The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  Never the women who did it, never his mother, always his father.

  In this way Henry had got to thirteen with death all around him, with death nudging into the peripheries of his vision, but without ever having actually seen – actually been allowed to rest his eyes on – a dead person. And now here he was again on the East Lancashire Road, denied another golden opportunity.

  He was grateful at the time. He consented. He let his head be turned away. He wasn’t sure he could have coped with anything horrible anyway. And someone had to flag down a car. Because that too was being grown up – standing in the road and flagging down a car.

  But there has to be a first time, doesn’t there? You can’t go on being protected from mortality for ever. And yet that seemed to be his father’s intention – to keep him out of the club.

  Until when? Until exactly when, Dad?

  Until you were old enough.

  And you were the one who said I was tied to my mother’s apron strings.

  Not the same thing. You’d be dealing with the dead in good time. There was no reason to hurry it.

  Wasn’t there? Do you know what it felt like? It felt as though you wanted the big stuff all to yourself. I couldn’t get near. You wouldn’t let me near.

  Trust me, Henry, it wasn’t a competition. I’d have been only too glad for you to have taken over, gezunterheit, but you were too young. I found my sister dead in bed when I was six years old. My grandmother, God rest her soul, died with her arms round me when I was ten. She died in my face, Henry. I swallowed her last breath. I couldn’t have wished any of that on you. But I didn’t want more for myself, I can promise you that. I’d had my fair share. More than my fair share.

  Maybe those events were the making of you.

  They weren’t.

  How do you know?

  I know.

  You’d have been a better man without?

  I’d have been another man without.

  Dad, you might not have been a man at all. You might have ended up like me.

  No. You’re the Stern Gang’s doing.

  And then, the day Henry leaves home to go to university, it happens again.

  Both his parents are intending to take him to the station to see him off – along with his grandmother Irina, and his surviving great-aunts Marghanita and Effie. But that’s too many. It will embarrass the boy, the Girls see that. So it’s down to just his mother and his father and then, at the very last minute, his mother cries off.

  ‘It will upset me too much.’

  Izzi Nagel open his arms to the heavens. ‘Why should it upset you seeing your son off to university? It’s what you’ve always wanted.’

  ‘That’s why it will upset me.’

  ‘How can getting what you’ve always wanted upset you?’

  Ekaterina exchanges looks with her son. What a husband! You marry a man from North Manchester and this is the subtlety you have to live with. He eats fire and thinks getting what you want must make you happy.

  ‘You take him. Just see he gets a nice seat in a comfortable compartment.’

  ‘Look,’ Henry says, ‘I don’t want any of this. Let Dad drop me at the station. That’ll be fine.’

  On the way out of the house he hears his mother whispering to his father. ‘Don’t dare drop him at the station. Go through with him. Make sure he’s got his ticket and settle him on the train.’

  He hugs his mother. These are not yet kissie-kissie times. Love you, Mom / Love you, son has not yet been imported from the United States of Schmaltz. In matters of human relations the English are still clinging on to dignity, the Nagels more tightly than most. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ she says, patting his cheek. ‘And don’t forget you are as good as anybody.’

  ‘I will. I won’t.’

  ‘But don’t be too much of a snob either. Try to value other people’s talents.’

  ‘I won’t. I will.’

  ‘And write.’

  ‘No choice, it’s an essay a week.’

  ‘No, you fool, I mean write to me.’

  Henry wishes, though he knows she means nothing by it, that his mother hadn’t called him a fool on the day he leaves home to go to university. Fool. Does he want that to be the last word he hears her say? But then he is upset, wavering, his insides rattling around in his body, his voice not firm. This will be further from her than he has ever been. Love you, Mom.

  More matter-of-fact, being seen off by his Dad. No word problems, because between his father and himself there are no words. Words will come later.

  ‘You got everything?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Ticket?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And you know where you’re getting off?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Goodbye then, handshake, wink, maybe a bit of rough stuff around the shoulders – that should have been it. But his father decides to see him on to the train. Mr Busy. ‘Here,’ he says, motioning to Henry’s bags, ‘let me take those.’

