The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  An anachronism — J. B. Priestley would still have been alive on the night Cartwright cleaned me up. But you know that dead-fart Yorkshire torpor I’m talking about.

  Bob Battrick, my second victor, at least shuffled around the table. But he too did me for savvy. Placing — that was his genius. He knew how to wear me out and cramp me up, pushing me out wide then bringing me in to the net, then pushing me out wide again, then tempting me back in to the net only to fire an awkwardly rearing ball into my stomach. All this with an octagonal cork bat and a square stance and a half-volley. Each time he caught me out he’d give a little skip and hold up his hand as though to apologize for his craftiness.

  If losing to Battrick was still more humiliating than losing to Cartwright — and I don’t intend to relay the score in either instance (look it up in the archives if you have a taste for statistics) — it was because of the expression of pity that never left his face the whole time I was playing him. ‘Better luck next time, me duck,’ he said as we shook hands, by which I took him to mean that he’d been doing his utmost to give me every point but that I’d lacked the nous to take a single one of them.

  Back in Aishky’s Austin a hangdog silence reigned. We’d all lost.

  ‘No post mortems, thank you very much,’ Aishky had said as we’d trooped back out into the fog. ‘I don’t want post mortems.’

  ‘I bet you don’t,’ Twink replied.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘What do you think it means?’

  ‘If I’d played the way you played tonight I’d keep it shut. What was it again — 21–6, 21–19, after you’d been 19–11 up on your own service? But you had to win with a smash, didn’t you!’

  ‘I thought no post mortems,’ Twink said.

  None of us had any reason to be proud. Aishky, too, had thrown away apparently unassailable leads, wanting to win with a smash. And Selwyn had barely got a ball over the net. But then if Twink hadn’t crashed the car …

  The first person to break the silence on the drive back was Selwyn. ‘Anti-Semites,’ he said.

  Aishky went for the brakes. ‘Where?’

  ‘Back there.’

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘Where we’ve just been. Anti-Semites.’

  ‘Are you telling me that’s why you lost now,’ Twink said, ‘because they were anti-Semites? I suppose the net was anti-Semitic’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s why I lost. I’m just saying it’s what they are.’

  ‘You’re meshugge,’ Aishky said. ‘They were nice people.’

  ‘Then why did they call Oliver Mordechai?’

  ‘Mordechai! Who called him Mordechai?’

  ‘The one with the shmatte bat.’

  Aishky and Twink wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth. ‘Oliver, did he call you Mordechai?’

  ‘Not that I remember. Why would he have called me Mordechai, anyway?’

  ‘Because he’s an anti-Semite. Mordechai the Jew.’

  ‘I never even spoke to him,’ I said. ‘Except after the game.’

  ‘And what did you say to him then?’

  ‘I dunno. “Well played,” I suppose.’

  ‘And what did he say to you?’

  ‘I suppose the same.’

  ‘No he didn’t. I heard him. He said, “Better luck next time, Mordechai.”’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He said, “Better luck next time, me duck.” Me duck, not Mordechai.’

  But there was no budging Selwyn Marks. ‘Anti-Semites,’ he muttered to himself for the rest of the journey home. The last of the night’s fireworks fried and spluttered in the fog. ‘Yiddenfeits,’ he said.

  So how did I react to this first setback to my sporting ambitions? Let’s leave me out of it for the moment. Others suffered that night.

  A couple of weeks later, which was about the normal time it took for poor people’s mail to be delivered in those days, Aishky Mistofsky, in his role as club secretary, received a notification from the Manchester and District Table Tennis League informing him that the League was in receipt of a solicitor’s letter on behalf of Miss Cynthia Cartwright, an employee at the Allied Jam and Marmalade works canteen. On the night of the alleged offence Miss Cartwright had been serving tea and cakes, as she regularly did at home matches, to a visiting team from the Akiva Social Club in Crumpsall. In the course of the evening, and while waiting for the majority of the visiting team to arrive, she had struck up an acquaintance with a Mr Sheeny Waxman who offered to drive her home. Miss Cartwright freely admitted that in return for the lift she was prepared to let Mr Waxman kiss her in the back seat of his motor car. But she wanted it to go no further than that, especially on a first date. Angry with her refusals, Mr Waxman drove her to Miles Platting, a considerable distance from her home, requested that she allow him to perform an indecent act upon her, and when she again refused he unceremoniously ordered her to get out of his car. Given the lateness of the hour and the inclemency of the weather, Miss Cartwright viewed this as a grave discourtesy on Mr Waxman’s part, and sought his suspension from the League, a written apology, and the cost of her taxi fare back to Dukinfield.

  Since there were no witnesses and it came down to one person’s word against another’s, the League could do no more than refer the matter to the Akiva Social Club and leave it to take whatever steps it thought necessary. I happened to be at the club, practising, when these steps were taken.

  ‘Anti-Semites!’ Twink said.

  ‘Yiddenfeits!’ Aishky said.

