Where my feel for the game came from, how I knew from my very first hit how to angle the book, how to chop, how to flick, how to half-volley, how to move — because yes, I had suddenly become a mover too — was a mystery to me. I’d never been a ball-player. I dropped catches. I mis-kicked. I allowed balls to be dribbled through my legs. Like an old man snoozing by an open fire, I dreamed in front of a gaping goal. Like a young girl counting the hairs on her first love’s chest, I lay on my back making daisy-chains on the long-leg boundary. You know the story — if you’re a reader you
are
the story: when the teams came to be picked I was the booby prize, the one you had to have because there was no one left. Sometimes I wasn’t picked at all; simply ignored, turned tail on, left smarting in the mud while the chosen ones ran off riotously to play. Hurtful, but at least safe. If the truth is told, I was frightened of balls and philosophically dismayed by them. Sphericality — was that it? Not knowing where a ball ended and where it began, not being able to tell the front from the back? I’m not looking for fancy excuses; it’s possible that my fear of balls proceeded from nothing more complex than the good relations other boys enjoyed with them. I don’t know where I was at the time or why I hadn’t been invited, but somewhere along the line, some time between
my seventh and eighth birthdays, boys and balls had met at a party, hit it off, and been going steady ever since, leaving me to stay home on my own or play gooseberry. Ping-pong didn’t change that. Not all at once, anyway. But it met me half-way. It made concessions to my solitary nature. Ping-pong is airless and cramped and repetitive and self-absorbed, and so was I.
But we sniffed greatness in each other.
I’d always been short of people to play with. I had two sisters, both older than me. My father had been away in the army when I was born and now worked long hours. My mother and her sisters and their mother were my company but they were sedentary and introspective and no less frightened of balls than I was. We listened to the
Morning Story
and later in the day to
Woman’s Hour
on the radio together, did crosswords and jigsaws together, pored over old family photographs together, played hangman and snap! and noughts and crosses together, and on special occasions snakes and ladders or hoop-la on a board nailed to my bedroom door. I also seem to recall that they bathed me a lot. Otherwise, when it came to the rough-and-tumble necessary to summon up the blood and stiffen the spirit of a growing boy, they weren’t much use. We had moved from Cheetham Hill to Heaton Park a couple of years before, far enough to lose contact with my old friends, and I was slow at making new ones. The other catch with our new address was that there were prefabs in the park just opposite us — built by German prisoners of war — and every time I went out a gang of prefab boys threw stones at me. For the time being, until I was able to enjoy the protection of a gang of my own, or until the prefabs were pulled down, my mother much preferred it that when I wasn’t at school I stayed in the house.
The only person not happy with this arrangement, apart from the prefab boys, was my father. ‘A stone’s going to kill him?’
In protection of my skin, my mother was as fierce as a tigress. ‘Does it have to kill him? Isn’t it enough he loses an eye?’
‘They’re little kids. They can’t throw that hard.’
‘Joel, these are not Yiddisher boys. When did you hear of a shaygets who couldn’t throw hard?’
‘So let him learn to throw hard back. I’ll take him out in the park and teach him.’
‘You’ll find time to take him out in the park? And you’ll be here to put his eye back?’
Most arguments came quickly to an end the moment my mother postulated my father finding time or being in.
They were still young — my mother was still glamorous in that slightly orientalized, simultaneously petite and fleshy Polish style (with little round white fish-ball cheeks) that drove Russian men wild — and I’d like to think they were still in love, but without doubt my father suffered from what his side — dodging all questions of morality — called ants in his pants. He was driving a coach at the time, working for a firm that hired out buses to schools for field trips, and to social clubs for boozy nights out. So he necessarily went to far-flung destinations and worked long hours. Even allowing for that, though, his bus was frequently seen in some odd places at some odd times.
The markets came later, following calls my mother made to the bus company. But it wasn’t long before his market lorry was seen in some odd places too.
