Whatever it is, I Don't Like it by Howard Jacobson Page A

daughter had picked illegally from the roadside a thousand miles north of here. And so we made a floating memorial park for him.
    Then we sang. Then they sang. No words, just a tune. ‘The Swan’, by Saint-Saëns. They’d been a quartet when they were young. Dot the singer, Joy on the piano, Eric on the violin, and the man who was now a faint discoloration of the Indian Ocean on the cello. ‘The Swan’ had been his favourite. Forever harping on things watery, you see.
    So here’s a question. Which came first? Were we putting him back where he belonged? Or had his interest in water been nothing all along but a premonition of his fate?
    He was blessed with a perfect day, however one understands it. Simultaneous showers and sunshine, the rain light and warm, and then a rainbow, especially vivid, as they always are in Western Australia, in the lilac section. Why not? As with farce, so with the pathetic fallacy. You get it in life, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get it in death.
    I thought we were finished, ready to return to the living, when Eric suddenly began to speak in maritime tongues. Not an address, just a quiet, private blessing. He wished his old friend a fair wind. A billowing sail. A good landfall.
    I felt shamed. Wasn’t it incumbent on me, the English-literature person, to essay something similar? Surely I had some apposite quotation. But the only nautical line I could think of was ‘’Twas on the good ship Venus’. So much for a solid grounding in the classics.
    What had happened to the John Masefield I’d read at school? What about all the Joseph Conrad I’d lectured on? What about Moby-Dick? What about the Ancient Mariner? ‘Alone, alone, all, all alone / Alone on a wide wide sea!’ Wouldn’t that do?
    Pathetic. Better with the good ship Venus. He’d liked a touch of rhymed ribaldry in his time, Allan Sadler. He could take a seasoning of profanity. He knew it wasn’t all ‘The Swan’. So I let him have it – man to man, me to him, but silently, for no one else’s ears. ‘By God, you should have seen us . . .’

Corrugation Road
    Life is a perpetual margarita. You sip the tequila and the lime, you taste a little salt, you need to sip again, you taste more salt, and so it goes – you grow increasingly thirsty on what you drink. If you’re not a drinker you could say life’s a perpetual Cleopatra. She too made men hungry by what she let them feed on. If you’re not into the flesh either then scrub the whole thing. I only write for the incontinent.
    I think it was incontinent of me to have done what I have just done, though I guess to some people it would merit about as much remark as a picnic in a layby. It’s all to do with the way you were brought up. I was taught to count every penny and never to travel further than a quarter of a mile for any pleasure. Had Cleopatra lived more than a shilling’s bus ride away my parents would have suggested I find somebody cheaper. ‘There’s plenty more fish in t’sea, our ’Oward.’ So to me it feels pretty reckless to have flown in from London to Perth (Perth Western Australia, not Perth Scotland – I’m not that much of a cheapskate), and then a day later to have flown out again to Broome, 2,500 kilometres up the coast, just to take in an Aboriginal musical.
    I’d said no at first when a particular person suggested it. I was jet-lagged. I was middle-aged. I was skint. And I didn’t like Aboriginal musicals.
    â€˜Name one.’
    I couldn’t. I thought perhaps South Pacific , or Porgy and Bess , but I wasn’t prepared to risk ethnic approximateness.
    â€˜Why don’t you let me sleep for a week then I’ll take you to the pictures?’ I said, and where I come from you can’t say much fairer than that.
    â€˜Are you a man or a mouse?’
    â€˜I’m a man,’ I said, ‘who