‘We can beat it easy, sir. We can thrash the living daylights out of it. We can have it for dinner.’
‘Exactly what I think.’ He kept his refrigerated briefcase open on the desk, so that we should have somewhere to deposit the wrappers and the sticks, when there were sticks. The moment we were all finished he’d snap it shut. The briefing was over. ‘Now let’s get out there and move them!’
A lady over here and a lady over there.
I did well. I was salesman of the month three months running.
But then when all is said and done, I’d had the training.
And I liked where the driving took me: the wet melancholy lanes and culs-de-sac, many of them still cobbled, reflecting the bile-yellow end-of-humanity phosphorescence of the streetlamps; the back-to-back and front-to-front workers’ cottages built in the same sickly pink you’d get in our Neapolitan wafers; the swag vases in the windows; the swag ornaments; the swag doorknockers and doormats; and the sallow northern women coming out with the telly still flickering in their eyes and their purses chinking. And I say I liked this? Yes. What I liked was that I was saying goodbye to it; that soon I would never see it again. No more North, no more poverty, no more wet, no more tsatskes — a few more months and then gone for ever!
The best of them, the more presentable of the tsatskes, I took to the Kardomah to be seen with. They scrubbed up well. They could have done with work putting into their pronunciation of the mother tongue, but I was hardly one to talk. I was Boogart’ Awl Cloofin’ it with the best of them now, despite all my efforts to stay clear of the infection, and anyway, as Sheeny said, in an interesting inversion of one of Jesus’s more controversial aphorisms, it wasn’t for what came out of their mouths that we valued them.
Sheeny had changed in the time I’d known him. He rarely head-jockeyed now. Whether this had anything to do with Sabine Weinberger, whether she’d converted him to passivity, I cannot say, but ever since that evening in Benny the Pole’s squeaking pad he had become lazy and quiescent, looking to be done to rather than to do. I’d collect him sometimes, in my father’s van, and drive him to one of the streets on my ice-cream round where a couple of tsatskes would be waiting. He never got out of the van or even made an effort to be introduced; he’d just lie there on the sugar bags like a sheikh, with his flaming putz out, engorged and ticking — for his putz too suffered from the same nervous twitch as the rest of him — waiting to be fellated.
‘Couldn’t you at least have kept it in your hasen until we drove away from their front door?’ I’d expostulate with him, afterwards.
‘Did they complain?’
‘That’s not the point, Sheeny.’
‘So what’s the point?’
‘This is my round. This is where I sell ice-creams. They know me here.’
‘So you should thank me.’
‘Why should I thank you?’
‘For giving them a thirst. Oink, oink!’
I wouldn’t reply.
‘Oink, oink?’
‘OK, Sheeny. Oink, oink. Now put it away.’
‘What for? Aren’t we going to Laps’ now?’
He was right. Not about my needing to thank him, but that they didn’t complain. I’ve always been surprised about that — just how compliant women are when it comes to the putz. No one tells you that when you’re cowering in your shell. You drag the ocean bottom of your imagination and come up with the insane idea that it might be something to slide your in-between between a lady’s painted lips and then suffer months of shame for sinking to such depths. And all along the ladies are thinking the same thought. Not every one of them gave Sheeny what he wanted straight away. Some of them felt as I did, that it was preferable to wait until we’d driven fifty yards down the street. But none ever said, ‘How dare you assume that I’ll suck on that thing just because you’ve got the chutzpah to have it hanging out?’
This is not sour-grapes misogyny. I got my share. But I was an incorrigible foreplay man. I liked to know their names. I liked to talk about the weather. I liked to know what they were reading. Then I liked to fish my putz out.
And it upset me that all women weren’t insistent on these necessary little social rituals themselves.
Partly I felt this out of respect for the women who had brought me up. I wouldn’t have wanted to think that any aunty of mine, or any sister come to that, would have woodpecked Sheeny the way those Middleton women did, without a by your leave. But my relative squeamishness proved something else, too. I wasn’t the real thing. I wasn’t Kardomah to my soul. As far as tsatskying went I was merely a tourist.
