J by Howard Jacobson

down the chimney, and out of the taps and electricity sockets, and in on the bottom of your shoes . . . Where are your shoes?’
    She shook her head a dozen times, blinding him with her hair,then threw her arms around him. ‘You are the strangest man,’ she said. ‘I love you.’
    ‘ I’m strange! Who is it round here who thinks trees are tapping at the window to reclaim what’s rightfully theirs?’
    ‘Then we make a good pair of crazies,’ she laughed, kissing his face before he could tell her he had never felt more whatever the opposite of disgust was for anyone in his life.
    vi
    Disgust.
    His parents had once warned him against expressing it. He remembered the occasion. A girl he hadn’t liked had tried to kiss him on the way home from school. It was the style then among the boys to put their fingers down their throats when anything like that happened. Girls, it was important for them to pretend, made them sick, so they put on a dumb show of vomiting whenever one came near. Kevern was still doing it when he encountered his father standing at the door of his workshop, looking for him. He thought his father might be impressed by this expression of his son’s burgeoning manliness. Finger down the throat, ‘Ugh, ugh . . .’ Ecce homo!
    When he explained why he was doing what he was doing his father slapped him across the face.
    ‘Don’t you ever!’ he said.
    He thought at first that he meant don’t you ever kiss a girl. But it was the finger down the throat, the simulating of disgust he was never to repeat.
    His mother, too, when she was told of it, repeated the warning. ‘Disgust is hateful,’ she said. ‘Don’t go near it. Your grandmother, God rest her soul, said that to me and I’m repeating it to you.’
    ‘I bet she didn’t say don’t put your fingers down your throat,’ Kevern said, still smarting from his father’s blow.
    ‘I’ll tell you precisely what she said. She said, “Disgust destroys you – avoid it at all costs.”’
    ‘I bet you’re making that up.’
    ‘I am not making it up. Those were her exact words. “Disgust destroys you.”’
    ‘Was this your mother or dad’s?’ He didn’t know why he asked that. Maybe to catch her out in a lie.
    ‘Mine. But it doesn’t matter who said it.’
    Already she had exceeded her normal allowance of words to him.
    Kevern had never met his grandparents on either side nor seen a photograph of them. They were rarely talked about. Now, at least, he had ‘disgust’ to go on. One of his grandmothers was a woman who had strong feelings about disgust. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing. At the time he wasn’t in the mood to be taught a lesson from beyond the grave. But later he felt it filled the family canvas out a little. Disgust destroys you – he could start to picture her.
    Thinking about it as he lay in Ailinn’s arms, trying to understand why the word had popped out of his mouth unbidden, Kevern wondered whether what had disgusted his grandmother – and in all likelihood disgusted every member of the family – was the incestuous union her child had made. He saw her putting her fingers down her throat. Unless – he had no dates, dates had been expunged in his family – that union didn’t come about until after she’d died. In which case could it have been the incestuous union she had made herself ?
    Self-disgust, was it?
    Well, she had reason.
    But if his own mother’s account was accurate, his grandmother had said it was disgust that destroyed, not incest. Why inveigh against the judgement and not the crime? And why the fervency of the warning? What did she know of what disgust wrought?
    Could it have been that she wasn’t a woman who felt disgust in all its destructive potency but a woman who inspired it? And who therefore knew its consequences from the standpoint of the victim?
    Do not under any circumstances visit on others what you would not under any circumstances have them visit on you – was that the