Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  Instead there were reproachful looks, flouncings out of rooms the minute Chas entered them, bouts of overcast moroseness so electric they fused the mains, sly expressions of regret, almost, for her father, as though Chas had become the betrayer suddenly in the revised history of why their little family was no more. And then, when Chas arrived home late one morning looking admittedly like a woman who’d been up all night wrestling with a gorilla – though the truth, as we know, was that she’d been lying quietly listening to her lover’s body think – the outrageous indictment: ‘Mummy, you should see yourself. You look a slut.’

  Quite something, Chas didn’t say, coming from a bulldyke!

  And Timmy?

  Somewhere in her heart Chas disdained her son. It usually happens that a mother loses all respect for her manchildren about the time they start falling for girls, their once-monastic touch-me-not sons all at once become open house for vagrants, every window in their natures banging open, fools for whoever comes knocking. Kreitman made her feel better by telling her that his mother had misprized him at the same age for exactly the same reasons. ‘It improved,’ he said, ‘when I gave up on expectancy and settled down into unhappiness. Then she felt I was back. A verdant son is a nightmare to a mother.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure I’d call Timmy verdant, exactly,’ she said.

  Verdancy of the conventional sexual sort Chas wouldn’t have minded. The trouble with Timmy was that he wasn’t just open house, he was vacant house, tenantless, the windows of his nature flapping broken on their hinges.

  He seemed greedy to her, without exactly having appetite. He wanted things, without exactly having ambition. He passed judgements, without appearing to have a morality. He denounced his parents’ sexual conduct with vehemence, obscenely, without appearing to know decency.

  Kreitman had his own thoughts. Born into what should have been the advantages of a cultivated, middle-class home, with bookshelves on every wall and the Kultur gathered every weekend on the lawn, Tim had been permitted, with barely a demur, to embrace the culture of the council estate. Permitted? No, it was more than that. Encouraged. For what reason? Nostalgie de la boue.

  ‘Why are there pictures of footballers on his bedroom door?’ Kreitman used to enquire, preferably over dinner in the presence of the Kultur, when there was the chance of whipping up one of those civilised arguments he liked so much.

  ‘He’s a kid. All kids are interested in football.’

  ‘But you’re not interested in football, Charlie. You’ve never watched a game of football in your life. I bet you don’t even know how it’s scored.’

  ‘What have my interests got to do with it?’ Charlie exclaimed, cheered on by everyone at dinner. For these were the great democratising days of parenting, when nothing was feared more than the intrusive influence of parents themselves.

  ‘Everything, Charlie. That’s the point of Tim having you for a father and not someone else. You should be passing on your advantages.’

  ‘We do. We send him to a good school.’

  ‘Where’s he allowed to do the same?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And when he comes home, it’s to this?’

  ‘As you know very well, Marvin, kids go their own way.’

  ‘Not if you make efforts to save them.’

  ‘Save them! This is the purest melodrama. Save them from what?’ It was usually Chas who upped the tempo of the challenge at this point. Unless it was Hazel.

  ‘Come on. You know what they have to be saved from. At best, triviality. At worst, degradation.’

  ‘Degradation!’ This ejaculation from everybody. For these were the great days of moral relativity, when whoever expressed a preference was a sermoniser.

  ‘Commonness then, if degradation is too hot for you. Tell me something, Charlie – since I know you don’t read the Sun, tell me why Tim has page-three girls on his wall.’

  ‘Boys do that, Marvin. Boys like looking at girls.’

  ‘Not girls like that, they don’t. Plumbers like looking at girls like that. It’s an acquired taste. Commonness always is. We glamourise commonness, thinking it’s a state of nature. It isn’t – nature is altogether more refined. So why, if it’s acquired, are you allowing your boy to acquire it?’

  Two invariable answers to that. You’re a snob, Marvin. And you’re making a great deal about very little, because kids grow out of their pin-ups and their football posters.

