If you could close your eyes to the manner in which he’d introduced himself, he was quite a catch. He even had a house in Alderley Edge.
‘Alderley Edge!’ my mother repeated. ‘And he condenses books for the
Reader’s Digest!’
Yes, the moral infection of swag had taken its toll of us intellectually too. How long was it since any of the women in our house had bought a Collins Classic? Austens, Jane; Brontës, Charlotte; Gaskells, Mrs? — all forgotten. They read magazines now, showbiz gossip, tittle tattle about the Royal Family, and condensed books. And they’d stopped listening to Tchaikovsky. Once upon a time we’d sat in a circle in the dark, oying over the Overture to
Romeo and Juliet.
It had made us all lovesick together. Not any more. I had my own methods for making myself lovesick now and my aunties were getting off on Sammy Davis Jnr and
the Melachrino Strings. We were acculturating to a lower class of English person.
Or
they
were. By way of compensation I was going far out in the opposite direction. I wanted nothing of anything that anyone I knew liked. It was a good job Twink had vanished from my life, otherwise I would have set about putting him right. Getting him on to Lieder instead of all that Puccini crap. Schubert, Twink, and not
Lilac Time
either.
Oh no, swag was not going to get me. I would belong to nothing and to no one rather than to swag.
But by God I had to fight against its volubility. The noise our culture made as it ran down! The racket!
We’d been softly spoken when we’d first bundled our belongings over from the Bug. Shush, lie low, keep shtum, and they may not notice we are here. But we’d forgotten our own lessons. Fallen in love with the host culture again, or rather with the lack of it. Even our pronunciation was deteriorating. Boggart Hole Clough, to take an example at random, Boggart Hole Clough where I’d picnicked as a little boy with some of my mother’s friends from the International Brigade, hopping on to a bus at the bottom of Blackley New Road, Boggart Hole Clough which you would have thought was characterful enough already, was now Buggart ‘Awl Cloof. We didn’t hop on to a bus any longer either, we caught t’buzz. Nor did we picnic. We bootered buhns which we shuvelled into our cake’oles in frunt of t’telly. We sooked hoomboohgs. We moonched fuhdge. Soon we’d be throwing stones.
It was no quieter anywhere else in Kamenets Podolski, north Manchester. We were all racketin’ down t’plug’ole together. Next door, where the Markses lived, was even worse. For his seventeenth birthday Selwyn Marks had been given a secondhand Morris Minor. His brother Louis flew back from Israel to teach him to drive it. He’d only been away a year but he was a different colour now — no longer dun from the Dniester but
Negev umber — and spoke with a broken accent. He knocked up with me on the table that was still out in their garden, balanced on a couple of dustbins, rotting, bubbling, whitened by the sun and the rain, curled at the corners. ‘I cannot play tsis game any more,’ he told me. ‘I’m musclebound from drrriving jeeps.’ He was in training to lift for Israel at the next Olympic Games. Which meant that while he could raise five grown men above his head he’d rupture himself if he had to bend down for a ping-pong ball. Selwyn had given up ping-pong altogether. Swimming too. Now he was going to be a racing driver. The only sport in which there was no anti-Semitism. ‘How do you figure that, Selwyn?’ I asked him. ‘It’s the helmets,’ he said. ‘They can’t see how big your nose is.’
He should never have been allowed to sit at the controls of a car, with or without Louis next to him. He panicked too easily. Just reversing out of the path was more than he could manage without it erupting into a shouting match with every member of his family.
‘I’ve
got
my left hand down. I’ve
got
my left hand down. What do you
think
I’ve got down.’
‘Selwyn, go slower,’ his mother called.
‘Mother, if I go any slower I’ll be going backwards.’
‘Meshuggener!’ his father shouted. ‘You’re already going backwards!’
‘I’m meant to be going backwards!’
‘So go backwards!’
‘But slower, Selwyn. Go slow. Where are you layfing to?’
‘Now come up grradually off tse clutch,’ you could hear Louis advising, next to him.
‘Tse clutch? What’s
tse
clutch all of a sudden. My car isn’t fitted with tse clutch.’
‘Selwyn, if you don’t vant my chelp I can go back to Israel.’
‘Vant! Chelp! Why are you talking to me like a fucking German?’
‘Selwyn, wash your mouth out.’
