The Making of Henry (14 page)

But no, in the end it does matter if all they're saying is that Henry is a dope who drops his pants – what was her expression? – sheds his trousers – without compunction. Not nice for his parents to get wind of. Not nice for his mother particularly. Not nice for his grandmother who thought she'd slain the curse of North Manchester man which had been laid upon her family. Not nice for Marghanita, who wouldn't want to think that what she nipped in the bud the night he carried her cocktail shoes in Wilmslow was nothing but serial endeavour.

‘No,' he tells her, ‘no. I don't believe it. I don't have a reputation.'

‘Ask your students.'

Lia has become one of his students. Part of that mature intake which the poly, having become a poly, is suddenly indecently eager to attract. Bring out your old! Someone's done a paper. Discovered that there's gold in them thar hills, old gold, any number of the hard of hearing and the all but past it, languishing in Pennine towns and villages, who would jump at studying Drama and Movement, or the Torment of Sylvia Plath, or even Literature's For Life with Henry, if they were only given the chance. Now in they stream, tapping their sticks, as though into a hospice for the terminally curious. Perfect for Henry. All attached, all older than he is. Not Lia. Lia is attached and the same age. But one out of two will do for Henry. This is how he has come to meet her again, anyway, after all these years. Eight, is it? Ten? He lost interest in Henshell, needless to say. Lost track of what their friendship was for. Now he remembers. It was for Lia.

‘And what will my students tell me?' Henry asks. ‘That I seduce them in return for good grades?'

‘No. I have heard no mention of your giving good grades.'

‘That I seduce them in return for bad grades, then?'

Grrrr, Henry! Why doesn't she ask him to be a tiger now?

‘No,' she says, ‘I wouldn't swear I have even heard the word seduce. They're more interested in the fact that everyone you sleep with is older than you, married or going out with someone else. The psychology of that arrests them. They're not stupid, Henry. They're curious as to why this is. Why, for example, you never seem to have a girlfriend of your own – not just of your own age but simply of your own, for you only. Why you're always scavenging round the edges of other people's relationships, as though for leftovers . . .'

‘Like yours, I suppose? Do you see yourself as a leftover.'

‘Like mine, yes. Definitely like mine. And do I see myself as a leftover? Yes. Yes, I do a bit.'

‘A bit?'

‘Don't be smart with me, Henry. I'm not complaining. I know the score. Something on the side suits me as much as it suits you. But everything you have is on the side. Which prompts some of us to wonder why you don't want anything that's – what? – in the middle, at the centre, a main course in itself.'

‘And the fact that I appear not to explains why I am always shedding my trousers?'

‘Maybe. Because it's as though you've finished before you've started. As though you know you're not going to get what you want the minute you embark, so the next one is a necessity, a foregone conclusion. If you could invert time, Henry, you'd have the next one before you had the last.'

‘And that would help me to keep my trousers on?'

She sighed. ‘Nothing will help you to keep your trousers on, is that what you want to hear me say? I don't know. Maybe nothing will. It's not for me to judge. I'm just your student. And your old friend's wife. Though no doubt . . .' She trailed away.

‘No doubt what? No doubt that's what I'm in it for? Because you're married to Henshell?'

She began to put her clothes back on. Growing weary, like the light. ‘Well, I'm not going to say that's not an element, Henry. I'd be a fool not to think about it at least. But I'm not accusing you of spite or anything like that. I'm sure you don't mean to do Henshell down. That's probably more my motive than it's yours. But this is new to me. You've been here before, Henry. By your own admission this is your thing.'

Henry hated these Pennine afternoons. The light not so much withdrawn as swept away, as though a smudgy hand had reached out and in one motion wiped a blackboard clean. Listen and that was what you heard, the blackness drying over the white, obliterating all trace, all remembrance even. Look out and nothing beckoned. As a boy Henry had kept the moors in the corner of his eye, a promise not of glamour exactly, not of Belkin's Hollywood or Bel Air, but of some glimmering Englishness whose quietude was strange to him, and which one day he would try to penetrate. Now he was on them, everything they'd promised, the glimmer and the quiet – the quiet as a property of the soul, he meant – was gone. What he'd seen was an illusion. He is standing on what was never there.

