by Jemma Wayne
I’d thought for a while that I would marry Hayley.
I haven’t actually articulated this to anybody, not even her, but I suppose really it was never because of a passionate, uncontrollable need to. Rather, we’d been together since school, we were getting to that age and I couldn’t think of a reason why not. Apart from getting dumped, of course. Which I hadn’t anticipated. Nor the impact with which that would hit me in the gut. She’d been there through my boyhood. She was the only person I’d slept with. Her rejection felt like a reproof – of who I was, of everything I’d become, forgetting she’d had a hand in shaping me. There have been a stream of weddings ever since where we bump into each other. Of course she never fails to look gorgeous, and assured, despite no longer sitting at the couples tables where we used to feel smug and sorted, but with singles cobbled together, taking sips from the wine that’s passed around to us only, the unattached, the unloved, to bestow luck that we will marry next. Please God by you. Clearly a custom invented by some enterprising Yenta. Next, as it happens, will be my flatmate Robert. And I’ll have to arrange the stag in some Eastern European destination. I’ll do it with appropriate gusto, obviously, I mean it’s Robert, but in truth I’m getting a little bored of these dos. They are condensed versions of what, I think, is the problem, my problem: irrelevance, routine, excess.
I give Sara’s breasts a squeeze, since they are there, and accept her kiss. Attempting not to breathe on her as I do so.
I know a lot of it’s down to my own choices. One of my uni friends works for the UN in Tanzania and posts Facebook pictures of himself on what seems like permanent safari. I wonder why I never considered a career like that. I think sometimes that I would have enjoyed living amongst expats and elephants. But not mosquitoes. I wouldn’t be good with mosquitoes. Besides, I’ve always wanted to be a banker. God knows why. I took the right A Levels, did the right degree, and spent enough summers doing the right internships. Now, I’m damn good. Mum of course boasts for me – my son the banker – irking the friends whose kids turned out to be not as high flying as their A*s once suggested. Though of course it’s never too late to be a doctor, Mum likes to remind me. She’s joking, I know. She wouldn’t have cared what career I’d chosen so long as I was happy. Dad too. They’re supportive, I’m lucky. In fact, I’m lucky in everything, always have been. And grateful for that. My life is nicely padded, nicely, nice. So why, why, why am I not, actually, happy? In spite of everything, there is dampness where fire should be.
Sara’s hand has moved downwards.
I look at her and feel a pang of guilt. There’s nothing wrong with Sara. She’s pretty. She’s smart. She’s Jewish. But she is, like the rest – like the rest, given away by that first twang of her slightly affected, slightly imperious North London accent. Though actually, there is a little less confidence in some of the girls these days; as 26 has given way to 27, then 28, the desperation to snag a Jewish man before they’re all taken has become more urgent, less easily concealed.
Sara reaches for another condom.
Not that I don’t enjoy confidence. I do. It’s just that they are all so similarly confident. Similarly… similar. Or else they are unavailable, or I’ve dated and rejected them in the past, or they have rejected me.
Taking the condom from Sara, I put it on swiftly.
“Are you sure?” I whisper. She told me she wasn’t looking for a relationship, she was bold about it, but aren’t all girls, really? Is it fair to pretend I don’t realise this? That I haven’t benefited from the insights of having a sister? Is it fair to wake her up at 4am for a second round when I have no intention of calling? I’ll definitely make her breakfast. And book her a cab. Sara smiles and pulls me towards her.
Of course there is Safia. Safia. Intelligent, feisty, beautiful in a way that even after all this time surprises me, and elegantly spoken – a mixture of St John’s Wood and Tehran – from underneath a dark fringe that covers half of one eye and that she continually hooks behind her left ear. We’ve been friends since our first year at Warwick but as far as romance goes, she isn’t Jewish – worse, she’s Muslim – so there has never been a point. For her as much as for me. Plus until a few years ago I was with Hayley. In any case I couldn’t do that to my parents. Not again. Gaby has just gotten engaged to a non-Jewish guy and it’s killing them.