  Kreitman doubted that. Kreitman believed you could always see the scars. What had he, for example, ever grown out of? (Seeking to disappoint his mother? Had he grown out of that?) But of course he did not now tell Chas what he thought – that Tim, like half the other kids in the country, was dying, if he were not already dead, of the culture of the council estate.

  Chas’s own view was altogether less apocalyptic than this. Timmy had been a lovely baby and a sweet child. A laugher. There were still pictures on the fridge of little Timmy stuffing candyfloss into Kitty’s face and laughing. All being well he would be like that again, given time. She had made allowances, like all sensible mothers, for the spermy thing. Now she had to make allowances – extra allowances, given the destabilisation caused by the break-up of her marriage – for the sniffy thing.

  ‘And what about the telly thing?’ Kreitman asked her.

  She wasn’t sure about the telly thing.

  Maybe from something somewhere on the telly Timmy would learn a little understanding, even compassion, if moral complexity from someone his age was too much to hope for – which Kreitman assured her it was.

  And Nyman? Without whom, etc., etc. …

  How went the world for the man with no visible means of support, no prospects and no attributes?

  It was a question Kreitman was frequently on the point of asking Chas. How fares the faggot, Chas? But he had resisted, not wanting to do anything to break the spell that held them, not wanting to stir her into anger, and not wanting to hear the answer, for fear of the pain it might cause him.

  Does that mean Kreitman dreaded learning that she secretly saw Nyman, or thought about him, or made efforts to hear of him? Or does it mean he dreaded luxuriating in Chas’s falsity, if false she turned out to be?

  Ah, if he only knew that.

  But one thing he did know – Chas was a new life to him, a deliverance from his old self, and therefore he would have been as a dog returning to its vomit, had he sought to reinstitute the bad habits of earlier times.

  So don’t ask Kreitman about Nyman, however drawn he was to the smell.

  He liked it fine where he was.

  Chapter Seven

  Although there’d been nothing in her marital experience to prepare her for the perversities of a man like Kreitman – Charlie, before setting foot on the planet Wrongdoing, having been an exemplary husband of the strictly horizontal school of sexual adventurism – Chas knew to keep the stopper on Nyman. That wasn’t difficult; he was of no interest to her. In extraordinary circumstances she had flirted with Nyman (the most extraordinary of the circumstances being that everybody else had flirted with him too), and then, under duress – force of events as much as any coercion coming from him – she had reverted to that queer family dutifulness which, not for the first time, had landed her in the soup. Flattering to a woman nearly twice his age that Nyman had asked for more, but not that flattering – every man was an Oliver Twist at heart, up for another helping whatever the dish. Quite what to make of Kreitman’s interest in a piece of nonsense that didn’t concern him and from which, as a gentleman, not to say as her husband’s friend, he should have turned his eyes, she wasn’t sure, but something told her no good could come of it. All right, simple jealousy might have heated his engines intially, but they were past that now. They were running. According to Dotty, who was no slouch herself, they were speeding. And there was nothing to be jealous of, anyway, given that what she’d done she’d done in rage. You can only play the cards you’ve been dealt. Not equipped to dress a man down
verbally, and not strong enough to punch him in the face, Chas expressed her contempt by whacking him off. Which, even allowing that she had once done the same to him, was none of Kreitman’s business.

  It should follow from the above that her assurances to Kreitman, both during their breakfast of bitter herbs on Dartmoor and after – that she had sent Nyman packing, that she had refused to help him, that she neither knew nor cared anything of his whereabouts – were truthful. They weren’t. When Nyman asked her for a loan she gave him one. Five hundred pounds to tide him over. The idea of her paying him for a kiss and a feel-up was so disgusting to her that she couldn’t say no to it. If nothing else, it proved what Charlie had reduced her to. She had heard of betrayed women cutting off their hair, or painting their faces grotesquely, as an act of terrible submission to their debasement. Chas kept her hair intact but paid a cyclist nearly half her age five hundred pounds for having let her hold his dick. Put the hard word on my sister, would you, Charlie? Now look!

