The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson Page A

other than itself. But what and who else was there to think about? Girls? — none. Friends? — my only friends were ping-pong players now. School? — poof, school! Holidays? — none till next summer. I hadn’t anything to look forward to. That was the most devastating effect of my double defeat — it robbed me of a future, left me without a single cheerful event to anticipate. Hence the thought of self-suffocation with my pillow. There was nothing left to live for.
    That I began to spend even longer periods in the toilet with my glue and scissors will come as no surprise to those who remember what it is to be a boy who has been beaten. I compounded shame with shame, heat with heat. I see now that I was attempting to transfer my humiliation, collage it on to someone else. Had I been able to get my hands on a photograph of Bob Battrick I would have cut up my aunty Fay and laid her across his knee with her Span-poached pants down. ‘Fancy a paddling, me duck?’
    And people say that sport is a healthy activity for the young.
    I didn’t suffocate myself. Though it might have been better for the short-term future of my parents’ marriage if I had. They were arguing over me again. What was the point of his coming home early, my father wanted to know, if he couldn’t get into his own toilet?
     
    Then he didn’t get back until four in the morning. My mother was waiting up for him, just as she’d waited up for me. Only for him she hadn’t rung every hospital in Manchester. We were all awake. We could feel the floorboards vibrating to her pacing.
    ‘And where have
you
been?’
    ‘Me?’
    ‘No — Yashki Diddle. Where have you been?’
    ‘Out.’
    ‘Out doing what, Joel?’
    ‘Out looking for somewhere to have a Jimmy Riddle.’
    ‘That’s it! You’ve taken your last ride, Joel.’
    We heard no more that night, not a squeak from either of them, but the following morning, finding me already locked in the toilet, he began breaking the door down with his bare hands. ‘You’ve got ten seconds to get out of there. Ten … nine …’
    Ten seconds? How was I going to put all the photographs away, screw up the gluepot, close the scissors, tie a bow in the ribbon, do up my pants, hide the box, in ten seconds? It was impossible. I was done for.
    ‘… eight … seven …’
    What saved me was the sound of my mother on the blower to the bus company. There was a terrible calm in her voice, like the quiet that must have fallen over the Steppes the night before The Hun rode in. She was explaining that the stress of the job had turned her husband into an alcoholic, that he was arriving home rolling drunk at all hours of the night, that he was leaving the bus parked in the middle of the road — not just
in
it but
across
it — that the neighbours were up in arms and were threatening violence against him, against his family and, more to the point — let’s get practical now — against the bus; hence she felt it was her responsibility, though she was a loyal and loving wife — no,
because
she was a loyal and loving wife — to bring matters to a head before someone, not least a coachload of innocent passengers, got killed.
    Not everything she asserted was untrue. The bus wasn’t popular with the neighbours. Every three or four months a new petition would be posted through our letter-box, signed by everyone in the avenue, including babies, demanding that my father consider other people’s right to light and quiet and park his monstrosity somewhere else. In the lake in Heaton Park, preferably. Myfather was always more upset by these expressions of public dissatisfaction than the rest of us were. He was the one who wanted only to give pleasure. He discussed the possibility of widening our path and getting rid of the garden shed. Getting rid of the garden even. ‘So that’ll be our view, will it,’ my mother had said, ‘your bus!’
    Without any real expectation of swaying her, he had offered to have it spray-painted