The Mighty Walzer (8 page)

‘So how was it?’ he wanted to know.

‘They’ve all got something wrong with them,’ I said.

He let go of the wheel and banged the side of his head with the heel of his hand. An upward brushing movement, as though he wanted to clear unwelcome matter from his brain.
They’ve all got something wrong with them.
He hated that sort of talk. Judgements, judgements. The stuff I’d picked up from my mother and the Violets. We couldn’t say boo to a goose, any of us, but we knew what we thought of the goose, oh yes.

‘I didn’t ask what they were like,’ he said. ‘I asked how it went.’

‘It went well,’ I said. ‘They’ve asked me to play for the team.’

‘Ah!’ Now he was pleased with me. ‘Thank you.’ He drove on in silence for a few minutes, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. Pride? Did I see pride? Then he asked, ‘And how was the bat?’

You can’t hurt your own father on the one occasion he’s pleased with you. ‘It was good,’ I said. ‘Better than the book.’

‘Ah! Thank you.’ More silence, and then, ‘You had a good night, then?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Thank you.’

Why did he keep on thanking me? I can only suppose it was because I’d put him in the right, at last. Proved that I was his true son and heir. Proved that he knew how to do the best for me. There was so much unaccustomed harmony between us, at any rate, that instead of turning left at Middleton Road he turned right, kept on going past the park and the mills and pulled up in front of a detached white-washed cottage by the rubberworks in Rhodes. ‘Home, James,’ he said.

I had to explain to him that this wasn’t where we lived.

He took a moment or two to get his bearings, then he said, ‘You’re right. Thank you. Thank you.’

‘So how was it?’ my mother wanted to know. My aunties, too, who had stayed around at our place later than usual, waiting for me to come home. Waiting to kvell.

‘They’ve all got something wrong with them,’ I said.

‘Such as what?’ Tell us, tell us.

‘Bits missing.’

‘We don’t believe you.’ Love and laughter, for the bright boy. We don’t believe you, but tell us, tell us anyway.

‘They have. They’ve all got bits missing. Broken ribs. Tuberculosis.’

‘Tuberculosis?’

This was a tactical error on my part. My mother was all for
me playing ping-pong because she believed it was safe. No one got hurt playing ping-pong. Now I was telling her the game was riddled with infectious diseases.

‘Well, not tuberculosis exactly,’ I corrected myself. ‘More like asthma.’

‘If they’ve got asthma they shouldn’t be playing.’

‘Ma, none of them should be playing. One of them’s about a hundred and won’t take his coat off. Another’s blind.’

‘Blind?’

‘He was the one I beat.’

How they laughed. They loved it when I was wicked, my mother’s side. It empowered them. We’d get into a huddle and we’d call the goose for all sorts.

But that always encouraged me to go too far. ‘The other one I beat,’ I went on, ‘was dead.’

‘Zei gezunt,’ my mother said. ‘You’re overexcited. Go to bed.’

By morning the atmosphere had changed. My mother had worked out that playing for a team entailed travelling. ‘I’m not sure I like the idea of you charging off God knows where at your age,’ she said, over cheese on toast. That was breakfast. The entire time I lived in my mother’s and father’s house I ate only cheese on toast for breakfast. We had a corona of melted cheese around our hearts, each of us. My father died of melted cheese in every artery. Yet my mother was worried that I’d come to harm playing ping-pong for the Akiva Social Club.

‘I think we travel as a team,’ I told her.

‘Travel as a team how? In an aeroplane?’

‘Ma, this is the Manchester and District Table Tennis League, Third Division. The furthest we go is Stockport.’ I didn’t know this for a fact. I was guessing.

‘Stockport! And how are you supposed to get back from Stockport?’

‘In a car, I imagine. One of the team drives us, Ma.’

‘Which one of the team? The blind one?’

Funny she should have guessed that.

Pending certification by the League Secretary — and it took about ten days for my registration form to be received and scrutinized, my three-shilling postal order to be cashed, and for Aishky Mistofsky, who was Club Secretary, to be given the all-clear — I could practise with the team but not play for it.

