Whatever it is, I Don't Like it

by Howard Jacobson

  They’re all scrunched themselves. And dyed. If you were dropped here from Mars with a knowledge only of Earthlings’ colours and cuisine you’d say they were all wearing red chilli noodles on their heads.

  I’ve stopped asking for a cut. If you ask an Australian woman hairdresser for a cut you come out bald. You know what marsupials are like: they nibble everything. So I just pop in for a scrunch. Then halfway through I suggest they take a bit off here and a bit off there.

  We are in what is called the Flinders Quarter. Le Quartier Flinders. An acre of quaint bohemian village lanes in the middle of a straight city. You buy recycled Levi’s here, designer trash, books about the environment, freshly squeezed carrot, lettuce and mango juice, and strong cappuccinos. It’s a brave part of town, favoured by people in wheelchairs, sellers of the Big Issue, junkies and assorted crazies. One particular crazy has taken a set against my girls. He is diagonally scarred from his right eyebrow to his left cheek and has Michelangelo’s Last Judgement tattooed on his neck. ‘Get fucked!’ he shouts whenever he happens to be passing. Maybe they took too much hair off him once. I blush for my marsupials, who aren’t old enough to be subjected to such verbal violence.

  I love them. They’re so small. They have no breasts or buttocks. I can’t imagine how you sit when you have so little flesh to sit on. But they manage it. They hover on invisible cushions of air, an inch or two above tiny upholstered toadstools, and ask me how my day’s been.

  They look Greek to me. They could be Nana Mouskouri’s grandchildren. But my scalp masseuse comes from Colac in the west of Victoria and my scruncher from Walhalla in the east. So how have they got to look so Greek? It’s partly environmental. Melbourne claims to have a bigger Greek population than any city outside Athens. Greek is in the air and communicates itself to everybody. Even the Chinese in Melbourne look a little Greek. It works the same way in Manchester. It doesn’t matter from what exotic place you hail, live in Manchester for a generation and you end up looking like a clog dancer. But my girls have made themselves look even more Greek by not eating. If you starve yourself your nose starts to stick out like Maria Callas’s.

  However, it’s not Maria Callas on the CD player. It’s Blondie. She seems to be singing Denise Denise – the name of a lesbian lover, for all I know – but they tell me it’s Denis Denis, in French. Just the thing for Le Quartier Flinders. They’re surprised I don’t know it. ‘You know Blondie, Heoward? Debbie Hairy?’

  I nod and smile, reaching for a biscuit and sipping my tea from a stainless-steel teacup designed for fairies. The minute I lean forward to sip tea they have to stop working on my hair. So why do they force tea on me in the first place? They don’t give you tea when you’re having your tonsils out.

  ‘Don’t you think she’s great, Heoward?’ Kylie Stassinopoulos asks me.

  I reserve judgement. ‘Why do you like her?’ I ask.

  She scrunches up her teensy body. She is wearing jodhpurs today but takes up so little room inside them there is space for the horse. ‘I dunno, Heoward, I just like her music, you know?’

  Once an academic, always an academic: I give her C minus for critical vocabulary, E plus for effort and Z for intelligible inflection.

  ‘So what’s your favourite Debbie Hairy song, Heoward?’ she asks me.

  ‘I’m more a Maria Callas fan,’ I say. Tight bastard.

  ‘Who does she sing with?’

  ‘Freddie and the Dreamers,’ I say, but she hasn’t heard of them either.

  This isn’t the best conversation in Melbourne, but I come here to escape conversation. It’s worse if you go to a men’s hairdresser. Worse for me, anyway. I have bad memories of men’s hairdressers. They abused me as a child. They sat me on a narrow wooden plank, which was a humiliation in itself, and whispered stuff in my ears. Psst! – want a camera, binoculars, carton of Scotch, black-and-white television, three-piece suite? No? What about a jam jar then? What about an MG, resprayed, new plates, soft top, false reg, taxed for the year, the lot? I was six years old – what use did they think I might have for an MG?

  But the more I refused the longer they kept me, and the longer they kept me the more hair I lost. I feared for my safety. It didn’t seem wise saying no all the time to a man with a razor in his hand.

  You don’t have worries of that sort in Le Salon Quartier Flinders. It’s safe here. I feel as though I am on retreat. It’s like camping by a river and waking to discover that the tiniest birds know your name. ‘Hi, Heoward. Hi Heoward.’

