Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

The subterfuge part worked fine. I bounded down the path in my new baggy burgundy tracksuit, a wildly rhetorical A for Akiva (embroidered for me by Fay) dilating over my pumping heart; my mother, my grandmother and my aunties waved from the lounge window; and Twink, sitting at the wheel of Aishky’s Austin, leaned across and opened the passenger door for me. One more wave and we were off — Dukinfield here we come. Looking back, I suppose it’s just possible that Twink really had seen and fallen for my aunty Fay and wanted to impress her, because he revved the Austin hard, reversed thirty yards down the street, and slammed into a lamppost.

We were lucky. In the fog and with fireworks going off, no one in my house heard the bang. And we hadn’t done serious damage to the Austin. A smashed offside rear light, that was all. And a small dent in the bumper. The damage to our nerves, though, would take much longer to assess. ‘This is something I don’t need,’ Aishky said, after he’d walked round the car a couple of dozen times, looking for scratches.

Although he was the younger of the two, Twink Starr was generally considerate of Aishky’s nervous system. When he saw Aishky getting overexcited he would go out of his way to settle him down, sending out calming signals to the rest of us with his hands and taking Aishky aside and reasoning with him in a loud and extravagant manner, like an uncle. Tonight, though, following his counter-attacker’s instincts, he went immediately into aggressive mode. ‘Aishk, what are you inspecting the bonnet for? Don’t give yourself the platz. How could I have damaged the bonnet?’

‘Suddenly you know about cars? You don’t know forward gear from reverse gear but you’re Stirling Moss all of a sudden.’

‘You don’t have to be Stirling Moss, Aishk, to know you’re not supposed to park in reverse. Doesn’t your jam jar have neutral?’

‘I don’t need this,’ Aishky repeated, getting back behind the wheel.

‘I’ll pay,’ Twink told him. ‘Do me a favour — don’t make a gantse megilleh out of it. Whatever it costs, I’ll pay.’

‘What’ll you pay with? Buttons?’

This was an allusion to Twink’s profession. He worked a button machine in a shirt factory in Derby Street, just behind the ice-rink. In the sense that our generation was meant to have put working at a machine behind us, the allusion was cruel. You’re a nebbish — that was what Aishky was implying. Which was rich, coming from him, a cutter in a holdall factory. I took it as a proof of the esteem in which Twink held Aishky that he didn’t play the nebbish card back, but simply fell silent, looking down and shaking his head.

‘Anyway, it’s not the money,’ Aishky relented, ‘it’s the aggravation.’

He was right: it was the aggravation we didn’t need. Not on match night. My first ever match at that. Needless to say, I felt it was all my fault. If I’d had the courage to face down my family on the question of being driven to Dukinfield by a blind man, none of this would have happened.

The aggravation was getting to Selwyn Marks, too, whose morale was already shot on account of his not having won a match for six weeks. He sat bunched up in the back seat, shivering and yammering something about bad omens.

‘Selwyn, do me a favour — shtum up!’ Twink told him. ‘We don’t need any meshuggener omens to explain why you’re going to lose tonight. Push, push, push. Listen to me — if you want to win a game of table tennis before you die, try playing some shots.’

‘I’m not having this,’ Aishky said. We were on Deansgate, making slow progress in the fog. He braked suddenly, without giving any signals. Behind us cars honked and swerved. ‘Leave the kid, alone,’ he said, ‘or we won’t be playing anywhere.’

Fortuitously, he’d pulled up dead outside my soft-porno shop. Through the fog I could see that the latest Span was in the window. A golfing issue. The cover showed the mother of a prefab boy teeing off and thereby uncovering a suspender. Playing golf in stockings — why was that so … whatever it was? A great yearning for the warmth and comforts of home overcame me. What was I doing out in the fog with these tsedraiters when I could have been back in the bosom of my family, sitting in the toilet with my scented chocolate box, religiously gluing aunty Fay’s serious spinsterly face to the body of a woman who I bet couldn’t sink a six-inch putt without showing the tops of her stockings?

‘Push, push, push,’ Twink repeated.

‘Genug is genug,’ Aishky said. ‘Loz the kid alone.’

I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was just possible that Selwyn had started to blubber.

The aggravation was getting to us all right. The only member of our team who might have been assumed to be in good shape was Sheeny Waxman who was making his own way to Dukinfield.

He couldn’t have been faring any worse than us, that was for sure. We lost our way in Gorton and then again in Audenshaw. The fog thickened. Bangers kept going off, rattling Aishky’s nerves. A half-spent Roman candle landed on the bonnet of the car, singeing the wiper blades. Once we nearly went into the canal at Guide Bridge, and shortly afterwards, taking what he thought was a turning on to Dukinfield Park Road, Aishky drove into someone’s private drive and would have gone into the garage had another car not been parked there already.

‘It’s just a question, Aishky,’ Twink said, ‘but what kind of a meshuggas is this? Is this meant to be a short cut or something?’

Aishky had had it. He jumped out of the car. ‘You do better.’

Twink started to climb across.

‘No you don’t,’ Aishky said, jumping back in. ‘We’re not going all the way to fucking Dukinfield in reverse.’

It was the first and only time I ever heard him swear. Culturally, we weren’t swearers. Not my father, not my aunties who called my putz an in-between, not Aishky, and not, as a general rule, Twink either. So it shows how fraught we were getting. ‘What do you mean all the way to fucking Dukinfield? I thought we were in fucking Dukinfield!’

‘Let me out,’ Selwyn said. ‘The fog’s making me feel sick.’

‘The fog’s making you feel sick? Who’s the asthmatic here? Push, push, push …’

At this point the owner of the house came out to see why there were four meshuggeners, two of them in tracksuits, screaming obscenities at one another in his drive.

By the time we found the Jam and Marmalade factory it was 8.45, which meant that the opposition was within fifteen minutes of being able to claim our eight games by default. Sheeny Waxman was waiting for us in the car park. He was sitting in the back seat of his car with his arm around a young woman. I hadn’t met him before but the atmosphere wasn’t conducive to formal introductions. He didn’t bother to get out of the car. ‘Noo?’ he said, winding down his window and looking at his watch. ‘Did you have a barmitzvah to go to first?’

I’ve often wondered if he meant mine. I was to see a lot of Sheeny Waxman over the next few years — he worked for my father for a while — but I never learnt to be comfortable with him. He always made me feel underage. There was some certainty about him that I was never able to gain upon. Maybe it had to do with the amount of time he’d been something like a linguist — a head jockey. He’d had a head start.

I couldn’t cope with his tic. How had he managed to turn this disability into an advantage? Normally when a person twitches badly he’s the one who’s embarrassed. But when Sheeny’s face went into spasm it was as though it was you who was being obliterated. The right eye closed, the head jerked backwards, the muscles in the neck tightened, and you felt it was your fault for not being able to hold his attention.