grateful and relieved that the other had not gone.

‘Do that thing with your eyes,’ Charlie said.

‘What thing?’

‘That thing when you sneak a look across at me with everything upturned. That sly, peeping thing. Ascertaining that I haven’t crept away, but not wanting me to see that you’re checking. Like a child on Christmas Eve, keeping a lookout for her presents.’

‘Do I do that?’

‘Often.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You do. I promise.’

‘That’s because I had no dad. No one to dress as Father Christmas. I always knew it was my mother creeping in.’

‘I’ll be your dad.’

She looked alarmed. Like a child waiting for her presents to be taken away from her. ‘Don’t say that, Charlie.’

He put his arms round her, folding her inside him. ‘I only mean that it touches me, the thing you do with your eyes.’

‘It doesn’t frighten you off?’

‘God, no. I love it. I love the way your eyes hold the light when you do it. I love the way they seem to steal all the light that’s in the room.’

‘They are lit with the light of you,’ she told him.

Whereupon he kissed them, making them better.

Wonder of wonders.

Then, out of the blue, ‘Hey, why don’t we’ — Chas ringing Kreitman to suggest — ‘meet up at my health club?’

Kreitman’s first instinct — to smell a rat. ‘I thought health clubs were single-sex institutions,’ he said.

‘Those are health farms . I’m talking about my gym.’

‘I didn’t know you had a gym.’

‘I have now.’

‘Why do you want me to meet you at a gym? Do they serve food there?’

‘I wonder why you associate seeing me with eating, Marvin.’

‘I associate seeing anybody with eating.’

‘I’m just “anybody”, then?’

‘If you were just anybody, Chas, I wouldn’t be in the state I’m in.’

‘What state are you in? Have you gone to pieces over me?’

She’s hysterical, Kreitman thought. ‘I’m a wreck,’ he said.

‘That’s exciting. Tell me more.’

More than hysterical. Hyperphasic.

‘About as exciting as an unweeded garden,’ he said. But he decided against mentioning the mould.

‘Then it sounds to me that a gym is just what you need.’

‘What will I have to do there?’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve never been to a gym.’

‘Not since school. Gym then was something everybody dreaded. It astounds me that these days people pay to go somewhere they once avoided like the plague. Will I be required to do handstands against wallbars?’

‘You can if you want, Charlie.’

Charlie!

‘Marvin,’ he corrected her.

She laughed her mistake away with a carillon of little bells, making nothing and everything of it. ‘Come tomorrow at ten,’ she said. ‘It’s quiet then. Do you have things?’

‘Things?’ Did she mean condoms?

‘Shorts, trainers …’

‘Those I’ll buy,’ Kreitman said. He had already mentally picked the bag he was going to carry his things in — South American leather, very soft, lots of zip pockets, with a tartan lining, on sale in his own shop right below him, a snip at three hundred and fifty smackers, but then it came to him at half that.

She gave him the address. ‘Ten o’clock, then.’

‘Ten o’clock then. Oh, and Charlie, how will I recognise you?’

‘Has it been so long?’