The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘What do you mean for starters?’ Aishky queried. ‘What else does he need?’

  This was the other big difference between them. Aishky Mistofsky played in the clothes he came home from work in. He took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and changed his shoes, that was all. He didn’t even loosen his tie. Whereas Twink Starr turned up already panting and dancing, like a prize fighter, in a hooded tracksuit, with a towel round his neck. Under the tracksuit, which he peeled off in stages, he wore a crested Fred Perry shirt, pleated shorts and long white socks with a blue stripe in them. In his bag he carried an asthma spray, two sets of sweatbands, a change of shirt and a small lawn-cotton hand towel with his own monograph sewn into it — JS. When the going got tough he would tuck this into his shorts like a waiter’s tea cloth, so that he could dry the handle of his bat between points. Years later, professional tennis players competing for more prize money in a single fortnight than Twink Starr and Aishky Mistofsky could hope to earn between them in a lifetime would, as a matter of course, tuck lawn-cotton hand towels into their shorts. But before Twink Starr no racket-player had ever thought of doing such a thing.

  ‘You want him to play in long hasen, like you?’

  ‘What’s wrong with long hasen?’

  ‘You don’t win in them, Aishky, that’s what’s wrong with them. And you have to keep them up with braces.’

  ‘Barna won in long hasen.’

  ‘That was the past, Aishky. Don’t talk to me about the past. This kid’s got a future — he has to have shorts.’

  ‘The next thing you’ll be saying, he has to have a Fred Perry shirt.’

  ‘Well he can’t play in his school blazer, can he, you potz.’

  They took me to Alec Watson and Mitchell’s in Market Street and continued to fight out their differences in front of the asssistants. ‘Here,’ Aishky called from the cricket counter, ‘what about a jockstrap and a box to go in it?’ And then from the football counter, ‘And maybe some shin pads …’

  ‘You’re a meshuggener,’ Twink shouted back across the shop. He was helping me choose a cover for my bat. Zip or stud, that was the issue. ‘Do you hear what I’m saying? You’re a meshuggener. You haven’t won a match in a month. But you know what to wear, suddenly. You don’t even look after your bat properly. You carry it around in a plastic bag with your sandwiches. I’m the one who has to pick the crumbs out of your pimples for you. You don’t even know they’re there. You don’t even notice them. But you’re an example to the kid!’

  Aishky was in his element, shouting and being shouted at in a public place. His beaky face shone with bashfulness and audacity mixed. ‘What about these?’ he called out. He was now in the boxing section. ‘You wouldn’t want him to spiel without these, would you?’ He was holding up a box of gum-shields.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ Twink said. It wasn’t a retort. More a philosophical expostulation, to no one in particular.

  I too was in my element. It was flattering to be argued over like this by two grown men, sort of. And I loved being in their element. It made me feel I was coming to the end of being a kid. A whole new world was opening to me, one in which you embarrassed the shop assistants. It beat having aunties all ends up.

  Which reminded me: I was only a short walk across Corporation Street from the soft-porno shop opposite the Cathedral; if there was some way I could give Aishky and Twink the slip for ten minutes, leave them to argue over my ping-pong wardrobe without me, I could be back before the contemptuous behind-the-counter judge, stammering out a request for the latest Span.

  I hadn’t finished with all that, now that I was coming to the end of being a kid and had a team to play for?

  Do me a favour.

  FIVE

  All matches shall start not later than 7.30 p.m.; the penalty for late starts shall be 2/6 for every fifteen minutes or part thereof.

  29(a) Match Procedure, The Manchester and District

  Table Tennis League

  The sets of any player not present by 9.00 p.m. shall go by default to the opposing team, and the defaulting team be fined 1/- per player then absent.

