HOFFMAN

 

Of the Jewish boys in his year, Hoffman loathed Goldman most. He was a scrawny figure with no prowess on the rugger or cricket field and an intense liking for maths and physics. When Hoffmann encountered him in the corridor, the quad or on the playing fields he would approach with his big grin which revealed his uneven teeth and murmur, close to his ear, “Hitler was right.” He disdained Jews because they were Jews but he had to admire Levin who hit more sixes than anyone, triumphed in the hundred metres and the long jump, took no insults and was reputed to have a way with the girls. Hoffman was careful never to express his prejudice when the handsome, confident athlete was near, but leaving the changing rooms after games one day, he encountered him, alone. He avoided making eye contact, but Levin blocked his path.

                                    “I hear you’ve been bullying my little friend, Goldman,” he said, calmly.

                                    “Not me,” said Hoffman.

                                    “You’ve been saying nasty things to him about the Nazis.”

                                    “No. I wouldn’t do that.”

                                    “You wouldn’t to me, would you, Hoffman.”

                                    “I wouldn’t to anyone.”

                                    “You know what, Hoffman, you’re not only a creep, you’re a coward. If you hate Jews, why don’t you say so?”

                                    “I don’t hate Jews,” said Hoffman. “I admire many Jews.”

                                    “Who, for example?”

                                    “You,” said Hoffman, feeling his insides sink.

                                    “Why do you admire me?”

                                    “I admire a good sportsman.”

                                    “Goldman’s a good sportsman.”

                                    “Is he?”

                                    “He’s a brilliant badminton player. Ever seen him on the court?”

                                    “No.”

                                    “You should watch him. How he makes that shuttlecock fly.”

                                    “I will.”

            Levin moved closer. Hoffman was tempted to take a step backwards but didn’t want to appear intimidated. In a sudden movement he didn’t see coming, Levin grabbed his lapels, lifted him onto his toes, shoved him against the wall and his face millimetres from his own, growled:

                                    “You threaten my little friend again and the dentist will have more work than straightening those teeth of yours. Got it, Hoffman?”

The terrified smaller boy let out a feeble, “Yes.”

Levin let go and swiftly gave Hoffman a punch in the solar plexus which doubled him up.

            Henceforth, Hoffman left Goldman alone, but the sight of him was maddening. What Hoffman needed was his own protection, someone bigger and more dangerous than Levin; but there was no one. The friends who were muscular and tough, were all on good terms with the sporty Jew. The experience implanted in Hoffman’s mind the necessity of having powerful friends if you wanted to get away with insulting people you disdained, a notion which would serve him well far beyond the bounds of his expensive, prestigious school.

            Almost everyone went to university, many to Oxbridge. It was more or less taken for granted that if you wanted a place, it could be arranged. Hoffman, however, was more eager to earn money than academic laurels. He had no liking for the Latin and Greek which were highly thought of by the school. When he heard one of his classmates was to read Greats at Balliol, he snorted. Better, he thought, to read the stocks and shares pages of the Financial Times. His father had worked in the City, before his descent into gambling debts, and still had enough contacts to get him a start. From the first day, he loved the place. There was money to be made here by nothing more than watching the numbers and making the right calls.

            The family home in Locksbottom became too restrictive. His father, moody and sullen, especially when a trip to the bookies resulted in a big loss, insisted on his rights. Descendant of aristocratic Germans who migrated to Britian in the mid-nineteenth century out of belief in land, sinking their wealth in an estate in Hampshire, the decline in his family’s fortunes rankled. Though he made enough in the City to put him among the top five percent, alienation from inherited pre-eminence seemed to him a rank injustice. After all, if a man had to go to work every day to make his millions, in a sense he was no better than a joiner or a bus driver. Though his employers admired his astute and ruthless pursuit of a rapid profit, he was employed ! The very thought of  it made his intestines shrink. No, to depend on an employer was a humiliation. He sank into sickly nostalgia for the days when his family commanded because they owned and they owned by hereditary title. When men had to jostle for place, it was possible to be overtaken by a pleb on the make. His son was born in the year The Beatles made their first film. That a quartet of barely talented urchins from a northern city full of communists could rival him for wealth seemed to predict the collapse of civilisation.

