Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘Any sign of ’em yet?’ my father said, as we scorched through Agecroft.

‘Don’t ask me, Joel,’ Sheeny said. ‘This is still a Friday night for me. And on Friday nights I don’t have eyes for anything except goyishe k’nish.’

My father leaned across me and punched Sheeny’s arm. ‘Shveigst du,’ he said. ‘The kinderlech!’

The kinderlech was me — although strictly speaking you have to be more than one child to be kinderlech — sitting up between them on a blanket over the engine. When I was present there was to be no swearing or lewdness of any kind. What Sheeny and I talked about when my father wasn’t there was another matter. Similarly what they talked about when I wasn’t there. But when we were in each other’s company not an immodest word was to be spoken. It was biblical. A word was an event, and for us to have met over an impudicious event would have been tantamount to my uncovering his nakedness. Which is forbidden.

‘Like the kinderlech doesn’t know from anything!’ Sheeny laughed. He was especially hoarse this morning. ‘Tell your old man how you’ve never seen what’s between a shikse’s polkes, Oliver. Oink! oink!’

I blushed, liking the imputation of wantonness and ashamed because I had done nothing to deserve it.

‘Shtum,’ my father said. ‘And tell me when you see the Copestakes.’

But we didn’t see the Copestakes. Not charging out over Rainsough Brow, not anywhere along the East Lancs, not charging into Carr Mill. Not a hair of them. ‘Do you know what I think?’ my father said as we hit Norris Green. ‘I think they’ve finally had a sickener and packed it in.’

‘Alevei!’ Sheeny said in his sleep.

‘Yep. The grobbers have given up. Bleh, bleh, bleh bleh bleh!’

Had he had an ounce of Saffron superstition in his bones he’d have known never to exult in a victory even after the event, let alone before it. But there’s no telling a Walzer. And what of course we saw, as we came rattling up the London Road with the brakes of our yellow Commer smelling like Saudi Arabia and the engine smoking like Gehenna, was the Copestakes’ Ford, already on the bomb site, in full and uncontested possession!

Bleh, bleh, bleh bleh bleh!

‘How the hell,’ my father wanted someone to tell him, ‘have they managed that?’

But just a moment … There was the Copestakes’ Ford right enough, but where were the Copestakes themselves? Were the boot on the other foot, and the boot had been on the other foot every Saturday prior to this, the Copestakes would have found us jumping about and clapping our hands to keep them warm, bleary eyed and hungry, but already busy putting up the stall, clanking bars, throwing planks, in other words incontrovertibly in evidence.

So why weren’t they?

My father got out of our van and went over to theirs. He walked around it a few times, keeping his distance as though he feared it could be boobytrapped, then chancing a closer inspection, peering into the cab, trying the doors. At last, after scratching his head, he felt the radiator. Cold! Ice cold!

‘The chazerim must have driven here last night,’ he said. He was outraged by this breach of etiquette, hopping mad, like a boxer who has been hit low.

‘So what do we do?’ I said. It was early in the morning. There was still time for us to drive to one of our old gaffs, shmeer the Toby and have a bacon and liver butty prepared for us by one of my father’s transport café floozies.

‘I’ll tell you what we do,’ he said. ‘We move the van.’

‘Our van?’

‘Their van.’

‘They’ve left the keys in?’

‘Course they haven’t left the keys in. We’ll have to bump it. Wake Sheeny.’

Sheeny was still asleep, with his head on his chest. It was the only time he was ever still. I shook him gently. ‘We’re bumping the van,’ I said.

‘Bumping whose van?’

‘Bumping their van.’

‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Not in this whistle. Tell your old man he’s off his rocker. You can’t go round bumping people’s vans.’

But my father was resolute. We hadn’t been beaten fair and square. The Copestakes had pulled a fast one. Which meant that we were within our rights, morally, to bump their van out of the way before they got back from wherever they were skulking. If Sheeny wouldn’t help, fine. We’d do it together. Father and son. Backs to the bumper, shoulders to the wheel.

It’s amazing what you can move when you have right on your side. The Copestakes’ Ford wasn’t as big as our Commer but it had good brakes and was laden with blankets and pillows and eiderdowns and counterpanes and bolsters and palliasses and sheet-sets and pillowslips and valences in boxes and, from the weight of it, a good few mattresses and bedsteads and quilted headboards as well. Inch by inch, though, heave by heave, we bumped its nose and then half its chassis out into the street. We’d have succeeded completely had my father’s ‘And one, and two, and three!’ not woken the Copestakes, with whom their van also happened to be laden and who had been sleeping the deep sleep of the devious among their wares.

What followed was a fracas of such unseemliness that in the end only the police could restore order. Quickly coming to an understanding of who was up to what, the Copestakes scrambled out through a side door, rubbed the sleep from their eyes and, calculating that they were no match for us physically, began placing bricks, of which there is never any shortage on a bomb site, under the tyres. No sooner did a brick go under one tyre than we removed it from another. And no sooner did we remove it than they replaced it. The quicker they moved, the quicker we did; and the quicker we moved, the quicker they did. ‘Front offside!’ my father shouted to me. ‘You take the front offside. Get that brick away. Offside, offside! That’s nearside, you tsedraiter!’ The chase around and around the van had got so hectic that it was difficult to remember whether you were kicking bricks out or stuffing them in. ‘Rear right!’ Copestake called to his kid. ‘There’s nothing under the rear right.’ ‘But I thought I’d just put one under the rear right.’ For a split second we had all the wheels free. ‘Geshwint!’ my father yelled. ‘Push!’ But we could never keep all four tyres free for long enough to make any further progress in our bumping.

Even before we had become rivals for the bomb site we hadn’t much liked the Copestakes. My father had gone to the same primary school as Copestake Senior and remembered him as a sneak. And funnily enough I had gone to primary school with Copestake Junior and remembered him as a sneak. It’s possible that neither of them actually sneaked but both just looked as though they did. It was their complexion that gave you the impression of surreptitiousness. They had a dirty shine on them like cockroaches, and they moved furtively like cockroaches too, turning up and vanishing and turning up again you couldn’t tell from where, just as they’d appeared from inside the bedding this morning while we were rightfully bumping their van into the road. One other thing I remembered about Copestake Junior from primary school was that he sold tickets to see Reeny Cohen do pee-pees in the garages behind Huxley Avenue. I can’t say what his arrangements were with Reeny Cohen, but if she didn’t know he was profiting from her water then sneaky was definitely the word for him. Otherwise plain disgusting.

It was this over-and-above dislike for the Copestakes that erupted in the early morning on London Road when, after what had at first been a silent chase around the van — silent as far as our talking to them or their talking to us was concerned — Copestake Senior suddenly took it into his head to start cursing. ‘Putz!’ he shouted at my father. ‘Kaker, yentzer, tochesleker.’ In other words: prick, shit-head, fucker, arse-licker.