  29(d) Match Procedure, The Manchester and District

  Table Tennis League

  MY FIRST LEAGUE match was against the Allied Jam and Marmalade Sports and Social Club (the A. J. M.), just this side of Dukinfield. It was November. The blue-black month, smoky with fireworks and fog. To give ourselves plenty of time to get there, Aishky Mistofsky had suggested that he pick me up from home at six o’clock. I was worried about this arrangement. I knew that my mother and my aunties would come to the window to wave me off and I didn’t want them to see Aishky with his blind face pressed to the windscreen. Not knowing how to raise this with him directly, I’d mentioned it to Twink who came up with the idea that he’d change seats with Aishky as soon as they arrived at our place, drive around the corner himself (which he reckoned he could just about manage, although he hadn’t learnt to drive yet), and then change back again once we were out of view. The explanation he’d give Aishky was that he was soft on my aunty Fay, whom he’d seen shopping with me in Lewis’s, and wanted to impress her with the sight of him sitting up like a mensch in his own Austin A40. Aishky would not be able to refuse him this. Impressing a woman with the aim of getting her to show you her bristles — even when the bristles in question happened to belong to someone you knew’s aunty — was a sacred undertaking: if you called yourself a friend you ministered to it. Besides, a bristle out for one was a bristle out for all. In a verbal culture, what goes around comes around. If you don’t cop the feel yourself, you at least get to hear about it.

  The subterfuge part worked fine. I bounded down the path in my new baggy burgundy tracksuit, a wildly rhetorical A for Akiva (embroidered for me by Fay) dilating over my pumping heart; my mother, my grandmother and my aunties waved from the lounge window; and Twink, sitting at the wheel of Aishky’s Austin, leaned across and opened the passenger door for me. One more wave and we were off — Dukinfield here we come. Looking back, I suppose it’s just possible that Twink really had seen and fallen for my aunty Fay and wanted to impress her, because he revved the Austin hard, reversed thirty yards down the street, and slammed into a lamppost.

  We were lucky. In the fog and with fireworks going off, no one in my house heard the bang. And we hadn’t done serious damage to the Austin. A smashed offside rear light, that was all. And a small dent in the bumper. The damage to our nerves, though, would take much longer to assess. ‘This is something I don’t need,’ Aishky said, after he’d walked round the car a couple of dozen times, looking for scratches.

  Although he was the younger of the two, Twink Starr was generally considerate of Aishky’s nervous system. When he saw Aishky getting overexcited he would go out of his way to settle him down, sending out calming signals to the rest of us with his hands and taking Aishky aside and reasoning with him in a loud and extravagant manner, like an uncle. Tonight, though, following his counter-attacker’s instincts, he went immediately into aggressive mode. ‘Aishk, what are you inspecting the bonnet for? Don’t give yourself the platz. How could I have damaged the bonnet?’

  ‘Suddenly you know about cars? You don’t know forward gear from reverse gear but you’re Stirling Moss all of a sudden.’

  ‘You don’t have to be Stirling Moss, Aishk, to know you’re not supposed to park in reverse. Doesn’t your jam jar have neutral?’

  ‘I don’t need this,’ Aishky repeated, getting back behind the wheel.

  ‘I’ll pay,’ Twink told him. ‘Do me a favour — don’t make a gantse megilleh out of it. Whatever it costs, I’ll pay.’

  ‘What’ll you pay with? Buttons?’

  This was an allusion to Twink’s profession. He worked a button machine in a shirt factory in Derby Street, just behind the ice-rink. In the sense that our generation was meant to have put working at a machine behind us, the allusion was cruel. You’re a nebbish — that was what Aishky was implying. Which was rich, coming from him, a
cutter in a holdall factory. I took it as a proof of the esteem in which Twink held Aishky that he didn’t play the nebbish card back, but simply fell silent, looking down and shaking his head.

  ‘Anyway, it’s not the money,’ Aishky relented, ‘it’s the aggravation.’

  He was right: it was the aggravation we didn’t need. Not on match night. My first ever match at that. Needless to say, I felt it was all my fault. If I’d had the courage to face down my family on the question of being driven to Dukinfield by a blind man, none of this would have happened.

  The aggravation was getting to Selwyn Marks, too, whose morale was already shot on account of his not having won a match for six weeks. He sat bunched up in the back seat, shivering and yammering something about bad omens.

  ‘Selwyn, do me a favour — shtum up!’ Twink told him. ‘We don’t need any meshuggener omens to explain why you’re going to lose tonight. Push, push, push. Listen to me — if you want to win a game of table tennis before you die, try playing some shots.’

  ‘I’m not having this,’ Aishky said. We were on Deansgate, making slow progress in the fog. He braked suddenly, without giving any signals. Behind us cars honked and swerved. ‘Leave the kid, alone,’ he said, ‘or we won’t be playing anywhere.’

