Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

Frank is susceptible to the criticism. He is of the aspirin generation. When he says heroin he over-bites the O, purses his lips around it the way an older and even more innocent generation of men fill their mouths with the Os in homosexual. He’s susceptible but also fiercely proud. Don’t tell him about addiction. The difference is — and here Frank’s pride swells into the sort of fervour you associate with campaigning environmentalists — the substance he was addicted to was entirely natural. Cunt, that was his narcotic. He snorted cunt. One sniff and he was hooked. To tell the truth, it began even earlier than that; cunt was mentioned — that’s how he got started. He heard the word cunt in the schoolyard and on the instant he became a cunthead. The taste itself only confirmed everything he’d already imagined for himself. He had friends who couldn’t keep their faces out of their girlfriends’ anuses; they’d start on the cunt and then nose their way rumpwards — girls didn’t like you to come at the anus straightaway, that was the reason for the surreptitiousness: you had to creep up on them, edge silently along the perineum like a soldier bellying under a wire fence, and then break cover all at once in a sudden bayonetting of tongues — but in his judgment, though of course he tried in time everything organic that womanhood could manufacture, for viscosity and perfume, for being fried alive in Mother Nature’s gumbo, there was no getting past the cunt. Not the bee in all its promiscuous drunkenness, not the worm gorking in the rankness of a writhing rick of compost, ever tripped as Frank tripped. So don’t tell him about bombing out!

A waiter goes by, collecting used glasses. ‘Got anything for young people, other than spiked lemonade?’ Frank asks him. He can’t resist. Let the little bastard laugh under his skinny vest. He’ll flatten his Os and nail him. ‘Heroin? Opium? Phenos? Mesc? Shmeck? Shmack? Es? Fuckin Es?’ He turns his eyes, cold, on the juddering Scotsboy. ‘What do you say, Hamish, to a penneth of crack, maybe?’

The boy pushes himself up from the table. It is impossible to tell whether he is sneering or in pain. He points a white attenuated finger at Frank. ‘A cat can look at a king,’ he says. Then he goes crashing out of the bar.

‘Gnomic people, aren’t they, the Scots,’ Frank says.

‘He doesn’t sound Scots to me,’ D says.

‘What is he then?’

‘How should I know? Cheltenham, I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘Are you saying he wasn’t with you?’

‘Never seen him in my life. I thought he was yours.’

‘My what?’

‘I don’t know — friend, driver, dealer, catamite, son … I don’t know. What do telly critics have? Had he been your driver I’d have asked you to lend him to me.’

‘What about if he’d been my catamite?’

‘No, thank you. Do I get my drink now?’

‘So what did he want with us, the wee rat?’ Frank wonders aloud, on his way to the bar.

When he returns, D is squeeze-boxing her face into an expression of mischief. ‘You aren’t by any chance prejudiced against Scottish people, are you?’ she asks him. ‘What have they done to you?’

‘Not Scottish people, just Glaswegians. But you’re the comedian. Isn’t everyone prejudiced against everyone? Wouldn’t you be out of work if we weren’t.’

She swigs at her beer. Gives him a sideways look, lips mashed into a damson puree. ‘We might start prejudiced but we don’t have to stay that way.’

‘So you see yourself as a reforming comic?’

‘I don’t see myself as a conforming comic.’

‘You’ll tell me next that you refuse the stereotypes.’

‘I refuse the stereotypes.’

‘And you think that’s why they laugh at you — because you refuse the stereotypes?’

‘I think they like a change.’

‘I don’t. I’ve just watched you. I think they like as little change as possible. I think they like you to tell them that it’s OK being just as they are.’

‘Which means bigoted, in your book.’

‘No, not bigoted. Just not pervious to everything. Still capable of laughing at what’s different to them. Still keen on derision.’

‘Which you think is a good thing.’

‘Fucking right. A good thing because it’s good for them.’

She throws him another of her squelchy purple smiles. ‘And you’re still the same spunky little bastard you always were, aren’t you? Is that how you like to think of yourself — ballsy? Do you think women like ballsy little blokes?’

He wonders if she’s going to start tickling him. Would he know how to handle himself in a bar in Cheltenham, with everybody watching, if she were suddenly to make a grab between his legs? Is he even ticklish any more? Is there any feeling left in that sad old sac of his?

‘I don’t know what women like,’ he says. ‘I used to, but I’ve forgotten.’

‘You think it might have changed? You’ve just told me people like as little change as possible.’

‘I was talking about laughter.’

‘Well, that’s what women still like. Make us laugh. Or have you forgotten how to do that as well?’

Frank stares into the middle distance. Mel’s territory. Will he say, according to the woman I once loved I have? Will he say, I have of late, whereof I know not, lost all my mirthmaking faculties? Will he confide to her that they have gone the way of his dick? Will he have a little cry?

No. Surprise surprise. It seems he still believes sufficiently in the future to think it’s worth keeping a few things to himself. ‘You’re the comedian,’ he says again. ‘You make me laugh.’

She’s too smart to rise to that. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ she asks him, after a moment’s reflection. ‘Don’t tell me you live in Cheltenham.’

‘Do I look as though I live in Cheltenham?’

She surveys him. His soft unused skin. His travelling Italian linens. His Rolex. The invisible gold chain around his neck. ‘Yeah,’ she says, still considering. ‘Or Essex.’

I don’t live anywhere, he wants to tell her. Where my caravan stops, that’s where I lay out my stall. But he sees that that might be an Essex thing to say. ‘I’m here to see your show,’ he says instead.

‘You don’t have to come to Cheltenham to do that. What else are you here to see? Or should I say, who else are you here to see?’

The question takes Frank’s breath away. It is as if someone has just made off with his maidenhead. ‘That’s a mite personal,’ he says.

She accordions her neck, puffles up her pudsy lips. ‘Bollocks,’ she says. ‘A girl needs to know with whom she’s drinking. You married?’

‘I’m not.’

‘You’re blushing. How old fashioned.’

‘Not as old fashioned as asking someone if they’re married. How many married people do you know?’

‘OK, are you’ — she dances her fingers in the air like puppets, little fat Japanese puppets bowing to one another — ‘with someone?’

He hesitates. Once upon a time he was never with someone even when he was. Once upon a time the no was on his lips before the question had left hers. But then a lie always did come easier than the truth. Always did, always does. Which is why it takes him so long to admit, ‘I’m not.’

‘So what’s a nice young man like you doing’ — up come the puffing fingers again — ‘without someone?’

‘Booted out.’ This, for some reason, he can say. This, for some reason, he likes saying.

‘For an even nicer younger man?’

Frank almost chokes into his wine glass. Until this moment it has never once occurred to him that Mel might have wanted to be shot of his ideological noise because she is in love with someone else’s. Another man? Mel? Not likely. Why take on another man when you hold all men to be a plague? When she booted him out she booted out the whole sex, half the entire species. It was on that understanding that he consented to go. As a representative, an emissary. Not for himself personally, but for all men is he wandering the earth. The one thing he hasn’t consented to is another man (forget the nicer younger, another is enough to be going on with) sneaking his fax machine into his office, hanging his towel above Mel’s …