Howard Jacobson: The Mighty Walzer

It wasn’t a punch. I’m not saying my father laid me out. But no sooner had he returned to the driver’s seat than he let fly with a backhand Ogimura would have been proud of, a humdinging swipe that caught me on the mouth, bringing tears to my eyes and silencing my sisters, who were just getting ready to start spluttering with laughter again. From my mother and her mother it drew a conjoined gasp. ‘Oh, Joel!’ my mother said.

He revved the bus out of the garage forecourt — ‘Oh, Joel,’ he jeered — and swung out on to the Blackpool road, careless of the traffic. We were at that stage of the journey where a penny was usually offered to the first person who saw the Tower, but there was no family fun of that sort today. I sat with my head down, determined not to cry, but promising myself that one day I would put a knife in my father’s heart, supposing I could ever find it. He looked stonily ahead, no doubt promising himself some similar reward in relation to me. When he finally spoke it was to justify what he’d done. ‘You and your long farkrimt face,’ he said. ‘I’m sick of you showing me up. You’ll treat people with respect when you’re out with me, you stuck-up little …’ But he didn’t finish. He wasn’t a swearer.

Looking back, I think I did the right thing not asking how I could be simultaneously diffident and arrogant, stuck in and stuck up. It could only have led to another klop. And who knows, to the bus spinning out of control and the whole family being wiped out.

So we drove the rest of the way in silence until we arrived at the Tower.

For northerners in search of their first good time in the ten or fifteen years after the War, Blackpool was where you always went looking, and the Tower Ballroom was where you invariably found it. In the Tower Ballroom you smooched your first smooch, kissed your first kiss, missed your first last bus home. For me the Tower Ballroom was where I first saw a row of twenty ping-pong tables, every one of them in use. It’s a sight, I have to say, going on recent experience, that still has the power to move me. People who love the spectacle of football speak of that heart-stopping moment when you come up out of the darkness of the stands and suddenly find yourself looking down upon the luminous verdure of the turf. Cricket, baseball, rugby, bowls — the same. In the end it’s the arena we come for, the landscape. And the landscape of sport is always green. Always and forever green. The colour of the Elysian Fields. Our only glimpse of Paradise. Which was what I saw when I walked into the Tower Ballroom. The Holy City. Avalon. The olive garden of the Hesperides and twenty separate ping-pong balls going plock. The music of the spheres.

It wasn’t a tournament. You just went over to a table and took your turn. Winners stayed on for a maximum of three games, losers went to the back of the queue and waited for another crack. But it wasn’t about winning and losing. It was about being spotted for potential. A dozen senior players and coaches wandered between the tables looking for kids who had what it took. Or to whom they believed they could teach what it took. This was big-break time. If you were to have any chance of snatching the title from Ogimura or some other inscrutable pen-hander in the future, this is where it would have to begin.

And here was me with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde already smoking in my hand and a cut mouth to remind me that less than an hour before I’d been publicly humiliated by a man I was no longer prepared to regard as my father. Some preparation for my big break that was.

He — he — had dropped us off at the Tower and then gone to have some repairs done to the bus. Tactful of him. My sisters were out on the Golden Mile, rolling pennies and looking for men. Tactful of them, too. As usual, the ones who felt most keenly for one’s suffering were the only ones who didn’t have the nous to get out of the way. So I was stuck, on my first ever ping-pong outing, with a mother and a granny.

‘They look nice boys on that table,’ my mother said. ‘Why don’t you join them?’

In my heart I knew I was not going to join anyone. I wasn’t a joiner. It wasn’t going to happen like that for me. It would all unfold in some other way. It would be the same with the Jezebels. I would not meet them at a dance. I would meet them some other way. And what was it I wanted, then, from ping-pong and from Jezebels, that was not what others wanted, that could not be initiated or satisfied in the ordinary way? Nothing. That is what has been so disappointing about my life — at the last, after all the blushing and the shrinking, all the exceptional hesitancy and reluctance, there is nothing I have ever wanted other than to lift the cup and fuck the girl.

It’s possible, then, that the man who was no longer my father was within his rights to nail me for a stuck-up prick and zetz me as hard as he did?

Anything’s possible.

What I also knew in my heart, now I was here, was that I wouldn’t have the courage to bat with a book. I looked around at the other kids. Several of them wore tracksuits. Some seemed to have their parents with them (though not their grannies), acting as trainers, muttering to them between points — ‘Concentrate, concentrate! Keep it simple!’ — dumb-showing strokes from the sidelines. And all of them, of course, used bats. But did I see anyone I couldn’t have licked? A few who might have pushed me hard, maybe. A tall kid with an over-pronounced follow-through, who hit the ball with plenty of topspin, but all you’d have to do with him was counter-hit from close to the table and you’d have the ball past him while he was still putting the final flourish to his previous stroke. A heavy chopper who was winning applause from bystanders for his showy retrieving, but where would he be when I got the ball to stop dead at the net? And perhaps the toughest of them, if only because he was the most determined, a round-faced boy in shorts who bounced around the table a lot, doing breathing exercises, refusing to accept that a ball was ever out of his reach. He’d take the longest to beat, because of the pleasure there would be in wearing him out. Death by push shot. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde itched in my palm. So no, I didn’t see anyone I couldn’t have licked. But I still didn’t have the nerve to line up with my book.

It doesn’t make much sense, does it? First they’d have laughed, then I’d have wiped the laughter off their faces. Game, set and match to me, with the moral victory thrown in. My trouble was that I couldn’t think long term — all I could hear was the snorting of that initial mockery, instead of the soft purrings of my own satisfaction in the end.

That’s the difference between a winner and a loser.

‘So how did it go?’ the man who was still not my father asked on the way back.

Behind me, the bus had fallen very quiet again.

‘I didn’t play,’ I said.

‘You didn’t play! We went all the way to Blackpool and you didn’t play!’

‘He was upset,’ my grandmother put in.

‘I wasn’t upset. I just didn’t want to play.’

‘Didn’t want to play, or couldn’t play? Didn’t want to play, or wouldn’t come out of your shell?’

(Something else my sisters had been doing while they were on the loose in Blackpool — collecting shells from the beach to slip into my pocket when we were back on the bus.)

‘I don’t think they’d have let me play with my book.’

‘Did you ask?’

‘No.’

‘No. ‘Course not. Why ask? Too much of a kuni-lemele to ask. Better to hide in a corner and go red. Or maybe you were sitting on the Benghazi smelling your own chazzerei the whole time you were there.’

‘Joel!’ my mother said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘if I want to play with a book any more.’