Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

When it falls, grandiosity, it falls big.

I tried desperately to free my mind from its own devils, to think about something other than itself, someone other than itself. But what and who else was there to think about? Girls? — none. Friends? — my only friends were ping-pong players now. School? — poof, school! Holidays? — none till next summer. I hadn’t anything to look forward to. That was the most devastating effect of my double defeat — it robbed me of a future, left me without a single cheerful event to anticipate. Hence the thought of self-suffocation with my pillow. There was nothing left to live for.

That I began to spend even longer periods in the toilet with my glue and scissors will come as no surprise to those who remember what it is to be a boy who has been beaten. I compounded shame with shame, heat with heat. I see now that I was attempting to transfer my humiliation, collage it on to someone else. Had I been able to get my hands on a photograph of Bob Battrick I would have cut up my aunty Fay and laid her across his knee with her Span-poached pants down. ‘Fancy a paddling, me duck?’

And people say that sport is a healthy activity for the young.

I didn’t suffocate myself. Though it might have been better for the short-term future of my parents’ marriage if I had. They were arguing over me again. What was the point of his coming home early, my father wanted to know, if he couldn’t get into his own toilet?

Then he didn’t get back until four in the morning. My mother was waiting up for him, just as she’d waited up for me. Only for him she hadn’t rung every hospital in Manchester. We were all awake. We could feel the floorboards vibrating to her pacing.

‘And where have you been?’

‘Me?’

‘No — Yashki Diddle. Where have you been?’

‘Out.’

‘Out doing what, Joel?’

‘Out looking for somewhere to have a Jimmy Riddle.’

‘That’s it! You’ve taken your last ride, Joel.’

We heard no more that night, not a squeak from either of them, but the following morning, finding me already locked in the toilet, he began breaking the door down with his bare hands. ‘You’ve got ten seconds to get out of there. Ten … nine …’

Ten seconds? How was I going to put all the photographs away, screw up the gluepot, close the scissors, tie a bow in the ribbon, do up my pants, hide the box, in ten seconds? It was impossible. I was done for.

‘… eight … seven …’

What saved me was the sound of my mother on the blower to the bus company. There was a terrible calm in her voice, like the quiet that must have fallen over the Steppes the night before The Hun rode in. She was explaining that the stress of the job had turned her husband into an alcoholic, that he was arriving home rolling drunk at all hours of the night, that he was leaving the bus parked in the middle of the road — not just in it but across it — that the neighbours were up in arms and were threatening violence against him, against his family and, more to the point — let’s get practical now — against the bus; hence she felt it was her responsibility, though she was a loyal and loving wife — no, because she was a loyal and loving wife — to bring matters to a head before someone, not least a coachload of innocent passengers, got killed.

Not everything she asserted was untrue. The bus wasn’t popular with the neighbours. Every three or four months a new petition would be posted through our letter-box, signed by everyone in the avenue, including babies, demanding that my father consider other people’s right to light and quiet and park his monstrosity somewhere else. In the lake in Heaton Park, preferably. My father was always more upset by these expressions of public dissatisfaction than the rest of us were. He was the one who wanted only to give pleasure. He discussed the possibility of widening our path and getting rid of the garden shed. Getting rid of the garden even. ‘So that’ll be our view, will it,’ my mother had said, ‘your bus!’

Without any real expectation of swaying her, he had offered to have it spray-painted green.

But the alcoholism charge was pure invention. My father only ever drank at Walzer weddings, sweet red wine, a fairy thimbleful, and then most of that got spilled over his sisters during the kasatske. Not that truth was the issue here. My father belonged to a generation of men who did not expect their wives to ring up their places of employ. He’d reached ‘four’ when he heard what she was doing. By what should have been ‘three’ he was downstairs ripping the phone off the wall and hurling it across the room.

But the moral damage had already been done. He was out of a job.

‘Don’t you ever again dare …’ I heard him threaten.

‘And don’t you ever again dare …’ I heard her threaten back.

‘Don’t you ever don’t-you-ever me …’

‘And don’t you ever don’t-you-ever don’t-you-ever me …’

To my knowledge it was the most serious fight they’d had. The nearest they’d come to raising their hands to each other. The telephone with its amputated wires lay smashed and hapless on the floor, like a corpse spilling its intestines. My father left the house and wasn’t seen or heard from for two days. When he returned he was staggering. ‘I’ll show you drunk,’ he jeered, flicking out a tongue I’d never seen before. He didn’t look like anyone I knew.

‘Come one step nearer and I’ll call the police,’ my mother warned him.

‘What with? You haven’t got a phone any more, remember. Ha! Ha!’

‘I’ve got a voice, Joel.’

‘So you have. And I’ve heard you use it, too. Very effective. Very refined. All those words. Such words you have, you and your kuni-lemele sisters and the Kazi Kid. And where would he happen to be at the moment? Don’t tell me. On the kazi.’

‘I’m not,’ I protested. ‘I’m here.’

‘Go to your room,’ my mother said.

‘That’s right, do what your mother tells you. Go to the kazi. In fact I’ll take you there …’

‘Get back, Joel.’

‘Or you’ll do what, Sadie?’

Or she’d do what she did — which was run out into the street, screaming, ‘Police! Police!’

All this because I’d lost at ping-pong.

The best market within range of Manchester in those days — and I’m talking takings now, not local colour — was Stockport. If your family somehow got its hands on a stall at Stockport you knew your future was secured. You could start thinking about taking elocution lessons and moving to Wilmslow. Men slept in their vans overnight to secure a pitch on Stockport market, and then drew knives on one another if there wasn’t enough space to go round. According to market mythology, the Toby Mush who went from stall to stall in policeman’s boots, with a clinking leather rent-collector’s bag on his shoulder, deciding who got to stand where at Stockport, was afflicted with a blind eye and a bent right arm, so many backhanders did he take possession of on market days. But every market was reputed to be run the same way. The Toby was the godfather. ‘First rule of the gaffs,’ my father advised me in later years, when he was regularly hauling me off against my will to markets all over the country, ‘always shmeer the Toby. If you don’t look after the Toby, the Toby won’t look after you.’

Just how well he looked after the Toby on his first attempt at getting on to Stockport market I have no idea, but it must have been well enough because by nine o’clock he was set up with a trestle table, four iron bars and a length of tarpaulin on a square yard of favoured cobblestone close to the public facilities. It helped that he was built like a brick shithouse himself. A slighter man might have found a breadknife protruding from his shoulder-blades, as a polite warning against trying for this pitch again. But you couldn’t have got a breadknife into my father’s back. That was why my mother had had to resort to the telephone.