Sara’s hair tumbles over her breasts in dark curls.
Safia’s hair is dark too.
I’ll shower after this. Mr Pike isn’t here so there’ll be time to dry between my toes.
***
For some reason I can’t stop thinking about that year – the year I became a man. It’s wrapped in a strong smell of leather and old books on account of the unprecedented amount of time we spent in synagogue; barmitzvah boys must attend every Saturday, every Saturday, Dan. Dad would often sneak off to the loos mid-service, loosen his tie, break out a novel, ostensibly not-pray, and once slip into the room laid out for kiddush and pilfer a fishball. But I have a memory of one Saturday, post shul, being in a field somewhere with him – I think it must have been the park, or maybe at school after a cricket match – and the two of us sharing a warm Coke while we pored over my portion, which I’d taken to carrying around with me in the weeks preceding The Big Day. It’s actually pretty hard work learning a Torah portion. First you have to decipher the Hebrew letters fast enough to read them without sounding like ET, then you have to learn the tune, and then you have to sing that tune with your non-choirtastic voice to everyone you know including all the girls you’re hoping to get off with at the party the next day. When I see barmitzvah boys being called up now, I still feel such empathy. Gaby, of course, being a girl and not having had her own portion when she was 13, learnt mine in half the time it took me and while I was practising, yelled corrections from her room down the hall. One afternoon this led to an all-out physical fight. But on the day of my barmitzvah I kept catching sight of her up in the ladies’ gallery, and even though she was with a gaggle of friends too adult to be much interested in 13-year-olds, she didn’t take her eyes off me. Her smile didn’t waver for the entire portion, even when I hesitated on the second verse and turned bright red, and though she later scoffed at the idea, I’m pretty sure that there was a moment when she cried.
It was also Gaby who, a few days later, guided me through phone protocol with Nicole Blatter during that crucial week after the first kiss.
I have never kissed Safia. It’s worth clarifying because a lot of people who see us together presume we have, presume we’re a couple, increasingly so in the years since Hayley. It isn’t unusual for me to rest my head against her like this. We sink comfortably into the worn leather of the sofa at our favourite café. There is only one such sofa, the rest of the room dotted with wooden chairs around long, sharing tables, but this Sunday we have scored it. Safia playfully flicks my head off her and leans forward to turn the page of my Observer. I raise an eye in mock irritation.
“Too slow,” she shrugs into her coffee.
I take a sip of my own: milky and sweet, two sugars. Safia’s is a more mature black. We have long since finished dissecting each other’s week, I have re-told the tale of Mr Pike, and we have slipped now into easy silence. A slightly wavy tendril of hair has escaped the bunch scooped onto the top of Safia’s head and is now caressing the nape of her neck.
I’m going to tell her. I’ve been thinking about it for months but with the beginning of autumn there’s been a new imperative. There is something about the remembered smell of freshly sharpened pencils and newly laminated exercise books that renders autumn, the period of nature’s demolition, for me prime pickings for new beginnings. I have to tell somebody to make it real, to make it happen. And it was always going to be Safia. It’s about completeness, I’ll tell her. About feeling whole, and part of something, important to something.
She glances up and catches my stare. With uncanny muscle control she upturns first one corner of her mouth and then one eyebrow into a familiar questi
on mark. I look back to the paper laid out between us onto which we are dropping crumbs of banana bread. It’s not like she’s my girlfriend, but I know her blessing will be the hardest. Mostly because my hankering is not for New York or Singapore or Sydney or somewhere else easy to explain, but for a place I know she’ll never understand, never condone, never feel for as I do. I train my eyes to the words on the page: Disaster of scrapping HS2 rail link, reads the headline. We both skim, then without consultation turn the page. Peers plot to revive plain cigarette pack law. Safia is a reformed smoker. We read the whole piece then spend a moment rating the collage of models’ off-duty style at Paris fashion week adorning the page opposite. Safia is not mean with her critique, just funny. She could be an off-duty model. I turn the page again. Israeli run shop divides Brighton. Safia’s breath changes, almost imperceptibly. Underneath the headline there is an article about a small Brighton store selling ethical products – such as soda from a tap into customers’ own bottles – that has unwittingly become the site for anti-Israel demonstrations. The company’s factory, apparently, is located in a settlement on the West Bank. I’d like to read the rest of the article, not just because of what I’m about to announce to Safia. But I don’t feel like a debate.
