J

by Howard Jacobson

  She wasn’t angry. Ez didn’t strike her as someone who would go through her clothes, or read her letters, or otherwise poke about in her life. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t, for example, dream of ringing Kevern to tell him what she’d just told Ailinn. And besides, an older woman could be permitted a few liberties a younger one could not. Wasn’t that their unspoken contract – that Ez needed the company of someone who could be almost as a child to her, and Ailinn . . . well she surely didn’t need another mother, but all right, someone who could be what she’d never had, an older sister, an aunt, a good friend? Yet even allowing for all that, there was an anxious soulfulness about Ez, a taut emotional avidity that made Ailinn the smallest bit uncomfortable. Why was she sitting on the end of the bed, her body twisted towards Ailinn as though in an act of imploration, her eyes moist with woman-to-woman understanding, the phone in her hand? What in the end did it matter to Ez whether or not she left the village woodturner a message?

  She knew she was lucky to be with someone who cared about her happiness. She wasn’t used to it. Her mother by adoption meant well by her but lost interest quickly. She would have had no attitude, or at least expressed no opinion, in the matter of Kevern Cohen. She never spoke of Ailinn’s future, a job, possible husbands, children. It was as though she’d given Ailinn a life by rescuing her from the orphanage and that was that. Satisfying her conscience, it felt like, needing to perform a charitable act, and once performed, her responsibility was at an end. What, if anything, followed, was of no consequence or interest to her. So there were levels of concern Ailinn accepted she had still to learn about. Maybe her mother was the way she was with her because Ailinn made her so. Maybe she lacked a talent for being liked. She certainly lacked the talent for being liked by herself. In which case she was grateful to Ez.

  And in which case shouldn’t she make an effort with the clumsy man who at first had treated her with such gentleness, smiling softly into her face, inclining his head to kiss the bruise under her eye? He was sufficiently unlike the others, anyway, to be worth persisting with.

  To hell with it, she thought – though she didn’t tell Ez she’d changed her mind; she didn’t want her to think it had been her doing – to hell with it, and instead of putting down the phone this time when no one answered, she chanced her arm.

  Hello. It’s Ailinn. You remember? Thick ankles – ring a bell? To be brief about it, because she was sure his time was valuable, she wanted him to know she had inspected herself front on and sideways in the mirror, and OK – she was too thick. And not just around the ankles. He waist was too thick as well. And her neck. She had become, she realised, as overgrown as the garden in which he’d been rude to her and told her it was a joke. She was grateful, by the way, for having the principles of comedy explained. She hoped she would be better able to get a joke the next time he was rude to her.

  Anyway, if it was of the slightest interest to him – and why should it be? – she had decided to take herself off to Weight Watchers on whatever day they set up their scales in the village.

  That’s me. And now you. What do you intend to do about the thickness of your head?

  She didn’t laugh in order to make it plain that she too had comic ways. She wasn’t going to make herself easy for him. If he couldn’t read her, he couldn’t read her. She didn’t want to be with a man who insisted she got his jokes but wouldn’t make the effort to get hers. Nor did she want to be with a man who didn’t hear how much she was risking. Without risk on both sides, why bother?

  Goodbye, she said. Then feared that sounded too final. Or should that be adieu? Unless that came over as desperation. No, goodbye, she said. And wished she’d never bothered.

  What good came of love, when all was said and done? You fell in love and immediately thought about dying. Either because the person you had fallen for had a mind to kill you, or because he exceptionally didn’t and then you dreaded being parted from him.

  That was a joke, wasn’t it?

  And she got that well enough.

  Kevern picked up her message. Relieved and reluctant at the same time – mistrustful of all excitement – he rang her back. He was surprised when she answered.

  Oh! he said.

  Oh what?

  Oh, I never thought you’d be there.

  Good, she thought. He imagines I am out and about.

  They could hear each other swallowing hard.

  Don’t go to Weight Watchers, he told her. It’s a free-for-all. And besides, you are fine as you are.

  Fine? Only fine?

  More than fine. Perfect. Lovely. She should take no notice of what he had said. There was something wrong with him.

  Something wrong in the sense that he said what he thought without thinking through its consequences, or something wrong in the sense that he saw what wasn’t there?

  He thought about that. Both, he said. And in many more ways besides. Something wrong with him in every possible regard.

  So my ankles aren’t thick?

  No, he said.

  And would it matter to you if they were?

  This he had to think about too. No, he said. It wouldn’t matter to me in the slightest bit. I don’t care how thick your ankles are.

  So they are thick! You have simply decided that to humour me you will turn a blind eye to them at present. Which is generous, but it might mean you will mind them again in the future when you aren’t feeling generous or you are in the mood to be funny. And then it will be too late.

  Too late for what?

  She had said too much.

  He waited for her reply.

  Too late for us to part as friends.

  I promise you, he said.

  You promise me what?

  That we won’t ever part as friends? No good. That we won’t ever part, full stop? Too good. That I won’t mind your ankles in the future, was what he decided to say. Promise.

  And now?

  Kevern sighed. You win, he said.

  I’ve won, she thought.

  She’s going to be hard work, this one, he thought.

