Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

The pliant hills turn harsh on him, fold back to show an ancient, unrelenting topography. Barrows. Blank farms. Cold lanes. Surely this is well north of Hardy country, but he feels suddenly like Jude Fawley behind the wheel of the Saab, reading his inescapable obscurity in the landscape. He passes a sign to Windrush on his right, to Woeful Lake Farm on his left. Just out of Mill End he drives by Hangman’s Stone. He drives on, looking straight ahead. So as not to see the gibbet where hung his ancestors in the next field.

He is changing his tune. He is not now going to Cheltenham expressly in order to do what he was originally going to Cheltenham expressly in order to do. He is going to Cheltenham because it’s on his way. On his way where? All right, in his way. Point your car west on the A40 and you don’t have much choice, do you? Eventually you get to the sea at Fishguard Bay, but some considerable distance before that you have to encounter Cheltenham. So while he’s there he’ll stay a bit, have a look round, find a hotel, do his laundry and his column. If he happens to bump into anyone he knows from the past, even if it’s anyone Mel has warned him against touching with a barge pole, well he’s not going to do any more than doff his cap, wish ‘em well and go on his way, is he?

Every day he decides he can’t go on spending quite so much money on hotel rooms, but every day has its own exceptional quality that can only be requited by a comfortable bed. And wherever else he is going to have to cut corners, he certainly isn’t going to cut them in Cheltenham. He drives around the town a couple of times and settles for the Queens. It occurs to him to ask for a suite with a balcony. But sees himself on his own in it, wandering from room to room, watching Friends on television. He is trying to stay rational. He is trying to convince himself that he has not come to Cheltenham in order to fall into Kurt’s arms, beg his forgiveness, weep at his feet, and then sneak his wife back to his hotel again. He is trying to tell himself he is not that insane. But he isn’t succeeding.

He knows where Kurt lives. He has his telephone number. It wasn’t all that hard to find in the end. Kurt’s college has become a university and Kurt a professor. Any fool can track down a professor.

In fact, Frank has been carrying Kurt’s number, written on a corner of his driving licence, where the prophet Mel won’t find it, for a year or more. He has always carried some arrangement of numerals relevant to Kurt about his person — scrawled in the back of a chequebook, pencilled into his passport. And not only relevant to Kurt, come to that. His wallet is an atomic scientist’s notebook of curious forgotten formulae and ciphers, e-mails and codes and extension lines and house numbers taken down at parties and screenings and walks in the park, of no practicable use that he can see at the time, but who’s to say what the future will bring. Notations for a rainy day. Which at last fade into mementoes of things you never did anything about. By the time you are Frank’s age your life is a teeming saga of things you never did anything about. But now that he is a bachelor again, a man with no house to go home to and no one to fuck him when he wakes and no sperm left to speak of anyway, he believes himself to be perfectly within his rights to wonder whether the rainy day in question hasn’t at last dawned.

He showers, puts on a bath robe, turns on the television — it’s a calmative in the afternoons, restores him to his routines — pulls his driving licence out of his wallet and stabs the numbers into the phone. Then he hangs up.

IT’S LIKE LOURDES outside the little Arts Theatre. Apart from himself, everyone is overweight and hobbling. Apart from himself, everyone is a woman in need. If one’s going to be literal about it, that last is not entirely true. There are other men in the throng, supportive men, ministering men, men who have entered imaginatively into the whys of their womenfolk’s fatness and even accepted, no doubt, their agency in its ineluctable progress. But there are no men as Frank understands the term. Meaning, men whose function it is to put the other case. Life is argument; Frank believes that he performs a near-Darwinian function in relation to women — he quarrels their vital spark into flame. In this sense he is the best friend any woman could ever have. And in this sense there are no men like himself queuing to get into the theatre to see the fat stand-up comedian (no one says comedienne any more) whose stage-name derives from the size of the cups into which she lowers her ungovernable breasts — D.

‘You fat bastard! You fat bastard!’ The audience holler for D who informs them over the speaker system that she won’t come out until they shut the fuck up.

The invective, in the mouth of a woman, makes Frank temporarily homesick. Shut the fuck up! How long since he’s heard that? Eight days? Ten days? An eternity? If he’s not careful he will cry. As if he isn’t already conspicuous enough, just three rows from the front.

D rolls on to the stage. Drink in one hand, fag in the other. Demoniacally slothful. Wearing a gross floral maternity frock over Doc Martens. A joke they all get. This is what you’re expected to wear, this is all you can wear, if you’re the size they are. So why aren’t you all putting your fingers down your throats, Frank wonders. If you don’t like the way you have to look, why aren’t you all hanging over the bath in the time-honoured fashion?

You could fit Mel and all her friends into the frock D’s wearing. One in each sleeve; four in the bodice. Tie the neck and you could shake another dozen down into it like dolly mixtures in a paper bag. Fling it over your shoulder — a sack of stray cats — carry it to the river and toss it in. Put them out of their misery.

‘Cheltenham, eh!’ D crosses her arms over her sloppy chest and squeezes her lips together. The audience laughs. In Cheltenham, Cheltenham is a funny word. She stumps to the front of the stage, coughing (’Fucking lungs’), breathing hard. ‘Always wondered what it was like in Cheltenham. Applied for a job here once … headmistress of the Ladies’ College. I had to fill in this form. Name, age, sex, previous experience …’ One eye arches. ‘So I wrote, “lots of shagging, but still not as much as I’d have liked …”

On Frank’s left a fat woman holds her stomach from sliding down between her knees. Tears spring from her eyes. The act hasn’t got going yet but already she’s beside herself. Lourdes. The miracle cure. Say fuck. Say shag. Own up to it: even though you’re fat you fuck. Own up to it: even though you’re fat you don’t fuck anything like as often as you’d like to fuck. Only it’s not fucking that you do and would like to do more — it’s shagging. Shagging is fucking reclaimed by women. Fat women. Say it. Shag. Enjoy the comicality of it. Shag. Shag. Shag.

Rhymes with sag. Rhymes with bag. Slag. Hag. Fag. Rag. Everything disobedient. Everything out of control. Abundant. Riotous. Thin girls screw (if you’re lucky). A cold steely wheedling little function. Fat girls shag. They spill. They bring the bed down.

Is this where Frank’s gone wrong? Would his mornings be busier if he were shacked up with a fat fiancee instead of an emaciated one?

It suddenly occurs to him to wonder whether Liz is in the audience. Could that be her, splitting her sides, next to him? Could she have blown up over the years? Is she too getting about in a floral maternity frock, aged fifty, heaving her breasts whenever she hears the words shag and fuck?

And then I dreamt you fucked me.

He’d postponed thinking about her; put the phone down before either she or Kurt could pick it up, and strode out to see what Cheltenham was offering in the way of cultivated entertainment. He’d have preferred something clean and bracing. A J. B. Priestley or a Terence Rattigan. A single-issue play. A chamber concert. A convocation of inter-faith charismatics. Partly he’s still proving Mel wrong — No, I wasn’t following my dick, as chance would have it; I was at the theatre. Partly he’s trying to prove to himself that he can lead a normal healthy life even though he’s on his own. Sitting listening to shagging stories in a room full of weltering fat ladies proves nothing either way.