Howard Jacobson: J

He did, however, have his own bench. Not officially. It didn’t have his name on it, but it was respected by the villagers of Port Reuben as they might have respected a wall against which the village idiot kicked his heels. Coco sits here. The silly bleeder.

They didn’t think he was simple-minded. If anything they thought him a little too clever. But there are times in the history of humanity when cleverness might as well be simplicity.

At this hour, and especially at this season, when visitors were infrequent, he usually had the cliffs and the sea that went nowhere to himself. Sometimes Densdell Kroplik, his closest neighbour, would venture out of the reclaimed cowshed he called his bachelor pad and join Kevern briefly on the bench to complain, in the manner of a prophet without honour in his own country, about the madness of the world, the sunken condition of the village, and, by way of proof of both — for he was a self-published chronicler of the times and of this place — his plummeting sales figures. An itinerant barber and professional local, he policed the cliffs and public houses of Port Reuben, barring it to interlopers with his eyes, dressing like a landowner, a fisherman, a farmer, or a fool, depending on what clothes were uppermost on the pile on his floor — sometimes dressing like all of them at once — interposing his tuberous frame between Port Reuben and outside influence. Not so much the gatekeeper, Densdell Kroplik, as the gate. Though history, as another form of over-cherishing the past, was discouraged, he got away with being unofficial custodian of Port Reuben’s secrets and teller of its tales, by keeping the narrative short and sweet — certainly shorter and sweeter than his conversation which, especially when he was cutting hair, boiled like the sea. Port Reuben, originally Ludgvennok, had once been an impregnable fortress of the old ways, and now it wasn’t. THE END. This was the essence of Densdell Kroplik’s A Brief History of Port Reuben , with a few maps and line drawings, done in his hand, and a number of comical footnotes, citing himself, thrown in.

No more, strictly speaking, than a pamphlet for visitors he would rather have stayed away, A Brief History of Port Reuben was for sale by the till in every tourist shop. What few tourists there were bought it with their fudge. But for its author it stood between prosperity and ruination, and by that he meant the village’s no less than his own. He checked his outlets every day to see how many had been sold, topping up stocks with signed copies from a sinisterly bulging rucksack that also contained combs, scissors, clippers, and shampoos and conditioners made to a secret formula from heather and thistles and wild flowers that grew in his scruffy clifftop garden. This he lugged, with exaggerated effort, as though making a sacrifice of his health to humanity, from shop to shop. Rather than have him engage them in conversation about his sales, which he never considered satisfactory, the shopkeepers kept out of his way, allowing him to load as many of his pamphlets on them as he thought appropriate. A number of them even bought multiple copies for themselves. They did as birthday presents to relations they didn’t like. Anything not to have him fulminating against the bastardisation of the times in their shops, blowing out his weather-beaten cheeks, pulling at his knotted polka-dot neckerchief in sarcastic rage, as though that was all that kept his head attached to his body.

On some mornings, in return for the opportunity to rattle on, Densdell would shave Kevern free of charge. Afraid for his throat — because he was sure Densdell saw him as the incarnate proof, if not the prime cause, of Port Reuben’s ruin — Kevern made noises of assent to everything he said. But he understood little of it. Once his razor was out, Densdell Kroplik gave up all pretence of speaking a language they shared. He dropped into a dialect that was older and wilder than the cliffs, coughing up sounds as though they were curses, using words Kevern had never heard before in his life and which he believed, half the time, did not actually exist. Rather than make an effort to decipher any of it, he would concentrate on the idea of the wind picking up the invisible hairs Densdell barbered from him, and spiralling them out to sea in clusters, like dandelion spores.

Little by little the sea claiming him.

This morning, to Kevern’s relief, Densdell Kroplik didn’t put in an appearance, so he could sit and fret without company. The very seagulls, smelling his anxiety, kept their distance.

He was a tall, skinny, golden-mopped man (though his hair was thinning now), who moved as though apologetic of his height. He was considered, for all his strangeness, to have kind eyes. He unwound himself on to the bench and looked up at the sky. ‘ esus Christ!’ he exclaimed, the moment he was comfortable, for no other reason than to pit his voice against those he heard in his head.

Better a voice he could control than a voice he couldn’t. He was no visionary, but there were times when he would mistake the sound of a seabird or the distant laughter of fishermen — he didn’t doubt it was a mistake — for a cry for help. ‘Kevern!’ he thought he heard. The two syllables pronounced with equal lack of emphasis. His dead mother’s voice. A sick woman’s voice, anyway. Quavering and reproachful, having to make itself heard above a jealous, jostling multitude of cries, detached from the person to whom it had belonged. ‘Key-vern!’

He hadn’t been close to his mother so he guessed this was a trick of longing. He would have liked her to be calling him.

But he recognised a danger in granting this primacy to his imagination: would he know the difference if one day someone really did cry out for his help?

He was not happy, but he was as happy here in his unhappiness, he accepted, as he was ever going to be. The sea confers a grandeur on the smallness of man’s dissatisfactions, and Kevern Cohen gratefully accepted the compliment, knowing that his dissatisfactions were no bigger than most men’s — loneliness and sense of lost direction (or was it the sense of never having had direction?) — of early-onset middle age. Nothing more. Like his father before him, and he had felt a deeper bond to his father than to his mother, though that wasn’t saying much, he turned and carved wood for a living — spindles, newels, candlesticks, bowls, lovespoons for the tourist industry which he sold in local shops — and turning wood was a repetitive and tedious business. He had no family alive, no uncles, nieces, cousins, which was unusual in this part of the world where everyone was as an arm joined to one giant octopus. Kevern was joined to no one. He had no one to love or be loved by. Though this was to a degree occupational — like the moon, a woodturner turns alone — he accepted that it was largely a fault of character. He was lonely because he didn’t take or make calls on his utility phone, because he was a neglectful friend, and, worse, an easily dismayed, over-reflective lover, and because he was forty.

Falling in love was something he did from time to time, but he was never able to stay in love or keep a woman in love with him. Nothing dramatic happened. There were no clifftop fallings-out. Compared to the violence with which other couples publicly shredded one another in Port Reuben, his courtships — for they were rarely more than that — came to an end with exemplary courtesy on both sides. They dissolved, that was the best way of putting it, they gradually came apart like a cardboard box that had been left out in the rain. Just occasionally a woman told him he was too serious, hard-going, intense, detached, and maybe a bit prickly. And then shook his hand. He recognised prickly. He was spiny, like a hedgehog, yes. The latest casualty of this spininess was an embryo-affair that had given greater promise than usual of relieving the lonely tedium of his life, and perhaps even bringing him some content. Ailinn Solomons was a wild-haired, quiveringly delicate beauty with a fluttering heart from a northern island village more remote and rugged even than Port Reuben. She had come south with an older companion whom Kevern took to be her aunt, the latter having been left a property in a wet but paradisal valley called, felicitously, Paradise Valley.