‘Wash my mouth out? What about vash my mouth out! How can I vash my mouth out ven I’m drriving. I’m drriving a fucking car here!’
‘Selwyn, don’t talk to your brother like that. He’s come a hundred thousand miles to teach you.’
‘I’m not talking to my brother.’
‘Then who are you talking to? Your mother? You’re swearing at your mother now!’
‘Let him swear at me, let him swear. Just make him go slow.’
Slow? So far the car hadn’t moved more than six inches. But it always ended the same way, with Selwyn snagging the gears, coming up too quickly off the clutch, burning the brakes, and slamming into the front wall.
‘If you von’t listen to me …’ I heard Louis complaining one afternoon.
It was Friday. The early rush hour where we lived. Shabbes looming. Everywhere people returning home, bearing sweet red wine and milky bread, driving into their paths. Only Selwyn still trying to get out of his.
‘I’m listening, I’m listening!’ he was shouting. He was revving the engine hard. I could smell oil and burning rubber. The same smell that hung over Cheetham Hill for weeks after Copestake’s warehouse had gone up in smoke.
‘Then do vot I’m telling you. Always look in your mirror before rrreversing out.’
‘How can I look in the mirror? I’m concentrating on my driving. If I look in the mirror I crash the car.’
‘You’ll crrrash the car anyway. You always crrrash the car.’
‘What do you mean I always crash the car? When did I crash the car?’
‘Selwyn, look in the mirrror.’
‘I’m looking, I’m looking.’
‘Now rrelease your chandbrake, slowly. Slowly! Vot gear are you in?’
‘I’m in gear, how do
I
know which, I’m looking in my mirror.’
‘Rrelease the chandbrake. You’re rruining your brrakes. Rrelease your chandbrake, Selwyn!’
‘Which is the handbrake?’
And then bang! Into the wall again.
‘That’s it,’ Louis said, jumping out of the passenger seat. ‘I cannot teach you! You’re unteachable.’
‘I wouldn’t be unteachable if you were any kind of teacher. I can’t understand what you’re telling me. Suddenly you’re talking to me like a Nazi. Vot’s vid de vot? You go to Israel and you come back looking like a shvartzer and talking like Hitler.’
‘You’re a lunatic,’ Louis said. ‘You’re a total tsedraiter.’
‘
I’m
the tsedraiter! Who’s the one that’s asking me to do a hundred things at vonce? Take tse brake off, put tse brake on, look in tse mirror, change tse gears …’
‘Lig in drerd, Selwyn! I should never chave tried! I should chave stayed in Eilat. Teach yourself to drrrive!’
And that was what Selwyn did. He looked in his mirror, found reverse, released his handbrake, eased off the clutch, backed into the street, changed into first and then second and then third, easy, sped towards the main road, had no idea what to do next, and plunged into the traffic like the person he had never in his life been, and never again would be, the bravest wildest maddest kid on the funfair dodgems.
Died on his way to hospital. Mangled. Killed by Christians. Was not how the local Jewish papers reported it. Merely: Selwyn Marks, younger son of Ida and Leon Marks. Tragically. Of multiple injuries. Only a few hundred yards from his home. Driving alone on a provisional licence. His car a seventeenth-birthday present from his loving parents.
Selwyn Marks, suddenly, to the grief of his distraught family.
Marks, Selwyn, beloved younger son and brother.
A flower ripped untimely from its stem.
Marks, Louis, stayed out in the garden for the whole of that night, howling like a wolf and pulling branches off the trees. My grandfather commented on his demented appearance the next day. ‘Isn’t he that wrestler — Jimmy … ?’
The noise was so frightening I wouldn’t have dared going out to comfort him even if I’d been able to think of anything comforting to say. But I remained awake, watching from my bedroom window, in a sort of second-best vigil. I couldn’t cry. Everything stopped at my throat. But it wasn’t the stoppage I’d looked for from Lorna Peachley. That was a rapture. A lightness. This was heavy with fascination. Not the unimaginable torpor that followed my grandmother’s death, either: the night that never knows the relief of morning; the grey half-lit dawn that never breaks into the colours of day. No, this was more dreadful because more exciting. I knelt at my bedroom window with my nose to the pane watching Louis tearing up the garden, and was exhilarated.
