The Mighty Walzer Read Online Free PDF Page B

around the bus and climbed up on to the running-board. My window was open and his face was so close to mine I could count the hairs on his facetious aviator’s tash.
    ‘See this garage?’ he said. ‘See that workshop? See those fields behind it? See those fences? See those trees? See that grass? See those houses at the end of that lane? All mine. Every stick and stone. Every brick. Mine. I own the lot. All of it. So don’t you think you can be smart with me, son.’
    Where is that mysterious far-away realm to which the diffident fly to find courage? Our secret; even from ourselves. ‘What about the birds?’ I was aghast at hearing myself saying. ‘Are they yours, too?’
    That did it. All at once I was in a universe of total silence, not broken even by the tweeting of my impertinent birds. A raging silence vibrating fearfully to the throbbing of our hearts. All our hearts — mine, his, my father’s, my sisters’, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. Maybe one of us was going to have a heartattack. Maybe we all were. Then I realized there was a finger in my face. Actually
in
my face. And that it had a voice.
    ‘You little snot-nose,’ it said. ‘I could buy and sell you a hundred times over. You wouldn’t make a dent in my bank balance. I spend more on manure in a day than it’d cost me to buy you …’
    Then, abruptly, silence again. The finger was gone and my adversary with it. Gone without another word to any of us. Disappeared inside their workshop the pair of them, no doubt, to calculate their value in spanners and jacks.
    Now here’s a question: Why, if this incident so incensed my father — and take my word for it, it did, it did — why didn’t he land one on the wing commander who was responsible for it, instead of on me who wasn’t?
    It wasn’t a punch. I’m not saying my father laid me out. But no sooner had he returned to the driver’s seat than he let fly with a backhand Ogimura would have been proud of, a humdinging swipe that caught me on the mouth, bringing tears to my eyes and silencing my sisters, who were just getting ready to start spluttering with laughter again. From my mother and her mother it drew a conjoined gasp. ‘Oh, Joel!’ my mother said.
    He revved the bus out of the garage forecourt — ‘Oh, Joel,’ he jeered — and swung out on to the Blackpool road, careless of the traffic. We were at that stage of the journey where a penny was usually offered to the first person who saw the Tower, but there was no family fun of that sort today. I sat with my head down, determined not to cry, but promising myself that one day I would put a knife in my father’s heart, supposing I could ever find it. He looked stonily ahead, no doubt promising himself some similar reward in relation to me. When he finally spoke it was to justify what he’d done. ‘You and your long farkrimt face,’ he said. ‘I’m sick of you showing me up. You’ll treat people with respect when you’re out with me, you stuck-up little …’ But he didn’t finish. He wasn’t a swearer.
    Looking back, I think I did the right thing not asking how I could be simultaneously diffident and arrogant, stuck in and stuck up. It could only have led to another klop. And who knows, to the bus spinning out of control and the whole family being wiped out.
    So we drove the rest of the way in silence until we arrived at the Tower.
    For northerners in search of their first good time in the ten or fifteen years after the War, Blackpool was where you always went looking, and the Tower Ballroom was where you invariably found it. In the Tower Ballroom you smooched your first smooch, kissed your first kiss, missed your first last bus home. For me the Tower Ballroom was where I first saw a row of twenty ping-pong tables, every one of them in use. It’s a sight, I have to say, going on recent experience, that still has the power to move me. People who love the spectacle of football speak of that heart-stopping moment when you