Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Within a week of the tournament I’d lost all capacity to sleep. I couldn’t even remember how to shut my eyes. The night before, I climbed into my bed like Cinderella stepping up into her pumpkin, quaking and overdressed, already in my tracksuit in case I suddenly found the trick of sleeping again and overdid it. I needn’t have worried. By six in the morning I was on Oxford Road waiting for the University to open.

I checked and re-checked my registration form. By the Sports Hall, Manchester University, it did mean this Manchester University …? There was bound to be a Manchester in the United States of America, and another in Canada, and probably a third in Rhodesia, and they were all bound to have a university, but that wouldn’t make any sense, would it, choosing one of those as the venue for our Manchester Closed?

Assuming it was our Manchester Closed.

I walked around Rusholme. Sat on a park bench. Refused one of the dawn whores — I think. Blushed in the event that I hadn’t. Blushed in the event that I had. Then found somewhere to have tea and toast. By the time I made it back to the University I was no longer early. Not late, just no longer early. I registered, nodded to a few people I recognized, pushed open the swing doors of the Sports Hall and pow! like Aishky had said, and I hadn’t even begun yet, pow! — all the exhilaration I’d felt when I first saw a room full of green tables in action in the Tower in Blackpool returned. Green, the green of the foothills to Heaven, wherever I looked. Eden. The Happy Valley. The Garden of the Hesperides. Hush, hear the nymphs — for they too had woken sleepless and turned up early — plock plock, plock plock, plock plock.

Shocking, how small the tables looked when there were so many of them in a single space. But wasn’t that the allure of the game for those of us who loved it? The confinement. No margin for error, and all the violence of competitive sport bounded by a nutshell. No spillage — there was the fatal beauty of ping-pong. No overflow or exorbitance. So there is no point blaming the players for being repressed. The game is repressed.

Plock plock, plock plock, went the shy Hesperides, and this time the music of the westernmost meadow on earth was for me.

There was my name, my certification, on the draw, accompanied by an asterisk to denote that I was seeded. I’d never before seen a draw, or even thought that as a tangible thing, a physical chart, actual sheets of paper which you could touch and rustle, a draw existed. So that was a draw! I loved it. I was transfixed by the artwork: the grand all-embracing brackets — Me against Him, and then Him gone, dropped from the picture, and Me against Someone Else — the empty dotted lines issuing from the noses of the brackets like spikes from the snouts of marlins, decreasing, narrowing, closing like jaws on that last incontrovertible horizontal. Every time I won a round I took up a seat within sight of the board so that I could verify the written proof of my advance. The mathematics of a draw staggered me. One hundred and twenty-eight players reducible to just one after only seven rounds. In that computation I saw the future, how little it took, sum-wise, to be the last man standing.

I was intoxicated by the tumult. It made me tremble. Made my stomach lurch with apprehension. So many wills, so many separate ambitions, so many arms going, enough piston power to light up the whole of Manchester on a winter’s afternoon. On the green battlefield of my soul the two sides of my family took up their positions. ‘Impossible,’ my mother and my aunties whispered, ‘impossible to expect to prevail against so many. Just do well. Get close. Lose honourably. No shame in that. Sleep, you are going to sleep. We will count to ten and when you awake you will remember nothing, my darling, but the will to lose … nine … ten … lose!’ But then the Walzers grabbed me for a hokey-cokey, conga’d me past the draw where my seeded name kept on greedily coming — Walzer, O*; Walzer, O*; Walzer, O* — emboldening me with the least imaginative, and to tell the truth the least flattering, of all expressions of optimism — ‘Someone has to win, why shouldn’t it be you?’

I won.

Someone had to.

So potent was the magic which my mother’s side worked on me — it is more captivating, when all is said and done, to be told that victory is not indiscriminate, but yours to throw away — that I can only suppose every other boy had a mother’s side working against him too. The closer I got to the final the more my aunties wheedled. My ears were wet with them. Their fingers paddled in my heart. I threw away leads, I served into the net on match point to me, I missed sitters — ‘That’s it, like that, my darling, just like that’ — but my opponents’ aunties must have loved them more, because for every sitter I missed, they missed two.

For the final itself all the lesser tables were cleared away and just one master table — the best and greenest table I had ever played on (a Jacques International Match Play Executive, I think it was called) — was erected in the centre of the hall. Then two hundred and eleven chairs were arranged around it.

I can be precise about the number. I counted them.

‘Do you think they’ve made a mistake?’ I asked Aishky.

Twink and Aishky had been knocked out of the senior tournament earlier in the day — if I haven’t mentioned a senior tournament that’s because I had no eyes for it — but they were staying on to give me encouragement. I doubt I was adequately grateful to them at the time. It takes courage to stay on at a tournament when it has no more use for you. And there were other things they could have been doing on a Saturday night. They were better friends to me than I deserved.

‘A mistake in what sense?’ Aishky wondered.

In the sense that two hundred and eleven chairs were hardly sufficient to seat a thousand spectators, was what I wanted to say. But I could hear in advance how that was going to sound. A man may think in thousands but he should never speak in them. I make no apologies for the wildness of my expectations. What did I know about tournaments? Wimbledon — that was my only model. All right, the Manchester Closed was not the All England, and table tennis was not lawn tennis, but I believed I’d made allowances for the difference. I was only thinking thousands, not tens of thousands.

I let the subject drop. Aishky looked concerned for me. He had mistaken my grandiosity for finals’ nerves. He nodded in the direction of my opponent, Nils Hagtvet, who was lying across three chairs (three more chairs, I noted) underneath the draw, a packet of Stuyvesant’s on his belly, blowing smoke rings. ‘He’s more nervous than you are,’ Aishky said. ‘He’s a ball chaser. He hasn’t hit one all day. He knows what you’re going to do to him.’

‘Does he?’

Now I did have finals’ nerves. Was I up to beating a boy who could blow smoke rings?

More than that, was I up to beating someone quite so elongated? I had wanted to meet an incontrovertibly white boy in the finals. Be sure you really want what you want before you ask for it. Nils Hagtvet was the whitest and most extruded boy I had ever seen. He could have come out of a machine for rolling vermicelli. Where he actually came from no one seemed to know, but he played in a higher division than I did, for Tootal Ties.

Twink echoed Aishky’s concern. ‘Do yourself a favour,’ he advised me, ‘take a long shower. And then see if you can find somewhere dark to lie down for half an hour. Don’t think about anything.’

It was the same advice my grandfather had given my father on the morning of the World Yo-Yo Championships. Except that Aishky added, ‘And don’t play with your putz.’