I tried the Waxman method just once. I interrupted my ice-cream round one wet bile-yellow but still somehow sticky April evening to pick up a bull-necked choc-ice fresser who’d been giving me the nod every night for a week. ‘Get in,’ I said. I didn’t even open the passenger door of my stop-me-and-buy-one for her. I let her walk around of her own volition and climb in. Then I parted my yellow nylon coat and pulled out my putz. Then I drove up into the fields behind the brickworks, turned the engine off, and sat back the way I’d seen Sheeny do. Sat back and looked down over the shot-towers and chimneys of Middleton. She couldn’t reach me. Her neck was not flexible enough. And the mini was not coach-built with Sheeny Waxman ask-no-questions fellatio in mind. ‘Out,’ I said. Then I lay down in the clammy field and waited for her to do me there. No, warm for the time of year, isn’t it. No, I’m going to Cambridge at the end of the year, and what do you do for a crust. No, read any good books lately. And it worked. Sheeny was right. She didn’t complain. It’s even possible she was grateful not to be harassed with small talk. The only one experiencing difficulties was me. I had been too well brought up. It had always seemed to me that politeness demanded a big come. Astounded expression, rolling eyes, spasming shoulders, quivering feet, ten-minute howl — the works. But half-way through Act IV Scene v I over-convulsed and spilled the change from the pockets of my nylon coat. The evening’s takings, all of it in threepenny bits and sixpenny pieces, flung far and wide across the meadow of old bricks and weeds. I finished coming then got her to help me gather in the dosh. Anyone watching would have thought we were lovers in the grass, looking for four-leaf clovers and daisies to chain around each other’s necks. We fell to talking as we searched, whatever we were, which I suppose you could say was a sort of foreplay after the event. Also not something Sheeny expended any energy on. So I still wasn’t able to feel I’d succeeded in being a callous carefree fellatee.
I didn’t find all the takings either. And that wasn’t the end of my problems. So little was I a callous carefree fellatee that I’d taken the keys out of the ignition when I lay me on the grass — don’t ask me why: just to be on the safe side, I suppose, just in case she decided to swallow those as well, just in case she had a mind to make off with the vehicle while I was coming — and these too had rolled out with the change. And were gone.
We searched for an hour. Then I walked back down with her in the warm rain and rang up the depot from her house. There were questions to be answered in the matter of what I was doing parked in the middle of a hill field when I was supposed to be out selling ice-cream. And what I was doing throwing away the keys. But the real trouble came when I was towed back into the depot with melted ice-cream pouring out from the back of the mini-van. For if you lost your keys you lost your freezer.
‘Every night,’ the manager said to me the next day, ‘I have to remember to plug in my briefcase. Do you know why?’
Of course I knew why. Because he was a loser, that’s why. But what I said was, ‘To keep it cold, sir.’
He showed me the palms of his hands. ‘Exactly. To keep it cold. And do you know what would happen if I forgot?’
Of course I knew what would happen. His life would improve. But what I said was, ‘You’d have a wet briefcase, sir.’
So far he seemed pleased with me. ‘Exactly. And if I have a wet briefcase … But you know the rest. You’re a smart lad.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Look, Walzer,’ he said, changing his position in his chair, and changing his tone, too. Confidentiality, that was what he was trying for. Smart lad to smart lad. ‘Look, Walzer, I can do one of two things. I can take the cost of the ruined pieces out of your next pay-packet.’ (Pieces, we called them. Christian for shticks.) ‘Or I can sack you.’
He was Oxford, as I’ve said. Balliol. Handsome, with shadow-grey jowls. And sad. It couldn’t have been what he had ever anticipated for himself, having to remember to plug a refrigerated briefcase in every night. But you start with reading economics — and the next thing … That’s the way with tsatskes — they imperceptibly creep up on a man.
