Howard Jacobson - J

His mouth must have moved because Kroplik asked him what he’d said. In for a penny, in for a pound, Kevern decided, taking a leaf out of Ailinn’s book. ‘I said, “Up yours.” I was repeating what you said to me in the pub last night.’

The barber rubbed his face with his hand. ‘Yeah, I sayz that sometimes,’ he conceded. ‘And a lot worse when the mood takes me.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Kevern said.

‘Like khidg de vey. If you knowz what that means.’

Kevern nodded, saying nothing. It was a way of getting through life: nodding and saying nothing.

‘You don’t know, though, do you,’ Densdell Kroplik went on, enjoying his own shrewdness. ‘But I’ll give yerz a guess.’

‘No doubt it means something like go fuck yourself.’

Kroplik punched the air. ‘We’ll make a local of yerz yet. Go fuck yerzelf is spot on.’

‘I didn’t bring up your abusive language to me last night so you could abuse me further,’ Kevern said. He heard how pious he sounded but there was no going back now. ‘I’d rather not be spoken to like that,’ he went on.

‘Oh, you’d rather not .’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘Pog mo hoin.’

‘Don’t tell me. . Your mother’s a fucker of pigs.’

‘Close, close. Kiss my arze.’

‘You are a mine of indispensable information,’ Kevern said, getting up from the bench.

‘That’s what I’m paid to be. Do you know who the first person was to say pog mo hoin in these parts?’

‘You.’

‘The first person I sayz.’

‘No idea. I wouldn’t have been around.’

‘No, that you wouldn’t. So I’ll inform yerz. The giant Hellfellen. That’s how he kept strangers out. He stood on this very cliff, right where you’re standing now, made a trumpet of hiz fist, stuck it in hiz backside and blew the words “kiss my arze” through it, so loud they could hear it three counties away, and you had to have a very good reason to come here after that.’

Kevern was not a folklore man. Mythology, with its uncouth half-men, half-animals, frightened him. And he hated talk of giants. Especially those who used bad language. If there were going to be gods he wanted them to be supreme spiritual beings who didn’t fart, who employed chaste speech and otherwise kept themselves invisible.

‘We’ve always known how to extend a warm welcome down here, that’s for sure,’ he said.

‘ We ?’ Kroplik made a trumpet of his own fist and belched a little laugh through it. ‘Well yes, in point of fact we do.’

‘So when you tell me to go fuck myself you intend nothing but friendliness by it.’

‘Nothing whatsoever, Mister Master Kevern Cohen. Kiss my arze the same. I’m being brotherly, and that’s the shape of it. And to prove it I’ll give you a free shave.’

On this occasion Mister Master Kevern Cohen declined. ‘Pog mo hoin,’ he thought about saying, but didn’t.

His detestation of swearing amounted almost to an illness. At school, although Latin wasn’t taught, one of his classmates told him that the Latin for go fuck yourself was futue te ipsum which, for all that it sounded nicer, still didn’t sound nice enough. Kiss my arse the same. It wasn’t only that he didn’t want to kiss anyone or have anyone kiss him there — least of all those to whom it would have been most appropriate to say it — he recoiled from the sound of the word. Arse ! Even cleansed of Kroplik’s brute enunciation it made the body a site of loathing. Swearing was an act of violence to others and an act of ugliness to oneself. It had no place in him.

With one exception he had never heard either his mother or his father swear. The exception — single in type but manifold in application — was his father’s deployment of the hissing prefix PISS before words denoting what he most deplored. As, for example, his transliteration of WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED into the raging, estless est-speak of THE GREAT PISSASTER or THE PISSFORTUNE TO END ALL PISSFORTUNES or simply THE PISSASTROPHE. Accompanied always by a small, self-satisfied whinny of triumph, as though putting PISS before a word was a blow struck for freedom, followed just as invariably by a stern warning to Kevern never to put a PISS before a word himself, not in private, and definitely not in public.

Otherwise the worst his father ever let drop in his hearing was ‘I think I’ve forgotten to rumple the bloody hall carpet.’

And even for that his wife reproved him. ‘Howel! Not in front of the boy.’

It was something more than distaste for bad language. It was as though they had taken an oath, as though the enterprise that was their life together — their life together as the parents of him — depended on their keeping that oath.

They were elderly parents — that explained something. Elderly in years in his father’s case, elderly in spirit in his mother’s. And this made them especially solicitous to him, watching and remorseful, as though they needed to make it up to him for being the age they were, or the age they felt they were. At the end of his life his father had admitted to a mistake. ‘We would have done better by you had we let you be more like the rest of them,’ he said. ‘We wanted to preserve you but we went about it the wrong way. May God forgive me.’

His mother had died a month earlier. She had been dying almost as long as he’d known her, so her exit was expected, though the means of it was not. In circumstances that could not be explained she had suffered multiple burns while taking a short walk only yards from the cottage. As she didn’t smoke she had no use for matches. The day was not hot. There was no naked flame in the vicinity. Either someone had set fire to her — in which event she would surely, since she remained conscious, have pointed a finger of blame — or she had combusted spontaneously — and what counted against that theory was that her torso was not burned, only her extremities. She lay quietly on her bed for three days without complaining and seemingly not in pain. Her final words were ‘At last.’

But his father died — aged eighty though looking older — in a slow burn of ineffective rage. On the faces of some old men the flesh sags from lack of expressive exercise, the feeling man behind the skin having no more use for it; but on his father’s it grew tighter with approaching death as though the skull beneath could not control its grimaces. On his last night he asked Kevern to dig out an ancient music system he kept hidden under the stairs in a box marked Private Property and got him to play the blind soul singer Ray Charles singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ over and over. He shook his fists while it was playing, though Kevern couldn’t tell whether at him, at Ray Charles, or at the cruel irony of things. ‘What a oke,’ his father said. ‘What a oke that is.’

He had to unclench his father’s fingers when the bitter light finally went out of him.

He let the music go on playing.

Kevern had always known about the box marked Private Property. Its futility saddened him. Would the words Private Property deter burglars? Or were they meant to deter him and his mother? What he hadn’t known was how many more boxes marked Private Property — some of them cardboard and easy to get into, others made of metal and fitted with locks, but all of them numbered — his father had secreted under his bed, on the top of the wardrobe, in the attic, in his workshop. Hoarding was proscribed by universal consent — no law, you just knew you shouldn’t do it — but he didn’t think this could be called hoarding exactly. Hoarding, surely, was random and disorganised, the outward manifestation of a disordered personality. His father’s boxes hinted at a careful, systematic, if overly secretive mind. But he’d read that people who kept things, whether they ordered them or they didn’t, were afraid above all of loss — the fear of losing their things standing in for their fear of losing something else: love, happiness, their lives. Well he didn’t need proof that his father was a frightened man. The only question was what he had all along been so frightened of.