Howard Jacobson: No More Mr. Nice Guy

Heaven. Except that heaven will never be so good. He’s got cricket on the radio. He’s got the sun on his face. He’s got the west London early August holiday smell of malt biscuits in his nostrils. He’s got that old truant sensation of release from homework in his heart. And he’s got no one in his car.

He’s never been happier.

And does he know yet where he’s going? It’s still looking like Oxford, but he’s leaving it to the Saab to decide destinations. His fingers barely touch the wheel. Wherever the Saab fancies going, he’ll go. All points of the compass look equally tempting to him. If it goes on being Oxford — and doesn’t suddenly become Aylesbury or Warwick — so much the better. He has known good times in Oxford. There have been those in Oxford, long ago, who would have minded had he not been fucking them every morning, had they not been fucking him every morning, had they severally — to be democratic about it — not been fucking one another at all hours of the day.

But fucking is not an issue. Fucking is definitely not on the agenda.

In despite of what she thinks.

It isn’t entirely true that he’s got no one in his car. A part of Mel is in his glove compartment. Her talking spleen. ‘Following our dick, are we?’

‘No, Mel.’

‘First thing we think of when we leave the house — where can we put it tonight.’

‘I won’t be putting it anywhere, Mel.’

‘Liar.’

‘You’ll see.’

And in truth, his dick is the last thing on his mind. Twenty years ago, ten years ago, his dick would have been driving the car. The great consolation of being fifty, for all your other organs, is that they finally get to sit behind the wheel.

The Saab slows so that he can take a look at the royal-icing of the Hoover building. Now owned by Tesco. Tessa Cohen. What odds would you have given against Mr and Mrs Cohen succeeding, however long ago, when they hit upon that artless elision as a name for their wholesale food empire? Frank remembers staring into their garden from the upper deck of the school bus, trying to get a look at Tessa in her kitchen. It troubled him, imagining her life. Do you cook and clean when you’re the Tes in Tesco, do you go shopping in your own shops, or do you just sit there, aloof like a stone statue? It seemed an important question at the time; it bore upon how you escape the ordinary. Once, he took Tesco’s next-door neighbours’ au pair to the pictures. Polish. The only Polish au pair in Manchester anyone had heard of. She did everything up close, whispered in both Frank’s ears, blew in Frank’s face, and danced her fingers at the entrance to her mouth when she spoke, as though not just helping her words on their way, but her breath and her spittle as well. He sat wet and entranced and up close while she flicked her fingers around in his pocket. Frank had never owned a pet but he guessed that this was what it was like to bring a white mouse to school in your trousers. Whenever the film reached an emotional climax the mouse nibbled on his dick. Yet the moment he tried a reciprocal nip at any part of her she wagged her free fingers at him and flicked his nose. You took whatever was offering in those days. And a dick gnawed black and blue in the pictures was still better than a night in on your own in front of the television.

Where is she now? Still au pairing on the Bury Old Road? And what’s she like at fifty? Still up close? Might she still be willing to mouse around in his pocket? If he cuts diagonally across the country to Birmingham, and then picks up the M6, he can be in Manchester well before dark.

‘Liar …’

He lets the road to Bury idle out of his mind. The Saab hesitates between the A40 and the M40. Oxford, either way. Slow or fast. The clock on his dashboard says four-thirty. If he takes the motorway he can be at the Trout Inn, drinking icy lagers over the river, before six. Fish in the waterfall. Peacock in the gardens. Crazy Jane in her Oxfam trilby and ratty fur coat, his first Oxford romance, his first girl with a mind, ordering pints in her Pete and Dud voice, passing him joints under the garden furniture. Where is she now? Mistress of a college was the last he heard.

Slow … slow might be better.

He’s out of touch with the customs of the country, but some indestructible instinct tells him that fish and chip shops open at five. He would love to be eating fish and chips, in the heat, while he drives, with his roof down, with cricket on the radio, and no one to advise otherwise. The car refuses the motorway, pootles round the edges of a couple of forgettable Berkshire towns with their garden centres and their excitable Palladian function and conference hotels, their Beefeaters and Harvesters, and pulls up of its own, dead on the stroke of five, slap outside a half-timbered chip shop on the western extremity of Beaconsfield. Open! And frying tonight! If he’s consented to be booted out of his home for no better reason than this — all the grease and batter his old heart desires, and fuck you with your nutritional censoriousness hanging retching over the bath — then he’s consented wisely.

A chemist’s shop is handily situated next door but one to the chippy. He goes in for a box of tissues, mansize, to protect the upholstery of his car from what he is about to dump on it. Double chips, he is thinking. And two fish. Maybe treble chips. Maybe one fish and two fishcakes. If they’ve got gherkins he’ll have a couple. Ditto pickled eggs. Peas he’ll skip. Or maybe he won’t. Everyone in the shop looks up when he asks for the biggest box of tissues they’ve got. Man on his own, end of the day — they’re bound to have their thoughts.

Because he’s wearing unfamiliar trousers — holiday chinos, pants for starting a new life in — he has trouble finding loose change and scatters coins across the floor. Doubtless they think he’s embarrassed. An old lady waiting for her prescription peers out at him from the alien world of the underprivileged. She has a small boy with her, hanging on to her hand. She nods and trembles, as much out of the perplexity of her class as the infirmity of her age, imparting the vibration to the boy, who nods and trembles along with her. He has a loose eye. Shaken out of its socket. Fucked, Frank thinks. Plebeianly fucked already. The kid’ll either be a doormat or a criminal, but he won’t ever know what any of it’s been about, either way. Thanks, Grandma.

Thanks Ma.

Thanks Mel.

He’s in the queue for his dinner when the old lady taps him in the small of his back. ‘You dropped money,’ she tells him. She gestures to the boy, standing looking at him with his loose eye, obediently holding out his hand. ‘He found it’ A pound coin. They’ve come looking for him to return a pound coin. That’s less than the price of a syllable at current Broadcasting Critic of the Year rates, All Frank has to do to earn a pound coin is start to write the word crap. Whereas who’s to say that in Beaconsfield a pound coin doesn’t represent a day’s labour. A week’s labour for a kid. A week up a chimney or down a pit; whatever they do in Beaconsfield — a fortnight on the towpath pulling a barge. It would be insulting in that case — wouldn’t it? — to wave it away, dismiss it, laugh the trivial amount back in their faces. So he thanks the kid and takes the coin. Which royally snafues his fish and chips. For the next half-hour, as he drives into the dying sun with his roof up, separating batter from paper with his free hand, he castigates himself for not setting a moral example and saving a soul, for not demonstrating that honesty can still be its own reward in this wicked wicked world, for not blessing the child and telling him that the pound he has found is now his to start a new life with.