The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  You render remote my mother, Dad – I could hardly have said that to you, could I?

  You could have tried it. And with the words in their more familiar order, who knows, it might have helped.

  Helped what?

  Helped make you a little less remote.

  What Henry did say, and this too sounded strange, was ‘You two all right?’

  ‘Yes, we’re all right.’

  Was there a hesitation?

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes, sure. Look, I’ll talk to you next time.’

  But of course there wasn’t one.

  Amazing, Henry thought, how a single mistake can claim you and that’s your life over. The mistake of his becoming a teacher, he meant, not his father’s visit in broad daylight to the Midland Hotel.

  He didn’t just think it, either; he observed it, sat in his cellar and watched his life running through his fingers the way a child wanting to make a fist of sand watches it seep from his grasp.

  That face you make when you are in a lift with people you don’t know and don’t want to know, that face which is in fact the disappearance of a face – Henry learned how to make it in his first years on the Pennine Way and never learned to make another.

  Unable to conceive of anything else to do, and seized by the irresistibly self-perpetuating logic of inertia – why bother when you can effect no change, how can you effect change when you lack the force to bother – Henry sank into middle age, a disgrace to himself, a shame to the collective idea of success he had shared with his friends, the longest-serving and least-published member of an institution he despised. Many a time it seemed that they would sack him, for learned publications, not teaching and invigorating, were the measure, though God knows they could have sacked him for the latter as well, so lacklustre had his seminars and lectures become. His own joke against himself, that he slept on his feet while lecturing some days, slept and snored and kept on talking, while his students, faithful as always to the letter, wrote ‘Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz’ in their notebooks. But though Mona Khartoum called him in a couple of times during her tenure, puckered up her O for Henry to salute, cautioned him against overuse of the concept genius and wondered if he wanted her to suggest a research topic, or introduce him to an editor, for a salaried academic couldn’t expect to do nothing with his professional life except read and reread Jane Eyre and yet never publish a syllable about it, no step was ever taken to remove him. Perhaps they liked having him there as a warning and a specimen, like the mock-up of the woolly mammoth or the mastodon you find in the entrance halls to provincial museums, evidence of the life that once roamed the planet but which, due to some fault of character or design, some incorrigible predisposition to male-centred humanism, some congenital incapacity to publish, is now extinct. Tyrannosaurus Henrix.

  Which could also have explained how come he was permitted to live a semblance of a man’s life at the poly or the uni or whatever the fucking place was called, throwing himself on the mercies of friends’ wives when they happened to turn up as mature students, and otherwise, in his early years there at least, putting it freely, if disconsolately, about. See how pathetic – was that it? See how harmless when not allowed to roam in packs?

  Look on this work, ye Mighty, and despair.

  EIGHT

  He has agreed to w-a-l-k Angus.

  It seems to Henry that if he is not prepared to r-e-l-i-n-q-u-is-h Moira, w-a-l-k-i-n-g Angus is the least he can do.

  Lachlan comes knocking, only hours after their conversation, begging Henry to get him out of a hole. His pretext is an aspirin. Does Henry have? Of course Henry has. Henry has half of Western Europe’s stock of aspirin. As Lachlan must have known, because Moira must have told him. But the real reason is the dog’s exercise. Lachlan isn’t up to it, doesn’t know what the matter is, a virus of some sort, and poor old Angus who’s been in all day is getting desperate. It’s your fault, that’s what Henry takes him to mean. It’s your fault for getting me to tell you my life story and upsetting myself. The other implication is that it’s Henry’s fault for engrossing the dog and keeping him indoors.

  ‘Bless you,’ Lachlan says when Henry agrees. ‘I’ll fetch him.’

  But Henry doesn’t want Angus in his apartment. There are ghosts where Henry lives and he doesn’t want the dog frightening them, or vice versa. So the handing over takes place, huggermugger, on the landing between them.

  ‘Just the dog,’ Henry says, when Lachlan starts to explain the contents of the little tartan bag that goes with him. ‘Nothing else.’

  ‘Yes, but you’ll need some of these if –’

  ‘Just the dog,’ Henry says.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Lachlan says. ‘But he can’t go out without a lead. Do you want me to attach it to the collar now or will you do it when you get him down?’

  Henry looks startled. ‘What does getting him down mean? Do I have to wrestle him or something?’

