Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

His are flowing now. He drives round and around the same couple of blocks. If his Saab were the blade of a saw he’d have taken a circle of real estate the size of Wembley Stadium out of working-class Gloucester. Not that there’d be anywhere for it to fall to. This is as low as it gets, Frank reflects, meaning this is as low as he gets. He is enjoying being back. He has been round so many times the girls have learnt to recognise and ignore him. He doesn’t know himself whether he is going to stop and pick one of them out; forces well outside his control will decide that. In the end it’s a black woman he hasn’t seen before, sitting alone in shadow on someone’s garden wall, eating a hamburger, who applies the brakes to his Saab. What attracts Frank to her is her long face. She reminds him of the French comedian, Fernandel. And what is so desirable to Frank about the French comedian Fernandel? Don’t ask him. Maybe it’s because she looks older than the others. Maybe it’s because she looks experienced. Maybe it’s because she looks like a man.

She drags herself off the wall and comes over to the car. She is extremely tall, like an Ethiopian, and wears an anklelength grey skirt with many slits in it through which Frank sees that she has long thin Ethiopian famine legs.

‘You look like a jumper,’ Frank says.

‘I’ll do anything so long as you pay me,’ she says.

She doesn’t wait to agree a price. She climbs in over the passenger door, still eating her hamburger. Along with the onions Frank smells cloves and cinnamon.

‘Take a left,’ she says.

Yes, Frank thinks, it’s good to be back all right.

On the way to wherever they’re going they pass the under-age girl in the sellotaped stilettos. She waves at the Ethiopian. ‘Can you give my friend a lift?’ the Ethiopian asks.

‘Depends where,’ Frank says.

‘She just wants to be with me. It’s all right. She’ll get out when we’re doing it.’

Frank stops for the Ethiopian’s friend. He can hear his pancreatic juices sluicing about in his stomach. The girl gets into the back seat. She doesn’t introduce herself. But then she is seriously not of age; she may not yet have learnt to speak.

They park in the forecourt to some wooden garages. The girl gets out and takes herself a few yards off. She stands absently against a garage door, like a little girl in a schoolyard, memorising her ten-times-tables.

‘So what do you want?’ the Ethiopian asks. Frank sees that she has removed a condom from her bag and is about to open the packet with her teeth.

‘Not that,’ he says.

‘I don’t do sex without a condom.’

‘I don’t want sex. How much for a hand job?’

‘Twenty.’

‘Twenty?’ Frank whistles through his teeth. ‘It’s gone up a bit,’ he says.

She shrugs. He remembers Fernandel shrugging identically in The Sheep has Five Legs. ‘Gone up since when?’ she asks.

She has a point. Gone up since 1970. He takes out his wallet and hands her over the twenty.

‘Why don’t you give me another ten,’ she says, ‘and I’ll suck your balls.’

Money, money, money. But how long is it since anybody sucked his balls? He hands her over a ten.

‘OK,’ she says, ‘lean back.’

He notes that she doesn’t ask where Fred is. He wondered how they’d get round that in Gloucester.

She is impatient with him immediately. ‘Spunk!’ she orders him. She is tossing him back-handed, as though she’s slipping a doorman a tip, her long lugubrious face turned in the opposite direction, his dick barely out of the recumbent position, and she is expecting him to spunk. After ten seconds!

‘You said you were going to suck my balls,’ he reminds her.

‘Don’t dictate to me,’ she says.

‘Who’s dictating? I’m just reminding you what I paid for.’

‘I’ll suck them when you start spunking.’

‘There won’t be any spunking,’ Frank tells her, ‘until you suck them.’

She sighs, dips her head into his lap, and for all Frank is able to feel to the contrary, sucks the dye out of the car upholstery. Ten more seconds later she is back up, expecting miracles. ‘That’s it,’ she says, ‘that’s it, spunk for mama. Think of my black pussy. Ooh, yes. Yes. Imagine you’re putting your big cock in my black pussy.’

She’s so unconvincing that Frank wonders how come they have a population explosion in Africa. Is it possible she’s a man after all? No. A man would have a better idea of what might be conducive to that big cock she’s been talking about. If nothing else, a man would have a better idea of where another man’s balls hang out.

‘It’s no good,’ Frank says. He knows what he ought to do. He ought to call it a night. He ought to pack the little one in the back of the car and drive them both back to where he found them. He doesn’t have to force spunk out of his testicles. And spunk is a bit of a flatteringly messy name anyway for the miserable dry spurtle he’s likely to squeeze out at best. But he also knows what he will do if he leaves these garages without an emission of some sort — he will start on the obsessional Flying Dutchman pilgrimage again. One thing he can’t do, if he is finally to sleep tonight and not brood over Kurt and Liz, to say nothing of young Hamish who he’s now decided is definitely a child he fathered on Liz in Paris, is drive back to Cheltenham unspent.

‘Give me another ten and I’ll suck you off with a rubber,’ the Ethiopian suggests.

Frank has a better idea. ‘Call the girl back in,’ he says.

They settle on a price. What does it matter? Another ten, another twenty, another hundred. The Ethiopian fiddles ill-temperedly with her clothing and brings out a long empty rubbery tit, more blue than black. Such a sight never did much for Frank in the pages of the National Geographic and it does even less for him now. But he’s not doing it for him. He’s doing it for his pancreas.

On the back seat the girl with the sellotaped stilettos opens her legs and shows him what she has between them. It is not quite as criminal an act as he’d feared. At least there’s hair there. ‘Spread yourself wider,’ he says. She wriggles in the seat and with her small bitten fingers pulls herself apart. Not as criminal, but a crime none the less. Fifteen years I could get for this, Frank thinks. Fifteen years minimum. With no remission. I’ll be an old man when I come out. Except I won’t be coming out. There’ll be no exposes on the box on my behalf. No Panorama or Rough Justice. Who’d campaign for the release of a television critic? I’ll be locked in a cell with Franklin for the rest of my life.

He re-arranges himself into a lying position at a three-quarters twist, so that he can put his mouth to the Ethiopian’s tit while still being able to see the little furry pink-nosed gerbil the girl keeps between her legs. He has his dick in his hand. And on his dick he has spittle which the Ethiopian has sold him for a fiver. Thus positioned, he finally comes.

But only after imagining that he is on his back on the stage of the London Palladium and that D the fat comedian is pissing in his mouth.

HE ISN’T WELL.

Mel kept him well. Maybe Mel made him well.

She found him, originally, wearing a three-piece Mafia suit, looking yellow and eating all the wrong foods at a conference on the televisual arts in Birmingham. He was doing television previews as opposed to reviews then, along with general media reporting, so he was there snaffling up tidbits and hearsay, and she was on a panel discussing, as you could tell from what she was wearing, the portrayal of women on television. They took an instant dislike to each other. That’s to say she tried to have him ejected from her discussion group for hectoring, and he tried to fuck her.