News, Events & Sneak Previews

In this section we'll keep you up to date with developments for Jewish Book Week 2006 and other relevant news. We'll also review some of the books featured at the coming festival.

SNEAK PREVIEWS

Read the first pages of Mrs Zhivago of Queen's Park by Olivia Lichtenstein. She will be speaking at Jewish Book Week on Thursday 1 March at 5.30 pm

I’d been fine when I’d got up that morning. Quite chirpy really. Not even irritated when I couldn’t find the kettle because my husband Greg had hidden it. It’s the very things that so charm you about a man when you first meet him that subsequently cause you such intense exasperation. Greg’s uncle had got Alzheimer’s when he was thirty-two and, as a result, Greg had developed a pathological fear of his memory deteriorating and had set himself little memory tests from an early age.

‘The brain’s a muscle just like any other and needs exercising,’ he says. Absolutely fine for him, but irritating for the rest of us, who don’t feel that remembering where you hid the kettle from yourself is a major and necessary triumph in the muscle-taut memory stakes. But that morning I remember whistling as I hunted for it and giving an exultant and good-humoured cheer when I finally unearthed it in the drum of the washing machine.

Greg remained oblivious; sitting at the kitchen table scratching out yet another furious letter in his illegible doctor’s handwriting, using the quill pen I had jokingly given him some years before with which to write his many letters of complaint. (I was surprised that he didn’t write on parchment, use a wax seal and get a liveried footman to deliver his missives by hand.) This current letter was to the council about a parking fine.

‘Ha, Chloe, listen to this,’ he said. ‘I’m demanding a reply from the councillor himself.’ He stood up, held the letter as far from himself as his arm would reach – vanity forbade the use of reading glasses and concomitant recognition of middle-age – cleared his throat and, using the special voice he reserved for officialdom, read: ‘Upon examining the legislation, I am astonished to learn that the London Borough of Brent, or its agents, appears to be attempting to extort money from me in an unlawful manner.

Please find enclosed an extract of the Bill of Rights Act 1689, enacted and formally entered into Statute following the Declaration of Rights 1689. I draw your attention to the following section:

That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void.’ He looked up at me, delighted with himself, like a dog that has brought a far-flung stick back in record time to lay at his master’s feet. He reached for a slice of toast, which he spread carefully with a thin layer of cholesterol-busting Benecol.

‘What does that mean then? That they can’t enforce parking fines at all without convicting you of a crime?’

‘Precisely,’ he said, giving a smug little smile as he left the room. ‘First you have to be found guilty in a court.’

Leo, our fifteen-year-old son, made a lightning kitchen raid before our eyes, during the course of which he successfully snatched a chocolate bar from a tin that was supposed to be hidden in a top cupboard, swigged orange juice from a carton in the fridge, and left before anyone could shout at him. Bea, the Czech au pair, gave a characteristic scowl at the space he had briefly occupied before shrugging and returning to her careful task of assembling a platter of exotic fruits that I had bought specifically for that night’s

supper. I said nothing, assuming it was for my twelve-year-old daughter, Kitty, who had recently announced that she was on a health kick and, as every parent knows, nothing and no one should stand in the way of any child who voluntarily eats fresh fruit and vegetables. Just then Kitty came in carrying a plate of half finished instant mashed potato.

‘I’ve got a tummy ache,’ she said.

‘I’m not surprised, eating that processed rubbish. What happened to the new health regime?’ I answered unsympathetically.

I realised then that the exotic fruit platter must be intended for none other than Bea’s own stomach. Sure enough, Bea settled herself comfortably at the table while I tried not to watch as she ate slice after slice of expensive mango, papaya and guava delicately with a knife and fork. The sun was shining and I was determined to preserve my good mood. So with only the merest tightening of the jaw, I emptied the dishwasher and brushed Kitty’s hair.

Really, everything was fine until I saw my third patient of the  day.

I’m a psychotherapist and our Queen’s Park house has a separate basement flat where I see my patients. ‘Most people put their nice harmless old mothers at the bottom of their houses, not a bunch of self-pitying whingers who bore on about their problems,’

says Greg. The idea that Greg is able to put the words nice and harmless anywhere near the word mother is, in the light of his own female parent, frankly risible. Moreover, my ‘self-pitying whingers’ helped see him through the last few years of medical school. But, being a GP, he doesn’t really have much patience for any sort of illness, and especially not those that have no obvious physical characteristics. The notion that people can feel better and happier by talking to a trained therapist causes him to roll his eyes in exasperated disbelief. ‘Why don’t they just talk to their friends instead of to a complete stranger like you?’ We discuss my work as little as possible.