  Then we went on playing.

  And that was that?

  Not quite.

  In private Aishky led Sheeny Waxman aside and warned him against taking liberties.

  Sheeny listened unperturbed. He couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Why hadn’t the slag just let him eat her in Miles Platting and saved herself the trouble?

  SIX

  For more serious offences, such as swearing or throwing a racket, it may be appropriate to warn the player formally that any repetition will incur a penalty, interrupting play if necessary, and showing that he has done so by holding up a yellow card so that it is clearly visible to the player and to spectators.

  18.1.7 The International Table Tennis Federation Handbook

  for Match Officials, 1993

  … SPECTATORS? WHAT SPECTATORS?

  But I am allowing my disappointments to run ahead of me again. That nobody was there to behold and marvel — no roaring Jezebels with retractable claws and fluttering pink autograph albums — should count as a consolation, a godsend, when all there was to behold and marvel at was me being trounced. They wouldn’t be there later, though, when trouncing was in my gift and no god would have dared say boo to me — there lay the pity of it. I fulfilled my destiny, I did everything my genes told me to do, I became king of the tsatskes, but a king without a kingdom, a king with no subjects.

  Back, back … One disillusionment at a time. So how did I react to the Allied Jam and Marmalade catastrophe, the hitherto unknown ignominy of having someone at the opposite end of the table get to twenty-one before I did?

  Badly.

  Badly while it was happening — though I hope I was able to conceal it, hope that no one saw I was playing through tears, blinded. But far worse afterwards.

  My mother was waiting up for me. She had already rung every hospital in Manchester twice. ‘Look at the time,’ she cried. ‘We’ve been worried sick. We’ve been at our wits’ end.’

  We nothing. My father was snoring on the couch, sleeping the innocent self-absorbed sleep of the grandiose. A smile twitched his mouth open. Where he was, thousands were cheering him.

  I didn’t answer my mother. Make her pay. That’s what mothers are for.

  ‘We thought you’d crashed.’

  ‘I did crash,’ I said. Then I went upstairs to bed, refusing cocoa, and thought about putting an end to myself with my pillow.

  It’s no fun, losing. Not until you’ve done a fair bit of winning, it’s not. Then of cou
rse it can be the most terrific fun in the whole wide world. Pain fun. But the perversion of embracing loss was beyond me at this stage. I was a deviant boy, but as yet not that deviant. You have to own something before you can start finessing around the business of throwing it away.

  And this night I believed I owned nothing. I was worthless. And conscious of more shame — I, already the very mollusc of mortification — than I had ever experienced before. I lay in my bed and relived every point I’d lost. A mortal fear gripped me: I would bear these losses like scars for the rest of my life; I would know no relief from them; I would go on playing and re-playing them for ever.

  When I closed my eyes I fell through space, down, down into a sucking colourless cone of infinitely narrowing circles; no fires in this hell, only repetition and reduction. Ring upon ring of it, round and round, lower and lower. When I forced my eyes open — for it was a temptation, that spiral, a ride to remember — the darkness pulsed above me, shifting shapes, emptiness opening and closing its gumless mouth as in a fever, now weightless as death, now heavy as disgrace.

  When it falls, grandiosity, it falls big.

  I tried desperately to free my mind from its own devils, to think about something other than itself, someone other than itself. But what and who else was there to think about? Girls? — none. Friends? — my only friends were ping-pong players now. School? — poof, school! Holidays? — none till next summer. I hadn’t anything to look forward to. That was the most devastating effect of my double defeat — it robbed me of a future, left me without a single cheerful event to anticipate. Hence the thought of self-suffocation with my pillow. There was nothing left to live for.

  That I began to spend even longer periods in the toilet with my glue and scissors will come as no surprise to those who remember what it is to be a boy who has been beaten. I compounded shame with shame, heat with heat. I see now that I was attempting to transfer my humiliation, collage it on to someone else. Had I been able to get my hands on a photograph of Bob Battrick I would have cut up my aunty Fay and laid her across his knee with her Span-poached pants down. ‘Fancy a paddling, me duck?’

  And people say that sport is a healthy activity for the young.

  I didn’t suffocate myself. Though it might have been better for the short-term future of my parents’ marriage if I had. They were arguing over me again. What was the point of his coming home early, my father wanted to know, if he couldn’t get into his own toilet?

  Then he didn’t get back until four in the morning. My mother was waiting up for him, just as she’d waited up for me. Only for him she hadn’t rung every hospital in Manchester. We were all awake. We could feel the floorboards vibrating to her pacing.

  ‘And where have you been?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘No — Yashki Diddle. Where have you been?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Out doing what, Joel?’

  ‘Out looking for somewhere to have a Jimmy Riddle.’

  ‘That’s it! You’ve taken your last ride, Joel.’