            Barry Hoffman rented a little flat in Clerkenwell, kissed his sentimental mother at the gate and laughed in that rather silly, adolescent way he had which closed his eyes and opened his mouth in gaping, seemingly good-natured stupidity.

                                    “I’m only going to Clerkenwell, mother. I’ll be home every week for Sunday lunch.”

                                    “I know, dear, but who will I talk to? Your father barely utters a word.”

 

            It dawned early on the young man that being convivially gregarious was more important to success than knowing how to trade. Everyone knew how to trade. At first it seemed quasi-mystical, but he soon penetrated the mystery. It was a banal business. The old hands relied on their brains, but the younger, who knew the electronic era was well-advanced and soon algorithms would do the work, watched the screens.

            The George Inn became his regular lunchtime retreat.

                        “Plenty of time yet,” said Merrick Walters and bought him another.

Hoffman checked his watch. Five to two. Two hours and four pints since they left the exchange. The glass sat on the bar, its tawny body topped by a white head of almost half an inch thickness. Though the fifth was less exhilarating than the first, lifting it and letting the cool, slightly bitter liquid fill his mouth and slide in suave delight down his gullet was liberating. Walters was more than twice his age, married with two children and a wife exasperated by his affairs.

                        “Now look at her,” he said, nodding in the direction of a young woman with a wine glass at her lips and a tall, dark-suited banker by her side. “The shoes, Barry, the shoes.”

                        “Oh, very elegant.”

                        “Elegant my arse, they shout out she wants a good fucking.”

Hoffman’s eyes closed and his train-tunnel mouth opened as he laughed like a child having its ribs tickled.

            Walters was congenial company and a good example. Hoffman found there were plenty of willing women when the champagne flowed, the oysters were plentiful, a trip on a yacht into the Solent could be arranged and though there crept into his feeling a haunting emptiness, it was easy to blank out by trading, drinking and more copulation. His future as a trader was assured. He would buy himself a fine house in Mayfair or Chelsea, join an exclusive club, mix with only the richest and most elevated; no doubt, at some time, marriage would be necessary. He didn’t have a great affinity for children, but the idea of continuing his line was important, and a man without offspring was less than a man. Yet a dissatisfaction gnawed at him. He’d joined the Young Conservatives before he left school, attended constituency meetings, got to his feet now and again, but there began to form in his mind the notion that he could rise in the political sphere. He admired orators. Even Tony Benn, whose views he loathed, impressed him. There was something magical about being able to move an audience, to make them share your own emotional responses, especially to what disgusted you. Though he accepted democracy, it was obvious people had to be swayed against their own interests. After all, the interests of the lower orders would wreck the City. No, democracy could go too far. The country should be run by those who owned it and the masses needed to absorb that message.

                        “You’ve got a good mouth on you,” said Douglas Heywood, stalwart of his constituency party and county councillor, “you enjoy the limelight and you come across as a decent chap. Why don’t you stand for a seat somewhere?”

            Hoffman swigged his beer, leant on the bar, and laughed.

                        “I might just do that, if I can get a few people behind me.”

                        “Don’t worry about that, I’ll rally the troops.”

            The Conservative Party was his home as much as his public school, the club, Lords, the City, so it was a shock to discover there were members who took sharp exception to his rhetoric. In preparation for the selection meeting, he’d honed his outrageous style. He understood as well as the next conniving power-seeker the need to address the voters through a crooked mouth, but amongst his own, he felt he could loosen his belt, even at the risk of his trousers falling down.