That was a big thing that was happening out there. A major event. Beautiful, as are all catastrophes.
It was only when he’d smashed the ping-pong table and then ripped apart the dustbins it had stood on, one after the other with his bare hands, banging the jagged sections against his chest, making the blood flow, that Louis went inside.
Inside.
Not so beautiful now.
Not so exhilarating suddenly.
And when I thought of what inside must have been like I was ashamed of myself for not crying for Selwyn and for merely playing at life and death with Lorna Peachley.
You should not make a tsatske out of mortality.
If that is not a commandment it ought to be.
So Lorna Peachley, too, through no fault of her own, became associated with that moral infection of triviality which I was determined to escape.
But not just yet.
It is definitely harmful to your game to take up a racket unless you are in the mood.
Victor Barna
EVERY MORNING AT school assembly, after prayers, the headmaster coughed, looked up like a conductor waiting for his orchestra to settle down, put his thumbs into the lapels of his gown, and read out the names of boys who had achieved something – let it be academic, artistic, sporting or simply in the field of personal development – of which the school could be proud. Stuart Grimshaw had won a place to study hairdressing at Sale College of Advanced Education — well done, Stuart. Mick Hargreaves had saved a cat from drowning in the Irwell — step up to collect your medal, Mick. Doug Swindells had kept a clean sheet in goal for Newton-le-Willows Nebbishkeits, including saving a penalty,
and
his mother was in hospital having her varicose veins removed — we’re all behind you, Dougie.
Notice anyone missing? Proud of, and behind whom, the school was not, even though he was currently the fourth ranked ping-pong player under eighteen in the country, holder of nine titles, and owner of more silver cups and medals than Stuart Grimshaw, Mick Hargreaves and Dougie Swindells had had hot dinners?
In the six years I was at the school only one truly accomplished and successful athlete emerged, and that was me. The rest were just nochshleppers. And yet not one word of my accomplishments did it breathe. Which is why when the Old Boys’ Newsletter arrives, asking for help to build a new gymnasium, I recite a little curse over it and throw it in the bin. Oliver’s revenge.
I did once summon up the courage to knock on the headmaster’s door, to formally lodge a complaint. ‘What’s your problem, Mr Horsfield — isn’t the game at which I excel shaygets enough for you? Do you have to kick shit out of people before you consider it sport round here? Do you have to roll in mud and shove your face up someone’s arse? Is it too much for you to bear, you yiddenfeit, you anti-Semitic piece of crap, that we should be good at a game
and
win scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge? Is that more than an erstwhile fucking Church of England grammar school can swallow? Well prepare to swallow more, shithead. Meet the master race. You’re looking at a double starred first
and
the next World Ping-Pong Champion. Won’t
that
be something for you to ignore in favour of how Albert Shaygets came last in the All Radcliffe fishing gala with an already dead mackerel measuring a quarter of an inch — we’re all proud of you Albert, you dim-witted freckled little snub nose petseleh, you!’
What I actually said, or rather what I found a roundabout way of wondering, was whether the headmaster was apprised of the fact that I had just represented my county at table tennis. Yes, he affirmed, looking me up and down as though I might be dripping something offensive and indelible on his carpet, yes he was, and he congratulated me if I had attained to something I had wanted, but the school, the
school
attached no more value to what I did on a ping-pong table than to what I did on a shove-halfpenny board. Anything else, Walzer?
You plough a lonely furrow as a ping-pong champion, that’s my
point. I’m not surprised I got high on losing. At least people
like
you when you lose.
But I didn’t start losing all at once. It wasn’t a matter of going down to Lorna Peachley and her zinging pudendum and immediately dashing out and losing to the whole world. Quite the opposite at first. What worked best was to beat absolutely everybody and
then
lose to Lorna. You have to be rich to be comprehensively fleeced. You have to have something they want to steal. And you can’t go from high to low in a single sweet disgusting bat’s cave instant if you’re flat on your belly when you start.
It was always when I’d just lifted another title that the longing for Lorna Peachley to take me by my handle and wield me was at its strongest. Behold, the conqueror returns – Imperial Caesar, Tamburlaine, Napoleon, wreathed in garlands, god-like, riding in triumph through Persepolis. Now approach, my little soft-limbed silver-throated witch, unbuckle here and make the tyrant tremble at your feet …