Free The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson Page A

encouraged me to go too far. ‘The other one I beat,’ I went on, ‘was dead.’
    ‘Zei gezunt,’ my mother said. ‘You’re overexcited. Go to bed.’
    By morning the atmosphere had changed. My mother had worked out that playing for a team entailed travelling. ‘I’m not sure I like the idea of you charging off God knows where at your age,’ she said, over cheese on toast. That was breakfast. The entire time I lived in my mother’s and father’s house I ate only cheese on toast for breakfast. We had a corona of melted cheese around our hearts, each of us. My father died of melted cheese in every artery. Yet my mother was worried that I’d come to harm playing ping-pong for the Akiva Social Club.
    ‘I think we travel as a team,’ I told her.
    ‘Travel as a team how? In an aeroplane?’
    ‘Ma, this is the Manchester and District Table Tennis League, Third Division. The furthest we go is Stockport.’ I didn’t know this for a fact. I was guessing.
    ‘Stockport! And how are you supposed to get back from Stockport?’
    ‘In a car, I imagine. One of the team drives us, Ma.’
    ‘Which one of the team? The blind one?’
    Funny she should have guessed that.
    Pending certification by the League Secretary — and it took about ten days for my registration form to be received and scrutinized, my three-shilling postal order to be cashed, and for Aishky Mistofsky, who was Club Secretary, to be given the all-clear — I could practise with the team but not play for it.
     
    In those days, when ping-pong players grew on trees, before — but let’s not start the Jeremiah stuff; we all know that Greater Manchester is no longer Eden — a team numbered five, with five more clamouring to get a game. Prior to me, the Akiva Social Club — positioned neither at the very top nor at the very bottom of the Third Division North, but enjoying the middle of her favours — consisted of Aishky Mistofsky, Theo/Twink Starr, the Marks brothers — Louis and Selwyn — and Sheeny Waxman. Selwyn, the younger of the Markses, and the nearest to me in age of the whole bunch, I’d met briefly on my first night in the club without realizing he was Louis’s brother. The word met might be stretching things a bit. He’d spoken to no one the whole time, not even Louis, so engrossed was he in rehearsing his shots. He played along in dumb show with whoever was on the table, hitting the ball exactly as they did and punishing himself when they missed. Although in rehearsal his repertory of strokes was prodigious, the moment it came to actual play he lost the nerve to try any of them, and was reduced to the safest of all safe shots, the backhand almost-horizontal shove, which he executed with the greatest deliberation from every corner of the table, never taking his eye off the ball, but to an accompaniment of all manner of insults against himself, as though his own timidity was a lasting shame to him. In appearance he was slight and undernourished; and apart from a premature moustache which grew with cruel disregard for shape or uniformity — a couple of dozen individual spikes of various lengths and colours — he was as white all overas a box of new balls, like a person who had never been seen by the sun.
    Sheeny Waxman, notwithstanding Aishky Mistofsky’s
post hoc
recollection that he’d been of our company on the night my talent was divulged, was an unknown quantity to me. He was very short, with a pronounced tic, and enjoyed a reputation as a head jockey — that was all I knew about him. A very short twitching head jockey with a terrific forehand. When I asked what a head jockey was they all laughed at me. ‘Something like a linguist,’ Theo confided, whereupon they all laughed again. As for Sheeny Waxman’s forehand, only Louis Marks, on our team, had a forehand that could equal it. And Louis Marks was injured. Hence me.
    I was going round to the Akiva almost every night now. If my father was home he would drive me. Otherwise I