Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

‘Same name as mine, sort of,’ Frank observed.

Crazy Jane kept her eye on the prison ramparts. ‘Yes, the name’s similar,’ she agreed.

‘And what is he inside for?’ Frank wondered.

‘Do you think that could be his window?’ Crazy Jane wondered in her turn.

‘No idea. What’s he inside for?’

‘Receiving stolen property,’ Crazy Jane said, distracted.

An hour later she confessed that Fanklin wasn’t so much an old school friend as an old lover. And an hour after that she confessed he wasn’t so much an old lover as a recent one, and that the offence he was inside for wasn’t so much receiving stolen property as grievous bodily harm. She was carrying an article about him which she asked Frank to retrieve, since he was curious, from the inside pocket of her ratty Oxfam fur coat. They were standing in a light drizzle with their arms around each other; Frank with his back to the prison so that Crazy Jane could rest her head upon his shoulder and go on looking up. He’d had his hands inside her coat most of the night, comforting her by rolling her breasts around and sliding his fingers into the waistband of her jeans, so it was no imposition to be asked to retrieve the article. It was torn from a local newspaper and described how it took eight police officers to restrain Franklin D. Smith, a Jamaican-born musician and drug dealer, when they broke into his flat after a neighbour had reported hearing a woman screaming. ‘That was me,’ Crazy Jane told him. ‘It’s all my fault.’

‘You were the neighbour?’

‘I was the screamer.’

Now it was Frank’s turn to cry. ‘Have you been seeing him while you’ve been seeing me?’ he wanted to know.

‘It was only a physical thing,’ Crazy Jane assured him.

‘Has he been hitting you while you’ve been seeing me?’

‘Not all the time. And anyway, you don’t hit me.’

Was that an accusation? Did Frank have his shortcomings as a lover?

Frank remembers pushing his hands all the way down the front of her jeans — the back of his hands against her skin, so that she didn’t have to turn around and lose her view of the prison — and sobbing like a baby. How they used to make him cry, those girls. What a blubberer they turned him into. Looked back on, from this vantage point, is that the essential story of his life? Here lies Frank Ritz: he cried over girls and felt their cunts. Usually at the same time.

Unless it’s, Here lies Frank Ritz: he wasn’t man enough to give a woman a good thrashing. Except when it came to his best friend’s wife. But that was in another country, and besides …

Seeing Frank cry, and feeling the backs of his hands knuckling into her, Crazy Jane started up again on her own account. Blub, blub, they went, he into her neck, she into his. Until she freed herself to blow her nose, adjust her trilby, and pour them coffee from a flask she’d had the forethought to prepare. Then she unwrapped a little parcel of silver paper and rolled them a joint. Forethought again. Then she assumed her original position with her arms round his back and her head on his shoulder and went on staring into the cells. And that was how the dawn found them outside Gloucester Gaol, stoned, snivelling, glued to each other with rheum, frozen to the bone.

Had Franklin been watching from the window he’d have counted himself fortunate to be inside.

Warmer now at the wheel of his Saab, Frank looks up at the prison and wonders whether Franklin’s still in there. In the good old Count of Monte Cristo days people were locked away and forgotten. Now telly can get you out provided you’re photogenic enough. It ought to make him prouder of his profession. What an honour to be associated with a medium that is so jealously watchful of our freedoms. Prises the innocent out of their dungeons where they were pursuing law degrees and releases them into the privileges of police-dramas and pop awards. Frank wishes he had his laptop with him. He could have knocked off next week’s column right here, in the shadow of the walls, on the very spot where Crazy Jane shattered the last of his illusions.

As for Crazy Jane herself, well, she went into penal sociology, married a murderer and became the mistress of a college.

A police car passes and slows. Frank realises he must look as though he’s masterminding a getaway. A notice at the prison gate warns that it is an offence under the Prison Act of 1952 for any person to help an inmate to escape. Although it doesn’t say so anywhere, Frank knows that it is also an offence to be pissed at the wheel of a Saab. If they stop and breathalyse him he’s sunk. How can he survive without his driving licence now he doesn’t have a home to go to? He will have to plead indigency to the court. He can no more do without his car than a gipsy can do without his caravan. He sits up very straight, trying to remember what muscles a face employs when it’s sober.

The police car turns around and comes alongside him. Is everything all right with him?

He thanks the officers. He is in some distress, he tells them. But nothing they can relieve. He has a brother who is serving time. Embezzlement. He comes and sits here quietly sometimes. To be close. Just something he needs to do. He doesn’t know whether they will understand that.

They do. They have experience of the ways prison can affect a family. But they ask to see his licence, even so. What they don’t say is bear with us while we check you out on our computer. One day, of course, they will. One day every policeman will have to say bear with me before he squirts aerosol in your face. They notice that he is some distance from his permanent address. He doesn’t say he has no permanent address. He says he is on business in Cheltenham. They recommend that he takes himself back there now and gets some sleep. He thanks them for their understanding. He doesn’t ask them, though they are the very people to ask, where the whores are. Whores he can find himself.

He is not driven by desire. He is driven by recklessness. Whatever the opposite is of compunction. Before it becomes moral, compunction is a physical sensation, a pricking at the heart. The opposite of compunction is physical too. Frank feels it as a duodenal sinking. His stomach lurches, empties, then floods with pancreatic juices. These are the juices that prompt a man to act against the urgings of his reason. It is unreasonable to pursue whores in the dead of night when you feel no desire, but the pancreatic juices insist on it.

In no time he is in whore-hell. What does it take? A scrub of common. A council estate. A few sulphurous street lights. The odd alley dark enough for pimps to park in. And a lot of imagination on Frank’s part.

A cluster of girls standing outside a phone box clock the speed of his car and simultaneously give him the nod. It pleases him to see it again, he realises he’s missed it, the old St Vitus twitch. One of the girls is black and shows some shiny cleavage, otherwise they are all more modestly dressed than any secretary turning up for work at a building society. Frank accelerates past them, then has to slow again for a speed bump. Traffic calmers. Why don’t they just pay the whores to lie in the middle of the road?

Ahead of him, Frank sees a Datsun disgorging a girl. You don’t really want one that someone else has just had, on the other hand it can be useful, when you can’t make your mind up, to have a second opinion. He tries to see from the way the Datsun drives off whether the whore has given satisfaction. He decides she hasn’t. The girl spits on the car. The driver shows her his finger. Love! He slows to get a better look at the girl. She is wearing a navy anorak but apparently no skirt. She has bare, streaked vermilion legs. Her white stilettos are held together with sellotape. She doesn’t appear to have a figure at all. She is younger than Frank remembers whores being. If he were to be moral or legalistic about it he would say she is too young; but this isn’t about morals or the law, it’s about pancreatic juices.