  His other thought was that she was just the girl for him.

  ii

  The morning after the call he sat on his bench and wondered if he was about to experience happiness and, if so, whether he was up to it. He could have done with someone to talk to – his own age, a little younger, a little older, it didn’t matter, just someone to muse with. But enter someone you can muse with and enter, with her, heartbreak. They were as one on this, he and the girl whose ankles he would never again object to, although they didn’t yet know it: to think of love was to think of death.

  He rarely missed his mother, but he did now. ‘What’s for the best, Mam? Should I go for it?’ But she had always been negative. What was for the best? Nothing was for the best – for her the best was not to go for anything, just stay out of trouble and wait to die.

  That was the impression she gave Kevern anyway. In fact she lived a secret life, and though that too was wreathed around in death, the very fact that it was secret meant she saw some risk as worth the taking. Was it because she loved Kevern more than she loved herself that she didn’t recommend risk to him?

  A funny sort of love, Kevern would have thought, had he known about it.

  As for his father, any such conversation would have been equally out of the question. ‘You always hurt the one you love,’ his father had said the first time Kevern was ilted by a girl. Kevern took that to be an allusion to one of the old songs his father listened to on earphones. His father did not normally have that much to say.

  ‘But she’s the one who’s hurt me,’ he answered.

  His father shrugged. ‘Bee-bop-a-doo,’ he said without taking off his earphones. He looked like a pilot who knew his plane was going down.

  ‘I’ll go for it, then,’ Kevern said to himself, as though after considering all the sage advice no one had given him. But he still wanted to run it all over in his mind.

  It infuriated him when D
ensdell Kroplik appeared up the path, singing to himself, a countryman’s trilby pulled down over his eyes, heavier boots on than the weather merited, swinging his rucksack full of unsold pamphlets and nettle conditioner.

  ‘If you want the bench to yourself I’ll clear off,’ Kevern said. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘If I’d wanted a bench to myzelf I’d have found un,’ Kroplik said.

  I see, playing the yokel this morning, Kevern thought. That wasn’t his only thought. The other was ‘Up yours’, though he was not normally a swearer.

  His mouth must have moved because Kroplik asked him what he’d said. In for a penny, in for a pound, Kevern decided, taking a leaf out of Ailinn’s book. ‘I said, “Up yours.” I was repeating what you said to me in the pub last night.’

  The barber rubbed his face with his hand. ‘Yeah, I sayz that sometimes,’ he conceded. ‘And a lot worse when the mood takes me.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Kevern said.

  ‘Like khidg de vey. If you knowz what that means.’

  Kevern nodded, saying nothing. It was a way of getting through life: nodding and saying nothing.

  ‘You don’t know, though, do you,’ Densdell Kroplik went on, enjoying his own shrewdness. ‘But I’ll give yerz a guess.’

  ‘No doubt it means something like go fuck yourself.’

  Kroplik punched the air. ‘We’ll make a local of yerz yet. Go fuck yerzelf is spot on.’

  ‘I didn’t bring up your abusive language to me last night so you could abuse me further,’ Kevern said. He heard how pious he sounded but there was no going back now. ‘I’d rather not be spoken to like that,’ he went on.

  ‘Oh, you’d rather not.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘Pog mo hoin.’

  ‘Don’t tell me . . . Your mother’s a fucker of pigs.’

  ‘Close, close. Kiss my arze.’

  ‘You are a mine of indispensable information,’ Kevern said, getting up from the bench.

  ‘That’s what I’m paid to be. Do you know who the first person was to say pog mo hoin in these parts?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘The first person I sayz.’

  ‘No idea. I wouldn’t have been around.’

  ‘No, that you wouldn’t. So I’ll inform yerz. The giant Hellfellen. That’s how he kept strangers out. He stood on this very cliff, right where you’re standing now, made a trumpet of hiz fist, stuck it in hiz backside and blew the words “kiss my arze” through it, so loud they could hear it three counties away, and you had to have a very good reason to come here after that.’

  Kevern was not a folklore man. Mythology, with its uncouth half-men, half-animals, frightened him. And he hated talk of giants. Especially those who used bad language. If there were going to be gods he wanted them to be supreme spiritual beings who didn’t fart, who employed chaste speech and otherwise kept themselves invisible.

  ‘We’ve always known how to extend a warm welcome down here, that’s for sure,’ he said.

  ‘We?’ Kroplik made a trumpet of his own fist and belched a little laugh through it. ‘Well yes, in point of fact we do.’

  ‘So when you tell me to go fuck myself you intend nothing but friendliness by it.’

  ‘Nothing whatsoever, Mister Master Kevern Cohen. Kiss my arze the same. I’m being brotherly, and that’s the shape of it. And to prove it I’ll give you a free shave.’

  On this occasion Mister Master Kevern Cohen declined. ‘Pog mo hoin,’ he thought about saying, but didn’t.

