Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

Is that what he’s doing? Is he sitting here visualising a bench in her name because he wants nothing but her name to be left of her? Her name and a few bleached slats of oak. Is this a murderer’s grief he’s feeling?

He’d be within his rights to want to murder her, lover or no lover. You can’t go on telling a man to shut the fuck up and not expect him to murder you eventually. But he sees it from her point of view as well; it’s precisely because he is a man — an M.A.N. with a D.I.C.K. — that she is so provoked by him. {Was so provoked by him. She is, of course, nothinged by him any more.) Her accusations were just: he did make a din. The racket of his dissatisfactions undermined her. Even when he kept his dick in his pants — which was often, which was most of the time if she was prepared to be fair about it — the sense he gave of a man jealous of his rights to a dick-led life of picaresque adventures (whether he went on those adventures or not) could only destabilise her. So if he’d be within his rights to want to murder her, she surely was within her rights to have wanted to murder him. But all that’s water under the bridge. He doesn’t want to murder her. He has never wanted to murder her. He reveres her and misses her and imagines erecting a bench to her memory looking out over the Valley of the Rocks. In celebration of the life of Melissa Paul, who preferred the commotion of the elements to the commotion of a man. He sees himself coming here every year, a foolish bent-backed old dodderer, drenched in tears. He is drenched in tears now. Heartbreak-blue late summer afternoons overlooking the sea do this to him. So do benches dedicated to dead women.

He trudges gravely back to Lynton, or is it Lynmouth, the high one anyway, where he finds a dark pub with a dark corner to sob in. He is quickly drunk. Salty tears drizzled into cheap red Italian screwtop wine on a hot day always increases the alcoholic content. Don’t ask him how: he’s a man of feelings, not a chemist. When he stumbles out he doesn’t recognise the world. Which way to turn? And where is he making for anyway? He turns right, past a garden in which children are hitting one another with balloons, past another pub outside which a man is throwing beer mats for a dog to catch, past the open door of a centre for shiatsu which he thought was a form of gentle therapy but in this part of the United Kingdom seems to entail bowing and falling on a mat, and walks slap into Liz.

There is no mistake this time. He has not been looking for her, he has not been thinking about her, he has not conjured her out of the vapours of his expectation. And even if he’d known for sure that she was Mrs Billy Yuill, that Billy Yuill for sure still kept a holiday cottage here, and that Liz would, for sure, be in it, he would not have been on the watch for someone in a belted white oriental combat outfit.

‘Liz!’

Her face falls into a mesh of distress lines. She looks away. If she can, she will walk on. Even run. She is fit. She throws people over her hip. She could outrun him.

He holds his ground. ‘Liz, it’s Frank. Frank Ritz.’

She raises her green eyes to him. The person he walked into was outside herself, free of time, cheerfully vacant after exercise. Now she is cruelly brought back to the dull oppression of interiority, memory, experience, bitterness. Thanks, Frank. He realises that he has done to her exactly what he has done so often to Mel — flung himself, like a brick through a screen, into the quiet blank of her attention when she was off happily with the fairies. Fuck the fairies, notice me!

‘I know who you are,’ Liz says. ‘I’m not likely to forget.’

‘You look good,’ he says.

‘Well, I was feeling good.’

She doesn’t tell him that he looks good himself. But then he doesn’t. He’s been unwell. And he’s just been blubbering on the cliffs. And mixing tears and booze. He must have red eyes. He must even have a red nose.

He touches the sleeve of her jacket. ‘How long have you been doing this Shiatsu stuff?’ he asks.

‘It’s not Shiatsu. It’s tai chi.’

‘Whatever. So are you good at it?’

‘Tai chi is not a competitive sport, Frank,’ she says.

‘Unlike friendship,’ is what he wants to say; but he is not such a fool as that. Instead he asks her to have a drink with him.

She shakes her head.

‘Just one.’

‘No.’

‘We could have Chinese tea, if you’re into all that.’

‘What for, Frank?’

‘Old times’ sake.’

‘And you think we should drink to that?’ She starts to walk away. He follows, keeping up with her stride.

‘There were some good times, Liz.’ It upsets him to hear these words on his own lips. You always know that the hour is going to come when you will have to try to rescue the past in a sentence. You always know that trial waiting for you. Now, at last, he’s heard himself say it. Now he really is old.

She is softer, momentarily, than he’d expected her to be. But more final, too. ‘There were good times,’ she said. ‘Some. But that doesn’t mean you want the memory of them back.’

So fuck off, Frank. Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out.

‘How are your children?’ he asks.

‘My children,’ she says, ‘are fine. But since when were you curious about my children?’

Since meeting Hamish? No, it’s too soon for Hamish.

‘How’s Kurt?’ he asks instead, as he pursues her down a flight of steps leading, he is alarmed to notice, to Sinai Hill.

‘Ask him yourself, Frank.’

‘The last time I spoke to Kurt he told me never to speak to him, or have truck with anything that appertained to him, ever again.’

‘If you’re wondering whether he’s softened his attitude, he hasn’t. Neither have I softened mine. It’s been good to see you, Frank. Go home.’

He wants to kiss her. It seems an interminable time since he’s kissed anyone. He’s kissed Josh Green, of course, but he’s not counting what he does with men. Even before he was booted out he hadn’t kissed Mel in months. Months! — years rather, if we’re talking about kiss with the whole of the mouth, a kiss kiss which is different from a peck kiss. He may have had his dick out in the presence of a couple of whores in the not too distant past, but you don’t get into kissing with whores. It is with whores as it is with wives and lovers — the kiss is the first thing to go.

But even if he’d kissed half of creation that very morning he would still want to kiss Liz now. Her face has begun to reassemble itself retrospectively; he can now recognise the creases he was once able to turn into channels for laughter to escape by. He feels affection for her, and, sentimentally, for himself through her. He could mourn his own youth in her face. But he can also celebrate his age in it. He wants to put his hand on her cheeks like a father. Yes, he likes it that she’s no longer young. Now young’s gone, who wants young any more? In a general way, he likes the blur that you see in mature faces, the suffusion of warm furry weariness; but it moves and stirs him especially to see that Liz is well on the way to looking like an old lion.

But if he’s going to kiss her he’s going to have to catch her. She is a lot further down Sinai Hill now than he is. He calls after her, but she is gone in a billow of Chinese canvas, in through the door of an end-of-terrace lime-coloured cottage which he is just close enough behind to hear her slam and double-bolt and chain.

Is that in fact a good sign, Frank wonders. Does it mean that Billy isn’t home? If Billy were home to protect her she wouldn’t need to double-bolt and chain her door, would she. She’d leave it ajar so that Frank could come barging through smack into her husband’s ukelele fist.