Howard Jacobson: Pussy

Fracassus is an independent child with an original mind. His thoughts, we are pleased to report, are unhampered by that dependence on received opinion which we often see to be the price paid by those who are overly articulate, language-crammed or well-read. Since words come to us infected by assumptions of which even the most self-conscious can remain unaware, the more disengaged from language a man is, the more connected to his own heart we can rely on him to be.

The chief architect of this argument had been Dr Cobalt, the only woman on the team of Fracassus’s tutors. A graduate of three universities and holding degrees in two soft subject and one middlingly-hard, Dr Cobalt was tall and slender like a snowy egret and made flustered men think longingly of the cool and even icy climates of the past. She had been the Grand Duke’s choice. Being masculinist by inclination – a hunter before he was strong enough to shoulder a rifle, a boxer before a glove tiny enough for his little fist could be found – Fracassus, his father believed, would surely benefit from contact with her gentler virtues. They all would. The Grand Duke, as evidenced by his taste in domestic architecture, was epithetical by nature. And everything about Yoni Cobalt suggested adjectives. She had long hair, big eyes, full breasts, and wore high heels. And every adjective cried out for an adverb. She had very long hair, very big eyes, very full breasts, and wore very high heels. That she could have been a very successful catwalk model or children’s television presenter made her decision to sacrifice herself to the bringing up of Fracassus the more estimable. Her senior on the tutorial staff, Dr Strowheim, commended her in moderation to the Grand Duke and Duchess, but repeated as though it were his own her argument that their son was enriched by what he didn’t know.

Whether Dr Cobalt was right to have mentioned to him and other members of the teaching staff that the Prince seemed more interested in looking up her skirt than in learning the difference between an active and a passive verb, was another matter. ‘It would depend,’ Dr Strowheim had jested, but with a distinct note of caution, ‘on how actively he looked.’

‘Pretty actively,’ Dr Cobalt said.

‘But it was only a look?’

‘As opposed to what?’

‘As opposed to a more physical exploration.’

‘It was only a look, though the last time he looked I did fear that it presaged—’

‘Then let’s say it was passive,’ the Doctor put in finally.

It did occur to him to suggest she wear trousers in the future, but trousers on women were implicitly banned in the Palace – the Grand Duchess was known not to own a pair – and, if he were to be honest about it, he would have missed the skirt himself.

Dr Cobalt slept badly as a rule, but on the night following her ingenious submission to the Grand Duke and Duchess that their son was brilliant by virtue of all that made him stupid, she didn’t sleep at all. The night was hot – that had something to do with it. There were mosquitoes in January, a month in which, once upon a time, it would have snowed. And her basement apartment in Origen Lower Mansions, which abutted the Great North Wall of the Republic, was stuffy and noisy. The air conditioning, which the management refused to service because there was no need of air-conditioning in winter, spluttered and wheezed. There was a low-level of continuous noise, too, from small protest groups camped outside the Mansions, voicing their entitlements, though it wasn’t always clear what they felt entitled to. Somewhere to live, seemed to be the sum of it. Whatever they could lay their hands on, Brightstar said. Promote rights instead of duties and this was the result. But it wasn’t the mosquitoes or the sound of people exercising their entitlement to feel entitled that kept her awake. It was guilt. She believed she’d failed in her pedagogic duties, failed the boy, failed his parents, and failed her sex. The words prostitute and whore had continued to make appearances in his conversation, though never in a context that rendered either of them appropriate. Otherwise wordless, he seemed to want to say these words simply for the sake of saying them, as though he heard an unholy music in them. Shouldn’t she, for his sake and, even more, for women’s, tackle him on this?

‘You can put your computer away, Your Highness,’ she told him one morning soon after her sleepless night, ‘and your play pad and your phones. Today we are going to have a game of synonyms.’

‘How do you play that?’

‘I’m going to give you a word and you’re going to give me another word that means the same. So if I say lesson…’

‘I say boring.’

‘Well, that’s more what you think of a lesson than another word for lesson. But let’s continue. So, if I say teacher…’

‘I say failure.’

If he were a man I’d throw burning tea into his face, Dr Cobalt thought. But she had to go on. Bait the line. Flick the rod. Reel him in. ‘Ok, so now let’s try woman.’

‘Ah no, not woman,’ he boomed. He knew the loudness of his voice irritated Dr Cobalt. Some mornings she had to get up in the middle of a lesson to take a pill. He gave her migraines. Though he liked looking up Dr Cobalt’s skirt he didn’t much like the rest of her. Behind her back he mimicked the way she put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes when his volume was too much at her. Once he’d seen a film on television in which a black servant, wanting to escape a telling-off, had run out of the kitchen with her apron over her head. He combined Dr Cobalt and the black servant in a routine that would have made him split his sides had he been capable of even callous merriment. ‘Oh, lordy, lordy,’ Dr Cobalt cried, lifting her skirts and covering her face with them. ‘Oh, lordy, lordy.’

Fracassus wished he had a friend to share this with. A girl, preferably taller than him, with custard yellow hair waterfalling down her back and false breasts, who would run around the room with him, mimicking Dr Cobalt, with her skirts over her head.

‘I’m waiting,’ Dr Cobalt continued. ‘Woman…’

He tilted his head and pushed his jaw out, something else he knew she found distasteful. It was surprising, even to himself, how much he knew about Dr Cobalt’s like and dislikes. He’d watched men on television panel shows expertly pressing women’s buttons. It wasn’t hard. You just had to know which faces to pull while they were speaking. ‘Girl,’ he said.

‘Anything else?’

‘Lordy, lordy.’

‘Lordy, lordy?’

‘Lordy lordy, Miss Scarlet.’

‘You’ve lost me there. Explain.’

‘Can’t.’

‘Why is it amusing you?’

‘You remind me, that’s all?’

‘I remind you of whom?’

He shrugged and dropped a pencil under the table.

Dr Cobalt knew what that was about. He was always dropping pencils under the table. ‘You can leave it there this time,’ she said. ‘Keep going. Another word for woman…’

She waited. And waited. Was he playing her? Had he rumbled her game? Come on, she thought. Come to momma. And at last he did.

‘Prostitute.’

‘Interesting. I believe I’ve heard you use that word before. But it doesn’t mean woman does it? A woman can be a prostitute but not every woman is a prostitute.’

‘Every prostitute is a woman, though.’

‘Well even that’s not true. You can have a male prostitute.’

‘Like a faggot?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Like what then?

‘We’ll come back to male prostitutes. Let’s stay with the women for now. What other words for prostitute do you know?’