  I am Romulus on the she-wolf’s teat. I am baby Tarzan up a palm tree with the apes.

  And now a wonderful thing happens. The foul-mouthed crazy with the Last Judgement tattooed on his neck pauses in the lane, pops his slashed head around the door, and treats the girls to a glorious smile. ‘Love you,’ he calls sweetly. ‘Love you.’

  I am not at the hairdresser’s, I am in Disney heaven. Attar of Greek roses falls from the skies like happy tears while marsupials with angel wings gently blow until I’m dry.

  O Sole Mio

  Years ago, when I was fancy-free and light of foot, I frequented a pub deep in the Oxford countryside where they served hare pie on medieval trestle tables and tested your general knowledge on an electronic IQ machine installed in the snug. If you pressed a button saying LITERATURE you were asked to name the two cities in which A Tale of Two Cities was set (anagram clue: Nodlon and Ripas), the author of Pride and Prejudice (anagram clue: Enja Staune), and the personal possession beginning with h which Desdemona lost (was it a: her honour; b: her handkerchief; c: her handbag?). Get these right first time, without any further clues, and the machine would go beserk, ringing bells and flashing the word GENIUS for everybody to see.

  Until they changed the questions I found this a useful place to take company I was anxious to impress.

  It wasn’t only LITERATURE at which I excelled. I was a bit of a smash at CLASSICAL MUSIC as well. Who composed Carmen (anagram clue: Zibet)? How many Beethoven Symphonies are there (a: 9; b: 150; c: 0)? – I got them all.

  So here’s one for you. Which Neapolitan song – so popular that even Elvis recorded it – celebrates its hundredth anniversary this year?

  Your anagram clue is: O, I’m loose!

  Another? Me? Oslo? Oi!

  Still not got it? Not as easy as you think, eh? One more anagram clue only. Ooo, slime!

  Then I’ll have to tell you. ‘O Sole Mio’.

  I’ll come clean and admit I didn’t know ‘O Sole Mio’ was a hundred this year either until I saw an announcement of a party to be thrown in its honour by Melbourne’s Italian community at the Crown Casino Showroom. As a lover of all things Neapolitan, I had no choice but to put on a striped fisherman’s jersey and go along.

  I enjoy being the only non-Italian at an Italian gathering. It’s the one time I get the chance to be the tallest person in the room. And I like being given a wide berth, everyone stopping talking and scattering when I approach, for fear I might be Interpol.

  Half an hour after the birthday concert was scheduled to start it started; a labially liquid lady in evening wear taking the stage and explaining that ‘O Sole Mio’ wasn’t only a treasure of Neapolitan civilisation but ‘formèd part of European cultural tradition that has all but disappear’. My Italian being non-existent and her English being only so-so, I didn’t fully grasp what this cultural tradition was. Only that it had something to do with feeling homesick.

  Eduardo di Capua was handed the words of ‘O Sole Mio’ just before he left Naples for a tour of the Ukraine in 1898, that much I did gather, and set it to music two or three years later while he was stuck in Odessa, looking out of the window of his hotel and wondering where the sun had gone. So, if you want to be pedantic, this isn’t the hundredth anniversary of ‘O Sole Mio’ as we know it at all, only of the lyrics. And with respect to the lyricist, Giovanni Capurro, it isn’t really for the words – ‘What a wonderful thing is a sunny day / But who needs it? / My very own sun / Is on your forehead’
(my translation) – that we love it. But I didn’t stand up and point this out. Let’s party now and then party again in another two or three years. Some songs you cannot celebrate too often. Especially when, to quote a programme left on my seat, they come ‘straight from the heart in simple and direct words and notes like a hot pizza beaming out of a hot wood oven’.

  Now you know why a pizza is red and round. It symbolises the sun.

  What a wonderful thing is a sunny day / But who needs it? / My very own pizza / Is on your forehead.

