Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (37 page)

Two things, in my experience, will now happen. Firstly, they will leap at the opportunity to say what at other times they feel they cannot, which is that they couldn't care less, absolutely couldn't give a monkey's – an expression of indifference which only a fool or a knave would condemn, for indifference is to humane concern what hate is to love: you need to feel the one to feel the other. Secondly, they will revel in the delicious irony of sending back to where they learned their violence those who would bring their violence here. Not only, in other words, are they indifferent to the suffering to which the would-be bomber might be subject, they long for it in their souls.

And if you don't believe this will be the response, again I urge you, try it. But be prepared for a fun night. The genie of mischief, long bottled-up but at last released, is a great lightener of spirits.

There is, I concede, an argument to be made against following the dictates of our heart. Ideally, the law exists to express our best selves, free of partisanship, passion and self-interest. It is impersonal because we cannot be. But it's a hair-trigger negotiation: now the law is too like us, now it is too little, now too much the brute, now too much the angel. So we dare never let it out of our sight. Least of all human rights law whose justification, paradoxically, is that it is removed entirely from the experience of being human – humans being punitive, vengeful, mischievous and on the whole against it.

This much we know: that society is a rough-and-tumble affair, and that whatever legislation would, in the ether of high-minded abstraction, make the person inviolable in all circumstances, is legislation that cannot work.

Lynda May, the art teacher charged with assaulting a pupil with a glue stick, has just been cleared. Three cheers for that. But why was the case ever brought? Why was she charged by the police? Why was a prosecution allowed to proceed to the level of the High Court? Why did the pupil, whose finger bled a bit, think he'd been hard done by? Why was he encouraged to pursue his nothing grievance by whoever it was at home that should have given him an Elastoplast and locked him in his room?

Human rights, that's why. The culture of the inviolability of the individual which has permeated society and found a particularly congenial, not to say opportunistic, resting place in our schools. Schoolchildren now think they have a human right. Here's your big chance, Mr Clegg – tell them they don't. By every account, the boy whose thumbnail Mrs May was alleged to have assaulted had a mouth so foul he spat asterisks. ‘F*** off,' he told Mrs May when she welcomed him to class. And this was art class. You could understand had it been geography or gym. I wish I'd said ‘F*** off, Hargreaves' fifty years ago when he tried to hang me upside down from a wall bar after a lunch of braised tongue and sago pudding. But art class!

‘F*** off', anyway, was what the boy said to Lynda May, for which vileness she would have been within her human rights to glue his lips together with a Pritt Stick and then send him somewhere he was certain to be tortured.

Only in heaven is there inviolability of person. Only in heaven do we enjoy the human right of not suffering the cruel consequence of cruel action, and that's because in heaven we have ceased to be human.

Dad Skills

 

According to James May, a person who drives fast cars on television, men are not what they once were. Myself – though I am definitely not what I once was – I never trust anyone who puts the word car and the word man in the same sentence. I just have, I know, but only in reference to James May. We have lost our ‘dad skills', he's been telling us. That's three, no, four words I don't care to see in the same sentence: man, car, dad and skills.

In support of his thesis, a poll has been conducted in which men who want a quiet life admit to not being able to bleed a radiator, unblock a sink, change a fuse or hang a picture. I suspect most men can do all these things well enough, but in their own time. If there is one essential difference between men and women it is that women cannot live for more than five minutes with a blocked sink whereas a man can survive a lifetime indifferent to it. He just runs the taps less often. Doesn't notice the smell (only women notice smells). And tackles the problem of washing-up by not doing any. This is a skill I learned from my dad.

His laissez-faire attitude to blockages apart, my father was a man of the sort James May laments. He could paint, he could wire, he could seal, he could grout, he could tile, he could install concealed lighting – to this day my mother is still looking for some of the concealed lighting he installed – he could wallpaper, he could lay carpets, he could fit a lock, but most of all he could make a hatch. Hatches were my father's passion.

That there must be some psychological explanation for my father's love of hatches I don't doubt. Always look for the pun, Lacanians tell us. Knowing to look for the pun is as far as I've got with Lacan, but it could be far enough in this instance. To hatch is to bring forth from the egg by incubation. My father was hatched as a twin. His twin survived the hatching but died tragically a few years later. Could it be that my father went on ‘re-hatching' into adulthood, making holes in walls in the unconscious hope of ‘breaking through' and finding his lost self on the other side?

We were the beneficiaries, anyway. No sooner did we move into a new house than my father began knocking through from the dining room into the kitchen. No other job came first. The windows might be broken, the walls might be damp, gas might be coming in through the plug sockets, but still the hatch had precedence. I say we were the beneficiaries, but the benefits were not always immediately apparent.

‘Remind me why we need this,' my mother felt it behoved her to ask before the first brick was removed. My father would laugh away her puzzlement. ‘We need it to make life easier for you – so that when we're sitting in the dining room you don't have to carry food in from the kitchen.'

‘Max, we don't sit in the dining room. We've never sat in the dining room. We don't
have
a dining room.'

‘So what's this room for?'

‘It's where you will fall asleep in front of the television.'

‘And where are we supposed to dine?'

‘Dine? Since when did we
dine
? We eat in the kitchen.'

He would turn from the wall with his club hammer in one hand and his stonemason's chisel in another and throw us all a look of supreme triumph. ‘Precisely. That's why we need a hatch.'