  Fortuitously, he’d pulled up dead outside my soft-porno shop. Through the fog I could see that the latest Span was in the window. A golfing issue. The cover showed the mother of a prefab boy teeing off and thereby uncovering a suspender. Playing golf in stockings — why was that so … whatever it was? A great yearning for the warmth and comforts of home overcame me. What was I doing out in the fog with these tsedraiters when I could have been back in the bosom of my family, sitting in the toilet with my scented chocolate box, religiously gluing aunty Fay’s serious spinsterly face to the body of a woman who I bet couldn’t sink a six-inch putt without showing the tops of her stockings?

  ‘Push, push, push,’ Twink repeated.

  ‘Genug is genug,’ Aishky said. ‘Loz the kid alone.’

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was just possible that Selwyn had started to blubber.

  The aggravation was getting to us all right. The only member of our team who might have been assumed to be in good shape was Sheeny Waxman who was making his own way to Dukinfield.

  He couldn’t have been faring any worse than us, that was for sure. We lost our way in Gorton and then again in Audenshaw. The fog thickened. Bangers kept going off, rattling Aishky’s nerves. A half-spent Roman candle landed on the bonnet of the car, singeing the wiper blades. Once we nearly went into the canal at Guide Bridge, and shortly afterwards, taking what he thought was a turning on to Dukinfield Park Road, Aishky drove into someone’s private drive and would have gone into the garage had another car not been parked there already.

  ‘It’s just a question, Aishky,’ Twink said, ‘but what kind of a meshuggas is this? Is this meant to be a short cut or something?’

  Aishky had had it. He jumped out of the car. ‘You do better.’

  Twink started to climb across.

  ‘No you don’t,’ Aishky said, jumping back in. ‘We’re not going all the way to fucking Dukinfield in reverse.’

  It was the first and only time I ever heard him swear. Culturally, we weren’t swearers. Not my father, not my aunties who called my putz an in-between, not Aishky, and not, as a general rule, Twink either. So it shows how fraught we were getting. ‘What do you mean all the way to fucking Dukinfield? I thought we were in fucking Dukinfield!’

  ‘Let me out,’ Selwyn said. ‘The fog’s making me feel sick.’

  ‘The fog’s making you feel sick? Who’s the asthmatic here? Push, push, push …’

  At this point the owner of the house came out to see why there were four meshuggeners, two of them in tracksuits, screaming obscenities at one another in his drive.

  By the time we found the Jam and Marmalade factory it was 8.45, which meant that the opposition was within fifteen minutes of being able to claim our eight games by default. Sheeny Waxman was waiting for us in the car park. He was sitting in the back seat of his car with his arm around a young woman. I hadn’t met him before but the atmosphere wasn’t conducive to formal introductions. He didn’t bother to get out of the car. ‘Noo?’ he said, winding down his window and looking at his watch. ‘Did you have a barmitzvah to go to first?’

  I’ve often wondered if he meant mine. I was to see a lot of Sheeny Waxman over the next few years — he worked for my father for a while — but I never learnt to be comfortable with him. He always made me feel underage. There was some certainty about him that I was never able to gain upon. Maybe it had to do with the amount of time he’d been something like a linguist — a head jockey. He’d had a head start.

  I couldn’t cope with his tic. How had he managed to turn this disability into an advantage? Normally when a person twitches badly he’s the one who’s embarrassed. But when Sheeny’s face went into spasm it was as though it was you who was being obliterated. The right eye closed, the head jerked backwards, the muscles in the neck tightened, and you felt it was your fault for not being able to hold his attention.

  The prematurely gravelly voice threw me too. The only person I knew who had a voice as hoarse and phlegmy as Sheeny Waxman’s was my grandfather on my mother’s side, but nobody thought he was putting it on to arouse women. Why it should have worked for Sheeny Waxman I never understood. Unless it was fear. When Sheeny Waxman flashed his cuff-links, went into spasm, and growled from his seat at the Kardomah, ‘ ‘Ello doll, new to town are you?’ a woman must have thought the Head of the Five Families was making a move on her.

  He’d been here, at Allied Jam and Marmalade, since 7.30, played his two matches, won them both, and had spent the last twenty minutes in the car park looking out for us.

  Aishky was angry with him. It wasn’t good manners to turn up for an away match and then walk out on your hosts. What were they doing now, the home team, twiddling their thumbs?

  ‘What they’re doing now, Aishky, is polishing off the cakes you couldn’t get here in time to eat and counting off the minutes before they can claim the match. You want to get in there and get your jacket off instead of giving me a rollocking. Eh, Cynthia?’

  ‘Is that his girlfriend?’ I asked, rather inconsequentially, as we hurried towards the clubhouse.

