The Mighty Walzer (32 page)

Pure pornography. The sexual history of slaves. The epic poem, as old as religion itself (and we are good at religion, my people), chanting the exultant longed-for fall from high to low. But all pornography must end in death — so did I mean it? Did I really really mean it?

Of course not. I was tsatskying. Even when I gave her my throat I was only tsatskying. I’d have run a mile had she put a mark on me. But it felt as though I meant it.

At the last I was only answering a challenge buried deep in the social history of the game itself. It was too small. A parlour game. It suffered from too modest a conception of itself.
Ping-pong —
what kind of name was that? Table tennis was hardly any better, with its reminder of all the ways in which it wasn’t tennis proper, real tennis, tennis in the open air, tennis under the sun, tennis that bit into your flesh and turned it the colour of maple syrup,
big tennis, expansive tennis, jet-set tennis, tennis for grown-ups, tennis which Jezebels rolled up to watch in their thousands, tennis which made heroes and heartthrobs out of tennis players. Name me ten table tennis players for whom your heart throbs. Name me five. Name me one.

Table tennis. Ping-pong. Gossima … Think of it,
gossima!
A good name for a condom, what? You won’t even know you’re wearing it. Whiff Waff was another one they tried. Meaning what? Something insubstantial, piffling, neither here nor there, like swatting at flies. You won’t even know you’re playing it. Why didn’t they just call it that –
Something Piffling
- and have done?

And what do you do, Mr Walzer? I excel at Something Piffling.

Doesn’t it make perfect sense to choose to lose, finally, at such a game?

And what do you do, Mr Walzer? I fail to make an impression at Something Piffling.

Choose to lose at something small and don’t you as a consequence win at something big? Was that not the paradox embraced by Jesus Christ our Lord? Forgo the whole world and thereby gain eternity? (I’ve said we are good at religion, my people.)

This is not a rationalization, though I see that it may appear that way. Grandiose in my ambitions I may have been, but in the final analysis I was never comfortable winning. I didn’t like the way it made me feel. And I never liked the way it made other people look. I remain a devoted student of the subject to this day — the illness of winning. I watch it day in and day out on television. I know the personalities — just like my grandfather did. Nastase, McEnroe, Navratilova, Coe, Christie, Lewis, Budd, Klinsmann, Cantona, every member of every Australian cricket team, Tyson, Eubank, Ballesteros, Norman, Hill, Schumacher, Curry, Cousins, Torvill, Dean. A roll call of the psychotic. It’s like having television cameras running day and night in
an asylum. Me me me me me me me me me me me me. And I am as transfixed by it as anybody. I can’t get enough. It’s like seeing your own soul out there, your own pumping heart, blood-red like meat in a butcher’s shop, charging around in shorts and running shoes. It’s like watching your own steak and kidney kishkies punching the air.

The ultimate B-movie.
The Horror of the Human Will.
Forget the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Forget the Fly. This one’s really sticky. This one’s come out of soup too disgusting to describe. And the telly commentators call it character.

So am I the only Christian around here? Am I the only one who believes that character is letting the other sinner win?

Here, have. You want it? You want it
that
much? Then have it, you sick fuck.

Geh gesunterhait, as Jesus would have said.

In an actual life, of course, these things have their own vicissitudinous way of working themselves out; they have a chronology, a history of apparent accidentality, they come off other people like balls off the walls of a squash court. I was destined to throw matches, to give up, to walk away, to storm off the table because my opponent was trying too hard – such an eventuality was written in my blood, it was always going to happen — but it took Lorna Peachley to get me started.

We were seeing each other again. I’d kept away, after her note, respecting her right not to be given headaches or otherwise made to feel peculiar by me. Up to her to decide what next, if anything. And when. I missed her, but I had no desire to ruin the poor girl’s life.

She kept me waiting for about a fortnight, then she phoned, her voice slightly chilly, but not downright freezing, reminding me that a match against Hampshire, her old county, was coming up – a needle match for which she was eager to be on the top of her form – and wondering therefore if we oughtn’t to get some serious practice in. We didn’t discuss what had passed between
us. We just knocked up for hours, careful never to play an actual game, for fear that I’d lose it and the whole thing would start all over. She kept her tracksuit bottoms on the whole time, too, just in case — I presumed this was her reasoning — just
in case
the sight of her prancing pudendum got me thinking about death again.

