J

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Business good?’

  ‘I make candlesticks and lovespoons for the tourist industry. There isn’t a fortune in that, but I get by.’

  ‘Why have local people given you the nickname “Coco”?’

  ‘You’d better ask them. But I think it’s ironic. “Coco” was the name of a famous circus clown. It must be evident to you that I am not an entertainer.’

  ‘But you entertain women?’

  Here we go again, Kevern thought. He sighed and walked to the window. Not knowing what else to do with it, he was still carrying Gutkind’s coat over his arm. Though the sea didn’t look wild, the blowhole was busy, fine spray from the great white jet of water catching what there was of sunlight. He thought of Ailinn’s whale and suddenly felt weary. ‘Get the fuck out,’ he wanted to tell the policeman. ‘Get the fuck out of my house.’ If ever there was a time to let go, let rip, let the bad language out of his constricted system, this was it. But he was who he was. Let’s get this over with, he thought. ‘Is this about the blood?’ he asked, not turning his head.

  ‘What blood is that?’

  ‘My blood. Lowenna Morgenstern bit me the night we kissed after the fireworks. She bit me hard. I don’t doubt I was seen afterwards with blood on my shirt. I assume that’s why you wanted to talk to me.’

  ‘You don’t still have that shirt, do you?’

  ‘Well I must have because I haven’t thrown any shirt away in a long time. But I’d be hard pressed to remember which shirt I was wearing that night. And whichever it was, it will have been laundered many times since then.’

  Gutkind made a perfect cupid’s bow of his transgressive lips. He knew why men washed their shirts.

  ‘Oh, come on, Goldberg—’

  ‘Gutkind.’

  Goldberg/Gutkind, Kevern wanted to say, who gives a damn . . .

  ‘Oh come on,’ he said instead, ‘you’re not telling me that laundering my shirts indicates suspicious behaviour?’

  ‘It could be if it was Mrs Morgenstern’s blood and not yours.’

  ‘Aha, and if, having got a taste of spilling her blood once, I couldn’t wait to spill it again.’

  ‘Well that’s a theory, Mr Cohen, and I will give it consideration. But to be honest with you it’s not Mrs Morgenstern’s blood that concerns us right now.’

  ‘So whose is it?’

  ‘Mr Morgenstern’s.’

  ‘Ah, well I’m glad he’s back in the picture. The village gossip mill has had him down as the murderer from day one. He’s already been found guilty and sentenced at the bar of the Friendly Fisherman. All you had to do was find him.’

  ‘You misunderstand. It’s not Mr Morgenstern’s blood at the crime scene I’m talking about. It’s Mr Morgenstern’s blood all over Mr Morgenstern.’

  Kevern shrugged a shrug of only half-surprise. ‘That makes it easier for everyone then, doesn’t it? Husband kills wife and lover and then kills himself. Case closed. Why are you speaking to me?’

  ‘If only it were as simple as that. It would appear that Mr Morgenstern didn’t die by his own hand.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘As you say yourself, Mr Cohen, there’s a lot of anger and frustration out there.’

  ‘You’re telling me Ade Morgenstern’s been murdered now?’

  ‘Well if he didn’t do it to himself – which given the manner of his death he couldn’t – and if it wasn’t natural causes – which it wasn’t – and if we rule out the hand of God – which I think we must – that’s the only supposition I can make.’

  Kevern Cohen shook his head. He couldn’t quite muster horror or even profound shock, but he mustered what he could. ‘Christ, what’s going on in this village?’

  Detective Inspector Gutkind showed Kevern a philosophic expression. As though to say, well isn’t that precisely what I hoped you might be able to answer.

  He didn’t write this in his report, but what Detective Inspector Gutkind felt in his heart was this: ‘Something smells. Maybe not this, but something.’

  ii

  Kevern thought he’d better prepare Ailinn for what she might hear. He had, some months before they’d met, he mustered the honour to tell her, kissed the murdered woman. He knew not to say it was nothing. He couldn’t have it both ways: if he boasted he was no citizen of Snogland, then he couldn’t claim a kiss was nothing. Besides, women didn’t like to hear men say that things they did with their bodies and which ought to involve their emotions were nothing. If it was nothing then why do it; and if it was something then don’t lie about it. But it wasn’t a long kiss and if he hadn’t thought about it much the day after – he wasn’t going to claim he hadn’t thought about it at all – he certainly hadn’t thought about it since he’d been with Ailinn who drove all trace of memory of other kisses from his mind.

