Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

And my father didn’t notice, was that the problem? He was yesterday’s swagman?

Partly yes and partly no. He was slow to perceive the transformation, that’s undeniable, but I believe he would have got there in the end. Swag was in his blood. Eventually he would have heard it crying to him in the night. Were he alive and in business today he’d be doing well with mobile phones. That’s what an eye for useless crap he had. So no. The real reason everything came tumbling down around his ears was that he’d never had the slightest idea how much money he had to spend or what anything was costing him and therefore what anything should sell for. Mike Sieff had been right all along when he’d clapped his hands and yelled and screamed and wondered if my father had been out in the sun too long, knocking the gear out at that price. It was no surprise that he was going bust. The surprise was that it hadn’t happened years ago.

He never opened his bank statements. He never took them out of their envelopes. He didn’t want to see. So long as he hadn’t seen in black and white how little money he had in the bank he could legitimately proceed on the assumption that he had plenty.

He could never find his invoices.

My mother would tear her hair out. ‘Joel, how can you price anything if you haven’t got your invoices?’

‘I can remember.’

‘So how much were the bathroom cabinets?’

‘The ones with no shelves?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the broken mirrors?’

‘Yes.’

‘I got those at a special price.’

‘And what was that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, about a funt.’

‘What do you mean about?’

‘About a funt, I don’t know.’

‘Each? A pound each? A pound for the lot? Which, Joel?’

‘Each. Each. A funt each. Or was it two funt? Something like that. Stop hacking me on a kop.’

Who cares? That’s what he wanted to say. Who cares? As long as we move the stuff out. Over there and over there. And again. And another. Last one. Who’s a liar?

If she really kept on at him he’d lose his temper and say, ‘It’s a loss-leader, now can we leave it at that!’

I don’t know how many times my mother, let alone his accountant, let alone his accountant’s mother, took him through the principle of losing a little in order to win a lot. But he was always bored by it. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he’d say. ‘Loz me ein. Don’t make me oisgemisht. We’re shifting gear, that’s all that matters.’

The rest of us fared no better. ‘What are you lot complaining about?’ he’d say. ‘You’ve got a roof over your head, haven’t you?’

In the end we very nearly didn’t.

Even he realized, before the end finally came, that he had to make a show of looking like a man in control. ‘Now what have I done with that invoice?’ he’d say, just as we were about to sit down to supper, frisking himself with the astonished look of a person who had never mislaid a thing in his life. Then the hunt began. Every pocket. The turn-ups of his trousers. The back of every chair. Under the table. Under the bed. Under the mattress. The bin. The garage. The van. Wherever he’d been. Where had he been? And if we were lucky we would find it, still at the warehouse, lying in a pool of diesel at the local garage, floating like a lily in the gutter outside Sheeny’s house, left on the counter of some transport café, or just in an extreme corner of his back pocket all along. He didn’t own a wallet. Never had owned a wallet. He was his wallet, that was the idea. If he had a wallet he would lose it, so he stuffed papers into whichever part of himself happened to be to handiest. We’d all seen him throw five-pound notes on the ground, imagining that he was scrunching them into his trousers. Sometimes we’d have to go out searching for cash, never mind an invoice, the day’s takings, hundreds and hundreds of pounds which he’d put somewhere. I recovered seventy smackers once, out of a lost sum of four hundred, just by following a trail of fivers to a phone box. Someone was using the phone when I got there so I knocked on the glass and reached in, retrieving another fifty wrapped in a brown paper bag.

When I told him what had happened to my ice-cream job he had the decency to see the joke. Like father like son. We both couldn’t keep a shilling in our pockets.

And then one day it wasn’t funny any more.

The house went from noisy to quiet in a single instant, and then went from quiet to noisy just as abruptly, but now at all the wrong times. People I had never seen before arrived in the early morning carrying boxes, then more people I had never seen before arrived in the dead of night to carry them away. There were constant phone calls out of business hours, some of them confidential and rueful — shushkehing phone calls: mutter mutter, ech ech — some of them wheedling, many of them angry, all of them futile. The phrase ‘You soon know who your friends are’ was forever on my father’s lips. He lost stature. His brick shithouse shoulders looked as though they’d been hit by a semi-trailer. He slumped and lost weight. He lost his appetite. One by one, my mother lost the rings from her fingers. Pawned. Reduced to pawnage — us! Us! Who until now had never known what or where a pawn shop was. But we were learning quickly. We were helpless in the arms of a process which I thought only attacked the families of crooked financiers or ne’er-do-wells: we were going mechullah.

‘If it wasn’t for you kids,’ my mother said, ‘I’d put my head in the oven.’

To my sisters she said, ‘Let this be a lesson to you. Never marry a man who doesn’t know where his invoices are. However much he makes you laugh.’

She had become like the Lady of Shalott. She wouldn’t look out of windows or answer the door or telephone. Thro’ the noises of the night she hid in shadows. The curse had come upon her.

There was only one consolation. The tower was in her name.

I’ve been told by other bankrupts that when it finally happens, when you go from going mechullah to being mechullah, there is a wonderful sense of relief. It wasn’t like that with us. The final blow was the bitterest blow. Because it was delivered not by any impersonal system of justice or retribution, but by a mortal enemy. Copestake.

Yes, that Copestake! Cockroach and fatherer of cockroaches.

Come the hour when the forests are all gone and the ice has all melted and the hole in the firmament is big enough to drop a hundred moons through, one creature will still be crawling across the face of the ruined earth, the copestake, inexpungible, impervious to all extremes of climate, proof against insult and obloquy, resistant to fire itself.

Yes, he had done well out of the insurance on the charred Cheetham Hill Road emporium. So well that for a while people wondered whether Benny the Pole mightn’t have been working for him and not the Beenstocks all along. Though it wasn’t beyond Benny, his old Kardomah chinas chipped in, to have been in the employ of them both. Against either of these theories was the condition of Mrs Copestake, who had begun to shake on the day after the fire and hadn’t stopped shaking since. Why would she be shaking if she’d got what she wanted to get — assuming she wanted what her husband wanted, that’s if he had ever wanted it (and conspired to get it) in the first place? Of course there could have been discussions between Copestake and Benny the Pole without Mrs Copestake being party to them; men who love their wives frequently keep them in the dark. But in that case Mr Copestake would surely be at the mercy of some pretty mixed emotions right now, seeing his wife quivering like an aspen, and by all accounts he wasn’t.