As if.

I’m sorry for Lorna Peachley. I’m sorry for all lovely girls. They fear they are the cause of their own troubles, but are never quite sure why. If they cover up a little – if they hide this bit or that bit — will it save them? Will someone then love them the way they long to be loved, without complications, without giving them headaches, just for themselves?

We won handsomely against Hampshire, paired exquisitely and chastely in the mixed doubles, saying excuse me if our shoulders brushed, and then contrived to stay over in Winchester an extra night. I was driving now. My father had lent me his back-up van, the Bedford dormobile with the sliding doors, on the understanding that I’d pick up a gross of two-pound sugar bags for him on my way out of town and on my way back in. Sugar was his new plunder line. Out they go and out they go! It was part of our war against the food boys. They’d taken to introducing swag lines, so we’d taken to introducing food. Tins of pink salmon at first. Then ham in triangular tins. Then tea. Now sugar. Knocked out at cost, sometimes below cost. Loss-leaders. And we led at losing, we Walzers. We got through mountains of the stuff. The trouble was the food boys had ordered the cash and carries to stop serving my father. As yet they didn’t all know who I was. They didn’t make the connection. So I was the sugar shlepper. Provided I picked up as many two-pound bags of sugar as they’d serve me every time I drove it, I could have the van. Which was fine by me now that I’d learnt from Sheeny the trick of criss-crossing the bags in the aisle between the rear seats so that they made a bed. A sugar bed. A bed of pure sweetness. On which,
in a lay-by outside Winchester, Lorna Peachley stretched out all her moving body parts, exhausted from their exertions against her old county, and went to sleep in my arms.

We woke in the middle of the night, laughing, with granules squirting into us from underneath.

‘Great idea, Sheeny,’ I said later. ‘That’s got to be the worst bed I ever slept on.’

‘Did you get what you were after or not?’ he asked me.

A tough question. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I got what I was after.’

‘Then don’t complain,’ Sheeny said.

Did I get what I was after?

She was beautiful to hold, granulated or not. She melted in my arms. She had that gift. The moving body parts. She fitted everywhere. Her bones folded. She flowed into you like hot wax. And she was more fragrant than a field of flowers. And more flavoursome. Lucozadey, minty, malted milkshakey. Not olivey, as you’d have expected. Not sun ripened. Not sun dark. But sun yellowed. All things white and golden. Honey and yoghurt. I could have drunk her perspiration. I
did
drink her perspiration. I rolled on top of her and licked it from her neck. Then she opened her mouth, and I was gone, vanished, a sea creature that lived a life of complete happiness, wanting for nothing, in the spaces between her syrup gums. And the one luxury item I am allowed to have with me on my Desert Island, to go with the Bible and the eight records of Schubert Lieder? Lorna Peachley’s mouth.

And don’t come looking for me, please.

The gift. Some have it, some don’t. And there’s never any way of knowing until you get in there and find out. The gift of bodily mellifluousness. It’s more than physical. The body alone cannot generate such music. In Lorna’s case it felt ethical. She had a daily beauty in her life.

So you could say she was my big chance.

‘Hold me,’ she said.

But I couldn’t.

I could
take
hold. And of course I could
be
held. But I couldn’t
give
hold.

‘Love me,’ she said.

But I couldn’t.

I could
make
love. And of course I could
be
loved. But I couldn’t
give
love.

She clutched at me as though she was drowning. I had fucked her head, punched holes in her, and now she was drowning, wouldn’t I save her? If I could have, I would have.

She sat up, and brushed sugar from herself. ‘Why did you bring me here?’ she asked.

I shrugged in the dark. ‘Because I wanted to be with you.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

Didn’t I? I shrugged some more.

‘I don’t think you know what you want,’ she said.

She sounded very bitter, weary and without hope, just as my grandmother used to sound.

I said nothing. I sat with my head between my knees and spun in the blackness like a satellite.

