the Akiva Social Club and leave it to take whatever steps it thought necessary. I happened to be at the club, practising, when these steps were taken.
‘Anti-Semites!’ Twink said.
‘Yiddenfeits!’ Aishky said.
Then we went on playing.
And that was that?
Not quite.
In private Aishky led Sheeny Waxman aside and warned him against taking liberties.
Sheeny listened unperturbed. He couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Why hadn’t the slag just let him eat her in Miles Platting and saved herself the trouble?
SIX
For more serious offences, such as swearing or throwing a racket, it may be appropriate to warn the player formally that any repetition will incur a penalty, interrupting play if necessary, and showing that he has done so by holding up a yellow card so that it is clearly visible to the player and to spectators.
18.1.7
The International Table Tennis Federation Handbook
for Match Officials, 1993
… SPECTATORS? WHAT SPECTATORS?
But I am allowing my disappointments to run ahead of me again. That nobody was there to behold and marvel — no roaring Jezebels with retractable claws and fluttering pink autograph albums — should count as a consolation, a godsend, when all there was to behold and marvel at was me being trounced. They wouldn’t be there later, though, when trouncing was in my gift and no god would have dared say boo to me — there lay the pity of it. I fulfilled my destiny, I did everything my genes told me to do, I became king of the tsatskes, but a king without a kingdom, a king with no subjects.
Back, back … One disillusionment at a time. So how did I react to the Allied Jam and Marmalade catastrophe, the hitherto unknown ignominy of having someone at the opposite end ofthe table get to twenty-one before I did?
Badly.
Badly while it was happening — though I hope I was able to conceal it, hope that no one saw I was playing through tears, blinded. But far worse afterwards.
My mother was waiting up for me. She had already rung every hospital in Manchester twice. ‘Look at the time,’ she cried. ‘We’ve been worried sick. We’ve been at our wits’ end.’
We
nothing. My father was snoring on the couch, sleeping the innocent self-absorbed sleep of the grandiose. A smile twitched his mouth open. Where he was, thousands were cheering him.
I didn’t answer my mother. Make her pay. That’s what mothers are for.
‘We thought you’d crashed.’
‘I did crash,’ I said. Then I went upstairs to bed, refusing cocoa, and thought about putting an end to myself with my pillow.
It’s no fun, losing. Not until you’ve done a fair bit of winning, it’s not. Then of course it can be the most terrific fun in the whole wide world. Pain fun. But the perversion of embracing loss was beyond me at this stage. I was a deviant boy, but as yet not that deviant. You have to own something before you can start finessing around the business of throwing it away.
And this night I believed I owned nothing. I was worthless. And conscious of more shame — I, already the very mollusc of mortification — than I had ever experienced before. I lay in my bed and relived every point I’d lost. A mortal fear gripped me: I would bear these losses like scars for the rest of my life; I would know no relief from them; I would go on playing and re-playing them for ever.
When I closed my eyes I fell through space, down, down into a sucking colourless cone of infinitely narrowing circles; no fires in this hell, only repetition and reduction. Ring upon ring of it, round and round, lower and lower. When I forced my eyes open — for it was a temptation, that spiral, a ride to remember — the darkness pulsed above me, shifting shapes, emptiness opening andclosing its gumless mouth as in a fever, now weightless as death, now heavy as disgrace.
When it falls, grandiosity, it falls big.
I tried desperately to free my mind from its own devils, to think about something other than itself, someone
‘Anti-Semites!’ Twink said.
‘Yiddenfeits!’ Aishky said.
Then we went on playing.
And that was that?
Not quite.
In private Aishky led Sheeny Waxman aside and warned him against taking liberties.
Sheeny listened unperturbed. He couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Why hadn’t the slag just let him eat her in Miles Platting and saved herself the trouble?
SIX
For more serious offences, such as swearing or throwing a racket, it may be appropriate to warn the player formally that any repetition will incur a penalty, interrupting play if necessary, and showing that he has done so by holding up a yellow card so that it is clearly visible to the player and to spectators.
18.1.7
The International Table Tennis Federation Handbook
for Match Officials, 1993
… SPECTATORS? WHAT SPECTATORS?
But I am allowing my disappointments to run ahead of me again. That nobody was there to behold and marvel — no roaring Jezebels with retractable claws and fluttering pink autograph albums — should count as a consolation, a godsend, when all there was to behold and marvel at was me being trounced. They wouldn’t be there later, though, when trouncing was in my gift and no god would have dared say boo to me — there lay the pity of it. I fulfilled my destiny, I did everything my genes told me to do, I became king of the tsatskes, but a king without a kingdom, a king with no subjects.
Back, back … One disillusionment at a time. So how did I react to the Allied Jam and Marmalade catastrophe, the hitherto unknown ignominy of having someone at the opposite end ofthe table get to twenty-one before I did?
Badly.
Badly while it was happening — though I hope I was able to conceal it, hope that no one saw I was playing through tears, blinded. But far worse afterwards.
My mother was waiting up for me. She had already rung every hospital in Manchester twice. ‘Look at the time,’ she cried. ‘We’ve been worried sick. We’ve been at our wits’ end.’
We
nothing. My father was snoring on the couch, sleeping the innocent self-absorbed sleep of the grandiose. A smile twitched his mouth open. Where he was, thousands were cheering him.
I didn’t answer my mother. Make her pay. That’s what mothers are for.
‘We thought you’d crashed.’
‘I did crash,’ I said. Then I went upstairs to bed, refusing cocoa, and thought about putting an end to myself with my pillow.
It’s no fun, losing. Not until you’ve done a fair bit of winning, it’s not. Then of course it can be the most terrific fun in the whole wide world. Pain fun. But the perversion of embracing loss was beyond me at this stage. I was a deviant boy, but as yet not that deviant. You have to own something before you can start finessing around the business of throwing it away.
And this night I believed I owned nothing. I was worthless. And conscious of more shame — I, already the very mollusc of mortification — than I had ever experienced before. I lay in my bed and relived every point I’d lost. A mortal fear gripped me: I would bear these losses like scars for the rest of my life; I would know no relief from them; I would go on playing and re-playing them for ever.
When I closed my eyes I fell through space, down, down into a sucking colourless cone of infinitely narrowing circles; no fires in this hell, only repetition and reduction. Ring upon ring of it, round and round, lower and lower. When I forced my eyes open — for it was a temptation, that spiral, a ride to remember — the darkness pulsed above me, shifting shapes, emptiness opening andclosing its gumless mouth as in a fever, now weightless as death, now heavy as disgrace.
When it falls, grandiosity, it falls big.
I tried desperately to free my mind from its own devils, to think about something other than itself, someone
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