He didn't want Lia to go yet. She probably had it right, he was ready for the next one, but he still didn't want her to leave. ‘The mistake people make about me,' he said, ‘is to think I see myself as a lover.'

‘And you don't?'

‘No, I don't. Not a lover in the heroic sense, anyway. I don't have that much interest in the grand scope and narrative of erotic love, I don't have the confident brush strokes. I'm more a miniaturist. If Don Juan is Rubens or Titian, then I'm Vermeer.'

‘You do interiors, is that what you're saying? You don't like going out?'

‘Correct, I don't like going out. But I mean something else as well.' He was sitting by her on the bed, stroking her arms, absently pulling hairs from her sweater, thinking about what he was. ‘I think I'd like to say,' he said, ‘that I'm an intimate proximist. Taking an intimist to be someone who has a preference for the smaller, nearer view, as against the broad sweep of the panoramic, then I'm one stage closer in. I'm besotted with the proximate. You remember “Hovis” Belkin – of course you do, Henshell hated him – well, he was the very opposite. “Hovis” was only interested in what was remote.'

‘He was never particulary nice to me, if that's what you mean.'

‘No, he wouldn't have been. You were altogether too familiar to him.'

‘But you always seemed distant yourself, Henry. None of us thought of you – don't be offended – as a warm friend. You were never really in the hutch with us.'

He's hurt. Not even in the hutch with Henshell, his second-best friend?

But he doesn't want her to see he's hurt. ‘No,' he says, as though the charge is a familiar one to him. ‘But that's only because I didn't know how to do it. The haughty are always people who just lack the trick of intimacy. Invite them to your homes and make them cocoa and they're pussy cats.'

He does a pussy cat for her. The nearest Henry gets to tigers.

‘So if Henshell had made you cocoa you wouldn't now be here fucking his wife?'

He laughed. What else was there to do? ‘I think it started earlier than Henshell,' he said.

‘Oh no, not your parents.'

‘Afraid so.'

‘They didn't love you . . .'

‘Or they loved me too much. Mothers, for their own reasons, keep you in thrall to the proximate, fathers are meant to push you out into the world.'

‘And yours didn't?'

‘Well, he tried. But maybe he was too influenced by my mother in the end, maybe she kept him in thrall as well. Who knows? Take bloody “Hovis” – he wasn't afraid of what was out there and his Dad was so aloof he only spoke on Yom Kippur, and that was to remind “Hovis” of his sins. To all intents and purposes he had no Dad. Half the time he coveted mine. Yet this didn't stop him going for distance. So where does family psychology get you? I'm sorry, I've forgotten how we got into this.'

‘We?
You
got into it by way of explaining why you can't play tigers.'

‘Ah yes, and why tigers notwithstanding I can't keep my pants on. I hope I am no longer a disturbing mystery to you.'

She was muffling up, afghan coat, suede boots, woolly gloves, two scarves, what you need to brave a Pennine winter. She was shaking her head over him. ‘Why are you so frightened of leaving things to chance, Henry? Why do you feel you must make your version of yourself prevail? You should trust other people more. You should risk their opinion of you.'

‘Other people?'

‘Yes. Me, for instance. About whom you haven't asked a question all afternoon. Not even how are you, Lia. It's a bit rich, Henry, all that loving what's close, all that intimate proximist stuff, when you wouldn't notice another person if she was sitting on your face.'

‘Try me,' he suggested.

But she couldn't be bothered taking all those clothes off again.

It didn't last. Mia, Jane, whoever. Nothing ever lasted. In so far as that had anything to do with Henry – and it didn't always – the reason wasn't callousness or cold feet. Order, that was the problem. ‘Save me from chaos,' Henry pleaded with every older someone-else's woman he met. Without a woman in his life, Henry was like the world before God created it. Nothing but flying fragments. At the mercy of hunger, boredom and his dick – when he could tell the difference – not understanding where he ended or the void began, unless he
was
the void. Then, if he was lucky, the woman came, parted the dry land from the sea, stuck up a firmament, blew light upon him, and arranged him into order. Trouble was – order is death. Chaos life, order death. This had nothing to do with Henry wanting to throw his socks about the bedroom floor. In fact, Henry had always been a neat person with a side parting, who kept his clothes in drawers and his papers in a filing cabinet. So there was nothing hippyish about his pronouncement that order was death. What he meant was that the moment women did what he needed them to do, they set in motion the process of deterioration. There was this to be said for the world before God created it: there was no death in it. That which is not created cannot die. Chaotic, Henry could have lived for ever. Ordered, as he longed to be, he could smell his flesh rot.

