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His key in the door, and shaking off his wet umbrella, Erik let himself into his Mamma’s front hallway in Paddington, on a wet Thursday morning. (Leaving Beast in charge of the shop – and he could only pray that he’d finally got the hang of the cash register and wouldn’t again try to charge anyone six shillings for a sixpenny Puffin. And beyond that, he had to stop calling poor Hank by Raven’s nickname for him. The poor lad suffered enough, just being her deluded besotted swain.)And standing in Edie’s dusty murky hallway, Erik put his brolly down, took his coat off. And cursed. Cursed, taking a look at the newspapers and letters on the hallstand. He picked one up, and recognised the stamp on it. Oh, dammit, Mamma. Dammit.He was waiting – therefore – when she got in from her charity coffee morning. He’d meant only to take care of cleaning out the pond, and to drop off the Spanish spices and candy she liked from his local deli. But this… well, a man had limits. They needed to have words. Again.And when he finally heard her key in the door – and her light, skipping trip down the hallway, still sixteen in essence, a girl, for all she was close on sixty – he had the letter in hand, brandishing it at the kitchen doorway. So that it was the first thing for her eye to fall upon, when she walked through and saw him.The guilty – mischievous – look on her face, immediately, said plenty. Oh, she knew what was afoot, all right.“Oh, Erik darling,” she said, innocently. (For shame, Mamma, Erik sometimes thought. For shame. No-one could lie by omission, by implication, by expression, with quite the skill and brio of Edie Lehnsherr.) “How lovely! I didn’t think it would get here half so soon!”Erik glared at her – for a moment – and then pulled ‘it’, open, the better to brandish the contents at her some more. “Again, Mamma?” he asked, stern. “Really? Are we going to go through all of this again?”And Edie came over, and kissed his cheek. Oh, damn the woman. How dare she look so pleased and fond, while he was trying to administer a dressing down, to get her to be reasonable, to… Well, yes. All of that was wasted energy, with Edie. “My love,” she said, and plucked it out of his hands. “You know what I’m like, when I get an idea in my head.” And she smirked at him, sidewise.Erik flattened his hands down on the kitchen table, and glowered down at them. As if he were fourteen again, sulky and helpless at Edie’s insistence on him attending school socials and dating her friends’ daughters. Not upwards of thirty-four, and… well, anyone’s comely daughters had been left well behind at this point. “Really, Mamma, though,” he beseeched. It had come to beseeching, now, of course. Stern remonstrances had been quickly abandoned. “The country club, again? Another application? Haven’t I prostrated myself often enough, before those blasted offensive narrow-minded self-satisfied bigots? Why would I even want to?”“The golf club, darling,” his Mamma corrected him. “It’s not a country club. Despite all the toney airs they give themselves.”“I don’t even like golf, Mamma,” Erik fulminated, feeling his cheeks heating up. “I don’t even like them. You must have had me apply half a dozen times, and every time they come up with some damned snooty faux-polite reason for knocking me back, that very carefully never mentions me being a son of Abraham, in regular attendance at temple. Mamma: you know it, I know it. It’ll be the same thing all over again, from the anti-Semitic pseudo-county Conservative club old barstewards. Why again? Why on earth?”“Oh, Erik darling,” Edie said, turning away to set coffee brewing in the nice new percolator he’d bought her. “My silly love. I don’t have you apply with any actual expectation or desire of membership. Heavens, I don’t expect them to actually admit you to membership, to welcome you with open arms. That isn’t remotely what it’s about.”The good china clinked as she got cups and saucers down from the cupboard: Erik generally got the benefit of the good china, unless he was in the doghouse. Especially when he was being coaxed into some shenanigans. Morosely he examined his cuticles: glowered a bit, in expectant silence. He wasn’t going to plead any further: he’d said his piece. He wasn’t going to ask. And here it came… Edie turning, cup in hand, her smile the sweetest in the whole fine British nation.“It’s just to periodically remind them,” Edie explained, sunny, smiling. “Of what historic, astounding, humungous horses’ asses they are. Although surely they should be full well aware, already?”
