Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘Oh, Joel, maybe he would have.’ Pity time for my mother’s side. After the elation, the compassion.

‘Oh, Joel! Do you have any idea how much he must have been ganvying all these months? It’s enough I didn’t call the police. And then do you know what he had the chutzpah to ask me for? Holiday pay. He whines all the way back in the van, gringeing and sniffing and wiping his nose on his sleeve and saying he’s sorry, and he’s never done anything like this in his life before, and please will I not tell his family, and please will I not mention it to his chinas, and then he says will I drop him off at Lapidus’s and can he have his holiday pay now? How do you like it! Holiday pay!’

‘Did you drop him off naked at Laps’,’ my sisters wanted to know, ‘or had you given him his trousers back by then?’

‘Never mind his trousers,’ I said. ‘What about his bandage?’

We all wanted to get in on the act.

‘I don’t know what you’re looking so pleased about,’ my father said to me. ‘You’ll have to take off school tomorrow. I haven’t got a floorman.’

‘Me!’

‘You. You’ve seen what you have to do enough times. “A lady over here and a lady over there! And again! And another!” Your mother can write it out for you if you’ve forgotten. I’d go to bed and practise if I were you.’

‘It’ll be good for him,’ I heard my father saying, long after I’d retired to my room. ‘It’ll get him out of that shell of his.’

‘The boy’s sensitive,’ my mother said. ‘He’ll come out in his own good time.’

‘Then it’ll get him off the kazi,’ was my father’s final word on the matter.

It’s wrong of me to load my bashfulness on to my mother’s side. It’s unfair to them and to me. Some of the things I was shy about I was right to be shy about. Being a child, for example. It was preposterous being a child and having thoughts. The only time being a child is any good, that’s to say has anything of nature about it, is when it’s mindless. Wordsworth’s Idiot Boy. Once the blank misgivings start, those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things, the blushing starts as well. And for some of us the misgivings start sooner than for others. As long as I’d been a child, as I remember it, I’d been ashamed of myself. The short pants, the squeaky voice, the teaty little mouth, the rubbery little in-between, the heat, the untestedness, the all to come and nothing had.

If I could have felt it looked right, me standing there confronting the edge, clapping my hands and shouting ‘And again, and another, let’s be having you, ooh, Mrs Woman, please …’ I’d have made a better stab at it. I wanted to be able to do it. It passed through my mind sometimes that I had it in me to go all the way, to progress from the floor to the side of the van, to oust my own father who didn’t even write his own material and become the greatest pitcher the gaffs had ever seen, the grafter to end all grafters, a spinner of such quicksilver spiel that people would come to listen to me from all corners of the globe, not just Joe Public but fellow pros — priests, professors, healers, comedians, mountebanks, evangelists, dictators — anxious to see with their own eyes the heights to which rabble-rousing could be raised, and of course the Jezebels with their retractable blood-red nails in legions as limitless as the sea, all with their purple throats thrown back and their soft funnelled mouths open and pulsing, like a thousand baby birds clamouring to be fed.

But that was in the future, when I would be a man. As yet I wasn’t even ready to start at the beginning. How could I call a grown woman ‘darling’ at my age?’ ‘Ee’are darling.’ Preposterous. How could I look a man old enough to be my uncle Motty in the eyes and address him as ‘cock’? Yes, there were younger boys than me on the markets, working the vegetable and flower stalls usually, prefab sorts of boys, rapscallions, lads (and no one had ever thought of me as a ‘lad’), from whose cherubic lips flowed a stream of loves and dears and wotchercocks and I’ll tell you what I’ll do guvenors — but they were the idiot boys. They suffered no disjunction. It would never have occurred to them to think there was anything amiss in swapping familiarities with grown-ups when you were possessed of no better credentials than a rubbery little in-between. So they were no example to me. They were of another species.

I tried, but it must have been a ghastly spectacle.

‘What was that?’ my father shouted down from his eminence, cupping his ear in a comical exaggerated fashion. He had a whistle in his mouth and wore a stupid striped Wee Willie Winkie hat with a woolly bobble on the end of it. On Fridays he was Mad Jack.

‘I think there might be a lady at the back who would like one,’ I repeated, in what I hoped was a slightly louder voice.

‘Oh, you suspect we have a lady to the rear who would care to make a purchase? Do we have a lady aft who is considering her position? Well when you’ve made your mind up, Mrs Woman, perhaps you would step forward and have a word with Little Lord Fauntleroy here.’

Little Lord Fauntleroy. My own father!

I was meant to be whipping up a frenzy. The phantom lady at the back is always eager to buy what the pitcher is selling long before he’s ready to sell it. Not exactly abstruse psychology. Stay, illusion! If she and the other phantoms like her are prepared to fork out seventeen-and-six for the jardinière in the form of a dying swan, imagine the mayhem — ‘Look, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m not just going to sell one, I’m not just going to sell two, I’m going to clear the whole jolly lot, never mind seventeen-and-six, never even mind fifteen shillings’ — when the price plummets to ten bob for the pair, the pair!

Over here and over there! All hell should break loose. And did when Mike Sieff leapt up and down and clapped his hands and burst paper bags. But with Little Lord Fauntleroy agitating the edge, selling all at once became a transaction of embarrassments. I communicated my diffidence. Suddenly people were reluctant to shove their hands in the air. Normally thick-skinned punters, regulars who knew the routines and their own roles in them, began to blush when my father chipped them. It was as if the fairy of mortification had waved her wand and hey presto! — the gaff was awash with Shrinking Violets.

My father did what he could with me. Sometimes, to break the calamitous spell of bashfulness I’d cast, he’d leave me in it, leave me to carry out the nest of cardboard suitcases with the rust-loving hinges to the non-existent punter at the back — ‘Sold!’ — leave me to go wandering at the furthest fringes of the edge and return, if I ever found the courage to return, with the cases concealed somewhere about my person. By turning me into the joke, some of the fun of the fair might just come back. I knew what he was up to. I understood the necessity to tease me. But that didn’t mean I could ever get my face right. I’d give anything, today, to be able to look my father in the eyes and say, ‘Go on, go on, Cheap Johnnie, make a shlemiel of me, let me be your stooge. I can take it, I can take a joke against myself. I have to take a joke against myself, otherwise I am madder than Mad Jack myself’ But it’s too late for that. And anyway, my face would let me down again.

This would never have gone on for long, even if I’d been good at it. There was no question of my being removed from school and turned into a marketman. Education was God. Education would stop us ever having to be beetroot farmers again. Or swagmen. And my father didn’t want me with him all the time, anyway. I cramped his style. The van was starting to turn up at some strange places, just as the bus once had. He was on first-name terms with the women who buttered the fat wedges of toast in every transport café between Manchester and north Wales, north Wales and Worksop, and Worksop back to Manchester again via Sheffield and the Snake Pass. They knew when he was coming and prepared special treats for him, liver and onion fry-ups, cheese and ham pies with double cheese, bread and butter puddings of which they gave him extra portions wrapped in foil to take home to my mother. Ha! Sometimes he’d slip me some loose change so that I could play the pinball machines while he discussed his dietary requirements with them in the kitchens. Sometimes they’d come out from behind the stoves and counters, wipe their hands on their aprons, kiss me and tell me how lucky I was to have such a wonderful father.