The Mighty Walzer (4 page)

I took the only path that was clear, to the men’s room, where I came upon my uncle Motty standing at a urinal, shaking his penis to get the last drop out of it, actually banging it the way you bang a near-empty ketchup bottle. My uncle Motty was the next Walzer brother down from my father. He was more placid than the others. A sofa to put his feet up on, a few quid in his pocket, the odd shtup — nothing serious, as long as it was with someone not his wife — and he was happy. When you looked at Motty’s big blond face you couldn’t understand why anyone
found life difficult. Which made it difficult for me to look at him. He winked at me. ‘Jew in a restaurant,’ he said without preamble. ‘Says to waiter — “Hey, you got matzo balls?” Waiter says, “No, I always walk like this.”’ He waited for me to laugh. I couldn’t do it. I wanted to but I couldn’t find the mechanism. Not for a smile either. Where to look, that was the problem. If I looked away it would be rude. If I looked at him I’d be looking at his penis — also big and blond, and still refusing to yield up its last reserves, no matter how hard my uncle Motty shook it. I turned an even deeper red and ran for it again.

It was shortly after this encounter that I overheard him wondering how much longer I was going to cower in my shell. Unfortunately for me, the phrase struck a chord with my father. ‘Hello — are you in there?’ he’d ask, rapping me on the head as he passed me on the stairs — hardly a tactic to get a whelk or a tortoise to show its face, let alone to tickle out a shrinking invert like me. But my father wasn’t a man for gentle coaxing. Having a son in a shell seemed to infuriate him to such a degree that I knew it wouldn’t be long before he resorted to trying to beat me out of it. He was a beater, my father? Let’s just say he had been klopped by his own mother and that these were, as a matter of course, klopping times. In the nineteen-forties and fifties we were all klopped. And are now the better for it? What do you think?

In the meantime, my sisters too wanted to get in on the act. I’d crawl out of bed in the morning and find a plate of lettuce outside my bedroom door. I’d put my foot in a shoe and find it full of broken eggshells. One morning I woke to the sight of a terrapin making eyes at me on my pillow. A gift tag was tied to one of its forelegs. ‘Hi, I’m Tilly,’ it read. ‘Can I be your girlfriend?’

I was twelve now, and spending an increasing amount of time on my own. When I wasn’t knocking a ball against a wall with a book I was running to the toilet where I’d lock myself away for hours on end, also with a book.

‘How long’s he been in there this time?’ — my father, back from work, not even bothering to enquire where I was. He
knew
where I was.

‘Days!’ — my sisters, wanting to stir it.

‘What’s he doing in there?’

‘Reading’ — my mother, wanting to calm it.

‘Reading? Reading what?’

‘A book, Joel, what do you think?’

‘The time he spends in there he could have written a book.’

‘The time you spend away you could have written twenty books.’

‘It isn’t normal. You can’t tell me it’s good for you, sitting on top of your own chazzerei for that long.’

‘Normal? Let’s not talk about normal. Eat your tea.’

My mother understood the needs of a retiring nature. The way my father’s side could move their bowels and be back out in the world again in sixty seconds flat had always disgusted her. To her way of thinking there should at least have been a cooling-off period, a fifteen-or twenty-minute interregnum between a motion and the resumption of normal activities, much as the laws of sexual hygiene insisted on an interval of pollution separating menstruation and intercourse. The three hours I was taking may have been excessive, she allowed, but then I was a boy and boys had other matters to attend to in a toilet. No names, no details. I’d be over it soon. In the meantime, loz aleyn, leave the boy alone.

Easier said than done. I was in a shell and I was in the toilet. ‘He’s always hiding,’ my father said. ‘He’s always
in
something. The only time I see him is when he’s giving a ping-pong ball a zetz, and then he’s in a trance.’

Didn’t he like me playing ping-pong? Hadn’t I won money for him? Yes. But he wanted me out in the world more. Why wasn’t I playing in a club? Why wasn’t I playing for a team? Why didn’t I play with a bat now, like a normal kid? Why didn’t I have
a girlfriend? Why was I sitting for hours over my own chazzerei? Why was I blushing all the time? Why did I show him up in front of his brothers? Why was I such a kuni-lemele?

