Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

She was beautiful to hold, granulated or not. She melted in my arms. She had that gift. The moving body parts. She fitted everywhere. Her bones folded. She flowed into you like hot wax. And she was more fragrant than a field of flowers. And more flavoursome. Lucozadey, minty, malted milkshakey. Not olivey, as you’d have expected. Not sun ripened. Not sun dark. But sun yellowed. All things white and golden. Honey and yoghurt. I could have drunk her perspiration. I did drink her perspiration. I rolled on top of her and licked it from her neck. Then she opened her mouth, and I was gone, vanished, a sea creature that lived a life of complete happiness, wanting for nothing, in the spaces between her syrup gums. And the one luxury item I am allowed to have with me on my Desert Island, to go with the Bible and the eight records of Schubert Lieder? Lorna Peachley’s mouth.

And don’t come looking for me, please.

The gift. Some have it, some don’t. And there’s never any way of knowing until you get in there and find out. The gift of bodily mellifluousness. It’s more than physical. The body alone cannot generate such music. In Lorna’s case it felt ethical. She had a daily beauty in her life.

So you could say she was my big chance.

‘Hold me,’ she said.

But I couldn’t.

I could take hold. And of course I could be held. But I couldn’t give hold.

‘Love me,’ she said.

But I couldn’t.

I could make love. And of course I could be loved. But I couldn’t give love.

She clutched at me as though she was drowning. I had fucked her head, punched holes in her, and now she was drowning, wouldn’t I save her? If I could have, I would have.

She sat up, and brushed sugar from herself. ‘Why did you bring me here?’ she asked.

I shrugged in the dark. ‘Because I wanted to be with you.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

Didn’t I? I shrugged some more.

‘I don’t think you know what you want,’ she said.

She sounded very bitter, weary and without hope, just as my grandmother used to sound.

I said nothing. I sat with my head between my knees and spun in the blackness like a satellite.

‘I think you’re too complicated for me,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re up to half the time. I can never tell what you want. You make me feel stupid.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, still spinning between my knees. ‘I don’t mean to do that. I don’t think you’re stupid. I think you’re lovely.’

‘Lovely isn’t the opposite of stupid,’ she said.

‘I don’t think you’re stupid.’

‘Well that’s how you make me feel. Stupid and useless. Do you think I don’t know that you lose to me on purpose? Why are you trying to make a fool of me?’

‘I don’t lose to you on purpose. And I’m not trying to make a fool of you. I like losing to you.’

‘There you are! You like losing to me. You do it on purpose. What for? Why are you making me ill? Why do you bring me out here in this horrible van and then go all touch-me-not on me? What are all these games, Oliver?’

‘Believe me, Lorna, I have not gone touch-me-not on you. I have never wanted to touch anyone more.’

‘You’re not there, Oliver. You’re just not there.’

‘I’m here,’ I said.

‘Yes, you’re here. But your heart isn’t. That’s if you’ve got a heart.’

‘I’ve got a heart …’

‘You just don’t feel anything with it.’

‘I do.’

‘What do you feel?’

I paused. ‘Love for you.’

No good. I heard it myself. No good. No bass in it. No weight. No heart. Just Whiff Waff. And you don’t get a second go.

‘Take me home, Oliver,’ she said. ‘And then please leave me alone. Go and lose to someone else.’

So I did.

No reason to do otherwise now. Why win? If there was no eel-slick little witch waiting to unbuckle, and take it all away from me again, why bother to ride in triumph through Persepolis in the first place?

No more interest in winning for its own sake?

Couldn’t do it. Now that I was entering the men’s game, putting away childish things, I couldn’t do it. Winning is a test of character, as every sporting commentator will tell you, and I didn’t have any character. Grandiosity, yes. Skills, yes. But character? Bottle? Creature from the Black Lagoon determination, knowing what you want and allowing nothing and nobody to stand in your way? Forget it.

I dropped myself from the county team so that Lorna could go on playing uncompromised. I suppose you could say that that showed character of sorts. But I was only getting in before they did. My form was shot. I went for six weeks without winning a game for the Hagganah. And serious questions were being asked about my temperament. Even about my manners.

Things came to a head the night we played the Railways, away. This was never a fixture I’d enjoyed. Even allowing for how little I enjoyed any fixture these days, in the company of the unfanatics, the otherwise engaged who were now my team-mates, the Railways stood out as dismal. The playing conditions were partly to blame. The Railways Social Club was a single room, painted glossy St Onan’s Church of England Grammar cream, through which ran more pipes than I had ever seen and which also housed the staff lockers, banks upon banks of them in pitted tin, like a mausoleum for lunch boxes, each one individually defaced with purple marker for identification purposes. This meant that at any time some sooty engine driver would barge in, regardless of the state of play, in order to change into a clean singlet. And you don’t argue with an engine driver, or with a guard come to that, when he’s just come in off his shift. In an earlier confrontation with the railways I’d hit a ball which landed in a guard’s locker just as he was closing it. ‘I won’t be opening that again, flower,’ he informed me, ‘until I’m back from Doncaster.’ To make things worse the tannoy system had to be on at all times, so that everyone could be made aware of any emergencies, derailments, late arrivals and departures, changes to the roster and so on. And you know what it’s like trying to make sense of anything anybody says into a railway microphone. ‘Is that me they’re calling?’ your opponent would suddenly wonder, if you happened to be playing well; and he’d be off to find out, leaving you standing there like a coitus interruptus, going off the boil.

Have I said that there were showers in here as well, behind the highest and most precarious burial pyre of lunch boxes? You could hear them singing as they lathered, drivers, guards, porters, furnace men, getting up steam. ‘When your swer-her-heetheart, sends a leh-heh-letter, of goo-hoo-hoodbye …’ You felt close enough to soap their backs.

‘Shut up!’ one of the ping-pong players would always shout, feebly, without any expectation of success. ‘We’re trying to concentrate here. It’s match night!’

Came the invariable reply: ‘Get fucked — this is a play area!’

The real Hagganah men handled it better than I did. Another night, another fixture, another win.

But they weren’t in decline. They weren’t terminal either/or merchants. They were just taking a break from what else interested them in life. So it was no skin off their noses how distracting the conditions at the Railways were, or what manner of beast you had to play when you got there. Whereas I was personally affronted by every single member of the Railways team, the thin streaks of piss that they were, with their dowager humps and their ruched reptilian necks and their shorts always too brief and their self-castigations — ‘Rubbish, you clown!’ — and their self-exhortations — ‘Come on, these five! come on, these four! come on, these three!’ — and their cute nicknames for themselves — Royboy, Stanley Roylance called himself, ‘That’s it, Royboy, let’s go, that’s it now’ — lanky, loping, leaping, undernourished, their thin hair stuck up as though electrocuted, their little all-bone tocheses stuck out indomitable as goitres, creatures from the black lagoon of the blind will. What were they doing anywhere near my game, whose subtleties were first revealed by moon-faced pessimistic lugubrious men from Hungary and Czechoslovakia — Barna, Vana, Farkas, Boros, Tsorres — witty hangdog Bug and Dniester losers who played in long trousers and collars and ties?