Free The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson Page B

caught a local train from Bowker Vale to Woodlands Road, one or other of my aunties accompanying me to the station, just in case the prefab boys thought of launching an assault.
     
    How anyone could have supposed that the prefab boys would have been deterred by a Shrinking Violet I can’t imagine, but the ploy worked. The one time I was stoned was the one time I’d persuaded my mother I was now big enough to walk to the station on my own.
    Usually Aishky Mistofsky drove me back. I’d promised my mother that if I didn’t have a lift I would ring home and wait for someone to collect me. The trains stopped early and she didn’t want me wandering in the dead of night. Not through that part of Manchester with all its shaygets perils. I didn’t of course tell her that Aishky Mistofsky was indeed the blind one and that I was never in more danger than when he drove me home.
    I had quickly grown fond of Aishky, in the gooey way a little kid grows fond of a big kid. I liked his gingery beaky face, which he brought very close to mine on account of his short-sightedness,and which he pressed right up against the windscreen of his Austin A40, for the same reason. I liked the way he laughed, throwing his head back and showing the red hairs at his throat — an action that didn’t so much register the funniness or smartness of something someone had said, as the uncomplicated pleasure he took in someone being there to say something to him at all. And I liked the way he played ping-pong, earnestly, with a resolute arm, as though he owed something to the ball. He never defended, not even when that was the one sure way of beating his opponent. He liked to hit, rhythmically, conventionally, the bat starting low down, arcing predictably, and finishing high up, and if that didn’t happen to be what it took to win that night, so he lost.
    In this he was the very opposite of his best friend, Twink Starr, whose great strength was his ability to find the edge of the table, but who would grit his teeth, chew his tongue, alter the whole nature of his game — pushing, chopping, half-volleying, sweating buckets, coughing up phlegm — if that was the only way to win the match. But I’m running ahead of myself. Before there were any matches — at least as far as I was concerned — I had to be kitted out. ‘For starters,’ Twink reminded me, ‘you can’t go on borrowing my bat — you’ll need your own.’
    ‘What do you mean for starters?’ Aishky queried. ‘What else does he need?’
    This was the other big difference between them. Aishky Mistofsky played in the clothes he came home from work in. He took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and changed his shoes, that was all. He didn’t even loosen his tie. Whereas Twink Starr turned up already panting and dancing, like a prize fighter, in a hooded tracksuit, with a towel round his neck. Under the tracksuit, which he peeled off in stages, he wore a crested Fred Perry shirt, pleated shorts and long white socks with a blue stripe in them. In his bag he carried an asthma spray, two sets of sweatbands, a change of shirt and a small lawn-cotton hand towel with his own monograph sewn into it — JS . When the going gottough he would tuck this into his shorts like a waiter’s tea cloth, so that he could dry the handle of his bat between points. Years later, professional tennis players competing for more prize money in a single fortnight than Twink Starr and Aishky Mistofsky could hope to earn between them in a lifetime would, as a matter of course, tuck lawn-cotton hand towels into their shorts. But before Twink Starr no racket-player had ever thought of doing such a thing.
    ‘You want him to play in long hasen, like you?’
    ‘What’s wrong with long hasen?’
    ‘You don’t win in them, Aishky, that’s what’s wrong with them. And you have to keep them up with braces.’
    ‘Barna won in long hasen.’
    ‘That was the past, Aishky. Don’t talk to me about the past. This kid’s