Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

‘Wrong, Frank. Those fat birds, as you so nicely call them, are laughing with the relief of being able to get their own back at last. They’ve been the objects of your antagonism for however many thousands of years, now they’re enjoying being able to express their own.’

‘So we’re not arguing. It’s great to slag off the other sex. There’s nothing in the world like it, I agree with you. I don’t give a shit about the history of it. If you’ve allowed yourselves to forget where the pleasure lies, that’s your fault. I’m glad for you if you’ve got it back. But don’t tell me you’re just redressing a balance. Because what’s going to happen once you’ve redressed it? Are you suddenly going to stop finding cock — the cock — funny?’

‘I don’t think we need to worry about that quite yet. I think we’ve plenty to do.’

‘Sure you have. And it’s not called therapy, either. I’m surprised at you. If there’s one person who oughtn’t to believe in therapy it’s a comedian. You are the therapy.’

‘A comedian can’t do everything, Frank.’

‘Yes, you can. Not for yourself, I grant you. But you’re not doing it for yourself We’re already agreed on that. You’re the captain of a sinking ship. It’s us, the passengers in the lifeboats, you’re meant to be thinking about. And we don’t want you pretending we’re not in trouble. Sing to us of death and drowning. Tell us the one about the cannibal and the shark. That’s the shit that keeps us going.’

‘That keeps you going.’

‘OK. But I’m the audience, remember.’

‘You’re not my audience. If I ever catch you in my audience I’ll make you wish you’d never been born.’

‘What’ll you do? Joke me to death?’

‘I’ll tell the story of your life, Frank. I’ll tell them what’s become of you after half a century following the great white ynaf that bit your appendage off. My girls like a good adventure yarn. Especially when it’s got a happy ending, like the hero bleeding to death on Exmoor. I’ll tell them what you’ve told me. That you no longer know whether to cry or to come. I’ll drag you up on stage. You can weep through your weenie for us — ‘

‘You need therapy, D.’

She throws a chocolate at him.

So everything’s all right then. Back to happy families.

‘I think that’s the only therapy I can allow,’ he goes on, ‘therapy for comedians. Help for the physicians who cannot help themselves. And I suggest we start by lifting that little apron of fat you’ve got down there and seeing if we can get a look at the knish.’

‘I prefer ynaf.’

‘I prefer show us your cunt.’

He makes a lunge in the direction of her deformity. She snorts with fright and laughter, bunching the bed clothes around her, piling on the fortifications. He doesn’t, of course, actually touch her. A deal’s a deal. And it’s its own kind of fun exactly as it is, galumphing with a corrugated dirigible, whose tits hummock about under their protective wrapping like badgers chasing their tails under parkland, and who lets you expatiate, lets you explain her job to her, lets you choke on your own too much, without feeling the need to kick you out of the house. Or in this case, the Five Star hotel.

Could it be that Frank’s found the secret of relational contentment? Agreeing from the outset to stay away from the cunt, except in horseplay? Are there to be satisfactions in being fifty after all?

He often thinks he’d like to have been a comedian himself. He would have enjoyed being on stage, making them laugh with that one.

They stay in bed, looking at the sea and the telly and not touching, for three more days. Each night, when there’s no more tolerable telly left, Frank goes back to his bed in the room next door, and each morning he returns for bacon, egg and coffee, followed by brown ale and black chocolate, in hers.

It’s a life. It’s a convalescence, anyway.

When he does put a foot outside the hotel he is surprised to see how bright it is. He rubs his eyes. That golden ball sitting in the sky … Could that be the sun? And those long thin things, the colour of salmon, moving about in the glare of the water, not eating … Could those be people? He catches sight of his reflection in a shop window. He has to look twice before he’s sure it’s him. He has put on weight on D’s diet. But he looks different in some other way as well. Good and not good; fraughtly placid.

He has banking to do. D has asked him to draw cash out for her on one of her cards, though what she needs cash for, unless it’s to tip room service, he can’t imagine. And he has to transfer funds from his savings to his cheque account. He’s gone through a further couple of thousand since he broke his resolution to stay away from five star hotels. If it goes on like this he’s going to have to get another column. It’s a thing he’s always promised himself — that he will never, never allow himself to be reduced to writing about family values or having the builders in, but he has been made a vagrant by his long-term partner and needs must when the devil drives.

She — she — has responded promptly but coldly to his faxed request for her to stick his mail in a jiffy bag and forward it to him poste restante, Torquay. She’s sent him everything, leaflets, handbills, minicab cards, menus from take-away restaurants, shopping lists from home deliverers, circulars from real estate agents, quotations for double glazing and loft conversions, notices of church fetes, invitations to car-boot sales, plastic sacks for the blind, electioneering material (including a signed letter from Tony Blair), the local council newsletter, an appeal for information about a missing cat, a free shampoo sample, and of course the domestic bills. All the shit that comes through the letter box she’s bunged him. So that he should feel he’s still at home? So that he should miss the palpable evidentiality — the dailiness, as sentimentalists of the hearth call it — of their domestic life? Some hope. There is no letter from her. No personal mark, other than a few impatiently scrawled arrows directing his attention to overdue amounts. It could have been worse, he accepts that. She could have thrown up in the bag before she sent it.

The violence of women. The vindictive uses to which they put the postal service. A girlfriend of Frank’s once sent what was left of an intimate chicken dinner, registered mail, to another girlfriend of Frank’s. Bones, carcass, gristle, giblets, parson’s nose, the lot. And that wasn’t all the big brown envelope contained. Used toothpicks fell out of it as well, the contents of an ashtray, a couple of lipsticked tissues, a wine cork, a tea bag — all the evidence Frank had stupidly forgotten to clear away (the waste bin isn’t away) of girlfriend number two’s infraction of the rights to exclusivity of girlfriend number one.

Perhaps exclusivity wasn’t the only issue. The chicken dinner in question had taken place while girlfriend number one was out of town. And had been cooked in her kitchen. And consumed on her dining table. And the ashtray had been found on her bedside table. And girlfriend number two had been her best friend.

But the violence of the response, none the less …

She rang him up in tears, the recipient of the bones, to solicit his understanding. ‘I had to sign for them, Frank.’

‘It must have been terrible,’ he said. But without conviction. He was a sucker for the meticulous ferocity of girlfriend number one. Fancy gathering it all out of the bin, fancy wrapping it all up, fancy quantifying your grievance to the last bone, and fancy, after all that, going down to the post office and filling out a form. It was awesome.