  Once they’ve sorted out the sound system, stopped the elderly violinist from clapping himself on his lapel where his microphone is pinned, and got to the bottom of how come a massed choir of eighty men and women with round rigatoni chests is coming over more muted than a bashful kindergarten duo, the concert starts to be wonderful. I have always loved this stuff – sobbing tenors dreaming of Sorrento in high fluting voices, bewailing ungrateful hearts, promising undying love. I used to be able to do it myself when I was young and had the lungs and the emotionalism for it. I’d seen a film in which talent scouts for the Metropolitan Opera spot Mario Lanza standing on a pair of stepladders in a field outside Naples, picking grapes and funiculi/funicula-ing, and I hoped that something similar might happen to me, light as we were on vineyards in 1950s Manchester.

  I couldn’t imagine a better life – eating huge breakfasts, wearing fishermen’s knits, and knocking off top Cs before adoring audiences in the world’s leading opera houses. And this was long before Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras. Nowadays every kid wants to play for Manchester United and sing with the Three Tenors, but in my time only the very sensitive harboured such ambitions.

  It never happened for me. Too tall, I suspect. But when night comes – Quanno fa notte, in Giovanni Capurro’s words, and me vene quase ’na malincunia – and I get to feeling quasi-melancholic (my translation) . . . but I don’t have to tell you the rest. We’re all a long way from Sorrento.

  The birthday bash for ‘O Sole Mio’ turns out to be the best I have ever been to. Domenico Cannizzaro sings it operatically; Toni Marchi less dramatically but with more subtle Neapolitan intonations, and we, we thousand exiled Italians sick for home, we sing it from the heart. Ma n’atu sole – but another sun, another sun – sta ’nfronte a te – is on your forehead!

  And it is all I can do to stop myself from weeping.

  Dining out Solus

  For reasons that need not trouble your compassion I have been dining out solus this last week. As a result of which I now understand what women mean when they speak of the humiliations of hitting the town unaccompanied. Yes, people look at you strangely. Half in pity, half in fear. Be seen dining solus and it is assumed you are some sort of sexual outcast, a trollop, a molester, an onanist, at the very best a bottomlessly sad human being who is unable to find love.

  The strange thing is that it is not only other people who think this, you think it yourself. I am eating alone – I must be a pervert.

  But you would still prefer this fact to be kept a secret. So you search for premises in which you can eat unnoticed. Never mind the food, all that matters now is the size and configuration of the eating place. Too much space is no good, for you dare not dine alone in the middle of a barn. But a cosy intimacy won’t do either. Find yourself without a companion at a tenebrous table on which a flickering candle burns and your heart will break with self-pity.

  This search for a well-balanced inconspicuousness can take up the whole evening. As the last of the late-night restaurants lower their shutters you catch sight of your reflection in the window of a taxicab which refuses to stop for you – a red-eyed, green-toothed, prowling beast with hair growing where it shouldn’t. And now they know for sure you are an onanist.

  I descend upon Lygon Street, Carlton, one of Melbourne’s busiest eating boulevards. The night is almost as sticky as I am, so the restaurants spill out festively on to the pavements and roads. A small table in the gutter is what I am after. With the single proviso that I can get wine by the glass, for a man alone at a table in the gutter with a whole bottle of wine to himself is a sad sight indeed.

  What I’d forgotten was that Carlton’s Italian restaurants have men out the front touting for business, Roman-style. This is precisely what someone in my position does not want. ‘Dining alone tonight, signore?’ they call out as I scuttle past. My neck concertinas into my shoulders. ‘Never mind,’ one of them says, blocking my progress with his stomach. ‘Eat with us anyway. I have just the table for you.’

  He does, too. Not quite in the gutter but at the very edge of the heaving pavement, where I can see the life but the life cannot really see me. Perfect. Eating is a nightly carnival in Melbourne and positioned here I can at least feel I am not excluded from the procession.

  I should eat fish, which is good here. But fish is for two, I always think. A bone thing. Just as pizza is too obviously for one. So I order a spaghetti marinara by way of compromise, and a glass of Chianti in memory of all the straw bottles I bought for girls to make table lamps with in the days when I never ate alone.

  Minutes after my Chianti arrives a second solitary gentleman is seated at the table next to mine. It feels deliberate, as though the waiters have engineered this proximity as a sort of social experiment, much as they put recalcitrant pandas together in zoos.

  The second gentleman is as sad as I am, but I am careful not to acknowledge him for fear he may be sad in a different way. I note his well-pressed short-sleeved shirt, his boyish blue-grey haircut, the beaten silver ring on his marriage finger, and the precise way he cuts up his champignons. Without any warning or preamble he turns to a woman at a nearby table and says, ‘I love your diamonds. I love the way they catch the light.’