  She was disappointed in him. Not angry. Just disappointed. Which was worse.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘if I’ve made you jealous.’

  ‘Jealous?’

  ‘I don’t mean jealous.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  What did he mean? ‘You know,’ he said.

  ‘Was there something between you I should be jealous of?’

  ‘No, no.’ Here it came – in that case why did he bother to kiss her . . .

  ‘What I feel,’ she said, letting him off, ‘is that it would have been nice to go on thinking of you as a man who doesn’t throw kisses around. Who respects himself or at least his mouth more.’

  Kevern tried to think of any man he knew who respected his mouth.

  ‘Well it was no disrespect to you,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t met you. Unless you believe one can demean a person in retrospect.’

  She thought about it for longer than he would have liked. ‘No, no it doesn’t demean me in retrospect,’ she said at last. ‘It demeans you, which reflects on me, and it takes a little from my fantasy . . . but that was always just girlish nonsense anyway. So no, yes, I’m all right about it, and I thank you for being honest with me.’

  Kevern felt he’d been kicked in the stomach. She was no/yes/noing him. Yes, no, she was all right about it, which was the language of compromise and disillusionment. And he had shattered her fantasy, which meant her hope to live a life above the common. He had brought her low with his honesty – honesty being the kindest yes/no word she could find for his being a man like every other.

  A man like Ahab, even. Demoniacally hell-bent on her unhappiness by simple virtue of his being a man. Except that he wasn’t. Yes/no.

  He asked her to make love to him, on his bed with the sheets thrown back and the windows open, not to remove all trace of Lowenna Morgenstern’s kisses from his lips, but to remove all trace of this conversation. She shook her head. It didn’t quite work like that for her. In the open air then. On the cliffs. In Paradise Valley. Let Nature do the job. But she wasn’t quite in the mood for that either. She would walk with him, though. A long bracing walk where they could talk about something else. Look beyond them. Not talk about themselves at all. ‘We are a bit in each other’s heads,’ she said.

  He knew what she meant but the last thing he wanted to do was walk her out of his.

  They walked well together, he thought. Which was a sign of their compatibility. They were always in step. When one put out a hand the other found it immediately. They stopped to look at the same flowers or to admire the same picturesque cottage. They stooped in unison to stroke a cat or pick up litter. Neither started to speak before the other had quite finished, or at the very moment that the other began a sentence. They talked side by side, like instruments in an orchestra. This wasn’t only good manners; it was an instinctive compatibility. Their hearts beat to an identical rhythm.

  Had his incestuous parents felt like this at the beginning, he wondered.

  He laughed, suddenly, for no reason. Threw back his head and laughed at the sky. She didn’t ask him why, she simply threw back her head and did the same. A minute later she seized him by the arm and made him
look at her. ‘This is very dangerous,’ she said.

  ‘You think I don’t know that?’ was his reply.

  He proposed a trip away, a few days’ holiday from this degrading village. Gutkind had not asked him to stay put, so he believed he was no more a suspect than all the other men in the county Lowenna Morgenstern had kissed. He was more worried about what the policeman might write in his report about the furniture.

  They would pack a couple of bags, drive north, find a city where people didn’t know them and weren’t murdering one another, stay in a nice hotel that had no view of the sea, go to a couple of restaurants, maybe take in a film, reconnect with each other after the Morgenstern business, no matter that they hadn’t come apart over it. Ailinn was surprised to discover he owned a car, which he kept under tarpaulin in the public car park. He had never struck her as a car person. Once she saw him drive she realised she was right. ‘You drive so slowly,’ she said, ‘how do you ever get anywhere?’

  ‘Where is there to get?’

  ‘Wherever it is we’re going.’

  He hadn’t told her. He wanted it to be a surprise. To both of them.

  ‘Let’s just drive,’ he said, ‘and stop when we’re tired.’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘I’m tired in anticipation.’

  Was this, he wondered, a play on his having been unfaithful to her in retrospect?

  He stopped the car and looked at her.