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Erik gave his mother one last look -- a look she knew very well the meaning of -- and stuffed the envelope in his back pocket. She'd won, and she knew it -- but damned if he was going to sit down like a good boy, and fill in that form with thoroughness, veracity and obedience. Not right now.It was too dispiriting -- too much one point on a continuous thread of hate, bile, bigotry and abuse, stretching out from one end to the other of eternity. The latest point -- bringing to mind the first instance, the first time he'd understood that some folk could hate him, because they needed someone to hate.He didn't need, or want, to think about it. Thanks, Mamma! There it was, though, large as life -- the night they'd come for Jakob, to Erik's childhood home in Hamburg, in the middle of the night. Not the Stasi, certainly not the polished, plumed and booted Gestapo -- the Lehnsherrs, prosperous bourgeois Jews, merited no such pomp.Regular local police, that was all, and a concocted charge of worker mistreatment, at Jakob's furniture manufacture workshop, his production facility that made cheap gewgaws and tchotkes for the working poor. The first step, in a process that led into confiscation of property and internment. Not that Erik had understood this, at eleven.Not that he remembered, at least. What he remembered was Edie. Edie had understood very well, that it had begun, inexorable -- and she had lost her mind. Lost it sufficiently, to fly at one of the officers in a rage, to come to the defence of her husband.The result was blood streaked across her blanched face, where the policeman had broken her nose. And without that, perhaps they'd only have taken Jakob for the time being. A point for Edie, then: at least her fury had kept them together.What Erik remembered next was stars, and broken glass -- little flashes and glitches of memory, beautiful and horrible. All three of them, dragged out onto the street, the stars in the dark night sky impassively witnessing their screams, the slaps, the slamming door of their lovely cherished comfortable house. And the glass, where the officer with the scratch across his face -- from Edie -- had used his nightstick on every beautiful bit of stained glass, in the doors and windows of the entrance hall and portico.Not exactly Kristallnacht, no. A smaller, earlier, personal trauma. It was quite enough, to have to shoulder and remember. And not even finished, at that point.It had only needed their next-door neighbour, opening up her bed-chamber's shutters to lean out and howl her approval, to put the final seal on the nightmare pantomime, the horror of the moment. All synthetic smiles and oily courtesy, normally, that old bag: but now, the fat, wrinkled old bully hung out of the window-frame, slobbering with glee, her sagging, pendulous, leathery-nippled teats falling out of her dirty nightdress, and her knobbly old fingers lifting up its folds to work frantically away at her rubbery, deformed, over-used clit. It was almost lost in the heaving poundage of her folds of cellulite and stretchmarks, mapped with broken spider-veins and sweaty pus-weeping pressure-sores.Her monstrously obese nudity, flopped over the windowsill, was enough in itself to scar Erik for life. And perhaps had been a deciding factor in his resolute, undiluted homosexuality.There was drool slobbering down her chin, as she wanked away with the pleasure of hatred, of tearing down in order to be one up. As she howled into the night, while the prim stars looked down. Ululating, a perfect gargoyle fright."Dirty Jew! Dirty Jew! DIRTY JEW! DIRTY JEW!"
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"Don't forget to put it on each way, darling!" Edie admonished Erik. "And a tupenny roll-up! I don't want to be giving the British taxman more than his due, if we come to have a lovely payday!"It was a Saturday morning, and instead of accompanying his mother to attend a peaceful, dutiful temple service, skullcap in place and devotional thoughts on his mind, Erik was performing quite another habitual service for his mother. Not one that the temple elders would have looked on kindly, either.