Maybe I saw myself in him, my own future. Maybe I was just losing my bottle again, the way I had against that limber foul-mouth Royboy Roylance. Or maybe I was once more the gull of language, as I’d been when talking on the phone to Phil Radic, and couldn’t resist the answer hidden in the question. I wasn’t much good at protecting my own interests, whichever way you read it.
‘Why don’t you just do both, Mr Lightbowne,’ I said, removing my yellow nylon coat without even bothering to check for personals, and flouncing out like someone failing an audition for a chorus line.
So I got to put in a few months with my father after all. And was there, in the middle, when the gantse geshecht came falling down.
The times were partly to blame. Swag wasn’t what it had been. People were spending their money on different things. The technological revolution hadn’t yet happened — no one had a computer or a facsimile or even an answering machine in those days — but transistor radios were coming in, and tape recorders were turning into cassette players, and when they weren’t jigging to a monotonous beat the poor were going to the Costa Brava and returning with more sophisticated attitudes to domestic ornamentation. Why have a love-in-a-cottage chalk wall plaque over your fire when you could load the mantelpiece with dying bulls and flamenco dancers whose satin skirts twirled in the updraught? Swag itself was changing — that’s what I’m saying. Swag was becoming internationalized, fulfilling grander dreams.
And my father didn’t notice, was that the problem? He was yesterday’s swagman?
Partly yes and partly no. He was slow to perceive the transformation, that’s undeniable, but I believe he would have got there in the end. Swag was in his blood. Eventually he would have heard it crying to him in the night. Were he alive and in business today he’d be doing well with mobile phones. That’s what an eye for useless crap he had. So no. The real reason everything came tumbling down around his ears was that he’d never had the slightest idea how much money he had to spend or what anything was costing him and therefore what anything should sell for. Mike Sieff had been right all along when he’d clapped his hands and yelled and screamed and wondered if my father had been out in the sun too long, knocking the gear out at that price. It was no surprise that he was going bust. The surprise was that it hadn’t happened years ago.
He never opened his bank statements. He never took them out of their envelopes. He didn’t want to see. So long as he hadn’t seen in black and white how little money he had in the bank he could legitimately proceed on the assumption that he had plenty.
He could never find his invoices.
My mother would tear her hair out. ‘Joel, how can you price anything if you haven’t got your invoices?’
‘I can remember.’
‘So how much were the bathroom cabinets?’
‘The ones with no shelves?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the broken mirrors?’
‘Yes.’
‘I got those at a special price.’
‘And what was that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, about a funt.’
‘What do you mean about?’
‘About a funt, I don’t know.’
‘Each? A pound each? A pound for the lot? Which, Joel?’
‘Each. Each. A funt each. Or was it two funt? Something like that. Stop hacking me on a kop.’
Who cares? That’s what he wanted to say. Who cares? As long as we move the stuff out. Over there and over there. And again. And another. Last one. Who’s a liar?
If she really kept on at him he’d lose his temper and say, ‘It’s a loss-leader, now can we leave it at that!’
I don’t know how many times my mother, let alone his accountant, let alone his accountant’s mother, took him through the principle of losing a little in order to win a lot. But he was always bored by it. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he’d say. ‘Loz me ein. Don’t make me oisgemisht. We’re shifting gear, that’s all that matters.’
The rest of us fared no better. ‘What are you lot complaining about?’ he’d say. ‘You’ve got a roof over your head, haven’t you?’
In the end we very nearly didn’t.
