J by Howard Jacobson

she had always been negative.
What was for the best?
Nothing was for the best – for her the best was not to go for anything, just stay out of trouble and wait to die.
    That was the impression she gave Kevern anyway. In fact she lived a secret life, and though that too was wreathed around in death, the very fact that it was secret meant she saw some risk as worth the taking. Was it because she loved Kevern more than she loved herself that she didn’t recommend risk to him?
    A funny sort of love, Kevern would have thought, had he known about it.
    As for his father, any such conversation would have been equally out of the question. ‘You always hurt the one you love,’ his father had said the first time Kevern wasilted by a girl. Kevern took that to be an allusion to one of the old songs his father listened to on earphones. His father did not normally have that much to say.
    ‘But she’s the one who’s hurt me,’ he answered.
    His father shrugged. ‘Bee-bop-a-doo,’ he said without taking off his earphones. He looked like a pilot who knew his plane was going down.
    ‘I’ll go for it, then,’ Kevern said to himself, as though after considering all the sage advice no one had given him. But he still wanted to run it all over in his mind.
    It infuriated him when Densdell Kroplik appeared up the path, singing to himself, a countryman’s trilby pulled down over his eyes, heavier boots on than the weather merited, swinging his rucksack full of unsold pamphlets and nettle conditioner.
    ‘If you want the bench to yourself I’ll clear off,’ Kevern said. ‘I’ve got work to do.’
    ‘If I’d wanted a bench to myzelf I’d have found un,’ Kroplik said.
    I see, playing the yokel this morning, Kevern thought. That wasn’t his only thought. The other was ‘Up yours’, though he was not normally a swearer.
    His mouth must have moved because Kroplik asked him what he’d said. In for a penny, in for a pound, Kevern decided, taking a leaf out of Ailinn’s book. ‘I said, “Up yours.” I was repeating what you said to me in the pub last night.’
    The barber rubbed his face with his hand. ‘Yeah, I sayz that sometimes,’ he conceded. ‘And a lot worse when the mood takes me.’
    ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Kevern said.
    ‘Like khidg de vey. If you knowz what that means.’
    Kevern nodded, saying nothing. It was a way of getting through life: nodding and saying nothing.
    ‘You don’t know, though, do you,’ Densdell Kroplik went on, enjoying his own shrewdness. ‘But I’ll give yerz a guess.’
    ‘No doubt it means something like go fuck yourself.’
    Kroplik punched the air. ‘We’ll make a local of yerz yet. Go fuck yerzelf is spot on.’
    ‘I didn’t bring up your abusive language to me last night so you could abuse me further,’ Kevern said. He heard how pious he sounded but there was no going back now. ‘I’d rather not be spoken to like that,’ he went on.
    ‘Oh, you’d
rather not
.’
    ‘I’d rather not.’
    ‘Pog mo hoin.’
    ‘Don’t tell me . . . Your mother’s a fucker of pigs.’
    ‘Close, close. Kiss my arze.’
    ‘You are a mine of indispensable information,’ Kevern said, getting up from the bench.
    ‘That’s what I’m paid to be. Do you know who the first person was to say pog mo hoin in these parts?’
    ‘You.’
    ‘The
first
person I sayz.’
    ‘No idea. I wouldn’t have been around.’
    ‘No, that you wouldn’t. So I’ll inform yerz. The giant Hellfellen. That’s how he kept strangers out. He stood on this very cliff, right where you’re standing now, made a trumpet of hiz fist, stuck it in hiz backside and blew the words “kiss my arze” through it, so loud they could hear it three counties away, and you had to have a very good reason to come here after that.’
    Kevern was not a folklore man. Mythology, with its uncouth half-men, half-animals, frightened him. And he hated talk of giants. Especially those who used bad language. If there were going to be gods