Safia turns the page.
In the end I don’t say anything. The sofa is too comfortable. And there is either everything or nothing more to say.
***
I used to wonder whether everybody behaves differently outside of their all-consuming work microcosm, or just me. Of course I know I’m still me, Daniel, but at work I’m a different me, a louder, cockier, sharper version. Am I putting it on? Am I that false? Or perhaps it’s real, perhaps the bank brings out the full Daniel Incarnate, harnessed at home by things like parents who remember me crying when I discovered where beef came from, and a sister who used to dress me in her tutu. Or maybe there isn’t a solid, tangible ‘me’ at all. At the bank, socialising takes place at bars and clubs where wives and girlfriends aren’t welcome or invited so I’ve never seen any of my colleagues in the context of their families. I haven’t seen if they’ve been able to find a workable way to split the paradoxical pieces of their souls. I worry that there isn’t a way. I worry that sleeping with the secretary isn’t what my mother expects of me. And that there’s something more important than the size of my bonus. And that no matter how quickly I am promoted I will never be as successful as my father who made his fortune from nothing, or as worthy as my grandparents who Survived. And that in my attempts to staple all the scattered fragments of myself together, I will never truly see the ‘me’ that others see or know what that means or who I am or why it is that something is missing.
It’s not that this quandary disappears in Israel. The longest I’ve ever stayed there is for a month and that was when I was 16. But there’s something about the dry, dusty heat that gets under my skin. There’s something about the history of the geography. There’s just a whiff of, something, that makes me feel centred, and connected, and different and –
There’s a dream I keep having. Some of it really happened but I’ve had the same dream so many times now that I can’t quite pick real from imagined. It’s nothing special, just me sitting on Rothschild Boulevard outside a café. The same kind of café that has flashed across news networks in previous years, devastated by a bomb. (Or rather bomb-er. Sorry, I’ve watched too much BBC and am removing the actor.) But there I am. Across the road are a group of fledgling soldiers decked out in olive green. To my left are French people, to my right Russians, the waiter is from Brazil. They speak in Hebrew and in their various languages and at fast fever pitch. And I, somehow, understand everything. Just sipping at my perfect upside down cappuccino. Not speaking myself but intuiting that something important is on the tip of my tongue. And I just feel this sense of getting it. It’s exciting, that feeling.
At the end of August I have this dream three times in one week.
As usual however a flurry of work means that there is no space to dissect any of it, and by the time I have another opportunity to breathe I have still not told Safia, or anybody, about Israel; it is thus no more real than my fantasies of taking up surfing, it is September, I’m back in my parents’ house helping my mother lay the table for the first night of Rosh Hashanah, and lazing around in the rooms I grew up in making resolutions for another New Year.
My favourite part of Rosh Hashanah is my mother’s honey cake. Mum – hair blow-dried to perfection and wearing heels instead of her usual indoor-Uggs – catches me peeking under the silver-foiled shell and slaps my hand away, directing me instead towards the dishes of fishballs, pickles, egg and onion, chopped liver, and olives, dotted everywhere about the room despite the fact that only four of us are coming. Most years the house is full by this point in the evening – grandparents, cousins, wives and husbands of cousins, a kid or two and a stray friend whose family are spending the festival in Israel. But this year, for one reason or another they are not attending.
Also not attending – or rather, not invited – is Gaby’s fiancé Pete. For the previous two years he has politely taken part; wearing a yamaka during the blessings, dipping apple into honey, and commenting more than once on the deliciousness of Mum’s cuisine. But those were in the days when Mum and Dad believed they were merely tolerating another of Gaby’s phases, like piercing her bellybutton. When Pete was this year officially not invited, Gaby suggested that perhaps Mum would be happier if her flagrant daughter was missing from dinner too. Mum promptly spent the next three hours alternating between raging and crying and in the end, Dad persuaded Gaby to change her mind. But she has not yet arrived. Even as Dad returns from work, late, and dodges Mum in the kitchen, she is yet to be seen.