That morning I’d said goodbye to Furious Frank, who has a little anger management problem we’ve been working on, and I was enjoying the ten minutes between patients by looking out the window and watching feet crunch autumn leaves as they passed.

Summer was over but I didn’t feel my usual desolation in the face of the impending season of mists.

The doorbell rang with a familiar nagging insistence. It was Gloomy Gina, who has been coming to see me for five years. (‘Do you think they know about the names you give them?’ my friend Ruthie recently asked me. ‘Of course not,’ I’d answered, ‘you’re the only other person who knows. It’s my gallows humour, just an affectionate shorthand for differentiating between them.’)

I hadn’t always been so cynical. At twenty-eight, I’d been the youngest person to qualify at the British Association of Psychotherapists and had always been dedicated to my work. Just lately though, the gloss seemed to have faded and I often felt I was only going through the motions.

Gina is rarely able to see the good side of a person or a situation and makes me feel like Pollyanna in comparison. She’d been much happier recently as she was soon to marry and hadn’t yet found much wrong with her fiancé, Jim, although God knows she’d tried. By her standards, she’d been positively jubilant for the past three months. That day though, her pretty face had a pre-Jim look about it. Something was up.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she began. Always a bad start with Gina.

‘This is it. I’ll never sleep with another man again. I’ll never know that excitement and mystery of discovering someone for the first time, of having that first kiss, of waking up together full of the wonder of newness.’

I wanted to say, ‘Don’t be silly, he could die, you might get divorced, you could have an affair,’ but I didn’t. Instead, I suddenly realised, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never thought of it like that.’ In that instant, like a painful and unexpected blow to the head, the seed of betrayal took root in my own breast.

I’m afraid I barely listened to anything Gina said for the rest of that session. I even felt a twinge of guilt when I took her cheque, but only the slightest twinge; after all, she gets her money’s worth with all her after-hours phone calls and midnight panic attacks.

Instead, I sat there nodding absently and staring at the wall behind her. The streaky bubbling smears of the earth’s oozings that were rising damply up my basement wall mirrored my mood of growing unease perfectly. The day, which only moments before had felt bright and full of promise, now felt cloudy and damp. The sun had gone in.

Never again to feel the first kiss of a new lover? What was that e. e. cummings poem, something about liking your body when it’s with someone else’s, the thrill of ‘under me you so quite new’? I’ve always rather loved e. e., initially because he died the day and year I was born, 3 September, 1962, which for an adolescent is a spooky coincidence, full of mystical significance. I felt we must have had a unique spiritual connection. For a while, I even thought that as his soul left his body at 1.15 a.m., the time of his death, it flew directly into mine as I opened my mouth to take my first breath at 3.23 a.m.

Just over two hours seemed about the right amount of time for a soul to travel from East Coast America to Chalk Farm in London.

Mainly I admired cummings because he was naughty enough to ignore capitals and muck around with grammar, something I was never able to get away with at my Grammar School. I tried it, obviously, in my ‘the soul of e. e. cummings lives on in me and I’m going to be the world’s greatest living poetess’ phase. But Miss Titworth our English teacher was a stickler for punctuation.

She even made us verbally punctuate our spoken English. ‘Miss Titworth comma please may I be excused question mark.’ This was the source of hours of witty schoolgirl repartee over crafty fags in the cloakroom. ‘Miss Titworth comma, how much are your

tits worth question mark.’

But now, sitting in my consulting room, all I could think was, ‘Is this it question mark.’ Forever and ever, the same old same old? After Gina left, I went upstairs and straight to the fridge, gloomily surveying the contents and grazing on pieces of cheese and cold meat like a sheep with attention deficit disorder. I needed something to fill the gaping abyss of the bleak, unchanging future I faced. Of course, I should know better, ‘food isn’t love’ and all that, but just as all dentists don’t have perfect teeth, neither do all psychotherapists have perfect psyches. Kitty came in and caught me guiltily sucking Philadelphia cheese from an index finger that had clearly scooped it directly from the tub, and swigging orange juice straight from the carton. Both my children have been taught that these two crimes carry a custodial sentence.

‘You’re always bloody telling us not to do that,’ she protested.