Kuni-lemele.
If tsatske was my most favourite word as a child, kuni-lemele was my least. In itself it didn’t denote anything much more offensive than oafishness. A kuni-lemele is a rustic simpleton. Not quite the village idiot, more the shtetl shlemiel. There can even be a bit of affection in the word. Not on my father’s lips, though. When my father called me a kuni-lemele he filled his mouth with a quivering kuni-lemele milksop substance, a curdled yellow jelly that shrank from the touch and trailed slime, like the underbelly of a slug.

That was what I heard, anyway.

It was in order to de-kuni-lemelize me, to get me out in the world, whether I shrank from it or not, that my father borrowed the coach one weekend for a family outing to Blackpool, where a boys’ weekly comic just happened to be sponsoring a giant nationwide ping-pong gala. My sisters were jumping up and down on the back seat of the bus, blowing kisses at male motorists on our tail. My mother was sitting with her mother in the seat behind my father, och un veh-ing together, and I was up beside him so that I could smell the diesel and see how the gears and the pedals worked and thereby get a taste for manly things. Mistake. Putting me up there just meant that when we pulled into a petrol station I was in harm’s way. In those days petrol stations weren’t self-service. Nor were those who filled you up merely anonymous pump attendants. Running a garage was a profession then; drive in for a couple of gallons and you were negotiating with men of substance — a retired naval officer who loved cars, a barrister lending a relative a helping hand over the long weekend. It was my misfortune to run into a wing commander. ‘Cheer up,’ he called to me, after switching off the pump and exchanging pleasantries with my father. ‘Cheer up — it may never happen.’

‘It already has,’ I said.

He had a red, raging, humourless face, the way they always do, the homicidal depressives who tell you to cheer up.

He looked bemused. ‘What has?’

This was a longer conversation than I had the courage for. But I was in now. ‘The thing you said may never happen …’

I waited for him to catch up. It’s possible I allowed my contempt for his slowness to show, even through my own intense embarrassment.

‘… it already has.’

‘Has what?’

‘Happened.’

That’s all I said. Happened. Not happened, you shmuck. Not happened, you fucking psychopath. Just
it already has,
and then
happened.

I watched his mouth vanish. So far he had been addressing me from the driver’s side, now he came around the bus and climbed up on to the running-board. My window was open and his face was so close to mine I could count the hairs on his facetious aviator’s tash.

‘See this garage?’ he said. ‘See that workshop? See those fields behind it? See those fences? See those trees? See that grass? See those houses at the end of that lane? All mine. Every stick and stone. Every brick. Mine. I own the lot. All of it. So don’t you think you can be smart with me, son.’

Where is that mysterious far-away realm to which the diffident fly to find courage? Our secret; even from ourselves. ‘What about the birds?’ I was aghast at hearing myself saying. ‘Are they yours, too?’

That did it. All at once I was in a universe of total silence, not broken even by the tweeting of my impertinent birds. A raging silence vibrating fearfully to the throbbing of our hearts. All our hearts — mine, his, my father’s, my sisters’, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. Maybe one of us was going to have a heart
attack. Maybe we all were. Then I realized there was a finger in my face. Actually
in
my face. And that it had a voice.

‘You little snot-nose,’ it said. ‘I could buy and sell you a hundred times over. You wouldn’t make a dent in my bank balance. I spend more on manure in a day than it’d cost me to buy you …’

Then, abruptly, silence again. The finger was gone and my adversary with it. Gone without another word to any of us. Disappeared inside their workshop the pair of them, no doubt, to calculate their value in spanners and jacks.

Now here’s a question: Why, if this incident so incensed my father — and take my word for it, it did, it did — why didn’t he land one on the wing commander who was responsible for it, instead of on me who wasn’t?

It wasn’t a punch. I’m not saying my father laid me out. But no sooner had he returned to the driver’s seat than he let fly with a backhand Ogimura would have been proud of, a humdinging swipe that caught me on the mouth, bringing tears to my eyes and silencing my sisters, who were just getting ready to start spluttering with laughter again. From my mother and her mother it drew a conjoined gasp. ‘Oh, Joel!’ my mother said.

He revved the bus out of the garage forecourt — ‘Oh, Joel,’ he jeered — and swung out on to the Blackpool road, careless of the traffic. We were at that stage of the journey where a penny was usually offered to the first person who saw the Tower, but there was no family fun of that sort today. I sat with my head down, determined not to cry, but promising myself that one day I would put a knife in my father’s heart, supposing I could ever find it. He looked stonily ahead, no doubt promising himself some similar reward in relation to me. When he finally spoke it was to justify what he’d done. ‘You and your long farkrimt face,’ he said. ‘I’m sick of you showing me up. You’ll treat people with respect when you’re out with me, you stuck-up little …’ But he didn’t finish. He wasn’t a swearer.