That men were by nature grandiose and unreliable, that they had ants in their pants, that they made you promises which they immediately broke, that they forgot you and half the time forgot their own children, was an assumption that no woman on my mother’s side so much as thought about questioning. That was just the way of it. It barely merited remark. And yet both my sisters were religiously educated to believe that no greater good awaited them than a man. Figure that out. And while you’re at it, figure out how come not a woman on my mother’s side — not my highly strung mother herself, not my palpitating aunties, not my small-boned fatalistic Polish grandmother — ever taught me to think of their sex with anything but suspicion. They chased
me down the snakes and up the ladders, they floated me in my little bath, and they whispered to me of all the Jezebels who were already out there, growing their nails, waiting for the hour when I would offer them my heart and they would pluck it out.
All in all, given the threat from the prefab boys and the cruel intentions of women, ping-pong for one was my safest option by a mile. The noise drove my sisters crazy, but my mother shushed them into leaving me alone. As long as I was hitting a ball against a wall I was out of their hair, wasn’t I?
Plock, plock. Kerplock, plock, if you want to be onomatopoeically pedantic about it, these being the days before sponge or sandwich. It began early. I had just started grammar school, a forty-minute walk and train ride away, so if I was going to get my regular hour’s practice in I had to begin at seven at least. And then, as soon as I was back from school, plock, plock, plock. Another hour on the balls of my feet. I loved it. The sound, the self-absorption, the growing mastery. And the nursing of a secret dream — to be impregnable, plock, to be the greatest, plock, and to win, thereby, plock, plock, the respect of men and the love of beautiful women with little white fish-ball cheeks.
So they hadn’t succeeded in frightening me off women, my mother’s side? Of course they hadn’t. You can’t float a boy in a bath and tell him about Jezebels with purple nails and then expect him not to want one.
Plock, plock. How they would roar when I snatched one title after another off Ogimura and brought the trophies back to the mantelpieces of Europe! 21–0, 21–0, 21–1 — a flawless performance but for Ogimura’s fluked net return on the last-but-one point of the final game, when a moment of rash but understandable complacency caused me to take my eye off the ball and survey the ecstatic, entirely female crowd. How they would cluster around my dressing room, waiting for me to come out to sign autographs, pressing their soft, perfectly spherical breasts into my stone chest, retracting their bloody claws …
By the time such folderols as bats and nets came into the house I was already an accomplished player with every stroke in the game. And I still wouldn’t play with anything except my
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
My mother’s side, of course, presented no sort of test. I could have hit them off the dining table with a bookmark, never mind a book. My father’s side put up a stiffer resistance, but they too had no answer in the end to the amount of backspin I could impart with the leatherette, let alone to the speed and accuracy of my attacking shots. Neighbours were brought in to marvel at what I could do and to try their hand against me. I fancy that my father was even secretly putting money on me. ‘A tusheroon says the kid’ll pulverize you. And he won’t even be using a bat!’
If I’m right about that then he must have cleaned up nicely in the early days. Nobody who hadn’t seen me play could have been anything but certain of beating me, so little did I look like a person who knew how to win, so completely, on the surface at least, was I the child of my mother. Even at the table I was diffident and apologetic, blushing if I happened to lose a point, and blushing even more when I took it.
I blushed with such violence in these years that I must have been in danger of combusting. Heat, that’s what I remember most about being a boy — how like it was to being the kettle that spluttered and steamed all day on my grandmother’s fire. So long as I was only practising on my own against the wall I was able to exercise a measure of control over my temperature — about eighty degrees Fahrenheit in the immediate vicinity of the ball, never more than that. But as soon as I played against another person the ovens came on. It wasn’t fear of losing — I knew I couldn’t lose. It was the exposure. Call it compound contradictory existential bashfulness. 1) — I was ashamed of existing, and 2) — I was ashamed of existing so successfully. Five, six unbeatable backhands on the run and my hand would be on fire with consciousness of its temerity; a couple more and there’d be smoke pouring out of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
At the end of a pasting I’d handed out
to Lol Kersh, an older kid with a purple birthmark and a stamp collection from across the street, his father, who had come to watch, demanded a closer look at my unconventional bat. He’d smelt the fumes. ‘I’ve rumbled you, you little mamzer,’ he said. ‘You’ve baked that book like a conker. Show me, show me. I bet it’s as hard as a brick.’ But when he inspected it he found that it was soft — very hot and very wet, but soft. As, in the face of his false accusation, was I.
Shy — even the word is shaming. And I was beginning to shame everyone around me.
