Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

The prematurely gravelly voice threw me too. The only person I knew who had a voice as hoarse and phlegmy as Sheeny Waxman’s was my grandfather on my mother’s side, but nobody thought he was putting it on to arouse women. Why it should have worked for Sheeny Waxman I never understood. Unless it was fear. When Sheeny Waxman flashed his cuff-links, went into spasm, and growled from his seat at the Kardomah, ‘ ‘Ello doll, new to town are you?’ a woman must have thought the Head of the Five Families was making a move on her.

He’d been here, at Allied Jam and Marmalade, since 7.30, played his two matches, won them both, and had spent the last twenty minutes in the car park looking out for us.

Aishky was angry with him. It wasn’t good manners to turn up for an away match and then walk out on your hosts. What were they doing now, the home team, twiddling their thumbs?

‘What they’re doing now, Aishky, is polishing off the cakes you couldn’t get here in time to eat and counting off the minutes before they can claim the match. You want to get in there and get your jacket off instead of giving me a rollocking. Eh, Cynthia?’

‘Is that his girlfriend?’ I asked, rather inconsequentially, as we hurried towards the clubhouse.

‘Never seen her before,’ Aishky said.

I didn’t say that I thought I had. That I thought I’d seen her on the cover of Span, swinging a golf club.

‘Sheeny Waxman doesn’t have girlfriends,’ Twink added. ‘He has opportunities.’

‘Which he takes,’ Aishky concluded. With some bitterness, I thought. ‘Now can we think about table tennis?’

It was a sticky situation. Our opponents had given us up and were on the point of writing walk-over on the official scoresheet. Legally, we could claim our last man had arrived with five minutes to spare, but no one knew where we stood, morally, in the matter of our last man being in fact our four last men. What saved us — not that it made any difference to the outcome — was the universal ping-pong player’s appetite for competition. The jam and marmalade makers wanted a game. They wanted to win. And given the fog-wash that was on us after two and three-quarter hours on the road, they couldn’t see anything to stop them.

The room was icy. There were radiators on every wall, great glossy cream cobra coils of burbling iron, much like the ones we jacked off behind at school, but the room stayed cold. The radiators were there for us to lose the ball behind, not to provide warmth. This was my first lesson in the ergonomics of ping-pong: every feature and dimension of the playing area must contribute to your discomfort; every item of fixed or moveable furniture is where it is for no other purpose than that you should lose your ball behind it.

Never mind Gossima — Tribulation, that should have been ping-pong’s nom de jeu. No wonder the game came naturally to sun-starved Slavs and Magyars. Tribulation was also the name of their native countries. And no wonder the game came naturally to me, cramped in my clammy shell.

Another law bearing on the playing environment of the game called Tribulation states that there must always be steps within two yards of the table or two bounces of the ball, whichever makes for greater inconvenience. Steps going up or steps going down. The Allied Jam and Marmalade ping-pong team played in a room that had steps going down and steps going up. The steps down, which no one had yet contrived a system for even partially blocking off during play, led to a small scullery-cum-kitchen, where there were buckets and beer crates and old stoves and gas pipes and cans of paint and boxes of tiles and stacked wooden benches with cross-supports ideal not only for losing your ball behind but for injuring yourself while you were searching for it. The steps up led of course to the stage, which sloped away in a manner that must have made it vexatious for the chorus of the Jam and Marmalade annual panto, but more importantly ensured that a ping-pong ball once up there would never come rolling down again. Since the ball ended up on the stage as often as it ended up on the table, why was no one posted there to retrieve it? And why was no one stationed at the bottom of the scullery steps with his hands cupped? These are questions only a person who has never played ping-pong competitively, or never lived within a thousand disheartening miles of the choking River Bug, would ever dream of asking.

I spent what was left of the evening on my knees, getting my own ball back and, because I was the youngest, getting everyone else’s back to boot. I had grazed elbows. I had cobwebs in my hair. I had fog in my lungs. And I was cold. Sweltering in my shell, freezing out of it. Should it be any surprise I didn’t win?

I’m not making excuses for myself. I was beaten fairly and squarely. Squarely, anyway. Twice. The first defeats I had ever suffered since I’d found the little white ball bobbing on the lake in Heaton Park. Were they good players, then, the two who did me? No. They were not good players. Neither of them was a good player. What they were was canny. They’d seen action. One of them must have been an employee of the jam factory since it was built in 1891. He made less of a concession to athleticism than Aishky did. Aishky at least wore plimsolls. Aishky at least took off his jacket. Jack Cartwright played in a cardigan with leather buttons and never moved his feet. He held his bat pen-hand, like Ogimura, but he didn’t have Ogimura’s flashing shots. Strictly speaking he didn’t have any shots, not even a backhand push like Selwyn Marks’s. He simply blocked the ball. Stabbed at it. Poked it dead. Whatever I put on the ball was what came back. If I hit it hard and flat, hard and flat was what I had to deal with. If I chopped the ball in half, half was all I saw of it. It wasn’t Jack Cartwright who beat me, it was me who beat me. But that didn’t stop me feeling a prize fool, dancing around in my brand new shorts and Fred Perry shirt, breathing hard and sweating profusely, unable to get a ball past a narcissistic old cacker who chewed at his false teeth throughout the match, who wore bracelets for arthritis on each wrist, who resembled J. B. Priestley for portliness and consciousness of sagacity, and who in truth might as well have been J. B. Priestley’s cadaver for all the vital principle he demonstrated in body.

An anachronism — J. B. Priestley would still have been alive on the night Cartwright cleaned me up. But you know that dead-fart Yorkshire torpor I’m talking about.

Bob Battrick, my second victor, at least shuffled around the table. But he too did me for savvy. Placing — that was his genius. He knew how to wear me out and cramp me up, pushing me out wide then bringing me in to the net, then pushing me out wide again, then tempting me back in to the net only to fire an awkwardly rearing ball into my stomach. All this with an octagonal cork bat and a square stance and a half-volley. Each time he caught me out he’d give a little skip and hold up his hand as though to apologize for his craftiness.

If losing to Battrick was still more humiliating than losing to Cartwright — and I don’t intend to relay the score in either instance (look it up in the archives if you have a taste for statistics) — it was because of the expression of pity that never left his face the whole time I was playing him. ‘Better luck next time, me duck,’ he said as we shook hands, by which I took him to mean that he’d been doing his utmost to give me every point but that I’d lacked the nous to take a single one of them.

Back in Aishky’s Austin a hangdog silence reigned. We’d all lost.

‘No post mortems, thank you very much,’ Aishky had said as we’d trooped back out into the fog. ‘I don’t want post mortems.’