In those days, when ping-pong players grew on trees, before — but let’s not start the Jeremiah stuff; we all know that Greater Manchester is no longer Eden — a team numbered five, with five more clamouring to get a game. Prior to me, the Akiva Social Club — positioned neither at the very top nor at the very bottom of the Third Division North, but enjoying the middle of her favours — consisted of Aishky Mistofsky, Theo/Twink Starr, the Marks brothers — Louis and Selwyn — and Sheeny Waxman. Selwyn, the younger of the Markses, and the nearest to me in age of the whole bunch, I’d met briefly on my first night in the club without realizing he was Louis’s brother. The word met might be stretching things a bit. He’d spoken to no one the whole time, not even Louis, so engrossed was he in rehearsing his shots. He played along in dumb show with whoever was on the table, hitting the ball exactly as they did and punishing himself when they missed. Although in rehearsal his repertory of strokes was prodigious, the moment it came to actual play he lost the nerve to try any of them, and was reduced to the safest of all safe shots, the backhand almost-horizontal shove, which he executed with the greatest deliberation from every corner of the table, never taking his eye off the ball, but to an accompaniment of all manner of insults against himself, as though his own timidity was a lasting shame to him. In appearance he was slight and undernourished; and apart from a premature moustache which grew with cruel disregard for shape or uniformity — a couple of dozen individual spikes of various lengths and colours — he was as white all over
as a box of new balls, like a person who had never been seen by the sun.

Sheeny Waxman, notwithstanding Aishky Mistofsky’s
post hoc
recollection that he’d been of our company on the night my talent was divulged, was an unknown quantity to me. He was very short, with a pronounced tic, and enjoyed a reputation as a head jockey — that was all I knew about him. A very short twitching head jockey with a terrific forehand. When I asked what a head jockey was they all laughed at me. ‘Something like a linguist,’ Theo confided, whereupon they all laughed again. As for Sheeny Waxman’s forehand, only Louis Marks, on our team, had a forehand that could equal it. And Louis Marks was injured. Hence me.

I was going round to the Akiva almost every night now. If my father was home he would drive me. Otherwise I caught a local train from Bowker Vale to Woodlands Road, one or other of my aunties accompanying me to the station, just in case the prefab boys thought of launching an assault.

How anyone could have supposed that the prefab boys would have been deterred by a Shrinking Violet I can’t imagine, but the ploy worked. The one time I was stoned was the one time I’d persuaded my mother I was now big enough to walk to the station on my own.

Usually Aishky Mistofsky drove me back. I’d promised my mother that if I didn’t have a lift I would ring home and wait for someone to collect me. The trains stopped early and she didn’t want me wandering in the dead of night. Not through that part of Manchester with all its shaygets perils. I didn’t of course tell her that Aishky Mistofsky was indeed the blind one and that I was never in more danger than when he drove me home.

I had quickly grown fond of Aishky, in the gooey way a little kid grows fond of a big kid. I liked his gingery beaky face, which he brought very close to mine on account of his short-sightedness,
and which he pressed right up against the windscreen of his Austin A40, for the same reason. I liked the way he laughed, throwing his head back and showing the red hairs at his throat — an action that didn’t so much register the funniness or smartness of something someone had said, as the uncomplicated pleasure he took in someone being there to say something to him at all. And I liked the way he played ping-pong, earnestly, with a resolute arm, as though he owed something to the ball. He never defended, not even when that was the one sure way of beating his opponent. He liked to hit, rhythmically, conventionally, the bat starting low down, arcing predictably, and finishing high up, and if that didn’t happen to be what it took to win that night, so he lost.

In this he was the very opposite of his best friend, Twink Starr, whose great strength was his ability to find the edge of the table, but who would grit his teeth, chew his tongue, alter the whole nature of his game — pushing, chopping, half-volleying, sweating buckets, coughing up phlegm — if that was the only way to win the match. But I’m running ahead of myself. Before there were any matches — at least as far as I was concerned — I had to be kitted out. ‘For starters,’ Twink reminded me, ‘you can’t go on borrowing my bat — you’ll need your own.’

‘What do you mean for starters?’ Aishky queried. ‘What else does he need?’

This was the other big difference between them. Aishky Mistofsky played in the clothes he came home from work in. He took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and changed his shoes, that was all. He didn’t even loosen his tie. Whereas Twink Starr turned up already panting and dancing, like a prize fighter, in a hooded tracksuit, with a towel round his neck. Under the tracksuit, which he peeled off in stages, he wore a crested Fred Perry shirt, pleated shorts and long white socks with a blue stripe in them. In his bag he carried an asthma spray, two sets of sweatbands, a change of shirt and a small lawn-cotton hand towel with his own monograph sewn into it —
JS
. When the going got
tough he would tuck this into his shorts like a waiter’s tea cloth, so that he could dry the handle of his bat between points. Years later, professional tennis players competing for more prize money in a single fortnight than Twink Starr and Aishky Mistofsky could hope to earn between them in a lifetime would, as a matter of course, tuck lawn-cotton hand towels into their shorts. But before Twink Starr no racket-player had ever thought of doing such a thing.

