The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson Page B

green.
    But the alcoholism charge was pure invention. My father only ever drank at Walzer weddings, sweet red wine, a fairy thimbleful, and then most of that got spilled over his sisters during the kasatske. Not that truth was the issue here. My father belonged to a generation of men who did not expect their wives to ring up their places of employ. He’d reached ‘four’ when he heard what she was doing. By what should have been ‘three’ he was downstairs ripping the phone off the wall and hurling it across the room.
    But the moral damage had already been done. He was out of a job.
    ‘Don’t you ever again dare …’ I heard him threaten.
    ‘And don’t
you
ever again dare …’ I heard her threaten back.
    ‘Don’t you ever don’t-you-ever me …’
    ‘And don’t
you
ever don’t-you-ever don’t-you-ever me …’
    To my knowledge it was the most serious fight they’d had. The nearest they’d come to raising their hands to each other. The telephone with its amputated wires lay smashed and hapless on the floor, like a corpse spilling its intestines. My father left the house and wasn’t seen or heard from for two days. When he returned he was staggering. ‘I’ll show you drunk,’ he jeered, flicking out a tongue I’d never seen before. He didn’t look like anyone I knew.
    ‘Come one step nearer and I’ll call the police,’ my mother warned him.
    ‘What with? You haven’t got a phone any more, remember. Ha! Ha!’
    ‘I’ve got a voice, Joel.’
    ‘So you have. And I’ve heard you use it, too. Very effective. Very refined. All those words. Such words you have, you and your kuni-lemele sisters and the Kazi Kid. And where would he happen to be at the moment? Don’t tell me. On the kazi.’
    ‘I’m not,’ I protested. ‘I’m here.’
    ‘Go to your room,’ my mother said.
    ‘That’s right, do what your mother tells you. Go to the kazi. In fact I’ll take you there …’
    ‘Get back, Joel.’
    ‘Or you’ll do what, Sadie?’
    Or she’d do what she did — which was run out into the street, screaming, ‘Police! Police!’
    All this because I’d lost at ping-pong.
    The best market within range of Manchester in those days — and I’m talking takings now, not local colour — was Stockport. If your family somehow got its hands on a stall at Stockport you knew your future was secured. You could start thinking about taking elocution lessons and moving to Wilmslow. Men slept in their vans overnight to secure a pitch on Stockport market, and then drew knives on one another if there wasn’t enough space to go round. According to market mythology, the Toby Mush who went from stall to stall in policeman’s boots, with a clinking leather rent-collector’s bag on his shoulder, deciding who got to stand where at Stockport, was afflicted with a blind eye and a bent right arm, so many backhanders did he take possession of on market days. But every market was reputed to be run the same way. The Toby was the godfather. ‘First rule of the gaffs,’ my father advised me in later years, when he was regularly hauling me off against my will to markets all over the country, ‘always shmeer theToby. If you don’t look after the Toby, the Toby won’t look after you.’
     
    Just how well he looked after the Toby on his first attempt at getting on to Stockport market I have no idea, but it must have been well enough because by nine o’clock he was set up with a trestle table, four iron bars and a length of tarpaulin on a square yard of favoured cobblestone close to the public facilities. It helped that he was built like a brick shithouse himself. A slighter man might have found a breadknife protruding from his shoulder-blades, as a polite warning against trying for this pitch again. But you couldn’t have got a breadknife into my father’s back. That was why my mother had had to resort to the telephone.
    They were on speaking terms again. Monosyllabic, but at least speaking. She had given him an