  She also gave him her address and told him that though he couldn’t possibly stay there at present while the wheels were coming off her marriage – no, not even for the odd night, not even on the floor, not even in the garage, no, not even in a sleeping roll at the bottom of her garden – she might be able to offer him a bed at some later date. With a view to further sex which she would pay for? Absolutely not. But if he thought that, she wouldn’t disabuse him. She would be the more demeaned. Or rather Charlie, by the same logic, the more reviled.

  Five or six weeks after Charlie moved out, at around about the time that Kreitman was losing to himself nightly at shove-halfpenny, she allowed Nyman to move in. That was how he saw it, anyway. He drove up in a small van, packed with his things, his bicycle on the roof. Chas sent him away. ‘You can come back and stay for a maximum of two nights,’ she told him, ‘provided you are carrying a suitcase no bigger than this.’ She opened her arms to give him the dimensions and noticed he was taking the opportunity to evaluate her chest. No one ever evaluated Chas’s chest. ‘A mistake,’ she told herself. ‘The boy is deranged.’

  The other mistake, she realised, no sooner did she see him standing in her hall, gingery and denuded in brief khaki shorts and boots and flak jacket, like some lewd Boy Scout, was that she hadn’t thought enough about the effect his presence would have on her children. People often stayed over at the Merriweathers’ without Kitty or Timmy’s feelings being taken into account. The house rambled. There was room enough to go on a ramble yourself if you didn’t like who you saw at breakfast. And Kitty and Timmy were not generally fazed by their parents’ friends anyway. But then their parents’ friends were by and large too ancient or too out of it to faze anyone; certainly none of them turned up wearing shorts and boots, and if you did happen upon a flak jacket at the Merriweathers’, the chances were it had seen service in North Africa or the Middle East and not been bought the day before at Prowler. What would she do if the children jumped to the mistaken conclusion that Nyman was here for her, a consolation, or worse, a replacement for Daddy? Oughtn’t she to tell him she’d confused her diary, give him his taxi fare and send him back wherever he’d come from?

  Something turned over in her stomach. She’d chance it.

  She needn’t have worried. No sooner did Kitty and Timmy set eyes on their new house guest than they were in love with him. ‘I’ve been here before,’ Chas thought. ‘What is it with this guy? It’s spooky. Is he some sort of hypnotist?’

  In fact, Kitty and Timmy had an excuse, vis-à-vis Nyman, which their elders hadn’t. They already knew him. Not in the usual sense of the word know, and not in the biblical sense either, but televisually, which is altogether more intimate.

  ‘Wow!’ Timmy had exclaimed, even before the introductions. ‘It’s Norman!’

  ‘Nyman,’ Chas corrected.

  Nyman hung his head.

  ‘Norman?’ Chas laughed.

  Nyman still hung his head.

  ‘You’re called Norman?’ She looked from one to the other. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘so what’s with this Norman?’

  And that was how she learned that Nyman who was no one had an alter ego who was maybe someone, a Norman who had done what Nyman had told them all on Dartmoor he was anxious to do – that’s to say make a bit of a name for himself on the box. Whether he had therefore been teasing them all, getting them to guess what his forte might be, getting them to vie with one another over his prospects when his prospects were already proven and garlanded – garlanded in the eyes of Timmy at any rate – or whether he was simply schizoid, Chas didn’t begin to guess. But her stomach turned over again.

  She found it difficult to extract from either of them what Nyman in his capacity as Norman was actually famous for having done. Nyman himself wasn’t talking, taking refuge in modesty and renewed difficulty with the English language. (No problem understanding when his pants were down around his ankles, Chas recalled.) And Timmy, unable even in his clearest moments to distinguish between success and failure on the box, or between fact and fiction, let alone between past, present and future, all of it merging into one great blur of form and a single trancelike continuousness of time for which there was no tense known in grammar, couldn’t quite find the description to fit the job.

  ‘An actor?’ Chas asked.

