Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

Frank wonders whether the tall one might not even be a matron. She has an otherwise-engaged look about her. One eye on an imaginary drip. Whereas the short one is bleary, and looks dumbfounded. Lucky old Kurt. Dumbfounded equals performance — isn’t that the received wisdom? You can be finished with the dumbfounded before they’ve realised that you’ve started.

Kurt hands around the snouts. Army supplies. ‘An army marches on its lungs,’ Frank says. First joke.

The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they’re chocolates and it matters which they select.

Kurt has a steel lighter. The girls extend their pursed faces towards his flame. Kurt lightly touches their fingers, steadying their hands.

‘You look like Elvis,’ one of the girls tells Kurt. The tall one. Frank’s. Frank feels as if someone has punched him in the stomach. Klop go his kishkes.

‘Elvis who?’ he says. Second joke.

That was what he was going to be had he not been a student of psychology at the University of Basle — a high court judge.

The girls know a quieter bit of park. Kurt and his put one arm around each other’s shoulders and then lace themselves together by putting their second arm behind their backs and holding hands. Frank wonders where Kurt has learnt to do this. On the Rhine, presumably. Frank’s leads him by the hand as though she is his mother. She has very large hands, dry, flat as spatulas, her fingers almost all the same length. It passes through Frank’s mind — more as a disturbance than a thought, a sudden shock to the cerebral cortex — that while it would be with only the greatest difficulty that he could take possession of her Gregory Peck, it would be the simplest thing in the world for her to take possession of his.

He has read somewhere that when a woman scratches your palm she is signalling that she is hot for you. A Mexican or a Peruvian thing. But he can’t believe the meaning isn’t universal. He releases one of his fingers from her grip and runs his nail across the inside of her sapless hand.

‘Ow!’ she says.

‘In Basle,’ he explains, ‘we say that pain is just another form of pleasure.’

‘Well that’s not what we say in Harrogate,’ she tells him.

Considering how little she seems to like him he is surprised that they end up on the grass in the quieter bit of park, separated from Kurt and his only by the trunk of an ancient oak tree. In such a spot, under such a tree, Kurt and Frank have been stretching themselves out for a forever of boy-years, remarking on how sad tree trunks always are, how they resemble the feet of elephants, wondering whether it’s true that elephants have long memories, wondering what the future has in store for them. Now they know.

Kurt!

Frank!

Hold the picture still.

Lying down, Frank’s is far more agreeably quiescent than she was standing up. He wonders if this is always the way with girls. An alchemical thing. Vapours rising to the top of a heated horizontal body. Or merely physics. Sex spilling out of a woman when she’s laid flat just as coffee runs out of an overturned coffee cup. If he could think of more things to do with her, he has the feeling that she would allow him to do them. But once he has rubbed her over a few times, like a window cleaner working at a stubbornly greasy pane, he is out of ideas. That she might let him under her clothes never so much as crosses his mind.

Of course he knows better than to make a grab for her neck. Do that to someone when they’re flat out on the grass and it has another meaning. Even in Yorkshire.

The tree prevents him from seeing how Kurt is getting along with his. It obscures their middles. From their extremities he is able to draw no inference other than that they appear to be getting along.

It’s kissing that comes as the real surprise to Frank. He has pecked at girls at parties before now, even banged teeth with them given half a chance, but nothing has prepared him for the sensation of swooning invasion that comes with making a black O of your mouth and allowing a thick viscid serpent of a tongue to maraud around in it at will. He closes his eyes and submits to the idea that man is nothing but a lightless honeycomb of leaking caverns; up into his palate the serpent goes, slick between his gums, blind behind his fillings, slow as torture or a sneer tracing the spongy pouches of his cheeks, then, in a sudden mocking writhe, quick past his uvula, brushing it aside like a bead curtain, and down down into his pharynx, where it might tickle his heart or stop his breath forever.

‘Mine has to go,’ Kurt tells him during an air break. The girls have gone to find a lavatory and to generally debrief. The boys use the bushes.

‘How was it?’ Frank asks.

Kurt rolls his eyes. ‘Didn’t you see? She touched it.’

‘She touched it?’

‘Didn’t yours?’

Frank is ashamed to say he forgot to ask her to. ‘We were too busy kissing,’ he says. ‘She’s got a great tongue.’

‘Yeah, and a big enough mouth to keep it in. She looks like a fucking camel.’

‘Yours isn’t so fair.’

‘Don’t start that. I like camels.’ Kurt is agitated. Pacing up and down. You can’t touch a boy of fourteen and not expect him to be agitated. ‘So what are we going to do?’ he says.

‘I don’t know. Get the train back?’

Wrong answer. ‘Mine,’ Kurt says, ‘reckons that yours doesn’t have to go.’

Frank thinks about it. He wouldn’t mind more kissing. And he knows he really ought to ask her to touch it while he’s got the chance. But he doesn’t fancy the journey home on his own. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’ll come back with you.’

‘That isn’t what I mean.’

Frank stares.

‘Mine says she does it.’

‘I thought you said she’s going.’

‘No, she says yours does it.’

Frank’s eyes open. ‘Toss off?’

‘Better.’

‘She performs?’

‘Better.’

Frank shrugs. Can’t think of anything better. Except kissing, and he’s done that.

Kurt makes a sucking noise in Frank’s ear. Slurp, slurp, swallow, gulp.

‘Ligner!’

‘I’m not. It’s the emmes. Mine says definite.’

‘Then I’ll stay.’

‘What about me?’

‘What about you?’

‘Mine says yours’ll do two. Actually prefers two, she says.’

Stillness falls over Harrogate.

Boys. Boys on backs. Boys on backs in rose gardens with trousers round ankles. Looking up at the sky. What will you do? What will I do?

She is on her knees, dipping from one to the other, like a woodpecker.

Can’t be clean, Frank thinks. Where had her tongue been immediately prior to its being down his throat? Can’t be hygienic. Can’t come.

Kurt neither. Not with Frank there.

Frank proposes a short walk.

‘Go on, then.’

‘Not me, you.’

‘No, you,’ the girl says.

‘And make it a long walk,’ Kurt tells him.

When he comes back they are kissing. ‘My turn,’ he says.

‘Too late,’ she tells him. ‘You wouldn’t come.’

‘He wouldn’t come either.’

‘He has now.’ She pokes her tongue out at him. That tongue. The tongue that once upon a time brushed his uvula aside. Out of her mouth — out of his mouth, come to that, and out of Kurt’s — it’s as flat as an egg-slice, like her hands. But not dry. Frank notices that her cardigan too is wet.

‘This time I’ll come right away,’ he promises.

She shakes her head.

‘Give me thirty seconds.’

No.

‘Twenty.’

Still she shakes her head.

‘I almost came before.’

‘I know,’ she says, ‘and I like the taste of Kurt better.’

Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,/And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be. Donne’s Flea. Frank’s favourite lyric poem. No flowers or mountains. Nature simply acting as a go-between for the sexes. So did Kurt and Frank commingle blood in Harrogate?