Howard Jacobson: The Making of Henry

Better not to go out. Better to be found, like the old lady, in your bed. But he likes the sensation of coming back home, and he can’t have that unless he’s been out. He walks for forty minutes, surviving attacks by traffic twice, the first time trying to enter Regent’s Park, the second time trying to leave it, then he catches the bus to Marks & Spencer in Oxford Street where he has taken to watching people more senior than himself raiding the café — Café Revive it’s called, ha! — making provision for what’s left of their lives, pocketing free sachets of sugar, free milk, free serviettes, some brazenly, some furtive as squirrels. How long before he’s doing this? He feels the depths of his pockets. Now? Should he start now? Two elderly women at a table next to his are reading UFO magazines. They are identically infirm, each with an arm in a sling, each with purple bruising below the left eye, each with a stick hooked on to the back of her chair. Have they been carted away in a spaceship, both of them? Henry wonders. Have they grown demented trying to get people to believe their stories? He knows how they feel. He too has been sequestered among aliens for most of his adult life. He too has never been believed.

He slips three plastic containers of milk into his pocket as he leaves, then thinks better of it and returns them, in his confusion dropping two on the floor. The women from the spaceship, following him, tread on one and spear the other with their sticks. Was that deliberate? Henry wonders. Is this what they’ve been programmed to do? To spill humans’ milk? He quits the café, flustered, conscious that compunctions cause more trouble than criminality. Something the old know, and is time Henry learned: businesses would rather you stole from them than made a fuss.

He’d dodge his bus fare if he dared, but daren’t. Back at his apartment block he pushes at the lock to make sure nobody has tampered with it or left it open for the traffickers in contraband electricity while he’s been gone. Then he has to frisk himself to find his key. Lost, is it? No, yes, no. How long, how long now before the beshitting starts?

Going up, he runs into Lachlan coming down. If Henry is not mistaken the old woman’s chief mourner is looking more cheerful now than earlier in the day. Though it’s warm and dry he is wearing a green knee-length oilskin, the pockets of which are bulging, Henry notices, and he is carrying a small portrait of somebody or other in oils. He holds it up, as though at auction, for Henry to inspect. ‘Robert Louis, the old ancestor. Staring out to sea on board the yacht Casco , bound for Tahiti, the lucky blighter. What do you think? Looks as though he could do with a square meal, but then none of our family ever enjoyed foreign food much. But otherwise, not bad, eh? Especially the frame. Worth a few, the frame. As you said, everything comes. And she won’t be needing him to look at where she’s going.’

‘Why, where’s she going?’ Henry asks, inattentively. Tahiti, is it?

An alarmed expression crosses Lachlan’s face. ‘You know. . A better place.’

‘Oh yes, there,’ Henry remembers. ‘When’s the funeral?’

‘Not sure. Crematorium’s getting back to me. You don’t mind her up there for another day or so?’

‘No,’ Henry assures him. ‘No, not at all.’

‘Hardly a nuisance, eh?’

‘Certainly not that,’ Henry says.

What’s one more, when all’s said and done? And better to be with the dead inside — remonstrating, remonstrating — than with the living in the madhouse which is out.

Henry Nagel, aged nine, proud to be entrusted with the shopping — saveloys and plaited bread and hot red horseradish which his father likes to spoon into his mouth directly from the jar — forgets to bring home the change.

Forgets? Or fails?

Only threepence, but these distinctions matter.

He can see the threepenny bit, the colour of fool’s gold, where it lies on the counter, between the till and the sheets of newspaper used for wrapping vegetables and soap powder. How it got there it would take him what’s left of his childhood to explain, but it has to do with awkwardness, his fingers not connecting as they should with Elliot Yoffey’s fingers. Elliot the grocer’s son, pale and tapered like a candle, a young man, not a boy like Henry, but another casualty of the shame plague which is rife wherever Henry goes. Humiliated to be buying meets humiliated to be serving, with the result that the threepenny bit rolls like a hand grenade into no man’s land, where Henry can’t quite reach it, and Elliot dare not lean over his side of the crowded counter to push it, and Henry would rather go home without than risk compounding shame with more shame by asking.

Who cares about a threepenny bit anyway, even in 1950s Heaton Park where there are trees but money doesn’t grow on them. Not Henry’s parents. Threepence? We pish on threepence! They aren’t rich, the Nagels in the little sunshine semi from which, if you stand on Henry’s bed when the sky lifts, you can see the grey-green fringe of the Pennines — but they are bounteously charitable and forgiving. Except that today they aren’t. Explain that. By what law must the mortified always be mortified a second time? Let some little muscled Philistine, member of the Hitler Youth, nephew of Attila the Hun, come swaggering home threepence-shy and no one says a word. Threepence? Ha! We pish on your threepence. But because it’s heart-stop Henry, the world falls in. Go back, Henry, and explain. Go back and take what’s yours.

Which he cannot do.

Go back, Henry, taking the bread and the saveloys and the horseradish with you, show them your bill, tell them how much you gave them, and then ask for your threepence change.

Which he cannot do.

He shakes his head. Tears rip his eyes like torn paper.

The door. There’s the front door, Henry. Now go. And if you are not able to come back with the threepence, do not bother to come back at all.

As though at nine he has alternative accommodation.

Henry’s father, the late Izzi Nagel, sits on the edge of his armchair, never comfortable, never at home — hard to imagine him at home here, of all places — and shakes his head. You want to know why no one says a word to the nephew of Attila the Hun? Do you? It’s because he doesn’t come back from the shop without the threepence .

No, he just burns the shop down.

His father shrugs. In a harsh world you have to do what you have to do.

So you would rather, Henry says, that you’d had a Nazi storm trooper for a son?

His father shifts his bulk and sighs — a poor ghost driven to extremity by an extremist son. If that’s my only choice — a Nazi storm trooper or a crybaby, maybe I’d have preferred the Nazi, yes. Then immediately takes it back, wiping the slate clean with his sleight of hands. UNCLE IZZI–ILLUSIONIST, FIRE-EATER AND ORIGAMIST, his card says. Herzschmertz Henry still carries one in his wallet. Queer to have had a father who always wanted to be called uncle. Almost as queer as to have had a father who always wanted to be called an illusionist and all the rest of it. Not a very good illusionist, fire-eater or origamist — but then you couldn’t expect his card to say that. And he did what he could, Henry concedes, with the hands God gave him.

He opens them now, palms towards himself, holding back the tide of his old exasperation with his son. For your own good, Henry, we sent you back to Yo fey’s. We pished on the threepence, but we couldn’t allow the world to pish on you.

So all this you did for love of me?

All this we did for love of you. To make you strong.

And you don’t think you might have loved me more — and made me stronger — by leaving me alone?