‘You weren’t meant to see me and don’t say bloody,’ I responded feebly. ‘Anyhow, why aren’t you at school?’ She did that sighing and rolling eyes thing that I thought was only supposed to happen after puberty when you are suddenly struck by the overwhelming

stupidity of your parents. She was still meant to be at the stage where I could do no wrong and her adoration was unequivocal.

‘I told you I had a tummy ache this morning,’ she said accusingly, ‘but you made me go to school and I was sick, so Bea had to come and pick me up.’ Bea had been rather pointedly and not altogether silently hovering outside the kitchen door; now she came in and shot me a reproachful look.

‘Thank you, Bea. Didn’t you tell Dad you had a tummy ache?’ I asked, deftly trying to pass the buck. ‘I mean he is a doctor.

‘Mum, you know you have to have your head actually hanging off your body before Daddy will take any notice at all.’

‘Poor baby.’ I took Kitty in my arms and held her.

I loved being a mother from the first moment I held my babies. Even now, I often lull myself to sleep at night by replaying their births in my head like a treasured movie. I loved the sweet milky smell of them and wore them close to my heart on my breast, like a precious brooch, for as long as they were small enough. I loved that part of them at the nape of the neck that you had to bury your nose into to kiss; I still do. I loved stuffing whole tiny newborn feet into my mouth. Kitty continues to let me nibble on her limbs and cover her with kisses and Leo is unusually accommodating for a fifteen-year-old as long as no one else is watching. I tease them both by telling them that I long ago made them sign contracts where they undertook to suffer my kisses and cuddles irrespective of their age and in perpetuity.

I’m a respecter of contracts. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d meant it seventeen years ago when I had made my wedding vows to Mr Grumpy, their father, promising to forsake all others and be faithful to him as long as we both shall live. I’ve had the odd little dalliance, a few stolen kisses, but never seriously contemplated infidelity. Recently, though, I’d found myself flirting with my only single male friends who are dyed-in-the-wool homosexuals.

‘What’s wrong with us girls?’ I bleat occasionally.

‘You’re just not, well, furry enough.’

‘We can be if we don’t wax our legs and upper lips,’ I protest.

But now, with Gina’s words on the finality of never sleeping with another man ever again ringing in my head, I felt as though I was gasping for air. What was I to do? Was Greg the only man I would ever have sex with? But could I really imagine having a lover? I’d rather assumed that you weren’t allowed to take your clothes off in front of a stranger once you were over forty. Surely it’s against the law on grounds of common decency. It’s fine for your husband to see you naked if absolutely necessary. After all, the less-than-taut, post-childbirth body is his fault, so there’s a kind of perverse pleasure to be gained in parading it in front of him, the very act a silent scream of Look what you’ve done to my body, you bastard. But someone new, that would be, well . . . the word ‘impossible’ springs to mind.

‘You find me interesting, don’t you?’ Ruthie asked me later as we reclined like Romans on her sofa and ate lunch.

‘Course, or we wouldn’t be celebrating our thirty-second year as friends. Why?’ I popped the last bite of a salmon and cream cheese bagel into my mouth.

‘It’s just that whenever I say anything to him, Richard sighs and closes his eyes.‘

‘Ah, HHATT,’ I pronounced sagely.

This is our shorthand; it makes text messaging so much faster and allows us to tell each other how we’re feeling without fear of prying eyes. It came about after I’d had a particularly bad fight with Greg when he had spent an entire weekend shouting at the children and me. I tapped out my message: My husband is a cunt. But I sent it to Greg instead of to Ruthie. When I realised what I’d done, my heart raced and I felt like a child caught making ‘V’ signs at the teacher. I had to bluff it out by sending Greg another one: Only joking, darling. What do you want for supper? Luckily I pulled it off. After that, acronyms seemed a safer route, hence HHATT – Hating Husband All The Time.

Ruthie yawned and stretched. That’s how I always think of her, yawning and stretching in a smudged, sleepy sort of way, like a cat rousing itself briefly to change position in front of the fire. At work she’s sharp, pressed, businesslike efficiency, but I know her secret; she’s always longing to go and have a little lie-down. She has a beautiful heart-shaped face, a Marilyn Monroe of a body and liquid brown eyes. When she was younger, boys wanted to stab each other to win her affections. Irresistibly, she is unconscious of her allure and wears it as comfortably and absent-mindedly as a favourite, and slightly grubby, towelling robe.

Published by Orion, a division of the Orion Publishing group

Read an extract of The Book of Samson by David Maine.

