Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

It was always when I’d just lifted another title that the longing for Lorna Peachley to take me by my handle and wield me was at its strongest. Behold, the conqueror returns — Imperial Caesar, Tamburlaine, Napoleon, wreathed in garlands, god-like, riding in triumph through Persepolis. Now approach, my little soft-limbed silver-throated witch, unbuckle here and make the tyrant tremble at your feet …

Pure pornography. The sexual history of slaves. The epic poem, as old as religion itself (and we are good at religion, my people), chanting the exultant longed-for fall from high to low. But all pornography must end in death — so did I mean it? Did I really really mean it?

Of course not. I was tsatskying. Even when I gave her my throat I was only tsatskying. I’d have run a mile had she put a mark on me. But it felt as though I meant it.

At the last I was only answering a challenge buried deep in the social history of the game itself. It was too small. A parlour game. It suffered from too modest a conception of itself. Ping-pong — what kind of name was that? Table tennis was hardly any better, with its reminder of all the ways in which it wasn’t tennis proper, real tennis, tennis in the open air, tennis under the sun, tennis that bit into your flesh and turned it the colour of maple syrup, big tennis, expansive tennis, jet-set tennis, tennis for grown-ups, tennis which Jezebels rolled up to watch in their thousands, tennis which made heroes and heartthrobs out of tennis players. Name me ten table tennis players for whom your heart throbs. Name me five. Name me one.

Table tennis. Ping-pong. Gossima … Think of it, gossima! A good name for a condom, what? You won’t even know you’re wearing it. Whiff Waff was another one they tried. Meaning what? Something insubstantial, piffling, neither here nor there, like swatting at flies. You won’t even know you’re playing it. Why didn’t they just call it that — Something Piffling - and have done?

And what do you do, Mr Walzer? I excel at Something Piffling.

Doesn’t it make perfect sense to choose to lose, finally, at such a game?

And what do you do, Mr Walzer? I fail to make an impression at Something Piffling.

Choose to lose at something small and don’t you as a consequence win at something big? Was that not the paradox embraced by Jesus Christ our Lord? Forgo the whole world and thereby gain eternity? (I’ve said we are good at religion, my people.)

This is not a rationalization, though I see that it may appear that way. Grandiose in my ambitions I may have been, but in the final analysis I was never comfortable winning. I didn’t like the way it made me feel. And I never liked the way it made other people look. I remain a devoted student of the subject to this day — the illness of winning. I watch it day in and day out on television. I know the personalities — just like my grandfather did. Nastase, McEnroe, Navratilova, Coe, Christie, Lewis, Budd, Klinsmann, Cantona, every member of every Australian cricket team, Tyson, Eubank, Ballesteros, Norman, Hill, Schumacher, Curry, Cousins, Torvill, Dean. A roll call of the psychotic. It’s like having television cameras running day and night in an asylum. Me me me me me me me me me me me me. And I am as transfixed by it as anybody. I can’t get enough. It’s like seeing your own soul out there, your own pumping heart, blood-red like meat in a butcher’s shop, charging around in shorts and running shoes. It’s like watching your own steak and kidney kishkies punching the air.

The ultimate B-movie. The Horror of the Human Will. Forget the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Forget the Fly. This one’s really sticky. This one’s come out of soup too disgusting to describe. And the telly commentators call it character.

So am I the only Christian around here? Am I the only one who believes that character is letting the other sinner win?

Here, have. You want it? You want it that much? Then have it, you sick fuck.

Geh gesunterhait, as Jesus would have said.

In an actual life, of course, these things have their own vicissitudinous way of working themselves out; they have a chronology, a history of apparent accidentality, they come off other people like balls off the walls of a squash court. I was destined to throw matches, to give up, to walk away, to storm off the table because my opponent was trying too hard — such an eventuality was written in my blood, it was always going to happen — but it took Lorna Peachley to get me started.

We were seeing each other again. I’d kept away, after her note, respecting her right not to be given headaches or otherwise made to feel peculiar by me. Up to her to decide what next, if anything. And when. I missed her, but I had no desire to ruin the poor girl’s life.

She kept me waiting for about a fortnight, then she phoned, her voice slightly chilly, but not downright freezing, reminding me that a match against Hampshire, her old county, was coming up — a needle match for which she was eager to be on the top of her form — and wondering therefore if we oughtn’t to get some serious practice in. We didn’t discuss what had passed between us. We just knocked up for hours, careful never to play an actual game, for fear that I’d lose it and the whole thing would start all over. She kept her tracksuit bottoms on the whole time, too, just in case — I presumed this was her reasoning — just in case the sight of her prancing pudendum got me thinking about death again.

As if.

I’m sorry for Lorna Peachley. I’m sorry for all lovely girls. They fear they are the cause of their own troubles, but are never quite sure why. If they cover up a little — if they hide this bit or that bit — will it save them? Will someone then love them the way they long to be loved, without complications, without giving them headaches, just for themselves?

We won handsomely against Hampshire, paired exquisitely and chastely in the mixed doubles, saying excuse me if our shoulders brushed, and then contrived to stay over in Winchester an extra night. I was driving now. My father had lent me his back-up van, the Bedford dormobile with the sliding doors, on the understanding that I’d pick up a gross of two-pound sugar bags for him on my way out of town and on my way back in. Sugar was his new plunder line. Out they go and out they go! It was part of our war against the food boys. They’d taken to introducing swag lines, so we’d taken to introducing food. Tins of pink salmon at first. Then ham in triangular tins. Then tea. Now sugar. Knocked out at cost, sometimes below cost. Loss-leaders. And we led at losing, we Walzers. We got through mountains of the stuff. The trouble was the food boys had ordered the cash and carries to stop serving my father. As yet they didn’t all know who I was. They didn’t make the connection. So I was the sugar shlepper. Provided I picked up as many two-pound bags of sugar as they’d serve me every time I drove it, I could have the van. Which was fine by me now that I’d learnt from Sheeny the trick of criss-crossing the bags in the aisle between the rear seats so that they made a bed. A sugar bed. A bed of pure sweetness. On which, in a lay-by outside Winchester, Lorna Peachley stretched out all her moving body parts, exhausted from their exertions against her old county, and went to sleep in my arms.

We woke in the middle of the night, laughing, with granules squirting into us from underneath.

‘Great idea, Sheeny,’ I said later. ‘That’s got to be the worst bed I ever slept on.’

‘Did you get what you were after or not?’ he asked me.

A tough question. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I got what I was after.’

‘Then don’t complain,’ Sheeny said.

Did I get what I was after?