Howard Jacobson - J

‘I’m in bits,’ he told her when she put her face up to be kissed.

The hands with which he held her shook. At first she thought it was she who was shaking, but she saw the light dancing in his wedding ring like sun on choppy water. ‘Make me whole again,’ he said, his scraggy beard moving independently of his lips, as though it too was bouncing on a wild, wild sea.

‘That’s a lot to ask of a pupil you’ve only ever given B+ to,’ she said.

He had no sense of the ridiculous and didn’t laugh. He was a folk singer in his spare time and, though they were a long way from any wild, wild sea, sang about fishermen bringing in herrings. The fact that he sometimes brought his guitar to school was another reason Rhoda allowed him to try it on with her. The other girls would be jealous if they found out and Rhoda had every intention of their finding out.

‘I just want you to be yourself,’ he said.

She swivelled her jaw at him. ‘What if I don’t know which of my selves to be?’

‘You don’t have to worry. You’re being the self I care best about now.’

Care best about ! But what she said was, ‘And which self is that?’

‘The good and innocent one.’

‘Ha!’ she snorted. Lacking experience she might have been, but they were in a hotel room drinking cider on the edge of the bed, on the outside of the locked door a frolicsome sign saying LEAVE US ALONE: WE’RE PLAYING, and she knew that while there were many words for what she was being not a one of them was ‘innocent’.

‘Oh yes you are,’ he said, unbuttoning her school shirt. ‘Where there’s no blood, there’s no guilt.’

‘There might be blood,’ she warned him.

He overcame his surprise to smile his saddest folkie’s smile at her. ‘That’s different. Blood shed in the name of love is not like blood shed in the name of hate.’

She wasn’t having any love talk, but she could hardly not ask, ‘How do you know? Have you shed blood in the name of hate?’

He let his long horse face droop lower even than usual. ‘All in good time,’ he said.

He was teasing her, she thought. This was his sexual come-on. I have done such things . . Boys did that but she didn’t expect it of a grown man. She liked him less for it and she hadn’t liked him much to start with. He shouldn’t have supposed she needed him to have terrible secrets. This was terrible secret enough. He was married, her teacher, older than her parents, undressing her, describing the shape of her breasts with his fingers, his touch so intrusively naked he might have been describing them in four-letter words. They were offending against every decency she had been taught.

He thought he guessed what she was thinking. He thought the mention of hate had startled her. But he had guessed wrong. She wanted him to finish a conversation he had started, that was all.

He told her in the end, some three or four visits to the hotel bedroom later. Very suddenly and brutally.

‘You’d have been about ten,’ he said. They were still dressed, looking out of the window on to a bank of air conditioners. Two pigeons were fighting over a crumb of bread that must have been thrown out of a window above theirs. The room had a worn, padded reproduction of the Rokeby Venus for a bedhead. In the days when the economy boomed and nothing yet had HAPPENED this had been an expensively raffish hotel, softly carpeted for high-heeled assignations. It still spoke knowingly of indulgence and love, but with only half a heart. So great a change in only six or seven years! Now a schoolteacher could afford to bring his pupil here.

A scented candle burned. His guitar case stood unopened in a corner. Was he going to sing to her, she wondered. The sign announcing that they were playing so leave them alone was swinging on the door.

She knew what he was referring to. WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED was the thing that happened when she was about ten. She hadn’t known much about it, living too far from any of the centres of conflagration to see anything with her own eyes or hear anything with her own ears. One or two school acquaintances must have been caught up in it because they never showed their faces again, but they hadn’t been close friends so their absence didn’t impinge on her. Otherwise, apart from her form teacher once bursting into tears, and the headmaster banning all mobile phones and personal computers from the school premises, nothing occurred at school to suggest anything was wrong, and at home her parents remained tight-lipped. There was a blackout imposed by her father, no papers allowed into the house and no serious radio or television, but that had hardly bothered Rhoda aged ten. OPERATION ISHMAEL, however, in which she went, in a single bound, from Hinchcliffe to Behrens, could not be accounted for without reference to the turbulence it was devised to quiet, and so, one way or another, Rhoda learnt what she had never been taught. Namely that something unspeakably terrible had happened, if it had.

For me to think about when I’m older, she’d decided.

And now older was what she was.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And. .’

He gathered her into his arms. She didn’t feel as safe there as she imagined she would when it all started. There was something ghostly about him — he was eerily elongated in body as well as face, as though he had grown too much as a consequence of a childhood illness equivalent to those that stopped people growing at all, bony, with a big wet vertical mouth that hung open despite the attempted camouflage of the beard, showing tombstone teeth. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him with the skin stripped from his bones.

Why am I doing this, she asked herself. Why am I here? I don’t even like him.

‘She would have been about the age you are now, had she lived,’ he said.

‘She?’

‘The girl. .’

She waited.

‘The girl I killed.’

‘You killed a girl?’

‘Come to bed,’ he said.

She shook her head. She wasn’t afraid. She just thought he was trying to impress her again. And maybe frighten or arouse her into doing something she didn’t want to do.

‘How do you mean you killed a girl?’

‘How did I do it?’

That wasn’t really her question, but all right, how did he do it?

‘Not with my bare hands if that’s what you think. I left it to others. I stood by and let it happen.’

She released herself. ‘What others?’

‘Does that matter?’

She pulled the face she and all her girlfriends pulled to denote they were talking to a moron. ‘Hello!’ she said. ‘Does that matter ?’

He reached for her cheek. ‘What matters is that I loved and killed for the same reason.’ He paused, waiting for a reaction. Was he expecting her to tell him it was all right. There, there — I forgive you . ‘What attracted me,’ he went on, as though he was working out his motives for the first time, ‘repelled me.’

‘You killed because you were repelled?’

‘No, I killed because I was attracted.’

She wanted to go home now.

‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Please stay.’

Rhoda stared into his ugly wet mouth and remembered a skull that had gone round the class during an anatomy lesson. Its mouth, too, though it had once been wired, fell open when the skull was passed from girl to girl.

‘You mustn’t think I’m going to be violent with you,’ he said.

‘ She probably didn’t think you were going to be violent with her.’

‘I had no choice with her.’

She might only have been a schoolgirl but she knew everyone had a choice. ‘That’s your excuse,’ she said, knotting her tie.

‘No, I’m not making an excuse. It just is what it is. Sometimes you have to do something — you can’t help yourself — you are drawn into it. You will understand when you’re older. You have to destroy to survive. While they live, you can’t. Most times it doesn’t come to that, but when the opportunity presents itself. .’