S A M S O N

This is the story of my life and it’s not a happy one. If you wish to read about me you’re welcome to but if you’re looking for something to give you hope & joy comfort & inspiration then you had best leave off here straightaway and go find something else. My life has an abundance of frustration and pain plus a fair bit of sex and lots of killing and broken bones but it’s got precious little hope & joy comfort & inspiration.

              It’s got some women in it too plus a wife. Dalila is the one you may have heard of. A rare piece of work she was—you may think you know the story but believe me there’s more.

              It’s an interesting question why anyone would seek hope & joy comfort & inspiration in a story in the first place. Something to think about. Maybe because there’s precious little of it in life so we gather up as much as we can find and put it in our stories where we know where it is and it can’t get out. But this story as I say isn’t like that. It starts and ends with me here in chains and in between if anything it gets worse. Betrayal adultery and murder all figure in words writ large as if in fire against the nighttime sky. With the story not even done yet it might get more hopeless still before my days in this world are over.

              In fact I’m sure it will.

              To give an idea of the killing: I once left a wedding feast to go kill thirty men and then went back to the wedding which flowed on like wine unabated. This in response to a riddle and a wager. So you see I’m not joking when I say that murder is writ large in my life in words like fire against the nighttime sky. The thirty men’s coats I removed from their stiffening bodies and then distributed to the wedding guests. Though normally prohibited from handling the bodies of the dead I was under some duress and consoled myself with thinking that they were so freshly killed that they were in fact not completely done with living as yet. Thus do we strike little bargains with ourselves and chip away at our integrity in the process.

              The wedding where this took place was my own. Perhaps it conveys some idea of the nature of my in-laws that they took these new garments willingly enough and wore them happily afterward notwithstanding the rips bloodstains and other marks of wear.

              I said this story begins in chains and so it does for I am in chains as I speak. They are iron and heavy and each link is the size of my hand and the thickness of my wrist. Mighty they are and in my prime they would have not held me but I’m no longer in my prime. As you might have guessed. The place of my enshacklement is a temple wondrously large which I’ve seen little of besides this sumptuous entertainment hall and the cells underground. In part this is because of the sorry state of my eyesight which is failing by the day. But I’ve seen enough to know that this hall is larger than some villages I’ve walked through. At one end of it is a little platform like an altar or a stage and upon this platform I stand. Towering columns ring this hall: the largest being a pair at the far end and a second mighty pair behind me at the rear of the altar. So too is the looming statue of Dagon—the Philistines’ so-called god which I will speak more of later. In the middle of the hall an enormous bonfire roars at all hours in a pit. I stand strung up at the edge of the altar with my arms spread in a T shape. My legs are free to wander but alas there’s nowhere for them to go. I spend my day shifting from one foot to the other trying to relieve the ache and for the most part failing.

              Chains stretch from the shackles on my wrists to bolts driven into the columns. Maybe twenty cubits in each direction. The bolts are as thick as a man and the columns couldn’t be encircled even by ten men with their arms spread wide—and even these aren’t as momentous as the columns at each end of the hall. Truly the palace is built on a scale beyond the understanding of simple men such as myself. I would say it is the work of the gods but that would be a blasphemy most foul as there is only One True God and I know that well. The difference between my people and the Philistines that surround me is that our God is the LORD of Abraham and Moses and Josue while the gods of the heretics are made of wood and they burn or stone and they sink or animal parts and they molder away over time. They are dull lifeless inanimate things. Dagon is the god of this temple and an imaginary creature nothing more. Half man half fish and pure nonsense as even a child could tell you but what can you expect from people who came swarming in their multitudes to Canaan in boats from across the sea?

              At times the Philistines even worship the works of the One True God as being gods themselves so they pray to the thunder or the sun or various animals and engage in many other laughable superstitious practices.

              I say laughable but admit I’m not laughing now.

              This I will attest: that at the moment they have the upper hand but one day the LORD will give me back my hands to hold over them. As He has done so many times before. And when he does so those hands will not be empty but will contain a mighty sword or awesome club or at least a very heavy stone with which to smite them. And so I shall and they will break into small pieces and die. They will die. And I will laugh and dance as will my people. They will sing songs in praise of my deeds. And tell stories.

              Those are stories which will have in them no dearth of hope & joy comfort & inspiration. Mark me well.

              I fear I am rambling and not sticking to the point. I ask you to forgive me as this is a fault I’m prone to—which you’ll see for yourself readily enough if you choose to attend my story for any length of time. The best thing for me to do now is start at the beginning for it is a story unlike any you have heard I have no doubt.

Back to the top