Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Modern Table Tennis, Jack Carrington

AND NOW LORNA Peachley?

Listen and you can hear her body parts moving. Shh, listen. Oof plock, oof plock.

That’s her bat you’re hearing. She took the sponge route. The women’s game needed a bit of speed and a fat wedge of naked foam upped the tempo prettily. Her chopping was always suspect too, so now she could just stick her bat out and half-volley. Oooof! Even the balls sighed when Lorna Peachley hit them.

Lorna Peachley came into my life — I mean properly came into my life — at a time when I was in danger of becoming a winner. Gone, the red face; gone, the existential bashfulness; gone, the boy with the rubbery little in-between. I habituated the KD now. I sat on girls’ faces. I played table tennis with the game’s equivalent of the Stern Gang. My own grandmother wouldn’t have recognized me.

And Cambridge? A year or two away yet, but in the bag. I already knew which college I was going to. The misogynistic one.

Everything conspired to make me impressive, even the new bats. I’d gone for sandwich in the end, as Sabine Weinberger, who knew nothing about the game except from a retailing point of view, suggested that I should. Though it was Lorna Peachley I listened to. ‘If you’re ever going to beat me it’s not going to be with pimples,’ she told me. But who wanted to beat her? Why would any normal man ever want to do anything but lose to Lorna Peachley? I went along with the pretence that I was experimenting with ways to overcome her, but in truth I only plumped for sandwich in order to lose to her more comprehensively.

That it improved my results against absolutely everybody else was merely a side benefit.

And it didn’t even do that right away. To begin with I had to sacrifice half my game to the fucking thing. The first shot to go was my forehand chop. With sandwich you either have to chop the ball so late your opponent has in all probability gone home, or you make no allowances at all and hope to blind him. The backhand lingered longer, but soon I discovered it was more economical and certainly more effective to block. The word tells you all you need to know about the stroke. As for example that it isn’t a stroke at all, but an afterthought, a stab, at its most athletic, a lunge. Except when Lorna Peachley executed it. Then it was as though everything soft in nature had mustered in a fairy ring. And the sound she made when she struck was like the air going out of a thousand luxury Rexine pouffes. Ooooooof.

Bit by bit there disappeared from my game — and indeed from the game in general — everything I’d originally loved about it. No more retrieving from the back of the room. No more coddling the ball and making it yours. No more giving it so much dig you could hear it changing its mind in mid-air. Thanks to science, in a few short years the game had gone forwards only to go backwards. Now we were all stabbing and zetzing as gracelessly as beginners. Except, of course, for you know who.

Yet out of this evil sprang forth good. The sandwich bat released the backhand flick that had been locked up inside me. Barna had flicked like no one else in the history of the game, using ordinary rubber with modest brown nipples. So far I had played exclusively (excepting my Collins Classic) with a bat that bore his name, but I had never truly been able to let my wrist go. Something inhibited me. I could drive with it. I could get plenty of topspin, and by changing the weight from my right foot to my left and swivelling my hips, I could disguise its direction and pull off a backhand winner where one was least expected. But that final wristy coup de grâce always eluded me. Now, liberated by the spring in the sandwich and the sensation, which may or may not have been an illusion, of enjoying an extra picosecond between feeling the ball on my bat and releasing it, I found a flexibility of wrist that made even Phil Radic stop and look.

In the end it was probably the sound that made the difference. We could no longer with any onomatopoeic justification say that we played ping-pong. Just as everything else in the world was growing noisier, our game had fallen quiet. In fact the new bats were not dead silent. What they did was cushion sound. They put a distance, at once uncanny and unsatisfying, between a stroke and its reverberation. I say unsatisfying because it robbed you of a due consciousness of drama to let fly at a ball with all your strength, only to hear a suffocated squelch, like a ripe grape falling on your neighbour’s lawn, the least division of a second later. On the other hand, whatever my loyalty to it, the plock of a ping-pong ball on a ping-pong bat had never struck me as subtle or heroic. I winced inwardly at the moment of contact — plock ouch! — and since no stroke is ever finished at the moment of contact, my follow-through was never the smooth ongoing trajectory it should have been. Now that there was no demeaning plock, I felt free to make a ballet of my follow-through.

Flourish — that’s what distinguishes the flick. Over goes the wrist, and up and away in impertinent disregard for decorum — like Fonteyn in the arms of Nureyev, like a shooting star, only more dazzling, more bewildering to the naked eye — goes the racket. Prosaic physiology alone applies the brakes. The socket of the arm says no, otherwise the spiritual momentum of the flick would carry you off for ever into the starry immensity. Yes, take me there, yes.

Forget the world in a grain of sand; if you would hold eternity, buy yourself a sandwich bat, study Victor Barna, and do as I did.

Impossible to describe the sensation of abandon which accompanies a perfectly executed backhand flick. Or the liberation. Or the relief.

It was like running away from home.

It was like having your in-between pulled.

It was like running away from home with Lorna Peachley.

It was like having your in-between pulled by Lorna Peachley …

Enough. None of those things happened.

I’d become a devil-may-care flicker, let’s leave it at that. And I flicked myself into title after title, into the Hagganah averages, into the newspapers, into the national rankings, everywhere except into Lorna Peachley’s pants.

This is the all-time loser’s great inborn gift — he knows how to ensure that there remains one avenue of opportunity always closed to him, or to be more positive about it, one lane of disappointment forever open.

Let’s get a few things clear. Had I wanted Lorna Peachley I could have had her. That’s not arrogance, just simple teenage fact. For our age and for the times I was in possession of the necessaries. Girls respected me because there was still a whiff of the shell-shrinker about me, a becoming withdrawal, a delicacy of feeling but without (any longer) the accompanying disfigurements of bashfulness. And thanks to Sabine Weinberger, I now knew that too much respect got you nowhere, that the time always came when you had to squat on their shoulders and insist on your way.

So I was covered for either eventuality.

I don’t think it would be too far-fetched, either, to say that I actually did have my way with Lorna Peachley, given that what I wanted more than anything was not to have her. My desire for Lorna Peachley took the form of a yearning to belong to her, to be hers to do with as she chose, to lose and lose and lose and lose to her. And I did.

It was some time before I ran into her again after that first meeting in Burnley on Twink’s last afternoon as a civilian. Her family had settled for a while in Timperley and had they been happy there it’s unlikely I’d have seen as much of her as I subsequently did. She’d have starred for Cheshire, I’d have starred for Lancashire, we might have played against each other in a mixed doubles a couple of times a year, and that would have been that. Indeed we did play against each other for our respective counties once, in a deciding mixed doubles rubber in a church hall in Macclesfield, and that was when I acquired the taste for losing to her. I can still remember the shot that did it, a disguised angled half-volley that left me with my feet in a tangle, fending at air. It was on a crucial point. She raised her hands in a salute to her partner, sending a vibration through all her moving body parts. Her breasts shuddered, her belly quivered, and I don’t think I can bear to describe — even now — what her vulva did. Was it the way she wore her shorts or was she just built differently from other girls? Transfixing, whatever the reason. The deep creviced V for victory of her mons Veneris never not visible, never not distinct, never not grand, never not moving.