Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Am I describing the difference between the amateur and the professional? Was what I liked about Aishky’s oy a broch — with its unspoken ‘What chance do I have against the shaygets when he hits like that?’ — the primacy it claimed in the end for ironic appreciation? When all’s said and done you are at liberty to marvel over the shaygets’s power of shot because ultimately you value something else more — the right to be amused, the intelligence to register the vanity of all skill and striving at the last. Yes, we were irredeemably amateur, we Akiva boys. Just passing through.

On the way to where?

Ah — to the Almighty, like my grandmother, I guess.

We ended up playing for Lancashire together, Langho and I, alternating the number one spot, forming a formidable doubles partnership which lasted for three seasons, but I am not able to recall a single word he said to me in that time. Maybe he would be similarly blank in his recollections of me. Maybe he doesn’t even remember I existed. I hope he doesn’t. That will clinch my argument. I was God-bound — not through any choice of my own, but as a matter of cultural necessity; we were all God-bound, we Akiva boys, preparing our souls, via ping-pong, for their final resting place — whereas he just wanted to win. Now I think twice about it, it’s not true that I recall nothing he said. I recall him telling me about the state of his elbow, the progress of his wrist strain, the worries he entertained about a calf muscle he’d pulled, the trouble he was having adjusting his grip to the new strapping he’d put around the handle of his bat. ‘Played, Jack,’ I’d say to him after we’d notched up another easy win in another noiseless hall in Rhyl or Wolverhampton, and he’d take me through the various ailments which had prevented his playing even better. Played, Ollie? Not something it ever occurred to him to say. Who was Ollie? Another person? What’s another person? He was lost in the pure egoism of the sportsman. Ask him how he was and he told you — whoever you were.

When I asked Twink how he was on our last weekend in Burnley together he immediately changed the subject. There’s the difference. We’d had an unusually eventful day. Quite out of nowhere a girl had turned up at the academy, a beautiful all-moving-parts girl in close-fitting brief blue shorts. Lorna Peachley. There were no beautiful girls in table tennis. Strictly speaking there were no girls in table tennis full stop. That was why Aishky favoured us knocking off and going to Blackpool for the weekend, where girls grew like weeds by the roadside. But Lorna Peachley was no Blackpool bog-moss. Lorna Peachley had eyes like Greek olives, a prancing pony-tail of blue-black hair tied with a lovesick purple ribbon, strong even teeth and thighs that fizzed like Lucozade. Those were the incidentals. Where she scored over every other girl either of us had ever seen was in the movement department: somehow or other she was able to set each of her parts (and she had many more parts than other girls, too) in discrete and sometimes incommensurable motion. You didn’t know where to look, that’s what I remember about her. You couldn’t decide where to send your eyes first. If you weren’t careful, you’d go dizzy.

‘Classy, too,’ Twink observed. ‘Did you hear her elocution? She says “Deuce” — D … D … D — not “Juice” the way we do. She’s got soft Ds.’

We laughed at that. Soft Ds. That wasn’t all she had that was soft, eh Twink, eh Oliver?

Twink had persuaded her to knock up with us. Which wasn’t difficult to do given that the Ribble pickpockets weren’t offering. We were on an exercise which involved serving, running round the table to retrieve your own serve, and then on to the next person who had to return your return and then run around to return his own, and so on. Three of us running round the table increased the fun without taking away anything from the rigour.

She could play, too. She’d represented Hampshire girls the season before but was in the process of moving house with her parents to Timperley, hence this getting-to-know-you weekend. Yes, she was a player all right, with that all-round game of exaggerated loops and non-stop jigging favoured by southerners. ‘She’s got one glaring weakness, though,’ Twink muttered to me over the Vimto break, ‘she’s vulnerable against the drop shot.’ Then his face splintered into shards of laughter. ‘Gevalt!’

So we peppered her with drop shots, driving her from the table with heavy topspin forehands, and then getting her to come charging in with all her parts in motion. I suspect she knew what we were up to. Because in the end she was practising her own drop shots on us. But she was a good sport. She never stopped bouncing on the balls of her feet. Nor did she try to punish us by keeping herself still or just moving in one direction.

Lorna Peachley was the subject to which Twink reverted when we lay at the furthest ends of the mattress that night and I asked him, noticing a change in his mood, if everything was all right. ‘Lucky you,’ he said. ‘She’s going to have to play in the Manchester league if she wants to get some decent opposition. You’ll get to see a lot of her.’

‘So will you,’ I said.

He fell silent. Our room gave out on to a busy thoroughfare. A feeble street-lamp sent a yellow poltergeist glare through the torn net curtains. The streets were noisy. Burnley had become the unofficial European capital of rock-and-roll after mill lads in crêpe-soled shoes and kiss-curls had ripped the local cinema apart on the first showing of Rock Around the Clock. The town was under a certain obligation now to stay rowdy. Teddy Boys hung around on corners strumming invisible guitars and making electric humming noises with their mouths. The old shrank from them. Where was Lorna Peachley staying, I wondered.

‘Not me,’ Twink said at last, ‘I won’t be here.’

I felt frightened. Not of the rockers but of change. ‘Why, where will you be?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been called up.’

‘You’re moodying me.’

‘It’s the emmes. I’ve been called up. I’ve got to go to Dorset.’

‘Dorset? Why Dorset? Is there a war on in Dorset?’

‘I don’t think I’ll be going to war. But then you never know.’

‘Why you?’

Lying on his back, Twink sighed, rattling his lungs. ‘My turn,’ he said. ‘I thought they wouldn’t take me with my asthma. But they examined me and said they couldn’t find any signs of it. Not real asthma.’

‘What’s unreal asthma? Surely you’ve either got it or you haven’t. What are they saying — that you’ve got hysterical asthma?’

He wasn’t saying what they were saying.

All at once I felt rage against the system. What about those useless hooligans on the streets of Burnley? They’d make good soldiers. They were born to be soldiers. What else were they doing out there except killing time until they were ordered over the top? And what about Langho? I could see him with a bayonet, standing with his legs apart, stamping the floor, waggling his little proletarian arse, shouting ‘Who goes there?’ and then telling them how he was. Whereas Twink, who loved opera and ping-pong … Where was the justice in putting him in uniform?

The following evening, on the bus home, he asked me back to his house. I’d been there many times, marvelling at his record collection and sitting in the dark with him in his room, comparing Gigli with Björling and di Stefano. ‘Name an opera,’ he’d challenge me. ‘Name an aria.’ Then he’d show me that he had ten different versions of it. Ten on LPs and ten on 78s. We didn’t only do tenors. I remember one or two wonderful Schwarzkopf and Tebaldi nights. And some of the low-down he gave me on Callas went straight into my school essays on women’s instability through the ages. But it was the tenors that made our hair stand and our flesh shiver and got us gulping in the darkness.