Maybe when he grew up it would be different. You need to be mature to be ordered. You have to be accepting. But so long as he stayed chaotic, how could Henry grow up?

How did you manage to grow up and yet stay chaotic, Dad?

Taugetz, Henry
.

FIVE

‘
Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz
and
taugetz taug
/
Taugetz, taugetz,
taugetz
and
taugetz taug
. . .'

Henry's father, the paper-magician, happy and blithering his favourite song. ‘
Taugetz, taugetz
, give me your answer do . . .' Beside him on the front seat, Henry, the misery-magician, not happy. How old is Henry now? Thirteen – thirteen going on three hundred, according to his father's calculations.

They have been to what Henry's father has recently taken to calling a gig. Another humiliation for Henry. Gigs being what rock musicians do – even rockless Schubertian Henry knows that – and are not to be confused with tearing up newsprint into pretty shapes for a bunch of four-year-olds who couldn't give a shit. Henry has been helping out, the paper-sorcerer's apprentice, now that he is of an age to be useful. He carries the cases. Makes sure they've packed enough newspapers and serviettes, not to mention the torches, the fire extinguisher, the blanket, the bucket of water. Come the performance, he holds one end of whatever his father wants one end holding. He is the butt of his father's mirth. ‘Here you are, Charlie, catch' – that's his stage name, Charlie – ‘oops, couldn't catch a cold, could you, Charlie?' And he does the navigating, getting them the length and breadth of the county, from one kindergarten gig to another. Tonight they have been to Liverpool. Hard town, Liverpool, his father had warned him before they set out. ‘How can it be hard, Dad,' Henry wanted to know, ‘when the person whose party it is is five? What are they going to do, knife us?' ‘You'll see,' his father told him. ‘You'll see.'

And his father was right. They
were
hard. Old lags in short pants, potato-faced, thug-nosed, jelly-spitting mafiosi with piggy proletarian eyes, who booed when they should have clapped, and heckled when they should have marvelled, who belched and farted and shouted ‘Fucking rubbish!' – and that was only the little girls – and who, when Izzi presented them with a dancing paper dolly each, screwed them up and threw them back at Henry.

‘Told you, Charlie,' Izzi whispered to his son. ‘Only one thing for it – you'll have to go and get the other stuff from the car.'

‘What other stuff?'

‘You know.'

‘Ah, Dad!'

‘Just go! And as for you' – to the under-age delinquents – ‘I've got something that'll keep you quiet.' With which wild boast he swept them up behind him like the rats of Hamelin, down into their cancered concrete garden, a place of rusted bloodbaths, broken bicycles with tampered brakes, seatless swings and ruined roundabouts, promising them real magic this time, blood and thunder, death and dissolution, inferno. Yeah? – we'd like to see it! Yeah, well, you're going to see it. Yeah? – well, where is it? Yeah, well, it's just coming. And two minutes later back it came – Henry with the bags of torches. Him? No, not him. Yeah – well, it had better not be him. And of course it wasn't him, not Henry, no one ever produced Henry if the call was for blood and thunder.

In no time, no longer than it took him to unzip a bag, pour paraffin, light a match and summon up a mouthful of spittle, Uncle Izzi had become volcanic, gargling lava, bouncing fireballs off his lips like balloons. Head back, throat open, smiling – for smiling pulls the lips away from danger, that much even Henry knew – he addressed his baby audience in flames, the fiery words evaporating when he breathed, exploding and vanishing as though they'd never been spoken. Or he would swallow fire –
seem
to swallow fire, there was the trick – sucking it into his stomach which must have been as one of the boiler rooms of Hell.

You like that, kids? You like that better?

Without doubt they liked it better. Offered the choice between paper-folding and a man with his face on fire, how could you not prefer the man with his face on fire. These, Henry reminded himself, were the children of arsonists and incendiaries, pyromaniacs and safe-blowers. They had grown up with sticks of dynamite in their cots the way other children had grown up with dummies. They were heat-resistant. They felt no pain. They had no
imagination
of pain.

