Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

This was, after all, why he had come to the spa town. Benjamin was in love. He was in love, and was here to receive advice from Haffner.

So he talked about hip hop. To Benji, this seemed logical.

As he ate, Benjamin described the curious fact that his two favourite songs, at this moment, were both about terror: the French hip-hop song called 'Darkness', and the French hip-hop song called 'Mourir 1000 fois', with its dark first line: in which the rapper told his terrified audience about his fears of death, in which the chorus simply stated that existence was punishment. They entranced Benji with their myth of the grand: the imagination of disaster. This was why he so loved the rappers from Marseilles: a city he had never been to; a city which, if he were honest, scared him with its reputation for the brutal.

Everything in Benjamin's life now seemed so fraught with significance. As if, thought Benji, he could destroy his whole life with one wrong decision.

He hazarded this to Haffner. Haffner thought it was unlikely that a life could be destroyed. It would take more than one wrong decision for that. Then he reached for the giant bottle of beer in front of him, and poured an accidentally overfoaming glass.

The restaurant advertised itself as Chinese. In its provenance, the food perhaps tended more towards the Vietnamese than the Chinese. There were moments when it was nothing but Thai. But no one here was concerned with the detail of origins: not the sullen Slavic waiters, the absent owners. Haffner, however, didn't care. So long as the effect was Oriental, then Haffner was happy. It possessed an aquarium in which melancholic fish hid themselves beneath mossy banks, munching sand. It seemed Oriental enough for Haffner.

In this setting, Haffner sat and listened to his grandson: his anxious grandson. He was, thought Haffner, the kind of kid who was so vulnerable to women that he'd probably get aroused just by the naked mannequins in shop windows, their robotic defenceless arms. Their invisible nipples and missing pubic hair, like some statue of Venus found beneath the tarmac of a Roman street.

But I think that Haffner could have gone further than this. There was so much to worry about, when considering the character of Benji.

Benji was the solitary only child. At fourteen he threw up in a girl's toilet after an evening of drinking whisky and was pleased at the suavity of his aim until he found out the next day that they had found sick everywhere. He used to listen to Liverpool matches on his clock radio in the dark under his Tottenham Hotspur duvet, for he was fickle. The first girl he kissed frightened him. Aged nine, he used to rehearse cricket strokes with a cricket stump and a practice golf ball in his bedroom, while listening to the classic ballad 'Take My Breath Away' on repeat. Like Haffner, the songs were always his downfall. He listened to 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' when Esmond drove him to the cricket matches.

Nothing in Benjamin's early youth had poise, or cool. Instead of cool, the miniature Benjamin hoarded Haffner's anecdotes. The stories of Haffner formed Benji's inheritance.

He treasured a portable Joe Davis snooker table — made on the Gray's Inn Road, in London, and guaranteed to add a touch of fun to family occasions — which he had found in Haffner's loft. One ball, the pink, was still in the centre right pocket, slung in the netting. It nestled there, solidly. Benjamin studied the faint lines printed on the baize. There were shiny trails of turquoise chalk. There was a line horizontally printed across the table, a little below the top. From this, a semicircle arched and settled. It reminded Benjamin of a soccer pitch. It was like a magnified penalty area. But this was not why Benji loved it. Its instructions, glued to the wooden underframe, were signed, in facsimile, by the great Joe Davis himself. From then on, in bed, with his clock radio beside him, its incensed digital digits flipping luminously and silently, Benjamin would read about Thurston's Billiards Hall in Leicester Square. Because he was romanced. For Haffner was Joe Davis's banker, in the 1950s. One day Joe Davis was in South Africa, at a hotel. He was resting. He was having some time off snooker. But then some guy challenged Joe Davis to a game. This man didn't know Joe Davis was Joe Davis. He thought he was just an ordinary person. It was, Haffner would remind his grandson, before the days of television. Joe Davis tried to refuse. He didn't want to play snooker, on his holiday. But the man was insistent. So Joe Davis played snooker. Naturally, he played with exquisite grace. And his challenger was amazed.

— What are you: Joe Davis or something? he said.

And Joe Davis paused.

— No, he said, but I know the man who sleeps with his missus.

Yes, Benji loved his grandfather: his grand grandfather. He was a romantic. And the romance was all inherited from Haffner.

So Benjamin found himself here: in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of a spa town, in the centre of Europe. And because he was here, he could ask Haffner anything.

— Is it true, said Benji, that you once gave away the Mercedes to someone else?

— No, said Haffner. No, it isn't.

— OK, said Benjamin.

He returned to the more familiar ground.

— This food is good, said Benji: piercing the inflated curve of a chicken dumpling with a chopstick. I mean it's exquisite.

Haffner queried this; the food, he thought, verged on the inedible: like every cuisine in this town. But for a moment Haffner loved him — his progeny with the marvellous appetite.

The problem was, Benji told Haffner, how did he know that this wasn't a craze? Because he was prone to crazes, he knew this. It was just that this didn't feel like a craze. It felt true. What else did he feel but love, thought Benji, when looking at the curve of his girl's breasts, matched yearningly by the imitative curve of his penis in his briefs? But, continued Benjamin, even if it was true, how important was this, in the end? It was only desire. It wasn't everything. So maybe he should return to his summer school, and forget all about her.

Haffner raised an eyebrow.

And he considered how, in the more ordered nineteenth century, the ordinary family judgement was the father on the son. This was how Haffner's life had begun — with Solomon Haffner in judgement. Now that the twentieth century was ending, however, it turned out that there could be something different: the judgement of the grandfather on the grandson. But instead of judging him for his lack of restraint, it was the lack of chutzpah which Haffner found wanting in his descendant. He would have to educate him into courage.

— Let me tell you my story about Palestine, said Haffner.

— No, I know this story, said Benji.

— I haven't started, said Haffner.

— Your Jewish story? said Benjamin.

— I will tell you again, said Haffner.

Having missed the major battle of the war in North Africa, then serving in the liberation of Italy, Haffner had been posted to Palestine. He was twenty-four at the time, he reminded Benji. He was — how old was Benjamin? He was about the same age as Benji was now. In fact, Jerusalem was the setting for his twenty-fourth birthday, on which day he announced he was going to drink twenty-four pink gins. And he did.

His battalion was ordered to keep the peace between the Arabs and the Jews: or, more precisely, between the Arabs and the crazy Russian Zionist Jews.

His people! As if those crazies were his people! What did Haffner have to do with the Orthodox, the serious — complete with dyed sidelocks and dyed caftans, the fringes of their prayer shawls ragged around their waists? In Palestine, Haffner had learned one of his very first truths. To be bohemian you had to be an absolute insider. It was the recent immigrants, the suddenly displaced, who most believed in nations and in boundaries. The ones who believed in a people at all.