Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

‘Bear with me.’ Someone has been paid to teach reception to say bear with me. As though there is grief and suffering behind the desk which the client must perforce help to shoulder. Frank does as he’s bid and patiently buoys up reception in its tribulations. Reception goes on tapping into its computer. ‘We are very sorry, sir,’ reception says at last, ‘there is no one of that name staying in this hotel. Could you have the day wrong?’

So what does that leave, Frank wonders.

‘I’d be very grateful,’ he says, ‘if someone could get me my car.’

What it leaves are the whores.

Wherever he has lived Frank has known where the whores are. Call it instinct; like a squirrel knowing the whereabouts of emergency rations. As for employing whores, he came to that at a relatively mature age. Nineteen he was, back in Manchester from Oxford for a long weekend, driving home in his father’s car from a game of poker with the boys. He had won and was feeling affable, so the sight of a woman his mother’s age standing at the kerbside at midnight in shabby respectable Cheetham Hill, nodding her head at him, aroused his compassion. She was either a friend of his parents who recognised the car and wanted a lift home, or she was a person in trouble, too well-brought up to signal her distress with anything more demonstrative than a nod of her head. He pulled up a few yards ahead of her, reversed, wound down the window, and smiled.

‘Business?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m on vacation from university.’

They sorted their misunderstanding out quickly enough. He could go back to her place for ten shillings. He could have full sex in the back of the car for seven-and-six. But what she recommended, given the time of night and his hesitancy, was a gam in the front seat for half a crown. Frank had never heard the word gam before. In his world you were sucked off, or you were plated, or you were given head. There were syllables involved; the operation required skill: co-ordination, sensitivity, patience; it partook of the civilised arts. Gam, in its flat unevocativeness, its unceremonial gummy functionality, its promise to be over before it had begun, opened up a stratum of society he had never before plumbed. Common he’d tried. But this was lower and more desperate than common. This was nothingness. This was life without meaning. For the price of your first bet on a lowly poker hand, for a mere tusheroon, you could stop your car by the kerbside, wind down your window, and pop your dick in a complete stranger’s mouth. Frank was electrified.

‘Take a right,’ the woman told him. ‘Take another right. Now take a left.’

She was neither old nor young. She was neither handsome nor ugly. She wasn’t anything. Frank was struck by how few concessions she made to the idea of glamour. Even pauperised glamour. No boots, no high heels, no stockings, no plunging neckline, not even lipstick. If she was dressed for anything it was housework. Had the idea of opening her mouth for passing motorists to pop their dicks into suddenly come to her while she was cleaning out her cupboards? A mere spur of the moment whim, like making a cup of tea or nibbling on a Nice biscuit. I know, I’ll go out and gam for half an hour. Was she not even driven by necessity?

‘Now right again. See that gate? Turn in there, reverse, and switch your lights off.’

Frank is shocked to see that she has directed him into the playground of his old primary school.

She holds her hand out for the money. Frank’s pockets are full of tusheroons, his poker winnings. She hears them clinking. ‘Tell you what,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you make it five bob and I’ll take my teeth out.’

On the last day of every summer term at Frank’s old primary school the year’s batch of leavers would hokey cokey in and out of the classrooms in a ritual goodbye to those they were leaving behind. Every year the same mocking valedictory song:

Standard one, standard two,

Standard cockadoodledoo.

Standard three, standard four,

Someone’s knocking at my door.

Frank too sang it when it was his turn to leave. Full of tears, but full of expectancy as well. Who would be knocking at his door?

Now he knows. Now here he is, back. Parked under the wall against which he used to flick cigarette packets, weighing up the pros and cons of having a drab gam him with her teeth out.

He fights against all the obvious sensations. Is he a soldier of sex or isn’t he? Any old person, positioned as he is, might choose to wind down the window and throw up. Wouldn’t it be a more intelligent response to feel privileged? An hour ago he was scooping up his friends’ loose change. What did that teach him about the world? Now he is being educated in the ways of people who have hitherto been as closed to him as a tribe of pygmies. Think of it: such indomitableness, such capacity to turn deprivation to advantage. Teeth fallen out eating crisps and candy bars for supper — all the better to gam you with, my dear.

The things they know, the northern industrial poor. The consolations they mine.

Frank hands her a second half a crown.

‘Right then,’ she says. ‘Where’s Fred?’

Fred, Frank gathers, is his penis. He ought to be taking notes. If he were back in Oxford at a C. S. Lewis lecture he’d have a pen and paper out. And he wouldn’t be learning that Fred is the name for a penis from C. S. Lewis.

So where is Fred? Frank reclines the driver’s seat, unzips himself, and fishes about in his trousers.

‘Come on,’ the woman says, ‘I haven’t got all night,’

This is Frank’s first experience of the love talk of the English whore.

By some profoundly mysterious law of inverse eroticism, that which is by no means arousing arouses Fred. In one flowing movement the woman coughs her teeth into her hand and drops her head on to his lap. Frank lies back in the seat and closes his eyes.

Sea-anemones pluck at him. Porpoise nudge him with their snouts. Loofah’d, jellied, suckered, he submits to the snuffling pull of the ocean, loses all sensation of weight and bone, comes apart in the arms of the water. Until the warm silent pullulating sea-bed claims his remains.

The things they know, the industrial poor.

Thereafter, Frank was an aficionado of street whores. He could smell them out. Dump him in any town at midnight and he could have driven you blindfold to where they congregated. He had a feeling for their landscape. Something in him answered to their self-effacement. The blighted streets they idled on, the dispirited wastegrounds of the senses they half-heartedly haunted, nodding their mechanical siren invitations — what were these but the sites he’d been visiting in his imagination since he was a child, the shtupping fields outside the perimeter fence, where a man might do any ugliness he pleased?

Out of the blue he became a more affectionate son than he’d been in years, whipping up from Oxford to see his parents every couple of weeks or so, borrowing their car, putting five shillings in his pocket, and going in search of the woman who’d initiated him. Time works differently, he noticed, when you’re looking for whores. He could drive up and down the same street for hours on end, observing the subtlest changes in the shadows, slowing if so much as a sweet wrapper blew out of a boarded doorway. It was never boring. There was always the prospect of one more whore turning up on one more corner. He got to know the other whoremongers who worked the area. He recognised their vehicles, became familiar with their driving habits and patterns of concentration, what combination of hour, traffic and fishnet would induce them suddenly to slap on their brakes. There was no freemasonry of whoring; in an obvious sense you were competitors, like men with metal detectors combing the same small strip of beach; but there was some quiet comfort in such unanimity of purpose. And that could keep you going during the long hours when the streets inexplicably emptied and not a whore stirred.