Looking back, I think I did the right thing not asking how I could be simultaneously diffident and arrogant, stuck in and stuck up. It could only have led to another klop. And who knows, to the bus spinning out of control and the whole family being wiped out.

So we drove the rest of the way in silence until we arrived at the Tower.

For northerners in search of their first good time in the ten or fifteen years after the War, Blackpool was where you always went looking, and the Tower Ballroom was where you invariably found it. In the Tower Ballroom you smooched your first smooch, kissed your first kiss, missed your first last bus home. For me the Tower Ballroom was where I first saw a row of twenty ping-pong tables, every one of them in use. It’s a sight, I have to say, going on recent experience, that still has the power to move me. People who love the spectacle of football speak of that heart-stopping moment when you come up out of the darkness of the stands and suddenly find yourself looking down upon the luminous verdure of the turf. Cricket, baseball, rugby, bowls — the same. In the end it’s the arena we come for, the landscape. And the landscape of sport is always green. Always and forever green. The colour of the Elysian Fields. Our only glimpse of Paradise. Which was what I saw when I walked into the Tower Ballroom. The Holy City. Avalon. The olive garden of the Hesperides and twenty separate ping-pong balls going plock. The music of the spheres.

It wasn’t a tournament. You just went over to a table and took your turn. Winners stayed on for a maximum of three games, losers went to the back of the queue and waited for another crack. But it wasn’t about winning and losing. It was about being spotted for potential. A dozen senior players and coaches wandered between the tables looking for kids who had what it took. Or to whom they believed they could teach what it took. This was big-break time. If you were to have any
chance of snatching the title from Ogimura or some other inscrutable pen-hander in the future, this is where it would have to begin.

And here was me with
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
already smoking in my hand and a cut mouth to remind me that less than an hour before I’d been publicly humiliated by a man I was no longer prepared to regard as my father. Some preparation for my big break that was.

He —
he
— had dropped us off at the Tower and then gone to have some repairs done to the bus. Tactful of him. My sisters were out on the Golden Mile, rolling pennies and looking for men. Tactful of them, too. As usual, the ones who felt most keenly for one’s suffering were the only ones who didn’t have the nous to get out of the way. So I was stuck, on my first ever ping-pong outing, with a mother and a granny.

‘They look nice boys on that table,’ my mother said. ‘Why don’t you join them?’

In my heart I knew I was not going to join anyone. I wasn’t a joiner. It wasn’t going to happen like that for me. It would all unfold in some other way. It would be the same with the Jezebels. I would not meet them at a dance. I would meet them some other way. And what was it I wanted, then, from ping-pong and from Jezebels, that was not what others wanted, that could not be initiated or satisfied in the ordinary way? Nothing. That is what has been so disappointing about my life — at the last, after all the blushing and the shrinking, all the exceptional hesitancy and reluctance, there is nothing I have ever wanted other than to lift the cup and fuck the girl.

It’s possible, then, that the man who was no longer my father was within his rights to nail me for a stuck-up prick and zetz me as hard as he did?

Anything’s possible.

What I also knew in my heart, now I was here, was that I wouldn’t have the courage to bat with a book. I looked around
at the other kids. Several of them wore tracksuits. Some seemed to have their parents with them (though not their grannies), acting as trainers, muttering to them between points — ‘Concentrate, concentrate! Keep it simple!’ — dumb-showing strokes from the sidelines. And all of them, of course, used bats. But did I see anyone I couldn’t have licked? A few who might have pushed me hard, maybe. A tall kid with an over-pronounced follow-through, who hit the ball with plenty of topspin, but all you’d have to do with him was counter-hit from close to the table and you’d have the ball past him while he was still putting the final flourish to his previous stroke. A heavy chopper who was winning applause from bystanders for his showy retrieving, but where would he be when I got the ball to stop dead at the net? And perhaps the toughest of them, if only because he was the most determined, a round-faced boy in shorts who bounced around the table a lot, doing breathing exercises, refusing to accept that a ball was ever out of his reach. He’d take the longest to beat, because of the pleasure there would be in wearing him out. Death by push shot.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
itched in my palm. So no, I didn’t see anyone I couldn’t have licked. But I still didn’t have the nerve to line up with my book.