Their eyes burned with excitement. Now you're talking, now you're cooking with gas, this is what you call a children's party. If only Henry's father would set fire to Henry as an encore, they'd suck their thumbs and go to beddy-byes content.

Smelling the paraffin, hearing the children's shouts, seeing the sky light up, the entire proletariat of Henry's reading and foreboding came out to look – missing persons, rent-evaders, men in hiding, IRA men, men with prices on their heads, dodgers, defaulters, defectors, defecators, escaped convicts, wife-beaters, spies, snoops, grasses, bigamists, bombers, whisky priests, welfare cheats, distillers of illicit hooch, contrabandists, drug dealers, inbreeders, squatters, illegal immigrants, under-age runaways, child-molesters, tower-block prostitutes and their pimps, men who slept with their mothers, neighbours who hadn't spoken since their blood feud first broke out in another country in another century, creatures not men, creatures with iron claws for hands, creatures with bullets for teeth, creatures who knew what they wanted, took what they wanted, what they borrowed never returned, inexpugnable, shatterproof, immortal. Whoosh, went Izzi's breath. Whoa, went the estate. Could they have been thinking that Henry's father had been sent by the council to burn the disgrace that was their habitation to the ground? Were they hoping to collect on the insurance? Who cared why they roared. Not Izzi. At last – an audience appreciative of his genius
at last
. Boiling hot, like a blacksmith, two scorched circles on his cheeks, like Old Nick, he blew four more fire rings at the moon, then took his bow.

See. See what happens when you're given a chance. My first ever Gentile gig, Henry.

You've done loads of Gentile gigs, Dad.

My first ever
über
-Gentile gig. What does that tell you?

Henry knew what it told him: never to come to such a place again.

But to his father it told a different story. From now on, paper for the Yiddlers, fire for the goyim.

That could have been the moment, Henry now realises, when his father decided to take a second wife.

Hence happy in the car home. ‘
Taugetz, taugetz
. . . Didn't I tell you?'

‘Didn't you tell me what?'

‘That Liverpool was a hard town.'

‘You did.'

‘And didn't we show 'em?'

‘You showed 'em, yes.'

‘Was I good or was I good?'

‘You were very good.'

‘Shame we didn't bring your mother.'

Silence from Henry.

‘She'd have liked it, don't you think?'

‘Dunno.'

‘You don't think so?'

‘Not sure.'

‘Maybe you're right. Maybe not. The excitement would have been too much for her. What do you think?'

‘I think so, Dad.'

‘Yeah, me too. And you? You all right?'

‘Me? Absolutely. Yeah.'

His father steals a sideways look at him. Concentrating on the road ahead. Not much traffic, but there's a light rain falling, making conditions treacherous. ‘Oil and water,' he says. And then, returning to what's on his mind. ‘So why the long face?'

‘I haven't got a long face.'

‘You have. It starts there and ends there.'

‘That's the shape.'

‘
Taugetz
.'

‘It is. That's how I'm built. It's how I came.'

‘Who you came from, you mean.'

‘Well, I came from you, Dad.'

‘Yeah, indirectly.'

‘Is there any other way?'

‘You should get out more.'

‘I'm out. I'm out with you.'

‘I mean with your chinas.'

Henry says nothing. Problems with his chinas, even then. Some dissatisfaction. Not knowing what friends are for. Wanting a little girlfriend, yes, but that's different, and not what his father means by chinas, anyway.

And also not knowing what his father's for . . .

He would have asked, had he dared, had the hour been right. ‘Dad, what exactly do you get out of this?'

Driving?

‘No, not driving. This . . .' But he couldn't spoil the party.

So ask it now, Henry. No, Dad, not the driving. This . . . that . . . Go on, Henry, spoil the party now. That fire-eating and stuff.

I enjoyed it. It gave pleasure. You saw that with your own eyes.
You saw the expressions on those kids' faces.

Should Henry say that had his father set about the estate with a blow-torch, that too would have lit up those kids' faces? No. Stick to what he wants to know. Which is not why
they
enjoyed it, but why
he
did.