  ‘No, just down the stairs. He doesn’t like the lift. Afraid of it, the silly sod.’

  ‘Do it now,’ Henry says, looking away. ‘You do it, here, now.’

  The dog’s tongue is making a lapping noise which Henry doesn’t like. He has a triumphant air. He may love Henry but he also has his measure. He knows that there is a battle of wills afoot and that he is winning it. He meekly offers his throat to Lachlan, in parody of obedience. See this, Henry? Well, you won’t be seeing this quality again for a while.

  ‘What you’ve got to watch with this clip –’ Lachlan begins to say.

  But Henry stops him. ‘You just sort it,’ he says. ‘I won’t be touching any mechanisms.’

  ‘No, but you’ll need to know how to unclip it when you let him off.’

  ‘I won’t be letting him off.’

  The dog pants, eyeing Henry with consternation. Unless its ironic consternation.

  ‘He needs an r-u-n,’ Lachlan explains. ‘He’s an old dog, but he needs his r-u-n.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘How old are you, Angus? Twelve, I’d say, at a pinch.’

  ‘How old’s that in human terms?’

  ‘Seventy-two, maybe seventy-five.’

  ‘Then I’ll r-u-n with him,’ Henry says.

  What he doesn’t say is that he has never w-a-l-k-e-d a dog in his life. Let alone r-u-n with one.

  Not counting the country daddy-long-legs which crawled across his unborn brain, little Henry was never allowed an animal of his own. The usual reason. Who would feed it.

  Together with the perhaps less usual reason: who would dare look upon it.

  Nothing short of metaphysical, Ekaterina’s horror of incalculable living things, into which category she placed the entire animal and insect kingdom. She had been given a rabbit when she was a child – Natalia – a lovely golden floppy creature, more hare than rabbit, with soft liquid eyes and a white patch on her chest, which Ekaterina thought of as an apron of the sort worn by the lady who came to do the dusting and make the beds. It helped Ekaterina overcome her initial fear of the rabbit to think of her as a maid. Two weeks after her arrival, maid or not, Natalia mysteriously fell pregnant. Not wanting to burden her daughter with the finer points of Natalia’s earlier life in the pet shop, Irina explained that rabbit-pregnancy was an airborne spore which had come in on the wind and invaded Natalia while she was busy nibbling her lettuce. Ekaterina marvelled at this and waited with her heart in her mouth for Natalia to deliver herself of bunnies. Are they here yet? Will it be this afternoon? Will it be tomorrow? They were exquisite when they came, balls of the warmest fur Ekaterina had ever touched, their hearts pumping through her fingers, one golden like its mother, two black, two brown, and one dirty grey. The next morning, when Ekaterina went to look at them, she noticed that the dirty grey was not moving. And the morning after, both the blacks. Had Ekaterina not seen Natalia pick up one of the browns in her mouth and dash it pitilessly against the side of the hutch, Irina would have let her believe the deaths were due to natural causes.
As it was, burying them under a tree at the bottom of the garden, she felt she had no choice but to try to convey to Ekaterina the idea of post-natal depression. Down to just the bunny that was the same colour as herself, Natalia appeared to settle back into the serenity of motherhood. But then one day the golden favourite disappeared altogether. Rather than get the inconsolable Ekaterina to accept that it was in its mummy’s tummy, Irina told her that she had taken it out of the hutch and set it free, to give it a chance in life. But by that time Ekaterina was off rabbits altogether.

  Which left, if the emotional instability of animals was to be a consideration in the matter of Henry’s having a pet, only fish. Henry remembers dimly the ornamental goldfish in the pool in the back garden, over which his mother sometimes shook a drum of what looked like pepper. Were they his? He never thought that they were his. But they didn’t last long, whoever they belonged to, on account of his father frightening them to death in the course of practising his fire-eating. That was his mother’s guess, anyway. They’d been fine and suddenly they weren’t. Izzi had gone out to exhale flame in the open, since he wasn’t allowed to do it in the bedroom, and the next day there they were, all six of them, floating bloated on their backs. Their eyes turned up. In shock.

  ‘If they’re in shock they’re alive,’ Henry’s father said.

  ‘By in shock I mean suffering the aftermath of shock.’

  ‘How do you know it was shock?’

  Ekaterina was adamant. ‘So what else do you think it was?’

  ‘Fish die. That’s life.’