Even he realized, before the end finally came, that he had to make a show of looking like a man in control. ‘Now what have I done with that invoice?’ he’d say, just as we were about to sit down to supper, frisking himself with the astonished look of a person who had never mislaid a thing in his life. Then the hunt began. Every pocket. The turn-ups of his trousers. The back of every chair. Under the table. Under the bed. Under the mattress. The bin. The garage. The van. Wherever he’d been. Where had he been? And if we were lucky we would find it, still at the warehouse, lying in a pool of diesel at the local garage, floating like a lily in the gutter outside Sheeny’s house, left on the counter of some transport café, or just in an extreme corner of his back pocket all along. He didn’t own a wallet. Never had owned a wallet. He was his wallet, that was the idea. If he had a wallet he would lose it, so he stuffed papers into whichever part of himself happened to be to handiest. We’d all seen him throw five-pound notes on the ground, imagining that he was scrunching them into his trousers. Sometimes we’d have to go out searching for cash, never mind an invoice, the day’s takings, hundreds and hundreds of pounds which he’d put somewhere. I recovered seventy smackers once, out of a lost sum of four hundred, just by following a trail of fivers to a phone box. Someone was using the phone when I got there so I knocked on the glass and reached in, retrieving another fifty wrapped in a brown paper bag.
When I told him what had happened to my ice-cream job he had the decency to see the joke. Like father like son. We both couldn’t keep a shilling in our pockets.
And then one day it wasn’t funny any more.
The house went from noisy to quiet in a single instant, and then went from quiet to noisy just as abruptly, but now at all the wrong times. People I had never seen before arrived in the early morning carrying boxes, then more people I had never seen before arrived in the dead of night to carry them away. There were constant phone calls out of business hours, some of them confidential and rueful — shushkehing phone calls: mutter mutter, ech ech — some of them wheedling, many of them angry, all of them futile. The phrase ‘You soon know who your friends are’ was forever on my father’s lips. He lost stature. His brick shithouse shoulders looked as though they’d been hit by a semi-trailer. He slumped and lost weight. He lost his appetite. One by one, my mother lost the rings from her fingers. Pawned. Reduced to pawnage — us! Us! Who until now had never known what or where a pawn shop was. But we were learning quickly. We were helpless in the arms of a process which I thought only attacked the families of crooked financiers or ne’er-do-wells: we were going mechullah.
‘If it wasn’t for you kids,’ my mother said, ‘I’d put my head in the oven.’
To my sisters she said, ‘Let this be a lesson to you. Never marry a man who doesn’t know where his invoices are. However much he makes you laugh.’
She had become like the Lady of Shalott. She wouldn’t look out of windows or answer the door or telephone. Thro’ the noises of the night she hid in shadows. The curse had come upon her.
There was only one consolation. The tower was in her name.
I’ve been told by other bankrupts that when it f
inally happens, when you go from going mechullah to being mechullah, there is a wonderful sense of relief. It wasn’t like that with us. The final blow was the bitterest blow. Because it was delivered not by any impersonal system of justice or retribution, but by a mortal enemy. Copestake.
Yes, that Copestake! Cockroach and fatherer of cockroaches.
Come the hour when the forests are all gone and the ice has all melted and the hole in the firmament is big enough to drop a hundred moons through, one creature will still be crawling across the face of the ruined earth, the copestake, inexpungible, impervious to all extremes of climate, proof against insult and obloquy, resistant to fire itself.
Yes, he had done well out of the insurance on the charred Cheetham Hill Road emporium. So well that for a while people wondered whether Benny the Pole mightn’t have been working for him and not the Beenstocks all along. Though it wasn’t beyond Benny, his old Kardomah chinas chipped in, to have been in the employ of them both. Against either of these theories was the condition of Mrs Copestake, who had begun to shake on the day after the fire and hadn’t stopped shaking since. Why would she be shaking if she’d got what she wanted to get — assuming she wanted what her husband wanted, that’s if he had ever wanted it (and conspired to get it) in the first place? Of course there could have been discussions between Copestake and Benny the Pole without Mrs Copestake being party to them; men who love their wives frequently keep them in the dark. But in that case Mr Copestake would surely be at the mercy of some pretty mixed emotions right now, seeing his wife quivering like an aspen, and by all accounts he wasn’t.
The Mighty Walzer Page 27