Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

In which case isn’t it time he was gone as well?

She is all right. Unhurt. Calm even. Certainly calmer than he is, or indeed than the other motorists, parked or otherwise, who want her details. The first thing anybody thinks of here if a match-stick lands upon their bonnet: is the car scratched, who threw the match, and what is the name of their insurance. Anything lying whimpering beneath their wheels can wait.

He runs to take her into his arms but somehow ends up in hers.

‘Are you all right?’

Who said that? It should be him speaking, but he is shocked to discover it is her.

He kisses her face. I’m all right because you are, that’s what he wants her to understand, whether or not the truth is that she has shown him the shadow of her destructibility and filled him with distaste.

Does he see a man getting quickly out of her passenger seat? Impossible to be sure. There seems to be a man, or to have been a man, dark, Greek-looking, Michael the footballer maybe. But he might have been a passenger in another car, might just as easily have been a passer-by, no more. Would have been mad of her, wouldn’t it, to be ferrying a lover up and down the very street where Henry is known to sit out and poison his mind with newspapers. Dare he ask her? Dare he ask her in this mêlée of short tempers and bruised metal, when all he should be concerned about is her safety, whether she is having an affair?

The disgrace of it all. The disgrace of his horror of disgrace, the disgrace of the impermanence of everything that comes contained in flesh. He feels himself giving up on her. Watches her recede into a coldness of his own making.

I don’t want this, he tells himself. I don’t welcome it. I will it to be gone. I abjure it.

What was it that touched him so deeply the other night? Have a heart, Henry. Have a heart.

Again he kisses her face, her neck, her ear — whatever’s warm.

‘Tell me that wasn’t Angus,’ she says.

He sets his mouth. ‘I can’t, Moira.’

‘Ah!’ she says. ‘Is Lachlan with him? How is he?’

‘I don’t know,’ Henry says. ‘I came straight to you.’

She shrugs him off her, irritated that he is standing here, stroking her hair, pulling valedictory faces. ‘For God’s sake, go and help him, Henry. Don’t worry about me. I’m all right.’

He does as he is told. Best this way. Wind Henry up and point him in the right direction.

Go and help whom, though — Lachlan or the dog? Please God let it be Lachlan, Henry prays, because he knows he will not be able to help a whimpering or wounded dog.

No need. Others have already moved Angus on to the pavement. Few spectacles are more interesting to people than that of car owners bickering about paintwork, but poor Angus also commands a little crowd, a semicircle staring down at him and shaking their heads, as though the funeral is over and there is nothing to do now but shovel dirt on him and be gone. Lachlan is on the kerb, a bag of old bones in his seven-piece suit, standing exactly where he was when he’d called Angus out into the traffic. He is opening and closing his fists in a gesture of impotence which Henry recognises at once, though he has never seen it before. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life? — that sort of gesture. Only in this case the dog does not have life.

‘I’m good for nothing,’ he says, seeing Henry. ‘I’ve been good for nothing all my life. I’m not even fit to own a dog.’

True, Henry thinks. I cannot argue with a word of that. You’re a dog-murdering fucking moron. Except that this is not what Moira has sent him over to say. ‘For God’s sake, go and help him, Henry,’ were her instructions. So Henry does what it is not in his nature to do, and puts his arms around Lachlan, exactly as, a moment before, Moira enfolded him in hers. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Henry says. ‘The car came from nowhere. You couldn’t have done other than you did. It was an accident. You mustn’t blame yourself. These things happen.’

And though the words sound hollow and without warmth to Henry, miracle of miracles they do not sound that way to Lachlan, who buries himself in Henry’s shoulder and lets the accumulated sorrows out of his chest at last, wave after wave of them, as though Henry is a medicine man and the patient’s grief the troop of evil spirits Henry has miraculously released.

He is wet, wet from the bone out, and smells of wretchedness and shock. All the more reason, Henry thinks, that I must hold on to him. Don’t ask him why, but Henry does something quite unexpected, for him, and very strange. He kisses the top of Lachlan’s head, where the hair is thinnest, and breathes him in. God breathed the breath of life into Adam’s dust-dry nostrils, Henry thinks, and now I know how Adam must have felt.

Light-headed. And not a little amazed.

And then because he knows Moira would expect no less of him — would want no less of him, put it that way, would hope that he could find such resolution in himself — he bends to scoop up Angus, that thing of piss and shit and undiscriminating love, and carries him half the length of the High Street back to Lachlan’s apartment. Henry’s first corpse. Done it. Done it at last. Not heavy as he’d expected. Not the cold dead weight he’d always feared. So warm and soft, in fact, that for a moment he believes the dog is not dead at all, that he can feel the bruised heart trying to beat again. But it is only Henry’s own pulse, quickening the dog’s pelt.

He is dignified in death, Angus. No lolling tongue. No foul exudations or protruding kishkes of the sort Henry knows will signal his own demise. Quiet he lies, rather youthful-looking, his scarf tied raffishly at his broken neck — for no one has thought to loosen it — his ears flat like sealed envelopes, his open eyes signalling neither anger nor regret. Not even resignation. Just the uncritical cessation of sight.

Back in Lachlan’s apartment, Henry rather reluctant to put him down, they lie him on his tartan rug, tuck it around him, then drink to his memory.

‘To Angus,’ Henry says.

‘The best friend a man ever had,’ Lachlan says, closing the curtains. ‘The best I ever did, anyway. I can’t imagine my life without him.’

Henry muses, looking at the space on Lachlan’s wall where the signed photograph of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Samoan sepulchre once hung. How much did Lachlan get for it, he wonders.

‘I know what you mean,’ he says.

He has to sit down to rest his back. It hurts, carrying a dead dog a quarter of a mile, however light the creature makes itself, evacuated of blood and breath and memory and hope.

Lachlan’s phone rings. It is Moira for Henry, but wanting first to speak to Lachlan. So sorry, so terribly, terribly sorry. Poor Angus. Poor you, Lachlan. Not such a good medicine man, Henry, for Lachlan still, it seems, has grief he must expel. Henry puts his head between his knees and tries not to listen. Let the poor bastard weep and weep and weep if he must. But whether he wishes to or not he hears Lachlan commend his consideration — his, Henry’s, Henry the hitherto uncommendable. ‘Yes, carried him all the way. And all the way up the stairs. No, he remembered Angus never liked the lift. But then I always suspected he was fonder of Angus than he made out.’

Was I, Henry wonders. Could they in honesty write that on my stone? — FONDER THAN HE MADE OUT.

When it’s his turn on the phone he finds that he too has upset to express. Tears creak behind his cheeks. Must be something in Moira’s voice. ‘Ah, dear!’ he says, gaining control. ‘I’ve been going through hell worrying about you.’

Has he? Well, he has if he says he has.

‘Shush,’ she tells him.

‘Ah, dear!’ he says again.