Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

He, too, watches in a stupefied hush. She is, after all, now he can see more of her, showing signs of wear. She flaunts a shorter skirt than she used to — the regulation callisthenics tunic of the new woman — but her flesh is not as confidently in charge of itself as it was. The wrong sort of dimpling is at work. There is vein activity afoot. She is being undermined, from the inside. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Soon she’ll be asking for just five more years. Maybe she’s already started the negotiations.

Smelling her death on her, Frank is aroused. It isn’t morbidity that does it, it’s pathos.

Frank has always possessed the gift of seeing all women in the one woman. In Clarice, bent over the counter wrapping slate, her skirt tight across her flesh, but her flesh no longer tight across the bone, he re-acquaints himself with all the mortally sad girls of his life. His grandmother, who was scarcely older than he is now when she died, though she seemed an aged and worn-out woman; his mother, whose fate it is to be nudged forever gravewards by him — here I come, mother, treading on your heels, faster, come on, faster; all the fat nebbishy keife he lifted off the streets of Droylesden in the days of the great white ynaf hunt; all those hysterical foreign students with their St Vitus cunts; poor poor self-depilating Mel. Can any of them look to him for recompense? Is there any way he can make amends? Yes. Tonight he will give himself to Clarice as a way of saying sorry to the lot of them. All for one and one for all. If one cunt is every cunt, then he has it in his power to kiss that long continuum of sad girls better, doesn’t he? — down on your knees, Frank, tongue out, for one last all-embracing act of lingual expiation.

‘Look, I can see you’re busy,’ he whispers to Clarice. ‘Is there any chance I can see you tonight?’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘The Poldark.’

She whistles through her teeth. The Poldark’s always difficult because Elkin’s always there. Stupid of Frank. He should have remembered. And besides, everyone knows her at The Poldark. She can’t just slip upstairs and slip back down again, fatter by however much Frank pumps into her, not in The Poldark.

Obstacles. But only obstacles. It comes back to Frank, on a warm tide of fond and forgotten pleasure, how wonderful it is to be in the company of a woman for whom there are only obstacles, never compunctions.

Compunctions lead invariably to a power struggle. Argument. Persuasion. Rhetoric. Whereas an obstacle is a partnership thing. A mere hindrance you can overcome together. Which they do. She will slip out of the flat. Late. After twelve. Elkin won’t hear a thing. He’ll be out cold, snoring through his beard. Height of the season fatigue compounded by extreme emmet exasperation. But she won’t risk The Poldark. She’ll meet him up on Deadman’s Point. Say, twelve-thirty. By the bench. Just watch your step. There’ll be a moon, but watch your step anyway.

Frank knows better than to ring Mel on his mobile and say, ‘Guess where I’m off to tonight.’

But it crosses his mind.

Now he understands what Mel means when she complains about the noise he makes. If there were anyone he could complain to, he’ d be complaining about the noise he makes. He can’t hear himself scheme or regret, he can’t hear his own counsel, he can’t even hear himself think twice, above the boom of his agitation.

How to get through to midnight plus thirty? See the sea? No, the sea must not be pre-empted; the sea is for tonight. Lunch? Crap on a paper plate. Crap with chips. No again. If he eats he will drink, and what if drink affects his enthusiasm for Clarice? Fortunately he has some crap-watching obligations to attend to. They’ll take care of the afternoon at least. Where would a man be without his work?

He returns to his room, stretches out on the Iron Maiden, which is what The Poldark means by a single bed, and surfs the daytime telly. On every channel a twenty-two-stone woman is being reunited with the child she abandoned at birth. The child too is now a twenty-two stoner. So it’s true what they say: it’s in the genes.

The cameras go gloating over the ruined features of the studio audience. Not a mouth that’s still. Not a chap that hasn’t fallen. Faces like messed-up jigsaw puzzles, every one of them. Frank’s too. He’d like to dry his tears but he is afraid that if he puts his hand to his face he’ll find his oesophagus where his eyes should be.

He can’t go on watching. He is overcome with grief and guilt, and therefore self-disgust. He is supposed to be a critic not a person. But he knows that if he switches off he’ll only be swapping one sort of agitation for another. And at least what’s on the box is impersonal. Species-shlock. The mess we’re all in together. As opposed to the mess he’s individually cooking up for himself In about … how many hours …?

Why is he so tense? What is he doing indulging such agonies of anticipation. It’s only Clarice, for God’s sake. An old family friend.

Treachery, is that it? Going behind Mel’s back?

No. He’s done treachery. Besides which, he’s a free agent. You can’t go behind the back of someone who’s denied you her front. (And might be granting it to someone else, newer, younger, nicer, quieter.)

Going solo then, is that it? Going solo where previously he’d gone à deux?

No. He’s done solo, too. Slipped in while Mel had her face averted. Only the once, but he’s done it.

That only leaves the dick. Following the dictates of the dick, one last time?

Forget it. The dick no longer dictates to him. In so far as the dick is in the picture, he dictates to it.

So why the breathlessness?

Why?

He falls asleep with the crap still churning. Out like a baby; one minute taking no shit, the next taking whatever his unconscious throws at him. He’ll be lucky, the state he’s in, not to be sucking off Kurt again. When he awakes it is evening. He can hear the bar going. The laughter of locals. Virna expostulating. A Ceilidh band.

He carries his soap and towel down the passage, showers, shaves, sighs, and goes downstairs. Elkin is nodding in his corner, snapping the hinged lid of his pewter tankard in time to the music. He enjoys a Ceilidh band. Virna less so. A band — any band — takes from the attention she is here to receive. She is wearing a purple satin shimmer suit to go with her complexion and raises one leg behind whenever a man kisses her. Strictly according to the Miss Manners Book for Wayward Bodmin Matrons. Mel would be proud to see her still going strong. It’s all about when you time your run. Mel and her friends tore the field apart in their early days. Now they sit dried out in the knacker’s yard, extruding their colons, preparing to become dog meat. While Virna, who kept her ankles together until she was fifty, is moist and full of running.

She espies Frank and calls him over. Frank’s here. ‘Lo Frank. All right? A drink for Frank. He hesitates. Does drink improve him or deplete him? He can’t remember. That’s how long it’s been since he had a midnight cliff date to keep.

He asks for water but doesn’t drink it. He doesn’t want to be peeing into the sea all night.

The Ceilidh band is the usual baffling mix of pixie men in frayed cardigans and woolly hats, and beautiful strong-jawed women with perfect teeth. The men thump timbrels with knobbly sticks. The women raise faerie pipes to their lips. And blow. Back in their caravans the beautiful strong-jawed women submit to the unwashed knobbly men and have their babies. Why?

One of the tympanists reminds Frank of Hamish. Cheltenham Hamish. His maybe son. He has a similar way of hugging his chest, between tunes. And is studded and padlocked in all the same places. Funny how quickly that adventure in paternity came and went. D’s fault, strictly speaking. It was she who put the case, from the available information, for everything being domestically comme il faut with the Brylls. Kurt, Liz, Hamish — and they all lived happily ever after. Very well, then. Who is Frank to worry, one way or another? Obviously, he is not the fathering kind. If he was the fathering kind he’d have fathered above board ages ago. He sees it now. There’s an Einsteinian dimension to it. It is all about the way you regard your dick in time. Fatherers choose to have the dick over and done with. Been and gone. Dick — seed — child. Job finished. Non-fatherers, amongst whom Frank must from this day hence number himself, are more forward looking. They are not ready yet for consequences. Time is curved, so they may yet fuck themselves back into their own boyhood, never mind Hamish’s. Now’s then and then’s now. The game is still afoot.