Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘I don’t know about you …’ Sheeny whispered as we took our seats.

‘Me neither …’ I said.

‘They’re so …’

‘I couldn’t agree more …’ I said.

‘Where do they …?’

‘Say no more,’ I said.

We both knew where they … The black lagoon.

‘Soft hands, let’s go!’ Roylance urged himself. He was a game down against Saul Yesner, and not liking it. ‘What am I doing losing to this twat?’ I heard him asking himself as he towelled off. Icy beads of perspiration ran down his throat, as slippery as mercury, not the tropic springs that burst boiling from our pores. ‘Come on, Royboy, come on now!’

It sometimes happens that one player has all the luck that’s going. You’re meant to live with it. Your turn tomorrow. Tonight, fortune favoured Saul. First an edge. Then the top of the net. Then another edge. And then another. Roylance couldn’t live with it. ‘How many’s that?’ he exploded. ‘Not again!’ And then under his breath, ‘You jammy twat!’

Saul Yesner raised his hand in apology each time, but otherwise let nothing disturb his concentration. He played like the three wise monkeys. A model of shrewd discretion three times over. He seemed to inhabit some other sphere, like a holy man. It was as though the god of ping-pong played through him. He merely interpreted, making the word flesh. So don’t blame him for the flukes — he was just the messenger.

He won easily, without the slightest sign that his victory mattered or came as any surprise to him. Of course he won easily! He no more expected to lose than to feel any of the punches we threw at his stomach.

Royboy could barely find it in himself to shake hands. I could see his lips forming the word twat over and over again.

So when it came to my turn against him it was already a grudge match in my heart if not in his. I murdered him, therefore — is that what you expect to hear? I tore him limb from fleshless limb? I made lean mincemeat of him? I feasted on his kishkies?

It was my match to win, let’s put it that way. I held a five-point lead over him when we changed ends in the final game. On my serve. The first of which, a backhand topspin corner to corner sandwich special, I over-hit. Not by much but by enough. It gave him confidence. He hitched his shorts, stuck his toches out and decided to make a fight of it. ‘Come on Royboy, these four. These three.’ He sweated over every point, pilules of ice-cold mercury, lifted his hand to call a let if there was the slightest distraction — and when wasn’t there? — and glowered at me from the other end of the table, as though it mattered, in the end, who won and who didn’t.

My lead narrowed but I held on to it. 19–16, with me to serve. He caught me at 19 all.

At which moment someone in overalls walked in to use the phone. Have I said that there was a public phone with an acoustic hood over it in the ping-pong room? This caller was at least aware that he’d chosen a bad moment. ‘I’ll just dial in here,’ he said, disappearing behind the door when his number rang, tugging at the phone lead to get as far away from us as was possible. But we could still hear him describing what he wanted for supper.

‘Jesus, Joseph and fucking Mary,’ Roylance said.

‘Let!’ called the referee.

I said nothing. Just bounced the ball on the linoleum floor seventeen or eighteen times.

Roylance took up his feral crouch. ‘These two, Royboy. Come on, soft hands. These two.’

And that was when my nerve snapped. If he wanted it that badly then he could have it. If I’d been any kind of fighter I’d have made the opposite resolution. If you want it that badly, you sick fuck, you deranged twat-caller, then I’m going to be the one who sees to it you’re never going to get it. But that would have entailed my sticking out my toches and mixing it with him. Accepting that we inhabited an identical universe of desire and will. And that I couldn’t do. Didn’t have what it took. No character. No bottle. Never was a mixer, as my father would have told you.

So I did the next best thing. I gave it to him as a gift. I had neither the character to win nor the character to consent graciously to his winning. So I gave it to him. You want it that much? Here, have! Geh gesunterhait, go with god’s blessing. And I very obviously served off the table, two preposterously over-hit forehand topspin serves that missed the table by a half-room’s length, sending the ball soaring high over the lunch boxes into the railwaymen’s showers.

Now no one had won, except on paper.

I can’t speak for other sports, but this is not something you do in ping-pong. It’s against the spirit of the game. It’s ungenerous. It creates bad feelings.

Royboy didn’t so much shake my hand as slap it. ‘A win’s a win,’ I heard him saying to his team-mates. ‘I don’t care how I beat the twat.’ But their captain came over to our captain, and our captain had to make a formal apology.

He said nothing to me that night, but he was on the phone to me early the next morning. ‘Phil Radic here, Oliver. I’ve been talking things over with the boys, and we’re wondering if you need a few weeks off.’

‘Is that a nice way of saying you’re dropping me, Phil?’

‘You’re wrong, Oliver. I’m the team captain. I don’t have to find a nice way of doing anything. I think you’ve been playing too much, that’s all. I think you should rest yourself for a match or two.’

‘Look, Phil,’ I was surprised to hear myself saying, ‘why don’t you just admit you’re dropping me and call it a day at that?’ I remember being pleased that I had found the social confidence to take no shit. Once you’ve been in a shell, you are never free of it. You are always map reading, measuring how far you’ve ventured out.

‘Do you want to come over to the club tonight to discuss it?’ Phil Radic asked.

Language traps you every time. A different question might have elicited a different answer. But, ‘I don’t really think there’s anything to discuss, Phil,’ just seemed irresistible, somehow.

And then I put the phone down.

And never played a game of ping-pong in Manchester again.

BUT THAT STILL left Cambridge.

And come to that, as far as warm life went, it still left the Kardomah.

My two fall-back positions. You cover yourself if you’re grandiose. You can forgo being the best at one thing if you’re confident you can be the best at another.

Royboy Roylance wouldn’t have been able to find his way to the Kardomah in a blue fit. Point to me. Phil Radic would, but where’s Cambridge, Phil? Another point to me.

See how it works.

But it meant that I was necessarily a faithless bastard. Ping-pong? What’s that when it’s at home?

And what’s home?

It’s a dangerous game to play. You can run out of fall-back positions in the end. You can be left with nothing to beat anybody with. And then where are you?

‘Ping-pong, Pnin?’

‘I don’t any more play at games of infants.’

Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

THE KARDOMAH WAS my last throw of the tsatske dice, my last spin of the draidle.

On a crunching colourless December morning my mother came into my room with a telegram from Cambridge in her hand. I was lying on my bed, looking out of the window, staring into the grim grey space where a sky should have been, waiting. ‘I haven’t opened this, darling,’ she said. ‘But don’t be too downhearted. There’s still Aberystwyth.’

I grabbed it from her. ‘They’re not going to be sending me a telegram,’ I said, ‘to tell me that I’ve not got in. Are they?’