Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Maybe when he grew up it would be different. You need to be mature to be ordered. You have to be accepting. But so long as he stayed chaotic, how could Henry grow up?

How did you manage to grow up and yet stay chaotic, Dad?

Taugetz, Henry .

‘ Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz and taugetz taug / Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz and taugetz taug . .’

Henry’s father, the paper-magician, happy and blithering his favourite song. ‘ Taugetz, taugetz , give me your answer do. .’ Beside him on the front seat, Henry, the misery-magician, not happy. How old is Henry now? Thirteen — thirteen going on three hundred, according to his father’s calculations.

They have been to what Henry’s father has recently taken to calling a gig. Another humiliation for Henry. Gigs being what rock musicians do — even rockless Schubertian Henry knows that — and are not to be confused with tearing up newsprint into pretty shapes for a bunch of four-year-olds who couldn’t give a shit. Henry has been helping out, the paper-sorcerer’s apprentice, now that he is of an age to be useful. He carries the cases. Makes sure they’ve packed enough newspapers and serviettes, not to mention the torches, the fire extinguisher, the blanket, the bucket of water. Come the performance, he holds one end of whatever his father wants one end holding. He is the butt of his father’s mirth. ‘Here you are, Charlie, catch’ — that’s his stage name, Charlie — ‘oops, couldn’t catch a cold, could you, Charlie?’ And he does the navigating, getting them the length and breadth of the county, from one kindergarten gig to another. Tonight they have been to Liverpool. Hard town, Liverpool, his father had warned him before they set out. ‘How can it be hard, Dad,’ Henry wanted to know, ‘when the person whose party it is is five? What are they going to do, knife us?’ ‘You’ll see,’ his father told him. ‘You’ll see.’

And his father was right. They were hard. Old lags in short pants, potato-faced, thug-nosed, jelly-spitting mafiosi with piggy proletarian eyes, who booed when they should have clapped, and heckled when they should have marvelled, who belched and farted and shouted ‘Fucking rubbish!’ — and that was only the little girls — and who, when Izzi presented them with a dancing paper dolly each, screwed them up and threw them back at Henry.

‘Told you, Charlie,’ Izzi whispered to his son. ‘Only one thing for it — you’ll have to go and get the other stuff from the car.’

‘What other stuff?’

‘You know.’

‘Ah, Dad!’

‘Just go! And as for you’ — to the under-age delinquents — ‘I’ve got something that’ll keep you quiet.’ With which wild boast he swept them up behind him like the rats of Hamelin, down into their cancered concrete garden, a place of rusted bloodbaths, broken bicycles with tampered brakes, seatless swings and ruined roundabouts, promising them real magic this time, blood and thunder, death and dissolution, inferno. Yeah? — we’d like to see it! Yeah, well, you’re going to see it. Yeah? — well, where is it? Yeah, well, it’s just coming. And two minutes later back it came — Henry with the bags of torches. Him? No, not him. Yeah — well, it had better not be him. And of course it wasn’t him, not Henry, no one ever produced Henry if the call was for blood and thunder.

In no time, no longer than it took him to unzip a bag, pour paraffin, light a match and summon up a mouthful of spittle, Uncle Izzi had become volcanic, gargling lava, bouncing fireballs off his lips like balloons. Head back, throat open, smiling — for smiling pulls the lips away from danger, that much even Henry knew — he addressed his baby audience in flames, the fiery words evaporating when he breathed, exploding and vanishing as though they’d never been spoken. Or he would swallow fire — seem to swallow fire, there was the trick — sucking it into his stomach which must have been as one of the boiler rooms of Hell.

You like that, kids? You like that better?

Without doubt they liked it better. Offered the choice between paper-folding and a man with his face on fire, how could you not prefer the man with his face on fire. These, Henry reminded himself, were the children of arsonists and incendiaries, pyromaniacs and safe-blowers. They had grown up with sticks of dynamite in their cots the way other children had grown up with dummies. They were heat-resistant. They felt no pain. They had no imagination of pain.

Their eyes burned with excitement. Now you’re talking, now you’re cooking with gas, this is what you call a children’s party. If only Henry’s father would set fire to Henry as an encore, they’d suck their thumbs and go to beddy-byes content.

Smelling the paraffin, hearing the children’s shouts, seeing the sky light up, the entire proletariat of Henry’s reading and foreboding came out to look — missing persons, rent-evaders, men in hiding, IRA men, men with prices on their heads, dodgers, defaulters, defectors, defecators, escaped convicts, wife-beaters, spies, snoops, grasses, bigamists, bombers, whisky priests, welfare cheats, distillers of illicit hooch, contrabandists, drug dealers, inbreeders, squatters, illegal immigrants, under-age runaways, child-molesters, tower-block prostitutes and their pimps, men who slept with their mothers, neighbours who hadn’t spoken since their blood feud first broke out in another country in another century, creatures not men, creatures with iron claws for hands, creatures with bullets for teeth, creatures who knew what they wanted, took what they wanted, what they borrowed never returned, inexpugnable, shatterproof, immortal. Whoosh, went Izzi’s breath. Whoa, went the estate. Could they have been thinking that Henry’s father had been sent by the council to burn the disgrace that was their habitation to the ground? Were they hoping to collect on the insurance? Who cared why they roared. Not Izzi. At last — an audience appreciative of his genius at last . Boiling hot, like a blacksmith, two scorched circles on his cheeks, like Old Nick, he blew four more fire rings at the moon, then took his bow.

See. See what happens when you’re given a chance. My first ever Gentile gig, Henry.

You’ve done loads of Gentile gigs, Dad.

My first ever über -Gentile gig. What does that tell you?

Henry knew what it told him: never to come to such a place again.

But to his father it told a different story. From now on, paper for the Yiddlers, fire for the goyim.

That could have been the moment, Henry now realises, when his father decided to take a second wife.

Hence happy in the car home. ‘ Taugetz, taugetz . . Didn’t I tell you?’

‘Didn’t you tell me what?’

‘That Liverpool was a hard town.’

‘You did.’

‘And didn’t we show ’em?’

‘You showed ’em, yes.’

‘Was I good or was I good?’

‘You were very good.’

‘Shame we didn’t bring your mother.’

Silence from Henry.

‘She’d have liked it, don’t you think?’

‘Dunno.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe not. The excitement would have been too much for her. What do you think?’

‘I think so, Dad.’

‘Yeah, me too. And you? You all right?’

‘Me? Absolutely. Yeah.’

His father steals a sideways look at him. Concentrating on the road ahead. Not much traffic, but there’s a light rain falling, making conditions treacherous. ‘Oil and water,’ he says. And then, returning to what’s on his mind. ‘So why the long face?’

‘I haven’t got a long face.’