‘I think you’re too complicated for me,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re up to half the time. I can never tell what you want. You make me feel stupid.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, still spinning between my knees. ‘I don’t mean to do that. I don’t think you’re stupid. I think you’re lovely.’

‘Lovely isn’t the opposite of stupid,’ she said.

‘I don’t think you’re stupid.’

‘Well that’s how you make me feel. Stupid and useless. Do you think I don’t know that you lose to me on purpose? Why are you trying to make a fool of me?’

‘I don’t lose to you on purpose. And I’m not trying to make a fool of you. I like losing to you.’

‘There you are! You
like
losing to me. You do it on purpose.
What for? Why are you making me ill? Why do you bring me out here in this horrible van and then go all touch-me-not on me? What are all these games, Oliver?’

‘Believe me, Lorna, I have not gone touch-me-not on you. I have never wanted to touch anyone more.’

‘You’re not there, Oliver. You’re just not there.’

‘I’m here,’ I said.

‘Yes,
you’re
here. But your heart isn’t. That’s if you’ve got a heart.’

‘I’ve got a heart …’

‘You just don’t feel anything with it.’

‘I do.’

‘What do you feel?’

I paused. ‘Love for you.’

No good. I heard it myself. No good. No bass in it. No weight. No heart. Just Whiff Waff. And you don’t get a second go.

‘Take me home, Oliver,’ she said. ‘And then please leave me alone. Go and lose to someone else.’

So I did.

No reason to do otherwise now. Why win? If there was no eel-slick little witch waiting to unbuckle, and take it all away from me again, why bother to ride in triumph through Persepolis in the first place?

No more interest in winning for its own sake?

Couldn’t do it. Now that I was entering the men’s game, putting away childish things, I couldn’t do it. Winning is a test of character, as every sporting commentator will tell you, and I didn’t have any character. Grandiosity, yes. Skills, yes. But character? Bottle? Creature from the Black Lagoon determination, knowing what you want and allowing nothing and nobody to stand in your way? Forget it.

I dropped myself from the county team so that Lorna could go on playing uncompromised. I suppose you could say that that
showed character of sorts. But I was only getting in before they did. My form was shot. I went for six weeks without winning a game for the Hagganah. And serious questions were being asked about my temperament. Even about my manners.

Things came to a head the night we played the Railways, away. This was never a fixture I’d enjoyed. Even allowing for how little I enjoyed any fixture these days, in the company of the unfanatics, the otherwise engaged who were now my team-mates, the Railways stood out as dismal. The playing conditions were partly to blame. The Railways Social Club was a single room, painted glossy St Onan’s Church of England Grammar cream, through which ran more pipes than I had ever seen and which also housed the staff lockers, banks upon banks of them in pitted tin, like a mausoleum for lunch boxes, each one individually defaced with purple marker for identification purposes. This meant that at any time some sooty engine driver would barge in, regardless of the state of play, in order to change into a clean singlet. And you don’t argue with an engine driver, or with a guard come to that, when he’s just come in off his shift. In an earlier confrontation with the railways I’d hit a ball which landed in a guard’s locker just as he was closing it. ‘I won’t be opening that again, flower,’ he informed me, ‘until I’m back from Doncaster.’ To make things worse the tannoy system had to be on at all times, so that everyone could be made aware of any emergencies, derailments, late arrivals and departures, changes to the roster and so on. And you know what it’s like trying to make sense of anything anybody says into a railway microphone. ‘Is that me they’re calling?’ your opponent would suddenly wonder, if you happened to be playing well; and he’d be off to find out, leaving you standing there like a coitus interruptus, going off the boil.

Have I said that there were showers in here as well, behind the highest and most precarious burial pyre of lunch boxes? You could hear them singing as they lathered, drivers, guards, porters, furnace men, getting up steam. ‘When your swer-her-heetheart,
sends a leh-heh-letter, of goo-hoo-hoodbye …’ You felt close enough to soap their backs.

‘Shut up!’ one of the ping-pong players would always shout, feebly, without any expectation of success. ‘We’re trying to concentrate here. It’s match night!’

Came the invariable reply: ‘Get fucked — this is a play area!’