  We heard no more that night, not a squeak from either of them, but the following morning, finding me already locked in the toilet, he began breaking the door down with his bare hands. ‘You’ve got ten seconds to get out of there. Ten … nine …’

  Ten seconds? How was I going to put all the photographs away, screw up the gluepot, close the scissors, tie a bow in the ribbon, do up my pants, hide the box, in ten seconds? It was impossible. I was done for.

  ‘… eight … seven …’

  What saved me was the sound of my mother on the blower to the bus company. There was a terrible calm in her voice, like the quiet that must have fallen over the Steppes the night before The Hun rode in. She was explaining that the stress of the job had turned her husband into an alcoholic, that he was arriving home rolling drunk at all hours of the night, that he was leaving the bus parked in the middle of the road — not just in it but across it — that the neighbours were up in arms and were threatening violence against him, against his family and, more to the point — let’s get practical now — against the bus; hence she felt it was her responsibility, though she was a loyal and loving wife — no, because she was a loyal and loving wife — to bring matters to a head before someone, not least a coachload of innocent passengers, got killed.

  Not everything she asserted was untrue. The bus wasn’t popular with the neighbours. Every three or four months a new petition would be posted through our letter-box, signed by everyone in the avenue, including babies, demanding that my father consider other people’s right to light and quiet and park his monstrosity somewhere else. In the lake in Heaton Park, preferably. My father was always more upset by these expressions of public dissatisfaction than the rest of us were. He was the one who wanted only to give pleasure. He discussed the possibility of widening our path and getting rid of the garden shed. Getting rid of the garden even. ‘So that’ll be our view, will it,’ my mother had said, ‘your bus!’

  Without any real expectation of swaying her, he had offered to have it spray-painted green.

  But the alcoholism charge was pure invention. My father only ever drank at Walzer weddings, sweet red wine, a fairy thimbleful, and then most of that got spilled over his sisters during the kasatske. Not that truth was the issue here. My father belonged to a generation of men who did not expect their wives to ring up their places of employ. He’d reached ‘four’ when he heard what she was doing. By what should have been ‘three’ he was downstairs ripping the phone off the wall and hurling it across the room.

  But the moral damage had already been done. He was out of a job.

  ‘Don’t you ever again dare …’ I heard him threaten.

  ‘And don’t you ever again dare …’ I heard her threaten back.

  ‘Don’t you ever don’t-you-ever me …’

  ‘And don’t you ever don’t-you-ever don’t-you-ever me …’

  To my knowledge it was the most serious fight they’d had. The nearest they’d come to raising their hands to each other. The telephone with its amputated wires lay smashed and hapless on the floor, like a corpse spilling its intestines. My father left the house and wasn’t seen or heard from for two days. When he returned he was staggering. ‘I’ll show you drunk,’ he jeered, flicking out a tongue I’d never seen before. He didn’t look like anyone I knew.

  ‘Come one step nearer and I’ll call the police,’ my mother warned him.

  ‘What with? You haven’t got a phone any more, remember. Ha! Ha!’

  ‘I’ve got a voice, Joel.’

  ‘So you have. And I’ve heard you use it, too. Very effective. Very refined. All those words. Such words you have, you and your kuni-lemele sisters and the Kazi Kid. And where would he happen to be at the moment? Don’t tell me. On the kazi.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I protested. ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Go to your room,’ my mother said.

  ‘That’s right, do what your mother tells you. Go to the kazi. In fact I’ll take you there …’

  ‘Get back, Joel.’

  ‘Or you’ll do what, Sadie?’

  Or she’d do what she did — which was run out into the street, screaming, ‘Police! Police!’

  All this because I’d lost at ping-pong.

  The best market within range of Manchester in those days — and I’m talking takings now, not local colour — was Stockport. If your family somehow got its hands on a stall at Stockport you knew your future was secured. You could start thinking about taking elocution lessons and moving to Wilmslow. Men slept in their vans overnight to secure a pitch on Stockport market, and then drew knives on one another if there wasn’t enough space to go round. According to market mythology, the Toby Mush who went from stall to stall in policeman’s boots, with a clinking leather rent-collector’s bag on his shoulder, deciding who got to stand where at Stockport, was afflicted with a blind eye and a bent right arm, so many backhanders did he take possession of on market days. But every market was reputed to be run the
same way. The Toby was the godfather. ‘First rule of the gaffs,’ my father advised me in later years, when he was regularly hauling me off against my will to markets all over the country, ‘always shmeer the Toby. If you don’t look after the Toby, the Toby won’t look after you.’

  Just how well he looked after the Toby on his first attempt at getting on to Stockport market I have no idea, but it must have been well enough because by nine o’clock he was set up with a trestle table, four iron bars and a length of tarpaulin on a square yard of favoured cobblestone close to the public facilities. It helped that he was built like a brick shithouse himself. A slighter man might have found a breadknife protruding from his shoulder-blades, as a polite warning against trying for this pitch again. But you couldn’t have got a breadknife into my father’s back. That was why my mother had had to resort to the telephone.