Dad dashes upstairs for a quick change before unloading himself into the chair next to mine. He has been less frantic about the whole affair than Mum who calls every morning just as I’m stepping on the train to work, urging me – for the entire length of my journey until I go underground – to reason with Gaby; but even he, between mouthfuls of fishballs, emits an air of desperation.
Dad’s hair is these days a rainbow of thick, untameable and uncoordinated greys. To complete the effect he has this evening adorned his head with a bright purple yamaka he got from Mum’s friend Elaine’s grandson’s bris. And jazz shoes that he swears are slippers. It is hard not to smile at the ensemble. Dad grins and leans over me to reach for a pickle.
“Have you spoken to Gaby?” he whispers.
“Not today.” We are talking quietly so as not to agitate Mum further. “She’ll be here though.”
Dad nods. “I know Mum’s being a bit extreme Dan, but look, there are real practicalities. I mean, if they have a son, will he have the snip?” Dad mimes. “You don’t know. Pete might want him to look like him.”
“Is Pete not ‘snipped’ then?” I laugh, noticing how frequently I have thought recently about the status of penises. “I can’t say I’ve been looking.”
“You know you do look though,” Dad says, unintentionally waving a pickle as he talks. “When you’re a kid at least, at school, you look. Richard Zelden: huge. Barry Gardiner: a little wonky.”
“Dad!”
“Won’t he wonder why he’s not like his friends?”
“You’re assuming his friends will be Jewish.”
Dad lifts his hand to respond but then takes a bite of the pickle.
When we were kids, I hated pickles but loved olives. Gaby the reverse. There was always a selection of them and nuts too at the Wednesday night meetings Dad took us to. He was a founding member of a cross-cultural London dialogue group and, as young teens, he would drag us along with him to listen to a local Imam or Vicar, until demands of GCSEs and A levels granted us Mum’s backing to stay at home, which I did while Gaby continued to join Dad out of choice. When he stepped down last year, Gaby took over his role. Perhaps this is why he speaks now like a man clutching desperately to a stream of water escaping from a tap that he himself turned o
n.
“You know I don’t care if my hypothetical first grandchild’s friends are Jews, or gentiles, or the sons of storm-troopers. But will he know what being Jewish means?”
“I don’t know what it means. You’re Jewish because you’re Jewish, that’s it. Don’t worry, if there’s another Holocaust, Gaby’s kids will be just as high up on the list of people to chuck into the gas chamber.”
“Daniel-”
“You know what I mean. I’m just saying, Gaby’s Jewish so her kids will be Jewish.”
“They’ll be Jew-ish.”
“Actually,” says Gaby. “I’ve already put my non-existent offspring’s names down for a place at a nunnery.” Gaby has appeared at the door. “Hi family,” she sings in falsetto.
The thing is, Gaby is a collector. She collected Sylvanian Families way past the age it was socially acceptable to do so under the pretence that she was playing with me. She discovered Holocaust literature aged 14 and spent the following six months reading everything from I Am David to Schindler’s List before moving on to a fascination with, I think, all things Russian. At Oxford she studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics and she collected ideas, giving us a sample over the dinner table as she moved swiftly from socialism to liberalism and finally landed as a signed up member of the Conservative party. But she is a hoarder too. Her Sylvanians are still intact in a box under the bed in her old room, her bookshelves are lined two books deep, and although she swears it is irrelevant to her whether her husband is Jewish, she forgets that the summer of my barmitzvah she signed herself up to a Chabad Lubavitch camp and declared herself Shomer Shabbos.
“Chag Sameach,” says Dad, standing up in his jazz shoes to kiss her.
Mum appears from the kitchen with a glass of wine and hands it to her as though the liquid is made not of grapes, but olives.