  Timmy simultaneously shook and nodded his head. ‘Yeah, kind of, not exactly.’

  ‘An actor in a soap?’

  ‘Mmm … No, yeah. Depends how you define soap.’

  ‘A presenter?’

  ‘Nah,’ Timmy said. ‘Not a presenter, not as such, not exactly.’

  ‘A contestant?’ Chas felt she was getting somewhere now. Maybe Norman had been a fellow guest of Timmy’s on Blind Date. Wow, you’re Norman was commensurate with that. I’m Timmy from Richmond! I’m Norman from Nowhere! Whoo!

  Timmy scratched his head. Nyman went on looking between his naked knees. It needed Kitty, in the end, to come in from the kitchen where she’d been removing photographs of her father from the fridge, to clear things up. Norman had been on the box about a year ago in a reality game show which bore some resemblance, it seemed to Chas, to the old Yes and No quizzes of her youth. How long could people stand one another’s company without saying anything – that appeared to be the premise; how mute, under the provocation of other people’s muteness, could you remain. At the end of a fortnight in a confined space, Norman had tied, controversially, for first place. Chas wondered what the controversy could have been. You were mute, surely, or you were not. Chas’s children exchanged looks. Did their mother know nothing! In order to drive other people into language, Kitty explained, you were encouraged to employ whatever subterfuge or underhandedness you chose. Some viewers, Kitty and Timmy among them, believed Norman’s repertoire of social offensiveness was sufficient for him to have won outright. It was more subtly, they believed, than the other guy’s, which consisted in crudities like hogging the lavatory and stealing other people’s milk.

  ‘Whereas Norman?’ Chas asked.

  ‘Hard to explain,’ Kitty said. ‘Just being himself.’

  ‘And wearing these cool clothes,’ Timmy added.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Chas.

  And the prize which he fairly or unfairly shared?

  The chance to host his own late-night talk show.

  Chas didn’t think it was seemly to probe too deeply, with the subject of their conversation sitting there, coolly clothed and saying nothing, but how did Norman’s genius for verbal forbearance qualify him to host a talk show?

  Her children exchanged the same looks as before. Mummy with her word fixation!

  That Norman, for whatever reason, had not gone on to host a talk show, Chas deduced without asking. It explained him a bit. He was another of those to whom telly had promised the world and delivered nothing. Not unlike Timmy, never again, after Blind Date, to be the sweet, engaging boy he’d been.

  The only thing Nyman had to say on his own behalf about the experience of being
Norman was that he had enjoyed being recognised for a while, even though he wasn’t strictly being recognised for himself, that’s if he had a self. ‘I liked it very much,’ he told Chas, ‘when I put my hand out to people at a party and began to say my name, and they said, “I know who you are.’”

  ‘You liked being famous?’

  ‘I don’t know if I liked that, but I liked thinking’ – and here he tapped himself on the forehead, reminding Chas of the old moron joke: kidneys! – ‘that they didn’t really know who I was at all.’

  ‘No, well, none of us does,’ Chas said, chiefly to herself.

  Because it was always a bit of a free-for-all at the Merriweathers, the question of how Chas had come by Nyman never arose. And because Kitty and Timmy saw him as belonging culturally to them – which made a change – it didn’t once occur to them to think he might have been for Mummy. Chas took a few deep breaths and believed she had pulled off a lucky escape. After three nights she showed Nyman the door, slipped him a couple of hundred pounds, and warned him that he really was going to have to find himself somewhere permanent to live, because she was too distracted, as a woman whose husband had recently left her – and that wasn’t an invitation – to have him here again. Though by that time, of course, he had already wangled himself the promise of Timmy’s floor, whenever he wanted it.

  And all this she kept from Kreitman? Yes. Even though it would have given him intense satisfaction to learn that Nyman’s other name, maybe even his actual name, was Norman? Not Niemand, meaning mysterious Mittel European existential Nobody, but plain Norm, normal Norm, as like as not from Basingstoke. Yes. Mean of her, but yes.