Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘I don’t know what you mean “satisfied”,’ he said. He felt cornered, so he fought. ‘I don’t know why you invited me to see my “handiwork”. What’s your point, Hazel. What’s happened?’

‘My point is that you have brought us to this. Me a bitter hag, yourself a fool and your daughter lying upstairs like a broken doll. That’s my point, Marvin!’

A terrible weariness descended on him. How old was he? A hundred? Five hundred? ‘Most of this we’ve had out before, Hazel,’ he said, measuring his words as though he had only a few dozen of them left in him. ‘You’re right. Right about what I’ve done to you. Right about what I’ve done to myself. But I’m fucked if I can see what I have done to Juliet.’

‘You’ve just seen her, Marvin.’

‘I didn’t do that, Hazel.’

‘You did it. You caused it, just as surely as if you’d raised your own fist.’

‘I thought she was knocked down by a bicycle.’

‘For God’s sake.’ For a fraction of a second Kreitman wondered whether she was going to raise her fist to him herself. ‘You’ve just seen her. A bicycle doesn’t do that. You know what a bicycle does. It makes you crazier than you are already, but it doesn’t do that . She’s been hit, Marvin. She’s been beaten up. And now you need a chair! Look at you!’

He did need a chair. His second totter in one evening. What a pity his mother wasn’t here to see it. Before his legs could go from under him, he sank on to the stairs.

‘Who hit her?’

‘Why, what are you going to do? Hit him back? When was the last time you hit anyone not a woman?’

He put his head in his hands. Was it all a madhouse now? Was Hazel right about what a bicycle does when you walk it into it, had it made him crazy? Had he woken up on the hospital trolley into an asylum for the insane? ‘You know perfectly well, Hazel,’ he said with vehemence, because a man demands justice even in an asylum for the insane, ‘that I am not a hitter of women.’

‘There are other ways of doing damage, Marvin.’

‘Yes, there are. But we aren’t talking about those. You’ve just told me Juliet was hit . Who hit her?’

‘You hit her.’

‘Who hit her, Hazel?’

‘Who do you think hit her?’

‘It wasn’t Charlie, surely to God?’

‘Charlie! I think, Marvin, that you and I ought not to be talking about Charlie. Before there’s any more hitting, let’s leave Charlie out of it. Your other friend hit her.’

‘I don’t have another friend.’

‘Nyman hit her, you fool!’

‘Nyman?’

‘Nyman. What do you say to that? Faggot is what you normally say. Try it out for size. “Nyman the faggot? Nyman the cocksucker hit my daughter?” First things first, eh? First he’s a faggot, then he hits your daughter. Let no one say you don’t have your priorities sorted.’

Are my ears ringing, Kreitman wondered, or is this what the world is going to sound like from now on? He put the flats of his hands beside him on the stairs. He was only two steps up but he needed all the support he could get.

‘Under what circumstances,’ he asked, ‘did Nyman beat up Juliet?’

‘The usual. Boy meets girl. Girl dances with boy. Boy beats up girl’

‘Juliet’s been seeing Nyman?’

‘That’s quick of you. Yes, Juliet’s been seeing Nyman. Satisfied?’

‘What is this, Hazel? What do you mean “satisfied”? Why would I be satisfied? He knocked me down. I hate the fucker. If either of us should be satisfied, shouldn’t it be you?’

‘You wish! You and your dirty little mind. What can I manoeuvre Hazel into this time? I know — how about the faggot I wrestled off his bicycle.’

Charlie. Kreitman heard Charlie. What really happened on that night of nights, a fairy tale for children by Charlie — one half of the C. C. — Merriweather. So what else had Charlie told her? As though it mattered! As though he cared!

He pointed his finger at her, wagged it like the moralist in all matters of sex he held himself to be. ‘It was you who wanted to fuck him, Hazel. It was you who shed tears because he was showing rather more interest in other women’ — he decided against saying Chas — ‘than in you.’

‘You found him for me, Marvin. You plucked him off his bicycle and gave him to me on a plate. And if I thought of saying yes please for a drunken minute, whose fault was that? Who reduced me to it? Who took every grain of dignity and self-worth from me, years ago … years ago?’

‘So this is about you, not Juliet?’

‘Don’t dare me, Marvin.’

‘I’ll dare you. I’ll dare you to tell me how I made Nyman hit Juliet.’

‘You brought him into our lives.’

‘I didn’t …’

‘You brought him into our lives after you’d made our lives shit.’

‘What was wrong with Juliet’s life?’

‘She’s your daughter, Marvin, that’s what’s wrong with it. You taught her to be sarcastic. You taught her to mistrust people and then to make a fool of them. You set her a cold example.’

‘She’s her mother’s daughter.’

‘And if she learned coldness from me, whose fault’s that? I wasn’t born cold. I didn’t come to you cold.’

Kreitman shook his ringing head. ‘What has this got to do with anything?’

‘What do you think? She thought she could tease Nyman the way she was brought up to tease people who can look after themselves. She needled him. She riled him. She admits she did. Her idea of love talk, just like yours. And she thought he was up to it because he was a friend of her dad’s.’

‘She knew he was no friend of mine. I warned her to keep away from him. I warned her he was a faggot and that faggots get emotional. Let alone give you fucking Aids. Have they slept together as well?’

‘What do you know, Marvin, about anything? You wound the boy up mercilessly and thought he wasn’t aware of it. You ragged him and ragged him and at the same time used him to get yourself hot. Do you think he hadn’t noticed? You made a foe of him, Marvin. Is that a surprise? Did you suppose he’d love you for it? You made him your enemy. You gave him a purpose. And when Juliet treated him exactly as you’d treated him he put his purpose into action. She asked for it, she admits that. She was defending Daddy in language of which Daddy would heartily have approved. In so far as Daddy has ever heartily approved of anything, except his dick. But she didn’t ask for a beating. No one in their right mind asks for a beating. You made that happen. You and your rage and your unhappiness and your greed. And that’s why I ask you are you satisfied.’

He looked up at her. Was that it? Was she finished? She met his eyes. Hers were raw with tears. His too, though his tears were the dewier. He had been a weeper, Kreitman, from the cradle, but when it came to tears of this bitter sort, old worn-out encrusted tears, he was the baby of the two. How long did they look at each other? Ten seconds? Twenty seconds? Or was it twenty years? Back, back their look went, unravelling all the way to the beginning. They were so spent they could almost have embraced. Now that we know what we know, what’s to stop us? Wouldn’t it be the supreme act of mutual charity, me for you, you for me? Could there be a single thing nicer we could do for each other? Or for poor Juliet, the sour fruit of our union, lying bruised in her bed?

Then the look between them went out like a dead match and Kreitman rose from the stairs and left the house.

Left from Shaftesbury Avenue into Wardour Street and then left again into the wicked warren of Berwick and Brewer and Broadwick. Round in a circle, then out via suppurating Peter Street, lined with pimps picking their teeth with old needles, and back in again through Piss and Shit Alley, where the homeless doss down and do whatever the homeless do. What does he know?