  Never a sight Henry likes to see, whether he already has reason to be distressed or not, his father carrying another person’s bags, even when they’re Henry’s. A distinguishing feature of the man, of course, no doubt about it, the alacrity of his public spirited-ness. Got a bad back, can’t move your furniture, need a push because your car won’t start, want your party to go with a bang – call Izzi Nagel. Demeaning, isn’t it, Dad? Demeaning to be at everyone’s beck and call?

  A question he means to ask. Why did you have to be the butler for all and sundry? Who appointed you dogs body of all Manchester? But he will need more than his usual amount of courage for that one. You don’t demean the demeaned.

  Sometimes Henry thinks he can actually smell it on his father’s breath. Servitude willingly suffered. Vassalage. Sour and a little too warm. So that’s what slaves smell of – egg and onion toasted in petroleum.

  On to the luggage rack his bags go, anyway. Neatly stored. Little Lord Fauntleroy with his manservant (who also happens to be his father), Izzi.

  With all the fussing, the train is filling up around them. Henry finds a table with just one sleeping person opposite. He’d have preferred nobody, but at least this person is wearing railway employee’s uniform and so might be getting off shortly. Might even be planning to drive the train when he wakes. Henry’s father makes sure Henry’s settled comfortably.

  ‘You won’t forget to write to your mother.’

  ‘Nope.’

  Then he pulls a small packet from his inside pocket. ‘Something for you to read,’ he says awkwardly. Not Henry’s father’s sort of sentence. Nor Henry’s father’s sort of gesture. Is this the first gift they have exchanged, without the intercession of Ekaterina, man to man? Henry is so astonished he thinks he is going to cry. A book, a book from his father!

  But before he can say so much as thank you, his father does what he is always doing and claps his hands over Henry’s eyes. ‘Quick,’ he says, ‘come on, off the train, quick.’

  Oh, shit! Henry thinks. What now? What this time? What tragedy has he conjured up for me today?

  And everything happens so quickly – for Henry of course does not struggle, but goes quietly, putty in his father’s hands – that when he next opens his eyes he is on the platform, and his father is in urgent conversation with the guard, and everyone is up out of their seats, looking, wondering, and people are running, and an urgent request for a doctor is going out over the Tannoy, though as Henry knows from experience, a doctor will be too late. Kaput, whoever you are, once Izzi Nagel has found you.

  ‘The man opposite me?’ Henry asks, as though he needs to.

  ‘Yes,’ his father tells him. Compassionately. That old deep adult sorrow, keeping from Henry what must be kept. ‘A heart attack, I’d say. Probably died in his sleep.’

  Then Henry remembers that the man did look a little green. So has he seen a corpse at last? He doesn’t think so. He didn’t really look. And he didn’t really know the man was dead. It can’t count as looking upon dea
th, can it, if you don’t know it’s death you’re looking upon.

  Thus, on my first foray into manhood, Henry thinks, does my father deny me once again. The ghoul he is, the fucking ghoul!

  For a moment it occurs to Henry to wonder whether his father planted the dead man there, has always been planting dead men there, as milestones marking the stages of Henry’s freedom from dependence. Except that there have been no stages of Henry’s freedom from dependence. He will die dependent.

  Once the body has been removed, propped up in a station wheelchair, like unwieldy luggage, the train gets underway again. To be on the safe side – his father’s idea – Henry is in another compartment. Henry concurs with this. He doesn’t want to catch anything. Malaria, rabies, bubonic plague – whatever the dead infect you with.

  A mile out of Manchester he unwraps the gift his father gave him. It’s a picture book, with diagrams. Henry suspects the first picture book with diagrams he has ever owned. Origami – Let’s Fold, it’s called.

  It bears a brief inscription on the title page, in childish writing. ‘For Henry, on the occasion of you going to university, Dad.’