  ‘Not six, all at the same time, Izzi.’

  ‘I think I’ve read,’ he said, ‘that the death of one fish can deprive others of the will to live.’

  She laughed at him. ‘And where would you have read that, you who have never read a sentence in your life?’

  Not true. He had read a dozen books on origami and fire-eating from cover to cover. But it wasn’t in his interest, just that minute, to cite those.

  So Ekaterina’s theory won the day. The fish had been going about their business, opening and shutting their mouths, when the flames had shot across them. Ekaterina put herself in their place. On her back, looking at the sky, she heard the bombs fall, saw the shadow of the flames, smelt the smoke and the paraffin, and said no to life.

  Soon afterwards they drained the pool and dumped sand in it for Henry to play in. But Henry wasn’t a sand boy. No matter how colourful the spades and buckets his father bought him, no matter how many moulds of Norman keeps and castles, or flags to fly above their ramparts, Henry was no sooner deposited in the sandpit than he fled it. Look out of the window and there he’d be, sitting under a tree, nursing his thin skin, reading The Awkward Age.

  What happens when you don’t get a boy a pet.

  He has a plan to ring Moira the minute he is out of the block, and get her to w-a-l-k Angus with him. It will be a try-out for them, an earnest of their future domesticity. There is a particular way of being together that couples out with their animals have, which Henry has always envied. An absent-minded complacency, an absorption in their separateness which is not to be confused with coldness, as though the reason for their being together, the abstraction of their union, is bodied forth in the ball of fluff charging around in front of them. The ectoplasm of their love.

  But she can’t make it.

  ‘Are you still angry with me,’ Henry wants to know, ‘because of before?’

  ‘I’m not angry with you.’

  ‘I’ve only agreed to exercise the little bastard in the hope I’d see you.’

  ‘You should be pleased to be doing Lachlan a favour.’

  ‘I am. Of course I am. That’s the other reason. To show you I have overcome my jealousy.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, but I can’t. Enjoy your walk.’

  Only when he rings off does it occur to Henry to wonder whether this is a ruse, hatched up between them, to get him, and the dog, out of the way.

  Thus does the dog become the ectoplasm of his insecurity.

  ‘OK, Angus,’ Henry says, ‘you and me.’ At which Angus, padding like a horse, looks up at him with eyes of longing.

  Henry can’t remember whether his favourite park, the one with all the graves in, is out of bounds for dogs. But he does know that parks are places where dog owners converse, and he doesn’t want any of that. He might be walking the dog but he is not dog-associated. So the High Street is the safer bet to be going on with, though he has forgotten how many shops are still open, how many people are about, and how conspicuous he therefore feels. Except that conspicuous is not the word. Searching for it, he rejects unaccustomed and awkward and even embarrassed in favour of humiliated. Is he insane, or what is he? Humiliated, humiliated to be walking a dog!

  And wherein lies the shame? Silly question to ask of Henry. Wherein doesn’t lie the shame?

  But he can tell you wherein lies the specific shame. In being seen to be reduced to the affections of a dog. Not mine, Henry wants to say. Nothing to do with me. Doing it for a friend. Allowing that the friend has nothing to do with him either.

  Henry is reduced to the affections of no one.

  Which seems to be the clue for Angus to piss against the tyre of a BMW.

  ‘Hey!’ someone calls.

  Neither Henry nor Angus takes any notice.

  ‘Hey! I said hey!’

  Henry looks up. They are outside Bar One or something similar. A man in a shiny metallic suit and of Middle Eastern appearance, could be Israeli, could be Lebanese, could even, Henry supposes, be Italian, is standing in the doorway, pointing rhythmically. He is on his mobile phone, and expects Henry to put up with his half-attention.

  ‘Your tyre?’ Henry wonders.

  ‘My wife’s tyre.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure she drives through worse,’ Henry says. He does not intend to apologise. Not on Angus’s behalf. For Angus, Henry will now lie on a bed of broken glass.

  The man goes on shaking his finger. ‘You should know you’re not meant to let dogs foul the footpath.’

  ‘That’s not the footpath. He wants the gutter, but your wife’s car is in the way. And on double yellow lines.’

  ‘In the way! You shouldn’t be walking him here at all.’

  ‘I take my dog,’ Henry says, ‘for walks where he wants to walk.’

  ‘And my wife parks where she wants to park.’

