The Travelling Hornplayer by Barbara Trapido

Author:Barbara Trapido
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1998-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

5. Tränenregen

Jonathan

When Lydia comes to see me a second time, the moment is not of the best. It is, in general, not a good time for me. The Sonia experience, I begin to sense, has almost run its course. I hang on in there for the sex, but here’s the paradox. That which was sex is not sex. I have found myself, of late, warming and softening to Sonia. I have begun not to be provoked to dislike by the sight of her narrow shoulders, or by the sound of her slight, blurry lisp; I have even, occasionally, found myself respecting her mind. I give quarter, increasingly, to her opinions and the more I do so, the less I feel impelled to assault her flesh.

This is puzzling to me, because I have always found Katherine’s cleverness to be a turn-on. If Katie produces one of her pithily couched observations about – about God knows what – about pretty well anything: Sophie Grigson; Legoland; the Nation of Islam – my response is to feel my sap rising. Yet Sonia’s cleverness deflates me. I must despise her or keep my hands to myself.

I suspect the same thing is happening for Sonia, in that I have begun to notice a certain mellowing. She has stopped winding me up. She has suddenly stopped making theatre of Fortnum’s and ‘the girlie’. I have noticed, for example, that I have begun to feature as a likeable walk-on character in one of her more personal by-lines, where she parades me as ‘Josh’ – an amiable bit of rough who washes from the waist up at the kitchen sink and quaffs PG Tips from enamelled mugs, in between committing gruffly executed acts of sex.

While this is naturally flattering to me, as a middle-aged bourgeois pen pusher, with my roots in the German-Jewish intelligentsia and the Anglo-Irish landed gentry, it is also clear to me that I have become one of Sonia’s dubious accessories. I belong in there with all that pricey furniture banged up from railway sleepers and salvaged driftwood. I am one of her items of fake rough.

Added to this, my own work isn’t going terribly well. It stares at me from the printouts, as if set in concrete.

‘Here I am,’ it says, ‘and if you don’t happen to like me very much, there’s sweet fuck-all you can do about it.’

The result is that I leave the bedsit far too often to replenish my supplies of Wotsits and Mini-Cheddars and, once out, I discover a tendency to malinger. I visit the launderette and the newsagent’s and the bookie’s. I find myself staring through Dixons’ windows at those multiple TV screens depicting postprandial mind destroyers of the Going for Gold variety. I begin to brood on the fact that it’s a long time since I’ve done the things I really love to do. It’s an age since I’ve camped out on a river bank with my clasp knife and my Tranja Stove. It’s forever since I’ve screwed Katherine out of doors.

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