  ‘Never seen her before,’ Aishky said.

  I didn’t say that I thought I had. That I thought I’d seen her on the cover of Span, swinging a golf club.

  ‘Sheeny Waxman doesn’t have girlfriends,’ Twink added. ‘He has opportunities.’

  ‘Which he takes,’ Aishky concluded. With some bitterness, I thought. ‘Now can we think about table tennis?’

  It was a sticky situation. Our opponents had given us up and were on the point of writing walk-over on the official scoresheet. Legally, we could claim our last man had arrived with five minutes to spare, but no one knew where we stood, morally, in the matter of our last man being in fact our four last men. What saved us — not that it made any difference to the outcome — was the universal ping-pong player’s appetite for competition. The jam and marmalade makers wanted a game. They wanted to win. And given the fog-wash that was on us after two and three-quarter hours on the road, they couldn’t see anything to stop them.

  The room was icy. There were radiators on every wall, great glossy cream cobra coils of burbling iron, much like the ones we jacked off behind at school, but the room stayed cold. The radiators were there for us to lose the ball behind, not to provide warmth. This was my first lesson in the ergonomics of ping-pong: every feature and dimension of the playing area must contribute to your discomfort; every item of fixed or moveable furniture is where it is for no other purpose than that you should lose your ball behind it.

  Never mind Gossima — Tribulation, that should have been ping-pong’s nom de jeu. No wonder the game came naturally to sun-starved Slavs and Magyars. Tribulation was also the name of their native countries. And no wo
nder the game came naturally to me, cramped in my clammy shell.

  Another law bearing on the playing environment of the game called Tribulation states that there must always be steps within two yards of the table or two bounces of the ball, whichever makes for greater inconvenience. Steps going up or steps going down. The Allied Jam and Marmalade ping-pong team played in a room that had steps going down and steps going up. The steps down, which no one had yet contrived a system for even partially blocking off during play, led to a small scullery-cum-kitchen, where there were buckets and beer crates and old stoves and gas pipes and cans of paint and boxes of tiles and stacked wooden benches with cross-supports ideal not only for losing your ball behind but for injuring yourself while you were searching for it. The steps up led of course to the stage, which sloped away in a manner that must have made it vexatious for the chorus of the Jam and Marmalade annual panto, but more importantly ensured that a ping-pong ball once up there would never come rolling down again. Since the ball ended up on the stage as often as it ended up on the table, why was no one posted there to retrieve it? And why was no one stationed at the bottom of the scullery steps with his hands cupped? These are questions only a person who has never played ping-pong competitively, or never lived within a thousand disheartening miles of the choking River Bug, would ever dream of asking.

  I spent what was left of the evening on my knees, getting my own ball back and, because I was the youngest, getting everyone else’s back to boot. I had grazed elbows. I had cobwebs in my hair. I had fog in my lungs. And I was cold. Sweltering in my shell, freezing out of it. Should it be any surprise I didn’t win?

  I’m not making excuses for myself. I was beaten fairly and squarely. Squarely, anyway. Twice. The first defeats I had ever suffered since I’d found the little white ball bobbing on the lake in Heaton Park. Were they good players, then, the two who did me? No. They were not good players. Neither of them was a good player. What they were was canny. They’d seen action. One of them must have been an employee of the jam factory since it was built in 1891. He made less of a concession to athleticism than Aishky did. Aishky at least wore plimsolls. Aishky at least took off his jacket. Jack Cartwright played in a cardigan with leather buttons and never moved his feet. He held his bat pen-hand, like Ogimura, but he didn’t have Ogimura’s flashing shots. Strictly speaking he didn’t have any shots, not even a backhand push like Selwyn Marks’s. He simply blocked the ball. Stabbed at it. Poked it dead. Whatever I put on the ball was what came back. If I hit it hard and flat, hard and flat was what I had to deal with. If I chopped the ball in half, half was all I saw of it. It wasn’t Jack Cartwright who beat me, it was me who beat me. But that didn’t stop me feeling a prize fool, dancing around in my brand new shorts and Fred Perry shirt, breathing hard and sweating profusely, unable to get a ball past a narcissistic old cacker who chewed at his false teeth throughout the match, who wore bracelets for arthritis on each wrist, who resembled J. B. Priestley for portliness and consciousness of sagacity, and who in truth might as well have been J. B. Priestley’s cadaver for all the vital principle he demonstrated in body.