  The next corpse that comes Henry’s way is his father’s. Struck down by a hammer-blow of guilt and sorrow. Nothing to stop Henry this time. Carte blanche. No one to shield his eyes or to usher him into another room or to order him to flag down a passing car. Now’s your chance, Henry. Go on. Go on, do it. Go contemplate the awful majesty of death to your heart’s content.

  His mother, too. But his mother has been damaged and he knows that’s beyond him. Whereas his father, they tell him, has an air almost of serenity and looks like a young boy again.

  And his breath? Henry wonders. Will his breath still be sour?

  Forgetting there won’t be any breath.

  Either way, it’s far too late for Henry now. He isn’t man enough to look.

  SIX

  Although Henry is always the first person in the country to get a flu jab, he is also always the first person in the country to get flu.

  Without the jab, he tells himself, it would have been even worse.

  In fact, Henry likes having flu. It reminds him of being jealous. The same aching of the limbs, as though his bones – his clavicles, his femurs, his humeri (words he’s looked up in an atlas of the human skeleton) – have overheated and become new centres of the senses for him; the same lazy throbbing of the temples, like warm jets of water flushing through his brain cells; the same submission to the caprices of the body and its blood. When he is jealous, Henry can barely move his head, so drowsily heavy, like a sunflower at evening, does it become; and so it is when he has flu. For these reasons, Henry has always preferred jealousy and flu to any other sexual activity.

  He imagines, Henry, that he looks rather spectacularly hollow on his pillows, the rims around his eyes purple, his lips faintly parted, his cheeks blazing. Not as beautiful as when he was young and the bones showed their burning tracery through his flesh, alarming whoever cared for him at the time, but he has a grander backdrop for his sufferings today, a softer and more billowing bed, an altogether more elegant bedroom with its row of seven little windows – one for each dwarf – looking out, not over the deathly Pennines, but the park, the West End, the City, an extruded horizontal of teeming London, a fluttering letter-box diorama of the metropolis from which, for a cruel day or two, flu has parted him. If you have to be ill, Henry thinks, this is the place to be ill in. He tries to imagine his father unwell here, but he cannot connect him with the pillows, cannot picture his cheek upon them. Which just goes to show that a person is not a person full stop, but changes with his habitat. As Henry’s habitat is changing him, like a hand constantly soothing his brow. So if this had been my place of birth, instead of up there, what would I have been, Henry wonders.

  Happy, for one.

  Successful, for two.

  No one I recognise, for three.

  On Sunday morning Moira brings him strudel in a plastic container. She lets herself in now, with her own key, then makes him tea. ‘Fluids are essential when you’ve got a cold,’ she tells him.

  ‘I haven’t got a cold, I’ve got flu.’

  She fluffs his pillows. ‘It’s a little early in the year for flu. People don’t get flu in August. You’ve got a cold.’

  ‘I’m too weak to argue with you,’ he says. ‘Which proves I’ve got flu.’

  ‘And I am not prepared to humour you, which proves you’ve only got a cold.’

  ‘Feel my forehead.’

  ‘And?’ she asks.

  ‘What temperature is it?’

  ‘Hot.’

  ‘See.’

  ‘Henry, your forehead is always hot. You’re a hot-headed person.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve got flu all the time.’

  No, she could say, but doesn’t, that’s because you’re jealous all the time. Yes, she has noticed it. They have been going out for three or four weeks, no more, but already he is jealous of his own shadow. When they pass a shop window which offers them their reflection he pauses so that he can admire them together. Henry in his dotage and a woman young enough, almost, to be his daughter. That’s when she observes that he is jealous of himself for being with her.

  He has an antique tray which moves up and down his bed on oiled brass tracks. The opulence of this place! On this tray, Moira lays out strudel for him and strong tea. And of course aspirin.

  ‘You take too many of those,’ she tells him.

  ‘A man of my age can’t take too many aspirin. It prevents the blood clotting. The only reason I am not having a heart attack now is aspirin.’

