The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson

and eyes, all the cheerless wherewithal to repair their lumpy brassieres and granny stockings and God knows what else. That was the fun part. It was the bus journey there and back I dreaded. Did we ever, my three S-emblazoned aunties and I, enjoy a single carefreebus ride? Not that I recall. If there wasn’t a goo-gooing baby to embarrass and frighten us there was a drunk, or a madman, or an invalid we didn’t know how to help, or a jeering gang of prefab boys. Irrational movers, all of them. From whom we had no choice but to leap. As a consequence, we drew notice to ourselves the way black holes suck in the stray matter of the universe. Notice and misadventure. We’d upset the conductor, we’d drop money, we’d lose our tickets, we’d stand on people’s feet, we’d fall into the invalid and spill him off the bus. And the blushing of one of us would set off the blushing of the others. Off we’d go — red, red, red, red — like traffic lights that are running against you. There is no hiding place on a bus. You either jump off or you suffer the exposure. And we were of no assistance to one another. The shy are tyrants. They are consumed by their own appetite for suffering. Nothing else matters. No one else exists. We lowered our eyes and individually burned, leaving the others to die in their own flames.
    Back in my parents’ or my grandparents’ house, where nobody was looking, the ordinary affections could be resumed. I could dote on my aunties and, more to the point, they could dote on me.
    Did they ‘hold me out’? I must be scrupulous here; I owe that to the love we bore one another. I don’t know whether they held me out. I can’t remember and I am not prepared to say I have suppressed the memory. (Why would I want to add the burden of suppression to everything I already do remember?) But that I was capable of being held out they were, if you can understand me, more conscious than I believe they ought to have been. It’s a matter of degrees of awareness. There was another odious euphemism to which I was subjected as a little boy.
In-between.
Shaming but true — the thing I had that made me not my sisters, the thing the shaking Mohel had taken a dirty-fingered moon-shaped slice out of and which thereafter and for evermore needed scrupulous bathing and talcuming, the thing I was heldout by, did not, in our house, go by any of the usual anatomical or nursery-rhyme names — a penis or the intromittent organ, say; a winkle or John Thomas — no, what I had was an
in-between.
And everybody knew it.
    In the end, the point is not whether my seraglio of women should or should not have enjoyed familiarity with my in-between, understood what it was and where it was — in the end the only point that matters is that with my father away and my grandfather permanently drunk and the Violets shrinking from every approach, mine was the only in-between between them.
    Enough said. Whatever harm I did them, the measure of the harm they had done me was the box of family photographs I was now smuggling into the lavatory as many times a day as I could get away with. And if you think a box of family photographs simply means a box of family photographs, you’ve got another think coming.
    The box itself nags at my conscience like an undiscovered weapon used to commit an unconfessed crime. Is it still where I left it? Will it ever be found? After all this time,
should
it ever be found?
     
    It was a chocolate box originally, a de luxe beau monde two-storey coffret, padded, scented, covered in pink velvet and lined with crimson silk. It had once cradled two pounds of the best quality Austro-Hungarian marzipan. An aged and toothless admirer, a fourth or fifth cousin on the non-Walzer side, had embarrassed Fay with it, and she had disembarrassed herself of it on to me. The lid showed a scene from one of Mozart’s operas. I doubt if it was
Il Seraglio.
Pink ribbons were sewn into the velvet, and with these you secured the lid or