Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

As captains of their separately sinking ships they should help each other, because no one helped them — that was the deal. They could keep each other company on the road. Frank was wrong about how light she travelled. There was more loot on that stage than he thought there was. She had a van to take care of all that, but who wants to be shaken around in a van? So yes, Frank could drive her, unencumbered, and in a spirit of non-ulterior-motive friendship, across Dartmoor to her next gig at Torquay. After Torquay she was down to have a few days lazing in the sun, which really meant sitting up in bed noshing chocolates, and he could join her in that. Then, if things were still working out, he could drive her to St Austell, which was not that many blind Cornish miles (not that he was counting) from Little Cleverley. And she, for her part, could be around late at night, as a sort of surrogate anchoring device, to stop him taking his dick out in public places and otherwise losing sight of his own best interests. That there was to be absolutely no fucking or anything in the slightest bit preparatory to fucking — unless you call black chocolate and brown ale a preparative to fucking — suited him fine. After what happened to him in Lynton or Lynmouth he has come to a new understanding of what it means to be fifty. Instead of wanting to fuck, you want to blubber. The day he left Mel he had cried, and he has cried on just about every day since. Sperm or tears, where’s the difference? One way or the other it’s the same profligacy with liquids and emotions. One way or another you’re still jerking off. So what you have to do is stay away from temptation in regard to spillage of either sort. And as far as any such temptation goes, D does indeed seem to have the requisite quality — the effects of Ella Fitzgerald’s intercession notwithstanding, she no more wants any of Frank’s liquids than any of Frank’s liquids want her.

Except that now he is shouting and banging the bolster.

If that were Mel at the far end of the bed, he would at this point expect to be banished to an inferior room and a lower storey. But then if that were Mel at the far end of the bed he would never have got to finish his speech. Because he doesn’t love D he is free to admire her, and one of the things he admires about her professionally (and no one is admirable except professionally) is her confidence to allow hecklers to have their say. Patience is a potent comic weapon in her hands; she stands still as a mantis on the stage, her arms folded across her chest, exactly as they are now, her lips pureed into a parody of infinite forbearance, and just waits and waits, assured that the trouble maker will at last choke on his own too much. This is an advantage she enjoys over Mel as a companion — she gives Frank leave to expatiate. Thereafter, mind you, the opinions of the two women quickly converge. And that’s another reason he’s glad he’s not fucking any more. There is now so little ideological or cognitive disparity between women — between the ones Frank meets, anyway — that there is a sense in which once you have fucked one, you have fucked all. See how time has changed him from the boy who thought he would be pulling at the Kardomah till he was a hundred, so peculiar in every particular, so infinitessimally herself and not another, was every girl he met. He was a cunt collector then, and to a trained eye no doubt cunts are still as various as they ever were. But as befits a man at the end of his sexual usefulness, he notices only the intelligences of women today, and it’s those intelligences he doesn’t mind he isn’t fucking, since he’s fucked them all already.

A long and heavy silence has prevailed since he banged the bolster, broken only by the sound of D knocking back what’s left of the ale.

‘I think sorry is the word you’re searching for,’ she says finally.

He agrees with her. ‘I am sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ve been a bit shaken up over the last few days.’

She allows a light yeasty belch to part her lips. It’s not quite a snort, though it’s on a snort’s errand.

‘Do you know what I’d do if I were you?’ she asks, but without waiting, as Mel would have waited, for an answer. ‘I’d go and see a therapist.’

‘To what end?’

‘To get help, Frank. You need counselling. Did you hear yourself just now? The cunt. The knish. You talk about women as if they’re nothing but parts. The bit of what you fancy.’

‘It’s the definite article you object to, is it? Would you be all right about it if I went indefinite. A cunt? A knish?’

‘Who’s talking about grammar?’

‘You are, D. You think the definite article is degrading to your sex. You think it objectifies them. But that’s not what the definite article does. Think of the the in The Holy Ghost, or The Lord, or The Ten Commandments. It gives them definition, doesn’t it, it confers the distinction of specificity on them. And the Lord (and no other) said unto the Israelites (and to no one else), gey gesunterhait, go forth and multiply and honour the knish — meaning the knish and nothing but the knish.’

‘A cunt belongs to someone, Frank.’

‘Does it? I’m not sure it does. A cunt is leased to someone, I’ll accept that. I think a cunt belongs to nature, and a woman is but the steward of it. But anyway I thought we were talking about the cunt, not a cunt — ‘

‘There is no the cunt. Just as there is no the shag, or the wife, or the bit on the side. You have to start again every time.’

Frank thinks about that. ‘You mean every shag is a new shag.’

‘It’s not a shag. It’s not a shag or the shag, it’s someone.’

‘So we are talking grammar after all. It’s the impersonal pronoun you really don’t like. It’s the it. What you’re actually against is that when our sex looks at your sex we think of giving it one. It’s the impersonal mirth you don’t like.’

‘Mirth!’

‘Dead right. Mirth. When we were kids we used to go on ynaf hunt. You won’t know what a ynaf is. You’re a London girl and London slang begins and ends with apple and pears. Where I come from, ynaf’s backward chat for fanny. Great name for a vagina, wouldn’t you agree? Ynaf. Wonderful to get your tongue around. Philosophical, to boot. It’s got why in it — the big question — and wine in it and naff in it, but mostly it’s got laugh in it.’

‘The laugh being mostly on whom, Frank?’

‘The laugh being mostly on us, D, we little Ahabs obsessively stumping over the great sperm-filled oceans of Wythenshawe and Droylsden. We knew what we were about. We knew the ynaf was making clowns of us.’

‘Oh, yeah? Well I’ve seen blokes on ynaf hunt, and none of them ever struck me as having a particularly sophisticated sense of the ridiculous. Speaking as a steward of the ynaf, I have to tell you that I don’t remember any masterful jokes made in pursuit of mine — unless you call “Show us your cunt” a masterful joke.’

‘It could be, depending on the context. Bluntness is its own fun, as you know perfectly well. You’re on stage five nights a week shoving bits of bloke into every orifice — you don’t need me to tell you about the mirthfulness of brutality.’

‘Parody, Frank. I’m up there taking the piss out of you lot. It’s called redressing the balance.’

‘The fuck it is. That’s not why those fat birds are sitting there in their thousands with their tits shaking, because you’re redressing the balance. They’re into the violence of it, D. They’re into the ancient fucking needling antagonism of sex.’