                        “You know as well as I do this country is being dragged down by idlers sucking the blood of hard-working men and women, and not a few of them wear Turbans and live on curry. Did we become great by treating the rest of humanity as our equals? Why would we have done that when we were forging ahead in trade and industry and they were living in mud huts and throwing spears at their dinner? What a ruinous policy is the pursuit of equality. The Labour Party distributes your money, yes your money, with reckless largesse to lazy shop stewards who bring their workers out on strike if a bluebottle lands on their sandwich at lunch time, it provides them with council houses at peppercorn rents while they spend their child benefit in the pub and the bookies. Now I’m as fond of the pub as the next man, but I don’t believe the State should pay for my beer. I pay my own way in the world, and what proud Englishman doesn’t? And as for the European Union: we’re ruled by foreigners. Have you seen the scale of the regulation? You can’t eat a bent banana. They’ll be telling you what night you can have sex with your wife next. Or someone’s else’s…”

            His silly grin and chuckles didn’t appease the hard-headed, calculating advocates of whatever made them richer, or the women who, disdaining feminism, knew a philanderer when they saw one.

            He came last in the ballot, the victory going to  Felicity Grantham who wrote for the financial press, spoke perfect RP and made several references to her friendship with minor royals.

            Not being picked at the first attempt didn’t dishearten him, but after five rejections, and never coming even close to second, he began to harbour an ugly resentment, a sentiment which turned vicious when it was conveyed to him that the grandees thought him too vulgar, demagogic and populist to represent the party at any level that mattered. Henceforth, his motivation was divided: to defeat all attempts at equality and supranationalism, and to bring low those who had stood in his way.

            One morning he was struck by a virulent toothache. He paid scant attention to his health, disdaining joggers, gym-rats and health-fooders. He liked a cigarette on waking, five or six pints on good pub night, ate heartily of what was claimed to clog the arteries or bulge the waistline, and boasted of not having seen a doctor since he was born. But this pain barely responded to paracetamol. How did those things work? They should be sued for calling them pain-killers. His mind had never turned to science because it required setting aside his opinions which seemed tantamount to giving up his life. Boffins interested him only if they were good for profit. All the same, he needed a dentist.

            She was short and dark, with striking brown eyes which seemed to read his mind. As she prodded his molars his mind whirred. How old was she? Twenty-five? Nice pair. Good arse. The local anaesthetic took effect remarkably quickly; she drilled while the assistant vacuumed. The amalgam pressed in, she asked him to bite and grind on the little black strip which reminded him of the film in old cameras. He rinsed and getting to his feet, grinned as best he could, though the left-hand side wouldn’t work.

                                    “Brilliant job ! What a relief ! Now, what would you say to a nice dinner this evening?”

In response to her alarmed expression he advanced:

                                    “Come on, I won’t bite. Well, not to start with anyway.”

            She was Polish. Both her parents were dentists and had funded her through training in the UK. There were bureaucratic encumbrances she had to wriggle by, petty exasperating impediments to recognition by the BMA, but she was an eel, she could twist. And she was willing. He profited from her compliance for two years and then offered his own when she sued for security. For a month or two, he behaved, but opportunity being the handmaiden of turpitude, was soon happily patting the backsides and ogling the breasts of the women in The George.

            His physical needs were satisfied, but the desire for power rankled.

            It was the crisis of 2008 which he embraced as his opportunity. Previously, he’d delivered speech upon speech, usually to small audiences in unappealing rooms, about the bureaucratic nightmare of the EU, the erosion of British liberties, the failure of liberalism; stood in one election after another for one council or another and had to smile and shake the hand of a victorious Labour apparatchik or Lib Dem do-gooder; but now he saw two great floods converging: the masses were going to be hit as the sinking boat righted itself by throwing many of them into the raging waves. It was obvious the majority would be made to pay for the recklessness of the bankers, a strategy he fully supported. Their suffering was his chance. They required a simple message, the simpler the better. Foreigners were to blame. Immigrants. Muslims. He knew it worked particularly well with the nostalgic elderly who had grown up in little places where a black face was never seen; and potently too in places where they were still very rare. The cosmopolitan, metropolitan places were effectively a lost cause.

