Long time no see.
We’re there now. Parking, my dad nearly mows down two dumpy ladies wearing stretchy trousers in appalling colours, but it doesn’t even raise a chuckle in our wagon. In good times this would be a great game, using our car like a cowcatcher. Not today, though.
‘Okay. I’m waiting here. Five minutes,’ he announces, not even looking at us, reaching behind the seat for a newspaper and snapping it open at the sports pages.
Mum and I see right away that the chemist/health shop is closed. Oh-oh. Clearly they knew I was coming.
‘Let’s get ice cream,’ my mother says recklessly, not glancing back at the car.
This feels pretty dangerous. I am prickly all over.
I get a tub of coffee ice cream and my mother, almost uniquely refined in her tastes and a really great cook, opts for something truly disgusting with caramel and scary little bits all over the top. For her, this is a throwback to a happy childhood she never actually had. She looks rebellious and gleeful which is cool to behold.
Walking back to the car, I note two things. I don’t need to pee anymore. And my dad is storming toward us, his hands flapping angrily like someone has stolen the car from right under him or maybe a war has begun and we are behind enemy lines. Spotting the tubs of ice cream takes him to a point beyond fury, a place Mum and I do not want to be. I look at her. I am scared now but she smiles beautifully and makes for the car, getting in the back with me. My dad returns to the driver’s seat and tugs the door closed, but he can’t slam it because his car is posh and new and he has to be a bit careful.
‘Aren’t you sitting in front?’ he asks crossly.
‘No,’ she says, and then, more quietly, ‘Home, James.’
I feel a great whirl of hilarity in my stomach now and I look at my mother with shock and delight. I whisper, ‘Home, James’ too. I keep saying it in my head and glancing at her. We eat our ice creams all the way home. I did not get my remedy for depression, but then of course, maybe I did, for a minute or two at least, which is perhaps all a person should rightly expect, I don’t know.
6. HAVE A CATALOGUE OF JOKES OR JOKEY SITUATIONS YOU CAN HAUL UP FROM MEMORY IN DARK TIMES.
You have to work pretty hard at rule number six. Sometimes, not very grown-up jokes are the best. For instance, my brother Gus and I often look at each other across a room and thrust out our lower mandibles, curling the mouth up at the corners, adopting a crazed, wide-eyed expression. Pretty soon we are spluttering into our drinks. It only takes a second. It is not grown-up but it is very reliable for a laugh, whereas jokes about German philosophers are not.
My dad tells one or two jokes I have never understood. One of them involves fishing and gefilte fish. It goes something like this. What happened to all the herring fished out of the X sea? Well! Ha ha ha! It ends up as gefilte fish in Chicago! My dad chokes up and all the sophisticates around him quake with mirth, shoulders akimbo and so on. The second joke is about an Eskimo. My dad went up to the Arctic once to cover some sledging championships or something for Sports Illustrated and he came back with some bizarre souvenirs, such as a sealskin doll for Harriet which smelled so bad she wouldn’t touch it and I buried it in the garden for her, plus some pretty bad jokes. It seems that when Eskimos had to choose English names for themselves for legal reasons or something, they picked whatever favourite activity they had or whatever object they were close to at the time. One lady was a fan of American football and so she called herself Sophie Football. Absolutely hilarious.
Here is another joke my dad finds very funny indeed. One afternoon in late August when I was fourteen or so, I cross the kitchen of our summer cottage on my way outside and see my dad finishing a snack involving bread and tomatoes and spring onions.
‘Hey, Jem.’
I stop. Oh-oh. ‘Yup?’ Will this take long? What does he want? I am aiming to go swimming.
‘Come here.’ He crooks his finger at me. This drives me wild. Having to get closer and closer just to be sent far off to get something for him.
‘I’m here.’ I take one step closer, that’s it.
‘How much pocket money do I owe you?’
‘June July-August.’
‘I’ll flip you double or nothing.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Come on, Jem.’ Be a man.
‘Okay then.’
I lose. My dad is so happy, he is just delirious with mirth. He goes looking for some more of his kids right away. He tries it out on Harriet and Gus and wins both times. This is one of the funniest things that has happened in the whole of my dad’s life, it seems. He tells the story for years and years. This is the kind of thing that keeps him going.
It is possible, when my dad is stuck in a queue at the supermarket or in a traffic jam, he calls up these jokes, and things improve for him right then, he feels better. You have to find your own thing. My mother saying ‘Home, James’ in a very quiet blithe voice the day we came back from our abortive trip to the chemist that summer, on a quest for some stupid herbal remedy for depression, that makes me smile, it really does, anytime I think of it.
Here is a joke. Can you be a cowboy if you are Jewish? I do not know the punchline. One day I’ll ask my dad, who is Jewish and a cowboy, maybe the only one that ever lived.
7. ALWAYS CARRY A BOOK WITH YOU.
This is a very important rule and easy to slip up on. Here is how. You say to yourself, I have carried that book with me every single day this week and never once have I had time to pull it out and read it. It is making a big fat unseemly bulge in my pocket, it is bumping up against my hip when I walk, it is weighing me down. Today I am not taking it, goddamnit. That is the day your friend is forty minutes late and you are left at the restaurant with the foot of your crossed leg swinging loose and you have studied every face and every painting in the place. That is the day your bus gets caught in a traffic jam or you end up having to take someone to the emergency room and wait four hours for the person to emerge. Always carry a book with you.
Here, though, are two times I had a book with me and it was of no use.
This was the first time. It is my turn for the emergency room. I am there because I cut my hand pretty badly and sometime between diving onto the floor of my flat in a petrified faint and getting into a cab to the hospital, I grab a novel and slip it into my coat pocket. I have paid attention to rule number seven, yes I have. I choose Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac, which I am reading for the second time. But when I am in Casualty, I am too sick to read. I am too sick and too scared. The nurse tries to speed me through. He asks, ‘Why are you so cold? How did this happen?’
I don’t know, I answer. I don’t feel well. I was cutting a bagel. I say this about the bagel because I have just read in a leaflet from a bagel shop that bagel-cutting injuries are a really common occurrence. I remember the bagel legend, too. How a Jewish baker invented the bagel in 1683 to commemorate the good deed performed by King Jan III of Poland. His good deed was this: he saved Vienna from a Turkish invasion. The bread was in the shape of a stirrup due to Jan’s love of equestrianism. In Austria the word for stirrup is Buegel. The name of the shop where I found the leaflet is Angel Bagel. Where was my angel tonight? Drunk somewhere, high on single malt. Nowhere for me. The thing is, I am lying about the bagel-cutting