  So I am right. He is sad in a different way.

  We eat in silence, uncomfortably aware of each other. A very tall waiter with a very small head collects our plates. ‘Yum, yum, yum, yum?’ he asks my double. To me he says, ‘How was that?’

  Neither of us replies.

  ‘In Sydney,’ my double suddenly bursts out, ‘they tout for sex. In Melbourne they spruik for food.’

  ‘Well, in Melbourne food is sex,’ I say.

  He ponders that, then, inserting his ring finger into the fist which is his other hand, he says, ‘I don’t think I like it.’

  He orders another glass of Shiraz from the unmannerly waiter. I ask for a second Chianti. He tells me that he is in Melbourne for a conference, that he is a mathematician and a lawyer, that his soft skin and brown eyes belie his age – ‘Look at them!’ he orders me – and that his brother always introduces him with the words, ‘This is David, he’s got five degrees and all he thinks about is sex.’

  Solitary eaters, I think. Every word of what they say about us is true.

  The waiter is back with our wine. ‘Are you circumcised?’ David asks him.

  The waiter’s sangfroid goes up in smoke. Serves you right for ‘Yum, yum, yum, yum?’ I think. He starts to blurt out something about the interesting people he meets in his job, but David isn’t listening. ‘I’m just a slut,’ he says to no one in particular.

  Once the waiter is gone again, David asks me, ‘Do you want him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what to do with him,’ I laugh, wondering how I can bring mention of my wife into the conversation. I may look sad but I have a wife. Wife. You read me?

  But by now he is bored anyway. I watch him totter off into the night (to find a prostitute, he tells me), his hands in his pockets, his little blue-grey bullet head bravely erect, a man not ashamed of being out on his own.

  Freed from Rage

  In Bristol with an hour or so to kill the other day, I happened upon Queen Square, recently restored to some of its Georgian glory by the removal of the dual carriageway which, in coarser times, someone in transport had thought to run through it. Perhaps he knew that before it was Queen Square it had been a rubbish dump, and so was acting as a true conservationist. But all’s well that ends well, a
s they say. Except that something, or someone, in Queen Square, isn’t remotely well.

  In the middle of the square sits an equestrian statue of William III, sculpted by Rysbrack. Widely regarded as Rysbrack’s greatest work, and the finest statue of a king on a horse made by any sculptor working in eighteenth-century England, it is, as you would expect of Rysbrack, classical in conception, judicious in choice of materials and, as these things go, only marginally pompous. The King rides stirrupless and carries what looks to be a roll of wallpaper but is probably his plans either for a European settlement, put into practice after his death by the Treaty of Utrecht, or for granting independence to the judiciary, as ratified by the Act of Settlement. A serious-minded king, then, seriously mounted. Carved into the pediment of the statue is the artist’s name, and above that, in graffito, is, or was the other day, a startlingly naked expression of unhappiness. ‘My name is Maureer. I hate you and all you stand for.’

  How long did I linger there, pondering the significance of this, measuring its hurt, fathoming its reasoning? Reader, how long is a ball of string?

  The first thing I wanted to understand was why Maureer felt it to be important we knew his or her name. Does it help to get your name, as well as your hatred, off your chest? And was I reading Maureer for Maureen? Type Maureer into the Internet and it thinks the same, correcting you in that sniffy way the Internet does – ‘Do you mean Maureen?’ (One of modern life’s great frustrations, that the Internet can talk to you as though you are a moron, but short of typing invective into your computer, or smashing it, you have no effective redress.)

  Anyway, Maureer and not Maureen it definitely was, the hand chillingly steady, inscribing the second r identically to the first. Not a Christian name I recognise, Maureer, though I know it as a surname. There’s a Monsieur Maureer, for example, working on Leonardo da Vinci and chaos theory in the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and a Christian Maureer who plays jazz saxophone in Austria, and a J. M. Maureer who is co-author (with Pugh and Pringle) of ‘The Impact of Wort Nitrogen Limitation on Yeast Fermentation Performance and Diacetyl’, but none of these is associated with Bristol as far as I have been able to ascertain, nor would you think that any of them has reason to hate unseasonably, though it’s always possible J. M. Maureer wished his work on worts sold better than it did.