Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Growing? Henry, you were always the same. Who was that other one?

That other one who what?

You know. .

I don’t.

Snu fed it.

There have been several.

No, the one who snu fed it while you were still at school. Werner somebody, was it?

Warren.

That’s him.

Warren Shukman. I’d forgotten Warren.

There you are.

Dad, Warren died forty-five years ago.

Yes, but that’s not the time it’s taken you to forget him. You forgot him in a month, you said so. You cried and said you had no feelings.

We weren’t that close.

So why were you crying?

Because I had no feelings.

Henry hears his father’s laughter. He loved making his father laugh. It was such a surprise to both of them. When Henry made his father laugh it was as though his father had just found a ten-pound note in an old pair of trousers.

So do the dead laugh at the hard-heartedness of the living? Better that than lying there weeping for yourself. Hardness is all — will that be the lesson? Someone, make me hard, Henry thinks. Make thick my blood. Though with Warren, when hardness came easy, he’d asked that someone make him soft.

They hadn’t been close, that was how Henry had explained it to himself. Nowhere near as close, say, as he’d been with ‘Hovis’. Though the fact of Warren’s hating ‘Hovis’ and once attempting to strangle him in the playground made for a closeness of its own. ‘You’ll end up naked in the gutter, a no one, an arsehole, swallowing your own sick,’ Warren had foretold of ‘Hovis’ after they’d finally been pulled apart, ‘and you won’t have anyone to help you then, because you’ll be too disgusting to touch, even more than you are now.’

‘We’ll all end up in the gutter,’ ‘Hovis’ had replied, rubbing at his neck, ‘but at least I’ll be looking at the stars.’

‘Meaning I’ll be looking at what?’

‘Meaning you’ll be looking at your own shit.’

‘Well, I’d rather look at mine than yours.’

‘Good, because you’ll be eating mine.’

Which only encouraged Warren to start strangling him again.

Henry reckoned ‘Hovis’ had a point about Warren Shukman and shit. Morally, Warren was the filthiest boy in school. It was Warren who introduced Henry’s class to onanism, getting a self-help group together, a good year before there was any reason for any of them to go public on the matter. It was Warren who told them about fellatio, which Henry found it difficult to credit, and cunnilingus, which ‘Hovis’ refused to countenance, though Henry was easier with that, suspecting he’d been doing it spiritually all his life anyway. And it was Warren who, at the age of thirteen, came to school swinging a full Durex. A sight which remained with Henry for many years, troubling his mind’s eye not only on those occasions his father brought up the subject of protectives, but also on the afternoon he stood head bowed with his classmates, watching Warren’s coffin being lowered into the ground while his father and his uncles wailed.

Extruded rather than tall, unclean in that way of the obsessionally clean, as though there’s unstoppable seepage from the mind into the body, with a pernickety person’s jaw and Adam’s apple and a translucent nose in a permanent wrinkle of disapproval (you actually could see orange light through his nostrils), Warren Shukman gave off such an air of sexual distaste that it was mysterious to Henry why he should have chosen to experiment sexually at all, let alone so widely and so soon. His ascetic profile reminded Henry of a rabbi’s, and indeed there were rabbis in Warren’s family, not to mention, somehow or other, a couple of turncoat charismatics and a Roman Catholic priest who wrote books settling the problem of pain which Brendan O’Connor read. Later, when he read Dostoevsky, Henry came to understand the connection between fastidiousness and lubricity, and even tried to introduce a module on the subject at the University of the Pennine Way, though that failed at the hurdle which was Mona Khartoum. (‘Honestly, Henry, there should be a law against you!’) But at the time, Warren baffled him.

‘Tell me when you need me to fix you up with a hum job, Henry,’ he remembers Warren offering, twitching his nose as though his own last hum job was something he would rather forget.

‘Yeah, all right, but I’m not rushing,’ Henry had replied.

‘Oh, so you do know what a hum job is?’

‘Sort of,’ said Henry.

‘Bet you don’t.’

‘It’s when you do it with the radio on.’

‘Bollocks!’

‘It’s when you do it with the radio on but very low.’

‘Double bollocks. You haven’t got a clue.’

‘All right, I haven’t.’

Warren Shukman advanced his mouth to Henry’s ear. ‘A hum job is when a bird puts your balls in her mouth and hums while she’s chewing them.’

Henry felt as though the Devil himself were whispering vilenesses to him. ‘Why would she do that?’

‘Which part of that?’

‘Any part.’

‘Because you ask her to, you moron.’

‘But why would I ask her to?’

‘Because you haven’t had it.’

‘But why would I want it, Warren?’

For a moment the question seemed to floor even him. ‘I don’t know. Because it’s like Everest, I suppose. Because it’s there.’

‘Yeah, but only because you put it there,’ Henry said, resentful that henceforth he was going to be troubled by a desire for something which until now he hadn’t even known existed.

In the time that has elapsed since Warren’s death, Henry has never again heard of a hum job and must reasonably assume, therefore, that Warren invented it. But whether he had heard of the practice and taught somebody to do it, or whether it was an invention from top to bottom — the performance and the practice — Henry doesn’t know and will never now find out.

Was it all a lie? Catching the bus to town on a Saturday morning to go buying second-hand records, Warren showed Henry the hotel to which he boasted he took married women. Tonight, for example, he was taking two.

‘How can you afford two rooms?’ Henry asked.

‘One room, shmuck. And anyway, they pay.’

‘They pay?’

‘Sure they pay. They love it.’

Married women would pay to go to a hotel with Warren Shukman, aged fourteen! Two at a time!!

And what is more to a kosher hotel!

It was beyond Henry.

But a rumour began to circulate that while Warren did indeed go to hotels, he went on his own, signed in as Mr Smith, and spent the night tossing off. ‘Hovis’ Belkin was the chief instigator of this rumour. ‘One of my uncles has just removed the gall bladder from the father of the hotel clerk’s girlfriend,’ ‘Hovis’ told him, ‘and he swears —’

‘Hang on, who swears?’

‘The hotel clerk. He swears that Shukman comes in on his own and goes out on his own. It’s the God’s honest truth.’

‘How can this clerk be sure that the birds don’t come along later and leave earlier?’

‘Because he does the night shift. And on some nights the hotel is completely empty — but for Shukman.’

‘He’s the only person staying?’

‘The only one.’

‘So why would he sign in as Mr Smith?’

‘Because he doesn’t want anyone to know who he is.’

‘Why not, if he’s there on his own?’

‘Why do you think! Because he doesn’t want it to be widely known that he goes there for a J. Arthur Rank.’

‘Can’t he have one of those at home?’

‘Hovis’ didn’t even bother to think about it. ‘Not in a clean bed he can’t, and not as Mr Smith he can’t, no.’