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"Have you at least filled in your betting slips, Mamma?" Erik enquired, his patience wearing just a little thin. "The last time you stuffed them in my pocket before you went off on a junket, they were blank! All I had was a little scrap of paper with racetimes and horses' names on, trying to fill them in at the front of the queue under the eye of Solomon!"(Solomon being, not the hero of a wise old Abrahimic proverb, but rather the manager of the local betting shop.)"Oh yes, my son, all done and dusted!" Edie assured him, lightly smirking. "You needn't tick me off! Or harrumph at me in that way you have! Not that it isn't very fetching on you, my handsome boy. Why you haven't been snapped up yet I can't understand. You know, my nice hairdresser, Sheila, her twins are in medical school now.... She's so proud of them, very clever, very mature... A girl and a boy. Now what were their names?"At this point Erik, flushing, forcibly dissuaded Edie from smoothing his hair, as she added, distracted, "Oh, darling, and don't forget, make it a Yankee! Heaven's sake, not all as single bets, it takes all the fun out--"
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Erik's amour-propre was a bit wounded, at this. "Really, Mamma?" he demanded. "How long is it, since I last did that? Since I really cocked up a bet?"A fair old while, that was the truth. But the trouble with a mamma who couldn't be beat as far as being sparky and on-the-ball was concerned, was that she didn't forget a damn thing. "Although that first time you attempted it, a lucky fifteen, that was certainly an experience for you, eh?" she teased him. He only narrowly avoided having his cheek chucked, like a fat and healthy gurgling eighteen-month-old, sitting up and chatting incoherently with old ladies from its pram.Bloody cheek: not that it wasn't the truth. When Jakob's heart had finally given out, in the first year of Erik's degree, it had left the three of them floundering, adrift. They'd clung together as if pushed out to sea in a boat under storm conditions, battered about by the elements.And by extension, they'd clung to family ritual, too. Part of that had been the man of the house, putting Queen Edie's weekly bet on at the bookies. (At least, once she'd got the bee in her bonnet, from her workman's college protegés. Edie, walking with commoners and kings -- splashing on the vinegar at whelk stands, duchesses to tea. Very well, one duchess.)With Jakob gone, Erik had been the man of the house. Nothing could have been a sadder thought. Of course, Edie was perfectly capable of placing her own bets. But that wasn't the point.
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It had been Solomon behind the safety glass in his little booth in the betting shop, that first time, also. A visor perched on his fat sweating ugly bald head, roll-up tucked behind his mangled boxer's ear. And a tattoo on the side of his face. Oh, Toto, Erik was very far from home.Erik was a nice nineteen-year-old Jewish boy, had just got distinctions on his first-year engineering exams at Imperial College. Recently bereaved, his heart pulsing out a little blood with every breath over it, still. And sweating a bit himself, under his best pressed shirt, and a trim from the barber's on the corner.The unexpected thing, was how much a bookies - his mamma's preferred bookies -- was exactly what he'd expected. The cigarette smoke, like walking into the steam of a sauna, but laden with tar and nicotine. (And for that matter, the alcohol fumes, despite the fact that it wasn't a licensed premises. Erik hoped that it was just residual fumes from patrons of the pub next door, nipping in to put a bet on while they were at it. But he wouldn't have cared to stake his life on it.)It was, in essence, every bit the seedy little hole he'd had qualms about, when his mother had charged him with this extra 'little job'. (Wiping her face dry of tears, as too often those few dreadful weeks after Jakob's final attack. Dry, and determined: that Erik hadn't dragged them all out of hell for nothing, that their lives would go on, would flourish. Even now.)
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The memory was clear: Solomon, quite impassive, gazing at him from behind the glass. And Erik, young and flustered, weighted down by the symbolic significance of this small task, dropping the betting slips that Edie had given him.And retrieving them off the grimy tiles of the floor, with a queue growing restive, muttering behind him. (A queue of grimy working men, grim-faced, none of them seeming like anyone it would be a good idea to cross.)Not that retrieving them had been much help. Edie had only marked off horses and race-times, in the redtop she'd handed him before leaving for her stint at the local community library: with careful instructions about bet structure, and tax, and arithmetic, and the six shillings that ought to be ample. Apparently.Erik had looked at the newspaper, standing there in the betting-shop. At the slips. Numbers and words had merged together, stress mounting. Not that he had cried, nor even come close. But it would have been a relief, just the same."You haven't got a sodding clue what you're doing there, have you, sonny Jim?" And despite the words, Solomon's voice had been kind.
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And -- despite the increasingly numerous and dissatisfied bunch of dedicated, experienced gamblers behind Erik -- he had taken the slips, through the narrow gap beneath the safety glass, and led the wet-behind-the-ears novitiate through the process of putting a few bob on the gee-gees.Erik had had final year tutorials on advanced robotics, that had caused him less intellectual sweat.But master the basics he did, with the calm, methodical, persistent tuition of Solomon -- his wisdom, indeed. And more than five, less than ten minutes later -- having bawled out to the backroom for 'Linda, my love' to 'come out here and bleeding serve paying customers, treacle!'' -- Solomon had pushed his visor further back on his head, and gazed at Erik with bloodshot brown eyes, from the broad brown face that Erik guessed, combined with his accent, to be of West Indian origin. "I was sorry to hear about your father, there, boy. Jakob was a good man, a right good man. As well as a steady source of income, around these parts."Erik was stalled, silenced. It had taken him a moment to ask, "You knew him?" (Oh, of course.) And then, "How did you know I was his son?"