Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Not counting the country daddy-long-legs which crawled across his unborn brain, little Henry was never allowed an animal of his own. The usual reason. Who would feed it.

Together with the perhaps less usual reason: who would dare look upon it.

Nothing short of metaphysical, Ekaterina’s horror of incalculable living things, into which category she placed the entire animal and insect kingdom. She had been given a rabbit when she was a child — Natalia — a lovely golden floppy creature, more hare than rabbit, with soft liquid eyes and a white patch on her chest, which Ekaterina thought of as an apron of the sort worn by the lady who came to do the dusting and make the beds. It helped Ekaterina overcome her initial fear of the rabbit to think of her as a maid. Two weeks after her arrival, maid or not, Natalia mysteriously fell pregnant. Not wanting to burden her daughter with the finer points of Natalia’s earlier life in the pet shop, Irina explained that rabbit-pregnancy was an airborne spore which had come in on the wind and invaded Natalia while she was busy nibbling her lettuce. Ekaterina marvelled at this and waited with her heart in her mouth for Natalia to deliver herself of bunnies. Are they here yet? Will it be this afternoon? Will it be tomorrow? They were exquisite when they came, balls of the warmest fur Ekaterina had ever touched, their hearts pumping through her fingers, one golden like its mother, two black, two brown, and one dirty grey. The next morning, when Ekaterina went to look at them, she noticed that the dirty grey was not moving. And the morning after, both the blacks. Had Ekaterina not seen Natalia pick up one of the browns in her mouth and dash it pitilessly against the side of the hutch, Irina would have let her believe the deaths were due to natural causes. As it was, burying them under a tree at the bottom of the garden, she felt she had no choice but to try to convey to Ekaterina the idea of post-natal depression. Down to just the bunny that was the same colour as herself, Natalia appeared to settle back into the serenity of motherhood. But then one day the golden favourite disappeared altogether. Rather than get the inconsolable Ekaterina to accept that it was in its mummy’s tummy, Irina told her that she had taken it out of the hutch and set it free, to give it a chance in life. But by that time Ekaterina was off rabbits altogether.

Which left, if the emotional instability of animals was to be a consideration in the matter of Henry’s having a pet, only fish. Henry remembers dimly the ornamental goldfish in the pool in the back garden, over which his mother sometimes shook a drum of what looked like pepper. Were they his? He never thought that they were his. But they didn’t last long, whoever they belonged to, on account of his father frightening them to death in the course of practising his fire-eating. That was his mother’s guess, anyway. They’d been fine and suddenly they weren’t. Izzi had gone out to exhale flame in the open, since he wasn’t allowed to do it in the bedroom, and the next day there they were, all six of them, floating bloated on their backs. Their eyes turned up. In shock.

‘If they’re in shock they’re alive,’ Henry’s father said.

‘By in shock I mean suffering the aftermath of shock.’

‘How do you know it was shock?’

Ekaterina was adamant. ‘So what else do you think it was?’

‘Fish die. That’s life.’

‘Not six, all at the same time, Izzi.’

‘I think I’ve read,’ he said, ‘that the death of one fish can deprive others of the will to live.’

She laughed at him. ‘And where would you have read that, you who have never read a sentence in your life?’

Not true. He had read a dozen books on origami and fire-eating from cover to cover. But it wasn’t in his interest, just that minute, to cite those.

So Ekaterina’s theory won the day. The fish had been going about their business, opening and shutting their mouths, when the flames had shot across them. Ekaterina put herself in their place. On her back, looking at the sky, she heard the bombs fall, saw the shadow of the flames, smelt the smoke and the paraffin, and said no to life.

Soon afterwards they drained the pool and dumped sand in it for Henry to play in. But Henry wasn’t a sand boy. No matter how colourful the spades and buckets his father bought him, no matter how many moulds of Norman keeps and castles, or flags to fly above their ramparts, Henry was no sooner deposited in the sandpit than he fled it. Look out of the window and there he’d be, sitting under a tree, nursing his thin skin, reading The Awkward Age .

What happens when you don’t get a boy a pet.

He has a plan to ring Moira the minute he is out of the block, and get her to w-a-l-k Angus with him. It will be a try-out for them, an earnest of their future domesticity. There is a particular way of being together that couples out with their animals have, which Henry has always envied. An absent-minded complacency, an absorption in their separateness which is not to be confused with coldness, as though the reason for their being together, the abstraction of their union, is bodied forth in the ball of fluff charging around in front of them. The ectoplasm of their love.

But she can’t make it.

‘Are you still angry with me,’ Henry wants to know, ‘because of before?’

‘I’m not angry with you.’

‘I’ve only agreed to exercise the little bastard in the hope I’d see you.’

‘You should be pleased to be doing Lachlan a favour.’

‘I am. Of course I am. That’s the other reason. To show you I have overcome my jealousy.’

‘Well, that’s good, but I can’t. Enjoy your walk.’

Only when he rings off does it occur to Henry to wonder whether this is a ruse, hatched up between them, to get him, and the dog, out of the way.

Thus does the dog become the ectoplasm of his insecurity.

‘OK, Angus,’ Henry says, ‘you and me.’ At which Angus, padding like a horse, looks up at him with eyes of longing.

Henry can’t remember whether his favourite park, the one with all the graves in, is out of bounds for dogs. But he does know that parks are places where dog owners converse, and he doesn’t want any of that. He might be walking the dog but he is not dog-associated. So the High Street is the safer bet to be going on with, though he has forgotten how many shops are still open, how many people are about, and how conspicuous he therefore feels. Except that conspicuous is not the word. Searching for it, he rejects unaccustomed and awkward and even embarrassed in favour of humiliated. Is he insane, or what is he? Humiliated, humiliated to be walking a dog!

And wherein lies the shame? Silly question to ask of Henry. Wherein doesn’t lie the shame?

But he can tell you wherein lies the specific shame. In being seen to be reduced to the affections of a dog. Not mine, Henry wants to say. Nothing to do with me. Doing it for a friend. Allowing that the friend has nothing to do with him either.

Henry is reduced to the affections of no one.

Which seems to be the clue for Angus to piss against the tyre of a BMW.

‘Hey!’ someone calls.

Neither Henry nor Angus takes any notice.

‘Hey! I said hey!’

Henry looks up. They are outside Bar One or something similar. A man in a shiny metallic suit and of Middle Eastern appearance, could be Israeli, could be Lebanese, could even, Henry supposes, be Italian, is standing in the doorway, pointing rhythmically. He is on his mobile phone, and expects Henry to put up with his half-attention.

‘Your tyre?’ Henry wonders.

‘My wife’s tyre.’

‘Well, I’m sure she drives through worse,’ Henry says. He does not intend to apologise. Not on Angus’s behalf. For Angus, Henry will now lie on a bed of broken glass.