            He floated the idea of a new party among the most rigid he knew and was thrilled when money flowed like floodwaters. He named it the Freedom for the UK Party. The posters and flyers were produced in millions: FUK for Tomorrow.

                                    “I think we need to reconsider,” said Donald Spragg, his main backer.

            They consulted PR and advertising people, at great expense. The consensus viewed a single word as most effective. PURIFY  was settled on after long deliberation.

                        “This country need purification,” he began his speeches.

His audiences applauded, long and loud.

            The trick was to find a town with the fatal combination of decline, ethnic uniformity, low educational attainment, lack of cultural richness, a large population over sixty-five and a festering resentment at the failure of politicians of all brands to make any difference locally over decades. Knobton, the perfect locale.

                        It was a little seaside resort which once bustled in the summer months, as the nearby towns disgorged, but had failed to transform when the package revolution arrived and ordinary folk content with a deckchair, an ice-cream, a paddle, a bucket and spade for the kids and a landlady who was a distant relative of Bloody Mary, began to see air travel, aparthotels, all the food you can eat, free drinks and vomiting in the streets of other people’s countries as their birthright. The young had no future there and moved out quickly or became junkies, alcoholics and street rats. The main thoroughfare had more boarded shops than living enterprises. The average income was below the national average. Few went to university. He loved it.

                        The demonym was Knob.

                        “I guarantee,” he said on the stump, “ you Knobs will stand proud once more if I represent you in parliament.”

                        The people loved him. The journalists descended for the by-election and the vox pop expressed itself fulsomely when the furry microphone was thrust forward:

                        “He says what he thinks. Not like the rest of ‘em. They lie as if they were born to it.”

                        “Get rid of all these foreigners, that’s the answer.”

                        “But,” asked the tentative journalist, “are there many foreigners here?”

                        “Not in Knobton itself, but they’re coming in millions. You see it on the telly every day.”

                        “Get out of that EU we’ll be all right. There’ll be money for the NHS then. What are we giving it to them for?”

                        “But,” suggested another hesitant journalist, “all EU countries contribute, and we get various benefits for doing so. Like the leisure centre here in Knobton, built by EU money.”

                        “I don’t know about that, but we want to get out and look after ourselves like we used to.”

                        The Conservative candidate who had served on the local council for seventeen years, had doors shut in her face, her leaflets torn up in front of her, abuse shouted at her and when she tried to ingratiate herself with the locals in The Shovels, a blank refusal of service form the landlord.  Hoffman secured a majority of almost fifteen thousand. The Labour man lost his deposit. The victor celebrated with a bottle of Krug Vintage Brut and unceremonious intercourse with his agent on the desk of his election office.

                        He took his place on the government benches gleefully.

                        His maiden speech began, “Mr Speaker, a week last Thursday, well over twenty thousands Knobs gave me their support..”

                        Unfortunately, the new member’s member was his downfall: his wife, now the mother of two, learning of his triumphal conquest and having bitten her lip so often she had almost chewed off her face, kicked him out, no courtesy extended. He was lavishly accommodated in Spragg’s Chelsea home, where his children visited once a month and his mistresses more frequently. Finally ensconced in the mother of parliaments, where he had always believed his talents should have delivered him, he immediately began planning his assault on government, an enterprise in which he was greatly assisted by the incumbents furnished with a huge majority by voters bitterly disillusioned by the previous lying, hypocritical, clownish regime, who wisely decided to use it to make the old cold, children poorer and the disabled more hampered.

                        “There’s nothing to it,” he declared, his eyes closing and his grin widening as he raised his pint, “the people are desperate, everyone has lied to them, everyone has made them depressed and despairing, perfect ground for whipping up hatred of foreigners,” and he slapped the buttock of the young woman next to him, as his acolytes roared with laughter and toasted his coming success.