Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

‘So how do you know you are right?’

‘If she isn’t with Billy Yuill what was she doing in Billy Yuill’s cottage?’

‘And you know for sure it was Billy Yuill’s cottage?’

‘A bit of a coincidence if it wasn’t. Billy Yuill has a cottage in Lynton or Lynmouth. I go to Lynton or Lynmouth. I run into Liz. She runs into a cottage. Who else’s cottage is it going to be?’

‘It could be Billy Yuill’s cottage without Liz being married to Billy Yuill. She could be borrowing Billy Yuill’s cottage.’

‘So what was Kurt doing there?’

‘Kurt is her husband.’

‘Not according to Hamish.’

‘But according to Hamish, Kurt wasn’t in the country. It’s looking to me as though Hamish can’t be trusted. You didn’t trust him when you first clapped eyes on him.’

The speaker remembers when Frank Ritz first clapped eyes on the boy they call Hamish. The speaker is D, the fat comedian, and she was there in a wine bar in Montpellier at the time. Tonight she is in a hotel in Torquay, sitting up in bed, eating black chocolate and drinking brown ale. She is on a black chocolate and brown ale diet. If she eats and drinks nothing else for the next twelve months she will be thin. It’s a combination diet. Together, the black chocolate and brown ale will adequately nourish her while at the same time eating her fat away from the inside. The combination works only so long as it is not intruded upon. Swallow so much as a grain of rice and the black chocolate and brown ale immediately fall out. They are like a couple of newlyweds sequestered in the country; the marriage works fine so long as no one calls in on them. The trouble D is having with this diet is that as soon as she has finished the black chocolate she rings down for a hamburger and chips.

Frank too is sitting up in bed eating black chocolate and drinking brown ale. He doesn’t need to lose weight. He is acting companionably. He is sitting up in the same bed as D but he is not her lover. D has no lovers. D is a celibate on principle and Frank respects her principles. Shortly he will go back to his own bed in an adjoining room. They don’t lie together. They merely sit up at the far ends of the same bed to watch television and go on D’s diet and discuss whatever is on their minds. The arrangement suits Frank down to the ground. A period of protocolic celibacy is exactly what he needs. But just in case nature suddenly tries to get the better of protocol, a bolster runs the length of the bed between them.

At D’s insistence, they wear night-shirts and pyjamas (severally) and dressing gowns.

Frank, who has never owned pyjamas, has had to go out and buy himself a pair.

He is being brave about it. So OK, it’s happened, he’s old, he wears pyjamas, and a plaited cord now swings where his dick once would have. Change, too, is part of life.

D also wears bedsocks.

Frank has explained that he cannot go so far as that himself. But he will be careful to keep his feet in his half of the bed.

The fiction is that the bed is like a bomb — one inadvertent touch and it will go up. The truth is that Frank’s powder is wet. And D wouldn’t go off if you dropped her out of an aeroplane.

Frank agrees that it is inconsistent to trust Hamish given that he has jewelry through his face. But he can’t see what would be in it for Hamish to lie so comprehensively about his parents.

‘Parents?’ D leans ironically on the final syllable of that word. Parentz? ‘I thought the theory is that Hamish is yourz. And that’s why you’re having so much trouble believing that what you got from him was a cock and bull story. No son of Frank Ritz would tell a lie! Isn’t that the sort of bollocks that’s going on in your head?’

Frank waves away the insulting imputation of gooey fatherliness. That the shivering morose kid with punctured skin might turn out to be a child of his — the fruit of what he pumped into Liz Bryll before he filled her full of hair brush (and who’s to say that that early trauma wouldn’t account for the kid’s moroseness: who’s to say how soon a sperm begins to feel?) — he does indeed fear. But the dread is more general than particular. This is about the age it always happens. You’re fifty, minding your business, of course distraught, of course charging fast towards the cliff-edge, but at least knowing who you are, and who, if anybody, is yours, when wham! bam! out of the blue some reprehensible little cunt in a backwards baseball hat flings himself into your arms: ‘Hi, dad, I’m the splat of jism you jerked into your best friend’s wife. Call me Hamish.’ Now’s the time for all the Hamishes to come crawling out of the wordwork. To be absolutely truthful, Frank has wondered why they haven’t made themselves known to him sooner. When you’ve chucked as much spunk around as he has, you expect some of it to stick. You even start worrying why it hasn’t. None stuck in Mel. None was meant to stick in Mel. She wasn’t the adhesive type. But even she has been bracing herself over the last few years to reject the inevitable army of foundlings whose undeniable facial resemblance to Frank Ritz, the poor bastards, will do nothing for her but enumerate instances of his infidelity. Some of them will predate her, right enough. But they’ve been together long enough now, Mel and Frank, for others to be coming along who originated in sperm that was rightly hers. Hers to kill, maybe, hers to suffocate in spermicidal jelly, hers to entrammel and garrotte in loops and coils, hers to have scraped out of herself along with sundry impurities of the colon, but still hers. None of this, though — least of all what Mel has been bracing herself for — has any bearing on the present conversation. He isn’t suffering precautionary paternal pride. No son of his would tell a lie! Come off it. Maybe he is suffering precautionary paternal pride: of course any son of his would tell a lie. Not the point either way. The point, as he explains to D, is ‘Why would Hamish be in on the fact that his father — Kurt, I’m talking about — is having an affair with his mother? Do parents tell their kids that sort of stuff? Hey, Hamish — remember your mother, the woman I acrimoniously divorced? Well I’m shtupping her again on the side. Be pleased for us, but keep it to yourself.’

‘And that’s what you think was happening when you shimmied up the drainpipe? You interrupted a man in a shower who was about to give his ex-wife a seeing to?’

‘I know Kurt. I grew up with him. He only ever showers before a shag.’

(That’s for her. Shag is her word. Shtup is what Kurt does. Kurt only ever showers before a shtup.)

‘And where, in this scenario, is the current husband?’

‘How can I know that? Away. Fishing. In America. Standing at a lamppost. Not around — that’s all. Out of the way.’

‘Out of the way just long enough for a how’s your father?’ She pops a chocolate, then folds her arms on her chest. ‘Shag shag shag.’

That’s the thanks he gets. ‘What do you mean, shag shag shag?’

‘You’re a pervy little bastard, Frank. You think all dealings between men and women are depraved. You hope! What’s wrong with the simple explanation? Why can’t your friends still be married? Why can’t they be borrowing this Billy person’s cottage in the country? Why can’t Hamish be their child? Why can’t he be lying to you about his parents because he knows they get upset whenever your name crops up (you being such a shit) and he wants to spare them that? Why has everybody got to be shagging someone they shouldn’t be shagging?’

‘Happy families — is that what you’re telling me they’re all playing out there! Is that the only game in town suddenly — happy families? Everyone else is shuffling the happy family deck and there’s just me, Frank Ritz, playing snakes and ladders. So how come you can still buy snakes and ladders?’