  She had a suggestion. ‘Let me drive. At least that way we’ll arrive somewhere.’

  He was worried that she hadn’t driven in a while, that she didn’t know the roads down here, that she wasn’t familiar with the vehicle, that she hadn’t studied the manual.

  ‘A car’s a car, Kevern!’

  Fine by Kevern. He pulled on the hand brake, turned off the engine, and changed seats with her. Not being a car person was one of the ways he had always defined his anomalous masculinity. The men of Port Reuben wanted to kill in their cars; they accelerated when they saw a pedestrian, they revved the engines for the pure aggression of it even when their cars were parked in their garages. Then on Sundays they soaped them as though they were their whores. If they reserved such attention for their cars it was no surprise, Kevern thought, that their wives, the moment they had a drink inside them, were eager to kiss him, a man careless of cars.

  Ailinn drove so fast he had to close his eyes.

  ‘Anyone would think Ahab’s tailing us,’ he said.

  ‘Ahab is tailing us,’ she told him. ‘Ahab’s always tailing us. That’s what Ahab does.’

  It seemed to excite her.

  ‘Couldn’t we, on this occasion at least, just let him overtake us?’

  She pushed her foot harder on the accelerator and wound down the window, letting the wind make her hair fly. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’ she asked.

  Questions, questions . . . Why so many feathers among the splintered furniture and ripped clothes, the broken toys, the smashed plates and fragments of glass, the bricks, the window frames, the pages torn from books holy and profane? Feathers from the mattresses hurled from upper windows, of course, but there are sufficient feathers in this single ruined garden to fill a mattress for every rioter in the city to enjoy the sleep of the righteous on. One feather won’t lie still. It curls, tickling itself, tries to float away but something sticky holds it to the child’s coat to which it has become attached. And where have all the hooks and crowbars appeared from? If the riots broke out spontaneously, how is it that these weapons were so plentifully to hand? Do the citizens of K sleep with crowbars by their beds? They bring them down with gusto, however they came by them, on the head of a man whom others have previously rolled in a ditch of mud and blood and feathers. A ritual bath. They rolled him and then wrung him out like a rag. The sounds of bones cracking and cries for help mingle with the furious triumphant shouts of murderers and the laughter of onlookers. Which prompts another question: when is wringing a man out like a rag funny?

  SEVEN

  Clarence Worthing

  i

  ALL WAS NOT well about the heart of Detective Inspector Gofuckyourself. (It wasn’t to be supposed he hadn’t registered Kevern Cohen’s unspoken contempt. He had good ears. He could pick up an unspoken insult from three counties away. So face to face, and knowing nothing of the other’s squeamishness in the matter of obscenities, he was hardly likely to have missed what Kevern wished he would do to himself.)

  He was overworked – that contributed to his malaise. In his lifetime, at least, the county had never seen so much serious crime. Murders, attempted murders, robberies with violence, infidelity with violence, a seething resentment of somebody or something that issued in behaviour it was difficult to quantify but which he described to himself as a breakdown of respect, in particular a breakdown of respect to him.

  He had his theories about the underlying causes but knew to keep them under his hat.

  Home for Gutkind was a small end-of-terrace house in St Eber, an inland town built around the county’s most important china-clay pit. A white dust had long ago settled on every building in St Eber, giving it, though entirely flat and shapeless, an Alpine aspect that the few visitors to the area had always found attractive. Gutkind’s cat Luther, who had been spayed and so had little else to do – ‘Like me,’ Gutkind sometimes thought – rolled around in this dust from morning to night, going from garden to garden to find more. He would be waiting for the detective inspector when he arrived home, his coat powdered as though with icing sugar, his eyelashes as pale as an albino’s, even his tongue white. Gutkind, who had no one else to love, sat him on a newspaper in the kitchen and brushed him down roughly, though he knew that he would be out rolling in someone’s garden again as soon as he had eaten. As with the cat, so with the man. Gutkind showered twice a day, more often than that at weekends when he was home, watching the particles almost reconstitute themselves into clay as they vanished in a grubby whirlpool down the plughole. It was a form of recycling, Gutkind thought, the clay that had coated his hair and skin returning to its original constituency underground. Otherwise he was not a recycling man. Too many of society’s ills were the result of the wrong sort of people with the wrong sort of beliefs finding ways of recycling themselves, no matter how much effort went into their disposal.

