Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

He entertains a futurable indignation. Falls into the righteousness of the future conditionally wronged. Will he his dick have kept decorously sheathed in honour of one who may turn out to have dishonoured him?

Ensnared in the treasonable grammar of sex, his imagination rackets between the tenses. She did, would she! He will, has he!

And between the senses. He can hear what he can picture. Mel’s flesh rounding out again. Mel’s penitential hair resprouting. Gone, the Hitler moustache. Already, to please the newer, nicer, younger man, a cunt as overgrown as Castro’s beard. Hush, listen! Bristle, bristle. Now it’s his turn not to be able to bear the din.

From what may yet prove to be the case he reverts to what may already have eventuated. ‘Did you say something earlier about a driver?’ he asks, inconsequently. But only apparently inconsequently.

‘Did I say that you’ve been booted out in favour of an even nicer younger driver? No. But have you?’

‘Did you say you were short of a driver?’

‘I said I wouldn’t have minded borrowing your young Scot, had a driver he turned out to be. Why?’

Fanned by provisional jealousy and heated by wine, a mad thought is catching in Frank’s mind. Short of a review a week, which he’s now proved to himself he can knock off in any old layby, he’s got nothing on. Maybe nothing on for life. D employs no props that he can remember. Other than a carton of fags. And never changes her costume. Provided he can fit her in the Saab, there should be no problem with what goes with her. Why not? She isn’t his kind of woman, but isn’t it time he found another kind of woman anyway? And she has eclat. Where she goes she causes wine glasses to rattle and windows to screech. Add that to the mini-tremble he can set off in a room of ageing broadsheet readers and they become a pretty formidable pair. Who knows, she may even be prepared to do his laundry.

‘Just an idea I had. Are you on the road for long?’

‘Another thirty days.’

‘Where do you have to be next?’

‘I can never remember. Bristol, I think.’

‘And after that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Cardiff, Swansea, Exeter, Torquay, somewhere down there. Don’t ask me.’

‘And you’re short of a driver?’

‘I will be after Bristol.’ Her face is making concertina music again. She lays it on his shoulder, in parody of a woman waiting to learn her matrimonial fate. Will he or won’t he? ‘Why? Do you know one?’

‘I’ll drive you.’

She looks up at him, her face cocked like a parrot’s, her eyes puckered into little ruches of sardonic fat. ‘Is this a roundabout way,’ she asks, ‘of trying to get into my knickers?’

He rises abruptly from the table. Minutes ago she’d caught him out in a blush. Now he is quite white. ‘Excuse me,’ he says. He is distracted, unable to look at her, his hands reaching uncertainly for his wallet, has he paid, hasn’t he paid. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. He is ghostly, like a man who has seen a ghost. And then he is gone, out of the wine bar, into the street, running.

The palsied at the next table go on staring, squinting at D through their drinks, wondering what, as a telly celebrity, she will do to amuse and enrage them next. She turns to them, giving them her fat shagger’s shrug. ‘Funny response to the word knickers,’ she says.

Speaking conditionally, she isn’t all that wide of the mark. It could have been the word knickers that did it. It is not a word Frank likes. If that’s fastidiousness, it’s fastidiousness about language not about sex. A man who has passed so much of his life with his head between women’s legs is hardly going to have an attitude to their pants, looked at libidinally. He can take them or leave them. In so far as he has preferences they are the universal ones — for the exiguous over the voluminous, for the fresh over the feculent. Otherwise they don’t matter to him. As decorations they have their place; as obstructions they are easily whiffled away. It isn’t what knickers are and what they do that upsets him — it’s how they sound. It’s their jocularity. They insist a culture of buffoonery and clumsiness. They intrude an ugliness he has never, for his own part, experienced.

Never? Well, seldom.

There is another reason, not quite so impeccably linguistic, for Frank’s distaste. Knickers are what fat women wear. Even when a thin woman talks about her knickers Frank immediately imagines her wearing what a fat woman wears. So when D, starting from a mountainous base, talks about hers — what’s more talks about getting into hers: a manoeuvre, an act of breathless clambering, a negotiation of hazards analogous to potholing — Frank’s imagination is stretched to its limits.

He has had fat girlfriends. In the beginning, when, like every other boy (except Kurt) he took whatever he could get, all his girlfriends were fat. Fat Susan. Fat Heather. Fat Reeny. Very fat Fiona. The rule was that you were allowed them — to practise on, as it were, like rough paper — so long as you weren’t seen with them. You met them inside the pictures at the other end of town. You called on them at midnight and walked them in the park. Their park, where nobody, except the previous fat girl, was likely to recognise you. Rainy nights were good because you could hide them under an umbrella. Fog was very good. Blackouts would have been best of all but he was born too late for them. His parents’ friends, his friends’ parents, were always talking about what they had got up to under cover of a blackout. Those must have been paradisal times for fat girls. How their podgy hearts must have raced when the doodlebugs came over and the sirens began to scream.

The big mistake of Frank’s fat period was to get caught with one.

They’d rented themselves a gaff, a talf, a deelo-free empty lettee, he and his wide-boy sexual argot-naut chums, for the Christmas season. A festive shtuppenhaus in Wythenshaw, over a newsagent’s. They each had a key cut, agreed a rough timetable, decorated the place with balloons and streamers, stole sheets and pillowcases from home and shared in a carton of Durex, wholesale. The timetable reserved Saturday nights and all day Sunday for communal shtupping, teamhanders, persuadable au pairs, serial cocksuckers like Marcia, poker — whatever was going. Otherwise, they each had their own night. If they hadn’t pulled that night they could swap with someone else who had, in return for a piece of the action, or not. Whatever. They were cool about it. United in a common cause. All for one and one for all. They might fall out over other things but they were not going to fall out over nekaiveh. The point of all the pulling and the shtupping — the whole point of keife, Kurt — was that it brought you together, not drove you apart.

Frank’s night was Tuesday. A good night. The behavioural model on which they worked showed that girls from the social classes they routinely raided were contrite by Monday morning, were washing their hair on Monday night, and were hungry to rave again by Tuesday. Wednesday they were contrite again. Thursday they were saving their energy for the weekend. Friday they went out with one another. Saturday and Sunday they were dredged up anyway by the communal nets Frank and his chinas threw over the side. So for one-to-one shtupping, with time for a bit of a smooch before and a snout each afterwards — romance, in other words — you couldn’t do better than Tuesday.

On this particular Tuesday Frank pulled from the babyfood counter in Boots on Corporation Street. They all used Boots. He’d ducked in to see if Rita or Mona in photography had anything doing — they all used Rita and Mona — and walked slap into Dilys stacking shelves. She was new. New to Boots and new to Manchester. New to Manchester was always an added inducement. In an immodest age it approximated to modesty. If you were new to Manchester there was a fair chance you hadn’t yet met and fallen in love with Kurt.