Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Never a sight Henry likes to see, whether he already has reason to be distressed or not, his father carrying another person’s bags, even when they’re Henry’s. A distinguishing feature of the man, of course, no doubt about it, the alacrity of his public spirited-ness. Got a bad back, can’t move your furniture, need a push because your car won’t start, want your party to go with a bang — call Izzi Nagel. Demeaning, isn’t it, Dad? Demeaning to be at everyone’s beck and call?

A question he means to ask. Why did you have to be the butler for all and sundry? Who appointed you dogs body of all Manchester? But he will need more than his usual amount of courage for that one. You don’t demean the demeaned.

Sometimes Henry thinks he can actually smell it on his father’s breath. Servitude willingly suffered. Vassalage. Sour and a little too warm. So that’s what slaves smell of — egg and onion toasted in petroleum.

On to the luggage rack his bags go, anyway. Neatly stored. Little Lord Fauntleroy with his manservant (who also happens to be his father), Izzi.

With all the fussing, the train is filling up around them. Henry finds a table with just one sleeping person opposite. He’d have preferred nobody, but at least this person is wearing railway employee’s uniform and so might be getting off shortly. Might even be planning to drive the train when he wakes. Henry’s father makes sure Henry’s settled comfortably.

‘You won’t forget to write to your mother.’

‘Nope.’

Then he pulls a small packet from his inside pocket. ‘Something for you to read,’ he says awkwardly. Not Henry’s father’s sort of sentence. Nor Henry’s father’s sort of gesture. Is this the first gift they have exchanged, without the intercession of Ekaterina, man to man? Henry is so astonished he thinks he is going to cry. A book, a book from his father!

But before he can say so much as thank you, his father does what he is always doing and claps his hands over Henry’s eyes. ‘Quick,’ he says, ‘come on, off the train, quick.’

Oh, shit! Henry thinks. What now? What this time? What tragedy has he conjured up for me today?

And everything happens so quickly — for Henry of course does not struggle, but goes quietly, putty in his father’s hands — that when he next opens his eyes he is on the platform, and his father is in urgent conversation with the guard, and everyone is up out of their seats, looking, wondering, and people are running, and an urgent request for a doctor is going out over the Tannoy, though as Henry knows from experience, a doctor will be too late. Kaput, whoever you are, once Izzi Nagel has found you.

‘The man opposite me?’ Henry asks, as though he needs to.

‘Yes,’ his father tells him. Compassionately. That old deep adult sorrow, keeping from Henry what must be kept. ‘A heart attack, I’d say. Probably died in his sleep.’

Then Henry remembers that the man did look a little green. So has he seen a corpse at last? He doesn’t think so. He didn’t really look. And he didn’t really know the man was dead. It can’t count as looking upon death, can it, if you don’t know it’s death you’re looking upon.

Thus, on my first foray into manhood, Henry thinks, does my father deny me once again. The ghoul he is, the fucking ghoul!

For a moment it occurs to Henry to wonder whether his father planted the dead man there, has always been planting dead men there, as milestones marking the stages of Henry’s freedom from dependence. Except that there have been no stages of Henry’s freedom from dependence. He will die dependent.

Once the body has been removed, propped up in a station wheelchair, like unwieldy luggage, the train gets underway again. To be on the safe side — his father’s idea — Henry is in another compartment. Henry concurs with this. He doesn’t want to catch anything. Malaria, rabies, bubonic plague — whatever the dead infect you with.

A mile out of Manchester he unwraps the gift his father gave him. It’s a picture book, with diagrams. Henry suspects the first picture book with diagrams he has ever owned. Origami — Let’s Fold, it’s called.

It bears a brief inscription on the title page, in childish writing. ‘ For Henry, on the occasion of you going to university, Dad .’

The next corpse that comes Henry’s way is his father’s. Struck down by a hammer-blow of guilt and sorrow. Nothing to stop Henry this time. Carte blanche. No one to shield his eyes or to usher him into another room or to order him to flag down a passing car. Now’s your chance, Henry. Go on. Go on, do it. Go contemplate the awful majesty of death to your heart’s content.

His mother, too. But his mother has been damaged and he knows that’s beyond him. Whereas his father, they tell him, has an air almost of serenity and looks like a young boy again.

And his breath? Henry wonders. Will his breath still be sour?

Forgetting there won’t be any breath.

Either way, it’s far too late for Henry now. He isn’t man enough to look.

Although Henry is always the first person in the country to get a flu jab, he is also always the first person in the country to get flu.

Without the jab, he tells himself, it would have been even worse.

In fact, Henry likes having flu. It reminds him of being jealous. The same aching of the limbs, as though his bones — his clavicles, his femurs, his humeri (words he’s looked up in an atlas of the human skeleton) — have overheated and become new centres of the senses for him; the same lazy throbbing of the temples, like warm jets of water flushing through his brain cells; the same submission to the caprices of the body and its blood. When he is jealous, Henry can barely move his head, so drowsily heavy, like a sunflower at evening, does it become; and so it is when he has flu. For these reasons, Henry has always preferred jealousy and flu to any other sexual activity.

He imagines, Henry, that he looks rather spectacularly hollow on his pillows, the rims around his eyes purple, his lips faintly parted, his cheeks blazing. Not as beautiful as when he was young and the bones showed their burning tracery through his flesh, alarming whoever cared for him at the time, but he has a grander backdrop for his sufferings today, a softer and more billowing bed, an altogether more elegant bedroom with its row of seven little windows — one for each dwarf — looking out, not over the deathly Pennines, but the park, the West End, the City, an extruded horizontal of teeming London, a fluttering letter-box diorama of the metropolis from which, for a cruel day or two, flu has parted him. If you have to be ill, Henry thinks, this is the place to be ill in. He tries to imagine his father unwell here, but he cannot connect him with the pillows, cannot picture his cheek upon them. Which just goes to show that a person is not a person full stop, but changes with his habitat. As Henry’s habitat is changing him, like a hand constantly soothing his brow. So if this had been my place of birth, instead of up there , what would I have been, Henry wonders.

Happy, for one.

Successful, for two.

No one I recognise, for three.

On Sunday morning Moira brings him strudel in a plastic container. She lets herself in now, with her own key, then makes him tea. ‘Fluids are essential when you’ve got a cold,’ she tells him.

‘I haven’t got a cold, I’ve got flu.’

She fluffs his pillows. ‘It’s a little early in the year for flu. People don’t get flu in August. You’ve got a cold.’

‘I’m too weak to argue with you,’ he says. ‘Which proves I’ve got flu.’

‘And I am not prepared to humour you, which proves you’ve only got a cold.’