Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘Fine. So get a bat.’

‘I don’t know if I’ll be any good with a bat.’

‘Right!’ he said. That was the end of it. Right meant discussion over. In arguments with my mother, right meant that the bus would be parked in some very odd places that night. In arguments with me, right usually meant no more than that he’d lost interest.

But a couple of days later I came home from school to find the bus outside the house and my father sitting on the garden wall waiting for me. Never in my life had I seen my father sitting on this, or any other, garden wall. ‘Right!’ he said. ‘We’re going out.’

He had a queer elsewhere expression on his face. As though he had decided that I no longer existed and was going to address all future comments to a ghost boy standing behind me.

‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll see when we get there.’

I should have noticed that he was carrying a brown holdall but I was too anxious about what was happening to notice anything. My father was never home at this time of the day. He never sat on walls. He never took me anywhere. And he never talked to ghosts.

‘Is Ma all right?’ I asked.

‘Everybody’s all right. Hop in.’

Everybody was all right but my father was taking me somewhere. Was he taking me to be adopted?

He drove without speaking, but calmly. Up Blackley New Road, past the reservoirs where other boys’ fathers took them fishing, around the biscuit factory which always smelt of malted milk and which I therefore thought a woman’s breasts would smell like once I next got to suckle some, and then slowly by the gates of Crumpsall Hospital.

A hospital — was that it? Electric-shock treatment to get me out of the toilet? A lobotomy?

But we didn’t stop at the hospital. Nor at the Jews’ Cemetery which abutted it. So it was life we were chasing, was it? More frightening still.

After about fifteen minutes he slowed down alongside some playing fields, peered out of my window, then drove another fifty yards before pulling in by a building that resembled a cricket pavilion.

‘Out,’ he said.

‘What are we doing?’ I asked.

’We’re not doing anything. You’re joining the Akiva.’

I’d heard of the Akiva. The Akiva Social Club. Hadn’t one of my aunties on my father’s side once been treasurer, prior to rumours that she’d been caught shmuckling subscriptions? All hushed up. Hadn’t another of the Walzer women found a husband there — someone else’s husband — at a Chanukkah dance? Also hushed up. How could I join the Akiva? The Akiva was for grown-up sophisticates and socialites. I was twelve. You don’t need a shmuckling treasurer for a club that has twelve-year-olds as members. Nor an adulterous dance floor …

Aha — a dance floor! So that was it. A dance floor. Forget the lobotomy; the man I could no longer call a man let alone a father had dragged me from my home and was now going to deposit me into the middle of a hokey-cokey — in my school blazer! Come on, Oliveler, join the line, join the line.

‘No,’ I said. It was a small protest but at least I made it. ‘No.’

He took me by the arm. ‘Don’t make this difficult for yourself,’ he warned me.

What happened next seemed to happen very quickly. One minute we were signing forms; then I was shaking the hand of someone preternaturally affable, in a painfully obvious wig, and with a still more painfully obvious hearing-aid; then I was walking down a long passage with my father; then he was turning the handle of a door.

The door opened on to a ping-pong room. There were about half a dozen people in there, two playing, the rest sitting around. They were all older than me, I saw that at once. What I also saw was that they were not sophisticates or socialites. No one had told me that in any club the table tennis room is always where the nebbishes and nishtikeits hang out, but I was able to make an immediate assessment along those lines unaided, for all that I was a running river of no-hoper embarrassment myself.

For their part, they greeted my arrival as though a bad smell had entered the room. I know now it wasn’t personal. Over the years I have seen that look a thousand times. Just when you think you’ve got the table to yourselves for the evening, mapped out a competition and started to relax into a little light male conversation — chipping, moodying, fannying — in walks a kuni-lemele with his dad.

But I knew from the pressure on my shoulders that there was no point in hanging back.

‘Play,’ my father said. ‘I’ll be in the bus waiting for you. I’ll wait as long as it takes. But don’t come back out in under two hours.’

‘I’m not prepared,’ I said. ‘I haven’t brought my book.’

Only then did I notice that he was carrying a holdall. ‘You said you didn’t want to play with a book any more,’ he said. ‘So here.’ He unzipped the bag and brought out a bat. The biggest bat I had ever seen in my life. A good eighteen inches in diameter, as heavy as a hockey stick, its surface coated with coarse sandpaper, so that what? — so that I should make the sparks fly?

‘Nah. Geh gesunterhait. Win.’

And he shoved me into the room.

Some time later I learnt that my father had made the bat with parts from his precious Yo-Yo which he’d been hoarding for over twenty years.

So he loved me after all.

The ‘free hand’ is the hand not carrying the racket.

5.5 The Rules

WE NOW ENTER an embarrassing phase even by the standards of this history of embarrassments. I can at least promise brevity.

My father was right to want to prise me out. Out of my shell and out of the lavatory. But I was further in than he knew.

Sometimes I wondered whether I was further in than any boy had ever been. Somebody had to be the World Shell-Skulking Champion, somebody had to hold the record for time sitting steaming on top of his own chazzerei — why shouldn’t it have been me?

Somebody had to have had the most disgusting imagination in history, as well, and the scummiest ever habits to go with it; and there I yielded to no one, man or boy. I had some way to go yet before I became the ping-pong player I had it in me to be; but I was already the Ogimura of filth.

The hand that built the Yo-Yo built the bat, but the hand that rocked the cradle moved the hand that wasn’t carrying a bat. You understand me?

Take time.

So far I’ve shovelled whatever blame I can on to my father’s side. Now it’s my mother’s side’s turn. In an important sense, it wasn’t me who was bolting the lavatory door and making love to myself for sessions which I considered brutally foreshortened if they failed to exceed three hours. It was them.

I choose my words carefully. Love.

I was a pupil at a boys-only grammar school with vague Church of England associations and a motto taken from Seneca — POTENTISSIMUS EST, QUI SE HABET IN POTESTATE — which translated roughly into HE IS MOST POWERFUL WHO TAKES HIMSELF IN HAND. Which was what we did. We took ourselves in hand from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, with no more than thirty minutes off for lunch. Prayers at assembly, ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’, ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, and then six and a half hours of self-love, singly, together, in teams competitively, in teams callisthenically, in the playground, in the showers, in the library, in the gym, under the coconut mat, up the wallbars, over the vaulting-horse, behind the cricket nets, behind the blackboard, under the desks, in the inkwells beneath the very noses of our teachers. St Onan’s Church of England Grammar School for Boy Perverts, Radcliffe.

Jerking or jacking off, was what the other boys called it. Their prerogative. They were less nice in their vocabulary than I was; they came from less particular homes; and they treated themselves with less respect. It’s not for me to judge. I can only state that there was nothingjacky or jerky in what I was doing. And nothing to justify the idea of off, either. I stayed on. May God be my witness, I stayed on.