  His detestation of swearing amounted almost to an illness. At school, although Latin wasn’t taught, one of his classmates told him that the Latin for go fuck yourself was futue te ipsum which, for all that it sounded nicer, still didn’t sound nice enough. Kiss my arse the same. It wasn’t only that he didn’t want to kiss anyone or have anyone kiss him there – least of all those to whom it would have been most appropriate to say it – he recoiled from the sound of the word. Arse! Even cleansed of Kroplik’s brute enunciation it made the body a site of loathing. Swearing was an act of violence to others and an act of ugliness to oneself. It had no place in him.

  With one exception he had never heard either his mother or his father swear. The exception – single in type but manifold in application – was his father’s deployment of the hissing prefix PISS before words denoting what he most deplored. As, for example, his transliteration of WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED into the raging, estless est-speak of THE GREAT PISSASTER or THE PISSFORTUNE TO END ALL PISSFORTUNES or simply THE PISSASTROPHE. Accompanied always by a small, self-satisfied whinny of triumph, as though putting PISS before a word was a blow struck for freedom, followed just as invariably by a stern warning to Kevern never to put a PISS before a word himself, not in private, and definitely not in public.

  Otherwise the worst his father ever let drop in his hearing was ‘I think I’ve forgotten to rumple the bloody hall carpet.’

  And even for that his wife reproved him. ‘Howel! Not in front of the boy.’

  It was something more than distaste for bad language. It was as though they had taken an oath, as though the enterprise that was their life together – their life together as the parents of him – depended on their keeping that oath.

  They were elderly parents – that explained something. Elderly in years in his father’s case, elderly in spirit in his mother’s. And this made them especially solicitous to him, watching and remorseful, as though they needed to make it up to him for being the age they were, or the age they felt they were. At the end of his life his father had admitted to a mistake. ‘We would have done better by you had we let you be more like the rest of them,’ he said. ‘We wanted to preserve you but we went about it the wrong way. May God forgive me.’

  His mother had died a month earlier. She had been dying almost as long as he’d known her, so her exit was expected, though the means of it was not. In circumstances that could not be explained she had suffered multiple burns while taking a short walk only yards from the cottage. As she didn’t smoke she had no use for matches. The day was not hot. There was no naked flame in the vicinity. Either someone had set fire to her – in which event she would surely, since she remained conscious, have pointed a finger of blame – or she had combusted spontaneously – and what counted against that theory was that her torso was not burned, only her extremities. She lay quietly on her bed for three days without complaining and seemingly not in pain. Her final words were ‘At last.’

  But his father died – aged eighty though looking older – in a slow burn of ineffective rage. On the faces of some old men the flesh sags from lack of expressive exercise, the feeling man behind the skin having no more use for it; but on his father’s it grew tighter with approaching death as though the skull beneath could not control its grimaces. On his last night he asked Kevern to dig out an ancient music system he kept hidden under the stairs in a box marked Private Property and got him to play the blind soul singer Ray Charles singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ over and over. He shook his fists while it was playing, though Kevern couldn’t tell whether at him, at Ray Charles, or at the cruel irony of things. ‘What a oke,’ his father said. ‘What a oke that is.’

  He had to unclench his father’s fingers when the bitter light finally went out of him.

  He let the music go on playing.

  Kevern had always known about the box marked Private Property. Its futility saddened him. Would the words Private Property deter burglars? Or were they meant to deter him and his mother? What he hadn’t known was how many more boxes marked Private Property – some of them cardboard and easy to get into, others made of metal and fitted with locks, but all of them numbered – his father had secreted under his bed, on the top of the wardrobe, in the attic, in his workshop. Hoarding was proscribed by universal consent – no law, you just knew you shouldn’t do it – but he didn’t think this could be called hoarding exactly. Hoarding, surely, was random and disorganised, the outward manifestation of a disordered
personality. His father’s boxes hinted at a careful, systematic, if overly secretive mind. But he’d read that people who kept things, whether they ordered them or they didn’t, were afraid above all of loss – the fear of losing their things standing in for their fear of losing something else: love, happiness, their lives. Well he didn’t need proof that his father was a frightened man. The only question was what he had all along been so frightened of.

  Kevern knew the answer to that while maintaining that he didn’t. You can know and not know. Kevern didn’t know and knew. There were books in the redacted section of Bethesda Art Academy library with pages torn from them. Kevern sat in what appeared to Rozenwyn Feigenblat, the academy librarian, to be a concentration of profound vacancy, reading the pages that were no longer there.

  One of his father’s boxes was marked for his attention. Another was marked for his attention only in the event of his considering fatherhood. What he was meant to do with all the others he had no idea. Hoard them, he supposed.

  Going through the papers and letters in the box marked for his attention, Kevern discovered a shocking truth about his parents. They were first cousins. That fact wasn’t documented or brazenly trumpeted, but it was evident to anyone capable of reading between the lines, and Kevern lived between the lines. He couldn’t have failed to gather, from his mother’s and father’s misery and from remarks they let drop over the years, that they didn’t belong down here, that they lived in Port Reuben not out of choice, because they loved the sea or sought a simple way of life, but under duress; but he had never understood the nature of that duress, who or what had brought them and why they stayed. Now he knew. Down here no one would care about their incest (as Kevern considered it to be) even had they got wind of it. Cousins? So bleeding what! We are all one big happy family here. We don’t care, my lovelies, if youz is brother and sister.