  ‘Then your wife and my dog have much in common.’

  ‘You’re a very rude person, you know that,’ the man says. Then, into his mobile, ‘Did you hear that? The arsehole!’

  Henry wishes, as he has wished all his life, that he had the insouciance to go over to the man and crush him and his mobile between his hands. If Henry had crushed more people between his hands in his fifty-nine years he would be a happy man now – happier, anyway – whatever his other disappointments.

  Instead, he shrugs. ‘Come on, Angus,’ he says. ‘Let’s see who else we can upset.’

  He has started to hum to himself. It is almost like carrying a gun, he has decided. Walking with a dog, at least when you have never walked with one before, is like being armed. No wonder people who walk with dogs and guns bear themselves with such swagger.

  ‘I ought to get one,’ Henry thinks. ‘I ought to have one of my own.’

  A dog, he means.

  But he would also have uses for a gun.

  It is possible Angus is able to feel what Henry is thinking through the lead. So far he has stayed close to Henry, keeping within the slack. Now he begins to put distance between them. If Henry is thinking about other dogs, then Angus will think about other dogs as well. And do it better.

  Head down, he noses out an urgent trail along the pavement, his jaw like a hovercraft, floating upon the aroma, or aromas, coming up from the flagstones. Could there be several? To Henry’s eye it appears that Angus is caught between two rival and parallel temptations, now breathing in the one, now breathing in the other, sometimes, with a worried shake of hi
s ears, attempting to breathe them both in at once. Whether they each veer into the doorway of the shop, or Angus has made his choice, Henry cannot tell. But having got here, Angus has another piss.

  ‘You’ve just done that,’ Henry says.

  ‘Hey!’ someone shouts from the shop.

  This time Henry doesn’t stop to slug it out.

  Then it’s off on the trail of other dogs’ piss. There are rivers of the stuff. Who would have thought it? What to Henry looks like dry desert slabs of cement and stone, are to Angus raging torrents of dog genealogy. And every trace engrossing. That’s what Henry can’t get over – how indiscriminately interested Angus is in everything he finds. Go on, Henry wills him, light upon a smell that leaves you cold, turn your nose up, say no to something. You’re seventy-five years old, you’ve been there, you’ve done it, there can’t be a surprise left. But there is. To Angus the world of dogs is as intriguing as it must have been the day he was born. Now there’s a stain at the foot of a parking meter, a congealed downward trickle burnt into the foot of a lamp-post, a telling discoloration of the bricks on the wall of a bank, just below the automatic teller, where, as always, there is a queue. Never mind waiting your turn, never mind people’s feet, Angus has to get to what he has to get to, it’s essential, absolutely beyond question, else he will miss – what? The site of a famous piss-in? Evidence of a spray-for-all which Angus cannot bear to have forgone? A haunting faecal memory? Is everywhere Pompeii for Angus – a normal dog day of another era, frozen for ever? What kind of life is this, Henry wants to know, where piss is all you ever think about, piss the centre of your every waking moment, and maybe of your every unwaking one as well, piss to sniff, piss to taste, piss to ponder, piss to piss on. A dog is meant to be man’s best friend, the animal world’s nearest approximation to us, not counting the eccrine-glanded chimpanzee, but any man who behaved one-hundredth as grossly as Angus would be locked away for life. Aren’t there said to be men who get off on sniffing girls’ bicycle seats? There had been rumours at Henry’s school linking the headmaster, Olly Allswell, MA, to a ring of degenerates who circulated among themselves soiled underwear belonging to women of the lower orders. Several of Henry’s friends had seen the postman delivering the parcels. To the school, would you believe that! ‘He’s probably sitting there with his face in them right this minute,’ Henry’s classmate Brendan O’Connor reckoned, ‘at the same time as he’s writing our reports.’ ‘Or with them on his head,’ Osmond Belkin guessed. ‘Or with our reports on his head,’ Henry jumped in. ‘You don’t suppose, do you,’ Brendan O’Connor wondered – Brendan, the handsomest boy in Henry’s class, eyes black as coals, but who would later waste his fires on the Catholic priesthood, perhaps as a consequence of this very conversation – ‘you don’t suppose he wears them for school assembly?’ No end, no end to the crimes you could ascribe to a pervert. Yet what was any of it compared to the improprieties of which Angus, without the slightest consciousness of shame, was routinely guilty?