Why the hell shouldn't I have enjoyed it? Fun, Henry. Remember
fun? No, you wouldn't. Not you with your endless sick notes from
your mother in your pocket. You wouldn't remember anything about
taking risks either. Or the joys of expressing a little wildness. Feeling
your blood heat. Ever felt your blood heat, Henry? No. I thought not.
And all right, I admit it, enjoying the attention. Is that so terrible?
There was a song your mother liked – ‘I don't want to set the world
on fire, I just want to start a blaze in your heart
.'

Different things inflame different people, Dad. Had you wanted to start a blaze in my heart, you'd have tried alternative methods.

Such as what? Burning your books? You'd have liked that. Then
you could have called me a Nazi. No, Henry, I didn't want to start
a blaze in your heart. I knew my limits. No one was ever able to set
you alight.

Too damp, you think?

Too frightened
.

I wasn't frightened of the fire-eating. I thought it was ugly.

Well, that was your opinion, Henry. Other people have always
found fire beautiful
.

I'm not talking about the fire. It's what you did with it. The smell, the paraffin, the putting things in your mouth, all that.

You didn't like the smell of para fin, I didn't like the smell of
ink. But I didn't say your homework was ugl
y.

He could have, though, Henry thinks. Given what Henry's maps and tables looked like, given the spider-scrawl Henry called writing, he'd have been within his rights. But then that's the line down which his own ugliness has travelled. Patrilineal, the mess Henry made with a pen – must have been, given the beautiful hand his mother had. Not that any of this is to the point. Nothing, of course, is to the point now. Should all be left dead and buried. Unhealthy, all this disinterring. Dispiriting. Like his father's fire-eating. Dispiriting. Soulless. Leave him alone.

Soulless? Don't start me o f, Henry. Your soul was a luxury we
made available to you. Not everyone had your advantages. No one
sat me on their knee and read me books. I had my hands, that was
all. Big hands. There's Izzi, the geezer with the big hands. You make
the most of what you've been given. I had this friend called Aaron
Eisenfeldt, who kept egging me on. I bet you can't knock this nail in
this piece of wood with your fist. So I did. I bet you can't rip a telephone directory in half. So I did. I bet you can't put your hand in
fire. So I did.

It was a good job, then, says Henry the Pious, that this Aaron Eisenfeldt didn't bet you you couldn't kill the headmaster with your thumb.

You're dead right there, Henry. He became a High Court judge in
later life
.

And you, Henry thinks, became a children's entertainer.

But just because someone dared you to do something, he says, it didn't mean you had to do it. Least of all that you had to
go
on
doing it.

Nothing his father says makes any sense to him. He is flesh of his flesh, but they might as well belong to separate species. Henry knows what he'd have said to Aaron Eisenfeldt had Aaron Eisenfeldt come to him with fire.

Fuck off, Aaron!

Eat shit, Aaron!

But why blame Aaron. Just because, it doesn't have to mean –

I agree with you. It didn't have to mean that
.

And just because you put your hand successfully in fire once didn't mean you had to put your tongue in fire for the rest of your life.

Who said I was successful? If you want to know, I burnt it
.

Ah, so that's it. So now you have to prove yourself for ever.

Taugetz. Was that the psychology they taught you at university?
We wasted our money, in that case. No. I got a taste, the same way
you got a taste for books. I don't say to you that you read books to
prove yourself, because once you couldn't finish one. I did it because
I liked it. I liked the illusion part of it, I liked the gadget part of it,
I liked the danger part of it – but don't tell your mother that – and
I liked amazing people with what I could do. I ask you again, was
that so terrible?

Henry thinks about it. No, it was not so terrible. Except that it was so terrible because it was so common. That's the word, Henry is afraid. Common. He knows he ought to have thought differently of it. He should have tried thinking it was exotic instead, tried telling himself that he was luckier than most boys who had dentists or accountants for fathers. My father is a fire-eater! What a start for a boy! What a beginning to what is meant, after all, to be a great adventure. Thank you, Dad, he ought to have said, for lifting me, by your example, out of the common. For it is not a common profession for a father, a fire-eater. Could Henry name one other boy who had a father who ate fire, or who ate anything but chopped liver on bagels, come to that? He could not. So he must have been using common in another sense. He was. He is. By common, when he employed it of his father, Henry meant low, lacking grace and sophistication, of little value, low class (unlike ‘Hovis' Belkin's family), inferior, goyische, unrefined. On account of which commonness Henry was ashamed to be his father's son. And hung his head.