One night I overheard my uncle Motty ask my father — it’s still not easy for me to reproduce his words, however long ago he spoke them — ‘When’s that genius kid of yours going to come out of his shell?’
What was I in his eyes — a snail, a tortoise, a whelk?
We were at a wedding. Not a real fresh virginal wedding, but a silver or a ruby wedding. I can’t remember whose. I probably never knew. I kept my head down at family get-togethers. Especially if it was my father’s side that was getting together. I wasn’t equipped to handle their ramping verve.
‘Well halloa dair, Amos,’ was how my grandfather greeted me.
I was never certain that he knew who I was. That’s the terrible contradiction at the heart of shyness. You think everybody’s looking and you fear no one is.
‘My name’s Oliver,’ I said.
He rolled his eyes, retracting the pupils and showing me the whites. Then he pinched my cheek. ‘Oliver,’ he said — as though coining a diminutive, as though my actual name for outside of the family, gentile use was Olive — ‘Oliver, help your Zadie to that chair.’
We were still on the street outside the Higher Broughton Assembly Rooms, waiting to clap in the happy couple. So a chair … ?
‘What chair, Grandpa?’
He had me again. ‘Wotcher, Olive
ler
!’ And he was off, looking for more descendants to torment.
And then there was the dancing …
Considering the shape we were — for the Walzer women, too, were built like brick shithouses — you’d have thought we might have passed on dancing, left it to the Yakipaks who lived in the south of the city, the svelte Sephardim with their slithery Spanish and Portuguese hips. Fat chance. A band played us into the hall and no sooner was the soup served than my uncles were out of their seats, buttoning up their dinner jackets, as though that would somehow make them lighter, steering my aunties around the dance floor the way my father drove his bus, fast on the bends and heavy on the clutch. Thereafter it needed no more than a thimbleful of sweet red wine for us to be back at the convergence of the Bug and the Dniester, throwing glasses over our shoulders and leaping on to tables to dance the kasatske. Make no mistake, a kasatske may sound like a tsatske from Kazalinsk, but there was nothing footling or fatuous about the way we did it, down on the heels of our dancing pumps, our arms folded, our jackets tight across our backs, our short stout Kamenets Podolski shanks going like pistons.
When I say
our …
In fact it was what we’d assimilated in Higher Broughton that I dreaded more than what we’d brought from Podolia. The polka and the mazurka had a certain sad elegance of yesteryear about them; the sight of a forebear slapping his thighs and shouting ‘Hoy!’ stirred ancient fertility associations — in these I could almost forget myself. But the hokey-cokey, and worse still, the conga — what were such trashy plebeian tortures invented for but my humiliation? Come on, Oliveler, join the line, join the line!
Join a line, me? Be
seen
in a line, me?
And who did I think was looking? Irrational, I acknowledge it. Why would anyone have been looking specifically at me? And
who was there to look anyway, given that everyone was
in
the line? But what’s reason got to do with anything.
On the night in question I was standing in a corner at the back of the hall practising ping-pong shots with an imaginary ball and trying to be invisible when the conga suddenly snaked my way, a deadly centipede of Walzers shrieking ‘Ayayayay, conga!’ and kicking its legs out. I turned the colour of Kamenets beetroot and ran for it. At one exit my grandfather was saying ‘Well halloa dair, Amos,’ to a small bewildered square-shouldered brick shithouse of a girl in a frilly pink dress. Close by the other my father was down on one knee, impressing a cluster of cousins by lifting chairs one-handed. The combination of himself in a tight dinner suit and a crowd to watch him was always fatal for my father. Down he’d go and up would come the chair. Nothing remarkable about that? I haven’t finished. Once he’d limbered up lifting empty chairs, he’d start on chairs that had my aunties in them. Not the introspective weightless aunties on my mother’s side, either, but rollicking Walzer aunties with round knees and deep chests. Three inches ... six inches ... a foot off the floor!
One-handed!
Oy a broch, Joel, you’ll rupture yourself! ‘Do you want me to tell you something, Oliver? — Solomon didn’t have the kaych your father has.’ I knew who they meant. They meant that Samson didn’t have my father’s kaych. And I also knew what my father did for an encore. A chair with an aunty sitting on it, plus me sitting on the aunty.