Though it began quickly, the hatch usually slowed down sometime towards the end of the third week. It wasn't that he would lose interest – though it's true his passion for knocking through cooled a little the minute he saw into the other room and presumably had to face the fact that yet again he had not found the missing half of his divided self – but little niggling problems would arise and put a dent in his fervour. The wall would start to crumble, necessitating a bigger beam than he'd anticipated. The house would turn out to have been built on a slant or a mudslide, so that while the hatch was at an ideal height in the dining room, it was either too low or too high in the kitchen. (‘Should have used a theodolite,' he admitted once.) And on one occasion he knocked through only to discover that he'd come out over the cooker. ‘That will save you even more carrying,' he tried to persuade my mother, but conceded that a hatch you could reach only at the risk of going up in flames had a serious design fault.

‘Snagging,' was how he described these problems. From which we were to assume that they would soon be fixed. But no hatch was ever finished or put to use. Unless you call having a shelf on which you could pile magazines from either room useful. Eventually, as the magazines and unread mail accumulated, the hatch vanished altogether and was never referred to again until we moved house and his enthusiasm to knock out another revived.

I see now that we should have been more grateful to him. Whatever the initial psychological compulsion, he was only trying to make our lives more comfortable and sophisticated. But in this he suffered as many men have suffered before and since. Though a woman claims she wants a man around the house who can ‘do' around the house, the truth of it is she will deride him for half the work he does, and not notice the rest. An old girlfriend of mine sent me spiteful letters after we broke up, complaining that the bookcase I'd built when we were together was so flimsy it fell down the minute her new boyfriend rested his aftershave on it. Another wrote letters no less unpleasant cursing me for putting up a bookcase that was so sturdy it could not be dismantled without the wall it was on having to be demolished.

This is why men eventually stop trying. I, for example, can lay new floorboards, retile a roof and plaster any surface. But I'm damned if I will. The floor has only to subside, the roof let in rain, the plastering look as though a bear on heat has rubbed up against it when it was damp, and there's hell to pay. Better to affect a practical incompetence and let the women call in James May.

Man Booker

 

I am in the garden of a house in far, far north London. So far north London that it might as well be Manchester. It has been a day of immense sadness. We are just back from a burial. My wife's uncle Gerry died three days ago. He was ninety-two and so there has not been that sense of tearing tragedy that makes the burial of a young person unbearable. But he was greatly loved. And precisely because he has been in people's lives for so long, it is already hard to imagine life without him.

On the way to the grave the black-hatted official leading the mourners stopped intermittently and held us up. This is a Jewish custom. It denotes our unwillingness to part with a person we have cared for. We would rather stop for eternity, but of course we don't have eternity on our hands.

Back in the house people are drinking tea and eating bagels filled with smoked salmon. Call that stereotyping, but what am I to do? They truly are drinking tea and eating bagels filled with smoked salmon. Jews don't throw down alcohol on such occasions. And they like food that tastes soft. In another column we might put our minds to why.

In the garden, which is big enough for me to stroll through on my own, I decide that it is all right if I turn my mobile on. I am waiting for an important message regarding an article I'm writing. No one thinks this is unfeeling. The living must return to life. There are an unaccountable number of texts and emails waiting for me. This is when I discover that my novel
The Finkler Question
has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

I don't want this news to intrude upon the family, but I know my wife would want to know so I go back inside and whisper into her ear. She is excited, and moved, as I am, that we should learn of such a thing on such a day.
The Finkler Question
is partly the story of a man not much younger than Gerry who is trying to hold himself together after the death of his wife. He has loved her for sixty years. The assumption is sometimes made that the old are people of diminished feelings, husks of confused recollections and barely remembered desires. Well, Gerry was no such thing. He was a man entire. Libor, the broken-hearted widower in my novel, is the same. He burns still with a love for his dead wife which is as intense as any youth's. No, he burns with a love that is more intense. The terrible thing we have to face about old age is that there is no release from longing in it, that we go on with our passions blazingly intact. Terrible and wonderful.

We have been so involved in the last few weeks of Gerry's life, in hospital visits and finally in the paperwork of decease, that we haven't thought about literary prizes. This is the first time in eleven novels I haven't waited to see if I am on a Man Booker list. I make that confession with some embarrassment. I have always argued against prizes. My ambition to be a writer dates from infancy. ‘As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, / I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.' I wanted to make sentences, not win prizes. The sentences were prize enough in themselves. Let others be fools to fame, I cared only about the quality of the work. But, as Alexander Pope knew, the opinion of the world matters, and the quickest way to gain its notice as a writer is to win a prize, and of all prizes to win for a writer of fiction in English, the Man Booker is the biggest and the best. So my protestations of scorn for it were inevitably mixed with covetousness. In a perfect world, where the words you write are immediately found and lauded by those you write them for – the whole of humanity, no less – a prize would not be necessary. But since humanity is deaf, or just too busy to give a damn, and since there seems to be a disconnect between those who want to read a good novel and those who write them – as though the world of reading is one big lonely hearts club waiting for a matchmaker – there must be prizes to bring us together. In which case, yes, thank you, I would like to win one.

And so, with every novel I published, I knew to the day, knew to the hour, when the list would be announced, grew abstracted for weeks before, and waited for the phone to ring. It didn't. It didn't for nineteen years. And then, in 2002, it did. Longlisted. First euphoria, then a quiet relief – for isn't victory simply the absence of defeat? – followed, of course, by the second phase of anxiety and abstraction. After the longlist, the shortlist. Knowing the very hour, the very minute, you wait again for the phone to ring, and when it does it's your publisher or your agent, depending who draws the short straw, telling you what you don't want to hear and they don't want to tell you, though you know it from the first jeering trill of the accursed phone.