  ‘Fine, Henry, so long as you don’t prick your finger.’

  ‘Why, what will happen if I prick my finger?’

  ‘You’ll bleed.’

  ‘Of course I’ll bleed. If you prick me do I not bleed?’

  ‘To death, Henry! Think how thin your blood must be by now. It’ll drain out of your finger in seconds.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Every last drop.’

  He thinks about it. ‘I can’t stop taking aspirin,’ he says at last, cutting into the strudel, ‘I need them for my migraines.’ Then he tells her about the spider, the daddy-long-legs which sat on his brain while his mother laboured to hold him back from a disgusting world.

  ‘And you’ve had migraines ever since?’

  ‘On and off.’

  She is sitting by his bed in a tasselled chair which must have intrigued and baffled Henry’s father, so dainty is it, so unlike anything that ever came from his workshop. ‘What is this?’ Henry imagines his father saying when he first saw it. ‘A sofa for fairies?’

  Moira is no fairy, which might be why she appears uncomfortable in it, on the edge, fiddling with her earrings.

  She shakes her head at Henry. ‘I seem to have spent my life,’ she says, ‘undoing what mothers have done to their sons.’

  ‘Well, one must suppose you wouldn’t accept the job if you didn’t like it.’

  ‘Who said I’ve accepted it?’

  ‘You’re turning me down?’

  ‘Don’t personalise everything. When it comes to remothering I’m turning you all down, I’ve had enough of it.’

  ‘Who’s “all”?’

  Their eyes meet. Hers very Baltic this morning, Henry’s rheumy, the colour of strudel. Then she turns her face from him and gets up, going to the window, where the world of men undone by mothers stretches further than the eye can see.

  ‘For a start, Aultbach has suddenly developed a limp,’ she says.

  ‘I thought the strudel wasn’t quite perfect today,’ Henry says. ‘But what’s that got to do with his mother?’

  ‘It’s got to do with me, it’s got to do with me having to mother him.’

  ‘I thought he had a girlfriend.’

  ‘He has, but she doesn’t mother. Then there’s Lachlan, then there’s you . . .’

  ‘Lachlan? What’s Lachlan been asking you to do?’
<
br />   ‘Same as you. Tuck him up in bed. Spoon him cake and give him aspirin.’

  ‘Tuck him up in bed? You visit Lachlan’s bed?’

  She remains at the window, her head averted. He loves the back of her. The front of her too, but the back of any woman Henry cares about is more poignant and therefore more sensual to him. When you’ve got jealous flu the receding parts of a woman are what you want to look at.

  She is wearing a cream suit, well tailored, the waist nipped in, the skirt straight with an insolent slit at the back, not just a parting in the material but a wilful slash, a touch of tartiness which the elegance of the cut otherwise belies. The way Henry likes it. On her feet high-heeled summer shoes, a lattice of fine straps, her painted toenails showing. Her weight is on her left foot, unbalancing her, giving her an impatient look, as though she would rather be somewhere else. But she must also know that when she stands like that her skirt tautens across her buttocks, and therefore she cannot want Henry to want her to go.

  ‘You’re all ill, you men,’ she says at last. ‘It’s a beautiful summer’s day out there and you’ve all got something wrong with you.’

  ‘That’s because we’re all old,’ Henry says. ‘But there’s no reason to be irritable with me just because you’ve been visiting Lachlan’s bed.’

  ‘I haven’t been “visiting his bed”. He isn’t well, you’re all not well, and he asked me to bring him round some patisseries.’

  ‘The way you used to do with his stepmother? Is he planning to resurrect the tradition? Including cremation?’

  ‘I don’t know what he’s planning.’

  ‘But you took him some.’

  ‘How could I refuse? He’s recently bereaved. He’s a customer. And I was coming to see you anyway.’

  ‘You mean you delivered him patisseries this morning, on the way to me? You’re telling me you’ve already been there? You’ve done him first?’