  Disposal? Detective Inspector Gutkind was not a brute but he believed in calling a spade a spade.

  And he was not, in the privacy of his own home, however dusty, a man to say he was sorry.

  He had no wife. He had had a wife once, but she had left him soon after they were married. The china clay was one reason she left him, and Gutkind had no desire to move (having to shower so many times a day confirmed his sense of what was wrong with the world), but the other reason she left him was his sense of what was wrong with the world. She discovered for herself what many of her friends had told her – though she hadn’t listened at the time – that life with a man who saw conspiracies everywhere was insupportable. ‘It’s your friends who have put you up to this,’ he said as he watched her packing her bags. She shook her head. ‘It’s your family, then.’ ‘Why can’t it just be me, Eugene?’ she asked. ‘Why can’t it be my decision?’ But he was unable to understand what she was getting at.

  Returning home after interviewing Kevern Cohen – yet another person who showed him scant respect – Detective Inspector Gutkind showered, brushed down his cat, showered again, and heated up a tin of beans. He felt more than usually miffed. If I could put my finger on something, he told himself, just something, I would feel a damned sight better. But whether he meant put his finger on the motivation of a crime, the name of a criminal, why everything was so twisted from its purpose, why his life was so dusty and lonely, why he hated his cat, he couldn’t have said.

  He had to have someone to blame. He was not unusual in that. What divided Homo sapiens from brute creation was the need to apportion responsibility. If a lion went hungry or a chimpan
zee could not find a mate, it was no one’s fault. But from the dawn of time man had been blaming the climate, the terrain, fate, the gods, some other tribe or just some other person. To be a man, as distinct from being a chimpanzee, was to be forever at the mercy of a supernatural entity, a force, a being or a collection of beings, whose only function was to make your life on earth unbearable. And wasn’t this the secret of man’s success: that in chasing dissatisfaction down to its malignant cause he had hit upon the principle, first of religion and then of progress? What was evolution – what was revolution – but the logic of blame in action? What was the pursuit of justice but punishment of the blameworthy?

  And who were the most blameworthy of all? Those whom you had loved.

  When the sentimental blaming mood was on him – and tonight it roared in his ears the way the sea beside which you had once walked with a lover roared in a treasured seashell – he would climb the stairs to his attic, open an old wardrobe in which he stored clothes he no longer wore but for some reason could not bear to throw away, and pull out a faded periodical or two from the dozen or so which hung there on newspaper sticks, exactly as they had once hung in metropolitan cafés of the sort sophisticated town-bred men and women once patronised in order to drink coffee, eat pastries, and stay up to date with prejudiced opinion. Given that Gutkind kept these periodicals because they contained extended ruminations penned by his great-grandfather, Clarence Worthing, they were, strictly speaking, heirlooms, and exceeded the number of heirlooms – though no one knew exactly what that number was – any one person was permitted to keep. Not being a law exactly, this was not rigorously policed; everyone kept more than they admitted they kept, but, as a detective inspector, Gutkind knew he was taking a bit of a risk and indeed much relished taking it.

  He had always dipped intermittently into these publications, enjoying picking up his great-grandfather’s thoughts at random, not least because Clarence Worthing had been a cut above the rest of the family, a self-taught thinker and self-bred dandy who had moved in circles of society unimaginable to Eugene Gutkind. He had never met his great-grandfather but had heard tell of him from his grandmother, Clarence Worthing’s daughter, something of a lady herself, and a bohemian to boot, who revelled in the fact that she had hardly ever seen her father, so tied up was he in his affairs – in all senses of the word, if Eugene knew what she meant – a whirl of feckless forgetfulness which she put down to his having been rejected as a young man by the only woman he had ever truly loved – a woman who was not her mother. Eugene marvelled that she was not hurt by this. You could not be hurt by such a man, she told him, so stylish was he even when he let you down. Gutkind yearned to have let someone down stylishly. Taking out the newspapers he bathed in the glorious retrospective reflection of his great-grandfather’s irresponsibility . . . and pain. By means of Clarence Worthing, Gutkind too became a person to be reckoned with – a man with a tragic past and a liquid way with words and women.