‘You want him to play in long hasen, like you?’

‘What’s wrong with long hasen?’

‘You don’t win in them, Aishky, that’s what’s wrong with them. And you have to keep them up with braces.’

‘Barna won in long hasen.’

‘That was the past, Aishky. Don’t talk to me about the past. This kid’s got a future — he has to have shorts.’

‘The next thing you’ll be saying, he has to have a Fred Perry shirt.’

‘Well he can’t play in his school blazer, can he, you potz.’

They took me to Alec Watson and Mitchell’s in Market Street and continued to fight out their differences in front of the asssistants. ‘Here,’ Aishky called from the cricket counter, ‘what about a jockstrap and a box to go in it?’ And then from the football counter, ‘And maybe some shin pads …’

‘You’re a meshuggener,’ Twink shouted back across the shop. He was helping me choose a cover for my bat. Zip or stud, that was the issue. ‘Do you hear what I’m saying? You’re a meshuggener. You haven’t won a match in a month. But you know what to wear, suddenly. You don’t even look after your bat properly. You carry it around in a plastic bag with your sandwiches. I’m the one who has to pick the crumbs out of your pimples for you. You don’t even know they’re there. You don’t even notice them. But you’re an example to the kid!’

Aishky was in his element, shouting and being shouted at in a public place. His beaky face shone with bashfulness and audacity
mixed. ‘What about these?’ he called out. He was now in the boxing section. ‘You wouldn’t want him to spiel without these, would you?’ He was holding up a box of gum-shields.

‘Do me a favour,’ Twink said. It wasn’t a retort. More a philosophical expostulation, to no one in particular.

I too was in my element. It was flattering to be argued over like this by two grown men, sort of. And I loved being in their element. It made me feel I was coming to the end of being a kid. A whole new world was opening to me, one in which
you
embarrassed the shop assistants. It beat having aunties all ends up.

Which reminded me: I was only a short walk across Corporation Street from the soft-porno shop opposite the Cathedral; if there was some way I could give Aishky and Twink the slip for ten minutes, leave them to argue over my ping-pong wardrobe without me, I could be back before the contemptuous behind-the-counter judge, stammering out a request for the latest
Span.

I hadn’t finished with all that, now that I was coming to the end of being a kid and had a team to play for?

Do me a favour.

All matches shall start not later than 7.30 p.m.; the penalty for late starts shall be 2/6 for every fifteen minutes or part thereof.

29(a)
Match Procedure,
The Manchester and District
Table Tennis League

The sets of any player not present by 9.00 p.m. shall go by default to the opposing team, and the defaulting team be fined 1/- per player then absent.

29(d)
Match Procedure,
The Manchester and District
Table Tennis League

MY FIRST LEAGUE match was against the Allied Jam and Marmalade Sports and Social Club (the A. J. M.), just this side of Dukinfield. It was November. The blue-black month, smoky with fireworks and fog. To give ourselves plenty of time to get there, Aishky Mistofsky had suggested that he pick me up from home at six o’clock. I was worried about this arrangement. I knew that my mother and my aunties would come to the window to wave me off and I didn’t want them to see Aishky with his blind face pressed to the windscreen. Not knowing how to raise this with him directly, I’d mentioned it to Twink who came up
with the idea that he’d change seats with Aishky as soon as they arrived at our place, drive around the corner himself (which he reckoned he could just about manage, although he hadn’t learnt to drive yet), and then change back again once we were out of view. The explanation he’d give Aishky was that he was soft on my aunty Fay, whom he’d seen shopping with me in Lewis’s, and wanted to impress her with the sight of him sitting up like a mensch in his own Austin A40. Aishky would not be able to refuse him this. Impressing a woman with the aim of getting her to show you her bristles — even when the bristles in question happened to belong to someone you knew’s aunty — was a sacred undertaking: if you called yourself a friend you ministered to it. Besides, a bristle out for one was a bristle out for all. In a verbal culture, what goes around comes around. If you don’t cop the feel yourself, you at least get to hear about it.