Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

After the comedian he goes in search of a bar. Not a good idea to drink in the theatre; he doesn’t want to be there when the miracle cure wears off and the fat ladies start to turn nasty. But then again, he doesn’t want to be wandering around Cheltenham where anyone might see him. He chooses something at the boulevard end of town, in Montpellier — which has its reverberations — and orders a bottle of something red. Fleurie or some such. It has, of course, to be French.

He is halfway through it, absorbed in his thoughts, looking out over Paris, sightless, his elbows on the table, his fists propping his chin, when a hand sweeps the back of his neck. A cuffing action, symbolically rather than actually concussive, a blow from somebody with only half a grievance. Somebody who is more hurt than hostile.

Kurt?

Liz?

Mel, even? Come to find him? Come to take him home?

Somebody who loves him. Loved him.

He jumps, but doesn’t dare look round.

‘It is you, you bastard, isn’t it? I’ve often thought about what I’d do if I met you one night in a dark alley. Well here we are.’

He recognises the voice. He’d be a bit of a shmendrick if he didn’t. He’s been listening to her telling shagging stories for the last hour and a half. He also knows why she’s been thinking about meeting him in dark alleys. This isn’t the first time his loose tongue has landed him in trouble. You don’t get to be Broadcasting Critic of the Year without upsetting a few broadcasters. Give them a bad review, give them only a half good review, and they’re dreaming of slicing your ears off in an underpass.

D, he remembers, he once characterised as a pussy cat masquerading as a tigress. Threatens your balls with her claws but in reality only wants to jump up into your lap and lick your neck. It was just a passing notice. Part of a larger survey of the new telly stand-ups. Were they called alternative comedians in those days? That’s how long ago the review was written. But time, he has learnt, doesn’t enter into it. They are like elephants. As to memory, not as to skin.

He turns around, smiles and slowly rises. Go courtly, that’s the received wisdom. Extend your hand. Look pleased to make or renew the acquaintance. Try to keep the colour in your cheeks even. Don’t let them smell fear. And nothing extenuate. Get into apologies the way his paper’s grizzling book reviewers are always doing when they meet a victim face to face at the Christmas party — I’ll read it again, I promise I’ll read it with more care the next time — and your bacon’s cooked.

‘This is hardly a dark alley,’ he says. The bar is well-lit, broad-windowed, white-wickered. It is also full, the drinkers distracted, their drinks fouled, their relations with one another agitated and fractured, by the presence of someone they recognise from telly. Their upset is palpable, viral, catching; it rattles the glasses in their hands, sends a fevered tremor through the wicker furniture, makes the windows screech. Frank can feel it coming up from the tiled floor. Celebrity-palsy.

Famously extruding her lips, she pats his cheek. Stubby fingers. Schoolgirl’s nails. ‘It’ll do just as well,’ she says. She looks the tiniest bit drunk. Maybe that wasn’t cold tea she was drinking on stage. She blows smoke in his eyes. Is this a prelude to something gentler? He is not at home in the world of fat stand-up female comedians. He is the habitue of thin female tragedians, where nothing comes of nothing. What will he do, he wonders, if she suddenly asks him for a shag.

‘Buy us a drink, then,’ she says. Then. As though to say she is now content with the way their old quarrel has been patched up. She punches his arm companionably, crumpling herself down in the chair next to his like an accordion at the end of a folk evening. Does she think he has made her an apology? She accepts it, anyway, whether he has made it or not. But then it never was that bad a review.

She is not on her own. She has a stringy boy with her. A roadie or a minder or something. Scots, Frank reckons. Wearing a white vest under a leather jacket. It’s a warm night — August in Montpellier — but he seems to have a shiver going. Like a snail, he carries his home on his back; wherever he is, it is forever Glasgow. He has a stud in his lip and a sort of eternity ring through his eyebrow. Frank’s mother bought him his first ring; a gold shield with his initials intertwined upon it. FR. Frank Ritz. A great looping monogram such as a drunken gentleperson might, in a bygone era, have employed to sign a dud cheque. A present for his sixteenth birthday. And strictly for wearing on his finger. What do mothers do now? Pay for the perforations? They are going round, some of these kids, so Frank has read, with rings through their prepuces. Is that something else you expect your mother to splash out on? First the Gameboy, then the dick ring.

No wonder they shiver, Frank thinks, if they’ve got that many holes in themselves.

The boy doesn’t look at him. He seems to be in a pet with Cheltenham for being prosperous, with the bar for being full, with the furniture for being comfortable, with the night for being warm, with the sky for being above. Fuckin shite.

He isn’t real; he’s come out of a book. Frank doesn’t know which book, only that it’s one of those exercises in unaccommodated north of the border demotic and that it’s dumped the fuckin bairn off the fuckin page.

If he were to bother being curious as to anything about him, aside from whether he’s wearing jewelry in his penis, Frank would be curious about his age. Eighteen? Twentyeight? This is a lost decade for Frank. He can’t discern any of the subtle distinctions. Soon it will be eighteen to thirtyeight that bamboozles him. Then eight to forty-eight. It’s an impercipience he bears with equanimity. He looks forward, what is more, to the day when he will apprehend even less. What else is the wisdom of age but a condition of perfect indifference to the lineaments and paraphernalia of youth. That apply to the lineaments and paraphernalia of young women as well, Frank? I mean it to, Mel. I mean it to.

‘White or red?’ he asks the comedian.

‘Come again, cock.’

‘What are you drinking?’

‘I’ll have red beer if you strongly recommend it. Otherwise, the usual colour.’

Of course, ale with the boys. She’s political, Frank recalls. When she’s not encouraging fat ladies to fuck more she’s pointing up social injustice.

‘So it’ll be bitter?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Pint?’

‘What do you think?’

A pint of bitter. In a wine bar! Frank feels quite lightheaded. When did he last order a pint of bitter? Twenty, twenty-five years ago? Probably at the Dewdrop. If not for the Finn, for one of her successors. After which, shagging ensued.

He wonders …

He turns to the boy. ‘And for you?’

The boy hugs himself and rocks to and fro. Dumb insolence this used to be called in the days when men wore their rings on their fingers. Punishable by being sent to your room. Or detention. And now? Frank would favour the death penalty himself, but others, he acknowledges, reckon a stint in a detoxification centre should be tried first. Or a week’s mountaineering in North Wales. Or a month’s snorkelling off Tobago … Now that he’s fifty, Frank finds that he’s in possession of thousands of examples of indulgence meted out to young thugs. Is that how you die, mentally leafing through the holiday brochures of the undeserving?

‘No beer? No wine?’

No yes. No no. No please. No thank you. No nothing.

‘Orange juice? Mineral water? Cocaine? Speed?’

There is movement under the boy’s vest. A heartbeat? Laughter, dying inside? Has something kickstarted his frozen engine into life, and is that something the farcical spectacle of an old geezer stumbling through the pharmacopoeia of the young?