Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

I told him that I didn’t feel up to a party what with my grandmother dying downstairs and everything.

‘It wasn’t a question,’ my father said. ‘I said you’ll be going to that.’

He made me wash my hair and oversaw my wardrobe. He made me stand still as a tailor’s dummy while he verified that I’d polished my sad never-trodden-upon winkle-pickers and properly buttoned my Italian suit. He even straightened my tie, he who had never in his life known how to decently knot his own. Then he opened the front door and pushed me out.

‘Don’t be late,’ my mother called.

‘Don’t be early,’ my father said.

I never went. I got as far as Sabine Weinberger’s front door, heard the music, saw the dancing, saw the size of the girls, and bottled out. It was the dancing that did me every time. Kids with whom I was completely comfortable, kids I knew from school and Laps’, kids I regularly made pickle meat of on a ping-pong table, were suddenly transformed into sophisticates the minute I saw them dancing. It was with dancing the way it had been with ball-playing: I’d turned my head away for two minutes and they’d learnt how to do it. With big girls, too. How come? How were they always able to steal an advantage over me? The size of those girls! What use would I be with girls as big as that — I with my rubbery little virgin in-between?

I never went. Never knocked. Never showed my face. I knew I couldn’t go back home and suffer my father’s wrath so I crept back into our garden and hid in the privet hedge for three hours, listening to my poor grandmother having trouble with her breathing. When I finally asked to be let in I had soil on my suit and twigs in my hair.

‘I see someone’s been having a good time,’ my father said.

I thought he was going to kiss me.

When I next ran into her in the street, Sabine Weinberger gave me one of those strange sideways glass-eyed looks of hers and reproached me for not coming to her party. I blushed and said I’d wanted to, but that my grandmother was dying. When I ran into her after that I no longer had a grandmother.

She knew. She’d seen the hearse leave from our house. Which meant that she’d seen me sobbing like a baby. She touched my shoulder and wished me long life. ‘I know how much you loved her,’ she said.

I thought she was going to kiss me.

And had she done so, I was suprised to realize, I would not have half minded.

So there was Alec Watson and Mitchell with its stock of oofplock foam and sponges, and there were the Saturday-morning ping-pong tables up and ready, and there was Sabine Weinberger waiting behind the cash register with her prominent bust and glass eye — and there were we, Sheeny Waxman and me, miles away on a gaff at Worksop. Or there we should have been. All very well talking about going to town and re-rubbering, but when do you get the time if you’re a gaff worker and a gaff worker’s son? ‘Do I ever get a Saturday off from this job?’ Sheeny had once asked my father. ‘Yeah, when pigs fly,’ my father had told him. ‘Oink, oink!’ Sheeny said disconsolately.

And then, out of nowhere, pigs flew!

The van broke down. Five o’clock in the morning we were outside Sheeny’s house, ticking over, waiting for his curtains to open, waiting for Sheeny’s mother to show herself, distraught, at his window, and then for Sheeny’s father to show himself, distraught, at another window, and finally for Sheeny to appear in person, coughing and twitching and complaining — ‘Oy a broch, Joel, what time do you call this?’ — when the van went into paroxysms of its own, shook, spluttered, convulsed and died.

‘Nishtogedacht!’ my father said. ‘That’s all we need.’

‘I’m going back in for a kip,’ Sheeny croaked. ‘Honk me when you’ve got her going.’

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ my father said. ‘You’ll sit here and put your foot on the pedal when I tell you to.’

‘You’re not going to push her?’

‘Where am I going to push her? Into your bedroom? Show me a hill, Einstein, and I’ll push her.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Crank her.’

‘Joel, don’t be meshugge. You’ll wake the neighbours. It’s Shabbes.’

‘And some of us have to work on Shabbes,’ my father said.

But there was no cranking the Commer back to life, Shabbes or no Shabbes. My father disappeared under the chassis for an hour. Then he disappeared into the bonnet, just his short Walzer legs sticking out like those of a creature stuck up the anus of another creature in that Bosch picture we had once failed to turn into a commercial enterprise. Then he disappeared into Sheeny’s house, covered in oil, but not swearing, never swearing, to make a couple of phone calls. It was nearly nine o’clock before he could get a mechanic over. And gone ten when the tow-truck arrived.

‘That’s it,’ he finally conceded. ‘You’ve got the day off.’

By that time Mrs Waxman was up and about in a cerise nightie, preparing him Welsh rarebit. She seemed to know how he liked it — lots of cheese.

Sheeny had been asleep in the cab the whole time. Snoring heavily but careful, even while comatose, not to crush his whistle or soil his cuffs. I shook him to tell him the good news.

‘What, what?’ he cried, trying to throw me off. ‘I didn’t!’ Then comprehension returned to his jittery blue eyes. He twitched his head out from his shoulders, a ratchet at a time. I looked away, one tortoise from another. When he was finally free of himself he said, ‘Oink, oink! Let’s go and get some new bats then I’ll take you to the Kardomah.’

‘The Kardomah!’

‘Geshwint. Before the shops close.’

The Kardomah? I was going to the Kardomah! Me ?

Oink, oink!

But first we had to do the bats. And Sabine Weinberger.

‘I wish you long life,’ she said when she saw me.

Hadn’t she already said that? It was my understanding that you said it once and that was that. On with life, no more references to death — wasn’t that the point of it? But then she was the one with the rabbinical background, she was the half-Vulvick, she should know.

She looked different behind a counter. Older. Taller. More assured. Maybe even more desirable. Her hair was up in a beehive, which drew attention to the fixity of her glass eye, though even that had a gleam in it I hadn’t seen before. Did she change marbles? One for home, one for school, one for work?

‘This is my friend Sheeny Waxman,’ I said. As though there was anyone in Manchester who needed to be introduced to Sheeny Waxman. ‘We want some help with rubbers.’

Did I see them exchange looks? Or was that just her new glass eye and Sheeny’s tic?

We put an hour in on one of Alec Watson and Mitchell’s tables, delighting mere sublunary shoppers, even signing a couple of autographs between shots. ‘You should pay us for doing this,’ Sheeny joked to Sabine Weinberger. ‘We’re good for business.’

‘I’d pay you if the shop was mine,’ she said.

‘You mean it’s not? Oliver, I thought you told me we were going to Weinberger and Mitchell’s.’

Sabine Weinberger laughed, putting her prominent bust into it.

‘So there’s no discount?’ Sheeny said.

‘I could ask.’

‘We don’t want it if it’s not from you,’ Sheeny said.

Sabine Weinberger made an exaggerated curtsy and squeezed us a glimpse of her tongue.

She was oddly kitted out for working a Saturday morning in a sports shop, in fine steel stilettos (that was why she looked taller) and a tight black jumper (that was why she looked more than usually prominent) and stiff petticoats under a black skirt. Just like Sheeny, she looked as though she’d come to work straight from the Plaza. Though in Sheeny’s case all creases had miraculously fallen out of his clothes, and there was not a speck of dust on him, whereas Sabine Weinberger was as crumpled as a used paper bag and had a serious lint problem.