Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

The other mistake, she realised, no sooner did she see him standing in her hall, gingery and denuded in brief khaki shorts and boots and flak jacket, like some lewd Boy Scout, was that she hadn’t thought enough about the effect his presence would have on her children. People often stayed over at the Merriweathers’ without Kitty or Timmy’s feelings being taken into account. The house rambled. There was room enough to go on a ramble yourself if you didn’t like who you saw at breakfast. And Kitty and Timmy were not generally fazed by their parents’ friends anyway. But then their parents’ friends were by and large too ancient or too out of it to faze anyone; certainly none of them turned up wearing shorts and boots, and if you did happen upon a flak jacket at the Merriweathers’, the chances were it had seen service in North Africa or the Middle East and not been bought the day before at Prowler. What would she do if the children jumped to the mistaken conclusion that Nyman was here for her, a consolation, or worse, a replacement for Daddy? Oughtn’t she to tell him she’d confused her diary, give him his taxi fare and send him back wherever he’d come from?

Something turned over in her stomach. She’d chance it.

She needn’t have worried. No sooner did Kitty and Timmy set eyes on their new house guest than they were in love with him. ‘I’ve been here before,’ Chas thought. ‘What is it with this guy? It’s spooky. Is he some sort of hypnotist?’

In fact, Kitty and Timmy had an excuse, vis-à-vis Nyman, which their elders hadn’t. They already knew him. Not in the usual sense of the word know, and not in the biblical sense either, but televisually, which is altogether more intimate.

‘Wow!’ Timmy had exclaimed, even before the introductions. ‘It’s Norman!’

‘ Nyman ,’ Chas corrected.

Nyman hung his head.

‘ Norman? ’ Chas laughed.

Nyman still hung his head.

‘You’re called Norman? ’ She looked from one to the other. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘so what’s with this Norman?’

And that was how she learned that Nyman who was no one had an alter ego who was maybe someone, a Norman who had done what Nyman had told them all on Dartmoor he was anxious to do — that’s to say make a bit of a name for himself on the box. Whether he had therefore been teasing them all, getting them to guess what his forte might be, getting them to vie with one another over his prospects when his prospects were already proven and garlanded — garlanded in the eyes of Timmy at any rate — or whether he was simply schizoid, Chas didn’t begin to guess. But her stomach turned over again.

She found it difficult to extract from either of them what Nyman in his capacity as Norman was actually famous for having done. Nyman himself wasn’t talking, taking refuge in modesty and renewed difficulty with the English language. (No problem understanding when his pants were down around his ankles, Chas recalled.) And Timmy, unable even in his clearest moments to distinguish between success and failure on the box, or between fact and fiction, let alone between past, present and future, all of it merging into one great blur of form and a single trancelike continuousness of time for which there was no tense known in grammar, couldn’t quite find the description to fit the job.

‘An actor?’ Chas asked.

Timmy simultaneously shook and nodded his head. ‘Yeah, kind of, not exactly.’

‘An actor in a soap?’

‘Mmm … No, yeah. Depends how you define soap.’

‘A presenter?’

‘Nah,’ Timmy said. ‘Not a presenter, not as such, not exactly.’

‘A contestant?’ Chas felt she was getting somewhere now. Maybe Norman had been a fellow guest of Timmy’s on Blind Date. Wow, you’re Norman was commensurate with that. I’m Timmy from Richmond! I’m Norman from Nowhere ! Whoo!

Timmy scratched his head. Nyman went on looking between his naked knees. It needed Kitty, in the end, to come in from the kitchen where she’d been removing photographs of her father from the fridge, to clear things up. Norman had been on the box about a year ago in a reality game show which bore some resemblance, it seemed to Chas, to the old Yes and No quizzes of her youth. How long could people stand one another’s company without saying anything — that appeared to be the premise; how mute, under the provocation of other people’s muteness, could you remain. At the end of a fortnight in a confined space, Norman had tied, controversially, for first place. Chas wondered what the controversy could have been. You were mute, surely, or you were not. Chas’s children exchanged looks. Did their mother know nothing! In order to drive other people into language, Kitty explained, you were encouraged to employ whatever subterfuge or underhandedness you chose. Some viewers, Kitty and Timmy among them, believed Norman’s repertoire of social offensiveness was sufficient for him to have won outright. It was more subtly, they believed, than the other guy’s, which consisted in crudities like hogging the lavatory and stealing other people’s milk.

‘Whereas Norman?’ Chas asked.

‘Hard to explain,’ Kitty said. ‘Just being himself.’

‘And wearing these cool clothes,’ Timmy added.

‘I know what you mean,’ said Chas.

And the prize which he fairly or unfairly shared?

The chance to host his own late-night talk show.

Chas didn’t think it was seemly to probe too deeply, with the subject of their conversation sitting there, coolly clothed and saying nothing, but how did Norman’s genius for verbal forbearance qualify him to host a talk show?

Her children exchanged the same looks as before. Mummy with her word fixation!

That Norman, for whatever reason, had not gone on to host a talk show, Chas deduced without asking. It explained him a bit. He was another of those to whom telly had promised the world and delivered nothing. Not unlike Timmy, never again, after Blind Date , to be the sweet, engaging boy he’d been.

The only thing Nyman had to say on his own behalf about the experience of being Norman was that he had enjoyed being recognised for a while, even though he wasn’t strictly being recognised for himself, that’s if he had a self. ‘I liked it very much,’ he told Chas, ‘when I put my hand out to people at a party and began to say my name, and they said, “I know who you are.’”

‘You liked being famous?’

‘I don’t know if I liked that , but I liked thinking’ — and here he tapped himself on the forehead, reminding Chas of the old moron joke: kidneys! — ‘that they didn’t really know who I was at all.’

‘No, well, none of us does,’ Chas said, chiefly to herself.

Because it was always a bit of a free-for-all at the Merriweathers, the question of how Chas had come by Nyman never arose. And because Kitty and Timmy saw him as belonging culturally to them — which made a change — it didn’t once occur to them to think he might have been for Mummy. Chas took a few deep breaths and believed she had pulled off a lucky escape. After three nights she showed Nyman the door, slipped him a couple of hundred pounds, and warned him that he really was going to have to find himself somewhere permanent to live, because she was too distracted, as a woman whose husband had recently left her — and that wasn’t an invitation — to have him here again. Though by that time, of course, he had already wangled himself the promise of Timmy’s floor, whenever he wanted it.

And all this she kept from Kreitman? Yes. Even though it would have given him intense satisfaction to learn that Nyman’s other name, maybe even his actual name, was Norman? Not Niemand, meaning mysterious Mittel European existential Nobody, but plain Norm, normal Norm, as like as not from Basingstoke. Yes. Mean of her, but yes.