Howard Jacobson - J

OPERATION ISHMAEL.

‘We should read it together,’ she suggested when Kevern told her he could remember little of it beyond Ahab and the whale and of course OPERATION ISHMAEL. ‘It’s my most favourite book in the world,’ she told him. ‘It’s the story of my life.’

‘You’ve been hunting a great white whale? Could that have been me, perhaps?’

She kissed him absent-mindedly, as though he were a child that needed humouring. Her brow was furrowed. ‘It wasn’t Ahab I identified with, you fool,’ she said. ‘That’s a man thing. I took the side of the whale.’

‘Don’t worry, men do the same. The whale is more noble than the whaler.’

‘But I bet you don’t wake to the knowledge that you’re the whale.’

‘Are you telling me you do? Is that where you’ve been all night, swimming away from the madness of Ahab? No wonder you look exhausted.’

‘I don’t know what I’ve been doing all night, but it’s a pretty good description of what I do all day.’

How serious was she?

‘All day? Truly?’

She paused. ‘Well what am I signing up for if I say “truly”? If you’re asking me if I actually hear the oars of the longboats coming after me, then no. But when people describe having the wind at their back it’s a sensation of freedom I don’t recognise. An unthreatening, invigorating space behind me? — no, I don’t ever have the luxury of that. There might be nothing there when I turn around, but it isn’t a beneficent nothing. Nothing good propels me. But I call it a good day when I turn around and at least don’t see anything bad.’

He couldn’t stop himself taking this personally. Wasn’t he the wind at her back? Wasn’t he a beneficent force? ‘I can’t bear to think,’ he said, ‘that you get no relief from this.’

‘Oh, I get relief. I get relief with you. But that’s the most dangerous time because it means I’ve forgotten to be on guard. You remember that description of the nursing whales, “serenely revelling in dalliance and delight”?’

He didn’t. He wondered whether she was intending to quote the entire novel to him in small gobbets. Something — and this he did remember — that his father had done when he was small. Not Moby-Dick — other, darker, more sardonic books. Until his mother had intervened. ‘What are you trying to do to the boy?’ he had heard her ask. ‘Make him you?’ Shortly after which his father locked his books away.

‘Well, whenever I feel anything of that sort,’ she went on, ‘whenever I feel calm, at rest, loving and being loved — as I do now — I feel I must be in danger. In my universe I don’t know how else to account for being loved. Don’t kiss me, I used to say to Mairead when she tucked me up in bed at night. I won’t be able to sleep. If you kiss me something terrible will follow. Hendrie wanted to send me to a psychiatrist. Or better still, back to the children’s home. Mairead said no. She believed the children’s home was to blame. She was convinced that something terrible must have been done to me there.’

‘And had it, do you think?’

‘Oh God, you and my mother. Something terrible’s been done to everybody everywhere. Where’s the point of hunting down the specifics? Anyway, I think you can tell when a terror has an origin in a particular event. You might not have a name for it but you can date it. A five-year terror, a ten-year terror. . This is a thousand-year terror.’

He wondered if she overdid the retrospective panic. If she overdramatised herself. Like him. ‘A thousand years is a long time to have been hunted by a one-legged nut, Ailinn.’

‘You can make fun of me if you like. I know how crazy it must sound. But it’s as though it’s not just me, as I am now, or as I was the day before yesterday, who’s always running. It’s an earlier me. Don’t laugh. You’re just as barmy in your own way. But it feels like a sort of predestiny — as though I was born in flight. Which I suppose I could have been. It’s a pity my real parents aren’t around to ask.’

Yes, she overwrote her story. But he loved her. Maybe overloved her. ‘We could try to find them,’ he said.

‘Don’t be banal,’ she came back sharply, thinking she would have to watch his solicitousness.

He shrank from her asperity. But he had one more question. What he feared when he knelt to check his letter box for the umpteenth time had no features. No person rose up before him. He could weigh the reason for his precautions but he could not picture it. She, though, had Ahab. Was that a way of speaking or did she actually see the man? ‘Is he Ahab in the flesh that’s coming for you—’

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Did I say he was “coming for me”? Sounds a bit like waiting for Mairead and Hendrie, doesn’t it? Was I waiting for them to “come for me”? You must think my psychology is pathetic, alternating hopes and terrors based on puns—’

‘I don’t,’ he said, afraid that they had begun to judge each other. ‘Your psychology is your psychology, therefore I love it. But all I was going to ask was whether Ahab is a generalised idea for you or you actually picture him coming at you with his lampoon.’

‘ Lampoon ?’

‘Slip of the tongue. You’ve been making me nervous. Harpoon .’

She stared at him. ‘You call that a slip?’

‘Why, what would you call it?’

‘A searchlight into your soul.’

He looked annoyed. ‘I let you off your pun,’ he said.

She kissed him. ‘Yes, you did. But we aren’t in a competition, are we, and I’m not making fun of you. It’s just that this slip is so you.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, it’s your fear of mockery, isn’t it. Your fear of anyone knowing you well enough to poke fun at you.’

She had him here. He had only to deny the justice of the charge to prove it. Touchy? Me?

She had him another way too. Wasn’t he her mentor in the matter of a sense of humour? Hadn’t he, when she’d been upset with him for teasing her about her thick ankles, lectured her about the nature of a joke? So how much easier-going was he when the joke was on him?

They were in this together, it seemed to her. Skin as fine as parchment, the pair of them. Pride a pin could prick. Hearts that burst when either looked with love at the other.

He could see what she was thinking but decided to be flattered that she offered to penetrate him so deeply. It proved she found him interesting and cared about him.

He excused himself to take a shower. Though he showered frequently, the sounds he made the moment he turned on the water — groans of release (or was it remission?), sighs of deliverance, gaspings deep enough, she feared, to shake his heart out of his chest — suggested it was either the first shower he had ever experienced or the last he would ever enjoy. She had wondered, at the beginning, whether it were some private sexual ritual, demeaning to her, but later she would sometimes shower with him and he made exactly the same noises then. She couldn’t explain it to herself. A shower was just a shower. Why the magnitude of his surrender to it? It could have been his death, so thunderous were his exhalations. Or it could have been his birth.

She was relieved when he stepped back out into the bedroom, dripping like a seal. He appeared exhausted.

‘There will be more, you know,’ she said.

‘More what?’

‘More showers.’

He expected her to say ‘More life’.

‘You never know what there will be more of,’ he said, ‘but that’s certainly more than enough about me and who I am and what I’m in flight from. We began this conversation discussing whales and you — the least whale-like creature I have ever seen.’